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It’s Still Real to Me, Dammit! Performed Ontologies and Professional Wrestling

DRAFT: NOT INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION

Neal Hebert

Ph.D. Candidate (Theatre History), Louisiana State University

Jon Cogburn

Associate Professor (Philosophy), Louisiana State University

Current Draft

07/10/2015

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On November 9, 1997, the 20,593 professional wrestling fans that packed Montreal’s

Molson Centre—plus approximately another million fans watching around the globe on

pay-per-view—gathered together to watch the World Wrestling Federation’s Survivor

Series Pay Per View.1 The majority of the show proceeded as expected with nothing

amiss. Viewers saw the standard progression of matches, improvised skits, and direct

address monologues that jointly comprise the spectacle of contemporary professional

wrestling. Sometimes the heroes prevailed against villainous adversity, and sometimes

they failed to overcome the odds against them but nonetheless vowed revenge. Things

changed, however, in the marquee match (or main event) of the show. The outcome of

the fight between Canadian hero and reigning WWF Champion Bret “The Hitman” Hart

and “The Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels would change professional wrestling forever.

This event, later christened The Montreal Screwjob, would make explicit the implicit

conditions of possibility for the instantiation of professional wrestling’s fictional

ontology and in so doing radically alter that ontology.2

1 The World Wrestling Federation, or WWF, was the name of Vince McMahon, Jr.’s northeastern wrestling promotion from 1979 until 2002. Prior to McMahon Jr.’s purchase of the promotion between 1979-1980, it was called the World Wide Wrestling Federation, and was promoted by Vincent McMahon, Sr. In 2002 McMahon Jr. renamed the company the World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE. This change was not McMahon’s choice: in 2002 the World Wildlife Fund successfully sued McMahon and his company for trademark violation. According to a deal McMahon had signed with the World Wildlife Fund, the initials “WWF” were the exclusive trademark of the World Wildlife Fund within Europe. McMahon’s Web site, WWF.com, and company logo from 1999-2002 both violated this agreement, and the company was ordered to change its trademarking. Throughout this paper, we refer to Vince McMahon’s company as the WWWF if we are referring to events that occurred between the company’s establishment in 1963 and its name change in 1979, the WWF if we are referring to events that occurred between 1979-2002, and WWE if we are referring to events that occurred between 2002 and the present.2 At the outset we should note that throughout this paper we will follow analytic philosophers who tend to use “ontology” and “metaphysics” interchangeably to denote our theories of the nature of reality, though our preferred usage would be that “ontology” denotes answering the three kinds of questions raised in Section III of this paper and “metaphysics” denotes the study of what reality must be like such that one’s answers to these questions are true. Analytic philosophers differ from Heideggerian usage, for whom the ontological concerns being while the merely ontic concerns particular beings. What Heidegger actually meant by “the problem of being” is rich, multi-faceted, and probably actually names several distinct philosophical problematics (cf. Herman Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being). In contrast with Austrian phenomenologists who saw their labor as a necessary precursor to metaphysics, Heidegger and the French phenomenologists who followed him came to be sharply critical of “metaphysics,” though they tend to identify this with a manner of thinking that historically leads to an overly reductionistic scientific world

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In what follows we argue that spectators of contemporary professional wrestling

must keep track of two competing ontologies, which we label “work” and “shoot,” the

former being the reality presupposed by the fictional elements of the performance of

professional wrestling and the latter concerning the facets of the actual world that make

the performance possible. As we will show, even prior to the Screwjob, anyone who

knew that the outcomes of the matches were predetermined was forced to view a

professional wrestling performance through these inconsistent lenses. But only after the

Screwjob did aspects of the shoot ontology recursively nest within the work ontology.

This leads to a new kind of incoherence in the work ontology itself, one arguably

paradigmatic with respect to all of our postmodern interactions with reality. If this is

correct, then professional wrestling is not just something of which one can develop a

metaphysical account, but is rather metaphysics itself.

I. The Montreal Screwjob and Why it Matters

Viewers of the 1997 Survivor Series Pay Per View knew that Hart, despite spending

more than a decade with Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation, had been

released from his WWF contract and would soon wrestle exclusively for the rival

wrestling promotion World Championship Wrestling.3 Although less than a year before

view (for an excellent discussion of how Heidegger’s critique of this is central to the so-called Kehre, see Mark Okrent’s Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics). Just to forestall confusion, we should note that we both endorse Heidegger’s critique of objective presence and the manner in which this critique undermines scientistic reductionism, but (with Graham Harman in his Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects) we do not think that either of these things undermine metaphysics understood in the traditional manner. Rather, they show that normative questions lie at the very heart of correct metaphysics. Our discussion below is entirely consistent with this.3 World Championship Wrestling (hereafter WCW), was owned by Ted Turner from its inception in 1990 until its purchase by Vince McMahon’s WWF in 2001. This purchase became possible when Jim Crockett Promotions (JCP), a wrestling promotion based out of North Carolina that eventually controlled the international National Wrestling Alliance, went bankrupt attempting to challenge McMahon’s newly-formed, newly national World Wrestling Federation. Turner purchased JCP because wrestling programming had been a key ingredient to the success of Turner Broadcasting Service’s TBS Superstation

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Hart gave an emotional speech live on Monday Night Raw affirming that he had signed a

WWF contract guaranteeing his employment for the next 20 years (with a rumored salary

of $1.5 million per year as the downside guarantee), WWF chairman Vince McMahon

released Hart from his contract because of the company’s inability to honor it given a

lack of revenue. As such, Hart was allowed to enter negotiations with Eric Bischoff’s

World Championship Wrestling and jump promotions without a non-compete clause—

which meant Hart could immediately begin appearing on television for the rival wrestling

company.

After receiving an offer of $2.5 million each year of guaranteed money from

World Championship Wrestling, Hart gave his notice to the WWF while WWF

champion. Hart was scheduled to become an active member of the WCW within a few

weeks. During this time, the real-life promotional war between the WWF and WCW had

caused numerous wrestlers to jump from one promotion to the other, and Hart was by far

the highest profile performer to change companies since Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall, and

Kevin Nash signed with WCW several years earlier.4 Other wrestlers who had switched

promotions while holding championships had done storylines disgracing the belts, and

WWF Chairman Vince McMahon reportedly feared Hart would do the same.5 Thus, in

the main event of Survivor Series 1997, McMahon colluded with referee Earl Hebner and

Michaels to double-cross Hart during the match. When Michaels placed Hart in Hart’s

throughout the 1980s. At the time of the Screwjob, WCW, and its ascendant executive producer Eric Bischoff, had been given unlimited financial resources by TBS and Time Warner to directly compete with the WWF. Bischoff and other decision makers in WCW would often speak publicly of their desire to drive the WWF out of business.4 Hogan signed exclusively with WCW in 1994, while Hall and Nash signed with the company in 1996. 5 Debrah Anne Micelli, who wrestled as Madusa (shortened from “Made in the USA”) in the American Wrestling Alliance, the National Wrestling Alliance, and World Championship Wrestling, and as Alundra Blayze in the World Wrestling Federation, did just that when she jumped ship from the World Wrestling Federation to World Championship Wrestling: on the December 18, 1995 edition of WCW’s Monday Nitro, Micelli threw her WWF Women’s Championship belt into a garbage can on live television. Micelli wrestled for WCW until 2001, then began a separate career as a monster truck driver.

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own signature submission maneuver, the sharpshooter, McMahon signaled the ref to end

the match prematurely, ensuring Hart’s defeat and guaranteeing that Hart would not leave

the WWF as its heavyweight champion. Hart, furious and disbelieving, began destroying

the ring, set, and cameras surrounding the ring to the crowd’s vocal approval. Before the

pay per view went off the air, Hart spit in the face of WWF chairman Vince McMahon—

who, at that time, was in WWF storylines only an announcer rather than an authority

figure—and began tracing the initials “WCW” (for World Championship Wrestling)

while standing in the WWF ring surrounded by the property he had just destroyed.

None of the above likely sounds particularly unusual to most individuals casually

familiar with professional wrestling—wrestling shows always have bad guys (“heels,” in

wrestling’s carnie argot) cheating to defeat good guys (“babyfaces”). Unlike these other

scripted incidents, however, the Montreal Screwjob was not part of the planned show’s

storylines, nor was Hart aware of what would happen. Instead, the Screwjob—the most

famous in-ring double-cross in professional wrestling history—was “real” life played out

in-ring and onscreen. Unlike prior true double-crossings6 where the public never figured

out that something untoward happened, the actual double-cross behind the Montreal

Screwjob was openly acknowledged on WWF television and became a key storyline after

the incident. Its subsequent influence on the performance of professional wrestling is

impossible to misinterpret, and the event’s later incorporation into storylines led to the

WWF’s greatest successes in both attendance and ticket sales.

6 There are numerous examples of this throughout wrestling history. We would like to direct your attention to two famous examples that help historicize this event: the 1985 WWF women’s championship match between then WWF Women’s champion Wendi Richter and The Spider Lady (legendary women’s wrestler and “shooter” The Fabulous Moolah under a mask) that ended when the Spider Lady rolled up Richter in a move called a small package and the referee quickly counted to three despite Richter “kicking out” of the pinfall attempt; and the 1925 championship match between Stanislau Zybyszko and Wayne Munn, which Zybszko won after “shooting” on Munn, legitimately pinning the world champion after agreeing to lose to him in the behind-the-scenes negotiations for the match.

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From the perspective of the philosophy of art, what is most significant about the

profoundly postmodern moment of the Montreal Screwjob is that it is a paradigm

example of how a practice can perform both its fictional storyline as well as the material

pre-conditions that allow for that storyline’s performances. Professional wrestling is not

unique in the extent to which propositions articulating the material preconditions can

directly contradict the very storylines being performed. What is unique about post

Montreal Screwjob professional wrestling is the extent to which viewers must be able to

track this contradictory reality in order to follow the storylines themselves. Shockingly,

this will entail that spectators must constantly balance two ontologies in order for

professional wrestling to succeed as an artistic genre. We dub these competing ontologies

the “shoot” (i.e., the reality of the performers behind the storylines) ontology and the

“work” (i.e., the fictional account of what’s going on in storyline) ontology. This

terminology is consistent with the carnie argot spoken by wrestlers since the turn of the

century whenever wrestling insiders find themselves discussing the complex relationship

between reality and story.

To appreciate professional wrestling in the wake of the Montreal Screwjob, an

audience member, much like audiences of professional wrestling throughout the 20th

century, must be able to grasp its identity and individuation conditions as in other arts.

But unlike more traditional arts—be they pop art, mass art, or high art—post-Screwjob

professional wrestling demands different paradigms of spectatorship that have been

naturalized within audiences since 1997. After the Screwjob, every single performance of

professional wrestling is intimately engaged in questioning, complicating, and

reinscribing its identity conditions as it plays with audiences’ abilities to distinguish

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between reality, the scripted event, and the material and political forces shaping the

writing of the scripts that govern the event in question. Where once wrestling was

predetermined sport, since 1997 wrestling is and can only be meta-theatrical in

performance.

We contend that the differing ontologies operative within professional wrestling

have a meaningful impact on the types of spectatorships necessary to enjoy these

performances. In this paper we will begin the task of providing an ontology of

professional wrestling. Any such theory will be complicated by how spectatorship has

changed in the aftermath of the Montreal Screwjob given the way the Screwjob has

redefined the genre-relevant norms of professional wrestling. Because of this sea-change

we contend that any attempt to articulate the aesthetic ontologies of contemporary

professional wrestling (identity and diversity) must be accompanied by a concomitant

account of the competing ontologies that inform contemporary professional wrestling’s

spectatorship.

II. Key Categories

Much of the way wrestlers and fans talk about the practice comes from the argot of 19th

Century travelling carnivals, which often had simulated fights between an evil strongman

and a carnival employee pretending to be a local who would defend the honor of the

locale in which the carnival was performing. In carnival argot, a work is any performance

or trick that constitutively involves the audience’s ignorance. Audience members who are

fooled by the work (for example those who believe that the outcome of the staged fights

are not predetermined) are known as marks. In contemporary professional wrestling

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performers are often called workers and the notion of a work is often contrasted with that

of a shoot, where a shoot fight is non-scripted and without a pre-determined outcome.

At its most basic level, professional wrestling is a simulation of an athletic contest

(specifically a fight) between at least two performers: the performers are referred to as

wrestlers (or, in the case of the WWE alone, male performers are called “Superstars” and

female performers are called “Divas”), while the simulation is commonly referred to as a

match. Within each match wrestlers frequently subject each other to strikes using their

feet, hands, and joints (such as elbows and knees), submission holds that appear to put

performers’ limbs and joints under stress while nonetheless keeping an opponent’s face

and body visible to audiences and cameras, and assorted other performed attacks, often

referred to as “moves.” Wrestlers typically pull their strikes, feign submission holds’

lethality, and fall in such a way that the impact of their bodies on the canvas is evenly

distributed throughout their body and thus less painful, but this is far from a painless

event. While wrestlers minimize the damage done to each others’ bodies, no amount of

care can prevent injuries from accruing given the nature of the performances on display.7

These maneuvers are read as having a certain “meaning” in the match, largely determined

by a move’s place within the fictional context of the match’s story.

One example of this would be a punch: in American professional wrestling since

the mid-1990s, punching has been a “legal” maneuver and a staple of most professional

wrestling matches. In All Japan Professional Wrestling’s 6/3/1994 match between

Toshiaki Kawada and Mitsuharu Misawa for the Triple Crown world championship,

7 There is, ultimately, no truly safe way to wrestle given the types of performances that occur in matches. Although wrestling’s travails with steroids and other performance enhancing drugs have made news since the late 1980s, less attention has been paid to the chemical dependency issues that plague both active and retired wrestlers. When tallying only former WWF/E performers, more than 50 wrestlers as of 2015 have died before reaching the age of 50. In many (if not most) of these cases, the cause of death (where a cause of death is released) is typically either steroids, prescription pain pill overdoes, or a combination of the two.

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however, Kawada only punches Misawa after thirty minutes of wrestling. Although this

move frequently begins any number of other matches, given the context of the

championship match in Tokyo and the pride of both performers to win, the move meant

something decidedly different than it would have had it opened the match. On that night

and at that time, Kawada’s punch to Misawa—the only punch in the nearly 40 minute

match—performed his desperation to hurt his opponent. It was only part of a sequence of

strikes wherein Kawada used every offensive strike in his arsenal of maneuvers to try to

hurt his rival, and the crowd in the Tokyo Nippon Budokan grew so excited upon

realizing that Kawada would risk an illegal strike to injure his opponent that the

thousands of fans in attendance began stomping their feet on the concrete floor in

appreciation.

Frequently, a match occurs before a live audience, although this is not necessarily

true of all matches.8 Often, these performances involve at least one other performer who

simulates officiating the fictional athletic contest by enforcing its (sometimes)

nebulously-defined rules: the referee.9 Matches rarely occur in isolation when they are

performed. Although single matches might have been put on as a complete performance

early in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when championship matches could last for up

to four hours, presently companies produce a slate of matches that are jointly labeled a

8 In the Memphis territory, Memphis Championship Wrestling, Jerry “The King” Lawler and Terry Funk had one of the most famous matches that did not take place in front of a live crowd: the “Empty Arena” match of 1981 that was only aired on television. In 1999, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Mick “Mankind” Foley had a similar match that was taped in an empty arena and aired during the 1999 Superbowl’s halftime show on television only.9 Some matches, that are presented as “unsanctioned” matches, certain “street fights,” or matches that are otherwise “too dangerous” for a company to allow to appear on their television, do not have a referee to preserve the illusion that these matches are solely to settle a private issue between performers rather than a part of the show—even if the matches air on television or pay per view. Obviously, this is a fiction within the storyline given that these matches are invariably integrated into shows such that audiences can buy tickets or tune into specific television shows or pay per views to watch these allegedly unsanctioned matches.

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card: audiences buy tickets to see a group of matches performed by a single producing

entity.10

The producing entity is understood to be a company or “promotion” by audiences;

performers are signed exclusively to a given promotion, and their matches can almost

always only be seen on shows that are produced by a given promotion. This promotion—

whether through a single storyline writer (called “booker” in wrestling’s carnie argot) or

through an entire writing team dedicated to this purpose—determines a wrestling

company’s creative direction. This means that the situations that lead to matches, the

results of the matches, and the characters portrayed by the performers in matches are all

predetermined or fictions created by the promotion (either singly or in improvisational

collaboration between a promotion and a talent). The booker or writing team decides

which wrestlers are champions, whether matches are championship matches (matches

where championships can change hands), and why any number of wrestlers are wrestling

each other rather than anyone else (“feuding,” commonly, although in prior eras

performers engaged in a long-term program would refer to this phenomenon as being

“married” to each other).

Although a given card might have eight matches, each of those matches is—on a

well-booked show—expected to serve a different role. An opening match is frequently

designed to excite a given crowd. Sometimes it does this through acrobatic maneuvers;

sometimes it does this through the pace at which the wrestlers do maneuvers; or

10 The practice of holding more than one wrestling match on a given slate of performances that takes place in a given night is popularly attributed to the “Gold Dust Trio” during the 1920s of World champion Ed “Strangler” Lewis, Joseph “Toots” Mondt, and Billie Sandow. Dubbing their new style “Slam Bang Western Style Wrestling,” the trio used their stylistic success at box offices around the United States to effectively take over the North American wrestling industry. The Gold Dust Trio’s format of multiple, shorter wrestling matches featuring a variety of performers was far more exciting than the single match, mutli-hour grappling contests that preceded it, and the “Slam Bang Western Style Wrestling” format of promoting events replaced almost all competing formats in North America within a year of its inception.

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sometimes it does this by showcasing a fan-favorite wrestler. Using our eight match show

as a hypothetical example, subsequent matches would feature virtuous wrestlers

(“babyfaces”) in contests against evil (“heel”) wrestlers. After the opening match, the

show will “slow down” by featuring slower-paced, less exciting matches to avoid

exhausting the crowd. After the opener, subsequent matches should consistently

crescendo until the final match of the evening to ensure that the main event match

receives the strongest reaction.

The above, of course, is only part of the story. While it certainly accounts for

much of the content of a given evening of professional wrestling, it does not account for

all of the things one sees at a live event or on television. The wrestlers’ entrances to the

arena, irrespective of whether one is discussing their arrival to wrestle a match or to

simply appear before a crowd, are also an integral part of professional wrestling: music,

masculinist/feminist posturing, pyrotechnics, and dance are all synthesized into the short

performances that accompany wrestlers’ appearances on stage. Moreover, sometimes

wrestlers appear in the ring within which matches are contested or appear before the

crowd at the spot where they enter the arena with a microphone: rather than engaging in a

physical contest, the wrestlers perform direct address monologues to the crowd or

verbally duel a future opponent (wrestling’s carnie argot dubs the act of performing a

monologue or an improvised scene “cutting a promo”). Shows frequently supplement the

matches with improvised skits between multiple wrestlers (either backstage or in the

ring), advertisements for wrestling-related merchandise (such as replica championship

belts, apparel, or DVDs of past wrestling events/matches), video packages that

summarize prior storylines, and assorted other things. Given all of the above, it becomes

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possible for someone to say that they watched wrestling for three hours despite their

being, perhaps, only a few minutes of actual wrestling within the context of a match (or

matches).11

III. Two Ontologies

When analytic philosophers attempt to provide an ontology12 of some genre of art they

are trying to isolate the features of entities that make them instances of categories

relevant to that genre. Isolating such features typically requires answering three

questions: (1) individuation (what qualities differentiate entities of the relevant kind from

each other and entities of other kinds?), (2) persistence (in virtue of what quality or

qualities are entities of the relevant kind self-identical over time?), and (3) normativity (in

virtue of what quality or qualities are different objects better and worse instances of the

relevant kinds?).

While these clearly do not exhaust all of the philosophical questions one can and

should ask about various artworks, proponents of the centrality of ontology think that

these questions are fundamental: answering other questions will be parasitic on

answering the above three questions. For example, consider the debauched immoralist

11 According to Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer, the 3/1/2010 edition of WWE’s Monday Night Raw, for example, contained only 16 minutes and 35 seconds of actual wrestling. The remaining time of the show was dedicated to interviews, monologues, skits, video packages, and the like. Throughout much of 2010, both WWE and TNA relied primarily on non-wrestling content to fill their shows. The opposite seems to be occurring for WWE events now that Monday Night Raw has become a three hour television show.12 One can make all sorts of Whig histories leading up to the current resurgence in metaphysics among analytic philosophers. One canonical text that occurs in perhaps all such histories is P.F. Strawson’s 1959 Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Strawson’s “descriptive metaphysics” is an attempted articulation of the picture of reality supposedly presupposed by our common conceptual scheme. He contrasted this with “revisionary metaphysics” which might seek to change the way we think about the world. Pace Strawson, we find all metaphysics proper to be at least potentially revisionary, just because the metaphysician is interested in what there is as well as how it is and how it should be. And following Nietzsche’s original programmatic hermeneutics of suspicion, our explanatory job with respect to an age’s common sense might very well explain why its presuppositions are both widely held and false.

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who claims that movies that celebrate cruelty should be aesthetically cherished in virtue

of the fact that these movies celebrate cruelty. An ethicist responding to this will do a

much better job if she is familiar with the genre relevant properties of movies. Are films

really the kind of thing that celebrate or encourage character traits such as cruelty? Is it

even possible for a film to have this kind of property? Assuming that there is a subgenre

of films that manage to do this, what differentiates instances of those films from other

kinds of films? These simply are questions of type (1) and (2). Finally, addressing type

(3) questions will give us insight into the genre’s aesthetic successes and failures.

Answering these questions will not automatically determine where we should stand on

issues of moralism and immoralism (or whether we should take a stand at all), but (in

addition to clarity about a bevy of ontological issues about human beings more generally)

they are prerequisites for the debate to get started.13

Before continuing we should note that the looseness, imprecision, and pragmatic

infelicity of many applications of fundamental ontological categories (e.g. individuation,

identity, and normativity) are neither bars to doing ontology14 nor something on their own

that requires replacement via a more precise language such as logic.15 Rather, the proper

metaphysical response to varieties of under-determination is to try to discern what reality 13See Berys Gaut’s Art, Emotion, and Ethics for the recent canonical discussion of philosophical problems raised by possibly immoral art. 14 Anti-metaphysical trends in continental philosophy make far too much of different forms of vagueness. For a discussion and critique, see Raphaël Millière’s “Metaphysics Today and Tomorrow.” Though we have learned much from deconstruction and the French phenomenological tradition generally, we concur with Millière’s critique.15 Building on earlier work by Bertrand Russell and Rudolph Carnap, Gustav Bergmann developed “ideal language philosophy” in texts such as 1954’s The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism and imparted this technique to a generation of students during the University of Iowa’s Department of Philosophy’s golden age. Recent work in this vein tends to take its impetus from W. V. O. Quine’s quip in 1953’s From a Logical Point of View that “to be is to be the value of a bound variable.” Though we both love logic, we find metaphysics following Quine’s stricture to be just one end of a false dichotomy with the deconstructionist’s anti-metaphysics mentioned in the previous footnote on the other end. Since underdetermination is properly a spur to further metaphysics (as we go on to note in the text above), none of the important work cited in the next five footnotes labors under either Quinean or deconstructive shackles.

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must be like such that our non-philosophical and ontological discourses involving

identity, individuation, and norms succeed and fail in exactly the way that they do. For

example, what must the world be like so that we can communicate as if word meanings

individuate in determinate ways, given that they manifestly do not.16 But we cannot really

understand the relevant kinds of under-determination unless we vigorously study the way

individuation, identity, and normativity work with respect to these kinds.

The overlapping genres and subgenres of art for which noted contemporary

analytic philosophers have penned recent book-length ontologies include: mass art,

horror movies and literature, film,17 fiction,18 jazz,19 dance,20 and video games.21 But alas,

professional wrestling has yet to find its metaphysical apologist. To provide a satisfactory

ontology of professional wrestling, one would need to begin by rigorously addressing

questions (1)-(3) with respect to the technical concepts described in the previous section.

And of course we can do nothing approaching this in one paper. However, we actually

almost already have enough on the table to show the radical aesthetic novelty of

contemporary professional wrestling. We must only complete one more bit of ontological

stage setting.

By the time Nicholas Wolterstorff published his canonical 1975 article “Toward

an Ontology of Artworks” analytic metaphysics of art had already developed a set of

broadly shared positions concerning the manner in which identity and individuation

16 Mark Wilson’s Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior is the canonical discussion of just this issue.17 For the first three, see Noël Carroll’s canonical A Philosophy of Mass Art, his more focused The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, as well as The Philosophy of Motion Pictures.18 Most recent work in some manner responds to Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make Believe.19 See Robert Kraut’s Art World Metaphysics.20 See Graham McFee’s Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance.21 For a Waltonian account, see Chris Bateman’s Imaginary Games. For an account rooted in capacity metaphysics, see Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox’s Philosophy Through Video Games.

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conditions play a role in differentiating genres of art.22 According to one part of the

consensus view, art genres divide into whether the artwork in the genre is a

“performance-work” or an “object work.” Performance-works are simply works that can

be multiply performed, where the same object (say a musical piece, dance, or play,

conceived abstractly) can be instantiated in different performances occurring at different

spaces and times. Performances themselves are discrete events spread out vaguely over

space-time. A particular performance, in its particularity occupying a region of space-

time, is not repeatable. What is repeated is the performance-work, which is an abstract

type shared by all of its performance instances. Wolterstorff notes that “The ontological

status of performances is relatively clear, however, while that of performance-work is

immensely perplexing,” and spends most of his article trying to discern an ontology of

performance-works.

For our current purposes, we need not address any deep metaphysical issues

involving the relation between abstract kinds and their instances. Nor do we need to

explicate the related distinction between an object-work (such as a painting, building, or

sculpture) and copies and castings of such works. Nor do we need to discuss the manner

in which literary works might be taken to be both object works and performance works.

For we already have enough on the table to make our central ontological point.

In professional wrestling, the word “match” is systematically ambiguous,

denoting incompatible ontological types, depending upon the stance taken by the

spectator towards what is occurring. To illustrate this, let us introduce two fictitious

22 As evidence of a consensus having developed on certain key connections between genre and individuation conditions, Wolterstorff cites R.G. Collingwood’s 1938 The Principles of Art, Margaret MacDonald’s 1952 “Art and Imagination,” R. Wellek and A. Warren’s 1956 Theory of Literature, C.L Stevenson’s 1957 “On ‘What is a Poem’?” Joseph Margolis’ 1965 The Language of Art and Art Criticism, and Andrew Harrison’s 1967 “Works of Art and Other Cultural Objects.”

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spectators, Bubba and Ian. Bubba grew up in Montgomery, Alabama during the bucolic

1970s. Every Saturday morning he watched locally promoted wrestling on television and

argued vigorously with friends at Jefferson Davis High School who thought the outcomes

of the matches were fixed. If you go to a chicken wings restaurant that shows

professional wrestling pay per views or other special events you might end up listening to

Bubba discourse extensively about how the wrestlers of his childhood (Ric Flair, Harley

Race, and Dusty Roads) could soundly defeat the entire card of the pay per view you are

currently watching.23 Bubba is being sincere. He either has no idea that the outcomes are

pre-determined and many of the skits are scripted performances written by one or more

people, or he’s so internalized “kayfabe” (a word found in carnie argot that denotes the

sacred oath not to reveal that a carnie grift such as professional wrestling is a work) that

he will not give himself over to doubt. Fans like Bubba are sadly an endangered species,

though they have been common enough in the past to be given their own sobriquet:

“southern fan” (SF). Southern fans are delightful to talk with because they have so little

aesthetic distance from the spectacle. They have not suspended disbelief, because there is

nothing to disbelieve, dammit.

Now consider Ian. Ian grew up in somewhat reduced circumstances in Montreal,

Canada. Some of his happiest memories are of his father taking him to watch “Géant

Ferré” (who would later become WWF superstar “André the Giant”) crush opponents in

the Montreal Forum. Ian is delighted when you tell him that when at the age of twelve the

real life André Roussimoff’s giganticism rendered him too big to fit on the school bus in

his childhood home of Grenoble, France, his neighbor Samuel Beckett (yes, that Samuel

23 It is worth pointing out that, since two of the three names listed as favorites of Bubba were all prominent bookers of professional wrestling while active performers, such beliefs seem to be empirically justifiable given how tough these wrestlers appeared to be throughout their careers.

17

Beckett) drove him to and from school. Ian has a Ph.D now and still enjoys the plays of

Beckett, but when you have him over to your house to watch pirated video tapes or

DVDs of Japanese professional wrestling, he just responds to the spectacle by saying

things like “that’s so fake” and laughing.

While the Southern Fan has no disbelief to suspend, Ian’s response to wrestling

now is that of the Interminable Critic (IC) who brings the hermeneutics of suspicion to

bear on everything. The IC is often a lovely person in all sorts of ways, but his or her

grasp of the material preconditions for many performance practices often interferes

radically with his or her ability to enjoy those practices. The IC is as stuck in disbelief as

the SF is in belief.

In truth, the vast majority of wrestling fans (F) put on both hats, as the suspension

of disbelief necessary for wrestling to work requires as much. While this is perhaps the

most pronounced with professional wrestling fans, it is not unique to wrestling. Most

people separate out Johnny Depp from Captain Jack Sparrow, and the ontologies relevant

to both are different. But one must look to the far corners of postmodern meta-fiction24 to

find genre of art where the two stances recursively interact in the manner in which they

now standardly do in professional wrestling.

Here is a way that professional wrestling is not like film. Were a film equivalent

of the SF (say someone who thinks Pirates of the Caribbean is veridical history) to talk

about their experience watching the film, their ontological presuppositions about the

individuation conditions of films are no different from that of the film equivalent of the

IC. The film SF would describe watching a cinematic dramatization of real historical 24 In fiction, one relatively recent paradigm example of just this is Jeff VanderMeer’s short story collection City of Saints and Madmen. The book’s typesetting, illustrations, and strategies of text delivery all work in concert to draw attention to the formal properties of literature as a discursive body of texts and the physical book’s status as an object-work. The literary works of Mark Danielewski go even further in this regard.

18

events, while the film IC would only be interested in talking about how much history is

falsified by the film. But nothing is to be gained from the claim that the SF and the IC

mean something systematically different by “film” because both seem to agree that the

work in question, historical or ahistorical, is nonetheless an example of a film.

This is not the case with professional wrestling. For the SF a match is a

performance in Wolterstorff’s sense. It is a unique individual event composed of and

related to other events, all with finite though vague boundaries in space-time. But the IC,

who focuses on the non-fictional elements (including the material preconditions and the

actual states of the world that might be considered to be represented by the work) of the

practice of professional wrestling a match is a performance-kind. This, of course, has real

bearing on how we understand professional wrestling. Although fans in the present are

conditioned to believe that the only results that matter occur on television, this was not

always a norm of professional wrestling performance.

In the 1970s and throughout much of the 1980s, wrestling television shows were

not a revenue stream because, unlike today, promotions did not receive money from TV

stations to put on a wrestling show. Rather, television shows were most frequently a loss

leader—a wrestling promotion would pay a carriage fee to get their television show on a

local network, then use that show to promote live events throughout the geographic area

that could watch the show. Thus, on TV “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair and Ricky “The

Dragon” Steamboat might have a confrontation that leads to a title match. But to see the

title match, fans would have to buy a ticket to the promotion’s next local event.

Interestingly enough, however, is that this title match might occur at every arena within a

geographic area that receives a promotion’s television, and promotions would promote

19

this match at a variety of live arenas. Thus, fans in Charlotte, Atlanta, and Charleston

might all see Ric Flair lose his NWA heavyweight championship to Ricky Steamboat.

Indeed, if a fan bought tickets and traveled to all three shows, she would see Ric Flair

“lose” his title three separate times because the same match (even if some of the moves

are different) was repeated at each show, and according to local or area-specific

television, each of these individual shows was the “real” match between Flair and

Steamboat (i.e., the match to which all local TV would build).

It is clear that, unlike with the case of film, the SF and IC have two ontologies,

inconsistent with one another in how they interpret the individuation conditions of what

is perhaps the key category of professional wrestling: the match. Following the meaning

of shoot and work, by “work ontology” we mean to denote an account of the way the

world would be if the fictional elements in wrestling were not fictional.25 In contrast, the

“shoot ontology” is an account of the way the actual world is such that all of the elements

of wrestling (fictional and non-fictional) can be performed. The SF is a mark, who does

not (or in some cases cannot) distinguish work from shoot. The IC is stuck on the fact

that the work is a work, and appeals to facets of the shoot ontology in her refusal to

suspend disbelief.

Again, one can do something like the IC with respect to other representational

media. There are, no doubt, numerous individuals who refuse to enjoy historical fictions

that depart too much from the way we take things to have really been. But debates

between a film IC and SF will not potentially change the SF’s ontology of film, for the

25 Note that we do not deny that a work ontology is “real.” This is not just because one of us has fairly strong ontological commitments concerning the reality of ficta. Given the physical sacrifices involved in the performances, we also find it to be astonishingly cruel to tell a wrestler that what they do is “fake.” This is exactly what David Wills was referencing when he, during a famous question and answer session with old and injured wrestlers, tearfully cried out “It’s still real to me, dammit!”

20

fictional world of films in no way constitutively presupposes false views about the actual

nature of film. With respect to professional wrestling the fictional world that the SF

wrongly takes to be actual does falsely presuppose that there is no performance-kind

notion of match. In virtue of this, the wrestling fan’s suspension of disbelief has always

had to be more sophisticated than that of other performance arts. There is just too

fundamental a metaphysical clash between the reality viewed by the disbeliever and the

fictional reality presupposed when that disbelief is suspended.

IV. The Screwjob Revisited

Now we have the machinery to understand the Montreal Screwjob, and hence the

postmodern condition of post-Screwjob professional wrestling. Our three kinds of

spectators (SF,IC,F) form a recursive hierarchy of aesthetic distance. The SF has no

aesthetic distance. The IC only has aesthetic distance. The F is able to be distanced from

her distance, suspending her disbelief for the purpose of enjoying the spectacle.

However, in wrestling the F’s distanced distance is considerably complicated by

the way professional wrestling fandom works. For just as there are two notions of

“matches” there are two kinds of ontology relative to “rooting.” Even the most intractable

IC, Ian from Montreal, can have happy memories about individual performers such as

André Roussimoff. For example, when Roussimoff convincingly played a gentle giant in

Rob Reiner and William Goldman’s The Princess Bride and was then reinvented as a

wrestling baby face, Ian was ecstatic. Though Ian would not watch his wrestling matches

and root for the fictional character André the Giant, he continued to root for André

21

Roussimoff’s success and was genuinely sad when the health problems from

Roussimoff’s acromegaly ended his life prematurely.

Normal wrestling fans frequently end up combining the SF’s rooting for the

characters to win their matches with rooting for the performers to “get over.” For

example, a fan of the wrestler Ric Flair could, on the one hand, want Ric Flair to win his

matches on television. On the other hand, a fan of Ric Flair could want the performer

who plays Ric Flair, Richard Fliehr, to be a successful performer who excels at his craft

on television: this might involve winning a given match, but it could extend to cover such

things as being happy when Fliehr performs an effective promo, being pleased when

Fliehr loses in such a way that the performance of the character is strengthened despite

the character losing in the ring, or even being happy that other fans are beginning to cheer

for Richard Fliehr’s character. Ric Flair might “get over” by winning a title, but Ric Flair

could also “get over” when his character becomes more central to the stories being told

on television or when other fans begin expressing their love or passionate hatred for

Fliehr’s performance as the character. Again, this happens with fans of films also rooting

for actors to be successful in their personal lives and in their ability to get good roles. But

it is not a constitutive part of the aesthetic experience for film. Indeed a fan that was

rooting for Johnny Depp while watching Pirates would have a degraded aesthetic

experience, since it would intrude on her imaginative complicity with respect to the

fiction.

By way of contrast, the aesthetic experience of most wrestling fans today is

considerably heightened by combining the shoot and work ontology while watching the

match. Consider the 2012 return of former Ultimate Fighting Heavyweight Champion

22

Brock Lesnar, an outstanding amateur and professional wrestler who left wrestling for

mixed martial arts, to Vince McMahon Jr.’s World Wrestling Entertainment. Lesnar, as

UFC Heavyweight Champion, became the biggest PPV draw in (non-boxing) combat

sports history after his heavyweight championship match against Frank Mir headlined the

PPV event UFC 100. Lesnar, after retiring from mixed martial arts and returning to

professional wrestling in the WWE, was brought in with a contract that gave him

unparalleled control over the marketing of his character. Lesnar’s wrestling attire retains

the corporate sponsorships he received while a mixed martial artist, and his gear

emblazoned with the Jimmy Johns corporate logo is striking on WWE television given

WWE’s unwillingness to allow any other performer to receive corporate endorsements.

When Lesnar began his first feud with John Cena in 2012, the WWE worked

carefully to preserve the illusion that Lesnar was a fighter rather than a professional

wrestler: interview segments with Lesnar intentionally imitated the cinematography of

Ultimate Fighting Championship’s “UFC Countdown” specials when Lesnar was

heavyweight champion, confrontations with Cena and Lesnar would devolve into fights

where Lesnar would throw real elbows at Cena in an attempt to cut Cena’s face and lip so

that blood would appear on television, and so on. The final match between Cena and

Lesnar was similarly challenging: throughout its 15 minutes, Lesnar was clearly hitting

Cena with real punches, knees, and elbows. Although the ending of the match was

predetermined and Cena was victorious, everything that preluded the finish of the match

was uncomfortably real. Even now, three years after Lesnar’s return to professional

wrestling, his (albeit rare) appearances on WWE television cause crowds to go crazy

because, to quote Lesnar’s in-fiction manager Paul Heyman, “Brock Lesnar is for real.”

23

What follows from Brock Lesnar being “for real?” At minimum, at least some

other performers are not for real, and this makes all of Lesnar’s matches in the ring must-

see events because they remain something different from everything else on the

professional wrestling card.

Although Lesnar’s presence is a rare occurrence on professional wrestling

television shows, the treatment of his character may well be a paradigm example of post-

Screwjob wrestling: as you can see from the above, this recursive intertwining of levels

of distance gains another level. While the F experiences little tension while inconsistently

presupposing both ontologies while rooting simultaneously for character and performer,

the postmodern fan (PF) is made acutely aware of the inconsistencies precisely because

propositions about the shoot ontology become presupposed in the fictional universe of the

work ontology. Prior to the Screwjob it was possible to be a SF and not miss anything

going on in the fictional world. After the screwjob this is no longer the case given the

ways in which the work ontology and the shoot ontology began to commingle at the level

of storyline. For any fan to understand why Vince McMahon, the shoot owner of the

WWF but work announcer of the WWF, could go on television in the weeks following

the Screwjob and discuss contract negotiations, his ability to end a match prematurely,

and assorted other things required a fan to understand that the work ontology was, at

heart, fictional: the storyline that naturally developed around McMahon as an evil

corporate executive who hates the working class could only make sense if fans were

aware that, at some level, there is currently and likely always has been something going

on outside the work ontology that informs the gaps within the work ontology.

24

What is distinctive of the PF then is a necessary suspension of the suspension of

disbelief, which is not the same as disbelief! If the F must distance herself from the IC’s

aesthetic distance, the PF must again distance herself from the F’s distanced distance.

And this is a common requirement of fandom in post-Screwjob professional wrestling;

with the internet and the Wrestling Observer too many fans are obsessively following the

shoot ontology, and often the shoot ontology’s “storyline” (an attempted description of

the performer’s actual lives) is much better than what the writers are coming up with in

an wrestling company.26 When this tension becomes too great WWE writers will bravely

contradict the previous work storyline in a way that, as we will argue in our concluding

section, forces fans face to face with their post-modern predicament.

Examples of this distanced distance are numerous. Consider WWE storylines in

2005. Fans who followed WWE wrestler Matt Hardy were aware that he and fellow

performer Amy “Lita” Dumas were a couple both in storyline and in real life; their

engagement was publicly acknowledged on Matt Hardy’s Web site, and Hardy routinely

engaged with fans on-line through his Web site’s forum. Readers of Hardy’s Web site

learned, in early 2005, that Hardy broke off his engagement with Dumas due to her

infidelity: she had been having an affair with WWE performer Adam “Edge” Copeland

for months, and Hardy outed her on his personal Web site. The WWE, unhappy with

Hardy’s online behavior, released him from his contract.

Fans of Hardy were upset with his shoot firing, and they began disrupting WWE

television tapings with loud chants whenever Dumas or Copeland appeared on television:

26 Indeed, much of Neal Hebert’s forthcoming dissertation, Professional Wrestling: Local Performance History, Global Performance Praxis addresses the ways that what we call the shoot ontology has complicated the performance and reception of professional wrestling throughout the twentieth century. Gender performativity, labor relations, the status of immigrant identities within the larger United States community, as well as numerous other issues, have all been embodied in rings irrespective of whether they were ever acknowledged within the work ontology.

25

fans would chant “You screwed Edge” at Dumas, and Copeland, then a fan favorite,

began getting booed at every arena the WWE held shows. This complicated WWE

storylines in the wake of Hardy’s firing: neither Edge nor Lita were supposed to be

villains (at least at first), but fans with knowledge of the behind-the-scenes details of

Hardy’s firing as well as Edge and Lita’s affair began reacting to the work babyfaces as

shoot heels. Although there was no reason in storyline for fans to boo Dumas and

Copeland, fans around the country began doing exactly that—and, several months later,

the WWE quietly rehired Matt Hardy to perform a “worked shoot” wherein real-life

events were incorporated into the fiction of the show’s storylines. Prior elements of the

storyline were invalidated by the real-life details of Hardy, Copeland, and Dumas’s actual

antagonism, and this invalidation required fans to understand both the inexistence of

relevant past events along with the present reality of the storylines that were now part of

the show and, thus, recognizable as storylines.

This idea of a “worked shoot” has been a part of wrestling’s creative arsenal for

years. It is only in the present era of professional wrestling that these worked shoots were

used to invalidate earlier storylines, however. In part, this is likely due to changes in the

paradigms by which wrestling storylines are created.27

V. Chiasmatic Postscript27 Hebert explains exactly how these paradigms shift within his in-process dissertation Professional Wrestling: Local Performance History, Global Performance Praxis. The transition from the territorial wrestling of much of the 20th century to the globalized entertainment product of the 1990s through the present is accompanied by changes in how promoters create and preserve wrestling fans’ aesthetic distance (and eventually allows for the distanced distance of the postmodern present). Louisiana promoter “Cowboy” Bill Watts, for example, loved to hire former athletes and incorporate their athletic background into their characters; but Watts’s Mid-South Wrestling intentionally presented a product where the fictional storylines would remain consistent form year to year. Performers who did anything to disrupt fans’ potential suspension of disbelief—such as losing a bar fight to a fan, feuding opponents being seen traveling together, and assorted other behaviors—were summarily fired by Watts in order to protect the integrity of Mid-South’s business.

26

One of the most compelling characters in the Judeo-Christian religious milieu is Jacob,

renamed Israel (“he who struggles with God”), who wrestles all night with a figure

indeterminate between man, angel, and God. This creature can’t defeat Jacob, so at the

end of the match he pulls a typical heel move, gratuitously injuring Jacob’s thigh. And let

us be absolutely clear about this. Using magic powers to injure an opponent is at least not

in the spirit of fair play as encoded in the rules of professional wrestling.28

The problem here is much worse than the normal one of the referee looking away

as the heel cheats. For if it might be God that Jacob is wrestling with, and the entire Old

Testament is the story of God’s belated and often sorry attempts to be a good referee for

the entire universe.29 But for familiar reasons one cannot be both participant and referee.

If one can change the rules to suit oneself whenever it is advantageous, then there is no

content whatsoever to the notion of a rule. Is it then any wonder that the true nature of

Jacob’s opponent is a metaphysically indeterminate man/angel/God, or that at the end of

the passage (Genesis 32:22-32) Jacob is able to demand a blessing from this creature? Is

it any wonder that in the Jewish ordering of the Old Testament books God’s very last

appearance among us is his temper tantrum response to Job (e.g. “Have you made a pet of

Leviathon for your daughters” (Job 41))? God can only cease being a monstrous

man/angel/god heel when he departs. His blessing of both Jacob and Job is to leave them

alone. And only here does God’s final turn become apparent, now as an eternal baby

28 Fans of WWF and WWE storylines since 1997 will no doubt recall that the professional wrestler Kane has magical powers that allow him to occasionally summon or control fire. For years the Japanese wrestling promotion Dynamic Dream Team (DDT) featured the work of Atsuo Sawada, who wrestled as Poison Julie Sawada, a magician who could cast spells in the ring that allowed him to use telekinesis to control the movements of his opponents should his spell be cast successfully. 29 See Jack Miles’ God: A Biography.

27

face,30 like famed luchador El Santo, who of metaphysical necessity can never be

unmasked.

If there is anything to the so-called “postmodern turn” it is that Jacob’s story is

everyone’s. The entities we wrestle with are revealed to be fictions, absent, but no less

real for all of that. To consider the possible ubiquity of this we must turn back to the

standard view of the nineteenth century hermeneuts of suspicion: Nietzsche, Marx, and

Freud. All in their own ways attempted to elucidate the material preconditions for

people’s commitment to religious ontology. That is, they sought to buttress a work

ontology with a shoot ontology, not explaining why the actual world is as described by

the work ontology but rather giving an ontological account of what reality must be like

such that people are led to embrace the work ontology in the first place.

It should be clear here that the stereotypical religious believer is SF while the

debunking hermeneut of suspicion is IC. Most people never attain the epistemic

sophistication of the normal wrestling fan. In fact David Hume’s admission that he

forgets his skeptical philosophy while drinking beer and shooting billiards is precisely the

admission that he vacillates between SF and IC. But what would the F be here? Someone

whose philosophy leads her to suspend disbelief without really believing in any robust

sense. Faithfulness, after all, is not reducible to the desiccated philosopher’s picture of

faith as believing a proposition for which one has little evidence.31 Pace the 19th century

hermeneuts of suspicion, we suspect that this most charitably describes the vast majority

30 We can’t be the only ones who found deep insight in the dinner table theological discussion in the movie “Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Ricky Bobby can only pray to his vision of the baby Jesus. Literal baby faces are themselves metaphysically impossible, somehow Winston Churchill made cute and lovable.31 We should note that we do not think this epistemic stance is proscribed by the Roman Catholic tradition or liberal forms of Protestantism. Philosophers gravitate to conservative Protestant accounts of faith as believing in some proposition without sufficient evidence precisely because contemporary philosophers are so concerned over what beliefs are true.

28

of actual religious “believers” who are fans, not southern fans. However, in some ways

this kind of fandom is different from that of professional wrestling. The professional

wrestling fan embraces both the shoot and work ontology while rooting for

performer/characters. It is not clear to us what a religious analogy would be.

But the PF is arguably the central figure of contemporary radical theology. If

Nietzsche is correct that the Christian valorization of truth leads to embracing a shoot

ontology inconsistent with the Christian work ontology, then the Christian can only stay

Christian by articulating an inconsistent work ontology, exactly as is being done (for

these very reasons) by postmodern theologians such as John Caputo.32 Caputo’s absent

God who insists but does not exist is motivated precisely by a fidelity and moral

temperament he takes to be essential to Christianity.

Following contemporary radical theologians, we posit that postmodernism proper

is always the result of the inscription of a practice’s shoot ontology into its work ontology

in a way inconsistent with the work ontology. But this does not destroy the work

ontology precisely because there is no alternative. Rather than thinking of wrestling’s

postmodern present as existing in opposition to its modernist past, we prefer to think of

wrestling’s postmodern present as building upon its modernist past: contemporary

postmodern wrestling is post-modern because it produces a largely modernist product

that is nonetheless aware of modernism’s limitations and shortcomings.33 To the extent

that there is a “postmodern condition” then, it is because of the ubiquity and necessity of

contemporary professional wrestling spectatorship practices in educated society at large.

32 See for example, Caputo’s recent The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps.33 We are indebted to our colleague John Fletcher for this formulation of the ways in which the relationship between modernity and postmodernity is fraught with complexity and less a relationship of antagonism and more of a relationship with numerous continuities and discontinuities between the two viewpoints.

29

The manner in which aspects of a shoot ontology inconsistent with a work

ontology become constitutive of that very work ontology iterates. Remember that SF

takes the work ontology to be a shoot! But what then of IC’s shoot ontology? Might it

also be a work in some deep sense? Perhaps one embraces the postmodern condition

precisely when one realizes that a given shoot is also a work. That is, whatever

hermeneutics of suspicion leads one to see one’s favored work ontology as a mere work

will also double back on the very shoot ontology being used to show that the work is a

fiction. In the case of wrestling, we note that one’s identity as a performer performing a

character also involves performing the very identity as a performer. But this realization

radically alters how one views so-called “real sports” as one begins to see the extent to

which the athletes themselves are characters. This of course leads to Howard Cosell’s

epiphany that “Professional wrestling is the only real sport,” precisely because it forces

the fans to confront the fact that a work is a work.

But here is the tension. If it is clear that a work is a work, then the work is in great

danger of no longer working as a work. The wrestling fan must persist in this chronic

instability, and commentators worry about the future of the practice as a result of this.

But this may be absolutely general. That is if postmodernism is true, we all must persist

in the same chronic instability.

We would like to conclude with the above thought about the possible ubiquity of

professional wrestling spectatorship norms, but we must issue one final clarification.

Nothing we have said is a concession to relativism, which is just the reduction of

everything to sociology. Clearly, if sociology is a work, then you can’t reduce everything

to it. Moreover the postmodern realization of the ubiquity of fictional elements only leads

30

skepticism or relativism if one’s philosophy of fiction dictates that fiction does not reveal

anything about the actual world, the world there before there were any people and that

will remain after we are all gone. While the equation of fictional and “unreal” has been a

shibboleth of contemporary debunking “theory” at least since the 1980s and is

presupposed among contemporary analytic “fictionalist” anti-metaphysicians, we find it

to be radically implausible.34

This is exactly where metaphysics must buttress ontological investigation. If the

PF is the epistemic exemplar of our age, what does this reveal about non-epistemic

reality? Metaphysics here might very well be the frustrated attempt to discern a final

shoot ontology to explains all works. But if the postmodernist is correct that such a thing

is of necessity itself a work, this must be understood to reflect something fundamental

about reality without humans. The end of this paper is no place to address this question,

but we should note that much recent European speculative metaphysics can be

reconfigured so that one might understand it as situating itself precisely in this problem

space.35 While we have said nothing to address this problem, we are happy to have shown

the manner in which professional wrestling is a paradigm case of it. Anyone who doubts

that there is (actual) truth in fiction will themselves have to wrestle with what we have

said.36

34 For an extended critique of this see Jon Cogburn and Mark Ohm’s “Towards an Object-Oriented Literary Theory.”35 For some relevant discussion of how speculative realism and object-oriented ontology are instances of this see again Jon Cogburn and Mark Ohm’s “Towards an Object-Oriented Literary Theory” as well as Graham Harman’s contrast of his own view with that of Quentin Meillassoux’s in Harman’s Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Harman’s discussion of how he and Meillassoux each keep and externalize distinct aspects of our Kantian heritage is beautiful. Harman keeps Kantian finitude and begins the construction of a metaphysics by de-anthropomorphizing it. If understood in a Sartrean context, Meillassoux can be seen as doing something analogous with respect to freedom, which is likewise de-anthropomorphized, argued to hold as the radical contingency of the non-human universe. 36 We dedicate this paper to Ian Crystal, who would have found it hilarious and also would have no doubt helped to make it much more so.

31

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