About the concept of Narrative

Within the Theory of Narrasis, narrative is radically redefined. It is not simply a story, a text, a semantic content, or a vehicle for communication. A narrative is an emergent and relatively stabilised configuration that arises within a narrasic system: a dynamic regime capable of maintaining operative continuity under change.

Narrative does not found the narrasic system, nor does it exist prior to it. It emerges when the system succeeds in concentrating part of its dynamics around a recognisable structuring axis.

From this perspective, narrative functions as a second-order narrasic operator. Its function is to reorganise already existing continuities in order to make them recognisable, reusable, and operable as a relatively cohesive unit.

In doing so, narrative reduces the operative cost of maintaining continuity within the system. It allows complexity to be condensed and multiple tensions to be coordinated without constantly redefining the system’s fundamental structural problem.

Narrative does not eliminate complexity.

It makes complexity tractable.

Primary Narrative and Human Narrative

The theory distinguishes between primary narratives and human narratives.

Primary narratives appear in non-human social systems. The hierarchy within a wolf pack or the organisation of a beehive constitute narrative forms capable of formalising and executing an organisational axis.

However, these narratives cannot reflexively intervene upon the axis they organise.

Human narrative does possess this meta-operative capacity. It can intervene upon, reformulate, and modulate the structuring axis that made its own emergence possible without destroying the system’s operative continuity.

This capacity makes human narrative an especially flexible and powerful mechanism of reorganisation.

Codification and Transmission

One of the fundamental properties of human narrative is its capacity for codification.

To persist beyond the immediate interaction that generated it, the organising axis of the narrative must become fixed in transmissible and reactivatable forms.

This codification is not exclusively verbal or linguistic. A narrative can be codified through:

• gestures,
• rituals,
• architecture,
• spatial organisation,
• music,
• images,
• or repeated bodily patterns.

Through this capacity, narrative can partially decouple itself from its original context and circulate across time and space without disappearing entirely.

Narrative Identity

When narrative operates within the human individual, it adopts the functional form of narrative identity.

Narrative identity is not a continuous internal monologue or the expression of a deep and immutable essence. It functions as an operative mechanism that allows the individual to maintain recognisable continuity under constant conditions of environmental variation and social dependence.

Elements such as the “I”, autobiography, or personal memory do not necessarily represent an essential truth of the subject. They are narrative executions through which the system organises its own continuity temporally and socially.

Narrative, Communication, and Symbol

Within the broader framework of the theory, narrative is structurally distinct from both communication and symbol.

Narrative possesses its own ontological status independently of whether it is actively communicated, interpreted, or verbalised. While communication constitutes a situated and local modulation of nervous systems, narrative operates as a stabilised configuration of continuity.

Narrative also structurally precedes the symbol.

When a narrative reaches a certain threshold of stabilisation and requires fixation into a portable and transmissible form, it precipitates into symbol.

The symbol does not literally contain the narrative. It acts as a condensed activator capable of reactivating previously existing narrative configurations within the narrasic system.