Futures and Fictions Read online

  Plot and plat, and the verb platting or later, emplotment, are connected with the notion of a groundplat: a diagram or working drawing used in practical geometry — for instance in surveying, carpentry and building — involving measurement and reduction to a two-dimensional representation. The plat, plane or flat, in technical manuals of the time, forms a part of the geometrical triad of a pricke, platte forme and a body — what we would call today point, area and body. The plot or plat, then, is a schematic geometrical projection, originally a chart or diagram included in a book for the purposes of demonstration. As Turner shows, playwrights conceptualised the capacity of the theatrical situation to achieve startling “imaginative projections” in terms of a power of “translation” or “projection” borrowed from these geometrical diagrams: “an artificial means whereby the viewer may see a series of particular places — remote in time as well as space — that could never be grasped by the naked eye alone” (Turner 2006: 8). A scene of a battle in France, a scene in the royal castle, temporal and spatial ellipses, all contained within the closed space of the theatre… none of this is natural, nor can it be taken for granted that audiences will accept it. So the playwrights forewarn the audience by using the analogy of the “plot” as a rhetorical device to justify the new narrative and spatial form: the action on the stage is “like” the plot of a piece of land or a house, it schematises a more complex reality. In the following examples given by Turner, dating from the end of the sixteenth century, we see the playwrights overtly petitioning the audience to use their power of imagination in order to become complicit in the function of this projective plotting:

  And for this small Circumference must stand,

  For the imagind Sur-face of much land,

  Of many kingdoms, and since many a mile,

  Should here be measured out: our muse intreats,

  Your thoughts to helpe poore Art, and to allow

  That I may serve as Chorus to her scenes

  She begs your pardon, for sheele send me foorth,

  Not when the lawes of Poesy doe call,

  But as the storie needes…

  The world to the circumference of heaven,

  Is as a small point in Geometrie,

  Whose greatness is so little, that a lesse

  Cannot be made: into that narrow roome,

  Your quicke imaginations we must charme,

  To turne that world; and (turn’d) again to part it

  Into large kingdoms, and within one moment,

  To carrie Fortunatus on the wings

  Of active thought, many a thousand miles

  (Dekker, Old Fortunatus)

  …But pardon, gentles all,

  The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared

  On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

  So great an object. Can this cock-pit hold

  The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

  Within this wooden O the very casques

  That did affright the air at Agincourt?

  O pardon: since a crooked figure may

  Attest in little place a million,

  And let us, ciphers to this great account,

  On your imaginary forces work.

  Suppose within the girdle of these walls

  Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

  Whose high uprearèd and abutting fronts

  The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.

  Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:

  Into a thousand parts divide one man,

  And make imaginary puissance.

  (Shakespeare, Henry V)

  “Plot” eventually came to mean a diagram of the spatial arrangement of the stage and the various entrances and exits during a play, which was hung on the boundary between off and onstage, and “subdivid[ed] the narrative action of the play into the entrances and exits of the actors, all within carefully ruled columns and boxes” (Turner 2006: 23). And indeed, the pivot of theatrical emplotment, as it came to be called, is the boundary between offstage and onstage. This is effectively where the risky business of plotting, the reductive projection of the detailed developments of the story into the limited space and gestures of the theatre, takes place. Emplotment was understood as a kind of projection from the dense complexity of an underlying story into its staged schematisation, in a concept adapted from the popular literature of practical geometry used in the work of the playwrights’ fellow artisans, and this trope from the “practical spatial arts” become hybridised with the inherited traditions of poetics. The history of the word “plot” therefore testifies to the emergence of an epistemological model from a body of professional knowhow and its transfer to the spatial device and narrative forms of the theatre — that is, poetics and its reception understood as ways of knowing. As Turner says, what takes place here is an “adapt[ing] [of] a practical knowledge of geometrical form to the realm of aesthetic form, using the methods, habits of thought, and even the economic formations of these technical fields to produce a device — a theatron or ‘beholding place’” (Turner 2006: 81).

  The last piece of this history falls into place with the convergence, in the late sixteenth century, of plot with the French word complot, originally meaning “dense crowd” — a word that brings with it the connotations of intrigue, strategy, possibly with devious or harmful intent. Complot related to a mode of practical intelligence (such as in military strategy) in which deliberation about human action involved the consideration of the spatial disposition of the actors. To the notion of a projection or translation from one space to another, it adds the sense of an ulterior agency controlling the space and players of the theatron (here, possibly, a theatre of war) from outside — the one who pulls the strings and directs the action while keeping the full story hidden backstage.

  As the designs and devices of a character in a play become assimilated to the projective plottings of the strategist, and to the directing of the play itself, this enriches the concept of emplotment as “the formal decision to represent some events onstage while withholding others from view” (Turner 2006: 213) — as an incomplete, schematic revelation. According to this developed sense of “plot”, as Turner argues, at the limit “all modes of ordering perceived experience […] could be said to constitute a preliminary level of emplotment” (Turner 2006: 24) — plotting, then, as a general epistemological model.

  If we make the simple gesture of moving beyond a simple binary model of offstage and onstage, what arises as a speculative surplus from the nexus of the “spatial, geometrical and topographical” and the “strategic, deliberative and pragmatic” senses of plot is a very distinctive schema: that of a potentially endless series of points of view, beholding places — theatrons — each one an information environment coupled with a perspectival orientation, stabilised by a closure which, however, is compromised by its ultimate contiguity with a (manipulative) outside. Which brings us back to the territorial sense of “plot” as an incomplete circumscription of material, and to Singleton’s understanding of design as involving the carving-out of a block of material which may be suspected of carrying with it germs of the outside, ulterior powers that will possibly compromise one’s intentions. In short, what plot suggests is a circumscription made for the purposes of gaining knowledge of some situation, but one that is always incomplete, and thus brings with it introjections from the outside.2

  This in turn suggests the schema of the yarnwork, the in-camera projection of the investigator’s predicament. The detective seeks to move from a particular “beholding place” — the inside of a limited “theatre” in which his perception of events remains constrained by the data immediately available — to a wider field where he would uncover, progressively, the “real story”. But the question here is the inverse of the playwright’s: how to move the other way, from the projected diagram — the plot — to that of which it is a projection. As if thematising their own mechanisms, in yarnwork scenes detective shows visually stage this infospatial drama in which the
protagonist is constantly trying to escape the local theatron, to discover the way “backstage” so as to reveal the broader global story.

  What is really required here — as will be confirmed by any dedicated viewer of such shows — is to maintain a thread between these different mappings of the information-space. Our detective has the local situation, with elements that do not fit, and which solicit her to follow the thread further, or to find the resources to cut into some anomalous clue so as to cut herself out of her current epistemological constraints. She cannot try to read the outstanding clue in terms of the local site, for this is precisely what it isn’t: the statement that shows that the dead man was moving millions of dollars into a Swiss bank account obviously is not a part of the local story about a hapless clerk who had split from his girlfriend and may have been suicidal. But the detective also cannot reformat the local plot entirely in terms of the global story she discovers: to see a homicide as “merely” an incidental effect of the movement of global capital also fails to capture the situation, which of course is also a local — human — tragedy! Either of these paths would dissolve the tension that drives the narrative forward.

  What is achieved by the most skilled plotters3 is a kind of stereoscopic — or multiscopic — way of looking at things, one that is able to shift between different information-spaces, different theatrons, while maintaining their delicate coherence. Knowledge then becomes a form of navigation, a shifting of perspectives or a movement across transformations, across contexts or through a staggered series of theatrons (and what is navigation, if not plotting?).

  Plot twists are the turning points in this navigation. Marrying the spatial, topographical or graphical sense of the word plot with the temporal sense of a narrative progression, plot twists are the points in the narrative at which one discovers that something which seemed anomalous or counterintuitive at the local level can be explained as the importation or introjection of an element of the wider environment into the local context (what the victim tried to scrawl in blood on the hotel bathroom mirror wasn’t her killer’s name, but the access code for a restricted-access Department of Defence computer account). Having previously achieved temporary stability with a provisional configuration of the available data, as we shift focus, as we change the mode of projection, this data is entirely reconfigured. As in a kaleidoscope, all of the elements shift in relation to one other, but this gives onto a new stability.

  These moments of disorientation and reorientation are what constitute, for the reader or viewer, the pleasure of the plot. In the best fictions, as they take place we feel our sense of ourselves as subject of this knowledge-process shifting along with the protagonist’s. Here, Jason Bourne provides the missing link between our fictional and therapeutic models, for the entire conceit of the Bourne series relies on traumatic dissociation. The locality of Bourne’s own psyche bears traces of a wider context of which he has no conscious knowledge — so Bourne’s brain is both theatron and complot. Each discovery of an external fact is also a discovery about himself, a reorientation. But in a more general sense, ultimately “trauma” is simply the condition of locality or contingent sitedness as such. Trauma is an epistemological condition, or the condition of epistemology itself: an incomplete cut between a local site and an outside that has already affected it in some way. It is the introjected traces of the outside, clues betraying the emplotment of a deeper story, which at once provide the constitutive disequilibrium that drives the investigation, and promise the possibility of knowledge.

  The plot twist, then, comprises both a stability, a new reconciliation of local and global, and a kind of panic that results from the impossibility of achieving this reconciliation in a single image: there is an oscillation between different orientations in which we find it difficult to grasp one without losing the other. This subjective state can of course be “resolved” in a certain sense, and this is the goal of Bourne’s quest and the aim of any therapy: to reach a level at which one finds a thread, manages to integrate most of the elements so as to become “functional” again. But in a more essential sense it is never resolved, or at least it could always go further. For the concept of plot makes things more complex and more twisted than reaching a ground, finally discovering the kingpin and closing the case. There is not simply a figure and a ground, but an infinite abyss of “offstages”, a constantly shifting relation of ungrounding, a potentially endless series of plot twists and complicities which, as in Bourne, tend to draw the investigator himself into their kaleidoscopic maelstrom. This is a question of affordance: how many revelations can the subject of knowledge afford before the grounds of his own self-knowledge are eroded, transformed, shifted, twisted so much by the plot that he becomes a patient rather than an agent of the investigation? In some of the best detective fiction this predicament itself is dramatised, as the investigator realises, on the edge of madness, that they themselves are caught up in the plot-threads they are trying to untangle. A peril which is, in fact, inseparable from the pursuit of knowledge, as evidenced in the sometimes agonising upheavals of the therapeutic situation.

  *

  The plot twist is the moment of cognitive reorientation in which the protagonist replots available data according to a new distribution whose principles were lacking in the situation or theatron within which he previously laboured; or rather, all but lacking, since precisely what these fictions show us, once again, is that there is never absolute discontinuity. But the yarnwork marks the moment prior to the plot twist, a moment which, within the drama, overtly thematises and figures, in the form of a diagram, the effort of thinking through the plot. If the plot twist is the moment of cognitive disorientation, a moment of the replotting of the available data, then the moment that directly precedes it, figured in visual media by the yarnwork, is a moment of perplexity. The yarnwork scene dramatises the anticipation of reorientation, of an incipient plot twist.

  Relating this back to the theatrical origins of the word “plot”, we can think of a yarnwork as the inverse of emplotment: where the plat was the diagrammatic avatar of the craft of emplotment — the management of the boundary between onstage and offstage, between story and plot, the projection of a dense unseen outside (complot) into a theatron, a beholding place — then conversely, in the yarnwork, the viewer — thus far trapped in a limited theatron — is given to overtly ponder, through the eyes of the protagonist, an incomplete reconstruction of its connection to another space: a diagram which, if completed, would enable navigation the other way, from a local situation to the dense multitude of which it is but a partial projection; to the next moment in the investigation, when the implication of the previous action within a wider plot will become clear. The yarnwork moment logically precedes the unveiling of this ulterior space, the passage “backstage”.

  Figure 2. Robin Mackay, Paul Chaney and Sam Forsythe (2015), Installation “Speculum Topographicum”. Bergen Kunsthalle.

  *

  Given all of this, one is tempted to say that the “extro-scientific detective story” is after all an impossibility. For, from this point of view, Meillassoux’s insistence, contra Vernes, that philosophical knowledge demands the jettisoning of all empirical detail in favour of an a priori “intellectual intuition” of the principle of absolute contingency, would leave us with a global with no consistent connection to any locality, thus denarrativising knowledge, discarding information on every side, dropping every thread, and abandoning all reliable possibility of navigation.

  Instead, the universe of the detective story is that of a problematic, not a rational-speculative materialism: one that combines the assumption of universal causal coherence with the drama of incomplete (local) cognitive purchase by way of a plot into which anomalous traces of the outside insinuate themselves, drawing the disoriented investigator into ever-widening vistas where his map of the world and of himself will be transformed, twisted, and replotted, across a series of moments whose diachronicity is constitutive of the nature of knowledge itself.
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  There is always something that stands out from the ground, something that “doesn’t add up” and which cannot be accounted for by local principles. What drives investigation is the theatrical introjection or emplotment of data from the global environment, the clue, the index of plotting at work behind the scenes, the element that doesn’t fit but will be leveraged in order to drive further plotting. The dice are always loaded; continual navigation and reorientation is inevitable. The essential tools of the detective and the therapist alike are the scalpel and the compass.

  1. This essay is part of a long-term research project which began with the seminar “When Site Lost the Plot” at Goldsmiths, University of London, 7–9 May 2013, expanded proceedings of which were published in When Site Lost the Plot (Mackay 2015). The project was extended during a residency at Bergen Kunsthall, “The Ultimate Yarnwork”, 29 Jan–9 Feb 2015, https://www.urbanomic.com/event/the-ultimate-yarnwork/. Significant contributions to the work presented here came from discussions with Amanda Beech, Paul Chaney, Sam Forsythe, Reza Negarestani and Benedict Singleton.

  2. Here we can expand on the analogy with the therapeutic situation by considering how Sandòr Ferenczi’s notion of introjection challenges Freud’s conception of trauma, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as extrojective defence against the outside. See my “The Barker Topos”, in Mackay 2015: 253–68.

  3. See the interview with the “nordic noir” writer Gunnar Staalesen conducted as part of “The Ultimate Yarnwork”, https://www.urbanomic.com/ podcast/yarncast-gunnar-staalesen-noir-in-ultima-thule/.

  Works Cited

  Boltanski, Luc (2014), Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies. London: Polity.

  Freud, Sigmund (1895), “The Psychotherapy of Hysteria”, in Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 253-305.