3 Great Fictions
I like to think of there being three great fictions in the world. First, there is artistic fiction. We tell stories for entertainment, knowledge, and moral guidance (among other reasons). The stories are quite real (sounds, words), but what they point to is in our heads. Same with art. There's the artifact, and there's the bit about what we do with the artifact in our minds, our experience. That's the fictive bit. Artifice. Can't say that the painting is artifice--it's right there in front of you, real as ever. It's something about what we say it *does* or *is* or how we change in being there with it for a bit, coming over all epiphanic if it's really good, and that's the fiction part working.
Second, there is science. This is different, and it's the same. I have to put it that way to try to get at it. Science constructs an account of the world--or at least a wild set of "natural" processes in the world. It does this with observation, with theory, with experiment, analysis, and with a lot of debate about what it's just done, did, and did over. What gets created is a fictive world. A world of point charges and dark matter and moments of inertia. These are objects first in an artiface of science. Yes, just theoretical constructs, and names for relationships, and tags to observations, but collectively they give us this jittery feeling that we see how things work without us, good enough at least to design bridges and cell phones and who knows what else. In the back of it all, though, there is this imagination trough that attracts. You look up at the moon. What's this whole thing that's happening, and why are we so petty and screwed over so much of the time, even those of us without drinking habits? And science says--here is what appears to be going on anyway, regardless. A bit peaceful, actually, if you think about it, even if not super full of ourselves. Still, it's a fiction.
Finally, there's the future. This is a strange space. Out in front of us, endlessly winding away, where thing are going, but never get to, and where nothing seems to come back. It's like we are looking out into a great road, no a huge number of roads, a maze of possible roads. The future we carve up into time slices--what's right in front of us, next breath on the way--good--now a rest, and then another. Beyond that, near day stuff with minor uncertainties and choices. Broader, there are events and bad weather and what will happen if my health goes, and it would be nice to be employed in a year. And we can push it past personal time to corporate life--where the will to be immortal is perhaps just as hard, but if you're good at it, a company can easily outlive its founders. Then there's geologic time--Hutton's no prospect of an end that was better than most jittery epiphanic momemts. Mostly though, it pushes out a point of closure--an asteroid impact, a messianic apocalypse, a collision of galaxies, a universe that expands and cools for billions of years which mean nothing because what's the point of making the clock of all things a blip of earth around a blip of sun in a blip of galaxy. Blipping useless.
We work our ways among these three great fictions. They matter hugely every day. How we handle ourselves, the narrative patterns of imagination, are framed by these three great fictions. To study one is to gain facility with each of them. But making the transfer isn't always easy. The study of artistic fiction--or the practice of art--is a form of inquiry. Not just self-inquiry, but of the things of the world, of relationships and objects, of expectations and not, of textures and forms and designs. Probably there are easy technical terms for these. I don't know them off hand. But what it gives one, I think, is an ability to bring things out of the unknown, to open up what isn't. This is very cool. What's the unknown, the blank before there was a big bang? The stuff that science hasn't got to yet. All the pieces of the future we haven't got around to thinking about. Art is into this. It sets up the ground for interpretation. It works the interpretation zizzle in us. Getting there, doing art--that's something different. Still with zizzle, but it's not like the thing is made of the same stuff as the properties of the thing.
Science has some of this, too, this bringing things out of the unknown. But it moves toward problems, the crucial experiment that decides among competing hypotheses. Science accumulates data, and makes a pivotal interpretation--provisional until the data are reworked and things are adjusted. Or everything slips in a shift--luminiferous ether? No, just the void? But a void that's apparently boiling with tiny stuff? Oh, is it dark matter? dark energy? Keeps us going because we rework the data. The data itself slips as evidence of this, to evidence of that. Right now, we gather climate data and scare ourselves silly--the climate changes. Heck, it's changing now in various places. Interpretation of the data in support of a ripping story about doom and destruction brought about by mankind's carbon sins (not to mention the methane sins of countless termites and pigs). Yeah, let's keep those pivotal interpretations coming.
Science sets us with a framework of relations in which mostly we don't have to include ourselves, and which done well, gives us things that are remarkably reliable after we've studied them, and a supply of new things that defy our intuitions, mostly, and that's good for us.
And the future gives us that greatest disrupter of the present, the event. Events come sweeping out of the future like the storm blowing in off the Pacific Ocean as I write this. Really, they don't come from the future, they erupt out of our living and doing things, and happening to be around to be the foil for what nature does anyway, under the most strictly controlled laboratory conditions. We long for events. It's a reason we watch sports, because it doses us up on events when there's nothing else that hits on our lives. We create a little contained future in a game, and watch it unfold, and for a bit we're the gods in the stands, and it's good. But all this is a fiction, from the future. The unexpected. Kissinger has this quip in Diplomacy about events--it's the one thing the diplomat can't control.
That's why these are great fictions--art, science, future--because we accept that we cannot control them. This is just an attitude, of course, because without us, these wouldn't be at all, so there's this dependency thing. But these things are greater than us, we accept that--that nature, the future, art--are on a grand scale. It's a kind of sublime. A stance about it. There it is. It is around these things--anticipating, characterizing, accumulating, contributing--that we do some of our very best work. Mostly fiction is contracted with the real, in league with the false and put in a different part of the bookstore from the "non-fiction" and the "self-help" and those cooking recipes with friendly advice--what's that all about? But the core of it is, these great fictions are at the root of how we go about framing some really important tasks, and this is beyond the bit about utility, entertainment, and being always prepared.
It's a point about a way of living, a reason for living, wave against the sand, shifting the beach a bit. I'm intrigued by these fictions, and find some advantage in the work to understand how they operate, and what my role is in carrying them forward.
Second, there is science. This is different, and it's the same. I have to put it that way to try to get at it. Science constructs an account of the world--or at least a wild set of "natural" processes in the world. It does this with observation, with theory, with experiment, analysis, and with a lot of debate about what it's just done, did, and did over. What gets created is a fictive world. A world of point charges and dark matter and moments of inertia. These are objects first in an artiface of science. Yes, just theoretical constructs, and names for relationships, and tags to observations, but collectively they give us this jittery feeling that we see how things work without us, good enough at least to design bridges and cell phones and who knows what else. In the back of it all, though, there is this imagination trough that attracts. You look up at the moon. What's this whole thing that's happening, and why are we so petty and screwed over so much of the time, even those of us without drinking habits? And science says--here is what appears to be going on anyway, regardless. A bit peaceful, actually, if you think about it, even if not super full of ourselves. Still, it's a fiction.
Finally, there's the future. This is a strange space. Out in front of us, endlessly winding away, where thing are going, but never get to, and where nothing seems to come back. It's like we are looking out into a great road, no a huge number of roads, a maze of possible roads. The future we carve up into time slices--what's right in front of us, next breath on the way--good--now a rest, and then another. Beyond that, near day stuff with minor uncertainties and choices. Broader, there are events and bad weather and what will happen if my health goes, and it would be nice to be employed in a year. And we can push it past personal time to corporate life--where the will to be immortal is perhaps just as hard, but if you're good at it, a company can easily outlive its founders. Then there's geologic time--Hutton's no prospect of an end that was better than most jittery epiphanic momemts. Mostly though, it pushes out a point of closure--an asteroid impact, a messianic apocalypse, a collision of galaxies, a universe that expands and cools for billions of years which mean nothing because what's the point of making the clock of all things a blip of earth around a blip of sun in a blip of galaxy. Blipping useless.
We work our ways among these three great fictions. They matter hugely every day. How we handle ourselves, the narrative patterns of imagination, are framed by these three great fictions. To study one is to gain facility with each of them. But making the transfer isn't always easy. The study of artistic fiction--or the practice of art--is a form of inquiry. Not just self-inquiry, but of the things of the world, of relationships and objects, of expectations and not, of textures and forms and designs. Probably there are easy technical terms for these. I don't know them off hand. But what it gives one, I think, is an ability to bring things out of the unknown, to open up what isn't. This is very cool. What's the unknown, the blank before there was a big bang? The stuff that science hasn't got to yet. All the pieces of the future we haven't got around to thinking about. Art is into this. It sets up the ground for interpretation. It works the interpretation zizzle in us. Getting there, doing art--that's something different. Still with zizzle, but it's not like the thing is made of the same stuff as the properties of the thing.
Science has some of this, too, this bringing things out of the unknown. But it moves toward problems, the crucial experiment that decides among competing hypotheses. Science accumulates data, and makes a pivotal interpretation--provisional until the data are reworked and things are adjusted. Or everything slips in a shift--luminiferous ether? No, just the void? But a void that's apparently boiling with tiny stuff? Oh, is it dark matter? dark energy? Keeps us going because we rework the data. The data itself slips as evidence of this, to evidence of that. Right now, we gather climate data and scare ourselves silly--the climate changes. Heck, it's changing now in various places. Interpretation of the data in support of a ripping story about doom and destruction brought about by mankind's carbon sins (not to mention the methane sins of countless termites and pigs). Yeah, let's keep those pivotal interpretations coming.
Science sets us with a framework of relations in which mostly we don't have to include ourselves, and which done well, gives us things that are remarkably reliable after we've studied them, and a supply of new things that defy our intuitions, mostly, and that's good for us.
And the future gives us that greatest disrupter of the present, the event. Events come sweeping out of the future like the storm blowing in off the Pacific Ocean as I write this. Really, they don't come from the future, they erupt out of our living and doing things, and happening to be around to be the foil for what nature does anyway, under the most strictly controlled laboratory conditions. We long for events. It's a reason we watch sports, because it doses us up on events when there's nothing else that hits on our lives. We create a little contained future in a game, and watch it unfold, and for a bit we're the gods in the stands, and it's good. But all this is a fiction, from the future. The unexpected. Kissinger has this quip in Diplomacy about events--it's the one thing the diplomat can't control.
That's why these are great fictions--art, science, future--because we accept that we cannot control them. This is just an attitude, of course, because without us, these wouldn't be at all, so there's this dependency thing. But these things are greater than us, we accept that--that nature, the future, art--are on a grand scale. It's a kind of sublime. A stance about it. There it is. It is around these things--anticipating, characterizing, accumulating, contributing--that we do some of our very best work. Mostly fiction is contracted with the real, in league with the false and put in a different part of the bookstore from the "non-fiction" and the "self-help" and those cooking recipes with friendly advice--what's that all about? But the core of it is, these great fictions are at the root of how we go about framing some really important tasks, and this is beyond the bit about utility, entertainment, and being always prepared.
It's a point about a way of living, a reason for living, wave against the sand, shifting the beach a bit. I'm intrigued by these fictions, and find some advantage in the work to understand how they operate, and what my role is in carrying them forward.
posted by Gerry Barnett at
3:20 PM
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