The Realist Underground: Referential Practices at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

The Realist Underground: Referential

Practices at the Turn of the Twenty-First

Century1

Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) (2006)

Abstract This paper examines the conditions of possibility for realism in several

fields of contemporary culture—literature, painting, film, and TV news.

It is argued that contemporary texts mobilize novel resources for the

representation of the real. Realism in these works no longer takes the

form of a seemingly self-evident mirroring of the world. Instead, the

work of representation unfolds along several axes—fact-finding, meta-

discourse, contractual negotiation, and praxis. Accordingly, contempo-

rary realist texts display a hybrid make-up, mingling elements of classi-

cal mimesis and postmodernism. The essay indicates how this complex

set of representational strategies informs alternative film-making

(David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art), live TV

news coverage of the 2003 Iraq campaign, and Michael Moore’s doc-

umentaries.

1. Playing the reality game: the corpus of contemporary mimesis

Influential currents of twentieth-century art and theory—formalism,

structuralism, (post)modernism—have articulated a harsh yet often

pointed critique of realist aesthetics. Postmodernist theory, in particular,

has compellingly highlighted the problematic nature of such concepts

or practices as literary truthfulness or the imitation of life through art.

Working on the principle that even “natural facts are […] discursive

facts” (Laclau and Mouffe 103), postmodernism has questioned the

nature of fact itself: it has challenged the simplistic belief that texts can

effortlessly access a common ground of objective truth. Against this

anti-realist scepticism, I propose to explore the hypothesis that realism

has survived the strictures of twentieth-century cultural theory. Indeed,

the radically antirealist stance of orthodox postmodernism is too coun-

2 Den Tandt “The Realist Underground”

terintuitive to gain uncritical endorsement. It awkwardly contradicts the

resilient sense that we can avail ourselves of pragmatic continuities in

everyday life—that we inhabit a realm about which we make verifiable

statements. Likewise, postmodernist aesthetics disregards the referen-

tial tenor of significant segments of contemporary artistic production.

There is therefore room for a re-evaluation of what realism amounts to

at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Twentieth-century anti-realist theory has been influential enough

to foster the belief that defining realist mimesis is quixotic, even point-

less. The present argument assumes, on the contrary, that the effort is

worthwhile, even though it involves theoretical developments that

arguably exceed the scope of the present essay. As a provisional defini-

tion, I suggest therefore that realism designates the aesthetic or discur-

sive practices that strive toward the representation of the phenomenal

world and of social relations, and that in so doing heed validity claims

or even truth standards marking out realism from other, less referential-

ly oriented uses of discourse. These principles informed the artistic

productions of the period we might call “classical realism”—the era

stretching from the early-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century,

when mimesis was a dominant aesthetic. Yet in order to indicate the

continued relevance of realism in a contemporary context, mimesis—

the privileged objects and strategies of the realist gaze—should be

redefined in broader terms: novel resources and tactics must be made

available to the representation of the real. Ironically, one of the canoni-

cal twentieth-century studies on realism—Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis—

indicates precisely how the gamut of what passes as suitable for mime-

sis could be diversified. While anti-realist criticism usually focuses on a

narrow, stereotypical concept of mimesis, Auerbach sketches out a

continuous, protean realist tradition extending from ancient literature

(Homer, the Gospels) to twentieth-century experimental writing (Vir-

ginia Woolf) (Auerbach 3-23; 5525-53). Auerbach is, I think, correct in

assuming that realism is not a fixed quantity: the representation of the

real is not doomed to stick to the discursive and aesthetic formulas of

realism’s era of cultural hegemony,

The first text I wish to examine in this discussion of contemporary

realism is David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ. This work is ostensibly a

parody of cyberpunk science fiction—the popular literary or film genre

depicting the development of virtual-reality technologies. Like previous

cyberpunk texts—William Gibson’s novels or the Wachowski broth-

ers’ Matrix—Cronenberg’s film depicts a world that has the status of a

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computer-generated simulation. “eXistenZ” itself is the name of a

computer game created by software designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer

Jason Leigh). Most of the film’s narrative unfolds within the simulated

arena of the eXistenZ game. Still, in one key respect, Cronenberg flouts

the cyberpunk formula: his film shuns computer-generated special

effects, privileging instead location shooting, studio sets, and, occa-

sionally, the props and puppetry of traditional horror stories.

eXistenZ therefore occupies an interstitial space between post-

modernism and realism. In its ostensible thematics and narrative struc-

ture, it is stereotypically postmodern. Its object is the nature of the real

in and of itself, especially in so far as the latter is reconfigured by the

technology of the information society. Also, like early postmodernist

works, eXistenZ blurs the line between the phenomenal real and script-

ed, textualized environments: Cronenberg’s plot creates metafictional

labyrinths reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions (see Borges,

“Garden,” “Tlön”). However, Cronenberg breaks with postmodern

metafiction by making realism the center of a narrative of political

resistance. The protagonists—Jennifer Jason Leigh and her sidekick

Ted Pikul (Jude Law)—are confronted with a guerilla movement

(indeed a realist underground) dedicated to overthrowing the software

capitalists that have brought the world of eXistenZ into being. These

Luddites of the computer age seek to counteract the capitalists’ “distor-

tions of reality.” At different stages of the narratives, Ted and Allegra

act as members of the underground. Yet, due to the intricacies of the

metafictional plot, their endorsement of the guerilla movement remains

uncertain.

It is admittedly difficult to evaluate how seriously Cronenberg

wishes his viewers to take the concept of a realist underground: eX-

istenZ is more a brilliant satire than a consistent realist manifesto. For

the present purposes, however, I wish to bracket off the film’s post-

modern ironies and to take its pro-realist pronouncements at face value.

I believe indeed that, by making the dedication to the real the rallying

cry of ragtag activists, Cronenberg voices concerns that resonate in a

constellation of texts that have developed alongside or even within

postmodernism. The core thematic of this realist underground is the

effort to find a dwelling space within what Jean Baudrillard—and after

him the screenwriters of the Matrix trilogy—call “the desert of the real”

(Baudrillard, Simulacra 2), i.e. the contemporary field of experience

impoverished by alienating fragmentation and ontological skepticism.

Calling this textual constellation a guerilla or a resistance movement


acknowledges the fact that, at least from the perspective of academic

readers, contemporary realism is a non-hegemonic movement, develop-

ing within an intellectual climate skeptical of referentiality.

2. Hybridized realism

Many contemporary artists swell the ranks of the realist guerrilla:

fiction writers (Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo); film-makers (Robert

Altman, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Sophia Coppola); painters (Andy

Warhol, Richard Estes, Mark Tansey, John Nava); as well as documen-

tary film-makers (Errol Morris, Morgan Spurlock, Michael Moore).

Mass-culture genres and computer-age media hold a significant posi-

tion within it—cyberpunk science fiction (William Gibson, Bruce

Sterling, Neal Stephenson); reality TV; music videos; graphic novels

(Dark Horse Comics such as Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons’s Martha

Washington series); or various avatars of the culture of virtual reality

(video games, computer animation).

This realist underground is inescapably diverse. It covers several

genres or media, cuts across geographical boundaries, and straddles the

fiction/non-fiction divide. Further, most of its texts are internally hy-

brid, interweaving discourses with differing textual logics and episte-

mological agendas. Hybridity in this case is due to the fact that the

corpus remains caught up in a dialogue with postmodern aesthetics and

theory. Acknowledging the impact of postmodernism on contemporary

realism is, I think, important. It would be pointless to celebrate a realist

revival that turns its back on the aesthetic and theoretical legacy of the

last fifty years. A few contemporary critics have adopted such a “know-

nothing” approach, however. They have made the rehabilitation of

realism an opportunity to excoriate postmodernist theorising (see Tallis

1981) or to distance themselves from their own previous endorsement

of post-Saussurean precepts (see Norris; Todorov; Eagleton). I believe,

on the contrary, that the heightened awareness of discursive mecha-

nisms fostered by postmodernism remains salutary. Instead of going

back to the presumed realist certainties of the past, it is necessary to

approach the scene of postmodernity under a change of lighting, as it

were. On the one hand, one should avoid uncritically endorsing the

condemnation of referentiality so emblematic of postmodernist ortho-

doxy, as well as the modernist pathos of alienation that underpins such

an anti-referential bias. On the other hand, one should take heed of the

subtle reflections on referentiality articulated within the postmodern

corpus, for instance in Jacques Derrida’s semiological re-readings of

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phenomenology (see Derrida, La voix), or in Jean-François Lyotard’s

discussions of language games and reference (see Lyotard, Différend

56-92).

Symptomatically, primary works themselves seldom encourage a

return to traditional mimesis: Within their textual space, they set up an

interaction between a referential epistemology and textual features

deemed definitional for postmodern works (metafiction, dialogism).

This coexistence of realism and postmodernism has been a hallmark of

important currents in the graphic arts as of the 1960s—Pop Art (Andy

Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein), Photorealism (Richard Estes, John Salt), as

well as the more recent ironical realism of Mark Tansey and John

Nava. These works lend themselves both to postmodernist and socially

referential interpretations. Yet academic critics have, symptomatically,

tended to foreground only the former, postmodern dimension. Edward

Lucie-Smith, in a survey of realist art, describes Warhol’s silk-screen

prints of documentary press photographs as only tangentially realistic

(Lucie Smith 1994: 169). Similarly, Fredric Jameson, in his ground-

breaking article on postmodern culture, makes Pop Art the prime locus

of the postmodern “waning of affect” (Jameson, Postmodernism 11)—

the aesthetic pose that privileges ironical pastiche over referentiality.

By the same token, Jameson argues that photorealist cityscapes fail to

provide a chart of contemporary life: They acknowledge instead the

artists’ inability to comprehend the complexities of contemporary

social conditions (Jameson, Postmodernism: 33-35). By claiming that

such figurative works might benefit from a change of critical perspec-

tive, I mean, on the contrary, that we should develop a paradigm that

does not systematically eclipse their otherwise patent referential im-

pact. Failing to do so would indeed impoverish our understanding of

the specific cultural work performed both by figurative and non-

figurative works: it would render us unable to distinguish contemporary

realist art from the modernist tradition of painterly abstraction against

which the new realism explicitly reacted in the early 1960s.3

Fundamentally, the hybrid make-up of the corpus sketched out

above is determined by contemporary artists’ recognition that realism is

not based on a simple, one-dimensional procedure of representation.

Classical realism was often described—by writers, readers, and critics

alike—as the offshoot of precisely this kind of self-evident gesture. In

Hamlet, Shakespeare endorses this seemingly transparent reflectionism

when he suggests that proper playacting should hold “the mirror up to

nature” (Shakespeare, Hamlet: 288; 3.2.22). The dramatist describes


thereby what anti-realist critics like Jean Ricardou later derisively

called the “referential illusion” (Ricardou 30). Poststructuralist theorists

have aptly exposed the false simplicities of reflectionism: they show

that what passes for a snapshot-like reproduction of the real or for a

commonsensical language of truthful art amounts to a complex discur-

sive negotiation. In particular, neo-historicist readers of realism and

naturalism—June Howard, Amy Kaplan, Walter Benn Michaels—have

shown that realist texts are not nature’s mirrors. Instead, they are spaces

of negotiation in which the real is not faithfully reproduced, but negoti-

ated and constructed.

The complexities of representation do not, I believe, spell the

death of realism. It is more productive to regard the negotiation and

construction of the real as the very stuff of a broadened field of realist

practices. In other words, referential impact in the present enquiry is not

exclusively tied to what Ian Watt, in his studies of 18th-century fiction,

calls “formal realism” (Watt 34). Under this term, Watt refers to the

principles of literary composition deemed necessary to achieve a com-

pelling mirror image of the world. Typically, authors devoted to formal

realism portray the phenomenal world instead of the alternative worlds

of fantasy: they depict individualized protagonists in historically specif-

ic situations, and detract their audience’s attention from the mechanics

of representation (Watt: 13-37). I do not wish to downplay the im-

portance of these reflectionist recipes for the history of realism, or even

to deny their perpetuation into contemporary culture. They should only

be viewed as one component in a more complex configuration. Real-

ism, in this light, is not the production of snapshots of unchallengeable

truth. It is a multifunctional, multilayered social process.

3. Heuristics, Reflexivity, Contract, Praxis

The complex configuration I have in mind can be mapped according to

four axes. Realist texts, in this logic, simultaneously mobilise a fact-

finding, a metadiscursive, a contractual, and an action-oriented dimen-

sion—heuristics, reflexivity, contract, and praxis. These terms desig-

nate strategies of representation that already informed classical realist

works but enjoy more autonomy and visibility in the field of turn-of-

the-twenty-first-century culture.

Heuristics refers to the fact-finding dimension of realist texts. In

classical realism, it covered such practices as the decision to bring to

the perception of middle-class readers the hardships of urban poverty

and the frustrations of the bourgeoisie’s domestic sphere. The tenor of

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contemporary realist heuristics is evocatively illustrated in Paul Aus-

ter’s and Wayne Wang’s Smoke.2 One of the film’s protagonists, Augie

Wren (Harvey Keitel) is an amateur photographer with an obsession for

fact finding. His “life’s work” consists in taking snapshots of the cross-

roads in front of his Brooklyn cigar store. “Every morning,” he sets up

his tripod “in the same spot at the same time” and has accumulated

more than four thousand pictures showing the intersection of 3d Street

and 7thAvenue “in all kinds of weather,” with any combination of

traffic and pedestrians.

Though the movie fails to clarify the meaning of Augie’s obses-

sion, one senses a double impulse in his photographic archives. On the

one hand, they betoken the need to be reassured about the continuity of

his life world. On the other, Augie’s watchfulness is rooted in a mod-

ernist hankering after epiphanies or miraculous occurrences—novelties

that break the routine of a cliché-ridden world. Auster’s and Wang’s

screenplay partly rewards the latter desire. In an incident that has the

trappings of a magical revelation, one of the film’s protagonists (Wil-

liam Hurt) accidentally discovers in Augie’s iconographic treasure a

picture of his own wife, who died several years earlier, and whose

presence has been haunting him ever since. Augie’s simultaneous

yearnings for continuity and rupture, though they seem mutually exclu-

sive, both betoken a rejection of the stereotypical concept of postmod-

ern everydayness—the Baudrillardian concept of a social world emp-

tied out of existential significance by information technology (see

Baudrillard, America 9-16).4

Reflexivity in realist texts alludes to the meta-cultural ability to

scrutinise the discourses by which the mapping of the world is carried

out. Given the importance of metafiction in post-WWII literature, it is

hardly surprising that contemporary referential texts should display

meta-realist features. “Classical realism,” on the contrary, was reputed

to conceal any symptom of textual reflexivity. Yet there are many

counterexamples: the naturalist novelist Stephen Crane indulges in

stylistic self-consciousness in Maggie, a girl of the street when he

implicitly contrasts the Irish-American idiom of the New York slums

with the rhetoric of epic romance (3-6). So does Mark Twain in The

adventures of Huckleberry Finn when he makes prefatory comments

on the literary use of U.S. dialects (48).

Contract alludes to the fact that realist texts serve as tokens in the

ongoing process of negotiation enabling societies to fashion their

concept of the real. This process finds literary antecedents in the han-


dling of reading contracts. Indeed, a text’s referential status does not

depend exclusively on its intrinsic discursive features: the capacity to

designate the real is empowered by a social pact. Writers’ remarks on

their own practice, reviews and criticism, readers’ feedback, or any

other statement shaping the appraisal of a text’s truth value contribute

to the elaboration of the realist reading contract. Daniel Defoe’s fram-

ing remarks on the reliability of Robinson Crusoe’s narrative carry out

this contractual function (25), as do reviewers’ comments evaluating

the accuracy with which Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan

handles such historical sources as Stephen E. Ambrose’s account of D-

Day.

Praxis covers the reformist, action-oriented component of realism.

This practical dimension is noticeable at all stages of the history of

mimesis. Referential works have never been completely divorced of

their effects on society and on social mores—a proclivity for social

relevance that led formalist critics to deny them literary value. Most

major figures of classical realism (Balzac, Dickens, Hugo, Flaubert,

Tolstoy, or Ibsen) wrote texts that had a political impact on their times

or were the object of social, even judicial negotiations (one thinks of

the censorship trial triggered by the publication of Flaubert’s Madame

Bovary) (see Bourdieu 129-30; Dubois 215). Zola’s naturalist manifes-

to “The Experimental Novel” explicitly identifies the link between

realism and commitment: more than reflections on aesthetics, Zola’s

treatise sketches out a “practical program” of social reform (195).

Logically, realism and naturalism have occupied an important position

in the political culture of the twentieth-century Left.

4. Negotiated disclosures

The combined workings of realist heuristics, reflexivity, contract, and

praxis can be brought forward in works that reflect upon the interpreta-

tion of photographic evidence. The latter procedure is particularly

important for contemporary realist texts, many of which focus on the

realist potential of photography and technologically generated images.

The critical perusal of photographs is an instance of what we might call

the negotiated handling of referential disclosure. Negotiated disclosure,

in this light, designates the moment when contemporary works spark

off the referential insights afforded by perceptual evidence and, simul-

taneously, explore the discursive logic that shapes or restricts such

seemingly incontrovertible revelations.

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This iconographic thematics, which we already encountered in

Augie Wren’s narrative, is central to Lisa Cholodenko’s alternative

film High Art or to technological thrillers such as Enemy of the State or

The Bourne Supremacy. These texts wrestle with the fact that photo-

graphs, even though they are direct traces of the referent, are also

vectors of negotiable, conventional, meaning. To borrow the terms of

Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, photographs are simultaneously

“icons” and “indices,” yet also “symbols” (Peirce’s term for arbitrary,

unmotivated signs) (Hoopes 239). They do provide an iconic likeness

of their object, even a physical, indexical print produced by the impact

of light on film. Yet semioticians—Saussureans, particularly—contend

that neither icons nor indices yield determinate meaning (see Barthes

1993). A photograph cannot, in this view, deliver the truth of the world,

as naïve realists mistakenly believe. It is only a “weightless, transparent

envelope” of the referent (Barthes, Camera 5). Even signs that are

prints of the real serve as tokens in a cultural exchange: the construc-

tion of meaning requires a conventional code, mobilized within a

semiotic negotiation.

In Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art, the negotiations shaping the

meaning of photographs unfold in two areas of the protagonists’ expe-

rience—the deontology of personal relationships and the fashion stand-

ards of the art market. The photographs around which the film revolves

are the offshoot of an ill-fated love affair between two women in the

New York avant-garde. Syd is a junior editor at a photography periodi-

cal appropriately entitled Frame. Lucy Berliner, in her early forties, is

an art photographer with a sagging reputation, the victim of a bohemian

subculture mired in nihilism and drugs. Syd’s project to devote a

special issue of Frame to Lucy’s recent work leads the photographer to

a painful career redefinition. To Lucy, realism—in the form of candid

snapshots of her avant-garde friends—is a matter of personal exposure

and integrity. She resents the demand by Syd’s boss that the Frame

story should offer an “examination of her friends and her life” for it is

patent that, to the magazine, her “incredibly honest” style is only a hip

cultural currency. Yet, unwilling to disappoint Syd and also eager to set

her life back on track, she delivers photographs that fit both her own

and the magazine’s definition of realism—intimate shots of Syd and

herself during a love fling in the countryside. Syd is at first afraid of the

personal exposure the publication of these shots implies. She also

suspects her jealous colleagues might accuse her of seducing Lucy for

careerist purposes. She first convinces Lucy to send for publication


older, less spontaneous shots of Lucy’s former lover. The realistically

inclined editor turns them down, leading Syd to consent to release the

more intimate images. Sadly, Lucy dies of an overdose before seeing

these last works published. Syd is left contemplating the ambiguity of

Lucy’s posthumous prints. Intrinsically, the shots, neither posed nor

staged, offer a straightforward disclosure—a record of “what hap-

pened” between the two lovers. Yet the life-changing occurrence thus

documented fails to fulfill its momentum unless the shots are allowed

to circulate in an artistic field ruled by the logic of economic and cul-

tural capital. This environment, however, reduces the images to a

fashionably titillating fare.

Similar negotiations play a structural part in the field of non-

fiction. Negotiated disclosures are essential to the workings of news,

particularly by live TV channels (CNN, BBC World). These networks

provide what they call “breaking news”—live coverage of emerging

(disruptive, even disastrous) current events. The initial disclosure is

then renegotiated and reframed through the cycles of retelling (serial

broadcasting, oftentimes with additional narrative, retrospective com-

mentary) typical of this media. In the BBC’s world coverage of the

March and April 2003 military operations in Iraq, one incident aptly

illustrated the disclosure potential of live TV. On Sunday, April 6,

2003, a unit of anti-Saddam Hussein Kurdish fighters accompanied by

senior BBC foreign affairs correspondent John Simpson and his crew

became victims of one of the war’s worst friendly-fire incidents. As the

northern front line was moving rapidly, the unit was bombed twice by a

US plane. About seventy people were killed, including the BBC’s

Iraqi-born translator. The other journalists were wounded (see Simpson

330-35).

The BBC crew were able to witness this massacre because they

had discreetly slipped through the net of Anglo-American censorship.

Simpson and his collaborators were not officially “embedded” in a

military unit. Had they been, they would have benefited from better

coordination with the US command, and the incident should have been

avoided. As things stood, the bombing became the object of a news

item in stark contrast with previous coverage. BBC World and CNN

had throughout the conflict avoided graphic footage of war victims.

Yet, with one of their own correspondents having narrowly escaped the

fate otherwise reserved to Iraqi soldiers and civilians, BBC World

broadcast pictures of burning trucks, bodies ripped apart, blood stains

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wiped from the camera lens, journalists pulling shrapnel from their flak

vests—all of it under John Simpson’s breathless, terrified voice-over.

I do not mean to argue that such news segments offer unmediated

realistic epiphanies—revelations of political truth. Yet I do not wish to

make the opposite claim either. While post-Saussurean interpretations

view photographic evidence as weightless fodder for the signifying

process, I do not believe that live TV images might lend themselves to

any re-interpretation whatsoever, thus also letting themselves be effort-

lessly contained by standardised, pro-establishment readings. Admit-

tedly, the very concept of “breaking news” fits the capitalist logic of

commodification: it implies that world events may be packaged as

fashionable merchandise. Symptomatically, the Simpson segment fitted

within the BBC’s journalistic star system. Not only were the images

broadcast repeatedly within the channel’s 24-hour programme loop,

they later became the centerpiece of a one-hour documentary, and are

also discussed in Simpson’s 2003 book on the subject, The Wars

against Saddam. Yet the concept of a negotiated disclosure makes it

possible to do justice not only to the reframing process to which these

images are subjected, but also to their moment of heuristic emergence.

This requires avoiding a reading grid polarised between the hankering

after absolute revelation and the fear of absolute censorship—the

overvaluation of authenticity and, on the other hand, unrelenting refer-

ential scepticism. Admittedly, disclosures in the field of news are

framed by an historical context, ideological inflections, and, of course,

logistical constraints. Yet the latter does not exclusively act as an

obstacle: it also creates the conditions of possibility for any new event.

Thus, even when context and situatedness play a crucial part, there is

still room for the emergence of meanings that are not from the outset

articulated within the boundaries of what, by reference to the idiom of

the “New” Labour Party in Britain, one might call “on-message” news.

Similarly, the path ideological negotiation will take is not predeter-

mined. Negotiation does not imply a one-dimensional, monological

reduction to a prepackaged, presumably conservative meaning.

In this light, John Simpson’s footage, instead of triggering a

transparent referential epiphany, initiated multi-leveled, context-

dependent disclosures. Politically, it undercut the fantasy of a victim-

less war. Moreover, the story implicitly led its viewers to realise that

there were other perspectives on the conflict than that readily available

to the audience of CNN, BBC World, and European and American

national broadcasters. Well before the Simpson incident, Iraqi wounded


and dead had been prominently featured on Arabic-language networks

such as Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiya. European TV stations had mentioned

the existence of such supposedly inflammatory images, broadcasting

them only in fragments. The Simpson footage starkly reminded West-

ern viewers of these half-silenced scenes of horror. In so doing, it

hinted at the existence of a dialogical Other—an audience in Arab

countries that constructed their perception of the conflict on the basis of

images and discourses unavailable to western viewers.

5. Pragmatic commitment

Constructing and reframing the meaning of film evidence is not merely

a heuristic or a contractual gesture; it is also a practical pursuit. In TV

news, interpretation presupposes the pragmatic activity of news gather-

ing itself, while the subsequent reframing of collected data is acted out

against the concrete obstacles of a socially contested field. Compared to

precedents in classical realism, cognitive praxis enjoys an enhanced

status in contemporary texts, even a new epistemological tenor (see

Den Tandt, “Pragmatic” 136-37). In a cultural atmosphere sceptical of

referential discourse, cognitive commitment implies that the seemingly

indecipherable social world must be tested or experimented with in

order to be known at all: it is not merely a backdrop of objective facts

awaiting the gaze of a supposedly unprejudiced observer. The dedica-

tion to cognitive praxis intrinsic to this activist concept of realism is

predicated on the hope that the social world’s knowable perimeter

might not be as restricted as sceptical epistemologies hold it to be. If

the world is inherently complex, the field of realist representation it

may support cannot be, paradoxically, defined in advance. Its horizon

should be actively staked out instead of being set at the most pessimis-

tic estimate.

Such pragmatic realism in the face of disenfranchising scepticism

is the chief impetus of Michael Moore’s documentary films. Roger and

Me (1989) and Bowling for Columbine (2002) display the urge to

explain in human terms phenomena that are otherwise attributed to the

agency of complex, irresistible forces (market constraints, economic

destiny, cultural determinism). Roger and Me focuses on the closing of

the historical General Motors automotive plants in Flint, Michigan. It

explores the social cost of desindustrialisation and delocalisation—

policies otherwise portrayed as the ineluctable destiny of postmodern,

globalised economies. Bowling for Columbine casts a retrospective

glance at the Colorado high-school shootings that claimed fifteen lives

13

on 20 April 1999. It investigates both the social roots of teenage aliena-

tion and the ideological mechanisms leading people to take the U.S.

gun culture for granted or indeed to champion it. Both films are made

up of documentary vignettes embedded within the narratives of frus-

trated or minimally successful investigative quests. Roger and Me

chronicles Moore’s fruitless efforts to meet with GM CEO Roger

Smith in order to discuss the Flint employment crisis. This endeavor

ends with Moore and his crew scuffling with security personnel in the

lobby of the GM headquarters. Bowling for Columbine, by comparison,

leads to partial victories. The director, aided by a wheelchair-bound

Columbine victim, successfully petitions a Wal-Mart store in the

vicinity of the Columbine high school to remove firearms ammunitions

from its shelves. In addition, Moore obtains an interview with National

Rifle Association spokesperson Charlton Heston, and asks him why he

agreed to host an NRA rally in Columbine a few days after the killings.

That the interview took place is already a victory of sorts. But the

meeting’s outcome is predictably negative. All Heston has to offer is

strained conviviality, gun-lobby rhetoric, and embarrassed body lan-

guage. Flustered by Moore’s insistent questions, he cuts the interview

short.

Pragmatism in Moore’s documentaries resides, first, in the recog-

nition of the limits placed upon the film crew’s investigative efforts.

This aspect of the films manifests itself in the understated irony inform-

ing what we might call Moore’s referential quixotism. The footage of

the director and his crew roaming Michigan and Colorado in search of

evidence and testimonies is indeed all the more poignant as it unfolds

against the suspicion that not all aspects of the tragedies portrayed on

screen will be explained in terms of verifiable chains of human-based

causes and effects. Yet the films do manage to make plain that the

director’s quests are legitimate and productive. For all the talk of

economic prosperity, the decision to phase out the Flint plant was made

by a specific board of administrators aiming for ascertainable economic

profits. Moore’s insistence upon meeting GM’s CEO is therefore not

specious. Similarly, even though the motives of the Columbine killers

may never be fully fathomed, it makes sense to challenge the intentions

of people who spread the discourse of gun culture with great determina-

tion, backed with considerable financial resources.

Ironical quixotism in Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine

combines with what we might call realist (or heuristic) sidelighting:

referential disclosures are triggered less by the texts’ main narratives


than through oblique remarks, background descriptions, or subsidiary

anecdotes. Moore’s Roger and Me follows this pattern as the hunt for

GM CEO Roger Smith—presumably the film’s main focus of inter-

est—leads viewers through a tour of Flint’s run-down sights—an

unromantic environment seldom depicted by other media. Realist

sidelighting also occurs in documentary vignettes offering viewers

glimpses of the everyday despair of Flint’s newly unemployed. We

witness, for instance, the bafflement of a young GM worker standing

on the stoop of the house from which he has just been evicted, confess-

ing he has no other place to go. Another secondary narrative under-

scores the admirable, though futile, dedication of a laid-off worker who

starts a rabbit farm only to learn that the new venture will be shut down

on account of health regulations. In Bowling for Columbine the same

technique is used in scenes contrasting attitudes toward crime in the

United States and Canada. Moore takes his crew from notoriously

unsafe Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario, the Canadian city across

the Detroit River. He enters several houses unannounced, revealing

thereby that Canadians feel so safe in their residential neighborhoods

that they keep their doors unlocked. Sidelighting, these examples

suggest, is an appropriate strategy for a realist project that shirks the

dogmatism of cognitive authority. Instead of hammering home their

documentary message, the texts foreground pseudo-realistic or even

anti-realistic structuring devices (the hopeless chase of Roger Smith;

the confessional interviews of Columbine) even as they let referentiality

reassert itself in the margins of the text.

The tentativeness of Moore’s quixotic approach is counterbal-

anced by pragmatist activism, mobilising what we might call carni-

valesque experimentation. The social world, the director suggests, is a

field of praxis that needs to be experimented through gestures such as

transgressive forays, satire, re-enactments, or specific appeals for

political action. Besides Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine,

this activism informs Moore’s documentary TV shows (TV Nation; The

Awful Truth) or essays such as Stupid White Men and Downsize This!.

Divided into short skits or chapters, these works lend themselves

perfectly to documentary-oriented agit-prop. One TV nation segment

(“Taxi”) stages an experiment meant to gauge the everyday racism

affecting blacks in the United States. Moore asks both a black celebrity

(Emmy-award winning actor Yaphet Kotto) and a less reputable white

person (a convicted felon) to hail cabs at a Manhattan intersection. The

crew’s hidden cameras records how taxis whizz past Kotto and pick up

15

the white customer (Moore and Glynn 75-77). Cabbies asked about this

apparent oversight respond they were not able to spot the black actor.

The latter is then placed under a klieg light and asked to carry flowers

and a baby (Moore and Glynn 78-78). Cabbies still describe him as

“kinda threatening” (Moore and Glynn 78). Other segments test the

boundaries of race and class by means of advertising campaigns (“Bri-

an Anthony Harris is Not Wanted”), beach landings (“Invading the

Beach at Greenwich, Connecticut”), or the creation of TV superheroes

(“Crackers, the Corporate Crime-Fighting Chicken”). The “Not Want-

ed” campaign uses TV ads, billboards, and sky messages in order to

advertise the fact that Anthony Harris, a black man pulled over repeat-

edly by the Washington, DC police, is in fact a law-abiding, church-

going citizen (Moore and Glynn 69-73). The Connecticut landing,

dubbed, with some overstatement, “the largest beach invasion since

Normandy” (Moore and Glynn 25) aims to highlight the illegal nature

of regulations preventing “hordes” (Moore and Glynn 24) of non-

Greenwich residents to use the beaches of the upper-class New York

suburb. The invasion elicits an immediate response from the Greenwich

police and the US coast guard. Lawyers are left to decide which level

of jurisdiction has been breached. Crackers, the superchicken, was

created in order to draw attention to the huge sums involved in corpo-

rate fraud—twenty times the annual amount of all burglaries in the

USA (Moore and Glynn 47). The Chicken—a seven-foot mascot

endowed with its own Crimemobile van—stages several demonstra-

tions, notably against banks. The actions, in spite of popular support,

were interrupted by the police.

The legal wrangling triggered by Moore’s raids, far from reining

in documentary investigation, extends the field of realist praxis. The

film-maker’s actions, like the sit-ins and freedom riders’ expeditions of

the 1960s in America, are meant to test the limits of citizens’ rights.

They reveal the utopian potential of the Bill or Rights or, conversely,

point up the grotesque situations obtaining when the latter is flouted.

One of the most hilarious segments from TV Nation reveals that until

1995, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution proclaiming

the emancipation of slavery had not been passed by the legislature of

the state of Mississippi. The TV Nation crew therefore ran a “Slaves

Wanted” ad in a Jackson, MS newspaper during the last week of “le-

gal” slave ownership in the state. Fifty applicants responded, among

which six were selected. The crew put them to work in shackles, gave

them slave names (“Jesse Helms Bob” or “Billy Bob Dole” [Moore and


Glynn 83]), and eventually freed them before the legislature ratified the

Emancipation Bill. Similarly, like civil rights protests, Moore’s docu-

mentary raids encourage legally sanctioned empowerment. The report

narrating the “Taxi” segment features telephone numbers where com-

plaints against discrimination can be lodged (Moore and Glynn 79).

Likewise, the introductory chapter of Stupid White Men (“A Very

American Coup”), which chronicles the discriminatory disenfran-

chisement of voters in Florida during the 2000 presidential election,

specifies how readers may contact their US congressional representa-

tive and advises them to run for office themselves (Moore, Stupid 26-

27).

6. Conclusion

Realism, in Moore’s praxis, acquires a meaning that is implicit in the

everyday use of the term, as when it is used in the phrase “to be realis-

tic.” In this case, realism is no longer understood as a reflectionist

practice seeking to establish what Richard Rorty ironically calls “a

relation between pieces of thought (or language) and pieces of the

world” (131). Instead, it designates the effort to mend social problems

within the limits of what is achievable in a given context. Although this

pragmatic reframing of mimesis arguably constitutes a central aspect of

contemporary realism, I do not mean to argue that the whole problem-

atic of referentiality and representation can be rephrased in terms of

interpretative praxis, experimentation, and commitment. In what pre-

cedes, I have been careful to skirt an issue that could not be addressed

in the present framework, but that inevitably stands at the heart of

discussions of mimesis—the status of truth. At bottom, what makes the

pragmatic endeavors of documentary film-makers or journalists

worthwhile is the assumption that their efforts are regulated by a com-

mitment to truthfulness. Recent debates in world politics—the contro-

versies surrounding the Iraq war, in particular—have cast a sharp light

on the political stakes involved in the sheer verisimilitude of govern-

ment claims.5 By the same token, there is no other way to evaluate

mimesis than by gauging a text’s ability to do justice to its context. This

is admittedly an awkward task for academic critics who, as Christopher

Norris laments, have striven hard to portray truth and objectivity as

outdated philosophical problems (1-2). As a result, contemporary

academic readers of realism—neo-historicists, for instance—are recur-

rently made to flout their intended conceptual framework by articulat-

ing readings relying on covert referential judgments. Breaking free

17

from this conceptual impasse without reverting to dogmatic certainties

is a crucial stake for the further study of realism. To revert to pragma-

tist terminology (or to David Cronenberg’s logic of virtual-reality

simulation), we stand in need of a critical framework that identifies

truth-oriented gestures in the reality game.

Notes

1. First published in BELL: Belgian Journal of English Language and

Literature, Ns 4 (2006): 67-81.

2. Ihab Hassan shows that a referentially grounded distinction between

realist representation and abstract art cannot be dispensed with. Though

the mapping of the real is determined by ideology and intertextual

conventions, a line can still be traced between texts that aim to map the

world and texts that do not. Thus, the sketches of fauna and flora drawn

by European travelers to the South Seas may be offshoots a colonial

project, obeying European standards of the fine arts, yet they fit in a

different category from abstract canvasses by Kandinsky or Klee

(Hassan 2003b: 7; see also Hassan 2003a).

3. See Den Tandt (1999: 50-52) for a more detailed analysis of Augie

Wren’s figure.

4. Joseph Dewey shows that the realist critique of the postmodern

society of the spectacle constitutes a key concern of contemporary US

fiction (Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Tyler, T. Coraghessan Boyle) (see

Dewey 1999: 4).

5. Michael P. Lynch argues that the Bush administration’s disregard for

truth in the preparation of the 2003 Iraq campaign reveals the philo-

sophical legitimacy of theories of truth—a field to which postmodernist

paradigms have little to contribute (2004: 1-2).

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