In Acts of Meaning (1990), Jerome Bruner writes,
To be in a viable culture is to be bound in a set of connecting stories, connecting even though the stories may not represent a consensus.
When there is a breakdown in a culture (or even within a microculture like the family) it can usually be traced to one of several things. The first is a deep disagreement about what constitutes the ordinary and canonical in life and what the exceptional or divergent. And this we know in our time from what one might call the ‘battle of life-styles,’ exacerbated by intergenerational conflict. A second threat inheres in the rhetorical overspecialization of narrative, when stories become so ideologically or self-servingly motivated that distrust displaces interpretation, and ‘what happened’ is discounted as fabrication. On the large scale, this is what happenes under a totalitarian regime, and contemporary novelists of Central Eurpope have documented it with painful exquisiteness–Milan Kundera, Danila Kis, and many others. The same phenomenon expresses itself in modern bureaucracy, where all except the official story of what is happening is silenced or stonewalled. And finally, there is breakdown that results from sheer impoverishment of narrative resources–in the permanent underclass of the urban gthetto, in the second and third generation of the Palestinian refuges compound, in the hunger-preoccupied villages of semipermanently drought-stricken villages in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not that there is a total loss in putting story form to experience, but that the ‘worst scenario’ story comes so to dominate daily life that variation seems no longer to be possible.
These observations strike me as deeply insightful.
Too often within the academy I see interpretation displaced by distrust, precisely because of what Bruner intriguingly names the “rhetorical overspecialization of narrative.” I have seen less of that displacement in the community of teaching and learning technology practitioners than I have in my disciplinary community. I suppose some part of me has always hoped that the groups could find not only synergy but healing in each other’s company, and that we could help each other become our best selves. I suppose I still have that hope.
Man oh man, all your posts today are just wonders… I must admit, I’ve got a chip on my professional shoulder lately, so I’m fixated on the “modern bureaucracy” I’m meshed into, one “where all except the official story of what is happening is silenced or stonewalled” – wondering how I’m contributing to the dangerous construction. But the context of the longer quotation is something I need to think about… And I gotta read me some Bruner –but how long have you been telling me that?
I’m going to wade in over my head here soon, I’m sure, but I’m thinking of a couple of things in reaction to this. First is that there are multiple overlays of interpretation. Let me construct a bit of a chronological sequence here:
(1) Event
(2) Event becomes a story when witness relays event with three “modifying” components — (a) the witness’s perspective (which will be some subset of all of the perspectives from which the event could be observed), (b) the witness’s interpretation, which is influenced by everything the witness brings to the act of observing, and (c) the witness’s expressive limitations, which affect the witness’s capacity to relay his or her interpretation of his or her perspective of the event effectively to an audience.
(3) Repeat step 2 as each audience member becomes a story-relayer, with all of the modification effects in that step.
The second thing that I’d like to argue is that arrogance is the element that enters the picture at any stage and brings distrust as the outcome of the relaying of a story, rather than interpretation. When distrust is combined with another layer of arrogance on the part of the audience, the result is the end of the original story and the start of another, solely destructive one in the next relay step: “Mr. Y lied when he was telling us about X.”
Arrogance finds its way into this sequence via categorical statement, not of “fact,” but of interpretation.
Take “open-to-alternate-interpretation” statement: “The squirrel was killed by a car when it crossed the road — it appeared to be headed to forage in the garbage can on the other side of the road.”
Here’s an arrogant overlay: “The squirrel was killed by a car when it crossed the road on the way to forage in the garbage can on the other side.”
Unless the squirrel chattered its intent in English before crossing the road, or whispered it to the witness in its last moments after the encounter with the car, there is no way the witness can truly know its intent. The person relaying this version has added an arrogant overlay in interpretation that invites a distrustful reaction.
It seems to me that particular types of story-relayers assume that their competence will be questioned if they cannot relay their stories with categorical certainty. I suspect that for these folks there is comfort (albeit shallow) in this notion: “The truth is what I say it is.” I’m thinking that’s what Bruner is describing as “rhetorical overspecialization,” and I’ll bet that the need to project competence accounts for this form being characteristic of modern bureaucracies.
Gardner’s musing about parallels in the academy’s interpretation/distrust balance strike me as a very interesting extension of this question, especially in this respect: discourse among faculty, as I’ve observed it over the years, often starts with forceful assertion, met with energetic challenge when there are differing perspectives. The forceful assertion is not designed to invite “free-range” alternate interpretation. It is designed for efficiency in discourse by eliminating weak counter arguments before they’re ever expressed. There is an expectation of intellectual rigor as a precursor for the forceful assertion, and there’s an equal expectation that any challenge will have to be at the same level of rigor — not a place for the intellectual (or expressive) weak-of-heart (dissertation defenses come to mind :-).
Now the sixty-four-dollar question: Doesn’t the normal pattern of academic discourse promote the arrogance overlay I was suggesting above? If the answer is yes, and I suspect that it is, that would lead to the natural prevalence of distrust effects in the story matrix of academic-institutional culture. And, the “open-to-alternate-interpretation” character of the connected stories in the community of teaching and learning practitioners is an obvious and understandable contrast — Bruner might describe that culture as a viable one.
At the end of the weekend, having just finished listening to the remastered CD of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” I found my way back here. I forget what’s in my blog, sometimes by the end of a week or two. The reminders that come from my earlier self are salutary in ways I could never have imagined, six years ago. Here I read again Bruner’s words, and Brian’s, and Chip’s, and I’m struck by how the Bruner resonated with all of us. Tonight Chip’s words are especially poignant because of my weariness, even exasperation with the form of “rigor” that isn’t about honest, painstaking, humble intellectual work but about bullying. Academic rigor is essential, but it’s essential not to confuse that rigor with the pseudo-rigor of unkindness, arrogance, learned shouting. Yet academic culture has evolved a “normal pattern” that almost guarantees polarization, in many contexts.
I’m not at all sure what can be done about this. To put it less passively, I’m not at all sure what *I* can do about it, if anything. Perhaps I am expressively weak-of-heart. Perhaps I’m just tired.