Narrative

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February 25th, 2021
Graeber focuses specifically on rules and Narrative, rather than on the distinctness of objects and actions, but he demonstrates very nicely how these fantasy worlds are pleasurable in part because of their mythic, childish exaggeration of Pattern.
And then there's 📙 After Virtue, which is a book about Virtue Ethics but whose most interesting perspectives to me have to do with the nature of Intelligibility in human action and how it relates to Narrative.
February 26th, 2021
The Narrative nature of human life is maybe even more central to 📙 After Virtue than the very concept of virtues. In a way it seems more like a book of "narrative ethics" than a book of "virtue ethics."
March 10th, 2021
We killed God, we killed the Self, we killed Narrative. Unmoored from that transcendental algebra, we swim in a brackish sea of Weird Fishes, slimy and confusing and infinitely fascinating.
The treatment of Narrative in 📙 After Virtue can seem to imply a nostalgia for the great coherent narratives of ancient societies, but MacIntyre's pluralism promotes another understanding. City-states are not necessarily empires. I think the stories MacIntyre talks about here are primarily plotoids:
March 1st, 2021
The Vertical is about Quest, Plot, and Narrative, while the Horizontal is about Things, Places, and Characters.
Thus the Narratives which we live out have both an unpredictable and a partially teleological character. *
March 29th, 2021
There's one key word of this web site that hasn't showed up here so far, and which I also wasn't expecting to see in 📙 The Biology of Desire, but which turns out to play a crucial part towards the end. The word is Narrative. Lewis describes a study of Inuit tribes that tried to find out why some of these tribes have tragically high suicide rates while in some tribes, the rate is zero.
March 9th, 2021
Viewing the self in terms of Narrative need not challenge Mead’s pluralistic usages of the term self. It complements them by providing an overarching framework that allows us to make sense of how memories and multiple selves are bound together, supplying a unity more comprehensive than the composite social self. *
📰 A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
In the context of a play, Chekhov's gun is meaningful if and only if it's fired in the final act. If the gun is never fired (or is otherwise irrelevant to the plot), then it's meaningless — not a prop, but mere set dressing. And just as we find Narratives unsatisfying when the elements in them don't pay off later, so too do we appreciate when things pay off meaningfully in our lives and the other contexts we care about. Otherwise it's just one damn thing after another.
We love hearing stories about characters who experience these epic heights of meaning: Harry Potter, Ender Wiggin, Frodo Baggins. Or consider Jesus's life and his death on the cross, which arguably hits harder on the human "meaning bone" than any other Narrative ever constructed.
📰 Against Narratives
For a long time I would default to a kind of Narrative playacting in every situation, trying to autopredict my own life.
Sometimes things happened exactly as I thought they would. But often they didn’t, and then I’d be disappointed and have to adjust the Narrative to account for the setback, hoping that the story would get back on course.
Most people believe that if we let go of Narrative we can’t move forward in our lives. But Singer thinks we don’t need a story: we can progress effectively just by doing the thing that seems most compelling at every point. Instead of acting in accordance to your Narrative preferences, you simply do the thing that’s tugging you forward.
Most of us immediately subject pure experience to Narrative processing, but you don’t need to do that. You can choose to experience every event through the lens of Narrative, or you can choose to reject it and live a life that’s not organized or confined by mental stories—to live an unstoried life.
📰 George Herbert Mead and the Unity of the Self
Two questions guide this examination of Mead’s ideas: what kinds of unity or continuity are characteristic of selves? And is there a form of unity – a “meta-self” – that can encompass the types of selves that we find in Mead? In response to the second question, I demonstrate that Mead had a Narrative account of the self, one that has the potential to incorporate different kinds of selves, although Mead left his account underdeveloped.
Through Mead’s sensitivity to the ways in which sociality informs self development his work can complement well-known Narrative accounts of the self in thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor.
Viewing the self in terms of Narrative need not challenge Mead’s pluralistic usages of the term self. It complements them by providing an overarching framework that allows us to make sense of how memories and multiple selves are bound together, supplying a unity more comprehensive than the composite social self.
📰 Inexhaustible Precision
In fairy tales, the quintessential form of the collective, the Narratives have been shaped through generations, the individual is as good as absent, they are told by a we to a we, and the language of this we is permeated by a kind of lowest common denominator of the culture: formulas, clichés, stereotypes, so simple that even a small child can be mesmerized by them, without what the fairy tale is about necessarily becoming childish.
📰 Pathologic 2 Mindmap: A Questlog People Actually Read
You know how sometimes in a game you have a codex with some lofty literary text, and then right next to it, there is a line that says “Go kill 10 rats?” Who wrote this? Is it the protagonist talking to themselves like that? Is it God talking to them? What is the nature of this text? So we wanted to somehow integrate these technical texts that any game needs into the Narrative.
If you are making some kind of Narrative-oriented open-world game with a complex plot, a mindmap can help you make the storyline more accessible. It will help the player to not get lost in the painstakingly written emotional dramas of several dozen characters.
📰 Patterns of Refactored Agency
The model of the mind that emerges from these thinkers is that we are at our base bundles of autonomous and somewhat anarchic behaviors, tied together by higher-level functions that work on a kind of Narrative basis – we hold ourselves together by telling stories about our actions, before and after the fact.
📰 Virtue Ethics: Not Practically Useful, Either
My experience of morality is contrary to traditional Virtue Ethics in almost every way. It doesn’t feel like it depends on my social roles. It doesn’t strike me as divisible – that is, it feels like solid goodness and words like “continence” or “prudence” don’t do anything to me. It doesn’t strike me as the same feeling that occurs when I consider important but non-ethical questions like procrastination. It doesn’t strike me as performed in a community or according to a Narrative. It’s just not Virtue Ethics.
📙 After Virtue
Once again we are involved in writing a Narrative history.
a concept of a self whose unity resides in the unity of a Narrative which links birth to life to death as Narrative beginning to middle to end.
I am presenting both conversations in particular then and human actions in general as enacted Narratives.
It is because we all live out Narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the Narratives that we live out that the form of Narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others.
Thus the Narratives which we live out have both an unpredictable and a partially teleological character.
Thus personal identity is just that identity presupposed by the unity of the character which the unity of a Narrative requires. Without such unity there would not be subjects of whom stories could be told.
The Narrative of any one life is part of an interlocking set of Narratives. Moreover this asking for and giving of accounts itself plays an important part in constituting Narratives. Asking you what you did and why, saying what I did and why, pondering the differences between your account of what I did and my account of what I did, and vice versa, these are essential constituents of all but the very simplest and barest of Narratives.
In what does the Unity of an Individual Life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a Narrative embodied in a single life. To ask ‘What is the good for me?’ is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion. To ask ‘What is the good for man?’ is to ask what all answers to the former question must have in common.
The unity of a human life is the unity of a Narrative quest. Quests sometimes fail, are frustrated, abandoned or dissipated into distractions; and human lives may in all these ways also fail. But the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest. A quest for what?
📙 Experiences of Depression
I will offer a tentative account of another kind of Narrative disturbance, one that I think occurs in at least some cases of Depression. Here, the person needs a Narrative, principally one about where she is going and how she is going to tackle various tasks, but she cannot formulate one because there is no sense that the future could be any different. However, what results is not an absence of Narrative thought. Instead, there is a cacophony of disordered thoughts as she struggles to form a coherent Story that cannot take shape. Thoughts go round and round without any efficacy, like a car engine that is out of gear.
📙 Improvisation
If the community of faith is the primary subject of theological ethics, Narrative becomes an inadequate category for interpretation.
📙 Learning From MacIntyre
In my psychoanalytic work I have long been skeptical of Narratives. It is MacIntyre who has taught me to see things otherwise. My skepticism stemmed from thinking of Narratives along the lines of plots with a beginning, a middle and an end.
But MacIntyre understands Narrative in a different way: Reflective agents thus increasingly understand themselves and others in terms of a certain kind of Narrative, a Story in which they as agents direct themselves or fail to direct themselves toward a final end, the nature of which they initially apprehend in and through their activities as rational agents.
In Narrative so construed, we do not need an Intelligible plot with a beginning, middle and end: we do not all have to be Aristotelian tragic heroes. Rather, Narrative for MacIntyre, is a Story of repetition and re-creation: of our repeated efforts to get clearer on, perhaps revise and shape, and try to achieve our final ends.
Note the emerging sense of having a life—expressed in “is this it?!” This anxious question expresses an awareness (however inchoate) of life as bios: as having a certain duration, Narrative structure, and limit (as coming to an end). This emerging sense of life as bios opens up the possibility for worry about life, to use MacIntyre’s phrase, going wrong.
📙 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics
Of course, beyond his methodological worries regarding these forms of ethical theorizing, Taylor is also well-known for his central claim regarding our orientation to the “good.” As he puts it: One could put it this way: because we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus determine our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in Narrative form, as a “quest.” But one could perhaps start from another point: because we have to determine our place in relation to the good, therefore we cannot be without an orientation to it, and hence must see our life in story. From whichever direction, I see these conditions as connected facets of the same reality, inescapable structural requirements of human agency.
📙 Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
Practices occupy only the first place in MacIntyre’s three-part definition of Virtue. The account of virtues in terms of (1) practices is incomplete until it is supplemented in chapter fifteen with additional definitions in terms of (2) the Narrative order of a whole human life, and (3) moral traditions.
📙 The Biology of Desire
They asked teens to talk about their lives, about their goals, and about their futures. What they found was that young people from the high-suicide communities didn’t have stories to tell. They were incapable of talking about their lives in any coherent, organized way. They had no clear sense of their past, their childhood, and the generations preceding them. And their attempts to outline possible futures were empty of form and meaning. Unlike the other children, they could not see their lives as Narratives, as stories. Their attempts to answer questions about their life stories were punctuated by long pauses and unfinished sentences. They had nothing but the present, nothing to look forward to, so many of them took their own lives.
Where the youths had stories to tell, continuity was already built into their sense of self by the structure of their society. Tribal councils remained active and effective organs of government. Elders were respected, and they took on the responsibility of teaching children who they were and where they had come from. The language and customs of the tribe had been preserved conscientiously over the decades. And so the youths saw themselves as part of a larger Narrative, in which the stories of their lives fit and made sense.
To me the message is clear: humans need to be able to see their own lives progressing, moving, from a meaningful past to a viable future. They need to see themselves as going somewhere, as characters in a Narrative, as making sense.
Bruce Alexander, who conducted the Rat Park studies (reviewed in Chapter One), has outlined a broad social theory of addiction in his 2008 book, The Globalization of Addiction, where he investigates societal dislocation and its negative impacts. Carl Hart (also introduced in Chapter One) showed how members of minority groups living in the inner city chose to take drugs because other choices seemed unavailable or meaningless. Clearly these populations have something in common with Chandler’s high-suicide communities—the loss of a viable cultural Narrative in which their individual Narratives made sense.
It seems that the creation of this larger Narrative is intended to build a sense of continuity that works as scaffolding for individual Narratives, and that’s what made the difference in suicide rates among Native youth.
The facility for viewing one’s life as a Narrative may be what’s missing in Addiction.
Stories don’t work without emotional themes. They would be impossible to follow. There would be no impetus to get to the next paragraph or the next chapter, either for the main character or for the reader. In the same way, real-life Narratives can’t be held in mind without the feelings that give them shape. Desire is the most potent of those feelings. Desire has the power to propel us through life, to get us from now to later. The trick to overcoming addiction is thus the realignment of Desire, so that it switches from the goal of immediate relief to the goal of long-term fulfillment.
Treatment just requires the attention of one other human being who can hold, possibly distil, and hopefully extend the Narrative energized by the cresting wave of an individual’s Desire to change.
📙 The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics
Insofar as this progression begins with some implied conflict or some undesirable state and ends with resolution, the beatitudes singly and collectively share the basic characteristics of Narrative. A subtlety, however, is that this progression refers to a future completion. So the beatitudes might be classified as belonging properly to the genre of Narrative only retrospectively, once the end has been attained. Prior to this completion, the beatitudes share something of the characteristics of a promise, since the second clause of each beatitude is a future contingent proposition that is true to the extent to which its speaker is reliable.
This central role of second-person relatedness in a child’s development appears to provide a useful metaphor for understanding at least part of what Aquinas means by the beatitudes. They are Narratives made possible uniquely by second-personal relatedness, oriented toward goals that a person might not anticipate attaining or even be able to imagine in advance.
As promissory Narratives, I suggest therefore that the contribution of the beatitudes in the VGBF network is to encourage the virtue of hope in such a way as to lead to the maturing of love.
📙 The Utopia of Rules
Everyday politics—whether in a rural village or corporate office—has everything to do with the manufacture of official Narratives, rumors, and accounts. It stands to reason that heroic societies, which turned political self-aggrandizement into an art form, would also have been organized in such a way as to become vast engines for the generation of stories.
As a corollary: in fantasy, as in heroic societies, political life is largely about the creation of stories. Narratives are embedded inside Narratives; the storyline of a typical fantasy is often itself about the process of telling stories, interpreting stories, and creating material for new ones. This is in dramatic contrast with the mechanical nature of bureaucratic operations.
Administrative procedures are very much not about the creation of stories; in a Bureaucratic setting, stories appear when something goes wrong. When things run smoothly, there’s no Narrative arc of any sort at all.