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
Monday, September 28, 2009
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.
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Concerning Bakhtin ’s quest for answerability, the ethical imperative and the use of sideshadowing as an argument for the antidetermininstic narrative.
ReplyDeletep. 118 Sideshadowing – events have no basis on the future.
Literary term – Sideshadowing – casts a shadow from the side. If two or more plot lines with characterizations run parallel, then the side shadow of one event within a plot line will be cast onto the other (plot line/character) forcing an alternative. Imagine the shadow cast by one plot line as an obstacle that the characters and events of the alternative plot line must avoid or navigate. At the event we see what did happen, but also what might also have happened as shown by the Sideshadowing alternatives, as well as the temporalities running in parallel.
In contrast to foreshadowing, Sideshadowing presents multiple possibilities that are not deterministic until their existence, a point of singularity, in the antideterminist field of space-time. Sideshadowing, upon its realization of an alternative event can literally cast two forward shadows onto alternate (sometimes many) plot lines signifying an event to come.
Morson “sideshadowing leads to the subjunctive contrary to the fact conditional.” Example: I would like to go. ≠ I like to go. I would have gone. ≠ I have gone.
p. 119 Our presence is deceptive at the sequences culmination. Morson claims that we create the mirage of only simple outcomes, and in actuality multiple possibilities are the norm.
In a kind of anti-Ptolemic way, sideshadowing forces us to realize that we are not the center of the event, or, for that matter, the universe, and that lines do not end at us. This means that a character action may simply be signpost on the ever ramifying map of possible events. This is akin to Boje’s rhizomatic narrative, and both work in accordance with his use of polychromic sensemaking Morson is especially complementary of Bakhtin’s answerability via his discussion on antideterminism and antifatalism. By offering multiple possibilities in the space-time field of narrative, the ethical imperative is amplified rather than diminished by adherence to fatalism and determinism. In short, each person’s behavior that is modeled by alternative temporalities via sideshadowing prevents the use of determinism and fatalism as an excuse for a lack of answerability. Additionally, the locking down of narrative, which is invariably done in managerialist and master narratives, is prevented.