Christophe Den Tandt on Virtual Grounds 1

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 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 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

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