Phantasmal Fictions

D. Fox Harrell

American Book Review, Volume 31, Number 6, September/October 2010, pp. 4-6 (Article) Published by American Book Review DOI: 10.1353/abr.2010.0031

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Tabbi continued from previous page powers traditionally associated with mindedness can be explained (and eventually discarded) in the course of scientific inquiry, according to Robert Chodat in Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (2008). As Turners remark about the discovery of the mind indicates, cognitive science concerns itself not with reflective attitudes in individuals or cultural constructions of consciousness, but rather with determining what the brain is. This return to ontology in cognitive studies, concerning what we know not how knowledge is constructed or narrated, has found a popular audience that eludes contemporary literary and cultural studies. A recent school in the field of New Media, known as Object-Oriented Ontology, similarly reflects this turn away from introspection, meaning, and agency, while bidding fair to activate a new popular audience through the sustained use of blogs, networks, and a whole range of media affordances that become, themselves, objects of knowledge. Its that last characteristic, the creation and activation of new audiences, that should interest literary scholars regardless of what we think about the cognitive project. In essence, the cognitive critics and new media activists have come up with their own way of insisting on whats really there (Kafka), and it is understandable that many among the Object Oriented, cognitivist generation share Kafkas impatience with explanationswith literary theory, unfalsifiable claims, abstractions mistaken for concrete particulars. At times, one senses in the current generation an impatience even with thought, a technophilia and assumption that only whats new is worthy of attention. The materialist reduction is probably too strong for literature, with its concern for subjectivity and intentional states that cannot, and should not, be discarded or explained away. At the same time, literary scholars should not neglect the underlying media that support our own practice and the practice of writing through the agesespecially not now, when the media of literary inscription and circulation are themselves being transformed irreversibly. Whether we are regarding the print medium (itself not exclusively textual) or other media, the weight of the technical device on our thoughts has to be taken into account no less than traditional questions of meaning, narration, authorial intention, and readerly interpretation. The tiered systems of observation that Burn describes in DeLillo, the co-existence of sensory perception and phantasmic imagination in print and electronic literature (D. Fox Harrell), and John Brunis characterization of the dense, complex, and dazzling rhythmic grooves of Cary Wolfes conceptual remix: these are the kinds of description that cognition and literary composition can share, without reducing meaning to the media of inscription, and without reiterating exhausted narratives (or simply applying those same narratives again and again to emerging identities and multiplying micro-cultures). We can expect less and less often that our literary explorations in new media are going to be primarily about story, or about the construction of a stable self or communitythe we who are not we of Jacques Derridas deconstruction and Wolfes posthumanism; the partly human, never fully cognized or named environment that was all around the orbiting brain that Joseph McElroy imagined in his great novel of 1976, Plus (reconsidered here by James J. Pulizzi). of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. Selfreference in art is not an isolated technique found only in metafictions, M. C. Escher prints, and curios. Neither is reflexivity necessarily an act of narcissistic indulgence or an aesthetes insistence on the autonomy of the higher arts. Rather, self-reflection represents an assertion of the aesthetic systems difference from other systems, the artists inclusion of only a small part of the infinite complexity of non-human environments and the beauty of being, all of which have their own existence apart from our cognitive maps, aesthetic representations, and narratives. As literary critics (Spolsky, Richardson) have emphasized gaps in nature and the fragmentation of expression into media-specific niches, neuroscientists speak similarly of an Explanatory Gap between an objective scientific explanation of brain processes and the elusive subjective quality of our introspective existence. (See Joseph Levine on The Explanatory Gap.) Procedurality as a basis for dynamic, artistic expression, in D. Fox Harrells terms, may be the best way to join not only literature and cognition, but also computational systems such as interactive narratives, games, electronic literature, digital media artworks, and social media technologies. The literary system, whether realist or metafictional, whether present in print or located in other media, develops in terms that are understandable as literature, not as something else: and this quality, the autopoiesis or self-making of the literary work of art, is much more central to the cognition of the literary work than narrativity, metaphor, or any of the purported origins of language and consciousness. The essays collected here introduce to a general literary audience not one more sub-category of conventional narrative fiction, but the renewal of fiction and its re-location in a world transformed by technologies of cognition.

The essays collected here introduce the renewal of fiction and its re-location in a world transformed by technologies of cognition.
Cognition may be the new philosophy for new mediabut at the same time, insights from the cognitive sciences are capable of reorienting literature toward older media. Those would include the primary medium of the brainwaterthat is the subject of Joseph McElroys nonfictional work-in-progress, excerpted here. Awareness of the ways expression is bounded by visual, computational, sound, and other nonverbal media is heightened in the new media ecology in which fictions are produced and received (see Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutzs Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology [1997]). Literary systems, like all cultural productions, constitute themselves by selecting elements from an environment that is infinitely more complex than the work itselfeven as smoke from a train is more complex than the smoke that Italo Calvino references, which ends up obscuring not the landscape but the paragraph that Calvino is writing and the reader, as imagined by Calvino, is reading: The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud

Joseph Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002). Over the past several years, he led a team of editors, scholars, programmers, and designers in the development of an open source, open access Directory of Electronic Literature (http://www. eliterature.org).

Phantasmal Fictions
D. Fox Harrell
The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. Italo Calvino Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low Where only chips and stumps are left to show The solid proof of former domicile. Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp, Race memories of king and caravan, High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man, Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp. Jean Toomer
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Smoke drifts over these pages, smoke from outside of sawmills in Jean Toomers classic Harlem Renaissance era manticore of prose and poetry describing the rural Georgia he explored during a fitful (if temporary) discovery of his multiply ethnicized self. Smoke drifts from the railway station, wafting over to you, the reader, from Italo Calvinos second-person, self-reflexive narration. In both texts, smoke is evoked as a phantasmin two parallel senses of the term. In literary theory and philosophy, in Gilles Deleuze (The Logic of Sense [1990]) and in the classic work of Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (1961), phantasms are imaginary constructions that structure human behavior and ideas. At the same time, visual studies scholar W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us that phantasmata are deeply akin to the cognitive psychological notion of mental images. Indeed, the unstable nature of smoke is an apt metaphor for the mental image, clearly apparent, and yet without the material presence of a solid object or

even the stability of a memory (since memories point back to events that have occurred in the real world). The metaphor goes further, however. For Toomer, the phantasm of smoke also stands in for a history of cultural theft, a sense of mournful loss encountered by people of African descent in the US. Smoke initiates a political image recalling ages of slavery and nobility in turn. For Calvino, the smoke phantasm blends two parallel stories, a narrative description of a man reading a book in a railway station, and a real life story involving the simultaneous mapping (onto the pages of the book the man is reading) of you, the actual reader, and your own narratives of personal experience. In the books that contain the quotations by Calvino and Toomer, we can observe a number of ways that phantasms can become transformative and transgressive: (1) rich, imagistic, detailed, and sustained storyworlds are produced in dialogue with the readers interpretation; (2) sociocultural norms Harrell continued on next page

Harrell continued from previous page and values are critically interrogated; (3) common formal literary and linguistic conventions are skillfully deployed (even experimented with), while maintaining the evocative force of (1). The notion of the phantasmal as mental image and ideological construction is at the heart of the majority of highly regarded literary works, crucially distinguishing the imaginary in literary fiction from that in many other modes of art production. This dual notion is also at the heart of phantasmal media. Yet, because media today are mostly computational systems, the mental imagery they evoke needs to be studied in the context of diverse user/reader epistemologies evoked primarily through data-structural and algorithmic constructions. In light of this goal, a theory of phantasmal media is intended to cover two gaps within practices that use computation to construct imaginative works of fiction. First, scholars can invoke a transdisciplinary perspective, incorporating cognitive science, computer science, and computational media arts. Second, we can illuminate an underdeveloped potential of computational media arts, the ability of computational systems to address the human condition including social ills, cultural imaginaries, shared values, notions of beauty, and the other hallmarks of many venerable forms of art. This expanded notion of phantasmal media can carry scholarship beyond the boundaries of print media to include computational systems such as interactive narratives, games, electronic literature, digital media artworks, and social media technologies that likewise engage users/readers and developers/authors. We need to fill in these gaps in our conceptual framework because phantasms are themselves constructed as an outcome of imagination at a number of interrelated levels. These are helpfully (if not exhaustively) described by philosopher Colin McGinn (Mindsight [2004]) as: (1) percept; (2) memory image; (3) imaginative sensing; (4) productive image; (5) daydream/dream; (6) possibility and negation; (7) meaning (cognitive imagination); and (8) creativity/expressivity. Especially relevant is the nexus between imagistic and conceptual thinking, McGinn reminds us that Sensory imagination employs sensory elements, much as perception does though, as we have extensively seen, these elements must not be conflated. Cognitive imagination employs conceptual elements, much as thinking does: these elements are not intrinsically modalityspecific, and combine to form propositional contents. What is in common is the general faculty that works on these elementsthe imagination. Bearing McGinns point in mind, the cognitive science perspective on imagination in this essay is grounded in the subfield of the cognitive linguistics enterprise that addresses meaning construction: cognitive semantics. In particular, cognitive semantics theories of conceptual metaphor and blending are useful because they address processes of imaginative cognition. Metaphor theorists propose that the understanding of many basic abstract concepts relies upon metaphorical thinking and analogy, and that metaphorical thinking arises from a basis in embodied human experience of the world. (See George Lakoff and Mark Johnsons Philosophy in the Flesh [1999] and Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Roschs The Embodied Mind [1991].) Such scholarship presents metaphor as a series of mappings from one conceptual space to another, and has shown that there are many basic, entrenched metaphors that people use to express everyday concepts. These concepts are often structured by image schemas, skeletal patterns that

recur in our motor-sensory experiences. Conceptual blending theory builds upon Gilles Fauconniers mental spaces theory and elaborates insights from metaphor theory to describe the means by which concepts are integrated, guided by uniform structural and dynamic principles both unconsciously in everyday thought and in more complex abstract thought such as in literary arts or rhetoric. Conceptual blending theory is not currently a predictive theory that can forecast exactly how humans combine ideas. Rather, it describes constraints on the process of combining conceptswhat makes one way of blending concepts more optimal than othersand provides a systematic way to talk about integrating concepts. While conceptual blending theory has been criticized for post-hoc and overly broad explanations (and defended regarding the same), it provides appropriate terminology and structure, in dialogue with other cognitive science results, to better understand phantasmal media experiences according to user needs, interests, values, feelings, and more.

Instead of concentrating on goal-specific computation, we explore material-based, open-ended imagination through cases of fluid and flexible representations in the form of animated visual images that could be called elastic anchors for imaginative elaboration. Though that article focuses on interactive and generative animation, the argument might be extended so as to build upon both media theoretic scholarship and cognitive science definitions and results, in ways that are useful for better understanding and producing phantasmal media. This type of approach is crucial to recall when addressing how phantasmal media might effectively address issues of ideology. Take the example of sociocultural identity found in many literary works ranging from Kamau Brathwaites Ancestors (a long poem published in 2001 that presents digitally inspired typographic layout and cultural/personal/historical content) to Ralph Ellisons sociological treatise in novel form, Invisible Man (1947). Far from just a higher-level literary concern, sociocultural identity is a central feat of human cognition. The fallout from this perspective is striking in at least two ways: (1) if our identities are largely imaginative, what are the implications for social scientists, humanists, and technologists grappling with the everyday lived reality of human identity categories (stereotypes, ideals, salient examples, etc.); and (2) how can theories of conceptual metaphor and blending aid in elucidating the types of ideologies, social relationships, political configurations, and global conflicts that result in our everyday lived experience as humans? Fiction has a unique ability to articulate nuanced subjective experiences of phenomena such as those related to identity, and computational meaning-making systems are uniquely poised to offer dynamic experiences that change based upon user interaction if only authors can take heed of the insights and progress already made in domains such as the literary arts. Recall that a theory of phantasmal media must also address a second gap: the striking difference between more mature art forms, with established conventions and strong accompanying communities engaged in meaning-making, interpretation, and criticism, and digital works that often remain comparatively remote and focused on self-reflexive exploration of the medium itself as opposed to content. Noticing this gap does not mean devaluing many computational works that operate as self-reflexive formal systems much like those of the literary group Oulipo. It also does not seek to undermine popular games or innovative game-like systems that have stirred rich emotional, dramatic, and even motor-sensory experiences for players such as the influential console game Shadow of the Colossus (2005) or the AI-based interactive drama Faade Harrell continued on next page
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The notion of the phantasmal as mental image and ideological construction is at the heart of the majority of highly regarded literary works.
Cognitive linguists (Seana Coulson, Todd Oakley, Raymond W. Gibbs, and others) have proposed that human concepts form idealized cognitive models (ICMs) upon which our understandings of objects in the world and abstract concepts are built. Using this terminology, works like Calvinos in which the reader is implicated in the text, or computer games in which the player controls a character within a gameworld, can both be seen as metaphorically mapping ICMs (mental spaces) that humans have of themselves into fictional ICMs, or to use terminology from conceptual blending theory, as selectively projecting aspects from conceptualizations of both real experience and fictional experience into a blended experience. Since blending integrates concepts from quite different, even clashing, conceptual frames, scholars speak of a double-scope experienceand if this experience is narratively structured, it could be considered to be what Mark Turner has termed a double-scope story. Turner describes stories as complex dynamic integrations of objects, events, and actors. Hence, the projected, or blended, story at one moment differs from the next, even as one persons projected story differs from anothers. In Material-Based Imagination: Embodied Cognition in Animated Images, Kenny Chow and I introduce a notion of material-based imagination that builds upon the theories just discussed along with embodied cognition perspectives of meaning-making:

Harrell continued from previous page (2005). Such works are valuable not only for the stunning content produced by practitioners, but also for insights gained into the extremely difficult nature of using procedurality as a basis for dynamic, artistic expression. For this reason, the literary/procedural gap described here calls for further works to build upon these advances and to do even better in invoking literary modes of meaning-making in computational domains, engaging multimodal sensory experiences in cinema, the performing arts, and, indeed, everyday life. The coordination of literary and computational models and media further calls for the grounding of expressive new phantasmal media systems in diverse, cross-cultural artistic practices. Cognitive scientists have described the hallmarks of narrative imaginingevent stories, action stories, parable, metaphor, metonymy, force dynamics, and more. Understanding how cognitive processes of narrative imagining comprise the building blocks for expressive works of fiction can serve as a bridge to understanding the nature of effective phantasmal media works. Modeling aspects of these cognitive processes that are regular enough to be amenable to procedural description, and crucially leaving the rest up to the facilities of human artists, can undergird a range of types of computationally expressive works, including not only canonical forms, but also new experimental systems. The tragedies and triumphs of the human condition, from descriptions of intensely personal melancholy to grand statements on the ability to view other humans as resources and to then exploit those resources, are all imaginative cognitive feats as well. If we see that substantial aspects of our experiences are, in fact, cognitive fictions as opposed to objective realities, the implications are profound. The supposed real curls up and drifts away, spectrally, like a pale line of smoke. Data-structures do not attempt to capture objective truths, but rather are subjective forms to be manipulated according to rules like sentences in novels. Algorithms for processing data become expressive tools also, limited to Turing-machine style processing, but robust in transforming content along within those confines. The key for harnessing computational systems to produce meaningful, potentially transgressive and transformative fiction then is to better understand patterns underlying imaginative cognition along with the non-deterministic nature of those patterns, and never losing sight of the fact that all data is comprised merely of smoky, subjective phantasms, and all meaning, even computationally produced meaning, is ultimately human imagination. D. Fox Harrell is an associate professor of digital media at MIT. The National Science Foundation has recognized him with a CAREER Award for his project Computing for Advanced Identity Representation. He is currently completing a book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, for the MIT Press.

Being Not Us
John Bruni
matter, Wolfe contends, is far from valid. For one, if language is fundamentally ahuman (before us), that suspicion has long been taken seriously by literary scholars, yet not, as we will soon see, adequately considered by cognitive science. Literature, especially poetry, belongs to the disciplines of slow thought that reaffirm the temporal as a crucial component of the process of interpretation (an issue covered in several later chapters).2 And, more visibly, authors, such as J. M. Coetzee, reflect upon the constraints on our thinking about our relationships with nonhuman animals, which turn on our own sense of who we think we are. Coetzees literary narratives, Wolfe says, disclose the moral gravity of our responsibilities toward nonhuman animals; this disclosure, as it unsettles the very foundations of what we call the human, becomes an unnerving weight difficult to speak of that resists our thinking. Language, therefore, is inextricably connected to how we think. For Wolfe, the language question underscores the difference between cognitive science, epitomized by Daniel Dennetts work, and Derridean deconstruction, that question being what language is and how it is related to our ideas about subjectivity, consciousness, and the like. Wolfe singles out Dennett for a specific reason: Dennett is regarded for moving cognitive science away from the limitations of a Cartesian model and a humanist viewpoint. Dennett, however, retreats time and again to this mode of thinking, a problem, as Wolfe advises, because it is through such backpedaling that Dennett makes his case for the cognitive differences between human and nonhuman animals. And how these differences are made, Dennett insists, does no less than set the ethical parameters for the treatment of nonhuman animals. More specifically, Dennett claims that nonhuman animals do not know they are thinkinga premise derived from their being seen to not respond but react, their inability to grasp secondorder meanings (the meanings of meanings) through languageand on the basis of this claim, he declares nonhuman animals are not subjects and hence do not experience pain as suffering. Wolfe considers Dennetts flawed argument as symptomatic of a larger (Cartesian) idea of the human as an abstracted fictional representation of subjectivity, an idea that, in successive chapters, he will carefully deconstruct. If thinking, in the Cartesian formulation, pronounces, I am, then a posthuman model of language reflects a profound skepticism about who

What Is Posthumanism?
Cary Wolfe University of Minnesota Press http://www.upress.umn.edu 392 pages; cloth, $75.00; paper, $24.95

Every book should have a soundtrack. For Cary Wolfes What Is Posthumanism?, I would recommend David Byrne and Brian Enos My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981). In Wolfes chapter-length analysis/conclusion, he cites Byrne as saying the record offended people who wanted to believe in the artist as someone with something to say. That is because it used a precursor of digital sampling to layer found vocal tracks (taped, for example, from radio broadcasts) over dense, complex, and dazzling rhythmic grooves. What the record does to dismantle the authenticity of the human voice, how it signifies presence, is rather similar, I think, to what Wolfe does to the larger notion of humanism. Referencing Jacques Derridas The Autobiographical Animal, Wolfe powerfully expresses his books thesis: [W]e are not we. Rather, we are always radically other, already in- or ahuman in our very beingnot just in the evolutionary, biological, and zoological fact of our physical vulnerability and mortality, our mammalian existence but also in our subjection to and constitution in the materiality and technicity of a language that is always on the scene before we are, as a precondition of our subjectivity. Not only does Wolfes statement memorably describe, in his view, the current attitude about posthumanism, it makes a point highly relevant to this special issue: what we believe defines us as human, and thus different from nonhuman animals, is perhaps the most supreme cognitive fiction of them all.1 In making such a point, the book convincingly argues for the centrality of literature to discussions about cognition. That the discipline of cognitive science tends to insist on having the last word on the
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we are. Again referencing Derrida, Wolfe contends that we are not wealways covers over a more radical not being able that makes our very conceptual life possible. This idea becomes a unifying theme (what we could call, in line with the earlier analogy to the Byrne/Eno record, a groove) for the first half of the book. That is, while we share finitude, the physical vulnerability, embodiment, and eventually mortality with nonhuman animals, such an experience is paradoxically made unavailable, inappropriable, to us by the very thing that makes it available, which is the radically ahuman technicity of language. We then move to a critique of the fantasy of transcending academic disciplinary and discursive finitude that reopens the space between human and nonhuman animals. In an elaboration of the books thesis, Wolfe writes, citing Derrida, that fantasy is guided by a concept of the human that the human falsely gives to itself to then enable its recognitionfrom a safe ontological distance, as it wereof the nonhuman other in a gesture of self-flattering benevolence wholly characteristic of liberal humanism.3 From there, we arrive at the closing chapter of the first half of the book on Temple Grandin, who has argued that her experience with autism allows Bruni continued on next page