The telling moment: Narrative as a discursive act.

Abstract

As a work of interdisciplinary dialogue, Mary Jean Walker (2012) successfully straddles the fields of neuro- and cognitive science and social psychology in addressing key questions on the role, value and truth claims of narrative as a mode of self-understanding. However, in the context of neuroethical debate her article raises a set of parallel conceptual and epistemological concerns which confuse and conflate what it is to tell stories. I suggest that Walker’s perspective is philosophically limited in that she does not explicitly acknowledge narrative as a discursive activity. In this, Walker is not alone – the neuro- and cognitive sciences frequently make assumptions about what narrative is and what it is not. This is significant because a theory of narrative which is blind to narrative as a discursive activity risks diminishing important social contexts involved in the construction of human self-understanding and truth. One of the most striking features of the disciplinary border-crossings which have resulted in narrative gaining conceptual prominence in fields such as psychology and neuroscience is the degree to which the term narrative is left undefined, or the degree to which it is conflated with prediscursive structures of action, experience or underlying neurobiological or cognitive substrate capable of being read in the same way we read narrative texts (Bamberg, 2006). While Walker acknowledges that narrative is interpretive, selective, relational and contextual, she subordinates the very object of narration itself – social discourse – to the neuropsychological structures and processes which underlie it.