I was the keynote speaker at the conference on “Das Wissen der Zukunft” (“Knowledge of the Future”) that took place at the University of Vienna on November 4-5, 2011.
My topic was “Anticipating the Future through Knowledge of the Fiction in Social Reality.”
I have heard a lot of statements and discussions about the dialogue between art and science. However, I have the distinct impression while listening to these discourses that, in spite of the massive focus on it by conferences of this sort, the dialogue between art and science is not going very well. The scientists don’t care about art and don’t respect it as a form of knowledge. My own view is that the presence of a third party at the table is very much required in order to bring this debate and project of the unification of knowledge forward. The third party to the debate is fiction. If many scientists do not take art seriously as a form of knowledge, it is very clear that they take fiction even less seriously as a legitimate form of knowledge. In my view, this is a very big mistake. In order to comprehend what is going on in the contemporary world – in many, many areas – we are going to need to bring in the perspective of fiction and start to show it a great deal of respect. I will demonstrate the truth value or logical value of my assertion that we need a rigorous new science of fiction in order to fathom what is going on around us.
I am by training an historian of ideas, and what I am most interested in is ideas. In my vision, great ideas need to be liberated from those who claim professional ownership of them. Just as it is one of my intellectual projects to liberate the idea of the quantum from quantum physics, to take it out of its context of professional physics and use it to understand everything, in a similar way, it is another one of my intellectual projects to liberate the idea of fiction from the specialists of literature, from the literature professors. In all domains of knowledge, in all areas of our social and individual existence, we suffer in our understanding due to naïve, unquestioned, unconscious assumptions about what is real and what is fictional. We need a serious and rigorous rethinking of these categories. In thinking about what is real and what is virtual, or what is real and what is fictional, I feel that I am up against the limitations of our language itself, the system of words-slash-terms-slash-concepts that we constructed a long time ago. And, as Wittgenstein said, the limits of language are the limits of thought. In everyday life media advertising that one sees and hears everywhere in the consumer society – in ads for electronic services ranging from online banking to online dating to online social networks – one sees and hears words like real and virtual thrown around as if their meaning were still self-evident, as if these categories had not already fundamentally been rendered obsolete by what we are collectively living through in all aspects of contemporary life, in the media space. I have seen or heard many advertising slogans in many languages in many countries which are structured exactly like this: “Buy our service and enjoy the real consequences of virtual living, virtual communities, or virtual interactions.” This advertising copy appears to be written in the spirit of a cynicism that takes advantage of the naïveté of the consuming public, oblivious to the implications what is taking place in the world around us. The goal of science is to understand the nature of things as they really are. In this sense, I am a scientist. But notice how it makes less and less sense nowadays to make statements like: “Science is about discovering the nature of reality.” or “My commitment as a scientist is to discover the nature of reality.” The New York University physics professor Alan Sokal said things like this very often about fifteen years ago, in the mid-1990s, when he was being widely interviewed after attacking French postmodernist thinkers for allegedly having inadequate scientific knowledge. The ground beneath our feet has shifted considerably since then. Reality – regardless of whether we think of it as scientifically objective or as socio-historically constructed – has been radically destabilized. The word “things” seems to be about all that we have left to speak about our passion for basic knowledge, our situation (to use two of the favorite words of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre). I find the use of the word “things” in this context of basic knowledge, basic experience, and basic culture fascinating, like “the nature of things” or “the order of things” (the title of Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses in English translation). “Back to the things themselves” was a dictum of Husserlian phenomenology, and I believe that we are now in a situation where existentialism and phenomenology must become important again. Yet what does it say about the state of our knowledge when we must rely so much on an abstract word like things? Or on bare life, which the philosopher Giorgio Agamben makes the centerpiece of his great work Homo Sacer? At the end of the seminal science fiction film Blade Runner, the android replicant played by Rutger Hauer says to Detective Rick Deckard: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.” This is a famous twenty-first century soliloquy, although written in the twentieth century. It is reminiscent of Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be – that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” I think that to continue to use the term “reality” is begging the question, because it is now indeed very problematic to know just what reality is. My goals are those of science. But I believe, along with the French philosopher Alain Badiou, that we will need a kind of Platonic invention of a new system of concepts for understanding what we have previously called the real and what we have previously called fiction.
In partial disagreement with Alain Badiou, I do not think that it will be a group of philosophers who will do this rethinking of the basic categories of how we relate to and classify knowledge and existence. It will a group of thinkers-slash-practitioners. They will be inspired by existentialist thinkers like Albert Camus and Paul Goodman – and even writers-slash-novelists like George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner – and how about the American contemporaries Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth – who are outside of philosophy? The thinkers of the “new real” will also have practical skills like in software development, database performance optimization, and hybrid technical-slash-cultural network topological design. The neo-Platonist project of which Badiou dreams will be a multidisciplinary project. I am sure that, in the end, Badiou will agree with me on this.
Academic philosophy itself long ago chose to reduce itself to a technical discourse, for purposes of careerism and institutional power, and thereby disqualified itself from taking the leading role in the revolution of ideas and of knowledge that is to come very soon. Academic philosophers have written bookshelves full of volumes on Nietzsche which are sitting up in the library stacks. But there is a great deal of confusion surrounding Nietzsche. The multitude of scholarly works have not succeeded in delivering to the public or to young students any clear understanding of the ideas of this greatest of German philosophers. The humanities professors have been babbling on about Nietzsche for 30 years, but nobody has understood a damned thing about him. Look, the emperor has no clothes! The Wikipedia article on Nietzsche tells us nearly nothing. It is about facts and not about ideas. And, by the way, the Wikipedia article on Albert Camus is one of the most absurd things that I have ever read. It claims that Camus was an adherent of an imaginary (in the bad sense) and non-existent philosophy that some Wikipedia contributor decided to call “absurdism.” There is no such thing as “absurdism.” So what is really the point of Nietzsche – what did Nietzsche say? – putting aside all the horrific fascist and leftist-arrogant interpretations? Both the fascists and the left-arrogant-Nietzscheans believe that they are not like us humans; they believe that they are superior to us, that they are a different species. I like a lot of things about post-humanism studies, but only when those things are combined with a deep commitment to good old fashioned liberal humanism. I am a human being. My own reading of Nietzsche, what I think really counts with Nietzsche, is that he was calling for a Gay Science, something like a science of fiction.
The scientific definitions of reality and fiction appear to be “behaviorist” definitions. We are dealing in this “primitive Earth civilization,” as Mr. Spock of the planet Vulcan would say, with a scientific knowledge that has an elective affinity with or a power of attraction towards objects of inquiry which “behave well” according to the expectations of how this primitive science would like its objects to behave. Something is considered to be scientific and scientifically “real” if it something that we can be quasi-certain about, those behaviors which can be grasped palpably and tangibly, which are greifbar in German, behaviors which are repeatable, and about which there is “scientific” consensus among those who consent. What nonconformist geniuses like Marcel Proust or James Joyce believed apparently doesn’t count for much in Earth civilization, that is, until eventually someone comes along and writes a book with a title like Proust Was a Neuroscientist or The Theory of Relativity in Finnegan’s Wake. Fiction, on the other hand, is that which we deem to be “just a story.” Anybody can think up a story, and one story is just as good as another. Even the so-called “postmodernist” and “social construction of reality” critics of science make this assumption about stories. They believed for several decades that they had knocked science down a peg by asserting that science is “just another story.” Once I heard someone say: “I used to respect science until I realized that it is just one more culturally constructed story.” This commonplace pseudo-critique of science is wrong, divisive, and ineffectual. According to Wikipedia, whose collaborative authors firmly uphold the current scientific paradigm: “Reality is often contrasted with what is imaginary, delusional, in the mind, dreams, what is abstract, what is false, or [the granddaddy of all pronounced opposites to reality] what is fictional. Fictions are not considered real.” [end of citation from Wikipedia] That is our operational, behaviorist, and pragmatic definition of fiction: fiction is that which is not real; fiction is the opposite of reality. This is an ideological procedure, and so far we have come up short in our efforts to analyse it.
An effectual, yet little understood, critique of the ideological operation of “the real” in all domains of contemporary society, including science, including – surprisingly – art, including politics and the media, is the system of criticism to be found in the thinking of Jean Baudrillard. The number of people on the planet who have seriously read and seriously understood Baudrillard I can count on the fingers of two hands, and I believe that I have had personal contact – at least virtual contact via e-mail as Baudrillard himself would have said – with all of them. Everyone else has ignored him or caricatured him. Baudrillard said explicitly “I am not a postmodernist,” and this was a correct assessment. Baudrillard’s great insight was that the insistence upon the Real is a binary opposition. As he wrote in his great book Impossible Exchange: “The real divested of the anti-real becomes hyperreal, more real than the real, and vanishes into simulation.” The media in which genuine thought flourishes is that of radical and recurring uncertainty. Thinking cannot be exchanged for anything, neither any declaration of truth in presence nor any alleged reality. Thinking is the great enemy of modern consumer society. It is precisely that which must be suppressed at any cost because thought exists in an impossible exchange, and we are living in the society of universal exchange. Our endless cultural signifying-processing in and through social technologies functions on the permanent insistence on the exchangeability of everything. The “other” of this insistence on the Real is the excluded term of the pair: radical uncertainty or Fiction. The insistence on the Real insists so much on its being purified from all fiction that it transforms itself into a monster. Baudrillard had several names for this monstrosity, the best of which is the Hyper-Real. He also called it: Simulation, the Simulacrum, the more real than real. But the real challenge is that of transforming fiction from a negatively defined term into an original, creative term. How do we do that? This is a Nietzschean challenge, a Nietzschean project, as defined by Nietzsche, for example, in On the Genealogy of Morals. There he starts to explore the question of how values can be proactively originated rather than being derived reactively, the very same question of “how does the new come into world?” that I have written about elsewhere. The answer is very simple. Simultaneously take very seriously what everyone else has said and believed, and at the same time ignore it all and follow your own inner calling. And this sincerity-slash-authenticity can be extended to an “I and Thou” relationship, and to many “I and Thou” relationships. My vision also entails going beyond Baudrillard. To see his positions and keywords – the language-terms of his self-contained system – as merely the beginning of the project of infusing knowledge of fiction into knowledge of the thing formerly known as reality. Needless to say, the new study of the science of fiction benefits from a great deal of input from the field of semiotics. DNA or the genetic code. The DNA code at the border between fiction and reality. The dominant ideology, the prevailing view on things in our society, what one reads and hears everywhere about genetics, about DNA, is that it is the master code of life. Life is defined in those little informational blueprints. This belief-system is, of course, reductionist. It appears to the statistically-oriented mind to be something like 50% of the correct explanation. But is reductionism necessarily bad? Of course, I personally think that reductionism is bad. But that is not a compelling argument. Most people in our society don’t think that reductionism is bad. Surprise, surprise! They have no idea what reductionism means. Nobody has ever explained it to them in a way that they can understand. And even if they did understand, they would, at first glance, have no compelling reason to abandon reductionism. Critical leftist intellectuals seem to think that reductionism is bad because they say that it is. No. Reductionism will only become bad, and will only fall, on the day when critical leftist intellectuals present a compelling argument against it, a compelling critique. The arguments that have so far been presented in the academic literature are not compelling. A well-known attempt at a critique of the “DNA as master code” ideology is that of Susan Oyama, a Professor of Psychology in New York, for example in her book The Ontogeny of Information. Oyama tries to critique the ideology of DNA as the master code of life by saying that the wrong question about life as an informational system is being asked. The right question about life would be too difficult to ask because our current computing paradigm does not yield sufficient computational power to support software programs that could answer it. Science is pragmatic and only asks questions that it is able to pragmatically answer. The allegedly awesome insight of Susan Oyama is that DNA is not static. DNA only becomes valid “information” that truly explains and corresponds to the reality of the organism in the actual living process of cell functions and the interaction of the organism with its surroundings. Real information only comes into existence in the process of ontogeny, which means the development or developmental history of an organism. So we must consider acquired traits in addition to heredity. Susan Oyama is constructivist. She is interactionist. She is dialectical. Everybody loves her work. It is frequently cited in critical theory literature. Oyama has supposedly “deconstructed” the myth of information. But no, Oyama has not deconstructed information. You would have to deconstruct the myth of reality in order to deconstruct the myth of information. Oyama has in fact remained within the same paradigm of believing in the reality and importance of information. She has merely tried to extend and expand the scope of what that professed great information is considered to be. She sees the larger picture of life processes. From the grounds of her commitment to the interactive and developmental dimensions, she believes that she is standing at a location from which it is possible to present a cogent argument as to why “our ways of thinking about the phenomena of life must be altered.” I do not find it to be a compelling argument. Information makes us into prisoners. Living under its rule, we are trapped by society’s expectations of us, by society’s definitions, written in its terms, of what our lives and our life’s activities mean. It is true that the living organism decodes in real-time, from the informational body of its genetic heritage, the behaviors that it needs to know in each instant in order to survive and live on. But the organism also has existential freedom. The living organism chooses what it does. In the here and now. It lives its story. It writes its narrative. It is the author of its own development. DNA is not destiny. Anatomy is not destiny. We always have choices, we discover choices, which can be regarded as being the fictional dimension. Every human being is condemned to freedom, to the freedom of his or her decisions. She must choose among the different possibilities, the potentialities, the quantum paths, the possible futures. Is the same true for animals? Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on which fiction is in command. Orwell’s Animal Farm? H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau? In the catastrophically negative Nazi fiction of a concentration camp, there are very few choices. But Roberto Benigni demonstrated in the film “Life is Beautiful” that there might even be some. The living organism can be the writer of stories, of fictions. Existence is not formed by the interaction of entities of any kind, but is rather designed by the living existent in free choice. Existence cannot be grasped by any language or conceptual terms; it remains a dynamic indeterminacy. CNN or the news of the world. It is almost too self-evident to require mentioning that the discourse of “the news” is at least as much about fiction as it is about any so-called reality. The news must be analysed as being in a strange tension between fiction and reality. I find it especially interesting when the news media reports with haughty morality on a crime while making itself into an accessory to the crime in the very act of reporting on it. Shortly after Amanda Knox was released from prison in Italy and returned to the United States, I saw a headline story about Knox on the front page of the German Bildzeitung, a sensationalist “yellow press” daily newspaper. Knox had stated that, while in an Italian prison, a prison guard had threatened her with sexual abuse. The graphical formatting of the article, the picture of Amanda Knox, the content and typography of the headline text – it was all a carefully orchestrated operation of supplemental sexual abuse of Amanda Knox. A sexual abuse carried out by the newspaper, its readers, and even by someone just glancing at it in the subway like me. An act of abuse practiced on the individual, in effect, by the entire society. Watch any consecutive hour of “CNN Headline News” and you will see many incidents similar to this. The former dictator Gaddafi’s daughter poured boiling water over the head of her nanny. We observe the nanny, suffering in her hospital room, in her hospital bed. It is one of the major headline stories of the day. It is shown six times an hour. In short, the news is fictional. The news is entertainment. The news is about making money for the news industry. In Cool Memories, Baudrillard wrote that he wanted to create a Situationist-like stealth agency that would “gather news of unreal events in order to disinform the public.” But it seems that this ironical project is no longer necessary since the news media themselves are now practicing the self-irony of doing exactly that.