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Corner, J. (2024). The ‘Narrative Turn’ Revisited: A Brief Note on Political Storytelling. Media Theory, 8(2), 147–156. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v8i2.1122

The ‘Narrative Turn’ Revisited: A Brief Note on Political Storytelling

JOHN CORNER

University of Leeds, UK

Abstract

This note reviews, through examples, how narrative remains a powerful and changing element in public communication, refreshed not only by shifts in technologies and modes but also by the tonalities and affective character of contemporary political exchange.

Keywords

Storytelling, Populism, Public Opinion, Political Strategies

Recognition of the importance of narrative forms, narrative functions and modes of narrative analysis beyond the humanities, connecting across the sphere of social inquiry, has now been shown for many decades. The observation by Martin Kreiswirth (1992) that there had been a marked ‘turn’ towards a broader critical engagement was an early and influential attempt at an overview. Kreiswirth began his account with a series of questions:

The large question I want to ask is why? Why narrative? And why narrative now? Why have we decided to trust the tale? And what does this say about how we define, organise and talk about knowledge? (1992: 630)

He outlined his project as being:

To examine the way that narrative, both as a subject and a tool, is configured and described from different disciplinary positions (1992: 630).

However, the range and the centrality of narrative forms to popular social knowledge and political exchange have continued to increase since his time of writing, with the rapid expansion and impact of modes of online ‘storytelling’ one key factor here. Another factor has been the growing use of the term itself in relation to political publicity, both by those involved in its construction (‘we need a new narrative’) and those involved in political reporting (‘a different narrative around economic recovery has recently emerged’).

As a result of this, forms of storytelling have become ever more central to political claims-making, such that what are in essence issues of narrative have often become interlinked with the issues surrounding ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ – terms which, among other things, point to shifts (sometimes marginal, sometimes substantive) in the forms taken by the practices of political deception. These practices have, of course, a very long history, a flourishing present in which some official political debate has effectively become ‘a battle of lies’ and, regrettably, what looks likely to be a promising future.

One very recent example indicating the international scope of the emphasis on narrative comes from two Chinese scholars (Xu and Gong, 2024) who examine the slogan of ‘Telling China’s Story Well’ from its proposal by President Xi Jinping at the 2013 National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference in Beijing through its subsequent, modified use during the pandemic. They argue that the slogan ‘has the rhetorical power to integrate and reinvigorate domestic and external propaganda’ and that its use demonstrates the ambition ‘to harness strategic storytelling to improve ‘coherence’ and ‘effectiveness’ (2023: 3). Both these capacities result largely from the holistic and affective character of narrative when compared with older, conventional forms of public informational flow as carried, for instance, in separate acts of description and argument and sometimes in detailed policy statements. Another recent article (Makela et al, 2021) puts its focus on modes of political storytelling in social media. In its general comments, it makes an important point about narratives and relativism, about the contradictory way in which, as well as functioning to install and assert certain ‘truths’, the narrative economy can also be put to use in creating areas of strategic uncertainty:

Indeed, it has become one predominant function of narratives in social debate to contest how events are perceived and understood. Further, narrative is even used to relativize factual arguments—to argue that everything, from justifying policies to determining what someone really did or said, is a matter of perspective or presentation (Makela et al, 2021: 146).

In this note I want to engage briefly with selected aspects of the ‘narrative’ dimension to contemporary media flows about social and political life and the overlapping or contradictory stories thereby generated, well aware that the territory is now vast and varied and increasingly explored through a range of subspecialist agendas and methods. Here, an excellent set of podcasts about styles of political storytelling and the various strategies that underpin their use can be found in Coleman (2024).

Narrative and the ‘fiction-effect’

First of all, we might note how the term ‘narrative’ can be applied across social and political discourse in tighter or looser ways. In the looser applications, it broadly covers any discursive practice that has ‘story-like’ characteristics alongside whatever other propositional, evidential and argumentative features it may possess. In tighter applications it points to accounts where the narrative movement and pacing, including the modes of character portrayal and the dramatic level of the incidents described, become closer to those of fiction and have a key structural role in the account, whether written or spoken. Popular accounts across different media, including social media, have inclined further towards a more forceful expressive shaping as the competition for visibility, engagement and intensity of projected experience has increased. The links with modes of ‘gossip’, with their implications of unsubstantiated and often hostile accounts, have become stronger as the forms of digital expression have become closer to the modes of speech. In the next section, I will examine an instance of these modes at work in political journalism.

Of key importance in the functioning of narratives of any kind as an element of social and political claims-making is the implying of causal linkage, both regarding past events and future possibilities, within a framework of judgement (sometimes implied, sometimes not) that carries affective resonance. More broadly, the factor of resonance connects back to points made in Paul Ricœur’s hugely influential writing, in particular his comments on the importance of the modality of the ‘imaginary’ and of ‘figurativeness’ in the writing of history. In his observations, he introduces the idea of the ‘fiction effect:

This fiction-effect, if we may call it so, is also found to be augmented by the various rhetorical strategies that I mentioned in my review of theories of reading. A history book can be read as a novel. In doing this, we enter into an implicit pact of reading and share in the complicity it establishes between the narrative voice and the implied reader. By virtue of this pact, the reader’s guard is lowered. Mistrust is willingly suspended. Confidence reigns (Ricœur, 1988: 186).

Providing accounts of political situations in the stronger forms of narrative has a similar effect in reducing the possible levels of scepticism which might be offered against them. Narratives invite us to immerse ourselves, often enjoyably, in their ‘storyworlds’rather than to evaluate closelytheir descriptive and propositional infrastructure. At the same time, they can exert a strong displacing pressure on those previous accounts which, taking more directly descriptive/argumentative forms, lacked the imaginative appeal of the narrative offer. They can thereby make difficult any attempt at effective criticism, refutation or alternative which does not itself use a strong narrative frame. A further point to make here is that once a narrative has become strongly established across a public or a subsection of the public it can be invoked for expansion, elaboration or even revision in relation to shifting circumstances through short inputs, written or spoken, which deploy a connection/reminder to the key characters, events or phrases previously ‘installed’. It becomes an always available, flexible, quickly comprehensible and affectively-charged map for understanding ‘what is happening and why?’ (Ash, Gauthier and Widmer (2024) develop a methodology for tracking the interconnections across a spread of political narratives, effectively a narrative network). This situation clearly connects directly with those broader discussions of the ‘political imaginary’ which have followed the pioneering work of Castoriadis (1987) and Taylor (2004) among others. A recent review of the literature here noted:

The imaginary poses questions of how we know the political and how the political is made. It illuminates the emergence of political forms and the unrecognised constraints that condition practices and understandings (Browne and Diehl, 2019: 396-97).

National stories and the ‘populist’ frame

Surrounding the deployment of political storytelling in most instances and strategically connecting with it, there are of course the much broader, looser, pre-installed and variously contested narratives of nation, incorporating variously elements of history, what are judged to be the essential characteristics (including of race and religion), perceived internal and external threats and perhaps notions of destiny. Angharad Closs Stephens valuably discusses the features of new nationalist frames and their modes of expression (their ‘narratives of attachment’) in her discussion of Laurent Berlant’s ideas (Closs Stephens, 2023). An international shift towards versions of a ‘populist’ frame brought about by changes in geopolitical power relations, disruptions within national versions of the economic and political ‘order’, and consequently, volatile patterns of public discontent with present circumstances and future prospects, has been widely analysed and debated. Muller (2017) and Moffitt (2020) have been influential in informing debate and Sorensen (2023) assesses the distinctive communicative modes at work.

When identifying a rhetorical attempt to construct a ‘people’ and ‘popular opinion’ for the political ends of pre-existing authoritarian power-blocs rather than the development of a broader, inclusive polity of civic involvement and resource-use, the term ‘populist’ is clearly pejorative. Trump’s now continuing project of American renewal against the perceived betrayals of liberal elites and containment by a ‘deep state’ has been a much-discussed example of this kind of inventive storytelling within the national frame. It has strategically combined modes of categoric assertion with relativism in the manner noted by Makela et al (2021) cited earlier. Rhetorically cultivating fear as much as hope, and mixing belief with doubt, it has been effective enough to keep the idea of the ‘stolen election’ of 2020 active and influential against the documented facts, thereby better positioning Trump for his 2024 electoral victory.

In Britain, the 2016 ‘Brexit’ vote to leave the European Union was also the consequence of populist narrative crafting by the established economic and social forces of the Right. In their ‘story’, anxieties about immigration and subordination to European bureaucracy were placed, with boldly deceptive skill (‘Take Back Control’), against the vision of a regained ‘sovereignty’ releasing the inherent energies and initiative of the nation. This is a project still in process, if fading in intensity and showing increased anger and bitterness in its telling as the promised economic and social benefits have failed to appear. It has required ever more inventiveness and shrillness in the identification of those factors, including those of betrayal and inner subversion, thwarting its realization. Coverage of the British General Election of July 2024 and the first months of the Labour government showed these themes to be powerfully at work in large sections of the British media. Such factors quickly become elements of what is the most inflexible and emphatic of contemporary narrative forms in public life – the conspiracy theory.

One example from deep-level storymaking about Britain, with precedents and parallels in the United States and elsewhere, would be the way in which strongly negative tales of ‘woke’ and ‘wokeness’ continue to be rendered across the mediasphere, including as a regular feature of front-page stories in the popular press and media. For instance:

‘Fury at Woke Barristers Refusing to Prosecute Eco-warriors’ (Daily Mail, 24 March, 2023).

‘Brits Say No to Woke’ (The Sun, 2 May, 2023).

‘Woke Culture is Poisoning Common Sense’ (Daily Express, 12 Feb, 2024).

‘If the British Red Cross wants to be Woke, it should start by changing its name (Daily Telegraph, 1 Sep, 2024).

‘Immigration and Woke Ideology has put ‘English Identity at Risk’ (GB News, 24 September, 2024).

These headlines, the stories that follow them, and the many items like them, including on social media, create a running, repetitive drama of national peril as Left or Liberal thinking is seen to undercut national integrity. They are offered as reports from a war zone. They are strong in intensity (‘fury’, ‘poison’) and often have contradictory elements (If ‘Brits’ are saying ‘no’, what is the problem?). The strategically loose notion of ‘woke’, largely replacing that of ‘political correctness’ with an intensified degree of scorn, is ideal for this populist narrative project (among other discussions of its development as a key ‘enemy’, see Cammaerts, 2022). It suggests a pervasive national inability to make ‘good judgements’ and ‘good decisions’ almost as the result of some infection or implantation targeting key groups and actors (including the police, public bodies and parts of the legal system). In its warnings, it offers a kind of remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers without the science-fiction. Repetition is not a problem for its narrative design; being essentially ritualistic and fabulist in character, it thrives on the regular renewal of the fears and pleasure it brings to its readership through repeat performances. Although this narrative mode has its roots in older styles of sensationalist journalism, it has intensified as a result of the intemperate character, exaggerations and repetitions of much web discourse and, as I noted earlier, the greatly increased competition for public attention.

Clearly, beyond the sphere of nationalist populisms but drawing upon them, major international conflicts such those involving Ukraine and Russia or Israel and Gaza have also shown the intensified use of contesting ‘master’ narratives. These have given emphasis to some factors of history, economy and population, strategically omitted others and made connections variously both with the contesting discourses of international diplomacy and of international journalism. For instance, the ‘back-story’ of Israel has remained subject to sometimes fraught contestation since the founding of the Jewish state, whatever the sustained commitment by the United States to promoting positive versions both of it and its later ‘chapters’ (on frameworks for understanding the developing situation in Gaza and Lebanon at the time of writing, see Zevin, 2023 and Chambers, 2024).

Narrative challenges and responses

How to challenge dominant narratives? Here, moves towards generating effective counter-narratives, whatever the difficulties, are likely to be more productive than attempts at modes of public critique on their own. For instance, Nordensvard and Ketola (2022) instructively compare Trump and Greta Thunberg’s very different accounts of climate change as diverse modes of populist storytelling.

Critique brings sharper understanding within its limited sphere of circulation but it is not a mode of direct political engagement and it does not itself bring change (an extensive discussion around this and related issues is contained in Phelan, Dawes and Maeseele (eds.) 2023 and see Corner (2024) on the relation between media research and media reform). Too often, and particularly within the academic sphere, it has been tempted to work not with the ‘people as they are’ but with ideas of ‘the people as they might be’ or ‘the popular in waiting’, so to speak. In a rather contradictory manner, it has thus implied a politics that has to wait on a progressive historical shift for its moment. The alternative noted above means, in many national contexts, not only accepting a heavily narrativized politics as the norm but working to produce competing, narratively engaging, accounts of ‘what is happening and why’.

Such a project, one of adopting a discursive approach associated with reactionary political projects for very different ends, the expanding of active democracy, raises many questions, ethical and practical, quite apart from the huge challenge involved in attempting to counter the well-resourced, increasingly confident and internationally-linked advance of the Right. These include the play-off between the desirable and the possible, questions which figured in discussion of Chantel Mouffe’s (2018) robustly general agenda for a Left political re-connection via modes of ‘populist’ appeal. To what extent the adoption of a new discursive approach can finally help to usher in altered relations of power, including economic power, and thereby significant and sustainable new terms for democratic governance is deeply uncertain, as Didier Fassin points out in his shrewd analysis of Mouffe’s ideas (Fassin, 2020). In a way which connects with my comments above, Fassin also notes how projects for the reconstitution of a ‘popular’ political culture need to be grounded in firm and steady attention to existing affiliations, fears, doubts and hopes. They also need to relate to, without mimicking, the language of their present expression.

 Reviewing the wider frame of possibilities for increasing media ‘freedom’, Dawes (2023) usefully emphasizes the severe limitations of the dominant ‘liberal’ models for achieving this. He points to the way in which the media’s own versions of these are often grounded in private ownership and freedom from regulation, factors which frequently constitute the central problem for political and public culture. He concludes that only a shift to an emphasis on expanded ‘civic’ freedoms can engage properly with what needs to happen in the mediasphere.

However, whatever else will be necessary and whatever the routes taken, no progressive politics is likely without a vigorously strategic and imaginative telling of stories that receive a widespread civic affirmation.

References

Ash, E., G. Gauthier and P. Widmer (2024) ‘RELATIO – Text Semantics Capture Political and Economic Narratives’, Political Analysis 32(1): 115-132.

Browne, C. and P. Diehl (2019) ‘Conceptualizing the Political Imaginary’, Introduction to Special Issue, Social Epistemology 33(5): 393-397.

Cammaerts, B. (2022) ‘The Abnormalisation of Social Justice’, Discourse and Society 33(6): 730-743.

Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge MASS: MIT Press.

Chambers, I. (2024) ‘Guilt, Gaza, and the Shoah’, Media Theory Blog:  https://‌mediatheoryjournal.org/2024/03/19/iain-chambers-guilt-gaza-and-the-shoah.

Closs Stephens, A. (2023) ‘What Does Lauren Berlant Teach Us about Affect, Mediation and Global Nationalism? Media Theory 7(2): 191-208.

Coleman, S. (2024) The Sound of Politics. Podcast at https://open.‌spotify.‌com/‌show/7kjQ9fViX3oFuBeIp84H4h.

Corner, J. (2024) ‘Media Research and Proposals for Media Reform’, Media Culture and Society 46(2): 436-443.

Dawes, S. (2023) ‘Breaking News: Media Freedom in Crisis’, in J. Petley and J. Steel (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Freedom of Expression and Censorship. Abingdon: Routledge.

Fassin, D. (2020) ‘The Blind Spots of Left Populism’, openDemocracy: https://www.‌opendemocracy.net/en/rethinking-populism/blind-spots-left-populism/ posted 18 Dec.

Kreiswirth, M. (1992) ‘Trusting the Tale: The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences’, New Literary History 23(3): 629-657.

Makela, M., S. Bjorninen, L. Karttunen, M. Nurminen, J. Raipola and T. Rantanen (2021) ‘Dangers of Narrative: A Critical Approach to Narratives of Personal Experience in the Contemporary Story Economy’, Narrative 29(2): 139-159.

Moffitt, B. (2020) Populism. Cambridge: Polity.

Mouffe, C. (2018) For a Left Populism. London: Verso Books.

Muller, J-W. (2017) What is Populism? Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Nordensvard, J. and M. Ketola (2022) ‘Populism as an Act of Storytelling’, Environmental Politics 31(5): 861-882.

Phelan, S., S. Dawes and P. Maeseele (eds.) (2023) ‘Critique, Postcritique and the Present Conjuncture’, Special issue, Media Theory 7(1).

Ricœur, P. (1988) Time and Narrative, Vol 3. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.

Sorensen, L. (2023) ‘Populist Disruption and the Fourth Age of Political Communication’, European Journal of Communication 39(1): 71-85.

Taylor, C. (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Xu, J. and Q. Gong (2024) ‘Telling China’s Story Well as Propaganda Campaign Slogan’, Media Culture & Society 46(5): 1064-74.

Zevin, A. (2023) ‘Gaza and New York’. New Left Review 144 (Nov Dec): 1-19.

John Corner is Visiting Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds and Professor Emeritus of the University of Liverpool. He has published widely since the 1970s in a range of international journals and in books. Recent articles or chapters have included work on opinion polls and political journalism, the new documentary economy, celebrity politics and the fake news debate.

Email: J.R.Corner@leeds.ac.uk