Chapter Two: Storytelling
In chapter one, we said that we all would like to see a world where we live in peace, love and harmony with each other and Nature. We also noted that we share a love of freedom, a desire to think for ourselves, a dislike of being told what to do. We sought to move past some of our conflicting opinions by examining Consciousness itself. We asserted that only the mind limits the mind. Pointing out that what we believe is what we see, we concluded that we need to investigate the narratives that inform our beliefs.
As a first step, however, we must acknowledge the questions such an investigation raises about everything we have said so far. To what does the word “Consciousness” refer? How can we investigate the ground into which civilization sends its roots without relying on those same roots? When we talk about how our minds work, aren’t we using words and culturally constructed notions such as “mind?” Strict Postmodernists would challenge the very idea that we can think for ourselves, act freely as individuals and change our world. Yet Postmodernism may have provided us with the very tools we need to locate, grasp and deconstruct the linguistic and cultural phenomena that are obstructing our dream of Peace on Earth.
Microtheatres of Power
The word Postmodernism represents a changed view of what history calls modernity. Europe became “modern” as it shifted from domination by kings, aristocrats and the church, through the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, to the Age of Democracy and the full emergence of the capitalist economic system. For most of the twentieth century, European/American history and culture celebrated this transformation as a great liberation. After the 1960s however, work such as that of French philosopher Michel Foucault called into question the idea that modernity had liberated us.
Foucault carried out what he called “genealogical” studies of discourses and “archaeological” investigations into social practice. He was formulating questions about power, knowledge and the self. How is power exercised? How does knowledge function? What constitutes us as the Subject (the intentional doer) of our thoughts, words and actions? He reached the conclusion that buried historical moments forged how we think, feel and act — even who we have become. The cultural landscape which we now accept as natural, normal, self-evident emerged from turning points made in our past . Paramount among these events was the transition to modernity.
Foucault observed that prior to this shift, rulers subjugated the inhabitants of their lands through public display of punishment. Examples of what happened if you broke the landowner’s rules served to control the peasantry. The gallows, the whip, the stocks, the severed head on the spike at the outskirts of town left little to the imagination. Fear of reprisal enforced the social hierarchy. Social and economic changes, however, favored new forms of social control. Increased population and movement to the cities overwhelmed the old system. Poor and homeless people filled the streets. Sanitation problems, disease and fear for safety threatened all levels of society. At the same time, the changing character of the workplace called for a new kind of worker. Capitalism depended on laborers producing profits using the tools, machinery and factory belonging to the owner. Maximizing productivity required workers who were more careful, consistent, reliably present and on time. Old methods of control by force lacked the necessary efficiency.
Foucault insists that no particular class or group actually controlled or directed the change to a more “modern” kind of social control. He pointedly does not focus on the bloody revolutions that redistributed political power during the same period. Underlying that political history, Foucault discovered something that he found much more interesting: a multitude of ways in which coercive power survived by changing location. Moving from concentrated blocks at the top of society, power dispersed into a dense weblike network, where it endured in smaller theatres of practice and discourse.
Prisons, schools and hospitals came into existence. If you had no job, or behaved “criminally,” you could be arrested and imprisoned or hospitalized. Such “dividing practices” served both to quarantine the dangerous and create conceptions of the normal. Power pressed architecture, too, into its service. Foucault describes an 18th-century design for prison buildings, for example, aimed at permitting the least number of guards the greatest amount of surveillance. See-through front walls of cells made prisoners into their own guards — for never knowing whether they were being watched or not. Schools put students in lines, seated them according to rank or size. Record keeping became an important modality of power. Institutions evolved systems to keep track of patients, students and inmates. Individuals became their record, their progress, their diagnosis.
Power increasingly involved individuals in policing each other. Schools set up hierarchies of students, each level responsible for those below. Power became ever more effective as it took up residence in microtheatres of the everyday — workplaces, family, circles of friends — where reward for compliance played as important a role as fear of punishment.
As power “modernized,” it relied less on exterior forces and increasingly worked within each individual. Words, discourses and narratives facilitated this shift. Decrees and proclamations gave way to reasoned explanations of actions taken by the government and other institutions. More important to Foucault, appeal to scientific authority certified discourses about intimate matters as well — from sexuality to health/illness, sanity and deviance. Power, concealing itself in knowledge, constructed notions of who we are, how we “normally” act and think. The more people heard such narratives, the more they internalized them and became self-monitoring.
Yet the power Foucault uncovered is not a force that denies, represses or says, “No,” to us. On the contrary, power is at its most powerful when it says, “Yes,” gives permission, constructs our desires, saturates our pleasure and happiness. Power can thus claim to produce freedom even as it limits the possibilities of our conduct. We don’t just acquiesce, we fully embrace power. Indeed, Foucault concluded, power inserts itself into the very make-up of our Self.
“Modern” power does not rest simply in the hands of one or more ruling classes as a tool for controlling other classes. All groups serve power — whether they enjoy the advantages and privileges it promises, or suffer the injustices and violence it permits. Certainly power does not affect all groups in the same way, even though it represents itself as inherently disinterested and available to everyone. Those at the bottom of the social hierarchy remain closest to violence such as getting fired from their job or arrested by the police. One might argue that the power Foucault is talking about holds the privileged in a more effective mental bondage than the disadvantaged. But power inhabits all modern souls, possesses minds, shapes attitudes, informs what we tell ourselves about ourselves and our world. Foucault characterized the relations it produces amongst us as “all against all.”
Power defines the legal. It authors the moral. It gives license to exploit. It drives competition. Power is success. Money is power. Power so pervades our world that we’ve come to take it for granted.
Many of power’s forms are less easy to identify than the violence that is its crudest expression. Hierarchies characterize our families, workplaces, schools, churches, government, college and university systems. We meet the exception in the “higher-up” who doesn’t require deference or flattery from someone “down below.” Power keeps women deferring to men, the employee to the boss, all of us divided between haves and have-nots. We vie with each other for jobs, positions, raises, awards, admission. Sports, reality TV, computer and video games engage us in enacting and celebrating competition. Advertising inundates us with symbols of power, power products, power imagery. City hall, state and federal government exert power over the individual. Lobbyists wield power to influence legislation. Right-wing political parties parry with the left for power. The more powerful nations invade and take over the weaker — or control them by economic force. Power maintains an economic system that forces us to risk the life of the planet rather than decrease the profits of corporations. Power knows no limits to the weaponry it would invent to protect the freedom it claims to produce.
Foucault makes so strong a case that it could seem to argue against the very possibility of free individuals. Yet, he repeatedly stated that his aim was to help us attain greater freedom. He will have accomplished that goal if we throw off the mental chains he uncovered and create the loving and harmonious world all of us would prefer.
Language and deconstruction
One of Foucault’s former students, Jacques Derrida, felt that Foucault did not go far enough. Derrida’s work taught us how language itself effects the way we see the world. He also based his theories on predecessors such as linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
In the 1910s, Saussure investigated the structure of language in an innovative way that came to be known as “semiotics.” Saussure called words, “signs.” Each sign, he explained, has two facets, or as a sheet of paper, two sides. On the one side, the sign is a sound or a mark — a “signifier.” On the other side, the sign is a concept, has a meaning, carries an idea — a “signified.” Signs function insofar as they differ from one another. Floor is floor and not door because “floor” and “door” differ as signifiers (“fl” and not “d”). They also differ as signifieds. Floor refers to the lower horizontal plane of a room; door to the opening for entering or exiting a room. The point is that signs function by virtue of what they are not.
Saussure also observed that the signifier and signified are only arbitrarily connected. In other words, “door” means “the entranceway or exit to a room,” only as long we say it does. The same signified, (“entranceway or exit”) is also connected to “la porte” or “deur” and any number of other signifiers in other languages. So the linkage between signifier and signified is an agreement, a construction, deriving from and residing in a particular cultural, historical context. Nothing universal or transcendent connects specific sounds or glyphs with particular ideas.
The signified (the concept, meaning) is also arbitrary, changing, mobile. “Door” could mean “entranceway or exit to a room,” or “hinged barrier used to close or open a room.” Many signifiers have multiple signified that differ greatly. “Open,” for instance. Because this instability of meaning permeates our writing, speech and thinking, we depend on context to anchor signification.
Day to day experience provides ample evidence. Recall the innumerable occasions when someone says something and someone else completely misconstrues the message. Many jokes, especially childrens’ jokes, play on words with similar sounds but different meanings. Listening to a popular song, two people might hear different lyrics or take the same lyrics to mean different things. One listener might even attach one meaning to a song one week and an entirely different meaning to the same song the next. Whether referring to words spoken, sung or on a page, we say we can “read between the lines.” In school we learn that literature and poetry utilize this ambiguity in particular ways. Decoding a text with understandings of metaphor, allegory, irony, etc. can completely modify the apparent meaning.
We are somewhat less aware of another problem that Saussure pointed out. The sign has no necessary relationship with anything outside the sign system to which it supposedly refers. Saussure set this referent issue aside preferring to focus on linguistic structure. But for us — on the brink of destroying our planet — it warrants further consideration.
What does it mean that words have no necessary connection to the referent? Consider the word “leaf.” If we look up “leaf” in a dictionary, we find a definition made up of words. There may be a picture, but no actual leaf. And although, “leaf” can in some instances evoke an image of a particular leaf from a particular plant, it may be used in many instances when it does not and need not do so. When we come upon the word, “leaf,” it may refer to some abstract idea derived from our perception of leaves in general; or to one of the innumerable actual leaves. Which points to another problem. Imagine for a moment the shapes of clouds or rocks, the colors of flowers or sunsets... No sign system could ever carry enough signs to adequately portray the referent. And if it could, it would be far too complicated to work for communication.
Derrida expanded on the referent problem. He pointed out that when we look up a word in a dictionary, the words that make up its definition are themselves defined by other words, which are defined by other words, which are defined by other words. One could say that the meaning we were searching for cannot be located in a single place, but is rather scattered throughout the book. The signs point to each other, but, Derrida asserted, never get beyond themselves. They are bound together in closed chains of signifiers and signifieds.
Derrida worked with the concept that language functions by virtue of difference between one sign and another. He used the spelling differance, changing the noun into a verb, to engage a wider horizon of differing than Saussure had discussed. He observed, for example, that each sign, whether in writing or speech, differs the moment it occupies from the moment that preceded, as well as from the moment that follows. It takes time to read or speak each word. Each sign also differs the space it occupies from the space others occupy. Words produce a linear sequence. And primary to how signification works, signs get their meaning by differing from their polar opposites.
What a sign means, Derrida said, depends on a relationship of binary opposition to another term. Male/female. Good/bad. Light/dark. That opposition produces a hierarchical relationship, one of the terms being preferred to the other. Yet, the binary opposition must rely on something that must inhere in both — the something by which they can be said to relate. This something Derrida calls the “trace.” Each term of a binary opposition retains a trace of the other. Take the word ‘wish,’ for instance. We might suggest its opposite is ‘fact.’ Wish/fact. Fact is valued more highly than wish. Yet wish is secretly buried in fact. And fact in wish. Every text can be collapsed or, as Derrida put it, “deconstructed,” to reveal something that language was concealing.
Derrida wants to take language back to its origins, and once there, press words to disclose what they’ve been leaving out, absenting, keeping “other.” Keeping away from us. He seeks to show how language cannot be trusted to mirror our world the way we may have assumed it could. But how can he do it? He, too, is forced to use language. So he invents words — such as his differance with an “a.” Yet these words, too, can be deconstructed. In the end, as Derrida constantly observed, neither he nor his words could escape.
Derrida unmasked language, showing us that we cannot write or talk without “infecting” what we’re talking about with the workings of language, the “marks of writing.” For Derrida, language so imbues its representations with signs of itself, so disrupts its portrayals of Being with its oppositions, that the Referent remains forever out of reach.
We need not agree with Derrida’s conclusion to find his work useful. On the contrary, we can apply what both Derrida and Saussure taught in our quest to save our planet. Saussure pointed out the disconnect between sign and referent. Derrida delved more deeply into how language separates. He showed us one way of deconstructing the barriers. These understandings can move us closer to connecting with Nature and our own physical being. After all, we ourselves are part of the Referent.
Narratives and the narrative field
Words and language structure our understandings of the world. We live language. Words inhabit us. Whether we’re talking about God, the Universe, our minds, our bodies, the past, the future... we’re using words — put together to form sentences and elaborated into discourses that make what we call the “real,” real.
The broad horizon covered by the term “discourse” includes any text or speech that displays some purpose or carries some meaning. Scientific explanation, exhortations, admonitions, conversation, email, advertisement, raps... all qualify as discourse. The number of sentences doesn’t matter. If the words make cohesive sense, it’s discourse. And just as words, or signifiers, are only arbitrarily connected to their signifieds, bound in closed chains of signification and disconnected from the Referent, so discourses too, have no necessary relation to the world they describe or assume.
At first take, this observation may sound trivial. We all know that we’re able to tell lies and misrepresent. And how many times have we found ourselves honestly giving an account of some event while another witness with equal sincerity submits a completely different report of the same event? How often when trying to reconstruct where we have misplaced something, do we find ourselves only with difficulty sorting out what we actually did from what we imagine we did? And haven’t we all returned to some episode or place in our past only to learn that it may not have been at all as we remembered it? Or that it meant something entirely different to someone else? The problem has larger implications.
Primatologist Donna Haraway shows how the Referent disconnect even holds for scientific discourses that claim to speak authoritatively about Nature. She replaces the word discourse with “narrative”, a term used in literary criticism to name the storytelling dimension in novels. This choice of words effectively emphasizes the fictive element in all discourse. The point is that, whether we (or our scientists and professors) are describing some sociological or anthropological phenomenon; depicting history; presenting philosophical, theological, biological or political theory; elaborating some nuclear, physical, chemical or cosmological hypothesis — we are storytelling, no less then when we recount some personal experience or “make up” a fictional tale.
Haraway uses the expression “narrative field” to speak of the plurality of discourses in any discipline. And one could likewise envision all of our narratives — from scholarly treatises to any other kind of writing, speaking, word-work; explaining, discussing, debating, joking, chatting, reading, arguing, listening, advertising; newspapers, magazines; the underlying messages in our cinema, music, radio, television, imagery, photography and graphics; all the narratives there ever have been, in whatever conceivable media — as constituting what could be called the narrative field. Haraway explains that she employs the world “field,” in part because it represents, “a dynamic web of meanings including the many complex spaces where meanings are contested...” Her characterization of a narrative field as a place of dispute brings out a most salient feature in this world fraught with conflict.
We are a species that has come to conceive of itself as pitted against, somehow outside Nature. We celebrate competition. We have divided ourselves into races and nations. Rich/Poor. Male/Female. First World/Third World. Hierarchies of power pervade our politics, workplaces, classrooms, neighborhoods, families... This context profoundly affects the discourses that make sense of our world by explaining why things are as they are. Even discourses that lay claim to objectivity are not impartial. They don’t disinterestedly represent the world. Like fictional parables, they teach values. They take sides.
Ideology is a set of beliefs, opinions and values that informs our discourses and narratives. None of us are free of ideology. Like a sieve that lets some things pass while holding others, ideology filters what we see and what we don’t. It works at a deep level in the storytelling process, selectively foregrounding some elements, downplaying others. Ideology remembers and forgets. It highlights and ignores. It circumscribes what we take to be the “natural.” It produces what we say is the “normal.” Our ideologically saturated stories reproduce and justify existing conditions. Or they criticize what’s going on and search for alternatives. They work at making what is seem inevitable and/or the best that’s possible. Or they point out how things could be different, why we need to change.
The key question, then, is how does change happen in a narrative field? Haraway approaches the answer by observing that each new narrative introduced into the field affects the narratives already present. A new narrative may (or may not) raise questions about others already in the field. Haraway suggests that we abandon narratives as new ones raise the cost of defending them. She also hints that conflict may not be the means by which this is most likely to occur.
Narratives meet with resonance, indifference or conflict, not only between us but within our own minds. We find ourselves weighing the value of one narrative against another. We consider what one narrative implies for another, discard and ignore discourses that seem less believable or less valuable. We adopt and focus on those we deem “better.” We may ground those judgments on solid criteria. Certain events in history — such as the Holocaust — have taught us not all ideologies are equivalent. Some are clearly better than others.
The problem is that unconscious adherence to certain narratives may impede our ability to judge intelligently. We may not even be able to perceive the evidence, since what we believe is what we see. The way out of the entanglement resides at least in part in awareness of such phenomena as language, narratives, dividing practices and microtheatres of power, and how they affect what we can think, feel and see. Considering the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, the closed chain of signification that the sign system represents and the disconnect between sign and Referent, we might understand how we have come to create a world of war, starvation, environmental practices that threaten the Referent that is our planetary home.
Strong objections may be raised to this line of reasoning. Stories don’t wage wars. Narratives don’t feed the hungry. Discourses don’t destroy the environment. Words alone will never bring Peace on Earth. It is we, as active agents, who are responsible. True — but it is we by way of our stories. Stories about who we are, what we’re doing here. Our narratives express what we believe to be the moral and ethical. Discourses inform our cultural traditions, produce and uphold our political institutions. Our narratives justify what we do and the way we do it. We live out our stories in everything from international relations to our personal interactions with one another.
The centrality of storytelling to life cannot be overemphasized. We use storytelling to organize what might otherwise appear a patternless chaos. Stories retain our understandings of the world, one another, ourselves. They make sense of the stream of our days, our years. They get us out of bed in the morning and to work each day. We use storytelling to help us make decisions, judge behavior, define success and failure. We fit our individual story into ever larger stories of the world. We live Story.
From childhood we grow up and into the sign system, encountering and engaging dozens, hundreds, thousands of narratives along the way. They make sense of everything around us. Or at least we think they do. What doesn’t make sense, we postpone or dismiss. Of course, the narratives we’re exposed to necessarily depend on the socio-economic class into which we’re born, the persons we meet, the schools we attend, the media available to us, our gender, as well as numerous other elements. As we begin doing our own storytelling, our personal narratives are inevitably entangled with those that we have encountered. Which were, in turn, spun from narratives that preceded them. Creating narrative is never an isolated activity.
From the breakfast newspaper to the evening news; watercooler to boardroom; classroom to library; at temple, church and mosque; in ballads and novels; from café to bar; silver screen to television; snailmail to internet; family gatherings to quiet moments alone; around campfires, bedtimes and all times in-between — we’re hearing, reading, reproducing, creating narratives. Common, repeated strands shape the normal. Strands never spoken rarely or never enter our thoughts.
Storytelling often remains unconscious. If we do become aware of the process, we easily underrate it. We explain to ourselves that it’s only natural to interpret events, put what’s happening into a larger context, supply a rationale for someone’s behavior. When faced with a problem that resists easy solution, awareness of discursive practice can prove critical. We change our narratives all the time, both personally and collectively. Think back to what you told yourself about the world when you were seven; what people told themselves about the Earth before we learned that it was round. If we know we’re free to step back from what we’re telling ourselves, interrogate and modify stories, even create entirely new narratives — we can effectively change perspectives and find a pathway beyond the impasse.
We can examine our relationships in terms of power. Wherever nonegalitarian and asymmetrical relations are enacted, power is served. Exclude reciprocity from personal relationships and you’re left with power. As long as we think of domination over others as natural, even a “right,” power is upheld, satisfied. And wherever we are powering over others, we cannot be truly fair or truly loving.
We can consider the effects of language on how we relate to ourselves, others and the world. Language signifies by opposition. Grammatical structures assume and produce relationships of Subject | Object (Doer of the action | thing acted upon). Whatever language represents, it represents as an object. Thus the world that language represents is pre-determined, a world with a particular character. The Universe may be as much a Subject center as each of us; but language can only approach that possibility by qualifying the Object status it imposes. Putting it another way, language does have recourse to categories such as “animism” or “pantheism.” Yet it can only deliver the Universe as though it were a thing. Equally important, when language attempts to represent Consciousness or our own subjectivity, it produces the ego — an identity constructed on the basis of separation, opposition and negation. The ego is not-other; not-world.
What we want, what all of us want is a loving world. If we don’t feel free to create that world, then we owe it to ourselves to find out why. This chapter has explored how language, narratives and cultural practices infected by coercive power operate on the deepest levels of our minds. Language and power are generating our identity itself, an identity we will examine further in the next chapter.
Sources
Michel Foucault
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 1982.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. 1979.
The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. 1984
Jacques Derrida
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1976
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. 1978
Donna Haraway
Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. 1989
Haraway, Donna. “Primatology Is Politics by Other Means.” In Feminist Approaches to Science. Ed. Ruth Bleier. 1986.
Postmodernism
Klages, Mary. Introduction to Literary Theory. http://www.colorado.edu/English/engl2010mk/2010syllabus.2001.htm
Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective. Ed. Joyce Appleby, Elizabeth Covington, David Hoyt, Michael Latham and Allison Sneider. 1996
Leitch, Vincent B. Deconstructive Criticism. 1983.