Contents introduction

CONSULITION.
Election years are robust times for the study of narrative. On a recent walk around the neighborhood with my big, furry golden-retriever, I came upon a sticker pasted across the bumper of an old pickup truck: “Nobody lies so much as after fishing and before an election,” it said. Well intentioned, and no doubt politically cognizant, my neighbor seems to miss the more subtle mechanics of political production and institutional power here in the twenty-first century. It’s not that politicians lie, or that the news media puts a spin on political issues, it’s that the very modes of narrative that inform political reality are, on a formal level, instruments of political power. Worse yet, the invisibility of narrative production as a formal strategy more often than not renders the source of political oppression—the politics of homeland security, the socially-corrosive infrastructure of the postmetropolis, the national response to terror attacks, etc.— below our political horizons, inaccessible because of the extent to which they are normalized and written into our experience of everyday life.
Foucault’s writings on “technologies of the self” describe the ways that individuals, as extensions of the state, unknowingly internalize and act out biopolitical narratives. As I have demonstrated, embracing the politics of domestic space and endorsing urban models that discourage the production of space make it difficult for individuals to achieve critical distance from the narratives of the state, narratives that they, themselves, put into practice in their everyday lives. This entrenchment of narrative in our very experience of reality has made political trauma an increasingly problematic and slippery theoretical concept.
LIBRIARY

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2. 
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3. 
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4. 
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5. 
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6. 
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7. 
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8. 
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9. 
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10. 
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11. 
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12. 
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13. 
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14. 
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