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Version 1.0, October 2016
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This is the accepted manuscript (post-print version) of the article.
Contentwise, the post-print version is identical to the final published version, but there may be
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How to cite this publication
Please cite the final published version:
Køster, A. (2016). Narrative and embodiment: a scalar approach. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences. DOI: 10.1007/s11097-016-9485-8
Publication metadata
Title:
Narrative and embodiment – a scalar approach
Author(s):
Allan Køster
Journal:
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
DOI/Link:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9485-8
Document version:
Accepted manuscript (post-print)
1
Narrative and embodiment – a scalar approach
Allan Køster. Published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2016
Abstract
Recent work on the relation between narrative and selfhood has emphasized embodiment as an
indispensable foundation for selfhood. This has occasioned an interesting debate on the relation between
embodiment and narrative. In this paper, I attempt to mediate the range of conflicting intuitions within the
debate by proposing a scalar approach to narrative and an accompanying concept of a split-self
(Waldenfels, 2000). Drawing on theoretical developments from contemporary narratology, I argue that
we need to move away from a binary understanding of narrative as something an entity (the self) strictly
is or is not; rather, we need to see narrative as an attribute admitting of degrees. I suggest that the relation
between narrative and embodiment should be seen along these lines, proposing three levels of the
narrativity of embodied experiencing: 1) the unnarratable, 2) the narratable and 3) the narrative. Finally, I
discuss the implications this framework has for the general question of the narrative constitution of
selfhood.
Keywords: Narrativity; Embodied experience; Split-self; the Unnarratable; the Narratable; the Narrative
I. Narrative, selfhood and embodiment
Although the idea that the self has a narrative basis belongs to some of the most influential theories on
selfhood in the contemporary debate, it has recently become a contested view where some commentators
either tend to downscale the importance of narrative (e.g. Lamarque, 2004; Tammi, 2006) or outright
reject it (e.g. Blattner, 2000; Strawson, 2004). A crucial point that a range of commentators have
consistently put forth is the conspicuous absence of embodiment. From this point of view, a consensus is
emerging that selfhood cannot be understood as a purely abstract narrative construction, but that narrative
needs to be grounded in a more fundamental notion of an embodied self. Richard Menary (2008), for
instance, argues against what he calls the “abstract narrative account”, pointing out that narrative
presupposes the existence of a pre-narrative embodied self and that ‘our embodied experiences,
perceptions and actions are all prior to the narrative sense of self’ (p. 75). Failure to be mindful of this
embodied and feeling self takes the narrative position to the absurd consequence that I ascribe pain to a
collection of narratives, which, according to Menary, simply ‘sounds wrong’ (p. 73). A similar conclusion
is drawn by Dan Zahavi (2007), who argues that narrative selfhood presupposes an embodied level of
pre-reflective selfhood as a condition for narrative to be attributed to a subject of experience in the first
place. Responding to the same concern, Kim Atkins (2008) argues against what she sees as a tendency in
the narrative approach to separate psychology from the body, arguing that selfhood needs to be seen as
something that ‘cut(s) across the psychological-bodily distinction’ (p. 79).
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This emphasis on selfhood as embodied, immediately prompts the indispensable question of how
we are to understand the relation between narrative and embodiment. If selfhood is inherently embodied,
how does narrative then relate to the embodied self?
In her attempt to answer this question, Catriona Mackenzie (2009, 2014) has persistently defended
narrative by proposing that embodiment and narrative should be seen as more or less inseparable and that
we should understand this relation through what she calls “the integrated bodily perspective”. In
Mackenzie’s view, the fact that embodiment is temporally extended implies that it is equally in need of a
narrative integration and, hence, that our lived bodily experiences are ‘always already mediated via
narrative self-interpretation’ (2014, p. 162). Consequently, for Mackenzie, narrative is part of even our
most basic embodied experiences. Priscilla Brandon (2014) agrees with this idea; however, believing
Mackenzie’s account to be too unilateral, she emphasizes how the relation between narrative and
embodiment is fundamentally bi-directional: narrative is not only shaped by embodiment – the reverse is
also the case insofar as narrative also shapes my bodily traits, postures and attitudes (p. 77). Whether
Brandon hereby actually adds anything to Mackenzie’s account is not clear.
In response to this suggestion, Diana Meyers (2014) has expressed concern that Mackenzie ‘over-
estimates the reach of narrative and under-estimates the cognitive and agentive powers of the body’ (p.
142), arguing that there is an extensive domain of what she calls psycho-corporeal meaning that evades
narrative structuring and is rather non-conceptual and practical in nature. Hence, any attempt to articulate
this dimension in the medium of language inevitably falls short (p. 147). Mackenzie’s attempt to integrate
narrative at this fundamentally embodied level of experiencing constitutes, according to Meyers, an
unjustifiable Cartesianism that intellectualizes meaning-laden, practical intelligence and, thereby,
succumbs to ‘the siren song of mentalization’ (p. 150). Menary (2008) is equally not convinced by
Mackenzie’s claim that basic embodied activities are narratively scripted and that I have ‘a barrage of
narratives in virtue of which I act and in virtue of which my actions are constrained’ (p. 69). Embodied
actions are rather enacted without thinking and should be understood as ‘primarily non-narrative
embodied abilities’ (p. 70). According to Menary, the direction of fit between narrative and experience is
rather to be inverted: it is not narrative that organizes embodied experiences, but narratives that are
structured by the sequence of embodied experiences (p. 75). In this respect, Menary differs from Meyer in
so far as he proposes that embodied experiences and skilled behaviour quite easily lend themselves to
narration. Embodied experiences are ‘the pre-narrative fodder’ for narratives (p. 70). A similar position
can be found in Daniel Hutto (2006), who describes embodied experiences as being ‘ripe for narrative’
(p. 237).
It is this intricate question of how narrative relates to embodiment and embodied experiences that I wish
to examine in this paper. In line with the above authors, I accept the critique of the abstract notion of
narrative selfhood and the conclusion that selfhood must be understood as, first and foremost, embodied
subjectivity. Starting from this position, I will suggest a framework for understanding the relation
between embodied experiencing and narrative. More specifically, I argue that we need a framework for
understanding this relation that can cater to the variety of intuition displayed in the contemporary debate.
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I believe that both Mackenzie and Brandon give a phenomenologically appropriate account when
pointing to levels of embodied experiences that appear to display strong narrative features; however, I am
equally persuaded by the critique put forth by Meyers that there are levels of psycho-corporeal meaning
that remain beyond the reach of narrative. Similarly, I agree with Menary and Hutto in that there are
many aspects of our embodied experiences that effortlessly offer themselves for narration; however, I
would also emphasize that there are many experiences where this is not the case and where narrative
configuration is a complicated and often strenuous achievement.
The solution to integrating these differing intuitions, I suggest, is to introduce a framework that
views the relation between narrative and embodied experience as scalar. The decisive move in this
suggestion is to refrain from the notion that narrative is something the self is and to rather see embodied
selfhood as a more encompassing phenomenon and embodied experiences as something that possesses
narrativity to varying degrees. While this way of looking at narrative is central to discussions within
contemporary narratology (e.g. H. Porter Abbott, 2011; Ryan, 2007; Sternberg, 2001), it has not yet
received much attention within the philosophical and psychological debate on narrative and selfhood.
Suggesting that embodied experiences is something that admits of degrees of narrativity is of
course not compatible with the strong claims that selfhood is constituted through narrative integration but
I take this as consistent with the general idea of embodied selfhood. This, however, prompts the question:
how are we to understand embodied experiencing in so far as it admits of degrees of narrativity? In order
to answer this, I will draw on Bernhard Waldenfels (2002a, 2004) and his notion of an embodied split-
self. The advantage of Waldenfels understanding of the self is that it explicitly makes room for
dimensions of embodied experiences that exhibit strong narrative qualities, but also for dimensions that
remain utterly alien to any such orders. Furthermore, the interplay between these orders should not be
construed as binary, but as a continuous scale where all aspects belong equally to the phenomenon of
embodied selfhood. This account of embodied selfhood underpins the understanding of the narrativity of
embodied experiences as scalar.
In order to unpack this perspective, I will begin by introducing Waldenfels’ notion of embodiment
as a split-self and situate it within the debate. Drawing on this, I will then move on to an introduction of
narrativity as a scalar phenomenon and show how this relates to the embodied split-self. I shall argue that
we can broadly distinguish three levels within the scalar narrativity of embodied experiencing: 1) the
unnarratable 2) the narratable and 3) the narrative. In the last section, I will turn to the issue of where this
approach leaves the question of a narrative constitution of selfhood.
II. Embodiment and the split-self
As should be easily recognized, the above sketched debate is saturated with attempts to get past the
Cartesian divide; Mackenzie proposes to bridge it through an embodied approach to narrative selfhood,
while Meyers claims that, in doing so, Mackenzie offers an overly mentalizing and Cartesian account of
the body. This struggle to find a balance between the structures of meaning that govern linguistically and
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intellectually organized experience and what Meyers call non-conceptual, psycho-corporeal meaning
seems to be at the very heart of any attempt to determine the relation between embodiment and narrative.
A similar problem also occupies Bernard Waldenfels’ extensive work on embodiment and
embodied selfhood. According to Waldenfels, there is a tendency in the contemporary debate to posit that
we are our bodies but, nevertheless, ‘still presupposed that there is somebody who is incorporated and
embodied without being body through and through’ (2004, p. 236). This tendency should not be reduced
to a mere trick of language or habit of the mind, but emerges from our experience of being embodied
creatures. As embodied, I not only am my body but I also have my body, as Helmut Plessner (1976)
argued. Hence, my self-experience is not exclusively one of pure habituated self-familiarity and self-
acquaintance, but equally one of self-distance, where my own body may appear as object (Ingerslev,
2013). Therefore, although all experiences, in a fundamental way, are embodied and have embodiment as
their prerequisite, the body may announce itself to varying degrees in experience; sometimes as an irritant
and obtrusive, while other times completely absent. For Waldenfels, this analysis indicates that the only
way to get past the Cartesian framework is to take its challenges seriously and not try to deny the
intuitions that feed the perspective. What is needed is a translation of our traditional language of
consciousness into a new language of embodied experience and in a way that integrates our Cartesian
intuitions (p. 236)
1
.
In terms of embodied selfhood, Waldenfels argues that this implies that we need to opt for a notion
of a split-self [gespaltenes Selbst]. In claiming that the embodied self is ‘split’, Waldenfels is not
attempting to reproduce the Cartesian divide and separate selfhood into two independent ontologies;
rather, what is split originally belongs together (Waldenfels, 2000, p. 258). That selfhood is split reflects
the basic experiential structure that we always given to ourselves through a simultaneous presence and
withdrawal [Entzug] – our bodies are simultaneously both covered and discovered. This manifests in a
variety of ways: on the most basic level, it is illustrated in the fact that our bodies are given as both object
and subject; as both seen and seeing, as touched and touching, as movable and moving etc. An example of
this duality is perhaps most vivid in the experience of waking up during the night only to find one’s left
arm completely lacking sensitivity and responsivity due to lack of blood supply. First when manually
moving the left arm with the right arm downwards, in order to reinstate blood circulation does the arm
“regain consciousness”, so to speak. In such experiences, we are unequivocally confronted with the
object-character of our own body. This implies both an inherently internal and external perspective of
myself, which can be the basis for a range of experiences of alienness and unfamiliarity: of what belongs
to the familiar order of my self-acquaintance and what evades that order. Examples could, for instance, be
the state of surprise when confronted with ourselves in e.g. hearing our own voice played back to us,
feeling alienated by our own reflection when looking in the mirror (Waldenfels, 2000, 2004), or, perhaps,
the experience of extreme bodily changes during pregnancy or realizing how age has changed one’s
physical appearance. While these experiences, to varying degrees, are commonplace in everyday life,
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Waldenfels takes up this ambitious project in his book Das leibliche Selbst (Waldenfels, 2000).