Narrative exhumed?

I take issue with Lyotard’s argument that lamenting the loss of meaning in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative. I would argue that the masternarratives are not dead, particularly in politics. As Lyotard says, a community’s relationship to itself and its environment is played out through narrative tradition. The Cold War narrative of Capitalism against Communism has been firmly replaced by the Clash of Civilizations and a strengthened emergence of ethnic identity expressed in increased ethnic conflict.
In addition, the presence of information as a commodity and the wealth of databases and internet does not reduce the presence and power of narrative, because humans still process information through narrative. Journalism, media, and the internet are all becoming more open-source, and there is less importance paid to reporters as the official the narrators of current events, but information nonetheless needs to go through a process of narration because humans like a good story. I heard an editor from the New York Times describes the paper now as ‘platform agnostic’ as they negotiate the changing shape of information and knowledge; they have blogs, videos, interactive media, and photo essays in addition to articles, but the central point is ‘the story.’ Google news is a database or collection of current events, but the first words on the webpage are “Top Stories.”

I also disagree with Lyotard’s argument that narrative is a way to forget and that the “storage, hoarding, and capitalization” of information in archives is a way to keep it in the present. We memorialize and archive in order to be able to forget, in the way that we write down a phone number in order to be able to forget it. If, instead, we recite the phone number repeatedly, we remember it and it remains in the present. Museums are temples to narrative and memory, efforts to keep past events in the present social conscience. The language games of narrative as well as science are used by the same ‘cultural imperialists’ and power brokers to legitimize their positions.
I agree instead with Jameson’s argument that narrative has just gone underground into the “political unconscious,” particularly in sciences. Instead of narrative legitimizing science as Lyotard proposes, I am more interested in Hayles’s use of narrative to put cybernetics back into history in order to examine it and the emergence of posthumanism in a critical, delegitimized light.

On another note, I disagree with Lyotard’s dismissal of Habermas’s theory that society strives towards consensus and that legitimacy resides in knowledge’s (be in narrative or science) contribution to common emancipation through the regularization of language. Although he criticizes it as teleological, hindsight shows us that Habermas’s belief in global civil society is not unfounded; international law, the internet and the globalization of media and communication all suggest a desire for common ground and a narrowing of relativism that Lyotard says replaces the masternarrative.