Every Telling Has a Tailing: The Politics of Narrative, Identity, and Knowing

To tell something is to do something.

This is the premise — not a metaphor, but a material reality. Every telling is an action. Every telling has a tailing.

I heard this phrase "Every telling has a tailing" in a video that wrestled with Joyce and Foucault. It stuck with me like a seed, unfurling its meaning over time. On the surface, it feels poetic. But in context, it becomes philosophical — and political.

Foucault says: all knowledge is political. Every truth claim is tangled in power. There is no such thing as neutral knowing.

Joyce, ever the linguistic trickster, echoes this in his own way. Telling leaves a trail. Not just in memory, but in culture, identity, and belief. To speak is to shape the world.

Take a simple statement: “I am 5’7.” What system is that? Metric or Imperial? Who decided which measurement gets used? Embedded in that is history, colonial legacy, economic standardization.

Or: “I am a woman.” A phrase that appears factual — but holds layers upon layers of pre-determined matrices. Gender as a biological assumption. Gender as a religious construction. Gender as family legacy. Gender as resistance or compliance. These aren't just facts. They're performative utterances within a framework of existing power, built before you and I were born.

Politics goes beyond the White House and Parliament. It diffuses itself into society. It codes our bodies. It defines what it means to know a body, what counts as a "fact" about a body — how it's measured, categorized, and moralized. That coding extends all the way down to the soul.

Even the concept of having a soul — who we believe has one and who does not — has been constructed by power. Certain creatures are deemed soulful, sacred, worthy of reverence. Others are considered soulless, disposable, subject to domination. This line of telling leads to ecological collapse. If some beings matter less, we abandon them. And in abandoning them, we abandon ourselves.

To know yourself, to name yourself, is already to walk into a web of inherited definitions. The terms of the self have already been decided. When women care for children or wash clothes, there’s often no name. No title. No compensation. But when someone enters a room with a spreadsheet, they’re called a financial analyst. When someone leads a board meeting, they’re called a CEO. If a woman tends to the sick, it’s care work. If a man develops a surgical tool, it’s innovation.

We construct ourselves as we speak. We participate in identity through the act of telling.

And so: every telling has a tailing. A ripple. A residue. A responsibility.

This isn’t about being afraid to speak. It’s about being awake when we do. To know that even our most innocent phrases are not free-floating. They have context, lineage, impact.

And for those of us who are narrative designers — writers, facilitators, cultural stewards — this awareness is a form of integrity. A refusal to pretend that language is neutral.

Because when we say something, we’re not just telling a truth. We’re building a world.

And we must remember: there is no such thing as "bare, unbiased" fact. In an age saturated with information — the second Pandora’s box after the internet, this time flung wide by AI — knowledge is no longer power. Discernment is. We don’t need classrooms that grade students on memorizing the date of the Gettysburg Address. They can Google it faster than we can say “test.”

What they need is to be taught how to identify credible sources, how to recognize bias, how to name and navigate their own. Because everyone has bias — especially those who claim they don’t.

The age of knowing is not about certainty. It’s about capacity. About discernment. About learning how to live with complexity and choose wisely anyway.

Every telling has a tailing. And in this era, perhaps the greatest responsibility we carry is not just in what we say, but in how we choose to know.