Narrative is often celebrated as the primary vehicle of meaning: the way humans make sense of experience, transmit values, and imagine alternatives. We are told that better stories can change the world.
Relationally, this is only half true.
Narrative does not merely make sense of experience. It stabilises coordination by smoothing contingency, compressing time, and reducing revisability. Its power lies not in what it says, but in how it organises intelligibility.
Narrative as Temporal Compression
At its core, narrative transforms uncertainty into sequence:
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events are ordered
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causes are clarified
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outcomes are rendered intelligible
This temporal compression is comforting. It turns open-ended processes into trajectories and accidents into inevitabilities.
But this comfort has a cost: possibility is narrowed. What might have been otherwise becomes what “had to happen”.
Heroes, Villains, and Moral Alignment
Narratives stabilise coordination by distributing roles:
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heroes anchor admiration
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villains anchor blame
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victims anchor sympathy
These roles are not merely representational. They are coordination devices. They tell us:
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who to side with
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how to feel
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when judgement is complete
Once roles are fixed, revisability declines. New information threatens not just beliefs, but the coherence of the story itself.
The Illusion of Closure
Narratives promise closure: an ending that resolves tension and restores order. Closure feels like understanding.
Yet closure often functions as premature stabilisation. It discourages further inquiry by presenting the situation as settled, finished, or morally resolved.
This is why narrative-heavy discourse often resists revision. To reopen the question feels like undoing meaning itself.
Why “Better Stories” Often Fail
Calls for better or more inclusive stories assume that narrative is inherently liberatory. But narrative form itself tends toward stabilisation:
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it selects
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it excludes
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it fixes relations
Even progressive narratives can become rigid, policing how one is allowed to speak, feel, or belong.
The problem is not the politics of the story, but the structural work narrative performs.
Narrative and Power
Narratives are especially effective tools of power because they:
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operate affectively
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feel natural and humane
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conceal their stabilising function
Institutions, movements, and media rely on narrative not simply to persuade, but to freeze coordination long enough to act.
This is why counter-narratives so often reproduce the same exclusions they seek to undo.
Living Without Narrative Closure
None of this implies that narrative should be abandoned. Rather, it must be handled carefully.
Relationally responsible use of narrative:
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resists totalising arcs
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leaves room for interruption
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foregrounds contingency rather than inevitability
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treats closure as provisional
Such narratives feel unsettling because they refuse to do narrative’s usual stabilising work.
Closing
Narrative is not neutral. It is a technology that stabilises coordination by organising time, roles, and outcomes. Its power lies in making uncertainty feel resolved.
To work relationally is to recognise when narrative is closing possibility — and to resist the urge to let coherence stand in for truth.
In the next post, we turn from stories to something even quieter and more powerful: taste — and how belonging and exclusion operate without ever being named.
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