Parafiction and Plausibility Author(S): Carrie Lambert-Beatty Source: October, Vol

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Make-Believe : Parafiction and Plausibility Author(s): Carrie Lambert-Beatty Source: October, Vol. 129 (Summer, 2009), pp. 51-84 Published by: MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40368563 Accessed: 10-02-2016 22:16 UTC

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CARRIE LAMBERT-BEATTY

Thereis no steadyunretracing progress in thislife; we do not advance throughfixed gradations, and at thelast onepause: throughinfancy 's unconscious spell,boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence,doubt (thecommon doom), then skepticism, then disbelief restingat last in manhood'spondering repose of If But once again gone through,we tracethe round again; and are infants,boys, and men,and Ifs eter- nally. Wherelies thefinal harbor,whence we unmoor no more?

- HermanMelville l

Istanbul,2005 Whenthe artistMichael Blum arrived in Istanbulto preparefor that city's NinthInternational Biennial, he discoveredthat the apartment building that had been homein the earlytwentieth century to the teacher,translator, communist, and feministSafiye Behar was slated for demolition. A remarkable,iflittle-known historicalfigure, Behar (1890-1965) was a TurkishJew who enjoyed a longfriend- ship- somesay a romance- withMustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of theTurkish Republic.The twomet in 1905,in theheady atmosphere of the Zeuve Birahanesi,

* Partsof this essay were presented at ThreeWallsGallery and DePaulUniversity in Chicago,and theInstitute of FineArts, New York. Feedback from Huey Copeland, Blake Stimson, Jonathan Katz, Tom Williams,Claire Bishop, Eve Melzer,and TaylorWalsh, and readingsby Helen Molesworth, JenniferRoberts, and, especially,Julia Bryan-Wilson, helped me tremendously.An earlyversion of some of thismaterial was publishedin TalkingWith Your Mouth Full: NewLanguage for Socially Engaged Art (Chicago:ThreeWalls Gallery and GreenLantern Press, 2008). Special thanks to MichaelBlum, Walid Raad, and Aliza Shvarts,and to mystudents, particularly David Andersson, Austin Guest, Trevor Martin,and Jack McGrath. Finally, while working on thispaper I had the benefitof readingVered Maimon'simportant essay "The ThirdCitizen" published in thecurrent issue of October.I hope that theconversation beffun in thesepaees will continue beyond them. 1. HermanMelville, Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851; New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 602.

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a bar ownedby Safiye's father on the groundfloor of the same now-crumbling buildingin theBeyoglu (then Pera) districtof Istanbul. Throughout the last years of theSultanate and earlyyears of the Republic,Behar and Kemalmaintained a correspondenceboth intimateand intellectual.The fewsurviving examples of theirletters suggest Behar had considerableinfluence on the leaderduring this crucialperiod in Turkishhistory, particularly concerning the rights of women in the new republic.The friendshipended onlywith Kemal's death in 1938,the sameyear Safiye emigrated to Chicago.There she wasactive for many years as a translatorof Turkish and an organizerfor various leftist causes. Blum,who trainedas a historianat the Sorbonnebefore beginning his art practice,gave over his Biennial exhibition to thedocumentation of Behar's life.2 He constructeda modest but thorough historical house museum (necessarily dis- placed fromthe condemnedbuilding to an apartmentcomplex - the "Deniz Palas,"or "Palace of the Sea"- beingused forthe Biennial).Culling materials fromvarious historical societies and archives,as wellas fromBehar's descendants, he set up vitrinesfeaturing her letters,photographs, and books,and arranged originalfurnishings in therooms of the apartment, to be peeredat overPlexiglas barriers.He relayedBehar's life story with both bilingual didactics and a certain flairfor stagecraft (a side tablebore a dishof roastedchickpeas, Kemal's favorite snack).A videointerview with Behar's grandson, Chicago architect Melik Tutuncu, broughther family legacy up to thepresent. Recoveringthe forgotten life story and unacknowledgedhistorical role of a femalefigure from an ethnicminority, this project, A TributetoSafiye Behar, partici- patesin a projectof revision whose foundations are in thefeminist and civil-rights movementsof the 1960s and '70s.Splitting History into histories (and herstories), it also buildson thepostmodern critique of metanarratives, while nodding to the discourseson identityand hybridityof the 1980sand '90s.Yet Blum's project was verymuch of its own moment. Under cover of thehighly conventional visual language of the house museum,Blum was able to addresstwo publics, and two politicalsituations, at once. For thelocal, Turkish audience, the frank discussion of MustafaKemal's likely affair with the Jewish woman, and herinfluence on his reforms,served as a criticalintervention in theofficial hagiography of theleader thatcontinues to saturatepublic lifein Turkey.The exposureof a previously repressedhistory signaled a critiqueof thatstate's penchant for secrecy (most infamously,its continuing denials of the Armenian genocide). Meanwhile, for the largecontingent of internationalvisitors brought to Istanbulby the Biennialin 2005- a momentwhen Turkey's potential membership in the EuropeanUnion wasbeing hotly debated - thelife story of thissecular, cosmopolitan, internation- alist,and progressivewoman, with her feminist organizing and herlove letters in

2. Blumreceived a master'sdegree from the Universityof ParisPantheon-Sorbonne, prior to attendingthe Ecole Nationale de la Photographiein Aries.Born in Jerusalem, he is currentlybased in Vienna.

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French,cut intostereotypes about Turkey as backwards,other, and "Islamicist" (perhapsreminding them, for instance, that Turkish women had theright to vote earlierthan their sisters in France).3 A TributetoSafiye Behar, then, was both historical and political(and a sugges- tionthat the former is inevitablythe latter as well).But it was also somethingelse again.For, arguably, the mostsubstantial thing about the lifeof SafiyeBehar is thatMichael Blum made it up. To someviewers, the fictionality ofthe installation's central figure was betrayed bydetails like the imperfectly pasted-on cover of the book of Nazim Hikmet's poetry on whichBehar was credited as translator,or thecoincidence that her face, blurred, blocked,or remote,could never quite be madeout in anyof the group photographs on display.4There is also a traceof overactingin thevideo, and a touchof dark humor,as whenSafiye 's grandson describes the death of his entire immediate family in a freakaccident in 1966- a convenienttragedy for Blum, whose research might otherwisehave gone on forever(and a personallycoincidental one, since that is also theyear of his ownbirth). But thoughsubtle clues were planted, the displaywas meantto be convincing.While several writers on theexhibition chose to revealthe fiction,some otherwise astute critics seemed to acceptthe exhibition's claims, find- ingSafiye Behar a fascinatingfigure but the artwork itself flat-footed.5 Turkish press reactionvaried according to themedia outlet. The progressiveRadikal ran a support- ive interviewwith the "Austrianhistorian" about Safiyeand her importanceto Turkishhistory, and onlyat thevery end of the long piece revealed that she was a fiction,recategorizing Blum as an artist.6In otherpublications, the ideological threat ofthis project to both Kemalist and Islamicistconservative forces in Turkeywas regis- teredmore clearly (one writerjoked thatonly Behar's fictionality saved her from assassination).7For his part, Blum always maintained, ifpressed, that Behar was "real to me."Curators and officialexhibition publications kept the question open,8 and

3. It intervenedin yet another waywhen the project was exhibited at the National Museum of ContemporaryArt, Athens, in 2006. 4. Additionally,knowledgeable viewers knew something was amiss when theylearned that one ot Behar's sons marrieda granddaughterof (the childless)Emma Goldman. 5. Reviewsof Blum's installationinclude: Elena Crippa, "Michael Blum,A Tributeto SafiyeBehar, 2005, 9th IstanbulBiennial," e-cart 7 (March 2006), at http://www.e-cart.ro, accessed May 1, 2008; T J. Demos, "9th InternationalIstanbul Biennial,"Artforum 44, no. 3 (November2005); Alison Carrolland CarolineWilliams, "Istanbul Biennale," Artlink 26. 6. "Atatiirk'slover Safiye," Radikal, August 28, 2005. I am gratefulto Merih Uz forresearch assistance on the Turkishpress reaction, to UnverRustem for English translations, and to both of themfor informa- tivediscussions during my research on the Beharproject. All Turkish translations are byRustem. 7. Entryon SafiyeBehar in the online alternativeencyclopedia Sourtimes/Ekflisozluk,posted by usernameterranovanian, October 9, 2005. 8. VasifKortum, Biennial co-curator, says that he tended to presentthe storyas fact;if the question arose he wouldgo no furtherthan calling Safiye "probable." E-mail to the author,May 21, 2009. According to co-curatorCharles Esche, Blum and the Biennialstaff sometimes replied to inquiriesabout Safiye's fac- ticityby saying"well, she isn't documented,"a phrase thatemphasizes the limitationsof the historical - recordwhile allowingthe questionerto assume what she would about whetherthat meant Safiye or someone like her- had or had not lived (while evokingimmigration politics, which are germane to Safiye's story).Esche rememberssometimes saying that he wasn'tsure himself whether Behar was fictional, since "bythat stage Safiye had a lifeof her own."Charles Esche, e-mail to the author,April 1, 2009.

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shehas acquired a kindof actuality in theyears since: a newspaperarticle mentioned heramong other historical figures, with no apparentawareness of her connection to Blumor to artat all;9the building she is supposedto havelived in (whichhas yet to be demolished)is knownin theneighborhood as "thehouse of Safiye Behar."10 As for ordinaryviewers at theBiennial, it appears that reactions to theinstallation varied, withsome taking the exhibit at facevalue and othersquestioning its facticity tovari- ous degrees.One criticdescribes viewers "scurrying back" to revisitthe installation oncethey heard that Safiye was an inventedcharacter.11 The shorthandI propose for discussing Blum's project is theparafictional.12 Fictionor fictivenesshas emergedas an importantcategory in recentart. But, like a paramedicas opposed to a medicaldoctor, a parafictionis relatedto but not quitea memberof thecategory of fictionas establishedin literaryand dramatic art.It remainsa bit outside.It does not performits proceduresin the hygienic clinicsof literature, but has one footin thefield of thereal. Unlike historical fiction's fact-basedbut imaginedworlds, in parafictionreal and/or imaginary personagesand storiesintersect with the world as itis beinglived. Post-simulacral, parafictionalstrategies are orientedless toward the disappearance of the real than towardthe pragmatics of trust. Simply put, with various degrees of success, for various durations,and forvarious purposes, these fictions are experiencedas fact.

9. Thisarticle appeared May 16, 2008,in thenewspapers Vakit Haber and Bugiinand theonline newsoutlet Haber 7, with Irfan Dumlu cited as authorin BugiXn. 10. Thanksto BetseyRobinson and Ioli Kalavrezou,who discovered this when they went to lookfor thebuilding in 2008. 11. MarcSpiegler, "Istanbul Biennial," Art Review 3, no. 12 (December2005/January 2006), p. 141. One Turkishviewer's report of havingbeen takenin bythe exhibitionis in the Beharentry in Sourtimes/Ekflisdzliik(username empas kumpas, posted November 24, 2005). 12. I meanthe term "parafiction" differently than the way it is sometimesused in literarystudies to designatetrue stories told in thestyle of fiction. I'm indebtedto theconcept of the "paratheatrical" as discussedby Bruce Wilshire ("The Conceptof theParatheatrical," TDR 34, no. 4 [Winter,1990], pp. 169-78),from whom I borrowthe analogy to theparamedic ("paratheater" is a termgenerally associat- ed withJerzy Grotowski). Perhaps closer to thecurrent discussion is theterm "superfiction" used by the artistPeter Hill, though his is a broadercategory (see www.superfiction.com).Myuse of"parafiction" differsfrom that of literarycritic James Rother in the 1970s,in discussionsof writerssuch as Barthelmeor Pynchon,whose work he describedas "para-"in thesense that it referred to or built itself on previousfiction, understanding language as self-multiplyingand non-referential, and historyas a sea of textsthat "disguise the ongoing impersonation of truth,deny that what is beingsaid yields no recapturablepast." ("Parafiction: The AdjacentUniverse of Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, and Nabokov," boundary2, 5, no. 1 [Autumn,1976], pp. 20-44,42). As I'll suggestbelow, I believethe contemporary casesI'll describedepart from postmodernist visions like this one thathave been taken to imply historical,epistemological, or ethical relativism. I agree with Michael Nash and OkwuiEnwezor, who in their variouswritings on mixturesof fiction and documentaryin contemporaryart have suggested that such experimentsactually defend against notions of failureof reference- see note 14 below.Rosalind Kraussmobilized the term "paraliterary" in the early 1980s to definea spacefor work which "cannot be calledcriticism," but also cannot"be called not-criticism":the writing of Barthesand Derrida, whichput the distinction between literature and criticismunder erasure. Though the issues at stake hereare somewhatdifferent, her model is particularlyuseful for Blum's kind of parafiction in particular:it's not history, but can't be callednot-history ("Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary," Originality oftheAvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,1983), pp. 291-95.

This content downloaded from 128.122.7.28 on Wed, 10 Feb 2016 22:16:47 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MichaelBlum. A Tributeto Safiye Behar. 2005. Frombottom: house museuminstallation; Safiye deliver- ing speechat the12th Womens Congress,Istanbul, April 1935 (CollectionWomen s Libraryand InformationCenter, Istanbul); plaque at siteof Safiye s home, Hamalbasi CaddesiNo. 18, Beyoglu.

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Theyachieve truth-status - for some of the people some of the time, as parafiction pioneerP. T. Barnummight have said. Allof which may be a niceway to saythat a parafictionis a deception.Blum's projectdeceived tactically, and for progressive purposes, and in a waythat allows for thepossibility of the deception'sdiscovery. But it deceivednevertheless, allowing viewersto be caughtin a "gotcha"moment of havingbeen fooled,to wonder uncomfortablyabout the status of theclaims the exhibit made, or to go awayin a strangekind of educatedignorance, their worldviews subtly altered - perhapsin truthfulways - byuntruths. Exploring this mode, Blumwas farfrom alone.13 Between1998 and 2008,artists gave us advertisingcampaigns for imaginary products, a not-really-censoredexhibition, hacked museumaudio tours,several never-mademovies, a shamsupermarket, nonexistent video installations, dubious abortions,a staged marriage proposal, an impersonatedPope, ersatz archives, ques- tionablemilitary units, a fakedvacation, an inventedcritic, a fictionalhistorian, a made-upmonkey, an arguablyauthentic rabbit, a projectedpenguin, and legionsof fakeartists, both historical and contemporary(twenty-seven in the recent pseudo- collaborativeEU portraitby Czech artist David Cerny alone).14 More generally, we've seen the term"intervention" supersede "resistance" in discussionsof politicalart, valorizingmodes like the parafictional that act disruptively outside the artistic context,15while in thewider culture, fiction-in-the-real has become the characteristic modeof political humor for our time, with Sasha Baron Cohen, The Daily Show, and BrassEye perfecting a technique in whichparodists pass as theirreal counterparts, interactingwith unsuspecting subjects whose gullibility, pompousness, stupidity, racism,extremism, orsimple greed for the spotlight is thenmercilessly exposed.16 If suchexperiments have become unusually pervasive in thisperiod, it's no wonder.Here's another list of parafictions: Fakerationales for war, a fakePresident dressed as a fakesoldier declar- inga fakeend to combatand thenholding up a faketurkey. An action

13. In the2005 Istanbul Biennial related works included Khalil Rabah's Palestine Before Palestine, an arrangementofobjects displayed in thestyle of a natural-historymuseum, all carvedof olivewood, and PhilCollins's reunion of Turkish reality-TV participants. 14. The parafictionalcuts through contemporary culture at a differentangle than the category of thefaux or partlyfictionalized documentary, though this phenomenon is certainlyrelated; the parafic- tionalmight be characterizedas theperformative version of "the documentary turn." See, among others,Michael Nash Experimentswith Truth: The Documentary Turn (Philadelphia: FWM, The Fabric Workshopand Museum,2004); OkwuiEnwezor, "Documentary/Verite: The Figureof 'Truth'in ContemporaryArt," in Experimentswith Truth: The Documentary Turn; Mark Nash, "Reality in theAge of Aesthetics,"Frieze 114 (April2008). Other overlapping or relatedcategories are Hal Foster's"Archival Impulse,"{October 110 [Fall2004]), Mark Godfrey's "Artist as Historian,"(October 120 [Spring2007]), DavidJoselit's theorization of avatars(see "Navigatingthe NewTerritory: Art, Avatars, and the ContemporaryMediascape," Artforum 43, no. 10 [Summer2005]), Nato Thompson's"Strategic Visuality,"{Art Journal 63, no. 1 [Spring2004]), and CarolineJones's "aestheticsof doubt," ("Doubt/Fear,"Art Papers 29, no. 1 (January/February2005]). 15. Notall interventionsare parafictional,but all parafictionsare in someway interventionist. The termemerged most influentially in Nato Thompson's exhibition The Interventionists: Artin theSocial SpheredMassMoCA (May 2004-March 2005). 16. Alongwith less political prank- and/or hoax-based entertainments in the Candid Camera tradition.

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moviestar became governor and the governmentstarted making its ownaction movies, casting real soldiers like Jessica Lynch as fakecom- batheroes and dressingup embeddedjournalists as fakesoldiers. This catalogueof eventsfrom 2003 is just partof Canadianjournalist Naomi Klein'ssad litanyin supportof her claim that it had been "theyear of the fake."17 Everymodern period may consider itself less honest than the ones preceding, but Kleinis not alone in feelingthat the firstdecade of the twenty-firstcentury has specialclaim to being,if not a morelie-prone era, thenone in whichuntruths have had especiallycatastrophic effects. The slewof recentwritings trying to describeor explainthis condition ranges from philosophical explorations of "the ethicsof the lie," to moralistwarnings about our entryinto "the post-truth era" to impassionedcalls for renewed personal and publichonesty.18 In thisperiod, parti- sansin the US made a sportof cataloguingone another'sdeceptions (two titles were LiberalLies and Lies and theLying Liars WhoTell Them). Time magazine ran the headline"Untruths and Consequences"on itscover in July 2003, over an imageof PresidentBush; two years later a much-neededterm was added to thephilosophi- cal lexicon,when satirist Stephen Colbert identified Bush's characteristic mode of "truthiness"- truth measured by conviction rather than accuracy. Of course,periodization itself is a kindof fiction,and parafictionis hardly an inventionof the pastdecade. Contemporaryinstances like Blum'strail long legaciesof hoax,prank, blague, Trickster myth, and parody.Even within more recenthistory there is a wholeseries of questions to be askedabout the relation of thiswork to itsprecedents (in Dada, in conceptualart and performance,in the brilliantlyundecidable actions of AndyKaufman, in the InvisibleTheatre of AgustoBoal, and in pranksteractivism from the Situationists to AbbieHoffman to ACT-UP).Andrea Fraser's docent tours were in thismode (ahead ofthe curve, she gave themup in 1998), whilerelated tactics in workby Fred Wilson,Cheryl Dunye,and Zoe Leonardallowed them to imaginethe lives of marginalized historical individualswhile simultaneously marking their erasure from the historical record.19Of course,Marcel Duchamp lurks behind all of theseexamples, and whetheror howthis recent work re-imagines his legacy is an open question.Here, however,I am primarilyinterested in a horizontalhistory, mapping connections

17. NaomiKlein, "The Year of the Fake," The Nation, January 26, 2004. Though Klein's list sounds a bitlike one Baudrillardcould have made, I'll be suggestingthat the more characteristic deceptions of the recentpast are performative:rather than a representationwith no original,we are besetby attemptsto launch something false into quasi-truthfulness. 18. Jean-MichelRabate, The Ethics of the Lie (New York: Random House, 2008); Ralph Keyes, The Post- TruthEra: Dishonestyand Deceptionin ContemporaryLife (New York: Macmillan,2004); Ihab Hassan, "A Plagueof Mendacity: A Plea forTruth, Trust, Altruism," http://ihabhassan.com/bibliography (version of essaysin CreamCity Review 28 [2004] and in An ABC ofLying: Taking Stock in InterestingTimes, ed. Livio Dobrez,Patricia Dobrez, and Jan Lloyd Jones [Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2004]). 19. A notefrom director Dunye at the end of her 1996film Watermelon Woman (which is abouta filmmakerresearching the life of the title figure, a blacklesbian star of 1930srace movies) states the issuewith perfect concision and ambiguity:"Sometimes you have to createyour own history. The WatermelonWoman is fiction."

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Top:01. ORG (Francoand Eva Mattes) and PublicNetbase. Nike Ground. 2003. Bottom:01.ORG. Rendering of proposed monument.2003. betweenexperiments in dissimulationand linkingthem to certainbroad historical shiftsof the recentpast. For despitetheir many precedents, paraflctions interestme becausethey are so powerfullyand uniquelyappropriate to ourhistor- icalmoment - whichis to say,powerfully and uniquelytroubling.

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Vienna,2003 One Octobernight in 2003 a flatbedtruck delivered a sleekorange-and- whiteinformation booth to a plot of grass on the northeasterncorner of Vienna'sKarlsplatz. Printed on one of the booth'sbroad glasswindows was a Nike "swoosh," a web address, and three words: "Nikeplatz (formerly Karlsplatz)."Visiting the URL, acceptingone of the flyersdistributed the next morning,or enteringthe booth to talkto Nikerepresentatives, one learnedthat muchas citieshave sold thenaming rights of sports stadiums to corporatespon- sors, Karlsplatzwould soon be changingits name. A monumentalswoosh sculpturewould appear in the shadowof the Karlskirchein whatwould, as of January1, be knownas "Nikeplatz."As theslickly animated Web site put it: "You wantto wearit, why shouldn't cities wear it too?"On thepark side of theinfor- mationbooth, a schematicmap of Europe had brokenout in orange dots, indicatingthat the Vienna initiative was part of a newinternational campaign. A Nikestrasse,Nikesquare, Nikestreet,or Piazzanike was coming soon to a Europeancity near you. As reporterslearned with their first calls to NikeAustria, however, none of this wasthe company's doing. The infobooth,Web site,and marketingcampaign com- prisedan artwork titled Nike Ground: a collaboration between the Italian artistic duo Eva and FrancoMattes, who go bythe name0100101110101101.ORG (hereafter, "01.ORG"),and the innovative Austrian new media/ art platform Public Netbase.20 Manyof the passersby interviewed by the artists simply shrugged: since com- panieslike Nike were taking over cities anyway, some said, they might as wellpay forthe privilege.21 Part of thisis a creditto the artists,of course.The designof

20. See VeraTollmann, "Becoming Nike: The Fake Behindthe Swoosh,"trans. Timothy Jones, Springeren(April 2003, net section); Ol.ORG's Web site on the project at http:// www.0100101110101101.org/home/nikeground/intro.html,whichprovides links to internationalmedia coverageof the intervention and a linkto an archivedversion of the project website nikeground.com; and "An Interviewwith Franco and Eva Mattesaka 01.ORG,"{Culture Jamming, http://www.culture- jamming.de/interviewlle.html).Clemens Apprich, "Intermission at the Combat Zone: A Reviewof Public Netbase'sUrban and SymbolicLines of Conflict,"Public Netbase: Non StopFuture: New Practices in Artand Media(Frankfurt: Revolver, 2008), online edition at nonstop-future.org;Brian Holmes, "Let it RIP: Obituaryof an EndlessMyth: Public Netbase, 1994-2006," Netbase / tO:Institute for New Culture Technologies,http://www.netbase.org/tO/intro/04. 21. NikeGround illustrates both the power and the problems of culture jamming, the genre of symbolic guerrillawarfare" (Eco) thatemerged as an importantform of activism in the1990s. Culture jamming is generallyoriented against corporate globalization, but typically focuses on itsmanifestations in the global North,such as thecommercialization ofpublic space, the loss of local specificity, orthe depletion of values likeoriginality and rebellionwhen they become so manyadvertising slogans. Its mostfrequent form is "subvertising,"attempting to underminea corporatebrand's meaning and valuewith semi-convincing manipulationsof itsvisual identity (paradigmatically, billboard alteration, like the Billboard Liberation Organization'ssubtle edit of an Applead sportingthe visage of the Dali Lama,from "think different" to "thinkdisillusioned"). Often knowingly drawing on Dada,especially the critical photomontages ofJohn Heartfield,as wellas situationistdetournement, culture jamming expresses - and stimulates- a desirefor freedomfrom commerce's incursion into mental and physicallandscapes. It consolidatesidentities and collectivitiesaround an anti-corporateperspective, and itcan be a kind ofgateway to critiquesof labor conditions,environmental damage, and other less symbol- and humor-friendly corporate affronts. On the otherhand, given that exposure is a crucialpart of branding, and thatthe youth-oriented brands most

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the Web sitewas spot-on,and the infoboothitself - crisp,sleek, rounded, and bright- wasboth outrageously out of key with the historic Viennese buildings sur- roundingit, and perfectlyattuned to thevisual rhetoric of design and marketing circa2003. The crucialskill for parafiction is stylisticmimicry - as in Blum'schan- nelingof theaesthetic of historicalhouse museums. While parodists have always knownhow much style matters, as netartists, 01.ORG had pioneereda mode of parafictionthat made it clearhow much more this would become the case in our currentinformation environment. One of theirfirst projects, done in collabora- tionwith Luther Blisset in 1998,was a convincingclone of theVatican's Web site at the URL vaticano.org,in which,among other alterations, acceptance of abor- tionwas worked into archived encyclicals.22 The Nikemap with its colored dots has a certainmartial feel, and theidea ofa triumphantforeign entity redubbing place names in a Europeancity has similar con- notations,but given the ubiquity of the logo in sportsand on thestreet, Nike's effort to occupyKarlsplatz didn't strain credulity too far (the corporation's flagship stores are calledNiketowns, after all, already indicating a certain territorial ambition).23 In theage oflifestyle branding and guerrillamarketing the Nikeplatz idea was different fromactual tactics in degree,not in kind.Its point was not how many people would acceptthe campaign as real (thoughmany did) buthow much they - andwe - have alreadyaccepted about the takeover of public space by commercial interests. It's rele- vanthere that Karlsplatz was and remainsknown as a hangoutfor drug dealers and addicts.Bold plans to revitalize the area as a culturalhub had recently been scrapped (to greatprotest by Nike Ground collaborators Public Netbase). Citizens might well havebeen willing to leta corporationsanitize what the city couldn't or wouldn't,in whatwould have been onlya slightlymore literal version of Times Square-style bar- gainsmade in New York and other cities. One unfazedpedestrian interviewed in Ol.ORG's documentationsays the renamingplan is "justthe reality of the corporate world." Another allows that this sortof thing is "partof commercial life." For these viewers, the corporation's civic incursionwas within the horizon of plausibility - part of capitalist common sense. So itwas, too, for those critical passersby who reacted to theproposition with dis- pleasure.A thirdclass of viewers approached the infobooth skeptically, and those ofus whoencounter the work as documentationof a pastintervention are flatter- inglyincluded in thisgroup. (The knowing,superior position one takesin such second-degreeexperiences of parafiction is no doubta partof their pleasure, and

likelyto be subvertizedgenerally want to ally themselves with the virtues of creativity, irreverence, and dar- ingdisplayed in projectslike Nike Ground, it is entirelypossible that culture jammers help their targets morethan harm them. This partially explains why most corporate giants don't take legal action against theirmosquito-like tormenters. 22. "LutherBlissett" is an open-usepseudonym that began being used in Italyin themid-90s, and continuesto be associatedwith art-related pranks in Europeand elsewhere.A groupof writers based in Bolognahas published several novels under the name. 23. In debunkingthe Nikeplatz rumor, the city council cited a lawon thebooks since WWII that makesit impossible to change street names in Vienna.

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possiblya limiton theirefficacy.) The projectfunctions differently for each of thesegroups; moreover, itcreates movement between them. For instance, a viewer whoaccepted the renaming as inevitableand laterdiscovered it was a fiction:she slips outside the consensusthat the parafiction'splausibility illuminates - or rather,the consensus that it calls into being as such. Like "I christenthis ship," or "I do" in a weddingceremony, the phrase "Nikeplatz(Formerly Karlsplatz)" on the informationbooth is a variantof the categoryof performativeutterances. Specifically, it is a case ofwhat J. L. Austin calledthe "unhappy performative" - speech acts that don't take. (If an actorin a moviesays, "I nowpronounce you man and wife,"the speechact is not untrue, but "infelicitous.")24Parafictions in general are performative,where that is understoodto meanthat they effect or producesomething rather than describe or denote it. Theyare unhappyperformatives insofar as they,like the movie wedding,are only"make-believe." But insofar as theymake someone believe, how- evertemporarily or ambiguously,they trouble the distinctionbetween happy and unhappyperformativity. Notably,01.ORG didn'tdiscuss its goals in termsof eliminatingaggressive brandingor curtailingprivatization. Rather, most of the team's rhetoric was about theirown right to use Nike'sname and logo. The logicwould seem to be this: since,with the rise of offshoreand contractedmanufacturing, the Nike corpora- tionnow arguably produces not shoes and shirtsbut ideas and feelings,and since thoseideas and feelingslive on ourbodies, in ourminds, and all overthe surfaces of our cities,"Nike" belongs to us. If a privateinterest colonizes enough mental and physicalspace, perhaps it becomesquasi-public. Ol.ORG's parafictionper- formedthis proposition too. Whether it wouldprove to be felicitouslyor notwas leftin thehands of the corporation. In thiscase, Nike took legal action to shutthe projectdown - whichis to say,to policethe public-private boundary that creative, aggressivemarketing like its own has worked to collapse.

Sydney,2002 Thisthird story actually begins in thespring of 1999,when an experimental fictionwriter and computerprogrammer who came to call himselfAndy Bichlbaumand a new-mediaartist who becameknown as MikeBonnano, then workingtogether as theanti-corporate corporation ®™ark, came into possession ofthe domain name GWBush.com. The upcomingUS presidentialelection was to be thefirst in whichthe Internet would be a significantfactor, and as primarysea- son rampedup, Bush strategistKarl Rove had alreadyattempted to forestall onlineopposition by buying up anti-BushURLs like "bushsux.com."25 The ®™ark

24. Austin,J. L., How toDo Thingswith Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at HarvardUniversity in 1955,ed. J. O. Urmsonand MariaSbisa, 2nd ed. (London:Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 14. 25. He had also purchaseddomain names that the campaignmight want so thatthey would not haveto buythem back later from "cybersquatters." See JimPuzzanghera, "Online Race forPolitical Domains:Bush Outpaces Gore in SnappingUp Sites,"San Jose Mercury News, ]une 7, 1999.

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team,however, demonstrated their more sophisticated relationship to the new technologyand its emergingepistemology (and possiblytheir awareness of Ol.ORG'sVatican project) in realizingthat a seeminglyboring, sanctioned, and officialURL was a farmore powerfulweapon. The Web site theyput up at GWBush.comdidn't slam the candidateor breaknew, damaging stories. Visually mirroringthe actualcampaign site, and writtenwith the samecheery braggado- cio, itsgoal wasto makethe Bush campaign more transparent. It describedhow theself-proclaimed "ecology governor" presided over Texas as itbecame the most pollutingstate in the Union; or proposedamnesty for anyone incarcerated for drugpossession who claimed, as Bushhad, that he or shehad "grownup."26 Thiswas the beginning of a modeof radical parody that the artists call "iden- titycorrection." The nextyear, now known as theYes Men, they put a copyof the WorldTrade Organization's Web site up at theaddress www.gatt.org, with similarly parodicchanges.27 This time, the "contact us" links on thefake site were occasion- allyused bypeople actuallytrying to communicatewith individuals at theWTO, and it is thenthat the Yes Men took"identity correction" beyond the bounds of traditionalparody. Theyreturned the messages. When an emailinvited the organization's presi- dentto speakat a conference,for instance, "he" would send his regrets, but suggest a subordinatehe coulddispatch instead. It is thusthat Mr. Hanniford Schmidt par- ticipatedin a Salzburgseminar on internationaltrade law, and thatMr. Granwyth Hulatberirepresented the WTO in debateswith anti-corporate-globalization activistson CNBC'sMarketwrap Europe at the timeof the G8 protestsin Genoa (proposing,among other things, a marketin "JusticeVouchers" so thatcountries thatdon't abuse people could sell human rights credits to thosethat do). Thisis correctionin the senseof unveiling,making clear what the targetis reallylike (accordingto thecorrectors). As 01.ORGdid withNike, aspects of the target'spolicies and beliefsare followedthrough to logicalbut exaggerated conclusions.Though they can be deliciousto readabout or watchfor those who share theYes Men's politics, the problem with these negative identity corrections is that theygenerally fail to inspireoutrage. Though the Web sites themselves irritate the targetentities, the speechesusually garner nothing more than bemusement (if that)from their primary audiences. And negative corrections have problems even in termsof rallyingthe sympathetic(for one thing,in theirwake actual current conditionscan seem relativelybenign). The brillianceof theYes Men,however, was to realizethat they could also correctidentities in thesense of repairing.In

26. The Yes Men,"Limits to Freedom,"http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/gwbush; TheYes Men: The TrueStory of the End ofthe World Trade Organization (New York:The DisinformationCompany, 2004), p. 14. Versionsof the sitesare archivedat www.rtmark.com/bush. 27. Afterhaving their site shut down by theirservice provider due to threatsfrom the WTO, they developed and released open-source softwareto automate the process of "funhouse-mirroring"any website(they called it,what else, "Reamweaver").See www.reamweaver.com;Michael Conner,"I am the WorldTrade Organization... Or Am I?," TheAustin Chronicle, July 5, 2002; "Corporationsthat miss the joke and just repeatthe lie,"New Media Age, February 12, 2004.

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TheYes Men. End of theWTO. 2002.

positiveidentity correction, the targetis made to announcestrategies and trans- formationsthat are salutaryfrom the point of view of thecorrector, and thatthe actualperson or entitymust then choose to ignoreor deny.28 This bringsus to Sydneyin May2002, when a WTO representativeby the nameof Kinnithrug Sprat arrived to addressthe Certified Practicing Accountants Associationof Australia.He spentnearly an hour summarizingresearch that showsthe failureof theWTO's operativeprinciples: the linkbetween cash-crop exportand drought;the decreasein the incomeof the poorestforty percent of populationsunder trade liberalization; the failure of foreign direct investment to stimulatethird-world economic growth. In lightof thisevidence, he explained, the WTO had decided to disband. It would reconstituteitself as the Trade RegulationOrganization, an entitydevoted to makingtrade "help people instead ofbusinesses."29 While the Yes Men's seeminglyoutrageous exaggerations of the WTO's actualstances had failedto get a rise out of audiencesalready aligned with its

28. On November12, 2008 thousandsof people in New York,Washington, and other citiesreceived complimentarycopies of TheNew York Times, with the bold headline,"Iraq War Ends."Co-created by The Yes Men, The Anti-AdvertisingAgency, Not An Alternative,CODEPINK, ImprovEverywhere, "many others, and hundredsof volunteers,"the "specialedition" nodded toJohn Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Waris Over (ifyou wantit)" billboardsof 1969-70,though here the parentheticalclause was impliedsimply by the preponderanceof progressivevisions in the headlines ("MaximumWage Law Passed"; "Secretary Apologizesfor W.M.D. Scare"). Whilethe fauxedition projected an ideal worldin whichthe effectsof the Bush yearswere rolledback, it got its special chargefrom the paper's initiallyconvincing appearance. It certainlydidn't fool anyone. But thinkingof the moneyand effortput into writinga fullnewspaper's worthof storiesin the rightdiction and style,printing it on newsprintpaper of the righttype and size, - withthe rightink and images,and then mobilizinghundreds of volunteersto hand it out in the street - ratherthan simply writing about the imaginedchanges in an essayor poem or blog makesclear partof the differencebetween parafiction and other typesof representation.There is surplustruth-value produced bythat labor - a kindof performativeresidue. See www.nytimes-se.com. 29. The Yes Men, "End of the WTO," http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/sydney;Shane Wright,"Fed: WTO hoax snaresAust's CPA," AAP NewsFeed, 27 May 2002.

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basicprinciples, to theirsurprise this announcement of socially-progressivedeci- sionsthat largely broke with those principles was met with marked enthusiasm, with accountantsapproaching Mr. Sprat after his talk,full of ideas forhelping the "TRO" servethe people of the global South. Such converts were bound to be dis- appointed- butnot before having had a concreteexperience of themotto of the anti-corporate-globalizationmovement: "Another world is possible." Hereis howthe Yes Men muse on thepositive reaction to theirmost fantasti- callyprogressive proposals: Could it be thatthe violentand irrationalconsensus gripping the world,what we call corporateglobalization, is maintainedonly through a sustainedand strenuouseffort of faith? Could it be thatalmost every- one- even those,like accountants,that we are usuallyinclined to thinkof as conservative- would immediately embrace a morehumane consensusif one werepresented by those in positionsof authority? Whatthey discovered is theirability to intervenein whatJacques Ranciere calls the distributionof thesensible: the system of inclusions and exclusionsthat determine whatcan be sensed;the literally common sense about what can be said,thought, seen,felt, and whocan say,think, see, and feelit.30 If a groupof Australian accoun- tantscan suddenly find it thinkable - even credible, even actionable - to realign world tradeto thebenefit of indigenous people and theglobal poor, then something like a newdistribution ofthe sensible has, at least temporarily, been brought into being. In manycases, the differencebetween happy and unhappyperformatives dependson theauthority with which the speaker is vested(not only does thestage priestnot really cause the two actors before him to becomemarried, but in mostof thiscountry no one can wedtwo men or twowomen). A happyperformative is usu- allyan authorizedone; moreover,part of what they performatively produce is that authorityitself. But, following Derrida, poststructuralist thinkers have argued for the politicalpotential of performativitybyquestioning Austin's absolute distinction betweenauthorized and unauthorizedspeech, serious and nonseriouscontexts, happyand unhappyperformatives.31 So does theparafictioneer. The YesMen real- ized thatthe consensusaround free-trade ideology could be changedby speech

30. Jacques Ranciere, ThePolitics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004). ThoughRanciere's stress on thecom- monalityof politics and aestheticsin "thesensible" is generativeit shouldbe notedthat the idea ofan explicitlypolitical work of art is a problematicone withinhis philosophy, where disruption of an exist- ingconfiguration of thesensible is incompatiblewith meaningfulness or readability: it willalways be caughtbetween "the readability of themessage that threatens to destroythe sensible form of art and theradical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all politicalmeaning." (p. 63) 31. A fewof the key texts for performativity theory are Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context" (1971), trans.Samuel Weber and JeffreyMehlman, in Limited,Inc (EvanstonIL: Northwestern UniversityPress, 1988); JudithButler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and theSubversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter:On theDiscursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge,1993); Eve KasofskySedgwick and AndrewParker, introduction to Performativityand Performance(New York and London:Routledge, 1995).

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The YesMen. Might MakesRight. 2001. acts- as long as the speakerswere "in positionsof authority."They lacked such authority,but given a URL and a changeof clothes, they could literally make-believe, convincingsome people, some of the time, that they had it.32This is, perhaps para- doxically,both to use and to undermine the authority they target. The Yes Men put it thisway: "It seems people can accept just about anything ifyou're dressed in a suit."33 Towardthe end of GenderTrouble, Judith Butler wrote that the seeming sub- stantialityof gender is itself ... a constructedidentity, a performativeaccomplishment which the mundanesocial audience,including the actorsthemselves, come to believeand to performin themode of belief.... Genderscan be nei- thertrue nor false,neither real nor apparent,neither original nor derived.As crediblebearers of thoseattributes, however, genders can also be renderedthoroughly and radicallyincredible.34 Here beliefbecomes the crux of the performative. The YesMen playwith the two sidesof thatrealization. On theone hand,free-trade ideology and theauthority ofits proponents are denaturalized,made "radically incredible." On theother, the viewer'scredence (and secondaryaudiences' witnessingof that credence) becomesa synapsebetween the imagined and theactual.35

32. Or one couldsay that they exaggerate the lack that is at thecenter of all identity,and theper- formativeiterations that construe it as substantive.Such pointsaside, the Yes Men do speakas white menfrom the globalNorth. To whatdegree is parafictiona sportof the privileged?On the other hand,the theory of performativity would be usefulin a discussionof the camp and/or queer aspect of theYes Men's pranks. Sarah Kanouse has madean argumentabout the phallocentrism ofprank-based activismin "CooingOver the Golden Phallus," Journal ofAesthetics and Protest 1,no. 4 (2005). 33. DennisRoddy, "Liar's Poker," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 12, 2004. 34. Butler,Gender Trouble, p. 141. 35. Earlier,01.ORG demonstrated the role of belief in theperformative, though problematically, when duringtheir papal stint they freely granted e-pardons to petitioners who tried to contact the Pope through theirfake Vatican website. When a priestsays "I absolveyou," your spiritual state has changed; when a few smartassartists say it, it has not. But if you believe you were pardoned by a priest,does it matter if it was

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Imaginea hypotheticalviewer of A TributetoSafiye Behar. a Europeantourist, vaguelyopposed to Turkishaccession to the EU, who takesthe exhibitas purely factualand whoseposition is softened,to somedegree, by the Turkish history she learnsthere. What happens when she discoversshe has been duped?For some viewers,Safiye's shift into the category of fiction might harden previous prejudice. Butthe parafictioneer's gamble is thatfor other viewers, or perhapseven for the sameones at differentpsychological levels, the experience of havingknown Safiye as realwould have a lingeringeffect even after the disillusionment. "The plausibil- ityitself is veryreal," says Blum.36 The artof the plausiblediscloses consensus aboutthe way things are; but it also can makea newreality sensible: accessible bothto feelingand reason.It notonly matches, but mobilizes Ranciere's model of fictionsas "materialrearrangements of signsand images,relations between what is done andwhat can be done."37 The efficacyof positiveidentity correction - and the poetry- turnson this powerto shiftsomething into the range of the plausible. Such shifts can be deeply moving.In whatmay be themost famous intervention by the Yes Men, a represen- tativeof Dow Chemicalagreed to an interviewon BBC WorldTV on thetwentieth anniversaryof the Union Carbidechemical spill at Bhopal,India, which devas- tatedthe regionin 1984,killing at leasttwenty thousand people and sickening untoldthousands more. Since Dow has categoricallyrefused to takeresponsibility forcleaning up the environmentaldamage or compensatingthe victimssince absorbingUnion Carbide in 2001,38 it was a surpriseto hearDow's Jude Finisterra announcethat the chemical giant had decidedto makereparations to thevictims and to remediatethe toxicsite, at a costof 12 billiondollars, in whathe called "thefirst time in historythat a publiclyowned company of anything near the size ofDow has performedan actionwhich is significantlyagainst its bottom line sim- plybecause it is theright thing to do." Eventoday, knowing that it onlytook the BBC twohours to detectand unveilthe speaker as an imposter,it is electrifyingto watchthe text below the talking head changeto "BreakingNews: Dow acceptsfull responsibility"(as itwas for Dow's stockholders, in a differentway: its stock price immediatelydipped).39 For thosetwo hours, the world believed that there would be somethinglike justice in Bhopal;for that time, there existed a differentmodel forcorporate decision-making, an ethical as wellas financialbottom line. Butparafiction is itselfethically risky. As manyhave pointed out, the victims of Union Carbide in India were also among those taken in by Finisterra's actuallyan imposter?For you it matters utterly (that's why this particular parafiction seems so cruel)while forthe nonbeliever observing you it matters not at all (that'swhy it also seems relatively pointless). 36. MichaelBlum, email to theauthor, March 23, 2009. 37. Ranciere,Politics of Aesthetics, p. 39. 38. Somevictims had received$300-500 from Union Carbide in 1989,equivalent to fiveyears of medicalcare, according to theBhopal Medical Appeal (www.bhopal.org); Bhopalis continue to develop toxin-relatedillnesses twenty-five years later. Dow has a website,the "Bhopal Information Center," givingits positions at www.bhopal.com. 39. A clipis availableon YouTube.

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TheYes Men. Dow Does theRight Thing. 2004. announcement(fitting that his name combinedthe patronsaint of impossible causesand theworld's end). One can onlyimagine their joy and corresponding disappointmentwhen they learned that they still awaited justice.40 Moreover, from some pointsof viewany purposeful deception is inherentlyinjurious. Consider theargument, which Sisela Bok put in ecologicalterms in 1978,that "... trustis a socialgood to be protectedjust as muchas the air we breatheor the waterwe drink."41Though the Yes Men mayhave outsmarted Rove in 1999,in someways thework they went on to do is itselfa "funhouse-mirror"of that operative's infa- moustechniques. Surely, the performativitythey deploy is thejester's version of "We'rean empirenow, and whenwe act,we createour ownreality."42 Such simi- laritiescan lead youto sidewith Bok and otherswho call fora returnto honesty in personaland politicalcommunication. Or theycan leaveyou agreeing with the Yes Men thatprecisely in such a climate,"we need to be deviousin orderto achievea conditionof honesty."43(Just what social trust, after all, do we imagine we wouldpreserve, in arguingagainst the use of deceptionin cultural-political

40. TheYes Men admit to "naggingdoubt" about this and haveapologized to thepeople of Bhopal. Theyhave also respondedsemantically ("For 20 years,the victims of Bhopal falsely hoped that Dow and UnionCarbide would do somethingto ease thesuffering that they'd caused . . . thosewho heard our announcementdidn't falsely hope, they were falsely certain that their suffering was at longlast over") and pragmatically:"Ifthe deaths, debilities, organ failure, brain damage, tumors, breathing problems, and sundryother forms of permanentdamage caused by Dow and UnionCarbide aren't enough to arouseyour pity, and the hour of "falsehopes" we caused is- fantastic,we won! Go straightto Bhopal.netand makea donation."(http://theyesmen.org/faq). 41. SisselaBok, Lying: Moral Choice in Publicand PrivateLife, 2nd ed. (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1999),p. 26. The YesMen are lessambivalent about this critique than the "false hope" charge. Since theBBC immediatelyand prominentlyretracted the story, they say, "There was no netmisinformation. In factthere was significantly more information as a result,since more people knew about Bhopal and Dow,especially in theUS" (http://theyesmen.orff/hijinks/bbcbhopal). 42. SeniorBush adviser quoted by Ron Suskindin "Faith,Certainty and thePresidency of George W. Bush,"The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004. 43. TheYes Men, "Frequently Asked Questions," http://theyesmen.org/faq.

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work?)For my part, I am ultimatelynot interested in passingethical judgment on parafictioneers.But neither do I thinkthe problems they raise can be putaside. The factthat parafictions are queasy-making is key to what they are and what they do.

NewHaven, 2008 On Thursday,April 17, 2008, the YakDaily News reported that the end-of-the- yearstudent exhibition set to open thefollowing Tuesday would include art major AlizaShvarts's documentation of a nine-month-longsenior project. According to a pressrelease from the artist and an interviewwith reporters, during this time she had used donatedsperm to inseminateherself as oftenas possible,while every month,on thetwenty-eighth day of hermenstrual cycle, she tookherbal medica- tionsto inducemiscarriage.44 In the exhibition, videos of the artistexperiencing vaginalbleeding were to be projectedon foursides of a clearplastic cube, the walls ofwhich would be infusedwith samples of the discharged fluid. Had thismultimedia sculpture existed alone (or existedat all?),the project mightnever have transcended the category of undergraduate art. But, as intended, Shvarts'sreal accomplishmentwas the dramathat unfolded in the wakeof her announcement.By 8 A.M.that day, six readershad postedcomments about the Shvartsstory on theYale newspaper'sWeb site.45 By midnight there were two hun- dredand eighty-two.Gawker.com picked up thestory at 10 a.m.,and byafternoon reportsof the "abortionartist" had echoed aroundthe blogosphere,with main- streammedia reporting the story in thedays immediately following.46 Predictably, it incitedespecial fervor on conservativeand anti-abortionWeb sites. The presidentof theNational Right to LifeCommittee called Shvarts a serialkiller.47 On theugliest fringe,anti-Semitic bloggers found ammunition in heractions (she received threat-

44. MartinePowers, "For senior, abortion a mediumfor art, political discourse," Yale Daily News, April 17,2008. The statementShvarts released read: "For the past year, I performedrepeated self-induced mis- carriages.I createda groupof fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodicSTD screenings andagreed to complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the15th day of my menstrual cycle, thefabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I usedto privately self-inseminate. Using a needlesssyringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutesof itscollection, so as to insurethe possibility offertilization. On the28th day of my cycle, I wouldingest an abortifacient,after whichI wouldexperience cramps and heavybleeding. To protectmyself and others,only I knowthe numberof fabricators who participated, the frequency and accuracywith which I inseminated,and the abortifacientI used. Becauseof thesemeasures of privacy,the piece exists only in itstelling. specific - Thistelling can taketextual, visual, spatial, temporal, and performativeforms copiesof copiesfor whichthere is no original."This statement with additional paragraphs explaining her intentions was pub- lishedas a guestcolumn in theYale Daily News on April18, 2008. She hadpreviously distributed the state- mentto members of her senior thesis class, her adviser, other faculty, and her college dean. 45. All eightinitial responses denounced the work, though one writerdid acknowledgeShvarts s freedomof expression. 46. LexisNexis's blog archive finds at leastfifteen distinct English-language blog entries posted on April17, and a hundredmore by late May. Internet search engines find dozens more. The story was picked up bythe mainstream news media on Friday,April 18, when it began to be reportedby wire services, The WashingtonPost, New York Times, Newsday, Newsweek, and newspapersfrom Ireland to Australiaand Korea. 47. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,351608,00.html.

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eninghate mail in thisvein as well),48even as otherslikened her to Mengele.49But theartist came in for critique from the left as well.A NARALspokesperson called the projectinsensitive and offensive,Yale pro-choice groups distanced themselves,50 and liberalbloggers worried (perceptively) that the project would only incite their opponents:"It's as ifsomeone came up witha formulathat incorporated all theirfavorite bugbears:Irresponsible sluts, frivolous abortions, liberal academia, and self-indulgent performanceart."51 A commontheme for the more moderate opponents of her project was thatthe acts she describedcould have been physicallyand mentally harmful.52And so, nearly across the board, there was condemnation of Shvarts's uni- versityfor allowing it.53 Thatsame day, a universityspokesperson issued a statement: Ms. Shvartsis engagedin performanceart. Her artproject includes visualrepresentations, a press release and othernarrative materials. She statedto threesenior Yale Universityofficials today, including two deans,that she did notimpregnate herself and thatshe did notinduce anymiscarriages.

The entireproject is an artpiece, a creativefiction designed to draw attentionto the ambiguitysurrounding form and functionof a woman'sbody.

She is an artistand has the rightto expressherself through performanceart.

Had theseacts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raisedserious mental and physicalhealth concerns.54

48. http://newsfromthewest.blogspot.com/2008_04_l7_archive.html, accessed March 1, 2009. Tellingly,Newsfromthewest, which appears to be completelydedicated to virulent anti-Semitism, calls itself "theInternet's most dynamic truthsite." The languageof unveiling truth and disabusingthe deceived is everywherein hate speech on theInternet (and of courselong before it, from the Elders of Zion to Holocaustdenial ). 49. http://sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/alicia-shvarts-is-an-artist-like-josef- mengele-was-a-doctor/ 50. ExecutiveBoards of theReproductive Rights Action League at Yale (RALY)and theYale Law Studentsfor Reproductive Justice, Letter to the Editor, Yale Daily News, April 21, 2008. 51. LindsayBeyerstein, "'Abortion as art' a hoax?"Majikthise, posted April 17, 2008, (accessed throughNewstex/Lexis-Nexis August 6, 2008). 52. Thiswas particularly the case foranti-choice writers, for whom the belief that abortion causes womenlong-term mental anguish is an increasinglyused argument. 53. RickRice, Brutally Honest, April 17, 2008. Michelle Malkin tried to lash this budding controversy to theculture wars of twenty years before: "Move over, Andres Serrano and Karen Finley: Here comes blood- smearingYale artstudent Aliza Shvarts," Michelle Malkin, April 17, 2008,http://michellemalkin.com /2008/04/17. 54. "Statementby Yale spokespersonHelaine S. Klasky,"Yale UniversityOffice of PublicAffairs, April17, 2008,http://opa.yale. edu/news/article.aspx?id=2262; reported in ZacharyAbrahamson, ThomasKaplan, and MartinePowers, "University calls art project a fiction;Shvarts '08 disputesYale's claim,"Yale Daily News, April 17, 2008.

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The firstnotable thingis the waythis statement plays into Shvarts'shand (to para- phrase the opening lines: she is a liar; we know because she told us so).55 Not surprisingly,the studentcountered with a statementof her own, standingby her initialdescription of her actions over the past nine months,and adding that"no one can say with 100-percentcertainty that anythingin the piece did or did not happen . . . because the natureof the piece is thatit did not consistof certainties." This led Yale to re-respond,claiming Shvarts had told the administrationthat if it reportedher admissionof the piece's fictiveness,she would denyit.56 No wonder,then, Yale was so quick to call in the authoritiesto secure veracity (those "senior officials"),and whythat aspect of the university'sstatement seems more than a littleoverwrought (not one dean, but two!). This only makes more clear,however, that in parafictionsinstitutional authority is a crucialingredi- ent in plausibility- whetherin the formof the Plexi barriersand neat labels of a historicalmuseum, the convincingslickness of a corporateidentity, the digitalsta- tioneryof an entitylike the WTO, or the magic cloak that is, apparently,the businesssuit. The Yes Men hijack thatauthority, but Shvartsclaimed no power other than her own. Instead,authorities swooped in to submita plausible,if disturbing story to the order-restoringcategory of the hoax.57Or, to tryto. Accordingto the university, ifshe was lyingin her initialstatements, and had neverinseminated herself, then her rightto sayshe had done so was protectedas artisticexpression. If she was not lying, and had done whatshe said she did, she wouldbe liable formoral sanction, perhaps treatment.In thissituation, only her rightto lie wasprotected. In a finaltwist, Shvarts was told thatshe could exhibither thesisonly if she signed a statementtestifying that it was a fiction.This coerced speech act would, of course, have destroyedthe piece, whichis sited in the state of uncertaintyjust as much as a sculpture might be specific to a particular physical location. In choosing to name her bleeding as "period," "miscarriage,"or "abortion,"each person who describes her project demonstratesits central point that what we take as biological facts are constructed in language and ideology.58But what

55. Formsof this classic "liar's paradox" are a themeof Rabate's Ethics of the Lie (see especiallych. 4, "Liesand Paradox,"pp. 193-258). 56. Shvarts,Yale lash over project, Yale Daily News, Friday, April 18, 2008. Shvarts's project can't be securelycategorized as a hoax- or evena parafiction- since it remainsunclear what was or wasn'ttrue abouther story. But it partakes of the parafictional, because the question about veracity isfundamental to itsstructure. 57. And to fulfillperfectly the role of normative,institutionalized patriarchy the projectwas designedto challenge. 58. Herstatement about the project was published as "Shvartsexplains her 'repeated self-induced mis- carriages,'"April 18, 2008, at http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/printarticle/24559."Becausethe miscarriagescoincide with the expected date of menstruation(the 28thday of mycycle), it remains ambiguouswhether there was ever a fertilizedovum or not.The realityof the pregnancy, both for myself andfor the audience, is a matterof reading. This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification ornaming - theact of ascribing a word to something physical - is at its heart an ideologicalact, an actthat literallyhas the power to construct bodies. In a sense,the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns theterm 'miscarriage' or 'period'to that blood."

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makesher projectmatter beyond its illustrationof thisidea is the waythis was conflatedwith the parafictionalquestions of whethershe had done whatshe said she had,whether an ovumhad everbeen fertilized,59whether she had lied to theYale officials.With these, the project mapped the action of theartist con- trollingher work onto that of a womancontrolling her body. Shvartsrefused to signthe statement, ensuring that her project would exist as itdoes: as a story.

The storiestold here involve a diverserange of practices and practitioners, fromhighly regarded contemporary artists to a student,and fromgallery art to tacticalmedia and politicalactivism. They concern a rangeof somewhatexotic places- Istanbul,Vienna, Sydney,cyberspace, and a uterus- and theyvary widelyin termsof theircomplexity, their formal means, their visual languages, and especiallythe outcomes they seem to favor.Sometimes the revelation of the parafictionis keyto the operation.This is when theycome closestto simple hoax- butalso, to effectiveactivism. Sometimes such a revelationis eitherwith- held or impossibleto provide,and thisis probablywhen they come closestto whatis conventionallyconsidered art. A completetypology of the parafictional and itstools would tell us much;however, for the timebeing I wantto maintain thatthe commonalities between these projects tell us at leastas muchas thedif- ferences.Here, then, are someprovisional conclusions, or whatwe mightas well call themorals of the stories.

Globalization"Immanence"^ Nike is a targetfor culture jammers like 01.ORG not onlybecause of its brandingsuccess and ubiquity,but also because it is a corporate-globalization moralitytale.61 And of coursethe twosides of the company- its brandediden- tityand its outsourcedsweatshops - are connected:the explosionof branding over the last twentyyears depends on the loosening up of capital via

59. Theoreticallythis empirical question could be answeredby testing the blood either for a second setof DNA or forthe presence of the hormone hCG. But in factgiven the limits of testing it would be impossibleto sayconclusively whether fertilization had occurredor not (leavingaside the question of whetherthat fact would determine whether or nota lifehad beenconceived). See MelissaLafsky, "Can Science Get to the Bottomof the Aliza ShvartsAbortion Fracas?," Dicoblog, Discover Web site, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/04/18/can-science-get-to-the-bottom-of-the- aliza-shvarts-abortion-fracas/. 60. As indicatedbelow, this term is takenfrom Pamela M. Lee, "BoundaryIssues: The ArtWorld Underthe Signof Globalism,"Artforum 42, no. 3 (November2003); Lee's mobilizationof the term "immanence"to discussart and globalizationin turnreferences Hardt and Negri'sEmpire, as wellas Deleuzeand Spinoza. 61. Choosinga specificallyAmerican corporation, the faux-takeover of Karlsplatz was structurally and thematicallyconcerned with models of economic imperialism.

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outsourcing.62This is somethingMichael Blum knows well, as the artistis perhaps best knownfor his 2001 project My Sneakers:a video and installation documentinghis negotiationof corporatebureaucracy and layersof sub-con- tractingin Indonesiain theattempt to meetthe workers who had sewnhis Nikes. MySneakers was made on the occasionof an invitationto an artist'sresidency in Jakarta,and I don'tknow whether it was in Blum'smind four years later when he wentto Istanbulto participatein anotherritual of the internationalart world. Butneither of theprojects he made on theseoccasions forgets that art is itselfa partof the globalizednetwork of capital.By makinghis artisticpilgrimage to Jakartaa journeyof return for his sneakers, Blum had linkedjet-setting and out- sourcingin an exampleof whatPamela M. Lee calls the immanenceof the art worldto globalization:the waythat continent-hopping artists, critics, curators, and collectorsparticipate not just byproviding representations of global trade and transit,but substantively:"the activities constitutive of the artworld's horizon are indivisiblefrom the activity of globalization itself."63 Biennials and other internationalexhibitions are mechanismsfor cities or regionsto enhancetheir standingin the global economicorder - the IstanbulBiennial has been called "partof broader plans for the marketing of Istanbul as a culturalbrand"64 - while bothcareers and artworks become organized in termsof travel,shipment, and just-in-timeproduction. Meanwhile, artists negotiate twin pressures to be locally specificand internationallylegible. Blum's Safiye Behar project concerns post- colonial subjectmatter, while the questionof EU accessiontoward which the artistmobilized the storyis partof the contemporaryprocess of globalization. And so, of course,is the internationalBiennial exhibition that was the project's contextand reasonfor being, which Blum kept in playby conceiving the Safiye storyspecifically for a splitaudience - local Turkishviewers and international biennialvisitors - witha rangeof educations,languages, and perspectiveson Turkishmodernity.65 Parafictioneersproduce and manage plausibility.But plausibility(as opposedto accuracy)is notan attributeof a storyor image,but of itsencounter

62. Whilethe history of brands and branding is generallyunderstood to begin in thenineteenth century,the change in the 1980s through the 1990s is expressed in theterm "brand equity" invented in this period (theWall Street Journal first used the term in 1985).It indicates that the brand - a setof images and asso- ciations- is increasinglyunderstood as a primaryasset in itself,rather than simply the public face of a companywhose value lies in its products and infrastructure. (SeeJonathan Knowles, "Varying Perspectives on BrandEquity," Marketing Management (July/ August 2008), accessed at www.MarketingNPV.com, March 18,2009). Klein points out how the new kind of branding connects to the "lightening" ofconsumer-prod- uctcompanies at thistime, as theybegan to contractout manufacturing processes rather than run their ownfactories, which in turndepends on tradeliberalization. Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001),pp. 4-5, 22-23. 63. Lee, "BoundaryIssues," p. 167. 64. SiireyyyaEvren, "Parrhesiatic Games in TurkishContemporary Art Scene," Third Text 22, no. 1, (January,2008), pp. 35-42,38. Evren's essaycalls for forms of Foucault'sparrhesia in contemporary Turkishart. This mode - riskyand directtruth-telling - would have a complicatedrelationship with theparafietional. 65. The projectalso critically addressed "biennial culture" with the time- and energy-intensiveclose lookingthat it required to discern the planted clues to its fictionality.

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Blum.Two stills from My Sneakers.2001. withviewers, whose various configurations of knowledgeand "horizonsof expec- tation"determine whether something is plausibleto them. While something similar is trueof anyartwork - thatits meaningis producedin the encounterwith the spectator- a parafictioncreates a specificmultiplicity. No one has done thismore powerfully than The AtlasGroup, an organization dedicatedto "researchingand documentingthe contemporaryhistory of Lebanon,"particularly the civilwars of 1975-91 (it was also, untilrecently, the identityunder which Walid Raad exhibitedmost of hisart). The firstvideo made forthis project was Hostage:The Bachar Tapes (#17 and 31)_EnglishVersion (2000), a testimonialby former hostage Souheil Bachar, who was held byIslamic militants

This content downloaded from 128.122.7.28 on Wed, 10 Feb 2016 22:16:47 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WalidRaad. Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (#17and #31) English Version.2000. ©WalidRaad. Courtesyof the Paula CooperGallery.

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in Beirutfrom 1985 to 1995.66 For some monthshe shareda cell withTerry Anderson,Benjamin Weir, and threeother victims of what became known, here, as the "WesternHostage Crisis." While each of theseother prisoners has pub- lisheda memoirabout his hostageexperience, this video was the firstpublic documentationof Bachar's.It opens withEnglish text explaining that Bachar made fifty-threetestimonial tapes with The AtlasGroup, but that"tapes #17 and #31are theonly two tapes he makesavailable for screening outside of Lebanon." We thenhear a man'svoice introducing himself in Arabicas SouheilBachar; sub- titlestranslate his words to English. Likeall thedocuments in The AtlasGroup Archive, Hostage crosses the prob- lemsof history-writing(the patchinessof documents,the "unreliability"of even first-handaccounts, the workof interpretationthat goes intomaking sense of them);traumatic experience and theways it bothcompels and disallowsspeech; and the particularepistemic conditions of the Lebanesecivil war, with its multi- plicityof combatantgroups, its unreliable sources of information,and its nightmarishlyextended duration (indeed historians disagree in determiningthe yearthe war "ended"). Onto these,Hostage maps questions of ethnicity,gender, and sexuality,as Bachar (or a womanvoicing his wordsin American-accented English)describes his cohabitation with the Americans, and especiallytheir simul- taneous attractionto and repulsion by his body,which culminatesin an ambiguouslyforced sexual encounter in theircell. Sometimesspeaking posed againsta jury-riggedcloth backdrop, Bachar's testimonyevokes the videotapes of hostagesmade bytheir captors.67 But as ifto reversethose coerced speech acts,here the formerhostage is at pains to take chargeof his testimony.The tape startswith instructions from the subjectabout itsmaking. Bachar explains how he shouldbe translated:the tapesshould be in theofficial language of the country where they are shown,English for the UK and US, Frenchfor France, Arabic for "the Arab world." He is alwaysto be dubbedby a "neutral-tonedfemale voice" (which thereafter chimes in). Whenhe saysthe subti- tles should be in white type on black or "if you prefer. . . blue like the Mediterranean,"he makesit so (performatively): the blackbackground obedi- entlyfades to blue. Bacharnot only tells his ownstories, but also controlstheir translation and dissemination.The factthat he allowsonly two tapes to be shownoutside of Lebanoncasts these as a messagefor foreign audiences. This makes it impossible

66. Basedin parton Raad'sresearch for his 1997Ph.D. dissertation on theIran-Contra affair at the UniversityofRochester, the tape was made during a postdoctoralresidency at theAmerican University of Beirutin 1999-2000,and completedin 2000.It was first shown informally in Beirut, and thenin experi- mentalvideo festivals in Europeand the United States (Raad, email to the author, March 12, 2009). 67. The coercedvideos haunt his testimony in Hostagesmost striking passage: "Tape 31" opens with twominutes, twelve seconds in whichall informationis withheld except for a silent,screen-filling shot ofthe rippling surface of a bodyof water (which is sometimeshard to distinguishfrom video static). Afterward,Bachar explains that the shot had been theaverage duration of all thevideos he had been forcedto make as a captive.

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forthe viewerto forgether own geopoliticallocation - or implication.But the videodoesn't assume a homogenousaudience. An Arabicspeaker will notice that at timesthe Englishvoiceover expresses something unrelated, or even exactly oppositeto Bachar'swords. These deviations are notinconsequential: in thesilent sexual encounterin theircell, an Americantries to penetrateBachar in the Englishvoiceover, while in Bachar'sArabic the roles are reversed.68In eitherlan- guage, whatstarts with a mutualpressing of body to bodyends in violence, complicatingagain the video's thematics of autonomy and coercion.The discrep- ancybetween the Arabic and Englishtexts makes that opposition even less simple. Likewise,while Bachar's self-willed, self-narrated, and consummatelyself-con- trolledtestimonial seems to overturnthe logic of the coerced videos of his captivity,the deviationsby the voice that literally speaks over his complicatethe simpleopposition of free speech and forcedspeech (and thoughthe performative fadefrom black screen to blue happensas ifBachar's words had willedit, it also introducesthe presence of an agentcontrolling the visualization of the testimony, he whotakes the opportunity offered by Bachar's "if you like"). Raad had originallyimagined that translation and dubbingwould actually be done in differentlanguages when the work was shown in othercountries, as stipu- latedwithin the video by Bachar, but no matterwhere the tapes have been shown thevoice and subtitleshave remained in English,further eroding the illusionof Bachar'sauthority over his ownimage as it travels.This introduces more distinc- tionsbetween viewers (uni-, bi-, and trilingual),and raisesthe question of English as theglobal lingua franca.69 (It is no coincidence,surely, that in hisIstanbul project MichaelBlum made Safiye Behar a Turkish-Englishtranslator by trade.) As in Blum'sproject, in Raad's Hostagethe rangeof positionsprovided for viewersare at once variousand specific.And as in Blum'sdouble address to foreign culturaltourists and to Turkishaudiences, the interpellationhere breaks downprimarily along geopoliticallines. As if to make thisclear, Raad cast as Bacharan actorrecognizable in Lebanon,giving viewers in thatcountry, or recent expatriates,an immediatehint of fictionality.Non-Lebanese but Arabic-speaking viewerswho also speakEnglish have the mistranslationsto cue skepticism,while English-onlyspeakers must rely only on thetape's aesthetics and siteof viewing to determinewhether, how much, and in whatdetails they doubt Bachar's facticity.70 Similarly,Raad was knownto changethe yearof The AtlasGroup's inception dependingon the contextand expectedaudience, from 1999, when he actually

68. Raad,email to theauthor, March 15, 2009. Raad explainsthat this difference was intended to complicate"the caricature of the penetrator / the top as theone in charge." 69. Had SafiyeBehar existed, she would have been thetranslator of a poemby Nazim Hikmet that capturessomething of thestatus of Bachar'sautonomy. What kind of freedomis it thatone has,he wondered,when at anymoment your country "may be signedover to America.""You and yourgreat freedom/ Youhave the freedom to become an air-base." 70. ThoughRaad is oftenquite careful to say that the characters in hisAtlas Group work may be fic- titious- Hostageis filedin a sectionof The AtlasGroup Archive that its website describes as "filesthat containdocuments that we producedand thatwe attributeto namedimaginary individuals or organi- zations"- he hasbeen surprised how often viewers take them at face value.

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startedworking in thisvein, to years- suchas 1948,1967, and 1975- thatevoked differentturning points in modernMiddle Eastern history. In otherwords, the workalters and is altereddepending on geopoliticallocation.71 But "location" mustbe understoodas morethan spatial: it includes the institutional, but also the geographicalsite in whicha viewersees thework; her location of origin,but also herpersonal history of dislocations. Such "locations" within and in relationshipto institutions,nations, languages, and historydetermine which aspects of thework are availableto a givenviewer at a givenmoment. And thisin turncorrelates to the spectatorialmodes such as disbelief,belief, suspicion, certainty, and doubt thatepistemologists call - in whathere becomes a pun- "credalstates." Withits rangeof different,shifting, but localizedresponses, the Bachar videoresponds to conditionsspecific to theLebanese Civil War (with its multiple, shiftingfactions, its manifold points of view). But also (and withouttrivializing) it is possibleto saythat because of thisspecific multiplicity Hostage and the restof The AtlasGroup work seems also to acknowledgethe conditionof the artworld intowhich they emerged: one fullyenmeshed with globalization, its competing demandsfor local specificityand globalinclusion, and itstensions around legibil- ity,audience, and language.72Fittingly, Hostage first reached wide attention when itwas shown at Documenta11 in 2002.Though created before Raad had achieved thislevel of international art world recognition, it turnsout thathis video - com- inginto and outof credibility differently for viewers depending on their(shifting, multiple)geopolitical locations - wasuniquely well-suited to the conditionssuch an exhibitionboth assumes and creates.

InternetEpistemology CarolineJones has argued that epistemologically complicated recent work such as Raad'sperforms a crucial service, inculcating a habit of critical doubt in orderto counterthe atavistic fearmongering that has characterizedthe "war on terror."73I largelyagree: the experiences of deception and doubtwe are put through by parafic-

71. Raad nowinsists on complicatingthese terms: "I thinkit is safeto saythat there may have been a timewhen I thoughtI knewwhat I meantby 'presumedhistorical knowledge of theviewers in a givenlocation.' This proposition has becomesomewhat blurred to me."E-mail to theauthor, March 15,2009. 72. It is importanthere to note- thoughit is obvious- that"globalization is nota singleprocess, period,or entity.For instance, very different geo-political and economicpressures are at playin the entryof various regions or nationalitiesinto the "global" contemporary art world (or rather,into visi- bilityfor Euro-American art institutions, media, and scholarship). 73. Writingat theheight of theBush-Cheney era in 2003,and tryingto diagnosethat administra- tion'ssuccess in leadinga nationpast logic and factinto a disastrousand unnecessarywar, Jones stress- es thecoolly cognitive aspects of neo-conceptualist work like Raad's, and therationality and criticality thatits "aestheticsof doubt"encourage in theviewer. I admirethis argument but part ways with it - slightly(part of the difference is simply that we are not considering exactly the same phenomena the onlycase we both discuss is Raad's).Parafiction encourages critical thought, but I believethat in doing so viaexperiences of discomfort, embarrassment, confusion, and oftenanger, it refuses to separatethe epistemologicaland theemotional. And I am lessconfident than Jones that this work can be complete- lyopposed to the culture of deception.

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tional experimentsprepare us to be better,more criticalinformation consumers, and thereforecitizens. This trainingrelates not onlyto the cultureof fear,however, but to media cultureat large,and particularlyto the epistemologicalshock thatthe rapid mainstreamingof the Internethas caused, especiallyin the last ten years.74A MacArthurFoundation white paper explainsthat the crucialskills for thriving in our current and coming information environment- the world of Wikipedia and Google- are the abilityto distinguishbetween various sources' levelsof reliability and a proclivityto question the transparencyof information.'75Every webpage created by theYes Men is an exercisein what,in a differenthistorical context, Michael Leja calls "lookingaskance"76: the kind of skepticalviewing required when online explorationbecomes a primaryway of knowing. However,in this informationregime, the challenge is not only to be vigi- lantlyskeptical. As Paul Virilio has said, control operates now not throughthe censure of true facts,but throughthe "over-information"surrounding them.77 In the ocean of data we dip into to resolve both looming decisions and passing inquiries (and of course, to investigateparafictions themselves) the problem may be less how to rememberto be skeptical,than how to decide when one has been sufficientlyso. What is due epistemologicaldiligence? When does one decide that somethingis - in the epistemologists'phrase now codifiedas Wikipedia'sprimary criterion- trueenough} It's this,perhaps, that separates the implicationsof parafiction from stereotypically postmodern assertions of the inaccessibility and relativismof truthor the real.78In experiencingmost parafiction - where the fictional hangs on the factual- one is evaluatingnot onlywhether a propositionis fictional,but what parts of it are true. (There was indeed an Arab prisonerheld along withthe Westernhostages, it turnsout; MustafaKemal was in factan adul- terer; but the Aliza Shvartses on Facebook and MySpace are imposters).79 Parafictionstrain us in skepticismand doubt, but also, oddly,in belief.

74. Thoughthe Internet obviously has a muchlonger history (ARPANET began operating in 1969) itwas after the introduction of the web directory and searchengine (Yahoo, 1994) that in theUS and WesternEurope, at least,it reachedsomething like the level of functionality and participationthat it has now,and beganto actually,rather than potentially, transform individual, social, and economiclife on a massscale. 1998 is a notableyear in thishistory: itis thenthat we were introduced to Google, then thatApple debuted the iMac (the firsthome computerspecifically designed with Internet use in mind),and thenthat weblogs began to appear. 75. HenryJenkins, with Ravi Rurshotma, Katherine Clinton, Margaret Weigel, and AliceJ. Robiso, "Confrontingthe Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," (October 19,2006), The John D. and CatherineT. MacArthurFoundation, available at http://digitallearning.mac- found.org/site/c.enJLKQNlFiG/b.2029291/k.97E5/Occasional_Papers.htm, pp.43-6. 76. See Michael Leja, LookingAskance: Skepticism and AmericanArt from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: UniversityofCalifornia Press, 2004). 77. PaulVirilio, Strategy ofDeception, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 48. 78. Mostof the practitioners I've been discussing, like myself, came of age intellectuallyin an environ- mentin which the role of culture in shaping what we take as fact,the ideological drivers and narrative con- ventionsof objective-seeming history, or theinaccessibility ofreferents among slippery signifiers or inter- lockingtexts were encountered as a kindof common sense. I speculatethat the forms they have developed arisefrom this in someway; but respond also to the zombie versions of these ideas that returned in recent yearsin forms like "teaching the debate" on evolution,or scorn for "the reality-based community." 79. AlizaShvarts, e-mail to theauthor, March 30, 2008.

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Of course the relationshipbetween parafiction and the Internetis not causal- parafictionlong predatesdigital networks. But to do parafictionnow is to engagewith this condition of communication,knowledge, even cognition. I don't thinkit is a coincidencethat 01.ORG and new-mediasponsors Public Netbasepicked a structurefor their Vienna infobooth that, with its broadwin- dows displayinglayered visual and textualinformation, resembled a kind of walk-incomputer monitor. In fact,the infoboothwas a customizedversion of the "Cocobello,"a modularstructure by Munich-based architect Peter Haimerl, whosevision included multiple booths popping up all aroundan urbanenviron- ment,"plugged into the existingcommunications network," and creating"a networkof spaces."80Likewise, even thoughit was not primarilyan Internet- based project(nor strictlya hoax), it makessense thatAliza Shvarts'sproject showsup in a listof top Internethoaxes.81 Parafiction's natural home is the blog,the discussionboard, or thewiki, where information is bothmalleable in formand materialin effect.As it challengesviewers to assessthe markers of reliability,then, even a projectlike SafiyeBehar, which had no Internetpresence to speak of and tooka distinctlypre-digital form, could be considereda kindof live-actionexperiment in Internetepistemology. - Bythis I meanthat it challengesviewers to assessthe forms of information fromthe font to theURL at thetop of the page - withas muchcare as thecontent, and thatit trains them in bothskepticism and belief.But I also meanthat it echoes someof the structure of an informationeconomy. The viewerpositions in a parafic- tionare multiple, but they are notequal. The peoplewho have the most knowledge goingin, or are themost astute information-interpreters (or,if there is Wi-Fi,those whoare literallywell-connected) avoid being duped; and theirexperience of the piecemay include the slightly sadistic fun of watching others in theirepistemologi- cal struggle.That is tosay, the viewers of parafiction are classed.82

Parafiction,for Art 's Sake Let'sreturn to A Tributeto Safiye Behar, and stepback to wonder:why would anyonebelieve it in thefirst place? After all, it wasn't in a historymuseum, archive, university,or anyother site even putatively dedicated to the pursuitof factsand truthfulness.It was in an artshow. By all reportsmost viewers started from the

80. PeterHaimerl, "Cocobello- Mobiles Atelier," Detail 6 (2004),pp. 676-77. 81. Pareene,"5 BullshitStories the Whole Internet Fell For,"Gawker.com, May 22, 2008.In fact, mostbloggers registered the possibility of "hoax"from the beginning. The factthat the story had such powerfulresonance even when discussed in thekey of "if" is anotherindication of the way parafiction complicatesthe distinction between happy and unhappy performative. 82. Classintersects these stories in multipleways, in fact.For instance, Shvarts s privileged position as an IvyLeague student seemed to drivesome of thedisgust with her project. As Julia Bryan-Wilson haspointed out to me thereis alsoa powerfulclass component to theYes Men's hijinks in termsof the viewer'srelation to thecast of characters (whether one is positionedcloser to thesuited experts the YesMen target and impersonate,or to theworkers or thepoor who are usuallythe most immediately impactedby them).

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assumptionthat the subjectwas factual,which has to do withBlum's skill, of course- but also withthe majormovement of art and art historyagainst the notionof art'sautonomy.83 From real bulletwounds to demonstrationsof the financialand politicalentanglements of artistic institutions, from the production of functionalobjects to the actualprovision of socialservices, artists in the last centuryhave ceaselesslydemonstrated the coextensivenessof artand the real, sloughingoff again and again the eighteenth-centurydistinction between utility and theaesthetic. But thatdistinction refuses to go away.It undergirdsthe Yale statement aboutShvarts: had her actsnot been art,it concludes,they would have had real consequences.What is elidedis thepossibility that it was art and she did whatshe saidshe did.And this isn't just a matterof lay critics expressing outdated assump- tions. The contradictionis built into parafictionalart. Afterall, while the acceptanceof art'sco-extensiveness with the real explains why Safiye Behar works, it'sprecisely the opposite idea aboutart that explains how Blum got away with it.84 You can speculate,make up facts,blend different types of facts, or evenlie in artbecause it is understoodas a fundamentallyfrivolous zone. (Of an artist who has produced functionalfirearms, one magazinebreathlessly wonders whetherwhat he is up to is "something. . . sinister,"or "justart.")85 It's thisattitude thatunderlies the immediateand recurringaccusation lobbed at Shvarts thather projecttrivialized abortion and miscarriage.As if to literallyput your bodythrough the procedureof insemination,to undergopossible termination of pregnancy(however early), to encounterand experiencethese "issues"in yourown physical and mentalbeing, and to repeatall of thisfor nine months wereless serious than, say, writing a termpaper about the abortiondebate. The projectmay be manythings - dangerous,counterproductive, perhaps even immoral- buttrivializing it is not.Yet the fact that it wasinterpreted this way is in itselftelling of the strangelyunshakeable assumption that art is a category definedagainst reality, unencumbered by - and unempoweredby - real conse- quence. Alan Beiber put it perfectlywhen he asked 01.ORG whetherbeing labeled"artist" was like getting a "jester'slicense."86

83. Psychologistsalso talk about an inherenthuman "truth bias." 84. Perhapsit is thisinterrogation of thequestion of utilityrather than the fake Wanted posters, pseudonymns,and so on thatlinks Duchamp to theseparafictional practices. See StephenWright, "TheFuture of the Reciprocal Readymade: An Essayon Use Valueand Art-Related Practice," Parachute 117 (January-March2005). Wright's discussion of art and usevalue in recentcollective practice in this essay (based on the catalog essayfor his Apexartexhibition "The Futureof the Reciprocal Readymade,"in Spring2004) is extremelyhelpful for thinking about art and politics(as is his term "art-relatedpractice"). The artistand criticSarah Kanouse has a wonderfulphrase for the way art's autonomyis beingused in practicessimilar to these:she callsit art's"tactical irrelevance." Sarah E Kanouse,"Tactical Irrelevance: Art and Politicsat Play,"paper presented at the Conferenceof the Unionfor Democratic Communication, Boca Raton,FL, May 20 2006,at http://www.readysubjects.org /writing/kanouse_artpolitics.pdf. 85. MelissaMilgrom, "Target: AVL," Metropolis (May 2000). 86. "Howto provoketoday?? Alain Bieber interviews 0100101110101101.ORG on NikeGround," RebeliArtMagazine, April 1, 2004, archived copy at http://www.0100101110101101.org /home/nikeground/interview.html.

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The criticBrian Holmes, though, has the metaphormost relevant for the currentdiscussion. In hisessay titled "Liar's Poker," he accusesart institutions and politically-engagedartists of playing a bluffinggame. The frisson of "relevance" is a typeof cultural capital that museums desperately need, and radicalartists can provide,he argues,using the example of Documenta to claimthat an artinstitution mustask its cultural producers for the ace ofpolitics, while proving all thewhile (with the help of the police, if need be) thatthis ace is mere- lya bluff,that it is reallya king.... And yetit is throughthis double game thatnew symbolic possibilities for conceiving and shapingthe wayswe live- whatNietzsche might have called "the transvaluation of all values"- can be distributedon the scale thatan exhibitionlike Documentaoffers.87

Artinstitutions lie, and turncultural producers into liars, by asking artists forthe winning hand of real politics(the ace), whileall thewhile framing what theydo as withoutconsequence (the king). If thisis indeedthe only way we have to proposenew possibilities for living and thinking- for re-distributing the sensible- thenthis goes a longway toward not only explaining, but justifying the fact thatwe haveseen a risein parafiction:in artbuilt on thecontradictions between art'sability to moveinto and changethe world, and artas a spaceof only symbolic relevance.Blum, at least,seems to have implicitlyrecognized something of the kindwhen he endedthe wall text in theSafiye Behar museum this way: In 2005,as Turkeyand theEU are playingliar's poker about their com- monfuture, Safiye might prove to be a helpfulguiding model for current and futuregenerations. A productof boththe East and theWest, she stoodup forher ideals and devoteda lifetimeto whatshe believedin. She wasa globalthinker before the termwas coined, seeing the world beyondthe narrow conceptions of borders, nations, and states. The "Safiye"in thisparagraph might simply be thecharacter of Behar; "guid- ingmodel" might refer simply to theprogressive ideals to whichshe devotedher life.But as Blum'swinking reference to thepolitics of deception suggests, it might also be Safiyethe exhibition - parafictionitself - thatcould serve as a guide.What wouldthis mean? Walid Raad has an interestingway of phrasingwhat art like his can do: "theway an artworkcan maintainand workdifferent kind of factsalive [sic] (historicalfacts; sociological facts, economic facts, emotional facts, aesthetic facts,etc. . . . )."88If thisdestabilizing of "fact"shares a bitmore ground than is comfortablewith "truthiness,"89 it resonates with Blum's insistence that Safiye is

87. BrianHolmes, "Liar's Poker: Representation ofPolitics/Politics ofRepresentation," Springeren 1 (2003). 88. WalidRaad, e-mail to the author, March 22, 2009. 89. Byregistering a generic connection I do notmean to collapseterms. Raad is talkingabout the proliferationand protectionof different kinds of fact, while "truthiness" describes the substitution of one kindof fact for another.

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real to him;with Shvarts's multiplication of themeanings of herbody's capabili- ties,and withthe recent effort by scholars such as BrunoLatour to revivea mode of realism,even empiricism,that does not give up on the idea of facts,but rethinksthem as mattersof investment, debate, and desire.90This is preciselythe territoryof parafiction, which at once revealsthe way things are and makessensi- ble theway we wantthem to be; and whichoffers experiences of both skepticism and belief.As forthe odd phrasingin theline from Raad, it maybe a simpletyp- ing error,artifact of a quicklye-mailed response to a critic'squestion. But how fortuitouslythe imageof workingfacts alive suits the poeticsand politicsof the paranctional.The paramedic,after all, doesn'tattempt to heal the patient.She resuscitateshim, she staunches his bleeding. She keepspressure on hiswounds.

Epilogue:Retracing Recall the descriptionof viewersin Istanbul"scurrying back" to re-view Blum'sinstallation after learning Safiye was a fiction.The critic'sphrase evokes perfectlythe temporally extended and multi-phasedreception of artthat resides in theplausible. But, scurrying? It'swhat a rodentdoes. The verbalso capturesthe air of thelaboratory that clings to theparafictional, where artists wear the white coats,and viewersrun throughtheir mazes. One of the disturbingthings about the paranctionalis the splitbetween the trap-layingartist and the specifically unwittingviewer, who thinks she is involvedin one kindof experience (historical museum;marketing campaign) while actually participating in another(fiction- basedinstallation; cultural critique). When asked why it is so difficultto geta rise out of audiencesat theirpresentations, then, the Yes Men got it exactlyright: "Perhapsa rumpledsuit would help. Milgram's study suggests that."91 "Scurrying"also expressesthe embarrassed, slightly furtive nature of parafictional spectatorship.Being taken in by a parafiction,after all, is not just epistemologicallydestabilizing. It is humiliating.Think of theaudience member whoasks a sincerequestion of a parafictioneeringpresenter, only to realizelater he was one of the fewnot in on thejoke. Or considerthe (purelyhypothetical) arthistorian, perhaps in a studiovisit with an artist,who nods knowingly about an historicalfigure before learning that he madeher up. Parafictionis an antidoteto vanity.It changesyou, leaves you both curiousand chastened.It also forever changesone's interfacewith the media,art, museums, and scholarship.The dif- ferenceis a certaincritical outlook, but one thatshould be differentiatedfrom

90. BrunoLatour, "Why Has CritiqueRun Out of Steam?From Matters of Fact to Mattersof Concern,"Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter2004), p. 231. 91. In StanleyMilgram's behavioral experiments atYale University in theearly 1960s, subjects were toldthey were participating in a studyabout learning, when in factthe goal ofthe experiment was to see howfar they would go in inflictingpain on anotherperson when commanded to bya figurein authority(the scientist).

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modelsof criticality as skepticism.Ranciere talks about a "poeticsof knowledge" opposed to "critiqueas suspicion."92Something like thisattitude takes shape, I think,as a post-parafictionalalertness to thepossibility of play. (Ranciere's poet- ics of knowledge,like the parafictional,"gives value to the effectivityof speech acts"). Artworks, lectures, books, exhibitions, and of coursejournal articles: theyshimmer slightly, possibly plausible, plausibly possible. However,this can be particularlydestabilizing for scholarship. No matter

Blum.Detail ofA Tribute toSafiye Behar.2005. howthoroughly I've researchedthe stories I've toldhere, I'm awareof theprovi- sionalityof myreport. Have I pulled back all the onion-skinsof fiction?How muchresearch would be enough?And must I unveilevery aspect of the works I've uncovered,if to do so woulddamage their future functioning? While parafictional artand activismrespond to broaderareas of cultural practice, it seems imperative to examinetheir lessons for the endeavor at hand.For theepistemological prob- lemsI've been describingdon't pertainonly to parafictionalart. They are the conditionsfor the enterprise of scholarlystudy of contemporaryart in general- forthis strange practice of tryingto thinkhistorically about the present.Doing thiswork we approachthe parafictional all thetime, relying on memoriesand sto- riesto build our histories- onlya stepaway from gossip, it sometimesseems.93

92. Jacques Ranciereand Davide Panagia, "DissentingWords: A Conversationwith Jacques Ranciere,"Diacritics 30, no. 2 (Summer2000), pp. 113-16;and Ranciere,The Names of History: On the Poeticsof Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994). 93. Fora discussionof scholars'involvement with their subjects, see Julia Bryan-Wilson, "Working It: ContemporaryArt, Gendered Labor, and Prostitution,"forthcoming in differences:A Journal of FeministCultural Criticism 21, no. 2 (Summer2010).

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Our argumentscan functionperformatively, shaping our subjects'future work, and beingshaped by them in turn.Moreover, like the viewer of parafiction, we are alwaysa stepbehind. Not onlybecause our fieldis ever-expandingtemporally but because,as partof our immanenceto globalization,it is growinggeographically. We havethe responsibility - and feelthe pressure - to be evermore inclusive and transnationalin our narratives.But, as thispaper's Euro-American focus itself demonstrates,few of us havethe languages,the culturalknowledge, or thelocal art-historicalbackground to properlymaster a fractionof whatwe wouldlike to think,teach, and write about. Whatto do? The subjectof parafiction might answer by paraphrasing the pre- tendNike Web site. Scholars don't usually wear pressed suits. So whyshould their scholarship?Why should we standin theMilgram position? What if contemporary arthistory were to differfrom other parts of thefield in owningrather than mini- mizing some of these contradictions and realities? Walid Raad said in 1989- maybe- that"facts have to be treatedas processes."94Acknowledging that no one of us is an authorityon the fullrange of artwe need to discussmight encourageus notto narrowour focus but to findways to research,write, and advise collaboratively.Admitting and evenvaluing the provisionality ofour knowledge- understandingthat term not onlyas "subjectto alteration"but as in the word "provisions,"also - we mightfind ways for artists to speakwithin or againstour texts.We might develop forms of publication that expect and allowamendment. Wemight embolden the mice. Dignify the scurry.

94. WalidRaad, unpublished compilation of statements about The AtlasGroup.

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