The iterative act of theorising: is it burrowing down through nested notions, or rather bouncing like echoes around differently angled propositional surfaces? ¶ 1
I'm going to lose myself for a moment in the reflections and refractions of the citational surfaces of Noel King's essays “Occasional Doubts” (1993) and “My Life Without Steve” (1994). King examines the paroxysm of literary criticism attempting to deal with the challenging surfaces of postmodernism. The problem, critics decry, is that postmodernism offers “a ‘fascination’ with mirrors, icons, surfaces” (Hebdige in King, 1994, p. 269). This “triumph of surfaces” threatens to render the “depth model” of authoritative interpretation and criticism useless. Citing Jameson, King proposes that postmodernism exemplifies “a loss of faith” in the idea of commentary and critique that until this moment has been assumed to be a “hermeneutic seeing-through of one level to another level” (King, 1993, p. 19). This “new depthlessness” flattens the dynamics between a number of binaries (the fundamental depth models) such as “inside and out”, “essence and appearance”, “authenticity/inauthenticity”, “alienation/disalienation”, and “signifier/signified” (p.19). ¶ 2
King tells us Foucault has believed it is always this way, proposing that “we can never go any deeper, any place more profound than the ‘surface level’; that ‘There is no sub-text…The enunciative domain is identical with its own surface’ (The Archaeology of Knowledge 119)” (King 1993, p.20). But what is left for a critic or commentator to do in this depthless world of surfaces? Jameson proposes that a “new kind of thinking about this critical distance must be done” (King, 1993, p. 20). ¶ 3
Meanwhile, writers like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida are doing just that, getting on with the job, as Rosalind Krauss says (cited in King, 1993, 1994), of putting “their own theories in operation” (Krauss, 1986, p. 293). These works, she proposes, are “paraliterary”—rather than offering a text with a number of hidden meanings, whereby the critic is tasked with “peeling back the literal surface of the work” (p. 293), a paraliterary work is “‘about’ its own strategies of construction, its own linguistic operations, its own revelation of convention, its own surface” (p. 293). ¶ 4
It is King (with Muecke, 1991) who begins to reflect on these approaches within the Australian context, settling on the term ficto-criticism (arguably credited to Jameson). So within this context, is ficto-criticism an actual emergent triumph of surfaces, or is it rather a critical response to such? It certainly responds to Jameson’s call to rethink critical distance. Ficto-criticism’s most observable strategy is the rejection of authorial objectivity via a reclamation of subjectivity (saved from solipsism by reflexivity). Certainly, ficto-criticism’s reliance on citation creates a sense of iteration, echo and reflection. This iterativeness has always been present in philosophy and theory, but in ficto-criticism, strategic fragmentation and resistance to absorbing quotations into neat and tidy arguments that provide closure, creates a heightened and self-aware sensation of bouncing between propositional planes. ¶ 5
But perhaps the answer has been staring us in the face all along. Within the notion of surface reflections are those that reflect our image back, allowing us to see ourselves from a different angle. And some surfaces do not completely reflect but allow partial penetration and refraction. All these metaphors suggest the phenomenological loop that can occur between critic and work, in which the work affects the critic, the critic the work and this is made explicit in the writing (See Module (i): Listening to My Listening – Listening in RealTime for more detail.) ¶ 6
A key strategy of ficto-criticism is to generate a reflexiveness in both the writer and reader, one that brings the textuality of the text to the fore and calls the reader’s position towards the text to the surface (Haas, 2017; Prosser, 2009; Brewster, 1995). In this way ficto-critical writing emerges as a true triumph of surfaces, one in which recursive acts of reflection problematise the assumed glory and status of authoritative theory as it clings to its fading image of objectivity. ¶ 7
For more on ficto-criticism see theory analysis: chapter 4, “Ficto-criticism as Performative Research”.
Brewster, A. (1995). Fictocriticism: Pedagogy and practice. Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian culture: Proceedings of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference, Adelaide, 1995, 89–92.
Haas, G. (2017). Ficto/critical strategies: Subverting textual practices of meaning, other, and self-formation. transcript Verlag.
King, N. (1993). Occasional doubts: Ian Hunter’s genealogy of interpretive depth. Southern Review, 26(1), 5–27.
King, N. (1994). My life without Steve: Postmodernism, fictocriticism and the paraliterary. Southern Review, 27(3), 261–275.
Krauss, R. (1986). Poststructuralism and the paraliterary. In The originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths (pp. 291–296). MIT Press.
Muecke, S., & King, N. (1991). On ficto-criticism. Australian Book Review, 134, 13–14.
Prosser, R. (2009). Fragments of a fictocritical dictionary. Outskirts, 20, 1–10.