Against the Obsession With Narratives

Summary

A case against trusting stories to do the work. “Dominant stories do not triumph because they are more persuasive or imaginative, but because they have the infrastructures that allow them to be diffused, repeated, and naturalised”. Emancipatory narratives began as “material practices of solidarity, organisation, and conflict”. The task: “to reorganise the collective power capable of changing reality itself”.

Rationale

A critique we largely accept. We wrote that dominant dispositions are “often backed by significant disparities in power and resources”; this essay would have us start there, not arrive there.