….We live in a post-narrative world where stories no longer shape our reality, but algorithms do?
Though the word’s etymology differs from the current meaning, narrative means describing an event or articulating discourse, which gives a rhetoric. Historically, humans have given birth to different narratives and developed different rhetoric to make life sustainable. Narration is an old art; we can trace its history back to the Mesolithic stage of society. Mature stories became part of life and adapted to the culture so well that they became the way of life. These are the narratives we inherit, which guide us towards our development. In his timeless classic One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabrial Garcia Marquez posited that science was an evolving narrative and rhetoric we kept for survival. Feminism, tracing back in history, was a form of narration about women’s repression. We look at anything in our daily lives and put it in a genealogical tube; we’ll realize the presence of each mature concept was a narration at times.
Today’s world is changing. Globalization, the culture industry, and social media have changed our perceptions. Society has three elements: shared culture, specific territory, and collective conscience, but in a globalized world, the definition has altered altogether. Now, we don’t have a collective conscience, which was the founding block of society—at least, as Durkheim asserted. Society in a globalized world has compressed space and time, which allows the world to become a global society. The unprecedented changes in our lives, including the flow of information, misinformation, disinformation, and distorted versions of truth, have significantly impacted the art of narration. The impact on the art of narration is so significant that Byung-Chul Han chants for the enchantment of the world and to save the narrations.
Byung-Chul Han is a Korean-born German philosopher. Han is a contemporary cultural and critical theorist who writes about culture, democracy, and technology. He is famous for his preciseness because his books barely touch the line of the third digit and for his poetic prose style while addressing a specific topic. His fame also stems from his insightful observations on the pathological nature of everyday life, particularly in the digital sphere, where he deconstructs the concept of misinformation in a democratic world and explores the aesthetics of Gen-Z in the digital age. In his latest book, The Crisis of Narration, he attempts to deconstruct the factors behind the regression and unsustainability of narratives in the modern world.
In the first section of the book, Han tries to defend the title of his book and explains two things: why narratives are essential and what the main reason behind the decline of narratives is. According to Han, society is a scattered entity with a cohesion of structure and agency – a canon of the functionalist school of thought. He argues that cohesion, bond, glue, or what sociologists call solidarity in society comes from different elements. In archaic societies, the art of narration works as an integral element of solidarity. The folk tales we experience in Pakistan unite people and put them on the same page. But today’s society lags behind the solidaristic power of binding people together. Though one may argue that the fundamental rationale behind it is the expansion of population and formation of global society, Han thinks of it from the narration perspective. For Han, the narratives used to generate solidarity and integration, but the modern world has lost their aura in society.
In an essay, Han describes how a revolution in the modern world has become nearly impossible because the solidarity and cohesion between communities have gone rough. For him, the problem lies in forming information empires that don’t allow people to stick to one narrative, rhetoric, or ideology. Moreover, disintegration has become a canon of modern-day life where people lack meaning and don’t associate themselves with history but with the present. When they live only in the present and don’t think about the future, it brings crisis to narratives.
In the book’s second section, Han sticks to the digital notion of information. The digital world lacks purpose, which runs counter to the narratives presented. A specific example of his argument is the tendency of youth to use social media, which is nothing but to release dopamine. Additionally, he comments on people’s mob behavior on various social media sites. People’s behavior on social media sites, where they choose the extreme end of any conversation, is the appropriate scenario to understand. We refer to this as mob behavior. The mob behavior on social media depicts two versions: intensely dislike or passionately like it. The most relatable example is Pakistani people’s mob behavior on Twitter, where they attempt to support extreme political ends and become victims of sub-conscious hypnotism.
The narration requires time. It takes time to build a narrative, but today, we don’t have time to do things. However, modern urban life is busy with a bureaucratic routine. And with the advent of social media, life has become noisy with the bombardment of information. The information’s language is lousy and disenchanting, but the narratives use strong language. For Walter Benjamin, children find meaning in everything, but today’s kids are astray from the path and have become digital beings. Digital disenchantment is different from Weber’s disenchantment of the world because of scientific disenchantment. It is about information and transparency.
In the book’s last section, Han comments on the problem of Netflix in the modern world. The age of Netflix has made viewers consumers and has taken on the primary function of cinema: creating themes. Ultimately, themes function to establish narratives, but today’s cinema lags behind them. He had made the same argument in his book, Saving Beauty. The actors in contemporary theatre, where he quoted Botho Strauß, are not portraying the acts; instead, the whole focus is on the smoothness of the body. Here, they are showing emotions rather than feelings. Emotions always have actions underneath, and feelings are expressions of human sentiments. Furthermore, Deleuze detected the same problem in his book Cinema, which is about the construction of a movie in modern times, heavily relying on the names of stars instead of developing characters around the themes. Hitchcock’s Psycho is an excellent example of what Han calls a narrative movie, and Hirani’s Dunki is a bad example.
The problem with Han’s writing, according to a general perception in academia, is that it has some serious methodological flaws. When interpreting the big idea, it is crucial to describe its modern relevance. Han sometimes describes the modification well but leaves the fundamental notion in the bushes, and that’s where the problem comes in, as he refers to the fact that we are not living in Foucault’s disciplinary society but rather in an achievement-oriented world. For this, Foucault used a methodology (genealogy) to draw the conclusion, which he proved through the genealogical study of prisons, but Han missed it in his writings.
Jamal Nasir, a research associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Studies, also serves as an editorial board member at Folio Books. He also contributes articles to TheFridayTimes.com and thenews.com.pk