Storytelling Ethics

Storytelling is an interplay of narrative-past, living story present, and antenarratives that shape the future. The interplay of antenarrative and narrative is about linear and cyclic shapes of the future. The interplay of antenarrative and living story can be more about spiral and assemblages of non-linear and non-cyclic variety.

The ethics of all this is in Bakhtin's ideas of answerability. Answerabiltiy is a presentness and an eventness. Its about an intervention in the living story webs of presentness, being that person in the moment of being who makes a difference, that resolves inequity, injustice, and creates an ethical living story of their life. Recognition of complicity is explained away in acts of narrative retrospection and prospective antenarratives of the line, or cycle, repeated, as it way in the past with the same inequitable result. Its time to explore spiral, whose time shape is not in a line or recurrent cycle, but is as Morson calls it a sideshadowing, not a foreshadowing or a backshadowing -- david boje Sept 28 2009