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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Narratives produce the ties that bind us. They create community, eliminate contingency and anchor us in being. And yet in our contemporary information society, where everything has become arbitrary and random, storytelling becomes storyselling and narratives lose their binding force. Whereas narratives create community, storytelling brings forth only a fleeting community - the community of consumers. No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people rather than bringing them together. Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. They are no longer a medium of shared experience. The inflation of storytelling betrays a need to cope with contingency, but storytelling is unable to transform the information society back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling as storyselling is a pathological phenomenon of our age. Byung-Chul Han, one of the most perceptive cultural theorists of contemporary society, dissects this crisis with exceptional insight and flair.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Preface
Notes
From Narration to Information
Notes
The Poverty of Experience
Notes
The Narrated Life
Notes
Bare Life
Notes
The Disenchantment of the World
Notes
From Shocks to Likes
Notes
Theory as Narrative
Notes
Narration as Healing
Notes
Narrative Community
Notes
Storyselling
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Preface
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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The Crisis of Narration
Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
polity
Originally published in German as Die Krise der Narration © MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2023. All rights reserved.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
Excerpt from Peter Handke, Zwiegespräch © Suhrkamp Verlag AG, Berlin, 2022. Included with permission of the publisher.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6044-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023939907
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
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Watch out, narration.
A little bit of patience for narration, please.
And then: patience through narration!
Peter Handke*
*
Zwiegespräch
, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2022, p. 10
PREFACE
Everyone is talking about ‘narratives’. Paradoxically, the inflation of narrative betrays a crisis of narration. At the heart of all the noise of storytelling, there is a narrative vacuum that expresses itself in a lack of meaning and orientation.1 Neither storytelling nor the narrative turn will be able to bring about the return of narration. A paradigm becomes a topic, and a fashionable object of academic research, only when there is a deep-seated alienation from it. All the talk about narratives suggests their dysfunctionality.
As long as narratives were our anchor in being, that is, as long as they provided us with a site, turning being-in-the-world into being-at-home by furnishing life with meaning, support and orientation – in other words, as long as living was a narrating – there was never any talk of storytelling or narration. The inflation in the use of such concepts begins precisely when narratives lose their original power, their gravitational force, their secret and magic. Once they are seen as something constructed, they lose their moment of inner truth. They are considered contingent, exchangeable and modifiable. They are no longer the source of what is binding, of what unites. They no longer anchor us in being. Despite the present hype around narratives, we live in a post-narrative time. Narrative consciousness, allegedly rooted in the human brain, is a conception that is possible only in a post-narrative time, that is, outside of the narrative spell.
Religion is a typical narrative with an inner moment of truth. It narrates contingency away. Christian religion is a meta-narrative that reaches into every nook and cranny of life and anchors it in being. Time itself becomes freighted with narrative. In the Christian calendar, each day is meaningful. In the post-narrative era, the calendar is de-narrativized; it becomes a meaningless schedule of appointments. Religious holidays are highlights and high points of a narrative. Without a narrative, there are no festivities, no festive times – no festive moods with their intensified feeling of being. All that is left are work and free time, production and consumption. In the post-narrative era, festivities are commercialized. They become events and spectacles. Rituals are also narrative practices: they are always embedded in a narrative context. As symbolic techniques for creating enclosure, they transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home.
A world-changing and world-opening narrative cannot be created by the whim of a single person. Rather, it owes its existence to a complex process in which various forces and actors are involved. Ultimately, a narrative is an expression of the mood of a time. Such narratives, which have an inner moment of truth, are the opposite of the eviscerated, exchangeable and contingent narratives – that is, the micro-narratives – of the present, which lack gravity, which lack any moment of truth.
Narration is a concluding form. It creates a closed order that founds meaning and identity. In late modernity, which is characterized by opening up and unbounding, forms of concluding and closing off are increasingly eroded. At the same time, with increasing permissiveness comes a growing need for narrative forms of closure. Populist, nationalist and right-wing extremist or tribal narratives, including conspiracy theories, cater to this need. They are taken up because they offer meaning and identity. However, in the post-narrative era, with its intensifying experience of contingency, these narratives do not have any strong binding force.
Narratives create a community. Storytelling, by contrast, brings forth only a fleeting community – the commodified form of community. These communities consist of consumers. No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people as individual consumers. Consumers are lonely. They do not form a community. Nor can the ‘stories’ shared on social media fill the narrative vacuum. They are merely forms of pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion. Posting, liking and sharing content are consumerist practices that intensify the narrative crisis.
Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates the narrative and submits it to consumption. Storytelling produces narratives in a consumable form. It charges products with emotion. It promises unique experiences. We buy, sell and consume narratives and emotions. Stories sell. Storytelling is storyselling.
Narration and information are counteracting forces. Information intensifies the experience of contingency, whereas narration reduces it by turning the accidental into necessity. Information lacks the solidity of being. Niklas Luhmann puts it lucidly: ‘[Information’s] cosmology is not a cosmology of being but of contingency.’2Being and information are mutually exclusive. A lack of being, a forgetfulness of being, is thus immanent to the information society. Information is additive and cumulative. It is not a bearer of sense, whereas a narration carries sense. The original meaning of ‘sense’ is direction. Today, we are perfectly informed, but we lack orientation. Information also dissects time into a mere sequence of present moments. A narrative, by contrast, brings forth a temporal continuum, that is, a story.
On the one hand, the informatization of society accelerates its de-narrativization. On the other, amid the tsunami of information, there arises a need for meaning, identity and orientation, that is, a need to clear the thick forest of information in which we risk losing ourselves. The flood of ephemeral narratives, including conspiracy theories, and the tsunami of information are ultimately two sides of the same coin. Adrift in the sea of information and data, we seek a narrative anchor.
We tell fewer and fewer stories in our everyday lives. Telling stories is in decline because communication takes the form of the exchange of information. Scarcely any stories are told on social media. Stories unite people by promoting their capacity for empathy. They create genuine community. The loss of empathy in the age of the smartphone is a clear sign that this technology is not a medium for telling stories. Its technical dispositif is already a barrier to the telling of stories. Typing and swiping are not narrative gestures. A smartphone allows only for the accelerated exchange of information. Narrating presupposes close listening and deep attention. The narrative community is a community of attentive listeners. But we increasingly lack the patience for attentive listening, even the patience for narrative.
When everything becomes contingent, fleeting and accidental, and all that is binding and unifying dissolves – that is, in the current storm of contingency – there is a clamour for storytelling. The inflation of narrative betrays a need to be able to cope with contingency. But storytelling is unable to transform the information society, which is devoid of orientation and meaning, back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling is a pathological phenomenon of our era. The narrative crisis has a long prehistory. This essay attempts to trace it.
Notes
1.
Transl. note: Here and throughout, ‘storytelling’ is in English in the original, except in passages on Walter Benjamin, where the German is ‘Erzähler’/’Erzählen’. The term is used for commodified forms of narration, as opposed to the proper telling of stories, ‘Geschichten erzählen’. The term ‘storytelling’ should therefore not be associated with Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay ‘The Storyteller’, ‘Der Erzähler’, which spells out the characteristics of the proper telling of stories.
2.
Niklas Luhmann, ‘Entscheidungen in der Informationsgesellschaft’, at
https://www.fen.ch/texte/gast_luhmann_informationsgesellschaft.htm
From Narration to Information
The founder of the French daily newspaper Le Figaro, Hippolyte de Villemessant, expressed the essence of information in the following remark: ‘To my readers, an attic fire in the Latin Quarter is more important than a revolution in Madrid.’ For Walter Benjamin, the remark ‘makes strikingly clear that what gets the readiest hearing is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest’. The newspaper reader’s attention extends only to what is near. It shrinks to mere curiosity. The modern newspaper reader jumps from one news item to the next, instead of letting her gaze drift into the distance and linger. The modern reader has lost the long, slow, lingering gaze.
A piece of news that is embedded in a story has an altogether different spatial and temporal structure from that of information. It comes ‘from afar’.1 This distance is its characteristic trait. Modernity is characterized by the progressive demolition of farness, the place of which is taken by gaplessness. Information is a genuine expression of a gaplessness that makes everything available. A piece of news that arrives is marked by an unavailable distance. It announces a historical event that resists availability and computability. We are at its mercy, as if faced with the power of destiny.
