One of the things that I’ve found most stunning, that in certain ways I somewhat regret, is my claim that fictions are real. Now there’s something about me that seems to create a ruckus wherever I go– and that’s been above all true of my pronouncements on this blog –but there have been few things I’ve said that have generated more heat than this thesis. Now for any materialist I would think this thesis would be obvious. If you’re a materialist then you’re committed to the thesis that all things are, well, either material or void. Fictions aren’t void, so that entails only one option: they’re material. Just as the materialist is obligated to give some sort of account of how a fish can move through water (given that water is a material thing and material things tend to resist) and just as a materialist must account for how its possible to see something (given that things are “over there” and there can only be some interaction if there’s some material connection– hence Lucretius’ theory of simulacra as “films” shed by bodies), the materialist is obligated to account for the reality of fictions. Put a bit differently, the materialist is obligated to account for the material existence of fictions.
Well this thesis, a year or so ago (I never have a very good sense of time) created a controversy. To this day I think Ian Bogost is the only person who shares my sentiment, and him perhaps in a more radical way than I. We’re both promiscuous in our ontologies in this way, feeling that the more beings, even Popeye and Unicorns, the better. Yet the Lacanian in me, noting the heated response this thesis generated for months on end– and there continues to be sneers against this thesis –is trained to sense that there must be something here. Given the response to the suggestion that fictions are real, given the acrimony this innocent suggestion generated, it seems that this thesis must have hit on either a) an important libidinal dimension of the Real in the world of theory, or 2) hit on a symptom haunting phallosophy and the world of (critical) theory. And in this regard, I would suggest– in, no doubt, a self-serving way (if I’m not my own hero who else will have me as a hero?) –this suggestion hit the real of the disavowed dualist foundation of critical theory. If this thesis generated such a ruckus then it would be because critical theory is often premised on a strong distinction between the domain of mind and culture on the one hand, and “reality” on the other hand. Here the world of mind is treated as a domain of representation that is unreal while the material world is treated as the world of reality. The question is then how to sort between those representations that correspond to reality and those representations that are purely a product of mind (fictions). This thesis is the necessary matrix of all existing critical theory, in that so much of critical theory consists in denouncing fictions, illusions, false apprehensions, on the basis of a model of the real.
read on!
However, the point not to be missed is that this way of approaching matters is based on a miscount. It is here that we encounter the disavowed dualist foundations of much critical theory. For what the critical theorist here fails to count as material is their own representations. These representations– as figures such as Dawkins and Dennett have taught us under the much (unjustly) maligned theory of “memes” (perhaps this constitutes a fifth blow to human narcissism after Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and OOO) –are not nothing. No, they too must be material entities that really exist in the world because they certainly aren’t void. So how do we account for this.
For years, along these lines, my mantra has been that texts aren’t simply about something, they are something. In other words, texts should not simply be understood in their referential and modal dimension, but should also be understood in their sheer materiality as entities, like animals, humans, rocks, and neutrinos, that circulate throughout the world. This is at the center of what I mean when I say that fictions are real. I am not making the claim that there is a person that exists like a human, named Popeye that I could marry, that has amazing biceps, that grows stronger when he eats his spinach, etc. No, I am making what I believe to be the obvious and common sense thesis that the cartoon Popeye ought not simply be understood as what it is about (its referential dimension), but also in terms of what it is (a material entity circulating about the world).
I believe this thesis is rife with all sorts of important theoretical and practical consequences. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound? The realist in me says “yes!” Does it produce effects? No! And this is the entire point. If we’re real materialists things have to circulate, they take time to circulate, they must connect in order to produce effects. This is the Lucretian teaching… That there is no real connection without material interaction. Sometimes, I think, our sense is that the very event of an idea having taken place means that that idea has come to pervade the entire world immediately, as if action at a distance were possible. As writers and thinkers this crushes us because we think (or I think) to ourselves “why bother, others have said this, others have pointed this out, therefore there’s no point to repetition. There’s nothing new here!” We are such bad materialists in these moments because we forget that things must circulate and that perhaps our role is to function as radio transmitters or “servers”, passing these things on a bit to others. Ideas, memes, fictions have to travel throughout the world. And often our role as activists and critical theorists is either to promote the circulation of certain “fictions” or to destroy them. Is this really so controversial? Would we be so concerned with ideology, for example, were it not material that produces real effects? We might balk at the idea of promoting certain fictions, yet is not a utopian idea, the idea of a life that no one has yet lived, a “fiction”? Aping Meillassoux’s thesis that “God does not exist, but could come to exist” (a wacky idea, I think), we could say that certain fictions imagine things that do not yet exist but that could come to exist. Realist materialism needs to go so far as to affirm modal materiality: the reality of possibility, yet only where possibilities have become real materialities; which is to say, conceivable.
But this is supposed to be a post on Eileen Joy. I got sidetracked. As I listened to her gorgeous talk at The Public School this evening (and The Public School is a very beautiful thing that you should all support and try to participate in, in some way or other) I realized that Joy and I have a profound affinity on these issues. And here I eagerly anticipate her article on these matters as well as the book she’s writing with Jeffrey Cohen on what an object-oriented literary criticism might look like. Like me, Joy wishes to emphasize that texts aren’t simply about something, they are something. And she wishes to think about what this reality of texts might imply.
Now I’ve had a devil of a time trying to develop the implications of the thesis that texts aren’t simply about something but are something. Joy takes this thesis home. What she emphasizes is the way in which things are both gatherings and how they gather other things. So here, in my view, one of the lessons to be drawn from Joy’s thesis– or rather one of her proposals given that she talks about her enjoyment of certain projects as “laboratory experiment” –is to investigate both 1) how are texts gathering of things (how can we bear witness to the plurality of entities that go into the production of a text), but also 2) how do texts gather other things together in new ways. In Deleuzian terms, how do texts function as “dark precursors” that conjugate divergent series together and relate them in new ways (this will be the topic of my talk for a lecture series at University of Minnesota later this month, for a series entitled “Rhetorical Bodies”)? In other words, what difference does a text make? And here, if I emphasize the reality of fictions, then this is because they are a limit case of certain types of entities generating new modal possibilities. Put in yet other terms, how do texts generate new collective entities? How do they gather entities? Here we require assemblage analyses, analyses of affects, analyses of power, analyses of the effects of signification, analyses of the ethico-aesthetic sensibilities generated by these gatherings, and much more besides.
As I listened to her talk I was reminded of a crucial distinction in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: The distinction between the factory and the theatre. In his notorious pronouncement that “the unconscious is a factory not a theatre”, Guattari was more true to Lacan than Lacan himself was to Lacan. In his doctrine of truth Lacan had contested the reigning “Freudian” thesis that interpretation represents the formations of the unconscious. Rather, Lacan had argued that the truth of an interpretation consists not in whether it represents the unconscious– the unconscious is an intersubjective process, so this is impossible –but rather in the effects that the interpretation produces. Does new material emerge following the interpretation? Is the symptom displaced onto new symptoms? Do symptoms dissolve? Do new desires emerge? These are the measures by which Lacan evaluated the truth of the interpretation. Like Badiou’s “truth-procedures”, truth is not something that precedes interpretation, but rather that which follows interpretation. It is what will have been, not that which hits what has been. Indeed, the activity of analysis is not something that discovers what was already there, but, following the logic of apres coup, produces something that will have been.
Guattari captures the essence of this position in his distinction between the unconscious as a theatre and the unconscious as a factor. The unconscious as a theatre is reterritorializing, always striving to bring the subject, the analysand, back to some (usually gloomy) past. By contrast, the unconscious as a factory is productive, generating something new. Here forms, affects, meanings, and ways of life are not already there, but are rather something created and invented in the course of analysis. Interpretation, analysis, free association– read Guattari’s beautiful journals, you’ll be surprised at how traditionally free associative they are –create something new, they don’t return (as in the case of Hegel’s famous definition of essence as that which was always-already) to something that was already there. Where a theatre says “everything represents something else”– recall Melanie Klein’s sad interpretations of her young boy… “The tunnel is Mommy, the train is Daddy. See how the train goes in the Tunnel?” “Your boss is really your father, see how this conflict recapitulates that conflict?” –Guattari’s unconscious is inventive. It creates something new, it is a path towards a new life, new set of desires, a new set of affects. It is a factory, not a theatre. And here we should ask not what a signifier represents, but what it does. Unfortunately too many of us want theatres… And we see this repeatedly in academia when so many fearful souls remark “isn’t this what X said?”, as if the important thing is to maintain the reference to the past.
So as I listen to Joy’s talk, I think to myself that she’s asking “what would it mean to approach the text as a factory rather than a theatre? What sort of practice would we have to develop to see texts as factories and approach them as factories and, to ape Heidegger’s “lassen sein“, to let them be factories?” The great thing about The Epic of Gilgamesh is that after 3000 or more years it still signifies as a text. It is still able to function a factory, despite the fact that we know little of its context. Isn’t this the problem with New Historicism? It wishes to gentrify the text, to turn it into a theatre, to reterritorialize it on its alleged conditions of production. It treats the text, therefore, as a mere effect, refusing the text as something, as something capable of creating effects. As Melanie Doherty continuously reminds me, Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, say that “a book is a little machine”. What would it mean to abandon that notion of interpretation as “theatre of representation” and to approach text in its thingliness as a machine capable of producing things? Are we prepared to approach texts in terms of their productive power?
October 5, 2011 at 3:27 am
Yup, I’m right there with you. Maybe I’ve even got it worse, as you say.
October 5, 2011 at 8:44 am
[...] His collaborator on that blog, Eileen Joy, recently gave a talk in New York entitled ‘Towards a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism’. The audio is available here. Levi Bryant at Larval Subjects has an interesting reaction. [...]
October 5, 2011 at 11:07 am
Well, since I’ve got several decades of work in on this one, I could go on and on and on . . . and have done so all over the place. Here and now, some quick observations.
Yes, fictions are real, they have effects in the world, and they’re bodied forth in texts that have palpable materiality, whether that of alphabetic and iconic marks inscribed on surfaces, molecules vibrating in air, images projected on screens, etc. The practical problem faced by literary critics is: so what?
The texts aren’t made as free-standing things, as trees falling in forests without ears. They’re made to be taken up. And the taking up happens inside peoples brains/minds. We have yet to figure out how to get direct access to that materiality. All we’ve been able to do is to go there by interpretive & hermeneutic indirection. That and a lot of hand-waving and tap-dancing.
Well, over the last three or four decades all that has collapsed. It’s lying in rubble in the offices and classrooms of literature departments all over the place. Do we have any new intellectual tools with which to tackle the materiality of fictional texts? If not, well, really, there’s no point in trying to go over the old battle ground with new terminology in hand, which is what most literary cognitivists and darwinians are doing.
As for the Dawkinsian meme, alas, neither Dawkins nor Dennett has produced even a hint as to how those can move about from one brain to another. The meme idea gets its rhetorical force from three sources: 1) It is self evident that ideas do ‘travel’ about. 2) A deep and abiding faith that reductive materialist explanations of mind and culture will one day pan out. 3) A culture awash in computer technology that realizes everthing in the uniform medium of bits.
But memetics has so far (waht? almost four decades?) produced little by way of explaining how that can happen, physically, with real brains. I’ve got a short argument on that here, and a rather longer argument: Colorless Green Homunculi, a review essay of Aunger’s embarrassingly incompetent The Electric Meme.
Note that I wouldn’t have taken the time to write such a negative comment if I didn’t in fact believe that we are on the edge of really being able to cash in on the materiality of fictions. But just what a positive program would look like, a compositionist approach to literary studies if you will, that’s not easily packed into a comment. Crudely put, my current view is that literary form is constituted of a host of devices which are intermediaries in Latour’s sense. But the meanings of words are negotiable, somes alot negotiable, sometimes not so much. But negotiable. That makes meaning a matter of mediation, again in Latour’s sense. So we’ve got these most peculiar objects (in, I believe, the proper OOO sense) that are an intercalation of intermediaries and mediators. Sorting them out, content and meaning, that’s going to be very tricky, but I believe we can make palpable progress, text by text by text.
October 5, 2011 at 11:37 am
yes, bodies, texts, rocks, speech acts, are all achievements in the making/gathering (or not as they often fail) and not simply more of the same old same old. This is why I prefer to think of creative work as in the business of manufacturing prototypes to be tested, as opposed to some kind of master-plan/mind deductive knowing-before-hand, try and find out what moves/calls who/what where/how, give it a test run/flight, try and gather results (including failures) and adjust accordingly.
October 5, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Kubla,
This post is not about memes, but as for the issue of memes I’m not sure what they great mystery is here. Memes travel from brain to brain through air (voice), images, writing, etc., etc. Transmission isn’t really a mystery here. I rather like the meme of memes as it decenters humans and grants units of culture an autonomy of their own.
October 5, 2011 at 12:23 pm
I rather like the meme of memes as it decenters humans and grants units of culture an autonomy of their own.
Yes. Very important. Dawkins got that right. Otherwise, he botched it.
Memes travel from brain to brain through air (voice), images, writing, etc., etc. Transmission isn’t really a mystery here.
The signals travel, but the meaning does not travel with the signals as I’ve explained here. If the meaning were in the signal there’d be no need, for example, to study a foreign language. You’d hear the speech, or read the writing, and the meaning would be right there for you to grasp and pick up. But that’s not the case.
If you don’t know, e.g. Mandarin, then both the written and the spoken signals are meaningless. You have to supply meaning to individual elements according to elaborate conventions one learns when one learns the langauge. That learning is almost effortless in the case of one’s native spoken language; and fact, the term of art is acquisition rather than learning. Somewhat more effort is required to pick up the writing system of one’s native language. In the case of Mandarin a rather considerable effort is required. Learning a second language is much more difficult; here it really is a matter of deliberate learning rather than acquisition.
This is true of imagery as well. As I point out in my post, anyone can see that a certain image depicts a man nailed to a wooden cross. But you need language to tell you that that man is a divinity.
For this reason alone memetics, as propounded by Dawkins and Dennett, is an egregious failure.
October 5, 2011 at 12:56 pm
Ah, coming from a linguistics background I never assumed meaning travels. What you say is an endemic problem for all theories of communication. Nor, I think, is meme theory a theory about meanings. For example, a nonsense word or sentence can be a perfectly adequate meme without meaning anything. This is the case with much of Dr. Suess, where the poem gets frustratingly lodged in your mind without meaning anything at all. The difficulty you cite doesn’t undermine the thesis that there are processes of natural selection and random variation at work with such things. If you look at chapter four of my Democracy of Objects you’ll find that I hold that meaning is not something already there in a signal, nor something a signal carries, but rather a product of communication. Meaning is a result and outcome, not a cause.
October 5, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Ah, coming from a linguistics background I never assumed meaning travels.
Well, I didn’t know that, sorry.
What you say is an endemic problem for all theories of communication. Nor, I think, is meme theory a theory about meanings.
Well, if meme theory is only about meaningless signals, then it won’t do the work Dawkins and Dennet or pretty much anyone else requires of it. Memes surely won’t carry religious ideas around, which is what seems most central to Dawkins and Dennett.
For example, a nonsense word or sentence can be a perfectly adequate meme without meaning anything. This is the case with much of Dr. Suess, where the poem gets frustratingly lodged in your mind without meaning anything at all. The difficulty you cite doesn’t undermine the thesis that there are processes of natural selection and random variation at work with such things.
Yeah, but “natural selection and random variation” doesn’t get you much if you can’t say what’s being varied, and what’s doing the selection, how and why. What’s the selective environment for memes?
How can you actually use this idea if you don’t know what entities to look for in the world?
Now, there has in fact been a fair amount of empirical work that looks at the transmission of ideas and artefacts. But the work generally doesn’t fly the meme flag. It’s hardnosed empiricism.
If you look at chapter four of my Democracy of Objects you’ll find that I hold that meaning is not something already there in a signal, nor something a signal carries, but rather a product of communication. Meaning is a result and outcome, not a cause.
Well, in the case of a written text, the writer surely has some sort of meaning in mind when writing the text. And the reader surely concocts some sort of meaning up reading it. But these two meanings may not be the same.
The same is true in face-to-face communication. But there people can talk back and forth and get a sense of whether or not they agree. They can negotiate meaning.
October 5, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Kubla,
Let’s put it this way, when religious ideas are circulated meaning is already operative for the people among whom they’re circulated. This is one of the paradoxical things about meaning that we learn from linguisitics: meaning is both always already operative and it’s something that is created and emergent. Deleuze is very good on this paradox in The Logic of Sense. I certainly agree that authors have meaning in mind when they write, but I also don’t think that authors are any special authorities where the meaning of their work is concerned. The meaning of a work is often a surprise to the author herself– at least this is what I find in my own writing –and we possess no special access to our own intentions (usually formulatingnwhat we intended after the fact). Recall that I come from a background as a psychoanalytic therapist. This point about intention as not defining meaning is axiomatic within that practice.
As for the those features that preside over natural selection of memes, they will be many. Some will be features of brains and minds. Certain musical refrains, for example, seem to lodge in our minds because they resonate with brain structures in a variety of ways. Likewise, others will be selected for or against because they appeal or fail to appeal to our narcissism. Other memes, as well, create a selective environment, encouraging the selection of some memes in a population and the rejection of others. For example, it is difficult for set theoretical reasoning to flourish in a memetic environment dominated by German phenomenology. Te memes of German phenomenology crowd out the memes of set theory like the cane toad in Australia crowds out other species. Technologies will play a role as well. Oral cultures, for example, encourage memes like poetry, rhyme, song, and cyclical, repetitive plots because cognitively it is easier to remember oral fragments encoded in this way. This changes with the invention of writing, where written text creates a selective environment where mathematics, law, philosophy, interiority (an intenral sense of self), etc can begin to flourish because writing allows complex chains of reasoning, the discernment of certain spatial relationships, and the treat of abstract things like “justice” as entities in their own right rather than as mere adjectives qualifying something else. And again, intenret communications technologies themselves create a selective environment. Writing here on my blog is very different than writing a book or an article because of differences in temporal structure in the two mediums and tye multi-media hyperlink world of the net. These are only examples. Many more can be given. Through repetition/replication memes undergo random variation, generating further memes that are more or less suited to these various environments.
October 5, 2011 at 2:31 pm
truce
October 5, 2011 at 2:40 pm
This is a fabulous conversation, Levi and Bill/Kubla – I would urge the two of you to work this into a (publishable) dialogue.
One thing it’s showing, though, is that Levi and Bogost are hardly the only two people who believe that fictions, or ideas, are real. We call them ‘fictions’ in order to denote that they aren’t the same kind of literature as ‘fact,’ ‘journalism,’ ‘documentary,’ ‘autobiography,’ ‘history,’ etc. But their reality, like the reality of all these other forms of literature or cultural product, is made up of such an immense and hybrid amalgam of elements – from neuronal movements (thoughts) to linguistic bits (words) to sounds and melodies and rhythms (think the song “I’m Popeye the sailor man…”) to books and images, with all the materiality each of them carry (photochemical, wood/paper, etc + iconic, indexical, symbolic), to muscular impulses and movements (think Popeye again, flexing his muscles, and all the kids who did that after seeing him do it) to television sets and networks (the ones that had broadcast the Popeye series for so many years) and their materialities (electrical, petrochemical) and on and on and on. Fully accounting for the material multiplicity of an object like ‘Popeye’ is almost impossible – it encompasses so many technological/media developments of the last few hundred years, for starters.
Yet it’s difficult to get at the *meaning* of Popeye without dealing in the realm of meanings, which means hermeneutics, ethnography, and all the other forms of *cultural* analysis that have been developed, and that a materialist analysis (like OOO?) can hardly replace. My approach to this complexity has been to find a reasonably workable synthetic model, one that isn’t dualistic (culture vs. materiality) but at least triadic (material + perceptual/mental/semiotic + social) and that is ecological and processual, capable of looking at the internal and external relations (spatial, temporal, etc) that make an object mean just what it does at a given time & place, and just work with it to generate useful insights. But if anyone would like to do a full and complete and *utterly thorough* (socio-semiotic-material, or however you carve up the totality) analysis of a single “real” or “fictional” cultural object – how about that Popeye? – I’d welcome it.
(That said, I don’t think the ‘memeticists’ or the literary/cultural Darwinists are anywhere near doing this.)
October 5, 2011 at 4:47 pm
Adrian,
I pretty much agree with all you’re saying here and agree that the memeticists aren’t doing this. However, the fact that they aren’t doing this is one of the things I like about memetic work. I confess I like how alienating this way of approaching units of culture is. Dennett calls this “adopting a meme’s-eye point of view”. Rather than asking what x means to us or how it signifies to us, the meme’s eye perspective adopts an intentionalistic language and asks “what do the memes want? what are the memes aims? how do they go about accomplishing those aims? etc.” So just as in biology we adopt an intentional stance with regard to genes asking not how genes benefit the organism, but rather how genes build organisms as machines for benefiting the genes, we do the same thing with units of culture.
In my view, this way of approaching matters– a way that resonates nicely with sociological autopoietic systems theory and post-structuralist thought –opens up all sorts of interesting perspectives and insights. For example, questions about truth, the rightness and the wrongness of a unit of cultural unit, meaning, intention, etc., are all bracketed, and we instead investigate why some cultural units tend to propagate whereas others do not. This meme’s-eye point of view does not exclude the other forms of analysis that you refer to– or it doesn’t have to –but rather just opens up an approach to culture from a more decentered point of view. Indeed, the thing to be avoided here is that we are merely passive vehicles with respect to memes. So far remain a completely necessary environment or selective system for memes. Thus, while we certainly get infected by memes and catch them like a cold, this doesn’t entail that we are powerless or passive in evaluating memes according to reason, truth, ethical considerations, aesthetics, etc. We exercise selective pressures on these entities.
With that said, one of the more interesting aspects of meme theory is that while memes currently are unable to replicate themselves without human brains, random variation and natural selection could bring memes to a point where memes become fully autonomous. This is what seems to be gradually taking place with artificial life computer technology and is the stuff of sci-fi horror films like The Matrix and Terminator. These films depict memes that have become independent and autonomous replicators.
October 5, 2011 at 5:38 pm
This is a fabulous conversation, Levi and Bill/Kubla – I would urge the two of you to work this into a (publishable) dialogue.
Alas, I’ve sort of had my fill of memes. This little dialog wasn’t on the agenda. It just happened.
I spent hours on hours on months for several years in the late 90s fighting in the meme wars. Even refereed an article or two for the short-lived Journal of Memetics. I really don’t want to go there again.
I’ve set forth my own views on these matters in an extensive series of notes I prepared last summer. I go into some depth on why Dawkins is wrong and on how to conceptualize memes, considered as the genetic elements of culture, in a way that avoids those problems. Unfortunately the reconceptualization is difficult.
October 5, 2011 at 8:45 pm
It baffles that people deny the thesis that “fictions are real”. It seems so obvious. If pure significations (“fictions”) were unreal they wouldn’t have powers to affect, let alone catalyze behavior (e.g, the efficaciousness of Bible stories, or the bill of rights).
I also support Adrian’s contextualization here: the existence of objects like Popeye is instantiated in the machines (T.V) and mediums (paper and ink) of its projection, the neurosoical memories of those who encode it and so many other relational activities. The distributed-productive existence of fictions is another reason why I prefer the term ‘assemblages’ to ‘object’ in cases of complex substantiality.
October 6, 2011 at 2:03 am
[...] and philosophy in this way? This is what wracked my brain in my discussion with Bill Benzon this morning (and I suspect there were religion things going on here). I couldn’t, for the life of me, [...]
October 6, 2011 at 2:56 pm
I just wanted to wade in here — and aside from the dialogue & debate over memes, which my own talk did not touch upon at all [and I have my own thinking on memes, having waded into that about 10 years ago and having once lived with someone who is one of the leading experts in cognitive literary studies, plus I come from a family of geneticist and mathematicians and medical researchers, so I naturally like thinking and talking about these things, BUT: my talk at The Public School of NY was not so much trying to get at the neuro- or cognitive implications of reading/transmission of idea-things and text-things as I am trying to craft a metaphysics or 'carnal' or 'guerrilla' phenomenology of reading/literary criticism [although I'm starting to back away from the term 'criticism,' since what I'm after is more, as Levi beautifully intuits, the building of something], and also to craft modes of reading that might pay better attention to the idea, as Shaviro put it at OOOIII at The New School a couple of weeks ago, that everything thinks. I would say: that everything thinks *in tandem* with everything else. How can we pay better attention to the networked sentience happening all around is all of the time, and to the ways in which texts “think”, prosthetically, to be sure, but also apart from us? And to that end, I mainly stop in here to say: thank you, Levi, for giving me even more to think about relative to my very nascent and half-baked ideas. We do, in the end, think together.
October 6, 2011 at 3:14 pm
Levi: one other thing to think about further is your point that critical theory often fails to account for the fact [and yes, it is one] that representations are also material things, and as such, do things in the world, have effects, etc. I totally agree about the larger point [that representations are also things/material entities, and this is a point that Graham really made "hit home" for me, in several of his writings--at one point, in the essays collected in "Toward Speculative Realism," he writes that the idea of a mountain is as real as a real mountain, or something to that effect: this has always stuck with me], but I worry that this paints all critical theorists with too broad of a brush, because I think much of critical their DOES understand that fictions/illusions/representations have material realities and effects–otherwise, why did Zizek write “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” just to posit one example. When “Critical Inquiry” ran a symposium in Chicago in 2005 to discuss the future of critical theory/Critical Inquiry, this issue was raised by more than one of the invited speakers, including Danielle Allen, who said, “If one wishes to know how language is working and shaping our world, one needs to know not just how it plays, obscures, reveals, and subverts, but also where human social orders are explicitly (and not just implicitly) held together by words: the realms of law and punishment, of value and the division of labor (gender and sexuality come in here), of religion, of organized strife (from athletic events to war), of membership in imagined communities like ‘the people,’ and of generational transition.” I could provide lots more examples, but my larger point is just that it’s very reductive to say that critical theory has, historically, mainly been concerned with showing how everything is discursive without paying enough attention to the material effects or thingliness of discursivity.
October 6, 2011 at 5:20 pm
I’d like to go back where this post began for a moment, even before the introduction of memes and Eileen’s work, back to the reality of fictions:
If this thesis generated such a ruckus then it would be because critical theory … The question is then how to sort between those representations that correspond to reality and those representations that are purely a product of mind (fictions).
I’d like to suggest that even (logically) prior to critical theory, there is a mere terminological problem, ‘mere’ in the sense that it can be banished by explicitly stated conventions.
Reality and fiction are opposed in fairly casual discourse. If now, in a more specialized discourse, Barak Obama and Falstaff are both real, and Falstaff is also fictional, what is Barak Obama? That is, Falstaff is fictionally real and Obama is Xly real. What do we put in for X? Do we say really real, or perhaps factually real?
What seems to be going on here is that we have various realms of being, if you will, all equally participating in being. Objects are indexed to the realm in which they exist. So, Falstaff is indexed to the fictional realm. And Obama is indexed to, say, the factual realm.
One issue that arises in the factual realm is whether or not this or that object exists. For example, does cold fusion exist? We have ways of determining where or not something exists in fact?
Is there a parallel issue with respect to objects indexed to the fictional realm? Is that, whatever that is, what’s at stake in the so-called canon wars? So, by one construal of the canon, the Green Knight is a properly constituted fictional being, but, say, Batman is not. And so forth.
October 6, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Whoops! Make that: “We have ways of determining whether or not something exists in fact.”
October 6, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Kubla,
This is a natural set of questions to ask, but it is also a conflation of a fiction with what a fiction refers to. Clearly, as I said in the post, there is no referent of the fiction Popeye as a being in the world that exists like Barack Obama. However, as a fiction qua fiction, Popeye exists (the fictional character that we find in comics, movies, cartoons, etc.). This is the material reality of Popeye, not the reference.
October 6, 2011 at 6:24 pm
Hmmmm . . . We’ve still got the mere terminological issue. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll talk of the factual realm and the fictional realm.
Yes, you’re right about reference. I’d skipped over the issue. Clearly neither Popeye, Falstaff, nor the Green Knight have referents in the factual world. But, do they have referents in the fictional realm? Does that question even make sense?
I can see that it would be easy simply to dismiss it. But I’m not sure. I’ve not had a chance to think it through.
Certainly people treat these fictions as though there were referents for them. We need not honor that practice, but . . . There’s an older style of literary criticism where critics would speculate about the lives of fictional characters outside the fictions through which we know them — How many children did Lady MacBeth have?? And many people freely offer such speculations about characters in their favorite TV shows, movies, manga, etc. Fan fiction arises out of this practice. Some fictions are thus enormously productive of further representations.
What is the source of this productivity? Does it make any sense at all to attribute that productivity to some ‘being’ in fictionland? I’ll have to think about that.
What do you think?
October 6, 2011 at 6:25 pm
Eileen,
Your point about the materiality of signification in critical theory is both fair and right. My only caveat would be that much of critical theory has treated these material signifiers as the primary glue or gathering mechanism that holds social relations together (or this is how it looks in many of the texts). I’ve tried to push back hard against this tendency, showing how other things that are not signifiers gather people together as well (huge influence of the historian Braudel here). I love to eat and to eat all sorts of different styes of food and I sometimes wonder if this relation to food doesn’t bleed into my relation to theory and philosophy as well. I don’t like sewing division if I can, but prefer integrating things because I find so many different positions and orientations to contain provocative and insightful ideas. In The Democracy of Objects I describe this as theory as bricolage. Bricolage doesn’t leave things unchanged or simply take them as is– it modifies them in working with them –but nonetheless, rather than drawing stark oppositions that requires exclusion, instead is open to these other theoretical materials and that tries to take up their most interesting kernels of truth. This very much holds for critical theory as well as I tried to make clear in my wilderness talk and TDO.
October 6, 2011 at 8:41 pm
I’ve been “accused” of being a “bricolage” artist in my own scholarship, so: right on!
October 6, 2011 at 9:54 pm
Nothing wrong with bricolage. Power to the things!
October 11, 2011 at 5:22 am
Interesting post! I’d be curious to know how you, Professor Bryant, see your view that fictions are real in relation to the sort of view being discussed in the quote below from the SEP entry on ‘Possible Objects’:
‘We make various assertions about fictional objects outside the stories in which they occur and some of them are true: for example, that Sherlock Holmes is admired by many readers of the Holmes stories. The simplest and most systematic explanation appears to be to postulate Holmes as an actual object possessing the properties such true assertions ascribe to him. Fictional objects may then be said to be theoretical objects of literary criticism as much as electrons are theoretical objects of physics. This type of view enjoys surprisingly wide acceptance. (Searle 1974, van Inwagen 1977, 1983, Fine 1982, Salmon 1998, Thomasson 1999). The theorists in this camp, except van Inwagen (van Inwagen 2003: 153–55), also think that fictional objects are brought into existence by their authors as actual objects.’
Since the motivations and emphasized consequences of what you’re saying are prima facie quite different (in a broad sort of way) from those forming the context of this analytic-style encyclopedia entry, it would be interesting if your view itself was essentially the same as the sort described here. Do you think it is?
October 11, 2011 at 5:24 am
Sorry for being such an outsider, by the way. I’m not proud of it or anything.