The Guardian carried a review of “Making Stories” by Jerome Bruner this weekend, a book about the way we construct personal narratives and how this relates to our sense of self. The review, entitled Tales of the unexpected, seeks to debunk what the author (Prof. Galen Strawson) sees as an obsession with personal narrative construction among psychologists
In the context of social software and new, more narrative-based approaches to knowledge sharing, this is a highly relevant debate
Regarding this “narrativist orthodoxy”, Strawson asks
“Is the narrativity view a profound and universal insight into the human condition? It’s a partial truth at best, true enough for some, completely false for others. There is a deep divide in our species. On one side, the narrators: those who are indeed intensely narrative, self-storying, Homeric, in their sense of life and self, whether they look to the past or the future. On the other side, the non-narrators: those who live life in a fundamentally non-storytelling fashion, who may have little sense of, or interest in, their own history, nor any wish to give their life a certain narrative shape. In between lies the great continuum of mixed cases.”
Prof. Strawson reminds us that even Sarte, who was interested in this self-narrating tendency, didn’t necessarily see it as a good thing
“When Sartre describes our relentless storytelling he doesn’t think that it is a good thing. He thinks it’s a disaster: it’s our fundamental existential failing, the heart of our inauthenticity or mauvaise foi.”
Finally
“So what exactly does this self-creation amount to? How far can you go? Bruner does not say, and the prospects for truth are not good for the narrators among us. It is well known that telling and retelling one’s past leads to changes, smoothings, enhancements, shifts away from the facts … Every conscious recall brings an alteration, and the implication is plain: the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your being … the less you do it the better.”
I wonder what this means for people who choose to live parts of their personal life online, such as personal bloggers? Perhaps it also has wider implications in a work context for the way we construct narratives around collaborations within organisations.
Weblog search engines
Headshift has a nice list of weblogsearch engines. I hadn’t come across waypath before – it looks interesting. That said, given another article touching on the pointlessness of social identity construction through public discussion (like a weblog) it s…
Not had time to read the detail but I fastened on the words “shifts away from the facts … ” in your quote from Strawson. Which begs the question what he means by “facts”; it sounds as if he is presenting facts as objective and existing outside the experience of the narrator, as if objectively verifiable. I’m sure there’s fancy philosophical jargon for this but let’s not go there. I also disagree with the idea that some people are not narrating their lives; surely we are always telling ourselves stories about ourselves, some would argue that that is what consciousness is… a narrator of experience.
Well …. first of all, I am not sure that I necessarily agree with Strawson’s comments – I will need to read the book to decide.
However, I recognise that each story becomes subtly recast over time, perhaps to reflect subsequent identity/belief changes or perhaps to gradually remove elements that don’t fit my sense of self any more. That is one reason why I found this review’s avowedly anti-narritivistic angle, and warning about it’s side-effects interesting.
Obviously some facts are objectively verifiable – at least testable – in hindsight against evolving personal narratives. This is most evident in public figures whose actions/statements are on record or are witnessed by others – if their personal narrative slowly evolves through recounting to the point where they explain either the actions/words or their intent in a new way that fits their current identity, then there may be people around who can justifiably contradict this. That’s the only example that comes to mind right now, but there must be more.
I think it is debatable whether some people consciously self-narrate. In my experience, some people’s lives are much more reactive than reflective, especially if their life is mainly about survival and/or provision for a family. We can argue whether consciousness is in fact a narrator of experience, but this can’t be proved or disproved. However, if we understand “narrativism” as pulling together a story that links their experience together within a partially constructed sense of self, then I don’t think we can say that everybody necessarily does this. We can observe, comment, reflect and learn without constructing a coherent story.
Having said all that, I myself am an arch-narrativist and my life to date is a collection of stories that contribute heavily to my sense of self – I may even bore you with some of them at some point
In particular, I am fascinated by the interplay between history, myth and fiction and the role that narrative plays in each (although my wife is more of an expert on this side of life than I am). My understanding of this, especially the role of oral history in some older cultures, tells me that narrative is tremendously important, powerful and possibly even hard-wired into our brains as a method of making sense of the world – Joseph Campbell’s PBS series on mythology some time ago showed quite clearly that almost all cultures share some common narrative structures in their myths and stories, which perhaps points to their deep-rooted role in our consciousness.
So, perhaps I don’t agree with the reviewer either, but it’s good to re-examine our orthodoxies once in a while
Thanks for commenting.
I still have to read the book. I think the critique has value in highlighting the reality that our self-narratives are helpful but they are also fallible. They cannot capture our whole reality. I don’t think anything can and that’s gives me a sense of wonder.
Still, Strawson sounds to me someone who has the sympathies of a pure empiricist.
Perhaps Stawson forgets that from the word go, the appeal to “facts” is already subjective. “Factuality” (if that’s even a word) is from the very beginning interpretative, limited by language and therefore in some ways a form of story-telling or at least they are kissing cousins.
I believe the narrative approach has highlighted to us that the reality of ourselves does not lie only in the question: “Is this factual?” but more profoundly within the question “Is this true–true even in a mythic kind of way?”
Sartre while warning us about the woes of self-narrative, I believe also warned us in the same breath that the alternative is a kind of despair.