| STORY
AND MORE
VIRTUAL NARRATIVES FOR ELECTRONIC TIMES |
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John S. Nelson Department of Political Science and Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry University of Iowa Iowa City, IA, 52242 john-nelson@uiowa.edu |
Anna Lorien Nelson James Madison College and Department of Women's Studies Michigan State University East Lansing, MI, 48825 nelson51@pilot.msu.edu |
 What
if our time
was no longer a calendar or clock? Call it a ship diving under dark waters. A web. A worm in the cosmos. A sojourn. A stone word. |
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 What
if our myth
was discovered to tell no tales? Let it be winds, dancing the tune of their death. A ritual of doubts and contentions. |
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| What
if our story
makes no myth and takes no time? Say acres unplanting. Say red 'barrow wheeling. Movies and the reals that show them. No woof. Warp.[1] |
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| As Christendom turns into a third millennium, the civilization of the West returns insistently to issues of narrative. For the last two decades of the century, narrativity has been much in the academic news. In communication studies, Walter Fisher promotes homo narrans.[2] Time, story, and contingency loom large in evolutionary biology.[3] Historical, anthropological, and cultural studies identify the foundations of modern politics as narratives.[4] | On
Walter Fisher and narrative
. . .
WF on History Professional Biography of WF Bibliography on Narrative Storytelling & Effective Speaking |
|
| On
Alasdair MacIntyre
. . .
Professional Biography of AM "The Achievement of Alasdair MacIntyre," by Edward T. Oakeshas |
In philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre has labored to reunite narrative with the social sciences.[5] Some social scientists would ground all human sciences in story.[6] Stanley Hauerwas would root religious ethics in narratives.[7] Even in economics, in several ways the least storied of the human sciences, dissidents from G. L. S. Shackle to Brian Arthur have been showing how temporality counts.[8] | |
| Because no movement in scholarship seems complete without a swift backlash against any bandwagon, and because the reservations often arise with special vehemence where the wagon has been housed between parades, the most telling evidence for a general comeback by narrative might be the doubts resounding in history, the home of storytelling in the late-modern university. | ||
 Statisticians
declare other scholars incompetent to use statistics. Rhetoricians
doubt that there can be rhetorics of inquiry. Economists scorn "econowannabes"
in other social sciences. Theorists of cinema and literature ignore
scholars elsewhere who analyze films and novels. Better a big
frog in a small
pond? Go figure. |
There Hayden White, surely among the field's leading theorists, has been busy disputing the value and need for narrativity.[9] He says that it is too susceptible to moralizing. The turn to morality, of course, is what Fisher, MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and company particularly prize in stories. Such is scholarship. Is there a moral to this tale? | On
Hayden White . . .
Summary of HW's "The value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" by Marina Umaschi |
as Norman O. Brown noted, is the issue for culture and politics. |
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| The resurgent concern for story is about time, we would argue, for electronic cultures. Stories pattern time. They style sensibilities. Now electronic technologies of communication are remaking our senses of time, which is to say, our capacities for experience. So the season of scholarship is right for attention to narrative. In fact, the need is urgent to appreciate how electronic media are provoking amazing plays on the ways that oral or written stories tell events for characters who move among their settings. | ||
| History and art, writes Kate Wilhelm, are "humanity's two attempts to conquer time." | As electronic media speed into our lives, they re-form our times. Thus the multiverse of multimedia -- the telegraphs, phonographs, films, telephones, radios, recorders, televisions, photocopiers, projectors, computers, synthesizers, faxes, internets, and more to come -- can take us into times unimagined in the simply linear, mostly static, merely modern Museum of History. Not even Microsoft knows to wonder, When do we want to go tomorrow? Yet that is what the narrative paradigm must inquire as we make the new millennium. | |
| Among the many recommendations that might follow for pursuing the narrative paradigm in electronic times, let us evoke three . . . | ||
| Practitioners of the narrative paradigm tend to pit story against argument or even what the West has known as "rationality." This is not a contrast we commend, as one of us has explained elsewhere.[10] But we would emphasize that stories and arguments conventionally take distinct forms. Briefs, treatises, judgments; accusations, opinions, apologies; articles, proofs, analyses; and many more: the Western world teems with forms of argument. Rhetoric of inquiry tries to come to good terms with these myriad forms of argument and their differences in our learning.[11] | Fisher himself targets "Argument in Drama and Literature."[12] The trick is how to avoid undue abstraction and resulting homogeneity. | |
| "Politics has content," says Jonathan Schell, "but it also has a texture and a shape." And "politics" can be plural, we'd add, with many telling textures, SHAPES, and tones. | Narrative and argument are less different paradigms than separable families of forms, styles, and emphases. Comparison is the key to the details. Among the better ways to make and analyze arguments in various forms is to comprehend them as implicit stories. Likewise we do well to learn how different kinds of stories argue. The forms and devices of argument intertwine intricately and significantly with the diverse moves and modes of narrative. This is central, not incidental, to biology and law, physics and history, economics and religion, organizations and -- particularly telling for the narrative paradigm -- public affairs.[13] The first recommendation is that scholars who promote the practice and study of narrative appreciate its continuing connections with specific forms of argument. Otherwise narrativists won't know how stories work. | |
| Stories, too, have many forms. As the types of events, settings, and characters differ, so do the stories. The narrative paradigm needs to pay better attention to this. Features like coherence, fidelity, and voice might be manifest in (nearly) all stories, yet they differ greatly among kinds of stories. Fables (with overt morals) do not cohere in the same ways or mean by the same conventions as parables (which leave their lessons unspecified). Neither coheres much like biographies or westerns or spot news. Narrative fidelity and voice are no more singular. Both families of criteria tie strongly to rhetorical ethos, which varies with the recurrent characters and audiences that differentiate many kinds and dynamics of stories. Aside from the James Bond hybrids, spy stories and romances often differ radically in modes of fidelity and tones of voice. The textures, shapes, and operations of science fictions depart in many ways from the flavors and devices of confessions, nursery tales, horror stories, and self-help narratives. | ||
| Narrativists, in other words, should be wary of the philosophical temptation to turn storytelling into abstracted epistemology. Argument analysis needs the sophisticated sense of details and differences that accounts of stories articulate. To turn storytelling into more summary statements of claims, warrants, backings, or good reasons is not to say much about how stories teach, please, or move us. Conventions of genre count; the narrative paradigm cannot afford to ignore them. Strange as it may sound at this late date, practitioners of the narrative paradigm can learn much from analysts of myth, literature, and popular culture. The second recommendation is for narrativists to take narratives more seriously in themselves, in all their diversity and detail as stories. Taking our own advice, we have begun to probe how conventions of popular genres in film and fiction are revising cultural norms for institutions and political standards for argument.[14] | As Mark Twain observed, "Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff." That's why people need new stories and experiences. | |
| But the third recommendation is the adventurous one. Electronics enable the invention of new media and forms for stories, reaching beyond oral speech, handwriting, and movable type. More than that, electronics engender the creation of new modes of communication. These are closely akin to stories yet distinct from them in ways comparable to theatrical dramas. If stories tell and dramas enact, then what should we say films do? Or televisions? Sometimes we say that these two electronic devices show as well as tell, but is this sufficient? Surely it will not do for computer games or virtual realities. | ||
| "Campbell's
Soup 1, 1968"
|
We say that electronic devices for albums, tapes, compact disks, and such record and play. Yet the alterations and inventions enabled, indeed encouraged, by our electronic technologies take both recording and playing beyond sheer re-production. Already we are racing past the anxieties about authenticity that beset Walter Benjamin, then outrunning the ironies of continual quotation that inspired Andy Warhol and Umberto Eco.[15] Rising Sun, here we come![16] As Marshall McLuhan argued, we are extending our sensoria.[17] To play our electronic devices, increasingly, is to play with them, in them, through them. It is, as popular grammar already has it, to do them. In ever new senses, "the play's the thing," not merely to catch a king but to make whole new kingdoms of experience, now electronically democratized. That's how, as Tom Petty can sing with a wry smile and lots of TVs in the background, "It's Good to Be King." | |
| The challenge for the narrative paradigm is to make sense of these electronic forms, media, extensions, and supplements for story. Within them arise further realms of experience and distinctive senses of time. Westerners tell time and stories like a bank teller counts currency, one bill or moment after another.[18] In the West, this become modern, linear time. Even the West, however, knows also the cyclical time of seasons, economies, and revolutions. It knows as well the episodic time of epics and sagas and soap operas. Like "Places in the Heart, these are moments that epitomize the whole, rather than cycle through a set of stations or ride a one-way track past ever-new settings into some unfated future. | More
on Tom Petty . . .
The
Unofficial
Lyrics
to
|
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| Surely computer mysteries, video games, programs to trace fractals for chaos, and the Internet's doors to the World Wide Web already exceed these Western templates for time. Some offer pick-a-path temporalities. Yet these are so intricate and interlooped, ample and recursive that their algorithms defy the human experiences of temporal lines, circles, or emblems. Others are even more evidently webs, networks, fields of space-time for us to enter and experience in ways individual but fully susceptible to sharing. Thus Marge Piercy portrays "the Net" as "a playing field, a maze of games and nodes of special interest, a great clubhouse with thousands of rooms."[19] For the narrative paradigm, each of these fields and mazes and rooms provides a potential resource and provocative puzzle. What time is it? What time has it? What does it do with us, to us, for us, through us? How do we do it? What are its stories, how and when? | ||
| Stories are time structures. That is, Stories relate the experiences of others to us: entangling us in times, engaging us in experiences, that we might not face otherwise. Dramas do much the same. The telling of stories or enacting of dramas enables audiences to identify with characters in the narrative or on the stage, experencing through their encounters and reactions something of what they sense and feel. This is vicarious experience, through the experiences of others. Machiavelli thought it so crucial for political education that he made it the main means of education for the prince and the republican alike. The modern paradigm of communication implicitly favors such experience, due to its mediation through the story or drama as the conveyance, the vehicle. This transports impressions of a distant world to an observer who cannot enter to experience it directly, personally, immediately.[20] No wonder the narrative paradigm is congenial to communication studies, where modern models of communication, mediation, or re-presentation are long dominant. | ||
| The time has come, however, for the narrative paradigm to commune in other ways as well. This means opening itself to other modes of time and experience. Electronics already cultivate them. Take film. It is one of the earlier of electronic technologies for communication. Almost always it works with drama, so it mobilizes vicarious experience. From the beginning, nonetheless, cinema has been interested intrinsically in dramatizing with "special effects" that conjure special experiences and times. Some effects serve the cause of vicarious experience, but many drive instead toward virtual experience. Film, in fact, is the closest the popular culture now comes to the cyber ambition of virtual reality. Computer technologies for animation and sound are fast taking cinematic effects ever farther in that direction. Rather than staying limited to some identifiable character's responses to dramatic situations, we then experience them more amply and directly for ourselves. Special effects supervised by James Cameron immerse us in the sights and sounds of the sailing but later also the sinking Titanic. Without being able yet to affect these events, as we might in an arcade game or a virtual-reality outfit, where the sights if not the sounds are apt to be "less real," we still can experience them vividly, virtually, by cinema. | ||
| Such virtual experiences differ categorically from the vicarious, and the narrative paradigm would do well to address them. The vicarious is experience of situations primarily through responses of characters in them; the virtual is experience of situations from their sights, sounds, and more, largely apart from reactions by people in them. A first step is to set aside the naive realism that defines all virtual experiences as defective, as missing crucial features of the real thing. Close but no cigar: you are not "really" going down on the Titanic, no matter how hard you forget yourself and grasp the seat to stay up as the ship tilts down. Nor are you "really" floating in microgravity in 2001, no matter how "poetic," "realistic," or downright "effective" the special effects. |  |
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| The trouble, as Machiavelli could tell you, is that how we engage and use our various kinds of experiences of various sorts of things is what determines their crucial aspects. If the prince needs to learn the limits of mercenary armies by thinking through anecdotes about several commanders long dead, experiencing their situations vicariously through their calculations and reactions, this is a better way for the prince to learn than experiencing personal mistakes in conducting wars. Likewise telescopes might offer "indirect" or "virtual" experiences of the stars. Electron microscopes might let us "see" creatures "too small to be seen with the naked eye." Televised advertisements might use caricatures or other special effects to present "sides" of automobiles or politicians that we could not otherwise know.[21] Why disparage these as near misses for experience? Why not welcome them as virtual experiences provided by technologies that extend our senses to enhance how and what we can know? | ||
Apollo 15 Spacesuit, on display at the National Air and Space Museum. Especially check out the interactive online features. |
Someone we know, admittedly with a mild susceptibility to vertigo, was nauseated by the 2001 images of weightlessness "on the big screen," even though no characters were spacesick in the least. This is rather than experience. The Omnimax cinemas at many museuems of technology around the country use six-storey screens to help viewers experience floating in orbits, flying in atmospheres, diving in oceans, and the like. It was no accident that the National Air and Space Museum launched these virtual experiences with "To Fly." This enables viewers to drift in a balloon, soar on a hang-glider, and so forth. What better way to build constituencies for its mission of honoring the explorers of the skies? It virtually lets us too do so.[22] Experience persuades, and virtual experience persuades both virtually and virtuously. That's why Machiavelli made it the royal and republican road to political virtue as virtuosity.[23] | |
| The narrative paradigm targets persuasion, and it stands to learn that stories persuade through vicarious experiences as much or more than good reasons. Different kinds of characters, settings, and events mean different structures of vicarious time and experience. But once we open the game to experiential persuasion, why stop with the vicarious or with story in some narrow sense? The virtual beckons at times in television, often in film, and predominantly in computer media, with their alluring invitation to play and otherwise do. "The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky spoke of film as the art of 'sculpting in time.'"[25] A subtext of Cameron's Titanic is an account of film-making as painting with time: the hero's talent for portraiture is celebrated in contrast to the drab ease of sketching "still lifes," and the movie drips with problematics of contrasting times and experiences.[26] | If we want to do philosophy well, urged Paul Feyerabend, "Let's Make More Movies."[24] | |
In
Feyeraband's enthusiastic spirit, explore these great movie websites
. . .
|
The narrative paradigm is about time, we say, but it can become so even more and better. Let it probe the experiential persuasion of the premier myth-makers of our times in computing, television, and film. A subtext of Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, is the demonstration of how electronic technologies of cinema, computing, and television enable us to make (virtual) contact with others. The film helps us experience how the President (played unknowingly by Bill Clinton) uses television to make contact with multitudes of Americans. It enables us to feel how Ellie Arroway (played cleverly by Jodie Foster) makes electronic contact by television with ordinary Americans, by film with us viewers, and by virtual reality with alien beings. We virtually experience her journey by wormhole to the stars just as she virtually experiences the aliens by projections of her father on a strange and starry beach. When the maker of films paints with time or sculpts in time, the virtual-reality result is for us as viewers to make effective contact with people and places we otherwise cannot experience, cannot tangibly touch, cannot (save for the experiential persuasion of special effects) empower truly to touch us.[27] | |
| The narrative paradigm needs to encompass the times, experiences, and persuasions of electronics. The third recommendation, accordingly, is that narrativists embrace the virtual narratives of film, television, computing, and company to explore their experiential persuasion. Only then can the appreciation of story times, experiences, and persuasions connect adequately with their electronic cousins. Only then can the conduct of scholarship situate itself fully in the worlds that it wants to comprehend, conserve, criticize, or help to create.[28] It is time for the narrative paradigm to target more than story. | 
Contact |
|
| Try
virtual gambling . . .
plus many more internet games and activities! |
The media and forms of communication facilitated by computers are opening us further to persuasion by virtual experience. They change the scale and structure of our experiences. The World Wide Web goes on and on, chaotically, with virtual lives available in innumerable linked but different dimensions. Multiplicitous in its times and multimediated in its experiences, the allure of its learning far exceeds the labyrinthine library that Umberto Eco used The Name of the Rose to evoke the amazing resources of Western civilization.[29] Yet the Escher architecture of the medieval library tower surely stands also as a postmodern emblem of the coming Net(work). Internet time can be a web crawler's or spinner's, with advertisers already are scrambling to exploit its capacities for persuasion. Computer time is active and playful. Virtual gambling has some advantages over visiting the neighborhood casino. Unhappy about that? Then engage some of the Web sites with activities to alter your moods. Doing persuades, and electronic activities do more than stories. | |
"Ascending" M. C. Escher Resources |
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Virtual
human anatomy . . .
|
 The
Iguana Sisters Home Page
Experience both sisters growing up in monthly photos and diary entries. |
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| If this multimedia essay were to end like many a Web posting, it would invite you to rejoin, amplify, or carry on the conversation. Let us do something like that by inviting you to try multimedia scholarship . . . | ||
| That is a great way to respond to this call for bringing the narrative paradigm into our electronic world of persuasion by stories and more. "After all," argued Robert Hutchins," the great thing about a university is that it can afford to experiment . . . [because] a university is free to cultivate and exhibit the independence of thought, the willingness to depart from tradition, the readiness to take a chance, if you will, that may come from the possession of a life that is nearly immortal." Forums like The American Communication Journal are responsible for giving our scholarship that kind of time. Let's take full advantage of it. | ||
