A note in defense of the conclusion of the previous meditation. I’ll keep it short.
Perceptions of settings are fictional and real despite common sensical notions of absolute difference between fictional and real perceptions. The shortest defense of this statement is simply to say that fictional perceptions are real. This can be stated the other way around without impacting the truth: our real perceptions are fictional from the beginning. This fact (or these facts, if you see the two preceding statements as saying different things) is evidenced in the ease with which we substitute one thing for another in daily life. We make substitutions all the time: images and athletic competitions substitute for war, for one kind of example. For another kind of example, we understand the same object differently depending on whether we have sole possession or must share it with others: consider the treatment of a given toy at a daycare versus the same toy in a child’s private collection. We accept these equivalences and distinctions as real despite their utter contingency bordering on arbitrariness. In other words, we typically ignore the fictional component of day-to-day life.
“Our sensation of remembering detailed, truthful memories is just as much an illusion as the grand illusion of perception.”
Gustav Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible
This tendency to ignore fictionality and accept substitutions as real goes deeper than symbolic equivalences between games and war or children making rules about toys that should be shared. Space and time, we assume, pre-exist our perception/action. But, as I have argued elsewhere, this appears not to be the case in any objective, scientific sense. Space and time emerge with our actions. Furthermore, we take scientific descriptions of relationships (this causes that) as descriptions of things themselves. If we didn’t accept substitutions of objective for subjective, social for phenomenal, and vice versa, we’d have to say we mistake scientific descriptions of relationships for descriptions of things themselves.
To quote the magician Gustav Kuhn again: “Our sensation of remembering detailed, truthful memories is just as much an illusion as the grand illusion of perception.”[i] We don’t call the perceptions and substitutions above illusions or mistakes in daily life because they aren’t illusions or mistakes except from a highly specialized perspective which has nothing to do with everyday human perception. So, when we say that perceptions of settings are simultaneously real and fictional, we are acknowledging a simple truth. The mistakes and illusions are perception, not its flaws.
[i] Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible, 138.
Architecture is Fiction 