Unnarratability

What do you do when narrative cultures collapse?

This essay is part of the Protocol Narratives series

Last week’s non-issue, where I palmed off an amateurish collage on you guys instead of delivering an essay, got me thinking about an aspect of narrative cultures that doesn’t get much attention, namely, how hard a situation is to narrate. Or to coin a term, how unnarratable a situation is. I explored a narrower version of this last year in a blog post, in the context of fiction, but I want to develop a broader version here, applicable to real events.

I’ll limit myself in this essay to global grand narratives unfolding over years and decades, but I think the theory here applies fractally all the way down to individual, day-scale narratives.

To begin with, let’s distinguish three regimes of narratability.

Strongly Narratable Conditions

First, there are strongly narratable conditions. In such conditions, the logic of a situation and the flow of events is clear to the point of being boring. Even extremely careless observers with no talent for coherent storytelling can provide a reasonable account of it. There is something like a prevailing platform narrative that supplies the default logic for all subordinate narratives.

The 1985-2015 period, arguably, was strongly narratable, and unsurprisingly witnessed the appearance of many strong global grand narratives. These mostly hewed to the logic of the there-is-no-alternative (TINA) platform narrative of neoliberalism, even when opposed to it. For example, the narrative of globalization anchored by the discourses of the WEF at Davos was opposed with a pleasing yin-yang symmetry by that of the World Social Forum, WSF. Both were driven by the logic of the TINA platform narrative. Either side could tell a coherent version of the whole story, with themselves cast in the heroic spotlight.

During this period, Big Histories ruled public discourses. Conflicts of opinion around these Big Histories were stylized and rule-bound enough that you could put on at least theatrically plausible debates. In the United States, for example, a show like Hannity and Colmes (1996-2009) could keep up a coherent throughline of commentary within the framework of a “balanced” debate between conservative and liberal voices. Liberal satire shows like The Daily Show understood their opposition well enough to parody it, in the form of what became The Colbert Report. Jon Stewart could pretend to debate Bill O’Reilly.

From Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman in the early years, to Thomas Piketty, Yuval Noah Harari, and David Graeber in the final years, many could, and did, peddle coherent (if not always compelling) Big Histories. Narrative performance venues like TED flourished. The TINA platform narrative supplied the worldwinds for all narratives. What the Avengers epic arc did for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or the 9-film epic arc for Star Wars, the TINA narrative did for the history of the world.

But then conditions got more complex, the platform narrative start to crumble, and we entered the second regime: weakly narratable conditions.

Weakly Narratable Conditions

The 2007-2020 period, arguably, was such a period (the long overlap of 8 years, 2007-15, was a period with uneven weak/strong narratability). In such conditions, a situation is messed-up and contentious, but in a way that lends itself to the flourishing of a pluralist, polycentric narrative landscape, where there are multiple contending accounts of a shared situation, Rashomon style, but the situation is merely ambiguous, not incoherent.

Polycentric narrative landscapes can range from friendly shared ignorance, where civil debate based on shared local rules of engagement can make local progress, to ritualized dialectical duels between larger ideologies that each play by their own unilaterally adopted rules of engagement, to Hobbesian narrative wars of all against all where everybody is just making it up as they go along, but it all hangs together anyway.

Polarized narrative landscapes are a special case: an entrenched polycentric narrative stalemate, marked by a great deal of negative-sum, mutually exclusive narrative hostility, featuring little to no narrative progress for extended periods. In the United States, this condition is often identified with “gridlock” that the Founding Fathers supposedly designed for, but as the experience of other parts of the world demonstrates, no design is necessary for this condition to emerge. Things just have to get sufficiently complex and confused.

In weakly narratable conditions, there is no broad consensus on rules of narrative engagement, and mutual assumptions of bad faith are the default. Those who issue plaintive calls for such rules are widely (and in my opinion, deservedly) ignored, even if they are occasionally locally heeded.

While weakly narratable conditions lack platform narratives, you could argue that there is something of a prevailing narrative protocol during weakly narratable times.

For now, I’ll define a narrative protocol as an emergent lawful pattern of narrative conflict that cannot be codified into a legible set of consensus rules of narrative engagement, but produces slow noisy progress anyway, does not devolve into confused chaos, and sustains a learnable narrative literacy.

I’ll have more to say about this idea of a narrative protocol in the future (it’s an idea I’m working on in the context of the summer of protocols, for a talk I have to deliver in September), but for now, I’ll trust you to get the basic idea.

Though it is not possible to identify a platform narrative in a situation governed by a narrative protocol (comparable to the TINA narrative of 1985-2015), it is possible to sort of “teach the debate,” and develop a kind of literacy that allows you to, if not navigate or make sense of the narrative landscape, at least exercise competitive agency within it.

This is what it meant to be “very online” in 2007-20. It meant you had acquired a certain literacy around the prevailing narrative protocol. Perhaps nobody could make sense of what was going on overall, beyond their private, solipsistic account of events, and it was perhaps not possible to play to win, but there was enough coherence in the situation that you could at least play to not lose. And even if you could not claim authorship of an influential grand narrative that was widely entertained (if not widely accepted), there were at least consolation prizes like “going viral” or “breaking the internet.” It rarely meant anything, but it sometimes made for big money, if not big impact.

The terminal stage of this sort of weakly narratable condition, governed by an emergent narrative protocol but lacking a canonical platform narrative, is what I dubbed the Internet of Beefs in a January 2020 article.

Unnarratable Conditions

At the time, I thought that the Internet of Beefs was a kind of end-stage with nothing beyond, but turns out I was wrong. The pandemic hit, and we got to what I think of as unnarratable conditions.

While the specific story of the pandemic itself was narratable, the story of the wider post-Weirding world, thrown into tumult by the pandemic, was essentially unnarratable.

Unnarratable times are fundamentally incoherent melees of contending historical forces. Times when there isn’t even a narrative protocol you can acquire a reliable literacy in, let alone a platform narrative upon which to rest your sense-making efforts. Where the environmental entropy is so high, people struggle to put together any kind of narrative, even solipsistic private ones that harbor no ambitions of influencing others. There is no privileged class (comparable to the “Very Online” before 2020) that can plausibly claim a greater narrative literacy than other classes.

In such a situation, conflict devolves into confused chaos, and factions litigating consciously nurtured hostilities give way to what’s sometimes called a goat rodeo (a rodeo for children, using goats rather than horses). Friendly fire becomes as common as damage dealt to enemies. People confusedly argue against narrative fragments that favor them, and support ones that hurt them. Narrative agency levels drop across the board, and Cipolla stupidity reigns.

The situation is too confused to even be considered Hobbesian (this is interesting, isn’t it? We often use Hobbesian to gesture at some sort of high-entropy ground state, but it is possible to sink lower than that).

This condition is often called VUCA — Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. To be distinguished from FUD — Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt — which is fake VUCA crafted by an enemy.

But I’ve started thinking of it simply as unnarratability.

It takes some skill to distinguish an intrinsically unnarratable situation from mere FUD created by a clever adversary who has gotten inside your OODA loop. Throughout the last decade, we mostly had weakly narratable polycentric or polarized narrative landscapes, but players often accused each other of creating the FUD that made the situation unnarratable. This continues to this day, but increasingly, charges and counter-charges of “crisis-actors” and Kremlin-fueled FUD ring hollow.

It increasingly seems like the world really is getting to be unnarratable.

Those who claim to possess satisfying grand narratives are barely able to persuade even close allies to share it, let alone induce narrative protocols through them, or install them as platform narratives. The result: a collective retreat to a warren of cozy cultural redoubts, usually governed by comforting reactionary or nostalgic local narratives, and a derelict public discourse.

We have been in such a condition at least since 2022, and arguably since 2020. If you set aside the narrow liminal story of the pandemic, the world has been nearly unnarratable for years now.

The Harambe Scale (It Goes to 11!)

So we have strongly narratable, weakly narratable, and unnarratable conditions. Let’s define a scale for that, going from 0-11, and call it the Harambe scale.

Strongly narratable conditions tend towards 0 (perfect narratability), and unnarratable conditions tend towards 11 (perfect unnarratability). The eponymous Harambe episode, which marks the transition from strong to weak narratability in our time, probably registers at a 6 or 7. I have no idea how to tie this scale to empirical data, or whether it should be thought of as a linear or logarithmic scale, but we’ll leave these niceties for later.

Between 0-6 Harambes, you have platform narratives and a legible broad consensus on rules of narrative engagement. At least stylized theatrical debates can be plausibly performed.

Between 7-10 Harambes, you have narrative protocols marked by an acquirable literacy and emergent slow and noisy narrative progress, but no broad consensus on rules of narrative engagement, and no platform narrative.

Past 10 Harambes, you start to devolve sharply into unnarratability.

When things hit 11, we get complete narrative collapse.

We can argue about where precisely we are (and have been) on this scale in recent years, but I’d say we’ve been hovering around 10.1 or so for the last year or so. The powerful logic of the pandemic narrative has dissipated. The tumultuous culture war polycentric narrative protocol of 2015-19 is trying to reassert itself, but most of us just aren’t paying attention to it — we sense that the narrative territory has expanded beyond its reach. If we think of a narrative protocol as a kind of cultural rule-of-law, current conditions are 90% outlaw territory, where the old protocol simply has nothing to say, and a new, more expressive one with sufficient reach hasn’t yet appeared.

So how should we think about such unnarratable conditions? Should we attempt to exit them, or adapt to them? Despite being stress-inducing, is it perhaps a healthy state?

If not, can at least get to a new protocol for a new weakly narratable regime registering 7-10 on the Harambe scale, even if strongly narratable regimes of < 6H are no longer possible past the End of History?

I’ll explore that in a future essay.