Gender and Agency by Lois McNay

Author:Lois McNay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press

Ideological and primary narratives

An ontological conception of narrative points towards the inherently symbolic nature of all action. Meaning is not inherent to action but is the product of intrepretative strategies amongst which narrative is central. In other words, the concept of agency that emerges neither rests upon an idea of unmediated practice nor does it dismiss action as an illusion of free will. One of the implications of the claim that action is symbolic in nature is that it throws into doubt conventional ‘negative’ conceptions of ideology which, to some degree, are based on a notion of an illusory distortion of the objective structure of action. If action derives its significance from interpretation, then any distinction between ideological and other narratives on the grounds of a separation between reality and illusion is problematic because all narratives are interpretative in nature. Narrative order is neither false in the sense that it constitutes an illusory coherence imposed upon the heterogeneity of experience; nor does it signify authenticity in that narration always effects a metaphorization of the real.

This understanding of narrative problematizes some of the assumptions of standpoint theory and other types of interpretative feminism which attribute an ‘authentic’ status to women’s social experience. For example, Dorothy Smith’s work on the everyday presumes a rupture in social consciousness between women’s daily experience – ‘primary narratives’ – and formal, impersonal modes of interpretation – ‘ideological narratives’ – that form part of an ‘apparatus of ruling’ (Smith 1990: 142). Smith explicitly rejects a simple distinction between ideological and primary narratives, arguing that there is always an imbrication of pre-given interpretative schemata within individual self-understanding to the extent that there is no ‘one objective account of what actually happened’ (1990: 157). Her implicit reliance, however, on a Schutzian notion of a presocial origin to consciousness results in an over-rigid distinction in which primary narratives are seen to adequate more closely than ideological narratives to the original temporal sequence of a given experience: ‘Interpretations are, in principle, to be checked against the original experience that the narrative “recapitulates”’ (1990: 159). Ideological narratives do not proceed in this fashion in that the formal encoding of experience for a particular end (for example, legal discourse) is highly selective and imposes a ‘conceptual agenda’ that is not concerned with matching the raw material of the original experience (1990: 160).

Ricoeur’s notion of the pre-interpretative or inherently symbolic nature of experience throws into question the idea that there can be any originary, raw material of experience against which the ‘deviation’ of more abstracted levels of discourse can be checked. The inherent connectivity of narrative meaning, that is, that meaning emerges only by placing events in temporal and spatial relationships with other events, questions the idea that a primary or original experience can be recovered (Somers and Gibson 1994: 59). The construction of any narrative, primary or otherwise, always involves an imaginative process of configuration that results in ‘an unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience’ (Ricoeur 1992: 162). In short, all narratives

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