Hopeful stories: On negative capability
The power of storytelling lies in its spontaneity. Just as surely as stories can be bent to reinforce the existing relationships and structures of power, so too, can they dynamically swerve to create the not-yet-real that is imagined in moments of personal and collective revolution, as the contradictions of material reality give way. We propose the tiny, ordinary aufhebens as a model of this inevitable and fundamentally hopeful feature of the storytelling animal. We can establish, if not an outcome, or a programme for so spontaneous a force as storytelling, then at least the hallmarks of a way of being that is productive of narrative possibilities. We can further describe our context and, in this way, suggest a method for living narratively and so living hopefully.
Our ways of seeing and being are experimental. Conducting an experiment combines both the holding of a tentative hypothesis (a concession that we suppose rather than know) with clarity of choice and a decisiveness of action. To live experimentally is to live with a willingness to make choices and take action, necessarily, in a context of not knowing. There is a pragmatic honesty to this, which compliments and coheres with the awareness that springs from our understanding of the storied world. One question, then, becomes what can be used to set the parameters for the experiment if we are sceptical about the nature - and even the existence - of ‘reality’.
The romantic poet, John Keats, coined the term ‘negative capability’ to express a crucial feature of this ambivalent, experimental mode:
...Negative Capability, that is, when a [person] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason [...] remaining content with half-knowledge.
John Keats, letter to his brothers, George & Thomas, on 22 December 1817
Negative capability could be understood to be the healthy counterpart to cognitive dissonance which is so disruptive of our social structures of pattern-finding minds. To save this idea from its Romanticism and reframe it in narrative terms, it is a recognition that ‘fact’ and ‘reason’ whilst undoubtedly useful, can only ever be partial. It recognises that our fact-finding, causal, story-creating minds mislead us because we are always in more than one plotline.
