jumping off sartre

Sartre's statements about the empirical focus of the psychological theories of the emotions at the time of his text and Husserl's premise on the impossibility of getting from accidents to essences could also apply to traditional narrative theories, which are overwhelmingly empirical. From the standpoint of cultural studies, the narrative is viewed as oral tradition, the handing down of culturally significant information, with the purpose of providing a common worldview, regulating behavior, teaching or legitimizing common attitudes or beliefs, maintaining hierarchies of information access, etc. (e.g., Eric Michaels.) From the standpoint of the disciplines of sociology or history, (grand) narrative may be viewed as a means of communication or self-representation within the public sphere, a means of organizing and representing microcultures or political views, or the expression of cultural and political identity. (e.g., Habermas) Even the denials of historical metanarratives by poststructuralists or post modernists (e.g., Lyotard) are viewed by others as merely another metanarrative and still include the idea of local narratives. In linguistics, the narrative discourse theory would seem to come close to a look at process or mode rather than product, and yet this theory too remains at the level of functional communication and observable (cause and effect) interaction. From the standpoint of literary theory, the narrative is discussed in its Dinghaftigkeit, its attributes of observable form. While theories about multiple narrators, the uncanny or focalization begin to get at a psychological or philosophical aspect that conjoins with the problem of language and meaning as such (Husserl, Heidegger, by way of Saussure through Derrida and others), there is still little discussion of narrative-being in that builds on Heidegger's idea of the origin of the work of art, the setting-up of an object as a tension of world and earth or connects the narrative to Merleau-Ponty's directed consciousness, or like Sartre's emotions, a view of narrative as an indispensable structure of consciousness.

I believe that investigation of narrative-being will lead to the discovery of a fundamental comfortable relationship between the structure of consciousness and potentiality, also revealing the assumption of a need for the absolute, the verifiable and the unequivocal meaning—certainly prejudices of Western culture in terms of psychology (e.g., Becker), beliefs and communication norms—as alien to consciousness. This understanding that we do not seek absolute and stable meaning but are conditioned to want it would have relevance for addressing problems of tension, anxiety and intolerance in and between fundamentalist cultures, as well as for further exploring the uncanny or the fear of unstable meaning.