Narrative imagination after posthumanism

This bite-sized paper is an initial attempt to re-imagine imagination considering posthumanist principles that indicate the entanglement between narrative and matter. The presented arguments are intertwined with a small story that is used to facilitate readership and attract and hold theoretical imagination. Ultimately, the text is an invitation to wander about the implications and practicalities of a more-than-human understanding of narrative imagination.

Keywords: relational materialism; narrative research; ontological turn; assemblage; anthropocentrism

Imagination has been fundamentally situated within humanist theories of the subject, and thus considered a mental faculty integral to the human condition. It is commonly assumed that imagination emanates from a conscious subject, that it is formed via human intentionality. Alternatively, social constructivist theories suggest that imagination lies in the individual’s ability to decode and construct meanings within discursive formations and cultural practices. As such, imagination is deemed not as a simple faculty of the individual mind but also as a social faculty.

A significant trend of thought within social constructivism proposes that narrative is central to imagination, and that narrative imagination constitutes a form and practice of human agency (Andrews, 2014; Brockmeier, 2009; Frank, 2010). Here, imagination is believed to depend on the narrative resources available in society, as well as the ability of human actors to make use of these resources.

There are compelling reasons to turn to narrative as a form of researching (the lack of) imagination (see e.g., Smith, 2010). However, the narrative approach tends to privilege (human) meaning making over other aspects of existence. Even if our concerns are based on the dignity and perfectibility of the human, this anthropocentric and logocentric approach is problematic, as it dematerialises imagination and reduces it into linguistic and social constructions, thus neglecting all other non-human forces that are at play (Feely, 2019; Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010).

Against this backdrop, the present paper articulates a postanthropocentric and materially sensitive view of narrative imagination by engaging with two intertwined posthumanist interventions: collapsing the traditional narrative/matter divide, and questioning the role of matter as a mere backdrop to human agency and action. To facilitate readership and arouse reader’s theoretical imagination, I will interlace my arguments with a ‘small’ story that I extracted from a ‘big’, well-developed story (Griffin and Phoenix, 2016).

Such story is The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), a dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood. The protagonist and narrator of the story is a woman called ‘Offred’ (a slave name), who is separated from all that she loves and taken as a servant. At some point, Offred misses her former husband, Luke. She is lying in a small bed and she wishes Luke were there, with her. Recalling this feeling, she says:

I wanted to feel Luke lying beside me, but there wasn’t room.

Underlying this sentence are two key theoretical points.

First, Offred’s imagination generates and is generated through feelings, not only rational thoughts developed in the realm of the mind. Imagination is embodied and felt in the flesh; it is experienced in and through the body (an exciting framework to extend thinking about this issue is the affective turn; see e.g., Goodley, Liddiard and Runswick-Cole, 2017).

Second, and most significantly for this paper, the size of the bed constrains Offred’s narrative imagination. Offred wants to imagine herself differently situated, but she is not capable. This does not depend entirely on her intentions and willingness to imagine Luke, neither on her linguistic repertoire. Here, the problem are not (only) words and the capacity of strategically and artfully use them, but (also) materiality.

There is a categorical solution to enlarge Offred’s narrative imagination. That is, to enlarge the bed, to provide her with a bigger bed. If so, she would be able to imagine Luke lying beside her. The possibility to imagine that possible world is not banal. Without it, Offred is restricted to the here and now, which for her is a very limited and painful place to be.

From the above, we can infer that that not only matter shapes our actual capacities (i.e. what we can do; which story we can tell; which future we can imagine), but also shapes our virtual capacities (i.e. what else we could do; which different story we could tell; which alternative situations we could imagine). Matter constrains and enhances narrative imagination, that is, the emplotment of possible worlds. In short, matter is a narrative resource.

At the same time, narrative is a material resource. Stories are embedded in the material world; they take the form of mundane objects (e.g., a bed), bodies and buildings. These material entities can be considered materialised stories. As Law (2000) argued, ‘there is no important difference between stories and materials’ (p. 2, original emphasis). Indeed, narrative and matter are always already co-constituted. They shape and interfere with each other. To paraphrase Fullagar (2017, p. 253), ‘materiality matters not as an add-on to language, not as a matter of language, but because the material can never be separate from language’. Within this perspective, material and semiotic entities possess the same ontological status; they work together in the same level.

In sum, what I advocate for with the arguments above is a relational materialist understanding of narrative imagination, which avoids essentialism and the dangers of anthropocentrism. Put differently, I have proposed a conception of narrative imagination that is responsive to the posthuman condition. This is a condition that calls to acknowledge our unavoidable interconnectedness with non-humans, including inanimate objects. Importantly, acknowledging the non-humans does not mean to stop caring about people. Quite the contrary. For instance, if we care about Offrey we have to care about the bed as well, because the bed shapes Offrey’s capacities to imagine and thus affects her visceral suffering. When addressing imagination, we should not focus on humans and their symbolic meanings exclusively, because imagination is context-dependent, relational and more-than-human. It emerges as the product of material and semiotic entanglements. It is not (only) a just human quality, neither a narrative practice. Rather, it happens in networks or assemblages in which elements of different orders of existence affect each other and generate affects through their relations. To do well trough imagination, we need enabling assemblages.

No doubt, the laconic sketch provided here is not sufficient to affirm advancement in knowledge on imagination. Further work has to be done to develop mature, sophisticated and comprehensive understandings, as well as to render the ideas accessible, so that people from different contexts can effectively connect with them. Furthermore, a more exhaustive and explicit engagement with theories and concepts inspiring the paper would be needed to achieve academic rigour. Despite these limitations, the paper delivers a key message that might be influential for a broad audience: Imagination is not simply an individual’s issue, but rather an issue of the ‘connective tissue’ between people, things, stories, feelings, and so on. In the face of the current ‘crisis of connection’ (Drichel, 2019), posthumanist thinking can be helpful to counter the humanist fantasy of a rational imagination and to accept interdependence as the human condition.

References

Andrews, M. (2014). Narrative imagination and everyday life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Atwood, M. (1986). The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Brockmeier, J. (2009). Reaching for meaning: Human agency and the narrative imagination. Theory & Psychology, 19(2), 213-233.

Drichel, S. (2019). “THE MOST PERFECTLY AUTONOMOUS MAN”. Relational subjectivity and the crisis of connection. Angelaki. Journal of Theoretical Humanities. doi: 10.1080/0969725X.2019.1620446

Feely, M. (2019). Assemblage analysis: an experimental new-materialist method for analysing narrative data. Qualitative Research. doi: 1468794119830641.

Frank, A. W. (2010). Letting Stories Breathe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fullagar, S. (2017). Post-qualitative inquiry and the new materialist turn: Implications for sport, health and physical culture research. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 9(2), 247-257.

Goodley, D., Liddiard, K., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2018). Feeling disability: theories of affect and critical disability studies.Disability & Society, 33(2), 197-217.

Griffin, M., & Phoenix, C. (2016). Becoming a runner: big, middle and small stories about physical activity participation in later life.Sport, Education and Society, 21(1), 11-27.

Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525-542.

Law, J. (2000). On the subject of the object: Narrative, technology, and interpellation. Configurations, 8(1), 1-29.

Smith, B. (2010). Narrative inquiry: Ongoing conversations and questions for sport and exercise psychology research.International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 3(1), 87-107.

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