An Unconscious Narrative

Unconscious and unacknowledged, the true power of narrative lies in the self-propagating autonomy it manifests – above and beyond any putative human control. We do not own the stories and meanings through which we live so much as they own us but an essential dissimulation of reflexive psychological self-definition endlessly fails, and is foundationally unable, to recognise this fallacy.

In as much as (an abstraction of) Narrative can be considered as a persistent, unconscious, and autonomously self-replicating or self-propagating entity – there is a useful convergence here with complexity science, information theory and physics more generally. Narrative represents an emergent property of distributed (yet) gestalt and globally-integrated cognitive systems; this in turn reveals itself as (a) most efficient or effective method of autonomous (global, cultural, psychological, communications) system self-propagation through (or as) a medium of material artefacts and minds; at a level of physics and rationale of material information or energy-processing systems, is further articulated as the path-of-least-resistance or lowest-energy solution. Narrative as unconscious, globally-distributed optimally concise and autonomously-emergent algorithmic systems solution is (both) the problem-space and the question to which a similarly evolving explanatory logic is the most plausible answer. It is not surprising that technology as cognitive-extension exhibits optimal compression heuristics for systemic self-propagation – physics and biology have been cultivating similar solutions for billions of years.