It never really went away, Lyotard and his Postmoderns notwithstanding. Especially since inveighing against meta-narratives on a culture-wide, historical level looks a lot like just another version of the same. (In postmodernism's case in particular, the new version of meta-narrative is often about the collapse of the Marxist one, and appears to coincide roughly with the increasingly sclerotic condition of those societies that had tried to put the old one into practice.) In general, though, we're not going to be able to avoid "meta-narratives" in this sense without losing our capacity to think in cultural/historical terms altogether.
But perhaps we should first distinguish "meta-narrative" from "grand narrative", and note that the postmodernist critique is really referring to the latter. And even grand narratives, so-called, should probably be distinguished from narratives as such -- the latter come in all sorts of lesser versions (not even counting the fictional ones), from single stories to editorial agendas to historical accounts and even to extensive cultural narrations, that still fall short of the comprehensive and more ideological treatments that earn the title "grand narrative". The Marxist story of class struggle obviously fits with that category, but so does the post-Enlightenment story of bourgeois progress, particularly in the more simplistic versions of "Whig history".
Yet we shouldn't let skepticism regarding such dated narratives close our eyes to any such development. Something must have given rise to the Enlightenment itself after all, and its doesn't seem that difficult to trace its roots, and hence the roots of our modern world, back to such significant historical phenomena as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the appearance of a scientific approach to knowledge of the material world. More than that, it would take an almost wilful blindness not to see what an enormous transformation the modern world represents compared to all previous epochs, regardless of what accounts for it -- perhaps the only comparable eras in degree of change would be the Neolithic revolution that spread farming settlements, or the Bronze Age rise of large urban conglomerations. It's obviously tempting to see this as "progress", and in many ways it obviously is, at least in the case of the modern age, with its ending of slavery, its spread of literacy, its great reductions in hunger and disease, and so on. But the real point is just the undeniability of the scale of the change.
And then comes the question: where are we now? At its end? Still in its midst? Or at the start of changing into something else altogether?
And what would that be? Nietzsche's ubermensch? Something post-human (or "transhuman")? Cyborgs? Androids? Up-/down-loadable digital minds?
All those are grist for stories that can become parts of the meta-narrative proper, a compendium of stories that is itself a story. There are many more such parts. Consider, for example, the Christian story that goes from Eden to the natural world to Apocalypse and the Last Judgment. Or the Whig History (and, ironically, Marxist) story that goes from feudalism to capitalism to history's end. Or the one that goes from Enlightenment to modernism to postmodernism. Or the cosmological one, from the Big Bang to the universe we see to its ultimate "heat death" (or Big Crunch, or Big Rip, or ???). Or, more recently, the technological one that goes from farming to industry to Singularity. They all exhibit versions of a narrative arc -- beginning, middle, and end, sometimes with a climax just before the imagined last stage.
But those -- and a multitude more like them -- are all grand narratives, and collecting them in this way doesn't in itself make a narrative, much less a meta-narrative. That hypothetical entity would include them as parts or types, but would go beyond them. Most importantly, it would have a space and a place for the personal, the unique individual, whose own grand narrative goes from birth through life to death. That is, the meta-narrative conserves the narrative structure underlying all attempts to provide a teleology or purpose to the human condition, and within that structure, it preserves the notion of the human individual's unique path -- which is just a name for the individual's reciprocal influence on the world around him/her, for good or ill. As a path or story, it has a direction, and in the immanent frame, the "good" direction can only be indicated by an ideal that is of this world, but never fully realized, always pulling us onward as we approach. This takes as many different forms in detail as there are different people, but in its abstraction, it is just that utopic version of an imaginative ideal that forever sits on the horizon.
Jun 14/20
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