The Crisis of Narration

Review

The crisis of literary studies as a critical practice and an academic profession animates season eight of the American Vandal podcast. A landmark survey of the institutional histories, proclivities and potential futures of literary criticism, the crisis is presented as one of method but also of labor. A crisis of method, as critics are compelled to engage with the relationship between their preferred modes of analysis, interpretation, and evaluation, and broader questions of purpose, task and mission. How should humanistic scholarship and pedagogy defend itself in an era of austerity, automation, and artificial intelligence? A crisis of labor, as the employment relations which once organized literature as a discipline within the US higher education system are in the process of complete collapse. Vulgar concerns with working conditions, attacks on academic freedoms, and the simple viability of earning a living, intrude on and disrupt the otherwise cerebral elucidation of ideas, concepts, and readings. The university is an antagonistic workplace after all.

For others, the crisis of literature manifests itself very differently. In contrast to a struggle over the allocation of scare resources within the university, the crisis is attributed to the amplification, extension, and diffusion of the literary across society. It is a crisis of hyperinflation and overabundance, one that devalues the currency of fiction but is equally an effect of what Peter Brooks refers to as narrative’s hostile ‘takeover of reality’. Far from an indulgent, effete, and purposeless activity, storytelling is identified as key instrument and technology of power: it is an infra-ideology that organizes the economic base whilst also reproducing social norms.

In Seduced by Story (2022), Brooks is vexed by the political ramifications of the ‘storification of reality’. Alternative facts and fake news are the toxic byproducts of a new narrative order, one which has replaced evidenced-based claims with myth, with stories that have forgotten their status as fiction. Politicians, for example, behave as if their rhetoric really does provide a satisfactory causal explanation of the world and popular sentiment is attracted, mobilized, and stirred through these narrative-oriented performances. As Christian Salmon notes in Storytelling (2010), the political transformation of history into mythology is matched by story-based transformations within the economy. Corporations not only manufacture physical commodities, but they also produce emotions, feelings, and vibes, participating in a form of semio-capitalism which valorizes the immaterial and affective dimension of consumption too – that is, its experience. Consumer engagement with this ‘dream society’ is stimulated and channeled by the stories a brand tells and the symbolic worlds and imaginaries they are encouraged to identify with and desire. 

Byung-Chul Han sets out to intervene on similar territory in The Crisis of Narration (2024). For Han, the crisis is linked to the inflationary noise and modish demands that characterize contemporary invitations to tell stories – personal and political. Narratives, however, become dysfunctional at the very moment they are recognized as objects of discourse, inquiry, and research: they are alienated from being and are no longer indissociable from life. What distinguishes Han’s account from those offered by Brooks and Salmon is its concern with separation and emphasis of ontology. In a present beset by unreliable narrators, Brooks insists that it is crucial to think critically about who is telling the story, how it is being presented, and to reflect on how this knowledge has been verified – if at all. As commentators, this is a crisis of epistemology; as political agents, a crisis of narrative control. Salmon meanwhile considers how digital technologies have reshaped media institutions, rerouted the circulation of information, and reconfigured attention. What such perspectives overlook, Han suggests, is the extent to which the conditions for narrative have themselves been destroyed. Hence it is a misnomer to talk about a narrative revival or narrative turn. Societies have entered a new ‘post-narrative’ era.

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The social capacity for narration has been negated by two rival but interlinked tendencies. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, narrative’s first nemesis is storytelling itself. According to Han, narration anchors being: it orientates, supports, and structures existence in a world that is meaningful. Narration binds experience: it is a ‘concluding form’ that founds solid communal identities within closed symbolic orders. Storytelling, on the other hand, emerges after tradition has been pulverized and social relations are subjected to the contingent, the ephemeral, and the fleeting. Unified, rooted, and stable communities of narration are supplanted by pop-up communities, communities that coalesce around fads, frenzies, and viral sensations, connections predicated on arbitrary consumption habits rather than deeply felt commitments. Capitalism, Han explains, has appropriated narrative and subsumed it to the logic of consumption. Commercialized as stories, narratives are stripped of collective belonging and used instead to promote content and advertise commodities. With non-commodified affiliations foreclosed, individuals are isolated in the lonely domain of the consumer. ‘Storytelling is storyselling’, which for The Crisis of Narration, is one of the defining pathologies of the present.

Narration’s second opponent is information. Combining distance with intimacy, narration slows down and extends the present, lingering over the remembrance of incidental details, sensations, and atmospheres. Like a magic lantern, it plays with light and shadow: it recounts, conceals, and forgets. Explanation is anathema to narration, which instead consorts with mystery, wonder, and opacity. Obversely, information places a premium on transparency, it obliterates space and contracts time: it presents events instantaneously but once consumed evaporates without trace. With the digitalization of the discursive economy, the eddies of sensuous being are captured and transformed into the ‘quantified self’, into data streams that can be tracked and optimized for improved performance and efficiency. Even idle daydreaming is harassed by the endless buzz of push notifications. Information, Han contends, implements a novel form of ‘smart domination’, one that ‘constantly asks us to communicate our opinions, needs, and preferences, to tell our lives, to post, share, and like messages’.

The emblematic device of this anti-narrative age is the smartphone, a gadget which both pivotal for the emergent ‘digital panopticon’ but whose primary gestures are also incommensurate with rapt listening. Humanity has evolved into ‘phono-sapiens’, a species disinterested in salvation and rather more preoccupied with typing, swiping, scrolling, recording, and adding to their socials. The stories, reels, shorts that proliferate across social media platforms update modernity’s existential dilemma of ‘live or tell’ with the injunction to ‘live or post’. Yet what is communicated, in Han’s estimation, is less conscious works of narrative recollection but immediate reports on activities, an unreflexive and additive form which ‘translates a life into a dataset’. Phono-sapiens communicate not through the exchange of tales but through information, cumulative instants which lack duration and exacerbate feelings of temporal fleetingness. As well as time, language too is said to atrophy within this format, as memory dissolves into content creation, into modes befitting self-promotion, marketing, advertising, forms that are impatient with and lack empathy for the other.

The demise of narration extends out beyond phenomenological experience and encompasses theories of knowledge. Han is perturbed by the method war between theory and ‘Big Data’. Whilst ‘Big Data’ can process, compute, and correlate astonishing amounts of information, it is unable to adequately explain causal connections. Its model is open, additive, and fundamentally lacking narrative closure. Theory, Han waxes, ‘designs an order of things, setting them in relation to each other. Theory explains why they behave the way they do. It develops conceptual contexts that makes things intelligible […] theory is a form of closure that takes hold of things and thereby makes them graspable’. Read as a narrative, theory produces an order of ideas and sets them into relation with the production of things, articulating a form of immanent causality that gives shape, meaning, and direction to social existence. So what does The Crisis of Narration make graspable and what might be considered to elude its clutches altogether?

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The Crisis of Narration is loosely guided by the type of historical materialist study popularized by Walter Benjamin, who remains a key presence within the text. Capitalist modernity marks a fundamental rupture with traditional narrative-based communities and its effects can be registered through the impoverishment of experience, the decay of language, and the desacralization of the world. Mechanical reproduction is replaced by digitalized reproduction and the present is conceptualized as an age of screens, Netflix, and smart devices, grammars of daily life which produce their own figures, pathologies, and compulsive behaviors – a ‘digital unconscious’. For Han, the transition from ‘modernity’ to ‘late modernity’ is propelled by the platforms, networks, and applications that have enveloped contemporary social life. Or, alternatively, it is the passage from modernist shock to postmodern likes, from Baudelaire’s spleen to Jeff Koons’s ‘wow’. Solidarity and communal ties are eliminated by a neoliberal regime which privatizes narrative into performances of the self, adopting models of self-realization structured around competition and productivity. A socialized ‘we’ shatters into an amorphous mass of entrepreneurs whose only product is their own personal brand. 

At the same time, there is somewhat of a disconnect between the vividly described features of the present and vague references to the historical processes that are presumably their causal conditions. This feeling of uncertainty is only heightened by the repeated deployment of elemental metaphors to evoke the predicament of late moderns, who are variously engulfed by the ‘storm of contingency’, the ‘tsunami of information’, the ‘flood of ephemeral narratives’, the ‘maelstrom of actuality’. Whilst such images undeniably provoke a powerful sense of onrushing disaster, their own formless fury disorientates as much as it makes graspable. As a ‘deluge’, information and storytelling are arguably naturalized and elevated to the status of myth, a type of fiction that, as Brooks reminds us, has forgotten its own determination by history.

Despite traces of Marshall Berman’s classic account of modernity and its maelstroms, Han focuses primarily on capital’s dissolution of previously fixed-fast social bonds, rather than the possibility of creating new styles, rituals, and worlds. Narrative is consistently aligned with what has been lost, with tradition, religion, the village, with social structures and practices rooted in the earth and harmonized with nature. There can be no revival of narration because its enabling conditions have been uprooted: it is only stories and surveillance from now on. Yet this opposition between a formerly anchored, solid, and orientated social ontology and one defined as vacuous, commodified, and insubstantial is perhaps filtered through its own romanticism and nostalgia. Pre-capitalist societies might well not have known alienation, but it by no means follows that the stitching of narration to living was not experienced as a form of domination, that individuals did not feel oppressed by the identities and roles assigned to them within these closed symbolic horizons. 

To be sure, Han might counter that it is precisely the disappearance of a ‘longing for another form of life’ that presages the affective passage from modernity to late modernity. The revolutionary ‘sense of beginning’ which drove modernity’s embrace of the new has stalled in late modernity’s mantra of the ‘on and on’, a sensibility without conviction or vision. Late moderns are said to lack the ‘courage to create a world-changing narrative’, satisfied instead with convenience and likes, with safe bets, with material that has already proved successful. Late modernity lacks strong attachments, it is a period without a future that is not simply replication, that is not an algorithmic remake, a repackaging and relaunching of the same. The significance of existing intellectual property for Hollywood studios lends anecdotal credence to this argument that there is an imaginative blockage, that rather than create new characters, scenarios, and genres, dream-makers are wedded to franchises, to mining what has already been created, what has already been loved.

A present without a future is nonetheless one of turmoil and unpredictability, a time of stress, anxiety, and existential crisis which provokes individuals to search out narratives that can re-orientate being. In an ‘age of storytelling’, these therapeutic cures take on the form of consumerism and conspiracy theories, viral trends that momentarily suppress the void. The chaos of a world emptied of inner truth is temporarily stabilized by ephemeral communities, which produce meaning through objects, images, and habits designed to be adopted and consumed. There appears to be a zero-sum logic at work within this periodization, where narration, as the power of ‘new beginnings’, is constitutively incompatible with storytelling, which cannot perceive, sense, or intuit forms of life substantially different from what already exists. Ideas of non-synchronicity like residual, emergent, and dominant structures of feeling are sidelined in favor of absolute homogenization. To put it overly flippantly, is it really not possible to fritter mindless hours away reacting to cat videos on social media and nonetheless still commit to collective narratives around climate change, social justice, and workers’ rights? Why the stern objection to passing fancies, frivolities, and whims, the deliriously trivial pleasures which connect us to random accounts for one hot minute. What if we like the stonk?

The answer put forward by The Crisis of Narration is that narrative triggers emotions, and emotional responses are seized on by capital, which turns existence into a site of extraction and exploitation. Emotions are located in ‘the part of the brain that controls our actions at the physical-instinctual level of which we are not conscious’. Fatefully, emotions bypass the intellect and affect behaviors directly, evading ‘conscious defensive responses’. Han concludes that ‘by intentionally appropriating narratives, capitalism takes hold of life at a pre-reflexive level and thus escapes conscious control and critical reflection’. Despite our better knowledge, stories excite emotions which modify actions and desire is channeled away from civic pursuits and routed instead towards consumption.

The commercialization of narrative into storyselling and the targeted capitalization of pre-individual states constitutes a form of theoretical closure. It offers an explanation of why we act against our own interests and of why reactions have eclipsed reasoned deliberation. A regime of storytelling has transformed citizens into users who are both compelled to market their unique brand, but who are also addicts, dependent on digital stimulants. One concern with concluding forms is the extent to which they lock relations too rigidly in place. If that which individuals cannot determine, their pre-individual affects, have been so thoroughly colonized by capital, how can they undo this determination? By situating smart domination within the manipulation of pre-conscious being, Han seemingly removes all possibility of agency. The malleable user-consumers of narrative content are separated from their intellectual faculties, a split which re-introduces a familiar and questionable opposition between emotion and reason.  

The capture of pre-reflexive feelings contributes to a sense of immediacy which characterizes Han’s account of the media ecologies of late modernity. Just as emotions bypass the intellect and encourage consumption, information uploaded to social media platforms similarly ‘bypasses consciousness’. These posts ‘represent our activities immediately, without any reflective filtering’. Whilst one might be sympathetic to a critique of the inanity of the creator economy and share concerns about the emptiness of time spent on such apps, it is perhaps overly naive to take social media accounts at face value. The appearance of immediacy is often an effect of mediation, achieved through selective editing, careful styling, and intentional modeling for engagement. More generally, whilst there might well be a perpetual stream of content to consume, personal feeds themselves are curated and screened. Fears regarding the openness of social media are equally matched by concerns about its narrowed horizons, about the retreat into opinion silos and echo chambers. Online communities establish their own hermetically closed symbolic worlds, spaces which reaffirm beliefs and amplify axioms in potentially dangerous and no less disorientating feedback loops.

Relatedly, Han observes that the uncertainty and loss of narrative bearing in late modernity has contributed to the turn to right-wing populism. Like the latest TikTok routine or meme-stock, these political orientations are categorized as ephemeral, as fleeting communities which lack ‘any strong binding force’. Whilst this might plausibly be the case with the sudden interest in GameStop in January 2021 for instance, it seems rather less persuasive when it comes to explaining the consolidation of far-right nationalisms across the globe. Contemporary forces of reaction have established a totalizing narrative which appeals to origins and addresses fears of proletarianization and thwarted dreams of social betterment. Meaning is restored and identities revived in a civilizational battle against woke elites, doctrinaire public sector workers, and immigrants intent upon replacing so-called indigenous populations. The ‘perspectives’ and ‘pictures’ hallucinated by right-wing demagogues might well be utterly deranged fantasies and demonstrably false, but their capture and mobilization of affect is no less committed, real or binding. For recent manifestations of attentive listening, one does not have to look any further that than the troubling spectacle of a Trump rally. Given its emphasis on blood, earth, and tradition, it seems premature to dismiss the nation and its insidious narratives of belonging as merely transient. 

Leaving the political scene, storytelling circulates through the economy as storyselling. Not only do stories magically transform ‘useless things into valuable goods’, information societies also consume ‘more narratives than things’. Narrative content has surpassed concrete use value in the order of economic significance. Yet framing storytelling from the perspective of circulation and consumption inevitably downplays its impact on the conditions, relations, and activities of production. Stories not only sell, they also produce: things and subjectivities. The discussion of the neoliberal regime gestures to this transformation, in particular its observation that subjects are coerced into becoming entrepreneurial content creators and producers of the self. For Han, the pervasive instrumentalization of narrative further isolates and fragments individuals, who compete for a share of the attention economy. What is perhaps passed over is the extent to which this inscription of narrative into work and work into narrative does in fact produce a unity-in-separation, a patchwork collective of workers exploited through their storytelling capacities. The Crisis of Narration is attentive to the affective composition of labor organized around the voracious hungers and unruly thirsts of media consumption but is less receptive to the affective restructuring internal to work itself.

The modifications narrative has made within the labor relation has a more prominent role in Salmon’s Storytelling, which observes that ‘the injunction to tell stories has become a popular obsession, an ideology, and even a slogan – the slogan for a whole era’. The era in question first takes shape in the 1990s and is connected to the Internet, which ‘revolutionized the discursive economy and blurred the distinction between true and false, reality and fiction’. Alongside changes to the ‘individual’, the ‘juridico-ideological’, and the ‘political-ideological’, Salmon includes the ‘microeconomic’. Companies have turned to narratives not only to captivate external audiences but to create protocols, model behaviors, and project mentalities that their employees are, in turn, expected to adopt, imitate, and embody. Storytelling becomes a ‘vector’ of ideology, one that valorizes change and flexibility within the workplace, that persuades workers that their most valuable asset is the capacity to learn new capacities. The spirit of capitalism here is one that preaches adaptability, of finding virtue within redeployment, to recognize redundancy as a growth opportunity.  

Jason Read discusses this entanglement of work and the imagination in terms of a ‘mythic composition of labor’. Stories operate as a type of ‘meta-conduct’, a conduct on conducts which does not directly shape action but alters what actions people conceive that they are capable of executing. The labor relation ‘cannot be separated from the narratives we tell to make sense of it, and orientate ourselves’. These narratives present individuals with behaviors, habits, and mindsets to be aspired to but they also foster communal feelings and identifications. The concrete acts and actions of labor are lived mythically, through abstract invocations to personal responsibility, self-reliance, and self-worth. In turn, society is imaginatively split into the strivers, the wealth creators, and honest grafters, a class whose noble endeavors subsidize the skivers, slackers, and socialists, wastrels coddled by the state. To confront the virulent imaginaries of the right, the left cannot solely rely on appeals to scientific facts or lament the loss of communities bound by folk traditions. What is needed is a new politics of the imagination, one that outflanks the esotericism of fascism with the eccentricity of communism.