Since I had aired some contrarian and rashly unqualified thoughts about the whole fictional enterprise recently in this blog, I thought I’d follow that with a reprise of a few propositions I formulated in my graduate student days:

1. Commercial fiction exists to justify the status quo and allow such justifications be experienced as pleasure, either through flattering the reader for his ability to predict what will happen or dignifying his typical circumstances or positing fantasies that dovetail with what commercial markets profess to offer.

2. Commercial fiction thrives on the reader’s isolation, which allows one’s fantasies to develop unchecked in the channels provided by the fiction and provides for a more absorbing suspension of disbelief (which is in itself one of the chief pleasures the form can afford). This corresponds well with how the consumer society relies on isolated and uninformed consumers who prefer to pretend rather than comprehend—this permits a wider array of unnecessary purchases and to allow unsubstantiated claims about products and the lifestyles they purport to provide go unchecked. Resistance, even to the flimsy premises of genre fiction and advertisements, requires social organization—you need a network of communication outside of mass media to set up a discourse counter to it. Isolation, on the other hand, streamlines acquiescence.

3. Vicarious participation is a prerequisite of both commercial fiction and commercial societies. In both instances we must be prepared to enjoy our emotions more thoroughly through proxies than through direct experience of nature or society. We must be prepared to choosed mediated forms of experience, because of the illusion of control it affords us, over direct, spontaneous, unpredictable “natural” experiences.

4. Plausibility may be redefined within the realm of commercial fiction to suit the consumer society’s requirements. Reading commercial fiction reconfigures the plausibility threshold so that only matters inconsequential to commerce and consumerist fantasy are rejected as “unrealistic.”

5. The question of the commercial novel’s form may best be seen as a problem of industrial design.

6. The commercial novel, one of the first commodities, popularized the notion that acquiring goods constitutes a story itself. The dream world we enter in fiction is akin to the dream lifestyle a branded commodity hopes to posit for us via its ads. A story unfolds, closure is obtained (the good is purchased) and a new story must begin. Commercial novels, in being worthless after they are consumed once, are emblematic of ideal consumer goods generally, which become beside the point of pleasure once acquired. Acquisition trumps even ownership itself as a species of pleasure.

7. Our facility for enjoying commercial fiction, adopting to its conventions and enjoying its foreshortenings and its illusions, makes us able to enjoy shopping more—its necessary pre-purchase fantasizing, its metonymic ads, etc. Familiarity with commercial fiction allows us to perceive the dramatic arc in our shopping experience. It dignifies shopping as a kind of personal mythmaking.

8. Connoisseurship in the market—the quest for distinctive goods—has roots in the connoisseurship of feeling, experienced vicariously through the earliest commercial novels and the taste in reading it allowed to be expressed.

9. Pleasure does not preexist systems of distribution and consumption. It manifests itself through those systems; the shape pleasure can take is defined by those systems. The 18th century commercial novel is an artifact of first forms of pleasure enabled by capitalism. (Needs are “set free” by economic growth.)

10. For commercial novels as well as consumer societies, anticipation is far more important than satisfaction.

—Rob Horning

Because of the disaster on the Gulf Coast, Americans have been treated to a great deal of disaster photography, and many platitudes about “unforgettable images” have been trotted out to try to rationalize the extremely disturbing experience of wiitnessing something so awful at such a comfortable distance. Most photos require captions to instruct us how to feel; in fact, many photos are mere pretenses for the captions, which supply the all important context that allows us to actually see something. The captions cue us to what is supposed to be visible, what we are supposed to see in this frozen, inert moment, this dead, empty image. Because meaning in general is in the way things progress and interact, the way things collide and change and evolve, a frozen image is inherently meaningless. For it to have meaning it must be supplied with a context, which itself is slippery, shifting, enmeshed in various dialectics—editors would like to help you to derive context with the caption they supply, but often the context is a matter of your own habitus, or what literally surrounds a photo, or what photo you just saw a minute ago, or some personal experience, or whatever. But the image can’t mean independently of whatever frames you bring to it. Every interaction with an image affords an opportunity for those ideological frames we bring to modified or reinforced. This is probably pretty self-evident, but photos present a temptation to ignore context, ignore the fluid nature of reality and attempt to see into the essence of things in an isolated frame. The immediacy of an image lends itself to the foreshortenings of reality by common sense, which limits us to the narrow ideological perspective with which we’re most comfortable. What is so shocking about the disaster photos is that they don’t seem to permit the common sense perspective, we can’t read them intuitively and find reassurance in the immediate and soothing interpretation that usually results.

—Rob Horning

This White House page has the full transcript of the speech during which Bush said this: “We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we’re going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we’re going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is—and it’s hard for some to see it now—that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house—he’s lost his entire house—there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)”

Can someone—Bill Clinton, Wesley Clark, Bush I, somebody—please go to New Orleans and act like the president? The leadership void is costing people’s lives.

—Rob Horning

This may be a personal shortcoming, a failure of my own imagination, but I no longer understand the purpose of fiction. I’m not sure what is significant about someone’s making up events that happen to made-up people and lead to made up denouements, especially when it is so easy to research events that actually happened to actual people. Isn’t much fiction, especially the sort that eschews formal innovation or stylized word play just lazy reporting, wherein writers draw on information they’ve gathered without bothering to verify it?

Fiction at its most basic provides a vehicle for escapism, a world the reader may enter and feel like the all-knowing master of that universe’s simplified, obvious rules for cause and effect; such fiction offers the illusion of power along with the escape into a more comprehensible and more orderly world. These simplified rules for how the world works provide the much trumpeted moral instruction that novels are sometimes held to provide, but the moral instruction is usually the pleasing celebration of values and formulas for living that readers already hold (This seems especially true of genre fiction, which indulges preordained fantasies that correspond with power balances in the actual society such fiction services.) Researched accounts of actual events seems much more likely to reveal alternatives to the status quo, paradoxically, than made-up fictions which are circumscribed by the habitus of its writer, which reflects all the biases of class and the imposed limits made by common sense of what is even possible. Imagination is actually more circumscribed than the real, whose capability to astonish only increases as one devotes energy to investigating it. Fiction seems to me a kind of abdication, a retreat from the possibilities that trouble the delicately balanced worldview that perpetuates the status quo.

Reality programming on television seems to be a reflection of the threat technology levies against fiction, whose flimsy justification once may have rested in the difficulty of gaining information about other people’s lives. But obvioulsy these programs impose the formulas derived from fiction on hours and hours of raw material; it reveals more of the process of the fictionalizing of reality; these are our social novels. Literary fiction seems to be a product with increasing snob appeal; the fundamental result of reading such books is reveling in a kind of moral superiority to the people who one imagines is missing out on such edifying experiences, reading such books is a way of consuming an image of oneself as “wise, perceptive reader,” capable of appreciating subtle nuance and whatnot like the writer whom one imagines as a peer, a fellow soldier in the war to preserve Culture.

—Rob Horning

By their nature we tend to take manners for granted and notice them only when they are absent. For most people manners reside beyond the realm of judgment; they simply exist, they aren’t optional or subject to criticism or refinement. This is precisely why Bourdieu sees manners as one of the ways in which the arbitrary features of a society are preserved and reinforced, made to seem natural. If something can be made a matter of manners, then that thing is removed from the world of contingencies and placed in the realm of eternal truths, given facts of social life: Writes Bourdieu in Outline of a Theory of Practice:"The principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and therefore more precious, than the values given body, amde body by the transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant as ‘stand up straight’ or ‘don’t hold your knife in your left hand.’ “ This line of reasoning leads him to conclude that “the concessions of politeness always contain political concessions.” In other words, the point of politeness is always politeness itself, a kind of symbolic social tax that must be paid in order to make social behavior possible; each specific culture will produce the “taxes” that will allow it to continue in its current state, with the same imbalances in power and influence, which are in turn built in to the various obsequities of politeness. Every enacted instance of politeness may, in some obscure and necessarily inarticulable way (if we could explain it, we could reist and alter it, redefine politeness as something else that serve ends we conciously wanted to serve), reinforce the status quo.

That’s not to say we should reject politeness. But it does put a different spin on the pleasure we derive from polite acts. Usually we congratulate ourselves for doing a good deed when we hold a door or smile at a stranger or let someone go ahead of us in line and we leave it at that; we don’t inquire into what makes a deed good, or whose criteria we are importing into our most intimate system of values, or how our own pleasure is related to it all. Society, like the human species, is able to reproduce itself by making the actions required to reproduce it deeply pleasurable on a personal level. The pleasure we get out of our polite acts stems from this and serves to induce us to participate in perpetuating the status quo. That it would feel so wrong to reject these acts, to resist being polite to make a political point, demonstrates how integral and effective politeness is in performing its social reproductive functions.

Small courtesies seem to mean more in the city than elsewhere, maybe because so many opportunities for them are missed and because they are so little expected. In cities there is a sense one must aggressively pursue one’s own interest as there seems a scarcity of time and space, or at least a frustration at having to share so much of it with people who are much less like you than they would be in small towns. But this frustration is also the source of the city’s sublimity: this ability to connect, however ephemerally, with total strangers, with people whose lives you can’t imagine, is a chance to enlarge youself, to seem to be without a social horizon. Of course some prefer social horizons, some like the idea that they’ll never meet a person who can teach them anything. Small courtesies seem to transcend the different habituses that separate groups from each other, but in fact they may reinforce those differences. What the tiny little drama of politeness enacts is a mini celebration of the existing order of things, the established rules that put us in the place where we can readily dispense social niceties.

—Rob Horning

I have nothing especially insightful to add about the tragedy in the Gulf coast region, but it seemed ridiculous to say nothing about it, to go on as if nothing happened. Its effects will be felt for a long time, and they will be national: gas prices will probably reach record highs, for one. And the obliteration of everyday life for millions of people will continue to yield fresh unfathomables. It’s impossible to imagine what the people who used to live in New Orleans must be going through. Their city is gone, as is all of their property and every aspect of everyday life that anchors a person, giving them a field of taken-for-granted things, which is necessary to even begin to live, to pursue any sort of goal beyond survival. Those fortunate enough to have been able to evacuate to other cities must be wondering if they should just try to find work where they are now, because there may not be anything to return to. The refugees, already impoverished, now with nothing—what will become of them? What sort of social safety net will catch them in a country currently run by people who insist that those who suffer are in general personally repsonsible for it? Americans will likely rise above that mentality to cope with this tragedy and hopefully remain at that level of sympathy in the months to come.

—Rob Horning