Abstract
The notion that a common narrative constitutes the meaningfulness of groups and other social collectives has been put forward by both philosophers and social scientists. In this view, the constitution of collectives is linked to the coherence internal to narratives—a paradigm herein dubbed the “intra-narrative” approach. Though elegant, this approach has inbuilt limitations. Focusing on philosophical arguments advancing the intra-narrative view, this essay contrasts this model with an “inter-narrative” approach premised on the meaningful connections interactants draw amongst a plurality of narratives and offers the phenomenon of “second stories” as an inroad to an inter-narrative theory of social collectives.
The fate of any group—whether large or small, long-established or still in formation—depends on its ability to marshal and maintain a shared story that allows potential and existing members to feel at home, to say, in effect, that “these are my people, this is my history, and this is my future.” Jacobs (2002, 206)
Introduction
This paper critically engages a small but highly influential set of ideas in the philosophy of “social collectives” 1 (groups, communities, organizations, etc.) advanced by Alasdair MacIntyre, David Carr, Anthony Steinbock, and Deborah Tollefsen and Shaun Gallagher. A central feature of all the works discussed here is the notion that members’ conception of, and identification with a collective takes the form of a shared narrative. To some extent, the particular arguments I engage with herein have worked their way into the social sciences. For example, the sociologist Joseph E. Davis (2002, 19), citing both Carr and MacIntyre, writes that narratives can “be the basis on which social relationships are organized. Interpretive communities come together around stories, constituting and reaffirming themselves as groups with particular attributes.” Similar ideas have cropped up without explicit connection to these philosophies. For instance, without reference to any of the works to be discussed here, Ronald N. Jacobs (2002), quoted at the opening of this essay, offers the kindred argument that narrative is essential to group formation and maintenance. Similarly, in a paper on “group narrative” Bruner and Feldman (1996, 295) write, “It would seem that any group that wants to constitute itself as a lasting or important one has to develop shared stories that not only define the group’s identity, but also provide a means whereby individual members can guide their own discovery of meaning in their own lives.” Yet, while the central premise is not unique to philosophy, it is philosophers who have advanced systematic arguments for the narrative nature of collectives. As such, their works are an ideal study in this paradigm of thought.
The theories of the narrative nature of social collectives offered by MacIntyre, Carr, Steinbock, and Tollefsen and Gallagher are informed by the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions. Accordingly, even while taking up different aspects of these traditions, each is committed to theorizing social collectives from what David Carr (1986b, passim) called “the member’s perspective”: the point of view through which members in a group or community conceive its existence and understand their own membership. With this in mind, these philosophers are not concerned with merely classificatorily determined aggregates of people, nor with setting forth objective criteria for what qualifies a collective as being a group, community, etc. Rather, they aim to account for the subjectively meaningful nature of collectivity and the form in which such meaningfulness can be intersubjectively shared amongst members. It is in view of this aim that these philosophers offer narrative as the form in which a group or community is “constituted” for its members; that is, they propose that it is through narrative that collectives become manifest to their members as significant and persistent social units, and that members deliberate and shape one another’s conceptions of the social collective. 2 This commitment to “the member’s perspective” is one this author shares and the problem of how narrative theory can best contribute to accounting for social collectivity from the participant’s viewpoint motivates all that follows.
If the narrative constitution of meaning is taken as a means by which collectivity may arise then whatever conception of narrative meaning is employed in these theories is the lynchpin of these accounts. At the center of these philosophers’ arguments is an operative concept of narrative “coherence” that establishes an assumptive framework within which their theories play out. While never itself explicitly theorized, the notion of coherence is taken up solely as the property of self-consistency amongst the components of a narrative. If coherence is conceived of only as an internal property of a narrative, then meaningfulness is likewise seen as inhering in and bounded by the narrative. This viewpoint, from which the meaningfulness of a narrative is characterized only by reference to the coherence of its contents, is what I refer to herein as the “intra-narrative” approach.
Putting the intra-narrative approach and its ramifications on display is the first order of business in this paper. In the first portion of this essay, I demonstrate how the intra-narrative approach has been used by philosophers to theorize social collectivity with broadly similar results. Rather than reviewing the unique details of each proposal, my intent is to demonstrate that, following from this particular view of narrative coherence, each theorizes collectives as coalescing to varying extent around a common narrative, with entailments for member consensus and cohesion, and for these narratives’ pertinence to the group as such. Critical discussion of these entailments is my focus on the second half of the paper. I do not put forward arguments against the possibilities of a unified narrative and common consensus. Nor do I seek to totally supplant the operative conception of narrative coherence that has informed this line of thinking. I do, however, believe that there are some inborn limitations to this interpretive strategy—limitations that should lead us to question whether an intra-narrative approach always adequately characterizes the role of narrative in collective life.
Rather than rejecting the notion that narrative helps us grasp the constitution of collectivity, I devote the final section of the paper to developing upon the claim that intra-narrative coherence is not the only source of narrative meaning in social life. To wit, there is meaning constituted in the interrelations between narratives. I argue for the necessity of attending to this “inter-narrative” dimension of narrative meaning and provide an initial look at its interactional constitution in narrative communication. As I will argue in the final section, there is a need to recognize and include theorizing of how participants in a collective construe the nature of their belonging together through interconnections spontaneously produced in narrative exchange. After briefly motivating this approach through social research on narrative, I make inroads toward an inter-narrative theory through an introduction and discussion of the efficacies of “second stories” (Sacks 1992a, 1992b). “Second story” narrative interactions are by no means the only passage to an inter-narrative approach, but they hold the distinct advantage of being an instance in which participants observably work out the nature of the interconnections between their experiences and knowledge, enacting and sometimes signifying forms of relatedness amongst themselves and others in the process. I conclude with a comparative discussion of the intra- and inter-narrative approaches. Without rejecting the intra-narrative approach, I note that an inter-narrative theoretical project poses some relative advantages, particularly in coming to grips with interpersonal differences within collectives.
Intra-Narrative Theories of Collectives
For the philosopher David Carr (1986b), the Gettysburg Address stands as a prime example of the role of narrative in constituting a community. Lincoln deftly frames the death and destruction of the battle as sacrifice to the cause of liberty and equality, the American Civil War is the continuation of a project that began with the founding of the United States, and the success of this project is imperative for the survival of democracy anywhere on earth. “Thus,” writes Carr (1986b, 156), “he accounts for the meaning of collective action by placing it within a story …” that, insofar as it was subscribed to by Lincoln’s fellow citizens, was taken up by Americans as “our story.” The sheer fame of the Gettysburg Address makes it an admittedly rarified example. For the philosophers who argue that narratives are basic to the ways participants constitute social collectivity, however, the examples are everywhere. Rather than the political projects of nations, Tollefsen and Gallagher (2017) offer the cases of a couple making plans to paint their kitchen over the weekend and of corporate mission statements, and Anthony Steinbock (1995) points to family stories as well as myths and legends passed down through the generations. The diversity of examples is consistent with their general point. It is not that some special kinds of stories provide touchstones for the members of groups and communities. Rather, they argue that narratives as such are the form in which participants meaningfully orient to social collectives. This is why the question of the adequacy and comprehensiveness of these accounts turns on the notion of narrative meaning these theorists employ. By introducing the philosophers’ basic arguments for the role of narrative in constituting collectivity, this first section establishes a basis for my later critical engagement with these theories by demonstrating both their broadly similar approaches and their more fundamental sameness with respect to the operative conceptions of narrative coherence they utilize.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981 [1985]) theory of the narrative basis of collectives is less well known than his argument for the narrative nature of identity, yet they are of a piece. Both initiate from MacIntyre’s assertion that the meaningfulness of actions, their “intelligibility,” is narrative in form. By this account, any adequate understanding of another’s actions both establishes the immediate aim of that activity and its significance within the actor’s personal and social context. MacIntyre insists that this kind of explication mirrors the formal characteristics of a narrative (MacIntyre 1981 [1985], 208). By extending this analysis to more encompassing projects of action and series of events, MacIntyre famously goes on to argue that whole lives require a narrative framework for their meaning (MacIntyre 1981 [1985], 211). By this account, any narrative frame of understanding can, in turn, be understood as an episode “embedded” within another, more encompassing, narrative (MacIntyre 1981 [1985], 222). This claim effectively traces out MacIntyre’s conception of “coherence” and instills a conceptual linkage between continuity and intelligibility: to live out a narrative is to act in mind of what it is meaningful to do and who one can meaningfully become given what has come before. “Embedding” shows coherence to always be the meaningfulness of actions and events set within a broader narrative frame and thus connects the individual to the collective levels of MacIntyre’s philosophy. This becomes evident in MacIntyre’s (1981 [1985], 220) insistence that notion of narrative identity is conceptually non-individualistic, linking any one life with narratives that encapsulate varying historical trajectories, forms of practice, and cultural values (MacIntyre 1981 [1985], 221). The collective level enters more distinctly into MacIntyre’s account when he suggests that social collectives may themselves be regarded by their members as narrative subjects (MacIntyre 1981 [1985], 223). Thus, the broader implication is that not only individuals but families, communities, institutions, and nations a continuously defined by and for their members through narratives which they live out, individually and collectively, on the fly “in light of certain conceptions of a possible shared future” (MacIntyre 1981 [1985], 215).
Even more extensively than MacIntyre, in Time, Narrative, and History (1986b) David Carr embraces the premise that narrative is the essential structure of understanding and identity and systematically makes the case for an analogical relation between personal and collective narratives. According to Carr (2014, 208), narrative mirrors the basic temporal organization of experience, instilling narrativity at the core of both the individual’s perception and action. Lest it be thought, however, that this renders narrative an automatic and inflexible register of events, Carr carefully distinguishes between the narrative-like flow of experience and the interpretive synthesis undertaken in reflection. Even while insisting that narrative is connected to the elemental temporality of experience, Carr resists the idea that narrative is a mere product of all events undergone by a subject. Rather, grasping one’s life as a cohesive, meaningful unit is accomplished in acts of reflection which formulate an articulable understanding by interrelating and interpreting events and actions in light of one another. It is from such a reflective process that one can plan, evaluate, comprehend oneself autobiographically, or revise one’s self-understandings and aims. Carr (1986b, 155) extends this account of the narrative form of life to collectives by suggesting that collective actions and sufferings may be experienced and reflected upon from the perspective of membership and participation which, for Carr, is a first-person plural perspective (what has happened to us, what we will do, etc.). Analogous to his emphasis on autobiographical narrative coherence as a reflective accomplishment, any narrative of a “we” is something which Carr insists is in principle articulated—typically formulated and narrated by one or a few members of the group—where the articulation accomplishes a collectively undertaken interpretive reflection. Importantly, for these collective narrative accounts to succeed as such they must resonate with others within the collective. If successful, in the sense that others accept the narrative, narrating a collective even holds the capacity to create a new “we” where none had existed previously. Hence, Carr (1986b, 163) summarizes, “a community exists wherever a narrative account exists of a we which has continuous existence through its experiences and activities” and this narrative account “is accepted or subscribed to by the other members.”
Anthony Steinbock’s Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (1995) contains a brief but densely argued section on the role of narrative in the ongoing constitution of community across generations. For this task, Steinbock accepts and aims to elaborate upon MacIntyre’s and Carr’s basic arguments. Narratives both convey and formulate members’ understanding of their community; and, in this respect, Steinbock sees narrative as the vehicle by which a sense of collectivity may be transmitted, while being continually updated and revised, beyond the lifetimes of particular members. With a nod to MacIntyre, Steinbock (1995, 214-15) concludes that “the unity of a history—personal or communal—is tied up with the internal coherence of a narrative ….” Steinbock equates this notion of a narrative’s “internal coherence” with the claims that persons’ historical sense of their community is “normal” insofar as it is developed as a system of concordances and typicalities. That is, narrative establishes a continuity in the senses of ongoing development (from this toward that) and a familiarity with what may be expected within the community. This does not, for Steinbock, imply that a narrative understanding of community is ensured to go on unchanging or unchallenged. Communities are ever evolving, and narrative follows and to an extent precipitates changes and schisms within a community. These considerations notwithstanding, Steinbock (1995, 217) portrays narrative as an effectively unifying sense-making process internal to a community: “Through narrative, [community members] are guided by the same thoughts, as it were, and these thoughts give rise to the shared historical narrative.”
Finally, Tollefsen and Gallagher (2017; Gallagher and Tollefsen 2019; Gallagher 2020) have been the most recent proponents for a narrative theory of collectives. While their special focus is on the problem of how members of groups can establish and maintain joint agency, they also relate their narrative solution to issues more central to the theorists discussed above, including the formation of group identity and the transmission of group norms. As with Carr, Tollefsen and Gallagher endorse the idea that action inhabits a narrative form, and they specially emphasize the notion that commitments to act are effectively the projection of a narrative framework. Building upon this premise, they propose that consistency with prior commitments results from a kind of “pressure” subjects feel to stay the course without some compelling reason to change the narrative. It is thus implied that, so far as action is concerned, coherence is a matter of sticking to a plot. This establishes their conception of narrative coherence in general as a meaningful organization of events into a comprehensive and self-consistent whole. With these ideas in hand, Tollefsen and Gallagher seek to extend this argument to “stories about groups—we narratives” (Tollefsen and Gallagher 2017, 102). A “we narrative” supports the continuation of collective ventures, they argue, by putting certain shared intentions and commitments on record. By this reckoning, a plan to which two people have agreed is an instance of a narrative shared between them. Proposing that this function of narrative is scalable to large, corporate groups, they also insist that the narratives established within such collectives may persist and develop beyond the timescale of individual’s lives or membership. With this, Tollefsen and Gallagher likewise bring the collective past into play by suggesting that the effects of narrative strengthen over time via the embellishment by accrual of a narrative continuity within the group. It is at this stage that their arguments dovetail most recognizably with those of MacIntyre, Carr, and Steinbock. As they envision it, as a “we narrative” develops it comes to transcend the collective’s individual members, accommodating the formation and transmission of group identity, beliefs, norms, and memories (Gallagher and Tollefsen 2019, 214; see also Gallagher 2020, esp. ch. 9). Hence, while the authors specifically aim to explain how groups establish and maintain patterns of joint action, they expressly indicate that their arguments amount to a general narrative theory of collectives.
It should be evident at this point that there is more than a superficial resemblance amongst these four narrative theories of collectivity. In rehashing the basics of these accounts, we see not only that each takes narrative to be an essential form for subjectively meaningful membership and participation in a collective, but that the meaningfulness of narrative is considered to derive from the coherence internal to a group narrative. Importantly, the notion of narrative coherence utilized across these theories, while functioning as a merely operative concept, is remarkably consistent. In each case coherence is evoked as an internal relationship amongst components of a narrative—one which sustains a consistent and overarching meaning. Despite their conceptual elegance, there are some significant limitations to these arguments.
As will be argued in the next section, regarding coherence solely as an intra-narrative phenomenon has shaped the respect in which collectivity can be recognized and accounted for by these philosophers as well as the varieties of narrative that can contribute to collectivization. It is not my objective to attempt a batch refutation of these arguments. My aim, rather, is to show that there is a layering of common constraints that emerge within these authors’ works, which I suggest are characteristic of what I have called the “intra-narrative” approach. In brief, I will argue that by attending exclusively to the meaning endowed by internal coherence, each of these accounts comes to envisage the role of narrative in collectivity as the establishment and sharing of a self-same story—a claim which, vitally, relies upon an equivalence between collectivity and consensus. Recognizing the limitations of a theory of collectives premised on the coherence internal to a narrative will motivate the move in the final section of this essay toward an “inter-narrative” account which emphasizes the connections drawn between disparate narratives.
The Insufficiency of the “Intra-Narrative” Approach
For each of these authors, the collectivizing potential of narrative is premised on the meaningfulness it establishes for membership. This meaning is reckoned to obtain in the internal coherence amongst narrative contents. In this section, I offer two kinds of objections to the adequacy of such an approach. In the first subsection (Inbuilt Limitations), I continue my critical reading of these theories, aiming to show the limitations which follow from these theorists’ basic commitments. The most troubling of these consequences is that, insofar as they tend toward associating collectives with comprehensive, single narratives, these social philosophies end up committing—albeit ambivalently—to a consensus-based account of social collectives. Throughout, I aim to show that the paradigmatic role of intra-narrative coherence constitutes the core layer of these limitations. It remains possible to counter this first objection by asserting that, however restrictive such a portrayal may appear, it is nonetheless appropriate because it matches with the basic role of narrative within social collectives. In the subsection that follows, I briefly recount observations from the social sciences which preclude that defense. In particular, these contributions suggest a need to theorize forms of meaningful connection between disparate narratives—an “inter-narrative” account of collectivity. Making initial strides in that direction will then be the aim of the final section.
Inbuilt Limitations
For Carr, as well as Tollefsen and Gallagher, the narratives in question are only those in which the collective could be described as subject or character. For Steinbock and MacIntyre the situation is more complex. Both gesture to a broader field of stories by reference to tales of individual historical figures, to literature, and to folklore. That said, for Steinbock and MacIntyre, these stories hold significance for members of a collective precisely as episodes in the overarching narrative of their common history and tradition. In each case, then, the relationship of narrative to collectives is conceived with respect to narrative of the collective. The narrative constitution of meaningful social collectives is thus imagined as an ultimately biographical enterprise. Without further consideration, we may observe that this proviso significantly limits the range of narratives addressed by these theories. As I will interrogate further in what follows, however, the more fundamental concern is that the selective attention to narratives of the collective seems to be driven by an “intra-narrative” notion of narrative meaning. What might be called the ‘biographic constraint’ may be linked to an operative conception of coherence as an “intra-narrative” relation amongst the parts of a single narrative. As we will see, in each case we find that collectives are paradigmatically theorized as meaningfully constituted by a comprehensive, unified narrative.
For Tollefsen and Gallagher, as we have seen, “we narratives” develop and sustain group identity by being cumulative through time. Their account of the continuity of collective identity and the authority of narrative reasons can exert over individual intentions are integrally linked with the development of an overarching narrative. For MacIntyre’s part, while at any moment a variety of narratives may be unfolding for the individual, social collectivity is reached via the “embedding” of particular events and lives within larger narrative understandings of particular practices, historical events and a lived tradition. A potential plurality of narratives is thus theorized as intelligible only as episodes within a grander, more encompassing narrative. A similar association between group membership and an overarching narrative manifests in Carr’s theory. Carr insists that “the coherence which can become an issue in collective Besinnung is the coherence of the community’s life taken as a whole” (Carr 1986b, 166), encompassing “the whole temporal complex (the ‘whole story’) in which we’re engaged” (Carr 1986b, 168). As with the story of an individual’s life, Carr specifies that the reflective achievement of coherence is practical and can thus change with circumstances; the community constitutes its narrative sense through the selective and motivated appropriation of portions and aspects of its current and historical circumstances. The narrative of a “we” is only the whole story in scare quotes, but it is nonetheless a unified account.
The putatively unified structure of collective narrative warrants further consideration, since, as each of these philosophers acknowledges, to theorize meaningful collectivity as entailing a single, summative and shared narrative raises the problem of consensus amongst members. This is despite the fact that none of the four narrative theories presented here takes the sharing of narratives for granted. All these philosophers explicitly reckon with the fact that all collectives face internal discord. In a paper that condenses his views, Carr (1986a, 130) writes that collective narrative “is born as a resolution of the conflict among its independent-minded members, and it never really overcomes the internal threat to its cohesion which is posed by their sense of independence.” As with Carr, Gallagher and Tollefsen portray the efficacy and validity of “we narratives” as depending on the “endorsement” of individual group members. That is, a given “we narrative” has no default status. 3 It requires uptake on the part of each individual. The authors thus suggest the need for critical appraisals of narratives, cautioning that any dominant narrative within a group is likely to be met with counternarratives which likewise deserve attention (Gallagher and Tollefsen 2019, 218). Yet, as with Carr, this consideration merely sets realistic conditions on their theory. If and to the extent that there is narrative consensus, their arguments apply.
However hesitantly it may be advanced by the philosophers, the consensus premise establishes an association between the unity of a narrative and the cohesion of a collective. It is notable that the same tendency shows up in Steinbock, whose discussion of different ways of tying the narrative threads together centers on the possibility that discordant narratives can drive collectives apart. So, he writes, “Despite [the homepeople’s] reference back to the normal tradition, they may have different ways of normatively drawing the narrative lines … Thus we have the case of competing narratives for the homepeople …” (Steinbock 1995, 216). Steinbock offers this analysis precisely in the context of talking about a narrative schism between early Christians and Jews that ultimately constituted two different religions. The notion of a plurality of narratives as “competing” speaks to a winnowing of focus that makes sense primarily within a framework that takes single narratives as its template. Within a single narrative framework, if disparate narratives are concordant, they are presumed to exhibit the features of a single narrative’s coherence; narratives that cannot be consolidated in this way may, in Steinbock’s consideration, precipitate the bifurcation of a community. Hence, despite recognition of disparate (and sometimes contradictory) narratives, the relationships between a plurality of narratives never figures as central to these philosopher’s accounts. All default to a position which takes a single, unific and overarching narrative as paradigmatic. The functions of narrative these theorists propose thus become dependent on a core consensus.
We should not overlook how much the default to a single, overarching narrative is closely related to the model of narrative coherence informing all of these authors’ theories, nor can we afford to ignore how demanding the intra-narrative approach renders the constitution of collectivity. With the meaning of a narrative being conceptualized solely as arising from the interrelations of its component parts, the intra-narrative approach narrows these theories’ explanatory scope in consistent ways. Within this framework, a multiplicity of narratives can be addressed only insofar as they cohere like episodes in a larger saga (e.g., MacIntryre’s “embedding”). Likewise, narratives circulated amongst members only bolster the collective inasmuch as there is at least some working consensus that sustains a shared narrative coherence. Taken on its own terms, the intra-narrative model of meaning imposes a fairly restrictive, and, as I will show next, overly simplistic account of the role of narrative in constituting collectivity.
Narrative Plurality in Collectives
In the foregoing subsection, I made the case that all four of the theories considered here share significant drawbacks which stem from the operative concept of (internal) coherence they hold in common. It is reasonable to expect a proponent to counter that, however restrictive the entailments and scope of theorizing based upon an intra-narrative model of meaning may appear in the abstract, they are nonetheless appropriate to the collective phenomenon for which they seek to give account. This counterargument would be successful if, from the point of view of its participants, a social collective is necessarily constituted as the center of a single, overarching, coherent and consensually commonplace narrative. Such defenses, however, can hardly be sustained in the face of empirical work which shows that the model of a common narrative offers limited traction when dealing with at least some collectives.
Consider Gary Alan Fine’s (2002) work on social movements. Fine’s initial description of the functions of narrative within these collectives is remarkably similar to the philosophers discussed in the prior section. His theorizing diverges from these, however, on what I see as two key points. In the first instance, even while narratives convey important cultural and ideological meanings, Fine reminds readers that the ideas they impart may not always be consistent with one another. Resultantly, a given member may hold inconsistent ideas; and, more to the point, each member’s ideas may differ significantly from those of other members, even while these individuals relate to at least some of the same narratives. This means that, for Fine, rather than producing an overarching and coherent narrative, the pivotal mechanism of narration within social movements is simply identification. Indeed, Fine challenges the very premise that meaningful collectivity involves members getting some overarching story straight when he observes that members may even relate to one another’s narratives in spite of ignorance of—or deep disagreement about—one another’s closely held beliefs about what is definitive for the group.
This leads to a second observation: collectives differ in the extent to which narratives are shared. 4 Rather than being oriented around the unifying coherence of a single narrative, Fine characterizes social movements as “bundles of narratives,” each of which have different trajectories. Some social movements “emphasize stories that are known to all or most members of the group, whereas other movements are more heavily reticulated” and “in this case, stories may be spread among only a subset of members” (Fine 2002, 243). 5 Some social movements may even lack a central narrative altogether. That is not to say that narratives are insignificant for these collectives, only that this fact complicates any simple association between members relating to a common narrative and group cohesion. With respect to the member’s perspective, a narrative may be known only to a dyad and still hold significance for those two members’ understanding of and identification with a larger collective.
Other narratively-oriented researchers have found it difficult to sustain the notion that a single narrative prevails within social collectives. The organizational settings of some of this work help to verify that the observations made by Fine are not restricted to decentralized, grassroots social movements. To the contrary, we might think of organizations, with their well-wrought hierarchies, clear objectives, teleological schemes for group action, and mission statements as the perfect place for a single, coherent narrative to obtain. Certainly, this is the paradigm case for Tollefsen and Gallagher’s theory of “we narratives.” And yet, Andrew Brown (2006, 734) suggests this is far from the truth: “As narrative constructions, organizations are emphatically not simple, monolithic or homogeneous.” Rather, The fabric [of an organization] is both a patchwork quilt of narrative episodes stitched together through shared conversations, and rippled, with stories variously borrowing threads from each other, continuing and extending some, and seeking to unravel others. (Brown 2006, 735)
In the next section, I will come back to the idea that interconnections between narratives are formed across member’s varying conversations. For now, the point of emphasis is Brown’s contention that organizations may appear to their members as a field of diversely interrelatable stories.
We can find a complementary point in Charlotte Linde’s (2009) ethnographic research on narrative and collective memory in an insurance company. As Linde demonstrates, members of the insurance company “work the past,” constructing positions on what it means to make a career within the organization and how to collectively understand their company’s mission, and how to interpret new challenges in light of previous ones. However, these narratives are not necessarily easy to reconcile with one another, nor does the company’s membership align with all of them equally.
It is worth noting that neither Brown’s nor Linde’s observations contradict the notion that narratives play a vital role in collectivity. Nor do those authors dispute that particular stories might hold special status and be repeatedly narrated within a group or community. Brown, for instance, accepts that certain narratives achieve more prominence than others, and Linde explicitly deals with the narrative practices that enshrine the life of the insurance company’s founder, as well as a process of “narrative induction” (Linde 2000) by which one works to make one’s own narrative fit with that of a community exemplar. Finally, it also bears emphasis that the social scientists here make no objections to the notion of intra-narrative coherence. Nevertheless, their empirical and theoretical insights challenge the adequacy of any theoretical model that identifies collectivity with an overarching and coherent narrative which is the object of consensus amongst members. As such, the central problem we encounter in their work is decidedly not that of identifying which amongst all the narratives proliferating a collective, if any, is the overarching and commonly accepted one. In my view, the theoretical challenge uncovered by this research is, instead, to account for social collectivity as it is meaningfully experienced by members through the conjunctions they produce between a plurality of narratives.
Toward an Inter-Narrative Approach
Given all the foregoing, my contention is that social collectivity may be realized within an arena wherein disparate stories do not necessarily join up neatly into a unifying plot yet can still be brought to bear on one another in significant ways in the midst of participants’ narrative communication with one another. Without trivializing intra-narrative coherence, the works discussed in the last section suggest that there is a need to theorize an alternate aspect of narrative meaning that becomes salient when narratives are juxtaposed with one another. As I will argue below, it is this inter-narrative dimension of meaning through which individuals may reckon their common standing as participants in a collective without recourse to the demanding and restrictive conditions entailed by the theories of collective narrative discussed in the first half of this paper. Even while they usefully point us in the direction of these insights, however, the social scientists discussed in the above do not provide us with an account of how this interconnectedness is realized by participants. My aim in what follows is to make an initial step in this direction.
How should we approach the interrelations between narratives? Recall that the philosophers’ aim in proposing these narrative accounts of collectivity was to grasp the member’s perspective. From this standpoint, primacy is placed on how a group or community comes to be experienced and understood by subjects in the midst of their participation in social life. Accordingly, it is not sufficient simply to point out that a multiplicity of narratives is shared amongst the members of a social collective. Rather, it must be shown that participants co-construct meaning-endowing connections between narratives. Studies of conversational narrative provide the ideal ground for this project. Vitally, it has been shown in studies of talk-in-interaction that stories frequently occur in clusters (Ryave 1978); one participant in interaction performs a narrative, motivating one or more others to provide narratives of their own in reply. Research upholds that within these exchanges conversational partners are doing more than simply reciprocating. In replying, interactants are also tacitly interpreting and commenting upon the foregoing narrative(s) via the observable parallels they construct within their own narration. These narratives that respond to and demonstrate (often subtly) an interpretation of a prior narrative have been termed “second stories” (Sacks 1992a, 1992b).
“Second stories” would seem, then, to provide a concrete example of how disparate narratives can be produced in relation to one another—and, by extension, of how participants in narrative exchange can establish and experience themselves as members of a collective beyond or even without recourse to a single narrative. In what follows, I take second stories as a prototypical case for theorizing inter-narratively. To be clear, I do not seek to offer a full-fledged inter-narrative theory of collectives. The situated work of co-constructing meaningful collectivity across a plurality of narratives cannot be paired down to one interactional phenomenon. Instead, the point of what follows is to illustrate a method of thinking through which an inter-narrative approach can continue to be developed and to highlight points of significant distinction from an intra-narrative approach.
Second Stories
The logic of inquiry into “second stories” is to probe the reflexive organization of story clusters. In Sack’s early analysis, offering a second story is most elementally a way that one interlocutor can display their understanding of the prior narrative. That is, conversation participants are doing a kind of fallible but often largely successful live analysis; producing a parallel account proves their understanding by mirroring back the general framework of the first. (This does not necessarily mean that the point of the second story agrees with that of the first, as I will discuss below). It is by virtue of this that “the teller of the second not only claims but proves her/his understanding of the first story through the designed resemblance of the second” (Arminen 2004, 321). Referring to the resemblance of the responsive story as “designed” or “achieved” highlights the fact that it does not just so happen that I have a story which is quite like your story except for a handful of distinct details. Rather, the second story is told so as to highlight matching elements. Because second stories are displays of understanding, their own meaning is also subject to negotiation within the subsequent talk-in-interaction. Consequently, and crucially for the analysis that follows, the interconnectedness of narratives is always intersubjectively constituted within the flow interaction.
Interlocutors’ achievement of a story cluster brings in tow a bevy of possibilities for positioning themselves in relation to one another and to their social milieu. As Maarit Siromaa observes, Conversationalists’ desire to share similar experiences thus manifests itself in second stories. A fitting second story as a response to the initial story illustrates how and to what degree the teller sympathizes and agrees with the preceding story and adjusts her stance relative to the stance of the first storyteller. It has thus been proposed that shared stance, alignment, affiliation, and understanding between participants can be displayed by producing a second story …” (Siromaa 2012, 528)
Examining second stories is thus an inroad to the problem of how inter-narrative connections are brought about amongst co-participants in the social world.
Building upon the literature on second stories, for the remainder of this section I will organize my discussion around interactional operations for which second stories are especially apt with a view to developing two, intertwined observations. First, conversational narrative exchanges can build and reinforce collective social identification as participants co-construct thematic comparability in their experiences and perspectives. Second, the respective meanings of these narratives become transformed because they are reflexively modified by virtue of their being brought to bear upon one another. Overall, we will see that, through the interactional achievement of story clusters, interactional partners co-constitute meaningful forms of social connectedness in and through the relative similarities and differences they articulate in inter-narrative connections.
By clustering their stories, conversation participants are never merely showing that they comprehend one another; rather they are delimiting comparability amongst their respective experiences and perspectives. It can be said that in so constituting analogous relations between narratives, interactional partners are conducting the groundwork of collectivization. To give a mundane example, one of fundamental functions of narrative interactions that feature second stories is that they enable participants to learn about their non-observable similarities to others. In lectures, Sacks spoke about second stories as a remedy for what he termed the “uniqueness problem”: that is, individuals may easily be mistaken in believing they are alone in having a particular kind of experience. Taking, as an example, an undiagnosed chronic pain condition, it can readily be seen that the associated experiences might be anomalous and isolating. But, If I tell somebody else … I produce a response in them which yields that they now will pop up with such a story if they have one … So that though I start with a possible sense of uniqueness I can solve that uniqueness problem by just telling somebody else the story … and it turns out that that’s an occasion for them to tell you that they’re in the same situation … (Sacks 1992b, 258-59)
The specifics of the so-called uniqueness problem aside, Sacks recognized that exactly this kind of effect is fundamental to mutual support organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the primary functions of people’s socializing with one another in these contexts is to become part of a meaningful collective of people with common struggles; in narrating their stories as connected at points, and co-constituting the significance of these inter-narrative conjunctions, participants come to find solace and identification with one another. This is especially powerful, Sacks argued, because a second story consists of a “proved” rather than a “claimed” relationship; there is a significant qualitative difference between respondents using situationally comparable narratives to make their understanding demonstrable and simply claiming “I know just what you mean” (Sacks 1992b, 252). Within second story interactions, each narrator demarcates with the other(s) how the meaning of their respective narratives extends onto their understanding of their own experiences and the social world beyond. This is particularly relevant for an inter-narrative theory of collectivity since the achievement of story clusters is demonstrably a matter of marking out a common lot of co-implicating experiences which can be the basis of social unification in the absence of a single narrative which explicitly articulates a “we” or exemplifies the coherence of an overarching plot.
Because the interactional achievement of a story cluster produces comparable narratives, these narrative exchanges present interactional partners with possibilities for transformative reinterpretations, for broaching disjunctions that qualify and modify the relative extension of their similarity to others, and for forging connectedness without total alignment between narrators. An essential feature of the interactional production of clustered stories is that, by each narrative being comprehended in light of the other, the construable meanings of each are reflexively altered. “Resignification” entails one such reflexive procedure by which the point of a preceding narrative becomes reconstrued by a second; in drawing certain parallels, along with providing evaluative “significance statements,” the teller of a second story suggests a possible interpretation which may provide “the listener with a new sense of what the preceding story is actually about” (Ryave 1978, 130). Building upon this idea, Iilpo Arminen’s (2004) study of Alcoholics Anonymous examined instances where participants’ second stories offer opportunities to tie personal experiences into collectively relevant meanings and values. Within AA, this process was evidenced when long time members would use second stories in order to scaffold new members’ narratives of struggles with alcoholism into culturally recognized experiences such as “hitting rock bottom.” Arminen (2004, 332) suggests that “Second stories thus can transpose the sense of the original stories, and invest them with metaphoric, or even epiphanic, qualities”; accordingly, the meanings effected within these story clusters come to represent more than the interpersonal standing of the two or more interlocutors involved in the dialogue: such exchanges encapsulate and exemplify “symbolic representations for the community” (Arminen 2004, 332) at large.
The pivotal role story clusters can play in fomenting a member’s perspective on a social collective in a context like AA, where sharing personal narratives is a ritualized aspect of participation, may at first blush seem unrepresentative of other social groups. Alcoholics Anonymous is a prominent example for social scientists precisely because narrative practices are a predictable and easy to study feature of meetings, not because the contributions of second stories are unique to this community. My own studies of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements have revealed similar patterns obtain within more informal conversation practices. In a series of life history interviews with people who had left more mainstream Christian congregations to join a Charismatic community, interviewees frequently recounted (unprompted) the significant influence of exchanging personal stories. Second stories were remarked upon as a habitual feature of these formative interactions. Whilst describing her gradual shift from seeing her experiences as anomalous and idiosyncratic to being a sign of richly meaningful spiritual communion that could be shared and cultivated with other believers, one interviewee remarked: “I would come to them and say, ‘This is weird. I experienced this, this, and this.’ They’d go, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s happened to me. And this is what it is.’” Told in form of a habitual narrative (with the modal auxiliary “would”), she grammatically encodes her sense that this was a general and consistent feature of her introduction to the community. While the glossing form in which she recounts these experiences prohibits precise analysis of the ways in which inter-narrative meanings were built up within those interactions, her quotative speech “That’s happened to me. And this is what it is.” also testifies to the fact that her interlocutors oriented to these narrative exchanges as opportunities to constitute generalizable meanings that bridged the disparate narratives. It is always an empirical question just what opportunities to exchange narratives, and what narrative practices will most prominently feature in a particular community’s practice. What is evident, however, is that second stories can play a significant part in constituting the participant’s point of view on social collectives even when the narrative practice of second stories is not a ritualized or formally instituted feature of communal life.
Second stories can at times serve as nuanced devices for argument and remonstration. Sacks offered his students a poignant hypothetical example: If one speaker reports seeing a terrible car accident in such a way as to support the inference that they were staring at the scene, the teller of a second story could very well recount a time when “I was in an auto accident, I was lying on the pavement, and here were all these people standing and gawking at us”; in which case “the comment the second story might be making about the first would be something about, e.g., the immorality of the kind of thing the first reported he had done” (Sacks 1992b, 256). And yet, even disagreeing second stories are not exclusively composed of stark contrasts and rebukes. Rather, even minor differences in the points being made by narrators’ respective stories can sensitize and prime members’ expectations and interpretations of the range of ways of being within a collective. It is partly in consequence of this that, as Carole Cain (1991) has argued, second story interactions can induce interactants to consider new interpretations of their own experience and knowledge in light of that of others. What is most striking here is that, in contrast to the primacy given to consensus in intra-narrative theories, second story interactions suggest that inter-narratively co-constituting narrators’ perspectives and experiences as bearing upon one another, with each narrative figuring in the other’s meaning, is basic, whereas the extent and forms of accord between participants may be considerably more nuanced. Such nuance seems entirely appropriate to a member’s perspective.
At this point, we can return to the two primary observations of this section: First, second story interactions concern the delimitation of comparability between distinct narratives and their narrators. Second stories entail tacit claims to degrees of relative similarity. No two stories are ever the same, but the construction of a second story is organized to achieve recognizable parallels that evidence the respondent’s understanding of the preceding narrative. It should be noted that while the examples given above foreground narratives of personal experience, “first” and “second” stories do not have to be about actions and events interlocutors have been through themselves. These narratives can just as well convey second-hand stories, local news, communal histories, and gossip. In each case, by clustering their stories to highlight comparability, interlocutors are relating to one another’s perspectives in a generalizing manner, co-constituting meaning at the interstices of their respective narratives. As such, the interconnectedness brought about within these conversational narratives situates interlocutors’ in relation within a social field that extends beyond the individual narrators. Success in this endeavor must be regarded as an interactional achievement, as the parallels and their implications are worked out within the conversation in ways both tacit and explicit through the extension, modification, or contestation of the meaning of the “first” in light of the “second.”
Hence, the second observation: in a strict sense, every second story modifies the meaning of the first. Tellers of second stories demonstrate that the kind of experience the first narrator spoke of touches on their lives as well. Vitally, the meaning configuring constitution of relatedness between stories is not a unilateral act carried out by the narrator of the “second story” because the co-construction of clustered stories is always embedded in the reflexive flow of interaction wherein each interlocutor’s contributions lend significance to those of the other. In so highlighting their mutual implication in the social world, communicative partners establish grounds for varying shades of agreement and disagreement of interpretation. The inter-narrative constitution of relatedness is the basis upon which transformations of meaning might be reciprocally established between unique narratives. As shown by Sacks’s discussion of the “uniqueness problem,” even strong alignments between first and second stories hold the potential to augment or reframe the first by demonstrating commonality. Whether interlocutors align with, resignify, or challenge one another’s narratives, second stories always figure the interconnectedness that adumbrate narrators’ standing to one another. As such, narrative interactions that feature second stories hold the potential to initiate connections that account for relative and open-endedly negotiable degrees of similarity and difference. Constructing degrees of similarity in relation to difference is vital, I suggest, not only to the coherence of communication but to the social efficacy of narrative exchange. It is in (often tacit) relation to the incomparable aspects of a narrative that it becomes literally remarkable that a similar thing has happened elsewhere. Even in the case of successful resignification, as in the example from AA, where at times disparate narratives may be interactively worked into institutionally endorsed frameworks, interlocutors locate the social significance of second stories in the comparability, not the identity of their narratives. Accordingly, the analytic approach and theoretical insights pertaining to second stories requires a recognition that the narratives themselves, and the significances they hold for each interlocutor, remain distinct. Instead what is focal is that interactants reflexively work to make observable to one another that their lives are connected at points and that they are, therefore, part of something together—and this something can be a social collective that exceeds the present interaction.
Conclusion
However much a common narrative might appeal as the ideal grounds upon which to theorize the role of narratives in undergirding members’ sense of collectivity, there are significant limitations imposed by this focus. I have argued that the tendency to resort to single narratives emerges from theoretically linking the constitution of meaningful collectivity with the coherence internal to narrative. The consequences are, I believe, undesirable. In addition to having a limited range of narratives to which such a theory can apply, reliance on a model of narrative meaning that can only reckon with single narratives has resulted in an overdetermination of the role of consensus in generating meaningful collectivity. There is nothing inherently wrong with the notion of “intra-narrative” coherence. Only, when treated as the solitary structure upon which narrative meaning hangs, it produces an inadequate picture of social collectives. It is for this reason that I have argued that the conditions laid out by intra-narrative theories do not exhaust the ways that individuals narratively constitute the contours of a collective and their standing amongst other members; nor do studies of even highly organized or ideologically-driven collectives support the notion that individual narratives meaningfully encapsulate all collectives or that particular narratives necessarily must be shared amongst their members. These considerations suggest that there is a need to understand how participants may develop their sense of a collective “inter-narratively” through connections drawn between disparate narratives.
Rather than laying out a comprehensive inter-narrative theory, this essay has taken “second stories” as a prototype for the general approach. Interactions that feature second stories do not circumscribe or fully spell out the reach of an inter-narrative approach, but they are a uniquely productive ground for thinking through its possibilities. Moreover, they root our thinking about the place of narrative in collective life within the mundane but vital work people undertake to locate and negotiate the significance of their relative points of connection—a task into which individuals may even enter inadvertently in the course of narrative exchanges in interaction with others.
What I have here called the “intra-” and “inter-narrative” approaches stand in a complex relation to one another. They are certainly not diametrically opposed alternatives. To start with, the same tools of narrative interpretation that ground the intra-narrativists’ claims about the structure and meaningful coherence of narrative are ostensibly utilized in interactants’ real-time interpretation of one another’s narratives and deployed in their creative construction of parallels. As such, the properties and possibilities of narrative are common to the two approaches. An inter-narrative approach, however, cannot lean exclusively upon the meaning of a given narrative in isolation, since the interactional work of connecting stories reflexively modifies their respective meaning.
For intra-narrative theories discussed here, the possibility that narrative can integrate or bolster collectives is conditional on the narrative being about the collective in question. This is not, in my view, a claim that can be robustly challenged or defended without further working out what this “aboutness” entails. It has not been my aim to do so in this paper. The main distinction worth emphasizing at this point is that inter-narrative meanings are worked out locally and the interconnections participants interactively achieve can figure their relatedness to one another, differentiated forms of belonging, and common objects of concern without necessarily involving the articulation of a “we narrative”; it is a possibility that these interactions may spawn a new narrative that articulates a collective subject in accounting for this connectedness (e.g., “We non-drinking alcoholics have all hit rock bottom at some point before committing to sobriety”); this is, however, a contingent outcome and thus not a requirement built into the analytic strategy of an inter-narrative approach or the interactional phenomena it highlights. Rather than disputing the role of narratives in which a collective figures as character, a goal of this essay has been to open lines of inquiry that would be foreclosed by stipulating the subject of the narrative from the outset.
There are, however, points of more direct contrast. The intra- and inter-narrative approaches seem necessarily to diverge in their handling of interpersonal and factional differences within a given collective. Proponents of the intra-narrative approach have rightly underscored the problem of conflicting accounts and dissenting views. This is a realistic and appropriate concern—especially because the emphasis on typically single, and always well proliferated, narratives could otherwise lead to prioritizing domination over consensus; and, apart from being an ethically and politically undesirable entailment, this would mitigate the intra-narrativists’ claims regarding the cohesive effects of a shared narrative. That said, difference is largely treated as a disclaimer rather than centrally figuring in the proposed functions of narrative. For an inter-narrative approach, particularly in light of the interactional dynamics at play in second stories, it is a fundamental feature of the way meaning is co-constructed across the asymmetrical fields of similarity and difference evinced in participants’ narratives. Difference is endemic to the transformations of meaning and forms of juncture that take place within narrative exchange.
Finally, I have argued that intra-narrativists have built their theories around paradigmatically singular narratives. An inter-narrative approach, in contrast, necessarily proceeds through the various and differentiated connections members draw amongst a plurality of narratives. There is, accordingly, no expectation baked into an inter-narrative approach that the work that interactants take to articulate the connectedness of their knowledge and experiences resolves into a common narrative. While I have insisted that the intra- and inter-narrative approaches are not diametrically opposed there are good reasons to think that an inter-narrative approach might offer unique advantages for a narrative theory of collectives. What all members have in common with one another may be very much ambiguous—not just theoretically, but on the part of those participating in a collective (Cohen 1985, 1994; Stromberg 1986). The nature of an individual’s identification with a collective can also vary; for some, the symbolic significance or practical aims of the collective may be of primary importance, while for others its meaningfulness might be vested in personal relationships with (even just a few) other members (Sapir 1932 [1999]). While these considerations do not exclude that any range commonalities may obtain, they should caution us against ensconcing foundational sharedness into our analytic frameworks themselves. An inter-narrative approach has as its aim, then, to grasp the means and consequences of participants co-constituting an evolving sense of collectivity through narrative interchange.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the editors and two anonymous reviewers. This research was conducted during a postdoc at the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS) at the University of Copenhagen and owes much to the support of Dan Zahavi and the members of the Early Ideas Working Group at CFS. Devin Flaherty provided insightful commentary on early drafts.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Financial support for this research was generously provided through the Carlsberg Foundation (Grant No. CF18-1107).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.