Against the Obsession With Narratives

“Dominant stories do not triumph because they are more persuasive or imaginative, but because they have the infrastructures that allow them to be diffused, repeated, and naturalised… The key question is not only what we say, but who can say it, where, and with what resources… The great emancipatory narratives (feminisms, trade unionism, anti-fascism, anti-colonialism) were not born as communication strategies but as material practices of solidarity, organisation, and conflict… Language can be a tool of liberation, but only when it is backed by material power: by institutions, by resources, by spaces and media that are not dependent on capital… Perhaps the task is not to ‘change the narrative,’ but to reorganise the collective power capable of changing reality itself.” There is no ‘narrative game’ without ‘the ground game’.