31: If Narrative Sells, Denarrate

do you ever have…thoughts?

Imagine you are walking down the street and a random person is following you, zig-zagging behind your back in alternating whispers and shouts of various phrases, unformed thoughts, baby announcements, exaggerated statements, political vitriol, and spiritual girly vitamin recommendations. This person is unrelenting, yet you don’t tell them to go away. You passively listen for hours. Maybe sometimes you turn around and even give them your money. They follow you all day and night, but it’s okay because everyone else on the street has one of these hecklers, too. Maybe you become one yourself sometimes. 

This metaphorical “heckler” is a dramatic and silly representation of the role short-form social media plays in our day to day lives, but maybe it can help us flip the script.

About two weeks ago, I deleted the Instagram app (ooh, ahh, groundbreaking, yes my medal is in the mail). Almost immediately I noticed something, I wasn’t consuming as many narratives. If I did want to explore online for a bit, I was doing so with YouTube or Substack instead, and being that these are both longer form content styles, I was not bombarded with excessive variety, personalities, and narratives. We can get into the social “Dunbar limit” another time.

When you’re consuming longer forms of media, it may even be for the same amount of screen time, but it is still less in terms of the multiplicity of stories you may be sponging up on shorter form media. Instead of seeing fifty Instagram stories of different people’s struggles, celebrations, travels, etc., I was only seeing maybe five to ten stories on Substack or YouTube in the same amount of time. It’s like going from reading only book covers to actually reading the books.

It’s embedded in the names that social media is narrative as well as consumption, Instagram “stories”, a “feed”. These are all obvious markers but we become so accustomed to them that we forget to analyze their function as concepts. What sells? Narrative (and historically, sex). We are human beings who evolved to love storytelling and have carried the traditions of oral history with us since language began. 

What grew into an issue for me, as an artist trying to take years worth of work and distill it down to four to seven second video formats, was that I was beginning to be sucked into the world of marketing and commodification. I had begun commodifying my artwork as a way to try to make a living in an increasingly competitive job market, but the greater issue became the growing sense that I was not trying to sell my art, that I was selling myself. 

Marketing gurus of all creeds will tell you it’s all about the story, the narrative. People don't buy the art, they buy the story behind it. It’s the reason a duct-taped banana can sell as art for an astronomical price. It’s the reason I felt burdened to always show face in my videos, sometimes more than the art itself.

Banana, by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. 

Then I came across a concept called “denarration”. It started with an excerpt of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleeb, which my partner sent me shortly after I’d told him I deleted Instagram: 

“I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Also, bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. You do not have to do much more in order to gain a deeper understanding of things around you. Above all, learn to avoid "tunneling." 

It sounds simple enough, but what does it really mean in practice? Is it not counterintuitive that getting away from language distances us from the animal? Or is it more in the sense that when we are not consuming, we are better able to see the world more clearly by thinking critically for ourselves?

Denarration is defined as “a kind of narrative negation in which a narrator denies significant aspects of her narrative that had earlier been presented as given. The simplest example of this might be something like, ‘Yesterday it was raining. Yesterday it was not raining.’ The effect of this unusual strategy is variable: Iit can play a relatively minor role in the overall text, or it can fundamentally alter the nature and reception of the story” (Brian Richardson, “Denarration in Fiction: Erasing the Story in Beckett and Others).

We are all unreliable narrators on social media. We are all telling a story, whether we mean to or not. It’s just human nature to want to adhere to an in-group, to be accepted, validated. 

What has helped me in beginning to seriously consider my intentions with social media use is stepping back for long enough to see it with better clarity, to take off the “boho filter *ੈ✩‧˚1”-colored glasses (those orange/teal filters had me in a chokehold!!). I began to ask myself why I was pouring so much time and effort to try to grow my Instagram in the first place when growth did not always directly lead to additional sales of my work. 

If it is not an efficient return on investment, why had I begun to feel obligated to continue playing the game?

So here we are, two weeks later, with no definitive timeline to keep Instagram in the digital trash can, but a definitive sense of reevaluating. I want to explore exclusively creating and consuming long form content for a period to see where it takes me creatively and mentally. 

I am no longer in the Sisyphean “sell sell sell” mindset, but have instead let the rock roll back down the hill without me, have sat down, and become Rodin’s “Thinker”, though much more girl-coded and with less impressive lateral back muscles. 

Rodin’s “The Thinker” again, but normal

What do you guys think about the concept of “denarrating”? Do you think we absorb too many micro-stories all day to retain anything useful and be more effective in crafting our own lives outside of a story?

Thanks for reading! Subscribe if you feel called. Here are some magic sparkles you may take with you on your way out *ੈ✩‧₊˚*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:.•*•.•*•.

-gab