What is it that we do, we fiction-making animals? We move in and through physical reality and experience ourselves wandering in environments – the former an event verifiable by modern science and the latter the subject of personal narratives. This way of putting things is an oversimplification, yes, but more or less correct. It is a mistake, however, to categorize the former (the physical) as factual and the latter (the experiential) as fantasy. The difference between science and fiction is not that the former deals with reality and the latter escapism or self-indulgence. Science deals in quantifiable description, whereas fiction describes (and describes into existence) qualities. Descriptions, simply, with divergent ends.
We are capable of operating in multiple ways. In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that we are incapable of operating in singular ways or worldviews. Standing on a plot of ground, we are (usually unconsciously) participating in the realities of particle physics, biology, and geology while we enjoy the vista and take note of the weather for the prospect of some afternoon activity or consider the site limits and topography for a building project or try to guess at the cost of the parcel or its distance to the nearest utility. The grass is green and sky blue in ways peculiar to the moment. A scent of pine and the echo of a distant siren waft through the air. We think of nature and civilization. There is no either/or. We stand there in an environment of our making. And this often unconscious but totalizing project, one that results in our perceiving ourselves in an environment and converts the physical world into environments, is a world-fiction.
The use of ‘we’ and ‘our’ in the preceding paragraph is not casual or literary. World-fictions are social, communicative, and shared. The old fashioned dichotomies of subject-object, self-other, and private-public are misplaced. We share our environments. The only divide is between what I deem important and what you deem important at any given moment.[i]
Importance to me versus importance to you is not to introduce endless interpretations or to suggest that fictions are fodder for such. Interpretation is another kind of science-oriented description. It is oriented toward what is not understood – assuming and seeking a reality behind appearances. Interpretation is, in Susan Sontag’s pithy phrases, “the revenge of the intellect upon art…the compliment mediocrity pays to genius.”[ii] An environment is not mimetic of other environments anymore than any given novel is representative of other novels. While a landscape may be designed or a novel written to emulate or even imitate another place or work of art, the totality of form and content on this plot of ground or in those pages is read as immediate, as here and now – this, not that. An encounter with a world-fiction is a moment of directness, which Sontag suggests disarms interpretation. What is more direct than a shared environment, in all its multiplicities of meaning?
And this, then, is our ground. There is no need to look behind or inside or above a given environment or to surrender to in the eye of the beholder or I know it when I see it reductionisms. A world-fiction’s continuity in the form of the literal narratives embedded in the environment is the ground of all values.[iii] And chief among those is the narrative of time.
[i] Here, and in most things in this book relating to social externalism, I follow the work of philosopher Axel Seemann. In particular, see Seeman, The Shared World: perceptual common knowledge, demonstrative communication, and social space, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).
[ii] Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” https://shifter-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Sontag-Against-Interpretation.pdf, accessed 28 June, 2020, 4-5.
[iii] Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, (New York: Vintage, 1993), 4. Cf., Kundera, The Curtain, 5.
Architecture is Fiction 