I pretty much agree with most of the sentiments to Beryl's question about
defining narrative and how the concept of databases impinge on it.
Westerners apprehend the flow of events in a fairly common way. Maybe
distinctions could be raised about cultural differences surrounding story
telling between industrialized societies and those that aren't. Maybe
distinctions could be drawn about how certain technologies influence the
way we organize our accounting of events. I'm thinking here of how
interfaces may affect how we write and read and how we assemble images and
sound.
In an issue of Open Letter magazine, a Canadian journal published in the
70's, Steve McCaffery, a poet, assembled a collection of essays called "The
Politics of the Referent."
Ron Silliman, also a poet, writes in his essay for McCaffery's collection,
"The repression of product (labor) nature of things is called the commodity
fetish. In language it is a fetish of description, of reference and has a
second higher-order fetish of narration.... It is the object without the
gesture. ... The ultimate act of the commoditized poem is the novel in
which the now passive reader (this too a division of labor) stares at a
'blank' page while a story appears to unfold miraculously in front of his
or her eyes... Born well within the commodity fetish, [the novel] does not
comprehend that it is doubly bound to the gravitational forces of language
and history. It assumes that it can evolve 'freely.' ..."
What I'm suggesting, as others have, is that the notion of narrative is
tied to this moment of technological change -- where our methods of
producing meaning are being digitized, quantified... it's not necessarily a
break, it's more that we are following the arc of cybernetic social
constructions.
Marshall
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