The Politics of Education and the Digital Turn in Storytelling A Critical Introduction
Storytelling is an activity with important social and political functions. The digital turn in education affects the educational functions of storytelling in ambivalent ways. While the emancipative affordances of this turn are given much visibility in academic and corporate discourse, the risks are neglected. Education and storytelling are influential practices in the social construction of reality. The uncritical endorsement of the digital turn in storytelling, however, makes education vulnerable to the influence of technocentrism and its myths. The ideas that images "have power" that digital community can compensate for the isolation of the individual and that the digital "revolution" brings about the "end of history" and politics are influential manifestations of these myths. The possibility for the digital turn in education and storytelling to open up emancipative opportunities depends on the extent to which educators are aware of and able to develop countermeasures against the oppressive tendencies associated with technocentrism and its myth. The chapters in this collection aim at supporting the efforts in this direction. 1. The Politics of Education, the Functions of Storytelling and the Problem of Control The politics of education is a key dimension in the competition for control over the future of society. For the actors participating in this competition, mastering the functions of storytelling is both crucial and elusive. It is crucial because storytelling is the activity through which the meaning of the world and the social world itself are created. It is elusive because storytelling is everywhere, present in numerous forms and shapes, public and private, and mediated and non mediated communication. The dual and perhaps contradicting nature of storytelling functions poses a very practical problem for those forces in society that are in apprehension of the intrinsic capacity of storytelling's meaning generation ability to subvert existing relations of power. The political ambivalence of this capacity reflects the broader ambivalence of education: necessary but dangerous. The question of control is rooted in this ambivalence and in the efforts to resolve the uncertainty it generates in one direction or another. In much of the relevant literature, digital storytelling is credited with all the functions of traditional storytelling in addition to the alleged virtues of digital Matteo Stocchetti 9783631675441 Downloaded from PubFactory at 07/22/2019 09:08:25AM via free access Matteo Stocchetti 14 technology. The potential of this combination seems to exceed the mere sum of its parts. In this chapter I discuss the power of storytelling and the implications of the "digital turn" separately, in order to avoid confusing the two. Clarifying this confusion is especially important because it helps to avoid the intrinsic attribution of the emancipative properties of storytelling to digital technology while disclosing the ideological implications of the digital turn in the politics of education. By changing the rituals associated with the practices of storytelling, the digital turn frames the role of storytelling in education within the myths associated with digital technology and, in doing so, enforces the performative control of digital institutions on the subversive potential of the culture, if not the content, of storytelling itself. It may be a good idea to start by discussing the power of storytelling, its fundamental ambivalence and the problem of control that it implies. Among the most effective and, in a sense, most radical cases for the power of storytelling is still that made by Jerome Bruner when he claimed that reality itself is constituted through narrative form (Bruner, 1991: 5) All other functions commonly attributed to storytelling, including its pedagogical functions, are in fact included in the idea that narratives are the tools through which reality itself, as accessible to humans, is constructed. If the idea of the "narrative construction of reality" sounds too generic to underscore the problem of control, one should consider that most of the relevant practices to establish, reproduce or subvert relations of power are based on and are intelligible through storytelling of some sort. The broad notion that storytelling is essentially about sense making points, for example, to a variety of communicative practices with important political implications such as the legitimisation of political power, the construction and manipulation of the symbols of collective identity, the interpretation of history and collective memory, the social construction of truth etc. Justification, for example, is a particular form of sense making through storytelling: an explanation with strong moral elements that perform important emotional and cognitive functions at individual and collective levels. Painful personal experiences need to be made sense of to deal with their emotional implications but also with the rational need to control the possibility of their occurrence in the future. At the collective level, events that can seriously undermine the integrity of the community also need justification. The best examples that come to my mind are the narratives of war casualties, especially in the Great War, and the narratives of economic "austerity" deployed in Western Europe since 2008. The justification of war casualties usually contains the idea that the sacrifice of so many young lives has not been in vain. This is obviously easier for the societies of those states that Matteo Stocchetti 9783631675441 Downloaded from PubFactory at 07/22/2019 09:08:25AM via free access Politics of Education and the Digital Turn in Storytelling 15 won the war. But the idea of sacrifice in these narratives also contains normative values that stretch into the future: from the sacrifice of the past into the lives of the present and the possibility of their sacrifice in the future (Mosse, 1990) More recently, the economic crisis triggered by the financial speculation in the US has been made sense of through narratives of sacrifice similar to those used in war, but ones in which democracy seems to be the first casualty: a luxury that the European citizen may not be able to afford anymore (Silva Escorihuela, 2013: 1 8) When wars or other dramatic events occur that may undermine social cohesion, institutions may engage in "authoritative sensemaking" through forms of storytelling that reduce public anxiety but also reassert the integrity of social institutions that the crisis may undermine, through myths that depoliticise the crisis (Brown, 2004: 95 112) The concept of legitimisation usually describes the form of justification involved when political power is at stake. The legitimisation of the forms of authority described by Max Weber traditional, charismatic and legal rational is grounded in narratives of one form or another. It is through these narratives that traditions, charisma and law itself become influential in the daily lives of people. In practice, to legitimise the power of some individuals, groups or institutions means to justify their power but also, and maybe this is the distinctive content of this concept, to issue an implicit claim about the rightfulness of the concrete manifestations of this power in the future. In the critical tradition, Walter Benjamin's ideas about the importance of storytelling and the politics of truth are probably among the most influential in contemporary research. Narges Erami, for example, uses Benjamin's essay The Storyteller to deploy a metaphorical linkage between carpet making and storytelling in support of the case for the ethnographic and "experiential" significance of the latter (Erami, 2015) Inspired by the same essay, in addition to the works of Kierkegaard, Jung, Heidegger, Bruner and others, Patrick J. Lewis juxtaposes research and storytelling in a passionate plaidoyer for the value of the latter in human life in general and teaching in particular (Lewis, 2011: 505 510) Annabel Herzog argues that Hannah Arendt's ideas about political storytelling and the "redemptive power of narrative" (Benhabib, 1990) were inspired by Benjamin's notion of storytelling as interpretation and the relation that, through this notion, connects history to those who experience it (a collective) through storytelling (Herzog, 2002: 89) The emancipative function of storytelling emerges quite clearly in both Benjamin and Arendt's endorsement of the idea that the truth that can be passed on by the storytellers is the Matteo Stocchetti 9783631675441 Downloaded from PubFactory at 07/22/2019 09:08:25AM via free access Matteo Stocchetti 16 point of view of the defeated and the dead the story told by those who have experienced the events and who, by virtue of this very fact, cannot tell and will never be able to tell any story. (Herzog, 2000: 15) In this account the power of storytelling consists in the recovery of a "destructive standpoint" which "dissociates the linearity of the victors' commemoration and wrecks conformist historical narrative" (Herzog, 2000: 15) If storytelling is the activity that can recover the truth of those who are denied the power of objectivity, one may appreciate with a certain dose of irony, the idea that even the authority of science needs narrative support. Jean Francoise Lyotard famously argued about the importance of narrative legitimisation of truth in the practices of scientific enquiry to ground its thesis about the "incredulity towards metanarratives" that, in his view, is the distinctive trait of the "postmodern condition" (Lyotard, [1979] 1982: xxiv) In relation to our discussion, I would argue that this "condition" is not one in which storytelling has lost its power but rather one in which performativity or "legitimization by power" (Lyotard, [1979] 1982: 45 48) signal a fundamental change in the nature of the dominant "grand narrative" a new story in which "truth"