Narratives of crisis: From affective structures to adaptive functions

Abstract

This commentary focuses on affective structures and the main adaptive functions of shared narratives to fill the gaps of the Conviction Narrative Theory. The transmission of narratives among individuals in highly uncertain situations is irrevocably tainted by affects and anchored in collective memory. Narratives have important evolutionary functions for human beings under threat and act as the social glue that creates and strengthens social bonds among individuals.

Since the dawn of time, the transmission of narratives among individuals tends to proliferate in times of wars; natural and man-made disasters, the COVID-19 crisis; and other dangerous and highly uncertain situations. These narratives that allow people to construct meanings of the crisis and cope with adversity are irrevocably tainted by affects and anchored in collective memory (Seeger & Sellnow, 2016). Because the Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT), proposed by Johnson et al., focuses primarily on textual objects, we aim to highlight the extent to which the structural and generative semiotics can constitute a relevant complementary contribution to the choice of narratives deployed by individuals in situations of radical uncertainty.

The singularity of semiotics as an interdisciplinary research field is to grasp constructed or coded elements that bear complementarity to social and cognitive sciences to seize the in-depth meanings of human communication (Greimas, 1966). The semiotic analysis of narratives implies identifying a structure, a dynamic that renders it possible to understand the narratives' architecture and deep mechanics. The narratives' architecture stems from the narratives deployed; their rhetorical and argumentative arrangements; the identified discursive structures, denotations, and connotations; and, finally, the systems of values and emotions that underlie these narratives. The dynamics of a narrative arise from a network of tensions rooted in a lacunar situation, an initial lack or trigger that acts as a revealer. In particular, during the COVID-19 crisis, a meticulous analysis of narratives revealed not only the collectively shared imaginaries that reflect humans' primordial primary fears of the plague disease but also the collective martial imaginary (McLaughlin, Pelletier, & Boespflug, 2022).

Indeed, structured semiotic analysis reveals the architectures of meaning at the narrative level and facilitates understanding individuals' emotions underlying a narrative, an action, or a practice. Nevertheless, CNT, which evokes the affective dimension as a fundamental constituent of narrative thinking, does not consider any tools for its analyses, whereas the semiotics of passions, founded by Greimas and Fontanille (1991), allows one to seize the experience of the subject, a subject governed by their feelings. The passion, which is a crucial and prototypical component of the Paris School of Semiotics (Broden, 1992), requires a thorough textual analysis of narratives governed by sensitive, somatic, and perceptual dimensions. The semiotic analysis of passion narratives demonstrates that this universe of modalities and configurations precedes a signification, is situated at a pre-cognitive level, and is animated by tensions that reveal various valences, areas of attraction and repulsion, and “states of mind.” These antagonistic narrative configurations affirm the primary affective and social nature of human beings that tends to transcend historical and cultural boundaries (Greimas & Fontanille, 1991).

Narratives have other prominent functions for human beings in addition to those mentioned in the target article. First, from the evolutionary perspective, narratives represent a universal activity that allows the transmission of survival-relevant information and meaning-making of new, uncertain, and dangerous objects or situations (Pelletier & Drozda-Senkowska, 2020). Second, narratives are transmitted to provide audiences with relevant information that allows them to construct representations of an unknown object or situation. Thus, narratives might be particularly persuasive in manipulating the audiences' representations of the physical or social environment to transmit or create desired reality (Sugiyama, 1996, 2017). Third, direct, person-to-person transmission of narratives tends to create and strengthen social bonds among individuals and, therefore, facilitates social cohesion and cooperation, which are elemental for individuals' survival (Bietti, Tilston, & Bangerter, 2019).

Thus, although people may be unaware of the affective structures and adaptive functions of narratives, especially in the context of radical uncertainty, there seems to be no doubt about their functions in terms of creating reality and strengthening interpersonal relationships. This offers a solid reason for strategically selecting one's narratives, which equates to persuasively manipulating reality and intersubjectivity. Thus, narratives are a powerful social construction tool that depends on the manner and the social context in which a discourse is constructed by individuals to structure the shapeless uncertainty.