During his period of exile in Rome, Gogol constantly begged his women friends back home in Russia to send him stories: stories about peasants and bureaucrats, stories about civil servants and money-lenders, and anecdotes from everyday life, to use in the second volume of Dead Souls, which he never completed. “Give your naïve stories to the world,” he begged in his letters. The formula makes us laugh, but our era has made it its own. The injunction to tell stories has swollen to become a popular obsession, an ideology and even a slogan—the slogan for a whole era. Managers tell their employees to tell stories. The big brands urge consumers to tell stories. “Tell stories” is the cry that is used to rally soldiers who are undergoing training. Spin doctors advise politicians to tell stories. Stories are invading newspaper columns, legal arguments, and computer screens.
This book is the product of an investigation into the new ways that narratives are being used in areas as diverse as management, marketing, political and institutional communications, and the manufacture of news—and into the surprising applications of narrative in both civilian and military domains. If you decide, as I did when I began my investigations, to use a search engine to explore the immense domain of the new uses that are being made of narrative, you will discover a great diversity of techniques and uses, ranging from traditional orality to digital writing and “digital storytelling,” and a plethora of practices used in management, communications, marketing, education, and therapy. There are spontaneous cultural practices, but there are also technologies of control and discipline. The Internet explosion has revolutionized the discursive economy (the production, accumulation, and circulation of discourses) and blurred the distinction between true and false, reality and fiction. A new continent is emerging. As yet, we cannot map its contours, but we can identify four main entities or regions:
1. At the microeconomic level of the company, storytelling has been incorporated into the production techniques (“storytelling management”) and the sales techniques (“narrative branding”) that make it possible to produce, transform, and distribute commodities. The expression refers to forms of action and control mechanisms that are designed to provide a response to a general crisis in participation and to the need to mobilize individuals on a permanent basis. These are practices that configure actual behaviors such as learning, adaptation, training, and guidance. They are used to control individuals, to manage emotional flows and affective investments, and to organize the world of sense-perceptions.
2. At the politico-ideological level, stories are used to capture people’s attention, to make the actions of those who govern us look credible and to allow them to win power … The goal is to involve the masses, and to synchronize and mobilize individuals and emotions. This is the task of candidates’ “spin doctors” and of the lobbies that tell their political stories. The 2008 Democratic convention in Denver supplies the model.
3. At the juridico-political level, storytelling inspires the new technologies of power that determine how individuals behave and subordinates them to certain ends through the use of surveillance, thanks to closed-circuit television, and profiling. This is the equivalent of what Michel Foucault identified and described as the “power of writing” that presided over the birth of disciplinary societies (the emergence of registers and files). In the digital age, it takes the form of a “narrative power” that can not only record the comings and goings of individuals, or what they say and do—it can now predict how they will behave and “profile” their stories.
4. At the individual level, finally, the success of blogs provides a striking example of the fad for stories. According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, someone starts to write a blog every second. Seventy-seven percent of bloggers are interested only in talking about “my life and experiences.” The report, which was published in July 2006, is entitled “A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers.”
How are we to interpret the stories that flow through the media-sphere?
Could they be an expression of the age-old human need to tell stories about ourselves, to identify ourselves and use narratives to give a meaning to our experiences? Has the Internet explosion provided storytelling with a new space and a readership that can be expanded to infinity? Or is it just one of those new managerial fashions that emerges every ten or fifteen years and that has now spread to the spheres of politics and the media? Do we have to see the increase in narrative profiling that allows the widespread inclusion of tracked experiences in ever more integrated databases as the menacing shadow of a new Big Brother who has traded in his old optical surveillance equipment for profiling and simulation technologies? The countless stories produced by the propaganda machine are protocols for training and domestication, and they are designed to take control of and appropriate the knowledge and desires of individuals.
Modern “storytelling” practices are not simply technologies for formatting discourses. They are also the very space within which discourses are elaborated and transmitted, a dispositif in which social forces and institutions, storytellers and the tellers of counter-stories, and encoding and formatting technologies, either come into conflict or collude with one another—and we must not forget the fragmented speech that constantly throbs and reverberates throughout the mediasphere. The huge accumulation of stories produced by modern societies has given birth to a “new narrative order” in which stories of power clash with stories of resistance, and have to pass the credibility test. The outcome is never decided in advance or determined by their narrative form.
Even though the second part of this book adopts a very critical stance when it looks at the ways in which narratives are explicitly used to conceal or distort the truth, and to manipulate states and public opinion (practices which became commonplace during George W. Bush’s presidential term), my intention is not to liken all these narrative practices to mere propaganda, but to identify what is at stake in them, the ways in which they operate, and their specific effects.
I think that Barack Obama’s election campaign proves my point. Obama turned political storytelling into a new rhetorical art. In the afterword to this edition, I trace the main stages of his campaign, which I followed week by week in the column I wrote for Le Monde throughout 2008. As I followed it, I became somewhat dubious, torn between an enthusiasm that was shared by most Europeans and my own doubts about the formidable storytelling machines developed by the candidate’s team. I, like many of you no doubt, have yet to reach any firm conclusions.
American readers should be warned: the lines you are about to read were not written by a European expert on the United States, but by a dubious pilgrim who wandered through American realities with the wide eyes of Montesquieu’s legendary Persian and the naiveté of the hero of Elia Kazan’s film America, America.
CS
September 12, 2009