The Referential Trail: Realism as a Dialogical Process (On Virtual Grounds # 10)

Christophe Den Tandt

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Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles (2015)

CHAPTER 9

The Referential Trail: The Dynamics of Referential Investigations1

2.4.1 Realism and the Paper Trail Jake Gittes, the private investigator of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, is asked to solve the murder of waterworks engineer Hollis Mulwray. To this purpose, he must retrieve the names of rural landowners whose unfarmed landholdings have been illegally earmarked to benefit from irrigation water apportioned for drought-stricken Los Angeles. Jake therefore consults the Los Angeles County Hall of Records. Prevented 1

This paper is the tenth instalment of a book-length study provisionally entitled On Virtual Grounds: Blueprint for a Postmimetic, Dialogical Realism. Previous instalments—entitled respectively “Toward a Dialogical and Postmimetic Realism,” and “Classic Realism, the Nostalgic View,” “Modernist Antirealism: Existential Alienation and the Solace of Form,” “The Thingless Sign: The Structuralist and Poststructuralist Challenge against Referential Illusion,” “The Politics of Mimesis: Realism as Discursive Repression,” “Antirealism and the Visual Media,” “The Reality Bet: Realism under Postmodernity,” “Negotiated Disclosures: The Core Strategies of Dialogical Realism,” and “Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality”— are also available on Academia.edu

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by a supercilious clerk from borrowing the landholdings ledger for private consultation, Jake thinks up a trick enabling him to rip off a whole page from the precious volume: he borrows a ruler from the clerk in order to ensure a clean cut, fakes a loud cough to cover the tearing noise, and speeds off to the destinations spelled out on the torn page. The clues thus revealed eventually enable him to expose a statewide scandal mingling financial and political corruption with, in true noir fashion, sexual perversion. In this, Polanski’s noir narrative whimsically literalizes what detective writers call the paper trail. This term designates the path followed by investigators tracking suspects or missing persons through labyrinths of archives: each piece of evidence sends the cognitive quester forth towards new documents, opening up further avenues of investigation. Deconstructionist neo-noir thrillers such as Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) chart out trail of clues that resist cognitive or narrative resolution. Polanski’s film, by comparison, still abides by the classic noir formula: it sends Jake on a trail that, however complex, does lead to disclosure. The tortuous yet centripetal investigation path traced out by Chinatown and other crime classics is therefore a proper paradigm for what I wish to call the referential trail of contemporary realism. The multilayered signifying strategies of realist referential apparatuses unfold in a fashion that indeed resembles the path of investigation of a paper trail whose scope accommodates documents and clues of all nature The term referential trail renders justice to the fact that the practice of realism takes the form of a dialogical process extending beyond the boundaries of separate texts: realism is not limited to the composition or reception of self-contained works of art. Instead, its referential apparatus triggers a sequence of reinvestigations and renegotiations. Previous chapters of the present essay have shed light on this process of realist negotiations. The discussion of TV reports from the 2003 Iraq War in chapter 7 is in essence a rough chart of a referential trail. More generally, the existence of an investigative trail is inherent to the very concept of dialogical realism on which the present argument is based. Admittedly, the dialogized processes we have tackled in previous chapters have mostly involved interactions among representational gestures (heuristics, reflexivity, contract, praxis) or planes of signifiers (the various layers of nature differentials). Yet as soon as we regard realism as a trail deployed across multiple texts and levels of social practice, we nudge the present argument in the

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direction of a more traditionally Bakhtinian interpretation of dialogical exchanges. The present section start outs indeed from the principle, central to Bakhtin, according to which any speech act is “a rejoinder in given dialogue … determined by its interrelationship with other rejoinders in the same dialogue” (Dialogic 274): it is a response to and an anticipation of past and future statements issuing from other language users. In this light, the realist investigation of a given situation—its specific trail—reworks the legacy of past representational traditions (its raw material) and anticipates the future input of potential respondents. In what follows, I analyze these dialogical dynamics first at the local level—in the reception of single photographic images. Photographs are adequate illustrations for this part of the argument because their status in the referential trail matches that of most other non-arbitrary signs. Subsequently, I broaden up the methodological scope to the analysis of more comprehensive trails of negotiations. To this end, I focus on the history of the representation of African Americans from the nineteenth-century to the present in several modes of expression (literature and the visual media). Through this example, I endeavor to develop the core terminology allowing us to chart dialogical negotiations of great complexity, shaped by heterogeneous social and discursive factors.

2.4.2 Determinate Referential Negotiations 10 Photographs have a vexingly ambiguous status with regard to reference and meaning. On first inspection, images obtained by photographic capture—indexical icons, to pick up the terminology introduced in previous chapters—should be able to provide decisive graphic evidence in referential investigations. In Chapter 6, I have argued that because of their reliance on technologically constrained mimesis, photographs have the capacity to act as stable (or “heavy”) signs. Yet I have also pointed out that this semiotic privilege is not tied exclusively in their supposedly self-evident graphic features. Their status as indexical icons only guarantees that their object is a matter of fact—a referent. The latter’s significance is, however, constructed largely through external chains of discourse. Photographs are therefore always beholden to some degree of semantic negotiation. In addition, there are more vexing obstacles to the reading of photographs than mere semantic indeterminacy. One must first

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question viewers’ basic ability to ascertain whether given documents are photographs (or any form of indexical print) at all. We have seen in Chapter 5 that anthropologists consider basic photographic recognition culturally relative: Melville Herskovits’s research among Australian first-nations people leads him to conclude that the technologically based mimetic mechanism European subjects take for granted is a learned skill (Sekula 85). Even in societies where photographs and film have been in common usage for decades, evaluating the link between these documents and their represented object presupposes on the part of viewers some elementary understanding of the technological means involved in image production. The rise of virtualization in recent decades has made the role of technological literacy the more crucial: image recognition and interpretation are subjected to ever more complex extrinsic verification procedures. Ironically, early-twenty-first century audiences face the computer-generated image world of the information society from a perspective similar to that of Australian aborigines gazing at argentic snapshots. Computer graphic processing, whose specifics are beyond the ken of many viewers, blurs the boundary between photographic live capture and image synthesis: it produces simulacra that are in many cases barely distinguishable from supposedly trustworthy photographs. Baudrillard famously argues that the iconographic environment thus generated abolishes any boundary between reality, image, and fantasy (Simulacres 16-17). Without endorsing this extreme skepticism, one must acknowledge that the evidential use of indexical images thereby becomes considerably more complex. The concept of the referential trail allows us to outline a strategy of interpretation that does take into account the obstacles to photographic self-evidence, yet does not endorse the indeterminist concept of photographic meaning inherent to structuralist semiology. Contrary to what Roland Barthes suggests in “The Rhetoric of the Image,” we may read photographs, film footage, and hyperimages otherwise than as arbitrary signs among other arbitrary signs. There are indeed constraints bearing upon the negotiation of photographic meaning. The latter is conditioned by the material contingencies of the negotiation circuit in which images are caught up and by this traffic’s overall shape—open or closed, divergent or convergent. This implies that the referential trail is more matter-bound and less inherently flexible than the indeterminist free play postulated by the

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(post)structuralist concept of signifying practice. To revert to the concepts introduced in previous chapters, we should view realist investigations as nature differentials stretching across time and space. As such, their sequences of contractual negotiations link up heterogeneous documents, situations, and institutions whose nature may admittedly speed up the flight of meaning, but also slow it down, even to the extent of providing meaning with an anchoring point. In this light, the referential trust commonly afforded to photographs expresses the legitimate expectation that the referential trail may lead to cognitive agreement: the trail has the capacity to follow the dynamics of centripetal dialogism, steering the contractual exchanges that fashion the meaning of images toward a binding resolution. 13 The negotiation practice sketched out above is conditioned by the retrospective and the prospective branches of the referential trail in which photographic documents fit. Identification and interpretation procedures are shaped, on the one hand, by norms of reception inherited from the past and, on the other, by what we may call a prerogative of dialogical appeal—the right of future viewers to renegotiate an image’s meaning. The retrospective branch of a photographic document’s trail is its enabling context—its set of explanatory captions, as it were. At the most general level, I pointed out in Chapter 5 that this retrospective branch comprises the long-term construction of visual perception studied by historians of the visual arts such as Ernest Gombrich and Joel Snyder. In this long-term perspective, the illusionistic effect of photography is the offshoot of a process of habituation brought about by successive developments in visual mimesis—perspective painting, magic lanterns, or dioramas (Gombrich, “Standards” 206-09; Snyder 234-46). Thus, early photographs had the capacity to trigger the spontaneous recognition of their object partly because they instituted a relation between subject, image, and world that had long informed previous iconographic traditions. Indeed, as Snyder points out, early inventors intended these photographs to reproduce these pre-existing norms by mechanical means (231). The impact of pre-existing habits of perception is even easier to trace in the case of film. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century various technological precursors of the film camera and projector—Joseph Plateau’s phenakisticsope (1828), William George Horner’s Zoetrope (1833), Coleman Sellers’s Kinematoscope (1861)—had been invented to fulfill viewers’ persistent demands for moving mimetic images (Balio 27-29; Monaco 82-83). In this logic,

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the spectators of the Lumière Cinématographe who were frightened by L’arrivée d’un train en gare should have realized that the tremor they experienced at seeing a locomotive rushing upon them from the screen was to a large extent triggered by cultural conditioning (Cook, David 11; Balio 37). Irrepressible as it may have appeared, their fear was the offshoot of centuries of cultural traditions encouraging subjects to discern three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional graphic signifiers. Besides these deep structuring factors, the median range of the retrospective trail comprises what one might call viewers’ foreknowledge and metaknowledge. These terms cover, on the one hand, viewers’ store of opinions, documents, and remembered perceptions—the store of cultural material Roland Barthes dismisses as “stereotypes” (S/Z, 211; my translation). On the other, they designate viewers’ awareness of the means by which such knowledge may be gathered with varying degrees of reliability. The importance of fore and metaknowledge may be gauged by the fact that viewers confronted with a snapshot of an object displaying no link to their known lifeworld whatsoever would not only be unable to identify the object in question but also unlikely to recognize the image as a photographic document at all. The meaning of most photographs, Barthes points out, is constructed by means of captions: the written copy of advertisements or press snapshots acts as an “anchorage” mechanism for an otherwise indeterminate gamut of possible meanings (“Rhetoric” 20). In a general perspective, foreknowledge and metaknowledge therefore constitute the store of captions available in a given culture. A thoroughly uncaptioned image, if such a document might be imagined, would not only carry no meaning but could not even be assigned a determinate semiotic status (whether iconic or, as a photograph, indexical). Finally, the most distinctly dialogical feature of the referential trail is its prospective branch. The referential value of photographic documents is indeed never final: the evidential potential of these images is rooted precisely in the fact that their imputed meaning will be corroborated or invalidated by overlays of new captions. Their relation to the lifeworld is determined by the latter’s further development in time: photographs caught up in the dynamics of the referential trail, are constantly in wait of what Charles Sanders Peirce calls their “Final Interpretant” (qtd in Ogden and Richards 280; italics in original).

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We may therefore consider in a new light some of the examples that, in chapter 5, I presented as emblematic of the obstacles facing the realist understanding of photography and film. Antonioni’s Blow Up and Costa-Gavras’s Music Box offer particularly useful, contrasted material for this re-evaluation. In light of the previous reflections on referential trails, it is clear that Antonioni’s commitment to epistemological indeterminism led him to create a narrative of photographic investigation that preempts any possibility of dialogical appeal. Ideally, Antonioni’s photographer (David Hemmings) would need a live witness to ascertain the reality of the crime he has inadvertently recorded: he could instantly close his case if another person were to corroborate the presence of a body in the park based on direct observation. Even in the absence of on-site verification, the photographer’s cognitive bewilderment would considerably ease off if he were able to present his snapshots to the gaze of another observer. This dialogical confrontation might validate his initial hypothesis, dismiss it, or proclaim it objectively undecidable for lack of sufficient evidence. It would in the worst of cases lead to an assessment of determinate ignorance, not a verdict of ghostly uncertainty. Predictably, this revised version of Blow Up would have to skip its famous finale: the mock-tennis game at the end of the film marks its ultimate endorsement of axiomatic skepticism; it makes sense only within a narrative allegorizing the vanity of perception and representation. In stark contrast with Antonioni’s skepticism, Costa-Gavras’s Music Box meticulously charts the sequence of dialogical appeals enabling its protagonists to solve the photographic puzzle at the heart of its thriller plot. The film needs to ascertain that presumed war criminal Michael Laszlo is indeed the person appearing on the face of the forty-year-old identity card issued by the Hungarian fascist militia. To that effect, it sets off a dialogical negotiation relying on the traditional mechanics of courtroom thrillers: the connection between Laszlo in his seventies and Mishka, the young fascist militiaman, is established by means of detective investigations and court debates— procedures requiring the adversarial scrutiny of evidence. By the standards of the genre, the details of Music Box’s referential trail are remarkably intricate. Viewers and characters do not discover Lazslo’s past at the same pace. To the former, the identity of Lazslo and Mischka is revealed circumstantially yet compellingly by midnarrative: we are made to understand that Laszlo’s eagerness to teach

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his grandson proper pushups techniques is a grim echo of his wartime execution procedures: his prisoners were sadistically obliged to carry out the pushup routine above an upturned bayonet. Armed with this knowledge, we are better able to appreciate the difficulties experienced by characters in their efforts to assess the link between photograph and suspect. Laszlo’s daughter Anne (Jessica Lange) is quixotically trying to exculpate her father. She discovers the old man’s wartime identity as she uncovers a blackmail plot: for decades, Laszlo had to pay off his former lieutenant, who threatened to make public photographs showing the militiamen boasting of their atrocities. Laszlo is tied to these incriminating images by the trail of blackmail money and by the contacts he had maintained with his lieutenant’s surviving sister. For Anne, the final disclosure comes when the atrocities photographs emerge from a charmingly ornate music box in which the lieutenant had concealed them. She then delivers her findings to the press and to judicial authorities, securing their dialogical validation. The virtuosity of this chain of evidence is more than a screenwriting gimmick: its narrative twists signal in metarealist fashion that photographic meaning is neither transparent nor inherently indeterminate. Even a trail of circumstantial clues involving multiple nature differentials can ascertain the meaning of images provided those elements are open to dialogical review. In fictions such as Music Box or Blow-Up, the nature of photographic meaning—whether determinate or undecidable—is admittedly to some extent dependent on creative choice. Authors opt either for a centripetal or for a centrifugal trail by subscribing to genre conventions that implicitly determine the shape of the dialogical trail in which photographs are negotiated. I pointed out in Chapter 5 that the rational plots of whodunnits turn photographs into decisive, determinate clues whereas the narrative labyrinths of hard-boiled novels or film noir render photographic evidence ambiguous. Nonfictional graphic documents are, of course, not amenable to such aesthetic decisions, yet the mechanisms validating their referential value are structurally similar to those prevailing in fictional investigations. The previous remarks on Antonioni and Costa-Gavras can therefore be brought to bear, for instance, on the documentary images whose problematic legibility I pointed out in chapter 5—the RAF photographs of extermination camps discussed in Lucy Carter’s Auschwitz, the Forgotten Evidence and the surveillance camera footage of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon (“Two Pentagon Videos”).

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We have gathered from the interpretation of Antonioni’s and CostaGavras’s feature films that the evaluation of documentary photographs amounts in the first place to an assessment of their referential trail— its density, structure, overall orientation, and material nature. What makes Lucy Carter’s documentary on Auschwitz/Birkenau photographs so valuable is the seriousness with which she addresses this issue of reception. Her argument highlights the paradoxical fact that the RAF shots of extermination camps could not initially be regarded as self-warranting graphic signs: they became compelling traces of genocide only in the later evolution of their trail of interpretation. The intelligence analysts who first peered over these otherwise technically perfect images lacked the hermeneutic framework adequate to what was at the time an unimaginable event. In the summer of 1944, the knowledge required for the interpretation of Auschwitz images did exist—notably thanks to reports from the Polish anti-Nazi resistance. Yet it was not shared by a sufficient number of allied personnel for it to trigger the instant recognition effect the photographs now elicit among early-twenty-first-century viewers. Conversely, our own astonishment at what looks retrospectively like ideological blindness is conditioned by our familiarity with the considerable documentation that has been gathered about the holocaust since WWII. We are instantly able to match the aerial views—the graphic signature of the grid-like pattern of barracks, the front gate, the railway spurs, the crematoria—with an object whose multiple facets have become public knowledge. Still, while these photographs meet the most demanding standards of historical scrutiny, their import can only be as solid as the sum of a convergent evidential trail—a concatenation of heterogeneous documents, each carrying its own mode of validity. As such, these images are not immune to referential appeals, including objections in bad faith. On the one hand, Carter suggests that they are so reliable that, by collating them with other sources, it is possible to determine which contingent of prisoners was being exterminated as the shots were taken (August 1944 was the moment of the deportation of Hungarian Jews). On the other, their residual falsifiability manifests itself in the fact that holocaust deniers still feel vindicated to publish negationist messages on the very YouTube web sites where Carter’s documentary is posted (“The Documentary”). This ill-intentioned gesture is, however, possible only at the price of an exorbitant denial: in addition to questioning the value of the isolated images, it requires

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dismissing the whole trail of evidence that makes them meaningful— indeed dismissing a whole lifeworld. The same strategy of interpretation applies to the Pentagon footage, admittedly with a less confident outcome. The reception of these images is hampered by the extreme rarity of the event they record and by the poor iconic quality of the surveillance camera footage that survives as the only direct representation of the disaster. Few viewers have previous experience of the spectacle or the physical traces of a plane crash, let alone the impact of a jet liner hitting a massive stone building at full speed. Thus, the realist approach to these images must in the first place highlight the deficiencies of the available referential trail, and point out how this situation opens the sluices for spurious expertise and conspiracy theories targeting an otherwise solid chain of circumstantial evidence. Simultaneously, realist observers should strive, as many press reports have done, to clarify why images in a given context have little evidential value to non-expert eyes. This might ultimately lead to a partial judgment of determinate ignorance, pointing out that, from the point-of-view of the general public, graphic documents are bound to contribute little to the knowledge of the otherwise well-documented Pentagon attack.

2.4.3 Referential Shifts and Reality Breaks After examining the local logic of referential trails, we must address the dynamics of cultural negotiations with a much larger scope—trails running across several decades, for instance. We will initially assume that these broader processes obey principles similar to those regulating the context-dependent apprehension of individual documents. We must therefore start out from the premise that even the widest-ranging cultural negotiations are dialogically homological to the local processes characterizing the production and reception of the cinephotographic sources discussed above. Still, the remarks below will lead us to expand the terminological toolkit so far elaborated for the discussion of single sources: we will develop keywords rendering justice to dialogical phenomena affecting such broader cultural units as genre and mode, or socially anchored categories like race, gender, and class. The corpus I address for this purpose is the decades-long fashioning of racial stereotypes shaping the representation of African Americans in literature and the visual media. As was the case in the characterization of the local aspects of referential trails, I assume that

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the negotiation of the portrayal of African Americanness has been caught up in what Barthes calls “a network with a thousand entries” (S/Z 19). This implies that the space of negotiation of African American stereotypes is not composed of isolated units. Its speech acts fit in transmedial and transgeneric sequences disregarding the boundaries of separate works, genres and modes of expression. Evidently, the following reflections cannot address all features of the huge field of African American cultural history. I merely wish to bring to light the methodological kernel that may help us make sense of its century-long evolution. In a sketchy fashion, we will therefore deal with examples stretching across an arc that runs from the mid and latenineteenth-century literature linked to abolitionism to the portrayal of urban blacks in the early-twenty-first-century HBO TV series The Wire (2005-08). The history of the representation of African Americans is a compelling exemplum for this methodological argument because throughout the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the cultural definition of race has closely been associated with the possibilities of realism. Slavery, segregation, and civil rights have held a central position in American culture and politics. The image of blackness has served as template for all varieties of discourse on racial difference. In this context, the political and cultural contest over race has predominantly been phrased, implicitly or explicitly, as a truthrelated problematic. Representing blackness has always revolved around the necessity (or the refusal) to render justice to political and social inequality, poverty, and exploitation. It is therefore no coincidence that realism and naturalism should have been considered consubstantial to the development of African American culture: Richard Wright, the first African American novelist acknowledged by a broad white readership, was a prominent figure of mid-twentiethcentury naturalism, and his work set the tone for African American fiction into the 1950s. Even in the decades when art and literature evolved toward postmodernism, the mass media were still beholden to the quintessentially realist demand for accountability in matters of race. In 1994, Time magazine triggered a media outrage by publishing on its front page a darkened mug shot of murder suspect O. J. Simpson, misleading readers as to the former football player’s and actor’s actual skin tone (“American”). This incident reveals that realism in the most literal graphic sense still carries a strong political charge when racial difference is at stake.

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The realist representation of race has from the onset taken the shape of a dialogical process because it has been the object of implicit or overt political and cultural contests. The quest for truth in the portrayal of African American life conditions has indeed been the object of controversies carried out in the media, notably at the initiative of officially instituted black cultural and political associations. The National Association for the Advancement of the People of Color, for instance, has had a longstanding policy of launching what I have called above dialogical appeals: it has systematically questioned what it perceives to be demeaning stereotypes of African Americans. The release of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), a paean to the Ku Klux Klan based on white supremacist novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, led the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP to petition city authorities to censor the film. As these efforts failed, the association asked moviegoers themselves to boycott the film (“The Birth”). In the 1930s, protests were uttered against the characters of Mammy and Prissy in Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), played respectively by Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen, and against Disney’s feature film Song of the South (1946), based on the Uncle Remus folk tales compiled in the late nineteenth century by Joel Chandler Harris. At a higher level of canonicity, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926), a sympathetic yet occasionally sensationalistic chronicle of the Harlem Renaissance, ignited controversies about the ability of white authors to render justice to African American experience (Pfeiffer xxxiii). Similar debates accompanied the publication of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a fictional first-person narrative of the early-nineteenth-century black resistance leader, as well as the release of Clint Eastwood’s Charlie Parker biopic Bird (1988). Dialogical appeals of this type are perhaps most frequent in the field of TV fictions, whose cultural impact, if only for commercial reasons, is closely monitored in the professional press. In the 1980s, at the peak of The Cosby Show’s success, NBC advertised the fact that Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a renowned black child psychologist, served as consultant for the series’ screenplay, thereby providing the show with expert dialogical validation (Otfinoski 49). Likewise, Shonda Rhymes’s ABC thriller Scandal (2012) benefited from press comments describing its lead actress Kerry Washington as an icon of a new postracial culture (Vega).

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It would, however, be naïve to expect the openly contested dialogical trail outlined above to chart a straightforward path toward a higher degree of realism, comparable to the relentless perfecting of mimesis evoked in Erich Auerbach’s famous essay. On the contrary, the history of the representation of African Americans displays what we might call a high level of uneven diachronic and intermedial development. This term refers in part to the fact that the drift toward truth in matters of race has hardly been linear across the decades. In addition, it implies that the pace of development of racial stereotypes has differed widely in various media. Remarkably, early African American literature—the corpus published from the decades of abolitionism to the First World War—exhibits a degree of political insight and sociological analysis one might expect to find only in later material—in Richard Wright’s, Zora Neale Hurston’s and James Baldwin’s post-1930s works, for instance. Pre-WWI novels, stories, and life narratives by Frank J. Webb, Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Dubois depict with great intelligence and exhaustiveness topics such as the link between economic exploitation and race, the sexual subjection of African American women, the gradual development of post-Civil-War segregation, and the color-based caste distinctions among African American themselves. On reading this corpus, one wonders by which retrograde gesture film studios could have released such overtly racist products as Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. Conversely, it seems surprising that the well-meaning yet comparatively timid liberalism of 1950s and 1960s films starring Sidney Poitier—Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967); Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)—could ever have been regarded as vehicles of racial disenfranchisement in their own time. By the same token, David Simon’s The Wire (2002-08) may be less pathbreaking in its depiction of black urban poverty than early-twenty-first century viewers may have assumed. The series can be credited as a daringly realistic social work not so much because it displays a higher degree of political commitment than earlier works dealing with African American experience but because it deals with issues—drug abuse, black urban poverty—that for obvious historical reasons turn-of-the-twentiethcentury authors could not address. In addition to the complexity inherent to this unevenly developed field, we must also address an obstacle due to the methodological

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premises of the present argument. The dialogical model I privilege in these pages indeed proves a double-edged tool for the analysis of a cultural-historical trail where issues of justice and truth are paramount. The portrayal of black experience obliges us indeed to re-examine the compatibility of dialogism with realism. In part, the overt negotiation of African American racial representations stands as a remarkable instance of a dialogically structured search for representational justice. Any depiction of blackness qualifies as what Bakhtin calls discourse “with a sideways glance” (Bakhtine, Poétique 275): it is always uttered in the knowledge of its being open to contestation. Yet if we accept this dialogical perspective as the only mode of addressing cultural processes, we may reduce African American experience to a mere power contest. The assimilation of culture to power has been, I mentioned in Chapter 4, one of the key principles of the variants of dialogism developed by the New Historicism. In a way that partly dovetails with what I am attempting here, New Historicist critics describe discourse as a sequence of “[m]oments of [n]egotiation” (Jürgen Pieters). Yet the debates they take under consideration are random chains of speech acts whose sole constant feature is their capacity to set up power relations regardless of truth value. This disenchanted view has obvious drawbacks for the mapping of African American culture: it offers little support to a subaltern group involved in cultural struggles where it often cannot hope to prevail. Outrage against Birth of a Nation did not prevent film scholars to describe the film as a seminal masterwork of filmmaking. Protests against the biased depiction of the Reconstruction era in Gone with the Wind did not impede the movie industry from flaunting the soundness of its paternalistic discourse by granting an Academy Award to Hattie McDaniel. Neo-historicist centrifugal dialogism makes it impossible to counter these partial defeats, for it precludes any appeal to an unmediated representation of injustice. Above all, indeterminist dialogism implies that the cultural negotiations over the representation of blackness amount to a mere reworking of stereotypes passed on from one cultural period to the other, regardless of documentary truth. In this light, the history of blackness would merely consist of the refashioning of stock parts similar to those Donald Bogle discerns in Hollywood’s racial representations: it would be a sequence of “Toms, [c]oons, [m]ulattoes, [m]ammies, and [b]ucks” only slightly retooled for the cultural needs of each period (Bogle). If so, characters played by Denzel Washington in films of the 1990s and 2000s would simply

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reprise Sidney Poitier’s 1960s movie roles and, more distantly, the parts ascribed to earnest middle-class African Americans in early black fiction (one thinks of Chesnutt’s black middle-class protagonists in The Marrow of Tradition). Likewise, the Baltimore drug lords in The Wire would be mere avatars of the black rapist of Birth of a Nation—stereotypes TV series reactivate by a purely intertextual mechanism, regardless of social facts and historical change. Against the pitfalls of indeterminist intertextuality, I have argued in Chapter 7 that it is possible to derive from Bakhtin a paradigm of centripetal dialogism that validates the possibility of cultural negotiations attempting to reach agreement over matters of fact. Several theoretical models predating Bakhtin-inspired poststructuralist dialogism or having developed independently from the Soviet theoretician’s tradition suggest how this centripetal practice may shape itself. One of them is Ogden’s and Richards’s theory of meaning, which aims for the development of an “improve[d] […] symbolism” (Ogden and Richards 84). Another may be derived from Jürgen Habermas’s concept of communicative action. I will defer the discussion of Habermas’s dialogism to Chapter 10, where I examine the principles of validity of realist negotiations. For the analysis of the dynamics of referential trails in the present chapter, I rely instead on a dialogical framework based on Ernest Gombrich’s famous discussion of the graphic arts. Gombrich’s analysis of painterly mimesis, developed in the late 1950s, is of particular relevance to our purpose because it depicts realism as the outcome of a negotiated practice, not an isolated act of perception. Painterly realism, Gombrich indicates develops through a process of successive approximations. The “correct portrait” is “like [a] useful map”: it is “an end product on a long road through schema and correction” (Gombrich, Art 78). The most arresting instances of such intertextually based mapping procedure are found in late-medieval printed volumes where the same woodcuts bearing different captions are used to represent different cities—“Damascus” and “Mantua,” for example (Gombrich, Art 60). Later artists created images with higher aspirations to mimetic accuracy on exactly the same principles. Seventeenth-century topographic artist Mathäus Merian, as he sought to portray Notre Dame of Paris, did not produce his image by the sheer visual observation of the cathedral. He turned to the available raw material— images of previous gothic churches—and redrew them by a process of “adaptation or adjustment” (Gombrich, Art 62). The representation

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thus created, though iconically inaccurate, possesses sufficient “distinctive features” to serve as map of its object (Gombrich, Art 62). The history of representation sketched out by Gombrich is accordingly both intertextual and postmimetic: it assumes that realistic images are not exclusively beholden to the mirror-like reproduction of perception. Instead of acting as self-evident iconic snapshots, painterly signs function as visual tokens whose capacity to stand for their object has, to take up the terminology introduced in previous sections of the present essay, a contractual and a pragmatic value. In the sequence of art history, these images have acquired from the perspective of artists and viewers a proven capacity to function as referential signs in partial independence of their iconic properties. The history of painterly mimesis evoked by Gombrich therefore resembles a referential trail relying on a practice of artistic bricolage. Each painter—Gombrich’s main example is John Constable—fashions on the basis of the heritance of the artistic past the techniques—even the tricks—he or she uses for the representation of the world, much as a stonemason retools bricks and stones in order to set up a building. 26 The referential bricolage sketched out by Gombrich’s unfolds along two axes. The path toward realism has both an intertextual and an extratextual dimension. It relies on rearrangements within the system of cultural conventions and, on the other hand, on the capacity to connect artistic works to the non-semioticized background of nature or social reality. The referential trail is in this light neither an aimless intertextual reshuffling of stereotypes nor a straightforward path toward a perfect mimetic duplication of reality. It is instead the indirect process by which cultural systems respond to external stimuli and constraints according to their own internal dynamics. As such, the distinction between intertextual and extratextual aspects of the referential trail is to some extent homologous to the binary I previously established between negotiable and non-negotiable signs. In Chapter 8, I have argued that realist practice is made up of cultural transactions determined by the variable degrees of negotiability of the semiotic components they set to work. Referential trails, as they stretch across time, comprise moments when semiotic negotiations are constrained to a lesser or higher extent. Extratextual constraints will predictably manifest themselves through the less negotiable, “heavier” components of the trail. Symptomatically, even theoreticians who claimed to consider these external obstacles to semiotic negotiability have not always properly acknowledged their impact on cultural

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processes. Ian Watt’s discussion of the novel’s “formalist realism” (34) and I. A. Richards’s discussion of the emotive and referential dimensions of art, which we reviewed in Chapter 3, illustrate this reluctance (Principles 245-53). On first inspection, these arguments are structurally similar to Gombrich’s analysis of painting in that they highlight the possibility of realism while taking heed of formalist principles emphasizing the autonomy of artistic conventions. Yet, possibly because of the prestige and novelty of the formalist paradigms, they fail to maintain a proper balance between the intertextual and extratextual axis, to the detriment of the latter. Even Gombrich seems wary of overemphasizing extratextual bonds: he assumes that some link to extra-artistic reality does exist, yet he fails to clarify its workings. The terminology I introduce in this chapter, on the contrary, tries to do justice to these two dimensions and to describe how they are mutually articulated. In the present argument, I wish to call the intertextual and extratextual aspects of the referential trail respectively the plane of referential shifts and, on the other hand, that of reality breaks and reality checks. According to this classification, referential shifts are rearrangements within the plane of culture, artistic genres, and discourse by dint of which narrative motifs, character types, or discursive registers acquire a heightened capacity to render accounts of the social world. Reality breaks and checks, on the contrary, are extra-artistic or extra-textual factors exerting an impact on the intracultural rearrangements of referential shifts. They correspond to moments when the seemingly lighter shifts of cultural change are affected by pressures that orient their course in a non-negotiable, determinate fashion. The term “break” in this logic refers to new, empowering historical developments. “Check,” on the contrary, evokes the constraining action triggered by the return to matter of facts. In contexts where the distinction between these two varieties of extra-textual occurrences is immaterial, the term “reality breaks” will suffice. For convenience’s sake, we will address referential shifts first. We may start out from the realization that referential shifts require the crossing of cultural or discursive borders, and may therefore be ranked as a function of the boundaries they transgress. This classificatory strategy admittedly induces a certain amount of terminological inflation and conceptual fuzziness. Within the limits of the present chapter, we will indeed not have the space fully to illustrate all types

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of shifts provided by our model. In addition, we will seldom be able to ascribe each cultural shift to one single airtight category: most of them fall under several headings, so that methodological syncretism is essential to their analysis. Yet terminological landmarks are indispensable in this matter. We must for instance avail ourselves of the capacity to distinguish between shifts affecting the content of representation from those affecting features directly or indirectly related to discursive form and structure. The former category comprises shifts implying the crossing of class, ethnic, or gender borders (transethnic, transgender, or transclass shifts). The latter includes transpositions occurring from one genre to another (transgeneric shifts), among texts belonging to different modes and therefore endowed with differing relationships to reality (transmodal shifts), or among texts enjoying different levels of cultural capital (transcanonical shifts). In addition, even though referential shifts are predicated on the possibility of driving realism forward, we must make provisions for movements of regression: there are progressive, yet also retrograde shifts. Only by means of this terminological toolkit are we able, for instance, to name the whole gamut of movements by which the politicized realism of the Afro-American literary corpus of more than a century ago could filter through the dominantly racist discourse of twentieth-century culture and resurface in more recent works drawn from various modes of expression. Transethnic shifts are evidently central to a realist corpus whose main concerns are race and ethnicity. These transethnic transpositions are functionally comparable to the transclass and transgender shifts that dominate other areas of realism (novels of feminine alienation such as Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth or of urban experience such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle). Early African American literature originated largely from transethnic shifts. We may indeed describe as such the gesture by which black novelists of the second half of nineteenth century appropriated the European and EuroAmerican conventions of melodrama, novels of manners, local color, and literary naturalism. In order to familiarize their readership with the life conditions of antebellum slaves and Reconstruction-era freedmen, black authors did draw on the direct record of lived experience and on African American vernacular traditions. Yet they also massively relied on the narrative devices—action-packed plots, hidden identities, disguises—that form the backbone of nineteenthcentury white popular fiction. Their novels depict black or biracial

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protagonists caught up in plots previously reserved for the protagonists of Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo. Crucially, the narrative roles thus conferred to African American figures were those of active, powerful romance protagonists, distinct from the passive figures of sentimental plantation literature. Thus, the transethnic shift carried out by black writers resulted in the decision to abandon the much-maligned Uncle Tom stereotype derived from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel. Instead, abolitionist fiction presents empowered figures comparable to another figure in Stowe’s narrative—George Harris, the former slave who takes his family to safety in Canada, learns to read, and immigrates to Liberia. The recourse to melodrama and romance remains in this case within the remit of a referential project because it is consistently wedded to documentary and political purposes. Melodramatic devices allow the overtly didactic novels of abolitionist fiction to offer to their readers as diverse a panorama of the effects of slavery and segregation as may fit in single texts. It is for instance referentially felicitous that William Wells Brown’s eponymous protagonist Clotelle should be cast out by her white fiancé and be condemned to an unsettled life. Her peregrinations make it easier for Brown to sketch out the practices of slavery and segregation in various locales and social groups. The referential benefits of melodrama are the more obvious when Clotelle, who has reached a safe haven in the North, dons a white man’s disguise in order to rescue her daughter retained in the South. Through the focus of an ostensibly white male protagonist, Brown is able to bring to light aspects of racism that would be difficult to broach in the narrative of a heroine whose biracial ancestry restricts her to the subaltern status of a colored person. Likewise, Sutton Elbert Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) appropriates the gothic accents of melodrama when it attempts to project a utopian image of what W. E. B. Dubois called “The Talented Tenth.” Griggs renders visible the existence of an empowered African American upper-middle class by means of scenes that metaphorically portray this social group as a secret society subjecting its new recruits to grueling initiation rites. Conversely, we may regard as regressive transethnic shifts the gesture by which Hollywood screenwriters reversed the representational victories earned by abolitionist literature. Films such as Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind returned African American characters to the roles they had been ascribed in Southern white plantation

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literature, thus blocking off any attempt to investigate the actual situation of African Americans both in the past and in the present. 31 Transcanonical shifts occur when texts within a given genre or tradition are given a heightened referential value by the appropriation of devices presumably reserved to a corpus enjoying a higher or a lower degree of cultural prestige. The former possibility—the upward transcanonical shift—plays a central part in Erich Auerbach’s history of mimesis. The German critic castigates ancient texts for following Aristotelian rules linking narrative dignity to canonicity and social rank. According to the Aristotelian standards of the high mimetic, only protagonists of high birth should appear in serious, dignified narrative action; the lower orders, on the contrary, should be confined to comic plots. Auerbach points out that in ancient culture, only the Christian gospels depart from this discriminatory logic: they further the advent of mimesis in that they are the sole major texts of their era in which humble characters partake in crucial events (41). Mimetic value in their case is obtained by heightening the canonical dignity of scenes of low life. In early African American fiction, a similar strategy informs W. E. B. Dubois’s The Quest for the Silver Fleece (1911). Dubois drives his narrative beyond the norms of popular melodrama by the recourse to narrative devices borrowed from the more canonically prestigious corpora of Greek myth and scientifically informed naturalism. The silver fleece in Dubois’s narrative is the cotton crop, which constitutes the main economic stake of the economy of the American South. Dubois’s novel implicitly compares it to the symbol of kingship sought by Jason and his Argonauts. Its economics, on the other hand, are depicted through the sociologicallybased method elaborated in Frank Norris’s and Upton Sinclair’s economic novels: one commodity—wheat in Norris, meat in Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906)—embodies the whole economic life of a nation or a region. Through the depiction of the production, exchange, and speculation of cotton, Dubois portrays the economic and political mechanisms that maintain blacks in a status of subjection. Other important instances of realistically motivated transcanonical shifts appear in texts that refashion existing stereotypes by incorporating the sense of nuance and complexity of classic psychological realism (Henry James, Edith Wharton). This type of transcanonical shift had already informed the realist novels of the Harlem Renaissance—Jessie Faucet’s Plum Bun (1928), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929)—, which differ from Brown’s and Grigg’s

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melodramatic plots by their focus on psychological development. The shift toward psychological complexity is also noticeable in the evolution of film and TV productions between the 1960s and the present. Liberal 1960s films—Sidney Poitier vehicles such as In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?—were propagandistic works focused on popularizing the civil-rights agenda. Characterization in these films was accordingly schematic, even politically naïve. On the contrary, later fictions featuring black actors—medical drama ER; urban thriller The Wire—depict black characters whose profile is not solely defined by race. In ER, Dr. Peter Benton (Eriq La Salle) is a young African American professional wrestling with multiple difficulties. His lower-middle-class siblings reproach him with neglecting family ties and failing to shoulder his responsibilities in the care of his aging parents. His affair with a white British doctor further alienates him from his family. Simultaneously, he needs to supervise the medical treatment of the hearing-impaired son he had from a previous marriage. The Wire makes the diversity of black experience visible through its variegated cast of Baltimore police officers, city administrators, slum dwellers, and drugs offenders. Among the black members of the police force, spectacularly differentiated character profiles prevail. Det. William “Bunk” Moreland (Wendell Pierce) is an earthy bon vivant trying to keep in balance his barroom lifestyle and his family commitments. Let. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) is a hard-driven rigorist whose integrity unfits him to thrive in the city’s political intrigues. Commissioner Edwin H. Burrell (Frankie Faison) embodies the very political compromising Daniels seeks to counteract. Howard “Bunny” Colvin (Robert Wisdom) is a fatherly pragmatist, whose philanthropic good will is thwarted, yet not extinguished when city authorities block his project of partial drug legalization. Det. Shakima “Kima” Greggs (Sonja Sohn) tries, and eventually fails to keep her commitment to detective work from impinging on her duties as lesbian mother. Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) is an aloof, elderly dandy dividing his time between expert police work and the building of exquisitely complex dollhouses. All these black characters interact with various ethnic and social groups within the framework of institutions such as city politics, the educational system, and the press. Transmodal shifts designate the transposition of narrative motifs, character types, or discursive features among texts assigned to different discursive modes. In the Introduction to the present essay, I

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pointed out that the concept of mode as defined by Northrop Frye helps us classify literary texts based on their status with regard to the average configuration of social reality. The gamut of modes, Frye suggests, runs from the evocation of myth to the portrayal of low life (Frye 33-36). Accordingly, transmodal shifts occur among texts enjoying a more or less direct connection to the actual conditions of a given social group. Shifts of this nature are particularly important for the dynamics of referential trails because they concern the difference between illusion, ideological utopianism, ideological misrepresentation, and, on the other hand, documentary realism. By virtue of transmodal shifts, a narrative formula that was previously the preserve of texts perceived as non-realistic or even politically manipulative may be appropriated in order to portray actual social facts. In recent media representations of African Americans, what we might call compensatory utopianism or even tokenism has been the object of particularly symptomatic transmodal shifts. In film and TV, tokenism designates the casting of African American actors with a view to filling political quotas. Paying lip service to civil rights is the priority in this this case, not documentary accuracy, serious political commitment, or the internal logic of plotlines. Criticism against 1960s Sidney Poitier vehicles was often based on the reproach that the actor was exploited as Hollywood’s token black male lead. From the perspective of genre analysis, tokenism corresponds to a disingenuous manipulation of the divide between romance and realism. By virtue of a mechanism whose origins hail back to plantation literature, tokenist narratives cloak their romance depiction of an ethnically pacified society as a representation of actual situations. Yet there are circumstances in which what used to be ideological sugarcoating may shift toward a serious utopian anticipation of social change. Sf narratives, action romances, and disaster films are intriguing instances in this matter. Since these texts enjoy a loose relation to social facts, they have the opportunity to present interethnic configurations characterized by a higher degree of equality and minority empowerment than what classic realist verisimilitude will bear. The Star Trek franchise featured from its earliest episodes a multicultural cast comprising an African American and a Japanese American officer (Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Nyuta Uhura and George Takei as Lieutenant Hikari Sulu). Likewise, Parker, the Chief Engineer of space ship Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), is played by

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African American actor Yaphet Kotto. Conversely, the absence of African Americans in the first installment of George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise (1977) (later renamed Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope) was interpreted as racially insensitive. Action romances of the 1980s and ’90s—48 Hrs. (1982) [Eddie Murphy], The A-Team (1983) [Mr. T.], Predator (1987) [Carl Weathers; Bill Duke], Lethal Weapon (1987) [Danny Glover]—offered a masculine-oriented version of interethnic casting relying on stereotypes of male solidarity derived from the military and the police forces. In these works, white action stars were seconded by their African American buddies in a display of interracial goodwill that was the easier to flaunt as these action-packed romances only had a tenuous connection to what was socially or even physically possible. Tokenist interracial casting reached a tipping point in the 1990s and 2000s, however, due to the perception of the growing impact of the African American upper-middle class. In this context, the screenwriters of the disaster film Deep Impact (1998) and of the technothriller TV series 24 (2001) thought it possible to portray as a commonplace political occurrence the presence of an African American at the head of the US federal government (respectively Morgan Freeman as President Beck and Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer). Contrary to what one would have expected in previous decades, neither of these fictions presents the accession of a black man to the presidency as a civil-rights triumph, nor do they hint that his victory may have been wrested at the cost of a racially divisive campaign. Accordingly, if these two works are viewed from the perspective of the 2010s, their politically deadpan evocation of a black presidency triggers a transmodal shift. In a historical situation where Barack Obama has completed two turns in office, what was previously a tokenist motif acquires a new modal value. It is as if one segment of what in the above remarks on Gombrich I called the referential bricolage were suddenly fitted into a new assemblage, thoroughly altering its function. Audiences of the 2010s watching TV re-runs of Deep Impact and 24 (both titles are favorites on European channels) may not even be aware of the fact that the fictional figure of the black President was a utopian projection when the film and series were initially released: they may mistake the narrative as having been intended as a realistic account of documentary facts. Conversely, one may conjecture that the shows’ screenwriters were tabling on the possibility of this modal shift: they may have hoped to see their work

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watched by viewers of the future for whom a black presidency may be taken for granted. The same ambition may have inspired the screenwriters of the technothriller TV series State of Affairs (2014), which depicts an African American woman as President of the US (Alfre Woodard as President Constance Payton).

The previous examples reveal that referential shifts are no mere intertextual speech acts: though they do unfold in part as rearrangements within the plane of culture, they are of necessity conditioned by the configuration and evolution of their non-discursive context. In other words, they respond to reality breaks and reality checks. I suggested above that these terms refer to historical developments of such magnitude as to exert constraints upon cultural representations verging on dialogical non-negotiatibility. When discussing the referential validity of photographs at the beginning of this chapter, I pointed out that individual photographic documents acquire a compelling referential value when they are caught up in convergent referential trails. Referential breaks are historical occurrences that affect referential shifts in similar fashion: they have the capacity spectacularly to maximize dialogical convergence and to bring their centripetal momentum to bear upon wide-ranging dialogical negotiations stretching across several decades. This definition of reality breaks takes its cue from Jean-François Lyotard’s remarks on the Kantian notion of the“sign of history” (“Sign” 393). In Kant, Lyotard points out, this term designates moments of “[h]istorico-political enthusiasm” whose universal impact seems to defy norms of understanding. (“Sign” 404). The German philosopher chooses to interpret these momentous signs—the French Revolution, for instance—as indices of “progress in its present state” (“Sign” 407). In a less confident vein, Lyotard interprets the major upheavals of the late twentieth century—“Auschwitz, Budapest 1956, May 1968” (“Sign” 409)—not as tokens of a monologic idea of progress but as the signs of a pluralist future—the “fission of the single purpose” of humankind (“Sign” 409). For the present purposes, I wish to transpose Lyotard’s and Kant’s argument to the field of referentiality. This implies laying the emphasis more on the existence of the signs of history than on their meaning. In a cultural context where ontological indeterminism is a potent force, it is indeed important to point out that historical

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developments compelling universal recognition do exist, and that they are capable of producing cultural effects even before acquiring a determinate interpretation. This referential reading of signs of history may be illustrated by reference to one of Lyotard’s chief objects of reflection—the Jewish holocaust. The revelation of genocide at the end of the Second World War acted as an overwhelming reality check upon the history of anti-Semitic stereotypes. Pre-WWII anti-Semitism had thrived in many different forms, and had been taken for granted sometimes even in the discourse of left-wing authors. In the mid1920s, it seemed proper for Ernest Hemingway to represent the debilitating effects of modernity through the anti-Semitic portrayal of Robert Cohn, one of the major characters of The Sun Also Rises (1926). After Auschwitz, however, any representation of Jewishness or Jewish history was implicitly impacted by the disclosure of the murderous consequences of supremacist discourse. This did not imply that anti-Semitism disappeared altogether or even that a consensus was achieved about the significance of what had happened in Nazi extermination camps. Yet discourses perpetuating pre-war antiSemitism or denying the existence of the holocaust had to reckon with the huge dialogical pressure caused by the well-documented awareness of mass extermination. Similarly, in the history of the representation of African Americans, the Emancipation Declaration, the introduction of Segregation after the Civil War, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid1960s, the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, and the election of an African American president have had the value of reality breaks and checks. Awareness of segregation, to take this one example, has acted as a reality check on the the reception of films such as Gone with the Wind and Fritz Lang’s Fury. We saw above that African American viewers lodged dialogical appeals against Gone with the Wind. Because of their awareness of segregation, they could only resent as ideological obfuscation the film’s depiction of freed slaves helping the daughter of their former masters regain her social rank after the devastation of the Civil War. Similarly, Fury’s narrative of the lynching of a white man made sense only given the audience’s knowledge of the reality of racially motivated murders. The screenplay clamored to be read not as a documentary anecdote, but as a gesture of liberal good will against segregation and against the censorship code that prevented racial violence to be openly

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acknowledged in Hollywood feature films. Obama’s election, on the other hand, illustrates the dynamics of emergence of reality breaks in the restricted sense of this term: it embodied a reality without precedents. As such, it had the capacity both to inflect the interpretation of stereotypes of the past and to generate new cultural representations—new referential shifts. On the one hand, it retrospectively validated the pre-existing representations of African American professionals that had multiplied in the film and TV fictions of previous decades. For instance, it sent the non-negotiable message that the depiction of black police officers in the broad corpus of 1990s and 2000s crime shows—NYPD Blue, Without a Trace, Cold Case— could no longer be regarded as the offshoot of mere tokenism but could serve instead as the chart of an actual social configuration. On the other hand, it carried the utopian promise of further empowerment. It made the depiction of an African American female president in State of Affairs or of a black female Starfleet commander in the new season of the Star Trek franchise a reasonable wager on future social developments. Conceptualizing the interface of text and context as the interplay of referential shifts and reality breaks offers the methodological advantage of freeing one’s analysis from the strictures of mimesis. Reality breaks do not link up to referential shifts solely by the mirrorlike bonds through which social background and discourse are traditionally thought to interact. Instead, breaks and shifts are caught up in chains of postmimetic interactions. Admittedly, extra-textual occurrences acquire some of their cultural resonance by means of mimetic sources: photographs, film archives, and press stories do attest to the existence of extermination camps, lynch murders, or, less ominously, Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama. Yet the previous reflections have shown that reality breaks make themselves felt in most cases as an overall pressure brought to bear upon the whole cultural field. They acquire the value of obstacles or empowering forces endowed with a quasi-physical presence. Their ability to influence discourse and culture therefore displays a paradoxical blend of certainty and indirection. On the one hand, they stand as nearly non-negotiable landmarks in the dialogical interplay. On the other, their capacity to act as signs is far less predetermined than that of mimetic images. Like a force impacting a complex field, they set off trails of rearrangements whose course is amenable to flexible dialogical refashioning. In the cultural/historical trail surveyed here, it

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would have been impossible to foresee the complex postbellum configuration whereby the plight of freed slaves could be fully acknowledged in the limited cultural perimeter of early African American fiction, yet covered up in the broader field of mainstream popular culture. Even more evidently, the screenwriters of Deep Impact and 24 could not guarantee that their narratives of black empowerment could enjoy what we might call prospective referential value. Similarly, reality breaks and referential shifts are less constrained than mimetic mechanisms by the barrier separating fiction from documentary reports: the very existence of transmodal shifts reveals that reality breaks trigger effects circulating across texts endowed with qualitatively distinct relations to social facts. The existence of a black president is as much an event for the huge numbers of documentary press reports in which his activities are chronicled as for the representation of black office holders in novelistic, film, or TV fictions. The hypothesis that realism unfolds as a postmimetic trail of breaks and shifts is admittedly not value-free. The core presupposition of centripetal dialogism, the previous reflections suggest, is the possibility of progress. Kant’s discussion of the sign of history, I have pointed out above, builds upon the same prerequisite. The German philosopher must indeed address the objection that the events he regards as historical landmarks are politically dangerous and above all unpredictable. There is, Kant concedes, no way to ascertain the sequence according to which such events will break out. Only the universal enthusiasm they trigger confers to them the status of significant nodes in a teleological narrative. Yet this manner of identifying signs of history suffers from an inescapable conceptual circularity: it is valid only if we presuppose that “‘[t]here is progress” in human history (Kant qtd. in Lyotard, “Sign” 408). Only thus can we separate tokens of the human future from chaotic upheavals. Similarly, reality breaks would be meaningless bumps in a constantly shifting cultural field if we did not endorse the axiomatic belief that cognitive progress is possible at all. Barring this assumption, we would be unable to confer to any event a reality status more substantial or dialogically constraining than that enjoyed by any other shift in cultural practices. The very concept of referential shifts would become meaningless. Conversely, the possibility of cognitive regression in the representation of social events would no longer be

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ascertainable: regression can only be appraised from the perspective of a cognitively superior standpoint. Overall, the analysis of referential trails leads us back to what in Chapter 6 I called the reality bet. Realism, I argued there, is a matter of referential trust. We have to accept the paradox whereby the possibility of referential investigations relies on the prior commitment to a cognitively confident perception of the world. The modalities of this realist ethos are further examined in the following chapter. At this stage, I only wish to point out that the model of cognitive investigation outlined in the present chapter has the value of a minimalistic script. It may therefore afford to remain more tentative than what a classic realist paradigm seems to require. From the beginning of this essay, I have argued that my argument is concerned with basic conditions of possibility: I aim to isolate the barest conceptual toolkit for realism to exist as a practice. The analysis of referential trails seems to lead to the conclusion that a three-term model comparable to Richards’s and Ogden’s semiotic triangle will suffice. In the same way as Ogden and Richards distinguish the symbol (sign), the referent (thing), and reference (thought, signified), the present argument makes do with referential shifts (speech acts), reality breaks (facts), and a realist ethos (a protocol specifying how speech acts and facts are identified and articulated). Clearly, this paradigm is open to several interpretations, depending on the constraints we spell out for the definition of its components and their mode of interfacing. The present discussion fosters a loose, inclusive, transmedial definition of shifts and breaks. It also favors a dialogical protocol allowing these elements to interact as flexibly as possible. Still, it would be possible to graft onto this minimal apparatus a more closely patterned model of representation, similar to the paradigm of classic realism. We might adopt a narrower specification of what passes for referential shifts and reality breaks, as well as a less flexible paradigm of their interfacing with social and historical processes. The resulting theory of realism would still be a specialized version of the present dialogical model. It would restrict, yet not contradict the principles laid out here.

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