Last week I had to assess some student presentations. One student gave an interesting talk about ‘Virtual worlds’, a cyberspace phenomenon I hadn’t really been aware of. These are fictional or imaginary worlds given graphic realisation online. They are not copies of particular real locations; nor are they necessarily fantastic (comic-book scifi escapism). Some generic hotel, bar or beach would be typical, it seems. Computer users enter into and ‘hang out’ in these spaces, through some iconic on-screen representation of themselves. However, it is not a game as such - there is no specific task or grid of rules, the time of a visit is not pre-determined. It’s simply a space to 'hang out', but from which the body is exempt.
Now according to the student, people apparently purchase objects or space within these worlds. A virtual island has recently been bought for a significant sum. One enters into a world which is in some sense fictional, and yet there is the desire for and possibility of possession.
This led to some random thoughts on fictional worlds and the category of the ‘fictional’ in general. Of course in one sense, a novel by Dickens or Proust (or whoever) constructs a recognisable ‘world’, similar to but distinct from that of the reader. One enters into this little universe, which has its peculiar feel, a whole phenomenology of characteristic ‘experiences’, the illusion even of textures and odours. Reading Proust or Dickens is to dwell in this world. And withdrawing from such a world can be an abrupt and vaguely disappointing transition. Not wanting to put the book down is among other things a desire to cleave to a certain world, to abide with and in it. It, too then is a ‘virtual world’. But at no stage, when we read the description of a clock on the mantelpiece, of an old sturdy chair do we, or can we say ‘I want to buy that’. Of course, it’s ridiculous. But when we talk about fictional objects, it would seem that not all fictional objects are equally fictional.
I wonder if readers might recommend something on this subject, ie, a possible taxonomy of fictions and degrees of fiction, including legal and political examples. In the film Michael Collins, DeValera, after the 1916 Rising, but before the Irish Free State, DeValera is made to say “We must act as if the Republic is a fact”. I’m unsure whether it’s an actual quote but the idea is that of the enabling fiction. Acting in fidelity to the fiction produces real and otherwise unrealisable effects. What we might question is how this Republic is any less fictional than the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” which it would replace? Is the latter not itself a legal fiction supported and made solid by law, bureaucratic structures and military force? Now before Ireland gained any kind of independence, DeValera also forms, and heads, a ‘cabinet’ with designated ministers. Is this cabinet qua cabinet a fictional entity? Does it await the nod of a posterity - which it also helps bring about - to make it ‘real’? But if it is a fictional entity it is obviously not so in the same way as Mme Verdurin’s Drawing room, or the ‘Elsinore’ that a theatre audience (agree to) see before them on the stage.
These are banal points. But what would interest me is a book which dealt with the category of the fictional without confining itself to the literary, and which when it did look at literary-fictional worlds saw them in relation to the that inescapable quota or fiction which is part of the very texture of (and not the opposite of) reality.
7 comments:
Well then, allow me to recommend a friend: Michael Joyce, and maybe in particular, Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture?
Not much use to you, but Huysmans' 'Against Nature' shows us our hero creating experience in his own room by using texture and smell especially. So even as the thing we are reading is fictional so our hero creates fictional places for him to 'experience'.
Some of the more sophisticated computer games reward players with virtual goods which they can then use to further their progress through virtual worlds ... these goods can be artefacts or they can be cash or equivalents with which to buy artefacts. There is a flourishing trade on the internet for both these artefacts and the cash with which to buy them. In other words, real money changes hands for virtual things; but the virtual things, paradoxically, have a real value in that they can allow a game player to get further into his or her game than s/he otherwise might. A lot of quite young kids are engaging in this trade already. Others, while not necessarily game players themselves, are setting up as entrepreneurs of these exchanges. I'd say we are at the beginning of something that will become much more sophisticated and much stranger.
Brilliant post Mark. It IS hard to think further into it, search for examples, with out running up against the wall of banality. This, in itself, might be interesting.
Seems to me, following from the previous comment re Huysmans, that Wilde is one direction to go... The picture in Dorian Gray is a bit less "fictional,"than the rest of the many art objects in the book - including the dirty book that may or may not be A Rebours.
But this isn't quite it, is it.
Or Cortazar's "Blow-Up."
But why am I stuck with the visual here. The untangling of the "reality" of the photograph...
Some time ago I collected a few links on items being bought, sold and stolen in MMORPGs. Perhaps
these will interest you.
"A Shanghai online game player has stabbed to death a competitor who sold his cyber-sword, the China Daily said. The incident creates a dilemma in China where no law exists for the ownership of virtual weapons."
"Rich Thurman, at one time possibly the biggest gold farmer in Ultima Online, ICQ’d me the other day to let me know it’s all over. He’s moving on and – in the hallowed tradition of MMORPG liquidators everywhere – putting his famous automated gold farm (pictured left) up for auction on eBay."
"Early last year a small Southern California company called Black Snow Interactive made a business move you could almost call shrewd if it weren’t so surreal. They rented office space in Tijuana, equipped it with eight PCs and a T1 line, and hired three shifts of unskilled Mexican laborers to do what most employers would have fired them for: playing online computer games from punch-in to quitting time. The games they were required to play were Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot, two of the most popular massively multiplayer role-playing games online. As the workers sat mouse-clicking virtual trolls to death, their characters acquired skills and gold at a brisk, assembly-line pace. For this, Black Snow paid the Mexicans piecework wages -- then turned around and sold the high-level characters and make-believe money on eBay, where a grandmaster dragon-tamer account from Ultima can fetch $200 and a Dark Age gold piece trades for roughly what the Russian ruble does. It was the world’s first virtual sweatshop, and it was more or less a money-making machine."
I wonder if readers might recommend something on this subject, ie, a possible taxonomy of fictions and degrees of fiction, including legal and political examples. Those of you not familiar with Irish history might yet know the film Michael Collins. After the 1916 Rising, but before the Irish Free State, DeValera is seen writing the following: “We must act as if the Republic is a fact”. . . . what would interest me is a book which dealt with the category of the fictional without confining itself to the literary, and which when it did look at literary-fictional worlds saw them in relation to the that inescapable quota or fiction which is part of the very texture of (and not the opposite of) reality.
I nominate Blanchot's "Literature and the Right to Death," which deals (in part) precisely with the relationships among the writer's art, literary language and the premier "legal and political example" of the revolutionary moment of state-foundation, and which suggests, more or less, that the empty "as if" of DeValera's "Republic" is the essence of both the writer's and the revolutionary's creative acts.
Thank you all - some really useful comments. The reality of state and legal fictions is, i suppose, performative to some degree.
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