Synopses & Reviews
Ever since its emergence, humanity has cultivated the art of telling stories, an art that is everywhere at the heart of the social bond. But since the 1990s, first in the US and then in Europe, this art has been colonized by the domain of public relations and triumphant capitalism, and relabelled with the anodyne name of 'storytelling.' This has become a weapon in the hands of marketing, management and political gurus, so as to better format the minds of consumers and citizens. Behind the advertising campaigns, but also in the shadows of victorious electoral campaigns from Bush to Sarkozy and Obama hide sophisticated 'storytelling management' or 'digital storytelling' technicians.
It is this incredible hold-up of human imagination that Christian Salmon reveals here, after an enquiry into the ever greater number of applications for which storytelling has been mobilized. Marketing now depends more on the history of brands than on their images, managers have to tell stories to motivate their employees, soldiers in Iraq train themselves on computer games conceived in Hollywood, and spin doctors construct a political life as if it were a narrative. Salmon unveils here the mechanics of a 'storytelling machine,' far more effective than Orwellian visions of totalitarian society. The subject that it wants to create is a bewitched individual, immersed in a fictive universe that filters perceptions, stimulates feelings and frames behavior and ideas.
Review
"This book, which is both concise and clearly written ... guides us through these texts which are largely unknown and now very influential." Le Monde
Review
"There are certain books that make you feel less stupid after reading them than before. ... It is a fascinating and never jargon-heavy book." Le Progrès
Review
Lively, very well informed and slickly handled.
Review
"Fascinating... intellectually satisfying... Salmon's insights are though-provoking and have ramifications beyond the world of advertising." The Washington Post
Review
"Lively, very well informed and slickly handled." Les Inrockuptibles
Synopsis
The narrative spell cast over politics and society.
Synopsis
Politics, as currently practiced, is no longer the art of the possible, but the art of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way it is perceived.
This is the subject of Christian Salmon's Storytelling, which looks at how the creative imagination has been hijacked in the twenty-first century. Salmon anatomizes the timeless human desire for narrative form and how it is abused in the marketing mechanisms behind politicians and products: luxury brands trade on their embellished histories, managers tell stories to motivate employees, soldiers in Iraq train on computer games conceived in Hollywood, and spin doctors construct political lives as if they were a folk epic.
Salmon unveils the workings of a "storytelling machine" more effective and insidious as a means of oppression than anything dreamed up by Orwell. The "reality-based community"--to use a phrase coined by an aide to George W. Bush--is now regularly outmaneuvered by public relations gurus and political advisers, as they construct story arcs for a population that has come to expect them.
About the Author
Christian Salmon is a writer and researcher in the Centre for Research in the Arts and Language at the CNRS in Paris. He is the founder of the International Parliament of Writers, of which he was president from 1993 to 2003, and is the author of several works, including Tombeau de la fiction, Devenir minoritaire, Verbicide and Storytelling. He writes a regular column for Le Monde.