"To exist is to survive unfair choices": "Tribal Ontology" in the Netflix Originals Series The OA

In 2017, Vox journalist David Roberts used the term "tribal epistemology"—borrowed from the anthropologist Helmut Wautischer (1998)—to describe a tendency for certain groups, in our current "post-truth" environment, to trust information which is "evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe's values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders". In the Netflix Originals series The OA (2016–19), Prairie Johnson—played by the series' co-creator and writer Brit Marling—is such a leader, however the knowledge she gives her tribe, that the universe is in fact a multiverse and that interdimensional travel is possible, widens rather than narrows their understanding of the world. Convinced of Prairie's claims, the tribe becomes focused less on their personal difficulties than on what Brian McHale calls "problems of modes of being" (McHale 10), as does the series; however, Prairie may be an unreliable narrator, and therefore both her status and her claims are called into question. McHale identifies the preoccupation with modes of being as a characteristic of postmodernist fiction which is distinguished from its modernist predecessor by a shift from "an epistemological dominant to an ontological one" (10; original emphasis). Where tribal epistemology of the type Roberts identifies resolves problems of both being and of knowing by uniting them in a subjectivity guaranteed by what Max Weber termed the "charismatic authority" (2012) of a leader, Prairie's tribe, each of whom feels marginalized by normative society, are given agency by the knowledge they acquire. This knowledge empowers them to become more than mere followers, particularly when they start to doubt Prairie. In Nietzsche's terms, they become who they are and as the series is set in a multiverse, this becoming involves engaging with multiple modes of being: a tribal ontology rather than epistemology.

In this essay, I will discuss the "tribal ontology" of The OA in the context of current debates pertaining to the social construction of both knowledge and identity. Significantly, a member of Prairie's tribe, Buck, is transgender as is the actor who plays him, Ian Alexander, who also plays himself in the second season finale where the previous events of both seasons are implied to have all been a "series within a series." I argue that this episode's deployment of metafictional techniques and the series' use of the trope of the multiverse are ultimately utopian in motivation, calling for a corresponding social multiplicity in the actual world which overflows "tribal" boundaries and removes the need for an epistemology guaranteed by charismatic authority.

In Marling and Batmanglij's first collaboration, the 2011 film Sound of My Voice, Marling plays Maggie, a cult leader in the Los Angeles of 2014 who claims to have travelled back in time from the year 2054 to warn her followers of the destruction of American society in her time. I have previously compared Maggie to Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" from Thesis IX of his Theses on the Philosophy of History: both have their backs to the future, "but unlike the angel, [Maggie] has already seen it and so for her the past to which she travels is a moment in the 'single catastrophe' of capitalist 'progress'" (2015). Maggie uses her knowledge of the future to educate her followers about a new, better way of living based on a return to community and the replacement of the 'culture industry' with an authentic folk culture, as valued by Benjamin and the members of the Frankfurt School with which he was associated, most notably Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. However, Maggie's cult has been infiltrated by two undercover documentary film-makers determined to expose her as a con-artist exploiting the credulous and needy. These characters, particularly Peter (Christopher Denham), are the film's protagonists and Maggie is represented as a potentially unreliable narrator to her cult. This is particularly evident in a scene where Peter attends a cult meeting during which, after she has described her...