The Subjectivity of Narrative: Part I

Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” is a cinematic masterpiece in many respects, but one aspect of the film - perhaps more than any other - has kept it relevant for the past 40-odd years since its release: The enduring mystery of whether or not the protagonist, Rick Deckard, is a human or a replicant. We’ll circle back to do a deeper dive on this in a subsequent article, but suffice it to say for now that the very fact that so many people can have such disparate interpretations of a single piece of narrative art is evidence in favor of the inherent subjectivity of the human experience. Narrative correlationism - the philosophy of art that is the subject of this series - holds that each person’s experience of a piece of narrative artwork is a subjective one. By extension, narrative correlationism posits that the audience experience of a piece of art is, therefore, the only one that matters, and that designing art with the audience experience foremost in mind should be the modus operandi of all narrative artists. I have, in this series, suggested that our every waking moment is characterized by an inescapable and automatic correlation between our past and our present, and that these connections that we build from moment to moment are stories, by definition. Well, I’d like to suggest now that the subjectivity of the human experience is, in fact, a side-effect of our inherently narrative way of experiencing the world. We’ve spent the lion’s share of this series so far laying the groundwork for the ‘narrative’ part of narrative correlationism, by defining narrative in cognitive science terms, and exploring what may have been our narrative worldview’s evolutionary heritage. But it’s about time now that we start to tackle the second part of the term: the philosophical school of ‘correlationism.’

The question of whether or not humankind’s comportment to the world is inherently subjective has been debated in philosophical circles at least as far back as Immauel Kant. As expertly summarized by Levi R. Bryant, “[Kant] [...] argues that we can never know reality as it is in itself apart from us, but only as it appears to us. If the mind takes an active role in structuring reality (for us) we are unable to know what [reality] is in-itself because we cannot determine what, in appearances, is a product of our own minds and what is a feature of things as they are in themselves.” (1) Phenomenology - a philosophical school founded by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century - is built upon essentially the same idea, that our human experience is marked by an “irreducible, essential interrelatedness between signifying consciousness and the surrounding world of significance.” (2)

Now, interestingly, the term ‘correlationism’ was originally coined by a man whose goal in doing so was chiefly to debunk it. Philosopher Quentin Meillassoux defined correlationism as a philosophy rooted in the idea that “we can’t know what the reality of an object in itself is because we can’t distinguish between properties which are supposed to belong to the object and properties belonging to the subjective access to the object.” (3) And Meillassoux called this supposed indistinguishability of objective reality and our subjective experience of it the “correlationist circle.” (4) Meillassoux considered Kant a correlationist, and cast many other post-Kantian philosophers under that same banner.

Speculative realism - the philosophical school that Meillassoux created in contradistinction to correlationism - disagrees with correlationist thought in two major respects. Meillassoux’s first criticism of correlationism is that it is anthropocentric by nature, in that it attempts to describe reality not as it objectively is, but only as it is experienced by human beings. Secondly, Meillassoux disagrees with the assertions of correlationist thinkers that objective reality is ultimately inaccessible to human beings.

Now, it’s likely fairly obvious by my adoption of the term “correlationism” for my philosophy of art that I disagree with Meillassoux’s dismissal of that particular school of philosophical thought. So let me take Meillassoux’s objections to correlationism point by point. I will admit that, by framing narrative correlationism from the perspective of how human beings experience the world, it is technically speaking ‘anthropocentric,’ by the strictest definition of the word. But there is something of a stigma in philosophical circles to the idea of anthropocentrism that I am hoping, here, to escape. In focusing on the human experience, I’m not trying to make a value judgment to suggest that our way of seeing the world is the only way it could be seen, or even the quote-unquote ‘best’ way. My point is that - given our current cognitive conditions - viewing the world through our subjective comportment to it is the only way that human beings actually can experience it. And I personally don’t believe it should be a high philosophical crime that a philosophy by humans and for humans should make the study of human experience its central focus. This series, after all, is about narrative, and - by my definition - narrative is chiefly characterized by a human being’s subjective conscious experience of the world. It only follows, then, that examining our subjective experience of the world should be - from a philosophical standpoint - what is most instructive towards this work’s particular ends. I would argue that correlationism in general is not invalid as a philosophical doctrine, so long as you recognize that it is specifically applicable to the human experience. It may be inadequate to describe reality as a whole, but it is incredibly relevant to describing each of our individual perceptions of reality, as filtered through our conscious minds.

It’s possible that phenomenology founder Edmund Husserl put it best when he observed that what distinguishes objective reality from our subjective experience of it is that the latter is actually measurable. (5) Philosophy, historically, deals explicitly in those things that are beyond measure, and science is rooted in precisely the opposite. And this is why the underpinnings of the philosophy of narrative correlationism are rooted, primarily, in cognitive science and not philosophy. Because, while correlationist philosophies have, at times, gotten close to accurately describing the human experience, modern cognitive science has gotten as close as I’ve ever seen to actually explaining why it is the way it is.

To Bor’s way of thinking, it is the remarkable, emergent properties of conscious processing that create the persuasive illusion - common to philosophers like Meillassoux - that human consciousness can somehow transcend the constraints of the physical organ that enables it. But Giulio Tononoi’s information integration theory fairly effectively discounts this idea. Information integration theory holds that consciousness is characterized by the output of the interconnected neurons in our brain. Our thoughts, by extension, cannot extend beyond the network that enables them. And the strength of these assumptions leads Bor to conclude that “subjectivity, far from a philosophical conundrum, might simply be a product of the way that closed networks generate their compound, unified items of information – a mathematical, computational process that we happen to call consciousness." (6)

In “The Ravenous Brain,” Daniel Bor presents an example of the subjectivity of human experience by exploring what it’s like to experience the color of a red rose: “The information, the knowing that the rose is red, is independent of the tool by which that information is acquired.” (7) Our senses, in other words, are merely the tools by which we acquire information; It is our brain that acts as the filter through which we assign that information meaning. The information, on its own, has no inherent meaning. Narrative discourse, in other words, is not the same as story. In the case of a film like “Blade Runner,” then, it may be our eyes and ears that take in the discursive elements of the film, but it is our brain where that information is processed, where our subjective narrative experience of the film is formed.

“Blade Runner” was released in 1982, and I was too young at the time to see the film during its original theatrical release, let alone to be a part of the original zeitgeist surrounding the debate over Deckard’s status as a replicant or a human. This was not the case, however, for the follow-up, “Blade Runner 2049,” which did not hit theaters until 35 years later, in 2017. I did have occasion to see the “Blade Runner” sequel in theaters, and as it happens I have my own chapter to add to the spirited debate.

I recently got drinks with an old friend whom I hadn’t spoken to since before the pandemic. Our conversation migrated to the subject of “Blade Runner 2049,” helmed by director Denis Villeneuve. My friend and I both liked the film a great deal. I told him that one of the things I liked best about the sequel was that it at no point definitively answered the question of whether or not Deckard was a replicant. Upon hearing my interpretation, my friend furrowed his brow, before proceeding to tell me that his takeaway from the film was that it had, in fact, settled that long-running debate.

Unlike the original Ridley Scott film, there is, to my knowledge, only one cut of “Blade Runner 2049” available for public consumption, so my friend and I definitely saw the same film. The discursive information he took in when we watched the film, the sights and the sounds, was the same information that I experienced when I watched it. But the reason that he and I had two very different experiences watching the same film was that, due to the subjective nature of consciousness, our brains were each very actively building our own personal narrative experience as the film progressed. My brain was deciding how each new scene in the film was connected to the ones that came before it. My brain was predicting how each new detail might be relevant to future scenes I hadn’t seen yet. I almost certainly noticed details of the film that my friend missed, because my brain was actively directing my attention to the parts of the film that were relevant to me, the parts that resonated with me because they were meaningfully connected to my own past experience. And my friend’s brain, meanwhile, was shaping his narrative experience of the film too, into a mental gestalt that was necessarily different from mine, and different from every single other person who has ever viewed the film.

Now, the way our brain draws connections between the events the characters are experiencing and things that we’ve experienced in our own lives is really the kicker here. Because no one else has had my exact life experiences. So, that part of my narrative experience of “Blade Runner 2049” - the part that’s filled in by my brain - will always be unique to me, by definition. Which, by extension, makes my overall narrative experience of the film unique to me as well. No one else will have my experience of a piece of narrative art, because part and parcel to that experience is the meaningful connections that I bring to it, and only I could bring to it.

Correlationism holds that everything new we experience is, through consciousness, ineluctably correlated with something from our past. Narrative correlationism adds to this discussion by asserting that these connections between our past and our present are stories by definition, and, in fact, that stories did not - and could not - exist prior to the development of brains capable of experiencing the world the way that we do. On an evolutionary level, the reason that our narrative worldview originally emerged - and the reason it has stood the test of time - is because it enables us to more efficiently process the information in the world around us, towards the end of furthering our survival as a species. It is precisely our conscious brain’s inherently narrative orientation to the world that creates the so-called correlationist circle, this indivisibility, from any given person’s perspective, of objective reality and their subjective experience of it. And narrative correlationism posits, finally, that the inherent subjectivity of narrative experiencing suggests that narrative artists should craft their work with their audience’s experience of the work first and foremost in mind. What artists create, in other words, is not narrative, but an experience that hopefully inspires a narrative in the minds of their audience. It is ultimately, therefore, the experience that we design, not the narrative itself, and that should shift our focus as artists away from the artwork as an end unto itself, and towards, instead, the ways in which that artwork can facilitate a narrative experience for our audiences.

With all of this as a backdrop, the next post will dig into the specifics of how the creators of both “Blade Runner” and “Blade Runner 2049” initiated and perpetuated one of cinema’s most enduring narrative mysteries, while exploring what narrative correlationism has to say about narrative design.

Move on to Entry #6

Go back to Entry #1

SOURCES

(1) Bryant, L.R. (2014). Correlationism. In P. Gratton, P.J. Ennis (Eds.), The Meillassoux Dictionary (p. 46). Edinburgh University Press.

(2) Moran, D. (2019). What is the Phenomenological Approach? Revisiting Intentional Explication. Phenomenology and Mind, (15), 72–90. https://doi.org/10.13128/Phe_Mi-24973

(3) Bryant, L.R. (2014). Correlationism. In P. Gratton, P.J. Ennis (Eds.), The Meillassoux Dictionary (p. 47). Edinburgh University Press.

(4) Bryant, L.R. (2014). Correlationism. In P. Gratton, P.J. Ennis (Eds.), The Meillassoux Dictionary (p. 47). Edinburgh University Press.

(5) Moran, D. (2019). What is the Phenomenological Approach? Revisiting Intentional Explication. Phenomenology and Mind, (15), 72–90. https://doi.org/10.13128/Phe_Mi-24973

(6) Bor, D. (2012). Ravenous Brain (p. 191). Basic Books.

(7) Bor, D. (2012). Ravenous Brain (p. 15). Basic Books.