The Agential Materiality of Storytelling

Walter Benjamin (Chicago Review, 16(1), 80–101, 1963) believed that storytelling was dying because its replacement (narrative and information) was no longer grounded in a living or material world of crafts and practicality. In this chapter, we attempt to bring storytelling to the living material world. We tie storytelling to a wide range of disciplines, including quantum physics, sociology, and complexity science, to illustrate how to apply living storytelling in the material world and how to utilize it to enrich our understanding of various disciplines. Once storytelling reunites with materiality and once the living feature of storytelling is revealed, the old paradigms of linear, sequenced plots, retrospective sense making, and social constructionism break down and a new paradigm candidate is demanded to replace them. We develop an alternative candidate, which includes social materialism, the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), posthumanism, antenarratology, and agential realism. Examples of this new storytelling in-a-material-world are presented as exemplars of qualitative projects for future living materiality-storytelling research.