There is a widespread mistrust of narrative in philosophy. From Plato, who banished poets from the ideal city for their power to mislead through imitation, to Jean‑François Lyotard, who defined postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives,” storytelling is repeatedly treated as epistemologically suspect.At the same time, the general public still treats narrative as the preferred form of knowledge. To know something is almost synonymous with being able to produce a connected story about it, to encode it in coherent chains of symbols, in the sense proposed by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The symbolic order retains something of its magic, and the moment when a new narrative finally snaps into place carries a peculiar pleasure that is difficult to describe.

This “snapping” is achieved through repetitive practice, but also through medial processing: once a story circulates often enough, it is filtered by the constraints of its channels, compressed by habits of telling, and normalized by expectations of reception. It is ground not only against one’s tongue and the listeners’ ears, but against the technical forms that carry it. Elements that resist transmission drop out; surplus details are pruned; new transitions emerge; linear sequences are imposed where parallel or unrelated processes once coexisted. In this sense, narrative coherence is less a property of experience than an effect of formatting, iteration, and storage, what Friedrich Kittler would call the material conditions of discourse. What we encounter as narrative form has always already been reorganized by its modes of inscription, reproduction, and circulation.

The pleasure of narrative is radically different from the pleasure of the text as theorized by Barthes. What narrative foregrounds is symbolic alignment: temporal sequence, causal logic, and conceptual coherence are made to converge. This convergence is itself the source of pleasure. Narratives are smooth; their smoothness has no depth: in the ideal narrative there is only surface. Nothing is hidden; everything is legible. This surface is also reflective, like a mirror: it presents the world, while simultaneously positioning us within it. Narrative does not merely describe reality; it frames us as readable elements inside it, stabilizing our place through symbolic continuity and representational closure.

The formation of narrative out of loose facts and motives feels miraculous because it operates against entropy. It appears almost as improbable as a shattered cup reassembling itself from its fragments (even though, strictly speaking, the second law of thermodynamics is beside the point here; energy is actively expended in the process). Narrative coherence is not given; it is produced through labor: selection, alignment, compression, and exclusion. This is the central event of narrative magic, the moment when dispersed elements are nested into symbolic unity. It is precisely this act of ordering, this visible victory over dispersion, that generates narrative’s power.

A widespread contemporary mode of public engagement with narrative still largely underappreciated, is a kind of DIY storytelling, in which audiences are supplied with loose motifs and encouraged to assemble their own narrative structures. A clear example can be found in the immigration rhetoric associated with Donald Trump and his administration. Through a volatile mixture of provocatively bizarre claims (migrants eating dogs), statistically plausible-sounding assertions (higher crime rates among migrants), plainly false statements (a higher proportion of mental illness), and factual elements (some policies under Joe Biden), the audience is not presented with a finished story. Instead, it is invited to perform the final act of narrative synthesis itself by selecting, aligning, and emotionally weighting these fragments to produce accounts that resonate with preexisting affects and ideological commitments.

In this model, persuasion does not operate primarily through coherent argument, but through distributed narrative affordances: users are given components, and narrative unity emerges through their own acts of connection. The result is not a single story but a field of personalized micro-narratives, each internally coherent and emotionally calibrated.

Audiences are seduced into taking part in this game, which is continually fueled by new motifs, rhetorical fragments, and other forms of narrative seed material. The justification of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine operates along similar lines: rather than offering a coherent, closed narrative, authorities provide the public with a heap of jigsaw pieces that anyone can rearrange. Individual fragments can be added or removed at will; the overall picture keeps shifting with its central motifs remaining relatively stable, yet always subject to drift and mutation.

Narrative coherence emerges downstream, produced by users themselves through acts of selection, alignment, and affective weighting. These participatory narrative modes follow the media logic described by McLuhan and Kittler: meaning is no longer primarily authored, but formatted; not transmitted as a finished message, but distributed as modular material to be recombined. Narrative becomes an interface that invites its audience to engage with it, and in doing so, to internalize its operational affordances.