Hoaxing in Retrospectre
by ANNIE LOWE
Reflections on HAUNTING THE SPECTRE AND THE METAPHOR
For this retrospectre, I’m drawing my inspiration from Ectoplasmic Materialism’s playfully prankish performance and workshop to pursue the provocation of “hoaxing the Gestell.” I want to briefly present (in theory) one way the hoax might respond (in practice) to Heidegger’s own appeal to art as a realm that is both “akin to” and “fundamentally different from” the essence of technology as Gestell (en-framing), and therefore where “essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 35). In QCT’s final meditation, Heidegger declares that in the ancient Greek context, poiesis and techne are twinned processes of bringing to presence. The hoax relates this coming to presence to the art of fiction. We could say hoaxes engage in a particular fictional mode that temporarily disguises its own fictional (en-)framing by presenting the frame and institutional forms of techno-science — “objective” fields of knowledge and expertise. Because hoaxes unfold as serial dramas, with each stage explicitly inviting scrutiny and reflection upon what it presents and encouraging decisive confrontation (e.g., deciding if it is real or fake), they are uniquely suited to thinking through how we culturally rely on expert discourses to define and legitimate the “reality” of the world by effecting to make it objectively present as what is or can be inventoried and “known.” (In later essays, Heidegger further identifies the Gestell with modern science as techno-science, to which we could add information sciences, today.)
Following Heidegger’s conception of the Gestell, the hoax presents us with the abstract notion of utter transparency and manipulability, of being able to know and identify any x and y and being able to make any x into y, in spectacular but concrete form. Upon revelation, the spectre of the defunct hoax confronts us with a perversion of that fantasy, through an instance of its attempted realization, to which we often observe or experience reactions of outrage and disgust. In this familiar scenario, hoaxers use professional and popular media publicity to attract attention and deceive experts and laymen only to publicly denounce the credulous with some version of a self-righteous or self-aggrandizing “Gotcha!” Impassioned responses are likely to condemn hoaxes’ irreverence toward technoscience and moralize feelings of betrayal by channeling a sense of nostalgia, appeals to conservatism (usually in less overtly political guises), and/or despairing or even cruel cynicism. Concrete certainty of the fake sends tremors of uncertainty and fallibility that threaten the ‘targeted’ institutional field, system, or discourse. The disaffected appear either paranoid or disillusioned; the disinterested, either naive or complicit. Institutions scramble to repair the rupture, fix the bug, and restore public image. Alternatively, we can consider the hoax as an artful reflection on and confrontation with the Gestell in its pretension to total reality — techno-science as grounded in the “real,” ordering and determining global reality.
Approaching the hoax as a literary artform reveals a picaresque narrative dissimulating and transgressing its fictional frame to dramatize a non-fictional frame through which the appearance of “reality” is conjured — not so much falsified or faked by imitating what is real, but fabricated by imitating the institutional discourses that authorize, define, and validate the reality of the real, conspicuously pandering to otherwise inconspicuous or tacit values and norms. In “Cybernetics and Ghosts” (1967), Italo Calvino — a member of the Oulipo group he describes as seeking “encounter[s] between mathematics and literature […] under the banner of hoaxing and practical joking” — gives a cybernetic definition of literature that presents poiesis in the tune of techne. With only a couple tweaks, his definition likewise provides a general dramatization of hoaxing the Gestell, where Gestell is like “a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material [objective reality], independent of the personality of the [observer], but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the [objective] plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on that second level is of great concern to the [observer] or his society.” While the Gestell techno-scientifically enframes the objective reality of the “real” world, the hoax slips in from the fictional plane to activate non-techno-scientific modes of reflection and confrontation. We could think of hoaxing the Gestell by imagining a modified version of his proposed literature machine: a theoretical hoax machine programmed to discursively simulate/stimulate objective reality by performing permutations on the generic style and conventions of objectivity. As an uncanny revenant, the hoax brings ambiguity and irony to presence in objective reality — an experience of Calvino’s reminder that “The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.”
The serial drama of the hoax archives (and reverse-engineers) the process of “objectivity” as a creative method that reveals the world by constructing a representative frame through which the world presents its calculable and orderable formal “objects” and the formal structures of their interactions as they are made available to observation and manipulation by instruments of technological in-formation. And so, hoaxes remind us that institutionally-codified signs of authenticity and factual accuracy aren’t identical with the reality they represent, nor do they necessarily guarantee correspondence to a real referent (authenticity and accuracy are not reality but value-positions with regard to reality), reopening the progressively total identification of Gestell with reality up to questioning. Heidegger cautions that this questioning should not be restricted to the techno-scientific realm whose mode of questioning addresses the disclosure of non-correspondence as a technical problem requiring a technical solution to better re-cover the point of fracture, but should invite “essential reflection” and “decisive confrontation” through the modes of questioning that come from the realm of art. Heidegger famous hatred even for typewriters notwithstanding, the illustrative grace of Calvino’s theoretical demonstration of the literature machine cedes authorial inspiration and even artistic creativity to posit that the un-effaceable poetic result, the poiesis as bringing to presence a particular poetic experience, happens in reading, when the printed text suddenly presents a “decisive confrontation” with the realm of art. Out of joint with the Gestell’s progressive inventory of objective reality, the appearance of literature “will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society.” Mixing art and techno-science, the shock of the hoax can unsettle enframing at its foundational groundlessness where it discloses itself to questioning from the realm of art.
Oriented by artistic and aesthetic modes of questioning, we can better contemplate informational content or representational validity as imaginatively presenting forms and structures to evoke a world without identifying it with or substituting it for the referential real world, questioning and evaluating the quality and desirability of techno-scientifically enframed reality — what do the foundational donnés and salient metaphors emphasize or impoverish about the experiential manifold of the objects and events it represents? What is inaccessible to this peculiarly enframed representational ‘realism’? How do its style, tropes, symbols, and so forth determine what appears in its frame, its internal distribution of values among what appears, and the internal logic it applies to how its world works? How is techno-science seduced by its own aesthetic sensibility (e.g., a mode of realism valuing complexity over ambiguity)?
//AL.
Annie Lowe is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Rice University (Houston, TX) where she researches literary spoofs on technology, the mathematics of hoaxes, faux physics, and pseudo-scientific fiction. Working under the direction of Drs. Judith Roof and Timothy Morton, her dissertation project, “Hoax Machina,” reconsiders coincident formalist and structuralist developments in the history of logico-mathematics, philosophy of language, and literary theory, understood as a narrative playfully doubled in hoaxic literature from the early avant garde to our contemporary period.
