Narration, Imaginary, Ideology

This work aims to explore how certain narrative structures, and the mechanisms of identification and projection they generate, are used to legitimize, maintain, and convey existing power structures and worldviews. Narratives have the ability to create a shared imaginary capable of justifying existing hierarchies, regulates behaviors, lifestyles, and values within a community.

In particular, the narrative of work ethics will be analyzed as an example, highlighting the narrative forms and semantic nodes it shares with the narrative of psychological self-work, particularly in regard to the ascetic aspect.

A focus will be given to the "compulsion to self-narrate" which increasingly characterizes both the media space and places of social interaction, whether work-related or not, proposing to read the phenomenon as a form of panopticon. The compulsion to self-narrate, regulated by rewards and punishments, along with the heteronomy of contents and narrative structures, operates as a horizontal social control mechanism, where individuals monitor, reward or punish how others narrate themselves. In this way, the subject of the narrative becomes its object, seeing their own perspective on themselves expropriated.

By offering an analysis of these themes, the paper proposes a critical perspective on the social functions of narration and the aestheticization of ideologies.