Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 1

Introduction

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism1

“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.

1 This paper is the introductory chapter of a book-length study provisionally entitled On Virtual Grounds: A Theoretical Paradigm for Realism at the Turn of the Twenty First Century.

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 2 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 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

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 3 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 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 (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” (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 . 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

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 4 quotes’” (Bell 1). Debates in recent criticism about the problematic legitimacy of realist art are given extended scrutiny in Part I of the present essay. Further chapters defy the methodological skepticism 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

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 5 high mimetic, the low mimetic, and the 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 favored 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 genre-focused definition assumes that realism, regardless of its claim

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 6 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; my translation). 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; my translation). As an avatar of literariness (or of equivalent concepts relevant to other modes of expression), realism loses its prerogative to map the non- artistic world. By comparison, the mode-based approach, with its

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 7 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 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

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 8 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.2 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 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 and Theodor 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

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

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 9 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” (47) integrating the subjectivism of modernist aesthetics and thereby departs from the fact-based “conscientious” realism of nineteenth-century authors (20). 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.3 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.4 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 Objectivity in the 1920s.5 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

3 For discussions of the stylistic hybridization of realism in the graphic arts, see Lucie- Smith; Debray 18-23; Bernabei, “Réalisme” 206-35; Castria Marchetti 268-97. 4 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. 5 For discussions of the aesthetics of the Ash-Can school, see Prown 126-29; Lucie- Smith 58-71; and Bernabei, “Groupe” 144-47.

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 10 appropriation both of Dadaist provocation and the imagery of advertising and consumerism.6 Likewise, the interweaving of mimesis and 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 (Saldivar526). 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 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

6 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.

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 11 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” (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 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

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 12 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, 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

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 13 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. CALIFORNICATION7 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 , 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, 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 path-breaking 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,

7 Following the convention introduced by music-video scholar Andrew Goodwin, titles of video clips are mentioned in small capitals.

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 14 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 160). Instead of a snapshot of the world, Sister Carrie is an open-ended metadiscursive work toying with “competing versions of reality” (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 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

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 15 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-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.

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 16 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. 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

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 17 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 toward 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 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

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 18 war against poststructuralist and postmodernist epistemological indeterminism.8 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. 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; my translation). 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

8 For arguments highlighting the continued relevance of realism in post-WWII culture, see Tallis, In Defence vi and Not Saussure 1; Eagleton 1-6; Wolfe 46 and Bradbury 1135-39.

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 19 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 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]

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 20 world system” (Postmodernism 38). Still, Jameson, on the basis of Kevin Lynch’s urban planning theories, and Morris, invoking social geographer , 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; my translation; emphasis in original). Secondly, realist texts render account of the multicultural configurations that have developed in most countries since the Second 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

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 21 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 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.9 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.10 Thus, the literary production of the realist movement

9 For a re-evaluation of the often neglected impact of idealism on nineteenth-century culture, see Moi 100-01. 10 For analyses of realism informed by the formalist concern for literary technique, see Watt 34-35; Furst 10, 23; Walcutt 23; Pizer, “Is American” 390.

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 22 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 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; my translation). 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

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 23 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 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; my translation): its reward is the pleasurable display of knowledge being elaborated within an environment that resists this endeavor.

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 24 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 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.

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 25 The realist dialogism explored in this argument is of a convergent nature: it is, as we saw above, oriented toward 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 toward 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 Two indicates that the defense of realism also requires a final de jure 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

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 26 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 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; my translation). 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; my translation); 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; my translation). 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] (Being 23) or Henri Bergson’s

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 27 dichotomy between the fossilized temporality of the physical sciences and the fluid intensities of psychological “duration” (Matière 230; my translation). 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 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

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 28 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 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 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

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 29 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. 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. ’s famous contention that “the ideas of the dominant classes are the dominant ideas” (338; my translation) implies that ideology’s epistemologically and politically flawed discourses, however deeply ingrained, can be exposed from the

Toward a Postmimetic and Dialogical Realism 30 external standpoint of the science of history. This level of confidence waned among theoreticians of the second half of the twentieth century, however. ’s neo-, 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; my translation). 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 knowledge that the information society has colonized all vantage points from which its idiom could be articulated (“” 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.

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