who has interesting take (that you don't necessarily agree with) on interplay of narrative as motive force versus material conditions/circumstances in outworking of history
I specifically don't mean propaganda (ie a narrative constructed with intent, to "sell something", which is only interesting for its utility) but what I've been calling "world-ideas" ie models of reality
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basically the way I unify narrative-mode "here is the story of history and the pivotal moments when ideas emerged" and materialist-mode "the narratives are fake let's look at what people ate" etc stuff
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is people behave according to a world-idea which contributes to guiding action but over time the narrative drifts away from reality (eg what power centers have "legitimacy" vs which have real power)
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this tension builds until it becomes unsustainable at which point a new narrative has to be constructed to explain the current reality
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at which point the narrative is projected both forwards in time to guide action and *backwards* in time to explain events from before it existed
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this to me is the crucial idea that can be used to make sense of both events of history over a long span and also writings of historians projecting their world-idea back onto times past
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this makes me think of anything umberto eco, like let's say Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna wherein he's really full of shit but expounding a semiotic theory of mind that kind of peeks under the rug of Concept and asks what the floors are made of
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elaborate
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mysterious flame is about an old man who's dying, going through things he read as a boy. 11 years since i read it, airy and self-indulgent as eco tended to be, but in there are questions about how we develop our understanding of the world. local semiotics as opposed to global.
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