How We Use Stories and Why That Matters

Cultural Science in Action

John Hartley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501351648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Narración

Using compelling examples and analysis, this open access book How We Use Stories and Why That Matters shows what the New York Shakespeare Riots tell us about class struggle, what Death Cab for Cutie tells us about media, what Kate Moss's wedding dress tells us about authorship, and how Westworld and Humans imagine very different futures for Artificial Intelligence: one based on slavery, the other on class. Together, these knowledge stories tell us about how intimate human communication is organised and used to stage organised conflict, to test the 'fighting fitness' of contending groups – provoking new stories, identities and classes along the way. This book guides the reader through the tangled undergrowth of communication and cultural expression towards a new understanding of the role of group-mediating stories at global and digital scale. It argues that media and networked systems perform and bind group identities, creating bordered fictions within which economic and political activities are made meaningful. Now that computational and global scale, big data, metadata and algorithms rule the roost even in culture, subjectivity and meaning, we need population-scale frameworks to understand individual, micro-scale sense-making practices. To achieve that, we need evolutionary and systems approaches to understand cultural performance and dynamics. The opposing universes of fact (science, knowledge, education) and fiction (entertainment, story and imagination) – so long separated into the contrasting disciplines of natural sciences and the humanities – can now be understood as part of one turbulent sphere of knowledge-production and innovation. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

PART 1

System (theory)

Demes and communicative causation

2

Pushing back:

Social media as an evolutionary phenomenon

We understand culture as the nonhereditary memory of the community, a memory expressing itself in a system of constraints and prescriptions.

(Yuri Lotman, B. A. Uspensky and George Mihaychuk, 1978: 213)

Social media: Long story!

Taking the long-term view, ‘social media’ is a tautology: we were always social; all media are social; all sociality is mediated, at least among Homo sapiens. Of course, the current international techno-cultural arrangements are not geared to the long-term view. They distinguish online social media (like Facebook) from entertainment media (like television) and from social networks (analogue as well as digital). It may be that most readers are focused on the here and now too. However, this chapter heads in the opposite direction, out of the endless present tense of social science, to push back as far as possible in order to understand what it might mean to claim, as Zizi Papacharissi (2015a: 1) does in her opening statement for the journal Social Media and Society, that ‘we have always been social’.

What follows in this chapter does not seek to establish a single method, but to learn from what is being achieved – and imagined – in other disciplinary fields. We must find ways to translate and enjoy each other’s expertise, especially across polarized disciplinary and ideological boundaries. Thus, this is not an application of a particular branch of science; it’s really about ‘noetics’ (Ong, 2012) – how we know what we know.

I. Pushing back

Let’s take that ‘always’ literally, and see where it leads, back beyond Fernand Braudel’s (2012) ‘extreme long term’ history (la très longue durée), beyond even the confines of H. sapiens, to a much more fundamental level, as explored in biosemiotics – that of life itself:

Semiotics, in the process of delimiting and defining itself, has shown a noticeable trend towards a view which states that semiosis begins where life itself begins. (Kull, 1999: 115)

In other words, ‘life’ and ‘sign’ may prove to be one and the same. It’s not just that ‘we’ (humans) are social and thus communicative, via media from language to the internet, but also that all life is founded upon signals communicated in, by, and among biogeochemical material processes, where the ‘self-creation’ and self-organization of complex systems, or autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela, 1980: 73–123; Luhmann, 2012), produces discrete entities, bounded by difference-from-environment, from molecular level upwards.

We’ll get back to the beginning of ‘all life’ later in the chapter, but for now let’s illustrate this point with something that emerged about halfway along terrestrial life’s timeline, about two billion years ago. That is when eukaryotic organisms appeared. Two billion years is a long time, but note that life lasted as long before eukaryotes as it has since. What’s special about them is that their cells have a nucleus. The cells of the other two domains of living organisms, the prokaryotes – archaea and bacteria – do not (Figure 2.1). Eukaryotes are in fact the cellular ‘complex systems’ from which we are descended, along with most multicellular organisms, including all the big stuff that humans tend to find charismatic: algae, plants, fungi and animals. Internally, they are quite complex structures, with nuclei and other ‘organelles’ within each cell. These include mitochondria and (in plants or algae) chloroplasts, which are thought to derive from once-independent bacteria. They provide energy to the cell and in turn depend on it. In order to constitute and maintain themselves as entities, eukaryotic cells require communicative relationships at all levels.

FIGURE 2.1 The biosphere: ‘To the best of our current knowledge, all organisms that are alive today or that have lived on this planet in the past are part of one large, genetically connected group: Life on Earth’ (Tree of Life Web Project). Image credit: Wikimedia, public domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phylogenetic_tree.svg. Source of quotation: http://tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/structure.html).

Internally, each cell’s actions are coordinated by cell signalling.

Externally, cells must communicate with the environment and its biotic load.

In the case of multicellular eukaryotes like us, each cell must communicate with other cells of the same organism, and with the trillions of other microorganisms living within each organism, such as gut bacteria.

Communication connects organisms to systemic relations at much higher levels of organization too:

• relations of descent and reproduction (family/genetic information)

• relations of prey and predator (energy)

• relations of cooperation and competition (culture)

• relations of environmental adaptation or niching (knowledge)

The very constitution of eukaryotes (including H. sapiens), then, is based on these communicative relations, internal and external, which, at maximum, interrelate every living organism with every other, present and past, differentiating life into an evolved new ‘envelope’ of planetary extent: the ‘biosphere’ (Vernadsky, 1 998). Thus, the original ‘social media’ must include cellular secretions – think pheromones. More generally, life cannot proceed without intra- and inter-species communication at all levels of complexity: life and sign are inseparable.

If you like, you may proceed even further back in time and in causal sequence, from life to rocks, from biogeochemistry to elementary physics, which may also be founded on communication. Elementary particles communicate with each other through ‘messenger particles’ (gravitons, photons, Higgs bosons, etc.) that carry force over a force field (gravitational field, electromagnetic field, Higgs field). Physics is the ‘fundamental’ or ‘enabling’ science because it describes mathematically a framework of perfect communication – of all particles with all particles – which then constructs the concepts of information and message, based on difference from randomness. Rethinking physical reality itself in terms of communication bases the natural world – physical and biological – not only on fields but also on relations.

‘Social instincts’

The very glimpse of such possibilities permits an approach to communication – the thing that makes the media into media and sociality social – that is naturalistic and scientific, but does not need to rely on a model borrowed from the war-effort physics of the 1940s. That model (Shannon, 1948) reduces communication to ‘transmission’ of ‘information’ from ‘sender’ to ‘receiver’ across a field (or wire). It still underlies the dominant ‘transmission’ model (Carey, 1989) of social communication in the social sciences and psychology. This reduces relations to ‘interference’ and ‘noise’ and communication itself to individualistic behaviour. As James Carey (2000) went on to warn, such a model of science is better suited to control than to democracy, because it replaces communication with behaviour and uses science to manipulate that. In critiquing ‘a science designed to rule over citizens’, Carey offers an alternative: a ‘science of enlightenment or citizenship, a science in society’. He writes:

Science, under the dominant construction of what science is, deeply undercuts the democratic impulse of journalism. For a science of journalism is a science about journalism: a science of bureaucracy, of systems, of procedures, of management and of control. It is not a science of creation and construction, a science of understanding and common action. A science from without cannot connect with the creative impulse from within. (Carey, 2000: 22)

We can now do better, using relational models to develop a communication-based science of ‘creation and construction’, of ‘understanding and common action’ that connects with ‘the creative impulse’, developed from interdisciplinary contact (and some feats of mutual translation) with evolutionary and complexity sciences.

The evolutionist Charles Darwin (1871) called the framework of human communication the ‘social instinct’.

As humanity advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that they ought to extend their social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to them. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent their sympathies extending to the humanity of all nations and races. … As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few people, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually through public opinion.

The highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive, is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts, and ‘Not even in inmost thought to think again the sins that made the past so pleasant to us.’¹ (Darwin, 1871, 1(3): 100–1)²

Extending the ‘social instinct’ to non-kin and even to unmet strangers (‘all the members of the same nation’) is an important move, both for humans and for bioscience. It draws attention away from the individual and the so-called ‘selfish gene’ celebrated by Richard Dawkins (1976) and focuses instead on the group, up to population level (‘all nations and races’). Instead of Dawkins’s individualistic gene-centred view of evolution, Darwin is pointing to a culture-centred view, where communicative sociality – language, relationship, identity and meaningfulness – binds groups, via social media, in such a way that their knowledge and technologies can be shared, stored and transmitted through time and across space, typically in competition with those of other, external groups.

Culture makes groups, which are the ‘survival vehicles’ (Pagel, 2012) for all who live within their boundaries. Hartley and Potts (2014) introduced the concept of ‘demes’, based on terms in both bioscience (interbreeding subpopulations) and political science (the demos) (Hornblower and Spawforth, 2005), to identify inter-knowing subpopulations or ‘we’-groups that are made in and by culture. Demes are cooperative and competitive – up to the point of destructive conflict – all at once. Within a deme, cooperation is not all lovey-dovey, since H. Sapiens, like previously evolved hominins going back two or three million years, had use of lethal weapons as well as tools. Indeed, current scientific thinking suggests that the ‘big brains’ of modern humans have little to do with toolm aking; they are instead the result of sociality: they are needed for communic...