Useful Stories

It appears to be something of a psychological truism – unduly obvious, self-evident, trivial – to say that when we tell stories about ourselves and our world, we tell stories that will be “useful” to us.  We tell stories that are interested in something.  They are invested in the outcome.  Perhaps not overtly, even consciously, but nonetheless, when we tell stories about the past, we put the past to work: on us, on those around us.  It is a kind of self and world-fashioning that we do everyday.

Let me underline that this does not mean that everybody floats around in a bubble, not touching other people, other groups or communities, each living in isolation from th other.  Our stories are fashioned in and by communities.  And communities are fashioned in and by their relation with still other communities.  The words we use are common.  Our stories are negotiated.  One could say, cautiously, that they are democratic.

Take, for example, the family photograph album.  Typically, more than one photographer must contribute.  If a mother takes photo’s of her children, then another, perhaps the father, must take photographs of the mother in order for her to appear.  Or perhaps a stranger.

Later, gathered around the family album, a conversation takes place: who is this?  What was happening then?  Who took this photo?  The story is pieced together again, and again, over and over.  It is retold, perhaps embellished, perhaps reduced in size, significance and extravigance.  New events, new photo’s change the rhythm, and topography of the story.  But it is still a real story – see the photo’s?  We were there, it happened, you and I can remember.  Memory becomes inescapably intertwined with photographs, viewed on dozens of different occasions.

But notice: what happens when you stop making photograph albums?  Or, your photograph “albums”, are actually files uploaded to Facebook, or Flickr, or a blog?  The community has changed, the format has changed, the conversation has changed.  The stories we tell are going to change, and the uses to which they are put, and their effects will change too.

It leaves me wondering what kind of stories I tell.  It makes me think that it is worth making the time to remember, and to create albums, journals, records.  What I’m talking about here is really tradition. Not in a negative or positive sense, but in a necessary sense.  We will make traditions, for better or worse.  The question is whether they are deliberate, or ad hoc.

Filed under: Family, Historiography, experiences, history, memory, technology , community narrative, family photo albums, family tradition, self-narrative, social structure of memory

Going postal

Have you ever wondered why, today, we can only ever be post?  It’s always post this or post that; post modernity, post capitalism (yeah, right), post secular — we can never actually be something, we can only ever be after something.

The reason is that we more often than not see things as (mere) products of an historical evolution.  There is no objective order that anchors us, only an impatience to be something other than what we are.  Today’s institutions are the baggage of the past, and yet we have not reached the future (obviously), because they are still hanging around.  So we can only ever be post, because, like, we’re so over it.

Oliver O’Donovan puts it like this:  This way of thinking – which is called ‘historicism’ (ie. everything is historical), “makes all created goods appear putatively outmoded. So that if there are currents of dissatisfaction evident in a society’s practice of [for example] marriage, such as might be indicated by a high divorce rate or a prominent homosexual culture, they will treated with great seriousness as signs of the evolution for which the institution is destined.”  Substitute churches, or democracy, or whatever for marriage, and you can see how pervasive this way of seeing the world is. Oh, except that democracy is nearly always seen as the end of the line.  But that’s a topic for another post.

But of course, we never actually become anything different, do we?  We are only ever posted, on the way, but never there.  We’re ghosts, stuck in between.  Thus we can never be content, only ever dissatisfied.

Filed under: history, observations, quotations , contentment, cultural politics, dissatisfaction, historicism, institutions, Oliver O'Donovan, postmodernism

Marx, Badiou, some thoughts

I recently met with some friends to read Alain Badiou’s book on the apostle Paul, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. I’d flicked through a couple of his books before, but this was the first time I’d read one through.  To brutally summarise it, Badiou, who wastes no time in telling you he has no time for the content of Paul’s gospel message, his God, or the supposed reality of the events to which Paul refers (Badiou designates it ‘fable’), is rather interested in the manner of Paul’s declaration as a universal address.  That is, it is to Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, men and women.  It addresses all in their singularity, without fragmenting truth into a fractal, regionally relative niche.  The declaration as addressing anybody, anywhere is what Badiou would like to take, shorn of any of the religious trappings.

In order to achieve this, he devotes his attention to a description of the apostle, and readings of some of his major letters (after he carefully notes which letters are acceptable, according to the historians he deems acceptable).  His reading of Paul is curious, and skewed at various points, but at others he has some intriguing insights.  The discussions of our reading group traversed this aspect quite a bit – just how good is Badiou’s reading of Paul?  Not that great we thought, but not without merit either.

My thought for today, however, is this.  I was reading some Marx at roughly the same time, and reflecting on where Marx opens his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with the famous remarks on history (after Hegel) happening as tragedy and farce, including the following:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a mighty nightmare on the brain of the living.  And just when seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. (p.15)

Marx goes on to give Luther as an example, donning the mask of the apostle.  In Badiou’s puppetry of the apostle, has he simply fulfilled the farce of Marx’s thought here?  Is Badiou wishing to dress up his philosophy with the power of a Christian heritage that weighs on his brain like a mighty nightmare?  Moreover, I’m struck with how the rhetoric in the New Testament – although it appeals to the Law and Prophets, something Badiou seems uncomfortable with in his reading of Paul – is marked by the newness of the event.  The newness is, of course, something Badiou recognises, and wishes to appropriate.

Thoughts, anyone?

Filed under: Marx, books, history, quotations, random thoughts , 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Badiou, Marx, Saint Paul