Futures and Fictions Read online

  What does the trope of the yarnwork give us to think as far as the construction of knowledge is concerned? Firstly, in general, plot-driven genre fictions boast this peculiar feature: they are epistemological dramas, dramatisations of the process of obtaining and configuring knowledge. The international thriller, the police procedural and the detective story present fictional inquiries couched within a framework where empirical data are assumed to be causally linked in a way that is subject to rational deduction. As Guy Lardreau observes, “in so far as such narratives present a search for the truth, how can they not envelop a theory of knowledge?” They therefore hold a particular interest for the philosopher in so far as they ask many questions familiar to him or her: “What is a clue, a sign, a proof? What is the status of evidence? What marks allow us to recognise the truth? […] the questions that govern the detective novel are those that we philosophers have always posed” (Lardreau 1977: 16–17).

  Such fictional scenarios present us with a localised object or event (the clue) that stands out from the ground of normality (the everyday crime scene), suggesting forces as yet unaccounted for (unknown accomplices, missing links); at the same time they imply an arsenal of reliable procedures (evidence-gathering, elimination, deduction) and perhaps scientific techniques capable of making objects speak (forensics) — methods capable of uncovering those unknown forces. As mentioned in many studies of detective fiction, it is a form that emerged, and could only emerge, in the modern scientific world, since it reflects the predominance of empirical evidence and rational deductive methods (see Boltanski 2014).

  Indeed, the classic predicament of the detective outlined above is similar to that which, according to Jean-Réné Vernes, lies at the origin of the very possibility of scientific knowledge (see Vernes 2000). For Vernes, what is called “Hume’s problem” (the fact that reason alone does not allow us to validly posit the existence of laws of nature, or to account for the regularities of empirical experience) constitutes a break in the history of philosophy whose consequences the discipline has yet to fully work through. Since, after Hume’s intervention, reason could no longer provide a grounding for the assumption of the existence of independent matter and natural laws, philosophy came loose from its mooring to the scientific spirit, and resigned itself to the examination of perception and the habitual structuring of phenomena within the mind. In response to this disaster, Vernes insists that our perceptions themselves force upon us the hypothesis of a causally determined “external world”. In his example, the concept of matter emerges when perceptually identical objects prove to have unaccountably different properties: if we have two coins that look and feel exactly the same, yet turn out to be of different weights, or if an apparently symmetrical die turns up a six on every throw, the probabilistic assumption that “all things are equal” is upset, and one is then compelled to cut open the coin or die in order to ascertain the reason for this departure from equilibrium. According to Vernes, the very meaning of “matter” lies in the enigma of the loaded die, in the disparity between apparent behaviour and an a priori model of the “ideal” die — the probabilistic assumption that “what is equally thinkable [viz. that the die will fall on any one of its faces] is equally possible”. This assumption, which becomes evident through its apparent infraction in privileged situations such as that of the loaded die, is identical with the hypothesis of matter, since it posits that any apparent anomaly must stem from our incomplete knowledge of an ulterior, causally consistent reality. This hypothesis “imposes itself upon thought”, and it alone can save philosophy from its post-Humean free-fall.

  Readers of Quentin Meillassoux’s work will easily comprehend how it proceeds from a confrontation with Vernes (see Meillassoux 2008) — indeed, Meillassoux has credited Vernes’s earlier work (Vernes 1982) with waking him from his dogmatic slumbers and inspiring his thinking on contingency (see Meillassoux 2008). Meillassoux precisely refuses Vernes’s attempt to reestablish scientific rationality on the basis of this probabilistic assumption, which he also sees tacitly inscribed in Kant’s argument on the transcendental necessity of the lawfulness of nature. Instead he chooses to accept the consequences of the reasonlessness of natural phenomena: nothing is necessarily as it is, even the laws of nature. Therefore we can have no sure knowledge of phenomena; the only certain knowledge we can possibly have is that deduced rationally from this very principle of “absolute contingency”.

  It would be an interesting exercise to extend Meillassoux’s inquiry into the possibility of a coherent “extro-science fiction” (one in which the laws of nature are themselves contingent and subject to change at any moment) (see Meillassoux 2015) to the hypothesis of an “extro-scientific detective fiction”. Surely the sleuth’s powers of deduction and evidence-gathering would be rendered utterly ineffectual in a universe (whether religious and magical, or “hyperchaotic” like Meillassoux’s) where victims could disappear, or be struck down by god, or where “clues” could simply materialise from nowhere, for no reason? For in the background of these fictions is a conception of knowledge founded on a stable causal framework, and their basic narrative device responds more to Vernes’s approach: the empirical presence of a salient feature that acts like a sort of mental grit, a cognitive irritant, impelling the protagonist to cut through the surface of things, to dig deeper, to slice open the die and find out why all things are not as equal as they ought to be, why the equation doesn’t quite add up. We could therefore say that the narrative motor of these fictions is fuelled by scientific epistemology; and that, philosophically, what they demand of us is to elaborate, not a strictly rational, but a problematic and procedural epistemology, one where knowledge is constructed in the attempt to restore equilibrium by cutting deeper and deeper into a situation in order to discover the unknown elements that continually throw it off-balance.

  The figure of the yarnwork is precisely a visual representation of this problematic cognitive state, one where the pieces, when connected systematically, still refuse to “add up”, where the die still seems to be loaded. And this brings us to the second intriguing feature of the yarnwork: in its onscreen versions, this form of fiction poses the interesting problem of how to render the cognitive reconfiguration of information visible, and visually compelling as image — a problem to which the yarnwork is a reliable and now classic response. Indeed, the yarnwork figures a most crucial moment in the plot: the moment when everything is almost in place, a moment of the highest tension for protagonist and viewer alike. As a kind of provisional summation, a pause in the narrative, the yarnwork moment invites us to join with the protagonist in experiencing this threshold moment, and in readying himself to make the final push toward resolution.

  The yarnwork binds together local empirical data in order to make it visible to the concentrated gaze, so that it might reveal what it owes to, and what it might contain of, some wider scheme of things, some more profound, hidden cause. But let us make a further observation about the way in which this information is pursued: rather than cutting into a problematic object such as the loaded die, in this kind of fiction the action of “cutting” moves outward, cleaving from the local to the global. As the typical situation would have it, arriving on the crime scene, what at first appears as a routine investigation will throw up some anomalous element, inspection of which will provide ingress into a broader intrigue. The ramifications of this anomaly will continue to unfold, with the episodic return of the sentiment that something doesn’t add up, and perhaps ultimately leading us to the yarnwork moment — both the cumulation of these episodes and the anticipation of all the missing pieces finally falling into place.

  There is also a narrative of the encrypted expression of power in play here: the local configurations are only corrupted and partial expressions of some ulterior plot, and the actors of the original crime scene may be mere puppets of a more nefarious crime. In this respect, the nature of these fictions can be clarified by comparing their narrative schema to a model drawn from elsewhere
— namely, the quest for self-knowledge pursued in the therapeutic process.

  In his early model of hysteria, Freud employs a metaphor for trauma that combines geology, cryptography and a theory of psychic defence (Freud 1895): At the core is trauma — the Thing that drives you but which, at the moment of consulting the analyst, you can neither access nor afford to touch. Around the core there are strata, hardened layers that are at once an expression of the trauma — like cooled lava — and an encryption of it, since it cannot be read clearly in these secondary residues. Their opaque, perplexing folds both block the way to the truth of the analysand’s symptom, and serve as protection against the trauma (like the crust of the earth, upon which the heat of the core can still be felt, and even keeps you warm, but cannot harm you). Yet (as both the geologist and the analyst must assume) these strata contain clues. Symptoms, indeed, are behaviours which, because they are apparently causally unconnected to their immediate context, seem to allude to some unknown factor. During the process of therapy, as the patient attempts to move through these layers to reach the core — i.e. to understand themselves and their trauma — on attaining each subsequent layer they are obliged to assemble a self-narrative using the materials at their disposal, which are always partial and incomplete; and it is the incompleteness of these narratives — something is always missing or not quite right — that continues to drive the meta-narrative of the therapeutic situation. Freud writes of

  the linkage made by a logical thread which reaches as far as the nucleus and tends to take an irregular and twisting path, different in every case. This arrangement has a dynamic character […] the course of the logical chain would have to be indicated by a broken line which would pass along the most roundabout paths from the surface to the deepest layers and back, and yet would in general advance from the periphery to the central nucleus (Freud 1895: 289).

  It is in following this winding thread that one hopes to reach the truth, which will reconfigure both what is known and the knower. This does not happen in a single revelatory moment, but over the course of a tortuous journey during which, episodically, the available data will resolve themselves into new patterns, each time providing a more comprehensive picture of the real source of the power that has a hold over the analysand.

  In the process of psychoanalysis (also, let us recall, inspired by the will to forge a “scientific” model of the psyche) as in the political thriller or detective drama, only at the end does one discover the power-source, that Thing that was driving the whole complex, the kingpin, the ultimate villain of the piece. In this sense, the original crime scene, that local, circumscribed and apparently trivial everyday scene which contains some worrying anomaly that doesn’t quite fit, is akin to the scene of the symptom, which, whether debilitating or merely peculiar, seems to have no reason, and therefore, within a “scientific” framework, must testify to the influence of some ulterior power — and thus compels continuation of the work.

  The question, of course — one to which each fictional detective, and each brand of therapy, provides a different answer — is how to find the thread from one to the other, or how to target the anomaly correctly and make the correct cuts in order to inspect it, further opening up one’s perspective from the local to the global scene. And this is, above all, a question of epistemology, one might almost say the question of epistemology, and of the yarnwork too: that of how the subject of knowledge can confidently pass from the gathering of piecemeal bits of information and observation of their asymmetries, to a configuration in which they are rendered coherent from a global point of view.

  In this sense, apparent departures within the crime genre are in reality only variations on a theme: CSI, for instance, gives us a diagram of contemporary modes of knowledge, but remains concerned with this connection between local and global. In CSI one proceeds from the crime scene inward to discover an ultra-local anomaly that will, in turn, allow one to ascend back to a reconstruction of the crime scene, and thereby to its place within a more global context (the chemical composition of soil particles recovered from the crime scene matches with the land around the corporate headquarters where the victim worked until he was fired for insubordination for calling attention to suspicious financial transactions…). In forensic drama the implicit scientific framework of the narrative form is literalised, and it is the microscopic object that provides the symptom, the grit in the otherwise smoothly functioning machine, that will be forensically inspected to reveal the broader scene.

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  The concept of “plot” provides a framework within which we can clarify such an epistemology and its attendant drama; and it is precisely the centrality of plot to these kinds of narratives — easy to denounce from a “literary” perspective as its weakness or debility, as in the faintly derogatory term “plot-driven fiction” — that explains their peculiar interest as epistemological dramas, or dramatisations of epistemology. Beyond the conservative gesture of countering the supposed poverty of this “minor” and all too “generic” form by the appeal to majority, perhaps through the hackneyed reference to Oedipus Rex as the “first detective story”, we can flip this literary denunciation of the supposedly downmarket craft of plotting by taking our lead from an historical account of the notion of plot that concerns not literature but theatre — which then will bring us back to the question of how the construction of knowledge is staged and narrated in visual forms of storytelling.

  It is immediately obvious that “plot” is a semantically rich word. Perhaps uppermost for us is plot in the sense of narrative, but not far behind it would come the conspiratorial sense of the word — the manipulation of affairs by some shady agent or agents behind the scenes. Also current, if less prominent, we find the senses of “plot” as territorial (a plot of land), graphic (plotting a graph), and geometrical or projective (plotting one space into another). All of these, as we shall see, are etymologically interlinked in a rather satisfying way, all the more so because this is not a case of returning to a single etymological origin but also (as is in fact common in etymology) one of accidents, convergences and semantic superpositions.

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  In his work on the history of design, Benedict Singleton has identified a set of perennial suspicions relating to the practice and the very notion of “design” and its related terms, all of which have connotations of complicity, connivance, deviousness or intrigue: craftiness, having designs on something or someone… and plotting (see Singleton 2008). Singleton links these misgivings to a well-founded fear concerning the primary act of design: In delimiting a plot — that is to say, in this context, carving out a chunk of material for use to a certain deliberate end — given that the material is never entirely neutral or lacking in its own history and energies, one also invites into one’s project forces from the outside; thus design is a constant negotiation with preexisting plots, an attempt to steer and mobilise them in the service of one’s own design for the materials at hand.

  Design has been seen as suspect, then, according to Singleton, because it deals not with the orderly marshalling of a passive matter — the hylomorphic schema whereby form is impressed upon matter — but with materials whose own proclivities and powers cannot be suppressed, but are to be harnessed and set to work for other purposes. Design is denigrated because the designer does not use her own prowess to tame matter, but colludes with nonhuman forces; which also means that the designer herself is subject to these ulterior plots that pre-existed her intentions and interventions. Design marks an acknowledgement of the designer’s own complicity in plots that may exceed her instrumental goals — for using already-existing energies to cunningly achieve your own ends suggests that other agencies may possibly have designs on you, and that, in selecting a plot to work on, you are merely further complicating twisted plots that existed long before you.

  The history of the word “plot” itself furnishes some evidence for this nexus of suspicion, intrigue and spatial material practice. In The English Renaissance Stage, Henry
Turner argues that the modern concept of plot emerged between the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries in the context of the dramatic arts, with the advent of a new kind of theatre, and in the attempts of its proponents to define their nascent profession (see Turner 2006).

  This involved the physical and cultural construction of a new type of theatre, a spatially enclosed building specifically marked out for dramatic use and with a platform stage (the word platform here already hinting at a connection with plot). This is the movement from an open-air theatre with journeymen actors and a porosity between players and audience (mystery plays) to an enclosed performance space to which an audience pays for entry, to watch the unfolding of plays whose action often spans more than one setting.

  What arose at this moment, as Turner explains, was the need for playwrights to conceptualise for themselves, and to explain to their audiences, the mechanisms of this new theatrical situation and its peculiar powers. The extraordinary nature of the theatre and the platform stage as a space that “can manipulate space, time, and the conventional properties of bodies” (Turner 2006: 32) was a crucial problem for the playwrights of the time not only intellectually but also commercially: to bring in an audience, they needed to justify the artificial construction within which they were to present their narratives. In plays of the period, therefore, we find lengthy defences or apologies which attempt to justify the theatre as spatial device, and to enlist the audience’s imaginative powers to make it function.

  In constructing these apologies, playwrights turned not to neo-classical literary theory or poetics, but to the conceptual resources provided by what Turner calls the “spatial arts”: that is, the practices of an emergent artisan class with whom they had daily contact, and with whom they seem to have identified (playwright, after all, refers not to writing but to materials that have been wrought, as in wheelwright) — and this is where plot enters the scene.