tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post3795287729254477489..comments2024-03-03T13:55:46.243-08:00Comments on Ambling Along the Aqueduct: Political Narratives: Shaping How We ThinkTimmi Duchamphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00673465487533328661noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-14217313184354900702007-05-04T09:01:00.000-07:002007-05-04T09:01:00.000-07:00Thanks for the comments, Timmi! Deconstructing leg...Thanks for the comments, Timmi! Deconstructing legal narratives sounds like an interesting acadeimc project, if it hasn't already been done (or even if it has). I haven't really thought about that before.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-50201584666120838982007-05-01T15:06:00.000-07:002007-05-01T15:06:00.000-07:00Excellent post, Rachel, offering a lavish number o...Excellent post, Rachel, offering a lavish number of jumping-off places. (I was tempted to call the blog “Amok along the Aqueduct” for the way my own mind works, but decided that such a name would be asking for trouble.) <BR/> <BR/>My first thought is to complicate the relation between narratives & culture: class, ethnicity, age & generation (& I so mean to imply a distinction between these two), sexual orientation, ideological orientation, religion, region, etc all impact on which narratives are plausible as well as immediately work to shape the sense one makes of the world. Let me offer with an example from Real Life. Over the last twenty-five years I’ve been called to jury service numerous times. The most interesting court, for me, to do such service in is the municipal rather than the superior court, since the former takes it jury pool from Seattle, while the latter takes it pool from the King County, which includes many suburbs. (Seattle, of course, has a more diverse population than King County.) In recent years I’ve usually been excused during the voir dire, either for peremptory challenge or, lately, for cause, when I’ve made critical comments about the charges (as in, “this law is arbitrary & Kafkaesque”) or questioned its appropriateness to the case described by the prosecutor. (On the one hand, laws in the US are, I believe, becoming increasingly unreasonable, while on the other hand, I myself have been bending increasingly greater scrutiny on our legal system as I grow older and more experienced.) <BR/><BR/>Every jury trial, of course, is set up as a war of narratives. When during the voir dire I refuse to engage with the prosecution’s narrative of the crime, I insist on making moral logic trump narrative truth by calling into question the unspoken assumptions in the narrative: which is something mere jurors are not supposed to do. Jurors are required to confine themselves to determining the narrative truth, which is to say they’re there to ratify the legitimacy of the system, however wrong it might be. <BR/><BR/>I learned something of this the last time I actually served on a jury. This was sometime in the early1990s (IIRC), at around the time ice skater Tanya Harding’s boyfriend assaulted another skater, Nancy Kerrigan, to take the latter out of competition for the US’s Olympics team. I know this only because the unfolding details of the incident were a frequent subject of conversation among the jurors before we reached the stage of deliberating, and only because the spin three of the jurors put on the narrative was at total odds with the one the media were telling. The composition of this jury was, in my experience, unusual. First, all of us were white. And of the six of us, five were women under fifty years of age. One of the women was a civil engineer, another of them a writer with a lot of education (me); the other four jurors were all working-class. The man, an officially retired pipe fitter who’d worked all his pre-retirement life at the gas company, was eking out his living post-retirement doing odd jobs & yard work for his church. And the three remaining women were all working-class, a mix of married & divorced; they bonded instantly during the first recess. These three women, interestingly, asserted discursive dominance over first the conversation during breaks & later over the deliberations (only, of course, because they were half of the group & there was only one man to five women; individually, I’m sure, they would have presented a much lower profile, or even if there’d been two middle-class men on the jury instead of two middle-class women). The old man pretty much took the attitude that he was outnumbered & that there was thus no point in his even trying to get a word in edgewise. (At a certain stage of the deliberations, though, I asked him pointblank what he thought because the case involved a heterosexual triangle involving two men struggling over a woman, & I wanted to know how he was reading the men’s reports of their responses, since part of the case hinged on one man’s saying he did what he did in response to his interpretation of the other man’s behavior.) The civil engineer, not surprisingly, stayed aloof until we began deliberations. <BR/><BR/>The narrative these women told about the Harding & Kerrigan incident was one of class warfare: they outright sympathized with Harding & disparaged Kerrigan (as stuck-up & snooty & a goody-goody & getting what she had coming to her): Harding, in their view, was the underdog, disadvantaged by her class background & her economic status, which made practice harder to come by, gamely fighting her way up to the top in a world dominated by people like Kerrigan. I may have been astonished by hearing such a thorough reversal of the tale blasting out over the airwaves 24/7, but I recalled it later when the media were after Clinton’s blood for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, for when public opinion polls showed that a large swathe of the public refused to be guided by their moral leadership (as the talking heads so pompously called it), the talking heads began going on & on about how the public didn’t seem to understand that the very foundations of the United States of America were being threatened by the president’s sexual misconduct, that their moral understanding seemed to be that of children. But in fact, it was the Beltway people who just couldn’t get it: the narrative they were selling was only their very particular narrative, not a national narrative of universal significance. Why? Because the Beltway people, like all powerful people, always assume that their view is <I>the</I> view (that’s what hegemony’s all about, right?) & that any narrative they tell is the one True narrative.<BR/><BR/>Such gaps in narrative intelligibility are the condition of any culture, but they’re probably more pervasive & significant in a culture with as much diversity as ours. <BR/><BR/>So to go back to the trial. For the three working-class women, the deliberations were all about determining what the “real” narrative was. The civil engineer at first tried to insist on following the judge’s instructions (as did I), but finally just gave up. I felt as if I had wandered into a soap opera focus group, for they talked about the three people involved as though they were characters in a soap opera. They openly speculated on the meanings of every smallest detail (including facial expressions & gestures used by the witnesses taking the stand) & constructed a hypothetical backstory (for which we had no actual facts as a basis), just the way I’ve heard people do when they’re watching soap opera. Still, in case you’re wondering: although we may have disagreed about the means of arriving at the verdict, we did all reach the same conclusion. <BR/><BR/>This is quite enough for one comment. I’ve more to say, but I’ll wait. (I’m already late to my writing date with Eileen Gunn…)Timmi Duchamphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00673465487533328661noreply@blogger.com