Re: Ishmael & Narratives LO3506

Jim Michmerhuizen (jamzen@world.std.com)
Mon, 30 Oct 1995 00:27:14 +0001 (EST)

Replying to LO3460 --

On Fri, 27 Oct 1995 J.Mullen@agora.stm.it wrote:

[ ... some profound reflections on history and narrative, from which,
in an embarrassment of riches, I finally pick this excerpt for comment: ]

> Isn't the whole point that every individual deserves society's
> respect as the protagonist in his or her own story? That these individual
> narratives make up a culture's collective History? "Counternarratives"
> are, in the end, "narratives" of equal weight as all others. Imagine
> growing up considering yourself the daring protagonist in creating your
> own story, a socially valued unique tale. Gosh... now there's a
> stretch...

Back in April it occurred to me to wonder how stories could be knowledge.
A good thread got going amongst some of us. I've really been occupied
with it ever since. One of the subsidiary questions I asked was 'what is
it about us here, at this point in time, participating in this group and
doing what we do for a living -- what is it that makes talk about stories
and narrative so fruitful, so rewarding, so fascinating?' There's often a
kind of social intuition at work in conversations like this -- topics
emerge into discussion before (not _after_) we've understood why.

So, in order to attack this question, I said to myself: 'What is the
opposite of a story?' Maybe the reason that the concept of 'story' seems
to promise us so much, seems so full of meaning, is that we've been living
for too long with its opposite -- whatever that might be.

A pretty good candidate for this is 'law'. Good old Newtonian Scientific
LAW.

Consider:
A story is a sequence of unique events. A law, abstractly, knows nothing
of unique events.

Newtonian physical law obliterates uniqueness of reference. Anything that
could uniquely identify a particle, in Newtonian physics, was accidental
and contingent.

This concept of law is still around, in some funny places where you
wouldn't expect, maybe. I've been reading Hubert Dreyfus on Artificial
Intelligence. He quotes two of the grand poobahs of AI, Newell and Simon:

"[our work] ... reveals with great clarity that free behavior of a
reasonably intelligent human can be understood as the product of a
complex but finite and determinate set of laws."

I don't believe this. Not even a little bit: not metaphorically,
analogically, parabolically. I wonder whether anyone on this mailing list
believes this anymore (I did believe it for a long time). What's
fundamental in human life is story, not law of this sort.

What if story, as unique sequences of unique events -- mine, yours, his,
hers, its -- is fundamental in this universe, and law is an abstraction
from stories?

A lot that we used to think was LAW is really patterning. This is much
different from law. The feedback cycles that envelop groups of people in
Senge's book are not Newtonian LAWS -- they're just patterns. Membership
in, or participation in, a pattern, is not generally assimilable to, or
explicable by, cause-and-effect talk: I don't cause the pattern, the
pattern doesn't cause me, I'm just part of it. (In this light, look at
the past discussions here of "emergent" properties of organizations and
groups.)

So there, Jackie Mullen, thanks for that paragraph...

--
Regards
     Jim Michmerhuizen    jamzen@world.std.com
     web residence at     http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
...........................................................................
. . . . There are far *fewer* things in heaven and earth, Horatio,  . . . .
 . . . . .       than are dreamt of in your philosophy...        . . | _ .