5.29 - 5.35


Storing and Sorting


5.29

It is worth keeping in mind the explanatory power of circulation and narration while examining a more recent account of evolution and cognition.  Coupling biogenetic anthropology with models of self-organization in far from equilibrium systems, Alex Argyros attempts to construct an "affirmative theory of narrative".  Argyros implicitly embeds narrative in verbal language ("Narrative and Chaos" 665).  He equates narrative with the discursive representations of chains of causation.

it [narrative] allows for the constitution of a representational structure whose basic unit is the causal frame:  actor-action-object.  The essential feature of narrative is that it maps the world causally.  Given the universality of narratival structures, both in everyday discourse and in the myths, cosmologies and fictions generated by all human cultures, we must assume that the world is sufficiently causal to offer a species able to represent it in narratival forms a selective evolutionary advantage. (662)

As the neologism indicates, narratival structures are not the same as narrative structures.  If Argyros had not implicitly embedded narrative in a verbal form of discourse, his paradigm case would not resemble the subject-verb-object formula of Indo-European sentences (n2).  Furthermore, evolutionary advantage is a contested concept likely to generate competing narratives.  In a bid to rescue narrative from those whom he perceives as its detractors, Argyros's blocks cross-modal interaction.  The causal frame, actor-action-object, is built up out of the transformations of states of being and the observation of these transformations.  However, narrative does not depend on the question "why?".  Narratives are not always accounts of causation.  Stories are not to be equated with causal frames.

5.29

5.30

In Alland's terms narrative as a form of art is founded upon a faculty of transformation-representation or as Argyros writes "narrative is a remarkably efficient information processing strategy whose function is to store, manipulate, and create the tremendous range of information constitutive of the world of human beings" (667).

5.30

5.31

Narrative and narration also explain how objects yield events and events become reified or, in more technical terms, how a syntagm can be labelled and function as an actant.  The self is not a sign, it is a story machine and its acts of abstraction subtend both the reconstructive and the recall dimensions of information processing or transformation-representation.  Memory work draws upon powers of abstraction to make knowledge portable.  Problem solving draws on a capacity for situation anticipation to make knowledge applicable.  With applicable and portable knowledge, one can begin to think the embodiment of knowledge.

5.31

5.32

Pedagogical situations are sensory.  They are also interpersonal.  Because they are sensory this makes even learning by oneself interpersonal.  Egocentric speech is like a dialogue between the senses.  In Vygotsky's and Luria's experiments, children placed in problem-solving situations that were slightly too difficult for them displayed egocentric speech.  One could consider these as self-induced metadiscursive moments.  The self in crisis will disassociate and one's questionning becomes the object of a question.

5.32

5.33

Not only is the human self as a metabeing both fracturable and affiliable in itself, it is also prone to narrativity.  That is, the human self will project its self-making onto the world in order to generate stories from sequences and to break stories into recombinant sequences.  Its operations on signs are material practices with consequences for world-making.

5.33

5.34

The fracturable affiliable self calls for reproductive models suitable to the interactions of multi-sensate beings, models that render dyads dialectical, questionable, answerable.  Narrativity understood dialectically does not merely mean making sequences or strings of events into stories but also stories into things, strung together for more stories.  From such an understanding, emerge non-dyadic narratives of reproduction, narratives where a thing-born transforms itself into an event, comes to understand itself as a process.

5.34

5.35

The historical possibility of such narratives owes much to the metacommentary of one man upon the work of another.  Here is a segment of Marx's critique of Hegel's dialectic:

To be objective, natural, sentient and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or to be oneself object, nature and sense for a third person, is the same thing.

To be and to have for oneself are the same thing as to be oneself for a third.  It's a good place to start making sense of sense.

5.35


wake bridge prow





© François Lachance, 1996