Futures and Fictions Page 23
A provisional definition of fiction could therefore be “a lie revealing itself as a lie” (Scheibe 1980: 21), with the added proviso that the revelation in question might only take effect in a particular context. Both fiction and deception peddle untruths, but fiction scuppers its own ability to deceive. In the case of the Horniman walrus, this dynamic plays itself out in the tensions between the interior and the surface of the mammal. The skin of a taxidermied walrus helps us to suspend our disbelief that the specimen we are looking at is in fact nothing more than a hide stretched over a substrate. This attempt to deceive the eye, however slight, is sabotaged not through some fault in the skin itself — some tear, transparency or discolouration — but through the interior — the substrate (too much stuffing as it were) — creating surface effects and distorting its “natural” appearance. Like a cartoon character who attempts to hide behind a lamppost quite obviously smaller than their body, the substrate of the walrus undermines the deception of the surface. However, the walrus’s substrate only renders itself visible through the surface of the animal, shattering the illusion the taxidermist works hard to create. To use another metaphor, the dynamic between the surface and the interior operates like a blush that unmasks the most accomplished of liars through the sudden rush of blood to the face. If surfaces can deceive the eye, this does not mean they are immune to an internal agent contradicting their truth claims. Objects in which this occurs operate on the basis of fictions rather than deceptions.
To subsume this curious object under the category of fiction, is, given the above definition, to claim that it operates as a lie that reveals itself to be a lie. With most works of fiction, this act of revealing is deliberate rather than accidental. With the Horniman walrus however, there is an internal agent that (at the risk of anthropomorphising the dead animal) “speaks” with a different voice than the one emanating from its surface. One need only consider the category of self-deception to realise that lies need not be spoken univocally. The same, I would claim, holds true for fiction. Since intentions can be elusive at the best of times, it is better to focus on the effects of fiction and deception, effects that can by turns be dazzling, confusing and deeply seductive.
Each of these effects hold true for an alternative definition of fiction, a definition which in many ways overruns the very notion of a definition, if we take the latter’s etymology as a boundary-setting activity at face value. For fiction is not always the equal partner in a stable relationship with fact. Sometimes fictions can operate outside of codifications of true and false. This is not a fiction that is opposed to fact, or even to deception, but one that builds up a series of surfaces so thick that notions of interiority and exteriority are thrown into question.
Essential Claims
For now let us dwell on the seam that separates the surface from its interior, which is a seam that has been mined by a great variety of artists, both living and dead. It has also proved to be a popular theme in philosophical thought. A theoretical preoccupation with surfaces and superficiality reached its zenith in the 1990s following the publication of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra, which famously lamented the meaninglessness that inheres in a social sphere dominated by simulacra. Around the same time, Fredric Jameson proposed that one of the supreme formal features of postmodernism was a new kind of depthlessness. Staging a confrontation between Vincent van Gogh’s painting of a peasant’s boots with Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980), he argued that the latter was symptomatic of a change in the way artworks encouraged us to read them, replacing a hermeneutic search for a larger meaning “behind” the work with a superficial fetishisation of the surface. Meanwhile Gilles Deleuze developed a more philosophically rooted conception of simulacra, grounded in a reading of Plato, or to be more precise, an interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s rallying call to “overthrow Platonism” (45). It is not my intention to retrace any of these arguments in any detail, but rather to conduct something of a raiding of Deleuze’s argument, insofar as it marshals an entire vocabulary of interiority, exteriority, falsehood and mimesis in order to redefine the concept of simulacrum.
Deleuze’s argument proceeds from the platonic distinction between essence and appearance, which in turn rests upon their respective proximity to transcendent Ideas. As Deleuze shows, the Platonic dialogues are replete with occasions when the philosopher is required to distinguish the true from the false, the pure from the impure. This activity touches on a range of subjects and involves a number of conceptual persona, from the best lover to the most abominable sophist. In each case, the philosopher’s task is to measure the truth claims of a particular person, object or event. And how does (s)he measure such truth claims? How does (s)he dismiss the false claimant and admit the true? It is, according to Deleuze, by measuring their proximity to a transcendent Idea, which is in turn grounded in myth, insofar as the latter is understood as a set of foundational archetypes rooted in the past, that carry symbolic weight in the present. This Idea cannot be embodied fully — the claimant is always only proximate to it — but it is nevertheless sufficient to bestow a certain degree of legitimacy on the claim, enough at least to protect the honour of a philosophy that sees itself as the arbiter of Truth.
A key aspect of this process is that for a claimant to be deemed legitimate, their resemblance to the Idea must go beyond surface appearances. They must carry their mimetic adherence to their core. For example, a legislator who lays claim to embodying the Idea of Justice must act in such a way that goes beyond the external appearance of being just. They must embody justice in all they say and do, regardless of how this might look. External resemblance is not enough to legitimise a claim for Plato. It must be backed up by an interior continuity with a transcendent Idea.
Armed with this philosophical rule of thumb, Plato is able to distinguish a valid claim, which is essentially a copy of the Idea, from an invalid claim, which is its simulacrum. Deleuze writes of the distinction as follows: “Copies are secondhand possessors, well-grounded claimants, authorised by resemblance. Simulacra are like false claimants, built on a dissimilitude, implying a perversion, an essential turning away” (1983: 47). The difference between the two is fundamental, and can be mapped onto the gulf that separates external appearance from interior essence. This is not to say that simulacra exist as pure surfaces, void of any interiority. As Deleuze makes clear, “the simulacrum implies great dimensions, depths, and distances which the observer cannot dominate” (1983: 49). In other words, the simulacrum allows for a discrepancy to creep in between the interior and the exterior. The simulacrum does not “do what it says on the tin”, in fact, its contents might be in total contradiction to the label. The simulacrum is founded on a principle of difference both between its interior and exterior, and between its interior and the Idea against which the philosopher tries to measure it.
As you might expect from a thinker well-known for his sustained critique of representational thought, Deleuze is quick to affirm the simulacrum over the copy, insofar as the copy derives its power from re-presenting an original. However, he does so not on the basis of a simple reversal of the Platonic position, but because the simulacrum abolishes the very distinction between the simulacrum and the copy. “The simulacrum is not a degraded copy”, Deleuze writes, “rather it contains a positive power which negates both original and copy, both model and reproduction” (1983: 53). In other words, the simulacrum should not be understood as a copy of a copy, and therefore belonging to the same series as the Idea against which it is measured. Such a series would be founded on a hierarchy of more or less mimetic forms, and would therefore still be representational. The simulacrum destroys such hierarchy; there is no commonality between the simulacrum and the original, or even a position from which to judge this commonality. In contrast to the copy, the simulacrum is founded on a principle of difference.
The example Deleuze gives of this is Pop art, which, needless to say, had an enduring concern with the mass (re)production of objects a
nd images. On the face of it, the Campbell’s soup cans, Brillo boxes and Coca-Cola bottles reproduced in Warhol’s work would seem to constitute straightforward duplications of the imagery of mass-produced consumer items. However the resemblance for Deleuze is only external, and the significance of Pop art lay precisely in its ability to push the mimetic principle so far that it changes not simply in degree, but in nature, turning from a copy into a simulacrum. Such an example is moot, given that many Pop artists not only mimicked the external appearance of consumer culture, but also actively embedded its logic of production into their artistic methodologies.
The resulting artworks, it could be argued, were similar both in degree and in nature to the cultural artefacts they copied, in so far as they passed through consumer culture without causing much friction along the way. Perhaps a less debatable example can be found in practices associated with camouflage.
Contrary to a popular misconception, camouflage is not simply a practice of copying the background environment into which one wants to blend. If the skin is an exterior border between the subject and their environment, camouflage, or to use the more technical term, “protective colouration”, does not seek to erase this border altogether. This is true both in human and non-human uses of camouflage. At the same time that camouflage enables a subject to become imperceptible within their environment, most often through visual means, it also enables an act of individuation to go undetected. This can happen on the scale of a single organism, for example a caterpillar that individuates and turns into a butterfly hidden inside a cocoon that resembles a dried leaf, or it can occur on an evolutionary timescale, where a species slowly individuates itself in relation to other elements in its background environment, while coming to resemble these elements ever more closely as time goes by. The potential for difference to emerge between the morphological (how plants and animals look) and the behavioural (how they act) shows that human visual perception can only ever scratch the surface of natural complexity.
In his uniquely heterodox work on mimicry, the surrealist writer Roger Caillois claimed that mimicry in the natural world “is necessarily accompanied by a decline in the feeling of personality and life” of the animal in question (1984: 30). If we look at camouflage from a vitalist perspective, this could not be further from the truth. Animal camouflage is not merely a form of adaptation to the background environment in which the animal lives. Nor is it a simply a visual pattern or aesthetic effect. As Hannah Rose Shell points out, camouflage is “meaningful as a way of seeing, being, moving, and working in the world. It is a form of cultivated subjectivity” (2012: 19). Shell makes this point in relation to human uses of camouflage, but I would claim it also holds true for non-human animals. The idea of cultivation hints at the presence of a self-reflexive agent modifying their appearance in relation to their surroundings, a ubiquitous process in nature, albeit one that may occur on a different timescale to the strictly human. In the natural world, a process of cultivation adds to the animal’s armoury of tools and techniques for defence, but also for doing battle with other animals, giving them a strategic advantage in a field layered with manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres. What appears to be a process of copying disguises another process of individuation. An apparent invisibility masks the roar of a species fighting for its ability to flourish. To borrow a term from Félix Guattari, we could say that such an operation proceeds by means of an “existential cut out” (2013: 63), which is to say, a territory established on the basis of an organism self-separating from a background that nevertheless sustains it.
Figure 1. Abbott Handerson Thayer (1918), Cut Out Silhouette.
In quite a different context, it was through the use of physical paper cutouts that Abbott Handerson Thayer, an American artist and naturalist who challenged nineteenth-century ideas about animal colourings, conveyed his discoveries to anyone who cared to listen.1 Such cutouts are one example in a long line of tools, techniques and technologies that have been used to expose the separation between exterior appearances and interior processes, from didactic collages to the military instruction videos and surveillance footage used today. These examples raise an interesting question regarding the visibility of simulacra in relation to the background of expected behaviours, objects and events with which they bear a resemblance. Namely, in order for the power of difference embodied in a simulacrum to make itself felt, must its ability to resemble that which it imitates momentarily be relinquished? Put otherwise, for us to recognise that someone is wearing a mask, must it momentarily slip, if not to reveal the face behind it, then at least another mask?
See Shells
In order to answer this question, let us take a detour through an artwork by Goldin+Senneby, an artist duo who have explored the murky world of “shell” companies in their collaborative practice. This example serves the additional purpose of shifting the emphasis from the visual to the discursive, allowing us to see that surfaces can operate in all manner of semiotic regimes, not only those apprehended through sight.
Goldin+Senneby’s longest running project to date, entitled Headless (2007-2014), is a complex conceptual object to describe, involving multiple exhibitions, a commissioned documentary, meetings in pay-perhour office spaces, interviews with appointed delegates, a lecture performance in a forest near Paris, another outside the macaque enclosure in London Zoo, and a murder-mystery novel dramatising the project’s development as a whole. The project hinges around a forced connection between the secret society set up by George Bataille in the 1930s (Acéphale — a French transliteration of the Greek for headless) and Headless Ltd., an offshore corporation registered in the Bahamas. Goldin+Senneby test the theory that Acéphale did not disband, as is generally assumed, or end with the eventual death of its members, but instead migrated into the secret world of offshore finance. This initial conceit for the project is ultimately rather implausible, and when we learn that Headless Ltd. is registered with The Sovereign Group (an international company that provides “wealth management services”), anyone who is familiar with Bataille’s work on sovereignty is likely to let out a small groan. Rather than focusing on this aspect of the project and the issue of sovereignty, it will be more useful to see what the work can tell us about the link between surfaces and fictions.
Figure 2. Goldin+Senneby (2009), Headless Symbol. Designed by Johan Hjerpe.
In the Headless project, the springboard that launches the work into the realms of fiction is again based on mimicry. Goldin+Senneby mimic the operations of the offshore financial companies they investigate by receding out of view as a proliferating cast of delegates and specialist contractors comes into focus. For example, when asked to give an artist talk at a gallery or university, they invariably send a spokesperson or emissary (the economic geographer Angus Cameron has played this role on a number of occasions); when asked to mount an exhibition, they employ curators or set designers to generate didactic displays. For part of their exhibition at The Power Plant in Toronto they screened a self-reflexive documentary in which two young filmmakers were hired to interview an investigative journalist about how they should go about investigating Headless Ltd. These working methods are central to the project as a whole, and they in effect create a “shell” of objects and actors that come into focus as Goldin+Senneby themselves recede from view, in the process mimicking similar practices of withdrawal in the world of offshore finance. The novel, also entitled Headless, mimics the genre conventions of a murder-mystery novel, and features a cast of real, made-up and slightly indeterminate characters and events. It has an almost telescopic structure of authorship, in the sense of a telescopic ladder where one section slides inside the next. Not only does Headless have a ghostwriter, John Barlow, but this ghostwriter himself has a ghostwriter, K.D., who seems to have been written into the plot against her own wishes.
Mimicry is what allows deception to go unnoticed, both in the Headless project and in the world of offshore finance. In the latter, a shell company mimics the operations of a normal
company, in some cases inventing shareholders, nominating a fake director and fabricating transactions. These actions and persona are what constitute the shell, or surface of the company. But what lies beneath this shell? From one perspective, shell companies are essentially hollow, which is to say empty of the usual functions of a company: selling goods or services. And yet from another perspective they mask an extended network of operations, often illicit, that hide within the interior of the shell. Exposing the discontinuity between the two is the unenviable task of financial investigators; rarely do shell companies undermine their own ability to deceive from within. By contrast, the deceptive surface of the Headless project is constantly threatened by the artwork itself. In fact, we could say that its very status as a work of art already casts doubt on the credibility of its authors’ claims. With both real shell companies and the Headless project there is a discrepancy between external appearance and an internal process, which involves the production of simulacra. However, it is only the Headless project, just like the Horniman walrus, that exposes the play between interior and exterior, and this is what allows the project as a whole to assume the status of a fiction.