The Fragmentation of Unity

At the centre of the capitalist project lies the contradiction between the individual and community. The former is fetishised, while the latter is divided into two: (i) An (unachievable because undesirable) aspiration and, (ii), a lost “golden age”, always past, always nostalgic.

Community is the staple ingredient of the soap opera, embedded into a mythological working-class setting that parades stereotypes: honest but poor and happy; the centrality of the pub as “community hub”; small, closed spaces; criminality; get rich quick schemes; substance abuse; domestic violence; respectability; the villainous rich; the lazy poor.

The general notion is a constant reinforcement of “they may be poor, but at least they have each other”. However, when analysed, one finds a confirmation of the individual. ‘Faults’ are personal, the political and the historical play no role. The spectator/reader is invited to speculate on “What happens next?” using their knowledge of past narratives and character traits to ‘guess’ the coming patterns. This forms a conspiracy of superiority between producers and spectator/reader, the latter always being in possession of more knowledge than the characters. This is not unique to soap opera, it is a feature (perhaps the feature) of all pattern narratives. There will be no surprises, no accusations, however ‘softly’ posited, that the socio-political or socio-cultural is in some sense or other responsible for human personality or action – this will always be, in mainstream TV and film (and novels), the ‘fault’ of the individual. The unity of fragmentation resides in this.

This fragmentation is installed in us from an early age, by the relation of fictional to realist (?) narrative. The fictional narrative has its roots, in English, in the Puritan spiritual autobiography and the character narrative of the 17th century. In these, an individual at the end of their lives recounts the narrative of that life as a ‘guide’ for the younger generation. Given its origins in Puritanism, this necessarily focuses on how one can lead a ‘good’ life, thus, ensuring that one becomes one of “the elect” and is admitted into Heaven (N.B. There was no way of knowing, as a Protestant, if one would “make the list” of the elect, one could only lead a good life. Catholicism, on the other hand, enabled penance and the forgiveness of sins through confessions…there was also the ability, as we see in Chaucer, to buy forgiveness). What we have then, by the beginning of the 18th century, is a class of persons who believe in the idea of “individual responsibility”, and a narrative structure that enshrines this. Hence, the appearance of the novel in English with Robinson Crusoe (N.B. Many of the early novels take the name of their central character as titles, so what we are reading is a quest narrative of an individual’s experiential ‘journey’).

We can take ‘narrative’ here to mean a connected story: a series of events unified by a single individual and by casual connection. What we can distinguish is, as I say above, two ‘types’ of narrative: (i) fictional narrative, exemplified by the novel and mainstream film and, (ii), the ‘realist’ narrative of one’s experiential life. However, (i) is predicated on, and structured by , cause and effect (X causes Y). In the interests of maintaining interest, the casual chain may be terribly convoluted BUT there is, nonetheless, necessary connection between each ‘link’ in the chain. For example: Cause (A) and Event (B) + Cause (B) and Event (C) constitute G(roup) 1; Cause (C) and Event (D) + Cause (D) and Event (E) constitute G(roup) 2, and so forth. Say we have 12 of these groups; seemingly, there is no connection between G2 and G12, yet there must be – If character X had not bought a newspaper on a particular day (G2), then she would not have been struck by a car (G12). This is the structure of fictional events.

What we must recognise is that (i), fictional narrative, becomes the cause of our thinking that the separate and distinct (discrete) events of (ii), realist narrative, are causal.

As infants/children we acquire language by being (a) told stories and by, (b), reading stories. Such stories appear to ‘reflect’ “real life”, in that they are told in a terminology, either linguistic or visual, which surrounds us in our experiential lives. The Western conceptual scheme is predicated in “making sense” of discrete events…which we might ‘translate’ as “imposing order upon”. The child hears/see this or that story (be it a fairy tale or, say, a narrative of their parents/grandparents lives – the latter being another imposition of order, the former an interpretation of the ‘rules’ governing [social] order), this this or that film/TV programme (be it cartoon or ‘educational’ narrative), each of which, regardless of content, is structured by logical causality. Thus, from an early age, the child imports and imposes this logical causality into/onto the events of their own lives. Thus discrete (random?) events become connected – partly as a psychological bid for security, partly as a result of engaging in a process that is, by most people, taken for granted.

I was once involved in a discussion about installing a 360° projection in a gallery. Now, whether this projection consisted of seven thousand images or seven, the spectator/reader (from now on S/R) will formulate connections, will construct narratives, even if the artist denies that these exist. We can also foresee an instance of a narrative being constructed if the S/R was told that a projection existed when all they could see were ’empty’ walls. I’ll forego a discussion of the concept of ’empty’ at this point.

We can see this fascination with, and necessity of, constructing narratives as a product of human psychology – the desire for predictibility, safety and security. That is, to see ‘middle’ and ‘end’ follow from ‘beginning’, although it appears that all ‘beginnings’ are devised in retrospect. Hence the popularity of fictional narratives – literature, film, music, computer games – and their classification as their “being like life” when, in fact, precisely the opposite is the case: “real life” has the structures of fictional narrative imposed upon it, and fictional narratives generate the psychological desire for predictability, safety and security.

Karl Popper claimed that what distinguished the human person from an animal was the ability to tell stories and to interpolate themselves into those stories. Thus, we are all central characters in the stories of ‘ourselves’ (my consciousness is mine; it cannot be anyone else’s, nor can I impute my ‘kind’ of consciousness to anyone else with any degree of certainty).

What we can deduce from these factors is that the overarching ‘motivation’ (inscribed by society’s use of narrative) is the human desire for ‘completeness’; that is, an epistemological desire produced by, but at one and the same time contradicted by (defeated by?) the conceptual scheme contained within our language, which is structured as an endless deferral of interconnected meanings. This ‘scheme’ appears to generate a search for an Archimedian point: a search for a stable foundation from which we can approach and make sense of the world outside ourselves. As a consequence of this search, we impose ‘sameness’ on both other subjects and objects, in that we insist on similarity even when it is not present – if it ever is. We might say that what remains the ‘same’ is the perceiving subject, not the subjects or objects of one’s perception. However, is it possible to say this, given that each perception modifies all of those which have gone before? Thus, the perceiving subject is also constantly in flux.