The Art and War of Story
How stories do things in our world
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” - Toni Morrison
Humans have long been enamored with stories, using them to entertain, educate, create communities, heal, and so much more. In other words, stories allow us to do things in the world.
Similarly, J.L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (1962), a seminal work in the philosophy of language, introduces the concept of “speech acts,” which are ways of using language to perform various kinds of actions. Austin challenges the common assumption that the primary function of language is to describe the world and to state facts. Instead, he proposed that many utterances are performative in nature; that is, they are not just statements that can be judged as true or false but are actions in themselves. An example of a performative utterance is "I apologize," where saying the words is performing the act of apologizing. Austin differentiates between three types of speech acts: locutionary acts (what people say); illocutionary acts (what people intend), and perlocutionary force (what results from the utterance).
How to Do Things with Words had a profound impact on the development of pragmatic and linguistic theory, influencing not only philosophers but also scholars in fields such as linguistics, communication, and legal studies. It has contributed significantly to our understanding of the functionality of language in social contexts.
In this newsletter, I similarly explore “how to do things with stories” building on what has already been said by many who are not always included in the canon as well as some who are. My overarching goal is to get one step closer to the holy grail of consilience in the field of stories - a shared wisdom about how stories do things in the world that unites expert knowledge with the wisdom of ancient traditions and everyday people. From this integrated view, my hope is to explore what is then possible to consider about the many different paths to a better future.
Consilience is a high bar. It’s the target I am aiming for which means I may not always get there but hopefully I land close. The Oxford English Dictionary defines consilience as: “The fact of ‘jumping together’ or agreeing; said of the accordance of two or more inductions drawn from different groups of phenomena.” The different storytelling traditions around the world jump together when it comes to what they reveal about shared human experience. These traditions remind us that stories connect us in ways that are profoundly human despite our differences. This is why the deeper you root a local story, the farther it travels around the world. As for inductive reasoning, I am an anthropologist so my ethnographic methods and qualitative data starts from the bottom up to say something universal and is well suited to begin to approach consilience.
The Fragile Real Study
I will largely be talking about audiovisual stories because the two-year study (funded by the Ford Foundation and the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling) this newsletter draws upon is based on interviews with audiovisual artists around the world that work in the mediums of film, television, and immersive storytelling. Historically, doing things with stories has been confined to impact filmmaking which has been dominated by documentaries, as opposed to fiction. Funders of impact filmmaking have also prioritized funding documentaries to create social change over fictional narratives. But narrative fiction, in all its formats – films, episodic, and digital - reaches more people. So with respect to impact and creating social change, there is a great deal of untapped benefit to explore by bringing fiction into the fold. This was the point of departure for the study.
The overall aim of the study was to provide an overview and assessment of the state of fiction in advancing impact goals with the goal of integrating documentary and fiction into one analytic frame that I refer to as “reality-based” storytelling. To achieve this aim I conducted a literature review and interviews with forty-five fiction practitioners from all around the world, most of whom come from global majority worlds. The literature review was by no means exhaustive and comprised a selective search of the science of narrative drawing from various fields including psychology, anthropology, media studies, communication, entertainment-education, popular education, public health and medicine. Drawing both on the science of what is known in the literature, and the lived experience of practitioners allows us to build on what has historically been done and synthesize what is currently being done to say something about the future of the field of narrative change.
I am a grounded theory researcher so the interviews serve as my data points and from this qualitative data I have developed an explanatory framework that I refer to as The Fragile Real which unravels how stories collapse fact and fiction to build worlds. This framework is offered as a potential guide for the field of narrative change and really anyone interested in what stories can do in the world.
When you place documentary and fiction in one analytic frame, different standards of truth come into sharp focus. The scholar Jerome Brunner has written prolifically about the different standards of truth as it relates to fiction. “Narrative “truth” is judged by its verisimilitude rather than its verifiability. There seems indeed to be some sense in which narrative, rather than referring to “reality,” may in fact create or constitute it, as when “fiction” creates a “world” of its own” (Bruner 1991, 13).
The perception of what is real is at the heart of The Fragile Real as an explanatory framework because depending on where you are looking from - and by from I mean what body you are in, the set of life experiences you have had, and where you are situated in the world - what is real shifts. This shifting space is what I refer to as The Fragile Real.
In this approach, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction blur, allowing for a more nuanced exploration of truth and the complexities of human experience. By embracing the fluidity of story, we can challenge traditional notions of truth and open up new possibilities for representation.
Focusing on this shifting space, also places emphasis on how stories make real the world around us which has an important effect: what we see as real multiplies. From this vantage point, seeing beyond what we take for granted or don't know that we don’t know becomes possible. Both of which are critical use cases for how to do things with stories.
Liberating Fiction
As for the fiction of it all, “visionary fiction” is a term Walidah Imarisha developed to distinguish liberating forms of science fiction that can build “new, freer worlds” from science fiction that reinforces dominant narratives of power (Imarisha, Brown, Thomas, 2015). This distinction is useful because it anchors the impact of stories in an analysis of power. I use the term “liberating fiction” to expand the purview beyond science fiction and connect back to the revolutionary roots of Third Cinema which Teshome Gabriel described as having an “aesthetics of liberation” (1982).
Stories that reinforce dominant narratives of power have been wielded to create hierarchy and wreak havoc the world over for a very long time. This is the war of story. The circulation of certain stories and the suppression of others is linked with issues of power and hegemony. There is a great deal that can be gleaned from these uses of story which is part of a broader vein - the use of art as propaganda.
Art as propaganda could be the subject of an entire literature review. For the purposes of this study, stories are a form of art that fall under this larger domain. Stories can be and have been used as propaganda throughout history and this use is an example of doing things with stories that influences, persuades and shapes public opinion.
From religion to politics, from propaganda to entertainment, stories have long been used to sway public opinion and shape the way people think. The narratives we encounter can shape, perceptions, and behaviors. They can reinforce existing power structures or challenge them. But one of the most potent uses is the way in which they condition what we think is possible.
There is a long history associated with the use of fictional narrative to create possibility and/or collective change. In the global context, the progenitors of Third Cinema laid a blueprint, and in the American context the L.A. Rebellion and the vanguard of independent media followed suit. Fiction makers across these spaces wrestled with how to use fictional films as a political practice that does not dominate and subjugate but rather liberates and creates anew.
The main point is that the makers interviewed in this report are part of a lineage and interpreting their words in this larger context sheds light on what’s new about the ways in which they are mobilizing fiction and what’s not. There is a genealogy, a kinship that ties those who do things with stories that is far too often obscured. Before “impact filmmaking” existed as a field, independent filmmakers like Djibril Diop Mambetey were using stories to influence, shape, and invent new realities and it’s important to bring this history in conversation with the findings of this study when discussing the evolution of doing things with stories (i.e. impact), particularly as it relates to fiction.
The poetics of engaging in what is possible is captured in an interview with Mambety where he distinguishes the spirit of what is possible from what might have been. His vision of interior worlds that have not been colonized is instructive and a productive intervention in a field where representation itself has limits. Mabety’s wish for children to have the wings to soar to new heights unshackled by the sins of prior generations is an apt metaphor for bypassing these same limits. Furthermore, his stance that filmmaking begins with conjuring the images that are inside of you points to an altogether different visual philosophy that relies on the mind’s eye as opposed to the looking gaze.
The poetics of this approach is a part of the history. The inventiveness in the form, and style of films like Mambety’s Touki Bouki (1963) and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot (1996) point to a history of using fiction to subvert what the world expects of places like Senegal and Zimbabwe. Filmmakers like Diop and Bikolo carved an altogether new moral center with their films that provoked the audience to consider ethical questions about everyone’s place in the world. It is through the use of style and poetics that their message broke through.
Breaking through the structural, political and cultural limitations of a historical moment is a uniting theme that connects the lineage of makers, past, present and future that use fiction to liberate. And breaking through is deeply tied to the art of story.
When stories break through, they escape control.
But the public sphere is far from an even playing field as far as the circulation of stories are concerned. Different narratives of reality are constantly vying for dominance and control. This battle has intensified in the digital age, with the rise of social media and the rapid dissemination of information. Stories can now spread at extraordinary speeds, across vast networks of individuals, influencing public discourse and shaping collective consciousness.
Against this backdrop, how stories escape or become authoritative has new challenges. The algorithmic infrastructure that tracks user data is particularly pernicious. Similar to the invisible hand of the market, what you see online is carefully and very invisibly curated for you in a way that deepens isolation under the guise of being ever more connected. This falsity creates a hunger for real connections that lends well told stories disproportionate power. The fact that technology and its algorithmic infrastructure locks us into a repeating loop of disconnection means when a story lands, it can explode. This is an opportunity to harness for liberation and all things possible that may be born from it.