Narrative Infrastructure: Hiding in Plain Sight
A Substack Article By Brett Davidson and Juliana Martinez
I. Introduction
What does it mean for something to be everywhere and yet invisible?
In 2018, medical researchers announced the discovery of a new organ. Not buried deep in some inaccessible corner of the body, but everywhere — a vast network of fluid-filled connective tissue cushioning every organ, threading through every muscle, present in every human being who has ever lived. It is called the interstitium.
As is the case with most “discoveries”, the interstititum was nothing new — it had been there all along. The reason it had never been seen was that the technique used to prepare tissue for the microscope — fixing, slicing, staining — drained the fluid, making it invisible. Ironically, the very act of trying to make the tissue visible destroyed the thing that needed to be seen.
Carnival Tuesday in Trinidad with the band Tribe. Photo Credit: David Kernahan.
We think narrative infrastructure has a similar problem. For years, the field has been treating narrative infrastructure as a mystery still to be solved — convening to define it, debating what it includes, asking what it really is. Yet even though several people and organizations have offered useful, practical answers, the question keeps coming up fresh, as if asked for the first time.
