Fragmented Narrative: Telling and Interpreting Stories in the Twitter Age 2021002183, 9780367074562, 9781032036762, 9780429020889

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FRAGMENTED NARRATIVE

With the rise and rise of social media, today’s communication practices are significantly different from those of even the recent past. A key change has been a shift to very small units, exemplified by Twitter and its strict 240-​character limit on individual posts. Consequently, highly fragmented communication has become the norm in many contexts. Fragmented Narrative sets out to explore the production and reception of fragmentary stories, analysing the Twitter-​based narrative practices of Donald Trump, the Spanish political movement Podemos, and Egyptian activists writing in the context of the 2013 military intervention in Egypt. Sadler draws on narrative theory and hermeneutics to argue that narrative remains a vital means for understanding, allowing fragmentary content to be grasped together as part of significant wholes. Using Heideggerian ontology, he proposes that our capacity to do this is grounded in the centrality of narrative to human existence itself. The book strives to provide a new way of thinking about the interpretation of fragmentary information, applicable both to social media and beyond. Contributing to the emerging literature in existential media studies, this timely volume will interest students, scholars and researchers of narrative, new media and language and communication studies. Neil Sadler is Lecturer in Translation at the Centre for Translation and Interpreting at Queen’s University Belfast. He holds an MA and a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies from the University of Manchester and his research centres on the uses and nature of multilingual narrative in digitally mediated contexts, particularly in the Arab world. His work has previously been published in New Media & Society and The Journal for North African Studies. He has also contributed entries to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media and The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation.

Critical Perspectives on Citizen Media Series Editors: Luis Pérez-​González, University of Manchester (UK) Bolette B. Blaagaard, Aalborg University (Denmark) Mona Baker, University of Manchester (UK)

Critical Perspectives on Citizen Media aims to define and advance understanding of citizen media, an emerging academic field located at the interface between different disciplines, including media studies, sociology, translation studies, performance studies, political science, visual studies and journalism studies.Titles in the series are focused on high quality and original research, in the form of monographs and edited collections, made accessible for a wide range of readers.The series explores the relationship between citizen media and various cross-​disciplinary themes, including but not restricted to participation, immaterial work, witnessing, resistance and performance. The series editors also welcome proposals for reference works, textbooks and innovative digital outputs produced by citizen engagement groups on the ground. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media Edited by Mona Baker, Bolette B. Blaagaard, Henry Jones and Luis Pérez-​González Translating the Crisis Politics and Culture in Spain after the 15M Fruela Fernández Fragmented Narrative Telling and Interpreting Stories in the Twitter Age Neil Sadler For more information, visit: https://​www.routledge.com/​Critical-​Perspectives-​on-​ Citizen-​Media/​book-​series/​CPCM

FRAGMENTED NARRATIVE Telling and Interpreting Stories in the Twitter Age

Neil Sadler

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Neil Sadler The right of Neil Sadler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Sadler, Neil, author. Title: Fragmented narrative : telling and interpreting stories in the Twitter age / Neil Sadler. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Critical perspectives on citizen media | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021002183 | ISBN 9780367074562 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032036762 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429020889 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Narration (Rhetoric)–Social aspects. | Social media and society. Classification: LCC P96.N35 S34 2021 | DDC 808/.036–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002183 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​07456-​2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​03676-​2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​429-​02088-​9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  Introduction  1 Theorising fragmented narrative: Knowing and being 

vii 1 15

Narrative knowing  16 Narrative and being  22 Defining narrative  34

2 Telling stories with fragments: Vertical, horizontal and ambient narrative 

42

Narrative and chronicle  43 Unstable texts, slippery sjuzhets and fuzzy fabulae  48 Vertical storytelling  51 Horizontal storytelling  59 Ambient storytelling  65

3 Interpreting fragmented stories I: Open texts, distanciation and writerly readers  Dialogue and distance  76 Attention and inattention  84 Gaps and fragments  88 The weakened author (function)  96

75

vi Contents

4 Interpreting fragmented stories II: Existential understanding, limited horizons and narrative forestructuring 

101

Understanding and interpretation  102 Interpretive horizons  108 Narrative horizons  112

5 Narrative and truth: Correspondence, coherence and disclosure  127 Truth as correspondence  128 Truth as coherence  133 Truth as disclosure  140

Conclusion: Stories, citizens and being 

156

Glossary of Heideggerian terms  Bibliography  Index 

163 167 184

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Although only my name appears on the front cover, this book would not have been possible without the input of many others. Mona Baker and Luis Pérez-​González have provided immensely valuable feedback and support throughout the writing process as editors of the series in which this monograph is to be published and for much longer as mentors and friends. Both have greatly influenced the development of my way of thinking and their belief in me has carried me forward despite my own doubts. I am also immensely grateful to my colleagues and students at the Centre for Translation and Interpreting at Queen’s University Belfast. My interest in philosophical hermeneutics arose as a direct consequence of discussions with David Johnston and Piotr Blumczynski. I thank my other CTI colleagues –​Kathleen Kaess, Sue-​Ann Harding and Chen-​en Ho –​as well as MA and PhD students in Translation and Interpreting for their tolerance, and at times even encouragement, of my forays into Heideggerian ontology as well as more broadly for providing a working environment that is not only intellectually stimulating but also caring and supporting. I thank my wife,Toria, for listening to me talk endlessly about ‘Dasein as a being which is concerned in its being about its being’ and apologise for the Heideggerian language that has slipped into her own way of speaking. I am grateful for my parents, Mike and Janet Sadler, who provided endless emotional and practical support.

INTRODUCTION

Abstract The introduction establishes the starting point that we live in a world characterised by fragmentation, proposing that Twitter is emblematic of this shift in the way that its affordances compel users to communicate through very short posts. It proposes that narrative, nonetheless, continues to play a key role in everyday understanding and provides a basic means for coping with fragmentation by allowing otherwise disparate information to be grasped together within significant wholes. This is followed by an introduction to the three contexts from which examples are drawn throughout the remainder of the book, namely the Twitter posts of Donald Trump, the Spanish political movement Podemos and Egyptian activists writing about the 2013 military intervention in that country. The chapter concludes with an overview of the contents of the book.

It is now something of a truism to argue that we increasingly live in and through media. Throughout the twentieth century mass media played a key role in defining what ordinary people saw and the ways in which they saw it, shaping their perceptions of the world as a whole, as well as their position in it. With the growth of social media in the 2000s to the present day, media have spread to many more aspects of daily life. Much routine communication takes place through instant messaging services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger; discussions on Twitter have become a commonplace aspect of academic life; Facebook is used to stay in touch with friends and organise events; Instagram enables the creation and maintenance of publics around interests and so on. These platforms, as well as the many others in use around the world, differ greatly in their affordances, their users and the

2 Introduction

uses to which they are put. Nonetheless, all follow the logic of mediatization –​in different ways, each enables aspects of daily life to be lived through media in ways that, for the most part, previously were not. In recent years a great deal of valuable work has been published seeking to make sense of this shift through concepts such as ‘deep mediatization’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017) and the ‘mediation of everything’ (Livingstone 2009). Peters’ ‘philosophy of elemental media’ argues media have become as important to our daily lives as water is to fish (Peters 2015). Others have shown the extent to which they shape our experience of the world (Hansen 2015), influence our thinking (Hayles 2012) and contribute to defining our very possibilities of being (Lagerkvist 2019; Markham 2020). The key starting point for this book is that mediatization has also been accompanied by a shift towards increased fragmentation of information. Most social media platforms favour brevity and very short posts are the norm on sites including Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and WeChat. To use most social media platforms is to be confronted with a flood of atomistic bits of information.Very brief individual comments, often from diverse sources and regarding a wide variety of issues, pile up on top of each other, structured only by the affordances of the platforms themselves. Fragmentation is not in itself a new phenomenon. Daily life has included encountering snippets of information from television and radio for many decades, from newspapers for well over a century and from friends and family from time immemorial. Nonetheless, it has accelerated. As the volume of information available has increased, there has been a trend towards the division of information into ever smaller chunks. Nowhere is this clearer than on Twitter and it is from there that most of my examples are drawn. Nonetheless, if I am right about the central importance of fragmentation, it is my hope that the arguments offered here can also be usefully applied in other contexts. The book title refers specifically to Twitter because I see it as emblematic of this shift. Twitter is by no means the world’s most important social media platform. It is used by a relatively narrow demographic, for a comparatively small range of purposes and popular only in some geographical regions. It does not function in isolation but rather exists within a complex eco system of other platforms and channels (Chadwick 2013; Harrington, Highfield and Bruns 2013; Vaccari, Chadwick and O’Loughlin 2015; Bruns 2019). It is highly problematic to draw simple conclusions from Twitter data about anything other than Twitter itself; nonetheless, the fact that Twitter forces fragmentation through its (current) cap of 280 characters per tweet makes it an ideal site to explore the broader shift towards fragmentation. For this reason, I make few references to Twitter’s (frequently changing) technical affordances but focus on characteristics which are shared with other platforms. In a similar way to how Postman saw the phrase ‘now … this’ as ‘a compact metaphor for the discontinuities in so much that passes for public discourse in present-​day America’ (Postman 1987: 115), I see Twitter as a metaphor for much contemporary communication. The move towards greater fragmentation has not been an entirely one-​way street. Social media platforms themselves have increasingly introduced features

Introduction  3

which enable, while not forcing, users to share less fragmentary content. Twitter has extended its character limit from 140 to 280 and, at the time of writing, allows users to post threads which join an unlimited number of tweets together, allowing for longer and more complex statements. Facebook and Instagram have introduced features that allow and encourage users to post videos expressing more complex ideas, albeit with the caveat that the videos posted disappear after 24 hours. A range of additional tools such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite, some developed by social media platforms themselves, others independent, are also available that allow advanced users to maintain separate feeds organised by hashtags, keywords, individual users and so on. Services such as ‘Thread Reader App’ and Storify 2 provide ways of presenting threads of individual tweets as a continuous, more conventional text. More broadly, there has been a rapid, and well-​documented, rise in the use of algorithms to make sense of vast quantities of information. Many platforms have moved away from the strict chronological ordering of their early days, towards algorithmically structured feeds which present content on the basis of its ‘relevance’ to users, determined according to opaque and shifting criteria based on user profiles built up from the digital ‘traces’ left by almost all internet activity. It is increasingly accepted that algorithms are a major driver of contemporary culture and politics and a significant literature is developing regarding their implications for society (Langlois 2014; Bishop 2018; Williams, Brooks and Shmargad 2018; Kotliar 2020), culture (Striphas 2015; Seyfert and Roberge 2016; Seaver 2017) and politics (Bucher 2018). These developments provide ways of organising chaotic flows of information. In different ways they direct the flow of fragments but the chunks of information remain small and are not presented to users within meaningful wholes. They make it easier to cope with fragmentation without running counter to the logic of fragmentation per se. Previous discussions of fragmentation have tended to present it as a bad thing. Bogart (1989: 1–2), for example, argues that ‘the very profusion of unconnected bits of information may well create a sense of disorder and chaos, which can lead to civic apathy’. Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death (1987), meanwhile, argues that the constant stream of fragmentary information characteristic of television and what he calls the culture of ‘now … this’ has led to a general degradation of public discourse. At the dawn of the ‘information age’, there were fears that it would be impossible to cope with the torrents of fragmentary information the internet made available. Gitlin (2001) warned of the dangers of being overwhelmed by ‘supersaturation’ while for Manovic (2001: 217) we had ‘too much information and too few narratives that can tie it all together’. The fear expressed in sentiments like this seems to be that fragmentation is intrinsically negative and something to be resisted. Without dismissing these arguments, the view presented in this book is less pessimistic. It begins from the premise that ordinary people clearly do manage to cope just fine with fragmentation in their everyday lives. Langlois suggests that if this is possible, it is because social media platforms provide the structure we need to do this, arguing that ‘in the social media context, it is the platform that

4 Introduction

increasingly organises our world for us’ to such an extent that in ‘making sense of the world [it] increasingly displaces the human element’ (Langlois 2019: 160). I do not agree with this position. Social media and their algorithms can juxtapose fragments but they cannot assemble them into meaningful wholes. Algorithms still cannot ‘understand’ anything. As I argue throughout this book, a human act of grasping together remains essential. That this continues to be possible, I will argue, is due not to the outsourcing of sensemaking to algorithms but rather because the human capacity to interpret and comprehend seems to have largely kept pace with increases in fragmentation. As Ong (2017: 14) puts it: ‘by the same token as it is an information age, our age is an interpretation age’. I share his view that the fracturing of information, characteristic of the digital, has brought with it increased demand for interpretation, characteristic of the hermeneutic. Fragmentation may make interpretation more complex but it clearly does not make it impossible. One of my basic assumptions is that encountering the world through fragments in no way makes it less meaningful. Theorising the kind of interpretation demanded by fragmentation is the primary goal of this book. The shift towards fragmentation, coupled with a general increase in the availability of data, has been accompanied by major epistemological changes within the academy. Big data approaches take full advantage of the increased volumes of information while the increasing importance of visualisations for the representation and interpretation of large datasets has produced a broad shift towards spatial metaphors (Halpern 2015). The metadata hidden in social media posts has allowed for increasingly sophisticated network analyses to be conducted, allowing for large-​scale studies of, as one early paper described it, ‘who says what to whom?’ (Wu et al. 2011). It has accelerated a shift towards structuring information following the logic of the database (Manovich 2001) where vast amounts of individually atomistic information can be quickly retrieved according to the wishes of the user. This work is undeniably valuable. It allows for analysis of human interaction at a scale and level of detail which was previously impossible.1 These methods provide ways to take advantage of, rather than merely cope with, the increase in information. There is, however, clearly a huge gulf between these interpretive methods and the way that most ordinary people cope with fragmentation in their daily lives –​it seems safe to say that most users, when scrolling through Twitter on the train to work, do not stop to produce network graphs. The main question underpinning this book, then, is how are we able to make sense of fragmented content in everyday interpretation? My approach to providing an answer to this question is phenomenological; my goal is not to lament fragmentation or even, for the most part, to critique it in terms of its social, political and cultural implications. Like Markham (2020), I see little value in calling for a return to a, probably mythical, vision of ‘the way things were’. Instead, my aim is to thematise, or make explicit, routine and everyday ways of interpreting as they apply to fragmented information, particularly as found on social media. My principal argument is that narrative plays a central role in doing this.

Introduction  5

The ongoing relevance of narrative The argument I will attempt to make in the chapters that follow is that narrative is crucial to the intelligibility of fragments. At first glance, this may seem absurd. Lev Manovic convincingly argued almost two decades ago in his classic book The Language of New Media (2001) that we are witnessing a shift from narrative forms for organising information, based around linearity and causal inference, towards the non-​linear, retrieval-​on-​demand logic of the database. As the production of information has continued to accelerate, and fragmentation has increased, this trend has in many ways continued. Algorithms for interpreting and retrieving information are much more strongly orientated to database than they are to narrative; in most cases, they select and order bits of information but without giving them the form of stories, as traditionally conceived. An apparent move away from narrative is also suggested by the peripheral position of stories and storytelling within most contemporary new media theory.2 Where narrative is invoked, as for example in Papacharissi’s work (e.g. Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira 2012; Papacharissi 2015a), it is left largely untheorised. New technologies disclose new ways of being-​ in-​the-​world, revealing otherwise hidden ontological possibilities (Gualeni 2015; Hansen 2015; Markham 2020). Perhaps, then, the increasing significance of fragmentary and non-​storylike modes of communication themselves presage a deeper shift away from the story-​based ontology which seems to have characterised much of human history as homo narrans (W. R. Fisher 1987) or as a ‘story telling animal’ (Macintyre 1985: 216). Clearly, non-​narrative modes of seeing the world and existing within it matter a great deal. Yet, in a host of other ways, narrative is as important as ever. First, stories continue to play an enormously important role in politics and social life. Political divisions continue to be conceptualised in terms of competing narratives. The seemingly endless arguments in the UK regarding the country’s departure from the European Union are grounded in disputed accounts of the current status of each country, based largely on disagreements regarding the past events which led to their current state and, equally or more significantly, what might happen in the future. In the late 1970s, Jean-​François Lyotard (1984) announced the demise of the metanarrative –​grand stories about the meaning of life, the universe and everything –​and the rise of local narratives as the defining characteristic of postmodernity. Today, in an era sometimes characterised as ‘metamodern’, or ‘post-​ postmodern’, while self-​mediation has further emphasised the significance of the local as Lyotard predicted, it also seems clear that metanarratives are as important as ever. In the chapters that follow, I make the argument that this is at least partly attributable to increased fragmentation as social media enable greater expression of the local, at the same time as they reaffirm reliance on metanarratives. Second, it is important to note that narrative has always co-​existed with other, non-​ narrative modes of understanding and existing. The ‘logico-​ paradigmatic’ (Bruner 1986; 2002) interpretive scheme of scientific inquiry works according to a fundamentally different set of principles to those of stories, grounded in abstract

6 Introduction

laws rather than specific relations between concrete events. Yet the existence of the logico-​paradigmatic mode, and its clear utility within many spheres of human activity, has not led to the eradication of storytelling nor even diminished its importance. Rather, it highlights the need for multiple epistemological and ontological schemes as well as drawing attention to their respective potential and limitations. Something similar, I suggest, is happening now. Data visualisations, for example, offer a way of understanding the relationships between large numbers of data points (and an alternative way of conceptualising ‘data points’ themselves) based on a spatial metaphor which differs in important ways from either the linear causal chains of narrative or the abstract laws of science.Yet they supplement rather than supplant one another, opening new interpretive possibilities without closing off old ones. Third, narrative is a way of interpreting as much as it is a way of representing. The fact that fragmented information is not presented in narrative form does not preclude narrative interpretations. Indeed, as I attempt to show, the emphasis on events in much social media communication leads directly towards storied interpretation and effectively demands it. It may well be true that social media causes action to be ‘atomized’ (Papacharissi 2010: 131). Stories, nonetheless, provide a way of grasping together atomistic happenings, actions and bits of information within meaningful units, producing relational interpretations which enable recognition of their significance. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the concept of the narrative as traditionally conceived, particularly if literary narratives are taken as prototypical, is poorly equipped to deal with the confusion and multivocality of social media. When I say ‘storied interpretation’, I do not mean that to interpret fragmented interpretation means to impose a neat, clearly defined and thematically grasped structure upon otherwise chaotic inputs; rather, I understand narrative as a way of ‘grasping together’ things that happen in order to see their relational significance, even if this story is itself never clearly grasped or thematically viewed. The approach to narrative I put forward to do this, sketched out initially in Chapter 1 and further developed in each of the following chapters, draws on a variety of traditions. Several of these were explicitly developed with narrative as a key theoretical concept: classical and contemporary narratology, narrative historiography, narrative sociology, narrative psychology and the narrative hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. By combining elements from these traditions I propose an understanding of narrative encompassing textual, social, mental and existential elements. I am concerned primarily with what narrative does, rather than with precise definitions of what narratives are. I propose that stories play a central role in both everyday knowledge of the world and our being within it. How we see the world, and the ways that we can see it, depend to a significant degree on both the stories we tell and the broader narrative environment within which interpreters are located. To supplement narrative theory, I also draw heavily on concepts from the hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer and, most significantly, the early work of Martin Heidegger. I am neither a philosopher nor an expert on Heidegger but believe that his approach has a great deal to offer any attempt to theorise fragmentation. The

Introduction  7

following ideas recur throughout the book and underpin many of the arguments I put forward: 1) to understand interpretation, it is necessary to go back to the more fundamental level of being and existence as the necessary ground for all factical, that is, specific, acts of interpretation; 2) interpretation should be understood as drawing out, or ‘disclosing’ potential meaning rather than as ‘meaning making’ which suggests that meaning is called into being through acts of interpretation. Quasi-​ mystical as this sounds, this helps to account for the relationship between meaning and things, recognising both the broad scope for variant interpretations as well as their limits; 3) an emphasis on ‘everyday’ interpretation characterised by ‘absorption’ and ‘circumspection’ provides a powerful framework for conceptualising complex acts of interpretation which are nonetheless made quickly and nonthematically; 4) thinking in terms of hermeneutics brings an emphasis on the interplay between part and whole, the basic characteristic of the hermeneutic circle, while acknowledging that in everyday life there is no need, and it may be impossible, to bring the whole in question directly into view. It is my hope that this book will contribute to the fields of new media studies, citizen media studies and narrative theory. With regard to the first, while references to narrative are relatively common in work on new media, there has been a notable lack of studies directly addressing the question of stories. Ruth Page’s excellent body of work represents a notable exception to this (Page 2010; 2012; 2018; Page, Harper, and Frobenius 2013 ). However, her work differs significantly from the approach presented here; Page’s work is grounded in sociolinguistics, with a particular emphasis on the construction and negotiation of personal identities. The approach presented here, on the other hand, is more philosophically orientated. It emphasises the interpretative process itself, the factors that may shape it and understands narrative itself in a much broader sense –​as a mode of being, as much as a method for communication. The question of interpretation and meaning in new media environments, moreover, has received comparatively little emphasis in comparison to platforms, structures and media power (Livingstone 2019: 174). By drawing on the wealth of theoretical work in hermeneutics, I seek to provide a nuanced account of everyday interpretation as it functions in fragmented contexts. I am not the first to do this. There have been attempts in the past to conceptualise digital media interpretation through hermeneutics (e.g. Capurro 2010), and Heidegger’s thought has been previously brought to bear specifically on media (Scannell 1996; Gunkel and Taylor 2014; Scannell 2014).Yet, as Gunkel and Taylor (2014: 40) note, while Heidegger’s approach can provide powerful insights into new media, it has not been extensively used to date. The literature applying principles of Heideggerian hermeneutics, whether directly or not, to new media specifically is particularly thin (Langlois 2014; Frosh 2019; Lagerkvist 2019; Markham 2020).This work highlights the value of Heidegger’s approach while leaving much to be done in drawing out what it can tell us about contemporary media and communication practices. Much of the existing research is grounded in either the ‘active audience’ tradition (e.g. Bird 2011; Livingstone 2015; 2019) or the ‘digital literacy’ tradition

8 Introduction

(e.g. Koltay 2011; Simsek and Simsek 2013; Pangrazio 2016). The approach presented here differs from these two bodies of work in important ways. With regard to the first, the concept of the ‘audience’ is seldom used in this book, partly due to the well-​documented issues with reifying diverse groups of readers into homogenous and commoditised audiences (Ang 1991), and partly due to the fact that the narrative approach largely rejects thinking in terms of relatively static concepts, such as audiences, in favour of a more dynamic approach built around individual and group stances vis à vis the stories in circulation in a given context. Work in digital literacy, on the other hand, typically has a pedagogical focus and, in its critical variant, often emphasises the production and reproduction of inequality arising from unequal levels of digital literacy within populations. In this case, a capacity to critically interpret new media content is understood as an acquired skill. The focus of this book, on the other hand, is on more fundamental issues. Rather than empirically addressing the reception practices of concrete audiences, it asks basic questions about the forms that stories take on social media and in other fragmented environments and the kind of interpretive processes which are needed in order to make sense of them. Rather than asking what skills are needed to critically assess content online, it asks about the conditions for the intelligibility of fragmented content and its grounding in human existence. As such, it does not seek to supplant these traditions so much as to put them on a stronger footing by addressing more basic questions about interpretation in this context. With regard to narrative, it first seeks to further contribute to synthesising insights from the diverse traditions of narrative inquiry, drawing on narrative psychology (Bruner 1986; Polkinghorne 1988), historiography (Mink 1970; White 1978; Carr 1986), philosophy (Macintyre 1985; Ricoeur 1980; 1984; 1985; 1988; 1991b) and sociology (Somers and Gibson 1994), as well as work in literary narratology (Fludernik 1996; Wolf 2003; Ryan and Thon 2014b) and translation (Baker 2006; 2013). There is no doubt that contemporary narrative theory is far more interdisciplinary than in the past. Nonetheless, Hyvärinen’s (2006) argument, made over ten years ago, that the traditions of narrative inquiry have remained largely siloed from one another, particularly with regard to literary and non-​literary approaches to narrative,3 still largely holds. Beyond synthesising traditions, I hope to enrich narrative theory more broadly by engaging substantively with hermeneutics. Hermeneutics have not been entirely ignored by narrative theorists (Brockmeier and Meretoja 2014; Schmitt 2014) and are central to Ricoeur’s work. Nonetheless, they remain marginal in most accounts of narrative. My hope, following the lead of Ricoeur, is to further demonstrate not only the significant insights that hermeneutics can bring to the study of narrative but, more specifically, to show the value of hermeneutic theory to the study of fragmented and digitally mediated narrative. Finally, the book seeks to contribute to current debates on citizen media and digital citizenship. I approach the unaffiliated citizen as a complex figure capable of both obedience to, and subversion of, authority. I explore this through consideration of the impact of narrative fragmentation and increased opportunities for self-​mediation on the relationships between citizens and institutions. My argument

Introduction  9

is that the implications of narrative fragmentation are profoundly ambivalent in this regard. On the one hand, the pressure towards fragmentary communication forces a greater responsibility for interpretation onto citizens, who are compelled to pro-​actively interpret if atomistic pieces of information are to be comprehensible. This, I suggest, is the primary way in which the notion of the ‘produser’ should be understood –​not in terms of ordinary citizens publishing content of their own (although this can be important) but as users being inevitably engaged in a ‘writerly’ (Barthes 1974) process of interpretation.This necessarily limits the power of authors to constrain interpretation, freeing space for oppositional and counter-​hegemonic readings with potentially emancipatory implications. On the other hand, as the power of institutions to act as ‘author-​gods’ decreases, I argue that interpreters’ existing ‘horizons’ of interpretation come to play an increasingly important role in supplying the necessary structure for the reading of narratives from isolated accounts of events. This may act to effectively close down interpretation, depending on the existential possibilities available to the reader, even if the lack of defined narrative structure in fragmented contexts theoretically permits a very wide range of interpretations. While my arguments are grounded in existential concerns rather than the accounts of hegemony and coercion which characterise much of the literature (cf. Hintz, Dencik and Wahl-​Jorgensen 2019: 29–​31), I will argue that increased fragmentation ultimately favours institutions over unaffiliated citizens by leaning toward narratives which are already hegemonic, without necessarily facilitating the kinds of storytelling able to disrupt the world as already disclosed.

Introduction to the three contexts referred to throughout the book While the principal aims of this book are theoretical, the claims I make are based largely on analysis of Twitter activity in three major contexts: 1) multilingual Arabic and English reporting on the 2013 military intervention in Egypt, when the Egyptian Armed Forces forcibly removed the former Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi and placed him under arrest; 2) Spanish language content posted by the Spanish political movement Podemos over the last few years; 3) the contemporary communication practices of Donald Trump. The rationale for selecting these three contexts is that each represents a very different level of authority and power, and they each occupy a very different position on the distinction between citizens and governments and institutions which characterises much contemporary discussion of citizenship (Baker and Blaagaard 2016b; Hintz, Dencik and Wahl-​Jorgensen 2019). In other ways, all three also subvert a simple binary between these two poles. Trump, as president of the USA, is the world’s most powerful individual person as the representative of the most powerful institution in the world. His communication practices, moreover, are famously fragmentary and he has been frequently criticised by his opponents for being incoherent. Twitter is clearly an extremely

10 Introduction

important medium for Trump but it is by no means the only communication channel open to him –​he also enjoys almost unlimited access to coverage in the mainstream mass media as well as having access to institution specific communication channels such as press conferences and White House statements. Yet, while enjoying the trappings of institutional power, and in contrast to most US presidents, he also communicates as an individual, representing himself as well as the presidency. Moreover, his anti-​immigration, and at times overtly racist, positions can be understood as performances of citizenship, albeit of a chauvinistic and narrowly construed variant which receives little emphasis in the largely optimistic literature on the emancipatory potential of digital media (Hintz, Dencik and Wahl-​Jorgensen 2019). Indeed, Trump’s disregard for the norms of governance in the USA, and the presidency specifically, suggests a significantly lesser degree of alignment, or affiliation, between him and the institution of the presidency than has generally been seen in the past. Podemos, on the other hand, has a more ambivalent position. Its origins lie in the mass protests against austerity, unemployment and neoliberalism of the 15-​M movement in Spain which ran, with varying degrees of intensity, from 2011 to 2015. As a formal political party, Podemos was established under the leadership of the leftist academic Pablo Iglesias in 2014 to provide a vehicle to contest elections. As such, it is strongly grounded in citizen activity and the reconfiguration of the relationships between citizens and elites in Spain is one of their central goals. The discourse of citizenship features heavily in the language they use –​major decisions are taken, for example at ‘Asambleas Ciudadanas’ [Citizens’ Assemblies] and, as of the time of writing, ‘Garantías Democráticas y de Ciudadanía’ [Democratic and Citizen Guarantees] feature prominently in their political programme. Nonetheless, the group has also institutionalised to a significant degree. Despite its horizontal organisation, it has a clearly defined leadership, a centralised power structure and it works within the framework of Spain’s constitution. The party’s relative success in European, national and local elections, including joining a ruling coalition with the centre-​left socialists in November 2019, have given it access to communicative resources typically only available to institutions. Even before entering government, Podemos politicians were frequently invited to participate in programmes on Spanish television and radio, giving them significant access to mass media audiences. The third group are Egyptian activists writing in English and Arabic at the time of the 2013 military intervention in Egypt, when the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated president, Mohamed Morsi, was ousted by the country’s armed forces. Activists such as @Sandmonkey, @Bassem_​sabry, @Zeinobia and @TheBigPharaoh made extensive use of social media, primarily Twitter, during this period to self-​ mediate and report on events happening within Egypt to external audiences. All were ‘crowdsourced to prominence’ (Meraz and Papacharissi 2013) and developed followings of tens of thousands and roles as important mediators. They embody citizen media in the sense that they were not associated with, and did not operate under the aegis of, an institution. Nonetheless, even they cannot be characterised as entirely unaffiliated in Baker and Blaagaard’s terms. Beyond ‘crowdsourcing to

Introduction  11

prominence’ (Meraz and Papacharissi 2013), many such activists had their influence significantly boosted through their inclusion on ‘who to follow’ lists published by major news outlets (e.g. Hounshell 2011; M. Fisher 2013b; 2013a; al-​Jazeera 2014). Many such activists were also called upon to comment on unfolding events for international media organisations and seem to have actively courted such attention, bringing with it something of the logic of the institutional media. Nonetheless, they had access to nothing like the range of communicative channels available to Donald Trump and could not rely on the extensive media coverage available to Podemos in Spain, leaving them far more reliant on social media. The three contexts are similar in important ways.They all focus strongly on political issues of public concern and therefore reward analysis through the lens of citizenship and all three strongly emphasise reporting, and determining the meaning of, events. All involve situations of crisis in one way or another.This focus is, admittedly, narrow and there are clearly differences between communication in contexts such as this and, for example, the more everyday communication practices studied in much of the existing literature on social media storytelling (e.g. Page 2012; Dayter 2015; Georgakopoulou 2016). My contention, however, is that the interpretation of fragmentary narratives is always grounded in existence and being-​in-​the-​world, even if this may lead to highly divergent factical interpretations in different contexts. In recent years there has also been increasing recognition of how everyday life and politics are intertwined. Billig (1995) showed that nationalism largely resides in ‘banal’ daily practice while Highfield (2016) emphasises the intermingling of the political with the everyday. Citizenship is practiced through structured activities like voting but can also be found in routine practices and interactions (Hopkins and Blackwood 2011; Hirsiaho and Vuori 2012; Hopkins, Reicher and van Rijswijk 2015). Agamben (2005) argues that we now live in a permanent ‘state of exception’ in which crisis moves from a temporary deviation to a constant state of being. This blurring of the exceptional and the everyday, the political and the banal, suggests a need for theory which recognises the diversity of human life and activity without relying on boundaries and distinctions which may be ultimately difficult to sustain.

Overview of chapters The basic idea underpinning this book is that narratives are more fragmented now than in the past, due in large part to the rise of social media-​based communication. Nonetheless, I aim to show that, despite the increase in narrative ­fragmentation, it remains both useful and necessary to examine communication in terms of stories, even when the fragments we are called upon to interpret at first glance bear little resemblance to traditional narratives. The splintering of narratives into smaller fragments, broadly speaking, shifts the onus for interpretation onto readers and requires more ‘writerly’ approaches to interpretation. I will argue that both the production and interpretation of stories are changed by this. Nonetheless, I propose that these changes largely represent an intensification of pre-​existing tendencies rather than completely new phenomena. I also attempt to explain, from a hermeneutic

12 Introduction

perspective, why the expanded opportunities for self-​mediation offered by social media have not necessarily produced emancipatory results. I argue the reasons for this run far deeper than problems such as biased algorithms and the domination of social media by corporations which has been the subject of much recent research. Chapter 1 presents the theory of narrative which underpins the rest of the book. Drawing on scholarship from philosophy, psychology, literary theory and historiography, I present an interdisciplinary theory of narrative in which stories play a central role in being and knowing. In the first part of the chapter I argue that our capacity to produce and understand explicitly narrated stories rests upon a fundamental role of narrative as part of existence itself. To do this, I make extensive reference to Heidegger’s account of being-​in-​the-​world and its arguments regarding the central importance of interpretation to the uniquely human way of existing –​Dasein. I suggest that a prethematic capacity for narrative as a part of being is required for it to be possible for happenings to emerge as events within meaningful wholes in the first place. Only on the basis of this prior narrative articulation of events is it possible to tell explicit, thematised stories. In the second part of the chapter I present an operational definition of narrative to clarify the limits of storytelling. I suggest there are four key dimensions of all stories, whether thematised or not: 1) temporal and spatial specificity and a grounding in factical happenings; 2) relationality of parts in the sense that stories are relational wholes and only exist in relation to the broader contexts within which they are situated; 3) figuration, in the sense that all stories have a structure of some kind, even if the sources of that structure may be varied and often difficult to pin down; and 4) ‘a sense of an ending’, understood as all stories projecting not only forward but towards an ending of some kind, even if it is not always clear. Each of Chapters 2, 3 and 4 address an aspect of Ricoeur’s account of threefold mimesis (Ricoeur 1984). Chapter 2 focuses on mimesis2 –​ ‘configuration’ –​ by examining narrative structure. It begins with a discussion of the distinction between narrative and chronicle made by some historiographers, arguing that narrativity varies significantly depending on both the writing practices of users and the reading practices of interpreters. I propose that the opportunities social media provide for chronicling, in the sense of recording chronological accounts of events without explicitly positioning them within narrative wholes, represents a significant shift, empowering unaffiliated citizens in previously unseen ways. The second half of the chapter introduces three major orientations to narrative structure in fragmented contexts which I term ‘vertical’ (characterised by episodic accumulation of narrative elements), ‘horizontal’ (characterised by projecting forward and back in time) and ‘ambient’ (characterised by contributions to connectively produced and largely unknown wholes). While all three approaches are available to all users in principle, I argue that in practice the range of viable storytelling methods depends on the level of influence of the narrator: powerful users able to command sustained attention can mix and match as they please; less influential users, on the other hand, are largely confined to limited contributions to ambient narratives.

Introduction  13

Chapter 3 moves to mimesis3 –​‘refiguration’ –​and shifts the emphasis onto narrative reception by exploring the factors which effectively broaden the range of possible interpretations when narratives are fragmented. It begins with a consideration of the key hermeneutic principle of distanciation. Drawing primarily on Ricoeur and Gadamer, I argue that, despite the emphasis on simultaneity on social media, the geographic and cultural distance frequently seen between storytellers and interpreters on social media creates significant room for manoeuvre in interpretation, greatly broadening the range of possible responses. I argue that this causes interpretation to approximate the reading of literary texts in which readers must bridge narrative ‘gaps’ through creative input. I propose, nonetheless, that the level of input demanded of readers is far greater with narrative fragmentation than in all but the most radical literary texts: rather than bridging defined gaps within determinate texts, readers must interpret defined fragments within indeterminate narrative wholes. The chapter closes with a discussion of the ‘author-​function’ (Foucault 2003), proposing that readers’ understanding of the author remains an important factor when interpreting fragmented narrative. The main argument throughout is that these factors greatly increase narrative dynamism, hugely expanding the scope for variant readings. This, in turn, creates a space for the empowerment of citizens by disrupting the ability of institutions to present compelling stories and opening a clearing for counter-​hegemonic readings. In Chapter 4 the focus is on mimesis1 –​prefiguration. It examines how interpretation is both enabled and constrained by Dasein. Noting the now extensive literature on the impact of algorithms and gatekeeping practices, my aim is to explore how interpretation is shaped by the being of interpreters even before these other factors come into play. To do this, the chapter begins with Heidegger’s account of understanding and interpretation as basic components of being which ground, and are grounded, in Dasein. It then moves to a consideration of Gadamer’s concept of the ‘horizon’ to explore the ways in which all factical interpretation is ‘forestructured’ by the way in which the world has already been disclosed to interpreters. This, I suggest, both influences the way that other worldly things can come into view at the same time as enabling them to come into view in the first place. The final part of the chapter uses the concepts ‘metanarratives’ (grand narratives providing answers to basic questions about the world) and ‘masterplots’ (generic plots which provide structure for specific acts of interpretation) to enable more concrete analysis of interpretive horizons and more clearly thematise their function in relation to narrative interpretation. I suggest that, while always important, these factors play an outsized role in contexts of high fragmentation as the drastic weakening of the intermediary level of ‘text’ produces an increased reliance on existing understandings of the broader context. I propose that the idea of the fragment itself relies on its being received as already situated within a meaningful totality of reference. I conclude by arguing that this increased reliance on context may, seemingly paradoxically, given the openness explored in Chapter 3, result in increased conservatism of interpretation in fragmented contexts, not in line with authorial intent but rather with existing world views.

14 Introduction

Chapter 5, finally, seeks to move beyond superficial assertions that we now live in a ‘post-​truth’ world through a detailed exploration of the relationship between narrative and truth in fragmented contexts. The first part of the chapter examines the extent to which two traditionally influential theories of truth –​truth as correspondence and truth as coherence –​are applicable to fragmented narratives, arguing that both continue to provide valuable insights without providing a completely satisfactory account of truth and narrative.The second part draws on Heidegger’s concept of truth as disclosure and its subsequent development by Kompridis in terms of ‘second-​order disclosure’ having either ‘unifying-​repairing’ or ‘decentring’ effects. On this view, beyond correspondence and coherence, we must also view truth on the more fundamental level of disclosure of the world itself, at the level of allowing us to see elements of the world in the first place, prior to any attempt to assess them. Drawing on Bakhtin, I suggest that the fragmentation of social media offers the possibility of moving towards more dialogic approaches to truth. Nonetheless, I argue that this requires interpreters to remain ‘open’ to experiences of the new in the face of a range of factors which encourage interpretive closure. Finally, I propose that fragmentation may impede the production of stories capable of producing second-​ order disclosure with world-​disrupting effects at the same time as reinforcing the possibility of producing second-​order disclosure with world-​repairing effects. This, I suggest, intrinsically favours already-​dominant groups which typically have more to gain from shoring up existing understandings of the world than from provoking disruption which reveals new interpretive possibilities.

Notes 1 Although the reliance of these approaches on the APIs provided by SMPs themselves does cause academic research to strongly favour platforms with researcher-​friendly APIs (such as Twitter) over those that offer limited or no access (such as Instagram). 2 Page’s work represents a significant exception to this (e.g. Page 2012; 2018). 3 He notes, as do I, that Bruner (1986; 2002) and Ricoeur (1980; 1984; 1988) represent notable exceptions to this, combining elements of narrative psychology, historiography, philosophy and literary theory to great effect.

1 THEORISING FRAGMENTED NARRATIVE Knowing and being

Abstract Chapter 1 addresses the basic question of what narratives do, arguing that they play a key role in everyday knowing and being. As a way of knowing, narratives enable individual events to be understood in terms of larger complex wholes. This shapes both the perceived significance of events and how they are encountered. I argue that the human capacity for knowing and understanding the world through stories is, in turn, grounded in a more fundamental, ontological role of narrative in shaping our sense of being-​in-​ the-​world. Drawing on Heidegger’s account of Dasein as temporal being, I argue that human existence has an intrinsically narrative structure which provides the necessary ground for both storytelling as ordinarily understood and narrative understanding more broadly.The final part of the chapter draws on diverse traditions of narrative theory to provide a definition of narrative, used in the subsequent chapters, based on the key elements of: temporal and spatial specificity, relationality, figuration and a sense of an ending.

‘Narrative’ as a technical concept and an everyday-​language term has been put to a bewildering array of uses across the humanities and social sciences over many decades. Theories of narrative are therefore unsurprisingly numerous, reflecting both the fluidity of the concept and the impossibility of producing any final definition or theory suitable for all times and places. Stories can be approached in terms of their sociality and role in intersubjectively constituting the social world (Carr 1986; Somers 1994; Somers and Gibson 1994). They can be studied semiotically in terms of structures of signification (Barthes 1975a; Chatman 1978; Rimmon-​kenan 2006) as well as in terms of aesthetics and poetics, as seen in long traditions in

16  Theorising fragmented narrative

literary (Culler 1975; Rimmon-​kenan 2002) and historiographical analysis (White 1973; 1987). Stories can be viewed in terms of their cognitive function, as a mechanism for understanding (Bruner 1986; Polkinghorne 1988; Mink 2001) as well as in terms of their capacity for the communication of individual and collective human experience to others (Fludernik 1996; Herman 2009). Narratives can function as arguments to persuade others as well as providing the basis of a logic used in the everyday assessment of beliefs and actions (Fisher 1987). The perspective presented here might be termed an existential theory of narrative, owing to its grounding in ontology and the phenomenology of human existence and reliance on Heidegger’s existential philosophy. This approach is not without risk. This is partly because ‘being is a word that hovers somewhere between the profound and the pretentious’ (Peters 2015: 10) but it is also due to the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of separating the ‘existential’, that is, that which is common to all existence, from the ‘existentiell’, that is, that which is specific to concrete individuals and thus defined by their own unique factical being-​in-​the-​ world.1 One of the great strengths of the narrative approach, as I will seek to show in the chapters that follow, is that it leads us to concrete, existentiell analysis, always asking which specific stories are significant in any given context and how they relate to one another. Nonetheless, it is important to first consider the fundamental and general assumptions according to which this analysis is conducted at the most basic level possible. With this in mind, this chapter sets aside the goal of producing a definitive theory of narrative, aiming instead to outline an approach suitable for the task of understanding the nature and implications of fragmented communication in the chapters which follow. To do this, I rely primarily on twentieth century, at times early twentieth century, theoretical writings on narrative and hermeneutics, two approaches which have many points of connection yet have remained largely separate from one another.2 The chapter is comprised of two main parts: the first addresses the question of what narratives do and argues that stories play a key role in processes of knowing by enabling us to ‘grasp together’ things that happen as complex wholes. The seemingly universal human capacity for doing this is, I suggest, grounded in a deeper role of narrative in existence. The second part strives to give a working definition of narratives as we encounter them which, in line with contemporary narratology, emphasises variable ‘narrativity’ rather than a binary distinction between narrative and non-​narrative. I argue that narratives are defined by the extent to which they exhibit four key characteristics: temporal and spatial specificity, relationality, figuration, and a sense of an ending.These features, I suggest, themselves derive from the characteristics of narrative as a way of being.

Narrative knowing The literature on the relationship between stories and knowledge derives primarily from work in psychology (e.g. Sarbin 1986; Polkinghorne 1988; Bruner 1993; Bamberg 2004) and historiography (e.g. Mink 1968; 1970; Dray 1971; White

Theorising fragmented narrative  17

1973; 1980; Ricoeur 1984; Danto 1985; Ricoeur 1985; 1988; Mink 2001). These traditions differ in important ways and are themselves diverse.3 Nonetheless, they broadly agree that narrative can, and does, play an important role in making sense of things that happen. The basic assumption underpinning this is that happenings are not intrinsically meaningful in and of themselves but derive their significance through their connections with other happenings. Seeing them in terms of these connections allows them to come into view as meaningful events.4 The significance of Catalan leaders’ decision to hold an independence referendum in 2017, for example, is apparent only in relation to the events that led up to the referendum (including the repression of the Catalan language, culture and identity during the dictatorial Franco regime) and those that followed (such as the arrest and subsequent imprisonment of several leaders of the independence movement in 2019). If the act of holding the referendum were to remain the same, but the preceding or subsequent events were to have been different, the story would change along with the meaning of the referendum within it. Narratives, then, are concerned primarily with events –​they are the basic stuff of stories and without them there can be no narrative. Similarly, narrative’s explanatory power can be turned only to events, or to things viewed in terms of events –​ stories can tell us nothing about the chemical composition of a pencil but a great deal about the significance of a specific pencil in terms of what has been written with it, by whom, at what times and in what places. More precisely, narrative as a way of knowing is concerned with specific relationships between specific events –​ the narrative meaning of the Catalan referendum derives from the specific configuration of events in this unique instance, rather than from theoretical accounts of independence referenda abstracted from their occurrence in factical contexts.These relationships may be purely temporal and concerned only with sequence but are more commonly causal –​most narratives of the Catalan referendum of 2017 refer to events understood to have caused the referendum to be held, rather than merely the events that temporally preceded it. It is this emphasis on causality which gives narrative its power to explain rather than to merely describe; a narrative account of the Egyptian military intervention of 2013 tells the reader not just what happened but also why it happened.This capacity for explanation is equally significant in daily life (e.g. a narrative explanation for arriving late to work) as it is in politics (e.g. a narrative explaining the factors which led to the implementation of austerity-​based economic policies in the UK following the 2008 financial crisis) and history (e.g. a narrative explanation of the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990). The events which provide the nodes in these networks of signification need not be ‘real’ in the sense of having materially taken place. For example, Donald Trump claimed in November 2019 that a significant proportion of recipients of the ‘Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals’ (DACA) scheme in the USA, which delays legal action against individuals brought to the USA illegally as children, had criminal records.5 The fact that only a tiny proportion of DACA recipients appear to have had criminal records (Valverde 2019) does not alter the capacity of Trump’s claim to shape narrative meaning. More significantly, narrative understanding is

18  Theorising fragmented narrative

prospective as well as retrospective and not solely capable of making sense of events which have already, or are purported to have already, taken place. Indeed, the most important events in stories are frequently anticipated future events rather than those that are already in the past. At the time of Donald Trump’s selection as Republican nominee for the presidential election of 2016, for example, he was frequently criticised for his past actions. Yet the strongest criticism in many cases focused on what he might go on to do in future. The leading Republican Mitt Romney, for example, warned that ‘if we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished’ before going on to specify that ‘his proposed 35 percent tariff-​like penalties would instigate a trade war’ and ‘His tax plan … would balloon the deficit and the national debt’ (Romney 2016). In this case, hypothetical future events play a central role in a narrative of Trump’s, then only possible, selection as Republican nominee for the presidency. By providing a means for perceiving and articulating temporal and causal relationships across past, present and future, narrative, as a mode of understanding, enables individual events to be ‘comprehended as elements in a single and concrete complex of relationships’ (Mink 1970: 551), through a synthetic process of ‘grasping together’ (Ricoeur 1984: 66). Central to narrative and hermeneutic theory is that the result of this ‘grasping together’ is not merely an appreciation of relationships but that networks of relationships together constitute larger meaningful units, drawing from ‘a manifold of events the unity of one temporal whole’ (Ricoeur 1984: 66). The whole and part are understood here to relate to one another dialectically: the individual parts of stories can be understood only in relation to the whole while the whole is itself defined by its constituent parts. Neither part nor whole can be comprehended in isolation from one another. As Taylor argues: We are trying to establish a reading for the whole text, and for this we appeal to readings of its partial expressions; and yet because we are dealing with meaning, with making sense, where expressions only make sense or not in relation to others, the readings of partial expressions depend on those of others, and ultimately of the whole. (Taylor 1985: 18) Narrative knowledge is, therefore, fundamentally characterised by the operation of the hermeneutic circle, defined by constant movement between mutually informing parts and wholes. Narrative knowing should not be understood, however, as a primarily individual activity as it is social in two fundamental ways. First, stories enable not only the production of knowledge but also the communication of that knowledge to others. Grasping together as a narrative the complex events of the 2013 military intervention in Egypt provides a way of comprehending it as a whole. Telling a story of

Theorising fragmented narrative  19

those events to another person allows for that understanding to be thematised and shared. Narrative therefore plays a central role in enabling shared understanding.Yet this does not mean that storied understandings are first produced by individuals and only become social when shared. In Heidegger’s words, ‘communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences … from the inside of one subject to the inside of another’ (Heidegger 2010: 157).This is because all narrative understanding is produced within an environment already structured by, and saturated with, other stories, whether those we encounter in face-​to-​face interactions and via the media in its diverse forms, or which pre-​exist us and come to us through tradition (Gadamer 1989). As discussed in Chapter 4, any individual interpretation is a taking up and appropriation of public and shared possibilities and, as such, is already ‘outside’ any individual subject (Heidegger 2010: 157). The close interrelation of these two aspects is captured in Heidegger’s concept of ‘rede’. Often translated as ‘discourse’ (Heidegger 2010; Gunkel and Taylor 2014; Heidegger 1962), rede is, in my view, more aptly rendered by Dreyfus (1990) as ‘telling’ so as to capture both the non-​linguistic sense of ‘telling things apart’ and the linguistic sense of ‘telling someone about something’. Narrative participates in the ‘articulation’ of the world, allowing configurations of happenings to be grasped together as discrete, if complex, events (e.g. as a revolution, football match or making breakfast). This is a kind of ‘pointing out’ (Heidegger 2010: 149) which enables things to be seen in particular, determinate ways while also limiting the ways in which they can be encountered. Thus, stories are a way of ‘taking as’ –​ understanding the events of the summer of 2013 in Egypt as a revolution, or as a coup –​and for identifying ‘joints’ –​for example, understanding whether the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 following a military coup was something distinct from the resignation of the former president Hosni Mubarak following mass anti-​government protests in 2011 or a part of a single complex of events. Telling new stories allows for these ‘joints’ to be redefined but we nonetheless always find the world as already articulated. The tension between narrative’s capacity to articulate and disclose the world in original ways and the influence of the way things already appear, based on the way the world has already been disclosed, is a key issue to which I return at several points in later chapters. The grasping together, articulation and taking as upon which narrative is based can be thematic, for example when stories are told out loud or in writing, images or video, or nonthematic, when constellations of events are understood as relational wholes but not perceived directly as such. In nonthematic stories, events are grasped together as complex wholes characterised by causal and temporal relationships without the structure of the whole itself being brought directly under consideration. In thematic narrative, the relationships upon which they are built are brought directly into view and there is a conscious process of storytelling in which narrators choose what to include and exclude, the order in which to relate different events

20  Theorising fragmented narrative

and so on. Crucially, nonthematic narrative always precedes and is the precondition for thematic storytelling: the articulation of what is understood in the interpreting approach to beings guided by the ‘something as something’ lies before a thematic statement. The ‘as’ does not first show up in the statement but is only first stated, which is possible only because it is there are something to be stated. (Heidegger 2010: 145) Thematic storytelling, then, should be understood as explicitly pointing out joints that have already been implicitly recognised in such a way as to allow others to see them with the storyteller. Nonthematic storytelling is more controversial than thematic narrative. In much of the literature on narrative and knowledge, including my own work in the past (Sadler 2018) and particularly in historiography, it is strongly emphasised that the world does not intrinsically have the form of a narrative; we may have a strong desire to see the world in terms of beginnings, middles and endings, but this teleological structure does not come from the events themselves (Kermode 1967; Mink 1970; Dray 1971; Chatman 1978; White 1980; ). From this perspective, narratives only come into existence through the thematic activity of storytellers and it is, accordingly, impossible to speak of nonthematic narrative. These scholars are correct, I believe, in that narrative does not come from the physical world and is an entirely human phenomenon. More problematic is the idea that the world is first experienced as non-​narrative and that the form of the story is subsequently imposed as a means of sense making. Perhaps it is possible for some historians and journalists to first assemble collections of facts and only then bind them together with explanatory narratives. Certainly storytelling can be a conscious activity. Most of the time, however, our experience and knowledge of events is in terms of wholes and ‘the flow of conscious life, like the temporal objects (events) we encounter around us, is lived as a complex of configurations whose phases figure as parts within larger wholes’ (Carr 1986: 28). This is as true of the experience of music as melodies rather than sequences of isolated notes, to use Husserl’s favourite example, as it is of encountering historical events in terms of the historical narratives which already saturate the environments in which we live. Most of the time, we are not conscious of these narratives yet they nonetheless provide vital reference points for the way in which the world and our place in it are understood. This stance, justified below in greater depth with reference to Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein, is a key component of the approach to narrative fragmentation taken throughout this book –​I argue that individual fragments are interpreted within larger narrative contexts in the first instance, rather than retrospectively assembled into meaningful wholes. Nonetheless, I am sensitive to critiques of approaches to narrative which suggest that effectively all experience and communication is storied, sometimes termed ‘narrative imperialism’ (Rowland 1987; Lamarque 2004; Phelan 2005a). I am by no means claiming a monopoly for interpretation for the narrative mode. Narrative is one way of understanding amongst

Theorising fragmented narrative  21

others, and there are many contexts in which storied understanding has little to offer. As I have already stated, the emphasis on events and causal relations means that only aspects of the world which ‘happen’ in some way can be interpreted according to narrative. The emphasis on the relationships between specific events makes narrative ineffective when it comes to drawing broader conclusions which transcend individual contexts, although as I argue in Chapter 3, narrative is not entirely helpless in this situation. Among narrative theorists, narrative forms of knowing are frequently contrasted to ‘logico-​mathematical’ understanding (Lyotard 1984; Bruner 1986; Polkinghorne 1988; Mink 2001). In contrast to the emphasis on the relationships between specific happenings in narrative approaches, the logico-​mathematical approach seeks to understand phenomena in terms of universal laws which are insensitive to their embedding in particular contexts. As such, this is the type of understanding typically sought in science, where the pursuit of objectivity seeks to eliminate the inherent subjectivity of narrative knowledge and its association with those who produce it, in favour of knowledge in forms which can be more easily shared, replicated and consumed (Lyotard 1984). Both the narrative and logico-​paradigmatic modes also ultimately belong to a broader category of metaphorical or analogical understanding (Burke 1941; Ricoeur 2003) allowing us to understand one thing in terms of another.6 The contemporary prominence of visualisations, for example, continues a long trend towards representing non-​ spatially organised data in terms of spatial relationships as a means of making sense of ever-​increasing volumes of information, avoiding both the laws of traditional science and the linearity and emphasis on causality of the narrative mode (cf. Halpern 2015). Recent years have also seen increasing recognition of affective ways of knowing, which, in their emphasis on visceral, bodily experience, exceed the limits of traditional conceptions of knowledge (Seigworth and Gregg 2009; Ahmed 2014; Papacharissi 2015a; Markham 2020). These modes have proven remarkably valuable in their capacity for enabling us to both make sense of the world in new ways and cope with the ever-​g reater size and ubiquity of available data. Yet, as discussed in the introduction, there are reasons to suggest that narrative remains important: 1) there seems to be a basic human tendency to see the world in terms of stories and storylike relationships. Technological change seems, so far, to have done little to change this; 2) politics and public life more broadly continue to be defined by narratives; stories continue to inspire people to action, from voting to protesting, in ways that other ways of knowing generally do not; 3) many of the experiences with which we must contend are eventful and all take place in specific temporal and spatial locations; the fact that large portions of our lives are now lived in and through media does nothing to change this; 4) narrative interpretation has none of the technical or educational barriers which prevent ordinary citizens from, for example, analysing Donald Trump’s tweets using the methods of corpus linguistics or network analysis. As such, the development of sophisticated, alternative ways of knowing need not be at the expense of the universal capacity for knowing the world through stories.

22  Theorising fragmented narrative

Narrative and being For most theorists of narrative, stories relate principally to knowledge and epistemology rather than being and ontology. Somers and Gibson (1994) want to reclaim narrative as an ‘epistemological other’; for Wolf (2003),‘narrative enables a conscious perception of time and thus contributes to creating and stabilizing a central epistemological category as a basis of human experience’; for Fludernik (1996: 15), ‘the entire frame of storytelling itself operates as a cognitively grounded frame’; Mink (2001) and Polkinghorne (1988) see narrative as an ‘instrument of mind’. As will be clear from the preceding section, I agree that narrative plays an important epistemological function. The approach adopted here, however, is built on the idea that narrative’s position as a way of knowing rests on a more fundamental intertwining of narrative and being. In the discussion that follows I attempt to justify this idea by drawing principally on Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics as presented in Being and Time (Heidegger 2010), which considers human existence to play a central role in both individual acts of interpretation and in shaping the range of possible interpretation more broadly. Heidegger’s ontology is extremely complex and nothing approaching a full account can be provided here. With that in mind, the following discussion will be limited to a number of salient aspects of his approach upon which the other chapters are based. These are: the distinction between world construction and world disclosure; the ontic and the ontological; the worldliness of the world; being as Dasein; and being-​with-​others. There is a long tradition across the humanities and social sciences of seeing human activity in terms of world construction, and, more broadly, in terms of meaning making. This is also seen in much influential narrative theory, which emphasises that telling stories is a way of creating meaning through the imposition of narrative structure on a world which is not initially encountered in story form (Kermode 1967; Chatman 1978; Mink 1970; 2001). This implies that to understand is to project meaning onto things which are not initially encountered as meaningful. Events, from this perspective, must be seen as initially formless and as only acquiring definition through the act of being consciously fitted into relational networks through narrative emplotment. On this view, to reinterpret textual material as time passes is to create new meanings. According to Heidegger and his followers (Kompridis 2006; Wrathall 2011; Capobianco 2014; Scannell 2014), on the other hand, this is mistaken on two counts. First, for reasons discussed below, things are always already meaningful as first encountered. Second, from the hermeneutic perspective, human activity is necessary for experiencing meaning but not, in itself, the source of significance. Interpretation is a way to ‘disclose’ or ‘uncover’ latent meanings rather than to create them as such. This view leaves room for the possibility of significantly different, even contradictory, interpretations of the same basic material as disclosing different possible meanings while avoiding the solipsistic notion that each person occupies their own world of meaning. In common with many approaches to meaning creation, the understandings reached by any specific interpreter are understood as greatly

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influenced by their position, as discussed below in relation to Dasein. Nonetheless, the hermeneutic view also, if non-​deterministically, grounds interpretation in the objects of interpretation themselves. As such, the hermeneutic view avoids the extremes of idealism and constructivism (Gunkel and Taylor 2014: 56), while recognising the significance of things themselves without resorting to essentialism or realism.7 Moreover, in emphasising ‘distanciation’ (Ricoeur 1976), discussed in detail in Chapter 3, and largely severing the potential meanings of objects of interpretation from the intentions of their producers,8 it is well suited to the new media environment which, as argued in Chapters 2 and 3, decentres content producers as authors able to control the interpretation, and even structure, of the stories they tell. Heidegger approaches the question of being through a basic distinction between the ontic, that is, being as brute fact, and the ontological, that is, ways of being. The Houses of Parliament in the UK, for example, ontically simply are, yet ontologically, their way of being is defined by the role they play within British society. This way of being in turn rests on interpretations of their relationships to other things both physical, such as the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and abstract, such as the institution of the law. The ontic/​ontological distinction, moreover, does not map onto the idea that there are separate physical and social worlds but rather onto different aspects of being. Both physical things, like buildings, and abstract concepts, like laws, exist ontically and have a way of being. This highlights three important points. The first is that insofar as things exist ontologically within a world of meaningful human activity, existence is both relational and grounded in interpretation. Second, the ontic and the ontological are inseparable and any account of being must address both aspects. Third, the ontic and the ontological nonetheless are not reducible to one another as fixed ontic properties do not impose limits on ways of being, nor do ways of being, in themselves, have the capacity to change ontic properties. Heidegger characterises the relational aspects of ontology through the notions of ‘reference’ and ‘relevance’: the way that things are is defined by the ways in which they ‘refer’ and are ‘relevant’ to other things. To use his favourite example, a hammer’s way of being is defined by its relationships with wood, nails, other tools, such as saws and screwdrivers, and so on. Reference involves not only the relationships between things, but also their positions within larger wholes –​ ‘relevance itself is always discovered only on the basis of a totality of reference’ (Heidegger 2010: 84).9 The ‘significance’ of things depends on their position within this ‘relational totality’ (Heidegger 2010: 85). The whole in question consists not only of other things but also ‘involvement’ on the basis that we do not typically encounter things in a disinterested way but rather through ‘concern’. Hammers, for example, are typically encountered as related to nails and wood but also in relation to the act of hammering, which is itself typically encountered in relation to making or fixing something –​a way of ‘taking care’ of things. In turn, the act of making something with a hammer is encountered in relation to specific modes of being –​for example as a woodworker or as an academic with limited practical

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skills.10 Things are ontologically determined, then, in relationship to an ‘involvement whole’ including other things but also activities, purposes and ways of being. Relational being through relevance refers to the idea that things are what they are through their reference to other things, activities and so forth. This, of course, does not affect their physical properties and the ontic being of material things does not depend on relevance: ‘that they have a relevance is an ontological determination of the being of these beings, not an ontic statement about beings’ (Heidegger 2010: 82).Yet, when we encounter ontic things, it is in terms of their relevance: letting something be relevant is the condition of the possibility that things at hand be encountered so that Dasein11 in its ontic dealings with the beings thus encountered can let them be relevant in an ontic sense. (Heidegger 2010: 83) This again highlights the interplay of the ontic and the ontological. We encounter the ontic through ontology and reference but the implications of that encounter subsequently play out both ontically and ontologically. The weight of a hammer is an ontic property. It is only possible to determine whether a hammer is ‘heavy’, on the other hand, through comparison to other things and in relation to tasks: it may be heavy if I get tired when trying to use it to hammer in nails all day when I am more used to sitting at a computer; the same hammer may be light if I try to use it as a door stop but it lacks the necessary heft to hold the door open. We will see later that there is a link with narrative from the outset, owing to the importance of temporality to existence. Nonetheless, the relationship between narrative and ontology is immediately apparent in relation to events, owing to their overtly temporal character. As already discussed, events are only recognisable as events by viewing them in terms of relational and temporal totalities and the ways in which they refer to other events. Their way of being, and the ways in which it is possible for events to be disclosed to us, are articulated by, and through, stories which allow for these relational totalities to exist in the manner of significance. In other words, we do not need narrative for it to be ontically possible to cut and join pieces of wood together. We do need narrative, on the other hand, for it to be possible to encounter this action as my making a box for my father to give to him for his birthday. This story enables some pieces of wood which otherwise simply are to exist as a gift, a way of being which is intrinsically temporal. To a significant degree, then, events are the stories which articulate them, whether thematic or nonthematic. The implications of this interplay between the ontic and ontological in narrative are both clearer and potentially more serious in political contexts. Muslim Brotherhood narratives of the 3 July 2013 military intervention in Egypt as a coup was one way of ontologically encountering a set of ontic, objective facts as a significant event.Yet this way of encountering it had significant ontic implications, leading first to counter protests and, ultimately, to the deaths of hundreds of Brotherhood protestors when sit-​in protests were violently cleared in August of that year. On

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the other hand, Muslim Brotherhood supporters’ constant repetition of a narrative presenting Mohammad Morsi as the legitimate president of Egypt meant that, for some, Morsi’s way of being was to continue being president. Yet this did not make Morsi’s return to power an ontic reality. Stories, then, frequently have ontic consequences. Nonetheless, they cannot simply determine brute fact, as implied in some constructivist approaches. Relevance and significance are central components of what Heidegger calls ‘the worldliness of the world’. At its most basic, this refers to the idea that relational networks are so important that they ultimately constitute the defining characteristic of the meaningful world in which we live as humans: ‘significance … is what constitutes the structure of the world’ (Heidegger 2010: 85). It means that the world is never reducible to the ‘sum of all extant things’ (Heidegger 1982: 296). As with things and events, Heidegger sees the world as the unity of the ontic and ontological, rather than as an unanchored human construct: ‘neither the ontic description of innerworldly beings nor the ontological interpreting of the being of these beings gets as such at the phenomenon of “world” ’ (Heidegger 2010: 64). Instead, the world represents a shared and meaningful environment within which things, people, activities, and so on can be encountered in terms of their relevance. The world is not to be understood as something separate from an autonomous subject but rather as that within which we ‘dwell’ and which provides the fundamental ground which makes all interpretation and understanding possible. The question of the world and its role in determining the range of possible interpretations in specific contexts is explored in depth in Chapter 4. For now, it suffices to say that narratives, large and small, constitute a significant part of the world as a relational whole.This is most readily apparent through the ideas of history and tradition. What it means to be a member of an individual family, a nation, or an institution, for example, is defined partly by an understanding of its past and anticipated future. Macintyre argues: ‘I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships’, going on to suggest: ‘I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of that tradition’ (Macintyre 1985: 221).These historical narratives form part of the ‘horizon of more or less clear shapes and contours’ (Carr 1986: 174) which provide the context for specific actions and acts of interpretation. Like other aspects of the world, these are narratives within which we dwell but regarding which we may not have a thematic understanding –​it is not necessary to be a historian in order to live in relation to a specific, if unthematised, understanding of the past and anticipated future.12 Heidegger was by no means the first to draw a distinction between ontic, ‘objective presence’ and more contingent, ontological ways of being. His great contribution, however, lies with regard to their priority. He argues at the outset of Being and Time that since the Ancient Greeks, ontic being has been privileged as the necessary ground for ontological being, leading to an emphasis from that time onwards on metaphysics, since, from this perspective, the route to understanding human existence runs through ontic being. For Heidegger this is a mistake because,

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if human existence is being-​in-​the-​world, this means that any knowledge we have of the ontic is acquired through, and by means of, the ontological. In other words, being as objective presence is only accessible through ways of being. His approach is clarified in the distinction between ‘just looking’ and ‘circumspection’. Heidegger does not deny that it is possible to simply look at things and that this lets us ‘encounter beings within the world solely in their mere outward appearance’ giving ‘a glimpse of what is objectively present’ (Heidegger 2010: 61). He emphasises that this, in certain circumstances, is an entirely valid and indeed useful thing to strive to do –​for example when carrying out investigations in the natural sciences. He critiques, however, the idea that this is the normal way that we encounter things in our everyday lives. To merely look at something is not the starting point from which subsequent interpretation follows, but itself a privative act reliant on ‘deworlding’ things –​that is, perceiving them separately from their worldly significance, rather than a return to a more basic level of perception (Heidegger 2010: 64–65). Ways of being ‘must not be understood as a mere characteristic of interpretation, as if such “aspects” were discursively forced upon “being” which we initially encounter, as if an objectively present world-​stuff were “subjectively colored” in this way’ (Heidegger 2010: 71). He argues, on the contrary, that our ordinary way of encountering things in the world is through nonthematic ‘circumspection’ in the context of our absorption in doing things. He illustrates this through the example of a door knob: it is more basic to encounter a door knob in the context of using it to open a door so as to enter a room or in order to do something else, than to begin by merely looking at it and taking in its ontic properties before grafting on its ontological significance in terms of doing things. He offers a further example with language, highlighting that the primacy of ontology is not limited to ‘useful things’: in the explicit listening to the discourse of the other we initially understand what is said … we do not, on the contrary first hear what is expressed in the utterance. Even when speaking is unclear or the language is foreign, we initially hear unintelligible words, and not a multiplicity of tone data. (Heidegger 2010: 158) We can hear language as a ‘multiplicity of tone data’ but normally do not. Even if we do not know what the words mean, we usually assume that they mean something, rather than having to reason our way to the conclusion that these unintelligible sounds are in fact language. This, I believe, is also true of narrative interpretation. The key idea is that events are initially encountered as events within relational wholes, rather than as mere ontic happenings upon which meanings are subsequently grafted. This idea runs counter to much traditional narrative theory which typically sees narrative as a retrospective act of sense making (Mink 1968; White 1980; Danto 1985). Instead, I adopt the view advanced by a smaller number of scholars that to see any event atomistically relies on abstracting it from the totalities of reference within which it is

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first encountered (Macintyre 1985: 214–​215; Carr 1986; Brockmeier and Meretoja 2014).This view, I argue in Chapters 2 and 4, is particularly useful for theorising the reception and interpretation of fragmented narratives for two reasons: first, because the textual fragmentation of stories need not lead to fragmented reception; and second, because, these narratives are frequently encountered circumspectly, in a state of ‘inattention’ rather than from the forensic, thematising viewpoint of the scholar. worldliness is so central to Heidegger’s account of being that the human way of being understood as relevant existence is characterised as ‘being-​in-​the-​world’. To be-​in-​the-​world does not require thematic awareness of the ‘system of relations’ which constitutes the world as a significant whole; rather these relations constitute the context within which it becomes possible to encounter things at all and which form the ground for thinking and acting. The relations are not ‘something thought, something first posited in “thinking”, but rather relations in which heedful circumspection as such already dwells’ (Heidegger 2010: 86–​87). This can be illustrated with reference to gender –​young children do not need a thematic awareness of gender in order to behave and interact differently with men and women. If and when they do begin to develop a thematic view of gender, it is from the starting point of already ‘doing’ gender as part of the ‘heedful circumspection’ which characterises everyday life and from existing within a meaningful world organised, to a significant extent, along gendered lines. Heidegger further elucidates being-​ in-​ the-​ world through the concept of ‘Dasein’: literally ‘being there’. One of the main things he means by this is that it is not possible to separate the way of being from anything which exists in the manner of Dasein from its position in the world. The world, then, ceases to be understood simply as a container and comes to be recognised as a fundamental determinant of the relational existence of all innerwordly beings, from hammers to events to people. In Heidegger’s words, being-​in-​the world is not the ‘objectively present insideness of something objectively present “in” an other’ but rather ‘the kind of being of this being itself ’ (Heidegger 2010: 128). This means that ‘the being which is essentially constituted by being-​in-​the-​world is itself always its “there” ’ (Heidegger 2010: 129) in the sense that, rather than being defined by its position in the world as such, it is its position in the world. The term ‘Dasein’, then, is not a synonym for ‘subject’ but is the unity of the self and the world: ‘self and world are not two beings, like subject and object, or like I and thou, but self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-​in-​ the-​world’ (Heidegger 1982: 297). The ‘there’ is defined by that which is near, understood as ‘that which is in the circle of an average reach, grasp, and look’ (Heidegger 2010: 104). He is emphatic that this circle extends beyond the immediate physical environment, illustrating his point with the then still new technology of radio: ‘with the “radio”, for example, Dasein is bringing about today a de-​distancing of the “world” … by way of expanding and destroying the everyday surrounding world’ (Heidegger 2010: 103). Since then, the technologically mediated extension of the world has obviously become significantly more complex. Television brings us into ‘quasi-​interaction’

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with others who may be distant in both time and space (Thompson 1995), enabling them to become ‘livable within our homes and personal lives, perpetually disclosed to us, pre-​reflectively, in our intimate lifeworlds’ (Frosh 2019: 54). The internet, of course, extends this much further still, not by creating an independent cyberspace separate to that of ‘real life’ (cf. Isin and Ruppert 2015: 27–​36) but by extending the ‘there’ further yet beyond the immediate physical environment. This does not diminish the importance of material environments, as the now substantial literature on digital materiality shows (cf. Farman 2012; Gillespie, Boczkowski and Foot 2014; Pink, Ardèvol and Lanzeni 2016). It does, nonetheless, highlight the increasingly complex relationships between ontic and ontological nearness and their essential integration in the constitution of the ontological ‘there’. Lagerkvist, building on this work on the increasing complexity of mediatized presence, explicitly draws on Heidegger to propose that ‘digital culture thus challenges a “there” with clear demarcations’ (Lagerkvist 2016: 105).Yet the fact that Heidegger sought almost a century ago to complicate the idea of a clearly bounded ‘there’ suggests that the increasing existential complexity brought by the internet is more a matter of degree than a change in kind. Stories, again, play a central role in constituting the ‘there’ by setting the immediate physical environment into relationships with the broader ‘there’. Narratives greatly influence our conceptions of ourselves and identities as well as of our families and nature of the institutions with which we interact on a daily basis. Literary narratives take the ‘there’ into the realm of the possible and beyond since they are not limited to what is understood to have really happened. Religious narratives, a very real part of the ‘there’ for many, allow for horizons to transcend the boundaries of the mundane (Crites 1971). The quasi-​interactions of television journalism described by Thompson (1995) very often take the form of stories –​insofar as the Catalan independence protests feature in the ‘there’ of interpreters in the UK, Germany or Italy, for example, it is through the stories told about them. Social media pushes this further still. Everyday ‘small stories’ (Georgakopoulou 2014; Dayter 2015) make narratives of the daily lives of others ‘near’ in ways they previously could not be. In activist contexts the ability to share stories in real time contributes to international solidarity networks, allowing for activists dispersed across vast physical distances to nonetheless be present in one another’s ‘there’. The ‘there’ is further defined by ‘thrownness’, ‘attunement’ and ‘projection’ as key elements of the ‘care structure’. Dasein is ‘thrown’ because it is always in a context where things are already significant. From the first moment that we encounter anything, we are already absorbed in the world and in a position of understanding things in relation to other things, actions and purposes.13 This is the fundamental condition for encountering things in the world. The ‘there’ is ‘attuned’ in that we are always already concerned with things, and ‘in’ a particular mood or state of mind with the manner of this attunement at any moment defining, on a primordial level, the way the world is disclosed.This is not something layered on top of an initial perception of ontic reality but rather something which fundamentally defines the way in which worldly things are disclosed to us (Heidegger 2010: 127–​138; Markham

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2020: 79–​96). ‘Projection’, finally, refers to the idea that ‘it is from out of or on the basis of some set of projected relations that I understand what anything is’ (Wrathall 2011: 3). This means that things are initially encountered in terms of both their synchronic relations with other things and diachronic relations with their future possibilities. The basic orientation of thrownness to the past and of projection to the future means that the ‘there’ must be understood in temporal as well as spatial terms. Rather than a series of knife-​edge ‘nows’, the ‘there’ is defined by the unity of past (thrownness), present (attunement) and future (projection). Narrative, once again, offers a more concrete way to conceptualise this idea through the intimate links between storytelling and the human experience of time, on the basis that ‘time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence’ (Ricoeur 1984: 3). A principal means of thematising the present into which we are thrown is through stories about how it came to be. This can take the form of written histories, built on thematic understandings of the past, but history is also part of the ‘there’ in a more basic way, in the prethematic awareness of history and tradition which informs our being in the present (Carr 1986: 100–​120; Macintyre 1985: 221–​223). It is equally true of our self-​understandings, as stories are told about us even before we are able to understand them. Once we are able to understand these stories, we cannot remember a time when they were not there, making it inevitable to respond to them throughout our lives (Lyotard 1984: 15). Stories are similarly vital to projection and our ability to comprehend, whether prethematically or thematically, people, events and things in terms of their future possibilities. To understand the significance of the Egyptian protests of 2013 at the time meant seeing them through narratives of different possible outcomes. Looking back on them now means considering the different possible futures towards which they projected –​what might have been. The temporality of events’ way of being is to a significant degree, therefore, based on narrative since it is through stories that they are able to come into view as part of the ‘there’. Emphasising the ‘there’ as a specific spatio-​temporal and relational position may sound deterministic. This impression is strengthened by statements from Heidegger such as ‘this “system of relations” does not volatize the being of innerworldly beings at all. On the contrary, these beings are discoverable in their “substantial” “in itself ” only on the basis of the worldliness of the world’ (Heidegger 2010: 87). The key point here lies in the idea of things being ‘discoverable’. For Heidegger, being itself is not dependent on the world; rather, wordliness is a requirement for existence and for us, as interpreting beings, to be able to discover things, or for them to be disclosed to us, as intelligible. The world, therefore, provides the context not for the creation of things but for their being encountered in specific ways. Nonetheless, being can never be fully discovered and disclosure is only ever partial. From this perspective, then, it is possible for being to be (ontically) constant but nonetheless disclosed differently, perhaps very differently, depending on both the shifting systems of relations which make up the world and the variability of Dasein’s position within

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the world. This is clearly visible with the shifting narratives about the 2013 military intervention in Egypt, which have presented it in various ways, including: a military coup against a democratic government; a regrettable, but unavoidable, do intervention to restore the 2011 Revolution to its correct path; a necessary intervention to undo the mistakes of the 2011 Revolution; a reassertion of military dominance against civilian government; a power shift within the Egyptian deep state; and so on. The ontic facts about which these stories are told remain the same throughout, yet by telling different stories about them, different possible meanings are revealed.

Narrative and being-​with-​others In line with the emphasis in Being and Time, the account of the relationship between narrative and being has so far emphasised individual existence and the disclosure of the world to individuals.14 Nonetheless, sociality is central to Heidegger’s account of existence, appearing in concepts such as ‘publicness’, ‘being-​with-​others’, ‘the one’ [das Man] and the ‘with-​world’ [Mitwelt], even if these ideas remain comparatively underdeveloped.15 He is unequivocal that ‘the world of Dasein is a with-​world [Mitwelt]. Being-​in is being-​with [Mitsein] others.The innerworldly being-​in-​itself of others is Dasein-​with [Mitdasein]’ (Heidegger 2010: 116). The existence of worldly things necessarily relates to people as well as other things: ‘the boat anchored at the shore refers in its being-​in-​itself to an acquaintance who undertakes his voyages with us, but even as a “boat which is unknown to us”, it still points to others’ (Heidegger 2010: 115). This highlights that the involvement whole pertaining to any situation includes not only our own involvements, but also those of others.The being of others constitutes a central element of worldliness, whether or not other people are physically co-​present (Heidegger 2010: 117–​120). Mere staring may be individual, and individualising, but circumspection necessarily takes others into consideration as vital nodes in the environment, as does ‘concernful taking care of things’ (Heidegger 2010: 120) since our everyday way of being and acting in the world is always carried out in relation to other people. The centrality of being-​ with-​ others to being-​ in-​ the-​ world is once again apparent with specific regard to narrative. Above I cited national narratives, histories and traditions as examples of narratives which give shape to the shared world. All are also examples of narratives which, by definition, have many tellers and many participants. To take up a stance in relation to a tradition necessarily means taking up a stance in relation to other people: predecessors whose actions caused the tradition to either come into being or continue; contemporaries whose actions will lead to either the tradition’s continuance, modification or abandonment; and successors who will determine its fate after we are gone. Historical narratives may feature heroes, but they also provide accounts of collective pasts relating to nations, subcultures, political movements or tribes, for example. This does not require agreement between different narrators but nonetheless implies a ‘we-​subject’ as stories are told ‘by an individual or individuals on behalf of the we; indeed using the we as the subject not only of action and experience but of narration itself ’ (Carr

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1986: 156). Historical narratives, in turn, provide means of understanding different ways of relating to one another and of understanding our individual lives within a common world (Crites 1971: 304). This is particularly relevant to citizenship since to be a citizen means to take up a particular stance towards other people. It is impossible for there to be a single citizen since the idea of a citizen rests upon a specific mode of being-​with-​others, even if the specific form this takes can vary greatly. Developments in the way that citizenship has been understood over recent years, towards a more performative and enactive approach (Dahlgren 2006; Dahlgren 2009; Stephansen 2016; Hintz, Dencik and Wahl-​Jorgensen 2019), can be understood in this regard as disclosing new existential possibilities of citizenship, through creative breaks from habitual practice (Isin 2008). This, in turn, enables factical individuals to take up these possibilities in their own unique ways. We have seen this, for example, with the emergence of ‘digital citizenship’. Technical change, the democratisation of mass communication and the subsequent emergence of innovative practices have enabled the existing concept of citizenship to be articulated in new ways, for the ‘joints’ to be redefined, as citizenship is tied increasingly weakly to passive rights afforded by nation states and more strongly to ‘publics’ which relate in new ways to national borders and physical geography. This, in turn, entails previously impossible ways of being-​with-​others. Individual acts of interpretation rely upon ‘publicly available’ understanding for their necessary ground. This is not to suggest that it is impossible to go beyond previous interpretations, but rather to say that public and shared understandings are a necessary starting point. With narrative, as discussed in detail in Chapter 4, we see this most clearly with the structuring effects of socially accepted, but often unnoticed, metanarratives and masterplots. Students, for example, narrate and comprehend their experience of studying at universities in relation to pre-​existing masterplots of a ‘normal’ student trajectory. This in turn shapes the way that they are-​in-​the-​world with other students, academic and professional staff, non-​ students, and so on. Metanarratives of freedom, democracy and nationalism provide the necessary ground for participating in independence protests in Catalonia by creating the possibility of the kind of being-​with-​others needed to collaborate with large numbers of otherwise unknown people and for the notion of national self-​determination to come into view as an existential possibility. Both masterplots and metanarratives provide publicly available roles, as parents, lecturers, members of juries, friends, and so on, which can in principle be taken up by anybody. This leads Heidegger to argue that ‘initially, factical Dasein is in the with-​world, discovered in an average way’ (Heidegger 2010: 125). We may take up those possibilities in ways which are uniquely our own, but we first encounter them as part of our being-​with-​others. The primacy of the public to the individual can also be seen by returning to the idea of telling [rede]. Telling, as discussed above, encompasses both articulating joints (i.e. encountering happenings as discrete events) and communicating with others.This act of communication, however, should not be understood as representation but rather as a way of sharing with another person a way of encountering an

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element of a shared world which has been made available to us through our own unique position in the world. As Heidegger puts it, telling is: a letting someone see with us what has been pointed out in its definite character. Letting someone see with us shares with others the being pointed out in its definiteness. What is ‘shared’ is the being towards that which has been pointed out. (Heidegger 2010: 150) To relate it directly to narrative, telling a story of my own experience to another person is a way of sharing with that person what an experience was like from a perspective which is uniquely my own. Nonetheless, both the world within which the experience took place and the reference points for my own experience are shared. There is, therefore, no clear movement from internal to external, individual to social, but both are intertwined from the outset through the sociality of the world. Storytelling is inherently interactional and sharing stories with one another is a key way of performing phatic communication, focused on the establishment and maintenance of relationships (Ochs and Capps 2001). Storytelling is also frequently collective –​to collaborate with other people in telling a story, for example by connectively narrating political events on Twitter (Meraz and Papacharissi 2013; Siapera 2013), is to define a way of being-​with them. Stories, moreover, are always about a shared world. Heidegger emphasises that the world may be disclosed to, and thus experienced by, different people in different ways but there is nonetheless ultimately a common world rather than a plurality of individual worlds: ‘the surrounding world is different in a certain way for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world’ (Heidegger 1982: 164). The inseparability of the world and ontological existence (as being-​in-​the-​world) means that whenever a story discloses some part of the world in a new way, or even if it reinforces the way an element of the world has already been disclosed, this also has a bearing on our relationships with others. This is true even in cases which seem highly individual. I might, for example, reflect on my day after returning home from work through a storied recollection of the things that happened and their relationships to one another. Even if the sole emphasis lay on my own personal experiences, and the only interlocutor was myself, the story would nonetheless ultimately be concerned with my experience of, and being-​in, a shared world. More broadly, being-​ with-​ others remains a temporal type of existence characterised by thrownness, attunement and projection.We are not thrown, attuned and do not project solely as individuals but with others. Prethematically, to participate in pro-​independence demonstrations in Catalonia was to be thrown into circumstances larger than the individual, to share a mode of attunement with other protestors and to exist in relation to future possibilities with a collective rather than an individual subject. Many people were thrown into the world in such a way as to make the emergence of the apparent necessity of protests a possibility; attuned to make the specific mode of being required for mass action available; and projecting

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towards future states bearing primarily on whole communities rather than individuals. In other words, they were in a common narrative as a way of being-​with each other. This narrative was again based on the unity of past, present and future. The existential possibility of engaging in mass, peaceful protests did not appear ex nihilo but was a taking up, and modification of, existing, publicly available ways of being, made available to individual participants primarily through shared narratives of previous protests and common understandings of history. In the central importance of desired future states, the narratives on which the protests were built also had the relationship of current protestors to future, as yet unknown, Catalan citizens as a central theme. Narrative enables the ‘there’ itself to be shared. Narratives, as ways of grasping being-​with-​others as a temporal unity, need not be explicitly recognised as such by participants. Nonetheless, storytelling also enables prethematic being-​with-​others to be thematised and brought explicitly into view. In an article published in The Guardian in December 2017, for example, the Catalan civic leader Jordi Cuixart (2017) tells a story which historically contextualises the protests of that time and makes predictions about their possible outcomes. In so doing, he also thematises elements of the Dasein-​with of participants in the protests, explicitly describing the circumstances into which they were thrown (emphasising close interconnections between Catalan and Spanish people as well as the repression of Catalonia by the Madrid government), their attunement (‘firm’ commitment, peaceful rather than angry) and contrasting future possible relationships between people (dialogue, peace and democracy or ‘dire economic, political and social consequences’). The account is presented partly in terms of individual experience but primarily in terms of collective ways of being-​in-​ the-​world and the relationships between collective selves –​that is, the Catalan people –​and collective others –​other Catalan protestors, Spaniards, members of the European Union, the Spanish government. Narrative can also disclose alternative ways of being-​with-​others due to the power of stories to open ‘the kingdom of the as if’ (Ricoeur 1984: 64).The Egyptian Uprising of 2011, for example, was accompanied by an explosion of creative and cultural production. Much of this activity had an explicitly narrative focus as participants in the uprising sought to both re-​examine the country’s past and explore its possible future, with regard to the reconfiguration of Egyptian society and the changed ways of being-​with-​others that this would entail.16 This meant imagining ways of being-​with-​others in the future and how it might have been possible to be-​with-​others if history were to have been different. The ecstatic unity of temporal being means that to project new ways of being-​with-​others in the future, or imagined alternative presents, through creative and collective acts of storytelling is also to disclose what it means to be in the present in new ways. Ahdaf Soueif, for example, powerfully describes, in her account of the early days of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012) how the collective Dasein of protestors changed radically according to their shifting perceptions of future possibilities and likely outcomes. She highlights on multiple occasions long discussions among protestors of what would need to happen in the future, telling

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anticipatory narratives of events that never came to pass, but nonetheless created new possibilities in the present.

Defining narrative The preceding discussion has offered a preliminary analysis of narrative as a way of knowing and being-​in the world. It is now necessary to turn our attention towards the features that allow stories to come into view as stories rather than descriptions, databases, poems and so on. It is possible in principle to approach a wide range of things in the world in terms of narrative but, clearly, some things are more readily comprehended through narrative than others. This idea is found in contemporary narratology where it is common to speak of ‘narrativity’, rather than a clear narrative/​non-​narrative divide (Fludernik 1996; Wolf 2002; Herman 2009). Narrative is thus viewed as a ‘fuzzy’ (Ochs and Capps 2001) or ‘prototypical phenomenon’ (Wolf 2014) on the basis that things may exhibit ‘strong’ narrativity, such as a fairytale, or ‘weak’ narrativity, such as a painting which can sustain but does not demand a narrative interpretation (Wolf 2003). The location of this ‘prototype’ is much debated by narrative scholars. In much early narratology, the implicit prototype was literary narratives of the kind found in novels (Todorov and Weinstein 1969; Barthes 1975a); for Ochs and Capps (2001) it is the stories produced through daily interactions; for Fludernik (1996) and Wolf (2003) it is storytelling as an acquired and culturally specific mode of meta-​cognition. In my view, all of these views are in a sense correct but also miss something important in failing to recognise the grounding of these different thematic modes of story within narrative as a prethematic way of being-​in-​the-​world. I suggest, therefore, that to identify factical narratives is to ask to what extent they share characteristics of prethematic narrativity as a way of being. From this starting point, I consider there to be four essential features: temporal and spatial specificity; relationality; figuration; and a sense of an ending.

Temporal and spatial specificity Narratives are temporally and spatially specific in two important ways. First, stories deal with occurrences taking place in specific times and places rather than abstract relationships. If we return to Cuixart’s article calling for an end to the imprisonment of Catalan independence activists, he grounds his narrative account in temporally and spatially specific occurrences: my mother emigrated from Murcia, a Spanish province, and my father was born in Badalona … I have been in prison for 50 days now … we are deprived of our freedom for having made use of our right to free expression and demonstration … the repressive spiral of the Spanish government has extended to the members of the government of the Generalitat. (Cuixart 2017)

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This specificity is the most significant factor distinguishing the narrative mode from ‘logico-​mathematical’ (Polkinghorne 1988) approaches grounded in universal laws. As Mink summarises: On the one hand we have all the occurrences of the world in their concrete particularity, on the other we have an ideally theoretical understanding of those occurrences that would treat each as nothing other than a replicable instance of a systematically interconnected set of generalisations. (Mink 2001: 213–​4) Even if in practice maintaining a clear distinction between these modes is not always simple, and the two main modes bleed into one another, specific happenings in specific places remain at the heart of narrative. Second, and equally significantly, stories are always told and interpreted within ‘particular historical, institutional, and interactional contexts’ (Ewick and Silbey 1995: 206). In more Heideggerian terms, stories are not only concerned with a ‘there’ but are produced and interpreted from a specific ‘there’ which constitutes part of its basic makeup.

Relationality Stories are intrinsically relational in three ways: individual stories are built of related elements; narratives always exist in relation to other narratives; storytelling is a worldly activity and is only possible in relation to the world. The narrative significance of any event can only be recognised by considering it in the context of other elements of the story. Donald Trump’s accession to the US presidency in 2017 means very different things depending on whether it is understood in terms of a restoration of American greatness or a fundamental challenge to a rules-​ based global order. Furthermore, it means that changing one part of a story has implications for the significance of the other parts. The acceptability of alleged Russian interference in the election that brought Trump to power might be viewed very differently depending on whether Trump is deemed to have been successful in making America great again or not. Second, all stories are produced and interpreted in relation to other stories. In one sense, this means that we draw on pre-​existing models for storytelling during narration, such as masterplots and metanarratives (discussed in Chapter 4). Any account of a revolution cannot help but be made in relation to masterplots of revolutions, even if storytellers strive to emphasise the differences between the specific events under narration and more generic ways of understanding, as, for example, in the emphasis on the ‘leaderless’ protest movements of the early 2010s in contrast to the central role of charismatic leaders in earlier masterplots of revolution. But stories are also always produced and interpreted in relation to specific other stories. As discussed in Chapter 2, much of the power of Trump’s claim to be making America great again rests on its juxtaposition with a narrative of decline. Without this other narrative as a counterpoint, it would make little sense. As this

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broader narrative environment shifts, so too do the meanings of individual stories. Consider, for example, how naïve accounts of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 as a ‘Facebook Revolution’ now appear, as the broader narrative context has shifted from emphasising social media as an emancipatory tool towards an environment where far more pessimistic views prevail. Accounts of the 2011 Revolution which inspired hope in 2012 now almost inevitably feel tragic, armed as we are with (narratively structured) knowledge of what ultimately came to pass. Finally, stories are told in relation to the world and thus also depend on the articulation of the world through non-​narrative forms of understanding. Facebook’s worldly significance, for example, is defined by the narratives of its relationships to social and political change told about it; its way of being is also shaped by structural relationships with other social media platforms, the way that concepts such as privacy and communication are understood and so on. As the way that the world is articulated and disclosed changes over time, so the stories that can and must be told about it. The role of social media in the spread of ‘fake news’, for example, only became expressible and comprehensible through narrative once the concept of ‘fake news’ itself had emerged, as distinct from earlier notions such as misinformation or ‘bullshit’ (Frankfurt 2005). In the same way, stories that have been previously told must be reinterpreted as the world is re-​articulated. It is scarcely possible, for example, to read Frankfurt’s work today, with its implicit narrative of cultural change, without reference to the contemporary notion of fake news.

Figuration Stories are not random collections of related elements but are structured ways of grasping together. Ricoeur (1984), as well as others (Polkinghorne 1991; White 2001), argue that this structure is the result of ‘emplotment’ or ‘selective appropriation’ (Somers and Gibson 1994). Consequently, narratives are understood as characterised by ‘boundedness, demarcation, the drawing of lines to mark off and order’ (Brooks 1984: 12) and storytelling as ‘grouping … [events] together with others, and ruling some out as lacking relevance’ (Danto 1985: 132). Exclusion, then, is at the heart of narrative. Narratives, with their propensity for cutting out noise, help to make the world comprehensible by enabling appraisals of relevance which cut down complexity, eliminating the need to integrate all available information into a single, comprehensive interpretation.17 This emphasis on selection has become more important than ever as the volume of data available has increased –​ turn of the century accounts of media ‘supersaturation’ (Gitlin 2001), for example, seem quaint when viewed in the light of today’s hyper cluttered mediascape. To tell a story, then, is to grasp together some events, but not all possible events and certainly not in all possible ways. The concept of emplotment works well with thematic storytelling, such as that of the historian, politician or journalist where stories are consciously constructed and deliberate choices are made about what is to be included and how it is to be presented. It is more problematic with prethematic narrative, however, as it implies

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that to interpret narratively is to purposefully give a plot to a set of events which do not, in the first instance, have one. To see narrative interpretation as necessarily proceeding in this way, grounded in deliberate decisions about form and content is, I think, wrong for the reasons presented in the first half of the chapter; it takes thematic hermeneutic activity as a starting point rather than nonthematic and everyday ‘absorbed’, concernful activity in which events are, for the most part, already emplotted as first encountered, before any thematic emplotment takes place. It also, in my view, over-​emphasises freely made choices without recognising the myriad ways in which narrative production and reception are forestructured. Instead of emplotment, I prefer to speak of ‘figuration’ for two main reasons. First, Ricoeur’s account of ‘threefold mimesis’ (Ricoeur 1984) built on prefiguration, configuration and refiguration shows that narrative structure derives not only from thematic configuration (i.e. emplotment), but also from the way that stories are prefigured by the context in which they are told and refigured when interpreted. In nonthematic storytelling, on the other hand, configuration takes place through ‘taking as’ without being a conscious process at all. The vaguer term figuration, then, is my attempt to capture these varied sources of structure, of which thematic emplotment is only one. Furthermore, the term connotes recent work in figuration theory (Couldry and Hepp 2017; Hepp, Breiter and Hasebrink 2018). Figurations, from this perspective, are ‘more or less durable social formations of humans’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 63), the boundaries of which ‘are defined by the shared meaning that the individuals involved produce through their interrelated social practices, which is also the basis of their mutual orientation to each other’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 63). They are not static objects but rather ‘formed, and reformed, in an open-​ended process’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 63) and are irreducibly social. As such, there are clear parallels between the understanding of figurations advanced by Couldry and Hepp and the approach to narrative I have sought to elaborate in this chapter. Stories, like Couldry and Hepp’s figurations, both generate and constrain possibilities; have a specific form while remaining fluid; are specific rather than abstract; and are shaped by both human agency and objective structures.

Sense of an ending Aristotle famously said that stories have a beginning, middle and end. Of the three, it is the notion of endings, and of narrative closure, that has provoked the strongest response amongst theorists (Burke 1950; Kermode 1967;White 1973; Brooks 1984; Ricoeur 1984; Benjamin 2006). Macintyre argues that ‘there is no present which is not informed by some image of some future and an image of the future which always presents itself in the form of a telos’ (1985: 215). Kermode is stronger still and draws a direct link between the Western preference for stories with endings and the central, meaning giving function of apocalypse in Christianity, arguing that this ‘end-​domination’ has ‘passed into our consciousness, and modified our attitudes to historical pattern’ (Kermode 1967: 14). Heidegger, on the other hand, argues that

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being-​toward-​death is a central feature of all human existence on the basis that death is the sole point of absolute closure within human existence. Against this position others, often working from more sociologically informed perspectives, have argued that much traditional narrative theory has an excessive emphasis on endings, teleology and closure (Ochs and Capps 2001; Mishler 2006; Page 2012). Page, making specific reference to the fragmented narrative of social media, highlights: As the corpus of stories continues to grow beyond literary and conversational contexts, the primacy of completed, teleologically focused narrative progression appears less like a norm from which all other narratives can be compared and more like a subtype of narrative associated with assumptions of artifice and artistic control. (Page 2012: 196) Carroll, speaking about narrative more broadly, describes closure as ‘recurring, though scarcely invariant’, arguing: soap operas and national histories, along with many other narrative genres, are still narratives, though they are frequently bereft of closure ‒ not because they intend closure but fail to achieve it, but rather because closure is not always apposite in narratives. Thus, although closure is a recurring feature of some, even a great many, narratives, closure is not a feature of all narratives. (Carroll 2007: 1) From this perspective, to stress the importance of endings is to over-​emphasise certain kinds of story, particularly literary ones, at the expense of other more open-​ ended types of storytelling. Journalistic reporting, for example, frequently involves giving both descriptive and explanatory accounts of events which are ongoing. There is no obvious closure in this case, yet it would seem absurd to conclude that news reports, consequently, cannot be narratives. The question raised by such perspectives is whether the absence of clear narrative closure, whether the result of a deliberate choice by a storyteller or ongoing uncertainty as to future events, undermines the importance of teleology as such. I would argue that it does not. Ambiguous endings in literature derive their power not by lacking a conclusion but by implying multiple possible endings. Through the functioning of relationality, these differences of outcome can have drastic implications for the meaning of previously presented elements of the story. They thus remain end determined, even if the ending is uncertain. The end determination of narrative, moreover, does not await the arrival of the reader at the end of the text. Interpretation proceeds by an ongoing process of hypothesis formation as the information available is understood in relation to putative wholes to contain and explain the significance of other elements (Eco 1979: 31–​33; Bruner 1991: 8). This provides provisional closure which allows for, albeit temporary, determinations

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of meaning. Interpretation is quasi-​retrospective, operating in the ‘future perfect’ (Schutz 1967) with interpreters projecting into the future in order to speculatively look back on things which have yet to happen. In many cases our initial beliefs about what will subsequently happen are confounded, whether we are reading a novel or interpreting unfolding political events. This requires adjustment to the putative whole, reconfiguring the significance of the constituent elements. But the fact that the projected conclusion may shift does not undermine the importance of endings. Conclusions, therefore, are essential even though they often remain provisional. Whether the anticipated end actually comes to pass or not has comparatively little impact on its meaning giving power: as Kermode (1967: 16) argues, the fact that the apocalypse has yet to actually happen matters little to those who believe in it. Nonetheless, the term ‘conclusion’ implies something more decisive than the provisional endings with which we must often be satisfied. It is for this reason that I prefer Kermode’s relatively equivocal ‘sense of an ending’ which maintains the importance of conclusions without requiring that they come clearly into view. This view is particularly apt, I argue in the chapters which follow, in contexts of fragmented narration: Chapter 2 highlights that even textual conclusions, in the basic sense of knowing when we have arrived at the end of the ‘text’, are largely absent in fragmentary social media storytelling; Chapter 3 argues that fragmentation creates the possibility of many different endings co-​existing simultaneously, shattering simple end determination; Chapter 4 argues that the anxiety caused by this indeterminacy may lead interpreters to ‘flee’ to clear conclusions, even where they are not specified by texts themselves.

Conclusion My goal in this chapter was to lay the theoretical foundations upon which the subsequent chapters are based. To that end, I sought to address what it is that narratives do and how they are to be defined. To that end, I argued that narrative, and storytelling as a practice, can be usefully understood in terms of both epistemology and ontology. With regard to epistemology, I argued that narrative provides a way of ‘grasping together’, allowing for multiple happenings to be understood as complex wholes, and that storytelling therefore constitutes an important way of knowing. Drawing on hermeneutics, I argued that this ‘grasping together’ can be both thematic and prethematic. It is thematic when a story is explicitly told, bringing causal relationships and overall narrative structure directly into view. It is prethematic when constellations of happenings are grasped together but without the nature of the grasping being readily apparent. While it is important to maintain this distinction, I argued, in line with Carr and Ricoeur, that both thematic and prethematic understanding through narrative rest on the same foundations. In the section dedicated to ontology, I argued that those foundations lie in the narrative-​ like structures of temporal, ontological being. From this perspective, narrative structure is not to be understood as something artificially imposed upon

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an otherwise unstoried world, but rather a development, and at times a thematisation, of the incipient temporality and relationality of ontological being. The second part aimed to draw out the features common to both thematic and prethematic narrative. There were two reasons for doing this: first, to demarcate the limits of narrative; second, to produce something approaching an analytical toolkit for use in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 which, in different ways, explore how, in fragmented contexts, temporally and spatially specific happenings are figured into relational wholes with a sense of an ending.

Notes 1 Ricoeur (1988: 67) highlights that Heidegger’s own account of human existence is not always successful in doing this, and at times feels more like a window into Heidegger’s own way of being rather than necessarily a universal account of being. 2 Brockmeier and Meretoja (2014) suggest this may be due to the longstanding influence of structuralism in narratology which does not readily mesh with the basic assumptions of hermeneutics. 3 See, for example, Part II of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (1984) for a detailed examination of the array of approaches to the role of narrative in the production of historical knowledge. 4 Merleau-​Ponty uses reasoning close to this to argue that, therefore, ‘the very notion of event has no place in the objective world’ (Merleau-​Ponty 2012: 433). 5 https://​twitter.com/​realDonaldTrump/​status/​1194415355592093698?s=20 6 This emphasises that all understanding of the unknown is inevitably grounded in the known. This idea is explored in depth in Chapter 4. 7 A parallel can be drawn here with Hutchby’s (2001: 444) approach to technical affordances which similarly proposes ‘an approach to the study of technologies and social life which offers a reconciliation between the opposing poles of constructivism and realism’. 8 Shaw (2017) argues convincingly, nonetheless, for the value of continuing to foreground intentions in the design of platforms themselves. 9 Kittler argues that it is only with Heidegger’s relational ontology that it becomes possible to develop an ontology of the media by allowing us to move beyond a tradition which ‘deals only with things, their matter and form, but not with relations between things in time and space’ (Kittler 2009: 24). 10 Heidegger refers to acts such as these using a range of terms which become quickly baffling in translation such as the ‘in-​order-​to’, ‘towards-​which’, ‘with-​which’, ‘for-​the-​ sake-​of-​which’ (Dreyfus 1990: 92). This level of granularity is (thankfully) not necessary for the present discussion. 11 ‘Dasein’, discussed further below, is the term Heidegger uses to refer to the specifically human way of existing. 12 Heidegger argues that the very possibility of history as a thematic activity is grounded in the nonthematic historicity of everyday being (Heidegger 2010: 355–​84). 13 This differs markedly from approaches such as that put forward by Manovich in which ‘the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records’ (Manovich 2001: 219). 14 Heidegger’s excessively individualistic focus has been critiqued by a number of scholars. Ricoeur (1980) argues that Heidegger’s emphasis on individual being-​towards-​death causes him to understate the significance of ‘communal destiny’; Kompridis (2006)

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and Scannell (2014) challenge in different ways the ‘soloistic’ tendencies of Heidegger’s account of authenticity, arguing it is only possible to be authentic with others; Lévinas (1969), responding to Heidegger, argued that a fundamental account of ontology should be grounded in ethics understood as being with others. 15 Several of these ideas have since been developed by others, including Olafson (1998) and Nancy (2000). 16 See Baker (2016) and Kendall (2015) for examples of cultural production doing this. 17 In this sense, it follows the opposite logic to that of the database, as I have argued elsewhere (Sadler 2018).

2 TELLING STORIES WITH FRAGMENTS Vertical, horizontal and ambient narrative

Abstract Chapter 2 explores how stories can be told through fragments, arguing that a range of narrative approaches are available to storytellers. The first part of the chapter argues that some narrative practices on Twitter closely resemble chronicles –​chronologically ordered lists of events which do not constitute cohesive wholes. Drawing on Heidegger and Croce, I propose that this must be understood as a distinct rhetorical strategy based in the voiding of the narrativity inherent to ordinary, storied existence. The second part examines three major approaches to storytelling through fragments. In vertical storytelling, multiple fragments gradually accumulate over time into something approaching a traditional text. In horizontal storytelling, individual fragments imply complex wholes without relying on specific other fragments. In ambient storytelling, many users contribute to large but loosely defined narrative constellations.

Chapter 1 examined abstract questions of what narratives are and what they do. The focus here, on the other hand, is on thematic storytelling practices, examining what fragmented narratives actually look like and the different approaches to telling stories through fragments. The first part draws on the distinction made in historiography between narrative and ‘chronicle’ to assess the extent to which it makes sense to speak of narrative at all in this context, with the connotations that brings of structured wholeness. I ask to what extent it is more useful to think in terms of chronicles, understood as chronologically ordered lists of happenings which nonetheless exhibit relatively weak narrativity. I argue that fragmentation almost inevitably causes narratives to look more like chronicles, a tendency further enhanced

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by a cultural emphasis on immediacy. I propose, nonetheless, that chronicle is but one possible response to this and that significant space remains for narrative. Where we do see chronicles, moreover, I argue that they do not represent a rawer version of narrative, closer to the way we ordinarily live, but rather a distinct rhetorical strategy, grounded in the privation of narrativity from everyday storied experience. The second part examines narrative directly and the possibilities open to storytellers for figuring fragments into narrative wholes. I propose there are, broadly speaking, three ways of doing this in social media contexts:‘vertical’,‘horizontal’ and ‘ambient’ storytelling. Vertical storytelling, I suggest, is characterised by the serial, episodic presentation of story elements which gradually accumulate into something approximating a traditional narrative. Horizontal storytelling is defined by the implication of other non-​explicit story elements requiring significant creative input from readers. This is similar to, but also significantly extends, the role of implicature in narrative in earlier storytelling forms. Ambient storytelling, finally, is characterised by many individuals contributing in small ways to larger, connected stories but in ways which cannot be clearly foreseen or controlled. All three approaches, I argue, remain grounded in the articulation of ways of ‘grasping together’ yet relate to temporality in notably different ways.

Narrative and chronicle The starting point for this book is that much social media activity can be usefully understood as storytelling, a view also expressed in a growing range of publications (Couldry 2008; Page 2012; 2018; Peys 2012; Chadwick 2013; Meraz and Papacharissi 2013; Page, Harper and Frobenius 2013; ). While this point is frequently taken for granted, it nonetheless warrants further investigation. I have previously argued (Sadler 2018) that social media storytelling is in some ways closer to chronicle than narrative on the basis that we do not always see all the features of narrativity described in Chapter 1: relationality (the elements of narratives derive their significance from their relationships with each other and with other stories); temporal and spatial specificity (narratives deal with particular happenings taking place at specific times and in specific places); figuration (narratives set story elements into relationships with one another); a sense of an ending (projection towards some kind of conclusion). Consider the following tweets posted by the Egyptian journalist and activist Hossam el-​Hamalawy (@3arabawy): @3arabawy ‫ وزير الخارجية يتقدم باستقالته من منصبه‬:‫ مصادر‬http://​almasryalyoum.com/​node/​ 1905301 [sources: Minister of Foreign Affairs resigns his position] http://​almasryalyoum. com/​node/​1905301] 03:08. 02/​07/​20131

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@3arabawy ‫العشرات من أنصار مرسي يهاجمون المعارضين المعتصمين في أكتوبر واإلسماعيلية ووالمحلة‬ ‫ والسويس‬http://​shar.es/​AoOeo [dozens of Morsi supporters attack opposition in sit-​in protests on 6th of October City, Ismailia, Mahalla, and Suez http://​shar.es/​AoOeo] 03:02, 02/​07/​20132 @3arabawy ‫ اقتحام حزب الوسط بالمقطم وإتالف محتوياته‬http://​youtu.be/​To8QavC4EOw [storming of al-​Wasat Party office in Muqattam and destruction of its contents http://​youtu.be/​To8QavC4EOw] 22:51, 01/​07/​20133 @3arabawy ‫ إشتباكات بين المتظاهرين واالخوان ببني سويف‬http://​youtu.be/​QqwZFJwePOQ [clashes between demonstrators and Muslim Brotherhood in Beni Suef http://​youtu.be/​QqwZFJwePOQ] 22:51, 01/​07/​20134 @3arabawy Military source tells @Shorouk_​News numbers of protesters in the streets of Egypt are as high as 17 million today! http://​ow.ly/​mwz8g:) 22:19, 30/​06/​20135 These examples report temporally and spatially specific happenings and, if read together, figure them into chronological relationships. Nonetheless, there is no obvious sense of an ending or explicit telos towards which they project or defined whole within which to interpret them. Consequently, they seem much closer to the form described by historiographers as ‘chronicle’ than to narrative, as the concept is understood here. The narrative/​chronicle distinction has been defined by historiographers in different ways. Broadly speaking, however, narratives are understood as setting events into logical and causal relationships with one another allowing for their comprehension as a whole. A ‘chronicle’, on the other hand, is a mere listing of events in such a way as to show their chronological sequence but without making explicit statements about their logical or causal interconnectedness or implying that they form a significant whole. As White puts it, in a chronicle the ‘event is simply “there” as an element of a series; it does not “function” as a story element’ (White 1973: 7). Strictly speaking, we might say that chronicles do not enumerate ‘events’ at all, but only happenings since ‘the event, as it unfolds, has being-​ towards-​its-​end as its defining forward momentum in time’ (Scannell 2014: 94). Chronicles strive to offer ‘a straightforward statement of what occurred’ while narrative provides ‘an account of them which [brings] out their connections’ (Walsh 1958: 480); while a story must offer some degree of closure, a chronicle

Telling stories with fragments  45

‘does not so much conclude as simply terminate’ (White 1980: 20). Narratives must have a ‘sense of an ending’ and are defined by finitude. Chronicles, on the other hand, are capable, in principle, of indefinite extension and are defined by infinitude. In practice, the distinction is often more difficult to draw. All chronicles are constructed according to some criteria of relevance which determine which events should be included and excluded (Danto 1985; White 1980). The chronological presentation of events is itself culturally specific and conventional, already a way of ‘grasping together’ sets of events as some kind of whole (Ricoeur 1984; White 1987: 173; Sternberg 1990; Bird and Dardenne 1997) since in practice chronicles are unavoidably finite. Consequently, ‘it is possible to find elements of chronicle in the most sophisticated history [i.e. narrative], and of history proper in the most primitive chronicle’ (Walsh 1958: 482). In the tweets from el-​Hamalaway cited above, we can see an emphasis on reporting major political events rather than, for example, referring to his own personal experiences, showing that criteria of inclusion and exclusion have been applied. The fact that the events reported all relate to the ongoing protests and Egyptian Revolution at least hint at a larger whole which would provide the context for the interpretation of each individual happening. Nonetheless, the fact that 100 per cent narrative and 100 per cent chronicle may be logical possibilities but practical impossibilities does not preclude ‘contrasting narrative which is relatively plain [i.e. chronicle-​like] with narrative which is relatively significant [i.e.“narrative-​like” in the sense proposed here]’ (Walsh 1958: 482). Consequently, it does not seem unreasonable to view tweets such as these as grounded more strongly in the logic of the chronicle than of prototypical narrative. It is tempting to see this as a consequence of Twitter’s technical affordances. From its launch in 2006 until November 2017 individual tweets were limited to a maximum of 140 characters. This made it difficult to tell stories exhibiting all the features of narrativity mentioned above within a single tweet. Before the introduction of the thread feature in December 2017, it was also difficult to bind multiple tweets together to present them to readers as unified wholes, thus enforcing fragmentation. Although the emphasis on reverse-​chronological sequencing has weakened in recent years on platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, the ongoing dominance of timelines and emphasis on ‘what’s happening now’ also come close to the logic of the chronicle. Perhaps, then, Twitter and social media which favour very small chunks of information inherently favour the production of chronicles rather than narratives. While technical affordances are undoubtedly important, this argument is ultimately unconvincing. Work in affordance theory shows that affordances may define a range of possibilities but do not mechanistically determine what users actually do (Hutchby 2001; Nagy and Neff 2015; Shaw 2017). Consider, for example, the following, also posted by el-​Hamalawy: @3arabawy R.I.P. Muslim Brotherhood 1928–​2013. 03:22, 01/​07/​20136

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In just a few words, this tweet neatly encapsulates all four dimensions of narrativity: it figures events into a chronological and causal sequence and has a clear sense of an ending, by anticipating a, at the time still indeterminate, future telos in what he saw as the Brotherhood’s imminent downfall. The approach to storytelling on which this relies is discussed in detail in the second part of the chapter but for now the key point is that the production of chronicles is not an inevitable consequence of Twitter’s technical affordances. An alternative explanation is to ground this type of chronicling in the way that events were experienced in the moment, as a kind of stream of consciousness rather than as a result of a retrospective sensemaking process. This idea can be found in the emphasis on immediacy in much writing on social media. Meikle argues that constant updates result in an ‘endlessly updated moment of now [which] places new events in a discontinuous sequence’ (Meikle 2016: 75). Page similarly argues that the linguistic strategies used on Twitter give rise ‘to a sense of an ongoing present in which the narrative tweets are continuously situated. Any sense of retrospection is diminished, as each episode is received within the context of an ever-​present now’ (Page 2012: 103). Papacharissi and de Oliveira (2012) cite the importance of ‘instantaneity’ in Twitter reporting of the Egyptian Uprising, with users providing constant, in-​the-​moment updates. Hermida (2013: 298), meanwhile, argues that the ‘event-​based’ and ‘event-​driven’ nature of Twitter ‘actively encourages the here and now’. Although not explicitly stated, the idea underpinning these perspectives seems to be that this style of communication is pre-​narrative, an expression of point-​like experiences which have yet to be ordered, controlled and grasped together through the act of storytelling. This argument is very close to the idea that chronicles are closer to our ordinary experiences of the world than are narratives, a kind of halfway house between the scattered and fragmented experiences of daily life and the order and cohesion of narrative proper (White 1980). As I attempted to show in Chapter 1, this view is problematic: we prethematically exist in, and through, narrative which inheres in human action (Ricoeur 1984), historicity (Carr 1986) and our relations to tradition (Macintyre 1985). Happenings, I proposed, are encountered as meaningful events in the first instance and stories should not be seen as grafted on to a world which is initially objectively present but meaningless, as a series of knife-​edge nows. It is not impossible to encounter and present events as point-​like, but to do this requires a privative act of ‘deworlding’ (Heidegger 2010: 65) to void them of their significance and relevance.This voiding is itself, at best, only partial since to tell a chronicle is at the least to anticipate future stories (Carr 1986: 90). Chronicle, then, must be seen as a specific discursive strategy rather than as simply mimetic of the human experience of time. Further support for this idea can be found in Croce’s notion that the difference between narrative and chronicle is not principally a matter a form, but a question of ‘different spiritual attitudes’ (Croce 1921: 21). For Croce, to chronicle is to be indifferent to the events thus related, and to separate them from contemporary application and needs. Since we always live in terms of our current situation, he concludes that ‘dead’ chronicle is the residue of ‘living’ history/​narrative (Croce

Telling stories with fragments  47

1921: 20), rather than something more fundamental and basic. Seen from this perspective, chronicle-​like reporting, in which events are relayed in strict chronological sequence and without explicit links between the events discussed, seems less like a sort of pre-​interpretive reporting of events as they are first encountered and more like a deliberate attempt to remove, at least partially, the narrative embedding of the events reported as they were first perceived. In other words, they seem closer to attempts to turn living narratives, regarding issues of great importance to their tellers’ lives, into something more closely approximating dead chronicles by removing aspects of narrativity. This might be partly explained in terms of a shift in emphasis within journalistic practice from explaining to description –​saying what happened but leaving questions of why and what it means to readers. As Bruns describes it, moving away from making ‘sense of the world for us by providing ready-​made, packaged, universally acceptable, and “complete” interpretations of news events’ and towards enabling us ‘to make sense of the world for ourselves’ by providing information on the basis of which to draw our own conclusions (Bruns 2005: 58). As the growth of social media has blurred the lines between professional and citizen journalists, it is not surprising for elements of professional practice to have had wider influence. Adopting the chronicle form may also be a rhetorical strategy. The narrative style represented by the chronicle has long been connected to the ideal of objectivity in both history (e.g. Danto 1985; Levine and Malpas 1994) and journalism, as a way of providing ‘just the facts’ (e.g. Mindich 1998; Muñoz-​Torres 2012), even as the possibility of objectivity in either field has been the subject of intense debate. To chronicle, then, can also be seen as a bid for credibility, to encourage readers to take the information presented as objective description rather than subjective interpretation. This is particularly important in contentious, polarised and allegedly ‘post-​truth’ contexts such as those under consideration here, in which objectivity, however illusory, is particularly prized. The link between chronicle and perceived objectivity, moreover, may have been particularly important for Egyptian activists writing in English for an international audience to maintain their credibility as reliable sources of information. That many held strong views about the events being reported is not in doubt, as evidenced in more overtly narrative statements mixed in with chronicle-​like reporting. For example: @zeinobia People are calling each other on the phone, there are panic and fear that this brotherhood is sending the country to civil war hell 12:08, 03/​07/​20137 @Sandmonkey In 2011, Egypt rose against Autocracy, in 2013 It is rising against Theocracy … History, either way, is getting made today … 08:34, 30/​06/​20138

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@Gsquare86 ‫انتظروا‬..‫الجيش عاوز ينجز ويحمي مصالحه قبل ما الثورة تنجح ده معنى الخطاب الحقيقي‬ !‫النصر قريب‬ [the army wants to get finished and protect its interests before the revolution succeeds, that’s the real meaning of the statement.. expect victory soon!] 4:24, 01/​07/​20139 These users as English-​language mediators of the uprising accrued large followings by being ‘crowdsourced to prominence’ (Meraz and Papacharissi 2013) as well as being canonised by Western media outlets,10 largely on the basis that they were reliable chroniclers of unfolding events. Nonetheless, the demand to appear reliable and authoritative had to be balanced with a need to attract and hold attention in a very crowded environment. This parallels the tensions of journalistic writing more broadly in which ‘the more “objective” they [journalists] are, the more unreadable they become; while the better storytellers they are, the more readers will respond, and the more they fear they are betraying their ideals’ (Bird and Dardenne 1997: 343). To maintain their legitimacy, therefore, meant blending elements of descriptive, ‘dead’ chronicles with more overtly explanatory, ‘living’ narrative.The absence of chronicling from more powerful actors such as Trump and Podemos, on the other hand, may be partly attributable to their different paths to prominence and the fact that they need not rely on being seen as reliable sources of information in order to maintain influence. The narrative/​chronicle distinction, then, offers a useful framework for thinking about storytelling in fragmented contexts. First, providing a stream of snapshot ‘nows’ closely parallels the much older chronicle form. This highlights once again that many of the communication practices seen on new media are less new than they first appear. Second, chronicle-​like storytelling is not a necessary consequence of the technical affordances of sites such as Twitter, which favour atomistic chunks of information, but rather a specific communicative strategy. Third, this strategy should not necessarily be understood as more immediate, less mediated and ‘in the moment’ than traditional narratives since it nonetheless represents a significant departure from our initial encounters with happenings as events characterised by thrownness and projection. To produce a chronicle, even on Twitter, requires a disciplined approach to narration in which linkages between happenings are severed and, to the greatest extent possible, the emphasis is placed on objectively present happenings rather than significant events. Fourth, the preference for narrative or chronicle may also relate to social media’s attention economy, with the different ways in which users rise to prominence and gain access to large audiences significantly influencing the approaches to storytelling which they adopt.

Unstable texts, slippery sjuzhets and fuzzy fabulae In the following section I elaborate what I consider to be three basic orientations to fragmented storytelling: vertical, horizontal and ambient narrative. First, however, it is necessary to briefly introduce the key narratological concepts and terms

Telling stories with fragments  49

employed in my analysis. As discussed in Chapter 1, sequentiality is at the heart of narrative and its explanatory power arises precisely from its ability to account for the relationships between sequentially ordered events. Nonetheless, the order in which events are related need not, and frequently do not, match the order in which they are purported to have actually occurred. Narratologists capture this by distinguishing between ‘fabula’, the order in which events are purported to have actually occurred, and ‘sjuzhet’, the order, and manner, in which they are presented in the story. Manipulating the relationship between fabula and sjuzhet is a mainstay of storytelling as the same fabula can be told through many different sjuzhets. To misquote E. M. Forster’s famous example, ‘the king died and then the queen died of grief ’ can be retold as ‘the Queen died of grief after the death of the king’. In both cases there is no ambiguity regarding the fabula and fact that the king’s death chronologically preceded that of the queen. Yet presenting events out of chronological order enables attention to be drawn to particular elements and interpretation to be influenced by serving ‘to emphasise, to bring about aesthetic or psychological effects, to show various interpretations of an event, to indicate the subtle difference between expectation and realisation, and much else besides’ (Bal 1997: 82). Bal adds a further layer of ‘text’, by which she refers to a ‘finite, structured whole’ which may be comprised of linguistic signs, images, video, physical movement and so on. Text has tended to receive less attention among narratologists over the years than fabula and sjuzhet, presumably due to their emphasis on literary narratives within which textual boundaries can often be easily and intuitively grasped: they begin on the first page of a novel and end on the last. Interpretations may vary greatly from reader to reader, but the words on the page did not. This was also a level over which authors had almost complete control –​they may not have been able to control readers’ responses, but they could control what they would see.There have always been limits to this fixity. Texts may be fixed but they are also always situated within fluid intertextual networks (Derrida 1974; Kristeva 1986). On the internet, it was recognised decades ago that hyperlinks fundamentally challenge overall textual cohesion by connecting parts of webpages to each other in open, ever-​changing networks (Riffaterre 1994). In social media contexts the picture is more complex still. Traditionally, the distinction between text and intertext has been intuitively graspable; the pages connected by hyperlinks are usually relatively discrete.This provided finite units of meaning even if the larger wholes were difficult or impossible to precisely define. Fragments, on the other hand, lack this kind of textual unity. As discussed below, the line between text and intertext can be almost impossible to draw; the bits of information are so small that they are effectively meaningless in isolation. Fragments, by definition, are not situated within finite and structured textual wholes, even as their way of being continues to be defined by their position within meaningful, referential wholes. Writers have far less control when communicating through fragments than they do when writing traditional textual narratives. Individual posts appear mixed together with posts by many others on users’ timelines. The order in which fragments are presented to interpreters may differ greatly from the sjuzhet envisaged by authors. Different interpreters may also encounter the

50  Telling stories with fragments

same fragments in a different sequence due to both the influence of algorithms in determining flows of content and the practice of re-​sharing content. There may be significant differences between: the order in which events really occurred, the order in which events are narrated by storytellers, the order in which they are presented to readers (as influenced by algorithms and gatekeepers), and the order in which they are actually encountered by readers. Finally, different readers may encounter different fragments altogether. Different users follow different people and use different search terms. Social media are ‘ambient’ (Hermida 2014) environments that readers dip in and out of rather than working their way through from start to finish as in a novel. In this context, storytellers cannot control what fragments readers will see, in what order, or how they will be contextualised. Texts themselves become mutable. These issues are not wholly new and to write has always involved opening ‘unforeseeable chains of events, large or small’ (Peters 2015: 278). Political soundbites have always been recontextualised by media organisations that share and amplify them. People did not necessarily read the articles in a newspaper from start to finish, instead choosing their own path through the content contained within. Television news, especially since the rise of 24/​7 news channels in the 1990s, is structured to allow viewers to dip in and out and does not need to be viewed from start to finish to be comprehensible. More content has always been available than it is possible for one person to read. Nonetheless, in the past two decades there has been rapid expansion and acceleration of all three tendencies. Social media platforms have greatly encouraged the production of atomistic content, resulting in far larger overall volumes of increasingly fragmentary content circulating. Recirculating and recontextualising bits of information, once the preserve of media organisations, is now a mainstay of our everyday lives within a ‘redactional society’ (Hartley 2000). Algorithms developed to filter information play an ever-​larger role in determining the way in which content is received, even if it is, in my view, an overstatement to suggest, as Langlois does (2019; 2014), that this also means that they increasingly displace the human in making sense of the world. The three approaches to storytelling analysed below represent different ways of responding to this situation. I do not suggest that they are wholly separate from one another –​on the contrary, the overlap between them will be evident throughout. Approaching them in terms of text, fabula and sjuzhet provides a lens for analysing them from three complementary perspectives. Thinking in terms of text leads to a consideration of the media of expression used to communicate and realise stories, their structures, organisation and boundaries. Exploring sjuzhet draws attention to what is actually said in acts of storytelling and in what ways. Asking about fabula, meanwhile, encourages exploration of the underlying networks of relationships which narratives imply and upon which their power as ways of ‘grasping together’ ultimately rests. My primary contention is that the significant formal differences between them are intimately connected with different ways of encoding and producing temporality and constitute significantly different ways of fulfilling narrative’s basic function as a ‘strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change’ (Herman 2009: 2).

Telling stories with fragments  51

Vertical storytelling I use the term ‘vertical’ storytelling to refer to narratives which are built up through sequentially posted fragments. This type of storytelling, as found on social media, has been previously described as ‘serial’ (Page 2013) due to similarities with older narrative forms such as the serial literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries and contemporary television and radio serials. I prefer the term ‘vertical’, however, since it better reflects the way content is presented on the screen –​as a vertically structured list of fragments rather than as continuous prose.11 It also leaves more space to recognise the varied and ad hoc practices which characterise social media storytelling by avoiding the connotations of orderliness and regularity which the link to older serial forms brings. Vertical storytelling responds to the disruption of text, discussed above, by building up individual fragments into larger units which approximate traditional texts. It can take two main forms. In the first, the stories produced ultimately resemble prototypical, bounded narratives. Consider the following series of tweets posted by the journalist and analyst Bassem Sabry on 2 July 2013: @Bassem_​Sabry 1-​Was just in the Qubba anti Morsi protests. The tv images aren’t describing things fairly 20:13, 02/​07/​201312 @Bassem_​Sabry 2-​Unlike the pro Morsi protests, the anti Morsi protests are fully spontaneous and diverse, families are there and quite celebratory >>> 20:14, 02/​07/​201313 @Bassem_​Sabry 3-​Unlike pro Morsi protests, anti Morsi protestors typically spend some time or so & leave while others get in. The squares aren’t static. 20:15, 02/​07/​201314 @Bassem_​Sabry 4-​There are also many groupings of anti Morsi protestors around Cairo, protesting in the streets in front of shops and clubs and so forth. 20:18, 02/​07/​201315 @Bassem_​Sabry 5-​I have never seen anything like this, not even during February of 2011. This is a genuine popular movement, no organisation whatsoever 20:18, 02/​07/​201316 @Bassem_​Sabry 6-​the general mood around Cairo has pretty much accepted Morsi is gone 20:19, 02/​07/​201317

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The numbers with which each tweet begins clearly indicate the sequence in which they are intended to be read (whether or not they appear on users’ timelines in that order) and unambiguously demarcate the boundaries of the story –​where it begins and ends and which content should be understood as constituting it and which should not. Once the boundaries of the text have been identified, they can be easily read together as a traditional narrative in which the sjuzhet and fabula are also well defined. In this example a set of temporally and spatially specific events are figured into clear relationships with one another, building a coherent fabula with a sense of an ending through the conclusion that Morsi’s departure has been widely accepted around Cairo. As in many bounded narratives, the chronology of the fabula nonetheless differs from that of the sjuzhet, with the fifth tweet jumping back in time to the 2011 protests. This type of storytelling, which shares many features with literary narrative, was unusual in 2013. It has become more widespread since the introduction of the thread feature on Twitter in December 2017 which allows for multiple tweets to be published together as a single text. Their textuality can be further enhanced with external apps such as ‘Thread Reader’18 which present all the tweets within a thread together as a single continuous text. This is important because it points to the ongoing significance of traditional bounded texts, even on highly fragmented platforms like Twitter.Their structure closely matches that of blog posts as described by Hoffman and Eisenlauer: the beginning, middle and end part of virtual narratives is inherently fluid, i.e. potentially open to internal change induced by bloggers and (to some extent) users. However, most weblog entries still exhibit a relatively fixed structure, although users are free to browse different parts of the narrative in … [a]‌multilinear way. (Hoffman and Eisenlauer 2010: 88) The constituent elements are less clearly held together as a single, coherent text than a novel or a newspaper article but nonetheless sustain being read in this way. The individual tweets may be encountered as fragments or simply as parts of a larger whole. In other cases, sets of tweets give the appearance of constituting a narrative whole but are more loosely bound together.This is particularly common where the ‘breaking news’ format is adopted (Page 2010), with events being reported in real time, as they occur. For example, Sabry live tweeted an account of his experience of attending a large anti-​Morsi protest in Cairo over the course of several hours on 30 June 2013. His posts included: @Bassem_​Sabry Journalists’ syndicate getting ready to march ‫ جرافيتي الحسيني أبو ضيف‬.‫نقابة الصحفيين تستعد للمسيرة بعد قليل‬ [journalist’s syndicate getting ready to march shortly. Graffiti of al-​Huseini Abu Deef] 19 14:34, 30/​06/​201320

Telling stories with fragments  53

@Bassem_​Sabry Chants by the journalist’s syndicate: people want the downfall of the regime. #June30 #Egypt 14:53, 30/​06/​201321 @Bassem_​Sabry ‫ وال يتأثر الدين بخروج أو دخول رئيس أو‬،‫ وليست الجماعة هي الدين‬،‫هذه ليست وقفة ضد الدين‬ ‫ هي‬.‫حكومة‬ ‫وقفة من أجل مصر‬ [this is not taking a stand against religion nor are al-​Jama’a al-​Islamiyya22 reli��gion, and religion is not affected by the entrance or exit of a president or government. It is taking a stand for Egypt] 14:59, 30/​06/​201323 @Bassem_​Sabry Journalists and Lawyers will move to ettihadeyya presidential palace as Tahrir is PACKED. #June30 15:20, 30/​06/​201324 @Bassem_​Sabry ‫ مصر‬.‫ النهاردة شوفته بيهتف في التحرير‬.‫قريبي عمره ما نزل مظاهرة وال لجان شعبية وال إنتخب‬ ‫كلها بتنتفض‬. [I saw a relative today, who never participated in protests, popular committees25 or elections, chanting in Tahrir. All of Egypt is rising up] 18:19, 30/​06/​201326 @Bassem_​Sabry I’ve been walking for 20 minutes away from #Tahrir. The flood of people doesn’t end. 18:58, 30/​06/​201327 In examples like this, individual fragments expressing aspects of the narrative are placed together but not explicitly linked to one another. Their juxtaposition, nonetheless, establishes ‘paratactical’ connections between them, adopting a narrative technique which was as important in ancient epic poetry as it is in contemporary television and radio talk (Scannell 2014: 154–​158). They clearly share a theme and have been selected according to apparent criteria of relevance. A beginning (preparations for the march) and ending (walking away from the march) are signalled, giving a sense of overall unity, even if there is little by way of a conclusion. The clear boundaries seen with the previous example, nonetheless, are absent, and it is less clear that these tweets are intended to be read together. They can be read in this way as a vertical narrative, and Sabry seems to have intended for this type of reading to be possible, but demand to be read in this way less strongly than the previous example. Some, but not all the fragments on this topic, can be read together (as in the examples cited above) and the result

54  Telling stories with fragments

remains coherent. The intention of enabling multiple interpretive approaches is further demonstrated by Sabry’s language choices. Most events are narrated only in English and a coherent narrative account of the protest can be drawn out from statements made in English alone. Some information is provided in both English and Arabic, while other details are narrated in Arabic only. They therefore support at least three vertical readings: bilingual English and Arabic, monolingual English and monolingual Arabic. In other cases, stories are built up over time but textual boundaries are hazier still. Rather than belonging to a clearly defined text, fragments may be more loosely bound together by shared reference frames without the larger text being otherwise demarcated (Page 2012: 189). For example, much of the commentary of Egyptian activists during the summer of 2013, building up to, and then reporting, the implications of the military intervention, is not easily divided into authorially intended narrative wholes. Nonetheless, bodies of fragments posted sequentially over time can be read together as constituting a kind of serial or episodic narrative (Page 2012: 192–​94).This can also happen with content published sporadically over long periods but which nonetheless shares a reference frame. Tweets posted by @ PODEMOS about environmental issues, for example, can be read as constituting a story in their own right: @PODEMOS No es una cuestión de ‘cochofobia’ que diría Esperanza Aguirre, es responsabilidad con el medio ambiente y con la salud de todas y todos. (video showing bike infrastructure in other European countries) [it is not a question of ‘carphobia’ as claimed by Esperanza Aguirre, it is responsibility for the environment and for the health of all] 12:27, 10/​11/​1628 @PODEMOS PP y C´s han vetado el Estatuto de Bomberos Forestales que presentó Unidos Podemos porque no entienden que proteger y cuidar el medio ambiente no es un gasto, es una inversión. Lo explica @anamarcelloana aquí 👇 (video of the Podemos activist Ana Marcello arguing in favour of a proposition to legally recognise forest firefighters to improve their working conditions on account of the danger to which they are exposed as part of their work) [the Partido Popular and Ciudadanos have vetoed the Statute of Forest Firefighters put forward by Unidos Podemos because they do not understand that to protect and care for the environment is not an expense, it is an investment. @anamarcelloana explains here 👇] 15:09, 29/​05/​1829 @PODEMOS Endesa es la empresa más contaminante del país.

Telling stories with fragments  55

🌍💡 Nuestra propuesta: crear una empresa pública de energía que apueste por las renovables y garantice una energía asequible y respetuosa con el medio ambiente. #HuelgaMundialPorElClima www.elsaltodiario.com/​cambio-​climatico/​diez-​empresas-​mas-​contribuyen-​ cambio-​climatico-​espana [

Endesa is the most polluting company in the country.

🌍💡 Our proposal: create a public energy company which opts for renewables and guarantees accessible and environmentally friendly energy #worldclimatestrike www.elsaltodiario.com/​cambio-​climatico/​diez-​empresas-​mas-​contribuyen-​ cambio-​climatico-​espana] 13:02, 27/​09/​1930 @PODEMOS Según la Agencia Europea del Medio Ambiente, la contaminación ambiental provoca 800.000 muertes al año, solo en Europa. Según Díaz Ayuso, ninguna. La ignorancia mata. www.eldiario.es/ ​ m adrid/ ​ I sabel- ​ D iaz- ​ Ayuso- ​ c ontaminacion- ​ N adie_ ​ 0 _​ 980252001.html [according to the European Environment Agency, environmental pollution causes 800,000 deaths per year, in Europe alone. According to Díaz Ayuso,31 not one. Ignorance kills www.eldiario.es/ ​ m adrid/ ​ I sabel- ​ D iaz- ​ Ayuso- ​ c ontaminacion- ​ N adie_ ​ 0 _​ 980252001.html] 15:17, 01/​01/​2032 These posts were published over a period of several years, interspersed with thousands of others about all kinds of other issues. Read together they nonetheless tell a relatively coherent story about the actions of others with regard to environmental policy, the attitudes of Podemos and the types of policies they would put into place were they to be elected and able to form a government of their own. For this to be possible, they rely on a process of gradual accretion to overcome the limitations of presenting information in atomistic fragments. Over time a meaningful whole emerges, albeit one which is not readily linked to any defined text. Fragments posted by the main @PODEMOS account are further supplemented by content posted by the individual accounts of figures within the party who contribute to a collaborative vertical narrative, highlighting that this type of storytelling need not be restricted to single tellers. Furthermore, Podemos also make use of their

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access to other elements of the ‘hybrid media system’ (Chadwick 2013), notably television and radio news. Fragmentary posts on Twitter are thus integrated with statements made using other channels, connections which are often made explicit by the embedding of video or audio clips within individual tweets.The clips are generally short but frequently say much more than is possible within 280 characters, providing a further means to overcome the limitations of fragmentation. These fragments, whether on or off Twitter, do not demand to be interpreted in any particular order and do not have clear textual boundaries, nor is it possible to refer to a single sjuzhet as the order in which the fragments are encountered, and which fragments are encountered, are likely to differ greatly from interpreter to interpreter. Nonetheless, it remains possible to interpret a fairly coherent fabula (or underlying chronology) –​in this case emphasising the central role of human activity in causing climate change and the possibility of taking future action to radically reduce carbon emissions and environmental pollution in response.This allows for the central narrative function of grasping together to function despite the lack of an obvious text. As the boundaries of vertical narratives become fuzzier, three major issues arise. The first is the extent to which beginnings and endings continue to matter. In her account of episodic social media storytelling, Page argues that we see a greatly reduced emphasis on ‘closed narrative sequences’, concluding: as the corpus of stories continues to grow beyond literary and conversational contexts, the primacy of completed, teleologically focused narrative progression appears less like a norm from which all other narratives can be compared. (Page 2012: 196) Page is right to highlight that fragmented social media storytelling frequently lacks the closed texts traditionally associated with written narrative. On a textual level, the posts by @PODEMOS about environmental issues in the previous example clearly do not constitute a ‘closed narrative sequence’ in the way that a novel does. Furthermore, Page (2010) and Georgakopoulou (2007) contrast this kind of ‘breaking news’ narrative with what they term ‘projection’ (understood as stories which anticipate future events rather than in Heidegger’s existential sense), on the basis that breaking news narrative does not explicitly emphasise future events or states. Nonetheless, this need not lead to the conclusion that the stories told in this way are any less teleologically focused. The presence of beginnings and endings in fabulae, even if not attached to texts with clear beginnings and endings, remain as crucial as ever and such stories continue to rely on projecting towards possible futures, even as they emphasise present events. Despite the textual openness of the @PODEMOS example, its power relies on its projection towards alternative teloses, in which climate change is either meaningfully addressed or continues to be ignored. As the discussion below on horizontal narrative explores further, a lack of textual ‘completion’ does not mean a lack of narrative wholeness.

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The second key issue is the possible conclusion that entire Twitter streams should therefore be understood as vertical narratives. Peys (2012: 8) makes an argument very close to this when he argues that ‘the timeline is the skeletal structure that brings it all together … It supports, unifies, and structures one’s tweets into a readable stream of narrative’, before going on to claim that each such narrative is, in turn, ‘merely a story within the infinite meta-​story that is history’ (Peys 2012: 6). This is not the view adopted here. I certainly agree, as I have argued, that it is possible to build up narratives through many separate fragments. At times it may make sense to conceptualise different strands within a timeline as more or less strongly connected ‘storylines’, within a complex narrative whole (cf. Schmitt 2014).Yet the simple fact that diverse fragments are presented on screen together does not imbue them with overall coherence, nor even with narrativity, since many posts are not readily amenable to narrative interpretation. The fact that social media timelines bring together on the screen potentially diverse content does not, in itself, provide them with unity nor create the possibility or necessity of their reconciliation into a single narrative. At the time of writing, for example, recent tweets appearing on my own home timeline discuss: reflections on anti-​slavery law in the UK; the violent suppression of protests in Sudan; Russia’s veto of calls for a UN condemnation of the suppression of the protests; a Sudanese activist encouraging others to avoid speaking to each other on the phone due to government surveillance; a link to an article about ongoing changes to the Danish welfare state; a link to an article in The Economist about cover versions of the song ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’; details of a job opening for a translation coordinator; commentary on European Parliament elections; and an academic expressing happiness that one of her students has been able to meet the scholar whose work she is translating. It pushes credibility to view all this content as ultimately reconcilable within a single narrative, exhibiting all the elements of narrativity discussed in the previous chapter. Even if they ultimately relate to one another as parts of a meaningful world, they need not do so within a single story. Even posts by individual users are not necessarily best understood as single, gradually accumulating vertical narratives. Individual users may build up parallel vertical narratives but also adopt approaches to storytelling grounded in the logics of horizontal or ambient storytelling, as discussed below. In terms of text, then, vertical narratives may be closed when their textual boundaries are clearly defined, or open when they lack defined boundaries and may be added to at any time, resulting in ‘delayed resolution narratives’ (Dayter 2015: 21).This difference is not merely formal but ultimately involves two different ways of relating to time and temporality. As the closest to canonical, literary storytelling, it is perhaps unsurprising that closed vertical storytelling also more regularly follows the conventions of this type of narrative. Anachrony, where the order of events in the sjuzhet differs from that of the fabula, is common, as in literature. Consider the following two-​tweet thread from Donald Trump:

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@realDonaldTrump I was saddened to learn of the recent passing of Bob Morgenthau, a truly great man! Bob served as a Naval Officer in World War II, was an extraordinary US Attorney, Manhattan District Attorney, and always a warrior for our Country that he loved so dearly … 19:43, 23/​07/​1933 @realDonaldTrump … I got to know him over his many years as Chairman of the Police Athletic League, for which he devoted so much time and energy. Bob Morgenthau, a legend, will be greatly missed! 19:43, 23/​07/​1934 Here the story jumps backward and forward through time to summarise Bob Morgenthau’s death, his career, and the fact that he will be missed.This grasps together past, present and future but there is little sense of contingency or openness.The future, that he will be missed, is presented as fixed. It is written in the ‘future perfect’ (Schutz 1967), in terms of what will have happened rather than what might happen. As the reader moves through this brief narrative they know that what is to come in the story, the text, is also fixed from the moment they begin reading. While, at the outset at least, the latter part of the story is still to come, it is already past in the sense that it has already been written.The reader knows that ‘what is to come has already taken place, that it is already there, and that the reading process will reveal it’ (Currie 2013: 15). This contrasts with open vertical narratives. These narratives grasp together past, present and projected futures but the future elements of the narrative text, sjuzhet and fabula are themselves uncertain. In this sense, they rely on a temporality closer to that of lived experience, where the future is unknown and unknowable, than that of literary narratives, in which the parts of the story still to be read are already fixed (Currie 2013: 12). When stories are told as ‘breaking news’ (Page 2010; Dayter 2015), there is no inevitable movement towards single telos, pinned down by a fixed text; rather, they evolve in the telling, opening and closing down interpretive possibilities. They maintain the promise of resolution but it is delayed to an unspecified future point. In both open and closed narratives, the future remains equally open and there is the same possibility for the future which is anticipated to differ from that which actually arrives.The presentation of a future event within a well-​formed story which closely approximates the norms of literature, where genuine contingency is impossible, nonetheless, downplays the uncertainty of the future.Where references to future events are made in open vertical narratives, on the other hand, future uncertainty is foregrounded.The activist @Zeinobia posted the following on 3 July 2013: @Zeinobia And no one will win in this, everybody will lose whether on the short term or medium term or long term 09:00, 03/​07/​1335

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In both cases, an unambiguous and unhedged statement is made about a future event.Yet the fact that Zeinobia positions her statement about the future within an open-​ended narrative emphasises contingency much more strongly than in Trump’s statement. The contingency of the future text highlights the contingency of the future events. The gradual, vertical accumulation of fragments into larger stories over time, however, is not the only way to tell stories with narrative fragments. This is particularly clear in Trump’s tweets, which do not rely on being read sequentially to make sense and, to a certain extent, resist such readings. His inconsistency and habit of contradicting himself both on Twitter and in other public statements have often been noted (Kruse and Weiland 2016; Holland and Fermor 2017; Superville 2018; Cillizza 2019; Carden 2019; Tan 2019). Many of these contradictions specifically concern narratives, for example the importance, or not, of the far-​r ight media figure Steve Bannon’s involvement in his presidential campaign, or the ongoing relevance or irrelevance of NATO. Such contradictions frustrate attempts to interpret his statements, on and off Twitter, in terms of a single narrative to which each statement should be understood as an addition. Setting aside the possibility that Trump’s communication strategy is a postmodern experiment in unreliable narration, this suggests that it is a mistake to expect his statements to be resolvable into a single, consistent grand narrative as those commentators drawing attention to his contradictory statements have clearly tried to do. This is not to suggest that Trump’s tweets are not characterised by vertical linkages. Despite the contradictions commentators have noted, his comments on the USA’s relationship with China, for example, can be read together as constituting a fairly coherent narrative. Yet they do not wholly, or even largely, rely on these connections in order to be meaningful. They are grounded in something closer to what Postman terms the logic of ‘now … this’ –​abrupt movements without expectations of consistency and continuity from fragment to fragment. As he, perhaps hyperbolically, describes it, ‘contradiction, in short, requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated aspects of a continuous and coherent context. Disappear the context, or fragment it, and contradiction disappear’ (Postman 1987: 127). While it is difficult to miss out chunks of a novel or historical work and still understand what is going on, the same is not true with much fragmented narrative where this type of reading is the norm. Effective storytelling through fragments, therefore, may make use of vertical linkages but need not rely on it.

Horizontal storytelling In horizontal storytelling, a single fragment implies a larger whole without the process of gradual, sequential accumulation seen in vertical storytelling. This type of storytelling, unlike vertical and ambient narrative, has received almost no attention in the literature to date. I term it ‘horizontal’ because the narrative whole stretches beyond any individual fragment, but unlike vertical narrative, does so into unseen implicit pasts and futures rather than up and down to previous and subsequently

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narrated material. Consider, for example, the following tweet posted by Juan López de Uralde, a Podemos member of the Spanish Congress: @juralde Cuando no se hace nada desde los gobiernos el problema se agrava, no desaparece 👉  Cada vez más basura de plástico se acumula en el litoral español: los desechos en las playas crecen un 65% www.eldiario.es/​sociedad/​plastico-​terreno-​litoral-​desechos-​acumulados_​0_​ 907109592.html [when nothing is done by governments, the problem gets worse, it does not disappear. 👉 Ever more plastic waste is accumulating on the Spanish coastline: rubbish on beaches increases by 65% www.eldiario.es/​sociedad/​plastico-​terreno-​litoral-​desechos-​acumulados_​0_​ 907109592.html] 7:49, 07/​06/​1936 Even read in isolation, a single fragment like this can tell a whole story without relying on vertical connections to previous or subsequent comments by the author. The first part of the tweet refers only to general relationships, that is, that government inaction aggravates rather than solves problems. The second part highlights a temporally and spatially specific increase in the amount of rubbish on Spanish beaches but does not provide obvious closure. Nonetheless, when this specific statement is read in terms of the interpretive scheme provided in the first part, it implies a narrative expressing the idea that government inaction is responsible for the growth of rubbish on Spanish beaches. It also suggests as a telos that the problem will continue to worsen until such time as the government intervenes, creating a sense of narrative wholeness. A single fragment, then, can say a great deal without relying on gradual, linear accumulation of elements.This is not, however, where it ends.This tweet also implies an alternative situation in which the government had intervened to reduce the amount of plastic on beaches and in which the current problem had been avoided.This idea is captured in the notion of ‘sideshadowing’ (Morson 1994), a narrative practice which draws our attention to what might have been, conjuring ‘the ghostly presence of might-​ have-​beens or might-​bes. In this way the hypothetical shows through the actual and so achieves its own shadowy kind of existence in the text’ (Morson 1998: 601). Sideshadowing as a technique, then, both serves a rhetorical purpose by framing present states of affairs in terms of alternatives, but also emphasises the idea of time as a field of possibilities, rather than an inevitable progression towards a certain outcome, destabilising the present (Morson 1994: 117–​133). The sense of uncertainty engendered by sideshadowing is nonetheless countered by a sense of certainty generated through the techniques of backshadowing and foreshadowing. This tweet does not explicitly claim that the Spanish government’s failure to act led to the accumulation of rubbish on Spanish beaches but nonetheless backshadows this past event, implying a linear causal chain of events leading

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to the problem which ultimately begins with specific past failures of the Spanish government. It uses foreshadowing in the implicit suggestion that both the current problem and its future worsening would be certainly avoided with a Podemos government. This is not a case of deliberately creating a sense of a ‘thickening haze of possibilities’ (Morson 1994: 133), as seen with the Russian novelists studied by Morson, but of ‘disnarration’, where events which did not come to pass are narrated (Prince 1988;Vindrola-​Padros and Johnson 2014;Vindrola-​Padros and Brage 2017). This gives the impression that the present and future are not fixed but can nonetheless be known with certainty.True foreshadowing is impossible with this kind of narrative since the future remains uncertain and, in an important respect, unforeseeable (Currie 2013: 34–​54). Nonetheless, this storytelling technique creates an impression of multiple possible presents and futures, all of which can be known with certainty. This approach is also frequently adopted by Trump. Consider the following: @realDonaldTrump The Stock Market went up massively from the day after I won the election, all the way up to the day that I took office, because of the enthusiasm for the fact that I was going to be President. That big Stock Market increase must be credited to me. If Hillary won –​a Big Crash! 10:12 AM 28/​06/​1937 Here, again, a complex set of narrative possibilities are implied within a single fragment. Strong performance of the American stock market is explicitly connected to Trump’s assumption of the presidency. It is also implied that this strength will continue as a consequence of Trump’s ongoing presidency. This is a kind of pseudoforeshadowing, as if the current strength allows us to know with certainty that it will continue so long as Trump is president. This is contrasted with a sideshadowed possibility of Hillary Clinton having won the election with the consequence of a ‘Big Crash!’. This possibility again is used to frame a present state and presented as known with absolute certainty. The strength of the economy under Trump is therefore presented as both potentially never coming to pass, opening the field of possibilities, and also as a necessary and inevitable consequence of his presidency, closing the field of possibilities. The certainty of foreshadowing is again placed in tension with the destabilising effect of sideshadowing. These techniques are of course not unique to horizontal storytelling. All narratives, however simple, involve implicature and active input from their interpreters. Anticipating subsequent elements of narratives is a central element of narrative reception, as explored in Chapter 3. Foreshadowing and backshadowing have been mainstays of narrative technique in oral and written stories alike for centuries (Ochs and Capps 2001; Currie 2013). The difference with horizontal narrative, however, is that implicature becomes the central element of storytelling. The proportion of narratives implied through shadowing of various kinds comes

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to greatly outweigh those elements which are explicitly presented. This allows for storytellers to communicate a great deal while having said relatively little explicitly which they might later have to defend. In making so many of the assumptions upon which horizontal narratives depend implicit, moreover, their workings become both less apparent, which may reduce the likelihood of scrutiny, and more deniable, since it is more difficult to hold someone to account for an implicit narrative than an explicitly told story. Horizontal narrative is further distinguished by the role of text. Vertical storytelling largely retains a recognisable text, whether it be the clearly defined text of a closed vertical narrative or the promise of an ultimately closed text in an open vertical narrative.The limits of such texts are porous but nonetheless broadly identifiable.With horizontal storytelling, on the other hand, the level of the text is largely removed. There is no implication that individual tweets constitute whole texts in their own right, nor is there necessarily an implication that such a text would be recoverable even if the reader were to also look at other content posted by the same author, previously and in the future. The fact that Twitter, and other fragmented contexts, prevent the presentation of whole texts at the same time in the manner of a book does not mean that writers necessarily build up their narratives serially. Instead, they may rely on the broader interpretive context, missing out the textual level, understood as a ‘finite, structured whole composed of language signs’ (Bal 1997: 5), almost entirely. An individual fragment may imply a whole, much more complex story, as in the example discussed above. Individual fragments do so, however, without needing to be anchored within a clearly delineated set of linguistic or non-​linguistic signs. As the level of the text recedes in importance, the significance of the intertext grows. Since at least the 1970s, it has been recognised that all textual material exists in relation to other material stretching beyond its own apparent boundaries. For Barthes (1977: 146) a text is a ‘tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’, while for Kristeva (1980: 36) a text is a ‘productivity’ in which ‘several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralise one another’. Derrida, meanwhile, famously asserted ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (Derrida 1974: 158), referring not to the idea that there exists nothing which is not textual but instead advancing a Heideggerian argument about the worldliness of texts. With statements like these, poststructuralist critiques sought to break down the idea of clearly bounded texts as self-​sufficient, emphasising instead that any text can only be what it is on the basis of its connections with other texts.These connections may be explicit, as when one text directly quotes another, or scarcely perceptible, given that all language is inflected by the concrete situations in which it has previously been used (Bakhtin and Voloshinov 1994). Horizontal narrative embodies these ideas to a far greater extent than the literary texts which originally inspired these comments, as even the illusion of a bounded text largely falls away. The intertext does not simply extend and complicate an otherwise stable interpretive context but must provide all the context for fragments to be intelligible at all. This has a destabilising effect. The ability of writers to produce texts as a mediating level between atomistic propositions and the broader intertext is the most

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important tool at their disposal for determining the way that individual narrative elements are interpreted, through shaping an important part of the larger hermeneutic whole. All stories have ‘gaps’ (Abbott 2002) requiring creative input from readers but authorial control over text allows authors to significantly shape how those gaps are filled. In horizontal storytelling, much of this influence is lost.Writers must rely on readers to fill in gaps but, in the process, sacrifice much of their control over how they do this. As discussed in Chapter 3, this leads to a significantly expanded role for interpreters, creating new possibilities. Nonetheless, horizontal storytelling also offers great power by shifting the onus for coherence onto readers and demanding a different type of reading. This is particularly clear with Trump’s communication style. Commentators highlighting inconsistencies in his statements, both on and off Twitter, point to the fact that they are attempting to interpret his statements vertically, expecting them to build up over time into a coherent narrative. If, on the other hand, they are read horizontally, the need for tight coherence between comments made at different times largely dissolves. Individual comments can horizontally project whole narratives without the need for each to precisely accord with prior or subsequent statements. A further difference between vertical and horizontal narrative lies in their temporality. All narratives are built on diachronicity in that they narrate events which take place over time. The type of understanding derived from narrative is also intrinsically diachronic –​it explains how actions and states relate to those which temporally precede and follow them. Events can likewise only be understood diachronically –​happenings may be point-​like but events are only comprehensible within a temporal whole. Narratives themselves are also intrinsically diachronic in their production and reception. Even if archetypical written stories are published as complete wholes all at once, they are written and interpreted over time. This is emphasised in vertical narratives, which are produced in multiple separate units and exist as configurations of time-​stamped fragments; the tweets in the numbered sequence posted by Bassem Sabry analysed above, for example, were published from 20:13 to 20:19 on 02/​07/​13. Since then it has become possible to publish multiple-​tweet threads all at once. Yet interpreting them is still a process spread over time. In horizontal narrative, on the other hand, the diachronicity of storytelling and reception is greatly compressed.A brief fragment can be taken in and comprehended almost synchronically, compressing the diachronic nature of interpretation. If interpretation is understood in the traditional sense (White 1978; Mink 2001), where narrative elements are first encountered as simply present and subsequently fitted into meaningful relationships with one another, an important aspect of diachrony remains –​fragment first, then story, then intertext. From the perspective elaborated in Chapter 1, however, interpretation is understood as characterised by thrownness and projection. Interpreters are understood to be already ‘in the midst’ before any individual act of interpretation. On this view, experiencing a narrative fragment and making sense of it as a fragment in the context of a broader intertextual whole becomes simultaneous. In this sense, the reader’s projections of those elements of

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the horizontal narrative which are not explicitly described (i.e. most of the story when dealing with small fragments) are part of its basic constitution from the first moment of interpretation, rather than something which is subsequently appended to a narrative element that is otherwise objectively present. In terms of its representation of events in temporal relationships, horizontal storytelling remains as diachronic as any other type of narrative. The example cited above about plastic waste on beaches is meaningful because it provides an account of temporal, and causal, relationships. But in their telling and reception they are almost instantly complete, even if the manner of the completion is only partially foreseeable and far from wholly within the control of the narrator. Interpreting vertical narrative, whether open or closed, over time involves projections which may be confirmed or refuted by subsequent narrative elements, making ‘a continuous series of abductions … during the course of the reading’ (Eco 1979: 31). In horizontal storytelling, on the other hand, there are no subsequent elements to confirm or refute the reader’s initial projections. Initial projections simply are the story. In this sense, they are in some ways similar to single images, a similarity which does not seem wholly incidental given the central importance of images to contemporary communication. While debate continues as to whether a single image can ‘tell’ a story (Speidel 2013), all the elements of a picture are presented at once, with the consequence that ‘visual art ‒ paintings, sculpture, even work as vast as architecture ‒ is often taken at first glance to be synchronic, apprehended all at once’ (Rabkin 2009: 36). Indeed, for Rabkin, learning to ‘read’ art specifically means adopting a diachronic approach to reception: we need extended time to apprehend art, to read it. When we slow down to study the Mona Lisa, we become aware of the sinuous river winding away from Leonardo’s model in the distant countryside … the artist put time into the Mona Lisa; careful readers of the painting come to understand that. (Rabkin 2009: 36) The kind of slow, close reading advocated by Rabkin has been the approach favoured by critics, across all media, for decades. This is precisely the kind of reading which is typically employed by journalists and academics when interpreting narrative fragments –​subjecting small fragments to extended analysis, analysis which inevitably takes time. It draws out the hermeneutic potential of individual fragments, allowing for the play of significations and for the ‘surplus of meaning’ (Ricoeur 1976) intrinsic in writing to come into play. Yet, as I explore in Chapter 4, this is not the primary way in which fragments are experienced. Frosh argues that ‘the majority of visual images circulating in contemporary media-​saturated societies are experienced … as fleeting and unremarkable ephemera’ (Frosh 2019: 36). Rather than being subjected to extended, diachronic attention, they are experienced in fleeting, largely synchronic moments of inattention. Horizontal narratives, I suggest, are frequently experienced in a similar way. The importance of synchronic storytelling lies in its capacity for the almost instantaneous communication of diachronic processes. A horizontal narrative can

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communicate a great deal about temporal and causal relationships without relying on reception spread over time. Ricoeur argues that we inevitably read ‘the end in the beginning’ (Ricoeur 1980: 180) of a story but nonetheless feel compelled to read to the end in order to find out what happened: a story’s conclusion is the pole of attraction of the entire development. But a narrative conclusion can be neither deduced nor predicted. There is no story if our attention is not moved along by a thousand contingencies. This is why a story has to be followed to its conclusion. (Ricoeur 1980: 174) In horizontal narrative, there is no need to follow the story to its conclusion. The end that can be read in the beginning is the only end available. This is extremely important in today’s crowded narrative marketplace where nobody, even the president of the USA, can be confident that they will hold their listener’s attention long enough to tell a vertical story. Horizontal narrative’s capacity for being interpreted inattentively is precisely its strength in the brutal contemporary attention economy. The writer provides a minimum of information and then relies on the reader to supply the rest, going far beyond the kind of ‘gap filling’ seen in other narrative contexts (Abbott 2002: 83–​85). This dependency weakens authorial control but also allows for diverse readers to interpret horizontal narratives in a manner which accords with their existing world view, an idea explored further in Chapter 5. Horizontal narrative is, therefore, both more open and more closed than open vertical storytelling from the reader’s perspective. Open, because horizontal narratives rely more heavily on creative input from readers, allowing more strongly divergent interpretations by different readers. But more closed in the sense that, however they are interpreted and reinterpreted, they are complete from the first instant and thus less open to refiguration by subsequent acts of storytelling in the way that vertical narratives are.

Ambient storytelling The third basic orientation is ‘ambient’ storytelling. Under different names, this type of storytelling has received more attention in the digital media literature38 and its key features are summarised by Page, Harper and Frobenius as follows: rather than multiple tellers working collaboratively within the same interaction of turns, the shared stories form a constellation of evaluations, retellings and reactions which may not directly be connected to each other within a single sequence … but nonetheless are embedded in a wider aggregation of talk about a particular topic, which in turn constitutes a social narrative. (Page, Harper, and Frobenius 2013: 209–210) The idea of ambient narrative is closely related to that of ambient news which ‘breaks with classic narrative structures, and instead creates multifaceted, fragmented,

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and fluid news experiences’ (Hermida 2014: 265). In vertical storytelling, the emphasis lies on gradually building up complex narratives over time through serial narration. Horizontal storytelling focuses on implying complete stories from individual fragments. In ambient storytelling, on the other hand, individuals contribute to larger and much more loosely defined narrative wholes. The impact that individual fragments will have on these larger wholes is largely unforeseeable as the manner of their contextualisation is taken almost entirely away from the control of their producers. Traditional storytelling, both vertical and horizontal, involves telling stories which can stand alone, at least in the limited sense in which any narrative stands alone. In ambient storytelling, the idea of a single teller producing an independent bounded narrative is largely abandoned. This can be clearly seen with the communication practices of Egyptian activists at the time of the 2013 military intervention. The following is a list of events reported, in English and Arabic, by three Egyptian activists, @Bassem_Sabry, @Zeinobia and @Sandmonkey on 3 July 2013: TABLE 2.1 Events reported on Twitter by the Egyptian activists Bassem Sabry (@Bassem_Sabry), Zeinobia (@Zeinobia), and Mahmoud Salem (@Sandmonkey) on 3 July 2013

@Sandmonkey Mohamad Morsi refuses to step down as President of Egypt Major demonstration takes place at the headquarters of the Presidential Guard

@Bassem_Sabry

@Zeinobia

Opposition leader Mohamad Morsi refuses to stand down as ElBaradei meets with president military Hosni Mubarak-era media Former deputy guide of figures stress importance of Muslim Brotherhood revolution and freedom tweets support for uprising Army tanks deployed in Adly Mansour made Al-Ahram newspaper reports Giza interim president that the Army is meeting political figures and Islamists will draw up road map Rumoured that Russia Pro-MB TV channel Masr25 Spokesman of the Islamist offering support to Army disappears group al-Jamaa alin response to US threat of Islamiyya supports call cut to aid for early elections El Hayat television channel Protestors gather in front of Another Jamaa Islamiyya showing protestors with the presidential palace spokesman denies pictures of el-Sisi in Tahrir support for early elections The military removes Morsi Previously detained TV filled with nationalistic at the behest of the religious TV figures songs praising the Army people released Morsi removed from power Morsi placed under house Announcement that arrest the head of the Constitutional Court will take oath as president the following day

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67

TABLE 2.1 Cont.

@Sandmonkey

@Bassem_Sabry

@Zeinobia

Army officers present in Essam el-Haddad, a senior Announcement made that state newsroom figure in the MB-affiliated ElBaradei, Coptic Pope Freedom and Justice Party, Towadros and Sheikh publishes image of the of al-Azhar Islamic Egyptian flag on Facebook University will announce the transitional roadmap Army deployed across Cairo The ‘real’ rebellion campaign Thirty members of the and Giza begins Shura Council, the upper house in the Egyptian Parliament, resign Morsi moved to Ministry Announced that ElBaradei, of Defence Pope Tawadros and Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayyeb, Sheikh of al-Azhar Islamic University, will read the Army statement Celebrations take place in el-Sisi addresses the nation Tahrir Square about removing Morsi and installing a caretaker government Large number of protestors Talk show host Mona el in Ittihadeya, site of the Shazly is crying on TV Presidential Palace Governer of Giza resigns People celebrate across Cairo Islamist TV channels closed Representatives of the and employees arrested Tamarrod opposition movement, Freedom and Justice Party and the Salafi al-Nour Party meet with the Military Clashes in the towns of Minya and Marsa Matrouh Reports that four dead in Marsa Matrouh King of Saudi Arabia congratulates the interim president Police stations burned in Marsa Matrouh Freedom and Justice Party leader Saad El Katanani arrested as well as Muslim Brotherhood supreme guide Rashad al-Bayumi Morsi placed under house arrest Huffington post declares military intervention a coup

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Contrary to Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira’s (2012) finding that Twitter communication at the time of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution was characterised by the fact that ‘frequently, the same news was repeated over and over again, with little or no new cognitive input’ (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira 2012: 13), here there is remarkably little overlap in what was reported. This suggests that activists like these did not see themselves as producing individual, standalone narratives but as contributing to broader storytelling processes involving many contributors. Seen in this way, the different focuses seen in the content reported by each, for example @Sandmonkey’s strong emphasis on the perceived wrongdoing of the Muslim Brotherhood, seem directed towards steering a broader narrative in a specific direction than attempting to produce an independent, standalone narrative designed to directly compete with others. A parallel with chronicle, as discussed in the first part of this chapter, can be drawn: there is no suggestion that writers such as these activists were incapable of producing standalone narratives or that they themselves did not interpret the events they reported within stories. Nonetheless, they chose to relate them using the structure of ambient rather than vertical or horizontal narrative. Rather than relying on being read in relation to previous and subsequent tweets by the same author, or to past and future events projected by a single fragment, narrative fragments like these rely for their coherence on being read in relation to content posted by other people. Ambient narratives are thus, in an important sense, more strongly ‘textual’ than are horizontal narratives, relying as they do on relationships with other concrete textual fragments. In some cases, this textuality is relatively strong, as for example when ambient narratives form around hashtags such as #Egypt during the 2011 Egyptian Uprising or #ows during the Occupy movement (Papacharissi 2016) or in the case of the various examples of ‘shared stories’ discussed by Page (2018). At other times it is weaker, relying on common themes to group together otherwise disparate narrative fragments. While this is similar in some respects to vertical narratives, ambient stories lack a single narrator to act as a point of unity, enabling the action of Foucault’s ‘author-​function’ (Foucault 2003). Consequently, their boundaries are much more nebulous. Ambient narratives, furthermore, do not rely on individual elements being presented within a fixed sjuzhet ordered in a specific way but rather through a process of gradual accretion of elements into a loosely and non-​linearly structured whole. With ambient narrative, there is no ‘correct’ order in which to interpret the elements. The temporal sequencing encoded in the fabulae of ambient narratives nonetheless remain vital. At times this can be relatively easily ascertained. The emphasis on ‘what is happening now’ and broad preference for chronological reporting mean that the sequence in which events are reported is often broadly similar to the order in which they really occurred. The examples mentioned above from @Sandmonkey, @Bassem_​Sabry and @Zeinobia, interpreted in the context of broader processes of ambient storytelling involving a much larger number of narrators, read as a broadly chronological account of events on the key day of 3

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July 2013. Yet although the general shape of the fabula may be relatively clear, the precise details are more difficult to define. The order in which events were reported may have broadly matched the order in which they really occurred but was not precisely the same. Was the army deployed across Cairo and Giza before or after celebrations began in Cairo? Did the statement from Mohammad al-​Baradei, Coptic Pope Tawadros and Sheikh of the al-​Azhar Islamic University Ahmed el-​ Tayeb precede or follow the arrest of the leading Muslim Brotherhood figures Saad al-​Katatni and Rashad al-​Bayumi? This matters because ambiguity about the fabula results in ambiguity about the underlying causal relationships, even if the broad strokes are clear. The loose structure of ambient narratives is also evident in the emphasis on repetition in much fragmented storytelling. Rather than gradually constructing clearly structured stories, contributing to ambient narratives can mean repetition of the same themes to build up intensity (and capture attention) without relying on individual fragments being read in a particular order (Meraz and Papacharissi 2013). This highlights that an ambient narrative is not necessarily a single story at all but may be thought of as a constellation of related stories told by many different people which produce a larger but loosely defined whole. In this sense they strongly parallel ‘public’ narratives (Somers and Gibson 1994; Baker 2006; Harding 2012) which operate beyond the control of individual tellers, such as narratives of ‘American social mobility, the “freeborn Englishman”, the working-​class hero and so on’ (Somers 1994: 619). These narratives have the features of narrativity discussed in Chapter 1 and broadly consistent fabulae which allow for the grasping together of sets of relationships but no fixed sjuzhet or text. They gain influence through ‘narrative accrual’ (Bruner 1991), the repetition of broadly similar, if non-​ identical, stories which builds ‘material coherence’ (W. R. Fisher 1987) in the sense that stories appear coherent because of their similarity to other stories. This allows for ambient narratives to acquire coherence without requiring that they exhibit strong ‘structural’ coherence, in the sense of avoiding internal contradictions (W. R. Fisher 1987). Ambient narrative is therefore defined by its multiauthoredness to a much greater degree than vertical and horizontal narrative. Ambient narratives are produced ‘connectively’ rather than ‘collaboratively’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Page, Harper and Frobenius 2013; Papacharissi 2015a; 2015b). Contributors need not, and often do not, share either explicit goals or Heideggerian ‘for-​whiches’. The loose boundaries of ambient narratives mean it is impossible for individual contributors to know the precise shape of the stories to which they contribute, let alone the identities of all the other contributors. Ambient narratives are thus sites of interaction which may be largely harmonious, as in the connective action of Egyptian pro-​democracy activists connectively articulating the 25 January 2011 Uprising in Egypt as a Revolution (Meraz and Papacharissi 2013). But, as a growing literature shows, they can also be sites of conflict, with different groups seeking to steer ambient narratives in very different directions. These conflicts often centre

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around hashtags and there are numerous examples of fairly consistent narratives emerging around hashtags only for them to subsequently be ‘hijacked’ by individuals and groups seeking to articulate counter narratives (Loza 2013; Jackson and Foucault Welles 2015; Ince, Rojas and Davis 2017; Gilkerson and Tusinski Berg 2018). This also happened with #June30 at the time of the 2013 protests in Egypt, employed both by users presenting Morsi’s removal as emancipatory as well as those narrating it as a coup. This potential for conflict draws attention to the fact that, while it may be impossible for an individual contributor to control an ambient narrative, ambient storytelling does not mean abandoning attempts to influence the narrative whole entirely. If users seek to lead readers to a specific interpretation, why use ambient narrative at all, rather than horizontal or vertical narrative? In some cases, the answer may be ideological –​genuine commitment to connective narration. It may also be, however, that for many users influencing ambient narratives is the most they can realistically aspire to. Horizontal storytelling relies on having a readership that will fill in the gaps in the way that you want. Donald Trump clearly has this with his supporters; @Sandmonkey, perhaps, does not. He cannot take it for granted that readers will complete horizontal narratives in the way that he wants since this requires readers to share interpretive frames (see Chapter 4). One response to this is to gradually build up vertical narratives which leave less room for interpretation. There is evidence of his doing this, and a user like @Sandmonkey with a relatively large followership (over 1,00,000 at the time of the 2013 military intervention) could be confident of sustained attention from at least some of his followers. Nonetheless, in Twitter’s brutal ‘attention economy’ (Tufekci 2017) he could not assume all his readers would do this. This issue is likely to be particularly acute at moments of crisis, such as the 2013 intervention, during which Egypt was briefly the focus of an enormous amount of international attention. Readers with little previous knowledge of Egypt’s history, society and politics dipping into Twitter as an ‘always-​on’ (Meraz and Papacharissi 2013) ‘awareness system’ (Hermida 2014) were unlikely to provide the kind of sustained attention needed for vertical storytelling to be effective or share the reference frames needed for effective horizontal storytelling. This makes attempting to shape that ‘awareness system’, rather than simply articulating a self-​contained set of vertical narratives, very important. The issue is made more complex still by the importance of what has been variously theorised as ‘redaction’ (Hartley 2000), ‘remixing’ (Gunkel 2016) or bricolage (Deuze 2006). Fragments of vertical narratives may therefore be encountered in wholly new contexts since ‘fragments of stories can lay dormant for weeks or even months before gaining prominence’ (Chadwick 2013: 64). Fragments produced with an orientation towards ambient narrative are thus strongly oriented to sharing and grounded in the logic of ‘sharable talk’ (Zappavigna 2012; 2015). As Gillen and Merchant (2013: 55) note, tweeters do not know when they post a tweet whether it will be read ‘in the context of … messages sent before or since, or whether it will stand alone’. Narrative fragments must therefore be produced

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to be rhetorically effective however they are subsequently recontextualised. This gives them, as elements of text, a strong orientation towards the future –​towards unforeseen and unforeseeable future narratives.

Conclusion This chapter began with a consideration of the extent to which fragmented narratives can be considered as narratives at all or whether they are better understood as chronicles. I suggested that the enforced fragmentation seen on Twitter and other social media platforms pulls storytelling towards the chronicle by impeding the telling of traditional stories. Nonetheless, drawing on Croce and Heidegger I proposed that for fragments to produce chronicles requires a privation of narrativity and is a deliberate rhetorical strategy. It is an important means for less influential users to demonstrate credibility as something approaching impartial chroniclers even if they also frequently incorporate overtly narrativised elements in a manner analogous to that seen in much professional journalism. In the second part of the chapter I presented three basic orientations in fragmented storytelling: vertical storytelling, in which narrative elements are presented serially and diachronically to gradually accumulate into complex wholes; horizontal storytelling, in which whole narratives are synchronically projected from individual fragments; and ambient narratives, in which many users make small contributions to larger, but largely unknown and unknowable, narrative wholes. It is important to reiterate that, though these orientations were separated for the purposes of analysis, they overlap greatly in practice. Consider the following: @PODEMOS Los conflictos políticos no resueltos por vías políticas crean monstruos. Nuestro total rechazo al fascismo #MVTCat10oct (video showing protestors carrying Spanish flags attacking other protestors) [political conflicts unresolved by political means create monsters. Our total rejection of Fascism #MVTCat10oct] 19:29, 09/​10/​1739 @PODEMOS Periodistas agredidos y acosados en Barcelona. Nuestra sociedad tiene que condenar y marginar el fascismo. Tolerancia cero. #SemanaClaveM4 (video clip from a news report showing protestors carrying Spanish flags attacking journalists. A voice over from the news anchor explains the attackers presumed the journalists were from the broadly pro-​independence Catalan television channel TV3) [journalists attacked and harassed in Barcelona. Our society has to condemn and marginalise fascism. Zero tolerance. #SemanaClaveM4] 14:20, 09/​10/​1740

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@PODEMOS “La declaración unilateral de independencia no tiene validez ni efectos” @ pnique #RdpPodemos (video of Echenique, a leading figure in Podemos, justifying this view on the basis that the referendum was unapproved) [‘the uniliateral declaration of independence has neither validity nor effect’ @pnique #RdpPodemos] 12:58, 09/​10/​1741 This brief series, interspersed with posts about other issues, shows elements of all three orientations. The three can be read together, along with other posts, as gradually building up a fairly clearly bounded vertical narrative account of unfolding events relating to the protests in Catalonia. Each can also be read in isolation from the others but in relation to the broader intertext as horizontal narratives. Echinique’s statement that the declaration of independence ‘has neither validity nor effect’ projects back in time to the circumstances under which the referendum was held as well as forward to its future impact. Furthermore, all three include hashtags which connect these individual statements to broader ambient narratives –​ #SemanaClaveM4 and #MVTCat10oct ‒ link in to ambient narratives about the Catalan independence referendum while #RdpPodemos is frequently used to tag Podemos statements made during press conferences, telling an ongoing story of the party and its statements. Individual elements of vertical narratives may be read horizontally or as components of larger ambient narratives. All vertical narratives, moreover, project beyond their own boundaries in the manner of horizontal narratives. Even the briefest horizontal narratives are not truly synchronic as they are still ordered and are encountered in time. Horizontal storytelling may draw on vertical narrative to provide shared reference frames with readers to influence the horizontal reception of individual fragments. Broader ambient narratives may constitute an important part of the intertext to horizontal narratives, enabling horizontal reception by giving insights into the broader contexts within which individual fragments can come into view as meaningful. Ambient narratives may feature horizontal or vertical storytelling and a host of ambient fragments may be read as together constituting a kind of vertical narrative, potentially in ways unforeseen by the authors of individual statements. Considering fragmented storytelling in terms of these three orientations highlights the complexity of contemporary storytelling practices. Sophisticated narrators continuously blend the modes to not only overcome many of the limitations imposed by fragmentation but also benefit from the opportunities it provides. As discussed towards the end of the chapter, important questions of power also emerge. All writers are, in principle, able to engage in all three modes. Yet

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their ability to have their content read in all three modes is not even across the board. For a writer to have their content read vertically, they must be able to hold readers’ attention. This favours those already in positions of power, with the attentional capital that this brings. Anyone may tell a horizontal narrative but for a writer to have their content read horizontally and interpreted in the way they want it to be interpreted, their readers must already share the appropriate reference frames. This reduces the influence of those who seek to disrupt reference frames which are already prominent, as discussed in Chapter 5. Anyone can contribute to ambient narratives, but those with larger numbers of followers, and offline power more generally, are able to shape them more significantly. Donald Trump’s ambient statements have significant influence on broader social narratives. He may, with confidence, use ambient statements to shape the reference frames for his horizontal narratives. Similarly, he may more readily integrate vertical elements into his horizontal narratives, for example in his frequent two-​tweet threads, in the knowledge that his dominant position in the attention economy will ensure that both parts are read. Power, then, not only provides narrators with access to more aspects of the hybrid media system, but also to a wider range of narrative strategies within individual platforms.

Notes 1 https://​twitter.com/​3arabawy/​status/​351885130110992384 2 https://​twitter.com/​3arabawy/​status/​351883462237626368 3 https://​twitter.com/​3arabawy/​status/​351820396225507328 4 https://​twitter.com/​3arabawy/​status/​351820095485521920 5 https://​twitter.com/​3arabawy/​status/​351449909699936257 6 https://​twitter.com/​3arabawy/​status/​351526224562106368 7 https://​twitter.com/​Zeinobia/​status/​352202034163875842 8 https://​twitter.com/​Sandmonkey/​status/​351242247381061632 9 https://​twitter.com/​Gsquare86/​status/​351722866552745986 10 See, for example ‘who to follow’ lists posted by al-​Jazeera (al-​Jazeera 2014), Foreign Policy (Hounshell 2011) and the Washington Post (M. Fisher 2013a; 2013b). 11 It is important to note the shift this represents in the way that content is presented to readers owing to their implications for interpretation. The shift to ‘vertical’ presentation of information is in some respects a reversal of the change from the scrolls used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans to the bound pages of the early Christians which Kittler (2009) argues has significant implications for reading practices. 12 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​352143082160013312 13 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​352143279594283008 14 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​352143630275837952 15 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​352144195705782274 16 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​352144189804392448 17 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​352144580688363521 18 https://​threadreaderapp.com/​ 19 Al-​Huseini Abu Deef was an Egyptian journalist killed while covering clashes between protestors and Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Cairo during 2012.

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20 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​351332931349929984 21 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​351337614713962496 22 al-​Jama’a al-​Islamiyya is an Islamist movement associated with a number of terrorist attacks, including the 1997 Luxor Massacre. 23 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​351339161720070145 24 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​351344584275668993 25 This term refers to unofficial checkpoints established by Egyptian citizens at times of protest to search people for weapons to maintain security. 26 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​351389602650669057 27 https://​twitter.com/​Bassem_​Sabry/​status/​351399343959457793 28 https://​twitter.com/​PODEMOS/​status/​796690639480045568 29 https://​twitter.com/​PODEMOS/​status/​1001465433629736961 30 https://​twitter.com/​PODEMOS/​status/​1177553975433814016 31 President of the Community of Madrid at the time of writing. 32 https://​twitter.com/​PODEMOS/​status/​1212392529854914560 33 https://​twitter.com/​realDonaldTrump/​status/​1153737353648889856 34 https://​twitter.com/​realDonaldTrump/​status/​1153737355188199437 35 https://​twitter.com/​Zeinobia/​status/​352335905333313536 36 https://​twitter.com/​juralde/​status/​1136888003262111744 37 https://​twitter.com/​realDonaldTrump/​status/​1144533973428842496 38 See, for example, Chadwick’s analysis of the ‘Bullygate’ scandal arising from allegations that then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown had psychologically and physically mistreated staff (Chadwick 2013: 60–​74); Papacharissi’s work on connectively produced narratives (Papacharissi and De Fatima Oliveira 2012; Papacharissi 2015a; 2016); and Bruns’ work on the ‘unfinished’, collaborative and open nature of online news curation (Bruns 2005; 2018). 39 https://​twitter.com/​PODEMOS/​status/​917456987348258817 40 https://​twitter.com/​PODEMOS/​status/​917376623845941250 41 https://​twitter.com/​PODEMOS/​status/​917358606932209664

3 INTERPRETING FRAGMENTED STORIES I Open texts, distanciation and writerly readers

Abstract Chapter 3 explores the reception and interpretation of fragmented narratives, broadly arguing that the fragmentation of narrative multiplies interpretive possibilities. It begins by considering the hermeneutic concepts of dialogue and distance, drawing on Gadamer and Ricoeur, to argue that social media narrative is both semantically autonomous and defined by dialogue. I then turn to the importance of recognising that most everyday interpretation is inattentive, drawing on Frosh (2019) to caution against the ‘attentional fallacy’. This is followed by an analysis of the creative input required from readers for narrative fragments to be comprehensible. Drawing on literary theory, I propose that fragmentation goes beyond the limited ‘gaps’ typically found in fictional literature, demanding a truly ‘writerly’ approach to reading. The chapter concludes with a discussion of authorship, proposing that the ‘author-​function’, as described by Foucault (2003), has an ambivalent status with fragmented narratives, at times acting as a key point of unity and at others largely fading away.

The previous chapter focused on the ways that stories are told and structured. The emphasis here, on the other hand, is on what it means to be a reader of fragmented narratives and turns to the kind of reading process narrative fragmentation demands. The chapter begins with a consideration of dialogue and distance as two major paradigms for interpretation. Traditionally associated with face-​to-​face and written communication respectively, I propose that social media combines elements of both in complex ways but is ultimately defined more strongly by distance than dialogue. I then examine the ideas of attentive and inattentive interpretation,

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arguing that social media fragments are very often received in a state of distraction rather than focused attention. This is followed by an exploration of the concepts of gaps and fragments in which I expand on the idea that, insofar as they are encountered as fragments, posts are received in the context of larger wholes from the outset. Nonetheless, these wholes are only weakly defined by the fragments themselves, compelling readers to become ‘writers’ in their own right.The final part of the chapter examines authorship, in terms of both the limits of authorial power resulting from fragmentation and the complex status of the author-​function as a unifying principle when narratives are fragmented. My argument throughout is that the reception of fragmented narratives results in a very wide range of interpretive possibilities. I argue in Chapter 4 that there are important limits to interpretation in social media contexts. My goal here, however, is to show that these limits do not principally come from narrative fragments themselves. The central importance of distance renders fragments semantically autonomous while dialogue is in many cases illusory and has limited potential to resolve ambiguity. Inattentive interpretation means that the activities in which interpreters are engaged strongly shape the disclosure of narrative fragments, multiplying the likelihood of different people producing very different interpretations. Fragmentation allows for radically different understandings of larger narrative wholes, introducing a level of dynamism which far exceeds the limited plurality of gaps. All this is accompanied by the removal of key narrative techniques traditionally available to authors to shape reader response as they lose control of the order in which fragments are received and the way in which they are contextualised. The weakening of the author-​function takes away a further interpretive anchor, reducing the reassuring, if illusory, sense of a known author standing behind, and providing a final signified to, narrative fragments.

Dialogue and distance Ricoeur (1976) argues that interpretation is fundamentally different with spoken and written discourse. Face-​to-​face communication is characterised by the shared situation of the interlocutors and is always addressed to a specific other (Ricoeur 1976; Thompson 1995: 84; Maitland 2017: 57–​60). If I speak with a colleague, my statements are formulated specifically with that colleague in mind. Deictic references to here and there, me and you, are for the most part easily understood and centrally important. In more Heideggerian terms, oral communication is characterised by a shared ‘there’, elements of which can be pointed out but which are also already there as part of a shared environment: ‘the speaker belongs to the situation of interlocution. He [sic] is there, in the genuine sense of being-​there, of Da-​sein’ (Ricoeur 1976: 29). This shared context also provides statements with determinate meaning by providing ‘the ultimate criterion for the referential scope of what we say’ (Ricoeur 1976: 34). In addition to a shared ‘there’, face-​to-​face communication happens in a common now; when conversing with another, norms of interaction do not allow us to pause for 20 minutes to think of an answer,

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however much we might like to. Responses must be formulated there and then, in the moment. To understand face-​to-​face communication is to understand the intention of the speaker: ‘the subjective intention of the speaker and the discourse’s meaning overlap each other [sic] in such a way that it is the same thing to understand what the speaker means and what his discourse means’ (Ricoeur 1976: 29). Face-​to-​ face communication is further shaped by the central importance of dialogue. In the event that a speaker’s intention is not grasped in face-​to-​face communication it is possible to ask for clarification, a process which may be continued as long as necessary for agreement to be reached about the meaning of a statement (Iser 1978: 164–​167; Ricoeur 1991a: 75–​88; Maitland 2017: 57). Dialogue does not provide a way to enter the mind of another but can tell us the extent to which another has understood our intention. Conversation is, to a significant degree, concerned with agreement, not in the sense that interlocutors must agree with the substance of what is said, whether it is right or wrong, but rather that they achieve agreement at least about what it is that is said. Genuine dialogue is powerful because it is not controlled by a single participant but allows new meanings to emerge which were not initially apparent. This is true even of our own statements, with dialogue allowing for meanings to come into view which were not previously apparent even to the speaker (Ong 2017: 41). In this sense dialogue relies on grasping the intentions of others but also enables initial intentions to be transcended. This is, in turn, tied to spoken language’s event-​like character –​it is primarily something which happens (Ricoeur 1976; Ong 2002: 73) and which cannot be wholly predicted. ‘Written’ communication, understood broadly, is, on the other hand, comparatively thing-​like (Ong 2002: 73). Whether through text, images, videos or sound recording, it produces an object which is durable beyond the event of its creation. This allows for distance, both temporal and spatial, between writers and readers. Consequently, although writing may be addressed to a specific other, it is always also addressed, in principle at least, to ‘anyone who can read’ (Ricoeur 1976: 92) since there is no way of knowing which others will ultimately come to interpret it. Writing is not oriented to a specific shared context in the manner of face-​to-​face interaction. While writing is inevitably produced in relation to a specific situation, there is no limit to the number of other, unforeseeable situations in which it may subsequently be interpreted. The meaning of deictic references to here and there, now and then, you and me is less determinate than in speech. These characteristics make writing immensely powerful since they make it possible to ‘speak’ across space and time. Nonetheless, they also impede the recovery of the meanings of written material through dialogue in the manner seen in face-​to-​face interaction since it is not possible to converse with an absent interlocuter. As a consequence, distance has often been seen as a problem to be overcome through the application of a rigorous method intended to make present the original meaning of the text, as for example in the nineteenth-​century hermeneutical writings of Schleiermacher, Droysen and Dilthey.

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Gadamer and Ricoeur, on the other hand, bring a more positive take on distance through the concept of ‘distanciation’. Both are emphatic that distance means that the meanings of written texts inevitably go beyond the intentions of their creators and the horizons within which they are created (Ricoeur 1976; Gadamer 1989: 370–​374).The recontextualization of content in situations distant in one way or another from those in which it was created allows it to take on new meanings, disclosing possibilities which could not be seen by authors. From this perspective, distance must be understood as ‘the product of our methodology and therefore not something added and parasitic’ and as ‘constitutive of the text as written’ (Ricoeur 1973: 133). Distance defines writing as writing from the outset since to write is to create something ‘semantically autonomous’ (Ricoeur 1976), the meaning of which cannot be controlled or known by its creator once out in the world. From this perspective, the productive potential of distanciation is something to be celebrated. It may not be possible to be certain of an author’s intent when producing a text but this also allows texts to endlessly sustain new readings which transcend the context of their creation in a manner rarely seen with speech. Even in speech, dialogue does not necessarily lead to perfect comprehension of others’ intentions. All face-​to-​face interaction involves some distance since it is impossible for one person to directly access the experience of another person (Ricoeur 1976: 15–​16; Iser 1978: 166). Dialogue allows this distance to be bridged but not eliminated. Distance may be productive in dialogue as well as writing –​ the possibility of latent meanings of our own statements being revealed in dialogue, mentioned above, relies on their being distanced from our intentions (Ong 2017: 41). The fact that these possibilities can emerge at all highlights that meaning is never completely reducible to intentions. As discussed further below, authorial intention and the context of production are still relevant with written material since writing is still produced by someone, about something. Even if we do not need to know exactly what an author meant to say, a sense of the context in which a statement was made gives a starting point for interpretation. ‘Exposing’ ourselves to texts, whatever form they take, also remains a way of encountering and being-​with others (Ricoeur 1981: 106). This cannot take the form of true dialogue since with text ‘one partner in the hermeneutic conversation, the text, speaks only through the other partner, the interpreter’ (Gadamer 1989: 388). Nonetheless, it is still possible to encounter the voice of the other through text even if the reader must speak for them. Quasi-​dialogue with texts can undoubtedly have positive effects in allowing for our current limits of understanding to be transcended. It can also, however, have more insidious implications where the sense of distance is masked and quasi-​ dialogue comes to feel like true dialogue. Distance may be apparent with books but is frequently less obvious with other media. Thompson, writing about television, argues: [quasi-​interaction] is a kind of intimacy which allows individuals a great deal of scope in defining the terms of engagement and in fashioning the character

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of intimate others. Individuals can conceive of the others they come to know through the media in a way that is relatively unconstrained by the reality-​ defining features of face-​to-​face interaction. (Thompson 1995: 220) Television allows us to feel like we are engaging in genuine dialogue with others. Nonetheless, as with a book, quasi-​interaction is the most that can be achieved, ‘severed from the reflexive monitoring of others’ responses which is a routine and constant feature of face-​to-​face interaction’ (Thompson 1995: 96). Frosh, on the other hand, puts a more positive spin on the issue and argues that television’s capacity to create a sense of intimacy and mask distance can render distant others ‘livable within our homes and personal lives’ (Frosh 2019: 54). In this case, quasi-​ dialogue is understood as enabling a way of encountering distant others which is less threatening than true dialogue. He suggests that this still allows for the disclosure of new ways of being-​with-​others even if it happens only on the terms set by the interpreter. The question of dialogue and distance is more complex still on social media. As a medium, the book provides no mechanism for genuine dialogue with writers. On television, genuine dialogue is only possible through occasional and tightly constrained means such as phone-​ins or polls. Almost all social media platforms, on the other hand, have the possibility of dialogue as a core affordance. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram allow dialogic exchanges between known interlocutors using affordances like @replies, allowing for communication which is ‘for-​someone’ (Scannell 2014: 31). In some contexts this has had important implications, for example in relation to news ‘gatewatching’ (Bruns 2005; 2018), whereby interactions between users do not directly control what information becomes publicly available (as in traditional gatekeeping) but nonetheless greatly influence which content has attention drawn to it and is afforded visibility.Yet many users, especially prominent users such as those under consideration here, do not make extensive use of social media’s dialogic capabilities, instead using social media ‘like a megaphone broadcasting information … to the outside world’ (Brym et al. 2014: 270), resulting in communication which is ‘for-​anyone’ (Scannell 2014: 29) rather than directed to a specific other. The technical possibility of dialogue does not mean that it always happens. Where dialogic interactions do take place, they also differ from face-​to-​face conversations in important respects. In-​the-​moment exchanges are certainly possible but the reflexivity of face-​to-​face interaction, where the participants constantly monitor and respond to each other, is greatly attenuated, if not entirely eliminated. Even rapid-​fire dialogues on Twitter give the participants greater control, in at least some respects, than do face-​to-​face interactions: ‘Twitter and Facebook, like earlier forms of writing, suspend the risks of real time. Even a split second of “time out” helps manage self-​presentation’ (Peters 2015: 273). We can abruptly break off our participation in social media dialogues in much the same way as we can simply walk away from televisually mediated quasi-​interaction in a way that norms of politeness

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do not allow in face-​to-​face interaction (Thompson 1995: 97). Similarly, we can take the time to carefully consider a response as if we were writing a letter in a way that the norms of face-​to-​face interaction do not allow.There is no need to formulate responses in the shared ‘now’ of communication. Public conversations on Twitter and other social media platforms may involve known interlocutors but posts must also take into consideration the fact that interactions take place in full public view and that the results are durable rather than ephemeral –​they must be both for-​someone and for-​anyone. Context collapse (Wesch 2009; Marwick and Boyd 2010) means that a conversation between two people who share a situation, for example two Catalan activists, may be read by others who do not, for example an analyst in Germany reading the interaction years later. The issue is further complicated by questions of language. A language such as Catalan has comparatively few speakers without a strong personal connection to the region. Languages such as Spanish, English or Arabic, on the other hand, are used by very large numbers of speakers across huge geographical areas. This increases the likelihood of statements made in these languages being read by very ‘distant’ interpreters.Writers must therefore constantly hold distanciation in view in a way that is not normally necessary in face-​to-​face dialogue. They must recognise that their words may in principle be read by anyone rather than only by known interlocutors. Similarly, the durability of statements means they must be produced with a view to the fact that they will be recoverable in the future.This issue takes on special importance in an era of fragmentation where changing interpretive contexts make significant shifts of meaning not only possible but likely. In this sense, social media dialogue approximates the kind of performative interaction seen in recorded television interviews rather than the face-​to-​face conversations of daily life. It is dialogue with a strong emphasis on distance. Distanciation, nonetheless, also functions in seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand, aspects of internet culture, whether conceptualised as ‘remix culture’ (Gunkel 2016), ‘bricolage’ (Deuze 2006) or meme culture (Shifman 2013; Sharbaugh and Nguyen 2014; Esteves and Meikle 2015), take full advantage of the creative possibilities of distanciation. Remix culture is grounded in disregard for authorial intention and the wilful recontextualisation of existing material, deliberately using distance to enable existing content to take on new meanings. On the other hand, temporal distance can also lead to a seeming sedimentation of meaning, as for example in ‘call out culture’ when attention is drawn to old statements by public figures now deemed offensive (Levenson 2018; Arnowitz 2019; Moran 2020). In these cases, the temporal distance between a tweet and its being ‘called out’ seems to be understood as precluding the possibility of dialogue about its possible interpretation. The posters of content which is ‘called out’ frequently try to clarify their original intentions, essentially asking for it to be interpreted in terms of dialogue, in the sense that the key issue is their intention, rather than a semantically autonomous meaning, and that this meaning can be clarified through interaction. Nonetheless, in these cases temporal distance is understood as having rendered dialogue unnecessary rather than drawing attention to the range of interpretations which distance enables.

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The relative significance of dialogue and distance also varies depending on individual user practices. Egyptian activists frequently engaged in dialogue with other Twitter users during the summer of 2013, answering queries and discussing key issues. If a user were to question a tweet posted by Donald Trump with the goal of clarifying his intentions, on the other hand, it is very unlikely that they would receive an answer. It is even less likely that Trump would engage in a constructive discussion with another user to clarify any misunderstandings in the manner described by Gadamer and Ricoeur as characteristic of dialogue. In Trump’s case, this may be partly attributable to his enormous number of followers –​almost 80 million at the time of writing. Yet this seems not to be the only reason. Pablo Iglesias, Podemos’ General Secretary, also very rarely engages in dialogue with others via Twitter. Given that, as of the time of writing he also has a large number of followers, over 2.5 million, and his posts frequently receive thousands of responses, this is not wholly surprising. It is more surprising, however, that he also engaged in dialogue very infrequently in early 2014 when Podemos was launched as a political party. At that time, his tweets typically received far fewer responses –​dozens rather than thousands. For example, in January 2014 he posted the following: @PabloIglesias El viernes estaremos en Asturias https://​facebook.com/​events/​251240838 377772/​@ahorapodemos [On Friday we will be in Asturias] 14:30, 22/​01/​20141 In response to this, a number of users asked if he would also be visiting other regions in Spain –​attempting to engage in a dialogue in order to clarify the meaning of his statement. He responded to none of them; interpreters even at this time were limited to quasi-​dialogue. This does not mean that statements by prominent figures like Trump and Iglesias are received in the same way on social media as, for example, those made on radio or television. The technical possibility of interaction via social media contributes to a sense of intimacy absent with media such as television, even with ‘celebrity’ users (Marwick and Boyd 2010). This is further suggested by the fact that many users attempted to engage in dialogue with Iglesias, asking specific questions, even though he had little history of responding. At other times users post replies even if any resulting dialogue is more likely to be with other users than with the original poster, as for example in the thousands of responses to Donald Trump’s posts. Fragments may therefore be encountered at least partially in terms of dialogue, even if their interpretation is shaped much more profoundly by distanciation. The significance of dialogue and distance also depends on the way that fragments are encountered. An Egyptian activist reading a fragment posted by another Egyptian activist whom they have known for a long time, shortly after its posting, is likely to encounter that fragment largely in terms of dialogue.The same fragment encountered

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by a Western analyst looking back on it several years later, on the other hand, will be encountered primarily in terms of distance. A fragment contributing to an ambient narrative which the interpreter has been following may be encountered in dialogue with other fragments while a fragment relating to a story the interpreter knows little about may be less easily incorporated into existing interpretive frameworks. An Egyptian activist reading in 2020 a post they posted in 2013 is also likely to encounter it primarily in terms of distance –​even if they know what they meant when they wrote it, the passage of time increases the range of possible interpretations. The question of what constitutes ‘distance’ in this context is also more complex. To some degree, social media allows large numbers of people to occupy the same space, regardless of their geographical location (Isin and Ruppert 2015). In an important way, this means an overcoming of distance.The shared space social media allows is quite different from that of earlier media such as television and telephones in that it is far more open and public. In Heideggerian terms, social media can significantly reduce the extent to which being located in different physical spaces precludes being situated in a common, existential ‘there’. Social media makes it possible to feel ‘near’ to spatially distant events through moment to moment reporting of events as they unfold. As the 2011 Egyptian Revolution showed, however, there are limits to this. Studies have shown that physical co-​location in squares was crucial to the Revolution’s initial success, and played a far more significant role than social media in building networks of solidarity and shared intentionality (Gerbaudo 2012; Gunning and Baron 2014). In this context at least, the removal of distance demanded something more visceral than social media could afford. This highlights the dangers of seeking to do away with online/​offline distinctions altogether, even if we recognise the myriad ways they intertwine. In some cases social media only ‘manufactures an appearance of “being there” ’ (Gunkel 2019: 314) which is nonetheless largely illusory. Social media enables dialogue across space but, in so doing, it eliminates neither spatial nor existential distance. In-​the-​moment narration does, however, make it possible for people who are ostensibly distant from one another to feel part of the same ‘there’. Couldry and Hepp (2017: 19) argue that in the contemporary world it makes little sense to draw a strong distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘mediated’ experiences. On the one hand, they are surely right that direct and mediated experiences in many cases have now become so thoroughly intermingled that they cannot be fully separated. For Egyptian activists during the 2013 intervention, for example, experiences on the streets were inevitably accompanied by mediated experiences of events in the country experienced via television, social media and private messaging, with understandings from both sources mutually informing one another. For those looking on and interpreting events from afar, only mediated experiences were available. Yet the apparent immediacy of social media reporting, and the apparent parallels between the experience of reading fragmentary reports and what it is like to experience things in the flesh has the potential to cover over the fact that their experiences were purely mediated. This makes it possible to feel there without genuinely being-​there.

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This illusory sense of being-​there is closely related to the apparent simultaneity of social media reporting, as the collapse of temporal distance through a shared ‘now’ may give the impression that existential distance has also been collapsed.2 The idea of a single shared ‘now’, however, relies on what Heidegger calls the ‘vulgar’ conception of time. From this perspective, time is understood as something constant, externally determined and wholly calculable. It may not be objectively present in the manner of a thing (Ricoeur 1984: 9–​12) but nor does it rely on human interpretive activity. Phenomenological time on the other hand is mediated through the care structure; we are in-​time in terms of thrownness, attunement and projection. Heidegger interprets this in a rather individualistic way, putting being-​towards-​death front and centre as ‘one’s ownmost, nonrelational, and insuperable [unüberholbar] possibility’ (Heidegger 2010: 241, emphasis in original unless otherwise stated). Ricoeur, on the other hand, argues that narrative takes us beyond this individualistic focus by introducing a way of being in-​time which is shared and not reducible to a single individual (Ricoeur 1980).To exist within the same existential now, then, requires dwelling in the same care structure, being thrown and projecting with others through narrative rather than simple contemporaneity in terms of calculable time. Contemporaneity by itself does not serve as a common anchor for interpretation. A parallel can be drawn here with the notion of liveness. Liveness is never simply the result of viewing events in real time but ‘the worked at, achieved and accomplished effect of the human application and use of technologies whose ontological characteristic is immediate connectivity’ (Scannell 2014: 99). On television, specific techniques are used to create a sense of liveness such as crowd noise in football matches, scrolling news tickers in television news, false starts and mistakes in statements made by television presenters and so on. Liveness is further distinguished from being merely ‘real-​time’ (van Es 2017) by the fact that liveness is inherently social and enables a distinctive way of being-​with-​others (van Es 2016). In narrative terms this can be conceptualised as being in-​time together through shared absorption within an unfolding story with an as yet uncertain conclusion. It provides a shared way of being-​there-​with-​others. The key point, nonetheless, is that what is shared is ‘the experience of viewing’ (Scannell 2001: 409).Thus, viewers share being-​ there with other viewers but not with those with direct, unmediated experiences of events. Both sets of observers can claim to have been-​there but they nonetheless do not share a ‘there’. The experiences are of a fundamentally different kind. Viewers are brought close to events and to other viewers in an important sense but without abolishing the distance between them and those with unmediated experiences. Liveness does not work in precisely the same way on social media as on television. Scannell emphasises that a key element of television liveness is that every viewer has access to precisely the same experience –​the same camera angles, cuts, commentary and so on –​even if the way they experience it as individuals varies (Scannell 2014: 103). With social media, on the other hand, the experiences themselves are much more varied. Different users may see some of the same content but much of it will differ from observer to observer. In this sense, they may share with

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one another a mediated and live experience of events even if the precise content on which their experience is based is not exactly the same for each person. It remains true, moreover, that liveness on social media is an effect which must be produced rather than a necessary outcome (cf. Markham, 2020: 94–​95). Many social media users employ fragmentary narrative techniques to cultivate this sense of liveness, for example through use of the present tense and deictic markers to the here and now. This gives an impression not only of being-​there in a mediated sense but of being-​there with the poster, of direct participation. As with television, this is a technique for attracting and maintaining viewer attention. As with television, however, an important gap remains between these different ways of being-​there. Liveness enables shared experiences but they are shared with others observing them live, rather than with those experiencing them directly. That events are encountered at the same moment, as measured through clock time, does not eliminate this major difference even as it may cover it over. As Dayan (2009: 22) puts it: ‘simultaneity without sharedness is not very important’. The relationships between dialogue and distance, writing and orality are thus changing.Writing has gradually become more dialogic as the internet has provided readers with new ways to explicitly respond to fixed content. Orality, in its turn, is also transformed as users engage in dialogue with others while remaining conscious of the permanence of what they say, and the fact that their statements may subsequently be interpreted in terms of distance. This results in a situation where the norms of oral and written communication are combined in new ways. As Stewart argues: Twitter increasingly collapses oral and written norms of communication, creating a space wherein the immediate, dialogic exchange of orality (Ong, 1982) is meshed with what boyd (2011, p. 46) calls the persistent, replicable, scalable and searchable qualities of digital content. (Stewart 2016: 64–​65) As a consequence, the producers of fragments must incorporate both dialogue and distance into their writing practices from the outset, recognising the very different ways in which the content they produce may be interpreted and the impossibility of saying anything that is truly univocal.

Attention and inattention We can add further depth by also distinguishing between attentive and inattentive interpretation. Attentive, or thematic, interpretation is characterised by its being reflective, self-​conscious and ‘detached’. This is the mode of interpretation with which we are most familiar as scholars since academic study consists, in essence, of the application of attention. This basic approach to reading is common to otherwise diverse approaches to interpretation. Literary critics, cultural theorists, critical theorists, scholars of mass and social media, philosophers and post colonialists differ

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wildly in their areas of interest, views on what constitutes a valid and useful interpretation and approaches; nonetheless they all pay active attention to things, albeit in different ways and to different things. The vast literature on research methods is concerned to a significant extent with ensuring that attention is applied in rigorous and consistent ways. Hermeneutics, for example, for most of its history has been primarily concerned with developing rigorous methods for attentive interpretation. Nonetheless, like many approaches in the humanities, it has been criticised for failing to recognise how interpretation is shaped by issues such as power, gender and ideology, as seen for example in the famous Habermas-​Gadamer debate. This criticism, to a significant degree, is grounded in a perceived failure to pay adequate attention. Academic investigation, despite its variety, also shares an orientation towards interpretation which ‘constructs something finite and definite from something infinite and indefinite’ (Iser 2000: 52). Research consists not only in paying attention to things but in subsequently turning the products of that attention into concrete outputs. Literary scholars write critiques of novels, visual anthropologists create ethnographic films, historians write histories, internet theorists write books and articles which pin down and give shape to otherwise chaotic flows of information and meaning. Interpretation is similarly thematic among journalists –​they pay deliberate attention to events as they happen, and then produce concrete outputs of one kind or another. Many of these concrete outputs are at least partially based on narrative. Historical accounts are an obvious example, but it is far from uncommon in other disciplines. In studies of the internet, for example, it is common to see narrative accounts of processes of change in both early (Manovich 2001) and recent work (Bruns 2018). In journalism, as in academia, conscious effort is exerted to maintain as clear a subject-​object distinction as possible. As part of this, objects of investigation are examined as ‘extant’ or ‘present at hand’; encountered in terms of their objective presence. This is apparent, for example, in Murthy’s argument that bundles of fragmentary content on the internet are understood as ‘digital objects’ (Murthy 2013: 26–​28) –​they may only acquire clear boundaries through interpretation, but subsequently exist as objects independent of their observers. This type of interpretation is also frequently grounded in explicit goals. At least in the case of academia and journalism, those goals very often consist in the production of knowledge. This, coupled with the fact that it strives to be ‘detached and disinterested’ aiming ‘only at the truth’ (Carr 1986: 171), gives attentive interpretation an epistemological tint. Yet to assume that attentive interpretation is the norm is to perpetrate the ‘attentive fallacy’ (Frosh 2019: 36–​42). Most of the media messages we receive, images we see, and stories we hear are not encountered in the context of our paying full attention to them but rather in the midst of doing other things. Hermida alludes to this with the concept of ambient news which ‘much like ambient music that plays in the background … a listener will tune in to the music when there is a change in tone or style that catches their attention’ (Hermida 2014: 361). This need not mean a lack of attention, but instead that, when distracted, attention is

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either dispersed (e.g. when our minds wander) or focused on something other than what we ‘should’ be concentrating on (e.g. thinking about committee work instead of working on a manuscript) (Highmore 2011). Much of the treatment of ‘absorbed’ everyday existence in division one of Being and Time (Heidegger 2010) can be read as an account of ordinary, inattentive being. Distraction should not necessarily be understood in negative terms; in different ways Frosh (2011; 2019), Scannell (1996: 144–​178) and Highmore (2011: 114–​138) argue for the emancipatory potential of inattention as creating a non-​threatening and unobtrusive space for encounters with the new and with alterity. For Heidegger, it is neither positive nor negative but rather the basic way for humans to exist. Inattentive interpretation proceeds quite differently from attentive interpretation. When interpreting inattentively, we encounter things through ‘circumspection’. In daily life we do not typically fixate on things as individual things but rather encounter them prethematically and in the context of being absorbed in other activities. In contrast to scholarly attention, which relies on ‘de-​worlding’, things encountered circumspectly are encountered principally and nonthematically in terms of their relations to other things. This determines the way of being of things and the manner in which they are intelligible: ‘what is at hand in the surrounding world is, after all, not objectively present for an eternal spectator exempt from Dasein, but is encountered in the circumspect, heedful everydayness of Dasein’ (Heidegger 2010: 103). In contrast to the explicit purposes of academic or journalistic inquiry, inattentive interpretation is more strongly ‘purposive’ than ‘purposeful’, governed not by explicit or implicit goals, but rather being ‘for-​the-​sake-​of-​which’. This is not ‘something thought, something first posited in “thinking”, but rather relations in which heedful circumspection as such already dwells’ (Heidegger 2010: 87). In other words, each of us has a prethematic understanding of who we are, itself grounded in a prethematic understanding of what we are ‘for’ –​that is, interpreting the world for-​the-​sake-​of being a good father, or a rigorous analyst or a good citizen. This orientation provides the necessary ground for taking up a stance in relation to the world which, in turn, provides the largely prethematic ground for inattentive interpretation. Rather than producing a fixed epistemological object, such as an academic or journal article, most inattentive interpretation contributes instead to our prethematic understanding of the world. Rather than teasing out and taming complexity with carefully constructed taxonomies and theoretical frameworks as in academic inquiry, everyday interpretation ‘is as much characterised by confusion as clarity, as much by simultaneity and complexity as discrete and separable motifs’ (Highmore 2011: 2). With inattentive interpretation, information and narrative fragments are encountered principally as to hand –​almost as pieces of ‘equipment’ understood principally in terms of their function rather than in and of themselves. The understanding produced is finite but not definite. Rather than a strict subject-​object distinction being maintained, both the interpreting self and focus of interpretation are unified as elements of the world: ‘self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-​in-​the-​world’ (Heidegger 1982: 297).

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Individual fragments, therefore, are disclosed according to Dasein but also reciprocally shape Dasein. The outcomes of this type of interpretation matter principally in terms of our everyday lives, activities and being rather than being concerned with abstract questions of truth. This gives inattentive interpretation more of an ontological slant, compared to the epistemological emphasis of attentive interpretation. This morning, for example, while making breakfast I glanced at my phone and saw a notification from Twitter telling me Donald Trump had tweeted about the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a controversial project to connect oil producers in Canada with refining facilities in the southern USA. I looked at the tweet for a second or two at most, only reading the part visible in the preview, and then carried on making breakfast. My background knowledge about the pipeline was minimal –​I could vaguely recall reading a newspaper article about it a few months earlier. I did not stop to think deliberately about Trump’s tweet as a narrative fragment, an object, as I am doing now that I am sitting at my desk and writing about it. Rather, I encountered it in a distracted way, in the context of my being absorbed in making breakfast. This context is not something which coloured my reading of the tweet, but rather fundamentally determined the way in which it was disclosed to me in that particular instance. My interpretation of the tweet was not given a fixed form or consciously thematised. Nonetheless, it contributed in a small way to my broad understanding of the world, and thus also my own Dasein, by influencing the disclosure of the world as a relational whole. In this case, my interpretation may have taken the form of an unthematised narrative but since I did not actively think about it or discuss the issue with anyone else, its contours remained largely unspecified and indeterminate. I interpreted Trump’s tweet, not in the context of a specific goal such as writing a book about his communication practices, but for-​the-​sake of my being a good academic and citizen who keeps up to date with what the President of the USA says. As with the distinction between dialogue and distance, attention and inattention do not represent a binary. Clearly, academic inquiry is strongly influenced by ways of being and presupposition. Few, in the humanities and social sciences at least, would now argue that truly objective knowledge is possible. The goals in research are also frequently hazy and as much journalism is carried out in the context of for the sake of being a good journalist as it is for explicitly defined objectives. Few would doubt that plenty of ‘unthinking’ analyses are published in academic journals. The fixity of interpretation seen in publications is nothing more than a temporary halting of a more fluid and variable interpretive process. Conversely, as Highmore’s account of distraction shows, dispersion of attention does not mean a lack of attention overall. We pay different amounts, and types, of attention to media fragments at different times. Inattentive interpretations are frequently thematised in everyday life in the course of interacting with other people.3 Nonetheless, thinking about inattention highlights the central importance of our existing ways of being in shaping interpretation in general and of media content in particular. Differences in Dasein may result in radical differences of interpretation which are nonetheless not obvious to interpreters themselves since they typically remain unthematised.

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Gaps and fragments Interpretation is never fully determined by objects themselves. Texts and narratives never precisely map on to one another since a text cannot ‘be’ a narrative. This is equally true whether narratives are understood as ‘mental images’ produced from texts acting as ‘blueprints’ (Ryan and Thon 2014a: 3) or as thematic or prethematic ways of understanding as I have argued. Interpretation always requires input from readers with the consequence that the process of ‘composition, of configuration’ is completed not ‘in the text but in the reader’ (Ricoeur 1991b: 26). Storytelling techniques may be used to encourage certain interpretations and discourage others but cannot guarantee readers’ responses. In literary theory, Iser (1974) captures this distinction by distinguishing between ‘texts’, which are stable objects, and ‘works’, which are ‘realised’ texts produced by the interpretive activity of the reader in response to the text. Readers’ responses are shaped by texts but not entirely determined by them: the ‘work’ is brought into existence through the ‘convergence’ of text and reader; consequently, the ‘convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader’ (Iser 1974: 275). Interpretive input is required from readers with even the simplest stories, even if at first glance they seem to permit only a single interpretation. Bruner (1991) identifies two possible exceptions to this general rule: 1) where ‘great storytellers have the artifices of narrative reality construction so well mastered that their telling pre-​empts momentarily the possibility of any but a single interpretation’ (Bruner 1991: 9); and 2), via ‘narrative banalization’ whereby a story becomes ‘so socially conventional, so well known, so in keeping with the canon, that we can assign it to some well-​rehearsed and virtually automatic interpretive routine’ (Bruner 1991: 9). We will return to both these ideas later but for now the key point is that this closing down is only ever temporary. Kermode (1979: 24–​45) shows this powerfully in his analysis of the biblical story of the Good Samaritan –​on the face of it a structurally simple and didactic parable designed to clearly communicate a specific message. Kermode shows, nonetheless, that the story has been interpreted in a wide range of different ways over the years and that even the influence of powerful institutional traditions did not prevent the proliferation of readings (Kermode 1979: 37). Mirroring Heidegger’s account of disclosure, he concludes that all narratives must be ‘obscure’ in the sense that their hermeneutic potential is ‘inexhaustible’ even as it is never fully available (Kermode 1979: 40–​45). A key driver of narrative obscurity is ambiguity arising from ‘missing’ information, variously theorised as ‘spots of indeterminacy’ (Ingarden 1979), ‘narrative vacuums’ (Abbott 2002) or ‘gaps’ (Iser 1974). In Ricoeur’s words, ‘the written work is a sketch for reading. Indeed, it consists of holes, lacunae, zones of indetermination’ (Ricoeur 1984: 77). Gaps can take a multitude of forms. There may be uncertainty regarding: chronology (which event happened first); logical or causal relations (how events relate to one another and what caused what); the identity of agents (who is responsible for what); significance (what is the meaning of an event); temporal or

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spatial location (when or where did something take place); scale (was an explosion large or small); character (was a demonstration peaceful or violent), and so on. The inevitable selectivity of narrative construction and comprehension means that such gaps are not avoidable –​no narrative account of any event can incorporate every possible detail. Nonetheless, the presence of gaps does not, in itself, act as a significant impediment to interpretation and frequently we do not even notice their presence. Even if we do spot a gap, in many cases the result is only what Dreyfus (1990: 71) terms ‘malfunction’ –​a momentary obstacle which can nonetheless be quickly and easily resolved without a meaningful break from ordinary circumspection. Turning now to fragments, gaps can frequently be observed even within individual tweets. Consider the following from Donald Trump: @realDonaldTrump We are a great Sovereign Nation. We have Strong Borders and will never accept people coming into our Country illegally 12:56, 24/​10/​20184 Although just 20 words long, this single tweet tells a horizontal narrative joining past, present and future: the nation is a great one –​presumably at least partly on the basis of things it did in the past –​and has strong borders. It will never accept people entering illegally. Nonetheless, to read it as a horizontal narrative means resolving several gaps: Which nation we are talking about? What constitutes ‘strong borders’? Does the nation have a previous history of accepting people coming into the country illegally? Is it possible to enter the country legally? On what basis should the nation be considered as great’? What is the relationship between being a great sovereign nation, having strong borders and not accepting people entering the country illegally? Who are these ‘people’? Readers themselves must supply all this missing information if they are to read the tweet as meaningful. These lacunae vary in the extent to which they permit varied readings and in their importance. Taking the first gap highlighted above as an example, it is in one sense easy to fill –​knowledge that Trump was the current US president suggested that the nation in question is the USA. In cases like this gap filling is relatively limited and readers need only concretise pre-​determined details which are omitted for reasons of economy.5 Yet in another sense, even gaps like this cannot necessarily be so mechanistically filled. Trump’s history of racially divisive statements raises questions about the reference of the terms ‘nation’ and ‘we’. For example, while campaigning for the presidency in 2016 he repeatedly referred to Gonzalo Curiel, a judge presiding over a legal case regarding fraud committed by Trump University, as ‘Mexican’ (White 2016). This called into question not only Curiel’s suitability for the case under consideration, but also his membership of the US nation in a more general sense. Moreover, Trump has strongly opposed the idea of regularising the status of existing undocumented immigrants to the USA. Yet several previous regularisation initiatives have been undertaken in the USA, giving legal status to

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individuals formally considered illegal immigrants. If the USA will ‘never accept people coming into our Country illegally’, it is unclear whether people who entered the country illegally but whose status has since been formalised should be considered part of the ‘great Sovereign Nation’ within which Trump includes himself. In this case the gap functions more like a ‘crux’ (Abbott 2002: 86–​87), a key point in a narrative on which the whole interpretation hinges. Gaps introduce interpretive dynamism by enabling multiple possible readings. In many cases, as in this example, the validity of interpretations cannot be decisively measured through reference to the ‘text’ itself, nor is it possible to engage in a dialogue with the speaker in order to resolve their meaning. Gaps like this can function along the lines of an Aristotelian ‘enthymeme’, a rhetorical technique where either the conclusion or a premise of an argument is left unstated so as to involve the audience in constructing the argument, even if they are not thematically aware of doing so (Hauser 1986: 79). Yet the impossibility of dialogue and impact of distanciation means that it must forever remain a lacuna which cannot be fully resolved –​there is no single, univocal meaning to be recovered. Narratives strongly characterised by gaps are capable of being interpreted in different ways by different people and are untied to a transcendental signified. As I argue below and in Chapter 5, this ambivalence may be emancipatory and allow for valuable experiences of plurality. Nonetheless, it also means that any specific interpretation can be denied while also enabling messages to be communicated which might be considered unacceptable if stated explicitly. This combination of deniability and multivocality highlights the central importance of gaps in ‘dog whistle’ politics (López 2014; Albertson 2015). If all narrative texts are obscure, it is also true that obscurity and hermeneutic potential vary greatly from text to text. This issue has been explored in depth by literary scholars drawing distinctions between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts (Barthes 1974), ‘open’ and ‘closed’ texts (Eco 1979), or the literature of ‘production’ and literature of ‘consumption’ (Castellet 2001). In each case, the key distinction lies in the role of the interpreter. A ‘readerly’ or ‘closed’ story is one which clearly specifies how it is to be interpreted. The creators of such stories seek to minimise gaps, offering stories up as objects for consumption. Where they cannot be avoided, the writer strives to restrict the range of possible interpretations. As such, the meaning of a closed text is comparatively limited and specified in advance, leaving the reader to find but not influence it. The presence of the author is too ‘absolute and visible to allow the interference of an unknown other’ (Castellet 2001: 50).6 This leaves the reader with ‘no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum’ (Barthes 1974: 4). Writerly texts, on the other hand, are defined by plurality and multiplicity. Rather than acting as containers of meaning, open texts much more loosely constrain the manner of their own interpretation. Rather than their meaning simply being more difficult to find than that of a readerly text, they are characterised by ‘a playing’ grounded in ‘a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations’ (Barthes 1977: 158). Interpreters are compelled to become ‘writers’ collaborating

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in producing the narrative, rather than simply realising something which already exists. Instead of simply filling in the blanks in a pre-​ordained and predictable way ultimately grounded in authorial intention, the reader must interpret creatively and go beyond the possibilities imagined and defined by the author. In Barthes’ words: the more plural the text, the less it is written before I read it; I do not make it undergo a predicative operation, consequent upon its being, an operation known as reading, and I is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text, one which will subsequently deal with the text as it would an object to dismantle or a site to occupy. (Barthes 1974: 10) Gaps in writerly texts are not puzzles to be solved but irreducibly ambivalent. In Ricoeur’s terms the emphasis shifts from mimesis2, the configuration of the narrative by the storyteller, and towards mimesis3, the refiguration of the narrative by its reader (Ricoeur 1984). In extreme cases, ‘it is the reader, almost abandoned by the work, who carries the burden of emplotment’ (Ricoeur 1980: 77). Peters rightly highlights that ‘readers have always hopscotched around, according to their needs’ (Peters 2015: 290). Nonetheless, the rise of the internet has brought with it a broad shift towards the writerly. It has encouraged and enabled readers to take far more control of the narratives they interpret and to co-​participate much more actively in their production than was normal in the past. Yet even the most writerly texts do not leave interpretation wholly unconstrained, and the range of interpretations open to any interpreter, at any particular instant, are not limitless. A tension remains between the intentions of authors and the activities of interpreters. Eco offers the following comments on the limits applicable to even the most open texts: the possibilities which the work’s openness makes available always work within a given field of relations … we may well deny that there is a single prescribed point of view. But this does not mean complete chaos in its internal relations. What it does imply is an organising rule which governs these relations. Therefore, to sum up, we can say that the work in movement is the possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous invitation to indiscriminate participation.The invitation offers the performer the chance of an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author. In other words, the author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work to be completed. He does not know the exact fashion in which his work will be concluded, but he is aware that once completed the work in question will still be his own. It will not be a different work, and, at the end of the interpretive dialogue, a form which is his form, will have been organized, even though it may have been assembled by an outside party in a particular way that he could not have foreseen. The author is the one who proposed a number of possibilities

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which had already been rationally organized, oriented, and endowed with specifications for proper development. (Eco 1979: 62) This quotation reminds us that thinkers such as Eco and Barthes were writing about literary texts self-​consciously produced to be open. The classic novels of the nineteenth-​century served as the archetype of readerly texts, and the avant garde poetry, prose and music of the twentieth century provided models of the writerly. For both Eco and Barthes, the extent to which a text is writerly or open rests not only in the characteristics of the text itself, but also in the intention of the author. Even an open text should not be viewed as an ‘amorphous invitation to indiscriminate participation. The invitation offers the performer the chance of an oriented insertion into something which remains intended by the author’ (Eco 1979: 62, my emphasis). This points to the limits of the dynamism produced by gaps. Gaps are not formless but rather defined by their surroundings. In a jigsaw puzzle, the shape of a missing piece is clear if the surrounding pieces are in place. Likewise, gaps in narratives are points of indeterminacy given shape by other, determinate parts of texts. They do not precisely determine reader response but nor do they leave it entirely unguided. As Iser puts it, in a literary text ‘the structured blanks of the text stimulate the process of ideation to be performed by the reader on terms set by the text’ (Iser 1978: 169). The terms set by the text are themselves ultimately set by the author. To a certain extent this type of gap can be seen with fragmented political storytelling. In the examples from Trump given a few paragraphs ago, the reader is called upon to engage in a process of ideation on terms set by the tweet functioning as a sort of text.We also see this in vertical narrative, as discussed in Chapter 2.Yet in many other cases interpretation does not take the form of filling defined blanks within a structured whole which ultimately belongs to an author. In horizontal narrative there may be an authorially intended whole but there is no textual whole and little to limit the interpretive possibilities. With ambient narrative there is neither a defined whole nor a single author. In contrast to Eco’s description of the open work, there really is something approaching ‘chaos’ in their internal relations. The respective importance of presence and absence is reversed. Interpretation in this case goes far beyond that imagined by Barthes or Eco as readers are called upon to ‘write’ the stories they interpret to a significantly greater degree, grasping different bits together in ways which are not determined in advance by either authors or texts themselves. It is in this difference that the shift from gaps to fragments lies. With gaps there is a textual framework to structure their interpretation. With fragments, there is no comparable fixed textual framework. Gaps have a definite shape since they are delineated by fixed textual elements. They are located within a set narrative temporality since, even though the future cannot be predicted, the next part of the story is already set. Gaps may be reinterpreted over time but the objectively present elements which give them their shape remain the same. Fragments, in one sense, also have a defined shape constituted by the extant elements in front of the interpreter, whether words, images, video, etc. Yet to interpret in terms of

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fragments is not to interpret atomistically since the notion of the fragment continues to imply a whole; a fragment is always a fragment of something, even if we are not always sure exactly what that something looks like. Consequently, they are, in important respects, much more amorphous because their existence is only knowable through reference to larger wholes which are not positively defined and, in many cases, only dimly graspable. Objective presence serves as a much weaker anchor of interpretation. That which must be ‘written’ by the interpreter is much more significant since very little of the whole necessary for grasping together fragments as meaningful is explicitly provided in the form of a text.This enables a far wider range of interpretive possibilities than gaps, as traditionally conceived, and exemplifies the Barthesian writerly text as one which has not only multiple meanings but cannot be pinned down to a single interpretation: ‘not a co-​existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination’ (Barthes 1977: 159). Langlois (2019: 163) argues that social media take over ‘processes of protention –​the capacity to imagine and project oneself into a future’ through their control of information flows. My argument is almost the opposite –​algorithms influence the content to which users are exposed but do little to determine what that content means and the ends towards which it projects since this continues to rely on the writerly input of interpreters themselves. In enforcing fragmentation, social media limit the ability of writers to take over protention on behalf of readers. Far from diminishing the importance of the interpreting self, this makes it more important than ever. ‘Writing’ in this case can mean different things. On the one hand, it is entirely possible to interpret individual fragments as fragments without relating them to other textual fragments. Consider the following: @PabloIglesias Hay que poner fin a la escalada de violencia y al golpe de Estado en #Bolivia. Esta es la vía: mediación de la Comunidad Internacional. Salida dialogada. Respetar las instituciones y el papel fundamental de la Asamblea Legislativa. Restaurar la democracia. @UNDPPA Jean Arnault has been appointed as the Secretary-​General’s Personal Envoy to #Bolivia. He will engage with all Bolivian actors and offer @UN’s support in efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis in the country. https://​un.org/​sg/​en/​content/​ [it is necessary to put an end to the escalation of violence and the coup d’état in #Bolivia. This is the way: mediation by the International Community. A negotiated exit. Respect institutions and the fundamental role of the Legislative Assembly. ‘Restore democracy’] 19:04, 14/​11/​197

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Without reading or listening to anything else Iglesias has said about the crisis in Bolivia, it is not difficult to interpret this fragment in terms of a whole and complete narrative. The content of this narrative, however, is only very loosely constrained by the tweet itself. ‘Democracy’, and thus the state to be restored, can mean very different things. Iglesias is clear that the role of the legislative assembly is ‘fundamental’ but does not say what that means in practice or specifically the outcome he believes it should lead to in this instance.The reference to an ‘escalation of violence’ leaves it unclear who is perpetrating the violence, what form it is taking and so on. In the event of mediation, who would be permitted to participate? What kind of ‘end’ to the violence would be desirable? Nonetheless, as a reader I can supply answers to all these questions even if I cannot find them in the text itself. On the other hand, it is also possible to seek out further information in order to try to clarify the meaning of the fragment. On 11 November 2018, for instance, a few days before Iglesias’ tweet, Podemos posted an official statement on their website expressing their view on the situation in Bolivia:8 they argue that the protests seen in Bolivia were led by the opposition deliberately seeking to overthrow Evo Morales’ legitimate government, that the Spanish government should ‘energetically’ intervene to support Morales and emphasise Morales’ record in alleviating poverty and bringing economic and social progress. Seeking out more information is a way to reduce the writerliness of fragmentary information, effectively rendering it more readerly by connecting it to other fragments understood to be part of the same textual and significant whole. As with a broken vase, we can imagine the shape of the whole no matter how small the fragment; the bigger the fragment, the clearer the overall shape and the narrower the range of interpretive possibilities. Both approaches nonetheless rely on input from interpreters. It is in this context that the once-​popular concept of the ‘produser’ (Bruns 2010; Bird 2011; Papacharissi 2015b) can be recovered. The principal way in which users ‘produce’ in internet contexts is not in the creation of content, but in the highly productive approach to interpretation demanded by fragmentation. Whether we are dealing with creative ‘writing’ or seeking out further fragments to enable a more readerly interpretation, far more ‘production’ is required for interpretation to be possible than with most traditional storytelling. In both cases, not only responsibility but also interpretive power is shifted to the interpreter. Even when readers seek out further information to render fragments more readerly, they, rather than the original producers of fragments, determine what information they seek in order to do this. Seemingly paradoxically, they must ‘write’ something closer to a traditional text in order to render it more readerly. The fact that interpreters are routinely able to carry out this kind of productive reading while remaining within everyday circumspection, nonetheless, means that ‘produsing’ should not necessarily be understood as grounded in conscious choice. It provides the opportunity for the exercise of agency and autonomy but does not demand it. Before moving on, some final provisos are called for. First, the terms ‘writing’ and ‘production’ imply the creation of objects. But, as I have discussed previously,

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the interpretation thus produced need not, and typically will not, have the character of an object. Nor are interpretations, in most cases, thematised at all. Second, fragments imply a whole just as strongly as gaps. To see a pottery fragment as a fragment means seeing it in relation to the pot of which it was once part. To see a narrative fragment as a fragment is to see it in relation to the whole within which it is, or might be, situated. The difference is that with a piece of broken pottery, there was, first, a whole vase which was subsequently broken. With a narrative produced as a fragmentary story, fragments and wholes come into being simultaneously and neither is prior to the other.There is no originary whole from which fragments are derived but a sense of the whole, or multiple possible wholes, must be there from the moment of first encountering a single fragment rather than produced retrospectively. This brings us back once again to Heidegger’s argument that worldly things are not first encountered as objectively present and retrospectively assigned meaning but rather encountered as meaningful from the start: interpretation does not, so to speak, throw a ‘significance’ over what is nakedly objectively present and does not stick a value on it. But what is encountered in the world is always already in a relevance which is disclosed in the understanding of world. (Heidegger 2010: 145) This highlights that, while fragments may not be defined by their contextual environment to the same extent as gaps, they nonetheless remain structured by interpreters’ pre-​existing understandings which shape their disclosure as relevant. Indeed, I argue in Chapter 4 that these ‘fore-​understandings’ are more important than ever in contexts characterised by fragmentation as interpreters must seek alternative crutches in the absence of definite texts. Third, openness creates the possibility for an experience of the plural allowing for the operation of poiesis in a productive, disclosive manner (Frosh 2019). It does not, however, ensure that it will be experienced in this way by interpreters. For Barthes, plurality enables the experience of ‘bliss’ but does so by imposing a ‘state of loss’, discomforting the reader and unsettling their historical, cultural and psychological assumptions, ‘bringing to crisis his [sic] relationship with language’ (Barthes 1975b: 14). To experience the plurality of a text is also to experience the ungroundedness of the interpreting self which, like a text, has at its centre an aporia, a desired transcendental signified which can nonetheless never be made present. For Heidegger, resolutely facing this ungroundedness and our own possibilities enables ‘authentic’ being.Yet he also argues that in daily life the standard response is to ‘flee’ to the safety of the known, ‘covering over’ unsettledness. The unsettledness which fragmented narration brings may also be covered over, with fragments being disclosed in terms of a single possible interpretation rather than as zones of indeterminacy. As Lagerkvist (2016) argues, and as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, the anxiety arising from the very unsettledness of fragmented narrative may produce a closing down of interpretive possibilities rather than an explosion.

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The weakened author (function) Authorial control of narrative meaning is never absolute. As discussed above, distanciation frees textual meaning from the limitations (and specificity) arising from its embedding in a common situation, as found in true dialogue. Authorial intention, moreover, is typically unknowable –​to readers, because we usually cannot engage in dialogue with authors, and even to authors themselves if, as I have argued, most of the time our activities are purposive rather than oriented to thematic, or even thematisable, goals. Barthes argues that despite this: [interpretation] in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions… The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us. (Barthes 1977: 143) This, he argued, is wholly wrong. It is to present language as something owned and controlled and to present texts as objects to be commoditised and consumed. On the contrary, he argued that readers should take full advantage of the effects of distanciation. He saw emancipatory potential in abandoning this view, claiming that the ‘death of the author’ brought with it ‘the birth of the reader’ (Barthes 1977: 148). Nonetheless, we seem to have a basic tendency to read and interpret intentionally, according to a perception of authorial intent (Hirsch 1967; Abbott 2002: 95–​ 97; Herman 2013: 23–​42). Distanciation reduces the importance of authorial intent without eliminating it entirely. Even the poststructuralist critics were unable to do without the concept of the author for long (cf. Burke, 1998). As Ricoeur argues: if the intentional fallacy overlooks the semantic autonomy of the text, the opposite fallacy forgets that a text remains a discourse told by somebody, said by someone to someone else about something. (Ricoeur 1976: 30) It may not be possible to wholly account for meaning through authorial intent but that does not mean authorial intentions are entirely irrelevant. This is true not least because ‘great storytellers have the artifices of narrative reality construction so well mastered that their telling preempts momentarily the possibility of any but a single interpretation ‒ however bizarre it may be’ (Bruner 1991: 9). Even if we acknowledge that authors are not ‘author-​Gods’ without absolute control over the meaning of what they write, they nonetheless are able to significantly influence interpretation using narrative techniques, including sequential ordering, ellipsis, focalisation and embedding (Bal 1997). Effective use of these techniques can make texts more readerly by foregrounding certain interpretations and reducing the extent to which

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they must be ‘written’ by their readers. In the process, the significance of the author, not just as the creator of content but as a reference point for its interpretation, is foregrounded. When narratives are fragmented, many of these techniques are either limited or impossible. It is much easier, for example, to produce subtle effects through the manipulation of anachrony (presenting events out of sequence) when the teller has the extended attention of an audience than it is over a series of fragments which may or may not be interpreted in the same order and not all of which will necessarily be encountered at all.The authors of fragmented narratives have far less ability to tightly specify textual boundaries or control stories’ internal structure (i.e. their sjuzhets) than do the writers of novels, newspaper articles or history books or the narrators of oral stories. As Hall argues, the way that a statement ‘is structured in its combination with other elements serves to delimit its meanings within that specified field, and effects a “closure” ’ (Hall 1973: 9). Fragmentation greatly limits authors’ ability to determine that combination, thereby weakening their ability to determine interpretation in a broad sense. Pablo Iglesias may have a particular interpretation in mind when writing an individual tweet which readers may seek to identify and use as a guide for their own interpretation. Yet we always ‘have to guess the meaning of the text because the author’s intention is beyond our reach’ (Ricoeur 1976: 75). The difference is that, with fragmented narrative, the author’s ability to precisely communicate their intention is more limited than with other types of storytelling. The limitations to authorial control in fragmented stories do not, however, impede the operation of what Foucault terms ‘the author-​ function’ (Foucault 2003). The author-​function is not a real person but rather the reader’s idea of the author, based on both what they already know about them and what they can glean from texts themselves.The author-​function provides a point of unity and a standard for judging the validity of interpretations without requiring that readers somehow make authors and their intentions present. This enables, in Foucault’s colourful words, ‘a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches but also with one’s discourses and their significations’ (Foucault 2003: 390). Rather than serving to fill texts with meanings, the author-​function is a way of limiting the range of acceptable interpretations: the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction. (Foucault 2003: 390) Crucially, this limitation ultimately comes from readers and the approach they adopt to interpretation rather than authors themselves.

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Like Barthes, Foucault is speaking here about fiction. Nonetheless, he does not limit his discussion to literature and makes the crucial point that the importance of the author-​function varies significantly according to genre and interpretive context. Technical manuals typically do not even have named authors, relying instead on their ostensive reference to an objective external world to pin their meaning. Articles published in The Economist are not attributed to individual journalists but associated with the newspaper as an institution. Folk tales have a kind of general cultural author rather than a named individual. Novels, on the other hand, are still widely seen as expressions of individual genius.The meaning of statements by politicians is strongly grounded in what they are understood to ‘really’ be saying.Three key points emerge from this: first, that it is an impression of the author (rather than the actual person) which provides narratives with unity; second, that the importance of the author-​ function is variable; three, its importance varies based on interpretive conventions rather than necessarily from the properties of texts themselves. At times, with fragmented storytelling the author-​ function is very strong. Donald Trump is famous for making contradictory statements on just about every topic imaginable. The stories he tells derive much of their unity, not from their coherence (either internally or with other statements which he has made), but from his position as their creator. To understand what story Donald Trump is telling, and what he means, is only possible through reference to Trump himself, acting as a unifying principle.9 This is particularly clear with horizontal narrative: individual fragments permit a very wide range of potential interpretations. Much of the unity they do have comes from their having been visibly produced by Trump, which allows for the operation of the author-​function. Depending on the readers’ view of Trump, the range of potential interpretations may still be wide. Nonetheless, the author-​function narrows the range of possibilities. This highlights that, while the author-​function may impede the ‘composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction’ as Foucault argues, in other contexts it plays a vital role in facilitating interpretation. This role is particularly important where fragmentation removes many other ways of doing this. This is not to say that the author-​function renders only a single interpretation possible. There is, for example, a long history of ‘symptomatic’ and ‘oppositional’ readings in literature (Fetterly 1978; Peterson 1987; Richardson 1997; Abbott 2002). In the former, readers look past the apparent intentions of authors and attempt to identify what texts have to tell us about the conditions under which they were produced. A post by Pablo Iglesias about taking measures, as part of Spain’s coalition government, to tackle the Covid-​19 crisis, for example, might be read symptomatically in terms of his perceived need to shore up support for the coalition of which he is a part. In the latter, texts are interpreted in ways which deliberately go against the perceived intentions of their authors. Nonetheless, the author-​function remains important –​both symptomatic and oppositional readings begin with intentional reading even as they subsequently react against it in different ways.10 Symptomatic reading need not entail a rejection of perceived intentions and oppositional readings need something to oppose.

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In other cases, however, fragmentation significantly limits the importance of the author-​function. With ambient narrative, relatively well-​known key storytellers are ‘crowdsourced to prominence’ (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira 2012) but there is also typically a long tail of less well-​known contributors. An observer of the 2013 protests in Egypt following the hashtag #June30 on Twitter, for example, would have seen content posted by many users about which they had no prior knowledge. This does not mean that it is impossible to draw conclusions about writers in this situation –​it is entirely possible to make judgments (rightly or wrongly) about writers based solely on the content of their fragmentary statements coupled with paratextual information such as their profile picture, handle, username and so on. Nonetheless, ambient narratives more broadly are only very weakly unified by the author-​principle as they have no nominal unifying authorial presence.This makes it impossible for the author-​function to operate on the level of the story as a whole. It precludes any sense that the ultimate meaning of the narrative lies in the intentions of a creator, allowing it to be read in the manner of a Barthesian text ‘without the guarantee of its father’ (Barthes 1977: 161).

Conclusion This chapter has argued that fragmentation in social media contexts causes the range of potential interpretations to proliferate and removes key anchors of meaning found with traditional narratives. Although social media communication incorporates dialogic elements, I have proposed that distanciation plays a central role in shaping interpretation, rendering textual material semantically autonomous. With inattentive interpretation, I sought to understand the manner in which fragmentary content is typically received and distinguish between the focused interpretation of the academic and analyst and the ‘distracted’ engagements of everyday interpretation. The reception of fragments in this way, I proposed, puts interpreters’ Dasein centre stage, increasing the likelihood of different interpreters understanding content in very different ways without being thematically aware of these differences. Social media narratives incorporate gaps which must be bridged through creative input from readers. They are also more fundamentally defined by fragmentation itself, which removes the ‘text’ as a stable reference point. Readers are thus compelled to become writers and to actively participate in the storytelling process at the same time as the meaning of individual fragments, and their relationships to one another, is rendered ambivalent and highly unstable. Finally, the weakened status of real authors limits their ability to tell tightly defined stories while, at times, the importance of the author-​function has become highly variable: centrally important as a point of unity in some fragmented storytelling, as with Donald Trump’s horizontal stories, and fading into the background with others, as in many ambient narratives. The main conclusion which arises as a consequence is that the interpretation of fragmented narratives is only weakly constrained by their textual characteristics (i.e. the words, images, video etc. contained in individual fragments) or by their creators, who have little control over how stories are encountered by their interpreters or

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over the way individual fragments are contextualised. As a consequence, the importance of the reader increases, compensating for narrative instability through hermeneutic activity. Nonetheless, the fact that, in everyday life, this is carried out within everyday circumspection means that the interpretation of fragments is by no means entirely free or principally a matter of thematic choices. It is to these limitations that the next chapter turns.

Notes 1 https://​twitter.com/​PabloIglesias/​status/​425998975951327232 2 A parallel can be drawn here with the power of ‘live’ television which similarly lies in a shared way of being in-​time and facing up to the uncertainty of the future (Scannell 2014: 93–​106). 3 An example of dialogue allowing understanding to come to light thematically. 4 https://​twitter.com/​realDonaldTrump/​status/​1055065538890735616 5 This limited type of gap filling is at the heart of Ingarden’s (1979) influential theory of reader response. See Iser (1978: 170–​178) for a detailed discussion. 6 All translations from Castellet are my own. 7 https://​twitter.com/​PabloIglesias/​status/​1195054824099917825 8 https://​podemos.info/​podemos-​condena-​el-​golpe-​de-​estado-​en-​bolivia/​ 9 There is a parallel here with Barthes’ view of a writer’s oeuvre which he sees not as a unified whole but as an intertext held together by common authorship (Burke 1998: 36). 10 Hirsch (1967) draws on this idea to argue that all interpretation is to some extent intentional.

4 INTERPRETING FRAGMENTED STORIES II Existential understanding, limited horizons and narrative forestructuring

Abstract Chapter 4 continues to explore the question of interpretation, arguing that narrative fragmentation increases interpreters’ dependence on existing ways of understanding. It begins with a discussion of Heidegger’s account of the relationship between understanding and interpretation as aspects of Dasein which define the range of possible interpretations and are ultimately grounded in being rather than any specific cognitive activity. To elucidate Heidegger’s ideas, and render them more readily applicable, I then turn to Gadamer’s account of ‘interpretive horizons’ to argue that the horizon is a precondition for interpretation rather than simply a limiting factor and also something which gradually shifts over time, rather than functioning as something fixed and inescapable. The final part of the chapter turns once again to narrative, examining metanarratives and masterplots as key components of the narrative horizon. They enable fragments to come into view as significant, in the context of larger narrative wholes, but in so doing also limit the range of interpretive possibilities. While important in all contexts, I propose this effect is especially important with fragmented narrative since, with small fragments, so much of interpretation is inevitably based on already accepted models.

Chapter 3 explored the aspects of narrative fragmentation which open interpretative possibilities in ways only weakly determined by the creators of content or content itself. The focus here, on the other hand, is on those factors which close interpretation down and limit the range of possibilities open to factical interpreters. There is now a substantial literature addressing the factors which influence meaning

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in social media contexts. Algorithms play a key role in shaping the content we see and defining the starting points of interpretation (Langlois 2014; Gillespie and Seaver 2016; Meikle 2016; Seaver 2017). It is clear that the operations of filtering, tracking and normalising which characterise internet-​based communication, and especially social media platforms, have a significant impact on the range of possible actions (Isin and Ruppert 2015). Others have shown that citizen and institutional gatewatchers have a significant impact on information flows, strongly influencing what content which users actually see (Bruns 2008; Stanoevska-​Slabeva, Sacco, and Giardina 2012; Meraz and Papacharissi 2013). Affect has also been demonstrated to play a significant role in fragmented internet communication (Papacharissi 2015a; Markham 2020).These issues are undoubtedly important but not my primary focus here. Instead, I attempt to take the analysis back to the basic level of human existence and the conditions of intelligibility which determine what can come into view and in what ways. As such, my goal is to examine the constraints on interpretation even before these other factors come into play. My key argument is that being-​in-​the-​world greatly influences the range of possible ways to interpret. I propose that the factors which ‘forestructure’ interpretation, while always important, take on even greater significance when stories are fragmented as we are compelled to rely heavily on Dasein if fragments are to be intelligible at all. The chapter begins with Heidegger’s distinction between understanding and interpretation, arguing that understanding is central to being-​ in-​the-​world and determines the way that other beings are initially disclosed. Interpretation, in turn, consists of taking up the possibilities disclosed through understanding. It then moves to a consideration of Gadamer’s concept of interpretive horizons to clarify key aspects of understanding through the idea that horizons are shared, yet each Dasein exists within a horizon in a way which is uniquely their own. Horizons determine what can be seen but neither horizons themselves nor our positions within them are fixed. The final part of the chapter turns specifically to narrative, focusing on the position of narratives within the interpretive horizon and their implications for the interpretation of narrative fragments. Focusing particularly on metanarratives and masterplots, I argue that the narrative models we draw from the horizon greatly influence the interpretation of narrative fragments by providing interpretive crutches.

Understanding and interpretation Heidegger differentiates in Being and Time between two very different uses of the term ‘understanding’. The first and more familiar is to view understanding as a specific mental activity, as ‘one possible kind of cognition among others’ (Heidegger 2010: 138). The second, and the sense with which I am primarily concerned here, sees understanding as an existential: ‘a fundamental mode of the being of Dasein’ (Heidegger 2010: 138). We do not first exist and subsequently begin understanding but rather, from Heidegger’s perspective, to understand is a central element of existence itself: ‘[understanding] “is” together with the being of Dasein in the sense of

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existence’ (Heidegger 2010: 140). Existential understanding has a disclosive character –​it enables the world to come into view, rendering it ‘available’. Existential understanding is not concerned with the meaning of specific aspects of the world in concrete situations but rather with a general understanding of being-​in-​the-​ world which allows things to come into view at all: As disclosing, understanding always concerns the whole fundamental constitution of being-​in-​the-​world. As a potentiality of being, being-​in is always a potentiality of being-​ in-​ the-​ world. Not only is the world, qua world, disclosed in its possible significance, but innerworldly beings themselves are freed, freed for their own possibilities. What is at hand is discovered as such in its serviceability, usability, detrimentality.The totality of relevance reveals itself as a categorial whole of a possibility of the nexus of things at hand. (Heidegger 2010: 140) From this perspective, the world pre-​exists any individual person and is disclosed, rather than constructed, through understanding. Understanding has the character of ‘significance’, which is to say that things are not comprehended as individual objects but as referential worldly beings defined by both their relationships to other beings and human involvement, together forming a whole, or ‘totality of reference’. Understanding discloses things in terms of their possibilities of being rather than as merely extant. This ‘frees’ elements of world in the sense of allowing them to ‘be’ in such a way that it is possible to use them and take up stances in relationships to them. Understanding has the structure of care in the sense that thrownness and projection play central roles. Understanding is thrown because ‘every interpretation … must already have understood what is to be interpreted’ (Heidegger 2010: 147). By this he means that we never understand anything from zero but always from a position of already understanding, in one way or another, which determines the ways things can initially come into view. Elements of the world are always, and from the first, understood as part of a significant whole defined by pre-​ontological understanding, even if that significant whole is not fixed and constantly, if slowly, evolving. Understanding involves projection in the central importance of future possibilities. Worldly things are disclosed through understanding not only in terms of their being at that instant but also in terms of what they may be in the future. Consequently, any worldly being is ‘existentially that which it is not yet in its potentiality of being’ (Heidegger 2010: 141). Interpretation, on the other hand, is more specific.While understanding discloses the world, providing it with intelligibility, interpretation means appropriating worldly beings ‘as’ something. Understanding ‘forestructures’ a range of possibilities which can be taken up in interpretation. For example, if confronted with a physical object with four legs and a flat top, understanding provides a forestructure of interpretation which makes it possible for me to take it ‘as a table’, ‘as a stool’, ‘as an earthquake shelter’ and so on. Upon encountering a specific physical object with

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this shape in a specific context, however, I will inevitably interpret it as one or more of the possibilities given in understanding. This highlights that it is not possible to understand without interpreting as is shown with the difficulties of expressing understanding in language –​it is only possible through reference to specific interpretations. As Heidegger argues: But if any perception of useful things at hand always understands and interprets them, letting them be circumspectly encountered as something, does this not then mean that initially something merely objectively present is experienced which then is understood as a door, as a house? That would be a misunderstanding of the specific disclosive function of interpretation. Interpretation does not, so to speak, throw a ‘significance’ over what is nakedly objectively present and does not stick a value on it, but what is encountered in the world is always already in a relevance which is disclosed in the understanding of world, a relevance which is made explicit by interpretation. (Heidegger 2010: 145) Understanding and interpretation, therefore, entail one another equally with neither having priority over the other. Interpretation does not fundamentally change what was pre-​ontologically apprehended in understanding. Rather, interpretation is the actualisation of latent possibilities which are themselves only knowable through the manner of their actualisation. As already noted, the basic way to interpret is in terms of reference and referential wholes. Understanding, to a significant degree, is an appreciation of those referential wholes, in terms of which individual fragments are interpreted. As argued in the discussion of chronicle in Chapter 2, it is possible to see things outside a totality of reference, although this remains a kind of seeing-​as. It is not, however, the normal way for interpretation to proceed. As Heidegger puts it: the simple seeing of things nearest to us as having to do with … contains the structure of interpretation so primordially that a grasping of something which is, so to speak, free of the as requires a kind of reorientation. When we just stare at something, our just-​having-​it-​before-​us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more. This grasping which is free of the as is a privation of simple seeing, which understands; it is not more primordial than the latter, but derived from it. (Heidegger 2010: 145) In other words, it is possible to simply stare at things without seeing them as something. To do this, however, means separating them from the wholes within which they are first comprehended and voiding them of their significance, rendering them meaningless.This idea has serious implications for any account of fragmented narrative. Postman, for example, argues that the ‘logic’ of television has spread so

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widely that we live in ‘a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events’ (Postman 1987: 128). From the perspective advanced here, this view is untenable. Fragments may be presented in isolation from larger ‘texts’ but this does not mean that they are encountered in the manner Postman describes. Indeed, to see a tweet (itself a much smaller fragment than the television items Postman had in mind) as just a tweet, stripped of its connections to past, present and future, takes precisely the kind of ‘reorientation’ Heidegger describes. Seemingly paradoxically, it is only by stopping and thinking that they come to seem incomprehensible and that their fragmentary nature is revealed. In ordinary life the referential wholes which forestructure interpretation are not thematically apparent. Individual interpreters need not have mental images of interconnected networks of fragmentary information along the lines of those seen in data visualisation produced in network analysis (Papacharissi 2015a). The whole ‘need not be explicitly grasped by a thematic interpretation’ (Heidegger 2010: 145). Rather, they act as unrecognised reference points for specific interpretations. The gendered pronouns used in many languages, for example, presuppose a world within which all people can be neatly divided into masculine and feminine categories even if language users by no means thematically consider this kind of social organisation in everyday language use. As debates on language and gender also show, referential wholes can be at least partially thematised and made explicit through analysis and discussion. Nonetheless, they quickly drift back into the kind of background awareness typical of daily life: ‘even if this totality of reference has undergone such an interpretation, it recedes again into an undifferentiated understanding. It is precisely in this modality that it is the essential foundation of everyday, circumspect interpretation’ (Heidegger 2010: 145). As a consequence, forestructures of understanding can only be brought into view partially and with difficulty. That they are so difficult to thematise is because understanding and interpretation are ultimately grounded in Dasein and being-​ in-​ the-​ world more broadly: ‘understanding always concerns the whole of being-​in-​the-​world. In every understanding of world, existence is also understood, and vice versa’ (Heidegger 2010: 147). As such, they remain for the most part ‘covered over’ and unthematised. It also means that they are intimately bound together with other existentials such as care, telling (Rede) and attunement. Consider, for example, the act of participating in protests in favour of Catalan independence, which requires that the notion of nationalism be rendered available as an interpretive possibility through understanding. This possibility in turn entails the articulation of the world in terms of nations, allowing for determinations of in and out group membership and distinctive ways of being-​with-​others. Furthermore, this articulation is grounded in being thrown into a history within which there is already a Catalan nation which exists; to understand the possibility of an independent Catalan nation-​state is to project towards a future state and for that anticipated future state to define present activities. Understanding is attuned in that possibilities are recognised and actualised

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in moods –​of anger, frustration, confidence or fear.The mood within which Dasein finds itself shapes the possibilities disclosed in understanding. Understanding is further grounded in ‘averageness’ –​publicly available ways of understanding which are already available and into which we are thrown.This does not mean that we all interpret things in the same way but that we nonetheless share common starting points which come from the world rather than an individual Dasein: Dasein can never escape the everyday way of being interpreted into which Dasein has grown initially. All genuine understanding, interpreting and communication, rediscovery and new appropriation come about in it, out of it, and against it. (Heidegger 2010: 163) Understanding, then, plays a key role in determining what can come into view and in what ways. The origin of understanding, nonetheless, lies not in the interpreting subject but in the possibilities afforded by public understanding, emphasising that understanding should not be viewed as a kind of solipsism. It is possible to reject and modify these ways of understanding –​a key issue examined in the next chapter. It is not, however, possible to ignore them. The importance of averageness is exemplified with language. Communication is possible only because it takes place in a context where ‘there already lies an average intelligibility’ (Heidegger 2010: 162) which provides a shared basis for understanding. Language enables the articulation and disclosure of the world. Language, as well as representation more broadly, also enables elements of the world to be disclosed without their needing to be experienced directly. This is the great power of media –​they allow us to experience far more of the world than would otherwise be possible, furnishing new possibilities of understanding and interpretation. Nonetheless,‘communication does not “impart” the primary relation of being to the being spoken about’ (Heidegger 2010: 162).Through language, and symbolic representation more broadly, interpretations may be shared without being limited by the things themselves. This creates the possibility of ‘idle talk’ in which existing interpretations move from person to person without giving genuine insight into the things talked about: Since this discoursing has lost the primary relation of being [Sein] to the being [Seienden] talked about, or else never achieved it, it does not communicate in the mode of a primordial appropriation of this being, but communicates by gossiping and passing the word along. (Heidegger 2010: 162–​163) Engaging in idle talk does not mean deliberate misrepresentation. Nonetheless, learning about the world through idle talk can have the effect of closing off questioning by giving the sense that the answers are already known.

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A further central element of averageness is ‘das Man’, variously translated as ‘the one’, or ‘the they’. Das Man is what Heidegger calls ‘the “subject” of everydayness’ (Heidegger 2010: 111) in the sense that it does not refer to any individual but rather to a kind of role which can be occupied by anyone: In utilizing public transportation, in the use of information services like the newspaper, every other is like the next. This being-​with-​one-​another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of being of ‘the others’ in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more. In this inconspiciousness and unascertainability, the they [das Man] unfolds its true dictatorship. We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the ‘great mass’ the way they withdraw, we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness. (Heidegger 2010: 123) His suggestion, then, is that part of being thrown is being always in a state of already having certain positions available to us which are not uniquely our own but publicly available to all. All being and acting begins with these positions. The translation of ‘Man’ as ‘they’ is problematic because it sets up a first-​person/​third-​person opposition –​‘they’ implies both ‘not me’ and that these positions/​activities ‘belong’ to someone else. This, in turn, suggests that existing according to das Man means aping the being of specific others. What Heidegger means, on the other hand, is that they are not reducible to any person.We may only encounter these positions or modes of beings as they are realised by specific others but they are no more ‘their’ possession than they are ‘mine’. The grounding of all interpretation within the public understanding of das Man is not an intrinsically bad thing: it ‘does not have a negative, depreciative significance but means something positive belonging to the Dasein itself ’ (Heidegger 1982: 160). Average understanding is necessary to initially take anything as anything, which is itself needed to take up positions in the world. As I discuss further below, it is particularly valuable with fragments as it greatly facilitates recognition of what the whole might look like. Nonetheless, Heidegger also sees in averageness a potentially dangerous ‘levelling’ effect if we fail to go beyond the understandings which forestructure interpretations and recognise the unique characteristics of a situation.1 This might mean interacting with a waiter in a restaurant purely in terms of their role as a waiter or seeing a politician simply as a member of a political party rather than acknowledging them as Daseins with their own unique sets of possibilities. This can cause ‘everything that is original … [to be] flattened down as something long since known’ (Heidegger 2010: 123).The problem, then, is not that everything that is unknown is initially disclosed in terms of the known but rather that it is possible for interpretation to fail to progress beyond this.

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The likelihood of unavoidable averageness and publicness turning into problematic levelling is exacerbated by ‘falling prey’ –​Dasein’s tendency to be overcome by averageness. As noted by Dreyfus (1990), Heidegger’s account of falling prey is somewhat confused and blurs two distinct aspects: in the first, Dasein is ‘pulled’ to understand entirely in terms of the world given that this is the starting point for all interpretation since in ‘public interpretedness, Dasein itself presents itself with the possibility of losing itself in the they, of falling pretty to groundlessness’ (Heidegger 2010: 170). In the second, Dasein ‘flees’ from its own ungroundedness and unsettledness into the apparent stability of existing understanding and interpretation, seeking to ‘guarantee to Dasein the certainty, genuineness, and fullness of all the possibilities of its being’ (Heidegger 2010: 171). Both these factors enable Dasein to ‘understand everything’ while at the same time being ‘disburdened’ of the need to understand and interpret in its ownmost way. Falling, for Heidegger, is not something from which it is possible to escape or a deviation from an initial un-​fallen position but rather an existential –​an element of being-​in-​the-​world.

Interpretive horizons Forestructures of interpretation, then, always play a central role in determining factical interpretations. My contention is that they are particularly important in contexts of narrative fragmentation. In the previous chapter I argued that the wholes in terms of which narrative fragments are experienced are only loosely defined by the fragments themselves. Forestructures of interpretation provide the missing structure, allowing fragments to come into view as meaningful from the first –​in essence for them not to be initially disclosed as fragments at all. As with much of Heidegger’s thought, however, the concept of forestructuring is powerful but abstract. It shows that being plays a central role in understanding and interpretation but is difficult to apply in concrete analysis. This issue can be partially remedied with the idea of ‘horizons of interpretation’, used occasionally by Heidegger but developed much further by Gadamer. As he puts it in Truth and Method: The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, and so forth. (Gadamer 1989: 302) The horizon determines what can be seen from the existential ‘there’ and limits the range of possible interpretations. ‘Seeing’ in this context is understood broadly to refer to all perception and ways of encountering and interfacing with the world: it is understood as a ‘universal term which characterises every access as access whatsoever to beings and to being’ rather than merely ‘perceiving with the bodily eyes’ (Heidegger 2010: 142). The horizon is necessarily limited but also provides the context which allows for the determination of significance.

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Thinking in terms of horizons more clearly shows the connections between being-​there, understanding and interpreting by drawing a parallel with the physical environment. Physical landscapes are shared rather than unique to any one individual. Many people may be situated within the same landscape yet what each can see depends on their precise location. If they are close together, their range of vision will be similar, even if they see things from slightly different angles. If they are distant from one another, some of the same things may still be visible but look very different. Other features may be visible to some and not others. This may give a significantly different sense of the referential whole: a hill might look large while standing at the bottom but small if larger mountains come into view after reaching the top. The landscape pre-​exists our entry into it and exists whether we see it or not. Nonetheless, it is disclosed in a unique way to each person.The landscape itself is not static but in a constant process of coming into and out of being. Changes may be gradual, as with the changing of the seasons, or abrupt, for example if part of a hill is demolished to make space for a motorway. The attunement of the individual does not alter the landscape but does change how it comes into view; a mountain might appear as an inviting challenge to a fresh hiker or a frightening obstacle to a fleeing refugee. Landscapes have no intrinsic boundaries but are defined solely by what is visible from a particular vantage point. As this vantage point changes, so do the boundaries. The same is true of interpretive horizons. The world includes elements such as laws, social institutions and practices which exist for all of us yet are disclosed differently to each Dasein depending on their interpretive position. Depending on Dasein’s position within it, some elements may be more or less visible. Racism, for example, may be obvious to some and marginal or wholly imperceptible to others. We are always already within a horizon which pre-​exists our entry into it. Nonetheless, it is disclosed to each individual in a unique way. The horizon gradually shifts, causing new interpretive possibilities to emerge and old ones to fall away.There are no hard edges to a horizon with the boundaries being defined principally by the ‘there’ of the Daseins within it, rather than acting as a property of the horizon itself. The horizon itself rarely comes directly into view and is not usually the focus of purposeful or purposive action or perception. Rather, it chiefly serves to provide the necessary ground for interpreting what is seen within it. It therefore provides a way to reconcile the uniqueness of individual perspectives with the fact that the world is nonetheless shared. The horizon includes elements in both the foreground and the background. Although our attention may be primarily fixed on the foreground, other elements visible within the horizon give perspective and shape how elements of the foreground are disclosed. Consider, for example, a tall building in a city. It will appear very different depending on the vantage point from which it is viewed, for example from an aeroplane or from the pavement in front it. Its relative size compared to both the onlooker and other buildings will differ. It will also matter whether we have seen it many times before, in which case it may fade into the background, or are seeing it now for the first time. It would be encountered differently in

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the context of a job interview compared to simply walking past owing to both differences of mood and concern. Throughout all these permutations it is ontically precisely the same building; its extant properties are unchanged.Yet the manner of its disclosure, the way in which we can and do see it, is different. As the horizon changes, so do the interpretive possibilities –​from up close it is possible to see physical details which are simply not apparent from far away; from an aeroplane, a sense of broader context can be accessed which it is only possible to see from afar. This in turn has a significant impact on the relational make-​up of the referential whole. Even if the same things are visible from different points in the horizon their significance as a totality is changed. It is important to note, furthermore, that interpretive horizons are significantly more complex than their physical counterparts. They are defined by the existential ‘there’ and include everything which is ‘near’, including: background practices (Dreyfus 2017), the media environment (Gunkel and Taylor 2014; Frosh 2019; Markham 2020), intentionality (Carr 1986), relationships to technology and figurations2 (Couldry and Hepp 2017), traditions and history (Macintyre 1985; Gadamer 1989) and how, in our digital lives, we are positioned in roles not of our own choosing through ‘digital interpellation’ (Markham 2020: 68–​71). All these factors contribute to both shaping the shared horizon and the manner in which things within it are disclosed. None are static but all are in a constant process of becoming. Contemporary interpretive horizons extend almost indefinitely, resulting in ‘environments [which are] suffused with the quality of being ready-​to-​hand’ (Gunkel and Taylor 2014: 157) regardless of physical distance. As Couldry and Hepp put it, ‘the set of media and information possibilities on which the typical social actor, at least in rich countries, can now draw is almost infinite’ even if ‘it is in fact a reduced set of possibilities from which we choose every day’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 56). Both Gunkel and Taylor and Couldry and Hepp are perhaps too quick to collapse the distinctions between the elements of the horizon disclosed through immediate experience and those disclosed through the media. Nonetheless, they are surely right that deep mediatization has resulted in horizons which in principle offer a far wider range of interpretive possibilities than ever before at the same time as they have become ever more crowded and confusing. Even so, the concept of the horizon provides a useful way to think about the factical interpretation of narrative fragments in terms of those interpretive possibilities which are apparent and those which are not. Consider the following tweet, posted by Echenique in the context of the Covid-​19 epidemic: @pnique Mientras Vox se dedica a montar ‘manifestaciones’ contaminantes a favor del contagio masivo, el Gobierno se dedica a esto Una guía muy útil sobre las medidas del escudo social para proteger a trabajadores, autónomos, PyMEs y personas vulnerables: https://​mscbs.gob. es/​ssi/​covid19/​ml

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[while Vox dedicates itself to holding infectious ‘protests’ in favour of massive contagion, the government is dedicating itself to this A very useful guide to social shielding measures to protect workers, the self-​ employed, small and medium enterprises and vulnerable people: https://​ mscbs.gob.es/​ssi/​covid19/​ml] 15:56, 26/​05/​203 The responses highlight a wide range of interpretations, emphasising the writerly nature of the interpretation of fragments. Some also thematise interpretations which were not visible from my own interpretive horizon –​for example some attempt to call attention to an alleged government ban on the distribution of personal protective equipment to old people’s homes; others contrast Vox’s protests with large protests held on 8 March 2020 to mark International Women’s Day; further responses criticise the difficulty of accessing the income support systems described in the linked document.These interpretations do not simply take up different interpretive possibilities which were initially available to all, but fall beyond the range permitted by my horizon –​interpretations which were simply not ‘visible’ from my own position. A horizon may determine the initial range of interpretive possibilities but the resulting interpretations may cause our position to change, disclosing new possibilities. To return to the above example, my encounter with interpretations of Echinique’s tweet very different to my own changed my own horizon, disclosing new interpretive possibilities which were not previously visible. This allowed me to interpret Echinique’s tweet in ways which I previously could not, enabling new ways of ‘taking as’. Horizons should therefore be understood as responding dynamically to others, rather than as solipsistic cages.This emphasises that neither horizons nor our position within them are fixed; both gradually shift over time: Just as the individual is never simply an individual because he is always in understanding with others, so too the closed horizon which is supposed to enclose a culture is an abstraction. The historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never absolutely bound to any one standpoint, and hence can never have a truly closed horizon. The horizon is, rather, something into which we move and that moves with us. (Gadamer 1989: 304) The horizon governs what may be perceived, and in what ways, at any moment in time. Nonetheless it is always possible to move to higher ground, extending the field of view and opening new interpretive possibilities. In Gadamer’s account there is some ambivalence between the horizon as a shared context for interpretation and action and as Dasein, understood in this case as a unique and individual position within that shared horizon. We have already seen the value of the first view. To see the value of the second, let us return to Echenique’s tweet cited above. My horizon was expanded by encountering an

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interpretation beyond the range of possibilities afforded by my own forestructures of interpretation. In one sense, this meant ‘acquiring’ the horizon to which this interpretation was a response (Gadamer 1989: 370).Yet this did not mean stepping out of my own horizon into that of another since to do this is impossible –​we cannot simply transpose ourselves from our own ‘there’ to that of another person. Instead, it meant bringing my field of view into contact with that of another person, effecting what Gadamer calls a ‘fusion of horizons’ (Gadamer 1989: 306–​307). This need not imply agreement or harmony but does emphasise contact and change. Nonetheless, it is important to note that my sense of that other horizon was ultimately based on my interpretation, which was itself forestructured by my existing horizon. Rather than ‘acquiring’ a horizon by transposing ourselves into other situations, ‘we must always already have a horizon in order to be able to transpose ourselves into a situation’ (Gadamer 1989: 305).This renders other positions intelligible while also limiting the ways that they can themselves be disclosed. Consequently, contact with the horizon of another is not the same as occupying that position. While it is entirely possible to simply swap physical locations with another person within a geographical landscape, horizons and their attendant disclosive possibility are not so simply traded.

Narrative horizons The concept of the horizon elucidates important aspects of disclosure. Nonetheless, the significant differences between physical landscapes and horizons of understanding draw attention to the limits of visual metaphors. Ironically, they do not make existential horizons themselves any easier to ‘see’ as they function in concrete situations. Thinking in terms of narrative, on the other hand, provides a way to thematise the relationship more clearly between understanding and interpretation. It is particularly well suited to events since it foregrounds temporal rather than spatial relationships. The basic premise of interpreting within a pre-​existing horizon remains the same. The difference is that, from this perspective, the horizon is understood in terms of existing narrative interpretations. These previous storied interpretations need not, and frequently do not, cohere with one another. Consider, for example, the following tweet, posted by Donald Trump in the context of mass anti-​racism protests in the USA in summer 2020: @realDonaldTrump Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors. These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW. The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe.4 Is this what America wants? NO!!! 09:15, 31/​05/​205 At the time this comment was made, many different, and often incompatible, narratives were circulating. These included stories which presented the protests as: an overwhelmingly peaceful and legitimate response to the murder of an

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unarmed black man by police, understood in the context of the systemic oppression of African Americans; a violent and disproportionate response to an aberrant act by police; dangerous confrontations between groups within America with wildly different visions of the country’s past and future, potentially leading to civil war; proof of Trump having lost control of America and of his dictatorial proclivities, as shown in his support of deploying the military against civilian protestors. These stories provide much of the necessary context for their potential significance to be disclosed. Depending on which stories feature more prominently within the horizons of interpreters, different interpretive possibilities are foregrounded within factical acts of interpretation. While the horizon cannot be made fully explicit, thinking in terms of this array of narratives provides a way to at least partially thematise interpretive possibilities. Furthermore, it emphasises multiplicity and leads us to consider the range of existing interpretations. This, in turn, leads to considering the central role of media in furnishing ‘symbolic repertoires’ (Appadurai 1990) for interpretation. In my own case, for example, my knowledge of the narratives cited in the previous paragraph is drawn almost exclusively from mediated experiences from a wide range of channels. Taken together, these interpretations produce a referential whole within which Trump’s statement is comprehensible. Nonetheless, this referential whole is not necessarily cohesive or harmonious. Thinking in terms of narrative captures these tensions and counteracts the tendency in Heidegger-​inspired approaches to downplay the ‘antagonistic tendencies’ within the social (Coeckelbergh 2019). It may be that we exist within a shared world, but it is a world characterised by confusion; grasping contradictory narratives together does not require their synthesis and reconciliation; new narratives frequently exist alongside others which they appear to directly contradict (Hammack 2011), adding new interpretive possibilities without the old ones disappearing. In addition to the importance of the other concrete stories, factical ways of ‘taking as’, two other types of narrative play a particularly significant role in understanding: ‘metanarratives’, grand narratives which provide broad-​brush ways for Dasein to understand the world and itself within it; and ‘masterplots’, skeletal narrative plots which provide ways of understanding causality and can be applied to specific acts of interpretation. Both contribute in significant ways to our background understanding of the world and both have strongly normalising tendencies, setting up expectations for the way that things usually and should happen. In Chapter 1, I argued that we encounter much of the world in terms of narrative from the first. This section is intended to illustrate the key factors which determine the form that these stories take.

Metanarratives Metanarratives are those stories which exert the greatest influence over our lives by providing basic, shared frameworks for understanding the nature of reality and our place in it. Examples of metanarratives might include that of ‘progress’, the idea that

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humanity is inexorably and teleologically marching towards improvement, or ‘environmental apocalypse’, in which human damage to the environment will eventually become irreparable. Narratives such as these provide answers to basic questions of human existence and tell us what we are, and should be, concerned with. Academic inquiry, understood in terms of the metanarrative of progress, for example, comes into view as the pursuit of human perfection. Academic inquiry, understood in terms of the metanarrative of environmental apocalypse, on the other hand, appears largely pointless. We do not first exist and subsequently encounter metanarratives as something occurrent, waiting to be found. Rather, we are thrown among them and dwell within them, with the consequence that they constitute an important element of Dasein. While all narratives are connected to Dasein, the link is particularly strong with metanarratives since they tend to be especially strongly focused on questions of being. The stories of the Bible, for example, narrate temporally and spatially specific happenings but also elaborate the relationship between the profane and the divine, lay down guidance for appropriate ways of being-​with-​others and provide an account of the origins and end point of humanity. This provides a context within which individual lives and actions can be understood. As with other aspects of the horizon, metanarratives form part of the ground of interpretation and need not cohere with one another. ‘Progress’ and ‘environmental apocalypse’ largely contradict one another yet both contribute to shaping the world –​the promise of understanding the world better drives me to continue working, even as a nagging fear of environmental collapse causes me to fear that it is worthless. Metanarratives may be explicitly told as stories. When Tony Blair announced the commencement of Britain’s military involvement in the Iraq War on 20/​03/​2003, for example, he thematised a metanarrative of historical change, claiming that ‘Europe is at peace, the Cold War already a memory’ but that, nonetheless, ‘this new world faces a new threat of disorder and chaos born of either brutal states like Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction or of extreme terrorist groups’.6 This is a narrative on a global scale, concerned not with individual lives but historic shifts affecting millions. In this speech Blair explicitly links his ‘order for British forces to take part in military action in Iraq’ to this larger metanarrative, attempting to establish a clear connection between them. The speech provides a context for interpreting this specific event within broader processes, suggesting that the decision to send troops also has much wider implications and is concerned with the very survival of Western civilisation. This in turn suggests that the invasion, which many saw as a breach of international law, should be viewed as not only acceptable but a moral obligation. In explicitly attempting to control the background against which the invasion was perceived, the horizon within which it was situated, Blair sought to control the manner of its disclosure to interpreters and its apparent significance. Equally or more frequently, however, metanarratives serve as implicit reference points without being explicitly renarrated. Any reference by a Western politician to terrorism is inevitably understood in reference to the broad narrative of the War on Terror, even if the metanarrative itself is not repeated. When I sit down to work in the morning, I do not thematically consider metanarratives of progress even as accepting the basic idea of understanding things better is a sine qua

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non for academic enquiry. This emphasises that the concept of the metanarrative is itself a way of thematising modes of being and understanding which, in their everyday application, function largely pre-​ontologically and are encountered principally through ways of coping and comporting in the world. As metanarratives are so closely connected with Dasein, they are particularly difficult to thematise and especially prone to fading into the background. They may remain largely or entirely unrecognised and yet hugely influence how specific events and actions are, and can be, encountered. Explicitly narrating metanarratives enables them to come into view, and can be a powerful rhetorical technique, but also gives them a fixity fundamentally at odds with the more nebulous way that they ordinarily function. Metanarratives, like Gadamer’s notion of ‘tradition’, have ‘a justification that is outside the arguments of reason’ (Gadamer 1989: 281) and they serve as powerful sources of authority. Also, like traditions, for metanarratives to remain influential they must be constantly reaffirmed. The media plays a vital role in doing this –​the War on Terror survived as a key metanarrative during the 2000s principally through its invocation in countless films and news reports. In an additional parallel to traditions, metanarratives are not fixed but gradually shift over time as they are invoked in different ways and their position within the broader horizon shifts. Film depictions of terrorism, for example, have gradually changed over the decades (Riegler 2010), partly driving and partly reflecting shifts in the way broader metanarratives of ‘the terrorist threat’ have evolved. As metanarratives move across linguistic and cultural borders through translation (Baker 2006) they are situated within new horizons, disclosing different interpretive possibilities. The repressive el-​Sisi regime in Egypt, for example, constantly invokes metanarratives in which it positions itself as Egypt’s sole guardian against terrorism and which are adapted from Western metanarratives of terrorism. Nonetheless specific details, such as the precise nature of the threat and the appropriate response to that threat, are significantly different. Although metanarratives have always been there, my suggestion is that they play a particularly important role in shaping interpretation in an era of intense narrative fragmentation. Consider the following tweet posted by @ahorapodemos on 5 March 2019, quoting a statement made by Podemos spokesperson Irene Montero in an interview on Spanish national television: @PODEMOS la gente no quiere volver al pasado con las tres derechas pero tampoco quiere volver al pacto de Ciudadanos y PSOE de 2016 en el que pactaron una mísera subida del SMI del 1%. Para frenar la derecha hay que garantizar derechos @Irene_​Montero_​ #MonteroEnRTVE [the people do not want to return to the past with the three right wing parties7 but nor do they wish to return to the Ciudadanos and PSOE [Socialist Workers’ Party of Spain] coalition of 2016 in which they agreed to a miserly 1% rise in the minimum wage. To stop the right we have to guarantee rights @Irene_​Montero_​ #MonteroEnRTVE] 21:34, 05/​03/​198

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Setting aside the specific details discussed, this statement references a series of metanarratives: 1) metanarratives of nationalism which make it possible to speak of the desires of ‘the people’ as if they were an individual; 2) metanarratives of linear progress which view the idea of ‘returning’ to the past as intrinsically negative; 3) socialist metanarratives which promote the elimination of economic and other types of equality as an essential goal, while cautioning against the threat of reactionary right wing politics; 4) humanist metanarratives of universal rights, understood as transcending politics. Drawing on these metanarratives facilitates interpreting this fragment by contextualising it and situating it within a referential whole. They make it possible for a reader with little prior knowledge of Podemos, its politics and the stories its politicians tell to interpret the fragment. The reader does not need to accept these metanarratives but only to recognise them –​they give a sense of Montero’s Dasein and of the horizon to which her comments are a response, enabling Gadamer’s fusion of horizons to take place. Yet the fact that the fragment is so short means that it cannot go far beyond referencing existing metanarratives. This means that they can be invoked, but also that the way that they are understood is grounded much more strongly in the interpreter’s pre-​existing forestructures of interpretation than in anything Podemos can say within a single tweet. An interpreter to whom these metanarratives are disclosed differently may produce a very different interpretation –​my own understanding of the metanarrative of socialism, for example, is likely to differ from Montero’s, disclosing the significance of her comment differently.Yet these different interpretive possibilities will not necessarily be apparent to individual interpreters.The reliance on existing forestructures which fragmentation brings means that interpretations are also comparatively likely to remain within the bounds of the familiar, as discussed further in Chapter 5. Shrinking the text increases the importance of the background at the same time as limiting the capacity for texts to alter the way that background is disclosed. My argument about the importance of metanarratives seems to run directly counter to classic works of postmodernism, which argued that metanarratives have diminished in importance as the small and local have risen in their place (Lyotard 1984; Harvey 1990). The previous chapter attempted to show that fragmentation greatly increases the scope for varying individual interpretation by limiting the possibility of telling stories which permit only a single interpretation. This suggests a hyper-​localisation of narrative, down to the level of individual interpreters. Yet as the first part of this chapter showed, individual interpretations inevitably begin with publicly available ways of understanding. A diminishment in the power of texts and authors, therefore, need not entail a commensurate reduction of the importance of metanarratives. On the contrary, fragmentation makes metanarratives more important than ever –​they are indispensable if fragments are to be intelligible at all. Narrative fragments may permit a very wide range of interpretations, with their extant being enabling an almost unlimited range of existential possibilities. Nonetheless, the possibilities disclosed to factical interpreters may be rather more limited.

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Masterplots If metanarratives are concrete stories which structure our understanding of the world in more and less explicit ways, masterplots are more abstract patterns of narrative emplotment.9 These skeletal narratives are not concerned with the relation or understanding of specific happenings taking place in specific places and times but with abstract patterns of causality.10 They provide preliminary structures for grasping together temporally ordered happenings which can be transferred from situation to situation and repeatedly re-​used. Consider, for example, the masterplot of the undergraduate experience: a young student enrols at a university; during the time they spend studying there they encounter many new people and ideas and their horizons are broadened.They develop in-​depth knowledge of a subject before graduating and transitioning to either postgraduate study or employment. Reality is almost inevitably more complex –​students need not be young, they may enrol on a course they find dull and unstimulating, they may find the intellectual environment stifling rather than enriching, they may struggle to find a job after graduating and so on. Nonetheless, a masterplot like this provides an idea of what ‘normal’ looks like and a starting point for interpretation by giving a sense of what the referential whole might, or should, look like. Masterplots operate at every level. When a student comes to my office for feedback, there is a masterplot to tell us both how to behave which provides a ‘script’ (Schank and Abelson 1977) that tells us both what ‘normally’ happens in this situation even if what actually happens in any specific instance differs from this norm. In news storytelling, narrative accounts of events are not created from nothing over and over again: journalists draw on existing narrative archetypes, adding in details and tweaking the overall structure as necessary (cf. Bird and Dardenne 1997). Masterplots can also function on a grander scale: Papacharissi (2016), for example, shows that the Egyptian Uprising of 2011 was presented as a revolution on Twitter, that is, narrated, based on a masterplot of revolution, long before President Mubarak was overthrown. This made it possible for participants to conceptualise themselves not only as protestors but as revolutionaries. Disputes over the meaning of events, moreover, not only imply differing narratives but, very often, also disagreements over the appropriate masterplot to invoke. In the case of the military intervention of 2013, those in favour of seeing the event as a coup focused on the removal of Mohamed Morsi as a democratically elected leader by representatives of the armed forces, a key feature of the coup masterplot. Many of those who saw it as a revolution, on the other hand, argued that Morsi lacked democratic legitimacy since he had ignored the popular will and behaved in an autocratic manner. They suggested that the army was not seizing power for itself but simply executing the will of the people as a kind of direct democracy, situating it within the masterplot of a popular uprising against a despotic leader. Masterplots provide models for what stories normally look like and play a key role in shaping the way they are both produced and interpreted. They are a condition of narrative intelligibility. As Ricoeur puts it:

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the received paradigms structure readers’ expectations and aid them in recognizing the formal rule, the genre, or the type exemplified by the narrated story.They furnish guidelines for the encounter between a text and its readers. In short, they govern the story’s capacity to be followed. (Ricoeur 1984: 77) The capacity of these paradigms to make stories followable are particularly important when narratives are fragmented. To return to an analogy from the previous chapter, the smaller the shard of ceramic in the hand of the archaeologist, the more they must rely on their pre-​existing knowledge of what pots ‘normally’ look like to have an idea of what the unbroken whole looked like. These pre-​existing ideas close off some interpretive possibilities, but they also enable the interpretation of fragments in the first place by giving a sense of the whole, enabling the shard to come into view as something which exists through projection rather than being purely extant. For this reason, they have a somewhat ambivalent status and can be employed both to buttress existing understandings and as a jumping off point for subversion of established interpretive patterns (cf. Baker 2006: 98/​99). The subject of a masterplot is not a specific individual but could be anyone. The masterplot of revolution, for example, provides a set of roles for specific individuals to fill and within which to position others –​the charismatic leader, the despotic ruler to be overthrown, ‘the people’, counterrevolutionaries and so forth. This highlights that masterplots are strongly grounded in ‘averageness’, in that they provide frameworks for interpretation which are principally drawn not from events themselves but from the interpretations already available as part of the world. Das Man is the subject of a masterplot rather than specific, factical individuals. As such, understanding which comes from masterplots is inherently inauthentic, in Heidegger’s terms. As discussed earlier in relation to averageness, this is not an intrinsically bad thing. Averageness is necessary for intelligibility and shared understanding. Masterplots ‘give guidance and direction to the everyday actions of subjects; without this guidance and sense of direction, we would be lost’ (Bamberg 2004: 360). Inauthentic understanding is the starting point for authentic interpretation and possibilities afforded in inauthentic interpretation can be taken up and applied in ways which recognise the unique characteristics of factical situations. It is impossible to authentically engage with everything in the world as this would make action impossible. It may be true that averageness ‘distorts without anyone having aimed to distort … yet at the same time it is what keeps things moving’ (Markham 2020: 90). As with averageness more broadly, applying masterplots may nonetheless lead to problematic levelling. When a factical sequence of events is understood purely in terms of a masterplot, its meaning can be immediately known but only in an average way. Its unique characteristics are ignored and the individuals involved are reduced to the abstract roles that they play. This is not inevitable. One of the great strengths of storytelling is that its emphasis on temporally and spatially specific happenings,

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rather than abstract relations, emphasises context-​sensitive knowledge –​answering not ‘what causes revolutions’ but ‘what caused this revolution’. They are uniquely well suited to the communication of personal experience (Fludernik 1996). Social media is particularly powerful in this regard since it allows unaffiliated individuals to narrate their own experience –​expressing their own facticity directly to distant audiences. Nonetheless, masterplots can result in levelling in two main ways. Stories of factical events may be told in such a way that they simply fill in the blanks of existing masterplots without assessing the applicability of those masterplots in relation to the events themselves –​for example the 2013 military intervention in Egypt was simply narrated as a coup, interchangeable with others, in some journalistic accounts (e.g. Fontevecchia 2013; Williams, Rush and Tomlinson 2013). Other accounts offered more nuanced interpretations, showing greater sensitivity to the specifics of the situation and striving to thematise it as a unique nexus of events (e.g. Fisher 2013a; Kirkpatrick 2013). They offered more authentic narratives, drawing on masterplots without being unduly constrained by them. Nonetheless, accounts like this may still be interpreted in terms of generic masterplots. In both cases the result is ‘idle talk’: interpretations are simply ‘passed along’ from one context to another without establishing a primordial relation to the events being narrated or recognising their unique facticity. Both types of ‘idle’ narrative are possible in all situations. They are, however, particularly likely in fragmented contexts. As discussed in Chapter 2, it is difficult to tell whole stories through fragments due to the limits of authorial control. This makes the invocation of existing masterplots a key narrative technique which enables storytellers to use implication to say much more than they can explicitly include within individual fragments. For example, on 29 May 2020, Donald Trump posted the following tweet in the context of widespread protests in response to the killing of the African American George Floyd by police on 25 May 2020: @realDonaldTrump …. These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you! 05:53, 29/​06/​2011 This tweet was widely interpreted to reference a similar statement in 1967 by the then Miami Police Chief, Walter Headley, as a threat to use deadly force against protestors and looters (Rosenwald 2020; Shabad 2020; Sprunt 2020).This established a link with a specific existing narrative while also invoking a masterplot of the violent suppression of African American-​led protests against racism by police being deemed both acceptable and appropriate by right-​wing elites. In so doing, Trump largely ‘passes along’ an existing, levelled interpretation of anti-​racism protests, apparently with little engagement with the specific facticity of George Floyd’s killing.

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Likewise, masterplots provide a way to immediately know what a fragment means, subsuming it within existing interpretations, without having to meaningfully engage with its content or establish a primordial relation to the events to which it relates. This can also be seen with the responses to Trump’s tweet. It may be entirely valid to interpret it in terms of the masterplot of violent police suppression of protests. Yet if this conclusion is reached too quickly, it, too, may be reached in an ‘idle’ way –​ through reference to existing masterplots about protests rather than as a unique story; in terms of averageness rather than in terms of the specific factical context in which it was made.12 When interpretation proceeds in this ‘idle’ way, there is no need for further consideration of the potential meanings of a statement since the meaning is already wholly known.This is not to say that the resulting interpretations are necessarily invalid, but that ‘idle’ interpretations are unavoidably shaky since they fail to take up a primordial relation to the statement under consideration at the same time as covering over their own comparative groundlessness. As Heidegger puts it: The average understanding of the reader will never be able to decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle, and how much is just gossip. Moreover, the average understanding will not even want such a distinction, will not have need of it, since, after all, it understands everything. (Heidegger 2010: 163) Fragments are particularly prone to this type of interpretation since, as discussed in Chapter 3, they only define their own interpretation comparatively weakly, making it comparatively easy for them to be subsumed within existing masterplots. This can be illustrated further by returning once again to the broken vase metaphor. In the previous chapter, I argued that the more fragments we have, and the larger those fragments are, the less scope there is for varying interpretations of the shape of the whole.Yet in deciding which fragments belong together and how they fit with one another, we inevitably draw upon our existing ideas of what vases look like. These prior models shape the disclosure of individual fragments as they are interpreted in terms of a range of possible wholes defined by the horizon. This is necessary to see fragments as meaningful –​they must be fragments of something rather than merely irregularly shaped objects at which we just stare. An archaeologist may strive to suppress these forestructures, or at least apply them cautiously, in order to remain open to the possibility that the whole differs in shape from anything they have seen before, deliberately deworlding.Yet the smaller the pieces, the less it is possible to derive the shape of the whole from the fragment itself and the more we must rely on existing models. In principle at least, archaeologists remain conscious of their reliance on educated guess work. In ordinary inattentive life, on the other hand, we do not strive to deworld and in most cases do not thematise our understandings. On the contrary, in absorbed circumspection, the kind of attention needed to assess the validity and origins of factical interpretation is largely, or entirely, absent. In ordinary circumspection:

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the useful thing at hand [such as a fragment of information about what is happening in the world] is precisely not encountered with regard to its ‘true in-​itself ’ by a thematic perception of things, but is encountered in the inconspicuousness of what is found ‘obviously’ and ‘objectively’. (Heidegger 2010: 338). Encountering fragments in absorption makes their significance appear obvious and transparent. It has the tendency to cover over the fact that they are fragments at all. Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira (2012: 9) argue that in the context of the 2011 Egyptian Uprising ‘as individuals constantly tweeted and retweeted observations, events instantly turned into stories’. It may be truer to say that fragmentary observations were instantly understood in terms of stories and in the context of determinate, if unthematised, narrative wholes, with masterplots providing the necessary models.This enabled fragments to be disclosed in determinate ways at the same time as covering over the interpretive leaps upon which that determinacy was based. To recognise the ambivalent meanings of narrative fragments, moreover, is to recognise in turn the ungroundedness of Dasein. As already discussed, all interpretations have implications for the interpreter as well as the ‘objects’ of interpretation. In Gadamer’s words, ‘a person reading a text is himself part of the meaning he apprehends. He belongs to the text he is reading’ (Gadamer 1989: 340).To recognise the indeterminacy of textual meaning, therefore, demands recognising the indeterminacy of the self. Subsuming fragments within established masterplots, a kind of ‘idle’ interpretation, provides a way to avoid this recognition by rendering the meaning of fragments determinate. Yet we are not talking about deliberate deception: ‘idle talk does not have the kind of being of consciously passing off something as something else’ (Heidegger 2010: 163). Rather it is a further example of fleeing (from the ungroundedness of Dasein) and being ‘pulled’ by the world. The combination of fragmentation and inattention, which characterises much social media interpretation, then, makes us particularly susceptible to falling prey and creates a strong impetus to flee. As a kind of falling, it also has a strong tendency to cover over the unsettled meaning of fragments at the same time as maintaining the invisibility of established narrative models. This does not mean that the stories which can be told, and the ways that narrative fragments may be interpreted, are determined in advance. As with metanarratives, masterplots are part of tradition and do ‘not persist because of the inertia of what once existed’ but need ‘to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated’ (Gadamer 1989). Also, like metanarratives, the media clearly play a significant role in this –​the masterplot of a damsel in distress being rescued by a male hero, for example, survives largely through its constant repetition in the media.The vast majority of pro-​independence protestors in Catalonia have only mediated experience of engaging in a successful separatist movement, yet these mediated experiences nonetheless provide models for understanding and action. Applying those models can take the form of simply replicating previous applications but can also lead to new interpretations which alter

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the traditions themselves, disclosing new interpretive possibilities. Each concrete application of a masterplot may introduce something new with implications for the masterplot itself as the ‘rules change under the pressure of new inventions’ (Ricoeur 1984: 69). This was seen, for example, with the ‘leaderless revolutions’ of the Arab uprisings. Initially, they were understood, both within and beyond the Arab world, in terms of existing masterplots of revolution.Yet the lack of obvious candidates for the ‘charismatic leader’ role made simply applying existing masterplots impossible. Rather than simply abandoning the masterplot of revolution, it was changed. This enabled the Arab uprisings themselves to be narrated using old plots in new ways. It also changed the masterplot of revolution more broadly, creating new generic models for interpreting future concrete happenings. Masterplots, then, function as a kind of interpretive grammar which structures the available ways of interpreting at the same time as it enables an almost unlimited range of possible combinations, with the system of rules itself slowly shifting all the while. As Ricoeur argues: [narrative] innovation remains a form of behaviour governed by rules. The labor of imagination is not born from nothing. It is bound in one way or another to the tradition’s paradigms. But the range of solutions is vast. It is deployed between the two poles of servile application and calculated deviation. (Ricoeur 1984: 69) Masterplots should therefore be understood as enabling, not only of interpretation following existing patterns but also of creative, new interpretations. Ricoeur’s final point about ‘servile application and calculated deviation’ and the examples in the previous paragraph highlight that there are very different ways of relating to masterplots, ranging from blind application to creative responses. As Hammack argues, ‘we inherit a world of meanings we may blindly reproduce, forcefully reject, or respond somewhere in between’ (Hammack 2011: 314). That said, masterplots are clearly resistant to change. Some in Egypt argued that existing masterplots of coups and revolutions were inadequate for describing what had happened –​akin to assessing the range of options provided in the paradigmatic axis and finding none of them satisfactory. As a result, some coined new terms such as ‘popular coup’ and ‘coupvelution’, implying that aspects of two seemingly contradictory masterplots should be combined. Nonetheless, these concepts, and narrative accounts of the military’s actions based on them failed, for the most part, to gain widespread acceptance.This may be in part because masterplots, like metanarratives, form part of the ‘mythological structure of a society from which we derive comfort, and which it may be uncomfortable to dispute’ (Kermode 1979: 113). They are not easily changed or dislodged. In previous work, for example, I have explored the role of masterplots in relation to accounts of sexual violence (Sadler 2019). In this context, a popular intervention is to highlight logical flaws in commonly held masterplots accounting for how, and to whom, sexual violence normally occurs, for

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example using quantitative data to challenge the idea that the targets of sexual violence are usually dressed provocatively or that the perpetrators of sexual violence are typically unknown to their targets. While this approach seems to bring impressive results, research has shown that the long-​term effects are often minimal, with attitudes returning fairly quickly to a position close to their starting point (Kaniasty and Norris 1992; Breitenbecher and Gidycz 1998; DeGue et al. 2014). This suggests that we are prone to clinging to masterplots even in the face of contradictory evidence. Even when new masterplots gain widespread acceptance, they do not necessarily supplant those which are already influential (Hammack 2011). This is partly because, in everyday life, masterplots are not thematically brought to bear on situations (although this is not impossible) but form part of our background understanding of the world. We may acknowledge flaws with masterplots when considering them thematically while they continue to form part of the background in the context of which factical interpretations are produced. This is compounded by the difficulty of thematising them in the first place: ‘many, possibly even most, of the master narratives employed remain inaccessible to our conscious recognition and transformation’ (Bamberg 2004: 362). This is, in large part, because the interpretations based on masterplots are in many cases grounded in practices and everyday comportment rather than thematic reflection. As Dreyfus argues, ‘the understanding of being human in an individual’s activity is the result of being socialized into practices that contain an interpretation not exhaustively contained in the mental states of individuals’ (Dreyfus 1990: 17). We know masterplots as much by living them as by thinking about them. To illustrate this, consider the status of the armed forces in Egyptian society. In principle, all Egyptian men, of parents with more than one male child, must perform military service. As a result, military service is, in one way or another, part of the lived experience of most Egyptians –​both through conscription itself and seeing relatives leave to carry out their military service. This creates deep connections between ordinary citizens and the armed forces: ‘a lineage with the army is created, making it difficult not to identify with its soldiers on a familiar and social level’ (Khalil 2012). Military service becomes a part of masterplots of ‘normal’ life in Egypt. This enmeshing of the armed forces in everyday life helps to explain the slogan ‘the people and the army are one hand’, popular in Egyptian protests in both 2011 and 2013. Interpreting the relationship between the people and the army in this way emerges as a possibility from a horizon within which military and civilian life are intermingled within masterplots of ordinary life and in the practical experience of a large proportion of Egyptians, rather than merely an intellectual commitment to the armed forces as an abstract institution. The difficulty of thematising masterplots is exacerbated by the fact that they are frequently interwoven with metanarratives and other masterplots. For example, the central role of the armed forces in masterplots of ordinary lives in Egypt is further enhanced by metanarratives emphasising the armed forces as the protector and driving force of the Egyptian nation. It is bolstered with a masterplot of the army intervening to solve particularly difficult problems invoked, for example, in specific

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narratives relating the army’s role in: casting off the vestiges of British colonial rule following the 1952 overthrow of King Farouk by a group of army officers, inflicting military defeat on Israel in 1973, ‘saving’ Egypt from the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013, as well as in military-​led national megaprojects such as the massive expansion of the Suez Canal, launched in 2014, or the construction of a new administrative capital, begun in 2015. As Mostafa (2017) shows, enormous resources have been expended on the promotion of this metanarrative for over 60 years, contributing to a situation where the armed forces were the most trusted institution in the country for several decades. This highlights that masterplots and metanarratives are by no means separate from one another but mutually informing: ‘they do not come clear-​cut in these two categories, but are thoroughly interwoven with each other’ (Bamberg 2004: 361). The masterplot of the army, riding to the rescue in times of crisis in Egypt, reinforces the metanarrative of its historic role. The legitimacy of that metanarrative is, in turn, bolstered by the repeated invocation of the masterplot of its saving the day in other concrete situations. The way that interpreters relate to these masterplots and metanarratives has significant implications for the way that they tell, and interpret, stories about the military. Differences of interpretation based on the embedding of interpreters in different contexts are clearly not unique to situations of fragmented narrative but rather a basic element of distanciation, as discussed in the previous chapter. My suggestion, however, is that metanarratives and masterplots are particularly important in contexts of strong fragmentation. To function as a narrative fragment at all, individual chunks must be understood in terms of a larger whole. This is true of all narrative interpretation in which there is a sense of a putative whole within which the individual elements fit from the first moment: the fabula is not produced once the text has been definitively read but rather ‘is the result of a continuous series of abductions made during the course of the reading’ (Eco 1979: 31). Metanarratives and masterplots play a central role in determining what these abductions looks like. Yet in a traditional literary narrative, metanarratives and masterplots fade in importance as more of the story is told. Interpreters can rely less on their existing knowledge and more on the unfolding story which confirms, denies and modifies their abductions. They can be led in directions which they did not, and could not, anticipate. Different readers may interpret a novel differently but are nonetheless led along the same narrative arc. This implies a diminishment in the importance of Dasein as interpretation proceeds, with the story carrying the interpreter beyond the limits of their own being. When narratives are fragmented, on the other hand, it is often as if we are unable to move beyond the position in which we find ourselves at the beginning of a novel. We must rely heavily on interpretive crutches for a sense of the whole but, with the partial exception of vertical narrative, do not reach a point where our initial projections are confirmed or denied. Rather than a gradual accretion of elements into a coherent whole, we are simply presented with more fragments, each of which projects forward and back into myriad interpretive possibilities. Rather than necessarily reducing over time, each fragment renews our reliance on existing metanarratives and masterplots, both to encounter individual fragments

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as meaningful and to connect separate fragments together. As a consequence, interpreters’ Dasein remains absolutely central throughout the entire interpretive process (which itself has no obvious conclusion) as it compensates for the lack of authorial or textual control. This means that the way that fragments are initially disclosed is centrally important since, as discussed further in Chapter 5, it is comparatively difficult for fragments to challenge and disrupt initial disclosure.

Conclusion This chapter has examined some of the factors which limit the range of possible interpretations when confronted with fragmented narratives. It began with a consideration of Heidegger’s account of understanding and interpretation, arguing that all concrete interpretations are grounded in how things are ‘already’ understood which determine what can come into view and in what ways. Following Heidegger, I suggested that this understanding is ultimately an element of existence. As such, understanding and interpretation must be viewed in terms of ‘thrownness’ and ‘falling’. With regard to the first, they both always take place from a position of already understanding; with regard to the second, the starting point for all understanding and interpretation is ‘inauthentic’ in that it is drawn from the world and possibilities afforded by ‘the they’, das Man. The second part turned to Gadamer’s concept of the interpretive horizon to further clarify the notion of understanding in terms of change, interactions with others and the tensions between its enabling and restrictive effects. The final part returned specifically to consider narrative, arguing that all specific narrative interpretations inevitably draw on existing interpretive paradigms, which can be conceptualised through the ideas of metanarratives and masterplots. I argued that, like all understanding, they are strongly influenced by thrownness and fallenness in the sense that the paradigms pre-​exist our encounters with them and that they rely on averageness as a source of publicly available intelligibility. Finally, I suggested that our reliance on understanding is significantly increased in contexts of narrative fragmentation, as little of the potential significance of individual fragments can be drawn from the fragments themselves. In addition to making thrownness more important than ever, I suggested that it also increases the tendency towards falling, pulling interpretation strongly towards averageness and levelling. Chapter 3 argued that narrative fragmentation greatly increases the range of possible interpretations as individual fragments only weakly constrain their own interpretation. My aim in this chapter, on the other hand, has been to show that our own Dasein nonetheless greatly influences the way that we encounter those fragments, resulting in a narrower range of interpretations actually being available to individual interpreters. This may seem paradoxical, but the arguments presented in these chapters do not contradict one another. Fragmentation decreases the narrative closure coming from stories themselves, at the same time as it increases the closure coming from interpreters.This represents a shift in the sources of narrative closure –​ away from texts and authors and towards the being of readers. As I have sought to show throughout, this should not be viewed as something intrinsically negative

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since, without understanding, it would not be possible to interpret fragments as significant at all. The importance of the horizon in the interpretation of fragments does not mean that fragmentation reinforces specific metanarratives or masterplots. Turning to one interpretive possibility does not eliminate others (Heidegger 2010: 141). Narrative closure issuing from authors is not intrinsically preferable to narrative closure coming from the being of readers, with some important exceptions discussed in the next chapter.

Notes 1 Dreyfus argues that Heidegger’s stance on das Mas is itself somewhat confused, caught between a Diltheyan emphasis on its role in intelligibility and Kierkegaardian concerns about the dangers of conformism (cf. Dreyfus 1990: 143–​144, 154–​158). 2 A key concept throughout Couldry and Hepp’s The Mediated Construction of Reality which they define as ‘open (expanded) set[s]‌of spaces for interaction and dependency, in which we are enmeshed, as we try to go on doing what we ordinarily do’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 65). 3 https://​twitter.com/​pnique/​status/​1264208470036877314 4 A reference to Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s candidate for the 2020 US presidential election. 5 https://​twitter.com/​realDonaldTrump/​status/​1267187902192193538 6 For a transcript of Blair’s speech see www.bbc.co.uk/​radio4/​today/​iraq/​library_​ blairspeech.shtml 7 This expression refers to the established centre-​ r ight Popular Party, more recently founded centre-​r ight Citizens party and the far-​r ight Vox party. 8 https://​twitter.com/​PODEMOS/​status/​1102683722242052096 9 The term ‘masterplot’ is widely used (e.g. Brooks 1977; Abbott 2002; Iversen and Pers-​ højholt 2020). It is worth noting nonetheless that a host of other terms are also used, including: ‘master narratives’ (Beeman 1991; Bamberg 2004), ‘canonical narratives’ (Gould 2002), ‘skeletal storylines’ (Baker 2006), ‘canonical scripts’ (Bruner 1991), ‘generic story patterns’ (White 2001) and ‘cultural narratives’ (Phelan 2005). 10 Strictly applying the criteria listed in Chapter 1, this means that they are not true narratives at all since they are not temporally and spatially specific. 11 https://​twitter.com/​realDonaldTrump/​status/​1266231100780744704 12 In this case, a narrative need only cohere with other masterplots, rather than correspond to ontic or factical realities. This has important implications for truth assessment, as discussed in Chapter 5.

5 NARRATIVE AND TRUTH Correspondence, coherence and disclosure

Abstract Chapter 5 addresses the relationship between fragmented narrative and truth. It begins with the idea of truth as correspondence, arguing that stories, even fragmented ones, frequently involve claims about brute fact which can be meaningfully tested in terms of their correspondence to external realities. Nonetheless, that the grasping together characteristic of narrative is grounded in the ontological rather than the ontic means that narratives as meaningful wholes cannot be tested in this way. The discussion then turns to truth as coherence. Taking narratives as statements, I argue that testing their coherence with narrative understandings of the world is a key way of assessing their truthfulness, even as it carries the risk of truth becoming detached from extant realities. The final part of the chapter addresses truth as disclosure, as presented by Heidegger in Being and Time (2010), arguing that fragmentation has the potential to disclose the essential ungroundedness and unsettledness of being by highlighting the irreducibility of being to the disclosure experienced by any Dasein. Nonetheless, fragmentation also exacerbates the factors which lead to the ‘covering over’ of the unsettledness of being in everyday life, at the same time as impeding the telling of stories which provoke disruptive world disclosure.

If narrative is largely ignored or left untheorised in contemporary scholarly debate on new media, in wider public discourse narrative it is at times presented as directly antithetical to truth, with ‘fact’ and ‘narrative’ presented as opposites. Arguments relating to the ‘narrative fallacy’ –​a tendency to see history in terms of narrative sequences supposedly leading to spurious interpretations of history –​imply that thinking in

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terms of stories leads away from seeing how things ‘really’ are (Taleb 2010). Social media, meanwhile, have been frequently associated with the rise of a supposedly ‘post-​truth’ world (e.g. Hannan 2018; McIntyre 2018; Kalpokas 2019) and more convincingly linked with the spread of misinformation (e.g. Bode and Vraga 2015; Lewandowsky, Ecker and Cook 2017; Allcott, Gentzkow and Yu 2019). With this in mind, this final chapter explores the complex relationship between stories and truth to ask on what basis the truth of fragmented narratives might be assessed. I do this through a consideration of three major approaches to truth. The first part of the chapter considers truth as correspondence and truth as coherence. In the former, truth is understood as the correspondence of statements to external realities making it possible, in principle, to make objective truth assessments. In the latter, truth is understood as coherence between statements, on the basis that we can never acquire the unmediated access to reality needed to assess truth in terms of correspondence. I aim to show that both these perspectives are valuable in understanding the truth claims of fragmented narrative. Stories typically include claims about ontic realities, the correspondence of which can be determined. Assessing narratives in terms of coherence enables stories to become detached from ontic realities but also provides a vital way of evaluating narratives which relate to events about which we have no unmediated experience.This is particularly significant in the era of deep mediatization where the ‘there’ of each Dasein extends far beyond their immediate physical environment, taking in large numbers of stories relating to distant parts of the world. The second part of the chapter explores a third approach: truth as disclosure. Drawing once again on Heidegger, and building on the discussions in the previous chapters, I explore the potential and limitations of fragmented narrative with regard to how things and events can come into view. The key theoretical reference point for this is Kompridis’ (1994; 2006) work on first-​order disclosure, which determines how things initially come into view, and second-​order disclosure, as subsequent interpretations either ‘decentre’ or ‘unify and repair’ initial disclosure. On the one hand, I refer to Bakhtin’s work on dialogism to argue that the proliferation of narrative fragments offers great potential for the world to be disclosed in new ways by highlighting the multivoicedness of language and counteracting the controlling force of monological discourse. On the other hand, I argue that the fragmentation of narrative enables small chunks of narrative to be easily subsumed within existing patterns of understanding, limiting their capacity to disrupt existing ways of understanding. Experiences of dialogism may also lead to fleeing, causing interpreters to become existentially closed off from unsettling encounters with the new. This means that fragmentation is equally capable of producing unifying-​ repairing and decentring effects, reaffirming the validity of the world as already disclosed at the same time as enabling it to come into view in new ways.

Truth as correspondence The basic idea of correspondence theories is that truth lies in correspondence or agreement between reality or facts and statements made about reality or facts.

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Therefore, the statement ‘gravity causes objects to fall towards the centre of the earth’ is true because it corresponds to external realities. The statement ‘gravity causes objects to fall away from the centre of the earth’ is false, on the other hand, because it contradicts external realities. Correspondence-​based views form the basis of the oldest theories of truth in the Western tradition, dating back at least to Aristotle and Plato (David 2016). From even this minimal definition, three major implications can be drawn: 1) truth is not substantive; it is not a thing or substance but a specific relationship between reality and statements; 2) since truth is not a thing, it is not objectively present ‘out there’ in the world waiting to be found; statements can only be made by humans so truth exists only insofar as there are humans to make them; 3) the ability of humans to assess truth according to its correspondence to facts depends on our ability to know facts. Concurrently, the possibility of certain, objective knowledge of truth relies on the possibility of certain, objective knowledge of facts. These ideas can be applied to narrative fairly easily: stories can be understood as statements which refer to the world. Truth cannot be an intrinsic property of narratives but depends on the relationship between stories and facts. Assessing the truth of narratives in terms of correspondence requires being able to know the events to which they refer independently of the stories which do the referring. To what extent, in practice, can narratives be assessed according to these principles? I have argued repeatedly in this book that the world is meaningful as first comprehended and we encounter it in circumspection rather than mere staring. Shared as it may be, the world is disclosed differently to each of us. We can never step outside our own Dasein since it is Dasein which provides the ‘clearing’ which enables things to come into view at all. Even if we succeed in establishing a primordial relationship with things and returning to the things themselves, we can still only know them through Dasein rather than as purely extant. Establishing a primordial relationship with things is far more difficult when we have only mediated experiences of them. In this case the manner of their disclosure can be largely severed from the things themselves. As Scannell (2014: 177–​190) argues, mediated experience is still experience. Nonetheless, to live a story is quite different from hearing one. This matters a great deal in the era of deep mediatization as many of the narratives we must assess refer to events about which we have only mediated experience. Very often there is no practical way to assess for ourselves to what extent they correspond to what ‘really’ happened (cf. Gunkel 2019: 313). As a consequence, we are often left comparing mediations with other mediations. This line of thought can lead to the conclusion that there is little or no value in thinking of truth as correspondence. Gunkel, for example, argues that the correspondence theory of truth is simply untenable: ‘the real thing, which would have anchored the entire system and sequence of mediations, appears to be endlessly deferred and ultimately inaccessible, remaining either an unattainable ideal or a structurally necessary fabrication’ (Gunkel 2019: 314). Objections such as this may be accompanied by a broader suspicion that there is no single truth. Ewick and Silbey, for example, espouse a widely held view in narrative theory when they uphold their

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‘epistemological conviction that there is no single, objectively apprehended truth’, grounded in ‘the recognition that knowledge is socially and politically produced’ (Ewick and Silbey 1995: 199). Both these criticisms are important. The inaccessibility of objective knowledge is clearly a major obstacle. Commitment to a single truth has too often meant privileging the perspective of dominant groups, especially white men, and dismissing or minimising truths which are not apparent to this group. Nonetheless, we should resist the temptation to entirely dismiss truth as correspondence too quickly. While the world may be first encountered as meaningful, the scientific method has shown that it is possible to ‘deworld’ the world to a significant degree; perhaps we first encounter the world in circumspection but we can be trained to merely stare at it. There are limits to this –​science is hardly apolitical and the knowledge it produces is clearly shaped by the cultural and epistemological contexts in which it originates. It does not result in perfectly objective knowledge of the ontic. Nonetheless, it has been remarkably effective at uncovering knowledge which is much less closely tied to Dasein than that of everyday comportment. Consequently, it is important to acknowledge that ontic facts can frequently be known with a significant degree of certainty. This matters because many, perhaps most, stories make claims which can be examined in terms of their correspondence to the ontic. For example, Donald Trump claimed on 12 July 2019 that ‘[Mexico] took 30% of our automobile companies … they moved into Mexico. All of the people got fired’ (Litke 2019). This claim is factical rather than purely factual since it is only through the interpretive action of Dasein that an entity such as an automobile company can come into view. Nonetheless, such numerical claims can be tested in terms of their correspondence: within a shared world in which factory workers exist, it is possible to legitimately ask how many have lost their jobs. This is precisely the kind of assessment carried out by factchecking organisations such as Politifact.com and FullFact.com which typically focus on the ontic, identifying specific claims which can be meaningfully tested in terms of correspondence. The validity and usefulness of this type of truth assessment should not be forgotten. Clearly, however, there are limits to what can be achieved in this way.This type of truth assessment relies not only on deworlding but also on denarrativising, extracting individual claims from a narrative whole. It follows the scientific principle of reduction, seeking to explain the validity of the whole from the validity of its individual parts. In so doing, we lose the ability to see and assess claims which are not reducible into constituent elements but can be made only through a narrative whole. Stories, after all, are concerned not merely with ‘what happened’ but also with ‘what does it mean’ or ‘what might happen’. This is apparent in the very next sentence spoken by Trump following the example in the previous paragraph: ‘They would all move back if they had to pay a 25% tax or tariff ’ (Litke 2019). This remains a claim about the ontic yet cannot be assessed in terms of correspondence since the event in question lies in the future. As such, it exists ontologically through projection but is not extant. Trump’s statement is not unusual in doing this –​as I have argued throughout, projecting into the future is one of narrative’s basic functions. Future

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projections are frequently vital elements of narratives yet their truthfulness cannot be assessed in terms of correspondence. Trump’s tweet concerns not only what has and might have happened but also expresses a judgment about those events –​implying that the relocation of car factories in Mexico is a bad thing. This emphasises that stories are often as concerned with evaluating as they are with simply listing events understood to have really taken place. These judgements are important in making stories what they are but are not amenable to assessment in terms of truth as correspondence since ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do not exist in the manner of extant things. As we might expect, the question is complicated further where narratives are fragmented. The correspondence view of truth relies on statements corresponding to external realities. The difficulty of knowing external realities in something approaching an objective way clearly complicates this. But this is not the only difficulty –​the statements themselves must also be fixed if they are to be assessed in this way. To a certain extent, this is achieved in ordinary life through the capacity of language to point out elements of a shared world in such a way as to allow multiple people to see them. When Donald Trump refers to the movement of automobile factories to Mexico, the averageness of language allows many different speakers to understand what is being referred to by terms like ‘Mexico’ and ‘automobile’. It enables multiple people to be brought ‘together in focusing on certain features of entities within the world as salient’ (Wrathall 1999: 82). Knowing what is being spoken about is equally important as knowing external realities for determining whether statements are true in terms of correspondence. Even with apparently specific ontic claims this is not always simple. Part of the Politifact article cited earlier, examining Trump’s claim that car factories have moved to Mexico, is dedicated to ascertaining the details of the claim made.Which factories and people are we talking about? That they were able to do this with some certainty, however, demonstrates that fragmentation need not represent an insurmountable barrier; in cases like this, the fixity provided by language is sufficient to grasp the statement being made. In other cases, however, fragmentation poses a significant challenge. I have argued over the preceding chapters that fragmented narratives rely on a great deal of reader input if they are to be intelligible. Stories, as understood, are always more than objectively present ‘texts’. Interpretations may differ greatly but where narratives are more fully elaborated, the text can serve as a fairly solid reference point for determining what has actually been said. Where narratives are strongly fragmented, this is much less the case. Fragmented narratives are inherently unstable and multivalent even if, as argued in Chapter 4, ordinary reading practices are liable to cover this over. Even ontic claims which can, in principle, be assessed in terms of correspondence may be difficult to pin down. Consider the following posted by the Podemos politician Gloria Elizo: @GloriaElizo Desregulación salvaje, evasión fiscal, dumping para copar mercados, captura de reguladores, lobby político Roturación social.

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“Uber admite que quizá nunca sea rentable” Pero nunca le faltan inversores Uber no es una empresa. Es acción política global 👇

www.elconfidencial.com/​tecnologia/​2019-​08-​18/​uber-​burbuja-​dinero-​ financiacion-​lyft-​cabify_​2176207/​ [savage deregulation, tax evasion, dumping to monopolise markets, capture of regulators, political lobbying Social upheaval. “Uber admits that it might never be profitable” but never lacks investors Uber isn’t a company. It’s global political action’ 👇

www.elconfidencial.com/​tecnologia/​2019-​08-​18/​uber-​burbuja-​dinero-​ financiacion-​lyft-​cabify_​2176207/​] 08:09, 19/​08/​191 On the face of it, this tweet tells an implicit story about Uber, suggesting that its rise is attributable to unethical business practices and dubious support from regulators. What precisely is meant by terms such as ‘savage deregulation’, ‘capture of regulators’ and ‘social upheaval’ nonetheless remains somewhat unclear. The scope of the tweet is also unclear –​is Elizo referring solely to Uber or using the company as an example of contemporary venture capital-​driven capitalism more broadly? Is she talking just about Spain or about broader changes? What is the relevant time period? This matters a great deal as the story as a whole depends on all these factors combined; the narrative may only be assessed by taking a stand on how these ambivalent aspects are to be understood. In the pursuit of clarification, we can read the linked article or examine Elizo’s previous statements yet that will not tightly constrain the meaning of this specific statement. Assessing narratives in terms of correspondence is, therefore, neither a waste of time nor a panacea. We cannot have truly objective knowledge of the ontic and our lives are ‘factical’ rather than factual: ‘facticity is not the factuality of the factum brutum of something objectively present, but is a characteristic of the being of Dasein taken on in existence’ (Heidegger 2010: 132). Nor can everything that narratives do be evaluated in terms of truthfulness. Nonetheless, factical existence is intimately tied up with ontic facts and the ‘factum brutum’ remains highly significant. Narratives are told in relation to and point out things which are objectively present. The validity of the way in which they do that does matter.To misquote Ewick and Silbey (1995: 199), a political commitment to giving voice and bearing witness does not mean that there are never single truths which can be (close to) objectively comprehended.As Norman (1991: 131), writing about truth in historiography, puts it: It is highly artificial, not to mention outright dangerous, to claim that the question of whether or not an historical narrative is true is not a good

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question, or a category mistake of some kind. This is often a perfectly appropriate question, and at times it is of the utmost importance that it be answered. The recent revisionist histories that claim that the Holocaust never occurred, for example, challenge the truth of received accounts, and themselves call for immediate disconfirmation. It just would not do to exempt such stories from ‘the criterion of truth’. (Norman 1991: 131) It is essential to recognise the limitations of the correspondence view of truth insofar as it can be applied to narrative. Nonetheless, it is also important to insist on the ‘criterion of truth’ when it can be legitimately assessed.

Truth as coherence Coherence views of truth, diverse as they are, argue that the truth of statements lies in their relation to other statements rather than to objective features of the world. With regard to narrative, this principally means assessing the truthfulness of stories based on their coherence with other stories rather than by measuring them against the events they reference. This contradicts everyday understandings of truth and implies strong relativism. Nonetheless, the coherence view of truth is important in a number of ways. Perhaps most significantly, it is an extremely common way for truth to be assessed in everyday life. Everyday assessments of truth as coherence do not rely on deworlding in the way that correspondence views do. Rather, they are grounded in everyday, worldly existence and involve measuring stories against storied existence. This approach requires no special training or the adoption of a distinctive, thematically critical stance. Being intrinsically worldly, the coherence view can test claims which the correspondence view cannot –​a statement about the future cannot correspond to an ontic reality but it can cohere with the being of things which exist, characterised by the ecstatic unity of past, present and future. Evaluations cannot correspond to ontic realities but they can cohere with understandings of right and wrong. It is also, moreover, frequently necessary to assess the truth of statements about realities regarding which we have no primordial knowledge.When reading a media report of a protest in Barcelona, for example, it is impossible for me to directly evaluate its truthfulness by comparing it to what ‘really happened’. All I can do is assess to what extent the report sounds coherent.We are similarly compelled to rely, to a significant degree, on coherence when the events referenced by a narrative took place in the past, since the (ontic) past cannot be directly accessed. As a consequence, coherence plays a key role in the writing of history, as historians assess the validity of their accounts in reference not only to the available evidence but also in terms of their coherence on the basis that ‘a “convincing” narrative convinces mainly because it is well-​formed and followable’ (Kermode 1979: 118). Collingwood (1994: 245), for example, argues that a historian must assess the evidence they use ‘by considering whether the picture of the past to which the evidence leads him

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is a coherent and continuous picture, one which makes sense’. Coherence plays a similarly important role in legal contexts; judges and juries cannot go back into the past so must determine truth partly from the extent to which narrative accounts are coherent and plausible (O’Barr and Conley 1985). Those fleeing conflicts and persecution similarly must, in many cases, give convincing narrative accounts of the trauma they have faced if they are to be afforded refugee status (Baker 2006: 144–​ 145; Good 2011; Zambelli 2017). This highlights that finding truth as correspondence is often closer to ‘finding a fit’ (Goodman 1978: 21) than to empirically verifying correspondence to ontic realities. Walter Fisher’s ‘Narrative Paradigm’ (1987), also employed by Baker (2006), provides a useful framework for exploring how assessments of plausibility are made as part of everyday ‘folk’ logic. He identifies three main types of coherence: structural coherence (the extent to which narratives are internally coherent and do not self-​contradict); material coherence (the extent to which narratives cohere with other narratives); and characterological coherence (the extent to which the characters in stories behave in consistent and believable ways and storytellers themselves are deemed credible). For example, in 2014 Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report offering a narrative account of the dispersal of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) protestors from the Rabaa al-​Adawiya and al-​Nahda squares in Cairo by the Egyptian security forces on 14 August 2013. The report presented the military’s actions as a massacre, arguing that the available evidence, including the death of almost a thousand protestors, showed that the security forces both fired first and used excessive force. As such it both made claims about specific ontic facts –​such as the number of deaths –​and about the significance of the complex of events as a whole –​arguing that it should be viewed as a pre-​meditated massacre rather than the unintended consequence of attempts to remove the Brotherhood protestors peacefully. To assess the coherence of the account following Fisher’s model means asking: 1) does it include internal contradictions, for example by claiming that protestors were unarmed at one point and armed at another, resulting in a lack of structural coherence? An analysis of the report shows that it does not. 2) Does it accord with other stories told about the same event? On the one hand, HRW’s account differs substantially from the narrative accounts provided by the Egyptian government (Youssef 2016). On the other, it largely accords with the narrative accounts provided by multiple other sources (Elmessiry 2014; Kingsley 2014; Ketchley and Biggs 2015; al-​Anani 2019). With regard to whether it is coherent to view it as a massacre, HRW’s account coheres with narratives of broadly similar events which are routinely seen as massacres, such as the quelling of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 or the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819. 3) Do the characters in the story behave in coherent and consistent ways? In this case, the key issues are whether HRW is a reliable narrator, whether it would be ‘in character’ for the Egyptian government to act with the brutality described in the report and whether it is believable that the MB protestors were unarmed as claimed. With regard to the first, the Egyptian state had repeatedly dispersed protests with violence in the recent

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past, for example at the Maspero Killings (Khalifa 2014) and Battle of the Camel (Policy 2011), both of which took place in 2011. The longstanding hostility of the Egyptian military towards the MB is also well attested (Kandil 2012). Assessing the extent to which it would be ‘in character’ for the MB protestors to be armed and to have attacked security forces is more difficult. Labelled a terrorist group by the Egyptian state, while maintaining that it is a peaceful organisation, the Brotherhood has long been characterised by tensions between moderate and radical factions with very different views on the legitimacy of armed struggle (Abed-​Kotob 1995; Rinehart 2009). This type of assessment enables a judgement of the extent to which the narrative is true by asking to what extent it is plausible without directly addressing the relationship of HRW’s report to objective realities. Yet judgements of coherence and judgements of correspondence are easily conflated. This is not necessarily a mistake. Davidson (1986), for example, argues that while it may be impossible to directly assess correspondence, a coherence approach can nonetheless give meaningful insight into the extent to which statements correspond to external realities. This is a key idea in the verification of statements in journalism, law and history. In all three areas it is commonplace to weigh up narratives without having any primordial access to the events they reference. All three often rely on testing structural coherence, collecting as many testimonies as possible to provide material coherence, and assessing the actions of those involved against knowledge of their character, whether derived from the story itself or from other sources. The outcomes of these assessments are frequently binary: a defendant is ruled innocent or guilty; an asylum claim is accepted or rejected. Nonetheless, this type of assessment is probabilistic. This highlights that what is sought with this approach is often ‘verisimilitude’ rather than truth per se. This is especially true with narrative, with several theorists arguing that narratives can only ever strive to be verisimilar (Polkinghorne 1988: 176; Bruner 1991; Ewick and Silbey 1995: 201). When appraising the truth of stories, the question ‘does this sound like something that would happen?’ is just as important as ‘did/​will this happen?’. Vital as this type of assessment is, evaluating the truthfulness of narratives primarily, or solely, in terms of coherence carries risks. Longstanding masterplots about sexual assault always involving physical violence, for example, caused many individual accounts of rape that did not include physical violence to be considered incoherent and thus dismissed as implausible. As Burt (1991: 27) puts it, when people ‘hear of a specific incident in which a woman says she was raped, they look at the incident, compare it to their idea of a “real” rape, and, all too often, decide that the woman was not “really” raped’. When accounts did not ‘ring true with the stories … [interpreters] know to be true in their lives’ (Fisher 1987: 64) it seemed impossible that they could correspond to external realities. The dangers are also apparent with conspiracy theories. The so-​called ‘birther’ movement in the USA, for example, that claimed that Barack Obama was not born in the USA and thus ineligible to be president, was based around a narrative which was structurally coherent (i.e. not self-​contradicting) and featured consistent characters (i.e. Obama

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as a deceitful alien). As it was repeated, it acquired material coherence through ‘narrative accrual’ (Bruner 1991: 18), making it seem truthful despite having little basis in external realities. This highlights two further key points. First, narrative coherence is audience specific. A different interpreter faced with the ‘birther’ narrative might have conceded its structural coherence but deemed it characterologically incoherent, based on what they believed Obama’s character to be and materially incoherent since it contradicted the standard narrative of Obama’s birth stating that he was born in Hawaii. This narrative may correspond more closely to ontic realities; it is important to note, however, that most interpreters accepting this narrative were no more able to directly assess the correspondence of claims that Obama was born in Hawaii than ‘birthers’ were able to demonstrate that he was born elsewhere. The key factor in determining the truth of either account is coherence. Even in cases like this, then, it is important to remember that it is rarely a competition between unambiguous, empirically grounded correspondence and unmoored coherence. Second, there is an inherent conservatism to judgements based on coherence in that they rely on statements already held to be true by interpreters. Once again, this is not necessarily a bad thing since the way things are already understood in everyday existence is not necessarily wrong. Nonetheless, this can leave comparatively little space for narratives which contradict existing perceptions of what is true, regardless of their grounding in ontic realities. As Kirkwood argues in response to Fisher, ‘these standards for good stories appear to leave little room for rhetors to suggest unfamiliar ideals which exceed people’s belief and previous experience’ (Kirkwood 1992: 30).That this is true, to at least some extent, is shown in research demonstrating that ‘debunking’ conspiracy theories, by providing evidence that they do not correspond to reality, seems to have little impact on the attitudes of those who believe them (Edy and Risley-​Baird 2016; Zollo et al. 2017). Demonstrating a lack of correspondence does little to undermine their coherence. Turning now to the coherence of fragmented narratives, Postman argues that ‘contradiction, in short, requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated aspects of a continuous and coherent context’ before going on to suggest that ‘in a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist’ (Postman 1987: 127–​8). While Postman’s statement is somewhat hyperbolic, it does highlight that fragmentation complicates the assessment of coherence. He is correct in the limited sense that it is frequently meaningless to assess the structural coherence of fragments taken in isolation. For example, the Egyptian blogger,The Big Pharaoh, posted the following on 3 July 2013: @TheBigPharaoh ‫ الحرية و العدالة‬.‫شيخ االزهر و البابا و حزب النور و البرادعى حضروا االجتماع مع السيسي‬ ‫رفض الحضور‬.

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[Sheikh of the Azhar, the [Coptic] Pope, al-​Nur Party, and [Mohammad] al-​ Baradei attended the meeting with el-​Sisi. The [MB affiliated] Freedom and Justice [Party] refused to attend] 7:14, 03/​07/​132 All that is required for this fragment to be structurally coherent is for it to be possible for the Sheikh of the Azhar and so on to have attended a meeting with el-​Sisi and for the Freedom and Justice Party to have refused to participate. This sets the bar for non-​contradiction extremely low.The bar disappears entirely in cases where fragments refer only to a single event. In this context it is unsurprising that characterological coherence takes on significant importance, with assessments of narrators’ reliability serving as a key measure employed by users when deciding what to trust on social media (Sterrett et al. 2019). This does not mean, however, that structural coherence disappears entirely as a measure of truthfulness. Structural coherence is concerned with the extent to which stories hang together as a whole. As the previous chapters have attempted to show, fragments exist, and are encountered as, elements of narrative wholes which extend far beyond the fixed texts of fragments themselves. One way to assess the coherence of fragments, then, is to assess the coherence of these larger, implicit wholes. Assessing the coherence of fragments in the way Postman suggests is therefore akin to assessing the structural coherence of a novel based on whether individual sentences contain contradictions. Not an entirely pointless activity but a strange one. The way that the wholes are understood in fragmented contexts, however, depends greatly on the interpretive action of readers. Consequently, the extent to which a fragment is understood to structurally cohere depends on the way that the whole is understood. Since understandings of these wholes may vary significantly, and thus the starting points for evaluation will also vary, it follows that appraisals of structural coherence may also differ. The same fragment may therefore be understood as part of both structurally coherent and incoherent narrative wholes.This uncertainty also affects material coherence since the way that the story is understood greatly affects which other stories it will, and will not, cohere with, compounding the scope for varying assessments of material coherence discussed previously. An alternative approach is to assess fragments themselves in terms of the extent to which they structurally cohere with the narrative wholes within which they are encountered and materially cohere with other stories. Following this approach,The Big Pharaoh’s claim may be assessed as true since it materially coheres with similar claims made by others. Conversely, a fragmentary comment by Donald Trump claiming to be making America great again may be dismissed as untrue on the basis that it does not cohere with other narratives of what is ‘really’ happening and which are ‘known’ to be true. This sets up very different thresholds for fragments to be deemed truthful, depending on the way they relate to how things are already understood. For fragments which cohere with what we already think, the bar is

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low –​a fragment need only not contradict those narratives to appear truthful. For fragments which go against what is already held to be true, on the other hand, the bar is much higher and such fragments are easily dismissed as incoherent. It is important not to push this argument too far and there is evidence to show that interpreters approach information shared on social media with ‘generalised scepticism’ (Fletcher and Nielsen 2019) rather than blindly accepting whatever coheres with their existing views. Nonetheless, thinking in terms of coherence has important implications for the capacity of fragments to alter perceptions of what is true, an issue to which I return in the second part of the chapter. To illustrate the complexity of assessing the coherence of narrative fragments, consider the following post from the Podemos activist Ione Belarra about floods in the region of Navarra in August 2019:3 @ionebelarra El 8 de julio en Navarra llovió en tres horas, tres veces lo que suele caer en todo julio. Esto es una emergencia climática. Lo primero es declarar la zona como catastrófica y que los vecinos y vecinas puedan acceder a ayudas. El Gobierno lleva casi dos meses sin hacer nada. [On 8 July in Navarra three times as much rain fell in three hours as normally falls during all of July. This is a climate emergency. The first thing to do is declare the area a disaster zone so that residents can access support. The government has done nothing for almost three months] 5:50, 27/​08/​194 There is nothing within the fragment itself to imply structural incoherence in the sense that none of the claims made directly contradicts another. In terms of material coherence, the claim that three times more rain than normal fell in July can be tested in terms of the extent to which it coheres with other accounts of the rainfall in Navarra at that time, as a way of indirectly assessing its correspondence to ontic realities. Whether ‘this is a climate emergency’, on the other hand, is a question of judgement and can only be evaluated in terms of other narratives. The narratives against which the claim is to be tested are concerned with future events as much as past ones; insofar as they relate to a climate emergency, the significance of the floods in Navarra lies not only in the damage they had caused at that point, but also in their being taken as evidence of further problems arising in the future due to climate change. Assessment is further complicated by the ambiguity as to whether ‘this’ refers to the rainfall in Navarra specifically or a broader pattern of increasingly frequent extreme weather. The extent to which this claim appears truthful, therefore, depends on both the way that it is understood and the other stories against which it is compared. This is shown in the responses to Belarra’s tweet,

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which include: approval on the basis that it coheres with other narratives presenting extreme weather as evidence of a climate emergency and broader metanarratives of disastrous climate change; rejection on the basis that their authors do not accept other narratives of extreme weather as evidence of climate change and the broader metanarrative of climate change; acceptance of the metanarrative of climate change but rejection of the idea that the floods in Navarra specifically should be viewed as evidence of a climate emergency since their authors see the rainfall as materially coherent with narratives of ordinary summer weather. Notably, none of the responses dispute the correspondence of Belarra’s claim regarding the volume of rain itself. The claim that ‘the government has done nothing for almost three months’ can be assessed in terms of material coherence by asking to what extent it coheres with other narratives of the government’s actions. It can also be assessed in terms of characterological coherence by asking to what extent Belarra should be considered a reliable narrator and asking whether it is believable that the Spanish government would behave in this way. For an interpreter seeing Belarra as fundamentally unreliable (as some of those commenting on her tweet clearly did), her statement may appear incoherent whatever its other merits. For an interpreter who trusts Belarra, the fact that she is the one to have narrated it may be sufficient to make it coherent. For an interpreter considering the government effective and responsible, it may seem implausible to claim that they have not acted. For an interpreter viewing the government as ineffective and careless, on the other hand, it may seem entirely believable that the government would do nothing. In the video embedded in the tweet, Belarra attempts to support this representation of the government’s ‘character’ by contrasting the rapid declaration of a ‘disaster zone’ by the regional government of Navarra with the fact that ‘el señor Sánchez se ha tomado tan en serio sus vacaciones que todavía no ha movido un dedo a este respecto’ [Mr. Sánchez is taking his holidays so seriously that he still has not lifted a finger in this regard]. My contention, then, is that while truth is commonly understood in terms of correspondence, everyday assessments of truth are much more strongly grounded in coherence. This is particularly important with social media since we frequently have no direct access to the realities to which fragments are purported to correspond. Coherence, moreover, provides a way for the assessment of fragments by asking to what extent they cohere with stories believed to be true. Doing this does not require that stories be thematised and deworlded in the manner seen with assessments of correspondence. Rather, in asking whether a fragment is true, interpreters need only consider whether it ‘rings true’, a practice which neither requires, nor necessarily provokes, a departure from everyday inattentive being. This allows truth assessments to be continually and rapidly made, which keeps things moving. The narratives in terms of which fragments are understood, and the stories against which they are assessed remain for the most part unthematised. This is invaluable in everyday life but nonetheless raises issues since it renders truth assessment opaque as neither the claims under assessment nor the criteria against which they are measured are easily thematisable.

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Truth as disclosure For the final part of this chapter, I will turn to Heidegger’s account of truth which, as we might expect, is somewhat idiosyncratic but valuable in a number of ways.5 It bears emphasising at the outset that Heidegger does not reject the correspondence view of truth. He is emphatic both that ‘the essence of truth lies in the “agreement” of the judgment with its object’ (Heidegger 2010: 206) and that truth exists in the relationships between statements and reality and is ‘possible determination of the being of the extant’ rather than something extant itself (Heidegger 1982: 217). He sees it as perfectly reasonable, therefore, to inquire about the truthfulness of statements by comparing the claims they make to the world itself, and asking to what extent they tally with one another.6 His focus, nonetheless, is not on the nature of this relationship or how to identify whether statements are true or not in this sense. Rather, he is interested primarily in the conditions which enable this kind of truth to emerge. He concludes that truth, as correspondence, ultimately rests on a more fundamental kind of truth which typically remains unnoticed: truth as ‘aletheia’ or ‘unveiling’. It is this idea of truth as unveiling with which I am principally concerned in this part of the chapter. On this understanding, truth refers to the disclosure of the world. Taken in this way, truth is intimately connected with Dasein since being-​true, as a mode of being, is only possible in relation to Dasein; disclosure implies not only something being disclosed, but also that it is disclosed to someone. This goes beyond the idea that only Dasein makes statements which may, or may not, be true. It proposes instead that it is only through Dasein that things can come into view at all in such a way that it is possible for statements to be made about them. Truth is therefore to be understood as a process that happens –​as ‘truthing’ (cf. Capobianco 2014) –​rather than as an extant thing or property. Heidegger’s emphasis on truth as uncovering is not accidental: ‘lanthanein means to be concealed; a-​is the privative, so that a-​letheuein is equivalent to: to pluck something out of its concealment, to make manifest or reveal’ (Heidegger 1982: 215). This emphasises that disclosure only happens through Dasein, but that what is disclosed comes from beings themselves and is prior to and not dependent upon Dasein. In other words, the interpretations which can become apparent to Dasein through disclosure exist whether or not they are actually disclosed to Dasein. This matters as it shows that Heidegger is not arguing that anything goes and that every statement can be deemed true, regardless of how it relates to the world. At various points in Being and Time he emphasises his ongoing commitment to the phenomenological principle of returning to ‘the things themselves’ (Heidegger 2010: 26, 148, 210, 341). His concerns about idle talk (discussed in the previous chapter) are partly grounded in the idea that it can prevent truthing from happening by covering over being since in idle talk statements are made about the world simply by repeating those made in the past, rather than through reference to things themselves. True statements, on the other hand, are those which disclose ‘possible determination[s]‌of the being of the extant’ (Heidegger 1982: 217), rendering them

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‘accessible’ with the character of ‘unveiling letting-​be-​encountered’ (Heidegger 1982: 215). We are therefore confronted with two quite different understandings of the term ‘truth’. One refers to the unveiling of the world while the other refers to correspondence between statements and the world. They are related but do not necessarily entail one another. A story may say something about the world which neither corresponds nor coheres and yet reveals something new and is therefore true in the sense of unveiling. On the contrary, ‘not all true assertions unconceal’ (Wrathall 1999: 84) and it is entirely possible for a story to both correspond and cohere without unveiling anything new –​reiterating what is already known to be true without enabling the world to be seen in a new way. Heidegger’s focus, as always, is on being at its most fundamental. More directly applicable to the concerns of this book are the applications of Heidegger’s ideas to textual meaning in the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur, remembering that ‘text’ is understood in a broad sense. To return to the concept of ‘distanciation’ discussed in Chapter 3, for Gadamer, the separation through time of a text and its interpreter is a ‘positive and productive possibility of understanding’ (Gadamer 1989: 297) in which ‘there continually emerge new sources of understanding, which reveal unsuspected elements of meaning’ (Gadamer 1989: 298). Similarly, for Ricoeur the separation of texts and interpreters produces a ‘surplus of meaning’ (Ricoeur 1976) as texts are continually reinterpreted in the light of changed circumstances. Both scholars follow Heidegger in suggesting that these new types of understanding are not new meanings grafted onto texts by readers but rather the disclosure, or uncovering of, the potential held within texts themselves. The truth of texts, therefore, should be understood not only in terms of their correspondence or coherence, but also in terms of ‘truthing’ –​from this perspective texts are true insofar as they disclose new ways of understanding texts themselves, the interpreting Dasein and the world. The nature of this engagement with the truth of texts is presented differently by each scholar. For Gadamer it happens through a ‘fusion of horizons’, as discussed in Chapter 4. On this view, all communication, whether genuine or quasi-​dialogue, offers the possibility of the horizon of an other entering into our own. Even if the position of the other is not accepted, mutual comprehension alone is sufficient to alter both horizons (Gadamer 1989: 303–​304). Gadamer conceptualises this further through the concept of the ‘experience’, by which he means an encounter with alterity which discloses new possibilities. Through experiences interpreters acquire ‘a new horizon within which something can become an experience’ (Gadamer 1989: 354). In other words, experiences not only provide the ability to see something specific in a different way, but also disclose new interpretive possibilities more broadly –​truth in Heidegger’s fundamental sense. For Ricoeur, on the other hand, it happens through the idea that texts ‘propose worlds that I might inhabit and into which I might project my ownmost powers’ (Ricoeur 1984: 81), with the active and productive operation of mimesis within both fictional and factual narrative opening ‘the kingdom of the as if’ (Ricoeur 1984: 64) as, through interpretation, we seek to ‘grasp the world-​propositions opened up by the reference of the text’ (Ricoeur 1976: 87). This not only allows us to see the world as referenced by the text, but

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also enables a kind of distanciation from our own Dasein without requiring that the horizon of the text be reconciled with that of the interpreter (Ricoeur 1991a: 86). This perspective ‘invites us to think of the sense of the text as an injunction coming from the text, as a new way of looking at things’ (Ricoeur 1976: 88). Interpretation, then, enables things to come into view in new ways by giving access to how things appear from Daseins other than our own.This includes the meanings of texts themselves but also opens up new ways of understanding our own Dasein which, in turn, discloses new ways of seeing. The emphasis on opening up new perspectives in both Gadamer and Ricoeur stresses that, while the manner in which the world is initially disclosed is determined by the horizon within which we are already situated, encounters with the world and with others have the capacity to change that horizon. This happens through the provocation of a disruption or disturbance of some kind: ‘experience is initially always experience of negation: something is not what we supposed it to be’ (Gadamer 1989: 354). Kompridis (1994) usefully conceptualises these different stages of disclosure with the terms ‘first-​order disclosure’, the way things initially come into view, and ‘second-​order disclosure’, the way that subsequent disclosure changes the way that things appear, revealing ‘previously hidden or unthematised dimensions of meaning’ (Kompridis 1994: 29). The kind of disclosure presented by Gadamer and Ricoeur is described by Kompridis as ‘decentring’ effects which function by ‘scrambling … our symbolically structured pre-​understanding of the world’ and ‘putting into defamiliarizing relief our self-​understanding and social practices’ (Kompridis 1994: 29). From a Heideggerian perspective, then, disruption and disturbance are closely related to, perhaps even preconditions for, truth. To what extent, then, are the fragmented stories encountered on social media capable of ‘truthing’ in the sense of producing the world decentring effects which enable productive second-​order disclosure? On the one hand, the opportunities on offer are remarkable. As has often been noted, social media allow people to interact with others from across the world. This greatly extends the possibilities for both quasi-​dialogue and genuine dialogue with distant others, enabling new experiences of alterity. It is significant, for example, that during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, unaffiliated citizens within Egypt were able to communicate directly with both distant onlookers and foreign journalists. Clearly there are limits to this, arising from the significant limitations caused by language, unequal access to the internet and so forth, causing certain voices to acquire a much wider reach than others. Nonetheless, these were interactions which would have been simply impossible during the mass media era of the twentieth century.The very possibility of engaging with distant others in this way created new possibilities for productive fusions of horizons. The fusions of horizons enabled by social media may take the form of epiphany moments when the voice of an other leads to seeing some aspect of the world or understanding Dasein in a wholly new light. Decentring need not, and usually does not, operate in such a dramatic way. Frosh (2019) argues convincingly that routine, ‘non-​threatening’ mediated quasi-​interactions with unknown others through television can gradually disclose new possibilities and enable new ways of

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being-​with-​others. Perhaps social media can do the same, by enabling regular, non-​ threatening encounters with others which gradually expand our horizons. ‘Low intensity’, digitally mediated encounters with others are capable of unveiling as well as overwhelming ruptures (Markham 2020: 84–​85). Fragmentation may even contribute positively to this, facilitating insights into other ways of being-​in-​the-​world less threatening to Dasein than fully formed narratives which, to be accepted, would entail a more wholesale rupture to Dasein as previously disclosed. Fragmentation may also offer some further benefits in terms of disclosure by highlighting unsettledness. Both Gadamer and Ricoeur emphasise the unique disclosive power of poetic language as going beyond that of the kind of language used in daily life. As Ricoeur argues: ‘through fiction and poetry, new possibilities of being-​in-​the-​world are opened up within every-​day reality’ through the ‘imaginative variations that literature carries out on the real’ (Ricoeur 1991a: 86). As discussed in the previous chapters, everyday language typically carries out a more limited role of pointing out elements of the world to enable multiple people to see them together. Fragmentation, however, inserts a hefty dose of the poetic into this everyday language. Unmoored from the limiting effects of shared immediate contexts and fixed textual structures, freely circulating and intrinsically ambivalent, everyday language comes much closer to poetry once fragmented. Moreover, there have always been elements of the poetic in everyday language and communication (cf. Zeitlin 2016). Broadly understood, ‘media are poetic forces. They perform poiesis; they bring forth worlds into presence, producing and revealing them’ (Frosh 2019: 1). Fragmentation may make it more difficult to tell straightforward stories which make unambiguous statements about the world, but in so doing it draws attention to the poetry in routine communication, enhancing its disclosive power in other ways. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘dialogism’ offers a powerful framework for exploring this further. For Bakhtin, all language is ‘dialogic’ or ‘multi-​voiced’ in the sense that it is ‘totally saturated with living intonations; it is completely contaminated by rudimentary social evaluations and orientations’ (Todorov 1984: 49). As with Heidegger, Bakhtin argues that heteroglossia is the natural state for language but that its dialogic nature is typically suppressed, with ‘unitary language’ being ‘defended’ against ‘the pressure of growing heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin 1981: 271). This follows through in his approach to truth which is grounded in the experience of these multiple possibilities and distinct voices, rather than on identifying any one of them as true and dismissing the others as false. As with Ricoeur and Gadamer, he is suspicious of the ability of any interpreter or interpretation to exhaust the truth of a text or sign, arguing instead that truth lies in the emergence of possibilities through interaction: it is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousness, one that cannot in principle be fitted into the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential and is born at a point of contact among various consciousnesses. (Bakhtin 1984: 81)

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Like Heidegger, he sees truth as an event rather than an objective relationship between statements and external realities: truth is the contact of different consciousnesses drawing out latent potential, rather than something which emerges, thing-​like, from that process. Beyond these similarities Bakhtin adds two further insights which go beyond Heidegger and his followers. First, he argues forcefully that the imposition of monological discourse which masks heteroglossia also has an ideological component. He sees it as tied to social domination: ‘the ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgments which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual’ (Bakhtin and Voloshinov 1994: 55). This has important implications for the experience of truth with fragmented narrative, an issue to which we will return below. Second, the ‘dialogue’ in Bakhtin’s account of dialogism is not restricted to authors and interpreters, but also includes the myriad other voices which saturate language due to its having been used in other contexts and for other purposes: when a member of a speaking collective comes upon a word, it is not as a neutral word of language, not as a word free from the aspirations and evaluations of others, uninhabited by others’ voices. No, he receives the word from another’s voice and filled with that other voice. The word enters his context from another context, permeated with the interpretations of others. (Bakhtin 1984: 202) From this perspective, all language use involves dialogue with multiple others in which different voices interact with one another, defining what words mean, and how they function, in specific situations. For Bakhtin, these voices may be in conflict with one another and he has little time for the idea that the differences are necessarily resolved, as implied in a fusion of horizons. Difference need not lead to synthesis and ‘for Bakhtin “dialogic” does not mean “dialectic” ’ (Emerson 1984: xxiii). Instead, he encourages us to note that ‘each word, as we know, is a little arena for the clash and criss-​crossing of differently oriented social accents’ (Bakhtin and Voloshinov 1994: 58).Truth, for Bakhtin, lies not in the suppression of these voices but in experiencing the dialogue and interplay between them, without requiring that they be synthesised or reconciled. Encounters with fragmentation on social media can provide vivid experiences of truth understood in this sense. Social media platforms are intrinsically heteroglossic, with the intermingling of many voices a basic feature of all major platforms. Even the most powerful users are, to a significant extent, reduced to being just one voice in a cacophony of others –​on my Twitter feed, for example, Donald Trump’s tweets are presented intermingled with those from Egyptian activists, work colleagues, Saudi Arabian academics, Northern Irish politicians and so on. In this context the idea of any single voice speaking a single truth seems almost absurd in a way that it does not in a rhetorically effective political speech, for example. Each fragment carries with it more or less clear traces of the context in which

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it was produced, establishing dialogic connections with yet more voices. Rather than merely allowing dialogue with distant others, the chaotic and fragmented experiences of social media foreground dialogue itself in a broader sense, in some senses undermining the dominance of individual voices. In principle, a platform like Twitter can be used to gain a multiperspectival and pluralistic understanding of the truth of a situation through the encounters it enables with diverse and potentially contradictory narratives. Langlois (2019: 163) argues that with social media ‘the technology makes sense of [information] for us, and we have only to trust it’. On the contrary, by highlighting multivoicedness it can draw attention to the irreconcilability of dialogism, emphasising human finitude and the limitations of what can be disclosed to any individual Dasein. It is important not to underestimate the power of fragmented narratives for truthing in this way. It is also clear that experiences of fragmented narratives frequently fail to live up to this ideal. There is significant debate as to the extent to which social media necessarily leads to polarisation (e.g. Sunstein 2018; Ali et al. 2019; Grover et al. 2019; Margetts 2019).There is little doubt, nonetheless, that social media is as capable of reinforcing existing views as it is of facilitating enlightening encounters with heteroglossia. From the existential hermeneutic approach adopted here, there are two major factors which may also impede social media’s capacity for truth as disclosure: the necessity of existential ‘openness’; and the seemingly limited capacity of fragments to provoke disruption.

Openness To experience truth as disclosure it is necessary to ‘open’ to dialogue and to others. For a productive fusion of horizons to occur, interpreters must be willing to permit the horizon of the other to enter into their own. This means encountering the other as a genuine other by allowing our own horizon to be altered in interaction. As Gadamer puts it: ‘in human relations the important thing is … to experience the Thou truly as a Thou ‒ i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs’ (Gadamer 1989: 361).To be open is to be ‘free for the call’ in the sense of allowing ourselves to be unsettled and, in so doing, to allow Dasein to be transformed (Kompridis 2006: 59–​60). Openness, therefore, is itself a mode of being. It is a prerequisite for experiencing truth as further disclosure of the world, which goes beyond the way in which it has been initially disclosed according to existing forestructures of understanding and those meanings passed along in idle talk, as discussed in Chapter 4. This suggests that it may be true that people who get their news principally from social media get it from a wider variety of sources than those who do not use social media (Kleis Nielsen, Cornia and Kalogeropoulos 2016; Fletcher and Nielsen 2017). This may mean little, however, if interpreters’ ways of being precludes truth as disclosure. Openness can be a deliberate strategy and it is important not to lose sight of the fact that ‘Dasein’s activities can modify the very constraints that make its activities possible’ (Kompridis 2006: 73). In the contemporary media environment, users

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have more freedom than ever to seek out and expose themselves to the horizons of others. Nevertheless, for Heidegger, being-​closed is our basic way of being due to Dasein’s ‘tendency to cover things over’ (Heidegger 2010: 298). Dasein is therefore both a precondition for the emergence of truth at the same time as it has a tendency to cover over truth as one of its basic characteristics; it is ‘equiprimordially’ in both truth and untruth (Heidegger 2010: 295). Heidegger argues that truth as disclosure must ‘always first be wrested from beings’ (Heidegger 2010: 213) by ‘moving in the opposite direction from the entangled, ontic, and ontological tendency of interpretation’ (Heidegger 2010: 298). In other words, it is not easy to be open. He presents a number of factors which lead to being-​closed, several of which were introduced in Chapter 4. First, while being open maximises the possible forms of world disclosure, it does not provide a stable basis for concrete actions. In order to be capable of acting in the world, Dasein must ‘take a stand’, committing, if not thematically and only temporarily, to a specific way of being-​in-​the-​world and of interpreting, shutting off truth as disclosure, at least temporarily. Second, Heidegger argues that Dasein has a basic tendency to ‘flee’ from the uncertainty of its own being, pushing it to ‘cover’ it over in an attempt to escape its own instability. Third, meaning, as discussed in Chapter 4, is fundamentally public and defined by the ways in which language has been used in the past. Even as it is used in new ways, and discloses new possibilities, it begins from, and rests upon, what it already is. Fourth, we can add to these points Bakhtin’s argument, mentioned above, that there is also an ideological component, with powerful groups seeking to impose a ‘uniaccentual’ approach to language in order to maintain their own dominance: in the ordinary conditions of life, the contradiction embedded in every ideological sign cannot emerge fully because the ideological sign in an established, dominant ideology is always somewhat reactionary and tries, as it were, to stabilise the preceding factor in the dialectical flux of the social generative process, so accentuating yesterday’s truth as to make it appear today’s. (Bakhtin and Voloshinov 1994: 56) When storytellers benefit from the way things have already been unveiled, they stand to gain from interpreters remaining closed since this inhibits truthing which might disrupt those existing understandings. There can therefore be powerful incentives to maintaining existential closure. Valuable as these ideas are, we must be careful not to imply it is impossible to encounter truth as disclosure as part of everyday being without some kind of heroic struggle, as Heidegger sometimes appears to suggest. I am sympathetic to the idea that the disclosure of the world in new ways can take more incremental, less confrontational forms put forward in different ways by Frosh (2019), Scannell (2014) and Markham (2020). Nonetheless, it may be that these factors are particularly likely to result in closure in contexts of fragmented storytelling. First, we typically encounter narrative fragments in a state of ‘inattention’ (Frosh 2019; Highmore 2011), in the midst of circumspective, concernful activity. The grounding of circumspection in

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the way that things have already been understood facilitates action but in so doing closes off truth as disclosure since Dasein is already ‘taking a stand’. Second, the basic uncertainty of being is greatly amplified in fragmented contexts, as even the ‘there’ in which we exist (the ‘da’ in Dasein) becomes increasingly difficult to pin down (Lagerkvist 2016). Encountering large volumes of frequently incompatible and incomplete stories allows for enlightening experiences of the truth of human finitude and the ‘pleasure of the text’ (Barthes 1975b). It may also lead to fleeing from the possibility of truth as disclosure. Third, as discussed in Chapter 4, the public nature of meaning is especially important where stories are fragmented, as interpreters are compelled to rely heavily on their existing understanding in order to situate fragments within meaningful wholes. This not only makes us comparatively likely to interpret in ways which fit with what we already believe, but also cover over the possibility of alternative interpretations and possibilities. Fourth, many social media users are committed to the imposition of ‘uniaccentual’ language in the manner described by Bakhtin. Donald Trump and Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias are very different from one another, and the stories they tell articulate the world in wildly different ways. Nonetheless, both post in a way which seeks to close down the play of multiple voices in favour of a monolithic version of the truth. The replication of existing power discrepancies on social media, even when platform affordances make fragmented communication unavoidable, means that dominant groups are still well positioned to promote monological world views. This is further reinforced by the fact that user experiences of social media platforms may be less heteroglossic than they first appear. Bakhtin (1984) argues that a novel may include many voices and yet remain monological, ultimately reflecting only the stance of the author. In one sense, on social media this cannot happen so long as there are multiple voices from multiple Daseins.Yet the heteroglossia actually encountered by users may be limited and remain largely uniaccentual. There is debate about the extent to which filter bubbles form (Webster 2014; Nelson and Webster 2017; Dubois and Blank 2018; Bruns 2019) and empirical data showing that ‘incidental news exposure’ is common on social media (Karnowski et al. 2017; Feezell 2018; Kümpel 2019). The apparent tendency towards homophily on social media (Kwak et al. 2010; Conover, Ratkiewicz and Francisco 2011; Wu et al. 2011; Dvir-​Gvirsman 2017) nonetheless suggests that user experiences may include many voices which speak from similar perspectives. This may be further exacerbated by social media culture which at times favours ‘the correct over the true’ (Herzogenrath-​Amelung 2016) in the sense of leaving little space for conflicting opinions. Alternate views may be true in terms of their correspondence and coherence and yet disclose nothing new. Similarly, statements which ultimately fail to pass tests of correspondence and coherence may, nonetheless, enable disclosure. Where dialogism is limited, the possibility of disclosive experiences is reduced. As Gadamer argues, ‘to ask a question means to bring into the open. The openness of what is in question consists in the fact that the answer is not settled’ (Gadamer 1989: 363). If the answers to questions are deemed to be settled, the issue may cease to be

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in question, obscuring the emergence of alternate possibilities. The imposition of orthodoxies is hardly unique to social media. Yet the difficulty of communicating nuance within fragmented communication, coupled with the brutality of ‘pile-​ons’ and the mob justice often seen on social media, limit the possibilities of dialogic interaction from which new possibilities may be unveiled. Finally, this section began with Gadamer’s insistence that openness means being open to the other. He is adamant that engaging with others in this way is a necessarily productive thing to do: ‘if a new experience of an object occurs to us, this means that hitherto we have not seen the thing correctly and now know it better’ (Gadamer 1989: 353). Gadamer may well be correct in saying this. Nonetheless, remaining open to others and treating them as equal partners in dialogue, as Gadamer seems to suggest (Warnke 1987: 102), is not necessarily an easy way of being to maintain in social media contexts where trolling is rife. Far from providing opportunities for the ‘non-​threatening’ encounters with others that Frosh (2019) sees as archetypical of television, encounters with others on social media are frequently overtly hostile. This highlights that, all too often, maintaining the openness required for truth as disclosure to be possible demands not only ‘resoluteness’ in the face of the unsettledness of being as Heidegger argues, but also maintaining vulnerability in the face of outright attacks. The fact that this kind of aggression is frequently targeted along gendered or racialised lines (e.g. Jane 2014; Campbell 2017; Lopez, Muldoon and McKeown 2019; ) also highlights that the disclosive possibilities of social media are not equally available to all. It may well be easier for white men to remain open to truth in this environment because they are also less likely to be threatened by others.

Fragmented disruption In addition to the requirement of openness, decentring truth as disclosure also requires some kind of disruption to habitual, nonthematic ways of being and acting –​‘once ongoing activity is held up, new modes of encountering emerge and new ways of being encountered are revealed’ (Dreyfus 1990: 70). Disturbance can be the consequence of chance –​in Heidegger’s favourite example, we become aware of a hammer as a present-​at-​hand object, rather than as present-​to-​hand equipment, only when it breaks, impeding our ability to use it as a tool. In addition to disclosing the hammer in a new way, the ‘equipmental whole’ to which the hammer relates (the other tools which we do have but are unsuitable, the nails which would be driven in with the hammer, the materials which can no longer be joined, etc.) also come into view in new ways. But new forms of disclosure can also be the product of purposeful action which deliberately seeks to provoke disturbance. In his later work, Heidegger became preoccupied with poiesis, which he understood as the power of art and poetry to disclose the world in new ways, an emphasis also seen in Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1989). As noted, however, art is not the only way to provoke decentring second-​order disclosure. Frosh (2019) foregrounds poiesis as an important outcome of everyday encounters with media,

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while Kompridis (2006) argues forcefully for the importance of reason and argumentation in disclosing the world in new ways. Telling stories to others is a powerful method for the production of world decentring second-​order disclosure because of its capacity to communicate human experience (Fludernik 1996). Stories offer a uniquely effective way to transcend the limits of our own horizon and to enter the horizon of an other on the basis that: interpreters of narrative do not merely reconstruct a sequence of events and a set of existent, but imaginatively (emotionally, viscerally) inhabit a world in which, besides happening and existing, things matter, agitate, exalt, repulse, provide grounds for laughter and grief, and so on –​both for narrative agents and for interpreters working to make sense of their circumstances and (inter) actions. (Herman 2009: 119) Narratives are so effective at proposing other worlds which we might inhabit, because they can give such a strong sense of what it would be like to be situated within that world.They make it possible to come close to stepping outside our own Dasein, not in the sense of doing away with Dasein altogether, but by stepping into the Dasein of an other. Clearly, however, not all narratives are equally able to do this. In legal settings the ability of defendants to produce compelling narrative accounts of their actions rests as much on their storytelling skill, or that of their advocates, as it does on the brute facts. A ‘true’ narrative, in the sense of correspondence and coherence, may, nonetheless, fail to disclose. The truth of literature lies not in any claim to directly correspond to ontic truths, but rather in its capacity to disclose possibilities and alternative horizons. To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, makes no claim to faithfully represent individual lives but rather enables readers, to some degree, to enter the horizon of the unjust and racist justice system of early twentieth-​century America. Yet there are many novels about racial injustice in the USA, few of which have the disclosive power of To Kill a Mockingbird. This emphasises that truth, as disclosure, is a possibility associated with narrative but not a necessary consequence. Rather, narrative’s disclosive power is tied up with storytelling skill and the extent to which stories are well structured. Bruner argues that ‘great storytellers have the artifices of narrative reality construction so well mastered that their telling preempts momentarily the possibility of any but a single interpretation ‒ however bizarre it may be’ (Bruner 1991: 9), citing Orson Welles’ broadcast of War of the Worlds, which supposedly convinced large numbers of people in 1938 that the earth was being invaded by Martians.This highlights the power of very well-​crafted narratives to provoke decentring effects, even when they disclose the world in ways which fail tests of correspondence and would, in other contexts, be simply dismissed as incoherent. In formats such as the novel, documentary film or long-​form journalism, writers can build relatively independent storyworlds for readers to inhabit which go beyond

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their current mode of being-​in-​the-​world. Gualeni (2015) similarly argues convincingly for the disclosive power of immersive virtual reality worlds. While stories only ever constitute a ‘blueprint’ (Ryan and Thon 2014a: 3) and readers must still fill gaps and supply missing information, whole narrative arcs can be presented, along with richly detailed accounts of contexts, which propose new worlds. The interpretation of such narratives naturally begins within readers’ existing horizons of interpretation, drawing on existing intertextual networks and genre conventions, but can also take readers beyond that initial starting point, modifying their horizons. The disruption they can provoke to established ways of being-​in-​the-​world may be substantial, not only rendering alternative ways of seeing available, but also making it possible to thematise our own mode of being which, as circumspect, is typically not available for thematic reflection. Reading To Kill a Mockingbird not only revealed to me something about racial injustice, but also unveiled to me previously unseen aspects of my own being as a white, British man. Despite living and working in a very different environment to that presented by Harper Lee, my own white privilege was brought into view through the disruption provoked by reading the novel. A breakdown in intelligibility does not necessarily lead to a reappraisal of our own Dasein as there are always ‘other ways of “going on”, unreflective and uncritically’ (Kompridis 2006: 60). Nonetheless, it does create the space for this kind of reflection to be possible. It is not clear that fragmented narratives are capable of producing this kind of disruption. Clearly, fragments may articulate the world in ways which contradict existing understandings. Nonetheless, it seems to me that fragments are more likely to produce what Dreyfus (1990) terms temporary ‘malfunction’ than the productive disruption discussed in the previous paragraph. As discussed above, fragments are both more easily dismissed as incoherent and subsumed within existing modes of interpretation than are fully formed stories. The disruption they cause can, in many cases, be swiftly remedied: ‘for most normal forms of malfunction we have ready ways of coping, so that after a moment of being startled, and seeing a meaningless object, we shift to a new way of coping and go on’ (Dreyfus 1990: 71). As discussed in Chapter 4, existing metanarratives and masterplots provide tools for easily overcoming temporary malfunction, resolving aporias through reference to established interpretive frameworks. This implies limits to the kind of small-​scale, incremental disruption discussed by Markham (2020: 83–​85). Fragments may demand narrative interpretation, as I have argued throughout, but they have a limited capacity to demand specific narrative interpretations which go against interpreters’ existing beliefs. Fragmentation itself may produce decentring effects but it may also undermine the capacity of specific, factical narratives to produce decentring effects and rearticulate the world. Fragmentation may also push narrators towards telling stories which rely heavily on established metanarratives and masterplots on the basis that to do otherwise means producing narratives which may be difficult or impossible for readers to understand. Moving too far from established paradigms may simply make them unfollowable. As discussed in Chapter 2, the Egyptian activists, Podemos politicians

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and Donald Trump all make significant use of horizontal storytelling which relies particularly heavily on readers supplying missing details. They are able to do this only through reference to existing metanarratives and masterplots, as shared and public interpretive tools. This is by no means, of course, new. Masterplots and metanarratives are key tools in storytelling in journalism, literature, politics and history. Works which seek to subvert pre-​existing forms of interpretation make reference to them even as they attempt to disrupt them. Narrative fragmentation, then, both encourages interpreters to make sense of bits of narrative in ways which do not disrupt the way they already understand the world, at the same time as it discourages storytellers from producing stories which strive to produce decentring effects.

Social media and unifying-​repairing effects For Heidegger, disclosure is principally about discovering the world in new ways. It is important to note, however, that disclosure can have ‘unifying-​repairing’ as well as disruptive effects (Kompridis 1994). Where the former is the case, first-​order disclosure is followed by second-​order disclosure which reaffirms and strengthens initial disclosure rather than challenging it. The production of unifying-​repairing effects is clearly a key function of narrative in everyday life.The repetition of stories is often grounded in the affirmation of the way the world is disclosed through those narratives. Meraz and Papacharissi (2013), for example, argue that the Egyptian Uprising of 2011 was framed and repeatedly narrated as a revolution significantly before the resignation of the then president, Hosni Mubarak. When this narrative first emerged, it was disruptive and enabled the relationship between the people and the state in Egypt to be conceptualised in new ways, engendering new possibilities for protest and action. Once in circulation, however, the purpose of repeating this story shifted from disrupting previously established understandings, towards the maintenance of newly established understandings. It seems significant that the disruptive narrative, without which the mass protests would have been impossible, did not originate on social media but spread principally through other means (Abdelrahman 2014; Gunning and Baron 2014). If the argument advanced in this chapter is correct, this is not surprising as the fragmentation of social media narration impedes the production of disruptive narrative. Nonetheless, as Meraz and Papacharissi observed, it seems that social media was very effective in sustaining and reaffirming this narrative once it was in circulation. In this case, fragmentation is a specific advantage, as the reliance on interpreters supplying much of the broader narrative within which fragments are to be understood allows for differences of interpretation to be largely glossed over. It may be, then, that while narrative fragmentation inhibits decentring second-​ order disclosure, it facilitates second-​ order disclosure with unifying-​ repairing effects. Every time a fragment is understood as coherent with an interpreter’s existing understanding of the world, it has a unifying effect by contributing in a small way to narrative accrual. Fragmentation makes it much easier for bits of

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stories which may have been told with decentring intentions to be understood as entirely in accordance with the interpreter’s existing horizons. As noted, these horizons shift over time; it seems comparatively likely, however, that these shifts will be only weakly influenced by narrative fragments. If, on the other hand, a fragment is deemed incoherent with an interpreter’s existing horizon, it can be more readily dismissed than a more fully developed narrative. This may also produce a world repairing effect, with the ‘confirmed’ untruth of the fragment providing further evidence for the validity of the interpretive starting point. The more an existing mode of disclosure is reaffirmed, the more difficult it is to disrupt. This remains ‘truth’ in Heidegger’s sense, in that unifying-​repairing disclosure still makes the world available and intelligible, enabling meaningful action. It may also, however, inhibit further disclosure which decentres first-​order disclosure. This is in some ways similar to what happens with the traditional media. It is common for the media to be used specifically for its world repairing events, looking to it to reinforce beliefs we already hold about things and understandings we already have about the way the world works. In McLuhan’s words: the first items in the press to which all men turn are the ones about which they already know. If we have witnessed some event, whether a ball game or a stock crash or a snowstorm, we turn to the report of that happening, first. Why? … because for rational beings to see or re-​cognize their experience in a new material form is an unbought grace of life. Experience translated into a new medium literally bestows a delightful playback of earlier awareness. (McLuhan 1964: 188–​189) Similarly, the brutal economics of commodified journalism discourage traditional news outlets from presenting positions which may challenge their readers’ existing views. Readers of The Guardian would probably learn more from hearing the perspective of a nativist right winger, in terms of disclosure, than from yet another editorial about the well-​established need for stronger action on climate change.The appetite of readers (including myself) for that type of content is nonetheless limited. It would therefore be wholly wrong to suggest that the unifying-​repairing effects are unique to either social media or narrative fragmentation. Even accepting all this, however, it seems possible that the fragmentation of narrative further narrows the scope for decentring stories. It is important to note that unifying-​repairing effects are not intrinsically bad. They enable collective action and they provide the grounding needed for taking a stand which is, in turn, necessary for doing anything. Fragmented, social media communication provides a way for marginalised groups to express and experience solidarity, re-​affirming alternative ways of being-​in-​the-​world through the establishment and maintenance of ‘counter publics’ (Fraser 1990; Jackson and Foucault Welles 2015). Fragmentation therefore offers new opportunities for resistance to hegemonic ways of understanding. As noted above in the discussion on diglossia, fragmentation is, in some senses, democratising in that it affects the powerful and

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the marginalised alike. In 2014, for example, the New York Police Department launched a campaign to improve its image among New York residents by asking ordinary citizens to post stories about positive experiences with police officers using the hashtag #myNYPD. The campaign quickly backfired, however, when some users ‘hijacked’ the hashtag to draw attention to narratives of police brutality (Hayes 2017). A key part of the ‘transgressive potential’ (Breideband 2015) of those responding in this way lay in the opportunities social media provided to unify and repair their existing understanding of the NYPD in the face of its attempt to disrupt this understanding. In a seeming paradox, unifying-​repairing effects may be needed in order to provoke focused decentring effects in others. Nevertheless, it is clear that the impacts of the shift to fragmentation are not felt equally by all. As Baker and Blaagaard note, unaffiliated citizens and institutions alike have access to these new communicative possibilities (Baker and Blaagaard 2016b: 16). The Chinese state, for example, has made extensive use of social media to shore up and support its vision of the nation while striving to drown out the voices of those striving to disrupt that view (Han 2018; Roberts 2018). Dominant groups retain powerful advantages when engaging in fragmented storytelling. First, dominant groups in many cases retain access to less fragmentary modes of narration. Donald Trump and Egyptian activists alike use fragments to tell stories. Unlike the activists, Donald Trump also has almost unlimited access to the traditional media and is able to guarantee access to large audiences for speeches, interviews and statements. The fragments posted through social media fit within a communicative approach which spans numerous elements of the ‘hybrid media system’ (Chadwick 2013).The dominant, then, can use fragments for unifying-​repairing effects without having to rely on them for the production of decentring effects. Less powerful groups, on the other hand, must make do with fragments. Second, even when communicating through fragments, dominant groups continue to enjoy large amounts of what, following Bourdieu, might be termed attentional capital, derived from their influence in other aspects of life: ‘those who have a lot of reputation, fame, money or power tend to have many more followers than everyday people. Their tweets also tend to be much more often re-​tweeted than common people’s tweets’ (Fuchs 2017: 232). Gender and racial inequality are as apparent online as in other aspects of life (Messias, Vikatos and Benevenuto 2017). Traditional gatekeepers continue to play an important role, with the consequence that groups that have long been able to command attention from media institutions also enjoy increased influence on social media (Ali and Fahmy 2013). A Podemos politician tweeting a narrative fragment can be confident that it will attract attention due to the party’s importance in Spanish politics. When Donald Trump tweets something, he need only think about what he wants to say. He does not have to ponder what will fare well within Twitter’s attention economy and thus make it onto a significant number of people’s timelines in the first place. Users with significant attentional capital can also make greater use of vertical storytelling, as discussed in Chapter 2, since they can post fragments intended to be interpreted together with greater confidence that they will be read in this way, allowing for

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some of the limitations of fragmentation to be overcome. Less powerful users, on the other hand, cannot take access to large audiences for granted and must pay far greater attention to maximising the impact and reach of their statements. Third, and perhaps most importantly, dominant groups are very often comprised of those who benefit from the world as already disclosed: ‘the narratives of the powerful tend to be, by definition, privileged and hegemonic’ (Hinchman and Hinchman 1997: 235). The key to maintaining this dominance lies in second-​ order disclosure unifying and repairing the way things already are. Powerful white men, for example, stand to gain little from second-​order disclosure which upsets a horizon within which their dominance appears natural and inevitable. Marginalised groups, on the other hand, have more to gain from decentring second-​order disclosure which disrupts established patterns of understanding. Decentring disclosure is not always a positive thing for marginalised groups. Immigrants to the UK, for example, have seen largely negative effects from the decentring disclosure provoked by the rise of nationalist and nativist politics in recent years. Similarly, not all in currently dominant groups oppose alternative, more equitable visions of the world. Nonetheless, on balance, fragmentation is more likely to favour elites than other groups.They are more able to provoke disruption if they wish but typically have less need to do so in the first place.

Conclusion This chapter has examined three major approaches to truth in the context of narrative fragmentation. First, the idea that a true narrative is one which corresponds to external ontic realities was considered. I proposed that while it is important to acknowledge the limitations of this approach, the idea of truth as correspondence with ontic facts cannot be simply disregarded and that some aspects of fragmented narratives can, and should be, assessed in this manner. Second, I examined the idea of assessing truth based on narratives’ coherence with other narratives. I sought to emphasise that this type of truth assessment is significantly more important in everyday experiences of fragmented narrative than truth as correspondence and, as such, must be taken more seriously than it often is. I also sought to demonstrate that many narratives can only be assessed in terms of their coherence with other narratives since they refer to the narratively articulated world rather than to objectively present extant realities. This highlights the limitations of ‘factchecking’ which seeks to assess truth purely in terms of correspondence, leaving out largely ontological questions of coherence. In the second part of the chapter I explored the idea of truth as disclosure. I argued that considering the truth of narrative, and particularly of fragmented narrative, in terms of disclosure offers significant potential if we accept with Heidegger that the possibility of truth as correspondence or coherence rests on truth as disclosure. It was argued that social media offers remarkable opportunities for the emergence of new ways of seeing due to its inherent dialogism and the possibilities for fusions of horizons which it enables. Its very fragmentation facilitates

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experiences of the unsettledness of Dasein. I also sought to show, nevertheless, that a host of factors mean that real experiences of fragmented narrative may fail to live up to this ideal. Rather than embracing the radical ungroundedness of being, fragmentation may cause interpreters to ‘flee’, closing them off to decentring disclosure. Even if users are not trapped within impenetrable filter bubbles, real-​world social media use may be largely monological. Finally, I sought to show that this situation ultimately favours the maintenance of existing world disclosure by elites. Social media may enable unaffiliated individuals to gain access to large audiences by being ‘crowdsourced to prominence’ (Meraz and Papacharissi 2013). Nonetheless, producing decentring second-​order disclosure remains more difficult than unifying-​ repairing second-​order disclosure and unaffiliated citizens continue to lack many of the resources enjoyed by traditional elites.

Notes 1 https://​twitter.com/​GloriaElizo/​status/​1163347214359506944 2 https://​twitter.com/​TheBigPharaoh/​status/​352490592665747459 3 The tweet also included a video of Belarra speaking in the Spanish parliament in which she criticises the central government’s response to the flooding as well as the then prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s refusal to form a collation government with Podemos in order to secure a parliamentary majority. 4 https://​twitter.com/​ionebelarra/​status/​1166392661114314752 5 My approach is based on Heidegger’s account of truth in his early works Being and Time (2010) and Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1982). His approach to truth evolved significantly in his later writings to move the emphasis from Dasein towards nature as physics (cf. Capobianco 2014). These ideas are fascinating but beyond the scope of this monograph. 6 See Wrathall (1999) for a detailed argument that Heidegger’s view of ‘propositional truth’ is broadly in line with traditional understandings of truth as correspondence.

CONCLUSION Stories, citizens and being

Abstract The concluding chapter explores the broader implications of the issues raised in the previous chapters. It first argues for the continued use of classic theory and for the value of making use of distanciation to allow it to speak to scholars today in ways unimaginable when it was first published. Second, it proposes that the challenges fragmentation causes for the provocation of disruptive effects are likely to be more acute for unaffiliated citizens than for institutions. Third, it argues for the value of promoting citizenship understood as a way of being-​with-​others grounded in listening and existential openness to the other.

The starting point for this book was that we live in a world characterised by fragmentation. Each day, we are exposed to so much information from so many different sources that it seems as if it must be impossible to comprehend. And yet we clearly do make sense of it –​most people, most of the time are able to live their lives without being overwhelmed. Not only is it possible to cope, but dealing with the barrage of fragments demands neither superhuman effort nor special skills. Instead, we cope in a way which is every day, banal even. My goal has been to provide a provisional answer as to how this is possible. The central argument I have advanced is that stories play a key role by enabling scattered happenings to be grasped together as complex, meaningful wholes. That we are seemingly able to do this so easily, I have suggested, is due to the storied nature of human existence. Following Heidegger, I have argued that human existence is Dasein –​being there. And the existential ‘there’ is run through and through with narratives which structure and allow the contours of temporal human existence to both come into

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view thematically and to act as prethematic reference points for understanding and action which remain, for the most part, unrecognised. The capacity to cope with fragments through stories is ultimately grounded, I have argued, in the very nature of human existence. Each chapter has explored this basic issue from a different direction. Chapter 1 sought to present an existential theory of narrative and argued for the intricate connections between stories, knowing and being. Chapter 2 examined the types of stories that can be told through fragments using the concept of the chronicle and three major approaches to storytelling which I termed vertical, horizontal and ambient narrative. All use fragments to construct complex narrative wholes but do so in very different ways. Chapter 3 asked about the implications for interpretation of narrative fragmentation and argued that the lack of defined texts and the central role of interpretation result in enormous scope for variant readings. This inhibits the ability of narrators to tell ‘readerly’ stories which permit only a narrow range of interpretations and demands ‘writerly’ reading practices. Chapter 4 argued that fragmented narratives’ lack of defined structure, nonetheless, increases the importance of Dasein as an anchor for interpretation. While this enables fragments to be encountered as meaningful, it also limits the range of interpretive possibilities initially disclosed to readers. Chapter 5, finally, explored the connections between narrative fragmentation and truth, asking both about how this kind of story might be assessed and what possibilities it offers for enabling truth as disclosure. I suggested that the extent to which narrative fragments, and fragmented narratives, are true can be assessed through examination of both their correspondence and coherence. I also proposed, however, that fragments are fundamentally ill suited to producing the kind of disruption needed for truth as disclosure, as the concept is understood by Heidegger. Much of the literature I have drawn upon to do this was produced long before the internet was invented. I hope to have demonstrated that this work still has a great deal to offer in theorising contemporary internet communication practices. This says something about the power of distanciation –​clearly Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur never could have imagined the contexts in which I have applied their ideas when they were first writing about them. The passage of time has revealed new possibilities in their writing which could never have been disclosed when they were first produced. It also says something important about the extent to which contemporary fragmented communication represents a genuine break from the past. The media landscape is now much more complex and confusing. Nonetheless, the world has always been confusing and it has never been possible to pay attention to all the information with which we are confronted.To give a Heideggerian example, it is as impossible to consciously take in every detail on a walk through the woods as it is to thematically understand everything on a Twitter feed. The picture, then, is largely one of continuity. The world may have changed drastically, but the existential characteristics of Dasein have not. I have also sought to show that narratives should receive far greater attention in social media research than they have so far. The narrative as a theoretical concept

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provides a means to conceptualise factical communication which foregrounds the conditions of its possibility without affording structure a simple, deterministic role. This suggests that to ignore or downplay stories is to miss something hugely important.The complexity of narrative in this environment nonetheless means that to invoke it without serious consideration of how it works also represents a serious omission. In daily life it is appropriate and necessary to engage with stories intuitively, in the mode of circumspection rather than thematic looking. In research, however, this is not good enough. Much of what is needed to do this is available within existing narrative theory. The kinds of fragmented stories I have analysed here, nonetheless, also highlight the importance of rethinking the concept of the story. In recent years there has been significant movement away from taking neatly bounded literary narratives as the prototypical narrative form. This shift, I suggest, needs to continue in favour of approaches which more fully recognise the interplay between the thematic and the prethematic in the telling and reception of stories. Heidegger’s concept of worldliness, aged as it is, can go a long way towards doing this by showing the importance of storytelling as a means of understanding, its relationship to being, and the interactions between narrative and other ways of being and knowing. Approaching these issues through the concept of Dasein suggests that the roots of the tensions between repression and emancipation, citizens and institutions, corporations and users which play out in the production, reception and direction of fragments on social media run deeper than is often recognised. It is vital to acknowledge that opaque algorithms, written to maximise users’ attention and engagement with social media platforms in monetizable ways, influence the content we see.The replication of offline hierarchies online means that dominant groups exert outsized control over the flow of information through gatewatching. Yet even before these factors come into play, what can be disclosed to individual interpreters and in what ways depends on the facticity of their own unique Dasein. As Heidegger shows us, tensions between a capacity to expand its own being and a tendency to cover over anxiety-​producing threats to existing ways of being are at the heart of Dasein. Even when exposed to the same basic content, the ways in which it is, and can be, understood depend on interpreters’ being-​in-​the-​world. Removing problematic biases from the algorithms which direct flows of content and redistributing gatekeeping power along more equitable lines is important. But it would only create the conditions for alternative stories and ways of understanding more broadly to reach audiences. If I am right that fragmentation essentially favours unifying-​repairing over decentring effects, this has significant implications. For activists, it is important to continue to recognise the value of social media as a site for solidarity and mutual support. For all the undeniable problems with trolling, abuse and commercial exploitation, social media enable large numbers of likeminded, but geographically dispersed, people to stay in contact with one another and reaffirm their commitment to causes. The transnational dimensions of the squares’ movements of the 2010s in which activists in places including Turkey, Spain, Egypt and the USA were able to communicate

Conclusion  159

with and support one another demonstrated the power of this. It can also have less positive implications, as the growth and success of far-​right and extremist online communities attest. But it certainly can be valuable, and unifying-​repairing effects remain important.Twitter and Facebook did not cause the 2011 Egyptian Uprising, the surge in the Catalan nationalist movement in the late 2010s nor the election of Donald Trump in 2016. They did make it easier for activists to stay in contact and to reaffirm for one another the validity and importance of key narratives underpinning the protests. Social media may not be where revolutions happen, but they can play a role in sustaining activist movements. It is also important to recognise their value to elites. It is true that social media have democratised mass communication –​it is now possible, in principle, for unaffiliated citizens to communicate directly to large audiences, even if the price for doing this is communicating largely through fragments. Yet elites retain significant advantages in their use. Elites, whether social, political or corporate, typically have more to gain from world repairing effects than other groups since, by definition, they benefit from the status quo. In many cases they retain access to non-​fragmentary forms of mass communication through access to the traditional media, allowing them to use fragments as part of broader communication strategies rather than having to rely upon them. As I sought to show in Chapter 2, they can also make effective use of a wider range of narrative techniques even when communicating through fragments. Their ability to hold audiences’ attention makes vertical storytelling a much more viable option for them than for less influential users, while horizontal storytelling is effective only when audiences already largely share posters’ preferred understandings –​a situation in which dominant groups are more likely to find themselves. They can exert much stronger influence over ambient narratives than other groups. The playing field therefore remains far from level. Far from undermining the dominance of elites, fragmentation facilitates its maintenance in important ways. With regard to decentring second-​order disclosure, it is important to further recognise the limits of what contemporary social media can achieve. If I am right that fragmentation is fundamentally unsuited to decentring, the fact that all major social media platforms are currently based around fragmented communication means that they are also poorly suited to decentring. This raises questions about what changes could and should be made to social media platforms. Many of the changes suggested in the existing literature would be welcome: moving away from corporate business models based on the capture and sale of attention; more effort to eliminate bias from algorithms and far greater transparency about how they work; more serious efforts to tackle the trolling which is both widespread on many platforms and disproportionately affects women and non-​white users; more effort to understand and improve the gatewatching practices which greatly influence information flows. Changes like this would make social media fairer, more democratic and less discriminatory. None of them, however, would fundamentally alter the logic of fragmentation itself. Social media would remain, for the most part, poorly suited to provoking the disruption needed to disclose the world in new ways.

160 Conclusion

This is in one sense dispiriting as it further highlights the limitations of what social media can do for progressive activism and the extent to which it can drive change. It remains difficult for activists to reach, and win over, large audiences. Social media have democratised mass communication to some extent but capturing mass media attention and support remain important in provoking major change. In other ways, however, this is comforting since it also implies a limit to what can be achieved by those with less savoury activist agendas. There seems little doubt that intolerant ethno-​nationalist ideas, once considered fringe in Western Europe and the USA, for example, have entered everyday political discourse. One factor in this has been the success of far-​r ight groups using activism to ‘mainstream’ their ideas (Davey, Saltman and Birdwell 2018). It seems, nonetheless, that this has happened by legitimising beliefs many already held (i.e. through unifying-​repairing effects) rather than fundamentally changing the world view of large numbers of people. In existential terms, disruption is, for the most part, a positive thing due to its capacity to reveal new possibilities of being. Concrete existentielle acts of disruption, on the other hand, are more ambivalent and can just as easily have negative as positive consequences. For the telling of stories which decentre, the answer to me seems to lie in getting away from fragmentation as much as possible. There is no doubt that there is more competition for our attention than ever before. It is also clear that people do not spread their attention evenly but are willing, and able, to focus it. There is still demand for lengthy narratives which require extended attention. Long-​form journalism is going through a revival facilitated, rather than impeded, by technological change (Dowling 2019). At the time of writing, non-​fiction works such as Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (Hirsch 2018) and Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Eddo-​Lodge 2018) continue to top bestseller lists due to the impact of ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests around the world. Works like these can present powerful narratives in a way that fragments simply cannot. They can advance accounts of the world which are not easily dismissed even if they jar with and disrupt the way things are already understood. There is also clearly still huge demand around the world for fictional narrative. Novels are still bought and read in large quantities; television drama is going through something of a golden age; cinema attendance may be dropping but the feature film remains an enormously popular medium. This offers the possibility for the kind of creative mimesis advocated by Gadamer and Ricoeur: freed from the need to precisely correspond to ontic realities, fiction can open up new perspectives and imagine other ways of being. It is true that much cultural production does little to realise these possibilities. Nonetheless, it is important to note the success of fiction which does address major issues, for example The Handmaid’s Tale (Miller 2017) and ‫[ سيدات القمر‬Celestial Bodies] (Alharthi 2010) which explore patriarchy and gender, Noughts and Crosses (Blackman 2020), The Nickel Boys (Whitehead 2019) and ‫[ ساق البامبو‬The Bamboo Stalk] (Alsanousi 2012), which examine race, along with works such as ‫[ النهاية‬The End] (Sami 2020) and Cicatriz [Scar] (Mesa 2015) which delve into the role of technology in contemporary and future society. All call attention to issues which

Conclusion  161

demand more thematic attention than they often receive within everyday life. We can legitimately ask to what extent they accurately portray lived realities but, in some ways, this is to miss the point. Fiction is not journalism: much of its power lies in its ability to disrupt unthinking circumspection and compel thematic reflection on the world. It is valuable as much because of its ability to open a space to think differently as due to its capacity to open a window on specific horizons. For any decentring to be possible, however, interpreters must be existentially open. Openness is a precondition for the possibility of any horizons, fictional or otherwise, productively fusing with those of interpreters. It is needed if the fragmented narratives of social media are to result in something like Barthes’ pleasure of the text rather than fleeing to the stability of the known. It is here that the implications for citizenship are clearest. Being a citizen is, ultimately, a matter of being-​with-​others. The type of being-​with-​others it involves seems to be evolving away from legal affiliation to a nation-​state and towards something more fluid and less tied to geography. In the process, perhaps it can become something more strongly grounded in openness than the closure implicit in firm borders and delimitations. Dahlgren (2006: 273) writes of the need for ‘civic competence’ through ‘the overall development of the subject’; he may well be right that specific skills are needed for the possibility of deliberative democracy. Nonetheless, from the perspective I have advanced here it seems that the possibility of acquiring and utilising these skills is grounded in Dasein’s basic capacity to be open. Heidegger teaches us that it is impossible to ever be completely open and that, most of the time, being is inauthentic. Nonetheless, it seems that cultivating openness as a way of being-​with-​others is an essential component for the realisation of more democratic, and equitable, forms of citizenship. Putting openness centre stage is quite a different approach to the emphasis on activism often seen in the existing citizen media literature (e.g. Isin 2008; Baker and Blaagaard 2016a; Stephansen and Treré 2020). From this perspective, activism is prized as the most valuable kind of citizenship. Although different language is used, this is often attributed to its capacity to disrupt established ways of being in favour of positive change. Emphasising the activist as a model for citizenship, nonetheless, also carries dangers. Activism is necessarily grounded in taking a stand in relation to one issue or another.This makes action possible and can have hugely positive results as history attests.Yet taking a stand like this also demands at least a degree of closure. In seeking to compel others to change their views on a matter, activists must be certain that they are right and others are wrong. This can easily lead to dogmatism, a risk which is apparent in polarised debates around the world in which political opponents are deemed not only mistaken but morally repugnant. In this context, there is little or no perceived value in recognising the stance of the other, rendering meaningful and productive fusions of horizon either difficult or impossible. It may be that, existentially at least, we already have too much stance taking, partly as a result of the way that fragmentation draws attention to the instability of being. My suggestion is to instead emphasise the model of the listening citizen. Heidegger argues that ‘listening to … is the existential being-​open of Dasein as

162 Conclusion

being-​with for the other’ (Heidegger 2010: 158). Listening is a necessary requirement for fusions of horizon to take place. In contexts of fragmentation, listening is particularly difficult as so much of what others can say depends on interpretation. To hear the stories of others through fragments demands active effort to avoid difference being subsumed within the known. Yet without existential openness it cannot happen at all. This is not to naively call for the establishment of an idealised, Habermasian public sphere. To do so would be to ignore the myriad factors which limit participation in public deliberation for all apart from middle-​or upper-​class white men.These inequalities must be fought and activism has a vital role to play in achieving this. Instead it is to call for what Ricoeur terms ‘hospitality’ (2006; 1996) a willingness to listen to the stories of others and allow them to enter our horizon while remaining faithful to our own being and those factical possibilities which are uniquely our own. It is to say that structural transformation must be accompanied by, and perhaps requires, openness within everyday being.

GLOSSARY OF HEIDEGGERIAN TERMS

Heidegger’s terminology is notoriously opaque and the precise meaning of even basic concepts continues to be the focus of much debate among Heidegger specialists. The definitions given below reflect my own understanding and the way these expressions have been used in this book. For detailed discussion of precisely what Heidegger meant by these and other terms, as well as an excellent introduction to Heidegger’s Being and Time more broadly, see Dreyfus’ Being-​in-​the-​world: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 (1990). Absorption The quality of everyday being in which we find ourselves ‘absorbed’ in doing things without actively thinking about them or consciously making decisions about them. Averageness  Being is ordinarily average in the sense that it is grounded in what is accepted and normal. Rather than starting from zero in determining how to interpret and interact with every thing and person that we encounter, we begin with an ‘average’ or general awareness of how people or things like that are normally understood. Authentic/​inauthentic  Ordinary being and interpretation are inauthentic in the sense that they necessarily begin with average ways of understanding. When meeting a new person, for example, we unavoidably initially understand them in terms of general characteristics (i.e. what people of their height, weight, ethnicity, occupation, etc. are normally like) rather than as unique individuals. Not to be understood as inherently negative, all being is therefore initially inauthentic. Authentic being and interpretation, on the other hand, consists not in escaping averageness but on taking up average possibilities in ways which are genuinely responsive to what is distinctive about people and worldly things. Being-​in-​the-​world  The basic kind of being that we have as humans is being-​in-​ the-​world. It is characterised not by static, physical properties (such as weight,

164  Glossary of Heideggerian terms

size, etc.) but by the relationships between the various elements of the meaningful world. For example, my existence is not directly defined by my eye colour and height, but rather by my relationships to other aspects of the world, such as my employer, the equipment I routinely use (e.g. the laptop I use for work and woodworking tools I use for my hobby), and the social structures within which I live my life. Being-​with-​others  Relationships with other people constitute a central aspect of all being-​in-​the-​world. This does not refer to being physically present with other people, but rather to the idea that we are always ‘with’ others in everything that we do and in our being itself. For example, to read a newspaper is to take up a relationship with other readers of that newspaper, with its writers, with the people whose lives are described in its articles, with the readers of other newspapers which I choose not to read, with people who do not read a newspaper at all, and so on. Care  Human existence can only be adequately understood in terms of what we care about to the extent that, for Heidegger, being is care. He defines what he calls the ‘care structure’ as the unity of ‘thrownness’, ‘projection’ and ‘falling’. Dasein Literally translating as ‘being there’, Dasein is the basic human way of existing. It refers to the idea that human existence is defined first and foremost by each of our positions (our ‘there’) within the world, rather than assuming that each of us first exists and only then encounters, interprets and responds to an external world. Das Man Das Man, or ‘the they’, is the subject of average understanding. For example, in my average understanding of what a trip to the dentist is like, neither the patient nor the dentist are specific, named individuals. Rather, they are roles which could be filled by any real dentist and patient. The real people taking up those roles in concrete situations, in turn, orient themselves to, and largely act in accordance with, average understandings of what is expected of someone taking up that role. Disclosure ‘Disclosure’ refers to the process through which, according to Heidegger, things come into view as meaningful. Thinking in terms of disclosure contrasts sharply with the idea of meaning making as it suggests that different meanings, which ultimately lie in things themselves, are revealed through human activity, rather than assuming that things are initially meaningless and only become significant through human activity. Existence As used by Heidegger, and in this book, ‘existence’ refers to a specific way of being which is characterised by meaningful relationships and the positions of people and things within meaningful wholes. In and of itself, a rock simply is; it exists, on the other hand, insofar as it is encountered in terms of the care structure, as: something to climb on, a valuable mineral to be mined, where I ate my lunch once during a hike, an example of a specific rock type and so on. Falling  Part of the care structure, ‘falling’ refers to Dasein’s tendency to ‘fall’ into understanding itself and the world in terms of averageness, rather than facing

Glossary of Heideggerian terms  165

up to the uncertainty of our own existence and allowing our interpretations to be guided by things themselves. For example, when riding my bike to work, I notice the vast majority of cars on the road not as unique pieces of equipment, driven by distinct individuals, but in terms of the general category of ‘traffic’. For-​the-​sake-​of-​which Ordinary, absorbed existence in daily life is lived for-​ the-​sake-​of something. For example, I may occasionally think about teaching good lessons with the specific goal of meeting promotion requirements. More commonly, however, I do not actively have a goal in mind at all, but rather try to teach in accordance with an implicit sense of what a good lecturer is like. This is a kind of purpose for-​the-​sake-​of-​which I teach in particular way, but not a goal or clearly articulated desired state. Interpretation The taking up of possibilities projected in understanding in order to take something as something in a specific situation. Ontic  The ontic refers to ‘brute fact’ and is a type of being not grounded in being-​ in-​the-​world or existence. The ontic properties of physical objects remain the same whatever their Dasein, for example. Ontology  Following Heidegger in Being and Time, I use the term ‘ontology’ to refer specifically to the study of the meaningful existence of Dasein and being-​ in-​the-​world, rather than to the study of all types of being. Projection  An element of the care structure, existence in general ‘projects’ in the sense that it is defined by relationships with other worldly things and by its own future possibilities. My own Dasein, then, is what it is due to the way it projects to other people and to things in the world as well as what I prethematically understand as what I might, or might not, become in the future. A bicycle is what it is due to its relationships with other things as well as all the various uses to which it might be put. Rede Typically translated as ‘discourse’, the term ‘rede’ is used here following Dreyfus’ (1991) rendering of it as ‘telling’ to capture both the linguistic sense of ‘telling’ someone about something as well as the non-linguistic sense of ‘telling’ two things apart from one another. Relevance and reference The ‘relevance’ of a thing refers to the way it ‘refers’ (i.e. relates) to other things.The ‘relevance’ of a hammer, for example, lies in the way it ‘refers’ to other tools in the workshop as well as to hammering, fixing things, looking after one’s home and so on. For Heidegger, relevance and reference constitute part of the ontological determination of things, which are always initially encountered as ‘relevant’ rather than as individual objects (c.f. Heidegger 2010: 81–87). Significance ‘Significance’ refers to the meaningful wholes in terms of which individual things are understood. The meaningful wholes in question comprise worldly relationships to other things, for-​the-​sake-​of-​whichs and the care structure. The significance of a potted succulent on my windowsill therefore depends on its relationships with the other potted succulents and plants in my house, my own Dasein and that of other succulent-​g rowers, the equipment I use to grow it (pots, cactus medium, fertiliser, labels) and so on.

166  Glossary of Heideggerian terms

Thematic/​prethematic  To ‘thematise’ means to bring directly into view an aspect of being which normally goes unnoticed in everyday absorbed life. Conversely, when something is prethematic, it happens without specific deliberation or choices being made. Brushing my teeth, for example, is largely prethematic in the sense that I do not stop each day to consider whether it is necessary to brush them, what the best way to brush them would be or whether I should use a toothbrush or a flannel to do it. Thrownness  Part of the care structure, existence is ‘thrown’ in the sense that we are always already in a state of caring about things within a world that is already meaningful. When I read a novel for the first time, for example, I do so while already having an idea of what novels are like, why authors write books and what I am likely to find in it. Understanding  From a Heideggerian perspective, understanding is an element of being itself rather than one possible mental activity. The understanding each of us has of the world defines the range of interpretive possibilities available to each of us in any distinct situation. For example, my understanding of tables allows them to come into view in a range of different ways –​as somewhere to eat a meal, something to sit on, something I can stand on to change a lightbulb, and so on –​even if the specific interpretive possibility taken up in a concrete situation varies from case to case.

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INDEX

Note: Tables are indicated by bold type. Footnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 40n7 refers to note 7 on page 40. absorption 7, 26, 83, 121 academic investigation 85 activism see Catalan activism; Egyptian activism affect 102 affordances, of social media platforms 1, 2, 40n7, 45–​6, 48, 79, 147 agreement, between narrators 30–​1, 77, 112, 128, 140 aletheia, truth as 140, 141, 143 algorithms 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 50, 93, 102, 158, 159 ambient narrative 48, 66, 68–​9, 69–​70, 70–​1, 82, 92, 99, 157 ambient news 66, 85–​6 ambient statements 73 ambient storytelling 42, 43, 57, 65–​71, 67–​8 ambiguity 38, 49, 69, 76, 88, 138 ambivalence, of narrative fragments 9, 90, 91, 99, 118, 121, 132, 143 anachrony 57–​8, 97 analogical understanding 21 anti-​racism protest masterplot 119–​20 Arabic 9, 10, 54, 66, 80 armed forces as national protector masterplot 123–​4 articulation, of the world 12, 19, 20, 36, 43, 105, 106 atomism 2, 4, 6, 9, 26–​7, 48, 50, 55, 62–​3, 93

attention, attracting and holding of 11, 12, 153–​4, 158, 159, 160; and interpretation 76, 79, 80, 84–​7, 97, 109, 120; and telling stories 48, 49, 64, 65, 69, 70, 73 attention economy 48, 65, 70, 73, 153 attentional capital 73, 153–​4 attentive interpretation 75–​6, 84–​5, 85–​6, 87, 105 attitudes 37, 46, 55, 123, 136 attunement 28–​9, 32–​3, 83, 105, 109 audiences 7–​8, 10, 47, 48, 90, 97, 119, 158, 159, 160; and truth 136, 153, 154, 155 authenticity 40–​1n14, 95, 118, 119 author-​function 13, 68, 75, 76, 97–​8, 98–​9 authorial control 63, 65, 96, 97, 119 authorial intent 13, 78, 80, 91, 96 authorial power 9, 73, 76, 116, 147 authority 8–​9, 115 authors 9, 23, 139, 144; and interpretation 76, 78, 91, 92, 116, 125, 126; and telling stories 49, 63, 72; weakened 96–​9 authorship 75, 76, 96–​9, 100n9 averageness 106, 107, 108, 118, 120, 125, 131 awareness system 70 background 105, 109–​10, 113, 114, 115, 116, 123 backshadowing 60–​1 Bakhtin, Mikhail 14, 128, 143–​4, 146, 147

Index   185

Barthes, Roland 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100n9, 147, 161 @Bassem_​Sabry 10, 51–​2, 52–​3, 66, 67–​8, 69 beginnings 20, 37, 52, 53, 56, 65 being: everyday 40n12, 146, 162; instability of 161; and narrative 22–​30; non-​ narrative modes of 5–​6; ungroundedness of 155; unsettledness of 127, 148, 155; ways of see ways of being Being and Time 22, 25, 30, 86, 102, 127, 140, 155n5, 163, 165 being there 27, 76, 82–3, 84, 109, 156; see also Dasein being-​closed 146 being-​in-​the-​world 11, 12, 158; and interpretation 86, 102, 103, 105, 108; and theory 26, 27, 30, 32, 34; and truth 143, 146, 150, 152 being-​open 161–​2 being-​there-​with-​others 83 being-​toward-​death 38 being-​true 140 being-​with 30 being-​with for the other 162 being-​with-​one-​another 107 being-​with-​others 22, 30–​4, 143, 156, 161; and interpretation 78, 79, 83, 105, 114 beliefs 16, 39, 150, 152, 160 Big Pharaoh blogger 10, 136–​7 ‘birther’ narrative 135–​6 ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests 160 bricolage 70, 80 broken vase metaphor 94, 95, 120 Bruner, Jerome 5–​6, 69, 88, 96, 126n9, 136, 149 brute fact 23, 25, 127, 149; see also ontic realities canonical narratives see masterplots canonical scripts see masterplots care 28, 83, 103, 105 Catalan activism 17, 28, 33, 34–​5, 71–​2, 80, 105, 159 causal relations 18, 19, 21, 39, 44, 64, 65, 69, 88 causality 17, 21, 113, 117 character 24, 32; and interpretation 77, 78–​9, 89, 95, 103; and truth 134–​5, 136, 139, 141, 144 characterological coherence 134, 137, 139 chronicle 12, 42, 43–​8, 71, 157 chronology 3, 12, 88; and telling stories 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52, 56, 68–​9

circumspection 7, 26, 27, 30, 158, 161; and interpretation 86, 89, 94, 100, 104, 105, 120–​1; and truth 129, 130, 146–​7, 150 citizen media 7, 8, 10, 161 citizens 8–​9, 10, 13, 21, 33, 123, 153, 158; unaffiliated 9, 12, 142, 153, 155, 156, 159 citizenship 8, 9, 10, 11, 31, 156, 161 climate emergency post 138–​9 closed narrative 56, 58 closed texts 56, 62, 90, 92 closure, of narrative 14, 37, 38–​9, 44–​5, 60, 97, 125–​6, 146–​7, 161 cognition 16, 22, 34, 66, 101, 102 coherence: characterological 134, 137, 139; material 69, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139; of narrative fragments 138–​9; structural 69, 134, 135, 136–​7, 138 coherence theory of truth 14, 127, 128, 133–​9 communication: face-​to-​face 76–​7; factical 158; fragmented 16, 147, 148, 157, 159; mass 31, 159, 160; practices of 7, 9–​10, 11, 48, 66, 87, 157; written 75, 77 comprehension 4, 9, 44, 50, 63, 156; and interpretation 75, 78, 89, 103, 104–​5, 113; and theory 18, 29, 31, 34, 36; and truth 129, 132–​3, 141 conclusions 2, 21, 39, 83, 99; and telling stories 43, 47, 52, 53, 56, 65 configuration 12, 17, 19, 20, 37, 63, 88, 91 conspiracy theories 135–​6 consumption, of texts 90 contingency 58–​9 contradictions 59, 69, 134, 136–​7, 146 conversation 38, 56, 77, 78, 79, 80 corporations 12, 158, 159 correspondence theory of truth 14, 127, 128–​33, 134, 140, 154, 155n6 counter narratives 70 counter-​hegemonic readings 9, 13 covering over, of groundlessness/​ unsettledness of being 95, 120, 127, 140 crises 11, 17, 70, 93–​4, 95, 98, 124 Croce, Benedetto 42, 46–​7, 71 Cuixart, Jordi 33, 34 cultural narratives see masterplots DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) 17 das Man 30, 107, 108, 118, 125 Dasein 12, 13, 156, 157, 158, 161–​2; and interpretation 86–​7, 99, 101, 102–​3, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 121, 124, 125; and theory 15,

186 Index

20, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 40n11; and truth 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 155, 155n5 Dasein-​with 30, 33 data 2, 4, 6, 105, 123, 147; and theory 21, 26, 36, 40n13 decentring 14, 158, 159, 161; and truth 128, 142, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155 deep mediatization 2, 110, 128, 129 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) 17 delayed resolution narratives 57 description 25, 34, 47, 92 destabilisation 60, 61, 62–​3 deworlding 26, 46, 86, 120, 130, 133 diachronicity 29, 63, 64, 65, 71 dialogic interaction 79, 148 dialogism 128, 143, 144, 145, 147, 154 dialogue: hermeneutic concept of 75, 76–​84, 87, 90, 91, 96; quasi-​ 78, 81, 141, 142 digital citizenship 8, 31 digital literacy 7–​8 digital media 7, 10, 65 disclosive power 148, 149, 150 disclosure: first-​order 128, 142, 151, 152; second-​order 14, 128, 142, 148–​9, 151, 154, 155, 159; truth as 14, 127, 128, 140–​54, 157; world 22, 127, 146, 155 disnarration 61 disruption 14, 51, 142, 145, 154, 157, 159, 160; fragmented 148–​51 distance, hermeneutic concept of 75, 76–​84, 87 distanciation 13, 23, 141, 142, 156, 157; and interpretation 78, 80, 81, 90, 96, 99, 124 distraction 76, 86, 87 disturbance 142, 148 dominant groups 14, 130, 147, 153, 154, 158, 159 dynamism, of narrative 13, 76, 90, 92 Echenique, Pablo 72, 110–​11 Eco, Umberto 64, 90, 91–​2, 124 Egyptian activism 1, 9, 159; and interpretation 81–​2, 117, 121, 123; and telling stories 43–​4, 45–​6, 47, 54, 66, 67–​8, 69–​70; and theory 17, 29, 30, 33–​4, 36; and truth 134–​5, 136–​7, 142, 144, 150–​1, 153 el-​Hamalawy, Hossam 43–​4, 45–​6 elites 10, 119, 154, 155, 159

emancipation 9, 10, 12, 36, 70, 86, 90, 96, 158 emplotment 22, 36–​7, 91, 117 empowerment 12, 13 end-​domination 37 endings 53, 56; see also sense of an ending enforced fragmentation 71 enthymeme 90 episodic social media storytelling 56 epistemology 4, 6, 22, 39, 85, 86, 87, 130 everyday being 40n12, 146, 162 everyday interpretation 4, 7, 75, 86, 99 everydayness 86, 107 existence, human see human existence existential openness 13, 56, 58, 91, 95, 145–​8, 156, 161, 162 existential understanding 103 experience, Gadamer’s concept of 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148 external realities 127, 128, 129, 131, 135, 136, 144 fabulae 49, 50, 52, 56, 57–​8, 68–​9, 124; fuzzy 48–​50 Facebook 1–​2, 3, 36, 45, 67, 79, 159 face-​to-​face communication 76–​7 face-​to-​face interaction 19, 76–​7, 78, 79, 80, 143, 145 factical communication 158 factical interpretation 11, 13, 108, 110–​11, 120–​1, 123 facticity 119, 132, 158 fake news 36 falling 108, 121, 125 falling prey 108, 121 fiction 75, 96, 97, 98, 141–​2, 143, 160, 161 figuration 12, 15, 16, 34, 36–​7, 43, 110 first-​order disclosure 128, 142, 151, 152 Fisher, Walter 5, 69, 135, 136 foreground 40n8, 58–​9, 96–​7, 109, 113, 145, 148–​9 foreshadowing 60–​1 forestructures, of understanding 103–105, 108, 112, 116, 120, 145 for-​the-​sake-​of-​which 86 Foucault, Michel 13, 68, 75, 76, 97–​8, 98–​9 fragmented communication 16, 147, 148, 157, 159 fragmented disruption 148–​51 fragmented social media storytelling 56 fragmented stories, interpretation of 75–​100, 101–​126 Frosh, Paul 28, 64, 75, 79, 85, 142–​3, 148–​9 fusion of horizons 112, 116, 141, 144, 145 fuzzy fabulae 48–​50

Index   187

Gadamer, Hans Georg 6, 13, 75, 160; on dialogue 78, 81; on disclosure 143; on distanciation 78, 141; on ‘fusion of horizons’ 141; on interpretation 121; on interpretive horizons 108, 111, 112, 141; on narrative understanding 19; on new perspectives 142; on openness 145, 147, 148; ‘tradition’ concept of 115, 121 gap filling 65, 89, 100n5 gaps 13, 63, 70, 75, 76, 88–​95, 99, 150 gatekeeping 13, 50, 79, 153, 158 gatewatching 79, 102, 158, 159 generic story patterns see masterplots government: in Egypt 19, 30, 68, 134–​5; in Spain 10, 33, 34, 55, 60–​1, 94, 98, 111, 138, 139, 155n3 grand narratives 13, 59, 113 grasping together 4, 6, 18–​19, 36, 39, 93, 117, 127; and telling stories 43, 45, 50, 56, 69 groundlessness of being 95, 108, 120, 121, 155 hammer example, in Heidegger 23–​4, 27, 148 hashtags 3, 66, 70, 72, 99, 153 hegemony 9, 13, 152, 154 Heidegger, Martin 6; on averageness 106, 107, 120; on being 23, 25–​6, 161; on being there 27; on being-​closed 146; on being-​in-​the-​world 27, 86, 105; on being-​open 161–​2; on being-​toward-​ death 38, 83; on being-​with 30–​4; on being-​with for the other 162; on being-​ with-​one-​another 107; on being-​with-​ others 30; on circumspection 26, 121; on communication 19, 106; on das Man 107; on Dasein 27, 28–​9, 31, 40n11, 86, 102–​3, 105, 106, 107, 108, 121, 132, 146, 158, 161–​2; on deworlding 26, 46; on events 22; on everyday existence 40n12, 86; on facticity 132; on falling 108; on groundlessness of being 95, 108, 120, 121, 155; hammer example in 23–​4, 27, 148; on history as thematic activity 40n12; horizons of interpretation concept of 108; on idle talk 106, 121; on interpretation 95, 104, 105, 126; on nonthematic circumspection 26; on nonthematic narrative 20; on ontic being and ontological being 25–​6; ontological hermeneutics of 22; on ontology 23, 24, 26; on openness 161; on outward appearance 26; on pointing out 19;

publicness concept of 30, 108; on rede 19; on seeing 104, 108; on telling 32; on time 83; on truth as disclosure 127, 140–​1, 146, 148, 151, 155; on understanding 102–​3, 105; on ungroundedness of being 95, 108, 120, 121; on unsettledness of being 95, 148; on worldliness of the world 25, 29 hermeneutic activity 37, 100 hermeneutic circle 7, 18 hermeneutic potential 64, 88, 90 hermeneutics 4, 6, 7, 8, 11–​12, 13, 63, 64, 145; and interpretation 75, 78, 85, 88, 90, 100; and theory 16, 18, 22, 23, 37, 39 heteroglossia 143, 144, 145, 147 historical narratives 20, 25, 30, 31, 132–​3 historiography 6, 8, 12, 16–​17, 20, 42, 44, 132–​3 history 110, 127–​8, 133, 135, 151; and telling stories 45, 46–​7, 47, 57; and theory 17, 25, 29, 33, 40n12 homophily 147 horizons: interpretive 9, 13, 101, 102, 108–​12, 125, 150; limited 108, 116; narrative 101, 112–​25 horizontal narrative 89, 92, 98; and telling stories 56, 61, 62, 63–​4, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72, 73 horizontal storytelling 42, 43, 59–​65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 151, 159 hospitality 162 HRW (Human Rights Watch) 134, 135 human existence 8, 102, 114, 156–​7; and theory 15, 16, 22, 25–​6, 38, 40n1 human experience 16, 22, 29, 46, 149 Human Rights Watch (HRW) 134, 135 hybrid media system 56, 73, 153 identity of agents, gaps as uncertainty regarding 88 ideology 70, 85, 144, 146 idle talk 106, 119, 121, 140, 145 Iglesias, Pablo 10, 81, 94, 97, 98, 147 immediacy 43, 46, 82 implicature 43, 61 inattention 27, 64, 84–​7, 121, 146 inattentive interpretation 75–​6, 84, 86, 87, 99 inauthenticity 118, 125, 161 individual fragments 20; and interpretation 87, 93, 98, 99–​100, 104, 119, 120, 124–​5; and telling stories 42, 51–​2, 53, 62, 64, 66, 69, 71, 72 instability, of being 161

188 Index

Instagram 1, 2, 3, 14n1, 45, 79 institutions 8, 9–​10, 11, 13, 153, 156, 158; and interpretation 88, 93, 98, 102, 109, 123, 124; and theory 23, 25, 28, 35 intelligibility 29, 150, 152; of fragments 5, 8, 62, 102, 116, 131; and interpretation 86, 102, 103, 106, 112, 118, 126n1; narrative 117; publicly available 125 intention: of authors 78, 80, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98, 99, 152; of speakers 77, 78 interaction 4, 11, 34, 65, 80, 125; dialogic 79, 148; face-​to-​face 19, 76–​7, 78, 79, 80, 143, 145; narratives as 69–​70; performative 80; quasi-​ 27–​8, 78–​9, 79–​80, 142–​3; via social media 79, 80, 81, 142 internet 3, 28, 49, 142, 157; and interpretation 80, 84, 85, 91, 94, 102 interpretation: attentive 75–​6, 84–​5, 85–​6, 87, 105; horizons of 9, 13, 101, 102, 108–​12, 125, 150; inattentive 75–​6, 84, 86, 87, 99; of narrative see narrative interpretation; storied 6, 112; thematic 75–​6, 84–​5, 85–​6, 87, 105 interpreting self 86, 93, 95 interpretive dynamism 90 interpretive grammar 122 interpretive horizons 9, 13, 101, 102, 108–​12, 125, 150 interpretive power 85, 94 intertext 49, 62–​3, 72, 100n9, 150 in-​the-​moment narration 82 Iraq War metanarrative 114 journalism 28, 47, 71, 85, 87, 160, 161; and truth 135, 149–​50, 151, 152 knowing 12, 15, 16, 131; narrative 16–​21, 22, 34, 39, 158 knowledge 6, 129, 130, 132, 133; and interpretation 85, 87, 118, 119, 124; and theory 16–​17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 26, 36 Kompridis, Nikolas 14, 128, 142, 145, 149, 150, 151 levelling 107, 108, 118, 119, 125 limited horizons 108, 116 listening 26, 94, 156, 161–​2 literary narratives 6, 8, 28, 34, 49, 52, 58, 124, 158 literary texts 13, 62, 92 liveness 83–​4 logical relations 44, 88 logico-​mathematical understanding 21

logico-​paradigmatic interpretive scheme of scientific inquiry 5–​6, 21 mass communication 31, 159, 160 mass media 1, 10, 142, 160 master narratives see masterplots masterplots 13, 31, 35, 135, 150–​1; armed forces as national protector 123–​4; and interpretation 101, 102, 113, 117–​25, 126, 126n12; military service 123; revolution 35–​6, 117, 119, 122; sexual assault 135; undergraduate 117 material coherence 69, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139 MB see Muslim Brotherhood (MB) meaning making 7, 22 media: citizen 7, 8, 10, 161; digital 7, 10, 65; mass 1, 10, 142, 160; new 5, 7, 8, 23, 48, 127; power of 7, 106; social see Facebook; Instagram; Twitter mediation 2, 93, 94, 129; self-​ 5, 8, 12 mediatization 2; deep 2, 110, 128, 129 metanarratives 5, 13, 31, 35, 139, 150–​1; and interpretation 101, 102, 113–​16, 117, 121, 122, 123–​5, 126 metaphorical understanding 21 military service masterplot 123 mimesis 12–​13, 37, 91, 141–​2, 160; see also configuration; prefiguration; refiguration Mitdasein 30, 33 Mitsein 30 Mitwelt 30, 31 monological discourse 128, 144 Morsi, Mohamed 9, 10, 19, 25, 44, 51, 52, 67–​8, 70, 117 multiauthoredness 69 multiplicity 26, 90, 113 multivoicedness 128, 145 Muslim Brotherhood (MB) 9, 10, 19, 24–​5, 124, 134–​5, 137; and telling stories 44, 45–​6, 66, 67–​8, 69 narrative: ambient 48, 66, 68–​9, 69–​70, 70–​1, 82, 92, 99, 157; and being 22–​30; and being-​with-​others 30–​4; ‘birther’ 135–​6; canonical see masterplots; and chronical 43–​8; closed 56, 58; counter 70; dynamism of 13, 76, 90, 92; forestructuring of 108; grand 13, 59, 113; historical 20, 25, 30, 31, 132–​3; horizontal see horizontal narrative; literary 6, 8, 28, 34, 49, 52, 58, 124, 158; nonthematic 20; prethematic 12, 34, 36–​7, 39, 40, 46, 88, 157, 158; thematic

Index   189

see thematic narrative; vertical see vertical narrative narrative banalization 88 narrative closure 14, 37, 38–​9, 44–​5, 60, 97, 125–​6, 146–​7, 161 narrative dynamism 13, 76, 90, 92 narrative explanation 17 narrative fallacy 127–8 narrative forestructuring 108 narrative fragmentation 8–​9, 11, 13, 20, 151–​2, 154, 157; and interpretation 75, 101, 108, 115, 125 narrative horizons 101, 112–​25 narrative imperialism 20 narrative instability 100 narrative interpretation 6, 13, 57, 102, 110–​11, 150, 157; and narrative horizons 112, 124, 125; and theory 21, 26, 34, 37 narrative knowing 16–​21, 22, 34, 39, 158 narrative mode, of understanding 15, 16, 17–​18, 19, 20–​1, 34, 35, 127 narrative obscurity 88–​9 Narrative Paradigm 134 narrative power 17, 33, 35, 38, 39, 49, 50, 56, 116 narrative psychology 6, 8, 14n3 narrative reception 13, 61, 72, 76, 99, 158 narrative theory 6, 7, 8, 12, 15, 16, 22, 26, 38, 129–​30, 157, 158 narrative understanding 15, 16, 17–​18, 19, 20–​1, 34, 35, 127 narrative wholes 12, 13, 76, 101, 121, 130, 137, 157; and telling stories 43, 52, 54, 56, 57, 59–​60, 66, 70, 71 narrative/​chronicle distinction 12, 42, 44–​5, 48 narrativity 12, 16, 34, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 57, 69, 71 narratology 6, 8, 16, 34, 40n2 nationalism 11, 31, 67, 105 116, 154, 159, 160 networks 4, 49, 50, 82, 105, 150; and theory 17, 18, 21, 22, 25, 28 new media 5, 7, 8, 23, 48, 127 non-​narrative modes, of understanding and being 5–​6, 16, 20, 34, 36 nonthematic narrative 20 nonthematic storytelling 20, 37 novels 34, 39, 160; and interpretation 85, 92, 97, 98, 124; and telling stories 49, 50, 52, 56, 59; and truth 137, 147, 149–​50 ‘now … this’, logic of 2, 3, 59

objective presence 25, 26, 85, 93 object-​subject distinction 85, 86 one, the 30, 107, 108, 118, 125 ontic realities 25, 28–​9, 128, 133, 134, 136, 138, 154, 160; see also brute fact ontic/​ontological distinction 23 ontology 5, 6, 15, 16, 20; and being 22, 23, 24, 25–​6, 28, 32; and defining narrative 39–​40, 40n9, 40–​1n14; and interpretation 83, 87, 103, 104, 115; and truth 127, 130, 146, 154 open texts 90–​1, 92 open vertical narratives 58–​9 openness, existential 13, 56, 58, 91, 95, 145–​8, 156, 161, 162 oppositional reading 98 orality 84 perceptions 1, 22, 26, 28–​9, 33, 136, 138; and interpretation 96, 104, 108, 109, 121 performative interaction 80 phenomenology 4, 16, 83, 140 philosophy 2, 7, 8, 12, 14n3, 16 plurality 32, 76, 90, 91, 95, 143, 145 Podemos 1, 9, 10, 11, 81, 94, 115–​16; and telling stories 48, 54–​6, 60, 61, 71–​2; and truth 131–​2, 138, 147, 150–​1, 153, 155n3 politics 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 159, 160, 161; and interpretation 90, 92, 107, 116; and telling stories 45, 50, 67, 70, 71; and theory 17, 21, 24, 25, 30, 32, 33, 36, 39; and truth 132, 151, 153, 154; see also Catalan activism; Egyptian activism; Podemos; Trump, Donald Postman, Neil 2, 59, 104–​5, 136–​7 post-​truth world 14, 47, 128 power: of art 148; authorial 9, 73, 76, 116, 147; disclosive 148, 149, 150; of distanciation 157; of fiction 161; of fragmented narratives 145; gatekeeping 158; of horizontal storytelling 63; institutional 9, 10; interpretive 85, 94; of ‘live’ television 100n2; media 7, 106; narrative 17, 33, 35, 38, 39, 49, 50, 56, 116; of poetic language 143, 148; political 9, 25; of social media 159 prefiguration 13, 37 prethematic narrative 12, 34, 36–​7, 39, 40, 46, 88, 157, 158 prethematic understanding 39, 86 production: of chronicles 45, 46; cultural 33, 41n16, 160; of knowledge 18, 85; of narratives 11, 14, 37, 63, 91, 94, 151; of texts 50, 78, 90, 94–​5, 158

190 Index

produsers 9, 94 projection 28, 29, 32, 130–​1; and interpretation 83, 103, 118, 124; and telling stories 43, 48, 56, 63, 64 propositional truth 155n6 public discourse 2, 3, 127 public understanding 31, 106, 107, 116, 125 publicness 30, 108 quasi-​dialogue 78, 81, 141, 142 quasi-​interaction 27–​8, 78–​9, 79–​80, 142–​3 radio 2, 10, 27, 51, 53, 56, 81 readerly texts 56, 62, 90, 92 reading: counter-​hegemonic 9, 13; oppositional 98; symptomatic 98 reception, of narrative 13, 61, 72, 76, 99, 158 rede 19, 31–2, 105 reference, Heidegger’s concept of 23, 24 reference frames 54, 70, 72, 73 referential wholes 49, 104, 105, 109, 110, 113, 116, 117 refiguration 13, 37, 65, 91 relational networks 22, 25 relationality 12, 15, 16, 34, 35–​6, 38, 40, 43 relevance: Heidegger’s concept of 23, 24, 25; of narrative 5–​9 remix culture 80 reporting 9, 11, 38, 45, 46, 47–​8, 54, 69; social media 82, 83 representation 4, 31–​2, 64, 106, 139 repression 17, 33, 34, 115, 158 revolution masterplot 35–​6, 117, 119, 122 rhetorical strategy 42, 43, 47, 60, 71, 90, 115, 144 Ricoeur, Paul 6, 8, 13, 39, 75; on being 40n1, 40–​1n14, 143; on close reading 64; on distanciation 78, 142; on grasping together 18; and horizontal narratives 65; on ‘hospitality’ 162; on intentionality 96, 97; on interpretation 76–​7, 88, 141; and ‘kingdom of the as if’ 33, 141; on masterplots 117–​18, 122; on mimesis 91; and ‘surplus of meaning’ 64, 141; on time 29, 83; on written communication 77, 88; see also distanciation; grasping together; mimesis Sabry, Bassem 10, 51–​2, 52–​3, 66, 67–​8, 69 Salem, Mahmoud (@Sandmonkey) 10, 47, 66, 67–​8, 69, 70 scale, gaps as uncertainty regarding 89

second-​order disclosure 14, 128, 142, 148–​9, 151, 154, 155, 159 seeing, Heidegger on 104, 108 self-​mediation 5, 8, 12 sense of an ending 12; and telling stories 43, 44, 45, 46, 52; and theory 15, 16, 34, 37–​9, 40 sequentiality 49 serial storytelling see vertical storytelling sexual assault masterplot 135 sharable talk 70 sideshadowing 60–​1 significance, gaps as uncertainty regarding 88 signification 15, 17, 64, 97 simultaneity 13, 83, 84, 86 sjuzhets 48–​50, 97 skeletal narratives see masterplots skeletal storylines see masterplots slippery sjuzhets 48–​50 social media platforms 2–​3, 3–​4, 36, 50, 71, 79, 80, 102, 144, 147, 158, 159; see also Facebook; Instagram; Twitter social media storytelling 11, 39, 43, 51, 56; see also Catalan activism; Egyptian activism; Podemos; Trump, Donald sociality 15, 30, 32 sociology 6, 8, 38 solidarity 28, 82, 152, 158 solipsism 22, 106, 111 space (spatial area) 28, 40n9, 77, 82 spatial location, gaps as uncertainty regarding 89 spatial specificity 12, 15, 16, 34–​5, 43 state of exception 11 storied interpretation 6, 112 storytelling 22, 42–​74, 67–​8; ambient 42, 43, 57, 65–​71, 67–​8; horizontal 42, 43, 59–​65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 151, 159; social media 11, 39, 43, 51, 56; thematic 20, 36, 42; traditional 66, 94; vertical see vertical storytelling; see also rede structural coherence 69, 134, 135, 136–​7, 138 structural transformation 162 subject-​object distinction 85, 86 symptomatic reading 98 synchronic storytelling 63, 64, 65, 71, 72 taking care 23, 30 teleology 20, 38, 56, 114 television 2, 3, 10, 27–​8, 142–​3, 148, 160; and interpretation 78–​9, 80, 81, 82, 83,

Index   191

84, 100n2, 104–​5, 115–​16; and telling stories 50, 51, 53, 56, 67, 71 telling stories 22, 42–​74, 67–​8; see also rede telos 37, 44, 46, 56, 58, 60 temporal location, gaps as uncertainty regarding 88–​9 temporal relationships 19, 64, 65 temporal specificity 12, 15, 16, 21, 34–​5, 43, 77 temporality 24, 29, 40, 43, 50, 57, 58, 63, 92; see also distanciation; time terrorism metanarratives 114, 115 text: closed 56, 62, 90, 92; open 90–​1, 92; readerly 56, 62, 90, 92; writerly 90–​1 textual meaning 96, 121, 141 the one see das Man the ‘there’ 27–​8, 29, 33, 109, 128, 147 the they 30, 107, 108, 118, 125 @TheBigPharaoh 10, 136–​7 thematic attention 161 thematic interpretation 75–​6, 84–​5, 85–​6, 87, 105 thematic narrative 42, 114–​15, 123, 157, 158; and theory 19–​20, 24, 25, 29, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 40n12 thematic storytelling 20, 36, 42 theories of truth: coherence 14, 127, 128, 133–​9; correspondence 14, 127, 128–​33, 134, 140, 154, 155n6; disclosure 14, 127, 128, 140–​54, 157 theory of narrative see narrative theory ‘there’, the 27–​8, 29, 33, 109, 128, 147 they, the 30, 107, 108, 118, 125 thinking 2, 27, 86, 105, 108 threads 3, 45, 52, 57–​8, 63, 73 threefold mimesis see mimesis thrownness 28, 29, 32, 48, 63, 83, 103, 125 time 12, 132, 141, 152, 157; and interpretation 77, 79, 82, 83, 84, 100n2, 101, 111, 115, 124; and telling stories 42, 44, 46, 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72; and theory 22, 28, 29, 33, 36, 40n9; see also distanciation; temporality To Kill a Mockingbird 149, 150 tone data 26 totality of reference 13, 23, 103, 104, 105 traditional narratives 11, 48, 99 traditional storytelling 66, 94 translation 8, 40n10, 57, 107, 115 trolling 148, 158, 159 Trump, Donald 1, 9–​10, 11, 17, 18, 35, 159; and interpretation 81, 87, 89–​90, 92, 98, 112–​13, 119; and telling stories 48, 57–​8,

61, 70; and truth 130, 131, 137, 147, 151, 153 truth: as aletheia 140, 141, 143; assessment of 126n12, 128, 130, 139, 154; as coherence 14, 127, 128, 133–​9; as correspondence 14, 127, 128–​33, 134, 140, 154, 155n6; as disclosure 14, 127, 128, 140–​54, 157; propositional 155n6; as unveiling 140, 141, 143 truthfulness 127, 131, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140 truthing 140, 141, 142, 145, 146 2011 Egyptian Uprising 66, 121, 159; see also Sabry, Bassem; Salem, Mahmoud (@Sandmonkey); Zeinobia 2013 military intervention, in Egypt 1, 9, 10, 18–​19, 24, 30, 66, 70, 119 Twitter: Catalan activism on 17, 28, 33, 34–​5, 71–​2, 80, 105, 159; Egyptian activism on see Egyptian activism; Podemos on see Podemos; Donald Trump on see Trump, Donald unaffiliated citizens 9, 12, 142, 153, 155, 156, 159 uncertainty 38, 58–​9, 60, 88–​9, 100n2, 137, 146, 147 undergraduate masterplot 117 understanding: analogical 21; existential 103; logico-​mathematical 21; logico-​ paradigmatic mode of 6, 21; metaphorical 21; narrative 15, 16, 17–​18, 19, 20–​1, 34, 35, 127; non-​narrative 5–​6, 16, 20, 34, 36; public 31, 106, 107, 116, 125 ungroundedness: of being 95, 108, 120, 121, 155; of interpreting self 95 unifying-​repairing effects 14, 151–4, 158, 159, 160 unsettledness, of being 127, 148, 155 unstable texts 48–​50 unveiling, truth as 140, 141, 143 vertical narrative 53, 55, 56, 57–​8, 58–​9, 92, 124; and ambient storytelling 65, 68, 70, 72; and horizontal storytelling 62, 63, 64 vertical storytelling 42, 43, 51–​9, 62, 153–​4, 159; and ambient storytelling 65, 66, 70, 71, 72 War of the Worlds 149 ways of being 49, 158, 156, 160, 161; and interpretation 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 100n2, 105, 106, 114; and theory 16, 22–​34,

192 Index

36, 40n1; and truth 143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 152 ways of being in-​time 83, 100n2 ways of being-​in-​the-​world 34, 143, 146, 150, 152 ways of being-​there 84 ways of being-​there-​with-​others 83 ways of being-​with 32, 33 ways of being-​with-​others 31, 33, 79, 83, 105, 114, 156, 161 weakened author 96–​9 with-​world 30, 31

world construction 22 world disclosure 22, 127, 146, 155 world repairing 14, 152, 159 worldliness, Heidegger’s concept of 22, 25, 29, 30, 62, 158 writerly readers 75, 93, 111, 157 writerly texts 90–​1, 92 writing 12, 19, 157; and interpretation 77, 78, 79–​80, 84, 93, 94–​5; and telling stories 46, 48, 49, 64 written communication 75, 77 Zeinobia 10, 47, 58–​9, 66, 67–​8, 69