Narrative, Contingency, and Singularity

The contrast between the uncertainty of the future and the fixity of the past is, despite some postmodernist strictures, a basic presupposition in our everyday experience of time: it provides, actually, much of the ground for an ontological distinction between the future and the past. Narrative is a major cognitive instrument to deal both with the irrevocability of the past and with the contingency of future events, dealing as it deals at its core with a retrospective perspective on events which used to be future or contingent, but have since become past and irrevocable. Narrative also models the limited openness of the past through selectivity and perspectivism, and therefore stands at the no-man's land between the irrevocability of the past and the emergence of "new pasts". My talk will address the peculiar relationship of narrative to the representation of contingent and singular events with particular emphasis on an interesting contemporary development—evolutionary cosmology. Lee Smolin and Roberto Mangabeira Unger have recently formulated a novel perspective on the laws of physics and the origin and nature of the Universe which might result in a revolutionary scientific paradigm, one which limits the role of mathematics in the understanding of the universe (thus transcending the current Newtonian-Einsteinian paradigm). Taking seriously the evolutionary nature of reality involves a recognition of the singularity of events at all scales, and of the reality of time as the grounding dimension of the universe. We hold, however, that there is an insufficient narratological awareness in the theory: narrative is a prime instrument to deal with emergence, singularity and evolutionary time, but the concepts of narrative and narratology are missing in the conceptual toolkit of the theory. I will attempt to spell out some narratological implications and concomitances of this evolutionary theory of physical reality and of its new conception of ontological singularity.