Арсен Аветисов – Political Narratology. How Stories Shape Power and Compliance (страница 2)

Political narratology is an attempt to restore a person’s ability to see the form of a story, not just its content. This book does not offer another universal theory or instruction manual for power. It provides an optic, a way of seeing political reality as a narrative construct that is created, maintained, destroyed, and reassembled anew.

The Narratives Will Remain

Political systems crumble, leaders leave or are re-elected, borders change. But stories remain. They pass from era to era, changing words and faces but preserving their structure.

The question is not whether we can live without narratives. It is already obvious that we cannot.

The question is different: do we realise the story we are living inside, or is that story living through us?

The Aims of This Book

This book has several objectives:

1. To show that narrative is not a by-product of politics but its structural foundation.

2. To describe the architecture of resilient political narratives.

3. To understand how narratives survive crises and why they collapse.

4. To analyse the emergence of counter-narratives and their fate.

5. To consider how the digital environment is changing the production and competition of political stories.

How to Read This Book

This book does not require specialised training in any single discipline and does not offer the reader ready-made answers. It gives a way to look and to see. And if, after reading it, political events begin to be perceived not as a chaotic stream of news but as elements of competing stories, the book’s purpose will have been achieved.

Who This Book is For

This book is addressed to those working at the intersection of disciplines: political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, media researchers, cultural scholars, as well as anyone who feels that the familiar language for describing politics is no longer adequate for what is happening.

Epigraphs

The epigraphs have been carefully chosen to precisely anchor a new stage of the argument. Those marked as [paraphrased] are concise distillations of core ideas from the authors’ works rather than verbatim quotations.

Part I: The Foundations of Political Narratology

Introduction

All domination seeks to awaken and cultivate belief in its legitimacy.

For a long time, humanity has been preoccupied with the same question: how can you unite and manage as many people as possible, make them loyal and engaged in achieving a common goal without resorting to significant resources or overt coercion?

One reason this is even possible is simple: a person rarely acts from a place of ‘pure rationality’. They act from interpretation.

In 2015, while studying how psychological and social factors influence behaviour, the World Bank commissioned the World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. Among other things, it identified a trio of factors that systematically influence people’s decisions.

Firstly, people often think automatically: the mind chooses not from scratch but from already available schemas and stories. Secondly, people think socially: identity, group norms, expectations, and the fear of exclusion are more influential than is commonly acknowledged. And thirdly, people use mental models: frameworks through which they ‘see’ the world and themselves in it. In other words, a narrative about the world becomes a kind of frame that colours the picture of every belief and opinion.

At the same time, a person rarely lives within a single, solitary narrative. Usually, they hold onto a system of interconnected stories, striving to preserve the integrity of their worldview and their own identity. This is directly linked to another important pattern extensively researched by Paul Slovic: large-scale representations of suffering often do not mobilise but paralyse. A big number can evoke not compassion but an internal shutdown – because the psyche struggles to withstand an abstract volume of pain.

The phrase attributed to Mother Teresa, ‘If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will,’ accurately captures this unsettling mechanism: it is easier for a person to respond to the fate of ‘the one’ than to the fate of ‘the many’. This is why communications that show a single figure are often more powerful than those that show statistics.

And here we arrive at politics. Politics is sustained not only by resources and institutions of power. It is sustained by emotionally effective stories that turn numbers into metaphors and chaos into a coherent worldview. A story can unite people who would otherwise remain fragmented, and it can also turn a disagreement into a war of identities. Most interestingly, the emotional impact on initiating decisions and actions becomes more important than conscious influence.

In his book Narrative Politics: Stories and Collective Action, Frederick Mayer describes numerous cases in which a story turned into the decisive element in collective action. If storytelling is the thread that binds groups together, then finding ways to work with this ‘technology’ becomes the first step towards uniting those in disagreement.

Today, the world is experiencing a crisis of disunity. Polarisation is growing, conflicts are intensifying, and shared frameworks of meaning are disintegrating. Millions are fleeing war, persecution, and climate threats, while other millions continue to act out old dramas of mutual blame. And as paradoxical as it may sound, without a common political narrative, the very idea of a shared goal – even the goal of civilisation’s survival – becomes difficult to imagine.

A common narrative does not guarantee harmony. But without it, a society either disintegrates or is held together only by coercion.

Chapter 1. What Is A Political Narrative

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

Whoever controls the interpretation doesn’t need to control the facts.

Politics Does Not Begin With Decisions

We are accustomed to thinking of politics as the sphere of decisions: passing a law, implementing a reform, changing a tax, declaring war, signing a treaty. It seems that politics is the realm of actions, not words. But this is an illusion.

No political action occurs in a vacuum. It is always preceded by a story that makes this action possible, permissible, necessary, or inevitable.

Before a law can be passed, it must be explained.

Before a war can be started, it must be justified.

Before freedoms can be restricted, a threat must be named.

Before a sacrifice can be demanded, a story must be told in which that sacrifice appears meaningful.

Politics does not begin with a decision. It begins with an interpretation. And it is this interpretation that we call a political narrative.

What We Call a Narrative and What It Is Not

In everyday speech, the word ‘narrative’ is often used carelessly. It is used to describe ideology, propaganda, slogans, the official version of events, ‘what the authorities say’. But a narrative is not all of these things. And not only these.

A political narrative is not a programme of action. A programme answers the question ‘What are we going to do?’ A narrative answers the question ‘What is even happening, and who are we in all this?’

A political narrative is not an ideology. Ideology is a system of ideas. A narrative is the story that these concepts are incorporated into to give them life.

A political narrative is not a slogan. A slogan is a compressed form. A narrative is the structure of meaning in which the slogan starts to work.

You can have an ideology without a narrative, and it will remain dead.

You can have a programme without a narrative, and it will not be accepted.

You can have facts without a narrative, and they will not be heard.

A political narrative is the frame within which facts gain significance, emotions find direction, and actions receive justification.

Story as a Form of Reality

It is important to understand one thing that usually slips by. A narrative is not a decoration of reality. It is the form in which reality becomes lived.

A person cannot live in a chaos of events. They need sequences, causes, culprits, goals, and a sense of what is happening. A political narrative serves this function precisely: it connects disparate events into a coherent picture of the world, with a beginning, a threat, a hero, a path, and a promise.

This is why, in moments of crisis, the narrative becomes more important than decisions. When the world is cracking and ready to split apart, a person asks not ‘What should we do?’ first, but ‘What does all this mean?’

Why Is Politics Always Based on Stories?

Can we imagine politics without stories? In theory, yes. In practice, no. Even the most ‘technocratic’ forms of governance rely on stories: about progress, stability, security, rationality, necessity.

When the authorities say, ‘That’s how the market works’, ‘Those are the laws of economics’, or ‘The circumstances demand it’, they are telling a story in which responsibility dissolves into impersonal necessity.

When the opposition say, ‘We were deceived’, ‘They stole our future’, and ‘We are reclaiming the country’, they are also building a story with a victim, a culprit, and a promise of restoration.