C-CS

Configuring/Configurations

ABSTRACT

Storytelling is a fundamental form of human communication. We become fully aware of our own lives through the process of putting our experiences together in story form. By the same token, we understand other persons (including those unlike us) by the stories they tell us about themselves. When the stories others tell us about themselves are similar to our own life story, they are much easier to understand than life stories that are strange to us.

Many of the story forms (narrative structures) that we use in telling our own personal history are borrowed from the cultures to which we belong. Legends, folk tales, fairy tales, saints lives, stories about heroes and heroines are cultural configurations. The life-story pattern can be traced from ancient epics through the Grail Quest romances and the Bildungsromane to contemporary novels of growing up. The life story is the story of the hero/heroine with a thousand faces. Every culture has its own version. The process of storytelling in the context of understanding ourselves and others is termed "configuring." The key element in configuring is the "transposition" of self and other. The understanding of a configuration requires configuring.

Configuring is the means by which we bridge the gaps in experience occasioned by null experiences when we communicate with persons unlike us.

Storytelling is a fundamental form of human communication.

In The Lives We Live By, Dan McAdams writes that "If you want to know me, then you must know my story, for my story defines who I am. And, if I want to know myself, to gain insight into the meaning of my own life, then I, too, must come to know my own story" (11). In The Life Story Interview, Robert Atkinson writes that "storytelling is a fundamental form of human communication" (1). In The Stories We Are, William Lowell Randall writes that "we are continually creating ourselves through the ceaseless reworking of the story of our lives" (78). In Identity and Story, the editors write that: "We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell" (3).

Understanding who you are is intimately bound up with understanding your history. To know who you are it is necessary to know who you were. Innumerable films about persons with amnesia configure for us the significance of the relationship between whom we were and who we are. Our links to a more remote past, before we were born, also factor into our understanding of who we are.

[Storytelling]. [Lives as Stories] [Understanding other persons thro their stories] [Similar Life Stories] [The life story pattern] [Life Stories borrowed from Cultural Configurations] [Images imply Stories] ["configuring"] ["transposition" of self and other] [Configurations require configuring]

We become fully aware of our own lives through the process of putting our experiences together in story form.

There is a type of therapy that involves keeping a diary. This technique corresponds to the circumstance that, when we are distressed, it is helpful to talk about what is bothering us. It would be odd, though, if that talk was about the facts of our lives. For example, I know a person who says that he is constantly stressed because he is short. Statistically speaking, it's a fact that he is short. But chances are very good that the cause of his distress is not the fact that he below average height for a man in the 21st century (he is not a midget by any measure—just not very tall). The far more likely cause of his distress is that something happened (probably when he was quite young) to make him feel that his height was an embarrassment, a vulnerability. To help us understand his distress he would have to tell us what happened to him. More importantly, he has to understand what happened to him. He might be telling himself a story that makes him more vulnerable to ridicule about his height than he needs to be.

William L. Randall notes:

If I tell myself today, for example, that I am a bright, clever, capable person, then, to the extent I believe myself and do not have direct experiences to belie that message, it is quite conceivable that, at least today, I shall be a bright, clever, capable person, and that all of my engagements with others will reflect that same brilliance and ability. I shall do better because I shall see myself as better. If, on the other hand, I tell myself that I am stupid or incompetent, then the chances are that most of my interactions with the world will come off rather badly. (43)

So, the first point we can make about the relationship between ourselves and the stories we tell about ourselves is that we believe them and are deeply affected by them.

On the other hand, if the stories we tell about ourselves are not accepted by the persons to whom we tell them, this is usually stressful. For example, if I tell myself "that I am a bright, clever, capable person." but I behave in dull, unimaginative, and inept ways, I will have difficulty believing my self-story, because other persons will not confirm it.

In sum, the process of coming to understand ourselves involves "the ceaseless reworking of the story of our lives" (78). It is a continuous negotiation between what we tell ourselves about ourselves and what others directly or indirectly tell us about ourselves.

One reason for writing down the self-story we are telling ourselves is simply that making it explicit in words reveals the confused understandings we have about ourselves. Take any complex idea that you are encountering for the first time. Often, you believe you understand it quite well but discover that, when asked to define it (say on a test) it is much more vague and confusing than it seemed when you were reading about it. The same phenomenon occurs in storytelling. We listen to ourselves tell our self-stories. They seem quite clear and coherent. But when we begin to write them down, the story is much less clear and much more confusing that it seemed when we were listening to ourselves.

The moral of this lesson is: the more articulate you are about your life, the better you understand yourself. Since our lives are bundles of experiences, to articulate them requires stories. To have an idea of who you are is suspect unless you can support that idea with narratives of your experiences. If you self-concept is: "great cook," the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. Another way of putting this point is: "if you talk the talk, you have to walk the walk."

we understand other persons by the stories we know about them.

Speaking of Elliot Washington, an African American high school teacher, Dan McAdams writes: "I have told you the basic facts. But what is the story?" (The Redemptive Self, 16). His remark points to an important aspect of human communication. Being in possession of information about a person is not a substitute for knowing the story of that person's life.

Photographs about one's past are endlessly fascinating records but their historical contexts are usually quite limited. I have a photograph of my father as a young man that has intrigued me from the first time I saw it. Who is this person that resembles my father and whose name is on the back of the portrait but who doesn't look like the person who raised me.

I don't know the story behind this photograph, so it does not deepen my understanding of my father and thus of my history. It remains a puzzle to me. Inside the picture frame was a newspaper—The Daily News (25 Park Place, New York)—used as stuffing. Its date was Thursday, August 30, 1928. If the photograph was taken that August my father would have been 18. He had yet to marry my mother. Why was the newspaper from New York when he was from Dickson City, Pennsylvania? Why does his hat and coat seem a bit too large and the bow-tie rather artificial? It seems like a studio photograph. Why was it taken? Did the photographer supply the clothes? Without a story there is no history.

But sometimes, even when you are told a story, it may not mean very much to you. For example:

In 1929, soon after Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge University, he was invited to a meeting of the Cambridge Conversazione Society on November 16th. It was a society whose membership requirement was that you had to be a genius to be accepted. ( Of course the existing members decided who was and who wasn't a genius.) The atmosphere of the Society was distinctly antagonistic.

At his first meeting, Wittgenstein got into a fierce argument with another member, Bliss. The members at the meeting thoroughly enjoyed the clash of views and applauded their new member for his aggressive put down of Bliss.

Lytton Strachy described the meeting in a letter: "Our brothers Bliss and Wittgenstein are so nasty and our brother Békássy is so nice that the Society ought to rush forward now into the most progressive waters. I looked in on Bliss on Sunday night and he seemed quite as nasty as Rupert Brooke ever was.... Wittgenstein detests Bliss, who in return loathes him. I think on the whole the prospects are of the brightest."

Most people have never been to meetings of clubs or professional societies where the members are expected and encouraged to be "nasty" to each other. For them understanding Strachy's glee in Wittgenstein's behavior would be as difficult as it is for persons who do not frequent dog fights where pit bulls battle to the death to understand how the persons who do can enjoy such violence.

Understanding people who have had experiences similar to ours is much easier than understanding persons unlike us

Understanding people who have had experiences similar to ours is much easier than understanding persons unlike us. Complicating the problem is the simple fact that there are many experiences that some persons normally have which other persons cannot under any conditions have. My wife has given birth: I have not. My father drove a horse-drawn produce wagon as a young man; I never have driven a horse drawn wagon. I grew up without a TV set; my children have always lived with TV sets. I have never lived in a place where shooting was a routine daily occurrence; many of my students have. My father-in-law was in the Normandy invasion and my cousin fought in the Battle of the Bulge during WWII; neither I or my sons have fought in a war. Because of these "gaps" in experience, I can only imagine what it is like to give birth, drive a horse drawn wagon, live where I could easily get shot, or fight in a battle. I refer to experiences we have not had as "null experiences" because, even though we know about them, they have not registered in our memory banks as experiences. Whatever experiences I have of birth, horse-drawn wagons, or war are virtual experiences. Mostly, I have seen films of experiences I have not had.

We might ask: to what extent do virtual experiences help us to learn about null experiences? I have seen films about battles, some more realistic than others. Would watching films about battles prepare me to engage in one? Well, the military thinks so. Combat films are a part of training. Perhaps more telling is the fact that during WWII, pilots were trained using flight simulation because of the shortage of actual planes. Persons who had never flown a plane, experienced flight simulation and were thereby able to fly planes.

Learning from simulated experiences is an everyday event. Much of what we think we know about the world in which we live, we learn from TV. Much of our own life stories are drawn from our literary cultural heritage.

The life story pattern can be traced from ancient epics through the Grail Quest romances and the Bildungsromane to contemporary novels of growing up.

Stories simulate life. In fact, life-story stories are as old as writing. The expression, "life is a journey" comes from the circumstance that stories about journeys taught countless generations how to grow up. The QUEST story is one of the oldest stories we have, dating back to Gilgamesh. "Jason and the Argonauts" is another ancient quest story and perhaps the prototype of the genre in which a young man discovers who he is by searching for a treasure—in Jason's case, the golden fleece. In the medieval period, the Grail quest stories continued this tradition of storytelling. The Grail story begins with Perceval as a boy seeing King Arthur's knights and wanting to become one. He goes to Arthur's court. At the round table is a chair in which only the grail questor can sit. None of Arthur's knights have been able to sit in it. Perceval, not knowing about the chair, sits in it. Everyone is astonished. Perceval then finds out who he is—the person who will find the Grail. The "treasure" at the end of the quest is a symbol of identity.

In the 18th century, the first novels were written. Since everyone tells the story of their lives, it is the most common and widespread form of storytelling anywhere. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first novelists often found themselves narrating a fictional character's life-story. Nor is it surprising that such fictional characters are often thinly disguised versions of the author. Such novelistic life-stories are called Bildungsromane. Susanne Howe, in Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen, says ". . . the Bildungsroman [is]. the novel of all-round development for self-culture, of which Wilhelm Meister is the archetype, and which flourishes today in countless modern German novels. (p. 6).

Jerome Hamilton Buckeley suggests that English Bildungsromane all tell a story in which:

A child of some sensibility grows up in the country or in a provincial town, where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed upon the free imagination. His family, especially his father, proves doggedly hostile to his creative instincts or flights of fancy, antagonistic to his ambitions, and quite impervious to the new ideas he has gained from unprescribed reading. His first schooling, even if not totally inadequate, may be frustrating insofar as it may suggest options not available to him in his present setting. He therefore, sometimes at a quiet early age, leaves the repressive atmosphere of home (and also the relative innocence) to make his way independently in the city. There his real "education" begins, not only his preparation for a career but also. . . his direct experience of urban life. The latter involves at least two love affairs or sexual encounters, one debasing, one exalting, and demands that in this respect and others the hero reappraise his values. By the time he has decided, after painful soul-searching, the sort of accommodation to the modern world he can honestly make, he has left his adolescence behind and entered upon his maturity. His initiation complete, he may then visit his old home to demonstrate by his presence the degree of his success or the wisdom of his choice.

This story structure links modern texts like Sons and Lovers, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mill on the Floss, Great Expectations, and their precursor texts (Wilhelm Meister) with postmodern texts like the Tin Drum, a kind of inverted Bildungsroman. As readers we typically group texts together on the basis of plot similarities. Most readers enjoy familiar plots. It is not only the romance reader who counts upon a formulaic plot to produce an accustomed set of pleasurable feelings.

Readers not only recognize story parallels, they count upon them. Review any set of romance stories and the parallels, stripped of their surface details reveal regularity after regularity.

Many of the story forms (narrative structures) that we use in telling our own personal history are borrowed from the cultures to which we belong.

Since the beginning of civilization telling stories has been a way of providing a cultural identity for persons. Fairy tales, legends, folk tales, ballads, and many other story genres have instantiated cultural practices in their audiences. In oral cultures, the stories were told aloud to groups of people and repeated over and over again. The Lives of Saints were vehicles for Christians to learn what it means to be an exemplary Christian. Scriptures are common in every culture as a means of educating their members in ways to behave. In the nineteenth century fairy tales and folk tales played important roles in informing children how to behave. Contemporary readers of Grimm's Fairy Tales note how frightening their versions of familiar tales must have been to the children who heard them. These stories that communicate lessons about a culture we might call "cultural stories," narratives that function socially to instruct their audiences in socially appropriate manners of behavior. They are linked to null experiences because they are stories that portray experiences that their audiences have not had or, sometimes, cannot have. As a culture, we have inherited a vast storehouse of cultural stories, revised to fit the circumstances of our times. In Grimm's version of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, she is eaten by the wolf in the end. The warning to children is quite clear: don't take up with strangers.

Some stories regarded by critics as great literature have become "classics and are canonized as instances of what it means to be human. Many cultural stories are repeated through the centuries and survive because their "lessons" remain relevant to our times. For example, at the time I am writing, yet another reframing of the medieval tale of Tristan and Isolde has been released. Nor is this surprising. Denis de Rougemont has argued that this tale about lovers who are kept apart by the circumstance that one is married to another person retains its power because it delineates passionate love in the form of a romance that is still an ideal in our culture. To be in love is the ideal. To love without being in love is a relationship you enjoy with family and friends. Being in love is a passionate state of affairs with symptoms that were described in the Arts of Courtly Love centuries ago

stories are often implied in photographs or single sentences.

In the twenty-first century, cultural stories are delivered by various media, not only books and oral performances, but also through radio, TV, magazines, films, and more recently 3D video games and VR scenarios. .

Some cultural stories are not especially recognizable as stories. Advertisements often include cultural stories about permissible behavior in our culture. Arguments about the offensiveness of certain ads are arguments about the forms of behavior they portray, for example, the Calvin Klein case in the ICMR case studies collection

Calvin Klein's Scandalous Advertising - Morality vs Money

The case deals with the controversial advertisement campaigns launched by the US-based fashion house Calvin Klein from the late-1970s to 2003.

It gives information about Calvin Klein, the designer's, evolution over the decades into a successful businessman.

The company's entry and success in the jeans, underwear and fragrance businesses is examined. The case then discusses the various Calvin Klein advertisements that angered business partners, religious leaders, family welfare groups, customers and a host of other factions for their excessively sexual content.

It critically analyzes two of the most controversial issues (the 1995 'kiddie porn' campaign and the 1999 advertisements for children's underwear), wherein the company was accused of sexually exploiting children. Finally, the case covers the events at Calvin Klein in the early 21st century, and points out the company's continuing focus on generating sales through erotic advertisements.

http://www.icmrindia.org/casestudies/catalogue/Marketing/MKTG084.htm

Some ads are single pictures and do not seem to be stories until you realize that they imply stories. This is noticeable when magazine ads show a picture that is a frame in a TV commercial.

The process of storytelling in the context of understanding ourselves and others is termed "configuring.".

We all know how to tell stories. We also know the difference between statements and stories. But, we do not always associate storytelling with mental abilities and intelligence. In our culture, the prototypical form of intelligence is logic. In recent decades, the notion that logical abilities are the measure of intelligence has been challenged. It is not necessary here to consider whether our logical ability is a better index of intelligence than our analogical (storytelling) ability. It is sufficient to recognize that storytelling is a cognitive ability commensurate with intelligence.

Storytelling is based on our ability to draw analogies between our experiences and those of others. It is the ability by which we are able to understand other human beings. Since we cannot get inside the minds of other people, to understand them we have to draw analogies between what they do and what we have done. This ability is termed, "configuring."

Configuring is a "figuring out" through analogies, an attempt to describe in general the contour of similar interpersonal interactions that suggests how specific instances work. (For instance, I might say that reading a story is like dreaming someone else's dreams.) It draws an outline of personal interactions metaphorically. To put the matter as simply as possible, a configuration offers an analogy from one realm of experience to suggest the shape an interpersonal experience might take in another.

To understand other persons, we tell ourselves stories about them based on similarities between what they do and what we have done.

The key element in configuring is the "transposition" of self and other.

There is a problem with this form of understanding that has kept it from consideration as "intelligence." Obviously, since we cannot know directly what motivates other persons' actions, we project onto them motives that we associate with those actions from our own experiences or from "virtual" experiences (stories we know). For many persons, this is pure guesswork and cannot be considered a form of intelligence.

Recent research in psychology has established that drawing analogies from our past experience is a pervasive mode of cognition. Philip Johnson-Laird, for example, has demonstrated that thinking is largely the activity of making "mental models" of the world. Even our most abstract concepts are mental models. Of course, a model is a simulation of experience that is created with our analogical ability.

Returning to the problem of guessing about the motives of other persons: when we draw an analogy between another person's experience and our own, we create a mental model of a type of experience and attribute the motives associated with it to the other person. The limitation is that we only have the experiences we have had and they may not match the other's behavior (may be for us a null experience). What this means (from a positive viewpoint) is that the more experience we have in an area of life, the better are our models of behaviors in that sector. It is not an accident that people who have know each other for a long time—say a husband and wife married for fifty years—can be very good at "guessing" what is in the other person's mind.

There is a "key" to improving our ability to understand other persons. Normally, we impose the pattern of our experiences on other people. Seeing someone eating a pizza in a cafeteria, we tend to attribute to that person our experiences of the cafeteria's pizza which could easily be mistaken. Generally, we tend to attribute to others our experiences from our point of view. The trivial quarrels people who are working out their relationship in its early stages are classic instances of this phenomenon. In the fall, when the summer heat has diminished, many people love to open the windows of their residences to get the fresh air. People living together for the first time might easily quarrel about opening the window to get the fresh air. From Jill's perspective the fresh air is wonderful. From Jack's perspective the air brings inside the molds that activate his allergies. For Jack and Jill to understand each other, they must take the other person's perspective. In other words, they must be the protagonist of the other person's life story.

This is what configuring refers to—our ability, not simply to impose our experiences onto others' experiences, but to learn the differences by efforts to re-construct our past experiences by taking the others perspective on the situations we experience in common. Configuring entails assuming the position of others as if our own, that is, transpositioning ourselves.

The understanding of a configuration requires configuring.

A corollary of this axiom is that to understand a story (a configuration) requires identifying with its protagonist who is other than us (configuring).

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Notes:

_ .The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from Babylonia and is among the earliest known literary works. Scholars surmise that a series of Sumerian legends and poems about the mythological hero-king Gilgamesh, thought to be a ruler in the 3rd millennium BC, were gathered into a longer Akkadian poem long afterward, with the most complete version extant today preserved on twelve clay tablets in the library collection of the 7th century BC Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. ...

."The Bildungsroman, or Erziehungsroman (German for "novel of development"), deals with maturation, wherein the hero becomes :civilized'--i.e., becomes aware of himself as he relates to the objective world outside of his subjective consciousness. . . . When the Bildungsroman is concerned specifically with the development of the artist . . , it is sometimes termed a Kunstlerroman (German for "novel of the artist"). Barnet/Berman/Burto, A Dictionary of Literary, Dramatic and Cinematic Terms. pp. 76-77 . ...

.Because it came into England chiefly through the influence of Wilhelm Meister, we may call it, for convenience, the "apprentice" novel, but it never assumed in England the importance of a group classification or a type. The German passion for categories, as opposed to the English preference for vagueness in these matters, has enabled the Bildungsroman to remain in Germany something distinct from the more definite Erziehungsroman, the pedagogic or education novel, like Exile. and Pestalozzi's Lienhard und Gertrud, which have a definite intent, partly practical and partly philosophical. It is distinct also from the Entwicklungsroman which has a more general scope and does not presuppose the more or less conscious attempt on the part of the hero to integrate his powers, to cultivate himself by his experience, which is essential to the Bildungsroman." ...

.In Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Jerome H. Buckley writes " . . . this study concentrates on the development of the Bildungsroman in England . . .; and, in writing it, I have been constantly struck by the awkwardness of the German term as applied to English literature. I have therefore considered--and sometimes, for the sake of convenience and variation, accepted--several possible synonyms: the novel of youth, the novel of education, of apprenticeship, of adolescence, of initiation, even the life-novel. The first two of these are perhaps the least unsatisfactory alternatives, if 'youth' can imply not so much a state of being as a process of movement and adjustment from childhood to early maturity, or if 'education: can be understood as a growing up and gradual self-discovery in the school-without-walls that is experience. But none of the substitutes quite replaces the label Bildungsroman as I interpret it, attempt to describe it in my introductory chapter, and affix it to a remarkable sequence of English fiction from Dickens to William Golding. If the word ultimately escapes precise definition or neat translation, its meaning should nonetheless emerge clearly enough from an account of the novels themselves and the steady recurrence of certain common motifs in them." (pp. vii-viii.) ...