Narratives

 梁啟超 (Liang Qichao) said

to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction

Which can be about the dissemination of ideas, though with modern sociology we can know that society is itself a kind of fiction, a narrative that is the result of power games between people, and their organisations and institutions, resulting int he great narrative that we ay call society, be it in the shape of small communities and neighborhoods or be it as matter of the word society.

The part of the narrative is not (only) a matter of the presentation but moreover and importantly a matter of establishing the inks, thus also the gaps that we may be able tip open fro a counter-hegemony. Wasn’t Goethe right? 

An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never met, even by those who make it: i.e., that empirical data should be presented without any theoretical context, leaving the reader, the student, to his own devices in judging it. This demand seems odd because it is useless simply to look at something. Every act of looking turns into observation, every act of observation into reflection, every act of reflection into the making of associations; thus it is evident that we theorize every time we look carefully at the world.

 From: Goethe, Preface,” Theory of Color, Miller 159; Quoted in: Frederick Amrine, 1990: The Metamorphosis of the Scientist. Goethe Yearbook, Volume 5: 187-212; here: 188