The narrativization of culture is not a recent development, but the realization that narrative theory can help us understand and analyse cultural formations is. Whether we consider fan cultures, subcultures or even dominant culture, we find a great number of very disparate texts, movements and emergent modes. What ties all these together into, not a coherent whole, but still a cultural formation, is the way they all employ narratives as their primary method of expression – by embedding these cultural patterns into well-known, pre-defined narratives which help participants make sense of their life-experience.
We know since Jean-Francois Lyotard that the postmodern period is marked by a suspicion of meta-narratives, that these meta-narratives have been revealed several times to be ideological constructions rather than natural givens, and that, as Linda Hutcheon points out “no narrative can be a natural ‘master’ narrative: there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we construct” (Hutcheon, 1988: 13, italics in original), but this does not mean, I would argue, that narratives are no longer involved in the legitimation of knowledge, but rather that the way we approach narrativized knowledge has changed.
As grand narratives no longer provide accounts for how to understand the world, or legitimizes knowledge, other narratives take their place. But these narratives - cultural narratives - are not totalizing, even if they sometimes attempt to be. They are instead created by and embedded in specific cultural formations. These cultural narratives are constructed by the cultural formation in order to articulate their concerns and to forge a cultural space for that cultural formation, within the total field of social space. As such, these cultural narratives draw up different mappings of the social network as it relates to the specific formation.
My project will critically investigate the ways and methods of cultural narratives in the creation of cultural formations – as such it will combine studies of participatory culture, fan culture, subculture and dominant culture, by noting how people devise their own stories to shape their particular understanding of their situation, and that these stories are in turn shaped by the specific culture’s position in the (perceived) cultural hierarchy.
When dealing with a hierarchy, we inevitably enter into a discussion of culture as a site of struggle, and I will indeed argue that cultural narratives do enter deeply into both real and symbolic struggle. Cultural narratives can thus be both tools for dominance or resistance; we can speak of dominant narratives and counter-narratives. Here, it is important to emphasize that cultural formations should no longer be understood in simple binary terms of dominant versus dominated cultures, but rather as a multitude of different formations, each with several accompanying narratives to reinforce cohesion, continuity and meaning, yet still within a struggle for dominance, distinction and recognition.
Narratives are thus vehicles of power, and need to be recognized and analyzed as such. Consider narratives of the Other, a subject already broached by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, counter-narratives do not attempt to create a separate-but-equal narrative which runs parallel to dominant narratives. Nor are they attempts of recuperating the Other into the dominant cultural narrative, but instead and attempt to oppose, disrupt and detourn dominant culture.
Although narratives may seem to be mostly the province of literary, cinematic and similar fictions, this need not be the case. Many cultural formations understand themselves in a narrative perspective, something Kim L. Worthington points out when she argues for the narrative aspects of identity and subjectivity construction, particularly in the case of social communities. She points out that identity is a narrative process which helps people understand and interpret their own selfhood. This process occurs as an oscillation between the individual and the communities the individual is part of.
Cultural narratives thus assist in the social construction of communities, where they usually work by reconfiguring events into a desired continuity, and so alter and reshape the social structures in order to create a specific cultural space previously unattainable. This form of emplotment often occurs by borrowing elements from pre-existing narratives, where we may consider Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg an example, where a pre-existing narrative is detourned to become a critical vehicle for feminists. Cultural narratives are therefore often empowering in the way they create new stories to better reflect a particular culture’s structuration.
It is this process of empowerment and construction of collective identity which my project will deal with, emphasizing how marginal cultures mobilize their difference from dominant culture create new narratives for resistance. This strategy of resistance is a complex network of many different narratives spun together to become unique and specific for the cultural formation in question, and is embedded in a continual struggle for authority, difference, distinction and cultural power.
It is also evident that textual practices aid and assist people in their daily lives, the way they navigate and make sense of socio-cultural space. These spaces are all implicated in a number of different narrative structures as ways of making sense of them, of creating a sense of distinction between them and not least to narrate the differences inherent in them. Whether these differences are glossed over, attempted to be smoothed out by recuperative strategies, or if the cultural dominant is resisted through detourning strategies, narrative structures are grafted on to what we may most precisely refer to a the cultural text.
The ways we construct social and cultural spaces are thus evident in the material processes; in other words present in the texts we produce, just as we ourselves and the cultural formations we participate in all are contaminated and interpenetrated by texts. We ourselves are not texts, nor are cultural formations texts, but there is always something textual about ourselves and our cultural formations because texts disseminate into us and our cultural formations and texts are in turn contaminated by us and our cultural formations.
