Story Fields

I found this idea really fascinating. Not least because it seems to help locate 'story' more firmly in a cultural milieu.

Story Fields: A story field is a particularly powerful field of influence generated by a story or, more often, by a coherent battery of mutually-reinforcing stories -- myths, news, soap operas, lives, memories, games -- and story elements -- roles, plots, themes, metaphors, goals, images, events, archetypes -- that co-habit and resonate within our individual and/or collective psyches.A story field paints a particular picture of how life is or should be and directly shapes our lives and our world, often without our even being aware of its influence.

I like that this enables us not to feel we have to look for a 'metanarrative' but for plural narratives and the way that they might fit into a narratival ecosystem whose shared and mutually reinforcing themes would function as ideologies.

It's helpful to look at the further explanation of the metaphor:

The word "field," as used in the term story field, refers to a field of influence, a pattern of dynamic potential that permeates a physical, social and/or psychological space. I borrowed the word from physics, where the term gravitational (or magnetic) field refers to a zone of dynamic potential that shapes the behavior of the physical phenomena within its range. Gravity provides some interesting metaphors to help us understand story fields. There are many ways to look at gravity. We can view a gravitational field as not so much a separate phenomenon from the objects within it as it is an extension of them. We could also say, with equal validity, that objects are cores or nodes of the gravitational field. Or one could also say that both the field and the objects within it are facets of some larger whole system, as the dancers and choreography are elements of the dance. Yet another way to put it is that objects and their gravitational fields are dynamic dimensions of each other. A similar intimate, ambiguous, co-creative, co-evocative relationship exists between story fields and the people who occupy and create them.

I think that's spot on: it resonates with the kind of dynamic understanding of culture that I would favour in seeing stories as cultural artefacts in the ongoing dialogue and semantic negotiations that are culture. I can tell that this image /metaphor is going to stay with me and I'm wondering how it's going to pan out in my thinking...