June 23, 2020
Post-Autonomous Fiction: Connecting Realities and Fictions
Today’s article on post-autonomous fiction is a guest post by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English.
Fiction isn’t the way it used to be, claims Argentinian literary critic Josefina Ludmer on Post-autonomous fiction. But what does this doctor honoris causa mean? What is this autonomy we’ve arrived after?
Understanding autonomy is, unsurprisingly, crucial in understanding post-autonomy and post-autonomous fiction. Which, as we will see, is revealing in terms of understanding the connection between reality and fiction.
Post-Autonomous Fiction: on Literary Autonomy
We are born, young and fresh. A few birthday parties later, someone gifts us a magical object. It is rectangular in shape, with considerable depth, height, and weight beyond our strength. Still, we carry it around. We interact with this inanimate best friend very often, mediated through the adults around us.
A children’s book; a book made for children.
Still, this explanation misses an essential word, the core concept behind it all: It is a children’s fiction book. A piece of literary endeavor. Now, that is saying something.
See, when we go shopping for a children’s book, we do not take into account the literary merits of the work of art at hand. No one asks if the rhyme scheme is varied and complex enough, if the rhymes are richA rich rhyme happens when one rhymes words from different parts of speech., if the typesetting suits the content and subject matter, or if the illustrations have a deeper symbolism, a unifying theme behind them.
These are intrinsic aspects of fiction.
When judging a book by such intrinsic characteristics, we are taking it as an autonomous artwork. This means that we take it to stand on its own merits and rely on nothing else.
We relate its aspects back to itself and, for better or worse, we compare it – using the same criteria – to other fictions we’ve come across before. Said artistic “qualities” appeared as such at a time in history and for some reason.
A Brief Literary History Lesson
In his book Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, the historian Eric Hobsbawm shows that national literature as we know it – a continuum of authors from past until present day – is nothing but a myth engendered during the early years of modern European Nation-States.
As religion stopped funding the arts and the private patronage was waning due to politico-economical changesIndustrial production as we know it had just begun, thus the infamous bourgeoisie consolidated itself and a socioeconomic middle class was birthed., art found its way to autonomy.
With the advancement of large-scale press technology, the literary bubble expanded as a sphere of autonomous action. One could survive off of fiction.
No, not eating books, that’s unhealthy and expensive.
Still, writers could stroll down the street, their texts under their armpit, looking for a newspaper or a publishing house and they would be sure to release something. That is, as long as they did not hurt the puritan feelings of the common folk.
Another layer of culture appeared in response: criticism. At first, risen from the remnants of aristocratic ballroom culture, the early literary critics based their commentary off their opinions, their own (self-proclaimed) highbrow taste – because, you know, blue blood flows through the body, gets to the brain, one gets blue ideas…
Jokes aside, at that time, criticism dwelt on the pages of newspapers, while fiction dominated the book format (although serialized narratives did inhabit the newspapers).
With the growth of newspapers (according to the intensification of industrial labor), more people had to be recruited to fill the pages with words. Thus criticism started to specialize and had to devise its own criteria for judging fiction. And here we are, glorious inheritors of an early 19th century adventure on printed paper! No one proud but me? Oh well…
Post-Autonomous Fiction: What Comes after Autonomy?
With this much history under our hoods, where are we getting at? Well, I will now lend the word to the authority on this topic, Josefina Ludmer:
Post-autonomous literatures, these territorial literary practices of the quotidian, are based on two (self-evident) postulates about the world today. The first is that all that is cultural and literary is economic, and all that is economic is cultural and literary. And the second postulate would be that reality (which is constituted by its changing media) is fiction and fiction is reality.
Ludmer, Josefina.
In How to Use the Truth to Tell a Lie, philosopher and psychoanalyst Levi Bryant points us back to Ludmer’s statement. Just like in Plato’s infamous cave story, nowadays all we know about the world is media-ted. Splitting the word like that helps us understand what’s going on.
Let’s go beyond simple news channels. Think memes. Our language, our speech, our very thoughts and the way we express our internal states have been captured and encapsulated in formulas for repetition.
The Media-ted Reality
One could say that there have been plenty of memes and any one could set a new trend. Still, the issue remains. The singularity of our very own expression, as elaborated by ourselves, within ourselves, is put aside in favor of an infinitely shareable and reproducible tiny amount of formatted information.
And so, reality is mediated. We can’t tell what’s news and what’s fake anymore (even professionals have trouble telling them apart). Reality works just like fiction. What prevents fiction from approaching us to reality? Nothing. Precisely Josefina Ludmer’s bet. To quote her:
Autonomy, for literature, meant specificity and self-reference, the power to name itself and refer to itself. The loss of autonomy of literature is the situation of the end of the autonomous spheres or the end of thinking through these spheres. As it has been said many times: the erasure of the relatively autonomous fields of politics, economics, and culture is today. The realityfiction of the public imagination contains and fuses them.
Ludmer, Josefina.
How is Post-Autonomous Fiction?
With the word, your highness:
Post-autonomous fictions of the present would leave “literature” behind, cross the border, and enter a real-virtual medium without outside, the public imagination: everything that is produced and circulated and penetrates us and it is social and private and public and “real”. In other words, they would enter a type of matter and social work (everyday reality) in which there is no “reality index” or “fictional trait” and which builds the present. They would enter the factory of the present which is the public imagination to tell some everyday lives […] The experiences of migration and the “underground” of certain subjects that define themselves simultaneously outside and inside certain territories.
Ludmer, Josefina.
As we can see from the quote, the era of novels intentionally written for film adaptation is the era of post-autonomous fictions.
Our relationship to the art of the written word is no more that of a reverence towards a unified national list of undisputed authorities.
Rather, we compare Netflix series to novel trilogy to video games, as if they had much in common. Let alone when we’re baffled by a news report that seems more absurd than anything we’ve ever known as fiction.
How Do You Know You’Re Reading Post-Autonomous Fiction?
But the question remains: How is post-autonomous literature? How may we know we’re reading it?
Well, in Ludmer’s words, it is a subjective position, rather than an objective metric:
I postulate a territory, the public imagination or factory of the present, whence I situate my reading, where I find myself. In this place, there is no reality opposite to fiction […] From public imagination I read the current literature as if it were news […]
Ludmer, Josefina.
To our help, I’ll list some traits she hinted at:
- Firstly, it resembles conventional literature. It is sold in bookstores, on the internet, and at international book fairs. Moreover, it is included in some literary genre, such as “novel” or “short story”.
- It is totally occupied by ambivalence. Though presenting itself as literature, we can’t make sense of reading applying the usual categories of authorship, style, meaning, etc.
- it takes the form of testimony, autobiography, journalistic reporting, chronicles, intimate diaries, and even ethnography (often with some literary genre into it: noir or science fiction, for example).
- Further, it does not oppose the subjective to historical reality. Rather, it fuses both.
- It usually presents the everyday reality of some subjects on an urban island.
What Looks like a Conclusion
During our school years we were taught to separate “fact from fiction”, a distinction we now know lacks most its usefulness.
As our sensibility gets shaped by ever-changing medias, and our imagination is dominated by ever more intricately fabricated (fake) news, we become the living crossroads of history and memory, subjective and objective fused in a single point.
Is it bad news for us, writers? If we let ourselves get overwhelmed by it, yes. It may feel awful to compete with huge news corporations and youtubers.
But it also means any and every thing from our ordinary life has literary potential to become a story. As we fictionalize our reality, that same reality becomes our fiction.
Funnily enough, it also means there is no geographical distance large enough anymore, as some of the most beautiful encounters may happen: César Aira gets to sit right next to Neil Gaiman at a bookstore (near you!).
Note: Also read about Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”, as an example case of post-autonomous fiction.
Works Cited
Ludmer, Josefina. Literaturas postautónomas. Transl.: Igor da Silva Livramento. Available at: http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v17/ludmer.htm.
Accessed: 08/June/2020.
2 Comments
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For some reason, the concept of post-autonomy (with which I was not familiar before this excellent analysis), tangentially reminds me of Raymond Williams and the so-called structure of feeling. The two are not really related (not directly anyway), but I see some parallels.
For Williams, “structure of feeling” refers to “a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private”. I wonder whether what you referred to as “the singularity of our very own expression […being] put aside in favor of an infinitely shareable and reproducible tiny amount of formatted information” is a contact point between the two concepts, post-autonomy and structure of feeling.
Another interesting element: When Ludmer mentions “I read the current literature as if it were news”, I was instantly reminded of a little peculiar habit of mine (I’m sure I’m not the only one): I generally avoid reading “the news” like the plague, because I’m well aware of the manipulation involved. However, I often find it entertaining to go through the readers’ comments section. Indeed, the more the tabloid nature of the website, and the sillier the comments, the greater my entertainment. So, to flip Ludmer’s approach, I read the current news as if it were literature – albeit of a very pulpy and inane kind.
That’s fascinating!
I mean, Williams remains a strong influence in Latin American literary studies, his work remains one of the basis upon which we rebuilt the field after the 20th century dictatorships. His work was notable in opening up academia for newer than new criticism approaches to the literary thing. Usually we label them as extrinsic literary theories. Thus, maybe there is a direct link. I’ve yet to check on her books’ bibliography sections.
I think yes, there is indeed a touch between both conceptions. Memes became a legitimate form of expression and communication quite fast, but they reduce more intimately elaborated expressions towards standardized forms (but the standardization practices, the norms guiding it, were not devised by ourselves – I mean, language itself was not devised by us ourselves, but still, one thing is bending the rules of communication to express ourselves, something entirely else is formatting our own expression to coincide with a formatted communication pattern not fully internalizable and established from without). It is, thus, most certainly a social structure being experienced intimately.
I also avoid the news like hell. I have not had a television for thirteen years now. I think your practice is just as post-autonomous as “reading fiction as if it were news”. Two sides to the same coin. Realityfiction. The very practice of trolling – commonplace on tabloid websites’ comment section – is extremely post-autonomous: it relies on a sort of autofictional (autobiographical+fictional) writing procedure in which one posits one’s own subjective position as just another semiotic good in the semiocapitalist turmoil of awareness commodities.