Hello World!
Toward Understanding Narrative Discourse in the Space between Wittgensteins
What’s all this then?
This newsletter is about rhetoric and propaganda. It is also about logical semantics and epistemology. And it’s about politics and shared reality.
A broad consensus has emerged among defense and cognitive security types1 that the understanding of narrative is crucial to the hygiene of the public zeitgeist and the defense against information operations. Obvious contemporary examples of narrative pathology include Qanon, antivax conspiracy theories, election denialism and various types of emerging neofascist or crypto-fascist ideologies. These pathologies have made political consensus practically impossible in the United States and other liberal polities and represent a profound threat to modern secular democracy. And all are rooted one way or another in narratives.
In early 2017, I founded a company called MarvelousAI with the explicit intent of tracking the predominant narratives in online discussions of US politics. The naive concept we had in mind included examples that can be paraphrased as:
Kamala Harris is a cop
Joe Biden is a pedophile
Donald Trump is a Russian agent
Obviously, recent political events played a substantial role in motivating this undertaking.2 But my 2017 interest was far from nascent. The past few decades have been riddled with phenomena — both productive and dangerous — cogent to this interest: Fox News, the Tea Party, Trumpism, third-wave feminism, Jade Helm, and critical race/gender analyses (both the reality and the caricatures) come to mind almost immediately as prominent examples.
Common to all of these is the concept of narrative. On the one hand, the term is thoroughly elaborated in both the academic literature and in mass culture. In settings as varied as news media (cable, broadcast, radio and written), academic literature, social media and everyday conversation, its use is inescapable. On the other hand, the term is highly ambiguous and hopelessly vague in practice. Its meaning varies just as widely as its contexts of use. In some cases narrative refers to the news event being described; in others it refers to the overall view of the world being promoted by the narrators; in still others it refers to the background assumptions brought to bear by audiences on the interpretation of events. Various authors have drilled down on each of these meanings, proposing more precise terminology: grand narrative, strategic narrative, narrative of identity, frame and trope are just a few examples from this broad rhetorical and interpretive landscape.
In an effort to get a handle on this terminological and conceptual morass, I dove into the literature head first, reading books on topics as diverse as political psychology, political communications, international relations, rhetoric and propaganda, intellectual history, narrative analysis, pragmatics (both meanings — more on that later), epistemology, hermeneutics, philosophy of language, critical theory and mythology. Suffice it to say, the conceptual and procedural diversity of these works has been difficult to bring together into a coherent whole, especially in the face of such disparate applications of narrative (and related concepts) as outlined above.
Nevertheless, the importance of this cluster of concepts remains.
So this newsletter represents a journal of my efforts to impose a taxonomy on these concepts and a structure on its elements. These efforts span not only the half decade since I started MarvelousAI, but the over two decades that I have been working in applied semantics in settings from academia to government/defense and business.
Bringing together the fruits of modern computing with the insights of over two millennia of research into rhetoric and epistemology will require a good deal of theoretical apparatus. Minimally, it will require a taxonomy of narrative types (both genres in the traditional sense and “levels” in the sense hinted at above) and a rich elaboration of their form and function. This newsletter is intended as a down payment on that objective. I will try, in weekly installments, to summarize major works in the space — a multidisciplinary space covering an impossible span of time and topic matters — with an eye toward the overall goal of understanding the role of narrative in contemporary political rhetoric, both populist and professional.
In an important sense, then, this newsletter is for me. To organize my thoughts and to start the process of distilling these works into usable prose. And to force myself to spend at least some of the hours I devote to reading on writing instead. But of course I hope that others find these discussions useful as well. The broader the audience, the better the feedback. Wrestling with these concepts is my number one objective.
What’s in a Name?
The title of this newsletter — Bottomless Mimesis — is a pun on a term taken from Aristotle’s Poetics. Mimesis, roughly speaking, is the process of “imitation” as it pertains to dramatic expression. In a more modern translation, we might better describe it as “representation.” A 2004 online glossary of Media Theory from University of Chicago defines mimesis in part as follows.
The term mimesis is derived from the Greek mimesis, meaning to imitate [1]. The OED defines mimesis as "a figure of speech, whereby the words or actions of another are imitated" and "the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change" [2]. Mimicry is defined as "the action, practice, or art of mimicking or closely imitating ... the manner, gesture, speech, or mode of actions and persons, or the superficial characteristics of a thing" [3]. Both terms are generally used to denote the imitation or representation of nature, especially in aesthetics (primarily literary and artistic media).
Within Western traditions of aesthetic thought, the concepts of imitation and mimesis have been central to attempts to theorize the essence of artistic expression, the characteristics that distinguish works of art from other phenomena, and the myriad of ways in which we experience and respond to works of art. In most cases, mimesis is defined as having two primary meanings - that of imitation (more specifically, the imitation of nature as object, phenomena, or process) and that of artistic representation. Mimesis is an extremely broad and theoretically elusive term that encompasses a range of possibilities for how the self-sufficient and symbolically generated world created by people can relate to any given "real", fundamental, exemplary, or significant world [4] (see keywords essays on simulation/simulacra, (2), and reciprocity). Mimesis is integral to the relationship between art and nature, and to the relation governing works of art themselves. Michael Taussig describes the mimetic faculty as "the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power." [5]
A literate reader will contrast my choice of mimesis with a similar term from ancient Greek philosophy: diegesis. The latter is widely adopted among practitioners of narratology — and more recently narrative theory — to describe the representation inherent in works of narrative. Authors from a variety of critical movements have used the term diegesis to refer to aspects of the so-called storyworld representative of the narrative under scrutiny. The actors, settings and events brought to mind by the narration comprise the diegetic level of a narrative. Often times the narrator is described relative to this level of analysis — homodiegetic, heterodiegetic, metadiagetic or extradiegetic — depending on how “involved” they are in the story.3 Indeed the preference for the use of the term diegesis in the analysis of narratives arguably has its provenance in the original Greek usages. While they do not appear to align on much else with respect to mimesis or the value of artistic expression, Plato and Aristotle agree that mimesis is about “showing” whereas diegesis is about “telling.”
Nevertheless, I have adopted the convention used by Paul Ricoeur in his series The Rule of Metaphor and Time and Narrative (Volumes 1-3), taking mimesis as a cover term in the analysis of meaning in narrative. I have done this for a few different reasons, most notably:
I have not set here out to redefine terms in a space as contentious and active as narrative or critical theory. The internal logic of “theory” is beyond the scope of these efforts and I do not want to import its conflicts or arrogate my own analyses into that space.
I really like the concept of mimesis as defined by Ricoeur in his work on hermeneutic phenomenology — which interestingly is sometimes referred to as post-critical. Specifically, I think his dialectical “virtuous circle” (as opposed to “vicious circle”) of mimetic processes is more aligned with the combined goals — at once epistemological and hermeneutic — that I tersely sketched at the beginning of this piece.4 Riccoeur's three mimeses capture the creation and uptake of narrative content in a comprehensive way that accounts for both culture and creativity; schematizes both the formulation of narrative and its interpretation.
Mimesis works with the pun. Bottomless Diegesis is not at all delightful.
I will try to publish weekly, but external factors are likely to drive the schedule in actual practice. Mostly I will publish as posts are completed. I have multiple in the works now, exploring George Herbert Mead, Paul Riccoeur and Hannah Arendt, among others.
Bottoms up. Until next time.
See, for example, Cognitive Security & Education Forum (COGSEC) and their 2021 report entitled Narrative Information Ecosystems: Conflict and Trust on the Endless Frontier and subsequent call-for-collaborators. Or this more recent (2022) piece by Christopher Giles at the Stanford Internet Observatory entitled A Front for Influence: An Analysis of a Pro-Kremlin Network Promoting Narratives on COVID-19 and Ukraine (TAKEDOWN). These uses of “narrative” are increasingly typical in the analysis of mis- and disinformation and so-called information operations.
As did the observation that most “narrative detection” technology on the market promotes embarrassingly simple conceptions of narrative that amount to little more than keyword-based topic analysis. More about that in a later post.
See, for example, H. Porter Abbot (2008), The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative and G. Genette (1980) Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method.
I will save a more detailed discussion of Ricoeur’s mimetic processes for a later post.