“There is no art or discipline for which the nature of reality is a matter of indifference,” according to novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, “so one ontology or another is always being assumed if not articulated.”[i] Choice of worldviews is a combination of chance (largely resulting from contingent factors such as where and when you were born and raised, the beliefs of your family and friends, etc.), opportunity (such as those proffered by education and self-directed research), and necessity (some limiting boundaries are imposed by disciplines and professions as well as by evidence provided through the senses over time – such as ice cream melts at the beach and large mammals don’t fly). The urge is innate. Whatever we may think we are and do, to re-phrase Robinson’s statement, we live in a world composed of, and spend our time composing, stories.
Few question the gist of the ideas presented in part one of this blog or the paragraph above. The most significant and most common critique is whether fiction is the right term for these quasi-innate/quasi-contingent-opportunistic-necessary worldviews. Here I turn to James J. Gibson. He begins his ecological study of perception with the observation that “animal and environment make an inseparable pair” – the latter term including other animals. Neither animal nor environment, according to Gibson, exists in any meaningful sense independent of the other. Nor does either exist in any meaningful sense in the worldview of the hard sciences. In particle physics, for example, both animals and environment are reduced to clusters of matter and energy in space and time.[ii] Cosmologists, at the opposite extreme, think in terms of planets and stars, solar systems and galaxies, up to the scale of the universe or universes. Animals and their environments, in other words, are orders of magnitude removed from the fundamental components of reality as understood by our best experimentalists. In the lenses of the most objective sciences, the things of the senses are epiphenomena. On a reality continuum, humans and habitats are closer, much closer, to the fictional end.
Animals and environments, of course, “exist” as epiphenomena – as actors and stages on which each of us, to borrow a line from Shakespeare, plays many parts. Even our habits of perception indicate our simultaneous urge for reality, on the one hand, and our incessant need to order the world according to our fictionalized and fictionalizing whims, on the other. The two key factors to identifying and giving attention to things in the environment, for example, are sensory intake of objects’ material qualities (that’s the one hand) and the emotional or motivational importance of that object to us (that’s the other).
Admittedly, all of this seems so obvious and historically factual as to deserve the name reality. But everything begins to look like history given the continuity of a fiction or worldview – call it a world-fiction.[iii] Think the history of architecture. The degree to which an organizing world-fiction is believed and comes to be regarding as an oppressive inevitably is demonstrated by the joy we take in confounding or contradictory fictions. Think superhero movies, fantasy novels, online avatars, and magic acts. According to a study by magician Joshua Jay and Dr. Lisa Grimm, given a choice between watching a magic trick and having its secrets revealed, 60% of people prefer the mystery or simple joy of what they don’t understand.[iv] The fact, if we can use such a term, is we attempt to avoid the weight of our chosen world-fictions by seeking novel ones. Think of the landscape of contemporary architecture.
[i] Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, (New York: Picador, 2016), 5.
[ii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 3-4.
[iii] Milan Kundera, The Curtain: an essay in seven parts, translated by Linda Asher, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008, 2005), 3.
[iv] J. Jay, “What Do Audiences Really Think?”, Magic, September 2016, 46-55.
Architecture is Fiction 