Narratives that promise exceptional customer experiences are critical to creating value. In the age of storytelling, we consume more narratives than the products themselves.
Storytelling is booming these days. So much so that the number of stories being told increases. In fact, the story does not mean any return to the narrative. Rather, it serves to instrumentalize stories and commercialize them. It takes root as an effective communication technique that often aims to manipulate the receiver. It's always about asking, “What's the best way to use storytelling?” Those who consider market managers in “storytellers” to be the vanguard of the new art of storytelling are mistaken.
A story as a story no longer has the power that stories once had. In a sense, stories place joints in the framework of existence. Thanks to this, they give direction and support to life. However, narratives, as products of storytelling, share many of their characteristics with information. Like them, they are ephemeral, arbitrary and ready to be consumed. They cannot stabilize their lives.
Narratives are more effective than bare facts or figures because they evoke emotions. Emotions are basic responses to narratives. Selling stories ultimately means: selling emotions. Emotions have a center in the limbic system of the brain that controls our actions on a bodily level that we are not even aware of. They can influence our behavior beyond our senses. Conscious defense mechanisms are bypassed in this way. Whenever Capitalism It deliberately appropriates the narrative and exerts its power on life in a pre-reflective dimension. In this way it escapes conscious scrutiny and critical reflection.
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The story covers different areas. Even data scientists study storytelling because they think data has no soul. Data is the opposite of narrative. They don't touch people. They activate the mind more than the emotions. Aspiring journalists also attend short story courses as if their task was to write novels. Storytelling is mainly used in marketing. His task is to turn even completely useless things into desirable goods. Narratives that promise exceptional customer experiences are critical to creating value. In the age of storytelling, we consume more narratives than the products themselves. Narrative content turns out to be more important than utilitarian value. Storytelling also commercializes the unique stories of places. In order to narratively ennoble the productions created there, the stories of the place are woven. Nevertheless, history, in its proper sense, gives identity and serves to shape society. The story turns it into a commodity.
Meanwhile, politicians are also deceived that stories are sold. In the battle for attention, narratives are more effective than arguments. Therefore, they are politically instrumentalized. The appeal is not reason, but emotions. Storytelling as an effective political communication technique is far from a political vision that reaches into the future and gives people a sense of direction and meaning. Political narratives must promise a new order of things, imagine possible worlds. Today we lack the narratives of the future that give us hope. We crawl from one crisis to another. Politics is limited to solving immediate problems. Only stories tell the future.
Life is a story. Man, as an animal Narani, differs from animals in his ability to tell stories and thereby realize new forms of life. History has the power of new beginnings. Every action to change the world begins with a story. The story knows only one form of life, that is the form of consumption. A story, as a story, cannot create completely different forms of life. In the world of narrative, everything is reduced to consumption. As a result, we become blind to other stories, other forms of life, other perceptions and realities. This blindness is at the heart of the narrative crisis.
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An excerpt from Byung-Chul Han's book Crisis of Narrative and Other Essays, which was recently published by Wydawnictwo Krytyka Polityczna. Translated by Rafal Pokrivka.
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Byung Chul Han – German philosopher and cultural theorist born in South Korea. He is one of the most translated and read philosophers in Europe, and his diagnosis is a matter of public debate regarding modern society. He teaches philosophy and cultural studies at the University of Berlin.
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