Here-Me-Now

This chapter is concerned with the changing function of narrative, that is, with the question of what happens when one of the central cultural forms we have for shaping human sensory data as well as information about the ‘real world’ finds itself in a condition of overstretch or is being challenged by different technologies of storage and retrieval. Why overstretch? First, the position of narrative—understood as more than simply ‘story-telling’—has changed due to an incremental surge in the amount of information, whose traditional transmission has been in narrative or para-narrative forms. What kinds of asymmetries occur when much perceptual, sensory, and cognitive data is being produced, i.e. recorded and stored by machines in cooperation with humans? While this has been the case for much of the twentieth century, its challenges are only being fully acknowledged since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Photography, cinema, television, and the Internet are all hybrids in this respect: they gather and store sense data that is useless without the human interface but exceeds in quantity what humans can make sense of but also what narrative can contain, i.e. articulate, ‘linearize’, or ‘authorize’.

Second, the same potential overstretch affects the kinds of spectatorship, of participation, of witnessing that are entailed by the display of and access to this data, especially in an environment that is common, public, and collective (like the cinema) but also ‘dynamic’, discrete, and ‘interactive’ (like the Internet), which, in other words, allows for feedback loops, for change in real time, and is thus potentially both endless and shapeless. Narratives are ways of organizing not only space and time, most commonly in a linear, causal, or consecutive fashion: they also, through the linguistic and stylistic resources of ‘narration’, provide for a coherent point of reception or mode of address: what is often referred to as a ‘subject-position’ or ‘reader-address’. Narratives, in other words, are about time, subject, and space or the conjunction of ‘here-me-now’.

My argument starts from the notion that linear temporality is only one axis on which to construct such a sequence and for making connections of continuity, contiguity, causality, and of plotting a trajectory and providing closure.