The Uses of Narrative

Explorations in Sociology, Psychology and Cultural Studies

Shelley Sclater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351301985
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Social scientists increasingly invoke "narrative" in their theory and research. This book explores the wide range of work in sociology, psychology and cultural studies in which narrative approaches have been used to study meaning, subjectivity, politics, and power in concrete contexts.The Uses of Narrative presents a range of case studies, including: Princess Diana's Panorama interview, media coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, memoirs of the wives of scientists who made the first atomic bomb, popular images of gay marriage, and the effect of the "Velvet Revolution" on writing autobiography.The book brings together contributions from European, Australian, and North American researchers, indicating the diversity and potential of narrative approaches. The editors adopt a distinctive and unique psychosocial approach to narrative, and set the individual chapters in the context of three broad themes: culture, life histories, and discourse. The Uses of Narrative complicates, challenges and stimulates--it will be of vital interest to sociologists, psychologists, social theorists, students of cultural studies, and others who are interested in the relationships between meaning, self and society.

Part I
Narrative and culture

Introduction

Corinne Squire

Individuals become to some extent their autobiographies and the social stories being told around them, but they become their cultural narratives too (Riessman 1994: 68–9). If narrative analysis in the social sciences is to extend beyond reading individuals’ lives, then ‘culture’, broadly defined, is surely one of the best fields in which to develop it. Culture is by definition made up of events, representations and values that are relatively long-lasting and widely distributed. This means that cultural narratives are never just individual. Cultural symbol systems may indeed ‘tell’ individuals their life stories (Riessman 1994) but often, too, cultural narratives are lived through collectively. If, as with many popular media, they are experienced individually, cultural narratives still have common meanings. Even the most individualised and emotionally charged narratives belong, as Clive Seale puts it in this section, to specific communities with specific scripts. This ‘top-down’ perspective on narrative leads the writers in this section, in particular, to pay sustained attention to the ‘cultural locus’ (Denzin 1989: 73) of stories, to the personal meanings of these cultural narratives (Bruner 1986) and to their significance in civil society (Alexander and Smith 1993).

A focus on culture also makes it impossible to take a formalistic, abstract approach to analysing the structure of social-scientific ‘texts’. Culture is never just a matter of abstract texts that can be analysed free of context. Culture with a small ‘c’ (Clifford 1990) is always lived, enacted or cultivated (Mercer 1994). It is actively made by people in specific situations, whether they are producing or consuming culture. Even when we are reading newspapers or watching TV, we are still acting on these media in order to make narrative sense of them. The writers in this part present a variety of such collective, active narratives, from self-evident examples like the everyday sequences of shopping, preparing and eating food and looking after the dying discussed in Seale’s chapter or the patterns of lesbian parenting described by Walters, to less obviously ‘active’ instances, like the press representations of the 1991 Los Angeles uprisings whose readings are explored by Jacobs, or the television sitcom representations of gay and lesbian marriage and parenting, whose significance for viewers and the wider cultural climate is examined in Walters’ chapter.

The concept of narrative in the social sciences is notoriously wide in scope, and attention to culture emphasises this breadth. The first three chapters in this part look at a range of products and activities that go to make up contemporary culture – not just what people say about their lives and their worlds, but also print news and feature articles, television sitcoms, legal judgements, medical procedures, relationships, marriages, parenting, shopping, cooking, caring for the dying. The chapters weigh up the narrative load carried by speech, but also by documentary writing, image sequences, institutional certifications, and the whole set of discourses and practices that constitute ‘everyday life’. They hold in common a notion of narrative as a temporal sequencing of representations or events. The press accounts of the Los Angeles uprisings considered by Jacobs do not all tell the story of the events themselves; many are editorial or opinion pieces that try to find reasons for the events. However, they are still narratives – sequential causal explanations ending, in this case, with the apparently unavoidable ‘tragedy’ of African American suffering and disempowerment. In Seale’s chapter, people live out narratives in their engagement with the deaths of those close to them, and, more prosaically, in how they deal with food and shopping. Both in the stories told of them and in how they are lived, these engagements take a repetitive, closed narrative form.

What does this ubiquity of narrative mean for social-scientific considerations of culture? In the last chapter of this part, Craib remarks on how concepts of narrative have become so broad that they seem applicable to every phenomenon that psychologists and sociologists take an interest in. One example he gives is causal explanation, which he notes is increasingly referred to as a form of narrative – as in Jacobs’ chapter. Such breadth of definition only really becomes a problem, though, when the category of ‘narrative’ is transformed from description into sufficient explanation. Within this section, the writers differ considerably on whether a narrative sequence makes psychological, social, cultural or merely linguistic sense of the elements in the sequence, and on how important that sense is. Perhaps it is not surprising that this divergence should appear in relation to culture, which after all is a category that forces us to view narrative on a wide screen. Seale argues that stories make us who we are, both as individuals and in the social world. By investing social bonds with emotion, narratives maintain these bonds. Seale suggests that this function is of particular significance at moments when social bonds are threatened or weakened – ultimately, when members of social groups have to face death and find meaning in it. For Seale, lived and spoken cultural narratives of, for instance, death, food preparation, even shopping, can be forms of ‘resurrective practice’, turning human beings away from death itself, helping them live in and through the rituals of their societies. The life progress of the body is, he says, mirrored and sustained in narrative progress. Seale is thus a strong exponent not just of the ‘top-down’ model of narrative, but also of the bottom-up (Berger 1997: 34) theory of close and constitutive parallels between the stories of individuals, cultures and societies – a theory that receives its most sustained exposition in Part II. This theory is contested here most vigorously by Craib, who argues that stories do not entirely account for individuals or societies, both of which are too complex to be caught in such simple analogies. Stories that set themselves up as such full accounts are ‘bad faith’ narratives. In particular, Craib lays stress on how the idiosyncrasies of individual emotions, the psychic realities referred to by Freud, evade all narrative formalisations, and on how stories that claim to contain such emotions impoverish and dis-empower them. Between these two, Jacobs and Walters concern themselves more specifically with the mutual relationships between persuasive narratives, their audiences and their subjects. Jacobs is interested in how the semiotics of culture interact with civil society, in particular through cultural symbol systems’ deployment of polarised and highly durable categories of inclusion and exclusion. The operation of the ‘tragic’ news narratives of the Los Angeles uprisings as a kind of implicit cultural backlash, emerging as they did at a time when people of colour were gaining social power, is an example. Like Seale, Jacobs is concerned with breaks in the usual narrative order, in this instance the Los Angeles up-rising’s interruption of conventional conversations about ‘democracy’ in the American public sphere. Walters discusses the significance of the recent upswing in popular media narratives of gay and lesbian ‘marriage’ and parenting, and, while acknowledging the narratives’ personal meaningfulness, argues that they are socially fairly ineffective. Their ‘delusional neo-liberalism’ ignores both the powerful, homophobic emotions Craib might point to, and the lived realities of discrimination and oppression.

Within arguments about the significance of cultural narratives, style holds an important place. Styles, specific linguistic forms, are a means through which the cultural saturation of narratives becomes manifest, and they are at their most obvious when we are dealing with clearly ‘cultural’ narratives. Of course, narrative content also expresses culture – as with the partial and contested shift, documented by Seale, from medical to self-help or ‘growth’ narratives of death; or with the inclusion that Walters describes of lesbian and gay partners and their children in narratives of ‘family’ on sitcoms, news reports, soaps and talkshows. Yet style itself narrates culture, often in subtle and contradictory ways. Many of the section’s arguments about cultural, social and personal continuity and change depend upon their attention to narrative style. Seale describes the heroic, romantic closure that the bereaved impart, across different narrative contents, to finished lives. Walters argues that, in popular culture, lesbians’ and gay men’s stories of relationships and parenting are assimilated into mimetic narratives of heterosexual family, so that they become comfortable variants of the heterosexual norm. Jacobs suggests that, despite content similarities in media representations of the Los Angeles uprisings and the 1960s uprisings in Watts, the tragic form that characterises the plot, characters and genre of the later representations marks an important, regressive shift away from the more optimistic romance form of the earlier representations. Finally, Walters’ account of lesbians and gay men living out new narratives of parenting points out the difficulty of describing these stories when, despite the familiarity of their contents, they are stylistically novel, genre-bending assaults on the family romance.

The plurality and instability of cultural narrative styles is for most of the writers in this part a guarantee of possibility. Unsurprisingly perhaps, an attention to culture has led them to a perspective on narrative inflected by postmodernism. Craib’s scepticism about sociologists’ and psychologists’ ‘grand narrative’ of narrative could perhaps be seen in this postmodern light. In general, however, Craib is on the other side: he views paeans to narrative multiplicity as misguided. He is pessimistic about popular culture’s ability to sustain genuine complexity, and sees most narratives as reducing personal and social meanings to glib fables. The other contributors, though, are also qualified in their assessments of narrative multiplicity and uncertainty. Seale values these properties, but emphasises the importance of stories’ repetitions and cohesion. Like Craib, he points to the unnarratable events – ultimately, death – that drive narrative reiteration. For him, however, unlike Craib, narratives mark emotional excesses and complex social realities by their failures, rather than denying them. Jacobs and Walters show how narrative plurality can generate change – but not necessarily in a progressive direction. Jacobs, interested in the genre clashes that occur at times of social crisis, argues for irony, specifically, as an open, counter-hegemonic form of rhetoric within narrative, but he also recognises its potential for elitism and anomie. Walters sees the progressive narratives of lesbian and gay parenting that are performed in everyday life as existing in a tense relation with conventional narratives of family, only occasionally and with difficulty breaking away from them.

Finally, we must return the question of narrative’s significance to its most concrete realm: that of narrative’s material effects. Again, contributors display a range of takes on the relationship. Walters, while she has little hope of social change resulting from ‘straight – with a twist’ media stories of lesbian and gay partnership and parenting, thinks such stories can be transformative when they are lived out actively and consciously within lesbian and gay communities. Jacobs draws a firm distinction between popular media narrations of ‘race’ and the material circumstances in which racialised differences are lived. The distinction emerges clearly in his contrasting of minorities’ improved material circumstances, including increased African American presence in the media, with the ‘tragic’ backlash representations of the Los Angeles uprisings. Craib emphasises the distinction further, regretting the tendency of narratives to become, for many, simulacral replacements of the real (de Certeau 1984: 186). Stories are wonderfully imaginative and creative products, he says, but telling a consistent, engaging story does not make everything right, at either the individual or the social level. He calls for attention to be paid less to stories’ persuasiveness and more to the differences between them and the external realities to which they refer. Moving in the other direction, Seale sees narratives as coterminous with materiality. Stories create the world we live in and are themselves creatures of their material cultural context. In Seale’s account, social scientists cannot tell what is a true story (Denzin 1989: 77), but they can tell which story is at odds with or agrees with which others, and which is most convincing. Even for Seale, though, stories are not the only means of sustaining the ‘resurrective practice’ he sees as their most significant consequence. All the contributors are, then, interested in narratives that claim to produce personal and social change. The debate is about whether and how narratives can achieve this aim.

References

Alexander, J. and Smith, P. (1993) ‘The discourse of American civil society: a new proposal for cultural studies’, Theory and Society 22, 3: 151-207.

Berger, A. (1997) Narratives in Popular Culture, Media, and Everyday Life, London: Sage.

Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Clifford, J. (1990) ‘On collecting art and culture’, in R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. Minh-Ha and C. West (eds) Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

de Certeau, M (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Denzin, N. (1989) Interpretive Biography, London: Sage.

Mercer, K. (1994) Welcome to the Jungle, London: Routledge.

Riessman, C. K. (1994) Qualitative Studies in Social Work Research, London: Sage.

1 Narrative, civil society and public culture

Ronald N. Jacobs

In recent years, research on public communication has shifted its focus away from the study of propaganda towards a concern with civil society and the public sphere. Recognising that the ideal of ‘democracy’ has very often been a shorthand way for talking about things that take place in civil society (Gellner 1991), scholars have begun to consider more carefully the processes of communication through which citizens discover common interests and identities, assert new rights and privileges, and try to influence public opinion and public policy (Alexander 1998; Cohen and Arato 1992; Keane 1995). Arguing that these communication processes are obscured by approaches which emphasise rational-critical discourse, this chapter outlines an alternative, narrative-based approach for studying civil society. Like the chapter by Seale which follows, it emphasises the importance of narrative in constituting and changing social orders, but it applies this understanding to public culture rather than to everyday social life. I illustrate the empirical utility of this approach by drawing on a larger research project that compared African American and ‘mainstream’ media narratives about racial crisis, and emphasise how the dynamic processes of plot, character and genre are important factors shaping the public culture of any civil society.

The limitations of rational-critical discourse

By contrasting rational and narrative models of communication, I am following the lead of others who have challenged and revised the now-classical understanding of the public sphere formulated by Jurgen Habermas (1989 [1962]).¹ The rise of a bourgeois public sphere during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (particularly in the Anglo-American world) was crucial for the history of democracy and enlightenment, because it led for the first time to the ‘people’s public use of their reason’ (Habermas 1989: 27). Claiming the space of public discourse from state regulation, and demanding that the state engage them in debate about matters of common concern, private citizens successfully campaigned to replace the dominant political practice of parliamentary secrecy with a new principle of open public discussion (Habermas 1989: 62).

While Habermas insisted that the development of the bourgeois public sphere was a crucial event in the history of democracy, he also worried that the democratic potential of public communication had become significantly reduced throughout the twentieth century. With the rise of advertising and marketing, Habermas feared that public opinion was being replaced by ‘representative publicity’, in which arguments were publicised but never really discussed or debated. ‘Public opinion’ had become an ‘object to be molded in connection with a staged display of. . . publicity in the service of persons and institutions, consumer goods, and programs’ (Habermas 1989: 236). In the face of these structural changes, Habermas argued that the best strategy for recovering civil society was to insist on procedural norms of rational-critical discourse, centring around the principles of symmetry, reciprocity and reflexivity. This is the ‘ideal speech situation’, referring to ‘the rules participants would have to follow if they were to strive for an agreement motivated by the force of the better argument alone’ (Cohen and Arato 1992: 348). By requiring that public discourse be subjected to the requirements of generalisable validity claims, Habermas believed that civil society would become more resistant to the corrupting influences of money and power.

As the public sphere has come under closer critical scrutiny, an increasing number of scholars have begun to question whether ration...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword by Norman K. Denzin
• Introduction
• PART I Narrative and culture
• PART II Narrative and life history
• PART III Narrative and discourse
• Conclusion
• Index