Fiction's Present without Basis

In the evening, the day the U.S. invasion of Iraq began, I went to a reading series held at a private home. The host was in jail, arrested during a huge anti-war demonstration which blocked buildings and streets of San Francisco. Fourteen hundred arrested, twelve hundred arrested the next day (the extent of the demonstrations never reported nationally). The audience (all writers) at the reading, and the readers, discussed the fact that language has been destroyed. It is only propaganda and lies at all. Saying we’re liberating them, ‘we’ mow down their people. (Jalal Toufic, in Forthcoming, comments that in Lebanon, “Even guerrilla operations by Lebanese against military targets in the part of Lebanon illegally occupied by Israel are termed terrorist!”¹ ) The writers speaking used words to the effect: ‘they (those saying they’re liberating) have destroyed language, we must destroy language (in order to make it)’.

I think language that’s poetry or fiction is the only language that can destroy language in that sense (to remake it).

That may not be an answer to the question posed (for a consideration of ‘fiction’s present’): “Does fiction continuing the tradition of modernist innovation have any reality for emergent political groups and cultures?”² Destroying language (to remake it) may be alongside that question.

“Can the novel establish itself in the present of global capitalism without abandoning its formal distinctness?” My sense is: it is its formal distinctness if it ‘transforms’ the time it’s in—’transforms’ in the sense of: to be only its language, syntax and structure in that time. It can change the space of the given—the space given as that language there, which rearranges changing the conception (present tense) of the outside given.

That is, fiction’s present is the act of changing the language then. The present is (phenomenally) a form of fiction, in being created ahead of us unknown. The present isn’t engaged in this sense, however, in MLA Style Manual language. Critical, explanatory language (intentionally regularized) is removed from the present as its space (is not the present of that language)—meaning, the intent of critical language is not that of being: the act of changing the present as real-time space (as language, itself a form of real-time space, which can change space outside not mimicking it—conceptual as also a physical change). Critical language is to be within shared terms, what has become that already. My argument is that language of poetry and fiction can be a new space by being (in the text) as given, there.

Yet the language of theory (such as Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus/Capitalism and Schizophrenia [2002]) is also written ‘physical’ space; that work a kind of summary that reconstructs modern terrain according to a description that we then recognize as present information (though “Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine” is a conjecture on “Thought, the State, and Nomadology” which is not about actual nomads, in Mongolia for example; it is created theory/future)—but the writing of that vision of reality (which one can accept in the same way one accepts news, if news were that, anyway the way one accepts observation, as the language of supposed rational/’straightforward’ exposition) does not change its space except to enhance it. It leaves that space in place, intentionally prolonging it, adding to it rather than altering it as the shape of the language in which it’s delineated, in a duration as to constitute a history of the present. Dropping a distinction between fiction and poetry as types of language is indicative of the current change also reflected in writers dropping the distinction between art of language and discursive language. Yet there are still distinctions. Language of fiction and poetry can change the created setting vertically/horizontally at once by that setting being differently the space that is syntax, rather than that setting being solely intellectually created (its very presentation depending on appearing as objective fact, therefore without apparently attempting its own transmogrification there).

An example of intellectual construct’s resistance to its meaning occurring as...