Weekly Retrospective #5
"Storification" and the Abuses of Storytelling; Humanities on the Decline; and Why Writers Shouldn’t Worry about the Machines
This is the fifth installment of my review series, where I unpack a few essays and topics I’ve been thinking about in the past week. It’s a cross-section of what this newsletter is all about.
It somehow turned out that the entirety of today’s weekly review deals with storytelling in one way or another. Lot of pessimistic takes floating around these days on the decline of literature and how fewer people read nowadays. The good news is, if you manage to read through this entire post, you can consider yourself ahead of the pack.
The first topic I’ll be covering is about a recent book that explores the issue of too many narratives today.
“Storification” and the Abuses of Storytelling
I recently read a review of SEDUCED BY STORY: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (2022) by Peter Brooks. The book introduces a term called “storification,” meant to describe the “hyperinflation of stories” in our everyday life.
When it comes to meaning, narratives are everything. A story of my own comes to mind as I write this. After I had not been to Croatia for many years, on my first night back, my uncle sat with me and proceeded to tell a long story—about the origins of the family house, the labor that went into it, and my great-grandpa’s travels for money to pay for it. The point being: this place has meaning, don’t run away and forget it!
Part of the reason I studied history was an interest in storytelling. It was about finding meaning through continuity with the past. What is life without stories, anyway. But Brooks is describing something else in his book. His claim is that adherence to narratives has taken the public hostage. Everything is about stories nowadays at the expense of everything else.
Admittedly, I see this everywhere. Financial traders openly trade “the narrative,” sometimes almost exclusively. People consciously avoid using certain language to not be associated with a particular narrative. An opinion can unwittingly group you with a political camp. In a world of heavily-curated stories, each point of view becomes a social signal, something packaged with something else. The entire internet is therefore flooded with such signals and judgment on them.
None of this is anything particularly new. Edward Bernays famously talked about the power of narratives in Propaganda (1928), which he used to create desires within consumers on behalf of his business clients. Such ideas are the foundation of modern-day public relations.
But when it comes to the internet, the web truly does run on narratives in an outsized way. Call them referential pieces of information, or better yet, memes: stories are the currency of the internet along with the wars over which narrative should dominate. So, it’s unsurprising that we’re overflowing with stories nowadays. I would say 2016 was the year this broke out in a big way, at least in the United States.
While storification in an online world is largely inevitable, it does have two serious problems: it is often abused and today’s stories usually do not confer actual meaning.
Firstly, regarding the abuse: because the internet deals in stories, it also deals in emotion. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han has written much about how this can synchronize public opinion and filter conversation. Everything begins to orbit around the narrative, narrowing the scope of acceptable views.
The increasingly affective nature of real-time communication reflects the fact that, as Byung-Chul Han observes, “emotions” travel faster and ramify more effectively than simple “rationality.” As communication via digital networks becomes ever more “accelerated,” it stands to reason that it would become increasingly “emotionalised,” leading (under conditions of perfect transmission) to what Han calls a general “dictatorship of emotion.”1
It’s not hard to see how this is easily exploited when power seeks political or social mobilization.
Secondly, more stories do not mean more meaning. This is where I agree with Brooks that narratives are being “hyperinflated.” What’s interesting is that we have an excess of stories, but the story has collapsed. By “the story,” I mean the meta-story: some collective, societal belief in the future. The past 20 years have been nothing short of a breaking down of any authoritative story, a de-normalization of all things once taken for granted, as Martin Gurri described early on in his book The Revolt of the Public (2013).
More information is negatively correlated with meaningful narration. Again, I come back to Byung-Chul Han, who succinctly wrote that, “the more we are confronted with information, the more our suspicion grows.”2 Too many stories as public trust drops to all-time-low. The stories are not conferring actual meaning, but are instead abusing us.
Humanities on the Decline
While we may be abused by stories like Brooks says, the actual study of stories has declined. In “The End of the English Major,” David Heller covers how and why the humanities are in crisis. It’s been widely shared, you may have read it.
He writes:
During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen percent.
The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Copperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.
The article, however, seems split on how to approach the problem. On the one hand, it presents an argument I’ve heard many times before: the main reason behind this is that funding is down. During the Cold War era, universities were flushed with government cash. Now that money is no more, and this is said to have hurt humanities across the board. Honestly, I’m not sure this is solely to blame. Elite universities are not buckling under extreme financial pressure or anything, but I digress.
Regardless, this is arguably not the most interesting part of the essay. The piece notes a few cultural and social changes that are also responsible. Namely, there has been a general decline of reading and the capacity for deep attention that comes with it. It is even affecting the professors themselves:
James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, told me in his office one day.
“You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.”
“Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!”
Assigning “Middlemarch” in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.
In the past week, I’ve encountered multiple people who write for a living expressing this same sentiment: “I’m reading less these days.” Often not intentionally, but out of compulsion and a struggle to ignore ever-present digital noise. The truth is, it requires a determined and conscious choice to read consistently these days. And if it’s difficult even for people who do this professionally, one can imagine the reality for everybody else.
While undoubtedly true in my own life, the actual loss is invisible in more pernicious ways. This brings me to another, more important issue discussed in the New Yorker piece. One of the leading casualties of the decline of the humanities (and reading more generally) has been our historicity—a sense of place in history, and with it, the ability to experience something other than ourselves. This is because historical-mindedness is inseparable from any study of literature.
Consider this sentiment, for example:
Tara K. Menon, a junior professor who joined the English faculty in 2021, linked the shift to students arriving at college with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach.
This “year zero” attitude—the view that almost everything that preceded us is steeped in primitivism and blood, and hence not worth studying—is surprisingly not that uncommon. What is amusing about this is how studying history would immediately invalidate such nonsense.
To give one example, we can read Walter Benjamin — who, describing an angel looking down on the past, wrote: “where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”3 Here was a man living amid World War II, who went on to commit suicide that same year, not because of the “unenlightened past” but because of the closing of his future. The view that the past is one string of tragedies has motivated countless before us, but it would be difficult to find many who threw out the study of history itself.
History has always been one of the main sources of meaning for people. One of my first pieces on this blog was titled Uncertain Futures. In it, I discussed how history became an obsession during the long 19th century. As I mentioned in that piece, one of the first romantic poets, Ugo Foscolo, dreamed in Dei Sepolcri (1807) of the dead rising from their tombs, fighting the battles of the future. As it was for Foscolo and countless others, history was a refuge amid a world undergoing great modern upheavals. There was something primordial about it.
American writer Norman O. Brown similarly wrote that across time, “humanity preferred ‘history’ to ‘life’ because it refused to accept the finality of death.”4 Again, it is through reading and history that we are able to see worlds outside of ourselves. But did Brown ever consider what a life would look like without history...?
I struggle to imagine any past time which has been so aggressively presentist in its outlook as today, be it for political reasons or just on account of its way-of-life. As Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education told the New Yorker:
“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”
Not so recently, The Scarlet Letter used to be high school reading material. Now, according to Claybaugh, it’s a book out of reach for some Harvard students.
Last week, I discussed Anton Jäger's piece, where he unpacks a phenomenon he calls “hyperpolitics.” I think this is relevant. Universities today offer a humanities that is more interested in only “politically problematizing” the past; your other option of study is to become a STEM-related technician. But the former is not a replacement for thought, and society can’t exclusively be the latter.
As one student remarks:
“You write one essay better than the other from one semester to the next. That’s not the same as, you know, being able to solve this economics problem, or code this thing, or do policy analysis.”
This has always been true, but students now recognized less of the long-term value of writing better or thinking more deeply than they previously had.
I think it’s fairly obvious which way the wind is blowing, and whatever loss that will come with it, so best we can do is tend to our own gardens…5 I suppose that’s why I started this blog. Universities and their humanities departments don’t hold a monopoly on writing and lit anyway, and I’m happy for that, although it is sad what is happening to them.
Why Writers Shouldn’t Worry about the Machines
Lastly, I want to briefly talk about machines and the written word. The question I’m wondering is, can a machine write a novel? Illustrators and artists have been the most vocal about their opposition to AI-generated work, but writers have also been feeling it lately. After all, schools are facing a serious writing crisis with ChatGPT. Magazines are also being flooded with submissions written by AI.
That being said, today’s machine still does not have the experience of cognition. And that means it can’t write a compelling novel.
David Berthy in his recent piece on his substack Patchwork relates this to chess.
Even after he lost to Deep Blue in a full length chess match for the first time in 1997, Gary Kasparov argued that while machines had advantages when it came to calculation, they lacked imagination.
Twenty years later, reflecting on his experiences in Science, Kasparov clarified his position further. He pointed out that even the AlphaZero system — which learned from itself and adopted a “dynamic, open style” like his own — did not end “the historical role of chess as a laboratory of cognition.”
Despite the ability of machines to dominate the game, the ability of humans to learn from the machines meant the game’s relevance was, if anything, enhanced.
Chess was “solved” by the machine, but that doesn’t imply its meaning was now closed to us. Chess is actually more popular than ever today with still so much to teach us.
Berthy goes on to discuss the sci-fi book The Player of Games (1988), where two characters duel in an elaborate match to decide who will be emperor. What results is an intensely social affair, even though it was supposed to be probabilistic and mathematical.
[Gurgeh] didn’t talk to Nicosar, but they conversed, they carried out the most exquisitely textured exchange of mood and feeling through those pieces which they moved and were moved by; a song, a dance, a perfect poem. People filled the game-room now, engrossed in the fabulously perplexing work taking shape before them; trying to read that poem, see deeper into this moving picture, listen to this symphony, touch this living sculpture, and so understand it.
This is what we can call the “state of play” or the social experience of cognition. The machine, in such a scenario, cannot fully comprehend it. But this state of play is nonetheless fundamental to the outcome. Contrast this to odds-based decision-making, which defeated Kasparov in chess. Both have their uses, but they are nonetheless different.
So writers, and artists more generally, do not need to worry. Since art and writing mainly involves the state of play, I would say the machine misses the mark most of the time, at least for now.
Quote taken from Mass Affect: War and the Global Synchronisation of Emotions (2022)
"I also know", said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden."
"You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born to rest."
"Let us work without reasoning," said Martin, "it is the only way to make life endurable."
— Candide (1759)
I'd estimate I still read 25-30 books a years...possibly a few more...but the nature of my reading is different than it was 20 or 30 years ago. I can remember long winter nights working my way through The Pickwick Papers and a Hawaii vacation during which I read Don Quixote (though Hawaii is a wonderful place, I have no interest in sunbathing, snorkeling, or surfing). Now I tend to read a few chapters here, a few chapters there when I'm not keeping up with my Substack subscriptions. I still LOVE reading books, but there's less time (or at least, fewer extended periods of free time), and I've adjusted accordingly.
Thanks for including my write-up, Anton. Great to see your contextualization + additional thoughts on the relationship between humans and machines.