What are we talking about? Who’s ‘we’ anyway?
Telling stories
Popular consciousness might be defined as a common understanding of the
world through stories. Stories percolate through popular consciousness by
many means - some by deliberate manipulation, some more haphazardly, orchestrated
by a diversity of intention, different strands of narrative intertwining
to create a matrix of understandings. There are the big, global stories
- and cinema has been a major carrier of these - and I think all the big
stories, including the fascistic ones, are powerful, glamorous, seductive.
The different strands of media tell a multiplicity of stories. They feed
into, nourish, are supported by and/or undermine each other in a turbulent
and unpredictable dynamic. Human beings understand themselves and their
place in the world in relation to this network of global and local stories.
These stories are what make our lived experience coherent to us: they give
us a set of reference points, a point at which we can weave ourselves into
the matrix of imagination and lived experience, an anchoring point from
which our own stories make sense.
Some stories we perceive as true, those told by the apparatus of journalism.
Stories about spirituality and ethics are told through the impulse towards
philosophy and religious faith. And art tells mythical, poetic, emotional
stories, and combines the subject matter and the methodology of all the
other storytelling systems, to encompass stories about the divine, the mundane,
the global, the domestic, the silly, the funny, the playful, the pleasurable,
the serious, the totally not-funny at all, in a network of transcendence
and integration, driven by metaphor.
But if the stories of a whole group of people are missing from popular consciousness,
our understanding of where and who we are is skewed. The implications of
this are massive. It is not simply a question of limited imagination - or
perhaps it would be more accurate to say, limited imagination potentially
has deadly serious implications. If, for example, the stories of half the
population are missing, this has enormous consequences for the conditions
under which they live their lives - and there are enough highly visible
current events right now, the summer of 2004, to make this statement without
even evoking the obvious example of the history of feminism and women’s
rights in general.