On Virtual Grounds: Blueprint for a Postmimetic, Dialogical Realism

Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) 2015 i Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

Contents

Introduction: Toward a Postmimetic Realist Practice ...... 1

Part I. Against Mimesis: The Critique of Referential Art in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics and Cultural Theory

1. Classic Realism: The Nostalgic View ...... 33

2. Modernist Antirealism: Existential Alienation and the Solace of Form ...... 41

The Modern Emptiness of Life ...... 41

The Autonomy of Artistic Form ...... 49

3. The Thingless Sign: The Structuralist and Poststructuralist Challenge against Referential Illusion ...... 63

The Semiotic Patterning of Perception ...... 63

The Signifying Chain ...... 69

The Alienating Mirror: Realism as Logocentric Illusion ...... 72

The Intertextual Simulacrum ...... 76

The Voice of Cognitive Authority: The Repression of Dialogism ...... 78

Performativity: Beyond the Descriptive Fallacy ...... 82

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4. The Politics of Mimesis: Realism and Discursive Repression ...... 87

The Avant-Garde and the “Realist Attitude” ...... 87

Realism as Naturalized Ideology and Performative Enforcement ...... 91

The Covert Hybridity of Realist and Naturalist Discourse ...... 97

Realism Dissolved ...... 99

5. Antirealism and the Visual Media ...... 105

Semiology and the Vanishing Object of Photography ...... 105

Film Montage and Computer Generation as Pseudo-Physis ...... 117

The Reappropriation of Visual Evidence ...... 125

Part II: Beyond Mimesis ...... 137

6. The Reality Bet: Realism under Postmodernity ...... 138

Virtualization and Dialogization ...... 138

Wagering on Reality: Shall I Project a World? ...... 153

The Realist Underground ...... 164

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7. Negotiated Disclosures: The Core Strategies of Dialogical Realism ...... 174

Heuristics, Reflexivity, Contract, Praxis ...... 174

Negotiated Disclosures ...... 195

8. Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality .... 211

Signs that Matter: The Judicial Spectacle of Material Evidence ...... 211

Virtualized Bodies: The Construction of Technospace in Music Videos ...... 214

The Dialogical Play of Light and Heavy Signs: Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog ...... 219

Urban Performance Art, or the Struggle with Residual Materiality ...... 229

The Material Reappropriation of Technosigns ...... 232

Toward a Materialist Monologism? ...... 239

Works Cited ...... 242

1 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

INTRODUCTION

Toward a Postmimetic Realist Practice

“And yet this is what really happened, isn’t it?” These words spoken at the end of Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling (2008) by a church activist (Ed Harris) to the mother of a kidnapped child (Angelina Jolie) ostensibly mark the closure of a criminal case. At this point, the protagonists of Eastwood’s narrative have proved beyond a doubt that a boy claiming to be the young mother’s rescued child is an impostor. They have also unfortunately discovered that her biological son was killed by a mass murderer. In the historical context of the film’s release, this endorsement of the capability of witnesses to ascertain matters of fact and the nature of experience carried an intriguing political ring. Some of the key issues of early twenty-first-century politics have revolved around the notion of truth, verifiability, scientific mistakes, and political lies. It would admittedly be simplistic to reduce the debate over the 2003 US-sponsored Iraq invasion to controversies over the possession of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein’s regime. Still, the propaganda effort that preceded the invasion and the hapless efforts of President George W. Bush’s administration at justifying it offered a reminder that even in a world of globalized information and hour-by-hour journalistic scrutiny, sheer factual disinformation may serve as legitimization for military action. The politics of verifiability are also at the heart of the controversies over the teaching of creationism in public education and over the funding of research investigating climate change. The former issue 2 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds raised the question whether empirically falsifiable statements about biological history should be cloaked as teachworthy science. The latter highlighted the power of business and politics to shape the development of knowledge. Finally, the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed the rehabilitation of a principle long discredited by apologists of speculative capitalism—that economic processes are accountable to the constraints of use value, indeed to the test of reality. The real-estate crash of 2008 reminded financial actors of the existence of a real economy—a world of actual needs and limited resources endowed with the capability of puncturing the inegalitarian fictions of Wall Street and Canary Wharf. The political relevance of factual accountability proves awkwardly ironical for researchers in the humanities at the turn of the twenty-first century. Distrust in the capacity of discourse to produce truthful, value-free statements about the world has been one of the pivots of the shared wisdom of cultural studies in the last thirty-five years. Saussurean semiology, poststructuralist deconstruction, neo- pragmatism, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, and neo-historicism have, admittedly with great theoretical acumen, rendered the search for truth indistinguishable from expressions of the will to power. They have therefore made it uncomfortable for scholars who opposed the Iraq invasion, disagree with Biblical literalism, take heed of global warming, and foresaw the 2008 economic crash to articulate their critique of these issues on the basis of truth-based arguments. Conversely, the cognitive skepticism of academia in the wake of postmodernism offers little conceptual support to the significant number of art works addressing similar aspects of the early-twenty- first-century political context. Films such as John Sayles’s Lone Star, Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ; documentaries by Michael Moore, Spike Lee, and Morgan Spurlock; literary fictions by Don DeLillo or Zadie Smith only find an imperfect vindication in theories of culture that problematize the link between art and the world in which political events unfold. In the field of aesthetics, approaching social issues from the perspective of truth and rationality has traditionally been the hallmark of realism: the latter movement has put its trust in what we might call, after Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, the “referential” dimension of art—its ability to maintain a determinate, truth-oriented relation to the non-artistic world (Frege 24; also Richards 115). It is indeed to the 3 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds resilience of this artistic program that the present essay is devoted. In these pages, I investigate how after a century of formalist, modernist, and postmodernist experimentalism, contemporary artists may still subject their social environment to what twentieth-century theoretician of the realist novel Georg Lukács calls the “reasonable” question (Meaning 69). Lukács designates thereby the capacity of realist art to interrogate society with a view to understanding its configuration, thereby counteracting the factors that hinder the same search for intelligibility. Investigating how the praxis thus characterized by Lukács manifests itself today raises serious problems, however. Realism at the turn of the twenty-first century forms an extended constellation lacking coherence and visibility. Its practitioners resemble the digital-age counterinsurgents sf novelist William Gibson calls “[c]ognitive dissidents” (Virtual 162) or the members of the “realist underground” depicted in David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ. They are dissidents in the first place because their cognitively oriented art has a demystifying edge. Realism, Lukács points out, must be “critical” (Lukács, Meaning 93): the cultural practice inherited from Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot and Gustave Courbet would lose its reason for existence if it did not scrutinize the society in which it develops in the hope of questioning its ideological pieties. Secondly, contemporary realism resembles an underground project in so far as it enjoys an unfavorable position in the present-day scale of cultural capital. Not that the authors discussed in this study are deprived of media and cultural attention: some of them are among the most notable figures of contemporary literature, film, or the graphic arts. Yet by the standards of some of the most influential currents in academic criticism, the element that makes their cultural practice most meaningful—their dedication to the understanding of the social scene—proves least useful to their artistic prestige and most difficult to legitimize at the level of theory.

Because of its scattered, hybrid nature, contemporary realism is a particularly awkward object for attempts at definition, either in terms of discourse or corpus. This is hardly surprising: most present-day scholars take it for granted that realism in any form resists categorization. The very label, Michael Bell, writes, quoting Vladimir Nabokov, is “one of those words ‘which mean nothing without quotes’” (Bell 1). Debates in recent criticism about the problematic 4 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds legitimacy of realist art are given extended scrutiny in Part I of the present essay. Further chapters defy the methodological scepticism prevailing in these matters as they outline a contemporary paradigm for this presumably undefinable entity. The present introductory section is only meant to provide an impressionistic overview of the corpus and of the factors that render its practices seemingly unmappable. In the first place, I wish to point out that the definition of what a realist representation of society in art might amount to is commonly approached from three complementary, yet mismatched perspectives: realism is defined in turn as an artistic movement, a mode of discourse, or an artistic genre. Among these terms, the realist movement designates the artistic works and creative contexts of authors explicitly endorsing realism as a rallying slogan—the cultural formation realism scholar Luc Herman subsumes as “programmatic realism” (9). In this logic, artists’ and critics’ programmatic comments—what literary naturalism critic June Howard calls the “generic text” (9)—serve as evidence of the movement’s existence. This definition is best suited to chart the development of realist art during what is now often regarded as its “classic” phase—the mid and late-nineteenth century (Belsey, Culture 2). Yet in practice, pinning the definition of referential art on such literary-historical criteria proves impossible, leading commentators implicitly to fall back on the concepts of mode and genre. Works with patent affinities to the programmatically attested movement may indeed lack the validation of an explicit generic text. In particular, art displaying features similar classic realism yet created before or after its chronological boundaries should by these standards fall outside of the realist movement. Conversely, the concept of movement is excessively dependent on authors’ and critics’ occasionally eccentric claims: Gustave Flaubert refused to see his novels bundled with the works of other French realists (Dubois 216-17); the surrealist avant-garde improbably argued that its dream-based aesthetic produced a supremely insightful representation of reality (Herman 71-72). The second definition, based on the concept of mode, characterizes realism as an artistic discourse whose thematic focus, epistemological assumptions, and humanistic commitment are specifically tuned to the representation of social reality. The influential typology developed by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism defines five artistic modes— the mythic, the romance, the high mimetic, the low mimetic, and the 5 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds ironic (33-36). Frye derives his principle of classification from Aristotle’s Poetics: he ranks the five modes according to the status conferred to protagonists and settings with regard to a norm of average humanity. Myths depict deities; romances feature superhuman heroes in magical environments; and the high mimetic represents socially privileged figures. In this logic, the low mimetic and the ironic modes are akin to realism and its pessimistic variant, naturalism. The protagonists of the low mimetic have a status comparable to average humans and evolve in an environment similar to readers’ everydayness. Protagonists of the ironic mode are also drawn from everyday life, yet are inferior in status and dignity to the human norm. Frye’s mode-based classification is sympathetic to realism in that it suggests that art of any period may be evaluated from the perspective of its relation to everyday life—a transhistorical principle famously endorsed by realism scholar Erich Auerbach. Its limitations are, however, due to its narrow endorsement of the concept of mimesis. As its terminology suggests, Frye’s Anatomy, like Aristotle’s Poetics and Auerbach’s famous study of realism in European literature, is predicated on the belief that art is of necessity devoted to a “technique of imitation”—the specular, mirror-like reproduction of social life (Auerbach 31; also Aristote 77-79). In this logic, classic realist literature, painting, and cinema developed a highly consistent variant of art’s overall capacity to deploy what Luc Herman, in a historical survey of the concept of realism, calls an “analogical system of signification” (160). This methodological choice fails, however, to take into consideration varieties of realism that might depart from imitation—practices, I argue below, that constitute core aspects of contemporary culture. Thirdly, viewing realism as a genre amounts to defining it as a set of works ruled by what Fredric Jameson calls “semantic” or “syntactic” conventions (Jameson, Political 107): realism would in this light be described as a textual paradigm defined according to specific thematic concerns or “mechanisms and structures” (Jameson, Political 107). This approach has been favoured by formalist theoreticians and their structuralist successors (Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov). It fosters a finer technical depiction of representational strategies than what definitions in terms of movement and mode may provide: instead of focusing on literary- historical data or on each work’s relation to the everyday context, the 6 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds genre-focused definition assumes that realism, regardless of its claim to designate the world, is a textual fabric whose principle of construction is not inherently different from that of other cultural artefacts. In so doing, the genre-based definition counteracts the blindness to literary signifiers of which readers sympathetic to realist mimesis are often suspected. Jean-Paul Sartre’s comments on literature provide a fair instance of the latter uncritical stance: the French philosopher contends that words in a prose text require no careful poetic structuring; they are only expected to “designate a certain thing in the world or a given notion correctly” (Sartre 26). Against this semiotic naiveté, genre analysis depicts realism as the offshoot of textual devices such as rules of verisimilitude and reality effects. From what precedes, it appears that the concept of mode provides if not an ideal, at least a workable methodological grounding for the present essay. Hopes for a sharply delineated realist movement at the turn of the twenty-first century are evidently pointless: the scattered and discreet nature of what I call the realist underground cannot cohere into a distinct historical formation; many works relevant to the present enquiry lack explicit programmatic endorsements. The concept of genre, on the other hand, is useful as a preliminary methodological resource, notably for the study of realism’s literary, filmic, or material signifiers. Yet it is disabled by the diversity of practices we have to take into account in these pages. Contemporary realist works are too diverse in theme and discourse to form a proper semantic or syntactic genre. Though I indicate below that at given historical periods there are areas of heightened thematic concern for referential art, realism’s proper remit remains the whole of social reality. Simultaneously, it is difficult to define beforehand which formal strategies contemporary realist works privilege in order to approach this broad field. Above all, the concept of genre has, under the influence of formalism and structuralism, become entangled in antirealist presuppositions. Reducing realism to “mechanisms and structures” or even to a preordained thematic catalogue makes it appear as the mere product of historical and cultural conventions. Its referential claims are thereby overlaid by what Roman Jakobson, writing about literature, call “literariness”— the constructedness and artefactuality of form (qtd. in Todorov, Théorie 36). As an avatar of literariness (or of equivalent concepts relevant to other modes of 7 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds expression), realism loses its prerogative to map the non-artistic world. By comparison, the mode-based approach, with its implicit trust in the bond between text and world, enables an analysis that refrains from axiomatic antirealism. Accordingly, the reflections developed in the present essay amount to a re-exploration of the realist mode for the needs of a contemporary corpus: they re-examine its epistemological presuppositions, and determine how its boundaries may be broadened beyond the bounds of mimesis. This effort follows a fragile path between the crude realism illustrated in Sartre’s comments and the formalist dismissal of any discussion of the interfacing between art and world.

The heterogeneity of the cultural corpus of the contemporary realist mode manifests itself in the first place by the coexistence of old and new aesthetic choices. Classic mimesis has indeed not disappeared from the turn-of-the-twenty-first cultural field. Its survival in the face of the skepticism, even hostility of the proponents of the avant-garde is one of the factors that make an argument in favor of contemporary realism possible at all. Resilient classic realism is discernible in the works of such literary authors as Raymond Carver, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates; film-makers such as Ken Loach and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; as well as photorealist painters such as Richard Estes and Charles Bell. Yet to these figures must be added the possibly more numerous authors practicing what we might call, by reference to the terminology popularized by Mikhail Bakhtin, hybridized or dialogized variants of realism. The latter term designates the aesthetic project pursued by works in which the techniques of representation previously guaranteeing art’s ability to represent the social world—and also making realism identifiable with regard to other modes of representation—interact dialogically with discursive devices borrowed from experimental movements that ostensibly problematize or reject the imitation of phenomenal appearances. Several novels dealing with the 9/11 attacks and global terrorism illustrate this narrative and epistemological hybridity: they use modernist and postmodernist devices in order to recontextualize events that to most readers belong to the documentary realm of TV news. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) represents the aftermath of the New York disaster through the prism of a young boy’s traumatized consciousness, hence by a 8 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds narrative method that mingles modernist internal focalization and postmodernist fabulation. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) ranges from psychological realism to metafiction: the protagonists’ efforts to cope with the aftermath of the attacks are played out against the evocation of a secretive artist’s performance acts mimicking the fall of victims jumping from the Twin Towers. Lavie Tidhar’s science- fiction novel Osama (2011) creates a narrative collage in which painstakingly detailed journalistic accounts of Al-Qaida attacks are presented as pulp-fiction novels offered to the readers of an alternative present where terrorism does not exist. The possibility of such a felicitous hybridization of realism with modernism and postmodernism is admittedly not uncontested. Its acceptance depends on scholars’ respective sympathies with regard to referential art or cultural experimentation. Traditional narratives of twentieth cultural history assume that modernist literature—in the same fashion as painting and to a greater extent than cinema—differs from classic nineteenth-century realism by its loss of trust in its capacity to represent the external features of everyday life.1 High modernist fiction favored instead the literary record of the movement of consciousness and interiority. This inward turn, according to champions of realism such as Lukács and Auerbach, detracts literature from the realist task of accounting for social and historical development (Lukács, Meaning 70-71; Auerbach 534, 551). Also, twentieth-century experimental literature has manifested its departure from social reality in its very use of literary language: it has been the field where anti-referential principles such as the Saussurean hypothesis of the arbitrariness of signs or the belief in the legitimacy of art for art’s sake have found a strong purchase. From the opposite perspective, a few scholars and critics have contended that even the most radical literary modernism may contribute to the mapping of the world. Modernist or postmodernist art may in this view be thought to pursue similar goals as the hybridized realism evoked above. Herman points out that modernist Marxists such as Bertolt Brecht and Theodor

1 In their landmark volume on modernism, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane argue that modern experimental literature developed as a response to literary naturalism’s perceived incapacity to represent the fragmentation of human experience under modernity. The shift, they point out, was particularly perceptible in the 1890s, notably in the evolution from naturalism to modernism of Scandinavian authors such as August Strindberg (25, 80-81; also Morris 21). 9 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

Adorno interpreted the works of Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett as instances of a broadened, renewed realism taking into consideration the complexities of representation (145-51). Wayne C. Booth argues similarly that the formal innovations of the twentieth-century novel—notably the techniques devised by Woolf, Proust, Mann, or Dorothy Richardson in order to do justice to the “real life of the mind”—were elaborated with a view to maximizing “realistic effects[s]” (55, 53). Damian Grant envisages the possibility of a “conscious realism” (15) that integrates the subjectivism of modernist aesthetics and thereby departs from the fact-based “conscientious” realism of nineteenth-century authors (14). Predictably, the present study embraces as a matter of principle realism’s capacity to modernize itself. Acknowledging the existence of reconfigured and hybridized avatars of the classic realist formula is a methodological requirement for critics interested in the perpetuation of referential art into the cultural periods where it was no longer artistically hegemonic. More than literary criticism, art scholarship has been responsive to realism’s metamorphoses across successive movements and styles: surveys of twentieth-century realist art take for granted that a socially oriented mapping of reality can be delivered through paintings, sculptures, and installations integrating the techniques of expressionism, cubism, or meta-painting.2 If this open- minded stance is transposed to the whole field of cultural production, the evolution of realism after the nineteenth century reads like a sequence of its hybrid offshoots. Even late-nineteenth-century literary naturalism, often regarded as the epitome of documentary literature, has been described as a heterogeneous genre mingling classic realism with the romance and the gothic.3 Likewise, painters of the turn-of- the-twentieth-century Ash-Can school produced naturalist art whose technique mingles realism and an early variety of expressionism, anticipating the postexpressionistic political art of the German New

2 For discussions of the stylistic hybridization of realism in the graphic arts, see Lucie- Smith; Debray (18-23), Bernabei (“Réalisme” 206-35), and Castria Marchetti (268- 97). 3 The status of American literary naturalism at the intersection of realism and several varieties of Romantic discourses is examined in Pizer (Realism (34-40), Walcutt (i), and Den Tandt (Urban 33). 10 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

Objectivity in the 1920s.4 After naturalism, the interfacing of referential art with modernism and postmodernism is noticeable in such landmark achievements as John Dos Passos’s cubism-inspired urban naturalism, Edward Hopper’s contemplative symbolist/surrealist aesthetic, Bertolt Brecht’s use of metacultural practices borrowed from vaudeville and the circus, or Pop Art’s appropriation both of Dadaist provocation and the imagery of advertising and consumerism.5 Likewise, the interweaving of mimesis and surrealism in Gabriel Garcìa Marquez’s or Toni Morrison’s magic realism has been hailed as one of the most important modes of expression of realism under postmodernity (Saldivar 526). Beyond the capacity of realist works to mingle supposedly antagonistic aesthetics, the corpus covered in this essay is hybrid also in so far as it cuts across the boundaries of artistic media and straddles the line separating fiction from documentary material. The interfacing of contemporary art to reality must be investigated in works as different in terms of genre and referential status as Julian Barnes’s metafictional prose narratives, the independent cinema of Jim Jarmusch and Lisa Cholodenko, Günter Wallraff’s and Florence Aubenas’s undercover documentaries, and the live TV news coverage of channels such as CNN and BBC World. More overtly than in the past, contemporary realist art unfolds within an intermedial field where each mode of expression fashions the representation of the social world according to its semiotic specificities. The respective share of literary fictions in this joint cultural endeavor is admittedly smaller today than it was in the mid-nineteenth-century, when literary realism together with painting served as reference points for mimesis. The routine tasks of the representation of the world have been taken over by photography, film, TV, and computer documents. Literature, on the contrary, as it veered toward modernist experimentation, has increasingly devoted itself to a skeptical investigation of the bond by which language interfaces with the world. Even if, as suggested above, the latter evolution is thought compatible with the advent of a modernized literary realism, we cannot harbor illusions about

4 For discussions of the aesthetics of the Ash-Can school, see Prown (126-29), Lucie- Smith (58-71), and Bernabei (“Groupe” 144-47). 5 Brecht’s appropriation of the popular arts is discussed in Willett (166-67), Schechter (68-73), Brooker (198), and Kowalke (231). For an analysis of Pop Art’s links to mass culture, see Osterwold (40-51). 11 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds literature’s actual footprint in the contemporary cultural field. The media of the information society have a considerably stronger anchorage in the everyday lifeworld of cultural subjects than that of novels or short stories. The media that have taken over the function of classic literary realism in the course of the twentieth century are to an overwhelming extent visual in nature. Documents based on cinephotographic images, often reconfigured by digitized processes, supply most of the semiotic material by which subjects of the information society piece together their representation of the world. In a perspective that might be mistaken for epistemological naiveté, I argue below that, compared to verbal material, such documents have a heightened capacity to serve as anchoring point for realist representation. Cinephotographic media foster the confident relation to the lifeworld postmodern theoretician Ihab Hassan felicitously calls “cognitive trust” (“Beyond” 206). I do not mean thereby to revive the naive belief in the power of photographic images to deliver an unmediated intuition of reality. Still, neither do I wish to endorse the antirealist assumptions that have dominated the academic discussion of these matters in the last decades: we do not have to follow the Saussurean credo suggesting that signifying processes, whatever their material vehicle, amount to a sequence of arbitrary signs ultimately equivalent to natural language. Accordingly, to take two examples further analyzed in chapters 5 and 8, there is no necessity to assume that the aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken by RAF reconnaissance planes in 1944 or the surveillance snapshots of the Boeing 757 airliner about to hit the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 have such a flexible link to reality that their meaning can be renegotiated ad infinitum. Instead, the interdisciplinary exploration of realism must heed the fact that signs in distinct media are negotiated according to distinct procedures and gain thereby specific referential prerogatives. There are, to use a somewhat crude metaphor, lighter and heavier signs in such semiotic negotiations. One of the tasks for the present investigation consists therefore in charting what might be called a jurisdiction of signifying processes, pointing out how the interplay of various signifiers in a given situation fosters or disempowers realist representation. Fiction films, documentaries, or TV footage occupy a central position in the analysis of this representational process because they are inherently 12 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds plurimedial or intermedial, and therefore carry out the multilayered negotiation of reality within their own textual apparatus.

The remarks above imply that the corpus of contemporary realism could in most cases be inventoried by spotting within discursively hybrid works those elements that, to use a well-worn metaphor, act as mirrors of the world. Tidhar’s Osama, in this logic, qualifies as realistic primarily because it features journalistic, documentary fragments counteracting the ostensibly counterfactual status of its alternative-history narrative. Likewise, plurimedial works owe their realist credentials chiefly to their reliance on cinephotographic images: the latter serve as referential anchoring points, almost in the fashion of natural signs. This corpus-definition procedure, if handled with proper caution, suffices for large segments of the cultural field at stake here. Yet its focus is still excessively narrow: we need to open up the boundaries of the realist mode to accommodate texts whose bond to social reality is not secured by reflectionist mapping. US rock band The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ music video CALIFORNICATION (2000) and Israeli performance artist Sigalit Landau’s Barbed Hula (2000) fulfil these criteria. Images in CALIFORNICATION alternate between real-space footage of the musicians miming the song’s performance and a digital 3D-animation narrative. The computer graphics mimic a Grand-Theft-Auto-style video game in which band members are metamorphosed into puppet-like animé players. These game avatars glide, run, or drive through stereotypical California locales: city streets, redwood forests, gold mines, porn-film studios, and, finally, LA’s business center shattered by an earthquake. Embedded frames pop up in the margins of this virtual tour of California, displaying non-animated footage of the player/musician supposedly active at the current stage of the game. CALIFORNICATION’s playful animation narrative is ostensibly not meant to offer a classic realist chart of the materialistic waste land the song refers to. The clip’s proper object is instead the video medium itself: it makes visible the principle of discursive construction that brings US everyday life into existence. Specifically, the virtuoso graphics comment on the process urban studies researchers have called the “virtualization of public space” (Ghent Urban Studies Team 88)—the various ways in which turn-of-the-twenty-first-century subjects relate to a technologically reshaped environment. Identities, 13 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds in CALIFORNICATION’s world, are fashioned through video capture and computer encoding. Landau’s Barbed Hula, if read as the carrier of a realist strategy, is even more defamiliarizing: the Israeli artist’s work addresses its chosen political problematic exclusively by harshly physical performative means. In 2000, Landau carried out a self- mutilating hula-hoop dance on a Tel Aviv beach, replacing the customary plastic toy with razor-sharp barbed wire. The videotape of her performance shows slivers of skin being ripped off her body while she seems caught up in a painless trance. Landau’s radical gesture, instead of investigating reality by means of specular images, suggests that the anguish of subjects imprisoned in a war-torn region must be enacted in the flesh. In this, Barbed Hula cannot be reduced to a message that might be carried by other, presumably less physically jarring signifiers. Its import relies on the assumption that in some cases, the bond to reality has to be endured materially. CALIFORNICATION and Barbed Hula are instances of what we might call postmimetic realist practice. This term applies to texts that depart from classic, specular mimesis and thereby partially relinquish what Jakobson calls the referential function of discourse. Postmimetic works rely predominantly on metadiscursive and performative devices. Metarealism, the keynote of the Peppers’ video, comments on the means whereby the representation of the social field is accomplished. Besides CALIFORNICATION, it is illustrated in such works as Nanni Moretti’s film Caro diario (1993), James Ellroy’s true-crime memoir My Dark Places (1996), and Julian Barnes’s short stories collection A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989). Just as CALIFORNICATION reflects on its own status as a cultural commodity, Moretti and Ellroy lay bare the workings of autobiographical recollection, and Barnes’s historiographical metafiction playfully investigates the paradoxes raised by the representation of the past. Performative realism, by comparison, designates a practice that actively intervenes within the social field. Its non-reflectionist strategies are most explicitly illustrated in politically focused interventions comparable to Landau’s flesh-ripping act: Augusto Boal’s “theater of the oppressed,” or documentaries by Michael Moore, Wallraff, Spurlock, and Aubenas. In a less direct fashion, performative realism informs Sasha Baron Cohen’s mockumentaries and urban performance art such as Parkour running, 14 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds which accommodate practices requiring artists’ physical engagement with their social and physical environment. Comparable instances of metarealism and performative realism have been discussed in previous scholarship under various terminologies. Amy Kaplan, in her pathbreaking The Social Construction of American Realism, locates metadiscursive awareness at the heart of classic realism. She suggests that features of nineteenth- century realist novels that had hitherto been read as aesthetic flaws should be reinterpreted as symptoms of the texts’ capacity to reflect on their own mechanisms of representation. In Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, for instance, the novel’s lapses into sentimentalism and its lack of a well-focused critique of consumerism should not be deplored: they allow Dreiser to lay bare “the way in which the terms of the realistic debate have become polarized rather than resolved” (Kaplan, A. 160). Instead of a snapshot of the world, Sister Carrie is an open-ended metadiscursive work toying with “competing versions of reality” (Kaplan, A. 160). Even more than metarealism, the prospect of a performative reconceptualization of realism has inspired considerable critical interest. A performative paradigm seems indeed to afford an escape from what Lilian Furst calls “the quagmire of mimesis” (17)— the theoretical aporias and artistic constraints induced by the process of the imitation of the world. Accordingly, Furst contends that the techniques of realist verisimilitude—the literary devices contributing to what historian of the novel Ian Watt calls “formal realism” (34)— ought to be reconceptualized as rhetorical elements: their purpose consists less in producing a replica of the human lifeworld than in impressing on readers the text’s capacity to evoke this field performatively, by means of an “act of persuasion” akin to “conjuration” (26, 102). Similarly, Pam Morris argues that “a performative understanding of language” (Morris 150) may free realism from what Jürgen Habermas, in his theory of communicative action, calls the “fixation on the fact-mirroring function of language” (Habermas qtd. in Morris 150). The present essay follows in these theoretical footsteps, and even takes into consideration works that drive the metadiscursive and performative realism further than Kaplan’s, Furst’s and Morris’s examples. Yet, more than these scholars, I am concerned with the considerable theoretical hurdles a postmimetic reinterpretation of realism implies. We might superficially interpret metarealism as a 15 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds variant of mimesis whose object is discourse instead of the world, and performative practice as the perpetuation of investigative strategies with a long pedigree in the field of realist reportage. This, however, begs the question how postmimetic strategies may render account of the world in any way that might be compatible with a realist agenda. Symptomatically, under postmodernism, metafiction and performativity have been viewed as deconstructive of realist claims. Metafiction is reputed, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, to “challeng[e] our mimetic assumptions about representation” (Hutcheon 32). Likewise, the performative paradigm has been invoked chiefly by antirealist formalist, deconstructionist and neo-pragmatist theoreticians. Roland Barthes’s famous analysis of the “reality effect” (“Effet” 81) or Jean Ricardou’s, Tzvetan Todorov’s, and Gérard Genette’s allusions to “referential” or “realist illusion” imply that what most people interpret as the imitation of life relies on mere performative gesturing—indeed on deceptive, illusionistic symbolic action (Ricardou 30; Genette, “Vraisemblance” 96; Todorov, Poétique 36-37). Likewise, Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism, which conceptualizes human experience a sequence of speech acts, proclaims the incompatibility of performative illocutionary effects and truth. Rorty, like other theorists of performativity—Judith Butler, Michel Foucault—, takes pride in forsaking the presupposition that discourse reflects reality by virtue of a relation of adequacy between thought, language and the world (Rorty, Objectivity 7). This raises the suspicion that realism loses itself when it scrutinizes its own strategies or when it takes the form of an artistic practice that privileges speech acts over specular representation. We will see below that the theoretical legitimization of paradoxical practices such as metarealism and performative realism requires a procedure that has made realist art and its advocates unpopular among twentieth-century critics: the definition, or at least the reinscription of a norm. Symptomatically, what makes metafiction and the performative paradigm alluring to late twentieth-century theoreticians is their promise of freedom anchored in skepticism and indeterminacy: they open the prospect of a discursive environment able to refashion itself indeterminately from one instant to the next. Likewise, the call uttered by twentieth-century critics in favor of an expanded modernist realism stems from hopes of bursting the bonds of what Damian Grant calls the “literalism”—the fact-based positivism—of nineteenth- 16 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds century literature (14). Modernist Marxist critic Roger Garaudy most explicitly puts this hope into words when he calls for the development of a “[b]orderless [r]ealism” (qtd. in Herman 148). Yet, both for epistemological reasons and for practical constraints of canon definition, a realist mode devoid of any boundaries is untenable. Advocates of classic realism (Auerbach, Lukács, Watt) compellingly suggest that, whatever conceptual flexibility is invested in its definition, the realist mode must define itself in contradistinction to other discursive modes whose epistemologies it cannot endorse— against the literal belief in the supernatural, factual impossibilities, idealistic illusion, or the adherence to socially narrow definitions of the life-world, for instance. I argue in Chapter 4 that, with some legitimacy but also considerable overstatement, poststructuralists, postmodernists, and neo-historicists have interpreted such restrictions as factors of existential or political repression. Realism, Leo Bersani suggests enforces a definition of reality paralyzed by the “[f]ear of [d]esire” (240). For neo-historicists, realism naturalizes the prejudices of the upper-middle classes or the epistemological biases of eurocentrism. I take these objections into account without, however, fully endorsing them. The redrawing of realism carried out in this essay cannot envisage an expansion of this mode’s scope so indiscriminate that it would amount to its conceptual dissolution. As far as contemporary performative texts such as Landau’s are concerned, part of the task at hand consists accordingly in defining the limiting factors that make them act in a fashion functionally equivalent, yet not identical, to the much-maligned principle of the adequacy of text and world. We need, in other words, to examine the mechanics and the legitimacy of what should paradoxically be called realist speech acts. One might be surprised to see postmimetic practice take up so much space in the present theoretical discussion, whereas the works falling under this heading command only a partial share of the contemporary realist field. Validating the referential credentials of metadiscourse and performative praxis is, however, crucial to all varieties of contemporary texts: what is at stake here is the very legitimacy of the hybridized realism sketched out above. The requirements of epistemological legitimization are in this respect higher than those of mere corpus definition. Many realist works may be spotted, I indicated above, by the fragments of “conscientious” (i.e. 17 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds classic) realism embedded within an otherwise experimental, even antirealist textual weave. Yet the realist status of these works should not rely on the impact of these mimetic fragments alone. Instead, we need a reading paradigm indicating how discursively and epistemologically hybrid texts as a whole may carry out referential tasks—how their intricate textual scaffolding may act as what we might call a referential apparatus capable of supporting realist strategies. A few remarks on literary magic realism may sketch out both the rewards and the difficulties of this endeavor. Symptomatically, Jose David Saldivar praises the idiom of Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and Toni Morrison in terms similar to Kaplan’s remarks about metadiscursivity in Dreiser’s fiction: he contends that magic realism is both socially referential and postmodern because it demystifies historically and ethnically constructed definitions of reality (522). Magic realism explores the “postmodern themes of transformation, hybridity, and multiple subject positions” (532), and therefore renders account of what Brian McHale calls the “heterotopian” nature of multicultural postmodernity—its unfolding on plural, interlocking epistemological spheres (McHale 17). From the present perspective, this reading does describe important features of the magic realism, yet it also awkwardly shifts its balance towards a validation of what Carpentier famously calls “lo real maravilloso”—“a reality that is inherently magical” (Carpentier qtd. in Saldivar 526). Realism as understood in the present pages cannot postulate the actual existence of a heterotopian world where, to take a few examples from Garcia Márquez and Morrison, humans can be born without a navel, children can elude physical aging, and rain can fall torrentially for months on end. For our purposes, Garcia Márquez’s and Morrison’s works qualify as realistic in the first place for reasons similar to classic realist texts: in many of their passages, they expose social wrongs—colonial, racial, patriarchal oppression—through the specular strategies of mimesis. Their magic components, on the other hand, instead of providing illusionistic snapshots of fantasy worlds, engage the social environment through defamiliarizing speech acts: they function as performative warning signs triggering a suspension of epistemological certainties. By depicting characters who must accept paradoxical or counterfactual situations as real, magic realism develops a form of performative metadiscourse obliging readers to 18 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds suspend their identification with the fictional world and to reflect about the limits bearing upon the construction of knowledge in a cultural environment that appears fragmented and heterotopian for determinate historical reasons.

As the previous reflections demonstrate, the realist appropriation of hybrid and epistemologically paradoxical texts requires a delicate engagement with postmodernist theory. Given the remarks I have made above about the neglect of truth-based discourse in present-day cultural studies, one might indeed have expected the methodology developed in the present pages to break with poststructuralism and postmodernism altogether. Symptomatically, a fair number of pro- realism writers and scholars have invoked the names of Balzac, George Eliot, Zola, Dreiser, and Saul Bellow as standard bearers in a war against poststructuralist and postmodernist epistemological indeterminism.6 I prefer to adopt a more nuanced, possibly more precarious theoretical grounding. In earlier stages of the present research, I had defined my object of study not as contemporary, but as postmodernist realism (Den Tandt “Postmodern” 41). This choice eventually proved inappropriate as it excludes from its scope the turn- of-the-twenty-first-century works most faithful to the classic formulas of mimesis and downplays the theoretical differences that oppose postmodernism and realism. The postmodern/poststructuralist legacy remains, however, a methodological reference at least on account of its scrupulous analysis of the mechanics of discourse. The critical tradition out of which postmodernism has developed—from early- twentieth-century formalism to classic structuralism—has altered our view of textual devices and of genre conventions in ways no interpretation of realism may ignore. Likewise, the new insights into realism’s textual structure and historical anchorage developed by 1980s and ’90s neo-historicist and neo-Marxist scholars—Amy Beth Kaplan, June Howard, Walter Benn Michaels, Brooke Thomas, Catherine Gallagher, and Nancy Armstrong—prove, with a slight shift of perspective, crucial for a vindication of contemporary texts.

6 For arguments highlighting the continued relevance of realism in post-WWII culture, see Tallis (In Defence vi; Not Saussure 1), Eagleton (1-6), Wolfe (46), and Bradbury (1135-39). 19 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

Still, the present essay diverges from postmodernism in refusing to endorse the latter’s unrelenting devotion to difference and dissensus. Post-Sausurean theorists are intensely wary of arguments that allege certainty and agreement where even minimal glimmers of indeterminacy can be brought forth. Yet the comments I make above about the necessity of a realist norm imply that a referentially oriented analysis of cultural practices is incompatible with the postmodern refusal of discursive closure or with its belief in the capacity of signifying apparatuses to follow what Roland Barthes calls a “writerly” sequence of infinite reinterprations and reappropriations (S/Z 10). A realist reading must instead show how even non-mimetic or antirealist texts in the contemporary corpus support a process of intersubjective, dialogized knowledge-building—how they can trigger what we might call negotiated disclosures. The theoretical foundations for such an argument are to be found, Pam Morris compellingly suggests, in theories of intersubjectivity such as Habermas’s reflections on communicative action, American philosopher Donald Davidson’s concept of “interpretive charity” (Morris 148), and in a realist reinterpration of Bakhtinian dialogism. Thus, the present essay takes heed of Rorty’s and Jacques Derrida’s arguments to some extent, yet it eventually aligns itself on the more realism-friendly contribution of theoreticians of intersubjectivity who elucidate the strategies by which actors of the communication process may, as Jürgen Habermas puts it, “reach understanding” about states of affairs (“Actions” 216). With this dual, though not perfectly symmetrical theoretical allegiance, I try to do justice to the open-endedness of performative language games while foregrounding the rationality of communicative action. Only thus is it possible to show how art can serve as a vehicle of knowledge within a context of epistemological indeterminacy—indeed how contemporary realism may scrutinize postmodernity under a referentially refocused lighting. Inevitably, contemporary realism also overlaps with postmodernism in its choice of thematic issues and in the chronological boundaries of its corpus. I noted above that while realist texts address all aspects of the social field, certain topics have, at given stages of cultural history, been regarded as particularly vital to referential art: one thinks of urban poverty, proletarianization, and the discontents of upper-middle-class domesticity in the late nineteenth century or of economic depression in the 1930s. Likewise, by the turn 20 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds of the twenty-first century, pro-realist and postmodernist critics concur in singling out the social geography of globalization as the main challenge to the intelligibility of the social field. Thus, if realism is possible at all it the present context, its object is likely to be the politics of space of global capitalism, and, specifically, the difficulties in perceiving the latter’s spatial and social configuration on the basis of phenomenal experience. Nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, Pam Morris contends, was intensely concerned with the “geographical dislocation and unsettlement” caused by modern life (92). Thomas Hardy’s in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), for instance, explores the hitherto poorly understood bonds that tied the world of farming to the newly hegemonic urban-based capitalist economy (Morris 91-93). In the eyes of postmodernist theoreticians such as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, realist analysis of this type has become almost fatally problematized by late-twentieth- century conditions: it must struggle against the complexity of what Jameson calls “the impossible totality of the [late-twentieth-century] world system” (Postmodernism 38). Still, Jameson, on the basis of Kevin Lynch’s urban planning theories, and Morris, invoking social geographer David Harvey, do not despair of seeing a realist idiom emerge that might be able to develop a form of “cognitive mapping” equal to the postmodern socio-economic labyrinth (Jameson, Postmodernism 51; emphasis in original; Morris 144). The texts analyzed in the present essay carry out this cognitive and artistic program. In particular, they address two factors that contribute to the loss of social intelligibility postulated by postmodernist theory—the technological reconfiguration of social relations (virtualization) and the heterotopian cultural diversity of contemporary polities (dialogization). Contemporary realist works indeed scrutinize how social space is perceived through information technologies suspected of emptying the lifeworld of its substance: realism today charts what Jean Baudrillard, emulated by the screenwriters of the SF film The Matrix, famously called the “desert of the real”—the reified waste land of global consumerism (Simulacres 10; emphasis in original).7 Secondly, realist texts render account of the multicultural configurations that have developed in most countries since the Second

7 All quotations from French originals and French editions of non-English sources are in Christophe Den Tandt’s translation. 21 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

World War and decolonization—a social change that has affected the trust in the epistemological models on which realism traditionally relies. In this respect, the problematic of contemporary realism addresses the set of issues that Homi Bhabha associates with the “third space” of postcolonial global polities (53). Globalization, the informational society, and multiculturalism define to a large extent the scope of primary texts relevant to this study. In terms of chronology, this implies that a slightly longer time stretch must be taken into account than the turn of the twenty-first century proper. For the present purposes, contemporary realism begins at the very earliest after the Second World War and, more visibly, in the 1960s, when the information society and multiculturalism emerged as identifiable topics in various media. Inevitably, this time frame only fits with various degrees of adequacy the specific chronology of realism in each cultural medium. Given my previous research interests, I am tempted to use the chronology of American literature as main set of coordinates. In this perspective, the period thus defined qualifies as the fourth generation of realism, succeeding classic American realism (the 1880s to WWI), naturalism in the Depression years, and a third generation that appeared in the late 1940s and ’50s with writers such as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud (Herman 219). Though the concept of a fourth generation is in itself appealing, it can only serve as a virtual reference point: I noted above that the hybrid configuration of the contemporary corpus militates against it, as does the difficulty in alleging the existence of a consistent realist movement within an intellectual context that limits its cultural visibility. In terms of geographical scope, on the other hand, it is logical that this study should not restrict its focus to American or British sources. Dealing with an international corpus is vindicated in the first place by the theoretical generality of the present argument, which easily integrates examples from across national borders. Above all, this choice results from the problematic ascribed to contemporary realism itself: the representation of globalization and multicultural polities can hardly be studied within the confines of a national corpus.

Finally, one may wonder whether the present study, as it pegs the analysis of contemporary works to their truth value and addresses a corpus comprising fiction and documentary material, does not revert 22 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds to a concept of realism as entirely deprived of artistic credentials. It is therefore unclear whether this discussion of contemporary works has the capacity to be concerned with art at all, or if it must of necessity address the representation of the world as a purely epistemological issue, regardless of aesthetics. These misgivings are, of course, hardly new: realism has perennially been dogged by suspicions of artistic ineptitude. Ironically, the claim that an unbridgeable chasm separates the imitation of life from aesthetic distinction has been endorsed by critics and advocates of realism alike. Aesthetic idealists reject the inclusion of brute nature into the perimeter of art.8 Conversely, champions of realism and naturalism—Frank Norris, Emile Zola, Jean-Paul Sartre—have gladly flaunted the rejection of style in favor or truth. Twentieth-century critics mindful of formalism yet sympathetic to realism, have fashioned a scholarly middle way in this matter. They have pointed out that the presumably spontaneous mirroring of the world requires a considerable amount of formal elaboration.9 Thus, the literary production of the realist movement may be retained within the canon of literary art. The present argument partially follows this cue, arguably with heightened concern for the epistemological issues it raises. It is indeed impossible to do justice to recent texts by setting up a firewall between artistic and non-artistic uses of language, as radical formalists or even Jürgen Habermas are inclined to do (Todorov, Théorie 44-45; Habermas, “On the Distinctionˮ 390-91). Contemporary works require on the contrary what Lilian Furst calls an “integrationist”—as opposed to a “segregationist”—conception of the link between art and world (34)— an interpretation that respects its “dual allegiance to art and lifeˮ (Furst 45). On the one hand, many works in the contemporary corpus take the referential value of art for granted: Michael Moore’s documentaries or Constantin Costa Gavras’s political thrillers are politically controversial for the very reason that they fashion their audience’s evaluation of real-life events. On the other hand, the very concept of hybrid realism makes the materiality of discourse and the differing prerogatives of signifiers in various media a key issue for the

8 For a re-evaluation of the often neglected impact of idealism on nineteenth-century culture, see Moi (100-01). 9 For analyses of realism informed by the formalist concern for literary technique, see Watt (34-35), Furst (10, 23), Walcutt (23), and Pizer (“Is American” 390). 23 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds contemporary corpus. It is therefore crucial to take into consideration the fact that that even the most emblematic instances of documentary description are verbal systems relying on figures of speech one would expect to find in stylistically self-conscious writing. Beyond the exaggeratedly dichotomized views of realism as either artless snapshot or pure textual artifact, the central question raised by the contemporary corpus is the possibility of defining a mode of aesthetic singularity that paradoxically remains compatible with a referential agenda. This variant of aesthetic structuring—of literariness, if in literature—should set contemporary realism apart from other uses of discourse, yet spare it from the formalist principle according to which foregrounded, “desautomatizedˮ discourse may no longer aspire to represent the real (Todorov, Théorie 81). Pam Morris, when tackling this issue, felicitously circumscribes realism’s specificity as the capacity to “offer the knowledge of the possibility of other possible real-worlds” (144). In the present context, I interpret Morris’s emphasis on the “possibility” of knowledge as implying that realism’s aesthetic signature chiefly resides in the texts’ metarealist components. In a cultural environment where the very possibility of truth-seeking discourse is problematic, the practice by which texts elaborate structures of cognition and simultaneously reflect on the obstacles facing this endeavor is in itself an art. It displays the aesthetic, desautomatized value of a gesture at odds with its own context while still targeting the representation of the world. Previous studies of realism, whether sympathetic or skeptical to its cognitive claims, have pointed out its compulsion to foreground procedures of knowledge-gathering. Structuralist theoretician Philippe Hamon, particularly, analyzes the mechanics by which a realist text stages a “communicative situation” validating its claim to “copy reality” (132). Hamon’s argument is admittedly meant to deconstruct literary referentiality. Yet, in a referentially refocused perspective, it may be read as an analysis of the aesthetics of cognition enabling realist texts to do justice to their social context without exhausting themselves in the itemization of contingent states of affair. Literary journalism or nonfiction novels illustrate what is implied by this aesthetics of cognition. Works such as George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), or Florence Aubenas’s Le quai de Ouistreham (2010) obey what Furst calls realism’s “dual allegiance:” they act both as 24 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds purveyors of referential payload and as aesthetically patterned texts. On the one hand, they would lose all reason for existence if they failed to deliver documentary insights about, respectively, the 1930s underclasses, murderous violence in the midst of the conservative 1950s American Midwest, and the precarious status of temporary workers in depression-ridden early-twenty-first-century provincial France. Yet their appeal also originates from their capacity to deploy referential apparatuses whose relevance outlasts the topicality of documentary facts. Symptomatically, critical discussions of these works focus on strategies of investigation—on Capote’s meticulous on-site research and his ambiguous fascination for the killers, or on Orwell’s and Aubenas’s tactics of immersion reporting. This focus of interest is in the first place motivated along realist lines: the referential apparatus is the blueprint for a cognitive practice that may be transposed to other contexts of investigation, possibly after having been retooled for increased effectiveness. Yet it is also a discursive structure affording aesthetic pleasure: documentary writing—like crime fiction, to which it displays obvious similarities—is no clichéd repetition of an outworn realist formula. It offers what German critic Klaus Schuffels calls, in reference to investigative journalist Günter Wallfraff, a “didactic spectacle” (qtd. in Wallraff v): its reward is the pleasurable display of knowledge being elaborated within an environment that resists this endeavor.

Part I of this essay begins with a brief evocation of the claims of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century “classic” or “programmatic” realism. These initial pages are meant to recall the cognitive trust characterizing both classic realist writers’ descriptions of their craft and the prose of their earlier scholarly champions—Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, Vernon Parrington, Alfred Kazin, or George Becker. The rest of the section carries out a task contemporary theoreticians of realism cannot dispense with: it reviews the critical arguments that throughout the twentieth-century concurred in depicting realism as a flawed endeavor. No validation of contemporary realism can ignore the antirealist scholarship developed in the framework of the modernist avant-garde, formalism, structuralism, and postmodernism. In addition to their intrinsic merits, these theoretical arguments form the cultural context that objectively constrains realist practice at the turn of the twenty-first century. The history of realism from the end of 25 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds its classic phase to the present is irretrievably enmeshed with the extremely cogent case that has been articulated against it. Part Two indicates how realist practice manages to assert itself against the background of postmodern culture. This section combines a de facto with a de jure validation of its object. I noted above that the clearest evidence in favor of contemporary referential art is the very existence of its corpus. The latter, in spite of its scattered and hybrid nature, comprises critically acclaimed works. Yet in order to demonstrate how such texts can be both socially relevant and artistically valid, it is also necessary to contest on the plane of theory the claims that seem to deprive them of their twin documentary and aesthetic capacity. Therefore, Part II of this essay shows, first, that the otherwise well-argued antirealist theoretical corpus has philosophical and ideological boundaries of its own, and that these blind spots are precisely the sites where the re-conceptualization of realist practice may be attempted. Secondly, I define a theoretical matrix of contemporary realist practice—a categorization of its basic strategies. I point out that realism, instead of the monologic and politically repressive discourse it has come to be mistaken for, is a dialogical practice requiring the combination of several discursive strategies and perspectives. Realism unfolds as a sequence of cultural and semiotic negotiations carried out both within the textual fabric of separate works and in the broader social and historical environment in which its texts are embedded. The realist dialogism explored in this argument is of a convergent nature: it is, as we saw above, oriented towards agreement. Instead of supporting indeterminate negotiations and reinterpretations, it tends toward an outcome regulated by reality standards. The latter norms act, in the first place, in the form of de facto constraints: they intervene at the level of the materiality of realism’s signifiers. I pointed out above that, in the plurimedial field of contemporary culture, the realist survey of a given situation is carried out by means of signs with differing degrees of negotiability. This implies that the dialogical investigation of a state of affairs relies in part on signifiers whose higher resistance to negotiation orients the dialogical interpretation towards intersubjective agreement about matters of fact. Taking heed of such resistance to semiotic negotiation, is, however, still not sufficient to secure cognitive trust. The last chapter of Part II indicates that the defense of realism also requires a final de jure 26 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds validation—a reasoned commitment to the possibility of closure. In a reasoning that may seem epistemologically circular but proves heuristically rewarding, I contend that realist artists and audiences must wager on the successful completion of realist negotiations from the outset: they must endorse a cognitive perspective acknowledging the possibility of a consistent lifeworld. The actual existence of this degree of closure is admittedly beyond proof. Yet trusting oneself to its possibility is not irrational. It is indeed a core requirement of realist mapping. This part of the argument indicates therefore to what extent contemporary realist practice, in a metadiscursive scrutiny of its own theoretical premises, explores and negotiates the prospect of a consistent, determinate human environment.

The argument outlined above imposes its own set of terminological choices. In the first place, it leads me to bracket out one of the major classificatory landmarks of realism’s literary history—the distinction between classic realism and naturalism. This marks an ironical break from my earlier research. I have indeed argued elsewhere that the realism/naturalism binary designates a substantial fault line in late- nineteenth and early-twentieth-century referential art, implying a greater or lesser degree of confidence about the possibility to map social conditions. On this view, turn-of-the-twentieth-century realism and naturalism were, if not distinct genres, at least literary or artistic discourses carrying specific epistemological prerogatives (Den Tandt, Urban 17-18; “American” 109-10). This dichotomized concept of realism and naturalism remains valid for certain aspects of the contemporary corpus: we may, for instance, distinguish between realist and naturalist components in contemporary science fiction (Den Tandt, “Cyberpunk” 95-99). Yet the present argument, because of its inclusiveness and generality, cannot structure itself around this distinction. In the broad gamut of hybridized discourses taken under consideration here, classic realism and naturalism lose their previous centrality. This does not imply that the issues previously analysed through the realism/naturalism binary lose all relevance, yet they are expressed through the terminology, categories, and specific interests of a new cultural field. Above all, this essay’s primary concern is the core legitimacy of referential art. Discursive differences among various realist practices, in so far as they entail specific epistemological orientations, are hardly negligible; yet in the present 27 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds argument, they carry lesser weight than the validation of the basic bond between text and social world. The bracketing out of naturalism as a methodological landmark is consistent with another terminological decision central to this essay— the suspension of the distinction between reality and what Jacques Lacan calls “the real” [“le réel”] (Le séminaire 64). Naturalism displays affinities with Lacan because it explores the emergent fringe or the underside of the social fabric: it focuses on what James Naremore, quoting French film-noir critic Waldo Frank, calls the “social fantastic”—grotesque poverty, mental alienation, and violence (16). In this, the chosen topics of naturalism display resistances to representation similar to those Lacan attributes to the real. The French psychoanalyst indeed uses the latter term to designate an elusive horizon of experience that resists all objectification. The real is glimpsed through “missed encounter[s]” (Le séminaire 65); it exists for the subject only in the form of inadequate substitutes—as the field of semioticized experience Lacan calls the “symbolic order” ( “Séminaire sur ‘La lettre’” 59). Catherine Belsey summarizes this aspect of Lacan’s doctrine by arguing that the “real” cannot be mistaken for the objectified lifeworld that makes up “reality” (6). The distinction thus established is functionally similar to a set of binaries elaborated by twentieth-century authors who castigate the social world’s lack of existential authenticity. It is in particular reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s distinction between elusive being [Sein] and inessential, objectified entities [Seiende] (23) or Henri Bergson’s dichotomy between the fossilized temporality of the physical sciences and the fluid intensities of psychological “duration” (Matière 230). Divorcing reality from the elusive real is, however, exorbitantly disempowering for an essay on realism. I do not mean to argue that theoretical paradigms making provisions for the unrepresentable are pointless, or that in the field of art, naturalism should refrain from turning to areas of social experience seemingly out of bounds for classic realist discourse. I believe, however, that adopting a terminology that overemphasizes, even glamorizes resistances to representation and the pathos of inauthenticity ushers in an a priori deligitimization of any determinate mapping of the social world. The present argument must therefore assume that what Lacan calls the real is destined to be absorbed into reality, and that this very task is realism’s purpose. This is both a practical necessity—the study 28 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds realism would be superfluous otherwise—and a matter of philosophical commitment: the present essay cannot on principle undermine the legitimacy of cognitive trust by intimating that our perception of the social world is afflicted with some inherent, irredeemable deficiency—indeed by what Lacan calls “lack” (Le séminaire 229). In this light, the basic terminological toolkit of the present study boils down to a few deceptively simple items: reality, realism, and referentiality. The meaning of the first two is apparent from the reflections above. Reality, in the following pages, is defined as the area of experience within the ascertainable horizon of social interactions and cognitive enquiry. Following Habermas’s cue, I often refer to this perimeter as the “lifeworld” (Habermas, “Actions” 227). Realism is the artistic practice aiming for the truth-based representation of this realm. “Referentiality” and “referential” are modelled on Frege’s concept of reference (Frege 24; also Richards 115). They designate the quality of texts and discourses capable of accomplishing the task set for realism above. In the following chapters, “referential” and “referentiality” appear in most cases in the discussion of realism’s signifiers. To these primary concepts, I have thought it useful to add a fair number of neologisms—postmimetic realism, the reality bet, grounding gestures, the referential apparatus, the referential trail, etc. One index of the lack of interest for realism in recent decades has indeed been the fact that most of the taxonomic inventiveness of theoreticians of culture has been invested in devising concepts that deconstruct referential art or that describe aesthetic practices alien to it. Devising a set of sympathetic terms and categories, even occasionally eccentric ones, is therefore useful and legitimate. Finally, one may wonder what status the concept of ideology enjoys in an essay that uses reality as one of its terminological anchoring points. Sympathy for realism seems indeed incompatible with what might be called the pan-ideological outlook of late- twentieth-century cultural theory—the belief that the social field cannot be approached otherwise than through conceptual schemes and discursive practices defined by class, gender, or ethnicity. Admittedly, as a study of realism, my argument cannot make ideology the sole shaper of perception and praxis. According to the pan-ideological paradigm, social reality appears in two contrasted guises: on the one 29 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds hand, it is entirely overlaid with apparatuses of domination; on the other, its power structures are mere cultural and historical constructs and seem therefore open to some effortless unravelling and reordering. I cannot fully endorse either of these claims. On the one hand, some space must exist for the elaboration of knowledge and political praxis outside of structures of domination. On the other, social configurations, cannot be altered by the swift implementation of processes comparable to the rewriting of texts or the deployment of innovative speech acts. Realism as defined here implies that the social world is only partly, hence not entirely, identifiable with a sign system. Therefore, political change does not always occur with the flexibility of re-encoding procedures or the irrepressible dynamics of performativeness. Conversely, the lack of plasticity of the lifeworld implies that there may be constraints on knowledge and action even more binding than the consequences of cultural and historical constructedness. The realist principles outlined above are not meant to negate the impact of ideology on social and historical development altogether. The attempt to carve out a space of discursive investigation loosened from politically determined conceptual schemes is, I suggest below, not incompatible with previous concepts of ideology—Marx’s classic definition, notably. This methodological choice should instead be read as a response to the logical traps in which the more recent pan- ideological arguments are caught up. The latter indeed fall within the remit of the Epiminides paradox—the contradiction plaguing all indeterminist and relativist paradigms. As the Epiminides paradox suggests, they can only be true by undercutting their own relativist premises. We may illustrate this point by a few remarks on the truth conditions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—a principle whose considerable impact on contemporary analyses of ideology is discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. Edward Sapir’s and Benjamin Lee Whorf’s anthropological relativism famously suggests that each population’s “picture of the world” is generated by the said group’s language structure. Populations with starkly different idioms therefore adhere to incommensurable “world-order[s]”—structures of experience that cannot be mutually “calibrated” (qtd. in Davidson 190). Paradoxically, for this inspiring yet reductive principle to be scientifically valid, it must be formulated in an idiom (and therefore a conceptual scheme) immune to the relativism it itself proclaims. 30 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

Donald Davidson, whom Pam Morris describes as an key resource for “dialogic” theories of realism, points out indeed that advocates of relativistic theories such as Sapir and Whorf are always led, against the gist of their doctrine, to make provisions for “something neutral and common that lies outside all schemes” (Davidson 190; Morris 147). If they did not, Davidson adds, they would not have even have the capacity to identify rival conceptual schemes or languages as “speech behaviour” or signifying gestures (196): observers tied down to one conceptual scheme have no means to recognize any other “world order” or language as meaningful. For our purposes, Davidson’s argument suggests that class, gender, ethnicity, or any other political fault line can be theorized or even perceived in everyday life only from a discursive position external at least in part to the scheme taken under consideration. A subject entirely under the sway of, say, an inegalitarian gender discourse would not be able to perceive the source of his or her alienation as the outcome of a gender system at all. That subjects are indeed able to interpret their situations along those lines suggests that their lifeworld is not entirely structured by discourses endowed with such paralyzing monologism. Davidson’s objections to theories of conceptual schemes help us conceptualize the place of realism in a cultural field where ideological discourses do structure representation to a considerable extent, yet overwhelmingly. Symptomatically, the difficulty in countering ideology was no burning concern for early theoreticians of this concept. Karl Marx’s famous contention that “the ideas of the dominant classes are the dominant ideas” (L’idéologie 338) implies that ideology’s epistemologically and politically flawed discourses, however deeply ingrained, can be exposed from the external standpoint of the science of history. This level of confidence waned among theoreticians of the second half of the twentieth century, however. Louis Althusser’s neo-Marxism, formulated in the early 1960s, implies that ideology’s power to entrap subjects in an imaginary relation to their social conditions may be deconstructed by the work of “theory” (166). Yet theory in Althusser does not have the prerogative of a full-fledged reality standard: it resembles just another perspective on society, in awkward coexistence with the ideological imaginary. In the early 1980s, Fredric Jameson’s landmark essays on postmodernism described a political situation in which some quixotic form of realist ideology critique might still be attempted, albeit in the 31 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds knowledge that the information society has colonized all vantage points from which its idiom could be articulated (“Reification” 23; Postmodernism 18). Theories of cognitive trust such as Davidson’s nuance this axiomatic pessimism. Davidson suggests that exteriority to conceptual schemes is ever available not only to theoreticians but also to subjects in everyday life. In an argument reminiscent of Habermas, Davidson interprets this bridging space as an area of “intertranslability” (190). In this field, conceptual schemes, beliefs, and linguistic meanings can be tested against one another with a view to making “meaningful disagreement possible,” against the background of “some foundation […] in agreement” (196-97; emphasis in original). Contemporary realist practice is inscribed in the discursive space thus defined. Like Davidson’s area of intertranslatability, realist practice offers no promises of absolute certainties. Instead, it opens up discursive and aesthetic negotiations that seek to resist the lure of cognitive arrogance, yet remain attentive to social, discursive, and physical constraints that bear upon the course of truth-focused representation.

33 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

PART I

Against Mimesis: The Twentieth-Century Critique of Classic of Realism

35 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

CHAPTER 1

Classic Realism: The Nostalgic View

Over a period of a hundred years, the prestige of realist mimesis—the classic expression of referential art—has suffered a spectacular reversal. In the decades of classic realism, the imitation of life in art was contested by the voices of aesthetic and moral officialdom, yet enjoyed self-evident epistemological and political legitimacy among emerging artists. In the early twenty-first century, on the contrary, realism is considered epistemologically naïve, and its politics are an object of distrust among various segments of cultural theory. In what follows, I address the case leveled against realism—antirealism, for short—by reviewing what I take to be its three main axes of argumentation. Realism, I point out, has been faulted for misinterpreting the stakes of existential and artistic authenticity, for misunderstanding the mechanics of language, and for fostering political conservatism and repression under a pretense of liberal and left-wing commitment. In a sketchy chronological breakdown, the first of these claims can be associated with modernism and formalism, the second with classic structuralism and poststructuralism, and the third with the politicized variants of poststructuralist and postmodernist theory, notably the New Historicism of the 1980s and 1990s.10 As a

10 For convenience’s sake, I use the term “classic structuralism” in order to designate Saussurean semiology before the mid-1960s, “poststructuralism” in order to characterize the philosophically oriented theories of discourse that appeared as of the 36 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds prelude to this survey of the various stages of antirealism, I find it useful to offer an evocation of classic realist practice as it was perceived by writers and critics during the decades of what was at the time still a fairly cohesive movement. This is no mere gesture of nostalgia. In a period when distrust of realism is an academic commonplace, we can thereby recall what has been lost because of the increasing cultural dominance of the case against classic referential art. After this initial section, Chapters 2 to 4 focus on antirealism in literary theory. Comparable arguments targeting the visual media are dealt with separately, in Chapter 5. The vastness of the domain of enquiry warrants this sequence of presentation: it would be unmanageable to provide a parallel analysis of anti-mimetic arguments in modes of expression differing both by their specific periodization and their signifying material. Still, the separate presentation implies no airtight partition: many arguments initially levelled against literary mimesis apply to realism in all modes of expression.

Realists and naturalists of the second half of the nineteenth-century showed little awareness of any epistemological and artistic obstacles likely to thwart their exploration of the social world. They were unmindful of previous arguments in philosophy and aesthetic theory challenging the desirability or technical feasibility of realism in art and literature. Plato’s Republic contains a long diatribe against mimesis, castigating it for offering a copy of the already worthless world of appearances (Platon 145-48). Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön contradicts Horace’s belief that verbal art may model itself on painting, and contends instead that the imitation of reality through literary language is no self-evident, unmediated process: literature is closely linked to time, whereas the graphic arts unfold in space (Lessing, Laokoon 875-76). Undaunted by the caveats of prestigious thinkers of the past, realists and naturalists felt that they had the license to, as American novelist Frank Norris put it, “get to the place where things are real” (qtd. in Bell 118). For Norris and his

mid-1960s, “postmodernism” in order to characterize theoretical arguments specifically concerned with late-twentieth-century culture and society, and the “new historicism” in order to subsume the 1980s and ʼ90s critical discussions of realism influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernism. 37 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds contemporaries, the essence of realism consisted in exploring the social field in search of the “complications of life” (Norris, Literary 51). Four decades before Norris, Russian advocate of realism Nikolai Chernishevky had argued that “the first function of art, a function of all works of art without exception, is the reproduction of life and nature” (62). Such calls for a barely mediated portrayal of life were echoed in the fictions themselves. In his New Grub Street, English novelist George Gissing castigated aesthetic idealists for regarding ordinary existence as a “vulgar” fabric of “paltry circumstance” (145). He praised instead those writers who made the “ignobly decent life” the very standard of realness (145). Emile Zola, in L’oeuvre [The Masterpiece], suggested that works of art are valuable only in so far as they inspire their audience to exclaim “[o]h [,] my God! [i]t is life [...]!” (290). Zola’s words are repeated almost verbatim in American naturalist Theodore Dreiser’s The “Genius.” Dreiser’s protagonist Eugene Witla makes his mark in the art market by producing paintings that seem to shout at their viewers that they are unpolished fragments of the lifeworld: “I’m dirty,” they say, “I’m commonplace, I am grim, I am shabby, but I am life” (222). On first beholding these canvasses, a gallery owner exclaims “[t]hank God for a realist” (223). The “complications of life” nineteenth and early-twentieth-century realists sought to bring within the literary spotlight were for the most part urban poverty, industrial exploitation, political corruption, financial speculation, and the despair of middle and upper-middle- class characters shackled to alienating social rituals. The living conditions of the urban-industrial working classes are the object of Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861) and Ėmile Zola’s L’assommoir (1877). The sentimental myths of upper-(middle)- class domesticity are exposed in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Enrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (1879), and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). Financial and real estate speculation are scrutinized in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835), Zola’s La curée [The Kill] (1871) and Norris’s The Pit (1903). Outrage over political corruption led Hamlin Garland to write A Spoil of Office (1897) and Sinclair The Metropolis (1907). Disgust about the romantic lies of militarism underlies Stephen Crane’s The Purple Badge of Courage (1895). Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale (1869) and Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) demystify the lure of the literary market. 38 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

Classic realists and naturalists were inclined to present such literary investigations as unproblematic exercises of data collection: by merely opening one’s eyes and taking notes, a novelist would readily compose a text that would have the epistemological transparence of what Zola calls a “house of glass” (qtd. in Hamon 133). Granted, writers’ comments about their own practice suggest that the imitation of life required some measure of sapprenticeship. George Eliot agonized over the proper literary strategy that would allow writers to “draw a real and unexaggerated lion,” shorn of any connotation of romance, yet not reduced to utter shabbiness (qtd. in Furst 4). Gustave Flaubert famously combined the representation of everyday life with a formalistic obsession for style (Barthes, “Flaubert” 142-43). Still, most realists found it strategically important to depict their practice as rooted in common sense and clarity of vision. French pioneers of the nineteenth-century realist school Champfleury [a.k.a Jules Husson] and Edmond Duranty used keywords such as “sincerity” and “useful truth” when they attempted to circumscribe the foundations of realist perception (qtd. in Herman 11, 13). In their logic, the latter faculties and values are spontaneously activated once the veil of illusion, idealization, and the supernatural is dispelled. Also, the realist ideal of transparence was legitimized by a cultural context where the reproduction of phenomenal appearance by illusionistic or mechanical means acquired an ever more central function. In 1822, Balzac called the invention of the Diorama—an enhanced version of the Panorama—“one of the marvels of the century” (Le Père, 322 n113; see also 89). Zola was a dedicated amateur photographer. Writers“already fascinated by the real” could not ignore the affinity between photographic capture and the documentary gaze in literature (Herman 11). Whereas realist literary epistemology was cloaked in an aura of self-evidence, writers’ genuine battleground was audience reception and censorship. Realist works stirred moral outrage among readers and critics, sometimes exposing their authors to judicial harassment. In France, the lawsuits launched against Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal were grounded in the belief that, as Baudelaire’s prosecutors put it, “gross realism” is “offensive to decency” (qtd. in Bourdieu, Règles 129). French realism’s status as the first avant-garde movement of the nineteenth- century was indeed grounded partly in the effort to bring what was 39 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds morally proscribed within the perimeter of literature in the name of truth (Bourdieu, Règles 129). The French authors’ judicial misadventures hung as cautionary tales over the careers of their American counterparts. William Dean Howells, the chief advocate of European realism in the United States, endorsed the cautious belief that his own predominantly feminine readership had to be shielded against the realistic bluntness that characterized the French novel (Pizer, Documents 8). Howells’s naturalist followers, on the contrary, delighted in posturing as crusaders fighting against the political hypocrisy and moralistic strictures of late-nineteenth-century society—a social scene Mark Twain had nicknamed the Gilded Age. By turn-of-the-twenty-first-century standards, the realists’ and naturalists’ bravado admittedly carried less admirable, indeed sexist and racist undertones—an unsavory fact, as well shall see in Chapter 4, that was scrupulously noted by late-twentieth-century scholarship. Still, the burden of anticipated or actual prosecution was not illusory. The constant scrutiny of self-censorship, the conflicts with editors and publishers, even the actual judicial proceedings were as likely to exert a crippling impact on writers’ careers as to serve as heroic rites of passage. The scandal raised by the publication of Sister Carrie in 1900 thwarted Dreiser’s early literary efforts, affecting his psychological health (Elias 113-17). Fifteen years later, the writer faced an explicit censorship drive targeted at The “Genius.” The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice noted that the novel contained “seventy-five lewd passages and seventeen profane ones” (Ziff 722), leading the novel’s publisher John Lane to withdraw it from circulation. Judicial perils were worth incurring, however, in so far as the literary struggle was waged in the name of scientific truth. Realism, as it turned against aesthetic idealism and public morality, struck an alliance with new approaches to biological processes and social life. In the early nineteenth century, Balzac placed his fiction under the scientific tutelage of biologist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, implying that his own literary study of character and society was as rigorous as the “great and illustrious” scientist’s study of nature (Balzac, Le Père 43; also Furst 175). Literary historian Hippolyte Taine developed a positivist approach to literature whose emphasis on sociological and historical factors—summarized under the influential concept of “milieu” [environment]—legitimized a scientifically informed realist practice (Taine, Histoire xxv; emphasis in original). 40 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

Likewise, Emile Zola’s manifesto “The Experimental Novel” (1880) invites writers to act as “experimental moralists” committed to a program of “practical sociology” aiming “to regulate life, [and] to regulate society” (177). Accordingly, most realists, in addition to their fiction, produced essays, articles, or pamphlets with documentary, scientific, sociological, or political purposes. In the US, for instance, the literary representation of urban poverty unfolded in parallel with efforts by urban reformers such as Jacob Riis, who in 1890 published famous photographic records of immigrant families in New York tenements. If we compare Riis’s work with Stephen Crane’s, it appears that Riis’s photographs constitute a nonliterary counterpart not only to the novelist’s fiction of the slums, but also to Crane’s own journalistic sketches of city life (see Trachtenberg, “Experiments” 141). Likewise, Edith Wharton’s novels, as they demystified women’s conditions, echoed Thorstein Veblen’s wry socio-anthropological deconstruction of the leisure classes (see Wolff xxi). Wharton’s contemporary Charlotte Perkins Gilman was both a feminist fiction writer and a sociologist of gender. Such interbreeding of literature, the social sciences, and the documentary was the birthplace of investigative journalism, a practice to which US and British realists significantly contributed. In 1877, American Journalist Nellie Bly [Elizabeth Jane Cochran] published Ten Days in a Mad House (1888), an exposé of psychiatric practices based on data she had gathered while posing as a mental patient. Naturalist novelist Jack London followed her example for The People of the Abyss (1903), a reportage of slum conditions in the London East End for which the author adopted the disguise of an American tramp stranded in the British capital. Similarly, American realist author David Graham Phillips addressed the political issues of the early- twentieth-century Progressive Era not only through social novels but also, more famously, through a series of journalistic articles entitled The Treason of the Senate (1906). These texts led President Theodore Roosevelt to call Phillips “[t]he [m]an with the [m]uck-[ra]ke” (Roosevelt). Abridged as “muckrakers,” the term came to designate a group of politicized journalists—among whom Lincoln Steffens or Ida Tarbell—who investigated political and financial intrigues. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906)—simultaneously a novel, a journalistic enquiry, and a socialist pamphlet—best embodies this fusion of realist literature and political practice. These texts anticipate later similar 41 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds efforts such as George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), the New Journalism of the 1960s, as well as late-twentieth-century agit-prop documentaries by Günter Walraff, Michael Moore, and Morgan Spurlock. Classic realism and naturalism, then, never entirely conformed to the monolithic, monovocal practice its later detractors made them out to be. Only a restrictive reading of their cultural work and an anachronistic evaluation of their political possibilities could lead one to regard them in this guise. The suspicion that classic realism and naturalism were fated to act as apparatuses of social repression is compelling only if these movements are expected to address agendas that became amenable to decisive political change decades after the peak of the movements’ artistic production. Above all, while even realist authors were content to describe their craft as the mirroring of the world, the cultural practice of realism and naturalism was never limited to mimesis: most authors took for granted the link between the objective mapping of the social world and the possibility of political intervention. The performative strategies I mentioned in the Introduction to the present essay are therefore no novel features of realist practice: they are the logical development of a tradition of long standing. Symptomatically, as American realism and naturalism moved away from their classic phase, their political dimension became more pronounced: novels of the Progressive Era used realist and naturalist discourse as overt political channels and, in the 1930s, naturalism supported an agenda to the left of the Roosevelt administration. In this light, the formalist critique of mimesis sketched out in the next chapters seems partial and misdirected. Yet, it is impossible to ignore that the very image of what realism stands for, as it was re-fashioned by twentieth-century academic supporters and detractors alike, remained intimately wedded to mimesis. The quasi- photographic imitation of social reality was subjected to ever more subtle analyses, and was simultaneously castigated both as the root of realism’s epistemological naiveté and the corset constraining its political possibilities.

43 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

CHAPTER 2

Modernist Antirealism: Existential Alienation and the Solace of Form

1.2.1 The Modern Emptiness of Life The realists’ and naturalists’ claim that they could reach out to “the place where things are real” (Frank Norris qtd. in Bell 118) conferred to their readers a prerogative that was still novel in the era of classic realism, and was indeed the reward of a victorious cultural struggle: readers of realism, Phillip J. Barrish writes, were invited “into a world whose governing claim to their interest [was] to be as plausible, actual, as the readers’ own world” (42); they were allowed to access the novelistic arena as if it were contiguous with everyday life. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), for instance, begin with their heroines boarding a train: Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber is heading for Chicago; Wharton’s Lily Bart is leaving New York to join the summer estate of one of her wealthy friends. In either case, no literary threshold marks out life from fiction; no narrative frame or authorial intrusion eases the transition toward Lily’s and Carrie’s environment. Such immanence of the social world with regard to its literary representation is the goal Erich Auerbach ascribes to mimesis. In a survey spanning two millennia of literary history, Auerbach records the erosion of the barriers preventing the integration of everyday occurrences within literary, historical, even religious texts. Authors pursuing a socially progressive variant of mimesis, Auerbach contends, have long striven

44 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds toward the “tragic-problematic” (38) portrayal in plain language of incidents affecting characters of “the humblest social station” (41). Transposed into Northrop Frye’s terminology, Auerbach’s argument implies that realistically minded writers have fought for the aesthetic legitimacy of the low mimetic and ironic modes. Conversely, Auerbach uses the term “the elevated style” (40)—roughly equivalent to Frye’s high mimetic mode—in order to designate the idiom by which aesthetes of the past flaunted their opposition to the “serious treatment of everyday reality” (491). During Antiquity, not even Aristotle’s Poetics—the most famous ancient defense of mimesis— challenged this elitist socio-aesthetic norm (Aristote 80: also Auerbach 84); only the Christian gospels, Auerbach points out, departed from it (41). Accordingly, Auerbach views the rise of the realist school in the nineteenth century as a significant victory against a centuries-old inegalitarian aesthetics. After Stendhal, Balzac, and Zola, it was possible at last for the common reader to enter the frame of a novel without feeling alienated both in social and discursive terms. A simplified narrative of nineteenth-century cultural history would suggest that, from Balzac and Zola to Proust, Woolf, and Joyce, the battle against the elevated style followed a fairly swift curve from victory to retreat. Realists initially managed to supersede what American novelist William Dean Howells called “the monstrous rag- baby of romanticism”—the aesthetic idiom that privileged otherworldly illusions over the phenomenal world (qtd. in Herman 34). Later, however, the realists lost their newly acquired cultural primacy to modernism. The latter movement rejected the supposedly alienating social world of modernity, and thereby invented a new, experimentalist version of the elevated style: it rendered art qualitatively different from social life again. This schematic scenario is supported by many statements from authors and critics. It is, however, too crude for multiple reasons. There is admittedly considerable evidence corroborating the fact that romanticism and the romance, whether in their canonical or popular variants, served as countertype for classic realism.11 Yet romanticism is a complex movement: it comprises its own realist dimension, which

11 For discussions of the rejection of romanticism by American realists and naturalists, see Parrington (248-49), Kazin (5), Becker (184), and Barrish (15-19).

45 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds manifests itself in William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s resolution to write about “incidents and situations from common life […] in a selection of language really used by men” (59), or in the literary and painterly portrayal of peasant life and industrial conditions. 12 Conversely, the distinction between realism and modernism is more porous than previously believed. Histories of modernism do not always register the fact that the French realist movement of the 1850s was the first artistic group for which the word avant-garde was coined.13 Realism conferred to its artists the alternative or oppositional social status that would later be emulated by similar avant-garde groups within modernism and beyond. Above all, realism shared with later avant-gardes a common artistic and philosophical opponent. In an innovative discussion of nineteenth- century culture, Toril Moi argues that realism reacted primarily against the older tradition of aesthetic idealism. The latter was partly embodied in romanticism, yet more substantially in neo-classical academicism (Moi 94-96). In this view, realist artists, as they shed the idealist celebration of eternal beauty, initiated a pioneering cultural dynamic out of which modernism itself would later develop (Moi 102- 03). Moi’s argument helps us discern, for instance, that the aesthetic divide separating late-nineteenth-century academic painter William Bouguereau from both realist Edouard Manet and pre-modernist Vincent Van Gogh is wider than the difference between Manet and Van Gogh themselves, or between Zola and Proust. In this light, interpreting the modernist critique of mimesis amounts to analyzing the process by which realism forfeited its status as a cultural avant-garde: we must clarify how the gesture that makes art contiguous with life ceased to be regarded as culturally empowering and how one specific feature of modernism—the rejection of mimesis—was allowed to become hegemonic among artists and academic readers. Moi’s reflections suggest that this cultural shift unfolded as a complex contest among aesthetics sharing the same cultural space. The present discussion can admittedly not fully render justice to this complexity: it offers a review of critical

12 The realist dimension of Romantic pastoralism is evoked in Koch (15) and Mayoux (191). 13Bourdieu (100-01) and Dubois (19) point up the status of mid-nineteenth-century realist as an avant-garde movement.

46 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds arguments, not a detailed historical narrative. I cannot, for instance, factor in the areas of twentieth-century culture where, against the modernist grain, classic realism and naturalism still played a central role.14 Likewise, I can only mention in passing a factor that discreetly yet powerfully shapes our awareness of the deligitimization of realism—the time lag separating the initial formulation of antirealist arguments from their accession to the status of a late-twentieth- century modernist and postmodernist doxa. Modernism indeed initially enjoyed a discreet, sometimes even marginal status in academic scholarship. Some of the critical texts discussed below, which are now regarded as pillars of the modernist corpus, were made available to Western European scholars in translation sometimes only decades after their publication (one thinks of Russian Formalism, particularly). Accordingly, the belief in a solid antirealist tradition originating, say, after the decline of European naturalism in the 1890s is to some extent a retrospective misperception: the rejection of mimesis in the name of modernist art became academic common sense only as of the 1960s or ’70s, after the controversial rise of the French New Novel, the 1950s debates about the presumed “death of the novel” in the US (Herman 218), and the emergence of structuralist and poststructuralist cultural theory. If we bracket out these complexities, we may consider the working hypothesis that modernist anti-realism justifies realism’s relegation from the avant-garde for two main reasons. First, it challenges the relevance of realism as a literary mode on existential grounds. By modernist standards, the realist project of making art contiguous with life is misguided: it leads authors, as Virginia Woolf famously put it in a critique of her Edwardian predecessors Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, to “spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and transitory appear the true and the enduring” (187). Second, modernism reproaches realism with remaining blind to the stakes of artistic form and genre. Realism is faulted for styling itself as non-art, and therefore for failing to acknowledge its status as a verbal construct. The former objection—existential inadequacy—reproaches realism with being unable to perceive the crisis of meaning induced by modernity: authors devoted to mimesis cling to the naive belief in the

14 The resilience of literary realism in the twentieth-century literary field is highlighted in Kazin (ix) and. Booth (23-64).

47 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds congruence of social phenomena, meaning, and values. Their ideal of cognitive and existential transparency, which is the very foundation of realism’s preference for the low mimetic or the ironic modes, obscures either the alienating impact of modernity or the vaster possibilities of empowerment that could be achieved in fields of experience transcending everyday life. The formalist objection, on the other hand, implies that realism, with its devotion to non-artistic prose and documentary procedures, either produces poor artistry or ignores the genre conventions on which it covertly models itself. In the logic of modernism, the latter flaw is no mere technical matter, as the concern for form is inseparable from the existential critique. Realist authors’ neglect of art makes them unable to perceive that in an alienated environment, the crafting of artistic discourse serves either as solace or as strategy of resistance. Contemptuous of the logic of artistic language and form, realism refuses to constitute itself as an autonomous aesthetic practice, distinct from—or critical of—the supposedly inauthentic idioms of the modern world.

In what follows, I discuss the existential dimension of modernist antirealism through Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács’s analysis of the nineteenth and twentieth-century novel. Lukács not only offered one of the most insightful discussions of the novel’s social status under realism and modernism, but, intriguingly, he did so successively from the opposite perspectives of each movement. His early works— Soul and Form [1910]; The Theory of the Novel [1916]—paved the way for modernist antirealism in so far as they make existential authenticity and alienation the main concerns of fiction. On the contrary, the Marxist works of his maturity—The Historical Novel [1937], Studies in European Realism [1948], The Meaning of Contemporary Realism [1955]—turn against modernism and prescribe realism as a philosophical and political norm. Choosing Lukács as theoretical reference point in a discussion of modernism is admittedly no neutral gesture: this decision fits the needs of a pro-realist argument. Some of Lukács’s contemporaries—fellow Western Marxists Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, particularly— examined the problematic of the loss of meaning under modernity and reached conclusions opposite to Lukács’s as to the value of experimental art (Morris 18-21). Yet Lukács is useful here precisely because of because of his resolution not to forsake the realist

48 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds project—a choice based on his clear awareness of what the waning of mimesis entails. Existential pessimism in Lukács’s proto-modernist Theory of the Novel manifests itself in the author’s contention that the literary idiom of Cervantes and his followers charts a world in which “the immanence of meaning in life” has receded from human grasp (41). Whereas fullness of experience was available to ancient masters of the epic such as Homer, modernity has created a context where lived authenticity has withdrawn from the phenomenal world and is now “beyond recovery” (41). Writers can therefore only produce novels featuring “problematic individual[s]” (80) who embark on a “demonic,” unfulfilled quest for lost values (100).15 Though The Theory of the Novel does not mention realism by name, it voices concerns that inform all of Lukács’s later essays and are indeed central to Auerbach’s discussion of mimesis as well. The disquieting prospect that values may recede from human experience highlights by contrast the fact that the imitation of life in art, if it is to retain any existential validity, must take for granted what we might call the marriage of appearances and meaning: realism assumes that substantial artistic, social and existential insights may be reached by the mere observation of phenomena. Long before Lukács and Auerbach, Plato had argued in The Republic that mimesis would be philosophically sound only if perception were spontaneously compatible with truth (Republic 92- 93). The Greek philosopher found this trust in appearances unwarranted. In this, his writings offer a conceptual foundation for the existential malaise affecting those early-twentieth-century artists and intellectuals who, like the young Lukács, deplored the modern “emptiness of life” (“Narrate” 147) and distrusted the artistic practice that limits itself to reproducing phenomenal reality. The Theory of the Novel somewhat enigmatically attributes the emergence of modern alienation to the “gradual working of a spell” (42). Lukács’s pro-realist essays, published after his endorsement of Marxism, provide instead an economic and sociological rationale for this disaster: they attribute it to the fall of the old feudal order, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the ensuing development of a capitalist economy so complex that it defies cognitive mapping (Historical 205,

15 For a sociological analysis of literary fiction based on Lukács’s concept of the alienated protagonist, see also Goldmann (23).

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245). While the Marxist Lukács concedes that the early-nineteenth- century victory of the bourgeoisie triggered a moment of revolutionary empowerment, he adds that the resulting mode of production soon degenerated into an agent of what he calls reification, bringing about the modern uncoupling of phenomena and authenticity. Lukács elaborates the concept of reification on the basis of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. In these reflections, Marx and Lukács contend that the intricacy of networks of economic interdependence and the development of monopoly capitalism have made it ever more difficult for subjects to perceive their own relation to the economy in human terms (Lukács, Historical 205;). Advanced monopoly capitalism confers to historical development the mystifying shape of an “alien force,” obscuring history’s nature as a sum of human actions (Marx, German 48; see also Lukács, History 110-40). According to the Hegelian premises of this theory, the most negative aspect of reification is its ability to break up the “totality of life” that makes human existence meaningful (Theory 49). For Lukács, The Hegelian concept of the “totality of [...] experience” (“Narrate” 143) indeed subsumes what has been lost because of capitalist development: as economic processes fragment the existential totality, they make “immanence of meaning in life” disappear (Theory 41). Literature’s ability to counteract or, conversely, to abet reification constitutes the benchmark of Lukács defense of realism and his condemnation of modernism. In his pro-realist essays, Lukács contends that the masters of the early or mid-nineteenth-century novel (Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, Leon Tolstoy) enjoyed epistemological privileges similar to those he previously ascribed to Homer. As members of what was still a revolutionary class, they were minimally affected by reification. As such, they had the capacity to understand the key historical processes of their own time and to fashion these events into “well-organized and multifaceted epic composition[s]” (“Narrate” 143). The novelistic gift required thereby, Lukács repeatedly points out, is never purely a matter of documentary technique—of crafting a proper snapshot-like replica of phenomenal reality (Historical 43; Meaning 55). The realist marriage of appearance and meaning depends on the possibility to depict “man as a whole in the whole of society” (Studies 5)—to anchor lived, local fact in overall meaning, fulfilling the Hegelian aspiration for totality. Specifically, classic realism is attentive to the significance conferred

50 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds on specific events by their embeddedment in historical sequences— their relation to past and future (Lukács, Meaning 55). Lukács argues, however, that by the second half of the nineteenth century, capitalist reification increasingly narrowed writers’ insight into historical causality (“Narrate” 122-23; Roman Historique 192). After the revolutions of 1848, naturalist writers such as Gustave Flaubert or Emile Zola cut themselves off from the totality of social conditions by severing their bond to the revolutionary proletariat. They were as such in a less favorable position to resist reification—the “devilish power that paralyzes all genuinely human activity” (Signification 152). As a result, they became precursors of modernists such as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The latter writers, instead of counteracting reification and alienation, merely register their symptoms (Meaning 78-79): their works compile a “kaleidoscopic chaos” of fragmented facts, cut off from meaningful history (“Narrate” 133). Worse still, they orient the novel towards the escapist representation of socially decontextualized subjectivities. The essays of Lukács’s late career suggest, however, the possibility for “critical realism” to survive under modernity (Meaning 93): there remains a vital need for a literary idiom attempting to reverse the impact of reification by subjecting alienated modernity to the “reasonable” question—that is, by elucidating the historical determinants that it forth (Meaning 69). Yet the threat of the modernist “emptiness of life” hangs like Damocles’ sword over this endeavor. In spite of his anti-modernist bias and his reliance on schematic historicist narratives, Lukács never ceased to take the measure of a cultural change that has shaped considerable segments of twentieth- century experimental literature and has benefited from considerable support in twentieth-century philosophy and aesthetic theory. Disenchantment with the emptiness of modern life underlies the taxonomies of authenticity and inauthenticity that, I pointed out in the Introduction, inform much of twentieth-century continental thought. Martin Heidegger’s obsession with being [Sein] (23), Henri Bergson’s celebration of “duration” (230), and Jacques Lacan’s references to the non-objectifiable “real” (Lacan, Séminaire 64) express the same recoil from the banality of phenomenal experience as that diagnosed by Lukács in modernist literature. Pam Morris aptly summarizes this structure of feeling when she points out that realism was bound to lose

51 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds its legitimacy during decades when “the first impact of mass urban society” provided ample evidence for philosophies proclaiming the inauthenticity of the lifeworld (22). I point out in Chapter 6 that, by the end of the twentieth century, the same problematic was given a new formulation by postmodernist theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard, with similarly dire consequences for realism. Modernist disenchantment, reformulated according to the terminology of postmodernism, leads Baudrillards and Lyotard to suggest that late-twentieth-century society is moved by forces so out of proportion with human cognition that it may only be an object of “astral” contemplation (Amérique 10) or of the sublime (Lyotard “Réponse” 31-32). Realism’s main flaw, the modernist critique of inauthenticity suggests, is therefore its clinging to a discursive mode targeting an inappropriate object. By focusing on externalized social interactions, realism fails to acknowledge the psychological and aesthetic impact of reified modernity. On the contrary, advocates of modernism praise experimental writers for rendering justice to this sense of estrangement and for exploring the utopian remedies that might palliate it. Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce were in this logic existentially clear-sighted in so far as their works either gave literary expression to angst, or sought a revitalization of experience beyond the visible present. Kafka’s fiction privileges the former axis of this program, Woolf and Joyce the latter. Joyce’s concern for the vital past and Woolf’s cultivation of interiority and pre-verbal intersubjective bonds illustrate what Ihab Hassan calls the modernist yearning for “transcendence”—the aspiration to access spheres of authenticity such as the afterworlds of the inner life, of primitive urges, or of aesthetic perfection (92). These are the “true” and “enduring” levels of experience Woolf faults Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells for failing to pursue (187). Of course, the quest for transcendence is only fully warranted if one assumes that the visible scene of modernity has become too insubstantial and resistant to scrutiny to sustain a literary endeavor devoted to social thematics of realism. Part II of the present essay takes as its premise that this pessimistic judgment is beyond proof. An artistic realist practice seeking to interpret the logic of social appearances is in this perspective not pointless.

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1.2.2 The Autonomy of Artistic Form

1.2.2.1 Russian Formalism What modernism regards as realism’s second major failing—its purported blindness to genre conventions and the autonomy of artistic language—has been one of the chief concerns of formalist criticism from the beginnings of this movement in early-twentieth-century Russia to its later developments in the Anglo-American New Criticism and classic structuralism. Literary works of art, formalist critics argue, are not meant to document the state of world: they should instead foreground their own structure—their textual principle of construction. Genuine literary texts, in other words, flaunt their ability to shape verbal material into what Joseph Frank and Cleanth Brooks respectively call “[s]patial [f]orm” (Frank 4) and “[w]ell [w]rought” structures (Brooks i) in the same way as modernist nonfigurative painting deploys pure patterns of shapes and color. We will see below that this formalist argument supports a two-pronged attack on realism. Ostensibly, formalism demystifies realism’s epistemological ambitions: the language of realist texts is shown to be inherently non-referential in so far as it is tied down to literary conventions. Realism’s actual practice, in this logic, is not the imitation of reality but the deployment of verisimilitude—the elaboration of what is essentially a literary norm. Simultaneously, formalism drives realist works back into the fold of verbal art: realist works cannot help being lattices of literary language, regardless of the socially referential agenda advertised by their authors. For Russian formalists, literature’s ability to foreground its own structure is rooted in the aura of strangeness characterizing literary language—the feature that sets it off from the non-literary world. Victor Shklovsky’s “Art as a device,” the essay often regarded as the origin of twentieth-century formalist literary theory, contends that the “singularization” of literary language has a defamiliarizing momentum (Chklovski 89;see Eagleton, Literary vii): it marks the prevalence of a text’s literariness over non-literary verbal usage, thus over the idiom by which speakers refer to the world in everyday situations. In short, literary form and genre conventions work at the expense of a text’s referential function. Shklovsky shows for instance that Leon Tolstoy’s War and Peace is structured according to a logic independent of its ostensibly realist agenda. In each scene, the narrator

53 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds feigns he is depicting objects alien to himself, as if discovering them for the first time (Chklovski 89). This device, which Gérard Genette later called “external focalization,” undercuts the realist orientation of Tolstoy novel: it manifests the text’s autonomy—the strange singularity—of its purely literary structuring mechanisms (Genette, Figures 207). Shklovsky’s critique of realism is taken up with relish by Roman Jakobson in “On Realism in Art,” initially published in 1921. With ironical exhaustiveness, Jakobson, provides a letter-coded list of what he takes to be the inconsistent definitions of realist verisimilitude. In the sequence of literary history, he points out, verisimilitude has been defined in turn as the product of authorial intention (definition A) ( “Du réalisme” 99), as a literary norm acknowledged by readers (definition B) (99), as a set of principles laid down by the nineteenth- century realist movement (definition C) (100), as the effect of an excess of background details (definition D) (106), and as the result of the systematic concealment of literariness (definition E) (108). Jakobson approaches this grab-bag of definitions from two theoretical perspectives. On the one hand, in remarks that set the tone for later formalist/structuralist theoreticians (Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette), he claims that any “natural’ verisimilitude” in “literary description” is “evidently devoid of meaning” (“Du réalisme” 100). Textual devices regarded by authors and critics as hallmarks of realism’s referential accuracy act like any other set of cultural conventions. Their primary function consists in exposing the artifactual status of the artistic canons that preceded them in the sequence of literary history. Thus, as nineteenth-century realism developed its own set of norms, it rendered obsolete the conventions of neo-classical academicism and romanticism (Jakobson, “Du réalisme” 103). For the rest, any “concrete content” of realism is “absolutely relative” (“Du réalisme” 102). Todorov rephrased this aspect of Jakobson’s argument in a late-1960s treatise on structuralist poetics, contending that verisimilitude does not designate “a relation to the real” (Poétique; 37) but, instead, the conformity with “the rules of the [literary] genre” (Poétique, 36; italics in the original). 16 In this logic, the marriage of the hero and the heroine at the end of sentimental novels, however unlikely by comparison with the course

16 See also Genette (“Vraisemblance” 71) for a formalist definition of verisimilitude.

54 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds of actual human relations, must be regarded as a requirement of these texts’ verisimilitude, comparable to the equally conventional expectation that protagonists of naturalist novels come to a tragic end. On the other hand, as the formalists dismiss the referential pretensions of literary texts, they bring to light structural devices specific to literary mimesis—the specialized literariness of realism, as it were. This aspect of formalist antirealism concerns definition C in Jakobson’s classification (verisimilitude as defined by classic realists), as well as its corollaries, definitions D and E. In the Russian formalists’ early writings, the principle of construction identified as the chief signature of nineteenth-century mimetic fiction is the “motivation” of literary devices (Chklovski, 86). Realist motivation, targeted specifically by Jakobson’s definition E, consists in the disingenuous compulsion to provide a “consistent [...] justification” for realism’s conventional “poetic constructions” (Jakobson, “Du réalisme” 108).The realist text, in this logic, cannot let its reader discover that, like all other varieties of verbal art, it obeys structural principles that are purely literary in nature and have little to do with the imitation of reality. Accordingly, in a gesture Gérard Genette compares to the logic of the judicial “alibi”, realism feigns that even its conventional formal features are instrumental in securing mimesis (Genette, “Vraisemblance” 97). This travesty of referentiality is often secured by means of the strategy subsumed under definition D: realist works spuriously justify—in fact, cover up—their literariness on the basis of parasitical displays of didactic anecdotes, background information, and pseudo-referential specifics—the whole parade of details for which realism is indeed famous. Didacticism in this case is a mere excuse: it conceals the “foreign, surprising” momentum of the literary principle of construction (Chklovski, “L’art” 94). In the late 1960s, Roland Barthes’s famous reflections on the “reality effect” rephrased Shklovsky’s and Jakobson’s theory of realist motivation along structuralist lines (“Effet” 81). Literary works pursuing “referential illusion,” Barthes argues, disavow their own literariness by spurning the formalist principle requiring that all elements of a narrative be functional with regard to its overall structural skeleton (“Effet,” 89). Referential writing features instead “insignificant” details devoid of any organic role in the narrative chain (Barthes, “Effet,” 82). Flaubert, for instance, as he evokes a provincial interior, depicts a piano on top of which are piled up “under a

55 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds barometer, a pyramid-shaped stack of boxes and cardboard” (Flaubert qtd. in Barthes, “Effet” 81; italics in original). It would hypothetically be possible to squeeze some psychological or social significance from this insubstantial literary bric-à-brac (the barometer points to bourgeois rationality and caution). Yet the “scandalous” profusion of information, Barthes suggests, mostly serves to gesture connotatively towards “some sort of background”—to “the real,” that is (“Effet,” 82, 85, 89). The scattering of details acts as a textual mist that, at an abstract level, signifies reality itself without actually addressing it in any substantial way; it signals the text’s overall devotion, if not to reality, at least to the referential function. As such, the “reality effect” is in essence a literary device: it is the very mechanism by which realist writing covers up its status as an autonomous verbal artifact (Barthes, “Effet,” 89). Jakobson’s essay of 1921 fails to mention a second formal feature of realism often discussed in formalist and structuralist theory—the metonymic structuring of literary prose. This topic became a key element of Jakobson’s reflections on language and literature only in the later developments of his theoretical corpus, most famously in his essay on aphasia and in several articles on poetics.17 In these texts, Jakobson describes metaphor and metonymy as the expressions of two fundamental structuring principles of discourse. Metaphor is based on a general principle of “deliberate similarity,” which is dominant in poetry (“Notes marginales,” 64); metonymy relies on “association by contiguity,” which determines the workings of (realist) prose (“Notes marginale” 64). Poems, in this logic, are regulated both in their verbal chain and in their mechanisms of meaning production by a logic of likeness and equivalence. Similarity determines the presence in the verbal chain of symmetries, repetitions and contrasts (Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson 183-84). At the level of meaning, it is the matrix of poetic comparisons and metaphors, which dominate poetic imagery. Prose, on the contrary, is structured according to relations of proximity, which are the foundations of metonymy. This figure of speech substitutes one sign for another, provided their referents are contiguous in space, time, or within a causal chain. Smoke can therefore be made to mean fire; a train may be identified by the time at

17 The relevance of Jakobson’s theory of metonymy to realist representation is discussed in Furst (69) and Herman (56).

56 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds which it departs (“the 9:42”), and a book by the name of the author who brought it into existence (“open your Shakespeares”) (Groupe μ 117-18). “Narrative prose” obeys this logic, Jakobson argues, in so far as its “inherent momentum” drives the story “from one neighboring object to the other, along a causal or spatial-temporal pathway” (“Notes marginales,” 64). Thus, in the sequence of the reading chain, readers of (realist) prose are encouraged to reconstruct a world whose elements are tied by relations of proximity. The relevance of Jakobson’s remarks on metonymy and prose to the analysis of realist description is patent. Balzac’s portrayal of Saumur in the first chapter of Eugénie Grandet is a complex weave of metonymies, synecdoches (i.e. spatial metonymies), and occasional metaphors in which the leading principle is the metonymic progression of an observer’s gaze zooming in on the urban landscape, starting from a totalizing perspective toward an ever closer scrutiny of the city’s local details. Likewise, the opening chapter of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, as it chronicles the heroine’s travel to Chicago, prepares the reader for the discovery of the metropolis by means of a carefully planned management of contiguity. As the train approaches the city, signs of the latter’s presence proliferate and are itemized according to their rank in a spatial-temporal sequence. The heroine’s later investigation of the “miles and miles of streets” of the Midwestern metropolis, notably during her frustrating job hunts, follow the same metonymic path (Dreiser, Carrie 16). Ironically, we will see in a later section that Jakobson’s argument on metonymy partly contradicts formalism’s and structuralism’s disregard for reference. Metonymy, the above reflections suggest, is a referentially based trope: it takes for granted an objective ordering of the world as well as the procedures securing the latter’s proper discursive representation. Metonymies are indeed rhetorically felicitous only if the extra-linguistic universe has a given shape: the world must be governed by contiguity and therefore devoid of discontinuities, even free from strangeness or surprise. Additionally, metonymies require a determinate relation between language and world. In the absence of the latter, the world’s orderly contiguity could not be mimicked in prose. Therefore, Jakobson’s argument about the metonymic nature of literary mimesis is partly grounded in knowledge of the world; it cannot be derived from the merely formal analysis of artistic language.

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1.2.2.2 Anglo-American Formalism and the New Criticism The approach towards realism adopted by Anglo-American formalism proved less radical, less counterintuitive, yet for those same reasons also less theoretically consistent than the critical revolution initiated by the Russian school. Anglo-American formalists—The New Critics, in particular—devoted most of their attention to poetry, a field in which they regarded formal consistency as the very measure of literary excellence. If the New Critics had summarily conferred to fiction the status they ascribed to poetry, they would have advocated a separation of literature from the social world no less abrupt than that described in the writings of their Russian equivalents. The New Critics’ emphasis on the spatial form of poems was indeed predicated on the idea that literature should not address the world in the same fashion as both scientific discourse and the more literal-minded realist fiction do: poetic texts—a phrase that in New Critical parlance often refers to all literary works, should act as internally consistent verbal systems, liberated, as I. A. Richards puts it, from “any external canon” (253; emphasis in original). In Principles of Literary Criticism, one of the seminal essays of Anglo-American formalism, Richards famously contends that poetry—and therefore literature at large—should not aspire to be “true” according to the norms of empirical “reference” (251, 245; emphasis in original). Its statements lend themselves to an “emotive” use of language, distinct from the referential, “scientific” one (250 emphasis in original). “[E]motive” in this context implies that literary works should by virtue of their high degree of formal coherence foster the “organization and systematization” (51) of “internal states of affairs” (246)—the complex mechanisms of “needs and desires” (246). Admittedly, Richards denies that his theory of poetic language implies the complete separation of art from life. The theory of “‘Art for Art’s sake’” is in his view a “misapprehension” (64) of the proper function of poetry, which, instead of isolating art from experience, should act as a structuring matrix allowing “ordinary experiences” to become “completed” (Principles 219). Still, his emphasis on the capacity of good literature to foster the optimal consistency of attitudes and mind creates an outlook where external, referential “stimuli” (246) are suspect of acting as contingent, even random disturbances with regard to the superior systematizing power of well-crafted texts.

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The Anglo-American formalists who chose to deal with the novel and its embarrassingly realistic legacy feign, however, to resist the anti-referential drift of Richards’s comments on poetry. They aspire instead to an inevitably fragile compromise between the claims of art and phenomenal experience. Rather than rejecting mimesis altogether, they claim to define the latter’s rightful position within a craft- oriented conception of narrative prose. René Wellek and Austin Warren, in their influential Theory of Literature, still consider it possible to distinguish between “[t]he novel” and “the romance” on the basis of the former’s capacity to be “realistic,” as opposed to the latter’s devotion to the “poetic,” the “epic,” or the “mythic” (216). Likewise, Wayne C. Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, does not summarily dismiss the contention that “‘[t]rue [n]ovels [m]ust [b]e [r]ealistic’” (23). While Booth may not take seriously the expectation that novels provide access to “[u]nmediated [r]eality” (50), he does number among the legitimate ends of fiction Henry James’s literary ambition to make novels produce “‘intensity of illusion’” (James qtd. in Booth 42): novels should give readers the impression that “genuine life has been presented” (Booth 44). However, in Booth as in other mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American critics, this possibly unexpected acknowledgment of realism is qualified by the formalist expectation that a favorable bargain will be struck between the novel’s referential prerogatives and the structuring mechanisms it must develop in order to secure its aesthetic consistency as a genre. Percy Lubbock implicitly makes this point in the analysis of narrative point of view—the reflections that laid the groundwork for the New Critical discussion of fiction. On the one hand, he privileges limited over omniscient narration—the “scenic” over the “panoramic”) method— partly on realistic grounds: a narrative situation should be allowed to “tell its own story”—to offer itself to the reader’s gaze as it might be perceived in the apprehension of everyday experience (Lubbock 156). On the other, such felicitous handling of point of view requires a tightening of novelistic form. It demands a degree of self- reflexiveness more likely to appear in Henry James’s works than in the rambling serialized fictions of the nineteenth century. It is in this light hardly surprising that the Anglo American formalists, in spite of their professed wish to balance the claims of art and life, should have proved better able to conceptualize structure, genre, and form than to provide an account of literature’s link to the

59 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds world. Symptomatically, the passages in which they pay lip service to the literary representation of the social context leave the foundations of nineteenth-century mimesis largely unexamined. Booth, Wellek, Warren, as well as and more recently Lilian Furst, use Henry James’s abovementioned formula as benchmark for fictional realism: novels should provide “‘intensity of illusion’” (Wellek and Warren 213; Furst viii). This remains, however, a poorly defined and paradoxical precept. Only a truth-based theory of literary reference, unavailable in Anglo-American formalism, could provide standards of evaluation determining what is required to make the intended illusion referentially compelling, and, conversely, what renders texts so remote from reality that they fail to secure the semblance of reality suitable to novelistic illusion. In the absence of such standards, privileging illusion as a foundation of realism confers to the literary imitation of life a negative connotation: the latter is covertly associated to trickery and deceit. On the contrary, when Anglo- American formalist essays discuss the mechanism by which fiction may achieve formal consistency, their argumentation is conceptually more effective. For instance, Wellek and Warren, in keeping with Richards’s concept of the emotive value of literature, explain how literary coherence is most easily secured when a novel’s “factual truth” is given only a last-resort status (212). Literary fictions, they argue, aspire to construct a “Kosmos”—a world vision endowed with a distinct, presumably superior “self-coherent intelligibility” (214 emphasis in original). In this endeavor, tight internal patterning outweighs adequacy to external conditions. It is therefore tempting to jettison literary referentiality altogether and to conclude that “[r]ealism and naturalism” are mere “conventions, style”—the features of a syntactic genre (Wellek and Warren 213). This view—an obvious echo of Russian formalism—implies that the only possible distinction in matters of verisimilitude “is not between reality and illusion, but between differing conceptions of reality, between differing modes of illusion” (Wellek and Warren 213).

The allure of formalism proved so difficult to resist in Anglo- American criticism that it affected even those authors seeking to reclaim realism against the New Criticism’s one-sided focus on literary craft. Most Post-WWII pro-realist essays indeed unwittingly carry out a Copernican reversal of realist premises: as they attempt to

60 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds circumscribe the literary devices enabling realism to map the social world, they confer to these supposedly referential textual features the status of formal constructs—the constitutive features of a genre. This phenomenon can be traced in the evolution leading from George G. Becker’s 1949 assessment of “the modern realistic movement” (“Realism” 184), through Ian Watt’s famed analysis of the rise of the novel in the late 1950s, to later authors such as Furst and, beyond the limits of the Anglo-American corpus, French structuralist Philippe Hamon. Becker still praises realism for being “closely allied with the development of physical sciences and positive philosophy” (“Realism” 184). Watt, on the contrary, endorses a paradoxically agnostic view of the novel’s status with regard to its social context. On the one hand, he regards realism as the defining feature of the English novel as it emerged in the eighteenth century. Accordingly, he singles out the rejection of the supernatural, the attempt to situate individualized protagonists within specific social and historical environments, and the use of everyday language among the elements that make Daniel Defoe’s, Samuel Richardson’s, or Henry Fielding’s fiction a more accurate vehicle of social mapping than poetry or verse drama. Yet in a spectacular concession to formalism, Watt undercuts his remarkable analysis of literary reference by calling “formal realism” (34) the system of distinguishing features his research has brought to light. The latter phrase, he writes, only designates a literary “convention” (35). There is “no reason why the report on human life” offered by novels adhering its principles “should be […] any truer than those presented through the very different conventions of other literary genres” (35). In this logic, the detailed exposé of the social geography of the 1920s Midwest developed in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, the same novel’s topical remarks about post-WWI Americans’ misguided fascination for the automobile, or Lewis’s allusions to the exodus of Midwesterners to California would have to be perceived as hallmarks of literariness, comparable to the codes of verisimilitude analyzed by Jakobson or Todorov. Furst explicitly builds upon Watt’s legacy, yet seeks to elude the deadlocked debate on the prerogatives of form and reference in which the English critic’s argument is entangled. To this purpose, she adopts a performative, pragmatist analysis of fiction stipulating that the realists’ “pretense of truth” (25) is mostly an “an act of persuasion” (26; also 94). Realism, in this view, cannot aspire to be an accurate

61 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds mirroring of the world: it is a performative practice to be analyzed under the light of speech acts theory. I indicate in more detail in a later section that the appeal to a performative model remains an empty gesture if it stays, as is implicitly the case in Furst, within the limits of neo-pragmatism or of the poststructuralist understanding of signifying performance. Still, confident that this theoretical basis frees the novel from “the crushing burden of mimesis;”, Furst sees the possibility of reinterpreting, even broadening Watt’s theory of formal realism (23). After reconceptualizing along pragmatist lines the cornerstones of realist representation as defined by Watt—the concern for socially defined characterization, determinate location, and historical temporality—, she includes within realism’s formal features devices that had been portrayed by Lubbock and the New Critics as obstacles both to novelistic objectivity and to formal consistency. She claims accordingly that realism’s codes of accreditation include the self- conscious authorial intrusions—the “dear reader” passages—common in nineteenth-century fiction, as well as the explicit negotiation of the narrative frame separating text from world initiated by such framing devices. In her view, the gestures by which “engaging narrators” (69) acclimatize their readers to the “determinate illusion” of the fictional world belong within the realistic apparatus (29). Overall, Furst’s pragmatist analysis of fictional illusion fulfills the formalist reversal I sketched out above: it fails to make clear how realist texts may be trusted to designate the world, and simultaneously extends the gamut of realist devices that can be reclaimed as the constituents of realism’s syntactic genre. Philippe Hamon’s early-1970s essay “Un discours constraint” can admittedly not be accused of swerving towards formalism since it stems from the explicitly antirealist context of French structuralist theory. The methodological reversal, in this case, works in the opposite direction: Hamon, in apparent breach of Jakobson’s and Barthes’s anti-referential credo, provides an analysis of realist discursive devices so extensive, sympathetic, and varied that it seems propelled by the same concern to preserve mimesis as that informing Anglo-American criticism. Hamon’s theoretical premises anticipate Furst’s essay in several respects. First, he includes within the perimeter of literariness not only the structure of the fictional world mapped by realist novels—its treatment of place, time, and social structure—but also the apparatus of perception and cognitive

62 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds observation the latter set up. Secondly, he anchors this analysis of narrative perception in a performative paradigm of discourse, symptomatically with little concern for the procedures of validation any realist “pragmatics” would require (132). Realism, Hamon claims is the vehicle of a cognitive “speech act” (132; italics in original)—a communicative gesture that cannot copy reality but can, by virtue of its “illocutory posturing” (132), “make us believe” that it does so (132). Hamon’s main focus lies accordingly on the numerous strategies by which novelists assert what we might call their voice of cognitive authority or their realist gaze—the mechanics that make an “ostensibly knowledgeable discourse” (145) both epistemologically credible and literarily palatable. Thus, Hamon points up the character types, locations, situations, figures of speech, or apparatuses of reception that render realism’s didactic agenda technically and literarily viable. He emphasizes, for instance, the effectiveness of descriptive scenes in which a character endowed with cognitive prestige—a “specialist, [...] erudite, [...] local authority, [or a] doctor” (142)—both describes and performs a technical act: A text that portrays an engineer taking apart a locomotive piece by piece for the sake of an apprentice indeed validates its realist credentials without excessively foregrounding its didactic nature (144). Conversely, Hamon highlights the elements that impede transparent cognitive transmission. He points out, for instance, that cognitive authority is best maintained if realist texts scan an environment or an historical context familiar to their author and readers. “[T]he realist protagonist is unlikely to travel far from his or her own environment” (137), he writes, for such a displacement would introduce the cognitively unsettling dimension of the exotic. Hamon’s reflections, like those of his Anglo-American counterparts, reveal that the formalist deconstruction of realism, as it itemizes the devices mobilized by would-be referential texts, gives the lie to the often-voiced opinion that this literary mode is stylistically formless. Formalism, in short, although it often handles the aesthetic of mimesis dismissively, leads to realism’s reintegration into literary art. Though paradoxical on the surface, this reversal is hardly surprising. The formalist attitude towards realism was emblematized early on in the critical gesture by which Boris Eichenbaum exposed under the gritty texture of Nikolai Gogol’s stories of social and spiritual alienation a clever lattice of puns, discursive contrasts, and

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“grotesque hyperbolic distortions” managed by a self-conscious narrator (“Comment” 235). 18 Thus, under the formalist lens, the ostensible artlessness of the realist text—its supposedly misguided attempt to model itself on a formless extra-literary field—is shown be a veil through which the constructedness of literary form is bound to peer through. Small wonder then that in the field of Anglo-American literature critics of the 1950s should have resorted to formalist means in order to make the considerable pre-WWII corpus of American realism and naturalism palatable to the readership of Hemingway, Faulkner, and the premodernist Henry James. The remarkable efforts of Charles Child Walcutt and Donald Pizer to vindicate Howells, Dreiser, or Norris consisted partly in indicating that writers who had been regarded as purveyors of documentary prose and proletarian propaganda could also be approached as literary craftsmen.19 In this perspective, the canonical redemption of literary realism and naturalism required that readers focus their attention no longer on writers’ eagerness to disclose hitherto ignored aspects of social life but rather on the phenomena that had mobilized the New Critics’ attention—the texts’ ability to shape their material into a self- supporting artistic vision. Similarly, readers were encouraged to overlook the link between realism and documentary reporting and to take into consideration its affinities with literary currents— transcendentalism and canonical American romance—that paved the way for formally reflexive modernist fiction (Walcutt vii).

18 Nivat provides further comments on Gogol’s grotesque imagery (33). 19 For a discussion of the political aspects of the formalist reappropriation of American realism and naturalism, see Walcutt (vii, 23) and Pizer (“Is American” 390).

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CHAPTER 3

The Thingless Sign: The Structuralist and Poststructuralist Challenge against Referential Illusion

1.3.1 The Semiotic Patterning of Perception Pursuing the work of deconstruction initiated by the formalists, structuralist and poststructuralist theoreticians have scrutinized not only realism’s alleged misevaluation of artistic language but more fundamentally the supposedly mistaken view of all linguistic practice on which mimesis relies. The radicalism of this theoretical current may be gauged by its capacity to undercut the methodological categories I have used so far—the concepts of movement, mode, and genre. Since (post)structuralism does not regard human subjects as primary or autonomous entities, it cannot concern itself with artistic movements initiated by determinate cultural actors. Likewise, the (post)structuralist critique of realism abolishes the distinction between mode (the measure of a text’s relation to the non-artistic world) and genre (the text’s principle of construction). The discussion below reveals that (post)structuralist theoreticians view human experience as a process unfolding within the texture of sign systems. It is in this logic impossible to distinguish between an autonomous, external world of facts and, on the other hand, textual structures misguidedly commissioned to act as its semiotic replica. Thus, the world of accessible experience is either identical to semiotic structures (i.e., to the patterning of syntactic genres) or to signifying processes so fluid

66 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds that they do not cohere into stable generic categories. On this view, the realist ambition to map what naïve observers call the world “out there” is a delusion or a hoax. Instead of grasping some putative non- semiotic reality, realist practice only produces semiotic patterns devoid of referential value. What passes for the imitation of life is only the intertextual reduplication of existing cultural models. Worse still, as it produces this simulacrum of the real, realism gives in to what Jacques Derrida calls logocentrism: it enforces a variety of artistic discourse that restrains the fundamental openness and fluidity of discourse. In its critique of realism, (Post)structuralism’s chief target is the endorsement of what John Langshaw Austin calls the “‘descriptive’ fallacy”—the semiotic model naturalism scholar June Howard dubs “naive reflectionism” (Austin 3; Howard 17). These terms designate the widespread belief that language serves mostly to enable subjects, as Jean-François Lyotard puts it disparagingly, to “conjure up” an “‘image of the world’ […] for themselves” (Différend 121). The reflectionist ideal of epistemological transparency is, as the term itself suggests, in most cases expressed through a specular metaphor: signs are expected, in Shakespeare’s famous words, to “hold up [...] the mirror to nature”—to serve as the objective reflection of an extra- linguistic field of data (Hamlet 3.2.22; 288). Other vindications of realism, Lilian Furst points out, resort to a functionally equivalent variant of this trope: they claim that language has the capacity to act as an open window upon the world (Furst, All 9-10). Zola provides a notable instance of this metaphor when he compares the naturalist text to a transparent glass house (qtd. In Hamon, Expositions 76). So does Jean-Paul Sartre when he states that words in literary prose should “dissolve in front of our gaze just as glass plate lets the sun shine through” (Qu’est-ce que, 27). We will see below that realist texts are less unilaterally dependent on the reflectionist aesthetic than is often assumed: they draw on a plurality of discourses and epistemological models—an insight revealed, paradoxically, by formalist and (post)structuralist analyses themselves. Realism is therefore not entirely synonymous with mimesis and, conversely, “antimimeticism,” to borrow a term coined by Luc Herman, does not in itself imply an overall condemnation of realism (Herman 139). Yet it is undeniable that the clichéd view of classic realism as the mirror of the world or “the transparent vehicle of reality” was abetted by

67 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds numerous nineteenth and twentieth-century advocates of realism, be they readers, writers, and critics (Howard 14). (Post)structuralists expose the philosophical and linguistic flaws of reflectionism notably by pointing out that the mirror-like representation of reality requires the possibility of natural signs— semiotic tools of unchallengeable truthfulness. (Post)structuralism has elaborated three main paradigms of the workings of signifying processes, all of them starkly refuting natural signification and specular mimesis. The first—developed by classic structuralists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, and the early Roland Barthes—views signs systems not as the reflection of any pre-existing background but as the very medium where perception and thought are broken down into manageable units and thereby made meaningful. The second—the poststructuralist theory of signifying processes developed by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida,, and Julia Kristeva— suggests that signs unfold in ceaseless, indeterminate sequences, leaving no room either for consistent meaning or for a substantial non- linguistic reality of which signs would be the mirror image. The third is the performative model of linguistic practice, championed by postmodernist theoreticians (Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Judith Butler) on the basis of earlier philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Langshaw Austin, and John Rogers Searle. These authors argue that our environment is generated by successive speech acts responding to other speech acts—thus by linguistic events that have the value of gestures, instead of iconical world maps.

The Saussurean argument about the capacity of signs to articulate— i.e. delimit, pattern, and combine—perception and meaning stands at the origin of a theoretical tradition whose other main links are Benjamin Lee Whorf’s and Edward Sapir’s anthropological writings, Roland Barthes’s semiological analysis of modern “[m]ythologies,” and Stuart Hall’s neo-Marxist analysis of ideology (Barthes, Mythologies 7; emphasis in original). Intriguingly, the founding text of this academic current—Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics— displays an antireferential radicalism one would expect to find only in later, indeed poststructuralist theoreticians. Saussure, unlike some of his disciples (Oswald Ducrot, even Barthes), hardly makes allowances for extra-linguistic referents—material things, for instance—towards which signs could gesture. His chapter on “The Nature of the

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Linguistic Sign” discards as “rather naive” the notion that language might act as a “list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names” (65). It replaces this presumed fallacy by the famous model according to which signs connect “a concept and a sound image” (66), respectively a “signified” and a “signifier” (67). After this point, the very idea of non-linguistic material objects drops out of Saussure’s argument. Matter exists only in the form of an undifferentiated “sound substance” providing the raw material for signifiers (112). The function of signs consists precisely in coupling signifiers carved out of the “vague plane of sounds” to units of meaning (signifieds) singled out from the “indefinite plane of jumbled ideas” (112). In this light, language works as the “domain of articulations”: it delimits and combines units abstracted from “two shapeless masses” (112). There is no room in this model for natural signs acting as truthful reflections of things—as realist name tags. Indeed, before signifiers and signifieds are yoked to form signs, there exist no definite objects to designate or reflect whatsoever, and no concepts to represent them in thought: “[N]othing is distinct before the appearance of language” (112). Therefore, the coupling of signifier and signified is inherently conventional or “arbitrary” (67). The “somewhat mysterious” linkage of sound and thought could indeed not possibly be motivated on any ground anterior to the creation of the sign itself (112). Working from the perspective of comparatist anthropology, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf elaborate a linguistic model similar to Saussure’s. In Sapir’s view, interpreting language as a positivistic mapping tool is a “fallacy” (89). Instead, Sapir claims that language, psychology, and economic practice obey an “unconscious patterning of social behavior” distinct from the necessity to act upon or reflect the extra-linguistic world (549). Anthropologists must therefore reckon with the fact that signs and behavior types are conventional: they are not determined by a fixed reality logic, and therefore acquire a different meaning “in societies other than [the anthropologists’] own” (Sapir 549). Whorf develops these insights in sharper relativistic terms. “Languages,” he argues, “dissect nature differently” (208) as they “classify items differently” (210). The American anthropologist supports these counterintuive statements by listing instances of glaring cultural and linguistic mismatch— examples that have made the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis famous (Hall, “Rediscovery” 66). “I clean [the gun] with a ramrod” in the Shawnee

69 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds language is expressed by means of “isolates of meanings” such as “dry space” (for clean), “interior of hole,” and a suffix meaning “by motion of instrument” (Whorf 208). Likewise, the Hopis use one single word for “insects” and “airplanes” yet have two words for “water” (210). Whorf infers from this that linguistic patterning challenges the validity of supposedly objective referential discourses: “no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself most free” (214). Barthes and Stuart Hall regard the patterning of perception and thought described by Saussure, Sapir, and Whorf as the semiotic fabric on the basis of which covertly politicized world views are articulated. “Myth Today,” the theoretical section of Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), is according to Hall “a locus classicus for the study of the intersection of myth, language and ideology” (“Rediscovery” 66). We will see below that it is also one of the most often invoked sources for the political critique of realism. Barthes suggests in this essay that “bourgeois ideology,” like realist fiction, quixotically lays claim to full epistemological transparency—indeed to the status of natural signs (Mythologies 139). Ideology disingenuously tries to pass itself off as a natural chart of an eternal, essential reality. Yet, because ideology is made up of Saussurean systems of arbitrary signs, it can only act in a similar fashion as the covert patterning of social behavior described by Sapir and Whorf (Mythologies 134). The world view it articulates is not nature itself but a “pseudo-physis”—a “naturalized” construct acting as an insidious force of political persuasion (Barthes, Mythologies 142, 140). The example put forward by Barthes in order to illustrate this signifying process has become a fixture of cultural studies textbooks: the French semiologist mentions a photograph on the cover of popular magazine Paris Match displaying a French soldier of central African descent (Mythologies 116). In the context of the Algerian war of independence, this document not only portrays a soldier who happens to be black but also, by foregrounding an act of military deference on the part of a colonial subject, sends a subliminal statement about the solidity of the French Euro-African Empire. As this ideologeme links up with similar messages in the broader lattice of colonialist discourse, it emulates the working of the Orwellian “Newspeak”: it prevents subjects from viewing the world in any other way than

70 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds through its patterning of perception—its ideologically inflected semiotic grid (Orwell, Nineteen 241). A world in which all magazines display photographs consonant with the portrait of the deferential African-born French soldier would erase all possibility of imagining alternatives to imperialism. Likewise, we will see below that realist novels focusing to a disproportionate extent on white upper-middle- class experience are suspected of instilling the suggestion that the norms of the latter class should apply to the whole of society. Admittedly, the comments above are more faithful to what antirealist critics have retained from Mythologies than to the letter of Barthes’s argument. In this early text, Barthes, unlike Saussure and Whorf, does not go so far as to claim that language grids abruptly dissect perception in the absence of any referential idiom. Barthes needs a subtler model, able to account for the fact that ideological sign systems, instead of acting as blunt brainwashing tools, hover like ghostly constellations over the familiar referential grids of everyday language. Therefore, he describes a cultural field structured by a two- tier semiotic apparatus. The latter is made up, on the one hand, of a plane of seemingly self-evident literal signification and, on the other, of a less directly perceptible plane of “second-order” meanings (Mythologies 114; emphasis in original)—two levels Barthes would later designate respectively as “denotation” and “connotation,” after Leon Hjelmslev’s terminology” (“Elements” 77; emphasis in original). In this model, “myth” or ideology is constructed within the second, connotative sign system (Mythologies 109): its political stereotypes are discreetly grafted onto the previously instituted denotative signs of natural languages. Thus, the advocacy of imperialism in the Paris Match example is fraudulently superimposed on the soldier’s recognizably African features, thereby effecting an ascertainable “deformation” of the representation of the soldier’s actual social conditions (Mythologies 122; italics in original). Still, Barthes later came to reject the legitimacy of denotation. The poststructuralist works of his late career—notably the theory of the “writerly text” discussed below (Barthes, S/Z 10)—follow the anti- referential drift of 1960s and ’70s semiology, and, by the same token, endorse the paradoxical relativism that was already implicit in Saussure and Whorf and would later prevail under postmodernism. In a gesture that undercuts any possibility of realism, these texts contend that discourse is inherently polyphonic. In this logic, no reality

71 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds standard—no voice of cognitive authority—is available in order to determine to what extent specific semiotic patterns of perception effect an ideological “deformation” of experience.

1.3.2 The Signifying Chain Saussure’s classic structuralism, without denying the capacity of language and culture to evolve diachronically, assumes that semiotic structures are fundamentally stable: the shifting diversity of concrete signifying behavior—“speech” or “parole,” in Saussure’s terminology—is undergirded by a plane of linguistic regularities, which Saussure calls “langue” (Saussure 9, 13; emphasis in original). The structuring power of “langue” is, as indicated above, evidenced primarily in the capacity of signs systems to articulate the “vague nebula” of meaning and matter (Saussure 112), conferring to these “two chaotic planes” a determinate shape (Barthes, “Eléments” 52). In mid-1960s French semiology, however, the classic structuralist emphasis on stable semiotic systems—still instanced in Barthes’s Système de la mode (1967)—gave way to paradigms based on the dynamic concept of signifying flow. The theories of signifying processes developed by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari depict the construction of meaning as a process of Heraclitean change: discourse is propelled by an irrepressible ability to reshape the cultural and social environment. Admittedly, these theoreticians approach the motility of signifying chains from various, sometimes incompatible philosophical perspectives. Most poststructuralists trace the origin of signifying processes to the fundamental incompleteness of time-bound human experience: the flow of signs serves in this logic as evidence of a tragic loss—the impossibility of achieving a totalizing, objective grasp of a world subjected to temporality. Others—Deleuze, Foucault, Butler—claim that the inherent fluidity of being should be experienced as a liberating potential rather than as the mark of a traumatic absence. Neither of these theoretical hypotheses is any less critical of reflectionist realism, however. Intriguingly, poststructuralist concerns over the instability of representation within the temporal flow are adumbrated in the first chapters of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, an essay whose critical fame is, I indicated above, most often attributed to its vindication of

72 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds realism’s democratic ethos. In these initial comments, the German critic indicates that the very purpose of realism consists in making world and meaning perceptible within a text—a goal that in poststructuralist terminology would be called presentification. Yet full-fledged presentification, Auerbach implies, is impeded by phenomenological constraints: it is limited by the apprehension of reality through the limiting perspective of human perception, the correlative need to interpret a partly enigmatic empirical given, and, above all, the impediments to knowledge imposed by the sequence of historical time. Auerbach develops these skeptical premises in a famous comparison between Homer’s Odyssey and the Old-Testament narrative of Isaac’s sacrifice. Homer, Auerbach suggests, quixotically writes as if all phenomena could be “brought to light in perfect fullness,” leaving no “lacuna, […] gap,” or “glimpse of unplumbed depths” (6-7). In Homer, “men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible” (3). The narrative of a scar incurred in Odysseus’ boyhood morphs seamlessly into the account of the hero’s incognito return to Ithaca at the end of his journey back from Troy, as if these moments were not inscribed in differentiated time frames. The Old Testament, on the contrary, renders justice to the painstaking labor of piecemeal, time-bound perception. Its descriptions are “fraught with background” (15) and framed by shadows. The protagonists’ main interlocutor is a “hidden God” (15) whose “motives and purposes” remain “unexpressed” (11). Dialogue is made up of “fragmentary speeches” interspersed with “silences” (11). Time and place are sketchy and therefore “call for interpretation” (11). Thus, while Homer’s “style […] of the foreground” (12) restricts itself to an idyllic “uniformly illuminated” present, the Old Testament is able to render the fleeting dynamics of the construction of knowledge and meaning (3): the story of Abraham and Isaac acknowledges that the temporal sequencing of perception renders epistemological certainties problematic. Caught in the transit from the fading past to an undefined future, the meaning of human experience is always liable to be reconfigured by new perceptions arising in the temporal flow.

If Auerbach’s Mimesis had pursued these reflections, it would rank as one of the founding texts of deconstruction. Instead, the essay soon switches to the less aporetic analysis of realism’s struggle against the cultural hierarchies perpetuated by the “elevated style” (401). Post-

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Saussurean theorists, on the contrary, shine the ultra-violet light of semiology on these disquieting shadows. Lacan’s psychoanalytical essays of the 1950s and 1960s develop the earliest investigation of the logic by which the signifying process, as it is embedded in time, undermines the closure of representation. Drawing on Freud and Saussure, Lacan postulates that the subject’s experience is structured as a “chain” of discourse—a sequence of signifiers that forms the fabric of what the French psychoanalyst calls “the symbolic order” (Lacan, “Lettre” 65, 59). The signifiers of the symbolic order serve as substitutes for a totalizing world-object Lacan calls the “thing” (“Chose” 217) or “the real” itself (“Lettre” 63; “Chose” 224.20 Yet, the term substitute in this context should be interpreted in the derogatory meaning of improper, unfulfilling token. The real is “irremediably lost” (“Lettre” 58): it can never be captured by the signifying chain, which nevertheless gestures towards its impossible presence. Signifiers, Lacan points out in a paraphrase of Saussure, are proper vehicles for this frustrating mechanism of symbolic substitution because they are “by [their] nature ... the symbol of an absence” (“Lettre” 34). They are, as the psychoanalyst puts it in commentaries on Edgar Allan Poe, tokens for a “purloined” counterpart (“Lettre” 39). The symbolic is accordingly haunted by the lack of the real, which the subject’s desire nevertheless seeks to retrieve against all odds (Juranville 81-88). Since lack is inexhaustible, desire remains unquenchable and the signifying chain is forever on the move, like headlines on “news ticker displays” (Lacan, “Lettre” 40). Eschewing Lacan’s occasionally baffling psychoanalytical apparatus, Derrida’s essays of the mid-1960s—On Grammatology (1967) and Speech and Phenomena (1967)—develop a remarkably scrupulous phenomenological analysis of the “news ticker display” of the signifying chain. In terms strikingly close to Auerbach, Derrida’s theory of différance investigates the process by which the life-world is made (un)available to a time-bound subject. Combining Saussure with Edmund Husserl’s and Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology, Derrida refutes the classic structuralist hypothesis according to which total, consistent meaning can be achieved within language. The inscription of stimuli in temporal experience, he argues, makes it impossible for

20 See also Juranville for an analysis of Lacan’s concept of the “thing” as figure of the real (85).

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“a sign [...] to appear in the fullness of [...] absolute presence” (Grammatologie, 102). Signs can only manifest themselves in the apprehension of a fleeting present where they are framed by the “retention” of the disappearing traces of the past and the inchoate “protention” of the future (Voix 72). Each signifier gestures toward its meaning, its signified. Yet the latter can only manifest itself as an “endless chaining” of new signifiers appearing further up in the temporal flow, indeed at moments whose tenor is yet indeterminate (Grammatologie 226). The subject’s apprehension of meaning is therefore inherently bereft of determinacy and closure: meaning is “differed ad infinitum” (Voix 113; emphasis in original) as it is caught up the game of presence and absence that constitutes the “movement of différance” (Voix 92). It would be mistaken, in this logic, to contend that experience eludes perception. Yet the stimuli involved cannot cohere into anything substantial enough to deserve the name reality: any judgment on the state of the world is liable to be reconfigured and rearticulated.

1.3.3 The Alienating Mirror: Realism as Logocentric Illusion Derrida’s and Lacan’s theories of the signifying chain prove devastating for realist reflectionism, exposing what might be called its epistemological and semiological disingenuousness. The various aspects of realism’s presumed imposture may be subsumed as manifestations of what Derrida calls “logocentrism” (Grammatologie 117). In what follows, I accordingly rely on this Derridean concept in order to review several poststructuralist objections to mimesis. Derrida calls logocentrism what he takes to be the widespread tendency of theological, philosophical, and literary traditions to conceal the disquieting instability of différance—the fluidity and hybridity of signifying systems. Instead of heeding the movement of différance, logocentric discourse produces a simulacrum of consistency, presence, and totality. Conscientious readers must accordingly strive to expose logocentrism and make visible the work of différance in all semiotic activity—a demystifying practice Derrida famously calls “deconstruction” (Grammatologie 124). In what follows, I indicate that when deconstruction is brought to bear upon realist discourse, it discerns in the latter two main logocentric strategies. The first is the very pursuit of “referential illusion”— realism’s attempt to make texts serve as iconic replicas of the extra-

75 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds semiotic world (Ricardou, Nouveau 30).21 The second is realism’s tendency to camouflage its plurivocity and heterogeneity: whereas realism styles itself as a flawless vehicle of cognitive authority, it covertly relies on discourses that are not traditionally regarded as referential. In Derrida’s logic, referential illusion is logocentric through its sheer pretension to mimic a non-semioticized referent—a possibility the philosopher discards in his famous formula “[t]here is no extra- textual ground” [“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”] (Grammatologie 227; emphasis in original). Through these words, Derrida rephrases in phenomenological terms Saussure’s previous claim that language never refers to anything determinate outside itself. In Saussure’s view, language users who naively postulate the existence of an extra- linguistic world misidentify the site where objects are defined: they set their sights on a putatively external field instead of what should be their proper target—the sign system itself. Derrida interprets the same alleged mistake as the misguided willingness to reach a bedrock of meaning unaffected by the disturbing indeterminacy of différance. Referential discourse looks for unalterable signifieds beyond the chain of stimuli, forgetting that the latter can only unfold unpredictably “from sign to sign” (Grammatologie 72). This amounts to a quixotic attempt to free oneself not only from the uncomfortably fluid signifying chain but, more fundamentally, from the temporal sequence of perception. Similarly, if we transpose Derrida’s terminology to Lacan’s conceptual framework, we may call referential illusion logocentric because its mimicry of a putative referent only covers up the loss of the real as totality of experience. For clarity’s sake, we may distinguish two conceptual levels in the Lacanian deconstruction of mimesis. The most fundamental is the hypothesis of the loss of the real. This radical premise, I mentioned in the Introduction to this essay, implies an axiomatic refutation of realism’s very possibility. Secondly, Lacanian arguments target the mechanics of referential illusion proper: in the French psychoanalyst’s perspective, the latter is merely a gesture of wish fulfillment, indeed a flight into the imaginary.

21 “Referential illusion” is further discussed in Barthes (“Effet” 89; my translation) and Dubois (31)

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Blindness to the loss of the real is an object of scorn for Lacan. Only “realist imbecility” could, in his view, lead one to believe that experience can be conceptualized as a material totality—a world in whose “entrails” nothing “could ever be hidden,” and where lost objects would always be retrieved by scientific investigation (“Lettre,” 35). This antirealist credo, however dismissive, is useful in so far as it exposes realism’s often unspoken ambition to grasp what Lukács calls “a totality of life” (Theory 49). Whereas Lukács, we noted above, makes totalizing representation an explicit requirement for realism, most advocates of mimesis misleadingly adopt the stance of modest empirical researchers. They claim they focus, as Russian critic Nikolai Chernishevsky puts it, on the “precise prosaic recounting of actual occurrences” (53). The realist novelist, Zola similarly argues, must emulate the experimental scientist who “consent[s] to humble himself, to spell out nature before he [is] able to read it fluently” (“Naturalism” 199). Yet realism’s or naturalism’s totalizing project is bound to peep out from under this unprepossessing stance. Whether in science or literature, Zola also writes, naturalists aim to “master nature” (“Experimental” 178), even “[t]o be master of good and evil” (“Experimental” 177). A similar aspiration to totality informs Auerbach’s vindication of mimesis, which is predicated on the idea that a text is the more real as its picture of the social world encompasses “the whole life of [a] period” (515). Likewise, the commitment of nineteenth-century realists to the depiction of “life” implies that realism must focus on a mystically resonant essence, the vital kernel of reality with regard to which all else—abstractions, idealism—is parasitical. By contrast, a Lacanian analysis of realism—Catherine Belsey’s Culture and the Real, for instance—is bound to conclude that in the absence of a totality of experience, realism only produces representations from which “something is missing” (41). Intriguingly, Belsey presents her essay as a partial validation of mimesis, thereby contradicting harsh anti-realist pronouncements she had developed in previous essays. Realism, she argues in Culture and the Real, at least does not give in to the naïve idealism of postmodernism, which takes for granted that the field of discourse is identical to the real itself (16). On the contrary, realist works assume that their object of representation is extra-discursive, and are therefore paradoxically best equipped to evoke the Lacanian sense of lack—indeed the very lack of

77 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds the reality they purport to grasp. Belsey’s reappraisal is, however, unlikely to satisfy pro-realist writers and scholars: it leads her to inventory the manifold ways in which realist literature, painting, or sculpture leave aspects of experience unexplored. In her view, Filippo Brunelleschi’s early-fifteenth-century experiments in perspective painting, however admirable, misleadingly suggest that mimesis makes any aspect of the real available to viewers. Brunelleschi himself, Belsey points out, concedes that painting is poorly equipped to reproduce “nebulous forms” such as water, smoke, or clouds— objects as evanescent as the signifying chain itself (91). Belsey adds that even when perspective painting attempts to simulate the solid lines of architecture, it only produces an “imagined scene” whose “remarkable display of verisimilitude” must “screen out actuality itself”: one sees either the actual scene or the replica “but not both at the same time” (94). The loss incurred thereby is even more perceptible if the temporal dimension is factored in. While admiring Canaletto’s scrupulously illusionistic Venetian cityscapes, one cannot but ignore the impossibility of retrieving the moment at which the canvass was created: the latter is “always elsewhere, unattainable, lost” (99). As Belsey calls the object of perspective painting an “imagined scene,” she accurately identifies what I called above the second axis of the Lacanian critique of mimesis: the deconstruction of referential illusion as a logocentric lure. In a Lacanian perspective, once mimetic realism loses its anchorage in the sustaining horizon of the totality of life, it can evoke this lost object only in the form of a fantasy—a comforting illusion. The iconic façade set up by realist works, far from producing the real, qualifies instead as a manifestation of what Lacan calls the “imaginary” (Lacan, “Chose” 238). The latter concept, theorized in the psychoanalyst’s famous study of the “mirror stage” (“Stade” 89), designates the psychological register through which the subject attempts to escape its “fragmented image” (“Stade” 93): the imaginary allows the subject to craft for itself the “fantasies” of an “orthopedic” shape “of its [own] totality” (“Stade” 93, 94). It is, in other words, the strategy by which subjects smooth over the fragmented mode of existence imposed by the symbolic order, or, in Derrida’s terms, by which they deny the indeterminacy of différance. In the dynamic of the mirror stage, babies, with their still inchoate sense of selfhood, find in the “gleeful assumption of their mirror

78 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds image” a reassuring yet deceptive sense of identity (“Stade” 90). They replace their painfully “quartered” bodies by a specular image that has the value of an “armor” or a “fortified camp”—thus of alienating substitutes (“Stade” 94). It is ironically symptomatic that the metaphor by which Lacan highlights the illusory nature of the imaginary should be the very same by which proponents of realism flaunt the clear- sightedness of mimesis. Shakespeare, we saw above, like countless writers and critics, expects mimesis to “mirror” nature (Hamlet 3.2.22; 288). On the contrary, mirrors in Lacan are a “lure” (“Stade” 93). Not that Lacan utters a wholesale condemnation of the imaginary: the latter constitutes a necessary stage of the articulation of the subject. Yet the exclusive devotion to the imaginary “spatial identification” of the mirror stage (“Stade” 93) condemns the subject to a “rigid,” “derealizing” stance (“Stade” 94, 92). The realist ambition to grasp the referent by a process metaphorically comparable to specular reflection can therefore only be an alienating logocentric fantasy, obliging realist texts to invest considerable energy in covering up the imaginary character of its would-be-referential charts.

1.3.4 The Intertextual Simulacrum As the leading figures of poststructuralist theory deliver their blanket indictment of reflectionist mimesis, they devote paradoxically little attention to the specific strategies by which the writers and works of the realist movement perpetuate this presumed imposture. Instead of dealing with a literary corpus that might appear too crude for serious scrutiny, Derrida, Lacan, and their disciples are concerned with experimental works that contest or debunk the mirroring of the world. Consequently, it took about ten years—until the emergence of the New Historicism—for the influence of deconstruction to filter through into realism and naturalism scholarship. Still, a few deconstructionist texts of the late 1960s and early 1970s—Barthes’s S/Z and J. Hillis Miller’s discussion of Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz—indicate how poststructuralism could serve as philosophical legitimization for antirealist insights that had already been implicit in earlier formalist criticism. The two critical essays mentioned above add one specifically poststructuralist item to the store of previous antirealist arguments: they contend that the realist attempt to produce an imaginary simulacrum of the world is merely, to borrow Julia

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Kristeva’s term, an “intertextual” signifying process—an imitation of culture instead of a snapshot of nature (Séméiotikè, 52). Barthes’s S/Z is famous among narratologists for providing a book- length analysis of one single short story—Honoré de Balzac’s “Sarrasine,”. Though S/Z never mentions Lacan by name, its reading of Balzac is haunted by the Lacanian hypothesis of the loss of the real. In “Sarrasine,” Barthes suggests, the disappearance of essentialist certainties is allegorized as castration: it is made visible in the figure of the story’s enigmatic protagonist, an elderly Italian castrate. This disempowering lack affects the whole social scene depicted in “Sarrasine,” and also undermines the story’s attempt to mimic reality through art: the latter endeavor can only take the form of a comforting simulacrum—a vacuous process of imitation. In a subsection of S/Z entitled “the replication of bodies”, Barthes indeed contends that realist literary description cannot evoke the vividness of objects and characters by reference to any foundational reality (S/Z, 61): it can only compare its own verbal simulacra of bodies and things to equivalent objects represented in different, though no less semiotically encoded artistic media. Typically, characters are introduced by comparison with figures in paintings; they are depicted not referentially but as echoes of other artistic artifacts. Thus, realism, even as it asserts its capacity to seize the extra-linguistic real, proves unable to escape the Saussurean logic according to which meaning is generated within sign systems—in the interaction that binds signs to signs and texts to texts. In Lacanian terms, the realist replication of bodies produces an imaginary chart of the world on the basis of sources that are themselves of the order of the imaginary. As Barthes puts it, echoing Plato, realism carries out “a second-order mimesis”: it “copies what is already a copy” (S/Z, 61) Miller reaches similar conclusions in an analysis of Dickens’s journalistic sketches of London life—nonfiction texts in which the novelist honed the realist craft he later transposed to his fiction. Refuting the idea that “‘photographic’” realism might offer some “one-to-one correspondence to some social historical reality” (287), Miller argues in formalist fashion that Dickens’s sketches are mere rhetorical constructs: the novelist evokes the lifeworld of Londoners through sequences of contiguous details, in corroboration of Jakobson’s theory of the metonymic structuring of realist prose. Miller contends, however, that metonymic enumerations cannot of

80 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds themselves deliver the truth of characters’ lives: contrary to Dickens’s realist expectations, a pawn broker’s existence is not necessarily signified by the bundle of objects in his shop. If signs refer not to “a plenitude but [to] an absence” (306)—i.e., if the total meaning of the real is unavailable—, then the “pell-mell confusion” of appearances, even if it is structured by the reassuring texture of contiguity, cannot yield a substantial, “coherent picture” of the social field (294). The link between metonymic details and overall meaning is therefore as “fictive” as a metaphorical bond (309). By the same token, metonymic prose enjoys no referential privilege over poetic metaphor. In classic deconstructionist fashion, Miller points out that Dickens cannot entirely camouflage the resulting existential and epistemological indeterminacy. The latter is revealed in one of the key features of the novelist’s London scene: its theatricality. In the absence of authentic behavior norms, Londoners “have caught the disease of theatrical representation”; members of each social group “pretend what they are not” (303). If Dickens’s realism were true to its ambition, it would expose these characters’ make-believe in the name of truth. Yet Dickens cannot invoke any principle of authenticity transcending the insubstantiality of the social scene he surveys. On the contrary, in a reasoning equivalent to Barthes’s discussion of the replication of bodies, Miller argues that Dickensian realism is a theatrical practice in its own right: it produces a spectacle of reality structured by “highly artificial schemas inherited from the past”—drama, previous fiction, the graphic conventions of painters such as Hogarth (309). Thus, in Dickens’s writing itself, theatricality covers up the impossibility of what I called above the marriage of phenomena and meaning: “theater replaces the meaningful link between metonymic isolates” (305). Barthes’s and Miller’s texts reveal in retrospect how relentless the formalist demystification of realist verisimilitude becomes once it is retooled along poststructuralist lines. All the features of what Watt calls “formal realism” (temporal, spatial, and social specificity, the attention to representative details, the use of everyday diction, etc.) are in the poststructuralist perspective exposed as logocentric decoys (34): they are the component parts of what might be called an alienating or constraining mirror—a corset of illusionistic rules consigning the signifying chain to a referential task the latter is too insubstantial or too fluid to fulfill. Similarly, the formal patterning of realist prose analyzed by Jakobson appears in this logic as a regimentation of the

81 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds signifying process mobilized for illusionistic purposes: the metonymic ordering of realist discourse, as it projects the image of a world organized according to spatial, temporal, and causal contiguity, is the very illustration of what Lacan calls the “orthopedic” gesture of the imaginary. It artificially patches up a “fragmented” or “quartered” image and in so doing represses différance.

1.3.5 The Voice of Cognitive Authority: The Repression of Dialogism The second major logocentric flaw of realist mimesis, I pointed out above, consists in its presumed tendency to repress the plurality—the polyphony—of signifying practices. Logocentrism, Derrida indicates, inevitably institutes a scale of inequality among sign systems. In a logocentric culture, a specific idiom is awarded the capacity to display full-fledged meaning in the “living present” (Voix 40) whereas other idioms are thought to be affected by what Derrida calls “the process of death at work within signs” (Voix 44). The very term logocentrism refers to what Derrida takes to be the most recurrent symptom of such often unacknowledged semiotic hierarchies: theology, metaphysics, literature, and linguistics, he contends, have consistently favored speech at the expense of the written word. The “logos” (Grammatologie 117) has been described as consubstantial with the voice of consciousness, of the spirit, indeed of “God’s infinite understanding” (Grammatologie,117). Yet, beyond the traditional privileging of the spoken word stigmatized by Derrida, any hierarchy among sign systems, whatever the chosen medium, must similarly be flawed. In this perspective, realism gives in to logocentrism in so far as it boasts a voice of cognitive authority: it claims to possess a privileged sign system attuned to being, truth, and life—ultimately, a language of natural signs. For critics wary of logocentrism, the gesture by which realism claims the privilege of conjuring up a simulacrum of the real amounts to an arbitrary impoverishment of semiotic possibilities: in its hankering after the single most perfect image of the world, realism restrains the inherent resistance to closure, the plurality, and polyphony of signifying processes. Besides Derrida, poststructuralist theoreticians of the late 1960s and of the 1970s have offered several terminological models meant to rank discourses according to their respective openness or resistance to semiotic polyphony. All of them implicitly or explicitly use realism as a conservative foil, and sketch out a history of culture oriented

82 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds towards a progressive liberation from the presumed logocentric repressiveness embodied in mimesis. One of the most familiar of these arguments appears in Roland Barthes’s S/Z, where the French theoretician distinguishes between the “readerly” and the “writerly” text (S/Z 10). “[R]eaderly” texts—realist works, notably—encourage their audience to reconstitute a supposedly finite, predictable; indeed logocentric meaning. “[W]riterly” texts, on the contrary, are predicated on the fact that the reading process is “plural”: such texts are refashioned beyond recognition on each reading (S/Z 11). Though S/Z’s argument is clearly stacked in favor of the writerly, Barthes attempts to soften the value judgment implicit in his own binarism. To this purpose he argues that even a realist/readerly story like Balzac’s “Sarrasine” yields some marginal degree of writerly openness (S/Z 14). The latter is perceptible to scrupulous, indeed deconstructionist readers. Like Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contend that signifying processes must open themselves to “multiplicities” (Mille Plateaux, 10). Using a botanical metaphor, they distinguish between the “rooted book” (Mille Plateaux 11), the “rootlet system,” and the “rhizome”—respectively hierarchical, pseudo-multiple, and genuinely non-hierarchical modes of textual and social organization (Mille Plateaux 13). By these libertarian standards, even highly polysemic modernist classics like Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) qualify only as “rootlet” texts. Similarly, Kristeva’s early essays chart the evolution of literary texts from “classic” literature, which prescribes a strict commitment to closure, to the “modern” avant-garde, which endorses the fluid diversity of the signifying chain (Révolution 318). The novel (and, one imagines, realism) occupies an ambiguous position in this typology: while paying lip service to the classic aesthetic of the “closed text” (Kristeva, Séméiotikè 52), it simultaneously deploys and conceals narrative mechanisms that depart from semiotic closure (Séméiotikè 61). Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism occupies a central position within the various strands of the twentieth-century aesthetics of writerliness and heterogeneity. Elaborated as early as the late 1920s, dialogism was introduced into French theory by Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, and indeed served as matrix for the poststructuralist models of signifying practice sketched out above. By coining the term dialogism, Bakthin suggests that any utterance always constitutes a “rejoinder in a given dialogue”

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(Dialogic 274; also 276): utterances are both dependent on previous speech acts and shaped by the anticipation of the further responses they will inevitably elicit. If translated as “polyphony” or plurivocalism, dialogism implies that utterances weave together a multiplicity of interacting voices (Kristeva, “Poétique ruinée” 35). Accordingly, “[d]ialogism” (Kristeva, “Poétique ruinée” 14), also translated as “heteroglossia” (Dialogic 263), designates the cultural and semiological phenomenon that Barthes would later conceptualize as writerliness and Kristeva as “intertextuality” (Séméiotiké 53). Literature and culture, in dialogical or intertextual logic, unfold as an open-ended fabric of interacting voices and texts. Bakthin claims that no idiom is immune to “heteroglot multiplicity” (Dialogic 278): all texts have the capacity to give voice to a “plurality of worlds” (Poétique 48). Still, the Russian critic singles out the novel as the preferred literary medium in which such “dialogized heteroglossia” may develop (Dialogic 273). Other literary media—nineteenth- century lyrical poetry, for instance—repress plurivocalism: they restrict themselves to “monologic” discourse (Dialogic 270)—a concept equivalent to Derrida’s logocentrism. As such, they unduly favor the “centripetal” over the “centrifugal [...] forces of language” (Dialogic 272). Bakhtin’s discussions of the novel occasionally use the term realism without derogatory connotations. Still, Bakthin’s theory, like the poststructuralist paradigms it inspired, was bound to be interpreted as yet another scourge of reflectionist mimesis. There is indeed something inherently monologic to the concept of a realist voice of cognitive authority. Philippe Hamon’s analysis of realism’s cognitive- oriented speech acts, which I discuss in Chapter 2, reveals that the epistemological privileges of realist fiction are secured at the cost of a restrictive gesture: realism not only disqualifies discourses reputedly alien to mimesis itself, but also covers up its own discursive heterogeneity. Advocates of realism may well resent the allegation that mimesis carries out this discursive censorship. Nineteenth-century observers took it for granted that realism’s break with idealism heralded an opening, not a closing of the literary field. French novelists Edmond and Jules Goncourt contended at the time that realism had allowed “‘the lower classes’” to acquire “a right to the novel” (118). Realism would in this logic fulfil one of the functions Bakhtin ascribes to dialogism: integrating the voice of the

84 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds disempowered within the cultural dialogue (Dialogic 278). Even more disquieting to realism scholars is the realization that realism, if shorn of its monologic privileges, ends up on the same footing as discourses it disqualifies as epistemologically alien to reality: a full-fledged celebration of discursive polyphony saps the legitimacy of realism’s rejection of what Zola calls “the supernatural and the irrational”— illusion, romance, superstition, madness, and dreams (“Experimental” 177). In spite of its ostensibly antirealist orientation, Dialogism will prove a crucial, methodological resource for the present essay. In Chapters 7 and 8, which are devoted to the dialogical mechanics of contemporary realism, I argue that Bakthin’s concept may be approached from a perspective that partly deviates from the poststructuralist premises through which it was initially popularized among European and American scholars. I do not mean thereby that the poststructuralists misread Bakhtin’s legacy: their interpretation of dialogism is substantiated in several of the Russian critic’s major essays—his 1920s study of Dostoyevsky as well as the shorter essay “Discourse in the Novel,” anthologized in The Dialogic Imagination. Still I believe that dialogism may be viewed in a broader perspective than the one defined in these texts or even in the whole Bakhtinian corpus. Dialogism, more than its poststructuralist equivalents, renders possible a theoretical stance that partly breaks free from dichotomized arguments about the respective legitimacy of discursive polyphony and monologism. On the one hand, I indicate in Chapter 4 that neo- historicist critics of the 1980s and ’90s have demonstrated, against more clichéd views of realist discourse, that realism and naturalism are never entirely monologic: their discourse is covertly heterogeneous. While the neo-historicists still phrase this insight in the spirit of deconstruction, they define thereby a reading perspective essential to the analysis of the contemporary corpus, which is overtly polyphonic and dialogized. Also, Bakhtinian dialogism requires a framework of analysis that takes into account concrete elements such as audience response within specific social structures. Taking good measure of this anchorage in specific contexts leads one to envisage a realist variant of dialogism—a discursive negotiation that does not unfold as an indeterminate chain of speech acts.

1.3.6 Performativity: Beyond the Descriptive Fallacy

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One particularly important source of discursive heterogeneity is clearly not given its due in the reflectionist definition of realism: the recognition that language functions not only as iconic map and but also as gesture, indeed as a performative process. The growing interest for discourse as performance—the so-called performative turn of cultural theory—finds one of its philosophical sources in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later essays. The language paradigm developed by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosopicus (1921) is, by poststructuralist standards, the very embodiment of realist logocentrism: Wittgenstein seeks to define the conditions of a logical language offering a truthful “picture of reality” (Tractatus 63). However, taking stock of the difficulties of this endeavor, Wittgenstein later developed a concept of discourse independent of the task of mirroring extra-linguistic states of facts. In this non- representationalist logic, communication amounts to set of “‘language games’” whose elements are ascribed a value by virtue of the very unfolding of the discursive process (Blue and Brown 81). Instead of serving as a purveyor of inert images, discourse is a pragmatically- oriented sequence of gestures, comparable to the moves of a “game of chess” (Blue and Brown 84). It is composed of what John Langshaw Austin calls “act[s] of speech,” and John Rogers Searle “speech acts” (Austin 20, Searle iii). Given their obsession with the dynamics of the semiotic chain, it is logical that poststructuralists should build upon the later Wittgenstein’s legacy, and should view language as a site of work, action, even conflict. Derrida does so in “Signature, Event, Contract,” a text in which the French philosopher pays homage to speech-act theory (“Signature” 81). Similarly, Jean-François Lyotard’s reflections on the “différend” rely on a performative view of discourse explicitly derived from language-games theory. Lyotard views each occurrence of the signifying chain—each emerging “phrase” (Différend 9)—as “an event” (“Discussions”371) endowed with the capacity actively to bring a “universe” into existence (“Discussions” 371). The French philosopher describes thereby a performative process of linguistic engenderment (Différend 109).22 Lyotardian phrases are no neutral charts of pre-existing states of fact: each of them “situates”—i.e. both

22 For a more detailed discussion of the performative aspects of Lyotard’s argument, see Den Tandt (“Invoking” 810).

86 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds produces and positions—a set of “instances (referent, addresser, addressee, sense)” (“Discussions” 372; see also Différend 27, 109, 110). Each is separated from the next by an interstice—a “différend”—that serves as a microcosmic battleground: the différend opens up the space where the given is contested and refashioned within a discursive process that moves from one signifying gesture to the next (Différend 29). Likewise, Kristeva depicts the unfolding of semiotic phenomena as fitting in an inherently transformative process. The object of her early essays is “signifiance”—the “work” accomplished by the “signifying act” (Séméiotiké 18, 19). Signifiance is by definition a transgressive gesture: it aims for “a surplus exceeding the rules of communicative discourse” (Séméiotiké 18; emphasis in original). Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality, derived partly from Bakthin, should be understood as a corollary of performative signifiance. Intertextuality means that each text is defined by its interaction with other texts within a given cultural field. This generalized interfacing is, in Kristeva’s logic, carried out as signifying work: each text appropriates and refashions earlier ones, thereby altering the ideological and historical context by which it was generated (Séméiotiké 53). The poststructuralist turn towards performative or pragmatic paradigms marks a partial departure from the Saussurean legacy. Speech act theory implies indeed that the effectiveness of language is only partially dependent on the semiotics of utterances—on what Austin and Searle call an utterance’s “propositional content” (Searle 30). A statement’s value, instead of issuing from the conventionally defined literal meaning of its signifiers, originates partly from its capacity to “[d]o [t]things” (Austin iii). For Austin, each statement’s performative dimension comprises both an inherent potential for agency (the “illocutionary force”) (115) and the capacity to trigger indirect effects by means of “‘perlocutionary”’ acts (101). Symptomatically, the poststructuralist and postmodernist theoreticians who most explicitly appropriate this view of linguistic practice— Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, or even Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—favor the illocutionary or perlocutionary force over propositional content: they regard as inessential or misleading the capacity of language to act as a vehicle of representation. Rorty’s neo- pragmatist “antirepresentationalism” (Rorty, Objectivity 1) stipulates that the goal of knowledge does not consist in “getting reality right”

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(Rorty, Objectivity 1), but rather in “acquiring habits of action for coping with reality” (Rorty, Objectivity 1). Better knowledge means acquiring more effective behavior patterns—a better repertory of gestures—, in partial independence from the propositional content of the statements through which these knowledge-related habits are carried. Since performative theories imply that language and art are sequences of actions instead of referential charts, they provide a ready-made methodological support for analyses of power relations within social apparatuses. In recent decades, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have provided some of the most famous instances of performative models of the politics of culture. Foucault, drawing on Nietzsche’s anti-idealistic reflections on language, develops an analysis of discursive apparatuses—the procedures of the humane sciences, particularly—characterized by radical skepticism toward knowledge claims. In his view, the genuine impact of discourse lies in its capacity to deploy “distributions of power” (History 99): “Between techniques of knowledge and strategies of power,” Foucault argues, “there is no exteriority” (History 98). Knowledge “is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint” (“Truth and Power” 131) within a “‘political economy’ of truth’’ (“Truth and Power” 131). The proper paradigm for knowledge is therefore less “language (langue) and signs” than “war and battle” (“Truth and Power” 114). Likewise, Butler articulates a theory of sex and gender disparaging propositional knowledge—in particular, the knowledge that produces “fabricated” gender identities (Gender 185). “That the gendered body is performative,” Butler writes, means that “it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (Gender 185). Identities are generated by “acts, gestures, enactments and can only be subverted by the same performative means” (Gender 185). Any belief in the stability of meaning is therefore complicit of a “fabrication” (Gender 186): it produces a spurious “‘figure’” (Gender 188) or a “phantasmatic” norm (Gender Trouble 192). Such figments, which in Lacanian logic pertain to the imaginary, conceal the inherent performativity of discourse. Among the theoreticians mentioned in the present section, only Kristeva and Lyotard have explicitly addressed the aesthetics of realism: Kristeva, we saw above, discusses the novel as a moment in the history of signifiance; Lyotard, I indicate in the Chapter 6,

88 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds evaluates the relevance of realism under postmodernity. Yet, regardless of any direct reference to realism, all performative theories of language imply that mimesis is utterly devoid of semiotic and a political legitimacy. From their perspective, the mirroring of the real is blind to what language actually does. Accordingly, the remarks I made above about the difficulties of integrating Bakhtin’s legacy into the present essay apply even more drastically to theoreticians influenced by the performative turn. Performativity, if understood in the logic of poststructuralism, leads to the deligitimization not only of mimesis, but even of all expressions of realist art. It is therefore fitting that a political critique of realism and naturalism should have developed in the 1980s partly on the basis of Foucault and performative gender theory, arguing that realist texts disingenuously fail to acknowledge their performative effects. Still, this leaves us with the paradoxical task of accounting for the fact that contemporary artists—Michael Moore, Günter Wallraff, Sasha Baron Cohen, Sigalit Landau, or Norah Vincent—have enthusiastically endorsed to performative strategies within works devoted to the exploration of the social field. Defining the conditions of such performative realism, I argue below, is possible indeed, yet only within a conceptual framework that turns its back on some of the pivotal assumptions of poststructuralism and postmodernism.

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CHAPTER 4

The Politics of Mimesis: Realism and Discursive Repression

1.4.1 The Avant-Garde and the “Realist Attitude” We have seen in the previous chapter that the poststructuralist critique of mimesis is never restricted to technical issues of semiotics. There is indeed an inherently political dimension to poststructuralism’s celebration of change and multiplicity: poststructuralist authors make it clear that their belief in the mutability of discourse and social configurations is the foundation of their political commitment. This Heraclitean world view is the basis upon which these authors challenge what they perceive to be realism’s conservative temptation toward discursive closure. Still, the leading figures of 1960s and ’70s poststructuralism articulated their politically based critique of realism only in general terms: few of their texts addressed the realist corpus directly. The task of exploring how the politics of the realist movement fare in the harsh light of deconstruction therefore fell to a later generation of scholars, mostly the 1980s and ’90s Anglo- American critics we may for convenience’s sake lump together as New Historicists. Conversely, even though the poststructuralist challenge against the politics of mimesis reached maturity only by the end of the twentieth century, it drew on several important pre-1960s precedents. Its main sources are the critique of the Enlightenment developed by the Frankfurt School, the libertarian ethos of the avant-

90 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds garde—surrealism, notably—, and the ontological skepticism of existentialist philosophy, which still haunts poststructuralist essays. Pam Morris and Luc Herman have highlighted the contribution of the Frankfurt School to the twentieth-century tradition of “antimimeticism” (Herman 139). Morris describes Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s rejection of mimesis as an offshoot of their pessimistic appraisal of the evolution of the Enlightenment into the twentieth century. In Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the promise of the philosophies of reason has been betrayed, and that the Enlightenment has become the handmaiden of a totalitarian process of domination and rationalization threatening “self-reflexive” reason itself (Morris 19; see Adorno and Horkheimer xii, 13). In many respects, their grim account of the drift of modern thought, politics, and society is similar to Lukács’s theory of reification. Yet it leads Adorno and Horkheimer to an analysis of realism diametrically opposed to Lukács’s. While most advocates of the movement—Lukács included—praise realism for embodying “the democratic impulse of modernity” (Morris 3),23 Adorno contends that the novels perpetuating the formulas of nineteenth-century realism remain shackled to a now discredited project (Adorno, “Situation” 39). Realism’s chief endeavor had been to represent “simple experience” (Adorno, “Situation” 37). In a modern context, this literary practice unfortunately boils down to reproducing the surface appearances of twentieth-century capitalism. Therefore, whatever its pretensions to political progressivism, the realist novel is complicit with the social configuration it portrays: it “only aids th[e] surface [of capitalist modernity] in its bu siness of misleading” (Adorno qtd. in Herman 138). Specifically, Adorno considers the realist novel incapable of addressing both the traumas of modernity and the strategies of rationalization that cause the deliquescence of contemporary reality. The novel’s epic format is ludicrous when applied to the experience of the world war (Adorno, “Situation” 38). Conversely, realist narration can hardly avoid aligning itself on the rationalized mindset of the culture industry—of cinema and press reporting, particularly (Adorno,

23 The set of authors depicting realism as an offshoot of the Enlightenment and therefore as an agent of social progress comprises Hippolyte Taine, Emile Zola, Vernon Louis Parrington, Alfred Kazin, Warner Berthoff, and Jacques Dubois.

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“Situation” 38). As such, it serves as “lubricant” to reification (Adorno, “Situation” 39). This implies that, like mass culture itself, realism conspires to portray the modern scene in a way that papers over conflicts: it offers the fantasy of a spuriously reconciled totality of experience (Adorno and Horkheimer, 121, 126). Realism’s presumed blindness to conflict—later interpreted by Lyotard as a denial of the “différend” (Différend 9)—must in Adorno’s logic be contrasted with the revolutionary potential of modernist art. The avant-garde’s formal experiments indeed expose the very discontents that the routinized aesthetics of mass culture (and, implicitly, realism) cover up. Thus, in direct reversal of Lukács’s condemnation of the avant-garde, Adorno confers to Kafka or Musil—not to the classic realists—, the privilege of articulating the aesthetic resistance against “the universal self-alienation” of contemporary life (Adorno qtd. in Herman 138). A similar appraisal of the politics of realism, admittedly phrased in a different conceptual grid, emerges from French surrealism and existentialism. The first surrealist manifesto of 1924, played a seminal role in this controversy, striking antirealist themes that have resonated in French theory until its late-twentieth-century moment of academic hegemony (Herman 72-81). In this text, André Breton suggests that the “realist attitude”—an offshoot of the positivistic ethos of the Enlightenment—blocks out the subject’s access to the unconscious— the supposedly freer psychological realm investigated by Freudian depth psychology (Breton qtd. in Herman 72). Herman indicates that Breton faults the realist attitude for enforcing a misguided organization of life: it “prevents the intellectual and moral freedom of the individual” in so far as it depicts experience in impoverished terms (Herman 72). Its insidious hegemony is due to its capacity to lure human subjects by a reassuring promise of logical continuity. Unlike the more fulfilling dream experience, it only sustains a life of “clarity.bordering on imbecility” (Breton qtd. in Herman 72): it confines the subject to the alienated plane of existence Lacan later called the imaginary and Adorno and Horkheimer call rationalized modernity. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay Qu’est-ce que la littérature (1948) partly reproduces the terms of Breton’s argument. There is admittedly some irony in this intellectual convergence: Sartre seldom misses an opportunity to excoriate surrealism, which he

92 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds portrays as the ultimate expression of art for art’s sake and therefore as the antithesis of his own ideal of politically and existentially “committed” art (87). We have seen above that Sartre is not hostile to the broader realist project. In his view, existentially and politically committed prose should rely on a variant of mimetic reflectionism formalist readers are bound to regard as utterly naive. Yet Sartre also contends that the mid-nineteenth-century novel—therefore most classic realist fiction--has not been able to render accounts of the world in proper existential terms, namely as “a productive disequilibrium” (163). These existentially based objections position his analysis between Lukács on the one hand, and Adorno, and Breton on the other. Sartre’s comments on realism address Flaubert and Maupassant. He suggests that these writers’ mimetic textual devices—what Ian Watt would later call their “formal realism”—prevent them from acknowledging “eternal freedom” (87) and “the strangeness and opacity of the world” (87, 147). In this view, Flaubert’s scrupulously mimetic practice paradoxically fulfils the program of aestheticism: instead of making the world available to action, it leaves it “petrified” (162). In true art-for-art’s-sake fashion, Flaubert’s writing “get[s] rid of human beings and things” by turning them “into stone” (162). Similarly, Maupassant’s realist craft keeps his narratives at a safe distance from “the inconclusive historical process at the moment of its own making” and transmute the latter into “accomplished history” (177). The devices in question are chiefly the novelistic use of the simple past, which relegates any “adventure” to the status of a “very antiquated, abolished disturbance” (174), and the reliance on paternalistic narrators, whose story-telling rituals shield readers from any exposure to “irreducible change” (175). In Sartre’s eyes, the resulting “negation of human time” (164) fulfils a political function: it narrates anecdotes “from the point-of-view of the absolute, namely, of order” (178). Therefore, nineteenth-century novelistic technique offers “a reassuring image of the bourgeoisie” (169) and proclaims the “eternity of the capitalist mode of production” (173). It serves in short as one of the preferred idioms of those existential hypocrites and social exploiters Sartre sometimes calls “bastards” [“salauds”] (Sartre, Existentialisme 85). Due to the time-lag in critical reception, these mid-twentieth- century analyses of the politics of realism—in particular those

93 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds developed in German cultural theory—, became available to academics for the most part in the 1970s, during the development of cultural studies and deconstruction, when they were rephrased in the terminology of poststructuralism and postmodernism. The existentialist critique of the realist attitude was absorbed into French semiology through Barthes’s first essays—Writing Degree Zero (1953) and Mythologies (1957)—, which develop an analysis of bourgeois discourse quite similar to Sartre’s. Similarly, surrealism’s objections to mimesis served as basis for psychoanalytically based arguments: Leo Bersani’s often-quoted essay “Realism and the Fear of Desire” suggests that realism sets up a “reassuring myth” obscuring the “social fragmentation” of nineteenth-century society and the liberating momentum of desire (246). Bersani’s text is in this respect similar to Julia Kristeva’s critique of the novelistic “closed text,” which I mentioned in Chapter 3 (Séméiotikè 52). On the other hand, the legacy of the Frankfurt School was channelled into cultural studies through the writings of Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Fredric Jameson, leading these theoreticians to the conclusion that realism is structurally unfit to account for dissociated postmodernity.

1.4.2 Realism as Naturalized Ideology and Performative Enforcement Given these precedents, the scholars of the 1980s and 1990s here labelled as New Historicists could avail themselves of a concept of the politics of fiction suggesting that mimesis is inherently shackled to an objectionable variant of discursive and ideological closure. This premise was all the more compelling for 1980s scholars as it made realism’s purported conservatism an avatar of deconstruction’s nemesis—logocentrism. Among the scholars who reinterpreted realism and naturalism along those lines, one should mention June Howard, Walter Benn Michaels, Mark Seltzer, Amy Beth Kaplan, Rachel Bowlby, Brooks Thomas, and Donna Campbell in the United States, as well as Catherine Gallagher and Nancy Armstrong in Britain. Their methodology draws on a pool of interrelated principles derived from neo-Marxism, neo-pragmatism, feminism, Foucault’s analysis of power, and multiculturalism. Though only a few among them may have explicitly endorsed the New Historicist label, their choice of mingling cultural materialism with (post)structuralist theories of discourse renders their research cognate to that produced by the core figures of the New Historicism—Stephen Greenblatt and

94 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds his followers.24 New Historicist scholars in this broadened meaning of the term focused primarily on American and British realism and naturalism from the mid-nineteenth to the turn of the twentieth- century. Their insights could, however, conceivably be transposed to other national traditions and to realist works in other media. The literary analyses they have elaborated are remarkably attentive to the textual specificities and historical anchorage of realist writing. Yet in the intellectual context sketched out above—poststructuralism and postmodernism—they were bound to approach their object defensively, with the suspicion that realism is either disingenuous or deluded about its own epistemology and political ends. What makes the contribution of the New Historicists valuable for the present argument, however, is their emphasis on the hitherto disregarded complexities of the realist corpus—its dialogical tensions, its appropriation of literary traditions seemingly antithetical to mimesis, and its complex imbrications within social configurations. Hinting that the political import of New Historicist scholarship may not be its most enduring legacy is admittedly ironical, for its reputation was established precisely on the basis of the political radicalism of its arguments. New Historicist essays, Amy Kaplan points out, shattered the left-wing/liberal consensus about the social function of realism that had prevailed in Anglo-American criticism until the 1960s (Kaplan, Social 6-7). Early or mid-twentieth-century critics such Parrington, Kazin, or Berthoff, I have pointed out in Chapter 1, took for granted that realism serves as a medium of anticapitalist dissent and existential empowerment. Nineteen-eighties scholars, on the contrary, view the fiction of Dreiser and Norris as “a conservative force complicit with capitalist relations” (Kaplan, A. 7). Walter Benn Michaels’s path-breaking reading of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie emblematizes this political re-evaluation: Michaels contends that Dreiser’s novel derives its “power [...] not from its ‘scathing’ picture of capitalist ‘conditions’ but from its unabashed and extraordinarily literal acceptance of the economy that produced these conditions” (35). Similarly, New-Historicist readers argue that realist and naturalist authors do not challenge—indeed sometimes virulently

24 See Veeser (“Introduction”; “The New Historicism”) and Pieters (23-27) for the definition of the corpus and methodology of the New Historicism.

95 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds re-inscribe—the gender and racial boundaries of their time.25 Naturalism, in particular, is faulted for making “the masculinist discourse of the Progressive Era” one of its “essential” components (Dudley 14). In the New Historicists’ perspective, the conservatism of the realist corpus is enforced by means of two main ideological strategies, which can be analyzed respectively by reference to Barthes and Foucault. The first is the semiotic procedure by which, as Barthes puts it, ideology becomes “naturalized” (Mythologies 140); the second is the performative dynamics by which discourse generates Foucaultian power effects through the agency of speech acts. I indicate above that in Barthes’s perspective, the patterning of perception performed by bourgeois discourse is politically significant in so far as it disguises “history into nature” (Mythologies 129). Sartre had previously pointed out that bourgeois ideology acts as a dehistoricizing force: it cloaks as objective facts representations that should more appropriately be perceived as historically and existentially contingent. Barthes aligns himself on this view as he points out that the bourgeoisie conceals the inherent constructedness (or “arbitrariness”) of its own discourse: its “pseudo physis” transmutes “fabricated” political situations (Mythologies 143; emphasis in original) into the “unchangeable” features of “Eternal man” (Mythologies, 142, 140). If applied to realism, Barthes’s argument suggests that novels claiming to investigate what Frank Norris calls the “complications of life” (Literary 51) reality in its raw authenticity—pass off mere ideological constructs as nature itself. In this reading framework, the naturalization of ideology performed by realist works is the more disingenuous as these texts focus on phenomena for which literate, presumably (upper)-middle- class audiences had thus far few sociological landmarks: realism constructs rigid, dehistoricized images of the nascent hegemony of the capitalist classes, the emergence of the urban industrial metropolis, extreme poverty, or the new gender roles generated by consumerism and a new labor market. Amy Kaplan indicates for instance that William Dean Howells’s urban fiction “tests the viability of domesticity as a touchstone of the real” (Social 47): it renders self-

25 For a critical discussion of gender and race in literary realism and naturalism, see Campbell (4, 60), Wardley (640-44), and Amy Kaplan (46).

96 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds evident the idea that, in a threatening urban environment, the (upper)- middle-class domestic sphere remains the sole rational “common ground” (Social 46). Social groups outside of this perimeter are caricatured as picturesque, threatening, or “unreal” (Socioal 44). June Howard argues likewise that naturalism, which had previously been praised for enlarging the literary scope beyond the perimeter of upper- middle-class life, mobilizes the rhetoric of social Darwinism in order to portray working-class characters, immigrants, and racial Others as inherently inferior: naturalism maps them as a mere gallery of beast- like “brute[s],” paradoxically both passive and irrationally violent (Howard 91, 95). As far as gender goes, Seltzer points out that realism and naturalism incorporate theories of sexual difference attempting to “provide a biological explanation and justification for gender inequalities” (Bodies 138): Historically constructed gender is thereby naturalized as biological sex. Additionally, ideological naturalization requires that realist and naturalist texts not only foist upon their audience the contents of their new social maps but also legitimize their knowledge procedures. Howard and Seltzer contend indeed that the realist or naturalist pseudo-physis seems the more compelling as it is vindicated by a reading contract flaunting the presumed cognitive neutrality of science (Howard 126-27; Seltzer, Bodies 44). In his literary panorama of the rising bourgeoisie, Balzac modeled his paradigm of characterization on the theories of botanist Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire and anatomist Georges Cuvier (Le Père 43; also Dubois 108); Zola validated his literary investigations of late-nineteenth-century French society by invoking Claude Bernard’s medical research (“Experimental” 162); American naturalists borrowed scientific and philosophical concepts from Darwinian philosopher Herbert Spencer, whom Dreiser regards as “a great father of knowledge” (qtd. in Moers 135).26 Mid- nineteenth-century middle-class readers may have been fooled into believing that realism thereby develops a world view that is intellectually daring and epistemologically sound. Yet the New Historicists imply that the cognitive “speech act” of realist fiction, to take up Philippe Hamon’s term (132; italics in original), cannot aspire

26 For a discussion of naturalism’s relation to Darwinism, see also Bannister (217) and; Bowlby (53).

97 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds to such neutrality and acts instead as a covert gesture of ideological advocacy.

The mere suspicion that what is presented as scientific truth serves as vehicle of ideological naturalization implies that the act of knowledge is also a gesture of power: naturalization is therefore closely interwoven with discursive performativity. Symptomatically, New- Historicist scholars are hardly disturbed by realism’s and naturalism’s occasional lapses into what non-poststructuralist observers would call false science. Instead of scientific truth (science’s propositional content), the main concerns of the New Historicists are the power effects (the illocutionary force) generated by realism’s endorsement of science’s referential epistemology. Firstly, the very notion of a scientifically grounded cognitive authority contradicts the Saussurean theory of the sign: the latter is inextricably linked to the hypothesis of the linguistic articulation of perception, which precludes the possibility of a monological, purportedly scientific mapping of the world. Secondly, if realist texts cannot act as reliable snapshots of social states of affairs, their naturalized ideology must derive its political impact through unacknowledged performative mechanisms: if novels are denied the possibility to offer cognitive maps of society through their propositional content, their capacity to produce political effects must indeed be attributed to their ability to trigger politically significant speech acts. Realist texts, in this logic, mobilize performative strategies that “produc[e]” subjects and institutions (Michaels 20) or “manage” social tensions and anxieties (Jameson, “Reification” 25). Foucault’s analysis of the nexus of power and knowledge is predictably central to this performative approach of the cognitive politics of realism. The French philosopher offers a fitting paradigm for the process by which texts inscribe class, gender, and racial stereotypes. In the first place, Foucault serves as reference point for the New Historicism because he offers a cultural politics that eschews the presumed naiveté of past theories—Marxism, notably. Instead of assuming that privileged observers—politically enlightened scholars, for instance—may aspire to some level of cognitive authority and moral superiority allowing them to demystify ideological strategies objectively, Foucault “dispense[s] with the constituent subject” and makes possible an analysis “account[ing] for the constitution of the

98 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds subject within an historical framework” (Foucault qtd. in Michaels 178).27 The object of a Foucaultian analysis of realism and naturalism is therefore not the ability of given texts to reveal or conceal the truth of a historical moment, but rather the complex strategies by which these works construct subjects (authors, characters, readers) and empower them to manage and control a field of power relations. Secondly, Foucault’s thematics—surveillance, the power effects of the humane sciences—are cognate to the specific concerns of realist and naturalist authors. In his reading of Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, Seltzer brings forward affinities between realist fiction and the “dream of absolute surveillance and supervision” deconstructed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (Seltzer, “Princess” 101). Naturalist fiction, on the other hand, focuses on the emerging urban-industrial world and is therefore “trouble[d]” with the “mechanical and biological” processes involved in population management (Seltzer, Bodies 116). As Zola himself indicates, albeit in a different terminology, naturalism aims to “master” the biological reproduction of historically constructed subjects and the criminal behavior of subaltern social groups (Zola, “Experimental” 178)—a strategy that can approached in the light of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics developed in The History of Sexuality. Two influential 1980s readings of American naturalism—June Howard’s and Walter Benn Michaels’s—are phrased along these Foucaultian lines. Howard makes makes no explicit reference to Foucault, yet implicitly aligns herself on his views when she points out that the naturalist stereotyping of working-class and immigrants masses is politically effective because it sets up an unequal, scientifically validated subject-object relationship: the scientific gaze in naturalism amounts to a performative “gesture of control” enabling sociological or psychological experts to look at lower-class subjects from a position of superiority (Howard 126). In this, American naturalist novels pave the way for the wave of reforms of the pre- WWI Progressive era—political developments Howard does not regard as beneficial to the working classes (131). Similarly, Walter Benn Michaels, in some of the most defamiliarizing readings of turn- of-the-twentieth-century literature, applies Foucault to a field the

27 See Pieters (59-61) for an extended discussion of Foucault’s impact on the New Historicism.

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French philosopher seldom discussed—power effects in economic discourse. Michaels’s severe judgment about the politics of naturalism is derived from an analysis of the process by which the “money economy” serves as a performative matrix regulating not only the fashioning of human subjects but also various modes of political and artistic discourses (Michaels 178). William Dean Howells’s realist fiction, in this light, models itself on an “economy of scarcity in which power, happiness, and moral virtue are all seen to depend on minimizing desire” (Michaels 35). Dreiser’s naturalism, on the contrary, manifests an “insatiable appetite for representation” which the novelist identifies with sexual promiscuity, corporate greed, and his own artistic practice (Michaels 19). Thus defined, the object of realism and naturalism no longer has any relation to the humanistically grounded imitation of life.

1.4.3 The Covert Hybridity of Realist and Naturalist Discourse Describing realist works in performative terms affects our perception of the texts’ discursive make-up, of the intertextual links they support, and of their interfacing with non-literary social practices. When realist texts are no longer perceived as mirrors of society, they come to function as arenas where discursive strategies are rehearsed, initiated or, as Michaels puts it, “exemplifi[ed]” (Michaels 27; emphasis in original). One might ironically minimize the scope of this performative shift by pointing out that it only generates a modified form of mimesis: strategies deployed in social life are re-enacted within literary texts, yielding an imitation of discursive gestures instead of the familiar quasi-iconic reproduction of phenomenal appearances. Still, the performative turn enacted in New Historicist scholarship undeniably makes readers sensitive to the texts’ dialogized, heterogeneous configuration. It discredits the belief that realism commits a literary and epistemological lapse when it strays from the confine of the reflectionist mechanisms of “formal realism” (Watt 34): if texts are seen to carry out political speech acts, there are no strict prescriptions as to the ways these performative gestures must be carried out. Instead, performative interpretations assume that barriers between supposedly incompatible discourses—fiction and non-fiction, realist and non-realist genres—are porous: “literary and non-literary ‘texts,’” Aram Veeser contends in an introductory essay

100 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds to New-Historicist literary criticism, “circulate inseparably” (Veeser, “Introduction” xi). New Historicist readings are indeed famous for handling fictional and non-fictional sources on the same footing: equal treatment of artistic and non-artistic phenomena is a defining feature of the New Historicism’s cultural materialism (Veeser, “Introduction” xi). Earlier interpretations, however attentive to historical and social determinants, maintained a qualitative distinction between literary texts and what was still regarded as mere background. There was an implicit requirement that, even in the analysis of realist works, specific reading procedures had to be reserved for literature, documentary sources, and the language of politics: 1920s realism scholar Vernon Louis Parrington castigates authors who ignore the boundary between literature and propaganda (325, 346). On the contrary, British New Historicist scholar Nancy Armstrong argues that the development of the mid-nineteenth-century English novel cannot be understood without taking into consideration realism’s appropriation of the semiotics of photography: the latter established an “epistemology of knowing” setting the norm for literature itself (Armstrong 21).28 Even more spectacularly, Walter Benn Michaels’s New-Historicist “The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism” discerns similar discursive strategies within Frank Norris’s naturalist novel McTeague, late-nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil painting (164), abstract expressionist canvasses, and obscure economic tracts devoted to the gold standard controversy (145-146). Intriguingly, Michaels interprets this constellation of works, most of which harboring claims to referential accuracy, through a reading grid otherwise reserved for romance—a genre that Hawthorne himself sharply demarcated from real life (65-67). In an earlier scholarly perspective, Michaels’s reading would indeed have be mistaken for an analysis of Norris’s gold symbolism—a sound, specifically literary topic. In New- Historicist logic, on the contrary, Michaels’s object of study consists in the power effects triggered both in literary and non-literary discourse by what he calls the “logic of naturalism” (137), a discursive practice whose financially focused speech acts work indiscriminately in fiction and documentary sources.

28 See Morris (139) for an analysis of New Historicist views on intermediality in realism.

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From the perspective of previous realist scholarship, the most disturbing feature in this paradigm shift is arguably the tendency of 1980s and ’90s essays to deconstruct the divide that was thought to separate literary idioms purporting to designate the real from those devoted to sentiment, illusion, the gothic, or the ideal. It is in this respect no coincidence that Michaels’s essay should meddle with the interface between realism and romance. Earlier critics of naturalism— Charles Child Walcutt, Donald Pizer, even Norris himself—had emphasized the surprising overlap between the fiction of Norris or Dreiser and the romance works of the American Renaissance (Walcutt 9-29; Pizer, Realism 107-109; Norris, Literary 72). Within this earlier critical framework, however, this intertextual interference was deemed incompatible with documentary ambitions: it was best regarded as a temporary suspension of referential claims, manifesting naturalism’s anchorage in a corpus of canonically superior, less materialistic texts. For late-twentieth-century critics, however, romance—especially the dark register of naturalist gothic—is no foreign body in texts that claim to capture reality. In an analysis that lies closer to Althusserian Marxism than to the New Historicism, Fredric Jameson points out that romance and realism do coexist in major nineteenth-century works, and that the resulting “generic discontinuities” (“Magical,” 144; emphasis in original), far from parasitical, are politically and dialogically significant: they mark at the cultural level the residual coexistence of an “organic,” pre-industrial mode of production with the “process of [...] rationalization” of “nascent capitalism” (“Magical” 148). Other late-twentieth-century critics argue that the same dialogical interface plays a metarealist function, marking the boundary between what can be represented clearly and what escapes the documentary gaze—the murky field film noir critic James Naremore felicitously calls the “social fantastic” (16).29 Similarly, New Historicist essays re-examine the relationship between realism and the highly popular sentimental romances of mid-nineteenth- century feminine literature—traditions that had been vilified by novelists themselves as the countertype of socially referential fiction. Alfred Habegger, Amy Kaplan, and Lynn Wardley indicate for instance that early American realists—Howells, James, Wharton—,

29 For an analysis of the gothic discourse of literary naturalism see also Dow (25) and Den Tandt (Urban 33)

102 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds far from negating the premises of feminine fiction, appropriated its formula and inflected it in order to broaden its scope toward the exploration of social issues of the public sphere (Habegger 64-65; Kaplan, A. 69-71; Wardley 640). Thus, however vigorously realism castigates romance as antithetical to real life, it cannot fail to integrate these unexpected accents within the dialogical fabric of its texts.

1.4.4 Realism Dissolved In several respects, the New Historicism leaves realism a better charted field. Even scholars who do not endorse the New- Historicism’s theoretical premises cannot but welcome the revelation of new complexities in the make-up of the realist corpus and in its links to other genres. On the other hand, New-Historicist interpretations risk theorizing their object of study out of existence. Deconstruction is sometimes touted as an end in itself among 1980s and ’90s critics. Several of them mention that their interest for turn-of- the-twentieth-century fiction was sparked by the discovery of unexpected convergences between aspects of the realist corpus—the rhetorical excesses of naturalism, the texts’ performative dimension— and the phenomena investigated by poststructuralist theoreticians of signifying processes.30 In this respect, postructuralist approaches handle realism as formalism previously did: in the same way as Eichenbaum, Jakobson, or Watt brought realism back to the fold of literary art, deconstructionist readers turn Balzac’s, Howells’s and Norris’s fiction into unexpected displays for the heterogeneous, indeterminate flow of the signifying chain. It is, however, not clear whether such arguments take stock of the paradoxical impact of deconstruction upon realism’s status as an object of study. Lacan and Derrida may feel no qualms about exposing what Lacan calls “realist imbecility” (“Lettre,” 35). Kaplan, Howard, or Michaels, on the contrary, have a vested interest at least in their own ability to define realism as a literary genre and a cultural movement. Yet the poststructuralist premises of their analyses leave realism an insubstantial shell: New Historicist essays must ceaselessly refer to objects—“realism” and “naturalism”—whose right to existence (at least as consistent discursive practices) their own

30 For analyses of naturalism as proto-deconstructionist fiction, see Baguley (208), Dow (25), and Amy Kaplan (160).

103 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds arguments deny. In so doing, they fall into the deconstructionist aporia Derrida had acknowledged in his early writings on différance: the necessity to resort to “ill-named” concepts whose very signifiers, if philosophical consistency were to be given due credit, should be crossed-out in every occurrence (Grammatologie 31). The difficulties experienced by the New Historicism in circumscribing realism’s mode of existence are evident if the theoretical movement’s most explicitly anti-referential principle—the performative view of realist texts—is driven to its logical extreme. If realist works are indeed sequences of speech acts meshing into the broader performative process by which human experience at large is generated, it would be fair to enquire whether all varieties of discourse contribute equally to the resulting mechanism of reality construction. Does one have to accept the counterintuitive view that no discursive practice plays a more central role than others in the engendering of reaityl? Ihab Hassan, in a re-evaluation of mimesis, points out that functional distinctions defining the relation of texts towards reality have been made at all stages of cultural history: Specific texts— Hassan mentions the drawings illustrating European explorers’ travel narratives—are entrusted with the mapping of experience, while others—paintings by Klee and Kandinky, for instance—pursue other goals (“Realism” 74). The distinction thus established is, according to Hassan, not disqualified by the realization that the designated maps of experience are ideologically inflected (“Realism” 74): the explorers’ “imperative to observe” does not cancel itself out because it indeed helps “Britannia rule the waves” (“Realism” 74”). Hassan admittedly fails to specify on which foundation the cognitive trust enjoyed by world-mapping discourses is grounded. Yet his remarks expose by way of contrast the paradoxes incurred by theoretical approaches that deny themselves the capacity to establish such distinctions. In New-Historicist logic, one should indeed agree with the counterintuive contention that Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) is epistemologically equivalent to Norris’s McTeague. Similarly, it would be difficult to establish that Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke relates to historical events in radically different ways from Mario Azzopardi’s On Hostile Ground (2000), a made-for-TV disaster movie chronicling the collapse of the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade into giant sinkholes. At best, one may contend that supposedly realist texts differ from their

104 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds non-realist counterparts because they mobilize specialized power effects generating an environment their audience has been ideologically trained to regard as actual. However, since the New Historicism cannot attribute any ontological privilege to any performative discourse claiming to signify reality, it is unable to determine how such reality-simulating speech acts may ever have been compelling or felicitous to their addressees, and why they have not constantly been contested. It is therefore not surprising that New Historicists should venture only with the greatest misgivings into debates on genre definition and should even more rarely comment on the detailed outline of the realist corpus.31 Emulating Tzvetan Todorov’s and Watt’s formalist arguments, most New Historicists confer to the principles laid down in realist manifestos the status of epistemologically naïve, historically contingent constructs. Realism, in this view, seems to have existed as an accident in nineteenth-century literary history. Michael Davitt Bell, for instance, after analyzing a broad corpus of writers’ comments on their own craft, concludes that American realists never endorsed principles that amounted to “any coherent formal tradition” (4). Other essays articulate genre definitions of sorts, yet at the price of significant literary historical contradictions and omissions. Howard, drawing on the structuralist semantics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, offers a definitional matrix of naturalism in which the thematics of determinism and free agency are reshuffled into a set of binary relations (40-69). Michaels’s discussion of the economic/semiotic episteme of realism and naturalism performs a similar definitional function, albeit with less theoretical clarity. Yet the two critics, as they deny themselves the possibility of invoking the most decisive criterion marking out realism from other genres—the capacity to map social reality—, are led to align themselves on existing canonical definitions or to expand the canon without conceptual consistency. Symptomatically, what Michaels calls the “logic of naturalism” floats between two incompatible definitions (137): on the one hand, it designates the loose weave of cross-generic speech acts depicted above, which implies a spectacular broadening of the field of

31 Critical discussions aiming to redefine realism and naturalism while taking heed of New Historicist arguments appear in Amy Kaplan (158-160), Barrish (111-157), and Den Tandt (“American” 107-118; “Refashioning” 414-420).

105 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds naturalism. On the other, it seems to characterize the literary kernel of works by Dreiser and Norris—canonical figures that were labeled as naturalists by critical traditions New Historicist essays were ostensibly meant to challenge. Ironically, as it carries out what we might call the dissolution of realism, the New Historicism undercuts one of its most productive contributions—the analysis of the dialogized hybridity of referential genres. The dialogization of realism and romance described by Jameson or by Michaels can indeed not be discursively significant if the texts’ referential claims are neutralized: actual dialogization occurs only if documentary components are identifiable and epistemologically validated. If not, realism merges with romance altogether, while romance loses the adversary landmark against which it so far defined itself. More damagingly, readings that complacently delegitimize the referential claims of realism may implausibly hint that non-realist discourses enjoy a higher degree of epistemological consistency or canonical prestige than their referential counterpart32. By contrast, the present argument requires a paradigm of discursive dialogization that views realism’s referential prerogatives as an asset, not a philosophical error. I indicate in the introduction to the present essay that, after its moment of cultural dominance, realism perpetuated itself through the twentieth century until the present by interacting with modernist and postmodernist experimentalism. The resulting dialogized realist diaspora would be void of any interest— and would even be barely identifiable—if its referential components were the upshot of merely formalistic principles of verisimilitude. Yet few critical studies address the various manifestations of twentieth- century referential art as elements within a single tradition: doing so requires overcoming the academic skepticism toward the one unifying principle that connects these referential works—their capacity to designate the world through art. On the contrary, legitimizing the possibility that art may represent the life-world not only solves the aporias of the New Historicist concept of realism, it also counters most of the other antirealist arguments surveyed in the present

32 The critical and popular success of magic realism since the 1980s may to some extent be attributed to this covert endorsement of the epistemological claims of non- realist genres. Jose David Saldivar’s celebration of magic realism as a quintessentially postmodern realist idiom is illustrative of this critical choice (526).

106 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds chapter. For if the mapping of society can be shown to be possible, the charge that referential discourse is politically objectionable loses any credibility: a reliable map cannot be faulted for being inherently conservative. Likewise, the presumed incompatibility of referential discourse and art, denounced by formalism, is no longer a given. Referential discourse enters into the make-up of the vast majority of works of art; if this idiom cannot be proven to be epistemologically flawed, one cannot take for granted that it renders these works aesthetically invalid.

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CHAPTER 5

Anti-Realism and the Visual Media

1.5.1 Semiology and the Vanishing Object of Photography The poststructuralist and neo-historicist critique of mimesis, I have pointed out in the previous chapters, delegitimizes all criteria for the definition of the realist corpus: arguments hostile to mimesis, if driven to their logical extreme, imply the dissolution of realism itself. This imputed failure of referential art is on first inspection more likely to affect literary works than the visual media. In the Introduction to the present essay, I mention that the twentieth-century critique of realism has been particularly devastating to realist literature because the raw materials of literary works—the arbitrary signs of natural language— are signifiers deprived of stable, necessary bonds to extralinguistic referents. Conversely, contemporary realism functions within a field where the representation of reality has to a large extent been entrusted to documents integrating photographic or cinematographic images, whether produced by analogical or digital processes. To viewers unacquainted with the semiotics of the graphic arts, the technologically generated mimesis on which the latter images rely commands a considerable degree of referential trust. Photography and film trigger powerful visual illusions. According to a famous anecdote of the birth of cinema, the spectators of one of the first exhibitions of the Lumière Cinématographe felt physically threatened by the screening of L’arrivée d’un train en gare, a short film featuring a train entering the station of the French Riviera resort of La Ciotat (Cook,

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David 11; Balio 37). This incident, whose specifics may admittedly have been overblown in popular film histories,33 reveals that the ability to produce kinetic thrills was one of the major attractions of early silent film. Logically, such pleasure relies on the ability of the photographic process to offer life-like traces of objects (Balio 12). Also, beyond visual illusion, photography is often regarded as a vehicle of documentary and scientific truth. Photography and film, whether produced as prints on an argentic film or pixels on a digital captor, are routinely used as documentary evidence not only in crime fiction but in actual judicial procedures (Gombrich, “Standards” 182- 83). Their presumed referential effectiveness is anchored in the fact that photographs and film footage seem to entertain a relation to reality that cannot be infinitely renegotiated: as traces of a non- linguistic ground, they seem unlikely to lose of all intrinsic meaning through their various reinterpretations. Because the present discussion of contemporary realism partly endorses the claims of photographic mimesis, it is the more important for us to scrutinize the referential trust granted to what Roland Barthes calls photography’s “analogical representation” (“Rhetoric” 15). The argument developed in Part II of the present essay indeed suggests that referential art can be rescued by factoring in the contribution of media using non-arbitrary signs, chief among them photography and film. The corpus of contemporary realism, I argue, is composed of texts that are either in implicit dialogical interaction with the visual media or that directly integrate photographic documents within their semiotic fabric. Photographic images in this cultural field rank among a gamut of non-arbitrary signs whose material status allows them to serve as referential anchoring points: they stabilize the meaning of the textual elements with which they interact, counteracting the dissolution of reference against which natural language cannot easily struggle out of its own resources. Still, in order to prove that such graphically based referential trust is sound, we must take under consideration the arguments suggesting that photographic images lack the semantic self-evidence they are usually granted. Up to the mid-

33 Contrary to what is often alleged L’arrivée was not screened during the very first major Cinématographe exhibition at the Grand Café in December 1895. It was released only a few weeks later. Also, little reliable evidence exists about actual audience response (Sklar, Film 29).

109 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds twentieth-century, most academic discussions of photographs endorsed Samuel Morse’s belief that mechanically produced images— daguerreotypes, in Morse’s comments—are “copies” or even “portions of nature herself” (qtd. in Sekula 86). Yet since the 1960s, the trend has been spectacularly reversed: antirealism has been given an unexpectedly strong purchase in the analysis of graphic signs. The evolution of the graphic media themselves in the late twentieth century and beyond—in particular, the development of computer generated imagery and virtual reality—seems to have vindicated such antirealist interpretation of visual evidence. In the comments below, I review these skeptical arguments mostly through the perspective of Saussurean semiology. The critique of photographic realism has admittedly been waged through various theoretical angles. Yet there is some advantage to using the theory of signs derived from the Swiss linguist as main framework of reference: Saussurean semiology articulates in particularly uncompromising terms objections to photographic mimesis that are phrased with more circumspection in other theoretical approaches. Its radicalism has made it the template of the most explicitly antirealist claims this essay must eventually challenge.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) develop an intriguingly skeptical appraisal of the power of photography, antithetical to the mimetic trust commonly granted to visual evidence. In both movies, a crime is viewed through the supposedly reliable gaze of photographic equipment. Hitchcock’s wheelchair-bound war photographer (James Stewart), as he plays the peeping Tom with his telephoto lenses, thinks he has spotted a crime of passion in an apartment on the opposite side of his block’s courtyard. Similarly, the fashion photographer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (David Hemmings), as he enlarges the negatives of snapshots taken in a London park, realizes that he has witnessed the aftermath of a murder he was not able to perceive with the naked eye. Yet both in Hitchcock and Antonioni, the putative objects of photographic capture—the very objects of crime—remain elusive, and their value is refashioned under the protagonists’ and the film viewers’ eyes. In Rear Window, the actuality of the murder is at first unclear, and the war photographer, unable to cross the courtyard in order to collect evidence on site, is led

110 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds to elaborate several inconclusive crime scenarios. When mischief is ascertained beyond reasonable doubt, one crucial component of the photographed (or, more accurately, the photographically espied) object—the victim’s body—proves difficult to locate. Antonioni’s fashion photographer seems by comparison more successful in his object search: he is at first able to retrieve the body he has spotted on his enlarged negatives. Yet his prints and negatives are stolen, and he proves unable to communicate his discovery to his stoned-out swinging-London acquaintances. When revisiting the crime scene, he discovers that the corpse has disappeared. While Hitchcock’s narrative brings its mysteries to predictable closure (the reality of the crime is confirmed; its perpetrator is arrested), Antonioni’s ending declines to resolve the paradox raised by his plot: the photographer’s vanished snapshots remain forever objectless. Hitchcock’s and Antonioni’s films may be read as allegories of the difficulties facing theories of signs in their handling of photography. On first inspection, photographic/cinematographic meaning seems proper fare for classic structuralist semiology. Saussure, in the first chapter of his Course in General Linguistics, mentions the possibility of a general “science of semiology” taking all signifying media into consideration (Saussure 17). At one point, the Swiss linguist mentions photography among semiology’s likely objects of study: photographs, he writes, qualify as “completely natural signs” (Saussure 68). Yet it is judicious in this matter to be more strictly Saussurean than Saussure himself. In the general drift of Course on General Linguistic, the author’s initial assessment of photographs amounts to saying that these documents are hardly signs at all. Since Saussurean semiology is to an overwhelming extent beholden to the principle of arbitrary signification, it must confine supposedly natural signs to a subordinate status, even disqualifying them as signifying material altogether. Photography proves therefore a vexing topic for Saussure’s disciples: it is a paradoxical object that leads their analyses to surprisingly counterintuitive conclusions. In “the Rhetoric of the Image”—a pioneering Saussurean reading of photography—, Roland Barthes faults the medium itself for its tricky semiotic status. Photographs, he argues, do not qualify as signs because it is impossible to conceive of an “analogical ‘code’” compatible with the workings of photographic mimesis (“Rhetoric” 15). Linguists indeed “refuse the status of language to all communication by analogy” (“Rhetoric” 15). Actually,

111 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds as Hitckcock’s and Antonioni’s films suggest, the roots of the difficulty lie even deeper: they reside in the interface between sign, matter, and world. What is at stake here is the very definition of what counts as objects from a semiological perspective. Saussure’s concept of human experience, I have pointed out in Chapter 3, may be called thingless. Unlike the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, which I discuss below, it does not admit of determinate objects—let alone significant tokens—with any degree of autonomy outside of sign systems. For Saussure, objects and ideas remain mere “shapeless masses” unless they are articulated by the signifiers and signifieds of sign systems (Saussure 112). Taken at face value, this claim deprives photography of all specificity with regard to other signs, including natural language. In the traditional perspective of photographic mimesis, the representational privilege of photography resides indeed in its mechanical reproduction of the features of what Ogden and Richards felicitously call “propertied things” (188)—pre-existing entities with a hard, determinate outline, even some degree of intrinsic meaning. On the contrary, a strict reading of Saussure suggests that photographs can at best be replicas of a background that is itself articulated semiotically by linguistic and cultural conventions. Thus, even if one disregards possible distortions induced by the photographic process, the meaning of photographs will be as immotivated and conventional as the semioticized ground they reproduce. Beyond its graphic signifier, a photograph has no referent: it can only have a signified, or, to use another Saussurean term, a “value” (Saussure 111)—a structural meaning infinitely rewritten according to the sign’s context or to changing cultural norms. Instead of being stencils of pre-packaged, proto-signifying hard things, photographs are clones of a signifying sequence endowed with merely conventional, relative value. Understandably, Saussurean analyses of photographs do not dwell on the embarrassingly counterintuitive notion of the dissolution of the photographic object. They focus instead on the uses of photography of which the Swiss linguist’s theory best renders account—the delivery of meaning by intentionally scripted images. Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and “The Rhetoric of the Image” indeed discuss what might be called rhetorically staged shots—the iconography of advertising and propaganda, saturated with more or less consciously encoded ideological messages. We have seen in chapter 3 that

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Mythologies tackles photography in its analysis of a Paris Match cover featuring a young African soldier saluting the French flag (Barthes, Mythologies 116). Likewise, “The Rhetoric of the Image” meticulously decodes a pasta advertisement evoking stereotypes of Italy by its green, white, and red tones and by its carefully orchestrated display of boxes of spaghetti surrounded by tomatoes (16). From these examples, Barthes infers that photographic meaning is generated by the two-tiered semiotic scaffolding—“connotation” superimposed over “denotation”—that, in his view, structures all modern mythologies ( “Rhetoric” 21; see also Mythologies 115). At the level of denotation, photographs display their object iconically. The denotative meaning of these photographed objects is then further negotiated through the connotative mechanisms of “ideology” at large (“Rhetoric” 24). Yet in this system, it is clear that denotation—the literal level of meaning production—is a weak, inessential link. Though Barthes labors to determine the value of photographic denotation, he is led to argue this mechanism produces a “message without a code”: it remains “quasi-tautological,” yielding no meaning of its own ( “Rhetoric” 21). The meaning of a photograph is therefore pieced together for the most part by the secondary system of connotations deployed over and above the literal image. Symptomatically, this assignment of meaning often requires the use of “caption[s]” anchoring—i.e., stabilizing—the meaning of otherwise indeterminate images (“Rhetoric” 19). Worse still, photographic denotation is disingenuous because its semblance of graphic objectivity makes it an ideal tool of ideological naturalization: photographic mimesis constructs a naturalized stereotype of what is in essence a conventional, historically and politically determined construction of reality. In this, Barthes covertly aligns himself on Saussure’s radical hypothesis of the objectless sign: photographs are virtually thingless semiotic fodder whose meaning is entirely rewritable by immotivated sign systems. The claim that photographs need to be rhetorically encoded in order to be meaningful leads to a further counterintuitive principle: the acknowledgment that the interpretation of photographs and films is entirely a learned skill. Allan Sekula, in an essay on photographic meaning, mentions anthropological evidence pointing in this direction. Anthropologist Melville Herskovits discovered that members of an Australian first-nations group had no innate capacity to recognize

113 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds photographs as traces of reality: only after having been shown by the European researchers how to connect the mechanically generated images to their putative objects did they acknowledge shots of their own family members as proper graphic signs (Sekula 85). Historians of the artistic gaze, chief among them Ernest Gombrich and Joel Snyder, reach similar conclusions. They chronicle a slow process of habituation enabling subjects to recognize three-dimensional perception in two-dimensional images. Their research acknowledges that the exact configuration of human vision is difficult to establish. If it can be charted at all, it appears to differ significantly from what has long passed for the very benchmark of realist visual perception—the canons of perspective developed by Alberti in the fifteenth century (Gombrich, “Standards” 206-09); Snyder 234-46). Perspective painting is revealed in this light to be a culturally constructed procedure. Later, the reconfiguration of vision implemented by perspective painting served as template for the basic features of photography: early photographic cameras were modeled on the older camera obscura used by painters for their perspective experiments (Snyder 231-32). In this, the history of perspective corroborates the Saussurean claim that photographs cannot be mistaken for the “natural and mechanical records of what we see” (Snyder 234): they rely on a socially regulated apprenticeship. This training process is allegorized in the signifying game depicted in Blow-Up’s enigmatic finale. After revisiting the vacant crime scene, Antonioni’s photographer joins a game of mock-tennis played by a group of proto-hippie merrymakers. Devoid of a real ball and therefore initially objectless, the game acquires the texture of reality as camera movements zoom in on the invisible object, whose familiar tennis thud is progressively registered by the film’s soundtrack. Thus, the scene discards the concept of photography as self-warranting evidence and replaces it by the suggestion that this mode of representation is regulated by socially acquired mechanisms. The invisible ball is not an object but a negotiable token in a Wittgensteinian language game. Its value and reality status are entirely dependent on the social consensus the game may command.

Compared to Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce offers a theoretical framework seemingly more germane to photographic realism. Admittedly, Peirce’s successive attempts to produce classifications of

114 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds signs, if taken in their entirety, are stunningly complex: at one point, the American philosopher envisages a taxonomy comprising ninety- four classes (Ogden and Richards 290). For our purposes, I restrict the analysis to the “trichotomy”—the terminological triad—most often cited by later theoreticians—C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, in particular (Peirce qtd. in Ogden and Richards 287). Representation, in Peirce’s view, occurs when a link is established between a “sign” and an “object” and, simultaneously, between the same sign and an “interpretant” (or “interpretant idea”) (Hooper 239). Peirce’s use of the term sign approximately correspond to Saussure’s signifier and to Ogden and Richards’s “symbol” (Ogden and Richards 11): it is the material form of the signifying process (in Blow-Up, for instance, the negatives and prints of the putative murder scene). The “interpretant” matches the Saussurean “signified” as well as Ogden and Richards’s “sense” (Saussure 65; Ogden and Richards 11): it is what Saussure calls the “concept” yoked to the signifier (in Antonioni’s film, the fashion photographer’s obsessive thought of a corpse in the park) (Saussure 67). Peirce’s “object” is the evanescent “thing” discarded by Saussurean linguistics (Saussure 65) or the more solid “referent” in Ogden’s and Richards’s model (Ogden and Richards 11). It is located outside the realm of signs/signifiers and outside any interpretant consciousness. In Blow-Up, if it had any lasting presence, it would be the murdered body in its inert materiality. Representation is effective, Peirce argues, only if the three components of the signifying process are caught up in an endless chain of inference and reference: each sign’s interpretant must be translatable into new signs, ad infinitum (Hooper 239). The mechanism of translatability thus conceptualized by Peirce is functionally equivalent to the Saussurean notion of sign system. Without it, the Peircean sign would not rise up above its status as a mute material entity. The compatibility of the Peircean model with photographic meaning is evidently due in the first place to the philosopher’s endorsement of the intuitive notion that there is an extra-linguistic world out there, available for photographic capture. Secondly, Peirce’s model, far more than Saussure’s, applies indiscriminately to all types of signs—not only words, but also footprints on a beach, bullet-holes, or iconographic designs (Hooper 252, 240). As Peirce takes the broadest possible field of signifying phenomena into account, he is able to distinguish between three classes of signs: “[i]cons” (Hooper

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252), which are linked to their object by dint of likeness (Hooper 30); “[i]ndices,” which are linked to it by “a correspondence in fact” (Hooper 30); and “[s]ymbols,” which rely on a link of “habit,” and constitute therefore Peirce’s equivalent for the Saussurean arbitrary sign (Hooper 251). This classification, contrary to Saussure’s, helps us pinpoint the semiotic specificity of photographs. The latter differ from the signs of natural language not only through their iconic dimension—the aspect of photography that often monopolizes the attention of theoreticians of the medium—but also because of their twin status as icons and indices: their graphic form is both homologous to their object (iconic) and physically produced by the impact of light on silver-coated plate, argentic film, or digital captors (indexical). The capacity of photographs to serve as compelling documents is therefore due to what we might call semiotic twining: the combined action of iconicity and indexicality has a mutually reinforcing value for photographic realism. Viewers looking at images that are both graphic likenesses and physical prints simultaneously acknowledge the resemblance of the photographic sign with its object and the material contiguity that must have existed between the object and the capturing device. Photographs seem reliable in so far as they are indexical icons. The twining of iconicity and indexicality in photographs, however important a tool of realist representation, should nevertheless not be mistaken for a guarantee of self-evident referentiality. Iconicity does not imply actual existence: icons have the capacity to depict illusory objects (dragons, UFOs) provided the latter obey some abstract conditions regarding their hypothetical inscription in space. More surprisingly, the physical contact or contiguity characterizing indexicality—ostensibly the strongest anchoring point of photographic realism—only has a limited referential import, which Peirce judiciously circumscribes. On the one hand, when a photographer takes a shot of a house, “the film is forced to receive an image of this house” (Hooper 254). On the other, even though indexical images “furnish positive assurance of the reality and the nearness of their Objects” (251), they offer “no insight into the nature of those Objects” (252). Roland Barthes similarly points out that the indexical photographic image merely “suggests the gesture of the child pointing his finger at something and saying: that, there it is, lo!” (Camera 5; emphasis in the original): it does not convey a determinate message,

116 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds only the sheer trace of “what has occurred only once” (Camera 4)— pure, meaningless contingency. Crime narratives often exploit such referential ambiguities for the sake of suspense. Many thriller plots have a metaphotographic dimension: they revolve around the disambiguation of photographic objects. The prosecutors and attorneys of film-maker Constantin Costa-Gavras’s Music Box must ascertain whether Michael Laszlo, an aging US citizen of Hungarian origin, is the person appearing on the face of an identity card issued forty years previously by an Hungarian fascist militia. Likewise, Philip Marlowe and Ezekiel (“Easy”) Rawlins, the private investigators respectively of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, are asked to locate persons they initially see only on photographic prints (Chandler 26; Mosley 18). Jake Gittes, in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, makes a living out of capturing sneak snapshots of adulterers. In this function, he is asked to gather photographic evidence of the supposed love trysts of Hollis Mulwray, a Los Angeles waterworks engineer soon found dead in suspicious circumstances. Object identification proves tricky in each case. In Music Box, the forty-year gap between the moment of photographic capture and the trial thwarts any legal certainty. In Farewell, My Lovely, the picture Marlowe was given, supposedly the portrait of strip-club star Velma Valento, turns out to be a photograph of one of Velma’s fellow dancers. In Devil in a Blue Dress, Rawlins initially believes he has been hired to locate blonde beauty Daphne Monet. Yet it is impossible on the basis of Daphne’s photograph to discern that the young woman is actually named Ruby Hanks and is an African American passing for white. Likewise, Jake Gittes’s shots do display Mulwray’s affectionate encounters with a young woman, yet they do not reveal that the latter is not his mistress but his step-daughter Katherine Cross, the offspring of the incestuous relation of Mulwray’s wife Evelyn with Katherine’s grandfather. The representational paradoxes exploited for fictional enjoyment in metaphotographic thrillers become vital hermeneutic stakes in nonfiction contexts: press or documentary pictures sometimes display a degree of undecidability unexpected in documents reputed for self- evident disclosure. The obstacles preventing photographs from delivering incontrovertible evidence have been a godsend for conspiracy theorists. Among these, Apollo 11 negationists are

117 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds arguably some of the most ridiculous. In early 2014, NASA released Internet copies of more than a thousand hitherto classified shots of the moon landing mission—alternative takes previously regarded as improper for press diffusion because of technical flaws (“After 40 Years”; “NASA’s Historic”). Remarkably, even in the face of this iconographic treasure trove, a surprising number of internet commenters still dismissed the images as decoys perpetuating what they regard as a US government lie: the mission, they claim, was entirely staged for film capture, presumably under Stanley Kubrick’s direction (Kubrick was indeed given this posthumous honor in a delightful mockumentary entitled Dark Side of the Moon) (Fox; “2001”). The technical arguments invoked for the negationists’ surprising claims are, for instance, the absence of visible stars in the photographed background of outer space (a fact indeed puzzlingly at variance with the star-studded skies of 1950s SF films and Star Trek series) as well as missing shadows in shots of sunlit objects on the moon surface. While photographic objections can easily be brushed aside in the moon landing case (starlight does not register on short- exposure shots; shadows hidden on some photographs are visible in others) (Fox), there are other debates where photographic undecidability poses more delicate questions of source criticism. In 2004, the release of previously classified aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken by RAF planes in 1944 reignited controversies about the Allied Command’s attitude toward the Jewish holocaust (Carter; Bard). To early-twenty-first-century observers, the RAF photographs are surprisingly sharp and spark off instant recognition: they display the death camps’ familiar configuration of barracks and train tracks, as well as the crematoria, from whose tall chimneys trails of smoke are seen to issue. Lucy Carter, in the BBC documentary Auschwitz, the Forgotten Evidence, therefore raises the question whether such seemingly compelling sources should have convinced Allied Air Forces to bomb the camps, stalling the Nazi genocide program. Admittedly, the military argument in favor of a raid was not clear-cut given the inaccuracy of WWII bombings. Yet the suspicion lingers that anti-Semitism led Allied war leaders to ascribe a low priority to efforts at saving extermination-camps prisoners. Speaking from the angle of source criticism, Carter’s documentary points out that the debate raises difficult issues concerning the limits of photographic meaning. Witnesses interviewed by Carter venture the hypothesis that

118 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds the genocidal apparatus was still too unfamiliar for British photograph analysts fully to realize what they were actually seeing. Death camps, in other words, had not yet acquired a meaning sufficiently distinct to transform the visual data into a photographic object. Similar controversies have arisen about the attack on the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. Commentators, particularly on Internet web sites, have pointed out that no indisputable photographic source exists indicating that a passenger airliner did crash against the building, leaving open the possibility of a missile or car-bomb strike (“Pentagon Attack Photos”). Ironically for a key event of the information age, the available photographic data is indeed fragmentary or poorly legible: crash pictures display few plane components instantly recognizable to non-expert eyes, and frames from surveillance cameras only reveal a fast-flying, poorly identifiable white oblong object zooming past (“Two Pentagon Videos”). There are two contrasted ways to address the paradoxes raised by such undecidable photographs. On the one hand, the previous remarks lend considerable credence to Saussurean semiology: they suggest that interpretations endorsing the arbitrariness of signs, however counterintuitive, effectively counteract the naïve belief in the self- evidence of images. If the ostensible, literal import of shots of the moon landing mission or the death camps may be disowned for whatever reason (including the skeptics’ lack of commonsense or good faith), it seems difficult to maintain any belief in the photographic object as an autonomous “propertied thing” (Ogden and Richards 188). The term object should therefore be used only as convenient shorthand, helping us to acknowledge the fact that visual data often acquires a routinized, entirely predictable value: the photographic signifiers often trigger instant recognition if not of an object-as-essence, at least of a stereotype fully legible within the limits of a given interpretive community. On the other hand, these examples lay bare some of the limitations of semiological models themselves in their handling of photography. Semiology indeed undercuts its own analysis of the intrinsic features of photographic signs. Its chief contribution to the reading of photographs resides in its admirably insightful delineation of linguistically and rhetorically based strategies for the construction of meaning. The studies building upon Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and “Rhetoric of the Image”— Judith Williamson’s, Joel Snyder’s, and Stuart Hall’s discussion of

119 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds advertising and press photographs (Hall, Representation 36-41, 228)—illustrate the hermeneutic gain thus achieved. Yet arguments beholden to the Saussurean paradigm bring to light mechanisms of photographic meaning that alter, even negate out of existence our perception of what constitutes the specificity of photographic documents. In their perspective, any meaning identified in a given image is the offshoot of a socially constructed network of meaning production. Paradoxically, the specificity of the photographic signifier (its status as a mechanically produced indexical icon) proves ultimately immaterial in this signifying process. Photographs are shown to construct meaning through the same channels as any other document. Semiology, then, presupposes the disappearance of what would be a specific photographic object.

1.5.2 Film Montage and Computer-Generated Graphics as Pseudo- Physis Faced with the paradoxes of photographic meaning, one might hope to see the realist credentials of visual documents validated at least by the moving images of film and television. Yet for realist-minded observers, the shift from still photography to film and television brings surprisingly ambiguous rewards. On first inspection, cinematography seems cut out for a realist medium: it considerably enlarges the scope of photographic capture, opening out new fields for the production of referentially valid indexical icons. Yet on closer scrutiny, the mechanics of meaning production set up by film and TV on the basis of moving images lend themselves to a surprising extent to the antirealist skepticism of semiological analysis. On the one hand, cinematography makes possible the indexical/iconic recording of motion, thereby broadening the scope of technologically aided mimesis. The referential benefit thus secured may, again, be judged by the response attributed to the first audiences of the Lumière Brothers’ Arrivée d’un train en gare. It matters indeed crucially in this case that the threat coming from the screen should have been a moving train: Christian Metz, one of the founding figures of the semiology of cinema, points out that motion footage is far better equipped than photography or even live theater to produce an “impression of reality” (Metz, Essais 13). Thus, even for an audience that had long been familiar with the reading contract of still photography, the Lumière film had the capacity to rupture the boundary between representation

120 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds and reality—inducing what theoretician of metafiction Patricia Waugh calls a moment of “frame breaking” (Waugh 28). Better still, referential illusion—always to some extent a derogatory term—is not the sole reward of motion-based filmic realism. The purported response of the Lumière audience, in spite of its apparent naiveté, is epistemologically sound in so far as it implicitly registers the fact that footage of objects and scenes unfolding across time maximize the trustworthiness of indexical capture. The recording of motion, as it relies on consecutive series of indexical prints (or on continuous scanning in the case of video), multiplies the referential guarantee afforded by the imprint of light on film or digital sensors: the indexical light trace is multiplied by 16 or 24 frames per seconds or by as many units of time video or digital capture is allowed to run. For the same reason, footage of a moving object is less likely to be faked or tampered with, at least by the technological means available to early and mid-twentieth-century cinematography. Surprisingly, however, a remarkably limited number of film or video documents make the sheer capacity to record motion through iconic/indexical capture their primary source of meaning. Only scientific and forensic footage, surveillance tapes, and a limited number of avant-garde films restrict themselves to producing mimetic traces of moving figures and objects. Most other films—be they fictions or documentaries—rely on the artifacts of montage— shot/reverse shot sequences, alternate montage (crosscutting), flashbacks, flashforwards, cutaways, inserts. Thus, they make their images meaningful by piecing together film segments that are in themselves endowed only with a limited semantic value. Symptomatically, the semiology of film makes montage the core mechanism of cinematographic language. Christian Metz describes montage as the foundation of the “grand syntagmatics” of cinema (Essais 121; Langage 142). Metz’s analysis reads like a transposition to the field of cinema of Barthes’s reflections on the linguistic ordering of visual language. In “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes points out that still photographs arrange objects and figures in significant configurations comparable to the syntagms of natural language (25). Metz contends likewise that cinematographic language, as it links up isolated frames by means of montage, creates wide- ranging “suprasegmental” syntagms—quasi-sentences whose meaning is to a large extent based on the concatenation of images (Langage

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152; also Essais 122). Metz cautiously points out that the film medium has no monopoly on visual montage: the latter is present in comic strips, photonarratives, and frescoes (Langage 170-75). Likewise, within films themselves, the syntagmatic logic of montage is not restricted to the “image strip” [“la bande images”]: it also informs the structure of the soundtrack [“la bande son”] and the other signifying layers that make up the complex scaffolding of a movie (Essais 121; also Langage 142-43). Still, the effectiveness with which montage makes images speak, to use a facile metaphor, is central to the specificity of film-making. The decisive semantic impact of montage had been foregrounded during the silent era in the famous experiment devised by Soviet film- maker Lev Kuleshov. The latter had produced several short films, each of them combining a single shot of Russian actor Mozhukin’s expressionless face with a variety of other shots connoting mutually incompatible emotions (images of a plate of food, a woman in a coffin, a little girl) (Monaco 449). By virtue of what came to be called the “Kuleshov effect,” viewers of each film claimed to be able to read off Mozhukin’s face the emotion (hunger, grief, affection) suggested by the neighboring shots (Bordwell and Thompson 207; also Monaco 449). The meaning of the Mozhukin film shot is therefore not inherent to the iconic/indexical trace of the actor’s inert face: it is constructed syntagmatically by the interaction of neighboring shots. The existence of a grand syntagmatics of montage steers cinematographic meaning towards the realm of arbitrary signification. If a film relies on montage, its meaning is likely to be for the most part a consciously scripted rhetorical construct. In this respect, film and video, regardless of their capacity to capture motion, barely differ from the advertisement photographs analyzed by Barthes. Still, Metz valiantly struggles against the suggestion that cinematographic meaning might be as immotivated as signification in natural language. He dwells on the “impression of reality” afforded by what in Peircean terminology qualifies as iconic/indexical motion footage, and makes it one of the anchoring points of cinema’s specificity (Metz, Essais 13; also 16, 113). Cinema, in this realistic perspective, captures “chunks […] of reality” (Metz, Essais 117). This paean to analogical (iconic/indexical) mimesis is, however undercut by the Saussurean premises of Metz’s writings. In a logic that corroborates both Barthes’s analysis of photographs and Kuleshov’s montage

122 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds experiments, Metz’s semiological argument lets cinema’s iconic/indexical mimesis be overwhelmed by the power of montage’s syntagmatically deployed signs structures. The Kuleshov effect, if it is rephrased in Metz’s semiological terminology, reveals that a montage- based film strip acts as a Saussurean sign system: each shot (each sign) find its significance through its interaction with footage (signs) exterior to itself. As far as the generation of meaning is concerned, the syntagmatic assemblage of montage therefore trumps the ostensible immediacy of photo/cinematographic mimesis. Arbitrary signification introduced through the channel of montage affects nearly all types of cinematographic productions. Among the “formal systems” of film-making listed by film scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (Film Art 44), the only structuring strategies that escape montage’s semiological patchwork are those found in films that do not aim to produce a determinate signified in the first place—abstract works such as Fernand Léger’s Le Ballet Mécanique (1924) or films based on “associational” form like Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958) (Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art 70). All other films construct their meaning by linking up shots according to some variant of Metz’s “grand syntagmatics.” Fictional feature films follow a narrative formal system; documentaries such as Pare Lorentz’s The River (1937) deploy a “rhetorical” form that builds up a “persuasive argument” (Bordwell and Thompson 55); films like Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1936) obey a “categorical” structure that lets them focus on items ranked according to a predetermined classification (Bordwell and Thompson 49). Semiologically inclined readers may therefore suspect these works of conjuring up what Barthes calls a “pseudo-physis” (Mythologies 142). As they piece together a semblance of reality by an assemblage of signs, film makers also naturalize the cultural constructedness of their own practice.: they disguise convention into nature. Their reliance on codes of mise-en- scène and montage is disingenuously camouflaged—indeed, “naturalized”—by the illusionistic impact of film capture (Barthes, Mythologies 144). Iconic/indexical representation—particularly the representation of motion—may in this logic be accused of concealing cinema’s main source of meaning—its syntagmatic assemblage. The term pseudo-physis, with its connotation of illusionistic trickery, is the more appropriate here as the canonical rules of “analytical” montage—in particular the system of “continuity editing”

123 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds of classical Hollywood films—were designed to cover up the disruptive mechanics by which the film strip is put together (Bordwell, Staiger,and Thompson 56, 55). Classical editing aimed to produce an impression of visual and temporal continuity: it smoothes over the dissociative impact of the splicing together of film segments—the abrupt cuts, the mechanical alternation of shots and reverse shots—and privileges camera positions and camera movements unlikely to disrupt audiences’ immersion into the fiction (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 56-59). The time-consuming procedures required for this Frankenstein-like simulacrum of reality stand out in stark contrast with the seemingly instantaneous capture of snapshot photography. Ironically, these seemingly artificial editing techniques are in themselves not qualitatively different from the syntagmatic structuring of natural language—from the composition rules of any narrative or novel, for instance. Yet, contrary to the grammar of narrative, they hardly rank as an innate skill implicit in each subject’s linguistic competence: they make up the toolkit of a craft that has developed for only a hundred years and was, before the advent of video software, practiced only by specialists (Metz, Essais 136). One need therefore not be a hardline Saussurean Marxist to suspect that cinema’s pseudo-physis is encoded not only linguistically but also ideologically. Metz’s reflections, in spite of their homage to cinema’s unmediated “impression of life,” are quite eloquent in this matter. The French semiologist indicates that a shot’s diegetic space— the narrative field captured by the camera—is always already a densely encoded lattice. Firstly, the objects pictured in the frame are constructs produced by the semiotic patterning of perception and by each social group’s “iconology”—the grid of connotations structuring the visual value of objects and subjects in a given culture (Essais 113). Secondly, this raw material is subjected to the conscious patterning of cinematographic mise-en-scène (the disposition of space in front of the camera) and to culturally determined conventions of narrative fictions. Ultimately, this carefully plotted configuration is delivered to the system of montage, which embeds the coded film frame within the wider code of montage’s grand syntagmatics (Essais 114-16; see also Bordwell and Thompson 202-28). The reflections above do not spell the demise of realist film- making, yet they do challenge its epistemological and semiotic status. From the perspective of a Saussurean analysis of film, realism is no

124 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds intrinsic feature of cinema: it is an extrinsic artistic and ideological norm—a code of “verisimilitude,” understood in Tzvetan Todorov’s strictly structuralistic definition (Poétique 37). Realist verisimilitude, in this logic, may be forced on many different modes of expression yet never finds any full-fledged validation in any of these media’s specific semiotic resources. In film, it acts as the conventional blueprint of a pseudo-physis, superimposed on the mechanics of montage, on the structuring principles Bordwell and Thompson call formal systems, and on the dense lattice of cultural codes existing prior to film capture. In this perspective, fictional feature films such as Ken Loach’s Raining Stones (1993), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L’enfant (2004) or Ashgar Farhadi’s Le passé (2013) qualify as adequate maps of the social world not through their status as visual documents but because they follow the set of culturally relative norms Ian Watt subsumes under the term “formal realism”: they endorse genre principles such as those analyzed by Watt himself, by Georg Lukács, and Erich Auerbach in the field of literature, and by Ernst Gombrich in the graphic arts. Accordingly, their characters and locales are socially and geographically specific (Watt); they offer a narrative dramatization of socio-historical conflicts (Lukács); they use the vernacular idiom in order to depict serious incidents in the life of characters from subordinate groups (Auerbach); and they reproduce the hypothetical perceptual experience of viewers who might be confronted with similar scenes and events in the non-fictional world (Gombrich). Such rules of verisimilitude are evidently transmedial: they are transposable to various modes of expression. Conversely, if one trusts the hypothesis of the arbitrariness of signs, these norms cannot find a perfect (i.e. inherently referential) embodiment in any semiotic support. In the list above, only the last condition—the simulation of perceptual experience—is tied to cinema’s status as a visual medium, yet the iconic simulation process designated thereby is not even specific to film (it applies to all realist graphic arts, including painting). By the same token, this Saussurean reformulation of the realist aesthetic narrows the presumed chasm between cinematic realism and its literary and painterly equivalents. If iconic/indexical evidence weighs little with regard to syntagmatic assemblage, the supposed visual privilege of film for the representation of the world is significantly diminished.

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The construction of a pseudo-physis, which seems a deceptive trick in realist film-making, takes on a diametrically opposed value for computer generated imagery (CGI) and virtual reality. Rather than aiming for the unmediated capture of the phenomenal world, this more recent technology enthusiastically embraces the fabrication of a reality simulacrum: pseudo-physis is its stated goal. In the late-nineteen- seventies and early-eighties, even before virtual reality became a major purveyor of images in popular cinema, computer interfacing, and computer games, Jean Baudrillard described this technology’s status and possibilities in sharply derogatory terms. The French philosopher warned his readers against the advent of “hyperreality”— a lifeworld consisting of simulacra that have lost any anchorage in a ground of reality able to validate their being (Simulacres 11). We will see below that Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum admits of several interpretations, not all of them as negative as that implied here. Yet on first inspection, “hyperreality” undercuts any possibility of an ontologically rooted realism based on the natural adequacy between referent and representation. Any claim to realism in this field must therefore be of the order of the externally imposed code of verisimilitude envisaged by Todorov. Compared to film, CGI and virtual reality shift the focus of pseudo-physis to what might be called the creation of a hypernature— the simulation of perceptual data. We have seen that in film, the artifice of pseudo-physis intervenes mostly at the level of montage, notably in the construction of narrative chains. Separate shots generated by cinematographic capture can still to some extent avail themselves of the prerogative of iconic/indexical realism; scripted syntagmatic construction sets in only in the combination of shots into film sequences. In CGI and virtual reality, on the contrary, calculations—indeed software computations—determine the smallest visual detail of each frame. It is in this respect no coincidence that, in the development of filmic special effects and computer graphics, the genesis of the virtual hypernature should have proceeded by successive attempts to simulate the natural elements—water in James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) and Wolfgang Petersen’s The Perfect Storm (2000); fire in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991); wind in Jan De Bont’s Twister (1996); and the visual texture of live animals in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) (Kofman). Through consecutive films and TV shows, the fabric of the virtual pseudo-physis was

126 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds created block by block, layer by layer. This incremental process may, in light of what precedes, be described as the generalization of montage to the whole surface of the film or computer image—a process implying the deployment of immotivated, arbitrary norms of verisimilitude to the whole of hypernature. Surprisingly perhaps, the ostensible novelty of virtual-reality graphics does not require any revolutionary reshuffling of semiological categories. Virtual images fit in two categories, both of which derived from the terminology of classic semiology we have used so far. One class of computer-generated graphics qualifies as what we might call hypericons: they consist of images displaying likenesses with objects of the phenomenal world, yet generated entirely by software. Numerous turn-of-the-twenty-first-century animated films—John Lasseter’s Toy Story (1995), Pete Docter and Bob Peterson’s Up (2009)—rely exclusively on hypericons, as do most graphics used for computer interfaces. I use the “hyper” prefix in this case to signal the mode of productions of these images. Yet from a semiological point-of-view, this terminological addition is nearly redundant since the iconic signs thus designated are equivalent to other icons produced by more traditional means—paintings, drawings, hand-crafted animation, etc. The “hyper” prefix refers at best to the purported ease with which such images are generated and reproduced. Other virtual images qualify as hyperindices (or, more accurately, hyperindexical icons): they are produced by digitized, computer-aided reconfigurations of indexical photographic or cinematographic sources. Photoshopped photographs are in this logic the most common variety of hyperindices. Other prominent applications of hyperindexical photographs and film footage occur in cinematographic special effects: in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997) or Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix (1998), actors move about in futuristic urban settings consisting of digitally processed collages of photographic/cinematographic documents. Such hyperindexical graphic manipulations build upon practices first developed in argentic processing. Hyperindexical icons are indeed the digital counterparts of the photomontage art works made famous by modernist artists such as Man Ray, Max Ernst, and John Heartfield (Ades 9, 12-13). Similarly, the computer procedures of photoshopped photographs emulate corrective techniques previously used in argentic lab processing. Accordingly, the qualitative leap afforded by digitized

127 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds hyperindices consists chiefly in the ease with which source images borrowed from several media can be made to morph with one another in order to produce graphic environments displaying a homogeneous visual texture. Graphic discontinuities were the main drawback of classic special effects: rear projections, recurrently used in shots of car occupants talking against a moving background, create disparities of contrast (Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art 160; Monaco 154); glass mattes and glass shots, used for the extraterrestrial settings of classic SF films, bring about differences in visual texture (Monaco 153; Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art 160; Monaco 154); miniature models, used in SF and disaster films, present discontinuities of scale and detail (Monaco 148). Computer-processed images, on the contrary, simulate a homogeneous medium in which visual fragments endowed with dissimilar semiotic statuses—icons and indices generated by photography or other graphic media—blend smoothly. The pseudo-physis of SF and fantasy, from George Lucas’s StarWars to David Benioff and D. B. Weiss ‘s Game of Thrones (2011) could barely exist without these visual technologies. In Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace the palaces and waterfalls of the royal estate of planet Naboo evoke a dream geography inspired by Claude Lorrain and his Romantic disciples. This fantasy world consists of a flawless weave of hyperindices and hypericons. Human actors and virtual animation figures coexist on the same plane, with minimal visual discontinuity. The capacity of computer-generated graphics to evoke dream geographies corroborates the antirealist skepticism about any claim to referential adequacy made on behalf of visual documents. In this logic, not only computer generation but even mere filmic montage are suspect of producing what in the terminology of Lacan and Derrida qualifies as an imaginary, logocentric simulacrum of the world. The pseudo-physis of montage and computer graphics constructs reality in the shape of a deceptively smooth and consistent mimetic replica—an “orthopedic” mirror, to take up Lacan’s term (“Stade” 93). In theory, the syntagmatic mechanisms of montage and computer generation might produce texts and visual compositions of any nature, even random ones. Yet most graphic works actually produced—in particular the visual commodities churned out by the leisure industry—are creaseless graphic fictions aiming for reassuring rationality and graphic consistency. According to Lacanian

128 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds psychology, the tropism of visual documents toward the soothing form is the very proof of their inadequacy to the real—a realm that is supposedly beyond orderly representation. No photographic or cinematographic capture, let alone any arbitrarily composed film sequence or computer simulation, may hope to do justice to this elusive object.

1.5.3 Toward the Reappropriation of Visual Evidence Faced with the cogent yet counterintuitive antirealist arguments sketched out above, one wonders how the referential trust commonly granted to photographic and cinematographic sources could still command any epistemological merit. Still, throughout the twentieth century, film-makers and critics have sought to buttress the claims of photographic realism. Predictably, one channel for its rehabilitation resides in a radicalized variant of Metz’s paean to cinema’s “impression of reality.” Film-makers and viewers may choose to bypass montage and its syntagmatic mechanisms of meaning construction altogether. By virtue of a strategy that might be called indexical reappropriation, they may anchor their realist aesthetic entirely in the status of photographs and films as mechanically generated traces of phenomenal appearances. Indexical reappropriation manifested itself early on in the history of film montage. The dominance of analytical editing in post-WWI feature films left a few film-makers and critics dissatisfied: they were hesitant to let cinematographic realism be reduced to a constructed verisimilitude superimposed upon an equally conventional grammar of montage. In this context, alternatives to analytical editing were devised in order to reclaim the immediacy of indexical film capture. The devices chosen as substitutes for the syntagmatics of montage— deep-space composition, long takes, the mobile camera—were meant to reduce the number of cuts from shot to shot, thereby breaking the mechanical predictability of editing. Deep-space composition, obtained by means of the deep-focus capabilities of wide-angle lenses, renders visible the interaction of actors in one single space with minimal recourse to shot/reverse shot sequences (Bordwell and Thompson 201; Monaco 98); long takes record protracted action without cutting (Bordwell and Thompson 188-89); the mobile camera, as it creates shifting, multiple angles of vision, makes cutting similarly superfluous (Bordwell and Thompson 174-77; Monaco 231). These

129 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds techniques are indexically realistic in so far as they restore the spatial and temporal continuity of film capture: they generate barely mediated traces of space and time. Jean Renoir famously relied on deep-space composition in order to enhance his films’ purported realism, a choice that earned him the admiration of pioneer French film critic André Bazin. Through this technique, Bazin writes, Renoir avoids “chopping up the world into little fragments” (Cook 391). Orson Welles used similar techniques, yet to slightly different effects. Welles’s cinema is not classically realistic: its tone and narrative structure comes closer to expressionism and metacinema. Yet Welles’s predilection for deep- space composition, the mobile camera, and long takes has a realist— or, more accurately—metarealist value: it alerts viewers to the anchorage of film action in space and time. In the opening scene of A Touch of Evil (1958), the preparation of a car-bomb attack is filmed through a nonstop take of nearly three minutes during which the mobile camera threads its way through the crowded setting of a border town between Texas and Mexico. The first cut occurs only at the moment of the long-awaited bomb explosion, as if the blast mimicked the disruptive impact of montage (Bordwell and Thompson 190-91). The scene, through its intricacies of mise-en-scène and camera movements, reminds viewers of the materiality of space, highlighting the fact that the latter exists independently from the semiotic manipulations of editing. From a Saussurean perspective, these alternatives to analytical montage are, however, half-way measures: the films in which they appear inevitably fall back on the syntactical assemblage of editing at some point. The full-fledged challenge against arbitrary signification in film requires therefore a more radical commitment to indexical reappropriation: it calls for an asyntactical indexical practice that cuts off cinema from the linguistic paradigm altogether. Metz briefly toys with this possibility: he points out that film language never amounts to a fully determinate language system: its analogical idiom cannot be decomposed into circumscribable minimal units that can be combined according to the linguistic principle of double articulation (Metz, Essais 117). Yet asyntactical cinema finds little purchase in the traditional feature films analyzed in Metz’s early essays. This technique thrives instead in experimental cinema or postclassical films and videos. The latter works have developed two contrasted modes of asyntactical footage—the former contemplative, the other kinetic and

130 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds performative. On the one hand, they use indexical capture for the sake of pure observation; on the other, they privilege the kinetic capacity of montage to make the experience of motion perceptible regardless of meaning. Contemplative indexical capture is a central feature of Gilles Deleuze’s monumental essays on cinema. Inspired by French philosopher Henri Bergson, Deleuze regards cinema not as a purveyor of syntactically constructed narratives but as the site of the “presentation of time” (Cinema II 35). There are, he argues, two channels through which the latter task may be carried out. Time may be displayed indirectly through the “movement-image” (Cinema I 23). This mode of film-making is the usual fare both of classical Hollywood and of movement-focused avant-garde films of the silent era. It is meant to offer a cinematographic enactment of “sensory- motor schemata”—sequences of actions that transform one situation into another (Cinema 2 3). The direct presentation of time, on the other hand, is entrusted to the “time-image” (Cinema II 33). The latter is the hallmark of post-WWII avant-garde cinema and of postclassical American films (Cinema 1 215-19). It occurs when movement breaks down or is suspended. The time-image emerging in these circumstances renders perceptible the complex unfolding of what Bergson calls duration—time liberated from the spatialized medium of movement (Cinema 1 1). I have no space to enter into the details of Deleuze’s daunting taxonomy of film images (inspired from Peirce’s no less formidable catalogues of signs). Suffice it to say that, for Deleuze, cinema offers the immediate capture of a complex gamut of modalities of change. Deleuze does not ignore the traditional units of film-making—shot, montage, long takes. Yet he refuses to view them as atoms in a “language system” (Cinema 2 28). Like all other elements of film-making, they contribute to the shifting movement of what is at bottom a “non-language material” (Cinema II 28; italics in original). The kinetic, performative counterpart of the contemplative cinema privileged by Deleuze is to be found in avant-garde films and videos featuring fast-paced editing and speeded-up capture (time-lapse photography). Music videos have been an important venue for this technique. U2’s EVEN BETTER THAN THE REAL THING (1991) resorts to supraliminal cutting: it displays sequences of shots whose rhythm exceeds human perception. Only by playing back some of its

131 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds segments in slow motion can we discern that its fast-paced montage contains, in addition to fragmentary shots of the musicians, frames of pure video static whose enigmatic presence has the value of a metamediatic joke: the clip subliminally signals its resistance to meaning. Other music clips resort to time-lapse photography or fast video capture in order to produce a pure graphic flow: separate images are absorbed into an indistinguishable motion blur. Madonna’s RAY OF LIGHT (1998) shows the singer performing against a dreamlike backdrop consisting of speeded-up footage of urban crowds and traffic, eventually reduced to a kaleidoscope of swirling lines. Jean- Luc Ponty’s INDIVIDUAL CHOICE (1983) offers a three-minute sequence of urban panoramas unfolding at a breath-taking pace under various weather conditions. There is an obvious continuity between this video practice and the most radical expressions of the movement- image as Deleuze identifies them in specific varieties of avant-garde films (Fernand Léger’s Le ballet mécanique (1924), Abel Gance’s La roue, Michael Snow’s The Central Region) (Cinéma 1 44, 46, 87). Like their avant-garde sources, the videos make clear that kinetic film practice, in addition to glamorizing movement, has the capacity to dissolve narrative meaning. Montage in these clips, instead of aiming at semantic construction, enacts the destructive momentum of temporal change. Indexicality, in this case, intervenes less at the level of separate frames—of distinct indexical icons—than in the kinetics of montage itself: fast cutting or fast-paced capture is the indexical trace of the temporal flow, to which separate frames or shots supply a mere dynamic raw material.

The radical variants of indexical reappropriation embodied in the contemplative film-making praised by Deleuze and the kinetic montage of music videos can, of course, hardly be the sole legitimate mode of expression of contemporary visual realism. Regarding them as such would needlessly disqualify the referential claims of most documentaries and traditional realist feature films, which rely on the syntagmatics of montage. Instead, what we should retain from the above reflections is the presence of a deadlock in the conceptualization of visual language: an unbridgeable gap separates the Saussurean notion that photography and film merely obey an arbitrary linguistic code and, on the other hand, the indexically based view that visual documents are inherently concerned with barely

132 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds mediated perceptual capture. Cinema, in this dichotomized logic, either patches together its pseudo-physis through montage or offers what might metaphorically be called a mute time or motion print, disregarding the determinate meaning film language evidently also generates. If we wish to reclaim for visual documents the capacity to act both as non-arbitrary signs and purveyors of articulated insights, we must overcome this impasse. This theoretical effort requires in the first place taking due notice of the fact that the value of visual evidence is no mere methodological issue: the legitimization of photographic realism does not revolve solely around the choice of a proper semiological toolkit, be it based on Saussure, Peirce, or Deleuze. I pointed out in the beginning of this chapter that the semiology of images is closely tied to the evaluation of the nature of the object of representation itself. Beyond terminological issues, what is at stake here is a certain commitment to the solidity of evidence and to the consistency of the lifeworld. Saussurean semiology, in its basic assumption, posits a skeptical judgment over the nature of reality: as it defines the interface of signifiers, signified, and the vanishing referent, it axiomatically disqualifies any truth-based capture of the latter by any sign medium whatsoever, including photography and cinema. This dismissal is rooted in the metaphysical belief that human experience is a field of absolute change—a flow of stimuli and signs undercutting the minimum stability required for a truth-based world picture. Symptomatically, all three concepts of cinema outlined above, regardless of their apparent antagonism, endorse this metaphysics of change. Saussurean readings locate change in the infinite negotiation of immotivated signs; Deleuze discerns it in the cinematic epiphany of duration; kinetic videos and experimental films in the dynamics of montage. Cinema and video are admittedly proper exempla for this philosophical assumption since their indexical capture of motion may be thought to enact an endless, indeterminate process. A realist apprehension of film must, on the contrary, counter this intuitively compelling, yet philosophically one-sided tenet by highlighting the lifeworld’s partial resistance to change: it must question both the belief in the inevitability of open-ended semiotic negotiations and the privilege of existential authenticity conferred to duration and inarticulate motion—concepts that naturalize a metaphysics of the indeterminate drift of experience.

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The present essay is to large extent based on the hypothesis that a “centripetal” or convergent dialogism—as opposed to the more familiar “centrifugal” variety championed by Bakthinian postmodernism—offers the proper legitimation for a determinate representation of the life-world (Bakhtin, Dialogic 272). This issue is dealt with in detail in chapters 7 and 8, where I further indicate how we may aspire to a reconceptualization of realism based partly on the dialogical reappropriation of graphic evidence. At this stage, I only wish to sketch out what is at stake in the contrast between a centripetal and a centrifugal representation of the lifeworld, and how this distinction affects visual documents. For this purpose, we may resort to a methodological metaphor elaborated on the basis of the metaphotographic thrillers discussed above. Specifically. we may consider how photographs and films fare respectively in what might be called the centripetal and centrifugal varieties of detective fiction— on the one hand, mystery novels (the whodunnits of the golden age of crime writing, popularized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie) and, on the other, hard-boiled novels à la Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler (Todorov, “Typologie” 11-15). Mystery novels have been described as the crime-fiction embodiment of the abstract rationality of modernity (Kracauer 53). They are as such centripetally structured. Set in a closed environment that serves as laboratory space for the investigator, they are entirely devoted to the resolution of criminal enigmas, which they inevitably bring to completion (Panek 133-43; Dubois 47-63). Hard-boiled novels, on the contrary, develop a looser action plot unfolding in a broader setting— typically the violent, sex-charged metropolis (Vanoncini 58; Den Tandt, “Down” 393-95). Unlike mystery novels, they are steeped in an atmosphere of uncertainty and loss: lack of closure—or, in the vocabulary or the present argument, centrifugal drift—is regarded as a definitional feature of film noir, Hollywood’s counterpart to hard- boiled fiction (Naremore 2, 38; Kaplan, E. 1). When crime enigmas are solved in these narratives, the detective’s final victory is overshadowed by angst and disenchantment. In this, hard-boiled novels qualify as existential mysteries or Lacanian thrillers—stories in which protagonists struggle against social and moral evils that find no palliative. The rational closure of whodunnits or the anxiety-ridden openness of hard-boiled narratives affects the status of individual clues and the

134 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds nature of the objects around which investigations revolve: clues— photographs included—are either buttressed or fragilized by the overall tenor of the lifeworld. In Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, even flimsy evidence proves reliable. A prestidigitator’s trick is enough for Hercule Poirot to “resurrect” an inscription on a scrap of charred paper. Poirot himself calls this technique “a very makeshift affair” (Christie 63). Yet the soundness of the procedure is supported by the dynamics of Christie’s centripetal plot. In the skeptical context of hard-boiled narratives, on the contrary, “[p]roof is,” as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe puts it, “always a relative thing[; i]t’s an overwhelming balance of probabilities” (Chandler, Farewell 238). In Farewell, My Lovely, the chain of evidence allowing Marlowe to prove that exotic dancer Velma Valento has refashioned herself into Mrs. Grayle, a soulless upper-class femme fatale, is compelling at the literal level, yet it cannot dispel the aura of mystery surrounding Velma’s uncanny metamorphosis. Photographic evidence is enabled or problematized in the same fashion. The CSI TV series follows the pattern of centripetal whodunnits. Its plots establish a mutually supportive relation between numerous truth-supporting forensic photographs and, on the other hand, a narrative format that prescribes that all cases find a proper answer. In hard-boiled narratives, on the contrary, ambiguous or misleading photographic clues—the swapped snapshot in Farewell, My Lovely or the ethnically ambiguous portrait of Daphne Monet in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress—are the more confusing as they appear in an environment of ubiquitous deception and ambiguity. At the deepest level, the objects of investigation—the photographic referents—match the tenor of the broader narrative too: they range from the most solidly present to the most evanescent. Centripetal crime narratives focus on stable photographic objects; existential thrillers target what we may call unphotographable figures— characters whose meaning is so unstable that they resist photographic objectification. Polanski’s Chinatown mobilizes the two opposite logics. The film’s first scene illustrates the close fit between whodunnit plots and unproblematic photographic evidence. Jake Gittes, having completed a routine adultery investigation, shows to his client shots of the latter’s wife having sex with a stranger in a Los Angeles Park. Beyond the husband’s sobs, the scene requires no dialogue, so self-explanatory is the action captured on film.

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Photography works more problematically in the Hollis Mulwray case, however. As Jake takes snapshots of Hollis Mulwray and Katherine, he is in no position to understand what his lens is actually recording. Katherine is a paradoxical, overdetermined character—the metaphorical embodiment of the economic and sexual perversions Polanski’s film, in hard-boiled fashion, attributes to the American upper classes. Jake can therefore not fully grasp the mystery surrounding Katherine. In the film’s closing scene, her fear at seeing her mother shot down and at being returned to her (grand)father elicits a sense of social and psychological breakdown no representation, even photography, can contain. Katherine Cross is is in this respect functionally equivalent to other metaphorically overdetermined characters eluding photographic reference—Velma in Farewell, My Lovely, Daphne in Devil in a Blue Dress, or Carmen Sternwood in Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939). Carmen is the murderously nymphomaniac daughter of a California oil magnate. Her relation to photography is utterly paradoxical. On first inspection, she is widely available for objectifying images: her nude shots are circulated by a pornography ring. Yet her homicidal rage makes her an unfathomable threat to the men who want to possess her. Her photographic elusiveness, consubstantial with the tenor of her centrifugal lifeworld, is allegorized in one of Marlowe’s dreams. The investigator, after having discovered the nude Carmen in the pornographer’s apartment, has a dream vision of himself trying to photograph “a naked girl […] with an empty camera” (Chandler, Big Sleep 46). The methodological metaphor outlined above does not imply that, in its handling of photographic and cinematographic evidence, contemporary realism must entirely align itself on the schematically rational ethos of whodunnits. It suggests instead that the work of realism in a contemporary context consists in testing to what extent a centripetal investigative strategies may be brought to bear upon a lifeworld that, figuratively speaking, displays the centrifugal, evanescent dynamics of noir. This is, after all, the very function of hard-boiled investigators: following the trail of evidence to its ostensible end point, regardless of the obstacles inherent to a context that seems to defeat determinate representation, yet without for all that overrating the possibility of closure. The agenda thus defined requires identifying the theoretical arguments and discursive mechanics that make centripetal dialogism a legitimate option for the representation

136 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds of the contemporary social world. We must, in other words, be on the lookout for reasonable signs of convergence or closure—indications that discursive processes may in given circumstances head towards determinate meaning. We will see in Parts II and III that such assurances are to be found both in the various degrees of materiality of signifiers and in the shape of their circuits of negotiation—their mode of production, and reception. These aspects of discursive practice display evidence of what I mean to call dialogical solidarity—the ability of heterogeneous discursive processes to prove mutually reinforcing in the establishment of semantic convergence. If applied to visual documents, an approach attentive to dialogical solidarity need not take the Saussurean belief in the dissemination of photographic meaning for granted. It may avail itself instead of the referent-oriented insights of Peirce’s theory of the sign or Ogden’s and Richards’s paradigm of meaning. In practice, we may assume that visual evidence is validated by a process whereby the construction of meaning is reinforced, not fragilized, by the interaction of the intrinsic features of images with their renegotiations in various contexts of reception. One of the key features of photography and cinematography discussed above—the semiotic twining of iconicity and indexicality— makes this type of dialogical solidarity possible. A similar mechanism informs even the visual medium seemingly least worthy of referential trust—virtual-reality images. We will indeed see below that in their practical applications, computer-generated icons entertain dialogical interactions with classes of signs and fields of experience qualitatively different from themselves, a process that facilitates their reappropriation into a dialogized mapping of reality. In this perspective, the referential trust commonly afforded to photographic and cinematographic documents is not illusory: it is anchored in a simultaneous assessment of the status of these images as mechanically produced graphic signs and of the likely limits to their renegotiation and reinterpretation. Their validity is buttressed both by their status as non-arbitrary indexical icons and by the fact that they are perceived and interpreted in contexts of communication whose possibilities for meaning are not inexhaustible.

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PART II

Beyond Mimesis: The Twentieth-Century Critique of Classic of Realism

138 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

CHAPTER 6

The Reality Bet: Realism under Postmodernity

2.1.1 Virtualization and Dialogization Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, depicts a world Emile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Fritz Lang, and Raymond Chandler might have distantly recognized. The film opens with a panoramic overhead view of an industrial megalopolis identified in screen captions as 2019 Los Angeles. The next shot shows the urban sprawl reflected in the pupil of an eye filling the screen in extreme close-up. This observer, zooming over the city in an airborne vehicle, discovers a tangle of urban canyons, fire-spouting oil refineries, and huge pyramid-shaped high-rises. Later shots reveal that under the hovering sky traffic, Los Angeles streets bathe in the glare of ubiquitous advertising graphics—neon signs, giant screens on the face of skyscrapers, floating dirigibles blaring out commercial messages. The city’s crowds make up a multilingual mass exhibiting a confusing plurality of ethnic or subcultural dress codes. Above all, the cityscape proclaims through its procession of signs that it is a construct of powerful corporations. In the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction, the film’s first scenes follow Deckard (Harrison Ford), a private

139 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds investigator, as he calls on some of the masters of this capitalist world. Whereas in Dreiser’s or Chandler’s novels these figures would include steel, oil or newspaper magnates, in Blade Runner they comprise corrupt policemen, genetic engineers, and robotics tycoons. While Blade Runner transposes the thematics of urban naturalism and hard-boiled narratives to a dystopian future, thereby claiming a realist genre affiliation, it also portrays a world afflicted with contradictions and dissonances—features that depart from the rational reading contracts both of science fiction and realism itself.34 On the film’s release, critics were struck by the fact that Scott’s settings are both futuristic and oddly antiquated (James 142). Up to the nineteen- seventies, sf literature and films foreshadowed a future obeying the logic of what Raymond Trousson, in a study of utopian literature, calls “geometrical” utopias (21):35 they depicted machine-run urban hives, whose design was extrapolated from the austere principles of architectural modernism—an aesthetic still dominant in Ira Levin’s novel This Perfect Day (1970) and George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971). The high-tech urban space of Blade Runner, on the contrary, is crowded with the shapes of the past. Fussy neo-gothic ornamentation reminiscent of turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture mingles with visual echoes of film classics—Lang’s Metropolis (1927) or Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946). The city’s geographic anchorage is similarly blurred: this ostensibly American urban space accommodates advertisements featuring Japanese models in traditional Geisha garb, robotics street vendors from Southern China or the Middle-East, as well as gangs speaking dialects mingling English, German, and Asian idioms. Other minor paradoxes seem so puzzling they may be mistaken for involuntary breaches of verisimilitude. Streets are steeped in a perpetual rainy gloom while the summits of high-rises are inexplicably clouded in a luminous glow. Also, the panoramic views of urban space as well as specific street scenes evoke an overpopulated world, yet the interiors of buildings are enigmatically deserted and crammed with nostalgic artifacts. The population of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles is affected by similar paradoxes and indeterminacies: humans and animals in Scott’s

34 For a discussion of the realist credentials of science fiction, see Suvin (26-27) 35 All quotations from non-English originals are in Christophe Den Tandt’s translation.

140 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds film are barely distinguishable from machines. Deckard, who specializes in hunting down rogue androids, is given the delicate task of gauging the biological status of a robotics tycoon’s secretary (Sean Young). Only by the end of an excruciatingly lengthy personality test is he able to ascertain that the young woman exhibits less-than-human levels of empathy, and is therefore an engineered organism. In Philip K. Dick’s source novel, Deckard’s own human make-up is explicitly problematized—a matter only discreetly hinted at in Scott’s adaptation. Similarly, Los Angeles pet snakes or fish are handcrafted by artisans who brand the constructed animals’ genes with serial numbers. The androids’ sense of a past self is constructed on the basis of photographs obtained from their supposedly human designers, or collected at random to make up the enigmatic record of a non-existent childhood. In one of the film’s most intriguing moments, one of these spurious photographic memories briefly turns into motion footage accompanied by a sound flash of children’s cries. The still image thereby morphs into a live reminiscence as if to further blur the boundary between live mental processes and engineered fiction. These contradictions are the more significant as Blade Runner ranks as a pivotal text of cyberpunk sf—a genre cherished by fans for its quasi-documentary function. The most popular cyberpunk works— William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984), Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix (1998), Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002)—alerted readers and viewers to the social reconfiguration induced by information technologies. In particular, they heralded the development of what Gibson himself calls “cyberspace” (“Burningˮ 195; Neuromancer 4). One of Blade Runner’s memorable moments shows how Deckard meticulously scans photographic evidence on his voice-controlled computer, isolating after numerous image-processing procedures the enhanced outline of a vital clue—a snake tattoo on the side of an android’s face. This scene was the more impressive to early 1980s viewers as it depicts a technological advance that was both within credible reach yet also startlingly new: personal computers had been marketed for a couple of years only, and featured few if any graphic or video capabilities, let alone voice commands. Thus, as viewers were given a glimpse of a new technological order of things, they were also ushered into a world fraught with ontological indeterminacy and epistemological ironies. It is not even clear, for instance, whether the panoptic eye in the opening scene belongs to a

141 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds human observer. It might as well be the computerized pupil of an engineered organism mystified by the forbidding spectacle of its own alienation. Contrary to classic realist practice, the function both of this panoptic moment and of the photograph-scanning scene resides less in asserting the film’s ability to capture the totality of the social world than in foregrounding the latter’s resistance to representation. In spite of the impressive array of technologically enhanced modes of vision paraded on screen, the social fabric Blade Runner makes visible is so protean and contradictory that it verges on insubstantiality.

Concerns about the unreality of society and the world at large are symptomatically rife not only in turn-of-the-twenty-first century popular culture, but also in present-day realism scholarship, be it in discussions of classic texts or of contemporary sources. In an argument that, cultural chronology notwithstanding, proves surprisingly relevant to Scott’s Blade Runner, Amy Kaplan contends that late-nineteenth-century fiction of urban life expresses complaints about the elusiveness of the social scene it otherwise seeks to portray realistically. In William Dean Howells’s New York novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Kaplan argues, “the ‘city’ often connotes ’the unreal’” (44). Howells depicts the late-nineteenth-century century metropolis as an object that is not immediately available to perception: it is “that which has not yet been realized” (A. Kaplan 44), and it therefore disturbs observers by “its potential, its threat, its promise” (A. Kaplan 44). Catherine Belsey discerns similar anxieties in a corpus that appeared roughly a century later than Kaplan’s—turn-of- the-twenty-first century sf films (David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ [1999]; John McTiernan’s The Last Action Hero [1993]) as well as works in the tradition of postmodernist metafiction (Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo [1985]; Julian Barnes’s novel England, England [1998]). These texts, Belsey contends, are pervaded with “‘the anxiety of the real’” (Belsey 4): their characters are caught up in narrative labyrinths weaving several levels of existence, none of which exhibiting the solidity and authenticity of anything worth calling reality. The protagonists of Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, for instance, struggle through a hyperrealistic computer game ushering them into situations whose reality status seems increasingly undecidable. Predictably, they hanker after a mode of being more existentially fulfilling than these quasi-fictional scenarios: Yet even

142 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds when they believe the software has been “paused” (Cronenberg), they end up wondering whether or not they are still in the “game” (Cronenberg qtd. in Belsey 8). As they evoke a tradition of epistemological and ontological uncertainty stretching one century into the past, Kaplan and Belsey throw light respectively on the prehistory and the contemporary perpetuation of a familiar brand of pessimism whose most explicit cultural manifestations appeared during the modernist decades. Without disregarding the value of Kaplan’s findings, it makes sense to point out that the concept of an existentially insubstantial urban world is less central to the concerns of late-nineteenth-century writers than to early or mid-twentieth-century modernism: the phrase “[u]nreal [c]ity,” used by Kaplan as chapter heading, is symptomatically borrowed from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) (A. Kaplan 44). Likewise, the “anxiety of the real” (Belsey 4) identified by Belsey resembles a later avatar of the sense of “emptiness of life” at the root of modernist anti-realism (Lukács, “Narrate” 147). In this light, texts such as The Purple Rose of Cairo and eXistenZ—or Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999), Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), to add a few items to Belsey’s corpus—prolong the absurdist tradition initiated by such classics of late-modernist metafiction as Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Jorge Luis Borges’s short prose works of the 1940s. Like these prestigious antecedents, they rewrite the existential alienation of modernism through a medium in which art questions its own strategies. I pointed out in Part I that Marxist theoreticians—Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Lucien Goldmann—interpret modernist or late modernist alienation as an effect of reification: the pessimism of twentieth-century art mirrors the process of “dehumanizationˮ by which capitalist societies cease to be transparent and meaningful to their own subjects (Lukács, Roman historique 218). Marx located the origin of reification—or, as the German philosopher puts it, “human self-estrangement”—in the capitalist division of labor: the latter renders economic processes opaque and dehumanized (Economic 135; see also Idéologie 365, 385). Later Marxists point out that the evolution of capitalism into the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries exacerbated the alienating impact of reification (Lukács, History 87). For Lukács, the failed revolutions of 1848 led the once

143 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds progressive middle classes to cut themselves off from the revolutionary proletariat, and thereby to relinquish their ability to understand the very social system they had brought into existence for their own benefit (Roman 199; “Narrate” 118-19). Goldmann, following Lukács, attributes the heightened dehumanization and breakdown of sociological intelligibility of twentieth-century society to the shift from entrepreneurial to monopoly capitalism and to the concomitant development of colonial empires (51). Postmodernist theoreticians, I indicate in more detail below, corroborate these pessimistic evaluations: the late-twentieth-century information society, they argue, is the culmination of the corporate refashioning of the world: it creates a situation where “dead human laborˮ has irreversibly displaced the lived contact with reality (Jameson, Postmodernism 35). Admittedly, tying turn-of-the-twenty-first realism to a historical narrative whose keynote is “human self-estrangement” affords no reassurance about its capacity to render accounts of social life. As the above comments on Blade Runner suggest, contemporary works with realist aspirations seem only able to draw up what Lukács might have called “problematic” maps of the social field—fragmentary, self- contradictory charts (Theory 78). In a Marxist perspective, inept artistry is only minimally to blame for this apparent flaw: the latter is caused instead by the texts’ anchorage in an inherently mystifying historical environment (Lukács, Theory 78). Blade Runner or the films and novels discussed by Belsey are in this logic the latest offshoots in a line of works that yield social insights only after being subjected to what French theoretician Louis Althusser calls a “symptomal reading”—a corrective hermeneutics scrutinizing their gaps, fractures, silences and contradictions (Althusser, Lire 1.31). This corpus of indirectly or imperfectly referential art, Marxist critics suggest, includes the 1950s French New Novel, American Pop Art, and late- twentieth-century photorealism. The social world in these works seems mute and forbidding, yet it is not inscrutable enough to prevent some socially referential payload from filtering through. Goldmann’s reading of the French New Novel shows that, if properly decrypted, the hermetic fiction of Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet provides an effective mapping of advanced reification (51-51; 290- 91). Human agency is seemingly absent from these novels: it is conferred to objects themselves, which make up an “autonomous

144 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds universe” (Goldmann 298). As such, French New Novels offer a literal enactment of Marx’s diagnosis of capitalist self-estrangement: they disguise social processes and subjects “into things” (Marx, Idéologie 387). Likewise, Fredric Jameson has argued that the ideological ambiguity of Pop Art and photorealism emblematizes the reified politics of postmodernity. Though intensely concerned with the iconography of consumerism, these graphic works exhibit towards their object a cool indifference that illustrates the complicity of late capitalist culture with market logic (Postmodernism 11). In the same logic, the predominance of science fiction in critical discussions of contemporary realism—in Belsey’s Culture and the Real or in Jameson’s reflections on postmodernity—may be read as the symptom of the alienating distance separating turn-of the-twenty-first-century art from the social world of which it presumably renders account: the defamiliarizing shift of temporal perspective inherent to sf emblematizes these texts’ inability to represent social conditions straightforwardly.

We may infer from the previous reflections that texts registering the anxiety of the real are referentially insightful in so far as they reveal new manifestations of reification in their own time (Roman 202; Signification 152, 191). I believe that turn-of-the twentieth-century works do carry out this referential agenda in spite of the epistemological obstacles they otherwise so plainly foreground. Specifically, they gesture toward two main causes to which the epistemological othering of contemporary reality may be imputed— one directly related to capitalist reification, the other indirectly. In the first place, contemporary texts—cyberpunk science fiction and electronic media such as music videos, particularly—are concerned with what urban studies researchers call the “virtualization” of social experience (Ghent Urban Studies Team 88)—the replacement of spatially based forms of sociability by electronically supported interfacing. Virtualization renders inscrutable the very coordinates of everyday experience—space and, to a lesser extent, time. Subjects living in a technologically generated field, cyberpunk sf indicates, see their fabric of perception wrested from human control and understanding. Natural skies give way, as William Gibson puts it in the opening line of Neuromancer, to a backcloth “the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (3). Existence, in Cronenberg’s

145 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds film, becomes entangled in “eXistenZ,” a new “game system” engineered by “software capitalists” working for companies bearing such names as “Cortical Systematics” and “PilgrImage.” Secondly, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century works—postcolonial literature, for obvious reasons, yet also contemporary sf—register the impact of the process of hybridization caused by large-scale migrations and media- supported cultural interchanges—a phenomenon we may call, by reference to Mikhail Bakhtin, the dialogization of social life. Dialogization has been analyzed notably by theorists of what Diarmid Finnegan calls the “spatial turn”—figures such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha or Paul Gilroy (Diarmid 369; see also Warf and Arias). It brings about the coexistence of competing world views— rival codes for the construction of reality. This multiplication of reality norms implies that the global expanse of postmodernity amounts to a patchwork of ill-fitting, even mutually exclusive human experiences. Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix illustrates how the former of these factors—virtualization—impinges on the subject’s experience. Ostensibly, the film’s opening scene follows the conventions of techno-thrillers. In the first shot, an enigmatic telephone conversation is heard in voice-over against a background of computer screens. The focus then shifts to a deceptively familiar film- noir setting. Police units surround a suspect hiding in a derelict hotel—an athletic woman clad in black vinyl, wearing narrow dark shades. In order to fend off imminent arrest, this character, later identified as guerilla fighter Trinity (Carrie Ann Moss), spurns any customary means of physical resistance: she rises into the air with the somber elegance of an airborne vampire, dashes from the hotel room horizontally by using the walls as a race track, and leaps from roof to roof across alleys and avenues until she reaches a telephone cabin inside of which she vanishes into thin air. This memorable sf moment, comparable to a modernist epiphany, has a metarealist value: it signals that we are not in the old film-noir metropolis or even in any recognizable city any longer: a techno-generated world renders physical constraints so defamiliarizing and evanescent that the latter seem to obey the rules of the gothic. The Matrix’s gothic-flavored sf highlights two interrelated features of techno-virtualization: its capacity to produce a simulacrum of phenomenal experience and its erosion of the basic stability required

146 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds to sustain inhabitable lifeworlds. The Matrix indeed echoes not only sf films such as Blade Runner but also postmodernist theorists like Jean Baudrillard in suggesting that the perceptible plane of contemporary social life, which in the Wachowskis’ film is called “the Matrix” itself, is a deceptive veil of encryption: the information economy, beyond its surface of technological gadgetry, is a constellation of barely decipherable corporate codes—a labyrinthine “[c]ryptonomicon,” to use sf novelist Neal Stephenson’s term. Conversely, the electronic encoding of social and economic bonds drains traditional interactions in phenomenal space of their substance. Beneath the layered techno-script making up the fabric of people’s lives lurks what characters in The Matrix, quoting Baudrillard, call the “desert of the real” (Baudrillard, Simulacres 10)—the residue of what was once the mainspring of reality and authenticity. The Matrix depicts this impoverished kernel of existence metaphorically, through shots of a desolate rocky landscape graced with such incongruous props as a late-nineteenth-century couch used by characters to converse about their own alienation. Another scene evokes the deliquescence of previous modes of reality through an admittedly ponderous sf allegory: it shows thousands of human subjects imprisoned in coffin-like pods—devices that capture their life energy in order to sustain the Matrix’s techno-generated simulacrum of social life. The negation of the lifeworld’s stability, on the other hand, is the very object of Trinity’s metamorphosis from film-noir suspect to techno-vampire: the scene suggests that the semiotically encoded social world possesses an inherent fluidity. The Matrix renders this plasticity visible not only through its initial genre-bending scene but also through many subsequent shots in which protagonist Neo (Keanu Reeves) learns to manipulate virtual urban landscapes molded by digital special effects. The link between constant change and digital encryption is evoked in an even subtler fashion in footage of computer screens featuring an endless trickle of ciphers—the vision of codes undergoing constant reconfiguration. Dialogization, the latter axis of the contemporary othering of reality, is depicted in multiculturalist and postcolonial narratives either as a source of alienating strangeness or of grotesque contrasts. Situations where characters inhabit the same social space yet endorse seemingly incompatible cognitive assumptions cause either a loss of existential bearings or turn everyday life into local-color comedy.

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Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1977) dwells on the former, disruptive dimension. The text focuses on Chinese immigrants who have gone through successive historical changes. The memoir’s central figure—Kingston’s mother Brave Orchid—witnessed the fall of the Chinese imperial system and the emergence of Sun Yat Sen’s republic. During her youth, Chinese families had to face the cultural uprooting of emigration to the United States. Once in America, Brave Orchid finds her new surroundings unreal. Chinese immigrants, driven by hope and desperation, had imagined their host country in the features of a “Gold Mountain” (3). When faced with its reality, they call it instead “the land of ghosts” (178). Not only is it unfamiliar but, to people hailing from a tightly structured traditionalistic society, its culture seems inferior. Accordingly, Chinese American children live in a world made up of mismatched planes. Kingston narrates that as a child, she communicated through the front-door mailbox slot with a creature she had been taught to view as the “Garbage Ghost”—in fact a white American dustman (115). Unlike proper ghosts, the latter displays the enigmatic, though eventually reassuring ability to “cop[y] human language”: he mimics the children’s Chinese (115). In order to bridge the gaps that rent their world, Brave Orchid and her daughter Maxine must rely on a life-long ethos of pragmatic dedication and on the imaginative ability to identify with legendary figures of empowerment such as Princess Mulan—the eponymous “[w]oman [w]arrior.” Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), by comparison, highlights the uncanny yet comic dissonances of multicultural conviviality. Smith, with considerable talent for reproducing the postcolonial British vernacular, pictures the interaction of a broad cast of Londoners of various origins—England, the Caribbean, and Bengal. Two of these characters, Millat and Magid Iqbal, the twin sons of Bengali-born parents, emblematize what we might call, by reference to Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the “impossible realit[ies]” of interethnic Britain (Márquez 13). The former proudly displays the attractive looks of a Bollywood star, and seems destined to become a British-identified ladies man. Yet he chooses to join a fundamentalist Islamic group awkwardly named “KEVIN” (the “Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation”) (295). The latter was sent by his father to live among his relatives in Bengal for fear of assimilation into British

148 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds culture. Ironically, he comes back from Asia a clean-shaven, white- clad, scholarly atheist, unconsciously affecting the accents of “a right fuckin’ Olivier” (449), as one of his father’s cockney friends puts it. Magid, in his gentle tones, creates an intercultural stir—indeed a dialogical crisis—when he convinces the barman of his father’s favorite halal pub to serve him “a juicy, yet well-done, tomato ketchup-ed bacon sandwich” (450). Smith’s fiction has been derogatorily labeled “hysterical realism” because it supposedly restricts itself to such intercultural comedy (Woods 42). Still, her multicultural local color aptly expresses the de-realizing impact of dialogization: her characters are tragic precisely in so far as they are imprisoned in the comic interplay of conflicting definitions of identity. In cyberpunk, dialogization is pictured not as a consequence of population shifts but as a technologically generated feature of information societies—indeed an offshoot of virtualization. On the one hand, the semiotic weave of cyberspace or the Matrix is of necessity heterogeneous: if it boasted the monochromatic texture of the future worlds of classic sf, it could not act as a credible substitute for proverbially polymorphous and untidy reality. On the other hand, the codes of its ostensibly polyphonic fabric are consubstantial in so far as they share the basic semiotic mechanisms that sustain all languages, whether natural or technological. Accordingly, seemingly separate planes of the cyberpunk world—technology, organic life, culture—are interlinked by virtue of their shared anchorage in encoding procedures. This allows cyberpunk sociability, as the street scenes of Blade Runner and Gibson’s Neuromancer attest, to accommodate not only distinct ethnic or techno-generated subcultures but also the liminal beings postmodernist feminist Donna Haraway calls “cyborgs” (149). In Haraway’s definition, the latter are “creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted” (149). Gibson depicts several varieties of these techno-biological crossbreeds: his fiction features human subjects flaunting animal or technological grafts—claw-like “scalpel blades” (Neuromancer 25), “fangs” (“Johnny” 28), perfectly oval-shaped skulls, or “Zeiss Icon eyes” (“Burningˮ 211). Cronenberg’s eXistenZ brilliantly satirizes cyberdialogization by having its characters use gaming software made up of sexually connoted, grotesquely organic matter: protagonists connect to eXistenZ through an umbilical cord implanted into the spine by oddly

149 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds inappropriate industrial means—a jackhammer jab, for instance. Likewise, game-console circuitry is made up of mutant animals cooked in a Chinese-style cafeteria.

Virtualization and dialogization have in most cases been analyzed as manifestations of postmodernity: as academic issues, they belong in the theoretical and cultural constellation surveyed, among others, by Jameson, Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Homi Bhabha, and Cornel West. Virtualization itself has been a key concern for postmodernist theoreticians with Marxist credentials—Jameson and Baudrillard, in particular. The latter blame the “unreality” of late- twentieth-century society on the development of the technologically mediated social sphere (Jameson, “Reification” 17). Accordingly, they interpret virtualization as the final victory of reification: it brings about a decisive breakdown in social intelligibility. In a Marxist perspective, postmodernist subjects entertain a paradoxically euphoric relation to their technologically reconfigured environment: they welcome a situation in which the capitalist technostructure has become parasitically alluring precisely because it constitutes, as Jameson puts it, an “impossible totality”—a ghostly, forbidding yet fascinating reified field (Postmodernism 38). On first inspection, this social change has easily identifiable material determinants: Jameson argues that postmodernity’s lingering elusiveness is due to the shift towards an economy based on “machines of reproduction rather than of production” (Postmodernism 37); it is the social offshoot of information systems, digitization, and computer networks, indeed the very tools engineering the virtualization process described above. On the other hand, the very notion of reification implies that the metamorphosis of the visible technosphere is only the outward expression of a broader reconfiguration of the capitalist mode of production, which affects in turn the perception of the world. The task of late-twentieth-century criticism, Jameson therefore contends, consists in developing the “cartographyˮ of an “as yet unimaginable” economy of information-based social relations (Postmodernism 54). The economic/epistemological shift Jameson associates with postmodernity has in its various stages of development been the object of Theodor Adorno’s reflections on the culture industry, Walter Benjamin’s comments on mechanical reproduction, Guy Debord’s analysis of the “Society of the Spectacle,” and Baudrillard’s

150 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds semiotically based analysis of consumerism (Debord 5; Jameson, “Reification” 11, 14; Postmodernism 17-18; Marxism and Form 60- 82). Baudrillard is of particular importance in this tradition. His theory of the simulacrum, by its merger of Marxism and semiology, highlights the specifically postmodernist variant of reification: it suggests how the economics of postmodernity may be apprehended as the advent of a power apparatus engineered by new signifying processes. According to Baudrillard, late capitalism cannot be understood by reference to what is commonly called the real economy: it does not obey such familiar norms as use value and industrial production. In its new system, the real economy is entirely overwritten by speculative exchange and by the mystique of consumerism (Mirror 22; Pour une critique 164-68). In a gesture Jameson considers decisive for postmodernist theory (Postmodernism 395), Baudrillard suggests that exchange value, when it achieves such “absolute pre-eminence,” obeys the relational logic of signs systems defined by Saussure (Pour une critique 164; see also Echange 17). Items in the parade of commodities mimic the behavior of signs in so far as they derive their function not from any anchorage in external reality (in this case, in use value) but rather from a shifting game of interactions among all other elements of the market system in which they circulate (Pour une critique 182-190). With tragic resignation, Baudrillard concludes that this process annihilates “referential value” in all human fields (Echange 20). Postmodern objects, subjects, or cultural representations are deprived of all claims to authenticity: they are only “simulacra” (Echange 77)—copies without originals, brought into existence by mechanisms mingling immotivated semiotic value, commodification, and media reproduction. Conversely, the realms of experience that previously stood as bedrocks of reality have been turned into the vacant sites of the “desert of the real” so vividly allegorized in The Matrix (Simulacres 10). Ironically, reification is so deeply ingrained in this postmodern waste land that its capacity to induce self-estrangement is seemingly suspended: commodification has become immune from any confrontation with an adversary principle able to unmask it (Simulacres 65; Transparence 12). Surprisingly, then, postmodernity is not a realm of visible alienation: it is suffused with inauthentic “positivity” (Baudrillard, Transparence 51). In Jameson’s eloquent formula, it gleams with “hallucinatory splendor” (Jameson, Postmodernism 32-33).

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Compared to the gloom of Marxist diagnoses of the information society, discussions of postmodernist dialogization seem positively solar. In this field too, a new social situation has become interwoven with a theoretical corpus that initially developed in partial independence from it. Poststructuralist models, which at first addressed linguistic and existential issues, are invoked in order to account for what Homi Bhabha calls “the new internationalism” (Location 6)—the geographically based power shifts induced by decolonization, the political struggles of dominated groups, the dissemination of “cultural and political diasporas,” and “the major displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities” (Bhabha, Location 7). The early stages of the cultural assertion of postcolonial minorities, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin contend, were characterized by the primacy of essentialist paradigms: ethnic identity served as stable referent for the definition of authentic human experience (21). The literatures of négritude or the African American Black Arts movement, for instance, superseded the derogatory ethnic stereotypes imposed by colonizers with positively connoted counterstereotypes, often simply portraying as desirable the very features that previously served as marks of inferiority. Still, cultural agendas endorsing essentialist minority identities, though they may have suited the needs of a specific historical moment, fall short of the libertarian spirit of late-twentieth-century postmodern culture. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that minorities should not rally around closed “regionalis[t]” or “ghetto” identities (Mille Plateaux 134); they should instead pursue a dynamic of “becoming minoritarian” (Mille Plateaux 134), eschewing the pursuit of dominance through a practice of “continuous variation” (Mille Plateaux 134). In geopolitical terms too, the postcolonial context renders essentialist cultural politics impractical: the postcolonial condition offers no field in which specific groups might, as Lyotard puts it, treasure their own “world of invariable names” (Différend 219). Homi Bhabha points out that a global field where population groups share the same space or are aware of one another’s cultures through media interchange “prevents identities […] from settling into primordial polarities” (5). Accordingly, turn-of-the-twenty-first- century polities require a dialogical model: they need a paradigm of identity and power that acknowledges the explicit and implicit

152 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds interactions among cultural sub-systems and prevents each of them from gaining hegemonic status over others. Poststructuralism and postmodernism offer the appropriate conceptual tools for this dialogical agenda: the critique of logocentrism, the celebration of textual hybridity, and above all the poststructuralist appropriation of Bakhtinian dialogism combine to fashion a vision of postmodernity where, to borrow Lyotard’s words, the “infinity of heterogeneous finalities” prevails over the cultures of closed identities (“Sign of History” 409; emphasis in original). Bhabha’s writings best articulate this fusion of postcolonial and poststructuralist paradigms. Bhabha conceptualizes dialogization through keywords such as the “necessity of heterogeneity” (Location 39), “hybridity” (37), “the Third Space of enunciation” (53), and the “liberatory” potential of the “enunciatory present” (255). In his view, dialogization—or hybridization—is part of a process that refashions identities not only through social interaction but also through the “contingent” emergence of temporality (Location 264). In other words, dialogization/hybridity develops along two simultaneous axes, corresponding respectively to Bakhtinian dialogism and Derridean différance. It arises in the first place through the mechanism by which a subject, in the dynamics of dialogical exchange, must provisionally adopt “the mental position of the antagonist” (35)—literally othering him or herself, and thereby becoming hybrid or “ambivalent” (35). Secondly, the subject becomes hybrid at a different level as it is affected by the passage of time—a process Bhabha views as a performative dynamics enacted in the indeterminate present of enunciation (264). Hybridity/dialogization is accordingly not to be resisted: subjects quixotically seeking to eschew interethnic dialogical encounters would still be othered by ineluctable “temporality” (Bhabha 38). Symptomatically, Bhabha adopts a resolutely optimistic view of this dialogical refashioning. While others might lament the loss of integrity caused by hybridity, he contends that “contestatory subjectivities are empowered” as they are unraveled and rewritten within an energizing performative process (256). They accede thereby to the “Third Space of enunciation” (53)—the field of creative interaction generated by “dialogical discursive exchange” and by the constant emergence of an ever more complex global field (Location 34).

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2.1.2 Wagering on Reality: Shall I Project a World? The greatest aesthetic challenge called forth by the virtualized and dialogized field of postmodernity, the previous comments suggest, is primarily the search for artistic practices that might render justice to its elusive environment. Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novel The World Jones Made addresses this issue with remarkable prescience. Dick describes a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century society where distrust of absolutes has become a state-sponsored doctrine. In order to forestall political and religious fanaticism, the Federal World Government has promulgated the “multiple-value system” (86-87), a dialogical code of conduct laid out in a new gospel, “Hoff’s Primer of Relativism” (22). Even government officials acknowledge that strict adherence to the relativistic primer is difficult. Citizens befuddled by Hoff’s system of (un)belief may, however, take their cue from the art of their era. The cultural life of Dick’s twenty-first century indeed features such didactic works as ballet performances meant to act out the indeterminate fluidity of existence: dancers morph from one gender into the other in front of live audiences, thereby allegorizing their society’s refusal of stable referents (80). Like Dick’s custodians of relativism, actual postmodernist theoreticians contend that late- twentieth-century art should refrain from reducing the world to determinate patterns, or even assume that any sum of experience is liable to cohere into a world at all. Brian McHale, in his discussion of postmodernist fiction, argues that literature seeking to be relevant to postmodernity must “foregroun[d] ontological issues” and subject them to skeptical scrutiny (McHale 10). Similarly, advocates of magic realism suggest that the late-twentieth-century context requires aesthetic practices registering the experience of a pluralist, not a monologic culture (Saldivar 526-32; McHale 17). The same authors take it for granted that the classic realist aesthetic is not up to this task, or even actively hinders it: realism is concerned with truthful representation and cannot as such render account of a world deprived of ontological anchorage. Accordingly, the objections to mimesis set forth in Part I, which in principle apply to all stages of cultural history, have been invoked in the field of postmodernist criticism as evidence of realism’s specific inability to address the climate of skeptical pluralism and indeterminism of the post-WWII context. Postmodernist objections to realism echo the earlier Marxist concerns about the inability of reified societies to produce

154 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds sociologically insightful art. However, unlike orthodox Marxists, postmodernist theoreticians argue that neither art nor philosophy should aim entirely to dispel the sense of unreality suffusing the contemporary scene. Doing so amounts to a quixotically naive—even politically repressive—hankering after ontological certainty, authenticity, and monologic closure. Jean-François Lyotard eloquently indicates to what extent these postmodernist principles disqualify the realist aesthetics. In comments that echo André Breton, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Paul Sartre, he contends that the purpose of mimesis in the twentieth-century has consisted in “preserving consciousness against doubt” (“Réponse” 19). Under postmodernity, however, the imitation of phenomenal appearance has become artistically counterproductive because it has been overwhelmed by capitalism’s capacity to “de-realize everyday objects, the roles of social life, and [its] institutions” (“Réponse” 18). Reluctant to confront this destabilizing dynamics, realists have merely played the “therapeutic” part of “cheerleaders of what exists” (“Réponse” 19). High modernism and mass-culture-oriented populist postmodernism fare little better in the French philosopher’s typology: he suspects the former, in spite of its devotion to aesthetic experimentalism, to harbor the “nostalgia of presence” (“Réponse” 28). The latter merely trivializes the legacy of the avant-garde by reducing it to consumerist eclecticism. Genuinely postmodernist art, as Lyotard defines it, must on the contrary earnestly address the epistemological challenge of its era. To this effect, it should take heed of Kant’s discussion of the sublime. The Kantian sublime, in Lyotard’s reading, signals the breakdown of the subject’s capacities of representation: it designates the suffering experienced by the subject when it witnesses its inability to “present an object” that exceeds the imagination, but can nevertheless be conceived by reason (“Réponse” 31). Whereas previously God, nature, and the industrial metropolis were singled out as objects of the sublime, under postmodernity reality itself triggers this crisis of perception.36 Thus, art accepts the challenge of postmodernity precisely in so far as it sets itself the task of alerting its audience to the fact that postmodern society has no stable reality concept: it signals that the social world is constantly disturbed by “the unpresentable” (31). Rather than

36 For the discussion of the various objects of the rhetoric of the sublime, see Den Tandt, (“Masses” 127-28) and Jameson (Postmodernism 32-35).

155 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds surrendering to the “fantasy of embracing reality” (32) and the “consolation of beautiful forms” (31), postmodern art keeps “inventing allusions to what cannot be presented” (“Réponse” 32). There are two dimensions to these serious objections—one concerning the tenor of realist discourse, the other the nature of postmodernity. I address the former in later chapters, arguing that the concept of mimesis as existential therapy, which Lyotard borrows from the tradition of modernist antirealism, is not borne out by the actual make-up of the realist corpus. We have already noted in Chapter 4 that classic realism is more complex than the one- dimensional profile foisted upon it by champions of modernism: it is in fact a dialogized practice. The contemporary realist corpus, I indicate in more detail below, is even more remote from this antirealist caricature. What interests us at the present stage of our argument is, however, the latter aspect of Lyotard’s analysis—the very soundness of his portrayal of contemporary conditions. Establishing the legitimacy of realism within a virtualized, dialogized scene requires indeed opening up the possibility that the postmodernist characterization of turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture as the field of the unpresentable might be one-sided. In other words we must show that postmodernist theory blocks off other legitimate perspectives on contemporary conditions, one among which being realism itself. If we follow the most sanguine opponents of postmodernism, refuting the arguments of late-twentieth-century prophets of unreality seems a fairly simple task. Christopher Norris argues, for instance, that postmodernist “dogmatic relativism” is dismissible on purely logical grounds (285). Like all similar doctrines, it stumbles on the “self-disabling” contradiction of the liar paradox (Norris 198). In the Introduction to the present essay, I have pointed out how Epimenides’ vexing syllogism affects the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For Norris, this logical impasse jeopardizes postmodernist theory altogether: as postmodernist discourse affirms the impossibility of absolute knowledge, it is against all logic compelled to maintain unshakeable trust in its own skepticism. Government officials in Dick’s The World Jones Made fall victim to this trap: in their efforts to enforce the principles of the Primer of Relativism, they naively pride themselves on learning the textbook’s skeptical doxa “by heart” (22). Still, jeering at theoreticians caught up in Epimenides’ logical snares does not

156 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds amount to a full-fledged refutation of their claims: all discourses, whether in favor of skepticism or cognitive trust, have to wrestle with obstacles of this kind. Symptomatically, the liar paradox has not eluded Lyotard’s attention. He analyzes it in detail in reflections on sophist philosopher Protagoras (Différend 19-22). Lyotard’s argument in this matter suggests that, contrary to what opponents of postmodernism may hope, exposing the logical contradiction of philosophical skepticism does not suffice to establish the possibility of knowledge. Stating that uncertainty must remain uncertain falls short of a solid validation of procedures of cognition. Only a provisional, contingent grasp of the world can be developed on this basis, and this frail edifice may at any moment be challenged by the indeterminacy of the unfolding of human experience in time (Lyotard, Différend 21). Instead of complacently deconstructing the paradoxes of relativism, the present vindication of realism requires an approach acknowledging the legitimacy of postmodernist skepticism without, however, conferring to the latter the intellectual hegemony it has enjoyed in the last decades. The chief theoretical foundation for an argument of this nature is Kant’s analysis of the limits of metaphysical thought. I contend indeed that postmodernism’s key principles, as well as its mapping of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century society, cannot aspire to be more than metaphysical hypotheses—inspiring to some extent, yet beyond proof. Thus, using Kant against Lyotard, I suggest that postmodernism has elaborated what the German philosopher calls a set of “world-concepts” (460). In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant uses the latter term to designate transcendental ideas pertaining to the “absolute totality of experience in the synthesis of appearances” (460). Such totalizing propositions—the (non)existence of God, the reality of freedom or of determinism, the finitude or the infinity of the cosmos—may in Kant’s view “neither hope for confirmation in experience nor fear refutation by it” (467): they are locked in the “antinomy of pure reasonˮ (259). World-concepts are no “arbitrary question[s],” however (467); they are rather “natural and unavoidable illusion[s]” that “every human reason must necessarily come up against in the course of its progress” (467). Yet a sound “skeptical method” (468; emphasis deleted), which Kant distinguishes from radical skepticism, relinquishes any hope of submitting them to a final cognitive judgment. With unwitting relevance to late-twentieth- century controversies, Kant adds that arguments over world-concepts

157 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds open up a “dialectical battlefield” (468) where supposedly decisive victories can, for lack of final proof, be gained “merely because the champion of the good cause h[o]ld[s] the field alone, his opponent having been forbidden to take up his weapons again” (468). Viewed in this Kantian perspective, postmodernism has elaborated a metaphysical synthesis of contemporary society whose indeterminism fits its historical context so tightly that it has in many cases discouraged scrutiny of its underlying assumptions. All major formulations of poststructuralist skepticism are in this light Kantian world concepts, be it Lyotard’s contention that contemporary society is irremediably disturbed by the unpresentable, Lacan’s characterization of the subject as haunted by desire and lack, or Derrida’s theory of the temporal deployment of signifiers under différance. Each of these propositions can be validated only from an external totalizing perspective. That human experience is essentially indeterminate and lacunar can be ascertained only by a gaze presumably unaffected by lack, différance, or the unpresentable itself. In short, demonstrating that postmodernity is under the sway of unreality can only be done from a standpoint where reality is paradoxically available. For lack of this touchstone of (un)reality, postmodernist arguments have the same epistemological value as the metaphysical hypotheses that serve as skeptical poles of Kant’s antinomies of pure reason: they are late-twentieth-century variants of the ungrounded claims stating that “[t]here is no absolutely necessary being existing anywhere” (Kant 491), that “nowhere in [the world] does there exist anything simpleˮ (477), and that “[t]he world has no beginning and no bounds in space” (471). In the same logic, on the basis of a philosophical source older than Kant, one may argue that postmodernist indeterminism covertly appeals to a paradoxically inverted version of René Descartes’s proof of the existence of God. The French philosopher contends that God must exist because in its absence, a “finite being” like the human subject could never of itself conceive of “any substance that were genuinely infinite” (117). Conversely, postmodernist indeterminism can be proved true only if contemporary subjects—even though they are presumably caught up in an environment of unreality, heterogeneity, and change—manage to locate within this very field a philosophical principle that could against all odds serve as final guarantee of the world’s indeterminacy, but would disclaim for itself any privileged metaphysical status.

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In the most compelling formulations of postmodernist theory—in Derrida and Lyotard, notably—, temporal experience has served precisely as this metaphysical case clincher. Postmodernism has managed to shield itself against Kantian allegations of metaphysical undecidability by anchoring its indeterminism in phenomenological reflections on time that seem unchallengeable on empirical grounds. We have seen in Chapter 3 that the destabilizing momentum of différance originates from the temporal dissemination of stimuli (i.e. of signs) within the structure of perception: consecutive stimuli rewrite the meaning of the present and past ad infinitum, pursuing no determinate goal. Likewise, Lyotard’s theory of the différend specifies that the subject is produced by the occurrence of heterogeneous “phrases” whose unpredictable and ineluctable chaining makes up the texture of “time” itself (Différend 10). Still, as counterintuitive as this may sound, the poststructuralist notion of a Heraclitean flow of time- bound perception constitutes an undecidable world-concept. Derrida’s portrayal of the temporality of différance or Lyotard’s evocation of speech acts “arising out of nothingness” (Différend 102) are, in a Kantian perspective, twentieth-century variants of the branch of the antinomy of pure reason arguing in favor of the infinity of the world in time and space (Kant 470). They are as such beyond proof. Admittedly, the phenomenologically based postmodernist view of temporality is more complex than what Derrida, quoting Heidegger, dismissively calls “a vulgar concept of time”—a merely linear sequence (Grammatologie 105). Yet by picturing temporal experience as aimless (non-teleological) and propelled by an irreversible dynamics, postmodernists endorse a paradigm no less dogmatic than the overtly metaphysical philosophies of history—Hegel’s, notably— they so assiduously deconstruct. Admittedly, the postmodernist case is rhetorically cogent because, in a century shattered by “signs of history” such as the Shoah, Hiroshima, and Stalinist totalitarianism (Lyotard, “Discussions” 383), indeterminate temporality seems more intuitively compelling than a Hegelian “narrative of legitimization” driven forward by ineluctable progress and headed for the end of history (Lyotard, Condition 54). Still, empirical improbability cannot pass for philosophical refutation, so that the postmodernist perspective on these matters cannot fully discredit opposing viewpoints, however marginalized they have been in recent decades.

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When postmodernist arguments are reframed in the light of Kant’s antinomy of pure reason, virtualization and dialogization, the two pillars of postmodern unreality, lose some of their seemingly irresistible momentum. In this new light, Baudrillard’s nightmarish vision of a virtualized future remains unappetizing, yet not ineluctable. Full-fledged virtualization—the victory of simulacra with the concomitant erasure of nature—is indeed a world-concept subjected to the same paradoxes as all other totalizing ideas. If the technologically generated posthuman/postnatural environment possessing “neither origin nor reality” did come to pass (Baudrillard, Simulacres 10), its anti-natural character could be established only by comparison with absolute reality—from the perspective of unsullied nature, for instance. Were this touchstone of reality available, virtualization would, however, remain paradoxically incomplete. Thus, a world of rootless technological clones is literally unthinkable or, more appropriately, it can be envisaged only if we accept that the resulting universe would manifest itself as a full-fledged second nature with all the prerogatives of the old one, including its hierarchies of (un)reality and (in)authenticity—hence its capacity to appeal to non-alienated truth. Symptomatically, Gibson’s cyberpunk novels, even as they evoke the threat of a world dominated by the “space that [isn’t] a space” of virtual interconnections, explore this universe through the perspective of protagonists propelled by aspirations to truth and fulfillment transcending the values of their virtualized world (Gibson, Count 62). Similarly, if Philip K. Dick’s/Ridley Scott’s Deckard turned out to be a cyborg, he would still exhibit moral qualms, existential anxiety, and concerns for the truth of his social environment. Thus, no degree of virtualization may entirely delegitimize the realist agenda, however daunting the obstacles this technological process may throw in the way of realist investigation. The same shift of perspective suggests that dialogization, however prominent a feature of the present social and political context, cannot be viewed as a flight into limitless diversity: it still requires principles, ethical or referential, framing its supposedly endless dynamism, and should make allowances for the possibility of common ground beyond cultural diversity. Ironically, a large segment of multiculturalist literature and art has no qualms endorsing such guiding norms: in Hong Kingston’s memoir, Chinese characters back up their political demands by pointing to an ascertainable history of oppression;

160 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds similarly, the characters of Smith’s contemporary London rely on the inalienable values of a bill of rights. Postmodernist proponents of dialogism—Bakhtin, Bhabha, Judith Butler, Richard Rorty and occasionally Lyotard and Michel Foucault—are less easily convinced by this covert universalism, however. They assume that cultural and social interchanges are infinitely open-ended: they will never encounter a truth-based referent able to bring their discursive movement to a close. Yet, by invoking an infinite regression of discursive exchanges, dialogical theories renounce the possibility of proof. They revert to the status of world-concepts for the same reason as Derrida’s différance and Lyotard’s différend do. I do not suggest, of course, that in a conceivable future, cultural controversies are likely to be rendered irrelevant by the rise of absolute truth—however intriguing such an event might be. I argue instead that dialogical arguments tend to obscure the problems caused by their anti- referential commitment by cloaking in angelic optimism the potentially conflictual dynamics of speech acts, which is too confidently perceived as the liberatory potential of the enunciatory present. The uncritical celebration of dialogical contests amounts in this perspective to ungrounded political utopianism—a glamorization of sheer energy and change deprived of proper philosophical foundations or political scrutiny. This point can be made by underscoring the pragmatist dimension of postmodern dialogism—the fact that it shares key principles with Charles Sanders Peirce’s and William James’s philosophy, including the latter’s conceptual paradoxes. Since postmodernist dialogism rejects truth values and lays its trust in the efficacy of speech acts, it qualifies indeed as a discursively based, performative variant of pragmatism. In his critique of late-twentieth-century thought, Christopher Norris, pertinently points out that pragmatists old and new (James and Rorty, say), as they abandon truth claims “renounce all warrant for criticizing false and deluded beliefs” and thereby lose any capacity to clarify their own political goals (Truth 293). James famously claims that philosophy should pursue “‘what is good in the way of belief” (qtd in Norris 297). Yet, Norris argues, one hardly sees how any evolution from what is good to what is better in the way of belief could be legitimated, let alone identified, merely on the basis of such criteria as efficacy and usefulness (291). A belief that is

161 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds performatively efficacious may not be useful; if useful, it may not be desirable; and, above all, it might not be true. By the same token, the postmodernist hope that speech-act contest will function as crucibles of resistance rings hollow as long as postmodernism deprives itself of the possibility to gauge whether any social progress is scored in specific discursive tussles. Such forced confidence amounts to believing in what we might call performative magic—the mysterious capacity of speech acts, as they engender the world from one moment to the other, to yield political benefits that remain paradoxically beyond any determinate evaluation. In the logic of performative magic, the sheer dynamism of discourse—its illocutionary force—serves as substitute for truth or ethics. Accordingly, arguments championing dialogism—Bhabha’s paeans to the enunciatory present, for instance—disguise the precarious groundings of such optimism by means of a discursive strategy that plays off one world-concept against another. Performative dialogism ostensibly endorses the world-concept of infinite time and space. Yet even as it declines to measure political achievement by means of determinate standards or to envisage the possibility of political setbacks, it discreetly set its hopes on the antithetical, equally undecidable metaphysical claim: it covertly banks on the availability of automatic progress, reconciliation, and closure. In the present defense of realism, it would admittedly be ironical to take issue with the latter aspirations: they signal the continued relevance of useful principles repressed by postmodernist orthodoxy. The problem lies, however, in the fact that performative dialogism relegates these values to the status of a hidden, somewhat shameful agenda

Admittedly, contemporary realism seems only modestly empowered by an argument that follows the precepts of as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and therefore dismisses all metaphysical claims back to back. The previous remarks imply indeed that realism is no less, yet no more legitimate than the skeptical theories that deconstruct it. Its possibility depends on a gesture similar to French seventeenth-century moralist Blaise Pascal’s famous bet on the existence of God and the afterlife. In his Pensées, Pascal argues that unbelievers have little to lose and much to gain by endorsing the otherwise unverifiable dogmas of Christianity (550). In an intellectual context dominated by antirealism, reality can be made the object of a similar wager: between

162 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds the postmodernist belief in unreality and, on the other hand, the referential trust in the possibility of an ascertainable lifeworld, “one must,” as Pascal puts it in his own religious context, “place one’s bet” (Pascal 550). Even though this gesture carries the negative connotation of a gambling, it constitutes the foundation of what Ihab Hasan, in a re-evaluation of realims, calls “cognitive trust” (“Beyond” 206). The mutually exclusive subject positions enabled by the reality bet sketched out above are illustrated in two major works of American late-twentieth-century fiction—Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s novels deal with the same social environment at different stages of its evolution. Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 must decipher the suburban spread of San Narciso—a newly minted California community fashioned by information technologies. This techno- suburb, the novel suggests, embodies the state of America in the mid- 1960s. Only the actions of mysterious subcultures vying against one another for political and informational control confer a semblance of structure to its mute, elusive fabric. DeLillo’s protagonist Nick Shay travels through an arguably less allegorically enigmatic, yet equally alienating variant of the postmodern waste land. The post-Cold-War society he inhabits is spiritually thin, economically iniquitous, still haunted by the fear of nuclear annihilation, and confronted with the fear of AIDS and ecological disaster. Both Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s characters perceive that the key question raised by this environment is whether it possesses sufficient substantiality to resolve itself into a lifeworld. Oedipa candidly voices this concern when, struggling with bewildering clues as to the nature of San Narciso, she asks: “Shall I project a world?” (56; emphasis in original). This question implicitly acknowledges that the evidence available about the structure of the social environment does not cohere into a lifeworld out of its own dynamics: the lifeworld’s emergence is conditioned by each observer’s commitment to the possibility of securing a consistent framework of experience. In Pynchon, the answer to Oedipa’s question about the worldness of postmodernity is deferred. The Crying of Lot 49 famously leads to an open ending whereby the heroine expects the arrival of still another subculture messenger bearing potentially decisive revelations about San Narciso’s power games. DeLillo’s Nick Shay, by comparison, resolutely commits himself to

163 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds the reality bet: he chooses to “liv[e] responsibly in the real” (82). Accordingly, he cannot endorse the facile skepticism of some of his acquaintances, who claim that “life” is “a fiction” and that “things [have] become unreal” (82). Instead, he “he[ws] to the texture of collected knowledge,” and “[takes] faith from the solid and availing stuff of (…) experience” (82). It is fitting that in the sprawling narrative fabric of Underworld, Nick’s commitment to reality should be dialogized with the stance of less epistemologically confident protagonists: his voice is only one strand, albeit a prominent one, in a large ensemble cast. What matters in the present context is, as DeLillo’s novel attests, not the absence of a consensus about the knowledge of of reality, but rather the assurance that the reality wager embodied in Nick’s attitude can find at least a de jure validation. There are several reasons not to go beyond this minimalist gesture at this stage of our argument. In the first place, the concept of the reality bet fits the existential tenor of the contemporary realist corpus. We have seen in the Introduction to the present essay that turn-of-the-twenty-first century realist works are problematic texts, reflecting the mood of what French New Novelist Nathalie Sarraute evocatively calls the “era of suspicion” (57). As such, they partly incorporate the postmodernist distrust of ontological certainties, and cannot profit from a reading grid that takes certainty for granted. Secondly, even the limited validation of referential practice sketched out above may serve as foundation for a felicitous change in heuristic perspective. Philosophical assumptions, both for postmodernism and realism, act as enabling supports for heuristic frameworks. Postmodernist art and theory, on the basis of their indeterminist metaphysics, excel in digging up evidence testifying to the othering of everyday experience. Likewise, if realism endorses the reasonable yet not uncontestable principles of cognitive trust, it is apt to bring out those aspects of the contemporary scene that justify a representation of postmodernity from the perspective of truth. The resulting realist practice, to misappropriate a term Bakhtin coins disparagingly, resembles a “centripetal” dialogism (Dialogic 272)—a cautious, pluralist, experimental appraisal of a social scene that, contrary to indeterminist beliefs, need not reshape itself ad infinitum.

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2.1.4 The Realist Underground The various cultural practices that fulfil the terms of the reality bet do not add up to a clearly demarcated cultural movement. I pointed out in the Introduction to this essay that the corpus of contemporary realism is a scattered, discreet constellation. Symptomatically, several texts mentioned in the present chapter even challenge the notion that cognitive trust—tentative optimism mixed with skepticism—may yield a viable subject position. Cronenberg’s eXistenZ features Luddites of the computer age who call themselves the “realist underground.” Dressed in Che Guevara-style military fatigues, these self-proclaimed “true and trustworthy realist[s]” struggle against the “deformations of reality” caused by commodification and virtualization. On first inspection, Cronenberg’s concept of a realist underground could serve as a fitting template for the realist praxis outlined in the present pages. Yet eXistenZ handles this prospect with dismissive irony. When the realist guerillas decree the “victory of realism,” they can only point at a barren landscape devastated by their own raids. Above all, one hardly sees how characters in a computer simulation might act as custodians of reality. Dick’s The World Jones Made pictures the realist underground in even grimmer terms. Its eponymous character Floyd Jones possesses paranormal skills enabling him to see with full accuracy one year into the future. With these cognitive privileges, Jones cannot accept the state-sanctioned view of a dialogized reality amenable to multiple interpretations. He therefore creates a fascistic party that overturns government-enforced relativism and restores, for better or worse, the perception of the world advocated by his band of fanatical followers. Intriguingly, The World Jones Made fails to make clear where readers’ sympathies should lie in this debate over the philosophical paradoxes of truth-seeking. For all his dictatorial flaws, Jones is credited with rekindling life- enhancing projects the relativistic government had smothered. Cronenberg’s and Dick’s dystopian farces stand in contrast with the numerous contemporary realist works where the commitment to reality is the object of earnest and sympathetic reflections. Gibson’s cyberpunk narratives, for instance, introduce a variant of the realist underground peopled with characters acting with remarkable dedication as “[c]ognitive [d]issidents” of the information society of the near future (Virtual 131). These referential questers enter informal brotherhoods committed to reclaiming an intelligible life-world

165 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds against social and epistemological odds. The primary function of Gibson’s realist underground is, predictably, of a cognitive nature: it features protagonists whose exceptional skills of perception make them comparable to Dick’s Floyd Jones. Colin Laney in Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties is able to discern patterns within apparently formless social and informational configurations: he identifies “nodal points” in data streams (Idoru 37); Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition and Zero History responds to fashion designs as to allergens, thereby intuitively grasping information vital to corporate strategies. Such icons of truth seeking are the sf counterparts of investigators in contemporary crime narratives. They are equivalent, for instance, to Nicholas Branch, the CIA analyst of Don DeLillo’s Libra, who seeks to retrieve the “secret history” (15) of JFK’s assassination from the “six point nine seconds of heat and light” of the Zapruder film—the grainy 8mm movie offering the best available visual record of the president’s shooting (15). Branch himself is comparable to the ubiquitous experts of TV fictions—characters in CSI, Without a Trace, or Cold Case—whose scientific investigations of crime contribute to a fictional sociology of contemporary life. As they foreground these icons of cognitive investigation, contemporary works perpetuate the classic realist tradition of introducing within fictional narratives observers embodying Emile Zola’s ideal of the scientifically trained artist mindful of social reform (Hamon 132). In Gibson’s technothrillers as in all other realist texts discussed in the present chapter, the subject position supported by cognitive dissidence is never restricted to mere fact finding. Instead, the realist underground sustains a multidimensional praxis comprehending modes of behavior such as pragmatic commitment, the ability to inhabit an unstable environment, and aesthetic experimentation. The pragmatic, activist axis of cognitive dissidence informs the behavior of protagonists as ostensibly different as Brave Orchid, the mother of Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, and turn-of-the- twenty-first-century documentary film makers Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock: these figures are dedicated to the retrieval of knowledge in challenging circumstances. Brave Orchid, whose itinerary from China to the US is chronicled in Kingston’s memoir, responds to the metamorphosis of mid-twentieth-century China by dedication to hard work and scientific education. Obliged to support her family in the home country before her husband can afford to let

166 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds them join him in the US, she obtains a medical degree. Already in her forties, she starts working as a doctor, a midwife, and, as Kingston puts it, a “shaman” coping with the complexities of a dialogized world (65): she fights both the battle of western medicine against germs and disease and the Chinese struggle against spirits and ghosts. With some degree of metaphorical transposition, Brave Orchid’s struggle against disease and ghosts matches the complex strategies of Moore and Spurlock in their efforts to expose the strategies of corporate leaders, politicians, and ideologues: information in the turn-of-the-twenty-first century context is no object that can merely be harvested: it has to be teased out, obtained by cunning, and advertised with some degree of performative showmanship. The implicit aim of the cognitive praxis sketched out above is the staking out of a shared, sustainable life space. Realist investigators therefore also act as existential settlers. Pam Morris points out that realism has always nurtured a concern for community: the sharing of knowledge both presupposes and generates a social bond (155). The connection between realism and the yearning for human interaction is particularly noticeable under postmodernity: Joseph Dewey contends that late-twentieth century novelists such as Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Tyler, or John Irving develop a new variant of realism in so far as they depict protagonists eager to weave networks of relationships at the local level. Their efforts, Dewey argues, amount to a gesture of resistance against capitalist dehumanization, and, in particular, against the fantasy version of the real constructed by the technologies of information (14-15). Dewey’s insight may be transposed to a broad corpus in various media. It applies, for instance, to Thomas Pynchon’s ostensibly postmodernist novel Vineland. The America depicted in this work is threatened by government conspiracies and overlaid with mass-culture kitsch. Yet the novel’s protagonists, instead of giving in to despondency, deploy a manic inventiveness in carving a niche for themselves in their unpromising environment. Ex surf-band musician Zoyd Wheeler maintains his status as a certified mental patient eligible for disability allowances by carrying out a media-covered life- threatening routine every year. Zoyd’s daughter Prairie, less eccentric than her father, displays remarkable authority and skill when asked to run the dysfunctional kitchen of a Zen retreat for female Ninja fighters (107). Isaiah Two Four, Prairie’s heavy-metal rocker boyfriend plans to develop a franchise of amusement parks for martial-arts enthusiasts,

167 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds thereby turning anti-social behavior into entrepreneurial pursuit (19). Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld follows a comparable logic, arguably in less cartoonish fashion. The novel is peopled with such courageous figures as Sister Grace Fahey, Sister Alma Edgar, and graffiti writer Ismael Muñoz. Against extraordinary odds of poverty, racism and medical plagues, these characters attempt to maintain a livable space within neighborhoods whose “surreal” state of dereliction has become a feature of the society of the spectacle, attracting chartered buses packed with foreign tourists (47). Similarly, in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century independent films such as Wayne Wang’s and Paul Auster’s Smoke (1995), Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999), and Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1998), local communities or sub-cultural brotherhoods are contrasted with a larger, dysfunctional megalopolitan context. Smoke introduces a cluster of characters inhabiting an island of conviviality in the middle of 1990s Brooklyn. The anchoring point of their relationships is a cigar store run by Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel). Ghost Dog is set in the waste land of a nameless industrial New York suburb (in fact, Jersey City). In this unpromising locale, Jarmusch’s eponymous character—a lone African American contract killer working for mobsters—is able to build his small circle of friendship: he bonds with a young girl named Pearline, who shares his interest for Japanese Samurai lore, and with a Haitian ice-cream vendor, who intriguingly thrives in an environment whose language he does not master. Aesthetic experimentation has a share in the practice of realist investigators because the struggle waged by these characters pursues goals that outstrip self-interest. The link between realist practice and art is underscored in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008)—a narrative set in seventeenth-century colonial America, but whose thematics resonates with twenty-first-century issues. Morrison’s colonists confront an environment so challenging that it makes “animosity” among the socially unequal settlers “utterly useless” (51). Though divided by race, gender, and above all by their status as free persons, indentured servants, or slaves, these characters must combine their efforts to maintain their uncertain dwelling. This pursuit, Morrison indicates, amounts to an art form, and it can be accomplished with various degrees of success. A few protagonists misguidedly associate settling with the urge to leave a mark of their triumphant selfhood on the landscape. White colonist Jacob Vaark dreams of possessing a

168 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds gentleman’s mansion comparable to the estates of the aristocratic landowners with whom he trades. As part of this project, he hires an African American blacksmith able to create a splendid wrought-iron gate. Symptomatically, both Jacob and the blacksmith die shortly after the completion of this real-estate fantasy: the unmanageable manor remains deserted. The proper art of dwelling, Morrison suggests, consists instead in shoring up a common life space—an effort pursued tentatively by Jacob’s wife and servants. Similarly, DeLillo’s Underworld is crowded with characters for whom inhabiting is an art form. Conceptual sculptor Klara Sax has chosen to reside on a former air base in the Southwestern desert. Surrounded by a cheerful crowd of art students, she refits B-52 bombers into huge painted sculptures. In the novel, her gesture is attributed to the nostalgic urge to exorcise the ghosts of the Cold War. In a Baudrillardian perspective, it also reads as an attempt to reclaim the technological waste land of postmodernity and to refashion it into an artistically glamorized dwelling space. Likewise, Ismael Muñoz domesticates his environment both in the fashion of an aesthetic and a political activist: there is only a slight shift of emphasis between his adventurous years as a graffitero spray-painting subway trains and his later efforts as a charity worker. Graffiti writing is carefully planned, illegal and glamorous. It allows dispossessed urban dwellers to redraw the city in their own image. Social work only prolongs this endeavor, albeit with a sharper insight into the community’s needs. Outside the realm of fiction, aesthetically minded existential settling is practiced by performance artists such as the Parkour acrobats of the French banlieues. Parkour runners chart their way across housing projects by means of hazardous climbs, leaps, and jumps (Zeitoun). In so doing, they explore and reclaim their life world through a careful appraisal of what is physically and imaginatively possible. Their practice, which I discuss in more detail in a later section, ranks therefore as a variety of realist inhabiting similar in status to Ismael’s graffiti raids, Klara’s conceptual art, and the survival gestures of Morrison’s protagonists.

As the realist underground both explores and inhabits the contemporary lifeworld, it develops a praxis comparable to a cognitively focused existentialism. It may seem odd to link the philosophy popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s and ’50s to contemporary realism. From the perspective of present-day academia,

169 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds existentialism resembles a ghost from the cultural past. According to a historical sequence more often taken for granted than critically examined, the thematics of existentialism—the absurd, authentic selfhood, freedom—have been eclipsed from academic discourse as of the 1970s, and superseded by the postmodernist concerns for the linguistic construction of experience and multicultural diversity. Yet a cultural shift of this magnitude can neither be abrupt nor irrevocable. Existentialist concerns are still traceable in novels such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) or Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which are otherwise regarded as classic instances of metafiction and postmodernist “black humor.” John Yossarian in Heller and Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut qualify as existentialist protagonists in so far as they are alienated subjects—“problematic” heroes, to take up Georg Lukács’s term (Theory 78)—responding to a world whose values have receded into invisibility. They therefore prolong the struggle against the absurd previously waged by anti- heroes in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s, Joseph Conrad’s. Ernest Hemingway’s, Richard Wright’s, and, of course, Sartre’s and Albert Camus’s fiction. American films of the late 1960s and 1970s—Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1979), Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)—lend themselves to a similar analysis: their countercultural appeal draws on existential angst and self-assertion. Beyond the 1970s, I argue below, existentialism did survive, albeit at the cost of a shift in thematics. A continuous tradition of existential art up to the present may indeed be traced out if we accept that the central focus of existentialism was redefined in a fashion that effected a partial merger of existential and realist concerns. The metamorphosis of existentialism under postmodernity can hardly be attributed to renewed confidence in the meaningfulness of the world. Fiction from the 1970s onward either perpetuates the classic existentialist thematics of alienation, or it formulates a postmodernistic representation of the subject’s relation to society whose tenor is hardly less pessimistic than in the previous literature of fear and trembling. DeLillo’s Underworld, published even beyond the cresting point of postmodernist fiction, illustrates the first branch of this evolution. In this angst-ridden narrative, pragmatic dedication unfolds against a background of philosophical doubt and political terror. These grim affects are embodied in the psychologically tortured

170 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds figures of FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover and Sister Alma Edgar, a conservative catholic nun doing charity work in the Bronx. Hoover is obsessed with “Dietrologia,”—the “science of dark forces” (280); he discerns manifestations of these powers in the USA’s nuclear contest with the Soviet Union—a political development that makes the postwar scene comparable to the world of Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death (50). Sister Alma Edgar sees enduring evil throughout the urban scene, indeed in the very neighborhoods where she otherwise helps derelicts cope with urban blight. The second variant of the thematics of alienation gives voice to the unease caused by a world constructed entirely of recycled cultural material—indeed by the field of Baudrillardian simulacra spawned by the information society. It constitutes as such the specifically postmodernist expression of existential absurdity. The imaginative rendering of disoriented subjects in a media-generated universe is the core concern of Pynchon’s novels. His Crying of Lot 49 (1966), whose protagonist Oedipa Maas is overwhelmed by San Narciso’s bewildering information flow, has served as template for the tradition that culminates in the corpus of 1990s and 2000s metafictional films resonating with the “anxiety of the real.” Among the latter, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog provides one of the most eloquent evocations of the uncanny affects of a world reduced to intertextual echoes. The Jersey City waste land in which Ghost Dog lives is overwritten with pastiche. Its grotesque villains are bumbling, chronically broke gangsters resembling extras from mafia epics such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) or Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). Similarly, Ghost Dog’s lifestyle as an ascetic loner is patched together from a toolkit of popular-culture references—film noir, hip-hop, and the philosophy of martial arts derived from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films. Classic theoreticians of postmodernism—Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson—suggest that the intertextual life-world of postmodernity neutralizes existential angst and extinguishes the very problematic of the subject. Existentialist texts foreground their protagonists’ selfhood because these subjects, however alienated, are passionate in their anguish and indignation. The postmodern field of cultural simulacra, on the contrary, seems to remove the foundation of this type of subjectivity: if consciousness is reduced to a patchwork of cultural scripts, it should no longer be able to measure its alienation by

171 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds reference to an ideal of authenticity validating existential rebellion. Autonomous selfhood may therefore be thought to perish. Jameson, building upon Baudrillard’s analyses, points out accordingly that one of the most emblematic subject positions made possible by postmodernity is the “waning of affect” (Postmodernism 10)—the cool fascination for the reified store of images and codes generated by contemporary culture, in utter disregard of the fact that this environment brings about “an unparalleled quantum leap in the alienation of daily life” (Postmodernism 33). Under postmodernity, Vincent Van Gogh’s or Edvard’s Munch’s vibrant outcries over the human condition are superseded by Andy Warhol’s replicas of consumerist images or Richard Estes’s distanced photorealist cityscapes (Jameson, Postmodernism 32). At the opposite end of the postmodern spectrum, late-twentieth-century society has generated a second subject position, equally incompatible with the pathos of existential alienation: the unconditional acceptance of Bhabha’s “hybridity” (37) and Lyotard’s “infinity of heterogeneous finalities” (“Sign of History” 409; emphasis). The latter stance, central to magic realism and the fiction of multiculturalism, amounts to reveling in the metamorphoses of one’s fragmented subject in the multifaceted flow of experience: the subject welcomes its othering in the supposedly empowering sphere of the “Third Space of enunciation” (Bhabha 53). As Zadie Smith’s White Teeth indicates, alienation is not the keynote in this case, but rather fascinated curiosity triggered by multiple, unforeseen cultural interfacing. The possibility for an existential subject position is reopened, however, if, as suggested above, the diagnosis of postmodernist theoreticians about the insubstantiality or infinite plurality of contemporary experience is counteracted by what I call above the reality bet. Protagonists and performers who take a wager on reality implicitly regain the capacity to position themselves with regard to the totality of their lifeworld not only through existential angst but also through cognitive appraisal and pragmatic intervention. Still, the existentialism of the realist underground differs in several respects from mid-twentieth-century precedents. It is, in the first place, practical-minded and subdued in tone—the features that indeed render its proponents comparable to the members of a clandestine operation. Protagonists in classic existential narratives—Antoine Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938), for instance—experience alienation

172 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds as an underserved trauma—a surprising deprivation of certainties that were previously taken for granted. To the protagonists of Smoke or Underworld, on the contrary, indeterminacy is a fact of life that has to be managed from day to day. Secondly, contemporary texts differ from their antecedents in that they less often portray existentialism as the complaint of isolated individuals pitted against the universe. I indicated above that the very project of inhabiting contemporary social space leads characters seemingly cut off from human interaction to join local communities: in the same way as Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog bonds with young Pearline, teenager Thomas Cole in Wang’s and Auster’s Smoke (Harold Perrineau) renews contacts with his remarried father family (Forest Whitaker), laying the foundation for a recomposed. In this, contemporary texts are less reminiscent of Sartre’s Nausea or Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942) than of Camus’s The Plague (1947), where the struggle against alienation is viewed as a collective endeavor. Above all, contemporary texts redefine the very source of existential concern. Classic existentialism portrays the loss of authenticity—the withering away of values deplored by Lukács— mostly as an eclipse of ethical standards and moral authority. In Camus’s short novel The Fall [La chute] (1956), this plight is emblematized by the theft from Ghent Cathedral of early-Renaissance artist Jan van Eyck’s painted panel The Just Judges (136). In Sartre’s Nausea it transpires through the tricks used by the powerful—indeed by the hypocrites Sartre elsewhere calls “bastards” (Existentialisme 85)—in order to maintain their unwarranted authority (Nausée 133). In turn-of-the-twenty-first-century works, on the contrary, the emphasis on moral values is superseded by questions about the integrity of worldness itself. Because of the pressure of virtualization and ontological relativism, the texture of the time-space continuum as a physical environment sustaining human communities has become the problematic object eliciting existential doubt. Brian McHale’s periodization of twentieth-century fiction from modernism to postmodernism implicitly acknowledges this shifting tenor of existential concerns. Modernist fiction, McHale contends, has an epistemological dominant: without denying the existence of a common ground of experience, it assumes that the phenomenal world is not spontaneously amenable to knowledge and is therefore approached through diverging interpretations. Modernism, in short,

173 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds raises questions about modes of perception: “How can I interpret this world of which I am part? And what am I in it?” (9). Postmodernism, on the other hand, is haunted by ontological uncertainty: it suggests that experience unfolds across a multiplicity of worlds that do not necessarily intersect. It therefore elicits queries fitting Lyotard’s and Bhabha’s concepts of plurality and heterogeneity: “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” (10). The realist underground, by comparison, partly endorses McHale’s diagnosis of ontological uncertainty, yet also avoids its ostensible skepticism. In the face of the “non-space” of postmodernity, contemporary realism opts for a positive answer to Oedipa Maas’s question whether a world should be projected in the face of confusion. Its purpose consists precisely in enquiring to what extent the supposedly inauthentic or fragmented contemporary field may nevertheless yield a texture that sustains conditions of existence sufficiently predictable for knowledge and human interaction. These are the terms in which contemporary art formulates the “reasonable” question that, according to Lukács, realism is bound to ask of the world (Signification 134). In accordance with the limits imposed by the reality bet, contemporary realism utters this query in a mood that is both hopeful and conscious of the determinate scope of its action: its object consists in defining a horizon of knowledge and practice, evaluating which areas of postmodernity may lend themselves to realist investigation.

174 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

CHAPTER 7

Negotiated Disclosures: The Core Functions of Dialogical Realism

2.2.1 Heuristic, Reflexivity, Contract, Praxis In abstract terms, we might infer from the previous reflections that the argument about the legitimacy of contemporary realism has already run its course. The obstacles facing realism at the turn of the twenty- first century, I point out in Chapter 6, are less forbidding than commonly assumed in academic criticism. Only at the price of impassable paradoxes is it possible to believe that our lifeworld is threatened with absolute virtualization. Likewise, no ultimate proof exists that the seemingly fragmented field of postmodernity might not eventually cohere into an epistemologically assessable perimeter amenable to truth-based judgments. Above all, a fair number of contemporary authors have developed an artistic practice implicitly rooted in the principles of cognitive trust evoked above. Though they may not form the kernel of a well-structured movement, they make up at least, to take up David Cronenberg’s ironical formula, an innovative realist underground dedicated to an aesthetic pursuit that mingles existential uncertainty with the concern for truth. Contemporary

175 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds realism seems therefore to possess the theoretical groundings and the dedicated cultural actors required to stake its claim. Still, as one might expect, these promising premises do not exhaust the task at hand. Authors satisfied with a de jure vindication of realism and the earnestness of their artistic commitment risk giving in to the dogmatism and naïveté embodied, as we saw above, in the eponymous protagonists of Philip K. Dick’s The Word Jones Made or the hapless realist guerillas of Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. The most challenging part of the present argument remains therefore the analysis of the means by which the realist underground renders its cognitively focused existentialism epistemologically sustainable and heuristically productive. We must clarify the discursive strategies enabling authors and readers, on the one hand, to discern a world where others only perceive fragmentation and indeterminacy, and, on the other, to keep this world image from degenerating into an imposture and an act of repression. Contemporary realism, I noted in the Introduction to the present essay, manifests itself in its most radical variants as a dialogical, postmimetic, and metadiscursive, practice. Only thus can it both overcome the sense of unreality of the turn-of-the-twenty-first-century lifeworld and withstand the strictures of antirealism. Before itemizing the discursive mechanics of dialogical realism, I wish to sketch out a preliminary blueprint of this practice on the basis of Julian Barnes’s “Shipwreck,” a short essay published in the English novelist’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. This text, I believe, reveals in a nutshell both the necessity and the feasibility of postmimetic, dialogized referential art. Barnes’s History consists of a sequence of semi-autonomous chapters toying with the thematics of the Biblical deluge through contrasted stylistic and narrative perspectives. “Shipwreck” itself consists in a quasi-scholarly analysis of the early- nineteenth-century painting by Théodore Géricault commonly known as The Raft of the Medusa [Le radeau de la Méduse], yet officially entitled Scene of Shipwreck [Scène de naufrage]. The famous canvas depicts a cluster of near-naked, exhausted men crowded on the makeshift raft built out of the timber of The Medusa, a French Royal Navy frigate that ran aground on shallows off the African coast. The sailors’ contemporaries were horrified to learn that the crew had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Barnes’s text investigates the effort required of Géricault in order to turn The Medusa’s disaster into

176 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds a painterly object. In the logic of the present argument, Géricault’s endeavor fulfils the terms of the cognitive existentialism outlined in Chapter 6: the French painter sought to retrieve consistent meaning against daunting obstacles—in this case, the sheer human horror of the sailor’s plight and the political restrictions bearing upon early- nineteenth-century official art. The evocation of cannibalism was indeed problematic by any standard of moral censorship. Also, the loss of The Medusa was a politically sensitive topic: the breakdown of military discipline that prevailed on the raft was an embarrassment for the French navy and for the authoritarian regime of Louis XVIII. Exposing the scandal in a canvas exhibited at the Salon was therefore an act of artistic truthfulness and resistance. Surprisingly, Barnes never uses the term realism to characterize Géricault’s efforts: his “Shipwreck” implicitly endorses the traditional classification of the French painter as a Romantic. Also, Barnes’s treatment of this subject adopts the postmodernist metafictional idiom characterizing most sections of A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. Yet in a tell-tale passage, Barnes describes Géricault’s goal as the pursuit of “truth to life,” a formula often used by nineteenth-century authors to express the essence of the realist project (126). I shall therefore assume not only that Barnes’s “Shipwreck” addresses basic realist concerns, but that the relevance of its comments on Géricault far outreaches the painter’s early nineteenth century context: in addition to weighing how Géricault could produce “truth to life” in his own time, “Shipwreck” highlights how the painter’s practice sketches out a referential practice relevant to postmodernity. “Shipwreck” highlights the dynamics of dialogical, post-mimetic realist art in the first place because it suggests that The Raft of the Medusa is neither an instantaneous imprint of the real on canvas nor an ahistorical painterly icon answering only to the exigencies of art. The painting as Barnes describes it is a work in progress—the offshoot of trials, errors, and implicit negotiations both with political censorship and with the conventions of painting informing Géricault’s cultural field. Thus, Géricault’s art is a form of real-life praxis, not a mere exercise in pictorial and semiotic patterning. By the same token, the cultural and political work Géricault’s painting accomplishes spreads beyond its pictorial frame, so that its significance cannot be evaluated by taking the painterly icon alone into consideration. In this respect, as Barnes’s depiction of Géricault’s praxis can be understood

177 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds by reference to theoretical paradigms that view culture as a performative, pragmatist pursuit—as a sequence of what Kenneth Burke calls “symbolic act[s]” (9). Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of the artistic field fits this pragmatist model. Bourdieu contends indeed that aesthetic choices, instead of expressing idealistic absolutes, are gestures by which artists mobilize their “habitus” (117). By making these choices, creators position themselves with regard to the factors shaping their cultural, political, and economic environment (Bourdieu 145-48). Art therefore becomes a set of tactical moves—of cognitively and politically resonant symbolic acts. Its practitioners must gauge the socio-practical consequences of decisions that naïve observers mistakenly regard as pertaining to the mere aesthetic realm. Similarly, in Barnes’s account, Géricault’s creative work consisted to a large extent in anticipating the political, artistic, even cognitive responses his work was likely to trigger. Barnes makes visible the artistic negotiations Géricault carried out by listing all the scenes and details the French artist chose not to paint. These discarded incidents are duly recorded in the survivors’ narratives, yet the painter’s pragmatic/artistic negotiation required that they be side-lined from the pictorial project. Representing the sailors’ rescue by another French navy ship, for instance, would have struck a triumphant note inadequate to the tenor of the survivors’ adventure: it would have turned Géricault’s work into government propaganda (Barnes, “Shipwreck,” 129). Accordingly, the rescuing ship, whose existence nevertheless had to be acknowledged, appears only as a feathery dot on the horizon, so small we cannot even make out whether it is approaching the raft or sailing away (130). Likewise, Géricault could not retain the moment when a butterfly settled on the raft’s mast (129). According to early-nineteenth-century artistic conventions, such a scene would have elicited a sentimental response unacceptable in a serious work of art and, in the present case, would have silenced the horrors the sailors had endured. Conversely, the sailors’ lapse into cannibalism—the most notorious aspect of their misadventure—could only be alluded to indirectly: explicitness in this matter would have swamped the painting with sensationalistic, gothic intensities, preventing its viewers from perceiving its human and political dimension (128). Most surprising, perhaps, are the adjustments Géricault had to make in order to anticipate his audience’s perception of the canvas’s

178 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds sheer referential import—indeed their ability to recognize the painting’s very object. Barnes points out that, even though the painting has come to be regarded as the very icon of shipwreck survival, the artist deliberately refrained from shaping it as a snapshot- like reproduction of the actual raft described in the sailors’ recollections. In reality, the craft floated under water, pushed down by the weight of dozens of survivors, who had to stand up huddled together (129). On the one hand, this state of affairs posed an aesthetic problem: with a cluster of men standing up straight out of the waves, the visuals of the actual scene did not lend themselves to the diagonal compositions favored by painters such as Jacques-Louis David and Géricault himself (129). On the other hand, an accurately mimetic image would have rendered the raft invisible, which would have prevented audiences from perceiving what the painting was meant to portray. The public at the Salon would probably have been unable to identify as shipwreck survivors a bunch of haggard men standing on an expanse of seawater as if by magic. The hapless sailors, Barnes ironically adds, might have been mistaken as derelicts re-enacting Sandro Boticelli’s Birth of Venus (129). Overall, Barnes’s “Shipwreck” describes an artistic practice aiming to do justice to the social world by means of a dialogical deontology of representation. Rather than limiting itself to reflectionist accuracy, the praxis Barnes discerns in Géricault initiates a negotiation of reality relying on a plurality of discursive norms and addressing the various institutions with which art works are bound to interact. A dialogical practice of this kind, “Shipwreck” reveals, requires a repertoire of gestures and speech acts beyond the boundaries of reflectionist mimesis. Surprisingly perhaps, this new realism remains within the remit of the paradigm outlined by Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. The German critic’s famous essay is indeed remarkable for its willingness to identify realist features in a sample of texts whose scope far outreaches the traditional boundaries of referentially oriented literature—from Homer’s epics and the New Testament to Virginia Woolf’s fiction (Auerbach 3-23; 525-553). Contemporary realist texts may therefore be credited with broadening the realist field even beyond what Auerbach envisaged himself. Still, for all its emphasis on discursive pluralism, “Shipwreck” stops short of describing Géricault’s praxis as a precursor of poststructuralist indeterminism. Barnes’s essay on Géricault differs intriguingly from postmodernist

179 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds metafiction—even from other metafictional chapters in A History of the World—by its suggestion that there were correct choices to be made in the assessment of the numerous constraints bearing upon the production of The Raft of the Medusa. Given the circumstances, the painting could not have been widely different from what it ended up being. The relevance of “Shipwreck” to a discussion of contemporary realism resides precisely in the hypothesis that doing justice to a specific context requires, in addition to the evaluation of plural representational perspectives, the refusal to resign oneself to a shifting multiplicity of interpretational outcomes. Disclosure through art is a negotiated, yet also a determinate process.

The postmimetic practice of dialogical realism portrayed in Barnes’s “Shipwreck” deploys multiple strategies across several planes of experience. For this reason, it offers few bearings for a discursive typology. The very concept of postmimetic practice implies indeed that the familiar markers of mimesis inventoried by formalist criticism no longer suffice to identify the discourse entrusted with the representation of social reality. Instead of the well-inventoried toolbox of illusionistic verisimilitude, contemporary realism develops a plurality of cognitively focused gestures requiring a set of coordinates based on new principles, or possibly even eluding characterization. As I discuss the mechanics of dialogical realism below, I attempt to do justice to this difficulty. Yet for clarity’s sake, my argument retains, albeit in a slightly altered fashion, the logic implied by the methodological dichotomy of genre and mode. The former term, I pointed out in the Introduction to the present essay, pertains to textual structure, the latter to a text’s relation to reality. For the present purpose, we may therefore assume that the discursive components of dialogical realism may be ranked, if not according to a strict binary opposition, at least along a continuum that stretches from textual features and speech acts to, on the other hand, epistemology. Accordingly, the subsequent reflections first elaborate a taxonomy aiming to make the strategies of postmimetic, dialogical realism identifiable as discursive gestures. Only in later chapters, do I address the prerogatives allowing these strategies to entertain a determinate relation to their context. In practice, the typology outlined in the present pages divides the gamut of realist discourse—its spectrum of referential practices—into

180 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds three main areas. Using a computer metaphor, I suggest that realism has its operating system, its hardware, and its regulating protocol. Realism’s operating system, discussed in the present chapter, is the core dialogical matrix of referential practice. It includes the basic representational gestures, attitudes, or strategies enabling texts to carry out a negotiated mapping of reality—indeed to produce negotiated disclosures. As such, the dialogical matrix is the marker of realism’s specificity: it makes realism identifiable with regard to the uses of discourse pursuing other goals than the referential mapping of the social field. Hardware, on the other hand, pertains to the material semiotics of realist practice: we will see in Chapters 8 and 9 that it designates what we might call realism’s referential apparatus—the gamut of signifiers, discursive structures, and media channels through which the dialogical mapping of reality is carried out. Barnes’s comments on Géricault indicate that referential apparatuses often extend across several modes of expression. Each realist investigation, in addition to being anchored within identifiable novels (or documentary essays, films, performances…), is woven into the fabric of adjoining texts and social practices. The referential apparatus of Barnes’s essay includes memoirs, paintings, and the politics of museum exhibitions; in many other contemporary works, it spreads across written text, sound, and images. Finally, realism’s regulating protocol, which I address in Chapters 10 and 11, comprises the principles of validity legitimizing successful referential investigations. A regulating protocol of this type is a requirement for realism because referential practice cannot be legitimized exclusively through the immanent dynamics of its dialogical strategies or by dint of some virtue of self-evidence embodied in the materiality of signifiers. To revert to the traditional terminology of genre criticism, the successful completion of realist enquiries cannot be the automatic effect of the structural features of a genre; negotiated disclosures cannot be enacted felicitously by the mere deployment of a discursive formula. Instead, for this outcome to be achieved, participants in the communication process (authors and audiences) must manifest their commitment to the epistemological viability of the referential mode their investigations resort to. In other words, realist enquiries demand a reasoned negotiation of what in Chapter 6 I called in the reality bet. We saw in Barnes’s “Shipwreck” that realism presupposes the refusal of indeterminacy. Its regulatory

181 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds protocol therefore comprises principles such as confidence in the stability of the lifeworld and trust in the possibility to reach what Jürgen Habermas calls understanding about “states of affairs” (278). The discussion below suggests that the terms of this protocol seem to be fulfilled when realist investigations obey principles of dialogical solidarity: the various subsystems of realist practice—the strategies of the dialogical matrix and the material signifiers of the referential apparatus—must be mutually reinforcing in their pursuit of truth. Still, dialogical convergence is only a de facto, not a de jure condition. It must accordingly be completed by a reasoned, explicit endorsement of cognitive closure on the part of realism’s practitioners. Authors taking the reality bet must commit themselves to the assumption that the process of negotiation through which states of affairs are investigated is not inherently open-ended. We will therefore have to analyze the various principles allowing closure to be postulated as a legitimate goal.

I discern in the dialogical matrix of contemporary realism—in its operating system—the interplay of four core practices or functions: heuristics, reflexivity, contract, and praxis. These terms correspond respectively to realism’s fact-finding, metadiscursive, contractual, and action-oriented dimensions. Heuristics in Barnes corresponds to the fact-finding tasks carried out both by Géricault, who collected the narratives of the Medusa’s survivors, and by Barnes himself, who retrieved in a scholarly fashion the sources making it possible to reconstitute the history of the famous canvas. This heuristic agenda, like the three other core functions mentioned above, is no novel prerogative of contemporary texts. In classic realism, it informed the decision to bring to the perception of middle-class readers the hardships of urban poverty and the frustrations of the bourgeois domestic sphere. It was at that time embodied in the familiar figure of the late-nineteenth-century note-taking realist writer, half-way between literature and newspaper reporting (Dubois 91-93; Wilson 36-39; Kazin 82-83). In Chapter 6, I mentioned several contemporary descendants of these classic fact-finders: the CIA operative scrutinizing the Zapruder film in Don DeLillo’s Libra; the android hunter in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, who scans photos for buried evidence and spots traces of inhumanity in the irises of humanoid suspects; CSI’s investigators working in laboratories full of diagnostic

182 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds technology; and the cognitive dissidents of William Gibson’s fiction, retrieving facts from the labyrinth of the technostructure. Overall, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century culture has offered a spectacular display not only of characters but also of narratives and technologies with a heuristic function (think of the ubiquitous surveillance devices, computer graphics, and evidence-processing software of techno- thrillers). The medium of choice of this thematics has predictably been the crime and investigation genre, whose various subdivisions have dominated TV fictions as of the beginning of the twenty-first century. The contemporary social field, precisely because it is reified and resists investigation, has triggered a heuristic obsession: popular- culture narratives foreground, if not the fulfilment, at least the desirability of the search for truth. The necessity to overcome reification accounts for the fact that contemporary heuristics should require more than the naked eye or the flâneur’s average curiosity: heuristic investigations rely, on the one hand, on technologically augmented perception and, on the other, on what we might paradoxically call a sharply focused contemplative temperament. Both the technological and contemplative axes of the heuristic gaze are illustrated in the figure of Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel), one of the central protagonists of Paul Auster’s and Wayne Wang’s Smoke.. Auggie is an amateur photographer whose “life’s work” consists in taking snapshots of the crossroads in front of his Brooklyn cigar store. “Every morning,” he sets up his tripod “in the same spot at the same time” and has accumulated more than four thousand pictures showing the intersection of 3d Street and 7thAvenue “in all kinds of weather,” with any combination of traffic and pedestrians. Auggie’s gesture qualifies as a benevolent, artistically oriented form of surveillance. Relying on the now outdated technology of argentic photography, it displays an ironical affinity with the computer-enhanced urban mapping carried out both by law- and-order agencies and by cyberpunk cognitive dissidents. Auggie’s 24 x 36 mm reflex camera is in this logic the ancestor of the enhanced-reality lenses that, in Gibson’s Virtual Light, allow protagonists to decipher beyond the surfaces of the San Francisco skyline the covert corporate networks that form the backbone of the city’s economy (133). Likewise, the cigar-store owner’s scopic obsession is functionally equivalent to the superhuman heuristic skills embodied in cyberpunk characters possessing an innate grasp of the

183 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds dynamics of the technosphere. The reliance on technological augments and on heightened cognitive skills signals both the difficulty and the high value of heuristic enquiries: the heuristic apparatus must be equal to the degree of opacity of its contemporary object.

Reflexivity in realist texts, I noted in the Introduction to the present essay, alludes to the meta-cultural ability to scrutinize the discourses by which the mapping of the world is carried out—metarealism, in short. In this light, Barnes’s essay on Géricault, as it gauges the representational potential of various aesthetic choices, is predominantly metarealistic. Likewise, Auggie Wren’s photographic hobby is a reflexive gesture in so far as it allows Wang and Auster to offer a mise-en-abyme portrayal of their own movie-making strategy: like Auggie’s snapshots, their film collect slices of life sampled from an urban micro-universe. Similarly, the enhanced-reality glasses in Virtual Light make clear what Gibson’s novel attempts to achieve in its portrayal of the information society. Another intriguing example of metarealist reflexivity appears at the end of Clint Eastwood’s Changeling. The last scenes of the film reflect both on the mechanics of courtroom dramas and on the procedures of knowledge construction. Narrative closure in this story of imposture and judicial miscarriage is indeed obtained at the price of a double judicial negotiation. The first trial has a heuristic scope: it re-examines the facts of the kidnapping and murder of the protagonist’s son. The second, taking place literally across the hall from the first, is metadiscursive: it scrutinizes the jurisdiction that allowed the first case to be reopened. The chief object of realist reflexivity, these examples suggest, is the set of constraints bearing upon referential strategies—the obstacles to the perception of reality and to the transcoding of the latter insights into socially acceptable discourse. Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash acknowledges this concern in the passages where it depicts a virtual-reality software called Earth. On the one hand, this SF antecedent of Google Earth offers a constantly updated three- dimensional cartographic representation of all the extant data about the planet. On the other, in accordance with realist reflexivity, Earth does not advertise itself as a stable or even fully accurate map: its graphic codes signal that it can only be as reliable as the information obtainable at any given moment in a given place. When protagonists

184 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds find themselves on a raft in the Pacific Ocean, the Earth map only traces their position on black-and-white satellite pictures instead of the 3D-color graphics that are used to model wealthier areas like Lower Manhattan (415). In other works, realist reflexivity targets economic and institutional barriers to representation. Congolese painter Cheri Samba’s canvas A Painting to Fight For, for instance, relies on metadiscursive devices such as self-embedment (mise en abîme), pastiche, and the juxtaposition of hybrid codes (painting, comic strips, and cartoons) in order to expose the modes of circulation and the power relations constraining contemporary African art. Samba’s figure stands central in the composition: the artist is spread-eagled in Christ-like fashion, holding his brush and paint can in his hands. His figure is seen protruding from a canvas within the canvas, bearing the same title as its framing composition: A Painting to Fight For. In front of this embedded painting, two European critics struggle to grab the painter’s legs and body. Comic-strip dialogue bubbles signal that each critic boasts he is the only person “who can best defend this painting.”37 Similarly, two off-frame figures, visible only through their hands and forearms, lasso Samba’s legs and body, and make the same proprietary claim about the artist’s work. Framed within the canvas from which Samba’s figure emerges, and partly concealed by the painter’s torso, a second embedded painting depicts a woman bathing her children in an African shantytown. The latter work bears a caption indicating that it was painted by Congolese artist Moke, Samba’s artistic mentor. As such, it evokes a painting practice that may have been less subjected than Samba’s to the market logic of European dealers and critics, and was thereby freer to render accounts of the African context. These examples undercut the belief that realism perishes when it is exposed to the reflexive strategies of postmodernist metafiction. Classic discussions of metacultural practice—Ihab Hassan’s theory of anti-art, Linda Hutcheon’s comments on post-WWII culture, or even Foucault’s prologue to The Order of Things—present this phenomenon as inherently deconstructive of realism, indeed as a perpetuation of the critique of mimesis initiated in early-twentieth- century experimental art (Hassan, Paracriticisms 21; Waugh 4, Hutcheon, Politics 77-78; Foucault, Order 3-16). Yet other critical

37 All translations from non-English originals are by Christophe Den Tandt.

185 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds analyses downplay the presumed incompatibility between metadiscourse and the realist project. Fredric Jameson’s concept of “cognitive mapping,” coined in his seminal essay on postmodernism, defines what is in essence a metadiscursive realism mingling a referential agenda with the semiotic reflexivity of poststructuralist paradigms (54). We have also seen in Chapter 6 that Catherine Belsey interprets the popularity of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century metafictional films as evidence of an ontological anxiety that partly contradicts the postmodernist disregard of any link between text and real. Likewise, naturalist scholar Donald Pizer suggests that authors such as Paul Auster and Don DeLillo, initially perceived as practitioners of postmodernist writing, fit in an extended naturalist tradition (“Is American” 391). Conversely, Lilian Furst underlines the frequent occurrence of metafictional techniques in classic realist texts—the notorious “dear reader” passages in Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot—and thereby questions the critical assumption stipulating that realism must conceal symptoms of textual reflexivity at any cost (71). Reflexivity in contemporary realist texts understandably differs from the radically deconstructive strategies one encounters, for instance, in Samuel Beckett’s fiction, where the narrator constantly contradicts his previous utterances or simulates the loss of his pen by inserting a blank space into the text (Beckett, Malone 226). Instead, realist reflexivity often takes the form of a pragmatic inventory of mapping strategies. Michael Moore’s TV Nation (2002) mini- documentaries carry out this type of reflexive assessments in a carnivalesque mode as they itemize from the outset which eccentric means must be marshalled in order to bring to light the social issues they focus on. Documenting the racial bias of New York taxi drivers, for instance, requires the presence, in addition of the TV crew, of an African American actor (Yaphet Kotto) planted on a street corner, desperately waiting for a cab to pick him up. Kotto is equipped with props such a bunch of flowers or a baby meant to reassure cab drivers that he poses no threat whatsoever (78). Another skit begins with the careful itemization of a naval task force deployed for what Moore calls “the largest beach invasion since Normandy”—in fact an action denouncing discriminatory policies limiting access to the beaches of upscale New York suburb Greenwich, Connecticut (25). The fleet thus assembled is composed of a dinghy full of Moore sympathizers led by

186 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds cheerful Hollywood actress Janeane Garofalo, eager to land on the precious stretches of real estate while fending off the efforts of the Coast Guards (27). Through such devices, contemporary texts perpetuate the practice identified by Philippe Hamon in classic realism: they flaunt their cognitive mechanics, thereby giving rise to a mise en abyme display of the tools of literary or filmic perception.

Contract is the function of contemporary realism that makes its dialogical dimension most perceptible: contractual transactions embody the intersubjective dimension of negotiated disclosures. Barnes’s “Shipwreck,” in this respect, reveals to what surprising extent Géricault had to enter into implicit negotiations with his intended audience in order to ensure that his painting might be recognized as a realistic token for its object. These implicit transactions make up what we may call the referential contract of Géricault’s painting. This term designates the realist variant of the reading or viewing contract to which all cultural works are beholden. Referential contracts outline the conventions by which, at given periods of history, specific works or genres are chosen as preferred vehicles for the representation of the real. This presupposes that a text’s prerogative to designate the real does not depend exclusively on its intrinsic discursive features: its referential status is empowered by an institutionally defined social pact. Writers’ remarks on their own practice, reviews and criticism, readers’ feedback, or any other statement shaping the appraisal of a text’s truth value contribute to this contractual validation. Lilian Furst underlines the importance of such framing devices in classic realism. The first chapter of Balzac’s Le père Goriot features the confidently referential credo “All is true!” (Furst 1; Balzac, Le père 44). George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë facilitate their readers’ transition from reality to realist fiction by means of conversational addresses to the narratee helping the latter accept the novel as a truthful representation of their lifeworld (Furst 71). In the contemporary corpus, the same contractual function is carried out, for instance, by reviewers’ comments evaluating the accuracy with which Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan handles historical sources about D-Day or by the press controversies surrounding the documentary endeavors of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock. Likewise, DeLillo’s Libra and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, as they revisit the narrative of JFK’s assassination,

187 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds rewrite the terms of a referential contract previously established by the numerous texts, whether fictional or nonfictional, published previously on this historically contested event. Beyond norms validating the reading and viewing processes, another type of agreement—more ambitious yet more problematic— lurks within realist practice: the performative negotiation we might call the reality (as opposed to referential) contract. By this term, I refer to a concept of negotiation that has retained the attention not only of practitioners or realism themselves, but also of theoreticians—neo- pragmatists such as Richard Rorty and new historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt—endorsing radical constructionism and the performative paradigm of discourse. According to these authors, all layers of reality are produced by discursive negotiations: perception and representation result entirely from the practice by which the world is woven together intersubjectively. Texts therefore serve as tokens in an ongoing transaction enabling societies to fashion their concept of reality. The reality contract is, at least in some form, familiar to most early-twenty-first subjects: our postmodern lifeworld seems to be negotiated from one moment to the next through multiple channels of information. In an analysis of late-nineteenth-century fiction, Brook Thomas points out, however, that this reality-generating debate, which he calls the “promise of contract” (8), was already central to classic realism. The classic realist text, in his view, embodies the possibility of an equitable society based on relations of reciprocity—a world entirely made up of “exchanges and negotiations among contracting parties” (8). This practice, Thomas contends, sets realism apart from other textual modes—sentimentalism and naturalism, for instance. The latter may be faulted for resorting to gestures of cognitive authority: they appeal respectively to moral absolutes (the religious ethics of sentimentalism) and to the ontological certainties afforded by an externally existing reality (scientific objectivity in naturalism). Instead of such a “vertical” appeal to metaphysical foundations (8), realism, in Thomas’s definition, works “horizontally,” according to a commitment to immanent practice (8). It does not “present” the world; it partakes in the processes that “perform” it (13). In terms of literary technique, the contractual reciprocity required by realism’s immanent enactment of the world is furthered by devices such as the dramatic method developed by Henry James (“‘scenic’ presentation or “drama” in Percy Lubbock’s terminology; “internal focalization,” in Genette’s

188 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds classification) (Lubbock 67, 110; Genette, “Discours” 209). According to Thomas, the Jamesian dramatic method, as opposed to the earlier method of omniscient “telling,” suppresses the need for a narrator that serves as guarantor of foundationalist certainties: it places readers at the same contractual level as author and characters (Thomas 9). I point out in more detail below that the reality contract—the immanent bond enacting the construction of the lifeworld—enjoys an ambiguous status in contemporary realism. It is on the one hand one of its pivotal components, indeed one of its regulating norms. Yet, if taken literally, it also acts as an obfuscating fantasy. The limits of immanent reality construction transpire in filigree from Thomas’s argument itself. The American critic cannot conceal the fact that, both in actual social life and in literature, the field of application of contractual realism is limited. Only few texts—a handful of Henry James’s works, in Thomas’s judgment—and no historically attested human society fulfill the “promise of contract.” Contemporary texts are similarly ambiguous in their handling of the reality contract. On the one hand, they echo Thomas’s pragmatist optimism: they portray the performatively generated contractual commonwealth as a desirable political goal. On the other, they make clear that the social world they must render accounts of is not magically reducible to this ideal. Their characters—the Brooklynites of Wayne and Auster’s Smoke, the anarchists of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Vineland, the Bronx activists of DeLillo’s Underworld—do develop an everyday praxis meant to carve out a lifeworld of mutual obligations and respect, yet the texts in which they evolve expose the utopianism inherent to the same contractual ideal. British novelist Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George eloquently makes this point. Based on actual events, this novel narrates Arthur Conan Doyle’s investigation of the Great Wyrley Outrages—an early-twentieth-century criminal case of animal mutilations. The suspect identified by the police and the media is George Edalji, the son of an English vicar of Parsee origin. An insecure young solicitor, George has been plagued by racism since his childhood. Still, even as he struggles with institutional racism, he seeks solace in a contractual utopia: he sees England as a kingdom entirely ruled by “an intense nexus of multiple rights and laws”—a world where “a contract springs into being” as soon as individuals carry out such commonplace acts as buying a train ticket (70).

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Barnes’s novel nevertheless makes clear that the contractual commonwealth of George’s dream, however admirable, cannot be mistaken for the chart of any actual world. From the perspective of practical politics, a social observer blindly trusting to its contractual utopianism would be bound to overlook most obstacles to justice contradicting the actual existence of a contractually appeased polity. The same observer would by the same token underestimate the difficulties facing realist fact-finding. From a philosophical angle, a society concretely fulfilling the fantasy of the reality contract would resemble the world without shadows that, I indicate in Chapter 3, Auerbach discerns in the naïve mimesis of Homer’s epics. Truth- based distinctions would be irrelevant to such universe: each act or speech act would equally contribute to the performance of reality, and no speech act could be (nor would have to be) discarded as epistemologically inadequate. In other words, it would be ruled by performative magic—the pragmatists naiveté that, I pointed out in Chapter 6, affects the writings of Bhabha and Butler. Precisely because realist practice cannot be reduced to unproblematic immanent reality negotiations, its contractual logic functions simultaneously on the two heterogeneous planes of the referential and the reality contracts. Realism, in its contractual dimension, oscillates between socially validated standards of referential representation and, on the other hand, speech acts that immanently weave the fabric of human experience itself. By the standards, of Thomas’s (or Rorty’s and Butler’s) performative pragmatism, such duality is conceptually inacceptable: the extrinsic certification afforded by referential contracts represents a flaw in what would otherwise be a perfectly immanent reality construction. Yet this breach of consistency, however inelegant, is an inescapable corollary of dialogism. Only a restrictive vision of dialogical interchange could hope to see the totality of the real reduced to the utopian prospect of pure, immanent contractual negotiations. In a more comprehensive dialogical perspective, the apparent mismatch between referential and reality contracts constitutes, on the contrary, a specific manifestation of the fragmentation of discourse and practice justifying the recourse to a dialogical model in the first place. This point can be illustrated by examining how contract both distinguishes itself from heuristics and remains functionally linked to it. The incompleteness, even the flaws of contractual practice turn out to be the enabling condition of fact-

190 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds finding. The search for truth begins when contractual practice seems inadequate or inauthentic—when the social performance of reality only covers a limited perimeter of experience, or when hitherto acknowledged referential genres have lost their capacity to act as contractually validated charts of reality. In Barnes’s Arthur and George, Conan Doyle’s investigation into the facts of the Great Wyrley Outrages is triggered by the injustice—metaphorically, the breach of social contract—of which George Edalji is the victim. Likewise, we will see below that the dialogical mismatch between contract and truth leads many contemporary works to focus on a judicially structured exploration of the real. Courtroom dramas, in particular—Eastwood’s Changeling or Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia for instance—develop reflections about the jurisdiction of representation—about the limits of what can be known and what can be enacted by intersubjective agreement. The prominent position they occupy among contemporary popular fictions—TV series and feature films—is as symptomatic of the status of realism today as the perpetuation of realist metafiction evoked above.

Praxis covers the reformist, action-oriented component of realism. As with the other elements of the present dialogical model, this fourth function is no new feature of referential art. Realism’s pragmatic dimension is visible throughout the history of this mode, though it was obscured by the familiar belief that mimesis must restrict itself to a strictly neutral, specular portrayal of social conditions. In spite of occasional disclaimers by artists themselves, referential works have never been divorced from their effects on society and on social mores. It is indeed because of their narrow ties to the social world that formalist critics found them incompatible with the dignity of art (Booth xiii). Most major figures of classic realism (Balzac, Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoy, or Ibsen) wrote texts that had a political impact on their times or were the object of social, even judicial negotiations. Ironically, Flaubert’s willingness to distance himself from the realist movement could not keep his contemporaries from regarding Madame Bovary relevant enough to mid-nineteenth-century society to justify a censorship trial, foreshadowing similar judicial actions against later realist authors (see Bourdieu 129-30; Dubois, Romanciers 216). Zola’s naturalist manifesto “The Experimental Novel” explicitly identifies the link between realism and social commitment as it

191 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds sidelines aesthetics and sketches out a “practical program” of reform (195). For these reasons, realism and naturalism have occupied an important position in the political culture of the twentieth-century Left. Lukács, once he endorsed Marxism, considered realism the only fictional genre compatible with human progress. Admittedly, writers themselves occasionally distanced themselves from this political stance, and critics mindful of realism’s cultural capital sought to dissociate it from what was perceived as a propagandistic drift (Parrington 325; Kazin 291). These gestures underscore by way of contrast realism’s widely acknowledged left-leaning political affiliation. Even the revision of the politics of realism under poststructuralism and postmodernism have not entirely changed the fact that realism is still considered a valid option for contemporary works with a critical edge, as is attested in Ken Loach’s or Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s cinematographic practice. Realism’s involvement in praxis is crucial to any discussion of this mode’s theoretical groundings because, through this pragmatic dimension, referential art most conspicuously manifests its postmimetic status. Texts that not only represent social life but also intervene within it with a view to social change evidently require principles of legitimation beyond the criteria of the mere imitation of life. This point can be made by briefly examining one of the most explicit offshoots of realist praxis: undercover investigative journalism. This reporting practice was initiated at the end of the nineteenth century and has recently taken the form of the so-called new documentaries—even mockumentaries—relying on the technique that might be called performative immersion. In 1887, American journalist Nellie Bly published Ten Days in a Mad-House, a report of observations she obtained by feigning madness and having herself committed to the New York insane asylum. Fifteen years later, naturalist novelist Jack London published The People of the Abyss, a report of social conditions in the London East End based on his undercover exploration of the British capital’s slums. London’s and Bly’s texts are early instances of what Theodore Roosevelt derogatorily called muckraking—an investigative genre practiced in the US by David Graham Phillips, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Ida Tarbell, and Upton Sinclair (Roosevelt, “Man”). Early- twentieth-century muckraking documentaries are the direct antecedents of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London

192 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds and The Road to Wigan Pier, for the completion of which the English novelist shared the plight respectively of tramps and impoverished North England miners. They also serve as distant models for the performative documentary praxis late-twentieth-century new documentaries. Michael Moore, I noted above, organizes beach landings in order to counteract the privatization of public space. Morgan Spurlock, in his film documentary Super Size Me, chronicles the damage inflicted on his own liver by McDonald’s supersize meals; in the mid-1980s, German investigation journalist Günter Wallraff took on the disguise of a Turkish immigrant and faced the health- threatening conditions of workers sub-contracted to the Ruhr-region’s steel plants; similarly, Florence Aubenas’s Le quai de Ouistreham records her own exhausting experience as an undercover reporter working among underpaid cleaning crews. The postmimetic dimension of undercover, performative reporting is noticeable in the fact that this practice entertains a relation to reality that fits the status neither of traditional documentary nonfiction nor that of realist fiction. In their traditional format, press reports and documentaries are still to a large extent expected to provide a monological, unambiguous specular report of what already exists. Overexplicitness—the obsessive foregrounding of the documentary’s cognitive payload—is still a feature of many TV reports. On the contrary, fiction, however realistic, is by the standards of formal logic predominantly non-referential. Performative documentaries elude this binary distinction: they let investigators intervene into reality through such fictional means as play-acting or scripted scenarios. Most undercover reports begin with a scene of theatrical metamorphosis in which investigators don a disguise and rehearse their chosen research persona. Nellie Bly practices the mimicry of psychosis in front of her bedroom mirror in order to be declared certifiably insane (1). Jack London jocularly relates how it feels for an affluent popular writer to enter a rag shop and purchase an outfit shabby enough to help him pass as an American sailor stranded in the East End (12). Günter Walraff carefully describes the “metamorphosis” by which he altered his German-looking features and his speech in order to blend in with Turkish migrant workers (8); he is careful enough to stage a “general rehearsal” of his persona, hanging out unrecognized in his favorite bar (10). Beyond the moment of disguise, these narratives develop extended scripted performances meant to trigger events, not merely

193 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds report them. With this paradoxical mixture of investigating and playacting, undercover reporting relies on performance strategies akin to those advocated by Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal in his essays of the early 1970s. In these texts, Boal lays out the principles of “invisible [t]heater” (37)—agit-prop skits organized “in the street, in a movie-theater line, a restaurant, a train” among people who “ignore they are in the midst of a performance” (37). Even fairly classic reports such as Wallraff’s resort to comparable gestures. The German journalist, eager to test the ruthlessness of the labor market, organizes with fellow investigators an entrapment scheme meant to demonstrate that a particularly dubious contractor has no qualms hiring labor crews for life-endangering tasks: under Wallraff’s prompting, he agrees to supply workers for an emergency job at a nuclear plant and to organize their quick repatriation to their home countries (263). Carnivalesque variants of such performances appear Sasha Baron Cohen mockumentaries Borat and Brüno. In the latter film, Cohen, disguised as an Austrian gay male model, tests the sense of social decency of minor American celebrities—American-Idol referee Carmen Electra, for instance—by inviting them to sit on the backs of squatting Mexican immigrants supposedly hired as avant-garde furniture. With its status half-way between fiction and fact, performative reporting adopts an experimental approach to its object: it takes for granted that the social field, in order to be known at all, must be open to what we might call reality experiments. The standard of adequacy of specular mimesis, which always involves appraising some form of iconic match between text and world, does not suit this experimental practice. Performative investigators do not assume that social situations may be mapped as mere backdrops of facts awaiting the gaze of an unprejudiced observer. Instead, they aim to probe the boundary of what may be achieved through praxis. It is, on the face of it, tempting to interpret reality experiments in light of the trend in cultural theory that has been called the performative turn: I noted in the remarks above, as well as in Chapter 3, that a wide array of poststructuralist, postmodernist, and neo-pragmatist theorists have given legitimacy to the view that the cultural field amounts to a sequence of speech acts. Yet the metaphysical tenor of the performative turn makes its application to realism counterproductive. Poststructuralists invoke performativity in order to celebrate change,

194 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds contingency, fluidity. They find in the performative concept of discourse a reassuring sign that cultural production cannot be contained by any constraints—notably truth-related ones—limiting the ceaseless, indeterminate reshuffling of semiotically structured experience. Ironically, constraints—particularly the material and social lineaments of social life—are precisely what investigators practicing performative immersion are meant to ascertain, even physically confront. In the Introduction to the present essay, I describe Sigalit Landau’s harrowing performance work entitled Barbed Hula, where the Israeli artist scours her skin by means of a belt of barbed- wire. This gesture, reminiscent of medieval ordeals, is intriguingly similar to the practice of performative investigators who use physical or psychological hardship as reality benchmark for their experiments. For Jack London, spending the night in a homeless shelter where clusters of tramps share the same bathing water is a fair indicator of the loss of dignity induced by East End poverty. For Morgan Spurlock, his own liver’s vulnerability to a high-fat diet is the very criterion by which McDonald’s food may be gauged. Likewise, for Walraff and Aubenas, the physical hazards and exhaustion of low- paying jobs offer compelling evidence of social inequality. Symptomatically, Wallraff, though he risks his lungs in the airborne dust of the steel industry, shies away from exposing himself to the radioactive environment of a nuclear plant (he prefers to evoke the latter danger by means of the entrapment scheme sketched out above). In this light, the standard of validity of realist praxis appears to be what we may call the sheer resistance of the world—the limits placed on action by material obstacles or by firmly entrenched social structures. I examine the implications of this criterion of validity in more detail in a later chapter. Let me briefly point out, however, that testing the limits of praxis through physical feasibility fits a common usage of the terms realism and realistic. “Being realistic” often designates the necessity to conform to the practical contingencies of situatedness. One of the specificities of contemporary realism’s performative experiments consists therefore in making practical constraints the object of journalism or art. As contemporary works carry out such reality experiments, they shouldn’t be faulted for adopting a course of action that implies some dishonorable surrender to repression and closure. Against the poststructuralist advocacy of irremediable

195 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds change, which fosters either ungrounded utopianism or stoic resignation, realist praxis offers the prospect of measured optimism. In a social and cultural configuration that offers many challenges to referential discourse, cognitive praxis is a gesture of resilience, not defeat. It is predicated on the hope that the social world’s knowable perimeter might not be as restricted as skeptical epistemologies hold it to be. According to the logic of the reality bet, taking stock of the world’s complexity means no less than doing justice to an environment whose field of realist representation cannot be defined in advance. Its horizon—the resistance it opposes to investigation—must therefore be pragmatically staked out instead of being set at the most pessimistic estimate. By the same token, phenomena that are otherwise attributed to the agency of complex, irresistible forces (market constraints, economic destiny, and cultural determinism) might be shown to possess an explanation in human terms after all.

2.2.2 Negotiated Disclosures The concept of dialogism I have used in the previous reflections differs in several respects from the more familiar definition of the same phenomenon derived mostly from the works of Valentin Voloshinov and Mikhail Bakhtin. These two Russian theoreticians anchor dialogism in sociolinguistic or sociocultural difference: they state that any utterance, text, or genre is dialogical in so far as it is an implicit response to utterances endowed with a lesser or higher degree of cultural capital, hence less or better able to control power relations (Bakhtine, Marxisme 41-43; see also Bakhtine; Esthétique 112). This sociodiscursive interpretation, I indicate below, does have its relevance to contemporary realist texts. Yet the remarks above suggest that the variant of dialogism required for the present argument primarily concerns the interplay not of social groups, but of various uses of discourse: dialogical interaction in these pages designates in the first place the joint action of heterogeneous symbolic gestures and the interplay of heterogeneous signifiers within intermedial strategies of communication. Also, one of the main divergences between Bakhtinian dialogism and the realist model of interaction outlined here concerns the general dynamics of dialogical exchange. Bakhtin, like his poststructuralist disciples, is committed to an open-ended variant of dialogism while the paradigm required for the analysis of realism favors dialogical solidarity and convergence.

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As it envisages dialogical interactions among discursive components, the four-axis grid discussed above is akin to the functional dialogism informing paradigms of discourse such as Roman Jakobson’s theory of the chain of communication, I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden theory of meaning, and Roland Barthes’s narratology of the readerly text. These theoretical models indeed share the fundamental premise that the effectiveness of discourse originates from the joint action of dialogized components. Jakobson depicts communication as a process involving six instances (addresser, addressee, context, message, code, and contact) to which are linked six discursive functions (expressive, conative, referential, poetic, metalinguistic, and phatic, respectively) (Essai 211-214). Ogden and Richards describe the thinking process as a chain of signs connected by relations of cause and effect. Taking their cue from the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, they take into consideration all varieties of signs (not only natural language but also percepts and psychological states), which makes the construction of meaning the result of a dialogue among several layers of signifying material. Barthes, in S/Z, describes classic narrative prose as a “fabric” weaving five interacting threads or “voices”—actions (“proaïresis”), connoted meanings (“semes”), fragments of common knowledge (“reference”), the unfolding of an enigma (the “hermeneutic” thread), and markers of indeterminacy (“the symbolic”) (24, 25). Among the three models mentioned above, Jakobson’s as well as Ogden’s and Richards’s are the most compatible with the present analysis of realism because they do not establish a necessary link between dialogization and indeterminism. The four-axis model I have introduced in this chapter is derived from Jakobson in several respects: realist heuristics is equivalent to the referential function—the element in the Russian linguist’s model that acknowledges the context-oriented dimension of discourse; reflexivity fits the metalinguistic function; contract overlaps with the phatic; and praxis is cognate to the conative. Unfortunately, Jakobson fails to clarify the conditions of validity of the referential function. His analysis displays either the formalist reluctance to investigate reference-related issues or, conversely, a degree of confidence in the referential effectiveness of communication so axiomatic that it makes any scrutiny of the latter irrelevant. Ogden and Richards, on the contrary, develop an approach outlining the conditions allowing dialogized sign systems to produce

197 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds true referential statements. They argue that a “reference” can be “true” (62) if it occurs in “sign-situations” (48) characterized by semiotic convergence: true reference is achieved when the “external context” (62; emphasis in original)—the perceptual signs mediating a set of events—and the “psychological context” (62; emphasis in original)— the signs conveying the subject’s mental processes as well as his or her expectations about the world—are mutually corroborating. In the terminology of the present essay, we may rephrase this as meaning that the success of realist dialogical interactions will be furthered (though, I pointed out above, not guaranteed) by dialogical solidarity: negotiated disclosures require the convergent deployment of the dialogical practices and functions outlined in the dialogical matrix sketched out above. On the contrary, Roland Barthes’s dialogized narratological model and Mikhail Bakhtin’s canonical formulation of dialogism marginalize the possibility of a convergent dialogical practice. Barthes’s S/Z, I pointed out in Chapter 3, is based on antirealist premises, and it expresses this credo in the make-up of its dialogical model. S/Z reduces a text’s realist components (“reference”) to mere intertextual citations—indeed to rehashed stereotypes (25; also 27-28). Above all, in a gesture consistent with Lacan, S/Z makes uncertainty, indeterminacy, and the refusal of closure central features of its dialogical matrix. The discursive fabric of literary texts, in this perspective, comprises a voice giving expression to an “hermeneutic” enigma, thereby eroding certainty. More symptomatically still, texts display markers of the “symbolic”—discursive features expressing the impossibility of plenitude and closure. In this, Barthes’s indeterminist narratology expresses, albeit in a pessimistic mode, the distrust of closure characterizing the general drift of Bakhtinian dialogism. In a gesture that anticipates poststructuralism, Bakhtin indeed confers to the refusal of closure a political value. In his view, the principles of convergence in discourse—the “centripetal” forces of language— restrict the benefits of heteroglossia (Esthétique 95). “[C]entrifugal” forces, on the contrary, act as agents of emancipation (Esthétique 95). As such, Bakhtin makes openness and closure the benchmark of the politics of dialogism: genres aligned on the discourse of power (nineteenth-century lyrical poetry, for instance) are suspected of being restrictively monologic (Esthétique 147) whereas discourses giving voice to the repressed Other (polyphonic novels, typically) are

198 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds expected to foster heteroglossia—openness to discursive pluralism (Esthétique 144). It is admittedly possible to tease out from the vast corpus produced by the circle of Bakhtin passages that seemingly contradict the Russian theorist’s commitment to dialogical open-endedness, and that advocate instead the convergent practice I discern in realist works. In an essay anthologized by Tzvetan Todorov, Valentin Voloshinov develops a dialogical model nearly identical to that which I derive from Ogden and Richards. The value of an utterance, he argues, is measured by the dialogical interactions defined respectively by the “extra-verbal context within which the word […] acquires its meaning for its interlocutor,” by “the spatial horizon common to the speakers (the unity of visible space […]),”by “the knowledge and comprehension of the situation common to the two speakers,” and by “the evaluation—which is again common to both of them—of the said situation” (Volochinov, “Le discours” 190; emphasis in original). As Voloshinov foregrounds the importance of a common horizon of interaction, he lays down the very conditions of a context-dependent dynamics of communication oriented towards agreement—a practice aiming for dialogical convergence and negotiated disclosure, for short. It would, however, be unfair to use this early text as evidence that Bakhtin’s later endorsement of centrifugal dialogical interactions should be scrutinized, even refuted. This passage’s value for the present argument consists rather in its acknowledgment of the possibility of a dialogical practice for which the open-endedness of discursive exchange is not an end in itself—a recognition the more precious as it comes from a source close to the most famous representative of dialogical theory. Previous examples—Barnes’s “Shipwreck,” notably—have revealed how texts may deliver instances of determinate, intersubjectively constructed knowledge. We may therefore work on the assumption that centripetal dialogism—whose inspiration, I point out in later chapter, dovetails with Habermasian communicative action, is a sound model for realist praxis. The dynamics of realist dialogism, in this light, consists in a process of negotiation informed by the confidence that a multi-layered, multi- perspectival practice may encourage, not undercut the perception of a given environment.

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The attempt to reach disclosure through the dialogical interplay of realist heuristics, reflexivity, contract, and praxis are prominently displayed in works that reflect upon the interpretation of photographic evidence. We have seen how important the hermeneutics of images is for contemporary realism: it features centrally both in the futuristic environment of technothrillers (Blade Runner, Libra, CSI, Enemy of the State [1998]) and in the realist micro-communities of alternative films (Smoke). It is also evidently a key component of non-fiction genres such as documentary film-making, photojournalism, and TV news. I pointed out in Chapter 5 that photographs and cinematographic documents, even though they are direct imprints of the referent, are also vectors of negotiable, conventional, meanings. At this stage, I attempt to determine whether certain types of dialogical practices may counteract, rather than exacerbate, the semiological indeterminacy resulting from the negotiation of photographic images. Concretely, we must determine whether practitioners of realism may privilege circuits of reinterpretation of photographic documents that maximize the effects of dialogical solidarity. We therefore need to identify a mode of dialogical interpretation that eludes two tendencies in the hermeneutics of poststructuralism. The latter theoretical paradigm, if applied to images, erodes their significance by including them in interpretation circuits that are either radically short of infinitely long. Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum enacts the former strategy: it depicts media artifacts as entirely confined within the discourse apparatus itself. Simulacra are deprived of any capacity to relate to the real: they only circulate within channels of (non)communication consisting in the vacuous repetition of sameness. On this basis, Baudrillard provocatively dismissed the live-TV coverage of the first Gulf War of 1991. In statements that did not endear postmodernist theory to its media critics, the French philosopher claimed that Operation Desert Storm had “never” actually “taken place” (Guerre): the purported military operations, he argued, only consisted of decontextualized simulacra generated by satellite- TV reports staging a glamorized spectacle of high-tech warfare. Derrida’s and Kristeva’s theories of différance and signifiance privilege the latter possibility—infinite rewriting and reframing. They thereby open the possibility that a specific document may, given the context, come to mean the opposite of what it was thought to signify at the outset. Realist negotiations, on the contrary, should avoid both

200 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds the muteness of the simulacrum and the infinite transit of signifiance and différance. They should steer the negotiation of visual evidence toward a configuration that yields ascertainable results. In Wang’s and Auster’s Smoke, the capacity of photographs to foster dialogical convergence is illustrated through an anecdote carrying overtones of romance. Auggie Wren’s attempt to compile a photographic archive of his own neighborhood is a source of puzzlement to Paul Benjamin (William Hurt), one of the film’s main protagonists. Faced with a display of dozens of Auggie’s snapshots, Paul questions the very usefulness of the cigar-store owner’s scopic obsession: he simply “do[esn’t] get it.” These objections are, in the logic of the present argument, phrased on the plane of contract: instead of challenging the heuristic feasibility of Auggie’s hobby, they question its intersubjective purpose. In a gesture reminiscent of the modernist a rejection of the emptiness of everyday life, Paul implies that there is no point in amassing images endowed with indisputable referential adequacy, yet deprived of any impact on anyone’s qualitative relation to his or her world. One productive dimension of the photos’ value is, however, soon revealed: amongst the prints spread out on Auggie’s table, Paul discovers a picture of his late wife, whose presence has been haunting him ever since she passed away. The scene has the trappings of a heuristic epiphany: the photographic negotiation, which Paul initially thought meaningless, yields the phantom of a loved being as if by magic. Yet, far from any genuinely supernatural occurrence, the scene makes visible the effectiveness of dialogical solidarity. To Auggie, who has never met Paul’s wife, her figure is just a token in a heuristic catalogue of nameless passers-by. To Paul, the print potentially possesses a shattering emotional value. Yet its significance is disclosed only at the intersection of the two characters’ lifeworld—as the joint offshoot of the obsessive photographer’s gaze and the widower’s memory. Barring this dialogical convergence, the photograph would have remained qualitatively mute. Lisa Cholodenko’s alternative film High Art provides a starker treatment of the same motif. Here, the heuristic reward is obtained at the cost of contractual negotiations and practical interventions that threaten the protagonists’ moral and artistic integrity. The photographs around which the narrative revolves are the offshoot of an ill-fated love affair between Syd (Radha Mitchell) and Lucy (Ally Sheedy),

201 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds two women in the New York avant-garde. Syd is an intern at a photography periodical entitled—with appropriate ambiguity— Frame. Lucy, in her early forties, is an art photographer with a sagging reputation, the victim of a bohemian subculture mired in nihilism and drugs. Syd’s project to devote a special issue of Frame to Lucy’s recent work leads the photographer to a painful career redefinition. To Lucy, realism—in the form of candid snapshots of her avant-garde friends—is a matter of personal commitment and strict artistic honesty. She resents the demand by Syd’s boss that the Frame story should offer an “examination of her friends and her life,” for the magazine’s editor patently regards her “incredibly honest” style only as a hip, saleable commodity. Yet, unwilling to disappoint Syd and also eager to set her life back on track, Lucy delivers photographs that fit both her own and the magazine’s definition of realism—intimate shots of Syd and herself during a love fling in the countryside. Syd is at first afraid of the personal exposure the publication of these shots implies. She also suspects her jealous colleagues might accuse her of seducing Lucy for careerist purposes. She first convinces Lucy to send for publication older, less spontaneous shots of Lucy’s former lover. The editor, unwilling to let go of his fashionable concept of realist immediacy, turns them down, leading Syd to consent to release the more intimate images. Sadly, Lucy dies of an overdose before seeing these last works published. Syd is left contemplating the ambiguity of Lucy’s posthumous prints. Intrinsically, the shots, neither posed nor staged, offer a straightforward disclosure—a record of “what happened” between the two lovers. Yet their import must be validated through a dynamics of dialogical solidarity unfolding on seemingly antagonistic planes. From the personal angle, their referential status is buttressed by Syd’s forced confession to the Frame editor that they are genuinely spontaneous. More tragically, Lucy’s death confers to prints the existential resonance of accomplished fate. Conversely, the life-changing occurrence thus documented fails to fulfill its momentum unless the shots are negotiated in an artistic field ruled by the logic of economic and cultural capital. This environment, however, reduces the images to fashionably titillating fare.

In the romance-inflected Smoke or even in the more disenchanted High Art, the work of photographic negotiation still unfolds according to the simulated logic of fiction. As authors, Wang, Auster, and

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Cholodenko have considerable license to determine both the feasibility of disclosure and its modalities of reinterpretation. The stakes of realist dialogism are understandably more intricate in non- fictional media such as photorealism and TV news—textual practices whose strategies, however similar to devices informing fiction and art, aim for disclosures endowed with the contractual value of fact. Live TV news, to which the following discussion is devoted, qualifies as a praxis-oriented variant of dialogical realism. It includes professional assignments—live war reporting, particularly—where information- gathering places investigators in situations even more hazardous than what practitioners of documentary immersion might consider. Its specific heuristic potential is anchored in its capacity to provide what CNN and BBC World call “breaking news”—coverage of emerging (disruptive, even disastrous) current events. In so doing, live news networks theoretically have the opportunity to give the lie to Baudrillard’s pessimistic appraisal of their practice: they lay themselves open to disclosures quite unlike ideologically contained simulacra. Disruptive live news may compromise the network’s often implicit, sometimes explicit ideological frame. Conversely, networks have the means to renegotiate, reframe, and contain these disclosures through the cycles of retelling typical of the news channel format— serial broadcasting, oftentimes with additional captions, narratives and retrospective commentary. As such, the reframing of live images obeys a double-edged logic: the initial scenes are given the discursive context without which, as mere film footage, they would not be legible; yet they are also overwritten with an ever thickening tangle of captions. In order to illustrate the politics of this mode of disclosure, I wish to focus on an incident from the news coverage of the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom. The 2003 Iraq war corpus is in appearance akin to, yet also quite different from the First Gulf War material that led Baudrillard to condemn the unreality of TV news. Instead of postmodernist insubstantiality, factual verifiability was the recurrent keynote of the 2003 invasion. Its media narrative was from the outset truth-sensitive in so far as it revolved around the thriller-like narrative of the search for weapons of mass destruction. In an ironical twist illustrating the value of realist disclosure, actual operations turned up evidence investigators did not expect to deal with—the absence of weapons stockpiles; a violent insurgency instead of crowds cheering

203 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds the US-led liberators; as well as, two years after the beginning of the invasion, dozens of photographs of Iraqi prisoners abused and tortured in US custody at Abu Ghraib prison (Duffy; Barry). The Abu Ghraib scandal would admittedly be an ideal subject for a case study of the negotiation of photographic evidence. Its revelations relied on what were at the time images of a new kind—digital snapshots far easier for non-professionals to produce than argentic ones. Diffused electronically worldwide, these documents possessed a referential impact other sources (written reports of humanitarian organizations, notably) did not command. Still, for reasons both practical and theoretical, I prefer to address an earlier event of a more limited scope. In the first place, Abu Ghraib is an issue whose wide-ranging political ramifications (the use of Torture by US government agencies, in particular) are too complex for the present chapter. More importantly, the prison scandal broke out when disenchantment with the conflict had already steered the interpretation of news reporting toward skepticism about war aims. The earlier story, on the contrary, is drawn from the emergent phase of the invasion, which confers to it a particularly significant heuristic tenor. Above all, in an analysis for which situatedness and the chronology of evidence are of the utmost importance, I prefer to discuss events I was able to witness with as high a degree of immediacy as live news allows—indeed footage I had the opportunity to watch when it was first broadcast on BBC World. The news item in question was aired initially by the BBC on Sunday, 6 April 2003. On that day, a unit of anti-Saddam Hussein Kurdish fighters accompanied by senior BBC foreign affairs correspondent John Simpson and his crew became victims of one of the war’s worst friendly-fire incidents. As the northern front line was moving rapidly, the unit was bombed twice by a US F-15 plane. About seventy people were killed, including the BBC’s Iraqi-born translator. The journalists were wounded (Simpson 330-35). Simpson’s BBC crew were able to witness this massacre because they had slipped through the net of Anglo-American censorship. The British journalist and his collaborators were not officially embedded in a military unit. Had they been, they would have benefited from better coordination with the US command, and the blue-on-blue incident might have been avoided. These circumstances created a reception context that maximized the possibility of disclosure: the

204 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds bombing became the object of news reporting in stark contrast with previous coverage. BBC World and CNN had in the early days of the conflict avoided graphic footage of war victims (xx). Yet, with one of their own correspondents having narrowly escaped the fate otherwise reserved to Iraqi soldiers and civilians, the British network broadcast pictures of burning trucks, bodies ripped apart, blood stains wiped from the camera lens, journalists pulling shrapnel from their flak vests—all of it under John Simpson’s breathless, terrified voice-over. I do not wish to claim that disruptive coverage of this type offers viewers an instant glimpse of political truth, unaffected by dialogical mediations. I pointed out in Chapter 5 that photographs or film clips are not referentially self-warranting. John Simpson’s Iraq footage cannot therefore out of its mere graphic features—or through its soundtrack, which, for convenience’s sake I lump together with graphic signifiers—serve as a vehicle of a realist epiphany. However, I would be careful not to dull its capacity of disclosure either. Indeterminism hardly applies to a report significant enough in its own context to break the framework of what British “New-Labour”-Party spin doctors called on-message news. We must therefore do justice to the cognitive impact of a document that is paradoxically both a token in a cultural code and the traces of an uncharted occurrence. This implies determining how new facts and their possibly unexpected meaning are fashioned by the interplay of enabling and disabling conditions—indeed by the dialogical interaction of contractual negotiations and praxis. The non-fiction disclosures of live news are shaped in real time by their chronological and spatial anchorage, by the encoding procedures of news corporations and, in fulfillment of dialogism, by the anticipated yet not altogether controllable response of audiences structured by geopolitical, class, gender, and ethnic specificities. In the cautiously optimistic logic of the reality bet, one should assume that these practical, cultural, political constraints will not merely act as obstacles to heuristic disclosure but also as the semiotic and dialogical frame that renders the emergent event meaningful. In the present case, commodification and political censorship stand out as the two main contractual strictures against which the potential for disclosure of this news segment had to assert itself. Commodification is an inherent feature of the ambiguous concept of breaking news. This term implies that live news is a proper channel

205 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds for unforeseen world events, yet that these moments of rupture may simultaneously be packaged as fashionable merchandise. In the worst of cases, shock news amounts to a codified gesture whose mechanics can be choreographed, even faked. The run-up to the Iraq campaign produced several instances of the latter type. In February 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell famously attempted to convince the U.N. general assembly of the “imminent threat” from Iraq by displaying a hodge-podge of pseudo-factual evidence—taped telephone conversations, satellite photographs, computer-generated sketches, even a mock-up vial of anthrax powder—most of which later had to be qualified or disowned by American authorities (Wolffe and Klaidmann; see also Thomas, Wolffe, and Isikoff; Duffy and Carney). Even in cases like the Simpson report, where good faith is not in doubt, commercial constraints still bear upon the recently disclosed content. The Simpson segment discussed here fitted within the BBC’s journalistic star system. Not only were the images broadcast repeatedly within the channel’s 24-hour program loop, they later became the centerpiece of a one-hour documentary, and are also discussed in Simpson’s 2003 book The Wars against Saddam. The second constraint—censorship—is admittedly difficult to document in a context shaped by official disclaimers, plausible deniability, unconscious bias, and, conversely, the temptation of conspiracy thinking. Yet two censorship-related issues relevant to the present example were explicitly discussed in the first weeks of 2003 Iraq conflict: the implementation of the embed system for journalists and the rules of media decency concerning the representation of casualties. The former term designates the protocol of military censorship that allowed journalists to offer live coverage of combat operations only if they were officially registered with and chaperoned by military units. Embedding constituted as such a compromise between the Viet Nam situation, where free-roving journalists were suspected of having turned U.S. public opinion against the war, and the radical restriction on news coverage that characterized the Iraq invasion of 1991. Its role as a censorship tool was denounced by international press commentators, who pointed out that most embed spots were reserved for journalists from countries that had joined the U.S.-led coalition. I noted above that the heuristic value of the Simpson footage was due to the BBC journalist’s refusal of these constraints. Still, in contrast with a complete news blackout or with

206 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds the exclusive use of pictures commissioned by the military PR services, the embed system may marginally be credited for offering some heuristic benefit: it opened the prospect that, in the dynamic of live coverage, scenes might come into frame that might challenge coalition propaganda. Principles regulating the representation of violence—morally based censorship, as it were—open up an equally complex field of contractual negotiations where no clear line can be drawn between standards of media worthiness, decency, ethics, and, on the other hand, restrictive political oversight. The Simpson incident indeed produced its heuristic disclosure partly by departing from the TV networks’ policies regarding what might be called the licensed spectacle of death—the graphic portrayal of casualties. It does not take too cynical a view of the press to argue that occasional displays of atrocities act as voyeuristic hooks in live news coverage and photojournalism. In the same way as car races produce spectacular accidents, war reporting offers the predictable thrills of violence and destruction. Yet in the controversial context of the Iraq war, voyeurism could sometimes be the handmaiden of journalistic freedom, while respect for broadcasting decorum could embarrassingly become entangled with political bias. The BBC—a public broadcaster with a middle-class-identified viewership—prides itself on eschewing voyeurism: the refusal of sensationalism is a defining feature of its network profile. Given the British Labor Government’s efforts to legitimize the military intervention, the network’s restraint coincided with what could be interpreted as a gesture of censorship covering up the inevitable violence of warfare. Conversely, the unexpected circumstances of the Kurdistan friendly- fire incident caused a temporary suspension of these journalistic principles. Overall, the Simpson story indicates how substantial disclosures are wrested from a dialogical context shaped by situatedness and negotiability. From the perspective of BBC audiences in April 2003, the footage’s immediate heuristic impact was its ability to puncture the fantasy of a quasi-victimless war—a humanitarian conflict made possible by technologically enhanced surgical strikes. In hindsight, this disclosure seems the more significant as it is conditioned by our awareness that it offered a glimpse of things to come: it ushered in a decade-long sequence of TV reports that chronicled violence against

207 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds either occupying forces or Iraqis themselves. Beyond the initial disclosure, the story is also remarkable for broadening the dialogical negotiation in which the representation of the conflict was caught up in its early weeks. By a mechanism similar to what I identified in Auster’s and Wang’s Smoke, it revealed to BBC viewers the benefit of subjecting events to the gaze of a dialogical partner. Other perspectives on the conflict were revealed to exist than that made readily available by CNN, BBC World, and European and American national broadcasters. Well before the Simpson incident, Iraqi wounded and dead had been prominently featured on Arabic-language networks such as Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiya. European TV stations had mentioned the existence of such supposedly inflammatory footage, broadcasting it only in fragments. In this context, the traumatic dimension of the Simpson footage—its capacity to effect a temporary lifting of censorship—indirectly pointed BBC viewers’ attention to the emergence of audiences in Arab countries that, regardless of their political evaluation of the war, which one cannot even assume to have been unanimously negative, pieced together the reality of the conflict on the basis of images and discourses unavailable to Western viewers.

Negotiated disclosures and dialogical solidarity seem to find telling illustrations in news stories that gain referential weight and complexity as they are corroborated by the sediment-like sequence of later investigations. Yet the import of the above examples should not be overvalued. The present chapter is meant primarily to highlight the presence of a dialogical practice in contemporary realist art, thereby dispelling the prejudice that condemns this mode of representation as monologic. I noted above, however, that the epistemological soundness of realism cannot fully be demonstrated in a discussion of what I called above realism’s dialogical matrix. Within this restricted perimeter, we can sketch out how the movement of realist discourse is staged, not how it can be validated. What impedes the epistemological legitimization of dialogical realism is the difficulty in determining whether and how dialogical solidarity secures its goal. More accurately, we have to be wary of the temptation to let centripetal dialogism reach its target too soon. The difficulty involved herein is apparent in the fact that dialogical sequences converging toward truth qualify as instances of what, in the discussion of Brook Thomas, I called (with some degree of skepticism) the reality contract. Thomas’s

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“promise of contract” regards discursive interaction as the only ascertainable reality, thereby implying that discourse and world are immanent to each other. Dialogical solidarity follows similar assumptions: if realist practice relies merely on the interplay of complementary communicative gestures—on the centripetal movement of its dialogical matrix—, it can indeed fulfill its task only if world and discourse are locked in some fundamentally benevolent agreement. The former must display enough compatibility with to the latter’s investigative momentum as to become indistinguishable from it. Reality must ultimately deploy itself immanently within the perimeter of symbolic negotiation. Smoke and High Art align themselves on these optimistic premises: the revelation at the heart of their narratives is conjured up without excessive exertions by protagonists provided they carry out an appropriate combination of communicative gestures. There is in these texts no trace of any radical oddity about the object of disclosure; the latter is not conquered against what Richard Rorty, in his critique of axiomatic skepticism, dismissively calls the “sense of strangeness of the world” (129). Against this sense of epistemological strangeness, dialogical solidarity implies that there is a strong enough affinity between the object of disclosure and the strategies through which it is negotiated is strong enough to create the impression that the former may be engendered by the latter within one single plane of existence. Frustratingly perhaps, even at the end of this essay, it will not be possible entirely to overcome the uncertainties pertaining to the legitimacy of dialogical solidarity. Even at this later stage, the present argument will remain caught within the hesitation of the reality bet: some form of reality contract aiming for the immanence of discourse and world is a precondition for realism, yet this aspiration toward immanence must remain tentative. Otherwise, realism, however plurivocal in appearance, would be characterized by a closed dynamics that would fail to meet the standards of dialogism altogether. In Lukács’s terminology, it would cease to be “critical” (Signification 170; Meaning 93). The next sections further explore how contemporary realism manages to sustain itself on the basis of these paradoxical foundations. We will see that realism accommodates a reality contract both more ambitious and more fragile than that envisaged by neo-pragmatists such as Thomas. Realism according to Thomas fulfills its contractual nature if it restricts itself to a narrow

209 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds range of discursive devices embodied in a limited corpus—late- nineteenth-century fiction, typically. Contemporary realism, on the contrary, deploys its dialogical negotiation through what we might call, by reference to Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, a distended reality game: its dynamics of disclosure and negotiation requires a heterogeneous set of practices mobilizing multiple forms of communicative behavior in several media. In order to assess this reality game, we must therefore gain a better understanding of the material support through which dialogical realism is deployed: we must investigate how dialogical solidarity fares in a multi-layered referential apparatus.

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CHAPTER 8

Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality

2.3.1 Signs that Matter: The Judicial Spectacle of Material Evidence In the climactic scene of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993), plaintiff Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) and his attorney (Denzel Washington) win their court case by a canny manipulation of what we might call realism’s referential apparatus—the materially heterogeneous gamut of signifiers available to referential discourse. Andrew is an AIDS patient who sues his former employer, a law firm, for firing him discriminatorily. He claims that his law partners, unwilling to keep an AIDS patient among the staff, set him up to commit a professional mistake. The film’s judicial debate revolves around the ability to identify AIDS symptoms. Andrew was indeed discharged after one of the firm’s attorneys spotted an AIDS scar on his forehead—a lesion whose medical significance the attorney had previously learned to recognize. The law partners plead, however, that they were ignorant of Andrew’s condition. Their claim seems borne out by the fact that at the trial, Andrew’s face shows no lesion of the type his colleague identified. Their defence attorney (Mary Steenbruggen) exploits this felicitous coincidence by having Andrew look at his own scar-free face in a mirror. Andrew’s counsel then feels

212 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds some theatrical breach of legal protocol is in order: he asks his client to bare his chest, letting Andrew display a body covered with lesions that seem to act as natural signs of the disease. Philadelphia’s chest-baring scene picks up a familiar motif of courtroom films. These works often highlight the fact that the judicial system obeys a referential contract restricting the scope of evidence that may be invoked in order to construct what we might call judicially admissible reality. Most courtroom films feature rules-of- evidence deliberations allowing attorneys, prosecutors, and judges to determine which witnesses or documents may be retained as judicially relevant. Decisive court victories in this context are scored by breaking this narrow referential contract: the court is forced to consider elements originating from outside the boundaries of admissible reality—in most cases items, signs, and facts with a different material and semiotic status than the elements thus far examined in the debates. In Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) the contract-breaking gesture is achieved by bringing forth cinematographic evidence contradicting attorneys’ and witnesses’ verbal arguments. Fury’s protagonist (Spencer Tracy) is nearly killed by a lynch mob who burn down the jail in which he is detained on false accusations of kidnapping. Yet in their blind rage, the assailants fail to mind the presence of newsreel crews filming their raid. When the case comes to court, the press footage destroys their professions of innocence. Similarly, the prosecutor of the Nuremberg court case in Kramer’s film (Richard Widmark) dispels any doubt concerning Nazi atrocities by setting up a court screening of death camps footage. In other films, discreet parasemiotic elements—signs at the periphery of articulated language—are sufficient to break the frame of admissible reality. In Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men (1957), a single compulsive gesture discredits what should have been the most incriminating testimony against a murder suspect. A young woman claims she witnessed the murder from across the street, through the window of a passing elevated-train. Yet as she testifies in court, she keeps rubbing the bridge of her nose, thereby revealing she usually wears glasses. The sole juror skeptical of the guilty verdict (Henry Fonda) is therefore able to turn his fellow jurors around by pointing out that the young woman is no reliable eyewitness. In Judgment at Nuremberg, the unconsciously brutal attitude of a German attorney (Maximilian

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Schell) badgering a traumatized witness serves as indirect proof of the authoritarian system the court is meant to put on trial. In Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny (1954), the irrepressible urge of Navy Capt. Philip Francis Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) to juggle steel marbles in his hands during court-martial debates lays bare the nervous imbalance that rendered him incapable to man his destroyer, and prompted his crew to mutiny. The examples above depict moments of heuristic disclosure in appearance similar to those we have encountered in Chapter 7 in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s Smoke (1995) and Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1999). More explicitly than in the latter two films, however, courtroom scenes make disclosure dependent on dialogical interactions between dissimilar, heterogeneous planes of signs. Breaches of referential contract are here triggered by intermedial discontinuities, or by what we might call nature differentials: the evidential value of speech is contrasted with the supposedly stronger signifying tenor of photographic images and material praxis. As such, these scenes highlight the main stakes of the analysis of realism’s referential apparatuses. They lead us to examine the impact exerted on realist representation by dialogical interactions at the level of the materiality of signifiers: we need to determine to what extent the choice of signifiers affects the validity of realist disclosure. Nature differentials, in this logic, are expected to allow realist authors to carry out what might be called grounding gestures: they open up the possibility for texts to switch toward sign systems that paradoxically reach out toward non-semioticized reality. According to the terminology introduced in Chapter 7, grounding gestures are catalysts of dialogical solidarity: the gesture by which Andrew Beckett displays his AIDS lesions to the courtroom audience takes for granted the fact that the shift from abstract legal argument to scars on the plaintiff’s body will heighten instead of weaken dialogical convergence. By baring his chest, Andrew aims to provide an anchoring point for the various signifying systems at his disposal, thereby orienting the latter toward disclosure. Admittedly, the insight thus produced is the product not only of certifiable evidence but also of philosophical commitment. Texts relying on grounding gestures—courtroom dramas, notably—disregard what would be the poststructuralist evaluation of intermedial discontinuities—the expectation that multi- layered semiotic configurations must make an argument more

214 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds fragmented and indeterminate, hence less conclusive. Instead, most courtroom dramas endorse the representational ethos of the reality bet: they opt for the possibility of knowledge against dogmatic skepticism.

2.3.2 Virtualized Bodies: The Construction of Technospace in Music Videos Courtroom dramas are proper introductory examples for an argument on semiotic materiality because they portray the mechanics of nature differentials and grounding gestures with considerable metadiscursive clarity. Yet they are also disarmingly schematic. For viewers unsympathetic to realism, courtroom disclosures are mere gimmicks sustaining a particularly pernicious type of referential illusion. These cinematic climaxes, as they seek to render privileged signifiers referentially self-evident, only fool audiences untrained in the semiotics of film. In what follows, I therefore analyze nature differentials in more complex source material. The following sections focus on plurimedial texts concerned with the representation of urban space—music videos, alternative films, and urban performance art. This corpus is broader, less tidy, and therefore better able than judicial thrillers to sustain an analysis that validates the referential claims of nature differentials without overlooking the complexity of the mechanisms involved. The resulting argument has a predominantly methodological focus: it defines a classificatory scale indicating how the materiality of signs—their position within nature differentials— affects referential value, and indeed maximizes dialogical solidarity. However, beyond the purely semiotic argument, I also use this corpus in order to comment upon the technological refashioning of the urban world. I pointed out in Chapter 6 that in contemporary works virtualization, together with dialogization, is the chief impediment to realist mapping of the contemporary city: it renders urban space paradoxically both insubstantial and overwhelming. Revisiting this topic from the angle of plurimediality and nature differentials leads us to evaluate whether realist works might counteract the sense of unreality of contemporary urban space by virtue of the sheer materiality of their semiotic means. Among the various elements of the corpus defined above, I address music videos first. The structuring principle for the present discussion is indeed each medium’s proximity or distance with regard to the aesthetic of postmodernism. By these standards, music videos come

215 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds closest to the postmodernist pole of the spectrum. The prominent status of videos in the postmodern culture of the spectacle was highlighted in the early 1980s, as soon as they became a topic of academic analysis (Jameson, Postmodernism 299-300; Kaplan, Rocking 44-48). Video clips attracted the attention of theorists of postmodernist culture because, on the one hand, they occupy a hybrid position in the cultural field—half-way between advertising and art—, and, on the other, because, as Andrew Goodwin puts it, they effect “the fusion of modernist high art and more popular discourse”: they are purveyors of a commercially oriented avant-garde aesthetic for the masses (Goodwin, “Popular” 174; also E. Ann Kaplan 33-48; Jameson, Postmodernism 69, 300; Wollen 167). The status of videos as quintessentially postmodern also has considerable relevance to the issue of semiotic materiality. We have seen above that the aesthetic of postmodernism is wedded to a concept of social relations viewed as unstable, fluid, even dematerialized. Reading videos from the perspective of referential apparatuses and nature differentials therefore allows us to determine how a realist grasp of the contemporary urban scene may be wrested from the signifying matter of texts whose dominant aesthetic orientation otherwise undercuts realist mapping. As a channel for the representation of the city, music videos are postmodern in their portrayal of human subjects interacting with an electronically reconfigured urban lifeworld. The short discussion of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ CALIFORNICATION (2000) in the Introduction to the present essay has already given some sense of the capacity of music videos to register this techno-induced change. In its evocation of the contemporary US, CALIFORNICATION marks out the sphere of agency available to performers inhabiting a landscape that was previously located in phenomenal space, but has now become virtualized. In this, CALIFORNICATION deploys what may be regarded as the core thematic and formal pattern of urban-focused videos—in fact, their chronotope: videos explore the boundary between what might be called body space and technospace. The former term designates the area of (urban) reality that can be explored and acted upon by the agency of performing bodies (singers and musicians, dancers); the latter stands for the virtualized social interactions of which the contemporary city constitutes the most visible embodiment. Body space manifests itself typically in shots of performers miming their music in rehearsal rooms, clubs, or any other locale (streets,

216 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds natural landscapes) signifying the solidity of phenomenal space. This physical realm is often portrayed by the traditional codes of realist cinematography—indeed by what in Chapter 5 I call iconic/indexical images. Technospace, on the contrary, is typically made visible by various forms of technopsychedelic image processing, from virtuoso camera movements and defamiliarizing montage to video effects and, as in CALIFORNICATION, computer generated imaging. It is therefore often conveyed by hyperindexical and hypericonic signs— photographic footage recontextualized by electronic processing and, on the other hand, images entirely generated by computer software. On the basis of previous stages of rock culture, one would expect videos to favour body space as an anchoring point of existential authenticity and cultural/political resistance. A proper celebration of body space must in this logic resemble the urban carnival depicted in Avril Lavigne’s SK8ER BOY (2002). In this clip, members of a youth gang stake out the venue of a clandestine rock performance by painting a red pentagram on the asphalt of a street intersection, then summon hundreds of rock rebels to party in the middle of city traffic. Lavigne’s video thereby echoes previous clips—Cindy Lauper’s GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN (1983) or The New Radicals’ YOU GET WHAT YOU GIVE (1999)—perpetuating the rock ’n’ roll mythology famously expressed in Martha and the Vandellas’ song “Dancing in the Streets” (1964): cities (plazas, malls or corporate buildings) must be appropriated as live performance areas. Conversely, ostensibly antitechnological clips offer a nostalgic endorsement of body space as they warn their viewers against its possible disappearance. Faithless’s INSOMNIA (1996) portrays a lone singer wandering through dehumanized administrative buildings, his body twisting in angst-ridden contortions. Placebo’s THE BITTER END (2003) and Nik Kershaw’s WOULDN’T IT BE GOOD (1984) connect these dystopian images of urban blight to virtualization and the resulting withering of physical selfhood. The former clip features characters reduced to spectral video-processed silhouettes haunting industrial buildings. The latter subjects Kershaw to techno-erasure: his body’s outline is replaced by bright embedded video images, and is eventually beamed into space by a satellite dish. Yet we must reckon with the fact that music videos follow the ideological indeterminism of postmodernist culture, and accordingly do not deal with body space and technospace as if they were mutually

217 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds incompatible. Even as THE BITTER END and WOULDN’T IT BE GOOD champion body space through their disenchanted portrayal of alienating modernity, they give in to what might be called techno- ecstasy. The virtualized urban subjects they depict are forbidding, yet also fascinating. Techno-ecstasy in its purest form appears in clips cognate to Jean Baudrillard’s reflections on urban postmodernity. Jean-Luc Ponty’s INDIVIDUAL CHOICE (1983) and Madonna’s RAY OF LIGHT (1998), for instance, make megalopolitan landscapes exhilarating in their very dehumanization. Ponty’s video, using time- lapse photography, offers a fast-spaced one-day chronicle of cityscapes magnified by the ceaseless stream of their changing skies, yet peopled only with human agents reduced to cogs in collective processes (stock-market frenzy, traffic, subway crowds). Madonna’s clip unfolds against a mesmerizing backdrop of fast-paced footage of urban traffic and crowds. In this, what was previously a body-space environment is metamorphosed into the “astral” landscapes Jean Baudrillard evokes as he compares postmodern metropolises to mountain ranges in the desert or to chaotic swirls devoid of human purposes (Amérique 4). We will see below that, due to the commercial constraints bearing upon the MTV format—notably the necessity to foreground performers—, videos cannot restrict themselves to such technopsychedelic footage. Yet the seduction exerted by this dehumanized view of the urban scene is considerable. Even in the otherwise dystopian CALIFORNICATION, there is a trance-like intensity in the singer’s smooth glide through the computer-generated scenery. The presence of a techno-ecstatic bias in music videos is most noticeable in scenes of metamorphosis and transfiguration—indeed in all the narrative and graphic motifs expressing the moment of passage from body space to technospace. As of the 1990s, music videos popularized visual morphing—the image-processing effect that turns performers into shape shifters. Michael Jackson in BLACK OR WHITE (1991) and George Michael in FASTLOVE (1996) allow their bodies instantly to morph into other physical embodiments or to be reduced to patterns of video lines and digital pixels. This practice is particularly significant for our purposes because it is geared to semiotic materiality and nature differentials: in their portrayal of transits into technospace, music videos suggest that the signifiers closely associated to body space display some natural proclivity to be superseded by the hypericonic and hyperindexical signs that form the

218 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds texture of technospace. While courtroom dramas privilege evidence with the highest degree of semiotic materiality, videos suggest on the contrary that their own signifiers are most valuable when they mimic the fluid dynamics of virtualized environments. The devices deemed specific to the video aesthetic—the mobile camera, fast cutting, fast- paced montage, time-lapse photography, image processing—mimic the Heraclitean flux of techno-generated postmodernity. The foregrounding of signifiers that are metaphorically speaking light and flexible signals the existence of a techno-generated world liberated from constraining facts. In music videos with an urban setting, the performing subject’s assimilation into technospace is traceable in the recurrent motif of street perambulation. In a video variant of the flâneur aesthetic, performers avail themselves of modes of transit across urban space stretching from the simplest physical exploration of phenomenal reality to virtualization itself. Similarly, the material means required to produce this type of footage range from familiar body-space techniques—typically, tracking and crane shots—to graphic computer imaging. From early on, clips have portrayed performers walking through city streets. In WAITING ON A FRIEND (1981) Rolling Stones singer and guitarist Mick Jagger and Keith Richard move leisurely down a New York sidewalk, from one brownstone to the next. In Bruce Springsteen’s STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA (1993), the American singer strolls through several areas of the City of Friends, including blighted inner-city neighborhoods. One step higher on the technological gradient, one finds the numerous clips where performers cruise through city avenues in cars (Madonna’s MUSIC [2000]), on bicycles (Thicke’s WHEN I GET YOU ALONE [2003]), or on a moving platform—a flatbed truck, typically. Graphically, this set-up evokes a moving stage—a literal, almost naive enhancement of the body-space performance area. Thus, Lauryn Hill in IF I RULED THE WORLD (1998) glides effortlessly through night-time, neon-lit streets, while Björk, in BIG TIME SENSUALITY (1993), in a more physically aggressive act, defends her mobile body-space perimeter against encroaching New York traffic. There is a point, however, when the expansion of body space tips over into virtual technospace. The Rolling Stones’ dallying on New York sidewalks in WAITING ON A FRIEND must in this respect be contrasted with the same band’s appearance in LOVE IS STRONG (1994). In the latter clip, the digital

219 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds embedding of hyperindexical photographs allows the musicians to appear as tall as New York high-rises and to fuse with, even trample the city’s monumental landmarks. In The Cardigans’ FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH (2003), the shift from phenomenal to virtual—from signs to hypersigns—occurs in mid-clip. Using location shots, this video first shows the band performing from a flatbed train wagon traveling through the desert. Yet at one point, visuals abruptly shift to shots of the musicians surrounded by swirls of video effects. The leisurely transit through body space gives way to a vertiginous technopsychedelic absorption into the non-space made visible by video hypericons—a condition that abolishes spatial coordinates.

2.3.3 The Dialogical Play of Light and Heavy Signs: Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog As they foreground nature differentials tilting toward disembodiment, the urban-focused videos discussed above seem unlikely vehicles for the grounding gestures on which contemporary realism relies. Still, in what follows, I indicate how a reflection on semiotic materiality eventually allows us to reclaim such graphics for realism. In the first place, technosigns, however disembodied, have a metarealist value. Like the urban choreography of cyberpunk films—the shots of characters in Matrix (1998) careening through urban settings in defiance of gravity—, video graphics render account of a reconfiguration of experience. Yet the metarealist reading of these visuals is valid only if we avail ourselves of a reality criterion. Only thus can we gauge to what extent image processing fosters what technorebels in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) call “deformations of reality.” Short of this norm, we could not assess whether the spectacle of technopsychedelia triggers metarealist reflections about the discursive mechanics involved in the representation of the social world. In practice, we must identify in videos’ referential apparatus an element that counteracts techno- ecstasy. In order to do so, I wish, by way of a long methodological detour, look at the semiotic means deployed by turn-of-the-twenty- first-century independent films and by the variety of performance art called Parkour (freerunning). Both of these practices are centrally concerned with urban space, yet they set up referential apparatuses whose overall dynamics stands in stark contrast to videos’ displays of technosigns.

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Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999) will be my main example for the discussion of the semiotic apparatus of independent film. I noted in Chapter 6 that indie films in part align themselves on the aesthetics of postmodernism, yet also view it from a critical distance. In a gesture typical of the realist underground, they counteract the culture of the information society by highlighting how micro-communities withstand the pressure of virtualization. Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog illustrates this double cultural affiliation: it interweaves the metacultural ironies of 1980s and ’90s action films with a story of human connectedness. Its action plot focuses on the last weeks of the eponymous character’s life: Ghost Dog, the reclusive African American contract killer obsessed with Samurai culture (Forest Whitaker), is hunted down by the mafia mobsters who once employed him. Within this crime-film lattice are embedded the subplots portraying the encounter between Ghost Dog, a young girl named Pearline, and an Haitian ice-cream vendor. These scenes justify the film’s inclusion in the corpus of the realist underground not only by their humanist tenor but also because of their setting: they unfold in an industrial suburb devastated by urban blight—an environment in stark contrast with the technopsychedelic glamor characterizing part of MTV’s or cyberpunk’s representation of urban space. In this section, we must show that the realist resistance implied hereby is partly carried out by the deployment of specific semiotic means limiting the technologically induced dissolution of experience. Semiotic materiality is a prominent feature of Ghost Dog because Jarmusch structures his film as a patchwork of deliberately heterogeneous signs. On first inspection, this semiotic variety serves as raw material for metafictional games, disqualifying the film from acting as a realist chart of the urban waste land in which it is set. Postmodernist playfulness unfolds on two levels in this case. In the first place, the film is overtly intertextual, flaunting numerous cinematographic, literary, or musical sources. Ghost Dog is a crossbreed of Samurai epics à la Kurosawa, Chinese martial-arts movies, and Hollywood gangster flicks. Its protagonist is shown practicing Japanese sword-fighting on a tenement roof. One of the favorite readings he shares with Pearline is Rashômon, famously adapted for the screen by Akira Kurosawa. As far as American sources go, Ghost Dog borrows from mafia epics—Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas

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(1990)—and from the corpus of 1990s hip-hop-influenced black urban thrillers—Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City (1991); John Singleton’s Boyz ‘n the Hood (1991); Allen and Albert Hughes’s Menace II Society (1993). There are also hints of the Hollywood western in the contract killer’s demeanor: he is a proud gun-toting male with a meticulously defined code of conduct, fated to die in a shoot-out reminiscent of Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1955). In a different vein, the scenes in which Ghost Dog interacts with Pauline and the Haitian ice-cream vendor hearken to Frank Capra’s urban pastorals. Also, in a gesture that both corroborates and complicates Ghost Dog’s relation to the realist movement, the aspects of the film verging on the documentary aesthetic—its footage of urban-industrial settings, notably—partly rely on identifiable intertexts. In particular, Ghost Dog alludes to Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), a movie praised for its naturalistic footage of working-class locales. Secondly, Ghost Dog is metafictionally playful in its often comic foregrounding of rituals of communication and semiotic processes. The hit man maintains his ghostly anonymity by communicating with the outside world—with his mafia boss, notably—exclusively through carrier pigeons. While Ghost Dog handles the birds with elegance and affection, the mobsters chase them around their apartment in slapstick fashion, awkwardly trying to fasten messages to their legs. A comparable metacommunicational game unfolds through the exchange of books—a process by which protagonists advertise their life- choices. Ghost Dog receives his copy of Rashômon from the mafia boss’s daughter before entrusting it to Pearline. Before his death, he also offers Pearline a copy of The Hagakure, the life code of the Samurai, encouraging her to model her life on the same precepts. Ghost Dog and the Haitian ice-cream salesman communicate by means of similarly eccentric strategies. The Haitian only speaks French, which Ghost Dog does not understand. Oddly, there is no practical misunderstanding in the two characters’ exchanges: whatever one says is almost magically repeated by the other in his own idiom, as if their interactions embodied a utopia of intuitive communication. Against its ostensibly postmodernist features, Ghost Dog can be reclaimed for realism from two interrelated though seemingly opposite perspectives—the former pertaining to realism’s contractual and reflexive dimensions, the latter mostly to heuristics. In the first place, the film, as it foregrounds its characters’ communicational expertise,

222 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds carries out what might be described as a realism of signifying practice. Jarmusch’s film portrays—indeed acts out—a world that sustains itself performatively, on the mere basis of contractual bonds, speech acts, and intertextual references. In this respect, Ghost Dog, though apparently remote from classic realism, fits Brook Thomas’s vision of a perfected realist universe: it fulfills the logic of what in Chapter 7 I called the reality contract. Characters and settings are endowed with a mode of existence identical to the discursive interactions they engage in. Still, in the discussion of Thomas’s contractual concept of realism, I noted that reducing reality to a reality contract is at best a utopian temptation: doing so betokens, as Catherine Belsey points out, a covert commitment to a variant of metaphysical idealism that fails to distinguish between human-centered culture and reality (13, 16). Intriguingly, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog acknowledges this objection. Even as it pictures characters in constant semiotic interaction, it intimates that the latter’s reality exceeds the reassuring perimeter of contractual exchanges. Accordingly, the film’s referential apparatus includes signs that cannot be circulated with the playful ease and fluidity informing the characters’ skilled signifying behavior. A nature differential separates, metaphorically speaking, lighter and heavier signs: the film’s semiotic components can be ranked according to their greater or lesser amenability to semiotic negotiation. Symptomatically, compared to the music videos analyzed above, Ghost Dog orients its nature differentials downwards rather than upwards—not towards the insubstantiality of technospace, but towards signs implying the higher degree of materiality of body space. Like the courtroom dramas discussed above, Jarmusch’s film displays graphic evidence that, by its physical status, is meant to withstand counterarguments. Resistance to semiotic negotiation in Ghost Dog manifests itself through the film’s systematic recourse to location shooting. Jarmusch’s work would indeed be a very different and far less interesting film if it had been shot entirely in studio settings or even in minimalistic out-of-studio locales deprived of the capacity to gesture toward a contingent social environment. Instead, Ghost Dog opens with a long overhead helicopter shot of urban-industrial New Jersey, letting the camera hover over seemingly endless expanses of factories, railroad yards, and parking lots. This long panoramic take leads the viewer’s gaze to the tenement roof where Ghost Dog raises his

223 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds pigeons. The rest of the film’s narrative is shot either in neighborhoods of cheap frame houses where the fictional mafia mobsters reside, or in the vicinity of a park surrounded by derelict brownstones, where Ghost Dog meets with Pearline and the Haitian vendor. Location shooting of this type is less frequent in Hollywood films and televised fictions than most viewers might suspect: action that according to narrative logic occurs outdoors (in external diegetic space) is still commonly filmed in the technically manageable environment of sound stages or in outdoor lots within studio compounds. In recent years, confinement to studio shooting has even enjoyed new prominence due to the advent of ever more technologically advanced special effects minimizing the share of live capture (Monaco 156-59; Finance and Zwerman 53-54, 64-65). In this context, Jarmusch’s predilection for outdoors location shooting signals his affiliation to the aesthetic of alternative cinema, harking back to the practice of the French early-1960s Nouvelle Vague and the documentary style of Cinéma Vérité (Thompson and Bordwell, Film History 521-23; 570-71; David A. Cook 566-67; Pam Cook 42). Location footage fulfills these film-makers’ aspirations to unmediated realism in so far as images shot in an off-studio context—especially extreme long shots with a panoramic scope—can never entirely be the graphic record of a planned mise-en-scène: the cinematographic frame opens out to include locales existing independently from any plotting prescribed by the film’s screenplay. The camera must be allowed to capture traces of experience over which the semiotic strategies of directors, screenwriters, and characters have no hold. The suggestion that location shots elude semioticization and aesthetic structuring must admittedly reckon with the semiological arguments minimizing the claims of reflectionist mimesis in cinephotography. We have seen in Chapter 5 that the mere graphic properties of photographs do not confer to the latter the status of natural signs: images do not trigger heuristic disclosures out of their intrinsic resources. Even the double status of photographs as icons and indices, which leads most observers to mistake them for mirrors of the world, generates no self-evident meaning: photographs acquire determinate meaning only from their interlinking with their discursive context. This caveat, if applied to film, implies that indexical iconicity offers no absolute foundation for a distinction between documentary footage and fiction. The stage-managed fantasy universes of non-

224 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds realist films—Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939); Merian C. Cooper’s and Ernest B. Shoedsack’s King Kong (1933)—are evoked to a considerable extent through iconic/indexical shots, in the same fashion as documentary arguments may be backed by non-indexical icons such as diagrams, captions or even cartoons. One should therefore not be surprised to notice that Ghost Dog’s filmic signifiers are overwhelmingly made up of iconic/indexical images, regardless whether they represent the seemingly less realistic scenes of metacultural interplay or the panoramic views of real-world locations. Simultaneously, the naturalistic visuals of Ghost Dog fall within the remit of poststructuralist arguments over the intertextuality of realist devices. We have seen in Chapters 2 and 3 that the poststructuralist concept of the reality effect, developed notably by Roland Barthes, suggests that the literary representation of the details of social life, instead of offering documentary insights, merely signals a text’s endorsement of the conventions of the realist genre: it creates an intertextual link between each instance of the realist corpus to previous works pursuing the same goals. Applied to Ghost Dog, this demystifying approach reveals, for instance, that the film’s introductory aerial shot, despite its apparent documentary self- evidence, is overlaid with ironical echoes of the cinematic past. Aerial panoramic long takes are a classic expository device, going back to films as diverse as Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961) or Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (1987). Jarmusch gives an ironical nod to this tradition by letting us discover Ghost Dog’s urban- industrial landscape through the point-of-view of one of the contract killer’s pigeons, hurrying back to the coop to deliver a message. The closest intertext evoked thereby is arguably the opening shot of Ridley’s Scott’s Blade Runner (1992): the pigeon’s eye view of a rust- belt waste land is a whimsical inversion of Scott’s futuristic urban sprawl focalized through the gaze of a rogue android. Similarly, the tenement settings revealed at the end of the introductory sequence are borrowed from Kazan’s On the Waterfront: Forest Whitaker raising pigeons on a tenement roof is the visual echo of Marlon Brando tending to his beloved birds in Kazan’s film. The antirealist impact of these intertextual references is compounded by Jarmusch’s decision not to confer real-world names to the locales in which Ghost Dog’s narrative action unfolds: Jersey City is mentioned only in the final

225 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds credits. Cars in the film bear license plates bearing fictional generic labels such as “The Industrial State” and “The Highway State.” In the face of these objections, it is the more important to point out that the grounding gestures triggered by Jarmusch’s location footage are reducible neither to a purely reflectionist use of cinematography nor to the denial of intertextual sources. They mark instead a specific position—resistance to semioticization—within a dialogical gradient that does not merely pit pure matter and pure discourse against each other. In this logic, location shots, by their indexical and iconic properties, render possible the most reliable mechanism of heuristic disclosure that can be carried out in a framework that is otherwise organized discursively, dialogically, and intertextually. Jarmusch’s location footage would indeed be utterly meaningless if it remained entirely resistant to semiotic negotiation. Photographic disclosure cannot aspire to being irrevocable in the literal meaning of the term since it is always produced by documents whose significance stems from their capacity to circulate as communicational or intertextual tokens. Ghost Dog reveals, however, that, barring absolute non- negotiability, photographic documents may possess a degree of imperviousness to semiotic play compelling enough for them to serve as vehicles for grounding gestures. Given the proper fit between signifiers, signifieds, and object, they may display the referential stability of quasi-natural signs: their referential trustworthiness is, if not absolute, at least binding in their context of production and reception. The lesser negotiability of location shots is evident if the latter images are contrasted with the spectacle afforded by technosigns. I pointed out above that music videos make postmodern fluidity perceptible by means of graphically malleable signifiers, notably software-generated hypericons and hyperindices. The effortless alterability of these computer-processed signs matches the labile configuration of contemporary experience, making the former the proper vehicle for the latter. Conversely, alternative films, as they borrow from the tradition of classic documentaries, find in indexical/iconic photography the semiotic means to implement the opposite agenda. Photographs are indexical in so far as they register and communicate the trace of a physical pattern that is not alterable at will: they are bound by what we might call constrained mimesis. The resulting signifiers, with their comparative resistance to graphic

226 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds refashioning, are therefore well suited to map a social environment whose physical configuration and cultural significance is similarly not amenable to quick transformation. Thus, the iconic/indexical urban panoramas of Ghost Dog use signifiers subjected to nearly inalterable graphic constraints in order to render perceptible the unmanageable thereness of rusty factories, parking lots, frame houses, telephone poles with tangled cables, and dejected housing projects. Without assuming that these background elements are immune to historical change, the film suggests that they are the offshoot of a slow process of historical sedimentation: their historical fashioning has occurred at a pace starkly contrasting with the postmodern fluidity of discourse, the plasticity of constructed experience, and indeed the presumably infinite alterability of technosignifiers. The previous remarks convey the raw impact of Jarmusch’s grounding gestures, yet they are still too impressionistic to render justice to the complexities of a realist strategy carried out through the plurimedial discourse of film. Movies are indeed heterogeneous both in their discursive vehicle and in the make-up of their represented world—in their signifiers and signifieds. Even relatively simple courtroom films are semiotically hybrid in so far as they use variegated means of expression—photographic images, speech, captions, intertitles—in order to evoke fictional worlds that are themselves structured according to several planes of signifying material—verbal testimonies, photographs, material evidence. For accuracy’s sake, we must therefore fine-tune the metaphor I have used so far—the juggling of lighter and heavier signs. We must point out that in the multilayered referential apparatus of film, nature differentials do not trace out a sharp divide among two classes of signs, one consistently referring to stable, the other to labile elements of the lifeworld. Instead, differentials cut across signifiers and signifieds in complex fashion, making the film’s referential apparatus resemble a staggered continuum of dialogical tensions stretching from the lightest to the heaviest signs. A first dialogical tension opposes what for simplicity’s sake we may regard as dissimilar filmic signifiers. The lightest signifiers of Ghost Dog’s filmic discourse are in this logic its credits, intertitles, and dialogue panels. In Peirce’s terminology, they qualify as symbols (arbitrary signifiers), and are as such amenable to flexible rewriting and restructuring. They are contrasted with the indexical/iconic photographic signifiers that make

227 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds up the majority of the film’s footage—images whose graphic properties are in part constrained by live capture and therefore resistant to aesthetic control. A second differential structures what we may schematically regard as indexically evoked signifieds—the elements of the mise-en-scène captured by photographic footage. Various filmed objects of the mise-en-scène indeed have quite dissimilar material statuses. The lighter among them are those that lend themselves to communicational and narrative scripting—actors’ movements, dialogues, and props. The Haitian ice-cream vendor’s van, with its colorfully customized decoration, is a proper instance of this flexible material. It is an overtly semioticized object, and is as such held in dialogical tension with such heavier signifieds as the aggregate bulk of the physical background—the inert mass of social life—captured by the location shots. In this logic, the film’s signature grounding gesture is fully realized only when the two differentials mentioned above mutually reinforce realist disclosure. This occurs when, figuratively speaking, heavier signifiers carry heavier signifieds: the low negotiability of the indexical/iconic footage—its constrained mimesis—underscores the corresponding historical, material, or social inertia of the filmed background. In this dynamic, the constraints bearing upon the indexical images seem to rub off on the represented objects, leading viewers to believe that the latter escape the remit of semiotic negotiation. In an antirealist perspective, the mirror-like fit between heavy signifiers and heavy signifieds—between indexical/iconic images and a social scene resistant to change—may admittedly be viewed as the result either of coincidence or scripted artistic choice. The former case—fortuitous likeness—, makes realist film-making a game of chance. The latter—stage-managed correspondence—, makes it the product of a monologic, logocentric gesture: realist films are in this perspective bound to unduly privilege location footage over other film practices—metadiscursive language games, for instance. Still, such antirealist arguments lead us to misidentify the actual referential value of Ghost Dog’s dialogized nature differentials. The quasi-reflectionist semiotic fit depicted above, however important to the film’s realist aesthetic, matters less than the recognition of the fact that the signifying chain contains at least one purely non-negotiable link—the constrained mimesis of indexical images. The latter element has the value of an index of closure. The very existence of constrained

228 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds mimesis signals that the play of signifiers, so explicitly foregrounded in Ghost Dog, cannot entirely be free. Thus, according to the logic of the reality bet, this non-negotiable kernel serves as anchoring point for dialogical solidarity: it encourages us to take good measure of obstacles to semiotic negotiation present at other levels of the film and its represented world. Notably, it alerts us to the intractable thereness of the social landscape, history, and social relations made visible by the location shots. In this perspective, the value of location footage in Ghost Dog— and in other independent films—goes beyond heuristics. These images make semiotic non-negotiability the object of a reflexive, metadiscursive deliberation. Their metadiscursive component is the more apparent if we contrast Ghost Dog with films where urban location footage is used in classic reflectionist fashion. Urban thrillers such as William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) picture urban landscapes as a backdrop to which characters relate unproblematically. The social background thus depicted is admittedly neither meaningless nor inert: it defines specific narrative possibilities and constraints, and serves as sociological yardstick for characterization. Yet it does not initiate reflections on the conditions of its own representation. By comparison, urban footage in Ghost Dog serves as a token in a negotiation of human experience carried out across the film’s whole semiotic spectrum. Ghost Dog indeed achieves its full referential impact precisely as it plays out the heavier, less negotiable signs of its location shots against its metacultural rituals of communication. The urban squalor disclosed by the initial helicopter shot must be set off against the whimsical crosscuts of the carrier pigeon hovering over New Jersey or against the decorous choreography of Ghost Dog’s Japanese sword practice; the real-world banality of lower-middle-class houses must be contrasted with the ludicrous antics of mobsters unable to pay their rent; the derelict brownstones must clash with the romance merriness of the Haitian vendor’s ice-cream van. Without these nature differentials, the thematics of historical and social sedimentation would not emerge with any clarity. Only thus does the film reveal that contemporary realism is concerned with the greater or lesser amenability of social structures to human agency.

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2.3.4 Urban Performance Art: The Struggle with Residual Materiality In a Lacanian perspective, the barely semioticized plane of experience Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog brings to light qualifies as the real. We have seen in Chapter 3 that Catherine Belsey discerns in mimetic realism some capacity to evoke the Lacanian real by indirection. Realist literature and painting do so, she claims, by revealing what their own practice of imitation must ineluctably leave unrepresented (151-52). Transposed to Jarmusch’s cinema, this argument implies that Ghost Dog’s location shots render indirectly perceptible the haunting figure of the real in the intractable materiality of urban space. Yet I have mentioned in the Introduction to the present essay that Lacan’s conceptual framework is axiomatically antagonistic to realism. In the contemporary texts discussed here, reality does not ineluctably elude the subject’s grasp: it stands as an object of heuristic investigation or as the material fabric of a residual lifeworld. Ghost Dog admittedly approaches this residual materiality predominantly in a contemplative mode, which encourages a Lacanian reading: the film emphasizes the enigmatic presence of residual space as well as the opportunities it offers for characters to develop personal bonds in the interstices of dominant social networks. In other areas of contemporary realism, residual materiality is viewed more explicitly as a field of resistance. We have already encountered realist practices—undercover reporting, in particular—in which the chief reality norm is the physical resistance of the world. In these works, the power or powerlessness of investigators in the face of material constraints or even physical danger marks out the limit of negotiable and perceptible experience. The same logic informs urban-focused performance art—base jumping, hip-hop dancing, and Parkour running, the latter of which I discuss in more detail below. These practices suggest that semiotic non-negotiability must be experienced physically. From a semiotic perspective, the referential apparatus mobilized thereby addresses material reality by means of signs heavier than the indexical icons available in film. Likewise, the subject position these practices construct with regard to urban space is not limited to appraisal, observation, and contemplative inhabiting: it includes risk and physical mastery. Parkour is an urban-focused physical discipline that developed in the 1990s in the French banlieues—the suburban projects home to large numbers of immigrant families or French citizens of colonial

230 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds ancestry. The term Parkour is derived from the French “parcours du combatant,” designating boot-camp obstacle courses (Belle 41-42; my italics). In its modernized spelling, Parkour refers to the set of gestures allowing runners—or “traceurs” (Belle 100)—to overcome physical obstacles (buildings, fences, bridges, railings) by means of well- rehearsed climbs or jumps, thereby creating for themselves itineraries defying the physical capabilities or even the imagination of less physically trained or daring subjects. The basic gestures of Parkour were created by a group of French teenagers from the Paris suburb of Lisses, among whom the chief initiator of the movement, David Belle. Their exploits were popularized in France through teenage-oriented action films—Ariel Zeitoun’s Yamakasi (2001), Pierre Morel’s Banlieue 13 (2004)—produced by French popular-cinema mogul Luc Besson. The discipline later acquired international fame, notably in Britain, where it spawned the Parkour Nation movement. Though Parkour may in principle be practiced in natural environments, it is closely associated with the now decrepit modernist architectural landscape of 1960s and ’70s suburban Habitations à Loyer Modéré (low-rent housing projects)—France’s ubiquitous form of social housing. As such, it ranks among cultural practices such as hip-hop and graffiti writing, which grew out of an environment increasingly ridden with alienation, racism, and crime—a world to which the initiators of Parkour claim to offer a disciplined alternative. The dimension of Parkour that is of prime interest here is predictably its capacity to act as a physically based practice of urban exploration. Parkour, Belle claims, enabled him to “discover locales within urban projects unknown even to the neighborhood’s inhabitants” (63; my translation). Likewise, Dan Edwardes, in The Parkour & Freerunning Handbook, points out that Parkour runners, as they start training, find out that “their perception of their environment undergoes a fairly radical overhaul”: [w]alls, railings, buildings, barriers … structures of every shape and size cease to be seen as they were intended to be seen” (Edwardes 24). Heuristic exploration is wedded to praxis in this case: the appraisal of urban space obtained through Parkour leads to physical and psychological emancipation. Belle, in his account of the genesis of Parkour, describes the practice as an ascetic training code modeled on military discipline and the martial arts. Its goal is to secure self-improvement through self- mastery. Thanks to Parkour, Belle claims, he has been able to shed the

231 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds oppressive burden that “smothers” inhabitants of social projects (63): he became able to “wipe out [the] concrete block that blocked [his] vision” (63). The character played by Belle in Banlieue 13 elegantly enacts this empowering agenda as he exits a police precinct not through the door but, in one smooth jump, through a narrow horizontal window between door and ceiling. Likewise, Edwardes states that in the dynamics of Parkour, “[b]oundaries fall away, and structures built to contain become stepping stones to greater physical and mental liberty” (Edwardes 24). The previously alienating suburban landscape turns into “a vast, almost limitless playground” (Edwardes 24). On this basis, Parkour qualifies as a heuristically and pragmatically focused discipline whose referential apparatus seemingly draws on purely material signs. It mobilizes a repertory of gestures—“[ro]lls,” “mounts,” “vaults,” “[w]all runs,” “[d]rop jumps”(Edwardes 40, 46, 50, 56, 62)—providing the components of a discourse of urban mobility. The terminology best suited for the analysis of what Belle initially called the “art of displacement” (Edwardes 8) might be derived from Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of cinema. We have seen in Chapter 5 that Deleuze views film neither as “a language system nor a language,” but instead as a “plastic mass”—a “non-language material” displaying various modalities of movement (Deleuze, Cinema 2 28; italics in original). Parkour apparently fits this definition: its sequences of gestures have no determinate literal signifieds or coded syntax; any sociological or existential meaning they may carry is grafted onto them retrospectively, by connotative and allegorical means. Instead, the traceur’s itineraries may be broken down into units comparable to the fluid “figures” Deleuze discerns in film (Deleuze, Cinema 1 187)—“vectors” and “lines of the universe,” in particular (Deleuze, Cinema 1 192). Parkour seems indeed ideally suited to trace out across the suburban landscape what Deleuze calls “line[s] of flight”—empowering gestures of deterritorialization (Deleuze, Cinema 1 198), There is, however, something excessively utopian in this Deleuzian reading. Parkour is neither a perfectly free dynamics of empowerment nor a set of purely material gestures requiring no articulate language for its testing of the world. Instead, it is inevitably caught up in a hybrid referential apparatus with several levels of mediation. In particular, it is intricately linked not only to the aesthetic but also the

232 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds practice of videos and action films. Its leading practitioners are reluctant to acknowledge this mediatic hybridity. Belle cherishes the vision of a discipline in stark contrast with the “virtual” world of “video game consoles” (Belle 84-85; my translation). Parkour should, in his view, rely exclusively on the confrontation of bodies against urban concrete, and be regulated by a reasoned calculus of danger. Its sole legitimate social appropriation should be the training of professionals in rescue services (Belle 114). “Freerun”—the variety of Parkour cultivating spectacle for its own sake—amounts in this light to commercial betrayal (Belle 106). Still, the bond with film and photography is impossible to ignore. On the one hand, Parkour gestures are strikingly similar to routines in film musical and music videos to the point that some degree of influence, however unconscious, seems impossible to rule out. On the other hand, Parkour established its reputation among other forms of street art precisely through the very media channels—documentary, fiction films, music videos—Belle claims to condemn (Belle 79). The circumstances that led to the filming of Yamakasi and Banlieue 13 illustrate both Belle’s efforts to maintain the integrity of the art of displacement and its inevitable reprocessing through the media (Belle 124-25). Accordingly, the full-fledged referential apparatus of Parkour ranges from the heaviest to the lightest variety of signifying material: it encompasses both the material signifiers making up the sequences of gestures across urban locales and the semiotic machinery I described in the discussion of music videos and Jarmusch’s film-making.

2.3.5 The Material Reappropriation of Technosigns Ironically, Parkour’s semiotic hybridity—its unacknowledged reliance on the electronic media—is the very feature that makes it significant for the present argument. Parkour indeed encourages us to look for covert nature differentials in all signifying practices based on dialogical continuums of light and heavy signs. In particular, it leads us to spot dialogical tensions in the practices whose semiotic medium is most remote from freerunning—technopsychedelic videos and computer-generated images. From this dialogical perspective, just as Parkour cannot be reduced to the purely physical exploration of city space, music videos and CGI graphics must contribute to a physically anchored contemporary realism, however incompatible this gesture may seem to their ostensible endorsement of virtualization. If

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Parkour’s referential apparatus cannot be severed from the technosphere, technospace media can by the same token not utterly dissolve urban space and human bodies into technosigns. Videos and CGI must therefore remain beholden to a residual share of materiality—indeed to what I called above body space. Retrieving a share of body space from the technospace texture of music videos and CGI qualifies as a variant of what in the analysis of photography and film I called indexical reappropriation. We have seen in Chapter 5 that the meaning of visual documents can be conceptualized from two antagonistic perspectives—one based on Peircean indices, the other the Saussurean concept of arbitrary signification. The former approach, favored by Deleuze in his comments on cinema, privileges the capacity of cinephotography to record reality as a direct indexical imprint. The Saussurean view, on the contrary, considers the syntagmatics of montage as the primary source of meaning, thereby making graphic evidence dependent on conventional semantic construction. In the present context, the distinction between indexical and arbitrary visual meaning is homological to the body space/technospace binary: on the one hand, matter-oriented body space is to a large extent signified by indexical signs—be they cinephotographic documents or the heavier bodily kinetics of Parkour. On the other, technospace is anchored in arbitrary signification because the fluid lifeworld it evokes is signified by tokens that admit of fast negotiations and reconfigurations. Body space, in this light, must be reappropriated indexically against the background of a ceaselessly renegotiated technosphere. Still, we have also seen in Chapter 5 that the radical indexical reappropriation derived from Deleuze’s time-focused concept of cinema is a dead end for realist practice: no theory of realism can profit from making arbitrary and indexical interpretations irreconcilable opposites; truth- oriented representations cannot limit themselves to pitting arbitrary signs against mute indexical prints. Against this dichotomized approach, the discussion of nature differentials developed in the present chapter indicates that indexical reappropriation will be the better able to serve as support for grounding gestures if it acts within the semiotic continuum of hybrid referential apparatuses. In this logic, technospace media can not only be reintegrated into the phenomenal lifeworld, but more importantly, the residual materiality retrieved from them does not revert to mute indexicality: it finds its place in the

234 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds meaningful field of nature differentials of the referential apparatus, which accommodates both body and technospace—heavier and lighter signs. Music videos are amenable to indexical reappropriation in so far as, contrary to what their displays of special effects might suggest, they fail to wholeheartedly condone the human subject’s absorption into technospace. Even overtly technopsychedelic clips must concede some ground to body space, thereby limiting the impact of virtualization or even opening up a site of explicit resistance against it. The physical struggle against technology is illustrated with disarming explicitness in Guns ’n’ Roses’ YOU COULD BE MINE (1991), where performers defend their body-space performance area against an attack of the Terminator cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger in person, since the clip served as promotional material for James Cameron’s Terminator 2). Madonna’s clip for the James Bond theme song DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002) develops the same theme with more subtlety. It displays the singer vigorously fencing against her own double or enduring tortures inflicted by North Korean villains. In the latter scenes, Madonna’s scantily-clad body withstands not only the efforts of her unsavory assailants but also the dissociation induced by the clip’s technologically enabled fast montage. The video suggests as such that the body’s exposure, even resistance to unwanted refashioning is as important a trope for music videos as the subject’s technopsychelic erasure. In this respect, DIE ANOTHER DAY reveals the residual anthropocentrism that has characterized the video aesthetic across the several decades of their existence: in spite of their ubiquitous image processing, video clips have never durably veered toward purely technogenerated graphic abstraction. Only footage displayed as visual background to live concerts or DJ performances takes the form of pure flows of technosigns. On the contrary, most clips broadcast by MTV or YouTube feature human performers at least in some segment of their footage. Commercial constraints may partly account for this foregrounding of performance. As an advertising medium, videos must display the commodity they are actually peddling: they contribute to the construction of what Andrew Goodwin calls the “star text”—the narrative of stardom (Goodwin, Dancing 300; also Frith 224-25). Yet this objection begs the question why human agency constitutes a focus of interest with a market value at all. A more nuanced appraisal of this issue should therefore

235 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds acknowledge that clips, instead of effecting the erasure of body space by virtualization, make visible the dialogical complementarity— sometimes complicit, sometimes antagonistic—of these two levels of experience. In this light, technopsychedelic videos such as Nik Kershaw’s WOULDN’T IT BE GOOD (1984) and The Cardigans’ FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH (2003), as they portray performers being beamed out of a satellite dish or dissolving into video swirls, express a fascination for dematerialization that their referential apparatus cannot altogether bring to completion. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ CALIFORNICATION, by comparison, offers a more balanced realist assessment the interplay of bodies and technospace. The clip’s computer-generated panorama of California is set off against shots of the musicians’ well-toned bodies, making it clear that a struggle against electronic refashioning is possible, and that it finds its anchoring point in the most overtly physical dimension of phenomenal space, whose presence cannot be negotiated away.

To some extent, computer generated imagery lends itself to similar procedures of indexical reappropriation as music videos. Computer- generated images, the previous examples indicate, are prominently featured among the special effects by which music clips stage the struggle of body space against technospace. They contribute to the nature differential this spectacle makes visible and are thereby dialogically linked to body signs. Still, if CGI is taken as a medium in its own right, the indexical reappropriation it renders possible follows a slightly different, more substantial path. CGI is indeed linked to the phenomenal world by performative means: its images connect to real space through chains of actions and gestures. The discussion of CGI in Chapter 5 purposely did not address this performative dimension. There, I dealt with computer-generated graphics according to the dismissive logic of antirealism. From this perspective, it was possible to indicate that these images piece together a graphically flawless pseudo-physis either through pure computer generation (by means of hypericonic signs) or through the mixture of computer processing and analogical capture (by means of hyperindices). The creaseless iconography resulting therefrom, I pointed out, has a psychological and ideological value of the order of the Lacanian imaginary: CGI’s virtualized hyperreality offers a fantasy compensation for the limits and frustrations of the embodied world. Still, even as staunch a critic

236 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds of late-capitalist hyperreality as Jean Baudrillard acknowledges that computer-generated environments are more than just a set of sanitized icons. The French theoretician dislikes hyperreal simulacra not merely because of their graphic hyperrealism but because of their capacity for action. In his view, their power consists in their capacity to engender further simulacra. In what amounts to technologically enabled incest, hyperreality sustains itself through technosigns providing for their own reproduction (Simulacres 11-12). Predictably, I interpret the performative aspects of virtual images differently from Baudrillard. In the present perspective, technosigns do close in upon themselves. Instead, they are performative and indexical in their capacity to enter nature differentials allowing them to accomplish tasks and gestures oriented towards or originating from the phenomenal world. The clearest instances of indexical and performative appropriation of virtual imagery occur in what might be regarded as the latter’s nonfiction applications. Since the early 1990s, computer-generated graphics have been essential to the interfacing mechanisms of computer exploitation systems. The sequences of actions making up most contemporary clerical work are accomplished by activating and manipulating the virtual-reality graphics—the so-called icons—of computer software. Virtual-reality graphics are also central to scientific research and engineering: the physical properties of internal combustion engines, airplanes, or even nuclear explosions are tested by means of computer simulation before the latter machines or events are produced as physical realities (“Enhance”; “Virtual Reality”; “Virtual Engineering”). In either case—be it in computer commands or engineering design—an indexical link of a pragmatic/performative nature is established between software-generated icons and, on the other hand, gestures and objects in the phenomenal world. By comparison, virtual images in fictions—the special effects of music videos or SF and fantasy films—are indexical and performative primarily in a metarealist perspective: fictional CGI graphics, whether hypericons or hyperindices, implicitly gesture towards the physical tasks and procedures that make up their process of production and their context of reception. More even than photographs and paintings, they indirectly signal the programming work invested in fashioning them into reality simulacra. Contrary to what Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality suggests, technosigns are not exclusively interpreted as constituents of a purely autonomous realm—as a world unto

237 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds themselves. Like all other signs, their value is defined by their position in an environment that is not restricted to their own semiotic medium. Thus, viewers may feel initially intrigued by CGI apparent capacity to supersede objects of the phenomenal world, yet they are not entirely fooled by it. They are led instead to match CGI images against their phenomenal counterparts—of comparing the computer simulacrum to its putative original—a gesture that lays bare the limits of CGI simulation. This ambivalent, yet not thoroughly naïve mode of appropriation of CGI graphics lies at the root of viewers’ interest for the technological prowess on which these graphics rely. Fascination for the technological underpinnings of CGI is the primary object of the “making-of” documentaries accompanying SF and fantasy films, which are often featured as bonuses to DVD copies or are sometimes issued as separate releases. The manufacturing of virtual reality—a process accomplished in phenomenal time and space by human subjects—is therefore a metarealist film topic in its own right. A specific subset of computer generated graphics lends itself to performative processes and indexical appropriations that go beyond the metarealist function sketched out above. Numerous SF and fantasy films— James’s Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Avatar (2009); Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)—feature virtual-reality characters whose screen figure is produced by means of digital techniques relying on the direct performative interaction of body and technospace—digital rotoscoping and motion capture, in particular. The monstrous Gollum (Andy Serkis) in Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King or the extraterrestrial embodiments of Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver in Avatar are the offshoot of a special-effects process whereby the actors’ spatial outline and movements are scanned by digital captors, producing a digitized space/motion matrix that is eventually fleshed out with a computer-generated texture. The resulting images might be called performative hyperindices, as they are obtained by the indexical interfacing of work in real space with computer computation. CGI’s Performative hyperindices illustrate a mode of body/technospace interaction whose field of application is much broader than filmic special effects. The handling of digital music instruments—synthesizers, electronic drums—obeys a similar logic, for instance. On first inspection, the digitized sounds of synthesizer technology qualify as audio hypericons and hyperindices:

238 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds they are generated either entirely by computation or by computer- processed recordings of live sound samples. Yet this classification makes sense only in the abstract—indeed for sounds outside of actual performance. The same sounds become performative hyperindices when they are triggered by keyboards, electronic drum sets, or any other musical controller activated by human players or any other musical agent in the phenomenal world. The sound performance thus produced arises at the border of body and technospace: the patterns of real-space musical gestures of the triggering agent act as a structuring shell for the activation of encoded digitized samples. Comparing CGI with digital music technology makes it easier to point out that the value of performative hyperindices lies in their abiding by certain limits dictated by spatial and temporal constraints. In theory, computer generation may create a broad gamut of images and sounds of which only a small portion have graphic or musical merit. In this context, performative indexicality performs a grounding function: because it structures computer generation according to real- time/space patterns (schemata such as the outlines of actors’ bodies or the kinetics of musical performance), it selects those configurations that have a tested value with regard to the lifeworld of their intended audiences. The make-up of Terminator 2’s main villain, a cyborg named T-1000, illustrates to what extent the constraints of phenomenal embodiment contribute to the genesis of technosigns. This robotic assassin, played in real-space film capture by actor Stan Winston, is a humanoid machine with the plasticity and resilience of liquid metal. It is as such capable of reconstituting its human-shaped body after withstanding bullet wounds, mutilating cuts, or even dissolution into tiny droplets. Conversely, its body parts morph into various tools and weapons—pliers, swords, etc. Admittedly, from the perspective of the practicalities of special-effects craftsmanship, this figure only required a modest input of computer-based visuals: its physical metamorphoses are produced mostly by such traditional means as foam and plastic puppets (Winston; Welch; “Terminator 2: Judgment Day T-1000 Effects”; “Learn Monster Making”). CGI, still prohibitively expensive at the time of filming, intervened primarily in order to secure the homogenizing effect of hyperindices: it facilitated the visual morphing of Stan Winston’s body, the foam puppets, and the computer-generated hypericonic body extensions. This comparatively low-tech pedigree makes the T-1000 cyborg even better

239 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds able to demonstrate the workings of grounding gestures and performative/indexical reappropriation. Whereas the robotic killer was meant to showcase a special-effects technological breakthrough—the creation of visuals in apparent defiance of physicality—, it simultaneously foregrounded its covert reliance on plain embodiment. Whether as spectacle, narrative agent, and special-effects artefact, T- 1000 is indeed the more effective as it is no pure technosign. A more alien villain might be more destructive, yet it would only be an abstract threat deprived of relevant connections to the environment in which it evolves. In this, T-1000 offers an apt reminder that technosigns in fictional texts, unless they are viewed from a dogmatically techno-utopian perspective, are still tied to phenomenal constraints. The nature differentials so clearly foregrounded in courtroom films like Philadelphia do structure the seemingly disembodied world of postmodern SF. The Residual materiality of technosigns—their status as performative hyperindices—acts as a reality norm at the very least in the manufacturing process, and in many cases also in the narrative function they fulfil.

2.4.6 Toward A Materialist Monologism? To some extent, the analysis of referential apparatuses developed above legitimizes the claims of postmimetic realism. If the elusive technosignifiers of music videos and CGI as well as the seemingly mute physical gestures of Parkour can be shown to contribute to the representation of reality, we must accept that realism unfolds across a much larger and diverse field of signifiers than that taken into consideration by classic mimesis. The present discussion endorses these postmimetic practices in so far as it highlights the pluralist validation procedures made possible by the diversity of signifying material available to authors and texts. Referential apparatuses, I have argued, are composed of signifiers with dissimilar referential prerogatives. A plurality of referential apparatuses with their specific nature differentials therefore exists, each defining grounding gestures likely to differ from the iconic bond between text and world postulated by reflectionist mimesis. Among this multiplicity, each apparatus has its own epistemological scope: its material configuration is oriented toward a specific area of reality—the body/technospace interface in music videos and postmodern SF, or, in alternative film- making, the tension between discursive playfulness and a seemingly

240 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds non-negotiable social environment. Yet the postmimetic practice thus evoked cannot escape axiomatic limits of its own. In spite of the attention paid to the plurality of grounding gestures, my argument cannot conceal its nostalgia for a referential anchoring point—indeed for a new variant of monologism. Since the procedures of referential validation reviewed above revolve around semiotic non-negotiability, they promote materiality itself as a reality norm, with the restrictiveness such a gesture involves. The ensuing materialistic monologism is noticeable in the fact that my analysis of nature differentials privileges heavier, physical signs within the semiotic continuum of realist works: less or non-semioticized experience is flaunted as benchmark of reality. For the sake of methodological transparency, it is fair to point out that later chapters of the present essay will nuance, yet not entirely refute the materialistic hierarchy defined above. In part, the choice of a realist paradigm based on lesser semiotic negotiability is a matter of commitment: it is an aspect of what in Chapter 6 I call the reality bet. Yet however fitting this choice may be to the contemporary realist corpus, it raises problems of practical interpretation. The very concept of nature differentials can indeed not function with equal felicity across all segments of realist art. While the plurimedial texts of the information age have the capacity to play signifiers of various material statuses against one another, literary realism, which formed the very template of realist representation in nineteenth-century culture, is less well equipped to do so. Literature relies mostly on one single class of signs. Ironically, its tokens—Peircean symbols or Saussurean arbitrary signs—qualify as lightest and least trustworthy in the materialistic continuum of nature differentials. In a later section, I will therefore determine how literature realism may be reclaimed into the present paradigm of realism. At this stage, I can only highlight the reassuring fact that the materialist bias informing the present discussion is softened by realism’s dialogical configuration. The next chapter shows indeed that the referential impact of specific texts, though it is pegged to semiotic materiality, is never restricted to this materially validated anchoring point. The naive materialism informing the courtroom dramas mentioned in the beginning of the present chapter is therefore only a reductive shorthand for the guiding principles of the present approach. Separate texts do not produce realist proofs by the mere ostension of their signifying material. Instead, Jarmusch’s

241 Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds cinema, music videos, postmodern SF, and Parkour suggest that the heavy signs in their referential apparatuses are effective only by the combined impact of their physical presence and of their interaction with semiotic levels enjoying a different degree of materiality. The next chapter generalizes this insight: I argue that realist works, far from being validated merely on the basis of their intrinsic textual or semiotic resources, are caught up in a negotiation extending beyond the boundary of separate texts: they set in motion a referential trail propelled by the dynamics of cultural production and reception, and, in the process, confront their own signifiers with signs endowed with different material, practical, and cultural prerogatives.

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