Menu

HOME OF THE BEST STORIES YOU'VE NEVER HEARD

Subscribe to our podcasts on iTunes or Soundcloud

The Terrifying Ambivalence of Theory-Fiction

Published on May 16, 2017 in Ark Review/Essays/Long read by Macon Holt

I want to talk about theory-fiction, an obscure practice that has been around for a
while but has recently reared itself back into view. While we could take this to
mean theory heavy pieces of auto-fiction such as I Love Dick or, according to the
unflattering assessment of the critic James Woods, the hysterical realists1 (works
such as those by D. F. Wallace, Don DeLillo and Zadie Smith), I think this is too
limited a perspective. These are all works that attempt, or are understood to have
attempted, to attain some definition as literary fiction. And even those that were
met with the disapproval of the (literary) establishment at first are still
comprehensible within the discourse of the prestige arm of commercial publishing.

What I want to focus on instead is the other edge of this practice. The space where
it is only sometimes necessary to appear as a book (or even, in these post-digital
times, a Reddit forum). The space where fiction bleeds into reality, where it can
be thought of as really more of a porous abstract engine that we use to energize
the structures of day-to-day life; giving it a form in which we can function. The
thing is that practice is built on theoretical foundations that some consider
irresponsible and perhaps downright wrong, however, I think they are more
accurately described as terrifyingly ambivalent. That said, I think this is an
ambilence we need to get to grips with if we are to navigate our present moment.

To do this, however, we need an object on which to hang some rather dusty

postmodern theory from Jean Baudrillard. Something that can allow us to see this
theory’s enduring relevance, even while it’s out of fashion, and something on which
to “break its spine” allowing it to escape the notion of the book and enter the
world. This is of course, fake news and the Gulf War.

The Gulf War, As You Know It, Did Not Take Place.

Over the last few months, I have had a great many conversations with people about
the spectre of living in a post-truth world. As I write this, it seems to me, that
the term itself seems to have gone into recession, as it is tied up with other
terms like fake news and alternative facts. While I share many of the concerns of
those I talk with about this, I cannot help but adopt a somewhat contrarian stance
of asking: What is new about this?

To me, this seems like the stipulations of postmodern theory hitting the mainstream
in a far more substantive way, than they did back in the 80s and 90s when the
intelligentsia started using the word postmodern as a way to scoff at contemporary
pretension. Today, we can see those who previously thought the “postmodern
condition” was little more than an academic parlor trick, have started to feel the
sting of a discourse that treats their conception of reality with incredulity. This
is not novel to those who have never been allowed into the powerful positions of
discourse; the poor and the disenfranchised. The only reason we are being told that
fake news and alternative facts are new, is because they are finally affecting
those whom have held the power to construct discourse: the establishment press and
politicians.

To say that what we call truth is no more than a social construct is a reasonable
conclusion to reach, when you have just watched something as clearly constructed as
news footage be referred to by a politician as the truth.

What concerns me is that, if we too easily buy
may confuse the propagandistic effects of fake
actual underlying causes that are required for
I’m happy to concede that facts and underlying
ourselves unduly if we think our discourse has
into this explanatory narrative, we
news and alternative facts with the
them to be effective. Because, while
realities exist, I think we flatter
ever really been composed of them.

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.

For example, back in the early 90s, the late post-modern French philosopher, Jean
Baudrillard wrote an essay, part of a series written during the Gulf War,
entitled, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. At the time, many were outraged by what
they saw as a relativist game about the construction of truth being played with
something as serious as war. Lives, they asserted, were literally at stake. While
it is true that the essay is provocative, taking, as it does, such a willfully
obtuse position, to characterize it as asserting some sort of crass relativism
derived from the mediatized nature of modern life is disingenuous. Rather, what
Baudrillard is arguing is that the thing we call “the gulf war” is a simulacrum, an
image without an original object, produced as propaganda. Images in forms that do
not depict with any reference to reality the suffering and murder resulting from
the mere push of a button miles away.

When war is conducted by so-called democratic nations, the population bears some of
the ethical responsibility as the population cede their sovereignty to politicians
who enact policy and violence. We can quibble about the amount of complicity or
coercion at play but, if we want to play a numbers game, it is fair to say that
sovereignty is something we willingly hand-over. After the lessons learned from
the uproar caused by the Vietnam war (first televised war), the ‘military-
entertainment complex’, to use musician and philosopher Steve Goodman’s2 term,
worked to ensure that war could only be viewed in palatable packages. It is in this
historical context that Baudrillard argued that the Gulf war did not take place.

Far from Baudrillard being the relativist that the mainstream opinion caricatured
him as, it was, in fact, the mainstream that could be seen as the relativists,
relying as they did on the public understanding of war-as-image or simulacra,
rather than the war itself, to maintain public consent to inflict violence. To say
that what we call truth is no more than a social construct may be a reasonable
conclusion to reach when you have just watched something as clearly constructed as
news footage be referred to by a politician as the truth.

Baudrillard had a fancy name for this kind of thing that refers back to something
but that has no original referent, he called them third order simulacra. This is,
for the majority of people, what the gulf war was. It is an intercut juxtaposition
of Saddam Hussein looking menacing, news reportage footage of cruise missiles
launching from ships, burnt out tanks and terrified displaced Iraqi faces, followed
by a close up of the sunglasses of an American soldier, which bleeds into George
H.W. Bush speaking to camera from the Oval Office. These fragments are all parts of
the a war that took place in the Iraqi gulf in the early 90s. But the thing most of
us call the gulf war is the collected images of media packages, not the war itself.
What these images refer to is ultimately nothing, and yet this is the basis on
which we make decisions. Decisions based on a fiction, like votes or other
political engagement or apathy, that shape reality.

(The) Cybernetic Cultures Research Unity Did Not Take Place.

According to Mark Fisher, a major consequence for Baudrillard of the cultural shift
to the field of third order simulacra was the elimination of the distinction
between fiction (particularly science fiction) and social theory. While we could
say that there are fictions that play more strongly into this new relationship
theory, I think it is clear, even if it is often disavowed, that theory has for a
long time been entwined with fiction. Theory here is not about laying out a
prediction that can be tested with experimentation, rather it is an attempt to
narrate empirical experience.

This line of thinking lead to the emergence of a practice that explicitly

positioned itself as theory-fiction. While earlier writers, such as Bataille,
Nietzsche and Sartre had attempted to use fiction to develop a philosophical
project, these works often served as illustrative, where they fiction served the
philosophical project. In the 90s, however, theory-fiction, a practice built out of
the shaky ontological foundation of postmodernism, attempted to collapse these
things into one another. Where the writing of theory could fictionalize and produce
reality. In short, this method was built from the understanding that our ideas
about reality, our theories of it, came out of fictions. Fictions we used to act
and shape reality. However, formany of theory-fiction’s practitioners, the fictions
that we lived with in the 90s and even now had not kept pace with our strange new
world.

CCRU

Key to the development of what is considered theory fiction today was, the
institutionally disavowed, CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), a group of
students, lecturers and researchers from the University of Warwick’s philosophy
department throughout the 90s. More than merely a banal research cluster, CCRU
attempted to collapse themselves into an entity that was both singular and
multiple, through experimentation with drugs, their interpersonal relationships,
music, technology and writing. They produced enigmatic texts that, while they may
have become somewhat kitsch now, at the time turned theory into a fiction of the
real. For example, this extract from the text Swarmachines;

There is no doubt anywhere that matters: simply facts. Debate is idiot distraction,
humanity is fucked, real machines never closed-up inside an architecture. Schizo-
capital fission consists of vectors dividing between two noncommunicating phyla of
nonpersonal multiplicity. First pyramid structures control structures: white-clown
pixel face, concentrational social segments, EU-2 Integrated history horizon.
Second, Jungle-war machines: darkening touch densities, cultural distribution
thresholds, intensive now-variation flattened out into ungeometrized periphery.

No community. No dialectics. No plan for an alternative state.

This is madness. But madness that should not be confused with uselessness.
Especially when the object you are trying to describe is, for most of us,
incomprehensible. Rather than pretending it was possible to “make sense” of a world
in the process of technologically dissolving the boundaries that defined the
individual and underpinned the late capitalist culture that persisted after the end
of the cold war, with these texts CCRU shifted theory into a fictional register so
as to approach a field of research that was both tantalisingly obvious but also
beyond the analytical tools of quotidian discourse. That being discourse between
individuals as opposed to the immanent discourse of an ever approaching cybernetic
future.

A recent Guardian long-read piece charted how CCRU used theory-fiction to develop
the politicophilosophical school of accelerationism3. This school of thought should
not be confused with the traditional leftist view of “sharpening the
contradictions”, where agitators help capitalism become more oppressive to
instigate a revolution. Instead, accelerationism uses an unconventional reading of
Marx and Deleuze and Guattari to argue for the harnessing of the capacity of
capitalism to dissolve boundaries (for example, the dissolution of national borders
through trade) as a way in which to liberate human potential. And perhaps even
liberate it from the human form itself. This is where the ambivalence comes in.

…the stakes are very high when you write something down but, paradoxically, this
knowledge renders these stakes absurd.

The odd thing, however, about this type of theory-fiction is that, as an object
itself, its influence is slow, even if the phenomenon it describes is ever
accelerating. As such, it can be hard to work out where the fiction exists. Is it
on the page where a collective effort was made to express inconsummate fragments of
reality? Or is it in the moment when the fragments seem to demand to be expressed
together? It is almost as if, in attempting to stay faithful to the complexities
and consequences that emerged from this environment of fast moving data and porous
boundaries, the requisite abandonment of vernacular meant that the work could not
spread. Indeed, by taking in and then expressing the experience of rapidly
digitizing capitalism the influence of the work of CCRU has been confined to those
willing to go along with their seemingly alien mode of thought. These are academics
for the most part, although more significantly some have gone on to work in silicon
valley…

Write Everything Down.

Years later, a recent example of literary theory-fiction, Satin Island by Tom

McCarthy, seems to have caught up to this impulse and found a way to move it to a
mainstream vernacular. The work is self-consciously literary but gives shape to a
world not unlike the one described by CCRU.

SATIN ISLAND

The novel is the story of U, a corporate anthropologist commissioned to write the

great anthropological report of the present moment by his employer. However, U is
confronted with a problem in the digital present. He remarks that “Bronisław
Malinowski, the father of modern anthropology, said: Write Everything Down” as you
never know what might be important your research. The problem is that today
everything that a scientist or social scientist could note down with empirical
confidence is already written down. Not just written down but stored securely,
copied and distributed in a format that is infinitely remixable. If the broadcast
media could produce third order simulacra, then this must be the fourth order at
the very least. Here, quite explicitly the only course of action is narration.

This, as with CCRU, is where we can see theory-fiction as terrifyingly ambivalent.

Theory-fiction is a practice that contains an approach to knowledge and the reality
that does away with the barometers of meaning we use to define ourselves, the world
and the good. However, unlike with earlier more nihilistic movements, there is no
triumph of transgression here, no pleasure or jouissance, because the world it
describes would obliterate anything capable of experiencing such things as we know
them. With such a view of the world, why not vote for Trump and accelerate the
system until there is nothing left but a radioactive mist? That said, from another
vantage point the same conclusion could have been reached years ago.

This ambivalent manifestation is, however, but one version of the theory-fiction
methodology in operation. As I write this I am aware that I stand at the precipice
of rabbit-hole. As the fictional mode can allow anything to come into play and with
theory it can become actionable. That said, in the age of nth order simulacra the
limited beings that we are may need to come to terms with the notion that fiction
really exists and reality is unknowable as anything but, hopefully complex,
fictions. Reductions of what is there to something we can narrativize. This means
that the stakes are very high when you write something down but, paradoxically,
this knowledge renders these stakes absurd. This need not mean we tear everything
down, only that not doing so is truly a difficult choice.

I know this was meant as a jab but I love this label ↩Interestingly (and more on
why later) he earned his PhD at the University of Warwick in 90s. ↩It is necessary
to mention my not mentioning of Nick Land. There simply is not space for a
discussion of his work here, despite the fact that a great deal of the ambivalence
at play here is down to him. The Guardian article linked to above would be the
place to start looking for more information. ↩

Share this:

Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in

new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)

FACEBOOKTWITTERGOOGLEPINTEREST

TAGS: ACCELERATIONISMAMBIVALENCEBAUDRILLARDCCRUDIGITAL CULTUREFICTIONGULF WARMARK

FISHERPOSTMODERNISMSATIN ISLANDTHE INTERNETTHEORYTHEORY-FICTIONTOM MCCARTHY

YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN

What is Accelerationism?

What is Xenofeminism?

“Like is the digital Amen”. Book Review: Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han

MACON HOLTLATEST POSTS

Macon has spent the last four years trying to shoehorn Infinite Jest into a PhD
about popular music and capitalism. He managed to do this by making it about
something called sonic fiction. He is one half of the podcasting team and the
reason why the critical theory section is an odd mix of Adorno and Deleuze &
Guattari. For many months he was mistaken for a ghost that had decided to haunt the
store, but it was just him editing his thesis and/or the podcast. Here he writes
about things which might be true or are entirely made up.

2 COMMENTS

The Ephemeral Body and Meaningless Symbols in Alexandra Kleeman’s “You Too Can Have
A Body Like Mine”. – arkbooks

AUGUST 15, 2017 AT 08:41

[…] then is all of this so important to the problems of our times? As I have
discussed previously on the pages of the Ark Review, we live in an age of symbols
devoid of referents. Trump is a president as a pure symbol business […]

Reply

Sonic Fiction and Five Fragments of Interpol – arkbooks

JANUARY 9, 2018 AT 08:00

[…] a contrived structure to explore something in reality (we could call this
fiction). I have written previously in more detail about the practice and some of
its more disturbing implications but, suffice to say, […]

Reply

LEAVE A REPLY

NOTIFY ME OF FOLLOW-UP COMMENTS BY EMAIL.

NOTIFY ME OF NEW POSTS BY EMAIL.

ARK REVIEW

Ark Review is a literary and cultural journal. Kind of like a digital expansion of
the bookshop! Here we do book reviews, essays, interviews and the like. Follow
along!

MOST VIEWED POSTS

01

The Terrifying Ambivalence of Theory-Fiction

I want to talk about theory-fiction, an obscure practice that has been around for a
while but has recently reared … More

02

Why Tom McCarthy’s “Satin Island” isn’t Kafkaesque

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy is not Kafkaesque as the recent review by Dr. Macon
Holt suggests. To illustrate why, the following … More

CATEGORIES

#bookishArk ReviewBook reviewsCartoonEssaysInterviewsLong

readManifestoMusingsReportsReviewTranslation

TAGS

#bookish AABC Against ________ Art book review books Chris

Kraus cinema Cruelty David Foster Wallace Deleuze and
Guattari Documentaryephemera feminism fiction film Growth Han Kang i love
dick Infinite Jest Kafka Kathy Acker KBH Læser 2017'
Vækst Lacan language Leisure literatureLouisiana Literature love Maggie
Nelson Manifesto Mark Fisher neoliberalism poetry politics queer readingsex Sylvia
Plath theory The Vegetariantranslation translation tuesday ViolenceVirginia Woolf

SUBSCRIBE TO THE ARK REVIEW

Name

Email *

PREVIOUS STORYProof that Kafka Read Lacan: Reading Kafka with Lacan

NEXT STORYRoutines of Quiet Girls

LATEST FROM ARK REVIEW

Review: “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh

My Year Of Rest and Relaxation, a 2018 novel by Ottessa Moshfegh,

Three Books that make us ROFL: Reading on the Floor, Laughing.

ROFL: Reading On the Floor Laughing Umberto Eco – Travels in

The Worst Reads of 2018

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada Each sentence of this

The Best Reads of 2018

Efter solen by Jonas Eika Rasmussen Five delightfully weird short stories (read

How an Unconventional Advice Column Helped Me Stay Sane: An essay about the
importance of Dear Sugars

A tall sweet looking guy walked into the store this morning, asking

Home of the best stories you've never heard