© Roger M Tagg 2012
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This book is based on papers presented at a conference on 'Narrative as a Mode of Cognition and Legitimation' held in spring 1987 at the University of Warwick, UK. The contributors are:
| Author | Affiliation (at time of writing) |
Title of Paper | |
| 1 | Donald (now Deirdre) McCloskey | U of Iowa | 'Storytelling in Economics' |
| 2 | Bernard S Jackson | U of Liverpool | 'Narrative Theories and Legal Discourse' |
| 3 | JM Bernstein | U of Essex | 'Self-knowledge as Praxis: Narrative and Narration in Psychoanalysis' |
| 4 | Rom Harré | U of Oxford | 'Some Narrative Conventions of Scientific Discourse' |
| 5 | Greg Myers | U of Bradford | 'Making a Discovery: Narratives of Split Genes' |
| 6 | Peter Lamarque | U of Stirling | 'Narrative and Invention: the Limits on Fictionality' |
| 7 | Christine Brooke-Rose | U of Paris VIII (retd) | 'Ill Locutions' |
| 8 | Michael Bell | U of Warwick | 'How Primordial is Narrative?' |
| 9 | Cristopher Nash | U of Warwick | 'Slaughtering the Subject: Literature's Assault on Narrative' |
I think the editor (the last named above) must have quit Warwick and returned to the USA - to research into his ancestry? His last book was 'The Unravelling of the Postmodern Mind' (Edinburgh University Press (2001), ISBN 978-0748612154.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Preface | xi | "We no longer need to be told - if we ever did - that the narrative mode of discourse is omnipresent in human affairs." |
| xii | "... the often unexpectedly aggressive if subtle action of narrative is now proclaimed to be found at work ..." | |
| xiii | "The authors speaking here describe narrative by-and-large as a technique for getting coherence. (I use this rough predicate 'getting' to leave open, as I think they are disposed to, the issue as to whether the process alluded to is the discovery or the production of coherence.." | |
| 1 - | 5-7 | "A metaphor or model, and a story, can complement each other in giving meaning to our experiences and observations. It applies to science, and also to economics." But on their own, both have shortcomings. |
| 10 | "Economists do not know why they disagree." | |
| 11 | St Augustine (quoted by Gerald Bruns): "I do not doubt that this situation (i.e. complexity of the Bible) was provided by God to conquer pride by work and to combat disdain in our minds, by which those things which are easily discussed seem frequently to be worthless". [RT: Without the theology, I agree - we say "that's a no-brainer", and often jump to simplistic - and often erroneous - conclusions.] | |
| 12 | "A foolishly sentimental poem has the same irritating effect on a reader as does a foolishly libertarian piece of economics. The reader refuses to enter the author's imaginative world, or is unable to." [RT: That sounds like me!] | |
| "An economist ... creates both an 'authorial audience' and a 'narrative audience'." The former know it's fiction. Everyday example: Goldilocks and talking bears [RT: or wolf]. | ||
| 14 | "It's not in equilibrium" is an economist's standard put-down. [RT: Mine is "it's not sustainable".] | |
| 16 | There's an 'aesthetic' reading of a text, and also an 'efferent' one - the latter being "what one can take away from it". | |
| 17 | "Pure theory ... like fantasy, violates the rules of reality for the convenience of the tale." [RT: This is especially true with economics.] | |
| "The Ricardian vice ... allowing fancy too free a rein." | ||
| 18 | The evasion (of an author from declaring a point of view) is "similar in history (to economics). The plot ... is always an embarrassment and has to be 'found' in the events, rather than put there by narrative techniques". It's the same with biologists who are recommended to "withdraw from the text yourself as often as possible so that the other party continually finds himself engaged in an unequal dialogue with the experiments, data, observations and facts". | |
| 19-20 | "Leaving blanks for the reader to fill in" is all part of the narrative 'game'. | |
| 20 | What's needed is a community of more sophisticated readers and listeners. [RT: I strongly agree - we are too gullible and pander to our current agendas and prejudices.] | |
| 2 - | 27 | "Though the law may define that which is relevant, it cannot define how the relevant facts ... are to be expressed. Nor can the judge's presentation of the facts ever be entirely neutral." The example used here is that of the cricket ground at Lintz, County Durham, UK. |
| What can the law do where "direct proof by immediate observation is unavailable" (or, where witness reliability is uncertain)? Can we use 'probability'? [RT: Hooray, someone has mentioned it at last.] Or 'narrative coherence'? [RT: Is that any better than Spence's 'narrative truth'?] | ||
| 28 | Neil MacCormick thought this wasn't enough - one needs to validate it with some form of 'justificatory discourse'. [RT: Like cross-examination?] Bennett and Feldman suggested 'plausibility'. [RT: Craig Thomson didn't sound plausible, but is that enough to judge against him?] | |
| 30 | Plausibility as seen by members of the jury is the issue; each member has his/her "own stock of substantive narratives" - and stereotypes. | |
| 31 | "When surface rhetorical tactics lose touch with the underlying story ... they lose their effectiveness." [RT: I think again of Craig Thomson.] | |
| 33 | There are multiple levels in narrative: the 'socio-linguistic' (on the surface); the thematic and the structural. | |
| I didn't manage to grapple with the remainder of this paper. | ||
| 3 - | 51 | "Implicitly, and indeed in ways Habermas has tacitly come to recognize in his rejection of Freud and turn towards Piaget, Kohlberg, and evolutionary history, reconstructed Freudian theory delineates an emphatic sense of history and historical praxis incompatible with the universalistic and transcendental structures that are generally regarded as the Achilles' heel of the Habermasian programme." [RT: I only put this in as a 'lowlight' - I still can't understand it after half a dozen attempts. The rest of the paper doesn't seem much better.] |
| 4 - | 81 | In scientific utterance, we get "the disinterested voice and the assertoric style". Presumably this is to bully the reader into agreeing? Does the phrase "We know that ..." really mean "trust me, ..."? |
| 82 | There's a lot of 'faith' involved in scientific writing, an assumption that we are "members of an esoteric order". | |
| 83 | "The moral order of the scientific community is - or appears to be - elitist." [RT: just like Nietzsche?] | |
| 84-5 | "That (scientific) community reveals something of the character of religious orders, such as the Benedictines." It's 'we', not 'I' - this keeps some distance between the scientist and the subject matter. | |
| 86 | Harré's 'Big Ell' - the "saintly figure of Logic". | |
| 87 | "Science must present a smiling face both to itself and to the world." | |
| 88-9 | He gives a story-like narrative he had written about how Pasteur discovered how a chicken cholera virus could become less virulent, and then compared it with Pasteur's own write-up, which used 'we'. | |
| 89 | The 'we' isn't "me and my assistants" - it's the 'scientific community'. | |
| 91 | "Trustworthiness of colleagues and co-workers has displaced truth of assertions." | |
| 93 | "The exertion of effort is claimed as a mark of moral virtue." | |
| 95 | "... rival teams of scientists appear as heroes and villains." | |
| "The moral order of the scientific community, the Order of St Isaac and St Albert." | ||
| 96 | Popper's 'fallibilism' [RT: shouldn't it be 'falsifiability'?] can't conclusively prove epistemological knowledge, but it "can be a guide to 'good conduct' ". | |
| "One should seek harder for evidence that would count against a theory than for that which would support it." | ||
| 97 | "Why is self-deception counted as a vice in the moral order of scientists? In everyday life it's just a failing, not a sin." Harré suggests that it's because other scientists may well subsequently quote you, and if you were wrong, you will lose their trust. | |
| If we don't have contrary evidence (against our theory), could it be that we haven't bothered to look for it? | ||
| Scientists expect their interlocutors (i.e. the people they communicate with) to have intellectual honesty, not to 'know the truth'. | ||
| 98 | "There is another kind of discourse, the theological, where terms from the strict system are cheerfully bandied about, and meet much the same fate, (namely) the encouragement of scepticism. One can't say 'true or false' about theological statements - but one could regard religion as being about moral maxims - which isn't so different from science. | |
| 99 | "Scientific discourse is made complex ... by virtue of the interweaving of another story line. It is a narrative of objectivity, of human indifference." | |
| 100 | "Students as apprentice scientists are trained in this rhetoric (e.g. use of 'we' and, of the passive voice). ... Everything that is personal is leached out of the discourse. The author tells the story in the name of "Big Ell himself". | |
| Isn't this "like trusting in the rope and pitons rather than in the mountaineer who handles them"? The message is that scientists hide behind this anonymity. | ||
| 5 - | 103 | A "whole posse of actors" can be involved in some scientific discovery: 1) the individual discoverer(s), their team members, several other research groups; 2) the thing discovered; 3) the agencies that make the discovery possible [RT: equipment, funding, organization?]; 4) the audience. |
| (The paper comments on stories about a discovery of 'split genes') | ||
| 115-9 | There are typically several 'textual transformations' that follow a discovery: 1) the research reports, which order a sequence of events; 2) the news articles, which describe an 'event'; 3) the reviews, which insert the discovery into other narratives; 4) the textbooks, which remove the narratives and 'fix' the discovery into an 'atemporal array'; and 5) the popularizations, of 2 kinds: 5a) scientific magazines and 5b) 'for Beginners' or 'for Dummies' books, e.g. with cartoons drawn by the likes of Borin Van Loon. | |
| 6 - | 131 | PL's aim is "to resist the tendency to collapse all story-telling into a single category". |
| 132 | The differences can't be just between what's " 'made up', 'invented' or 'a product of the imagination' " on the one hand, and what relates to some actual experience on the other. | |
| 134 | PL admits he's a 'realist': "Objects exist independently of what we think about them". [RT: Is that like the uneven pavement that I tripped up on a few weeks ago in Glenelg? I didn't think about it until after I had fallen flat on my face, but it was certainly there - a bit like Dr Johnson's stone.] | |
| [RT: However I would say that we do 'objectivize' a lot of concepts without such physical or experiential evidence. And AP Kerby was a strong narrativist when he wrote "emotions have life cycles".] | ||
| 136 | 'Scare quotes' are a term for the quotes people put round terms like 'reality', 'the world', 'existence', 'objective' and even 'truth'. This may be justified in a literary context [RT: or psychiatry], but less so in the law, business, the world of work or sport. | |
| 137 | The idea of a single 'objective reality' "seems to crumble away in the literary case, perhaps it crumbles away in any case". However 'anti-realism', the idea that the world is totally dependent on the mind, also seems inadequate for many purposes. | |
| 139 | To say that a thing is 'fictional' is to imply that it doesn't exist; to say that a description is fictional implies that it isn't true. | |
| 140 | Bentham argued "that all of the following were fictitious entities: notion, relation, faculty, power, quantity, form, matter, and more notoriously, duties, obligations and rights". | |
| 141 | "Russell conceived of what is real as 'what we are acquainted with' ". [RT: my single quotes] | |
| 146 | How can we avoid losing "the distinction between 'responsible' and 'irresponsible' discourse? Rorty talked about "that need to distinguish sharply between science and poetry which makes us distinctly Western". | |
| 147 | Lamarque says that the difference is in the 'fictive stance', "an attitude taken towards them (i.e. sentences or utterances) by participants in the 'game' of fiction. | |
| 148 | The fictive stance ... "involves ... a disengagement from certain conventional commitments of utterance". ... "An audience is invited by a storyteller not so much to believe the propositions as to make-believe them." | |
| "Just as inferences to an author's beliefs are blocked or suspended under the fictive stance, so too are inferences about speech-act commitments under the response of make-believe." [RT: my comma] | ||
| "The fictive stance is an invitation ... for a reader ... to adopt a cognitive distance from the propositional content." | ||
| 151 | PL hopes he has "put a damper on this euphoric progression [RT: presumably to total relativism, via the slogan "it's all stories"]. | |
| 7 - | 154 | The "two truths theory", e.g. poetry and science, or religion and science. |
| 156 | One can have sentences which represent two different kinds of perception, e.g. reflective and non-reflective. | |
| 170 | "Classical irony is merely the power of one discourse over another." | |
| Some narrative devices are "ill locutions", so we can understand why Austin and his followers don't deal with them. [RT: There's a joke (pun) here; Austin and co use the term 'illocution'. Hence the title of this chapter. [RT: Incidentally this author is better known as a novelist than an academic philosopher. Some would say it is more appropriate to regard Sartre in the same light.] | ||
| 8 - | 173 | Whether we call something 'narrative' or 'myth', is this just 'name-calling', or is there a fundamental difference? |
| "But the advantage of the word 'Myth' is that it insists, sometimes embarrassingly, on its problematic status and large claims. 'Narrative', on the other hand, may give a misleading impression of avoiding such problems while effectively sneaking myth in through the back door." [RT: If this were on Facebook, I would click the 'Like' box for this view.] | ||
| "Myth is characteristically a point of intersection between lived time and a timeless order." | ||
| "Narrative provides a fundamental model for the creation of human meaning at large." | ||
| 174 | MacIntyre hoped that "within the community for which such a conception (i.e. his) of virtue is active it will not be experienced as an 'as if'. This collapses any difference between narrative and {experience or "lived temporality"}. [RT: my curly brackets.] The reference here is to the title of a book by Hans Vaihinger - "The Philosophy of 'As If' ". | |
| 175 | Barbara Hardy's statement "We dream in narrative ... [RT: and do everything else in narrative too]" was actually intended to show the dangers of imposing imaginary narratives on life - something MacIntyre seems to favour. | |
| 197 | "Narrative meaning exists dialectically in the tension between its world and the world of the reader." | |
| "To dissolve narrative into life is to dissolve the terms of its proper and important meaning for the sake of a speculative chimera." [RT: I suppose by the latter he means fanatical relativism, or some extreme postmodernist stances.] | ||
| 9 - | 199 | [RT: This whole chapter comes through as a very scathing opinion about literary theory at the time of the Warwick conference.] |
| 203 | Partly quoting Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, CN says "The 'humanistic concept of the self' has now been eclipsed by themes that shatter many of our most essential traditional 'distinctions, such as rational/irrational, appearance/reality, interior/exterior, fact/fiction'. He blames technology for this. | |
| 204-5 | It all leads to 'literary indeterminism' - "an 'undecidability' in the relations between texts ... ('intertextual indeterminacy') and ... between a text and the things it appears to refer to as outside it ('extratextual indeterminacy')." | |
| 205 | "Books, traffic signals, advertisements (and thence the things advertised), facial expressions, bottlecaps, thrown stones, all belong to this 'archtext' that is the world of our understandings." | |
| 208 | "In revelling in potent strategies for the dis-integration of some of our illusions, we may have abandoned our larger critical sense in favour of yet more ominous deceptions." | |
| 210 | Isn't this all somewhat like a computer virus? | |
| 211 | "In those days we differentiated, now we 'defer' ". [RT: A jab at postmodernist orthodoxy.] | |
| 212 | "Every narration is someone's model of how to behave." | |
| Just as the world doesn't care "whether works of art are to be held as mimetic or not, it's the same with literature we don't care whether it's 'referential' or 'pure'. | ||
| Literary theorists became disappointed "not in writing's failure to represent 'the outside world', but in its failure, no matter how hard it has tried, not to represent it" [RT: my italics]. "Writing ... (has an) utter inability to stay out of the world, out of readers' thoughts about the world ... to avoid getting its hands dirty." There is no "Pontian handwashing". | ||
| 213 | The whole enterprise (postmodernism) is now 'middle-aged' - certainly not "so fresh and final as to stand outside history". | |
| 214 | "Could we (literary theorists) imagine a better way to shore up the status, the credentials of our salaried dabbling with fictions - against the claims of, say, science and technology - than by neutralizing or purging the truth-test from the realm of worthwhile intellectual endeavour?" | |
| 215 | "Is it really true, the rumour we hear, that all 'creative writers' and all literature PhDs are now driving taxis in Milwaukee?" | |
| It's "not the word, but the word-processor (, that) is made flesh." | ||
| 216 | Let our 'autocritique' begin "by telling tales on ourselves, and testing the strength of reality's (or other dimensions') resistance to them." | |
| This chapter has been 'anthropocentric' "because it fits best my definition of myself as subject and the ... life narrative that I like for myself". | ||
| 217 | An "All is One" indeterminism cannot "nominate some crisis - whether it proposes solutions or not", as criticism, by definition, has to do. |
Most of the chapters in this book are at least fun, but I am not surprised that Cristopher (yes, no 'h') Nash decided to call it a day and research his interesting ancestors.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 28th May 2012
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .