1ac myth 1ac -critical Introduction of us armed Forces Aff
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- K2 Political Solidarity
- Narratives Promote Cultural Understanding
- Narrative Challenges Stereotypes
NarrativesTransform AgencyNarratives transform our understanding of agency and actorsStone-Mediatore 03 Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University (Shari Reading Across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance 2003 http://books.google.com) Marginal experience narratives playa role in oppositional politics that discourse analysis, social theory, and factual data cannot replace. When storytellers use writing creatively to grapple with obscure or contradictory experiences and when they situate t3hese experiences historically, they bring into public view the social pressures and social alternatives that have shaped many people's daily lives but that have been systematically omitted from ruling narratives. Moreover, when marginal experience narratives bring into our language and historical memory the muted tensions and ambiguities of daily experience, they initiate new ways of constructing the categories bywhich we interpret historical life. They sketch, for instance, "actors" that cross cultural and national boundaries, "action" that is enacted in diffuse gestures by people who are excluded from public life, and "historical events" that develop outside the parameters of official events and government arenas. Narration of historical experience is, in fact, crucial to a meaningful rethinking of these categories, for only close attention to the nuances and contradictions of historical life can recast such categories in a way that resonates in our daily lives, moves us to engage in political projects, and enables us to do so with attention to the complex contours of our world. While a theory of language or society may contribute to ideology critique or to the development of counterhegemonic discourses, only the continual reckoning with historically specific experiences ensures that those alternative discourses do not themselves become dogmatic but are responsive to evolving, multifaceted historical struggles. Finally, when writers use narration strategically to publicize obscured experiences, they enrich not only language practices but experience itself, for they provide a new lens through which we can organize our everyday experience and historical world. Neither empirical reporting nor discourse analysis has this effect on our experience of our identity and history. Certainly the reporting of empirical data can add crucial, missing information to historical documents. And the rhetorical analysis of such documents can elucidate the ideological mechanisms that structure our interpretation of our world. Beyond this, however, narratives that probe ways to articulate and situate unspoken tensions in everyday life can transform experience, helping those of us who have been reduced to "victim" or "cheap labor" to claim agency and helping all of us to identify with cross-border, cross-culture demo~ eratic struggles. K2 Political SolidarityNarratives are important to political solidarityMohanty 04 Professor of Women’s Studies at Hamilton College Chandra Talpade, Feminism Without Borders, p 77 This section focuses on life story-oriented written narratives, but this is clearly only one, albeit important, context in which to examine the development of political consciousness. Writing is itself an activity marked by class and ethnic position. However, testimonials, life stories, and oral histories are a significant mode of remembering and recording experience and struggles. Written texts are not produced in a vacuum. In fact, texts that document Third World women's life histories owe their existence as much to the exigencies of the political and commercial marketplace as to the knowledge, skills, motivation, and location of individual writers.
Narratives are crucial to creating cross-cultural understandings without claiming to completely “know” the experiences of othersYoung 96 Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago (Iris Marion, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” Democracy and Difference, Ed. Seyla Benhabib] In a communicative democracy participants in discussion aim at reaching understandings about solutions to their collective problems. Although there is hardly a speaking situation in which participants have no shared meanings, disagreements, divergent understandings, and varying perspectives are also usually present. In situations of conflict that discussion aims to address, groups often begin with misunderstandings or a sense of complete lack of understanding of who their interlocutors are, and a sense that their own needs, desires, and motives are not understood. This is especially so where class or culture separates the parties. Doing justice under such circumstances of differences requires recognizing the particularity of individuals and groups as much as seeking general interests. Narrative fosters understanding across such difference without making those who are different symmetrical, in at least three ways. First, narrative reveals the particular experiences of those in social locations, experiences that cannot be shared by those situated differently but that they must understand in order to do justice to the others. Imagine that wheelchair-bound people at a university make claims upon university resources to remove what they see as impediments to their full participation, and to give them positive aid in ways they claim will equalize their ability to compete with able-bodied students for academic status. A primary way they make their case will be through telling stories of their physical, temporal, social, and emotional obstacles. It would be a mistake to say that once they hear these stories the others understand the situation of the wheelchair-bound to the extent that they can adopt their point of view. On the contrary, the storytelling provides enough understanding of the situation of the wheelchair-bound by those who can walk for them to understand that they cannot share the experience. Narrative exhibits subjective experience to other subjects. The narrative can evoke sympathy while maintaining distance because the narrative also carries an inexhaustible latent shadow, the transcendence of the Other, that there is always more to be told. Second, narrative reveals a source of values, culture, and meaning. When an argument proceeds from premise to conclusion, it is only as persuasive as the acceptance of its premises among deliberators. Few institutions bring people together to face collective problems, moreover, where the people affected, however divided and diverse, can share no premises. Pluralist polities, however, often face serious divergences in value premises, cultural practices and meanings, and these disparities bring conflict, insensitivity, insult, and misunderstanding. Under these circumstances, narrative can serve to explain to outsiders what practices, places, or symbols mean to the people who hold them. Values, unlike norms, often cannot be justified through argument. But neither are they arbitrary. Their basis often emerges from the situated history of a people. Through narrative the outsiders may come to understand why the insiders value what they value and why they have the priorities they have. How do the Lakota convey to others in South Dakota why the Black Hills mean so much to them, and why they believe they have special moral warrant o demand a stop to forestry in the Black Hills? Through stories—myths in which the Black Hills figure as primary characters, stories of Lakota individuals and groups in relation to those mountains values appear as a result of a history by which a group relate ‘where they are coming from.” Finally, narrative not only exhibits experience and values from the point of stew of the subjects that have and hold them. It also reveals a total social knowledge from the point of view of that social position. Each social perspective has an account not only of its own life and history but of every other position that affects its experience. Thus listeners can learn about how their own position, actions, and values appear to others from the stories they tell. Narrative thus exhibits the situated knowledge available of the collective from each perspective, and the combination of narratives from different perspectives produces the collective social wisdom not available from any one position. Narratives are key to relating experiences of injustice that otherwise cannot be shared – they are crucial to cross-cultural communicationYoung 2000, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago [Iris Marion, Inclusion and Democracy, p.70-7] Another mode of expression, narrative, serves important functions in democratic communication, to foster understanding among members of a polity with very different experience or assumptions about what is important. In recent years a number of legal theorists have turned to narrative as a means of giving voice to kinds of experience which often go unheard in legal discussions and courtroom settings, and as a means of challenging the idea that law expresses an impartial and neutral standpoint above all particular perspectives. Some legal theorists discuss the way that storytelling in the legal context functions to challenge a hegemonic view and express the particularity of experience to which the law ought to respond but often does not. Several scholars of Latin American literature offer another variant of a theory of the political function of storytelling, in their reflections on testimonio. Some resistance movement leaders in Central and South America narrate their life stories as a means of exposing to the wider literate world the oppression of their people and the repression they suffer from their governments. Often such testimonios involve one person’s story standing or speaking for that of a whole group to a wider, sometimes global, public, and making claims upon that public for the group. This raises important questions about how a particular person’s story can speak for others,’ and whether speaking to the literate First World public changes the construction of the story.22 While these are important questions, here I wish only to indicate a debt to both of these literatures, and analyse these insights with an account of some of the political functions of storytelling. Suppose we in a public want to make arguments to justify proposals for how to solve our collective problems or resolve our conflicts justly. In order to proceed, those of us engaged in meaningful political discussion and debate must share many things. We must share a description of the problem, share an idiom in which to express alternative proposals, share rules of evidence and prediction, and share some normative principles which can serve as premisses in our arguments about what ought to be done. When all these conditions exist, then we can engage in reasonable disagreement. Fortunately, in most political disputes these conditions are met in some respect and to some degree, but for many political disputes they are not met in other respects and degrees. When these conditions for meaningful argument do not obtain, does this mean that we must or should resort to a mere power contest or to some other arbitrary decision procedure? I say not, Where we lack shared understandings in crucial respects, sometimes forms of communication other than argument can speak across our differences to promote understanding. I take the use of narrative in political communication to be one important such mode. Political narrative differs from other forms of narrative by its intent and its audience context. I tell the story not primarily to entertain or reveal myself, but to make a point—to demonstrate, describe, explain, or justify something to others in an ongoing political discussion. Political narrative furthers discussion across difference in several ways. Response to the ‘differend’. Chapter 1 discussed how a radical injustice can occur when those who suffer a wrongful harm or oppression lack the terms to express a claim of injustice within the prevailing normative discourse. Those who suffer this wrong are excluded from the polity, at least with respect to that wrong. Lyotard calls this situation the differend. How can a group that suffers a particular harm or oppression move from a situation of total silencing and exclusion with respect to this suffering to its public expression? Storytelling is often an important bridge in such cases between the mute experience of being wronged and political arguments about justice. Those who experience the wrong, and perhaps some others who sense it, may have no language for expressing the suffering as an injustice, but nevertheless they can tell stories that relate a sense of wrong. As people tell such stories publicly within and between groups, discursive reflection on them then develops a normative language that names their injustice and can give a general account of why this kind of suffering constitutes an injustice. A process something like this occurred in the United States and elsewhere in the 1970s and 1980s, as injustice we now call sexual harassment gradually came into public discussion. Women had long experienced the stress, fear, pain, and humiliation in their workplace that courts today name as a specific harm. Before the language and theory of sexual harassment was invented, however, women usually suffered in silence, without a language or forum in which to make a reasonable complaint. As a result of women telling stories to each other and to wider publics about their treatment by men on the job and the consequences of this treatment, however, a problem that had no name was gradually identified and named, and a social moral and legal theory about the problem developed. Facilitation of local publics and articulation of collective affinities. Political communication in mass democratic societies hardly ever consists in all the people affected by an issue assembling together in a single forum to discuss it. Instead, political debate is widely dispersed in space and time, and takes place within and between many smaller publics. By a ‘local public’ I mean a collective of persons allied within the wider polity with respect to particular interests, opinions, and/or social positions.23 Storytelling is often an important means by which members of such collectives identify one another, and identify the basis of their affinity. The narrative exchanges give reflective, voice to situated experiences and help affinity groupings give an account of their own individual identities in relation to their social positioning and their affinities with others.24 Once in formation, people in local publics often use narrative as means of politicizing their situation, by reflecting on the extent to which they experience similar problems and what political remedy for them they might propose. Examples of such local publics emerging from reflective stories include the processes of ‘consciousness-raising’ in which some people in the women’s movement engaged, and which brought out problems of battering or sexual harassment where these were not yet recognized as problems. Understanding the experience of others and countering preunderstandings. Storytelling is often the only vehicle for understanding the particular experiences of those in particular social situations, experiences not shared by those situated differently, but which they must understand in order to do justice.25 Narrative Challenges StereotypesNarratives are necessary to correct for stereotypes and misconceptions about other groupsYoung 2000, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago [Iris Marion, Inclusion and Democracy, p.70-7] While it sometimes happens that people know they are ignorant about the lives of others in the polity, perhaps more often people come to a situation of political discussion with a stock of empty generalities, false assumptions, or incomplete and biased pictures of the needs, aspirations, and histories of others with whom or about whom they communicate. Such pre-understandings often depend on stereotypes or overly narrow focus on a particular aspect of the lives of the people represented in them. People with disabilities, to continue the example, too often must respond to assumptions of others that their lives are joyless, that they have truncated capabilities to achieve excellence, or have little social and no sex lives. Narratives often help target and correct such pre-understandings. Revealing the source of values, priorities, or cultural meanings. For an argument to get off the ground, its auditors must accept its premises. Pluralist polities, however, often face serious divergences in value premises, cultural practices, and meanings, and these disparities bring conflict, insensitivity, insult, and misunderstanding. Lacking shared premises, communicatively democratic discussion, cannot proceed through reasoned argument under these circumstances, Under such circumstances, narrative can serve to explain to outsiders what practices, places, or symbols mean to the people who hold them and why they are valuable. Values, unlike norms, often cannot be justified through argument. But neither are they arbitrary. Their basis often emerges from the situated narrative of persons or groups, Through narrative the outsiders may come to understand why the insiders value what they value and why they have the priorities they have.
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