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Christophe Den Tandt

Université Libre de Bruxelles (2015)

CHAPTER 6

The Reality Bet:

Realism under Postmodernity1

2.1.1 Virtualization and Dialogization

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s

novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, depicts a world Emile

Zola, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Fritz Lang, and Raymond

Chandler might have distantly recognized. The film opens with a

panoramic overhead view of an industrial megalopolis identified in

screen captions as 2019 Los Angeles. The next shot shows the urban

sprawl reflected in the pupil of an eye filling the screen in extreme

close-up. This observer, zooming over the city in an airborne vehicle,

1 This paper is the seventh instalment of a book-length study provisionally entitled

On Virtual Grounds: Blueprint for a Postmimetic, Dialogical Realism. Previous

instalments—entitled respectively “Toward a Dialogical and Postmimetic Realism,”

and “Classic Realism, the Nostalgic View,” “Modernist Antirealism: Existential

Alienation and the Solace of Form,” “The Thingless Sign: The Structuralist and

Poststructuralist Challenge against Referential Illusion,” “The Politics of Mimesis:

Realism as Discursive Repression,” and “Antirealism and the Visual Media”—are

also available on Academia.edu

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discovers a tangle of urban canyons, fire-spouting oil refineries, and

huge pyramid-shaped high-rises. Later shots reveal that, under the

hovering sky traffic, Los Angeles streets bathe in the glare of

ubiquitous advertising graphics—neon signs, giant screens on the face

of skyscrapers, floating dirigibles blaring out commercial messages.

The city’s crowds make up a multilingual mass exhibiting a confusing

plurality of ethnic or subcultural dress codes. Above all, the cityscape

proclaims through its procession of signs that it is a construct of

powerful corporations. In the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction,

the film’s first scenes follow Deckard (Harrison Ford), a private

investigator, as he calls on some of the masters of this capitalist world.

Whereas in Dreiser’s or Chandler’s novels these figures would include

steel, oil or newspaper magnates, in Blade Runner they comprise

corrupt policemen, genetic engineers, and robotics tycoons.

While Blade Runner transposes the thematics of urban naturalism

and hard-boiled narratives to a dystopian future, thereby claiming a

realist genre affiliation, it also portrays a world afflicted with

contradictions and dissonances—features that depart from the rational

reading contracts both of science fiction and realism itself.2 On the

film’s release, critics were struck by the fact that Scott’s settings are

both futuristic and oddly antiquated (James 142). Up to the nineteen-

seventies, sf literature and films foreshadowed a future obeying the

logic of what Raymond Trousson, in a study of utopian literature, calls

“geometrical” utopias (21):3 they depicted machine-run urban hives,

whose design was extrapolated from the austere principles of

architectural modernism—an aesthetic still dominant in Ira Levin’s

novel This Perfect Day (1970) and George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971).

The high-tech urban space of Blade Runner, on the contrary, is

crowded with the shapes of the past. Fussy neo-gothic ornamentation

reminiscent of turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture mingles with

visual echoes of film classics—Lang’s Metropolis (1927) or Howard

Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946). The city’s geographic anchorage is

similarly blurred: this ostensibly American urban space

accommodates advertisements featuring Japanese models in

traditional Geisha garb, robotics street vendors from Southern China

or the Middle-East, as well as gangs speaking dialects mingling

English, German, and Asian idioms. Other minor paradoxes seem so

2 For a discussion of the realist credentials of science fiction, see Suvin (26-27) 3 All quotations from non-English originals are in Christophe Den Tandt’s translation.

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puzzling they may be mistaken for involuntary breaches of

verisimilitude. Streets are steeped in a perpetual rainy gloom while the

summits of high-rises are inexplicably clouded in a luminous glow.

Also, while the panoramic views of urban space as well as specific

street scenes evoke an overpopulated world, the interiors of buildings

are enigmatically deserted and crammed with nostalgic artifacts.

The population of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles is affected by

similar paradoxes and indeterminacies: humans and animals in Scott’s

film are barely distinguishable from machines. Deckard, who

specializes in hunting down rogue androids, is given the delicate task

of gauging the biological status of a robotics tycoon’s secretary (Sean

Young). Only by the end of an excruciatingly lengthy personality test

is he able to ascertain that the young woman exhibits less-than-human

levels of empathy, and is therefore an engineered organism. In Philip

K. Dick’s source novel, Deckard’s own human make-up is explicitly

problematized—a matter only discreetly hinted at in Scott’s

adaptation. Similarly, Los Angeles pet snakes or fish are handcrafted

by artisans who brand the constructed animals’ genes with serial

numbers. The androids’ sense of a past self is constructed on the basis

of photographs obtained from their supposedly human designers, or

collected at random to make up the enigmatic record of a non-existent

childhood. In one of the film’s most intriguing moments, one of these

spurious photographic memories briefly turns into motion footage,

accompanied by a sound flash of children’s cries. The still image

thereby morphs into a live reminiscence, as if to further blur the

boundary between live mental processes and engineered fiction.

These contradictions are the more significant as Blade Runner

ranks as a pivotal text of cyberpunk sf—a genre cherished by fans for

its quasi-documentary function. The most popular cyberpunk works—

William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984), Andy and Larry

Wachowski’s The Matrix (1998), Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report

(2002)—alerted readers and viewers to the social reconfiguration

induced by information technologies. In particular, they heralded the

development of what Gibson himself calls “cyberspace” (“Burningˮ

195; Neuromancer 4). One of Blade Runner’s memorable moments

shows how Deckard meticulously scans photographic evidence on his

voice-controlled computer, isolating after numerous image-processing

procedures the enhanced outline of a vital clue—a snake tattoo on the

side of an android’s face. This scene was the more impressive to early

1980s viewers as it depicted a technological advance that was both

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within credible reach yet also startlingly new: personal computers had

been marketed for a couple of years only, and featured few if any

graphic or video capabilities, let alone voice commands. Thus, as

viewers were given a glimpse of a new technological order of things,

they were also ushered into a world fraught with ontological

indeterminacy and epistemological ironies. It is not even clear, for

instance, whether the panoptic eye in the opening belongs to a human

observer. It might as well be the computerized pupil of an engineered

organism mystified by the forbidding spectacle of its own alienation.

Contrary to classic realist practice, the function both of this panoptic

moment and of the photograph-scanning scene resides less in asserting

the film’s ability to capture the totality of the social world than in

foregrounding the latter’s resistance to representation. In spite of the

impressive array of technologically enhanced modes of vision paraded

on screen, the social fabric Blade Runner makes visible is so protean

and contradictory that it verges on insubstantiality.

Concerns about the unreality of society and the world at large are

symptomatically rife not only in turn-of-the-twenty-first century

popular culture, but also in present-day realism scholarship, be it in

discussions of classic texts or of contemporary sources. In an

argument that, cultural chronology notwithstanding, proves

surprisingly relevant to Scott’s Blade Runner, Amy Kaplan contends

that late-nineteenth-century fiction of urban life expresses complaints

about the elusiveness of the social scene it otherwise seeks to portray

realistically. In William Dean Howells’s New York novel A Hazard of

New Fortunes (1890), Kaplan argues, “the ‘city’ often connotes ’the

unreal’” (44). Howells depicts the late-nineteenth-century century

metropolis as an object that is not immediately available to perception:

it is “that which has not yet been realized” (A. Kaplan 44), and it

therefore disturbs observers by “its potential, its threat, its promise”

(A. Kaplan 44). Catherine Belsey discerns similar anxieties in a

corpus that appeared roughly a century later than Kaplan’s

examples—turn-of-the-twenty-first century sf films (David

Cronenberg’s eXistenZ [1999]; John McTiernan’s The Last Action

Hero [1993]) as well as works in the tradition of postmodernist

metafiction (Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo [1985]; Julian

Barnes’s novel England, England [1998]). These texts, Belsey

contends, are pervaded with “‘the anxiety of the real’” (Belsey 4):

their characters are caught up in narrative labyrinths weaving several

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levels of existence, none of which exhibiting the solidity and

authenticity of anything worth calling reality. The protagonists of

Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, for instance, struggle through a hyperrealistic

computer game ushering them into situations whose reality status

seems increasingly undecidable. Predictably, they hanker after a mode

of being more existentially fulfilling than these quasi-fictional

scenarios: Yet even when they believe the software has been “paused”

(Cronenberg), they end up wondering whether or not they are still in

the “game” (Cronenberg qtd. in Belsey 8).

As they evoke a tradition of epistemological and ontological

uncertainty stretching one century into the past, Kaplan and Belsey

throw light respectively on the prehistory and the contemporary

perpetuation of a familiar brand of pessimism whose most explicit

cultural manifestations appeared during the modernist decades.

Without disregarding the value of Kaplan’s findings, it makes sense to

point out that the concept of an existentially insubstantial urban world

is less less central to the concerns of late-nineteenth-century writers

than to early or mid-twentieth-century modernism: the phrase

“[u]nreal [c]ity,” used by Kaplan as chapter heading, is

symptomatically borrowed from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922)

(A. Kaplan 44). Likewise, the “anxiety of the real” (Belsey 4)

identified by Belsey resembles a later avatar of the sense of

“emptiness of life” at the root of modernist anti-realism (Lukács,

“Narrate” 147). In this light, texts such as The Purple Rose of Cairo

and eXistenZ—or Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), Spike

Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999), Christopher Nolan’s Inception

(2010), to add a few items to Belsey’s corpus—prolong the absurdist

tradition initiated by such classics of late-modernist metafiction as

Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Jorge

Luis Borges’s short prose works of the 1940s. Like these prestigious

antecedents, they rewrite the existential alienation of modernism

through a medium in which art questions its own strategies.

I pointed out in Part I that Marxist theoreticians—Georg Lukács,

Theodor Adorno, Lucien Goldmann—interpret modernist or late

modernist alienation as an effect of reification: the pessimism of

twentieth-century art mirrors the process of “dehumanizationˮ by

which capitalist societies cease to be transparent and meaningful to

their own subjects (Lukács, Roman historique 218). Marx located the

origin of reification—or, as the German philosopher put it, “human

self-estrangement”—in the capitalist division of labor: the latter

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renders economic processes opaque and dehumanized (Economic 135;

see also Idéologie 365, 385). Later Marxists point out that the

evolution of capitalism into the late nineteenth and the twentieth

centuries exacerbated the alienating impact of reification (Lukács,

History 87). For Lukács, the failed revolutions of 1848 led the once

progressive middle classes to cut themselves off from the

revolutionary proletariat, and thereby to relinquish their ability to

understand the very social system they had brought into existence for

their own benefit (Roman historique 199; “Narrate” 118-19).

Goldmann, following Lukács, attributes the heightened

dehumanization and breakdown of sociological intelligibility of

twentieth-century society to the shift from entrepreneurial to

monopoly capitalism and to the concomitant development of colonial

empires (51). Postmodernist theoreticians, I indicate in more detail

below, corroborate these pessimistic evaluations: the late-twentieth-

century information society, they argue, is the culmination of the

corporate refashioning of the world: it creates a situation where “dead

human laborˮ has irreversibly displaced the lived contact with reality

(Jameson, Postmodernism 35).

Admittedly, tying turn-of-the-twenty-first realism to a historical

narrative whose keynote is “human self-estrangement” affords no

reassurance about its capacity to render accounts of social life. As the

above comments on Blade Runner suggest, contemporary works with

realist aspirations seem only able to draw up what Lukács might have

called “problematic” maps of the social field—fragmentary, self-

contradictory charts (Theory 78). In a Marxist perspective, inept

artistry is only minimally to blame for this apparent flaw: the latter is

caused instead by the texts’ anchorage in an inherently mystifying

historical environment (Lukács, Theory 78). Blade Runner or the films

and novels discussed by Belsey are in this logic the latest offshoots in

a line of works that yield social insights only after being subjected to

what French theoretician Louis Althusser calls a “symptomal

reading”—a corrective hermeneutics scrutinizing their gaps, fractures,

silences and contradictions (Althusser, Lire 1.31). This corpus of

indirectly or imperfectly referential art, Marxist critics suggest,

includes the 1950s French New Novel, American Pop Art, and late-

twentieth-century photorealism. The social world in these works

seems mute and forbidding, yet it is not inscrutable enough to prevent

some socially referential payload from filtering through. Goldmann’s

reading of the French New Novel shows that, if properly decrypted,

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the hermetic fiction of Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet

provides an effective mapping of advanced reification (51-51; 290-

91). Human agency is seemingly absent from these novels: it is

conferred to objects themselves, which make up an “autonomous

universe” (Goldmann 298). As such, French New Novels offer a

literal enactment of Marx’s diagnosis of capitalist self-estrangement:

they disguise social processes and subjects “into things” (Marx,

Idéologie 387). Likewise, Fredric Jameson has argued that the

ideological ambiguity of Pop Art and photorealism emblematizes the

reified politics of postmodernity. Though intensely concerned with the

iconography of consumerism, these graphic works exhibit towards

their object a cool indifference that illustrates the complicity of late

capitalist culture with market logic (Postmodernism 11). In the same

logic, the predominance of science fiction in critical discussions of

contemporary realism—in Belsey’s Culture and the Real or in

Jameson’s reflections on postmodernity—may be read as the symptom

of the alienating distance separating turn-of the-twenty-first-century

art from the social world of which it presumably renders account: the

defamiliarizing shift of temporal perspective inherent to sf

emblematizes these texts’ inability to represent social conditions

straightforwardly.

We may infer from the previous reflections that texts registering the

anxiety of the real are referentially insightful in so far as they reveal

new manifestations of reification in their own time (Roman 202;

Signification 152, 191). I believe that turn-of-the twentieth-century

works do carry out this referential agenda in spite of the

epistemological obstacles they otherwise so plainly foreground.

Specifically, they gesture toward two main causes to which the

epistemological othering of contemporary reality may be imputed—

one directly related to capitalist reification, the other indirectly. In the

first place, contemporary texts—cyberpunk science fiction and

electronic media such as music videos, particularly—are concerned

with what urban studies researchers call the “virtualization” of social

experience (Ghent Urban Studies Team 88)—the replacement of

spatially based forms of sociability by electronically supported

interfacing. Virtualization renders inscrutable the very coordinates of

everyday experience—space and, to a lesser extent, time. Subjects

living in a technologically generated field, cyberpunk sf indicates, see

their fabric of perception wrested from human control and

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understanding. Natural skies give way, as William Gibson puts it in

the opening line of Neuromancer, to a backcloth “the color of

television, tuned to a dead channel” (3). Existence, in Cronenberg’s

film, becomes entangled in “eXistenZ,” a new “game system”

engineered by “software capitalists” working for companies bearing

such names as “Cortical Systematics” and “PilgrImage” (Cronenberg,

eXistenZ). Secondly, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century works—

postcolonial literature, for obvious reasons, yet also contemporary

sf—register the impact of the process of hybridization caused by

large-scale migrations and media-supported cultural interchanges—a

phenomenon we may call, by reference to Mikhail Bakhtin, the

dialogization of social life. Dialogization has been analyzed notably

by theorists of what Diarmid Finnegan calls the “spatial turn”—

figures such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha or Paul

Gilroy (Diarmid 369; see also Warf and Arias). It brings about the

coexistence of competing world views—rival codes for the

construction of reality. This multiplication of reality norms implies

that the global expanse of postmodernity amounts to a patchwork of

ill-fitting, even mutually exclusive human experiences.

Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix illustrates how the

former of these factors—virtualization—impinges on the subject’s

experience. Ostensibly, the film’s opening scene follows the

conventions of techno-thrillers. In the first shot, an enigmatic

telephone conversation is heard in voice-over against a background of

computer screens. The focus then shifts to a deceptively familiar film-

noir setting. Police units surround a suspect hiding in a derelict

hotel—an athletic woman clad in black vinyl, wearing narrow dark

shades. In order to fend off imminent arrest, this character, later

identified as guerilla fighter Trinity (Carrie Ann Moss), spurns any

customary means of physical resistance: she rises into the air with the

somber elegance of an airborne vampire, dashes from the hotel room

horizontally by using the walls as a race track, and leaps from roof to

roof across alleys and avenues until she reaches a telephone cabin

inside of which she vanishes into thin air. This memorable sf moment,

comparable to a modernist epiphany, has a metarealist value: it signals

that we are not in the old film-noir metropolis or even in any

recognizable city any longer: a techno-generated world renders

physical constraints so defamiliarizing and evanescent that the latter

seem to obey the rules of the gothic.

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The Matrix’s gothic-flavored sf highlights two interrelated features

of techno-virtualization: its capacity to produce a simulacrum of

phenomenal experience and its erosion of the basic stability required

to sustain inhabitable lifeworlds. The Matrix indeed echoes not only sf

films such as Blade Runner but also postmodernist theorists like Jean

Baudrillard in suggesting that the perceptible plane of contemporary

social life, which in the Wachowskis’ film is called “the Matrix”

itself, is a deceptive veil of encryption: the information economy,

beyond its surface of technological gadgetry, is a constellation of

barely decipherable corporate codes—a labyrinthine

“[c]ryptonomicon,” to use sf novelist Neal Stephenson’s term.

Conversely, the electronic encoding of social and economic bonds

drains traditional interactions in phenomenal space of their substance.

Beneath the layered techno-script making up the fabric of people’s

lives lurks what characters in The Matrix, quoting Baudrillard, call the

“desert of the real” (Baudrillard, Simulacres 10)—the residue of what

was once the mainspring of reality and authenticity. The Matrix

depicts this impoverished kernel of existence metaphorically, through

shots of a desolate rocky landscape graced with such incongruous

props as a late-nineteenth-century couch used by characters to

converse about their own alienation. Another scene evokes the

deliquescence of previous modes of reality through an admittedly

ponderous sf allegory: it shows thousands of human subjects

imprisoned in coffin-like pods—devices that capture their life energy

in order to sustain the Matrix’s techno-generated simulacrum of social

life. The negation of the lifeworld’s stability, on the other hand, is the

very object of Trinity’s metamorphosis from film-noir suspect to

techno-vampire: the scene suggests that the semiotically encoded

social world possesses an inherent fluidity. The Matrix renders this

plasticity visible not only through its initial genre-bending scene but

also through many subsequent shots in which protagonist Neo (Keanu

Reeves) learns to manipulate virtual urban landscapes molded by

digital special effects. The link between constant change and digital

encryption is evoked in an even subtler fashion in footage of computer

screens featuring an endless trickle of ciphers—the vision of codes

undergoing constant reconfiguration.

Dialogization, the latter axis of the contemporary othering of

reality, is depicted in multiculturalist and postcolonial narratives either

as a source of alienating strangeness or of grotesque contrasts.

Situations where characters inhabit the same social space yet endorse

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seemingly incompatible cognitive assumptions cause either a loss of

existential bearings or turn everyday life into local-color comedy.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical The Woman Warrior:

Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1977) dwells on the former,

disruptive dimension. The text focuses on Chinese immigrants who

have gone through successive historical changes. The memoir’s

central figure—Kingston’s mother Brave Orchid—witnessed the fall

of the Chinese imperial system and the emergence of Sun Yat Sen’s

republic. During her youth, Chinese families had to face the cultural

uprooting of emigration to the United States. Once in America, Brave

Orchid finds her new surroundings unreal. Chinese immigrants, driven

by hope and desperation, had imagined their host country in the

features of a “Gold Mountain” (3). When faced with its reality, they

call it instead “the land of ghosts” (178). Not only is it unfamiliar but,

to people hailing from a tightly structured traditionalistic society, its

culture seems inferior. Accordingly, Chinese American children live

in a world made up of mismatched planes. Kingston narrates that, as a

child, she communicated through the front-door mailbox slot with a

creature she had been taught to view as the “Garbage Ghost”—in fact

a white American dustman (115). Unlike proper ghosts, the latter

displays the enigmatic, though eventually reassuring ability to “cop[y]

human language”: he mimics the children’s Chinese (115). In order to

bridge the gap that rents their world, Brave Orchid and her daughter

Maxine must rely on a life-long ethos of pragmatic dedication and on

the imaginative ability to identify with legendary figures of

empowerment such as Princess Mulan—the eponymous “[w]oman

[w]arrior.”

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), by comparison, highlights the

uncanny yet comic dissonances of multicultural conviviality. Smith,

with considerable talent for reproducing the postcolonial British

vernacular, pictures the interaction of a broad cast of Londoners of

various origins—England, the Caribbean, and Bengal. Two of these

characters, Millat and Magid Iqbal, the twin sons of Bengali-born

parents, emblematize what we might call, by reference to Gabriel

Garcia Márquez, the “impossible realit[ies]” of interethnic Britain

(Márquez 13). The former proudly displays the attractive looks of a

Bollywood star, and seems destined to become a British-identified

ladies man. Yet he chooses to join a fundamentalist Islamic group

awkwardly named “KEVIN” (the “Keepers of the Eternal and

Victorious Islamic Nation”) (295). The latter was sent by his father to

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live among his relatives in Bengal for fear of assimilation into British

culture. Ironically, he comes back from Asia a clean-shaven, white-

clad, scholarly atheist, unconsciously affecting the accents of “a right

fuckin’ Olivier” (449), as one of his father’s cockney friends puts it.

Magid, in his gentle tones, creates an intercultural stir—indeed a

dialogical crisis—when he convinces the barman of his father’s

favorite halal pub to serve him “a juicy, yet well-done, tomato

ketchup-ed bacon sandwich” (450). Smith’s fiction has been

derogatorily labeled “hysterical realism” because it supposedly

restricts itself to such intercultural comedy (Woods 42). Still, her

multicultural local color aptly expresses the de-realizing impact of

dialogization: her characters are tragic precisely in so far as they are

imprisoned in the comic interplay of conflicting definitions of identity.

In cyberpunk, dialogization is pictured not as a consequence of

population shifts but as a technologically generated feature of

information societies—indeed an offshoot of virtualization. On the

one hand, the semiotic weave of cyberspace or the Matrix is of

necessity heterogeneous: if it boasted the monochromatic texture of

the future worlds of classical-sf, it could not act as a credible

substitute for proverbially polymorphous and untidy reality. On the

other hand, the codes of its ostensibly polyphonic fabric are

consubstantial in so far as they share the basic semiotic mechanisms

that sustain all languages, whether natural or technological.

Accordingly, seemingly separate planes of the cyberpunk world—

technology, organic life, culture—are interlinked by virtue of their

shared anchorage in encoding procedures. This allows cyberpunk

sociability, as the street scenes of Blade Runner and Gibson’s

Neuromancer attest, to accommodate not only distinct ethnic or

techno-generated subcultures but also the liminal beings

postmodernist feminist Donna Haraway calls “cyborgs” (149). In

Haraway’s definition, the latter are “creatures simultaneously animal

and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted”

(149). Gibson depicts several varieties of these techno-biological

crossbreeds: his fiction features human subjects flaunting animal or

technological grafts—claw-like “scalpel blades” (Neuromancer 25),

“fangs” (“Johnny” 28), perfectly oval-shaped skulls, or “Zeiss Icon

eyes” (“Burningˮ 211). Cronenberg’s eXistenZ brilliantly satirizes

cyberdialogization by having its characters use gaming software made

up of sexually connoted, grotesquely organic matter: protagonists

connect to eXistenZ through an umbilical cord implanted into the

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spine by oddly inappropriate industrial means—a jackhammer jab, for

instance. Likewise, game-console circuitry is made up of mutant

animals cooked in a Chinese-style cafeteria.

Virtualization and dialogization have in most cases been analyzed as

manifestations of postmodernity: as academic issues, they belong in

the theoretical and cultural constellation surveyed, among others, by

Jameson, Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Homi Bhabha, and

Cornel West. Virtualization itself has been a key concern for

postmodernist theoreticians with Marxist credentials—Jameson and

Baudrillard, in particular. The latter blame the “unreality” of late-

twentieth-century society on the development of the technologically

mediated social sphere (Jameson, “Reification” 17). Accordingly, they

interpret virtualization as the final victory of reification: it brings

about a decisive breakdown in social intelligibility. In a Marxist

perspective, postmodernist subjects entertain a paradoxically euphoric

relation to their technologically reconfigured environment: they

welcome a situation in which the capitalist technostructure has

become parasitically alluring precisely because it constitutes, as

Jameson puts it, an “impossible totality”—a ghostly, forbidding yet

fascinating reified field (Postmodernism 38). On first inspection, this

social change has easily identifiable material determinants: Jameson

argues that postmodernity’s lingering elusiveness is due to the shift

towards an economy based on “machines of reproduction rather than

of production” (Postmodernism 37); it is the social offshoot of

information systems, digitization, and computer networks, indeed the

very tools engineering the virtualization process described above. On

the other hand, the very notion of reification implies that the

metamorphosis of the visible technosphere is only the outward

expression of a broader reconfiguration of the mode of production,

which affects in turn the perception of the world. The task of late-

twentieth-century criticism, Jameson therefore contends, consists in

developing the “cartographyˮ of an “as yet unimaginable” economy of

information-based social relations (Postmodernism 54).

The economic/epistemological shift Jameson associates with

postmodernity has, in its various stages of development, been the

object of Theodor Adorno’s reflections on the culture industry, Walter

Benjamin’s comments on mechanical reproduction, Guy Debord’s

analysis of the “Society of the Spectacle,” and Baudrillard’s

semiotically based analysis of consumerism (Debord 5; Jameson,

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“Reification” 11, 14; Postmodernism 17-18; Marxism and Form 60-

82). Baudrillard is of particular importance in this tradition. His theory

of the simulacrum, by its merger of Marxism and semiology,

highlights the specifically postmodernist variant of reification: it

suggests how the economics of postmodernity may be apprehended as

the advent of a power apparatus engineered by new signifying

processes. According to Baudrillard, late capitalism cannot be

understood by reference to what is commonly called the real

economy: it does not obey such familiar norms as use value and

industrial production. In its new system, the real economy is entirely

overwritten by speculative exchange and by the mystique of

consumerism (Mirror 22; Pour une critique 164-68). In a gesture

Jameson considers decisive for postmodernist theory (Postmodernism

395), Baudrillard suggests that exchange value, when it achieves such

“absolute pre-eminence,” obeys the relational logic of signs systems

defined by Saussure (Pour une critique 164; see also Echange 17).

Items in the parade of commodities mimic the behavior of signs in so

far as they derive their function not from any anchorage in external

reality (in this case, in use value) but rather from a shifting game of

interactions among all other elements of the market system in which

they circulate (Pour une critique 182-190). With tragic resignation,

Baudrillard concludes that this process annihilates “referential value”

in all human fields (Echange 20). Postmodern objects, subjects, or

cultural representations are deprived of all claims to authenticity: they

are only “simulacra” (Echange 77)—copies without originals, brought

into existence by mechanisms mingling immotivated semiotic value,

commodification, and media reproduction. Conversely, the realms of

experience that previously stood as bedrocks of reality have been

turned into the vacant sites of the “desert of the real” (Simulacra 2;

Simulacres 10) so vividly allegorized in The Matrix. Ironically,

reification is so deeply ingrained in this postmodern waste land that its

capacity to induce self-estrangement is seemingly suspended:

commodification has become immune from any confrontation with an

adversary principle able to unmask it (Simulacres 65; Transparence

12). Surprisingly, then, postmodernity is not a realm of visible

alienation: it is suffused with inauthentic “positivity” (Baudrillard,

Transparence 51). In Jameson’s eloquent formula, it gleams with

“hallucinatory splendor” (Jameson, Postmodernism 32-33).

Compared to the gloom of Marxist diagnoses of the information

society, discussions of postmodernist dialogization seem positively

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solar. In this field too, a new social situation has become interwoven

with a theoretical corpus that initially developed in partial

independence from it. Poststructuralist models, which at first

addressed linguistic and existential issues, are invoked in order to

account for what Homi Bhabha calls “the new internationalism”

(Location 6)—the geographically based power shifts induced by

decolonization, the political struggles of dominated groups, the

dissemination of “cultural and political diasporas,” and “the major

displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities” (Bhabha,

Location 7). The early stages of the cultural assertion of postcolonial

minorities, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin contend,

were characterized by the primacy of essentialist paradigms: ethnic

identity served as stable referent for the definition of authentic human

experience (21). The literatures of négritude or the African American

Black Arts movement, for instance, superseded the derogatory ethnic

stereotypes imposed by colonizers with positively connoted

counterstereotypes, often simply portraying as desirable the very

features that previously served as marks of inferiority (xx). Still,

cultural agendas endorsing essentialist minority identities, though they

may have suited the needs of a specific historical moment, fall short of

the libertarian spirit of late-twentieth-century postmodern culture.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that minorities should not

rally around closed “regionalis[t]” or “ghetto” identities (Mille

Plateaux 134); they should instead pursue a dynamic of “becoming

minoritarian” (Mille Plateaux 134), eschewing the pursuit of

dominance through a practice of “continuous variation” (Mille

Plateaux 134). In geopolitical terms too, the postcolonial context

renders essentialist cultural politics impractical: the postcolonial

condition offers no field in which specific groups might, as Lyotard

puts it, treasure their own “world of invariable names” (Différend

219). Homi Bhabha points out that a global field where population

groups share the same space or are aware of one another’s cultures

through media interchange “prevents identities […] from settling into

primordial polarities” (5). Accordingly, turn-of-the-twenty-first-

century polities require a dialogical model: they need a paradigm of

identity and power that acknowledges the explicit and implicit

interactions among cultural sub-systems and prevents each of them

from gaining hegemonic status over others.

Poststructuralism and postmodernism offer the appropriate

conceptual tools for this dialogical agenda: the critique of

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logocentrism, the celebration of textual hybridity, and above all the

poststructuralist appropriation of Bakhtinian dialogism combine to

fashion a vision of postmodernity where, to borrow Lyotard’s words,

the “infinity of heterogeneous finalities” prevails over the cultures of

closed identities (“Sign of History” 409; emphasis in original).

Bhabha’s writings best articulate this fusion of postcolonial and

poststructuralist paradigms. Bhabha conceptualizes dialogization

through keywords such as the “necessity of heterogeneity” (Location

39), “hybridity” (37), “the Third Space of enunciation” (53), and the

“liberatory” potential of the “enunciatory present” (255). In his view,

dialogization—or hybridization—is part of a process that refashions

identities not only through social interaction but also through the

“contingent” emergence of temporality (Location 264). In other

words, dialogization/hybridity develops along two simultaneous axes,

corresponding respectively to Bakhtinian dialogism and Derridean

différance. It arises in the first place through the mechanism by which

a subject, in the dynamics of dialogical exchange, must provisionally

adopt “the mental position of the antagonist” (35)—literally othering

him or herself, and thereby becoming hybrid or “ambivalent” (35).

Secondly, the subject becomes hybrid at a different level as it is

affected by the passage of time—a process Bhabha views as a

performative dynamics enacted in the indeterminate present of

enunciation (264). Hybridity/dialogization is accordingly not to be

resisted: subjects quixotically seeking to eschew interethnic dialogical

encounters would still be othered by ineluctable “temporality”

(Bhabha 38). Symptomatically, Bhabha adopts a resolutely optimistic

view of this dialogical refashioning. While others might lament the

loss of integrity caused by hybridity, he contends that “contestatory

subjectivities are empowered” as they are unraveled and rewritten

within an energizing performative process (256). They accede thereby

to the “Third Space of enunciation” (53)—the field of creative

interaction generated by “dialogical discursive exchange” and by the

constant emergence of an ever more complex global field (Location

34).

2.1.2 Wagering on Reality: Shall I Project a World?

The greatest aesthetic challenge called forth by the virtualized and

dialogized field of postmodernity, the previous comments suggest, is

primarily the search for artistic practices that might render justice to

its elusive environment. Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novel The World Jones

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Made addresses this issue with remarkable prescience. Dick describes

a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century society where distrust of absolutes

has become a state-sponsored doctrine. In order to forestall political

and religious fanaticism, the Federal World Government has

promulgated the “multiple-value system” (86-87), a dialogical code of

conduct laid out in a new gospel, “Hoff’s Primer of Relativism” (22).

Even government officials acknowledge that strict adherence to the

relativistic primer is difficult. Citizens befuddled by Hoff’s system of

(un)belief may, however, take their cue from the art of their era. The

cultural life of Dick’s twenty-first century indeed features such

didactic works as ballet performances meant to act out the

indeterminate fluidity of existence: dancers morph from one gender

into the other in front of live audiences, thereby allegorizing their

society’s refusal of stable referents (80). Like Dick’s custodians of

relativism, actual postmodernist theoreticians contend that late-

twentieth-century art should refrain from reducing the world to

determinate patterns, or even assume that any sum of experience is

liable to cohere into a world at all. Brian McHale, in his discussion of

postmodernist fiction, argues that literature seeking to be relevant to

postmodernity must “foregroun[d] ontological issues” and subject

them to skeptical scrutiny (McHale 10). Similarly, advocates of magic

realism suggest that the late-twentieth-century context requires

aesthetic practices registering the experience of a pluralist, not a

monologic culture (Saldivar 526-32; McHale 17). The same authors

take it for granted that the classic realist aesthetic is not up to this task,

or even actively hinders it: realism is concerned with truthful

representation and cannot as such render account of a world deprived

of ontological anchorage. Accordingly, the objections to mimesis set

forth in Part I, which in principle apply to all stages of cultural history,

have been invoked in the field of postmodernist criticism as evidence

of realism’s specific inability to address the climate of skeptical

pluralism and indeterminism of the post-WWII context.

Postmodernist objections to realism echo the earlier Marxist

concerns about the inability of reified societies to produce

sociologically insightful art. However, unlike orthodox Marxists,

postmodernist theoreticians argue that neither art nor philosophy

should aim entirely to dispel the sense of unreality suffusing the

contemporary scene. Doing so amounts to a quixotically naive—even

politically repressive—hankering after ontological certainty,

authenticity, and monologic closure. Jean-François Lyotard eloquently

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indicates to what extent these postmodernist principles disqualify the

realist aesthetics. In comments that echo Breton, Adorno, and Sartre,

he contends that the purpose of mimesis in the twentieth-century has

consisted in “preserving consciousness against doubt” (“Réponse”

19). Under postmodernity, however, the imitation of phenomenal

appearance has become artistically counterproductive because it has

been overwhelmed by capitalism’s capacity to “de-realize everyday

objects, the roles of social life, and [its] institutions” (“Réponse” 18).

Reluctant to confront this destabilizing dynamics, realists have merely

played the “therapeutic” part of “cheerleaders of what exists” (

“Réponse” 19). High modernism and mass-culture-oriented populist

postmodernism fare little better in the French philosopher’s typology:

he suspects the former, in spite of its devotion to aesthetic

experimentalism, to harbor the “nostalgia of presence” (“Réponse”

28). The latter merely trivializes the legacy of the avant-garde by

reducing it to consumerist eclecticism. Genuinely postmodernist art as

Lyotard defines it, must on the contrary earnestly address the

epistemological challenge of its era. To this effect, it should take heed

of of Kant’s discussion of the sublime. The Kantian sublime, in

Lyotard’s reading, signals the breakdown of the subject’s capacities of

representation: it designates the suffering experienced by the subject

when it witnesses its inability to “present an object” that exceeds the

imagination, but can nevertheless be conceived by reason (“Réponse”

31). Whereas previously God, nature, and the industrial metropolis

were singled out as objects of the sublime, under postmodernity

reality itself triggers this crisis of perception.4 Thus, art accepts the

challenge of postmodernity precisely in so far as it sets itself the task

of alerting its audience to the fact that postmodern society has no

stable reality concept: it signals that the social world is constantly

disturbed by “the unpresentable” (31). Rather than surrendering to the

“fantasy of embracing reality” (32) and the “consolation of beautiful

forms” (31), postmodern art keeps “inventing allusions to what cannot

be presented” (Le postmodernisme, “Réponse” 32).

There are two dimensions to these serious objections—one

concerning the tenor of realist discourse, the other the nature of

postmodernity. I address the former in later chapters, arguing that the

concept of mimesis as existential therapy, which Lyotard borrows

4 For the discussion of the various objects of the rhetoric of the sublime, see Den

Tandt, (“Masses” 127-28) and Jameson (Postmodernism 32-35).

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from the tradition of modernist antirealism, is not borne out by the

actual make-up of the realist corpus. We have already noted in

Chapter 4 that classic realism is more complex than the one-

dimensional profile foisted upon it by champions of modernism: it is

in fact a dialogized practice. The contemporary realist corpus, I

indicate in more detail below, is even more remote from this

antirealist caricature. What interests us at the present stage of our

argument is, however, the latter aspect of Lyotard’s analysis—the

very soundness of his portrayal of contemporary conditions.

Establishing the legitimacy of realism within a virtualized, dialogized

scene requires indeed opening up the possibility that the

postmodernist characterization of turn-of-the-twentieth-century

culture as the field of the unpresentable might be one-sided. In other

words we must show that postmodernist theory blocks off other

legitimate perspectives on contemporary conditions, one among which

being realism itself.

If we follow the most sanguine opponents of postmodernism,

refuting the arguments of late-twentieth-century prophets of unreality

seems a fairly simple task. Christopher Norris argues, for instance,

that postmodernist “dogmatic relativism” is dismissible on purely

logical grounds (285). Like all similar doctrines, it stumbles on the

“self-disabling” contradiction (Norris 198) of the liar paradox. In the

Introduction to the present essay, I have pointed out how Epimenides’

vexing syllogism affects the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For Norris, this

logical impasse jeopardizes postmodernist theory altogether: as

postmodernist discourse affirms the impossibility of absolute

knowledge, it is against all logic compelled to maintain unshakeable

trust in its own skepticism. Government officials in Dick’s The World

Jones Made fall victim to this trap: in their efforts to enforce the

principles of the Primer of Relativism, they naively pride themselves

on learning the textbook’s skeptical doxa “by heart” (22). Still, jeering

at theoreticians caught up in Epimenides’ logical snares does not

amount to a full-fledged refutation of their claims: all discourses,

whether in favor of skepticism or cognitive trust, have to wrestle with

obstacles of this kind. Symptomatically, the liar paradox has not

eluded Lyotard’s attention. He analyzes it in detail in reflections on

sophist philosopher Protagoras (Différend 19-22). Lyotard’s argument

in this matter suggests that, contrary to what opponents of

postmodernism may hope, exposing the logical contradiction of

philosophical skepticism does not suffice to establish the possibility of

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knowledge. Stating that uncertainty must remain uncertain falls short

of a solid validation of procedures of cognition. Only a provisional,

contingent grasp of the world can be developed on this basis, and this

frail edifice may at any moment be challenged by the indeterminacy of

the unfolding of human experience in time (Lyotard, Différend 21).

Instead of complacently deconstructing the paradoxes of

relativism, the present vindication of realism requires an approach

acknowledging the legitimacy of postmodernist skepticism, without

however conferring to the latter the intellectual hegemony it has

enjoyed in the last decades. The chief theoretical foundation for an

argument of this nature is Kant’s comments on the limits of

metaphysical thought. I contend indeed that postmodernism’s key

principles, as well as its mapping of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century

society, cannot aspire to be more than metaphysical hypotheses—

inspiring to some extent, yet beyond proof. Thus, using Kant against

Lyotard, I suggest that postmodernism has elaborated what the

German philosopher calls a set of “world-concepts” (Critique of Pure

Reason 460). In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant uses the latter term

to designate transcendental ideas pertaining to the “absolute totality of

experience in the synthesis of appearances” (Critique of Pure Reason

460). Such totalizing propositions—the (non)existence of God, the

reality of freedom or of determinism, the finitude or the infinity of the

cosmos—may in Kant’s view “neither hope for confirmation in

experience nor fear refutation by it” (467): they are locked in the

“antinomy of pure reasonˮ (259). World-concepts are no “arbitrary

question[s],” however (467); they are rather “natural and unavoidable

illusion[s]” that “every human reason must necessarily come up

against in the course of its progress” (467). Yet a sound “skeptical

method” (468; emphasis deleted), which Kant distinguishes from

radical skepticism, relinquishes any hope of submitting them to a final

cognitive judgment. With unwitting relevance to late-twentieth-

century controversies, Kant adds that arguments over world-concepts

open up a “dialectical battlefield” (468) where supposedly decisive

victories can, for lack of final proof, be gained “merely because the

champion of the good cause h[o]ld[s] the field alone, his opponent

having been forbidden to take up his weapons again” (468).

Viewed in this Kantian perspective, postmodernism has elaborated

a metaphysical synthesis of contemporary society whose

indeterminism fits its historical context so tightly that it has in many

cases discouraged scrutiny of its underlying assumptions. All major

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formulations of poststructuralist skepticism are in this light Kantian

world concepts, be it Lyotard’s contention that contemporary society

is irremediably disturbed by the unpresentable, Lacan’s

characterization of the subject as haunted by desire and lack, or

Derrida’s theory of the temporal deployment of signifiers under

différance. Each of these propositions can be validated only from an

external totalizing perspective. That human experience is essentially

indeterminate and lacunar can be ascertained only by a gaze

presumably unaffected by lack, différance, or the unpresentable itself.

In short, demonstrating that postmodernity is under the sway of

unreality can only be done from a standpoint where reality is

paradoxically available. For lack of this touchstone of (un)reality,

postmodernist arguments have the same epistemological value as the

metaphysical hypotheses that serve as skeptical poles of Kant’s

antinomies of pure reason: they are late-twentieth-century variants of

the ungrounded claims stating that “[t]here is no absolutely necessary

being existing anywhere” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 491), that

“nowhere in [the world] does there exist anything simpleˮ (477), and

that “[t]he world has no beginning and no bounds in space” (471). In

the same logic, on the basis of a philosophical source older than Kant,

one may argue that postmodernist indeterminism covertly appeals to a

paradoxically inverted version of René Descartes’s proof of the

existence of God. The French philosopher contends that God must

exist because in its absence, a “finite being” like the human subject

could never of itself conceive of “any substance that were genuinely

infinite” (117). Conversely, postmodernist indeterminism can be

proved true only if contemporary subjects—even though they are

presumably caught up in an environment of unreality, heterogeneity,

and change—manage to locate within this very field a philosophical

principle that could against all odds serve as final guarantee of the

world’s indeterminacy, but would disclaim for itself any privileged

metaphysical status.

In the most compelling formulations of postmodernist theory—in

Derrida and Lyotard, notably—, temporal experience has served

precisely as this metaphysical case clincher. Postmodernism has

managed to shield itself against Kantian allegations of metaphysical

undecidability by anchoring its indeterminism in phenomenological

reflections on time that seem unchallengeable on empirical grounds.

We have seen in Chapter 3 that the destabilizing momentum of

différance originates from the temporal dissemination of stimuli (i.e.

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of signs) within the structure of perception: consecutive stimuli

rewrite the meaning of the present and past ad infinitum, pursuing no

determinate goal. Likewise, Lyotard’s theory of the différend specifies

that the subject is produced by the occurrence of heterogeneous

“phrases” whose unpredictable and ineluctable chaining makes up the

texture of “time” itself (Différend 10). Still, as counterintuitive as this

may sound, the poststructuralist notion of a Heraclitean flow of time-

bound perception constitutes an undecidable world-concept. Derrida’s

portrayal of the temporality of différance or Lyotard’s evocation of

speech acts “arising out of nothingness” (Différend 102) are, in a

Kantian perspective, twentieth-century variants of the branch of the

antinomy of pure reason arguing in favor of the infinity of the world

in time and space (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 470). They are as

such beyond proof. Admittedly, the phenomenologically based

postmodernist view of temporality is more complex than what

Derrida, quoting Heidegger, dismissively calls “a vulgar concept of

time”—a merely linear sequence (Grammatologie 105). Yet by

picturing temporal experience as aimless (non-teleological) and

propelled by an irreversible dynamics, postmodernists endorse a

paradigm no less dogmatic than the overtly metaphysical philosophies

of history—Hegel’s, notably—they so assiduously deconstruct.

Admittedly, the postmodernist case is rhetorically cogent because, in

a century shattered by “signs of history” such as the Shoah,

Hiroshima, and Stalinist totalitarianism (Lyotard, “Discussions” 383),

indeterminate temporality seems more intuitively compelling than a

Hegelian “narrative of legitimization” driven forward by ineluctable

progress and headed for the end of history (Lyotard, Condition 54).

Still, empirical improbability cannot pass for philosophical refutation,

so that the postmodernist perspective on these matters cannot fully

discredit opposing viewpoints, however marginalized they have been

in recent decades.

When postmodernist arguments are reframed in the light of Kant’s

antinomy of pure reason, virtualization and dialogization, the two

pillars of postmodern unreality, lose some of their seemingly

irresistible momentum. In this new light, Baudrillard’s nightmarish

vision of a virtualized future remains unappetizing, yet not

ineluctable. Full-fledged virtualization—the victory of simulacra with

the concomitant erasure of nature—is indeed a world-concept

subjected to the same paradoxes as all other totalizing ideas. If the

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technologically generated posthuman/postnatural environment

possessing “neither origin nor reality” did come to pass (Baudrillard,

Simulacres 10), its anti-natural character could be established only by

comparison with absolute reality—from the perspective of unsullied

nature, for instance. Were this touchstone of reality available,

virtualization would, however, remain paradoxically incomplete.

Thus, a world of rootless technological clones is literally unthinkable

or, more appropriately, it can be envisaged only if we accept that the

resulting universe would manifest itself as a full-fledged second

nature with all the prerogatives of the old one, including its hierarchies

of (un)reality and (in)authenticity—hence its capacity to appeal to

non-alienated truth. Symptomatically, Gibson’s cyberpunk novels,

even as they evoke the threat of a world dominated by the “space that

[isn’t] a space” of virtual interconnections, explore this universe

through the perspective of protagonists propelled by aspirations to

truth and fulfillment transcending the values of their virtualized world

(Gibson, Count 62). Similarly, if Philip K. Dick’s/Ridley Scott’s

Deckard turned out to be a cyborg, he would still exhibit moral

qualms, existential anxiety, and concerns for the truth of his social

environment. Thus, no degree of virtualization may entirely

delegitimize the realist agenda, however daunting the obstacles this

technological process may lay in the way of realist investigation.

The same shift of perspective suggests that dialogization, however

prominent a feature of the present social and political context, cannot

be viewed as a flight into limitless diversity: it still requires principles,

ethical or referential, framing its supposedly endless dynamism and

should make allowances for the possibility of common ground beyond

cultural diversity. Ironically, a large segment of multiculturalist

literature and art has no qualms endorsing such guiding norms: in

Hong Kingston’s memoir, Chinese characters back up their political

demands by pointing to an ascertainable history of oppression;

similarly, the characters of Smith’s contemporary London rely on the

inalienable values of a bill of rights. Postmodernist proponents of

dialogism—Bakhtin, Bhabha, Butler, Rorty and occasionally Lyotard

and Foucault—are less easily convinced by this covert universalism,

however. They assume that cultural and social interchanges are

infinitely open-ended—that they will never encounter a truth-based

referent able to bring their discursive movement to a close. Yet, by

invoking an infinite regression of discursive exchanges, dialogical

theories renounce the possibility of proof. They revert to the status of

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world-concepts for the same reason as Derrida’s différance and

Lyotard’s différend do. I do not suggest, of course, that in a

conceivable future, cultural controversies are likely to be rendered

irrelevant by the rise of absolute truth—however intriguing such an

event might be. I argue instead that dialogical arguments tend to

obscure the problems caused by their anti-referential commitment by

cloaking the potentially conflictual dynamics of speech acts—the

liberatory potential of the enunciatory present—in angelic optimism.

The uncritical celebration of dialogical contests amounts in this

perspective to ungrounded political utopianism—a glamorization of

sheer energy and change deprived of proper philosophical foundations

or political scrutiny.

This point can be made by underscoring the pragmatist dimension

of postmodern dialogism—the fact that it shares key principles with

Charles Sanders Peirce’s and William James’s philosophy, including

the latter’s conceptual paradoxes. Since postmodernist dialogism

rejects truth values and lays its trust in the efficacy of speech acts, it

qualifies indeed as a discursively based, performative variant of

pragmatism. In his critique of late-twentieth-century thought,

Christopher Norris, pertinently points out that pragmatists old and new

(James and Rorty, say), as they abandon truth claims “renounce all

warrant for criticizing false and deluded beliefs” (Truth 293) and

thereby lose any capacity to clarify their own political goals. James

famously claims that philosophy should pursue “‘what is good in the

way of belief” (qtd in Norris, Truth 297). Yet, Norris argues, one

hardly sees how any evolution from what is good to what is better in

the way of belief could be legitimated, let alone identified, merely on

the basis of such criteria as efficacy and usefulness (Truth 291). A

belief that is performatively efficacious may not be useful; if useful, it

may not be desirable; and, above all, it might not be true.

By the same token, the postmodernist hope that speech acts contest

will function as crucibles of resistance rings hollow as long as

postmodernism deprives itself of the possibility to gauge whether any

social progress is scored in specific discursive tussles. Such forced

confidence amounts to believing in what we might call performative

magic—the mysterious capacity of speech acts, as they engender the

world from one moment to the other, to yield political benefits that

remain paradoxically beyond any determinate evaluation. In the logic

of performative magic, the sheer dynamism of discourse—its

illocutionary force—serves as substitute for truth or ethics.

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Accordingly, arguments championing dialogism—Bhabha’s paeans to

the enunciatory present, for instance—disguise the precarious

groundings of such optimism by means of a discursive strategy that

plays off one world-concept against another. Performative dialogism

ostensibly endorses the world-concept of infinite time and space. Yet

as it declines to measure political achievement by means of

determinate standards or even to envisage the possibility of political

setbacks, it discreetly set its hopes on the antithetical, equally

undecidable metaphysical claim: it covertly banks on the availability

of automatic progress, reconciliation, and closure. In the present

defense of realism, it would admittedly be ironical to take issue with

the latter aspirations: they signal the continued relevance of useful

principles repressed by postmodernist orthodoxy. The problem lies,

however, in the fact that performative dialogism relegates these values

to the status of a hidden, somewhat shameful agenda

Contemporary realism seems only modestly empowered by an

argument that follows the precepts of as Kant’s Critique of Pure

Reason and therefore dismisses all metaphysical claims back to back.

The previous remarks imply indeed that realism is no less, yet no

more legitimate than the skeptical theories that deconstruct it. Its

possibility depends on a gesture similar to French seventeenth-century

moralist Blaise Pascal’s famous bet on the existence of God and the

afterlife. In his Pensées, Pascal argues that unbelievers have little to

lose and much to gain by endorsing the otherwise unverifiable dogmas

of Christianity (550). In an intellectual context dominated by

antirealism, reality can be made the object of a similar wager: between

the postmodernist belief in unreality and, on the other hand, the

referential trust in the possibility of an ascertainable lifeworld, “one

must,” as Pascal puts it in his own religious context, “place one’s bet”

(Pascal 550). Even though this gesture carries the negative

connotation of a gambling, it constitutes the foundation of what Ihab

Hasan, in a re-evaluation of realims, calls “cognitive trust”

((“Beyond” 206)).

The contrasted subject positions enabled by the reality bet sketched

out above are illustrated in two major works of American late-

twentieth-century fiction—Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

and Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s novels deal

with the same social environment at different stages of its evolution.

Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 must decipher the suburban

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spread of San Narciso—a newly minted California community

fashioned by information technologies. This techno-suburb, the novel

suggests, embodies the state of America in the mid-1960s. Only the

actions of mysterious subcultures vying against one another for

political and informational control confer a semblance of structure to

its mute, elusive fabric. DeLillo’s protagonist Nick Shay travels

through an arguably less allegorically enigmatic, yet equally

alienating variant of the postmodern waste land. The post-Cold-War

society he inhabits is spiritually thin, economically iniquitous, still

haunted by the fear of nuclear annihilation, and confronted with the

fear of AIDS and ecological disaster. Both Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s

characters perceive that the key question raised by this environment is

whether it possesses sufficient substantiality to resolve itself into a

lifeworld. Oedipa candidly voices this concern when, struggling with

bewildering clues as to the nature of San Narciso, she asks: “Shall I

project a world?” (56/82; emphasis in original). This question

implicitly acknowledges that the evidence available about the

structure of the social environment does not cohere into a lifeworld

out of its own dynamics: the lifeworld’s emergence is conditioned by

each observer’s commitment to the possibility of securing a consistent

framework of experience. In Pynchon, the answer to Oedipa’s

question about the worldness of postmodernity is deferred. The Crying

of Lot 49 famously leads to an open ending whereby the heroine

expects the arrival of still another subculture messenger bearing

potentially decisive revelations about San Narciso’s power games.

DeLillo’s Nick Shay, by comparison, resolutely commits himself to

the reality bet: he chooses to “liv[e] responsibly in the real” (82).

Accordingly, he cannot endorse the facile skepticism of some of his

acquaintances, who claim that “life” is “a fiction” and that “things

[have] become unreal” (82). Instead, he “he[ws] to the texture of

collected knowledge,” and “[takes] faith from the solid and availing

stuff of (…) experience” (82).

It is fitting that in the sprawling narrative fabric of Underworld,

Nick’s commitment to reality should be dialogized with the stance of

less epistemologically confident protagonists: his voice is only one

strand, albeit a prominent one, in a large ensemble cast. What matters

in the present context is, as DeLillo’s novel attests, not the absence of

a consensus about the knowledge of of reality, but rather the assurance

that the reality wager embodied in Nick’s attitude can find at least a de

jure validation. There are several reasons not to go beyond this

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minimalist gesture at this stage of our argument. In the first place, the

concept of the reality bet fits the existential tenor of the contemporary

realist corpus. We have seen in the Introduction to the present essay

that turn-of-the-twenty-first century realist works are problematic

texts, reflecting the mood of what French New Novelist Nathalie

Sarraute evocatively calls the “era of suspicion” (57). As such, they

partly incorporate the postmodernist distrust of ontological certainties,

and cannot profit from a reading grid that takes certainty for granted.

Secondly, even the limited validation of referential practice sketched

out above may serve as foundation for a felicitous change in heuristic

perspective. Philosophical assumptions, both for postmodernism and

realism, act as enabling supports for heuristic frameworks.

Postmodernist art and theory, on the basis of their indeterminist

metaphysics, excel in digging up evidence testifying to the othering of

everyday experience. Likewise, if realism endorses the reasonable yet

not uncontestable principles of cognitive trust, it is apt to bring out

those aspects of the contemporary scene that justify a representation of

postmodernity from the perspective of truth. The resulting realist

practice, to misappropriate a term Bakhtin coins disparagingly,

resembles a “centripetal” dialogism (Dialogic 272)—a cautious,

pluralist, experimental appraisal of a social scene that, contrary to

indeterminist beliefs, need not reshape itself ad infinitum.

2.1.4 The Realist Underground

The various cultural practices that fulfil the terms of the reality bet do

not add up to a clearly demarcated cultural movement. I pointed out in

the Introduction to this essay that the corpus of contemporary realism

is a scattered, discreet constellation. Symptomatically, several texts

mentioned in the present chapter even challenge the notion that

cognitive trust—tentative optimism mixed with skepticism—may

yield a viable subject position. Cronenberg’s eXistenZ features

Luddites of the computer age who call themselves the “realist

underground.” Dressed in Che Guevara-style military fatigues, these

self-proclaimed “true and trustworthy realist[s]” struggle against the

“deformations of reality” caused by commodification and

virtualization. On first inspection, Cronenberg’s concept of a realist

underground could serve as a fitting template for the realist praxis

outlined in the present pages. Yet eXistenZ handles this prospect with

dismissive irony. When the realist guerillas decree the “victory of

realism,” they can only point at a barren landscape devastated by their

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181

own raids. Above all, one hardly sees how characters in a computer

simulation might act as custodians of reality. Dick’s The World Jones

Made pictures the realist underground in even grimmer terms. Its

eponymous character Floyd Jones possesses paranormal skills

enabling him to see with full accuracy one year into the future. With

these cognitive privileges, Jones cannot accept the state-sanctioned

view of a dialogized reality amenable to multiple interpretations. He

therefore creates a fascistic party that overturns government-enforced

relativism and restores, for better or worse, the perception of the world

advocated by his band of fanatical followers. Intriguingly, The World

Jones Made fails to make clear where readers’ sympathies should lie

in this debate over the philosophical paradoxes of truth-seeking. For

all his dictatorial flaws, Jones is credited with rekindling life-

enhancing projects the relativistic government had smothered.

Cronenberg’s and Dick’s dystopian farces stand in contrast with

the numerous contemporary realist works where the commitment to

reality is the object of earnest and sympathetic reflections. William

Gibson’s cyberpunk narratives, for instance, introduce a variant of the

realist underground peopled with characters acting with remarkable

dedication as “[c]ognitive [d]issidents” of the information society of

the near future (Virtual 131). These referential questers enter informal

brotherhoods committed to reclaiming an intelligible life-world

against social and epistemological odds. The primary function of

Gibson’s realist underground is, predictably, of a cognitive nature: it

features protagonists whose exceptional skills of perception make

them comparable to Dick’s Floyd Jones. Colin Laney in Idoru and All

Tomorrow’s Parties is able to discern patterns within apparently

formless social and informational configurations: he identifies “nodal

points” in data streams (Idoru 37); Cayce Pollard in Pattern

Recognition and Zero History responds to fashion designs as to

allergens, thereby intuitively grasping information vital to corporate

strategies. Such icons of truth seeking are the sf counterparts of

investigators in contemporary crime narratives. They are equivalent,

for instance, to Nicholas Branch, the CIA analyst of Don DeLillo’s

Libra, who seeks to retrieve the “secret history” (15) of JFK’s

assassination from the “six point nine seconds of heat and light” (15)

of the Zapruder film—the grainy 8mm movie offering the best

available visual record of the president’s shooting. Branch himself is

comparable to the ubiquitous experts of TV fictions—characters in

CSI, Without a Trace, or Cold Case—whose scientific investigations

Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds

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of crime contribute to a fictional sociology of contemporary life. As

they foreground these icons of cognitive investigation, contemporary

works perpetuate the classic realist tradition of introducing within

fictional narratives observers embodying Emile Zola’s ideal of the

scientifically trained artist mindful of social reform (Hamon 132).

In Gibson’s technothrillers as in all other realist texts discussed in

the present chapter, the subject position supported by cognitive

dissidence is never restricted to mere fact finding. Instead, the realist

underground sustains a multidimensional praxis comprehending

modes of behavior such as pragmatic commitment, the ability to

inhabit an unstable environment, and aesthetic experimentation. The

pragmatic, activist axis of cognitive dissidence informs the behavior

of protagonists as ostensibly different as Brave Orchid, the mother of

Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, and turn-of-the-

twenty-first-century documentary film makers Michael Moore and

Morgan Spurlock: these figures are dedicated to the retrieval of

knowledge in challenging circumstances. Brave Orchid, whose

itinerary from China to the US is chronicled in Kingston’s memoir

The Woman Warrior (1977), responds to the metamorphosis of mid-

twentieth-century China by dedication to hard work and scientific

education. Obliged to support her family in the home country before

her husband can afford to let them join him in the US, she obtains a

medical degree. Already in her forties, she starts working as a doctor,

a midwife, and, as Kingston puts it, a “shaman” coping with the

complexities of a dialogized world (65): she fights both the battle of

western medicine against germs and disease and the Chinese struggle

against spirits and ghosts. With some degree of metaphorical

transposition, Brave Orchid’s struggle against disease and ghosts

matches the complex strategies of Moore and Spurlock in their efforts

to expose the strategies of corporate leaders, politicians, and

ideologues: information in the turn-of-the-twenty-first century context

is no object that can merely be harvested: it has to be teased out,

obtained by cunning, and advertised with some degree of performative

showmanship.

The implicit aim of the cognitive praxis sketched out above is the

staking out of a shared, sustainable life space. Realist investigators

therefore also act as existential settlers. Pam Morris points out that

realism has always nurtured a concern for community: the sharing of

knowledge both presupposes and generates a social bond (155). The

connection between realism and the yearning for human interaction is

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183

particularly noticeable under postmodernity: Joseph Dewey contends

that late-twentieth century novelists such as Joyce Carol Oates, Ann

Tyler, or John Irving develop a new variant of realism in so far as they

depict protagonists eager to weave networks of relationships at the

local level. Their efforts, Dewey argues, amount to a gesture of

resistance against capitalist dehumanization, in particular, against the

fantasy version of the real constructed by the technologies of

information (14-15). Dewey’s insight may be transposed to a broad

corpus in various media. It applies, for instance, to Thomas Pynchon’s

ostensibly postmodernist novel Vineland. The America depicted in

this work is threatened by government conspiracies and overlaid with

mass-culture kitsch. Yet the novel’s protagonists, instead of giving in

to despondency, deploy a manic inventiveness in carving a niche for

themselves in their unpromising environment. Ex surf-band musician

Zoyd Wheeler maintains his status as a certified mental patient

eligible for disability allowances by carrying out a media-covered life-

threatening routine every year. Zoyd’s daughter Prairie, less eccentric

than her father, displays remarkable authority and skill when asked to

run the dysfunctional kitchen of a Zen retreat for female Ninja fighters

(107). Isaiah Two Four, Prairie’s heavy-metal rocker boyfriend plans

to develop a franchise of amusement parks for martial-arts enthusiasts,

thereby turning anti-social behavior into entrepreneurial pursuit (19).

Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld follows a comparable logic,

arguably in less cartoonish fashion. The novel is peopled with such

courageous figures as Sister Grace Fahey, Sister Alma Edgar, and

graffiti writer Ismael Muñoz. Against extraordinary odds of poverty,

racism and medical plagues, these characters attempt to maintain a

livable space within neighborhoods whose “surreal” state of

dereliction has become a feature of the society of the spectacle,

attracting chartered buses packed with foreign tourists (Underworld

47). Similarly, in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century independent films

such as Wayne Wang's and Paul Auster’s Smoke (1995), Jim

Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999), and Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art

(1998), local communities or sub-cultural brotherhoods are contrasted

with a larger, dysfunctional megalopolitan context. Smoke introduces

a cluster of characters inhabiting an island of conviviality in the

middle of 1990s Brooklyn. The anchoring point of their relationships

is a cigar store run by Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel). Ghost Dog is set

in the waste land of a nameless industrial New York suburb (in fact,

Jersey City). In this unpromising locale, Jarmusch’s eponymous

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character—a lone African American contract killer working for

mobsters—is able to build his small circle of friendship: he bonds

with a young girl named Pearline, who shares his interest for Japanese

Samurai lore, and with a Haitian ice-cream vendor, who intriguingly

thrives in an environment whose language he does not master.

Aesthetic experimentation has a share in the practice of realist

investigators because the struggle waged by these characters pursues

goals that outstrip self-interest. The link between realist practice and

art is underscored in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008)—a narrative set

in seventeenth-century colonial America, but whose thematics

resonates with twenty-first-century issues. Morrison’s colonists

confront an environment so challenging that it makes “animosity”

among the socially unequal settlers “utterly useless” (51). Though

divided by race, gender, and above all by their status as free persons,

indentured servants, or slaves, these characters must combine their

efforts to maintain their uncertain dwelling. This pursuit, Morrison

indicates, amounts to an art form, and it can be accomplished with

various degrees of success. A few protagonists misguidedly associate

settling with the urge to leave a mark of their triumphant selfhood on

the landscape. White colonist Jacob Vaark dreams of possessing a

gentleman’s mansion comparable to the estates of the aristocratic

landowners with whom he trades. As part of this project, he hires an

African American blacksmith able to create a splendid wrought-iron

gate. Symptomatically, both Jacob and the blacksmith die shortly after

the completion of this real-estate fantasy: the unmanageable manor

remains deserted. The proper art of dwelling, Morrison suggests,

consists instead in shoring up a common life space—an effort pursued

tentatively by Jacob’s wife and servants. Similarly, DeLillo’s

Underworld is crowded with characters for whom inhabiting is an art

form. Conceptual sculptor Klara Sax has chosen to reside on a former

air base in the Southwestern desert. Surrounded by a cheerful crowd

of art students, she refits B-52 bombers into huge painted sculptures.

In the novel, her gesture is attributed to the nostalgic urge to exorcise

the ghosts of the Cold War. In a Baudrillardian perspective, it also

reads as an attempt to reclaim the technological waste land of

postmodernity and to refashion it into an artistically glamorized

dwelling space. Likewise, Ismael Muñoz domesticates his

environment both in the fashion of an aesthetic and a political activist:

there is only a slight shift of emphasis between his adventurous years

as a graffitero spray-painting subway trains and his later efforts as a

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185

charity worker. Graffiti writing is carefully planned, illegal and

glamorous. It allows dispossessed urban dwellers to redraw the city in

their own image. Social work only prolongs this endeavor, albeit with

a sharper insight into the community’s needs. Outside the realm of

fiction, aesthetically minded existential settling is practiced by

performance artists such as the Parkour acrobats of the French

banlieues. Parkour runners chart their way across housing projects by

means of hazardous climbs, leaps, and jumps (Zeitoun). In so doing,

they explore and reclaim their life world through a careful appraisal of

what is physically and imaginatively possible. Their practice, which I

discuss in more detail in a later section, ranks therefore as a variety of

realist inhabiting similar in status to Ismael’s graffiti raids, Klara’s

conceptual art, and the survival gestures of Morrison’s protagonists.

As the realist underground both explores and inhabits the

contemporary lifeworld, it develops a praxis comparable to a

cognitively focused existentialism. It may seem odd to link the

philosophy popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s and ’50s to

contemporary realism. From the perspective of present-day academia,

existentialism resembles a ghost from the cultural past. According to a

historical sequence more often taken for granted than critically

examined, the thematics of existentialism—the absurd, authentic

selfhood, freedom—have been eclipsed from academic discourse as of

the 1970s, and superseded by the postmodernist concerns for the

linguistic construction of experience and multicultural diversity. Yet a

cultural shift of this magnitude can neither be abrupt nor irrevocable.

Existentialist concerns are still traceable in novels such as Joseph

Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) or Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five

(1969), which are otherwise regarded as classic instances of

metafiction and postmodernist “black humor.” John Yossarian in

Heller and Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut qualify as existentialist

protagonists in so far as they are alienated subjects—“problematic”

heroes, to take up Georg Lukács’s term (Theory 78)—responding to a

world whose values have receded into invisibility. They therefore

prolong the struggle against the absurd previously waged by anti-

heroes in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s, Joseph Conrad’s. Ernest

Hemingway’s, Richard Wright’s, and, of course, Sartre’s and Albert

Camus’s fiction. American films of the late 1960s and 1970s—Mike

Nichols’s The Graduate (1967), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1979),

Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane

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Blacktop (1971)—lend themselves to a similar analysis: their

countercultural appeal draws on existential angst and self-assertion.

Beyond the 1970s, I argue below, existentialism did survive, albeit at

the cost of a shift in thematics. A continuous tradition of existential art

up to the present may be traced out if we accept that the central focus

of existentialism was redefined in a fashion that effected a partial

merger of existential and realist concerns.

The metamorphosis of existentialism under postmodernity can

hardly be attributed to renewed confidence in the meaningfulness of

the world. Fiction from the 1970s onward either perpetuates the

classic existentialist thematics of alienation, or it formulates a

postmodernistic representation of the subject’s relation to society

whose tenor is hardly less pessimistic than in the previous literature of

fear and trembling. DeLillo’s Underworld, published even beyond the

cresting point of postmodernist fiction, illustrates the first branch of

this evolution in cultural thematics. In this angst-ridden narrative,

pragmatic dedication unfolds against a background of philosophical

doubt and political terror. These grim affects are embodied in

psychologically tortured figures such as FBI director Jay Edgar

Hoover and Sister Alma Edgar, a conservative catholic nun doing

charity work in the Bronx. Hoover is obsessed with “Dietrologia,”—

the “science of dark forces” (Underworld 280); he discerns

manifestations of these powers in the USA’s nuclear contest with the

Soviet Union—a political development that makes the postwar scene

comparable to the world of Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death

(Underworld 50). Sister Alma Edgar sees enduring evil throughout the

urban scene, indeed in the very neighborhoods where she otherwise

helps derelicts cope with urban blight. The second variant of the

thematics of alienation gives voice to the unease caused by a world

constructed entirely of recycled cultural material—indeed by the field

of Baudrillardian simulacra spawned by the information society. It

constitutes as such the specifically postmodernist expression of

existential absurdity. The imaginative rendering of disoriented

subjects in a media-generated universe is the core concern of

Pynchon’s novels. His Crying of Lot 49 (1966), whose protagonist

Oedipa Maas is overwhelmed by the bewildering information flow

generated by the high-tech expanses of Southern California, has

served as template for the tradition that culminates in the corpus of

1990s and 2000s metafictional films resonating with the “anxiety of

the real.” Among the latter, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog provides one of the

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most eloquent evocations of the uncanny affects of a world reduced to

intertextual echoes. The Jersey City waste land in which Ghost Dog

lives is overwritten with pastiche. Its grotesque villains are bumbling,

chronically broke gangsters resembling extras from mafia epics such

as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) or Martin Scorsese’s

Goodfellas (1990). Similarly, Ghost Dog’s lifestyle as an ascetic loner

is patched together from a toolkit of popular-culture references—film

noir, hip-hop, and the philosophy of martial arts derived from Akira

Kurosawa’s samurai films.

Classic theoreticians of postmodernism—Lyotard, Baudrillard,

Jameson—suggest that the intertextual life-world of postmodernity

neutralizes existential angst and extinguishes the very problematic of

the subject. Existentialist texts foreground their protagonists’ selfhood

because these subjects, however alienated, are passionate in their

anguish and indignation. The postmodern field of cultural simulacra,

on the contrary, seems to remove the foundation of this type of

subjectivity: if consciousness is reduced to a patchwork of cultural

scripts, it should no longer be able to measure its alienation by

reference to an ideal of authenticity validating existential rebellion.

Autonomous selfhood may therefore be thought to perish. Jameson,

building upon Baudrillard’s analyses, points out accordingly that one

of the most emblematic subject positions made possible by

postmodernity is the “waning of affect” (Postmodernism 10)—the

cool fascination for the reified store of images and codes generated by

contemporary culture, utterly disregarding the fact that this

environment brings about “an unparalleled quantum leap in the

alienation of daily life”(Postmodernism 33). Under postmodernity,

Vincent Van Gogh’s or Edvard’s Munch’s vibrant outcries over the

human condition are superseded by Andy Warhol’s replicas of

consumerist images or Richard Estes’s distanced photorealist

cityscapes (Jameson, Postmodernism 32). At the opposite end of the

postmodern spectrum, late-twentieth-century society has generated a

second subject position, equally incompatible with the pathos of

existential alienation: the unconditional acceptance of what Bhabha

calls “hybridity” (37) and Lyotard the “infinity of heterogeneous

finalities” (“Sign of History” 409; emphasis). The latter stance, central

to magic realism and the fiction of multiculturalism, amounts to

reveling in the metamorphoses of one’s fragmented subject in the

multifaceted flow of experience: the subject welcomes its othering in

the supposedly empowering sphere Bhabha calls the “Third Space of

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enunciation” (53). As Zadie Smith’s White Teeth indicates, alienation

is not the keynote in this case, but rather fascinated curiosity triggered

by multiple, unforeseen cultural interfacing.

The possibility for an existential subject position is reopened,

however, if, as suggested above, the diagnosis of postmodernist

theoreticians about the insubstantiality or infinity plurality of

contemporary experience is counteracted by what I call above the

reality bet. Protagonists and performers who take a wager on reality

implicitly regain the capacity to position themselves with regard to the

totality of their lifeworld not only through existential angst but also

through cognitive appraisal and pragmatic intervention. Still, the

existentialism of the realist underground differs in several respects

from mid-twentieth-century precedents. It is, in the first place,

practical-minded and subdued in tone—the feature that indeed renders

its proponents comparable to the members of a clandestine operation.

Protagonists in classic existential narratives—Antoine Roquentin in

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, for instance—experience alienation as an

underserved trauma—a surprising deprivation of certainties that were

previously taken for granted. To the protagonists of Smoke or

Underworld, on the contrary, indeterminacy is a fact of life that has to

be managed from day to day. Secondly, contemporary texts differ

from their antecedents in that they less often portray existentialism as

the complaint of isolated individuals pitted against the universe. I

indicated above that the very project of inhabiting contemporary

social space leads characters seemingly cut off from human interaction

to join local communities: in the same way as Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog

bonds with young Pearline, teenager Thomas Cole in Wang’s and

Auster’s Smoke (Harold Perrineau) renews contacts with his remarried

father, laying the foundation for a recomposed family (Forest

Whitaker). In this, contemporary texts are less reminiscent of Sartre’s

Nausea [La nausée] (1938) or Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942)

than of Camus’s The Plague (1947), where the struggle against

alienation is viewed as a collective endeavor.

Above all, contemporary texts redefine the very source of

existential concern. Classic existentialism portrays the loss of

authenticity—the withering away of values deplored by Lukács—

mostly as an eclipse of ethical standards and moral authority. In

Camus’s short novel The Fall [La chute] (1956), this plight is

emblematized by the theft from Ghent Cathedral of early-Renaissance

artist Jan van Eyck’s painted panel The Just Judges (136). In Sartre’s

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189

Nausea it transpires through the tricks used by the powerful—indeed

by the hypocrites Sartre elsewhere calls “the bastards”

(Existentialisme 85)—in order to maintain their unwarranted authority

(Nausea 133). In turn-of-the-twenty-first-century works, on the

contrary, the emphasis on moral values is superseded by questions

about the integrity of worldness itself. Because of the pressure of

virtualization and ontological relativism, the texture of the time-space

continuum as a physical environment sustaining human communities

has become the problematic object eliciting existential doubt. Brian

McHale’s periodization of twentieth-century fiction from modernism

to postmodernism implicitly acknowledges this shifting tenor of

existential concerns. Modernist fiction, McHale contends, has an

epistemological dominant: without denying the existence of a

common ground of experience, it assumes that the phenomenal world

is not spontaneously amenable to knowledge and is therefore

approached through diverging interpretations. Modernism, in short,

raises questions about modes of perception: “How can I interpret this

world of which I am part? And what am I in it?” (9). Postmodernism,

on the other hand, is haunted by ontological uncertainty: it suggests

that experience unfolds across a multiplicity of worlds that do not

necessarily intersect. It therefore elicits queries fitting Lyotard’s and

Bhabha’s concepts of plurality and heterogeneity: “Which world is

this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” (10).

The realist underground, by comparison, partly endorses McHale’s

diagnosis of ontological uncertainty, yet it also avoids its ostensible

skepticism. In the face of the “non-space” of postmodernity,

contemporary realism opts for a positive answer to Oedipa Maas’s

question whether a world should be projected in the face of confusion.

Its purpose consists precisely in enquiring to what extent the

supposedly inauthentic or fragmented contemporary field may

nevertheless yield a texture that sustains conditions of existence

sufficiently predictable for knowledge and human interaction. These

are the terms in which contemporary art formulates the “reasonable”

question that, according to Lukács, realism is bound to ask of the

world (Signification 134; Meaning 69). In accordance with the limits

imposed by the reality bet, contemporary realism utters this query in a

mood that is both hopeful and conscious of the determinate scope of

its action: its object consists in defining a horizon of knowledge and

practice, evaluating which areas of postmodernity may lend

themselves to realist investigation.

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