Master Narratives: Ideology Embedded and Embodied

Abstract

While I agree with most of Maiese and Hanna’s (2019) claims in The Mind-Body Politic, I argue that it is possible to offer a fuller explanation of the effects of ideologies and how they are implemented by adopting a narrative analysis to examine the role that narratives play in shaping the social and material conditions of institutions, and individuals’ cognitive habits and affective frames. A narrative analysis maintains that much of our perceptions of and experiences in the world are shaped by the synthesis of conceptual and affective knowledge that we encounter in socio-cultural narratives. Socio-cultural narratives are understood here as narratives that establish, shape, and reinforce cultural beliefs and practices or societal social structures, process, and organizations. By utilizing a narrative analysis we can then employ an additional methodology to examine and understand how we, as individuals, develop and change our particular embodied habits and affective framing patterns. I show how this can be done by focusing on, and expanding upon, Maiese and Hanna’s discussion of neoliberalism and the backfire effect, where individuals resist changes to their affective framing patterns and habitual ways of being in the world.