Abstract
This article presents the initial results of the research project titled “Narrative Empowerment for Analysis: Epistemic Challenges in the Technical Construction of Strategic Narratives.” To instrument the construction of strategic narratives, it is necessary to characterize their technical features. Gerard Genette’s modal narratology, as developed in “Figures” III, allows us to describe the relationship between the pseudo-time of the narrative – the succession of sentences and pages – and the diegetic time – the time of the story being told – as well as phenomena of mode and voice. We conducted a micronarrative analysis of DGSE notes related to the Rwandan crisis in the 1990s and are now conducting a macronarrative analysis of the entire set of documents, considering their chronological succession as a single narrative for the recipients. We present the challenges encountered during the decomposition process and provide a description of the analysis output, which will serve as material for reflecting on an appropriate digital medium for the construction of strategic narratives.
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Notes
- 1.
The concept of empowerment used in this research stems directly from work devoted to perception and its instrumentation. Substitution means a relationship between an agent and an instrument and indicates that this relationship enables and constrains a new power, for example perceptive power. Typically, it is possible for blind people to experience objects at a distance without contact via the active use of a dedicated instrument [12]. By extension, we propose to mobilise this concept to evoke the conquest of a new capacity for strategic analysis linked to the synthetic power of the narrative resulting itself from the analyst’s relationship with a textual instrument possessing a manipulable structure.
- 2.
Particularly with reference to the visionary and very comprehensive study entitled Tactique des renseignements (Intelligence tactics), published in two volumes (1881 [13] and 1883 [14]) by Major General Jules-Louis Lewal, to whom Franck Bulinge pays tribute in his textbook which we quote in this article.
- 3.
In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Barthes distinguished three forces of freedom in literature: mathesis, its capacity to engage in a dramatic (as opposed to epistemological) discourse on life; mimésis, its capacity to grasp reality through stubbornness and displacement; and sémiosis, freedom in the heteronymy of the things of language.
- 4.
The English translation of Figures III which will serve as a reference for this article is that of Lewin published in 1980 [8].
- 5.
The narrative pseudo-time corresponds to the sequence of words and sentences, whereas the diegetic time refers to the time in the world of the story being told.
- 6.
This second name is a proposal from Nouveau discours du récit [9], p. 29 and 88.
- 7.
To break down the temporal structure of a narrative, we can choose to situate ourselves on an arbitrary scale. Genette calls micronarrative the level of the shortest anachronies, and macronarrative the overall level, which neglects them. A primary narrative at the micro level can thus belong to an anachrony at the macro level.
- 8.
A paralipse is a “lateral omission” [7, p. 290], which consists in not giving information that one possessed (in the sense of focus) and which is therefore missing from the understanding.
- 9.
In Nouveau discours du récit, Genette specifies that the pause is not necessarily descriptive – it can be a digression –, and that a description is not necessarily a pause (p. 35).
- 10.
Genette, in Nouveau discours du récit, completes his rejection of the opposition mimesis/ diégésis by replacing mimesis by rhésis, transcription.
- 11.
In Nouveau discours du récit, Genette insists on the continuum between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic levels (p. 102).
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by Alten SA (CIFRE). We would also like to thank the students of the Recitech group at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne for their assistance in applying Genette’s method to the corpus.
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Marès, F., Bachimont, B., Gapenne, O. (2024). Narrative Empowerment for Intelligence: Structural Study Applied to Strategic Notes. In: Baratgin, J., Jacquet, B., Yama, H. (eds) Human and Artificial Rationalities. HAR 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14522. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55245-8_9
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