In Search of the Lost Narrative

Spanish version: En busca del relato perdido

The narrative as a form of knowledge

Narrative is one of the main ways we have to interpret the world around us. According to Jerome Bruner (1996, 2003) there are two forms of cognitive functioning, the paradigmatic and the narrative. The paradigmatic form is based on logical-scientific argumentation, while the narrative is based on the strength of the stories.

Faced with any event, Homo sapiens builds a narrative to understand it. The narrative allows to introduce an order into the surrounding chaos, see who are the actors of the story, show their action programs, etc. In short, narrative constructions reassure us because they reduce uncertainty and simplify an environment that is complex by definition.

Roughly speaking, Bruner’s paradigmatic and narrative models coincide respectively with Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2. As he explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, System 1 is fast, intuitive, automatic, emotional, and stereotyped; System 2 is slow, logical, calculating, and requires effort. For Kahneman

The mind — especially System 1 — appears to have a special aptitude for the construction and interpretation of stories about active agents, who have personalities, habits, and abilities.

As explained in Thinking, Fast and Slow through tens of experiments, even the most rigorous mathematicians and statisticians, in theory the maximum exponents of System 2 thinking, usually fall into the traps set by System 1. Kahneman defined these falls as cognitive illusions.

If necessary, the narrative can go beyond the simplification of the environment and enter into the future through the construction of hypotheses and the development of predictions. The human ability to create fictions (a hypothesis is a microfiction) is an evolutionary advantage over any other species. An example: an anthropoid with the ability to imagine future scenarios — “I am going to reserve food and water in case there is a drought tomorrow” — had an enormous advantage over any other species that inhabited the African savannah three million years ago. These microfictions can mean the difference between life and death.

But Kahneman comes back: within the cognitive illusions there is the so-called illusion of validity, a type of bias where the subject

overestimates his or her ability to interpret and predict accurately the outcome when analyzing a set of data, in particular when the data analyzed show a very consistent pattern — that is, when the data ‘tell’ a coherent story (Wikipedia).

This effect persists even when the person is aware of all the factors that limit the accuracy of his or her predictions.

Narrative implosion

COVID-19 has triggered a narrative chain reaction. Although Homo sapiens had already faced other pandemics, this is the first to spread across all continents in a handful of days thanks to the dense transportation network built by globalization. In his post El derecho a narrar (The right to narrate) published a week ago on my blog Hipermediaciones, Julio Alonso reviewed the main stories built around COVID-19: the story of the end of capitalism, the virus as genocide of the surplus, the experiment created in a Chinese laboratory and sent as a “gift” to the West, Gaia’s revenge against the permanent aggression of Homo sapiens to natural environments, etc. To these discourses enunciated by intellectuals and scientists, we must add the petabytes of information produced daily by the great media actors, and tons of micro-texts that bounce madly on social media.

What emerges from communication networks (which are not just “social media”) is an urgent collective need to put what is happening into discourse. In short: the Homo sapiens of the year 2020 are desperate searching for a story, looking for a narrative that allows them to process a catastrophic event on a planetary scale that only had antecedents in the memory of apocalyptic science fiction.

If the globalized society facilitated the transmission of the coronavirus, the mediated society expanded the production and circulation of discourses. Not even a quantum computer would be sufficient to record and process all the textual/narrative content that the coronavirus is generating, from curvilinear maps and graphics to memes, speeches of scientists, political and religious leaders, journalists, colleagues, relatives and friends. In this context,

it seems that each subject or group projects their own world view onto the pandemic and makes it say what they want: the anti-capitalists quote Marx and dream of the end of this mode of production; the ecologists predict the end of abusive behavior of Homo sapiens with the environment and, at any time, the Men of Faith will ring the bell, with the brochure of the Saint John’s “Apocalypse” in hand, to warn us that the game is over. And in the midst of so much verbiage, it will not take long for a mathematician to break in with a bunch of Excel templates and simulations announcing that, yes, the Truth is Out There (Era en Abril…).

According to the Argentinian semiotician and sociologist Eliseo Verón, the weft of discourse processes of production, circulation and interpretation assumes the form of a network. If the “infinite network of social semiosis”, as Verón called it, forwarded to the image of a galaxy, these days we are witnessing a collapse in the production of meaning that reminds us of the image of a black hole that swallows everything.

Metaphors and discursive reversals

The unbridled narrative production that this pandemic brings also includes a series of metaphors that simplify — remember the role of the narrative: reduce chaos and uncertainty, tame complexity — what we are experiencing. I transcribe below a couple of paragraphs from my article El virus y sus metáforas (sangres sudor y lágrimas) The virus and its metaphors (blood, sweat and masks) published in Perfil a few days ago:

These days an interesting phenomenon is taking place in Spain that we could call “discursive reversal”: if economic crises always disguise themselves as natural catastrophes — how many times did we face the “turbulences” of the markets or a financial “earthquakes”? —, in this case a natural crisis is put into discourse through a very human metaphor: we are waging a “war” against the coronavirus.

The metaphor of the war allows identifying “friends”, “allies”, “enemies” and “traitors”. If we are in a state of “war”, then “strategies” will be established and the whole of society will “mobilize” against the coronavirus. But metaphors do not only facilitate the description of a phenomenon: they can also become a “guide to future action”.

In the case of Spain, the presence of senior military officers at government press conferences reinforces this rhetorical scaffolding, not to mention the Winston Churchill-style speeches that Pedro Sánchez delivers every Saturday night. No one doubts it: days of “blood, sweat and masks” await us.

Social semiosis

When political or economic crises happen, different situations can occur at the discursive level. Let’s look at a couple of them. On the one hand, the main actors can remain silent and do not make their point of view about what is happening. Something like this happened with Argentine President Fernando de la Rúa during the 2001 crisis: the presidential silence generated a communication gap that, in addition to raising uncertainty, motivated the appearance of countless rumors (see my article El año que vivimos en peligro / The year we lived in danger in Telos ).

Faced with the silence of the great actors, it may happen that the rest of the enunciators begin to share messages, the word parable grows and the discursive network is filled with whispers, hoaxes, rumours, fake news and other textual species. Arguably, to function well, political or economic systems require regular discursive circulation, halfway between the silence of the first situation and the uncontrolled overinterpretation of the second.

Low sense production is as bad as excessive.

Stop Making Sense

In these weeks many philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, historians and communicators have been forced, in one way or another, to say something. The same is true of artists. The global village is crying out for stories to understand what is happening. And there the problems begin. I don’t understand the colleagues — I’m talking about well-known voices from social sciences — who are making precise predictions about what life will be like in the A.D.world. (after Coronavirus). That if capitalism ends, if the new social state comes, that George Orwell has already signed us for his next superproduction, that we will live in harmony with pangolins and bats … Chi più ne ha più ne metta.

If the great magicians of Big Data, destined to predict future behaviors based on the new oil of the numbers, are blindly beating the batons because they do not know precisely how many people are infected or how many have died… What is left for social sciences? It is probable that a good part of the stories accumulated by social sciences since their birth do not help us to understand what is happening, not to mention their null predictive capacity. As I said before, these days each one of us projects his or her vision of the world onto the pandemic and makes it say what he or she wants. And for a many of these enunciators, like David Byrne in Stop Making Sense, as we say in Spanish, the “outfit of visionaries is too big for them”. Illusion of validity in its purest state, Kahneman would say.

One of the most reasonable things (and tragic because of its impotence) that I have read during the confinement are these reflections by Mariana Enriquez published in the UNAM magazine :

Most of the time I don’t know what to say and they constantly ask me to say something. A column on how I handle confinement. An opinion on the mutant nature of the virus. Do I find the cities empty and partially recovered by animals beautiful? Everything is contradictory and distressing. A writer, an artist, must be able to interpret reality, or at least try. As a person who works with language, you should collaborate in public discussion. Thinking, writing, interpreting. But with each passing day, thinking about this pandemic turns into a heavy mist: I don’t see, I’m lost, I can barely make out my hands if I extend them.

Why do I have to be an interpreter at this time? Why did I write some books? I rebel against this demand for productivity when I only feel bewildered. What can we do, what can we think. In a chat with a friend I said, honestly: “I think short.” It is true. I can’t find reflections.

Coda

Simplify, reduce chaos, combat uncertainty … I try to bring order to what I just wrote:

• Homo sapiens builds narratives to make sense of reality and simplify the surrounding chaos. And also to visualize future scenarios (hypotheses).
• Narrative as a way of thinking can also be a victim of cognitive illusions (illusion of validity).
• The global crisis has generated a textual explosion that, at the same time, causes a collapse in the production of meaning. Homo sapiens cries out for narratives to process what's going on. And metaphors to understand what is happening and what to do.
• Remaining silent is not an alternative -society awaits our discourses and listens more than ever to scientific enunciators-, which implies a great responsibility when it comes to talking or writing on what is happening.

Although the priority today is to stop contagions, decompress hospitals and plan the end of confinement, among all the pending tasks we should put on the table the need to decongest the discursive space so that we can: 1) return to a less frenetic production meaning regime ; and 2) bend the overinterpretative curve that prevents us from thinking clearly.

NOTE: Sorry for the possible mistakes, I’m not an English native speaker.

References

If you want to read more about these topics, here is a list of texts to entertain yourself during quarantine:

Boyd, B. (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA.: Belknapp Press.

Bruner, J. (2009). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. New York: Harvard University Press.

Eco, U.(1992). Interpretation and Overinterpretation. New York: Harvard University Press.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast And Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lakoff, G. y Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Verón, E. (1987). La semiosis social. Barcelona. Gedisa.