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It’s Still Real to Me, Dammit! Performed Ontologies and Professional Wrestling
DRAFT: NOT INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION
Neal Hebert
Ph.D. Candidate (Theatre History), Louisiana State University
Jon Cogburn
Associate Professor (Philosophy), Louisiana State University
American Society for Theatre Research
Performance and Philosophy Working Group
10/01/2013
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On November 9, 1997, the 20,593 professional wrestling fans who packed Montreal’s
Molson Centre—plus approximately another million fans watching around the globe on
pay-per-view—gathered together to watch the World Wrestling Federation’s Survivor
Series Pay Per View.1 The majority of the show proceeded as expected with nothing
amiss, the standard progression of matches, improvised skits, and direct address
monologues that jointly comprise the spectacle of contemporary professional wrestling.
Sometimes the heroes prevailed against villainous adversity, and sometimes they failed to
overcome the odds against them but nonetheless vowed revenge. Things changed,
however, in the marquee match (or main event) of the show. The outcome of the fight
between Canadian hero and reigning WWF Champion Bret “The Hitman” Hart and “The
Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels would change professional wrestling forever. This
event, later christened The Montreal Screwjob, would make explicit the implicit
conditions of possibility for the instantiation of professional wrestling’s fictional
ontology and in so doing radically alter that ontology.2
1 The World Wrestling Federation, or WWF, was the name of Vince McMahon, Jr.’s northeastern wrestling promotion from 1979 until 2002. Prior to McMahon Jr.’s purchase of the promotion between 1979-1980, it was called the World Wide Wrestling Federation, and was promoted by Vincent McMahon, Sr. From 2002 until the present McMahon Jr. renamed the company the World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE. This change was not McMahon’s choice: in 2002 the World Wildlife Fund successfully sued McMahon and his company for trademark violation. According to a deal McMahon signed with the World Wildlife Fund, the initials “WWF” were the exclusive trademark of the World Wildlife Fund within Europe. McMahon’s Web site, WWF.com, and company logo from 1999-2002 both violated this agreement, and the company was ordered to change its trademarking. Throughout this paper, we refer to Vince McMahon’s company as the WWWF if we are referring to events that occurred between the company’s establishment in 1963 and its namechange in 1979, the WWF if we are referring to events that occurred between 1979-2002, and WWE if we are referring to events that occurred between 2002 and the present.2 At the outset we should note that throughout this paper we will follow analytic philosophers who tend to use “ontology” and “metaphysics” interchangeably to denote our theories of the nature of reality, though our preferred usage would be that “ontology” denotes answering the three kinds of questions raised in Section III of this paper and “metaphysics” denotes the study of what reality must be like such that one’s answers to these questions are true. Analytic philosophers differ from Heideggerian usage, for whom the ontological concerns being while the merely ontic concerns particular beings. What Heidegger actually meant by “the problem of being” is rich, multi-faceted, and probably actually names several distinct philosophical problematics (cf. Herman Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being). In contrast with Austrian phenomenologists who saw their labor as a necessary precursor to metaphysics, Heidegger and the French phenomenologists who followed him came to be sharply critical of “metaphysics,” though they tend to identify this with a manner of thinking that historically leads to an overly reductionistic scientific world
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In what follows we argue that spectators of contemporary professional wrestling
must keep track of two competing ontologies, which we label “work” and “shoot,” the
former being the reality presupposed by the fictional elements of the performance and the
latter being the facets of the actual world that make the performance possible. As we will
show, even prior to the Screwjob, anyone who knew that the outcomes of the matches
were predetermined was forced to view a professional wrestling performance through
these inconsistent lenses. But only after the Screwjob did aspects of the shoot ontology
recursively nest within the work ontology. This leads to a new kind of incoherence in the
work ontology itself, one arguably paradigmatic with respect to all of our postmodern
interactions with reality. If this is correct, then professional wrestling is not just
something of which one can develop a metaphysical account, but is rather metaphysics
itself.
I. The Montreal Screwjob and Why it Matters
Viewers of the 1997 Survivor Series Pay Per View knew that Hart, despite spending
more than a decade with Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation, had been
released from his WWF contract and would soon wrestle exclusively for the rival
wrestling promotion World Championship Wrestling.3 Although less than a year before
view (for an excellent discussion of how Heidegger’s critique of this is central to the so-called Kehre, see Mark Okrent’s Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics). Just to forestall confusion, we should note that we both endorse Heidegger’s critique of objective presence and the manner in which this critique undermines scientistic reductionism, but (with Graham Harman in his Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects) we do not think that either of these things undermine metaphysics understood in the traditional manner. Rather, they show that normative questions lie at the very heart of correct metaphysics. Our discussion below is entirely consistent with this.3 World Championship Wrestling (hereafter WCW), was owned by Ted Turner from its inception in 1990 to its purchase by Vince McMahon’s WWF in 2001. This purchase became possible when Jim Crockett Promotions (JCP), a wrestling promotion based out of North Carolina that eventually controlled the international National Wrestling Alliance, went bankrupt attempting to challenge McMahon’s newly-formed, newly national World Wrestling Federation. Turner purchased JCP because wrestling programming had been a key ingredient to the success of Turner Broadcasting Service’s TBS Superstation.
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Hart gave an emotional speech live on Monday Night Raw affirming that he had signed a
WWF contract guaranteeing his employment for the next 20 years (with a rumored salary
of $1.5 million per year as the downside guarantee), WWF chairman Vince McMahon
released Hart from his contract because of the company’s inability to honor the contract
given a lack of revenue. As such, Hart was allowed to enter negotiations with Eric
Bischoff’s World Championship Wrestling and jump promotions without a non-compete
clause—which meant Hart could immediately begin appearing on television for the rival
wrestling company.
After receiving an offer of $2.5 million each year of guaranteed money from
World Championship Wrestling, Hart gave his notice to the WWF while WWF
champion. Hart was scheduled to become an active member of the WCW within a few
weeks. During this time, the real-life promotional war between the WWF and WCW had
caused numerous wrestlers to jump from one promotion to the other, and Hart was by far
the highest profile performer to change companies. Other wrestlers, who had switched
promotions while holding championships had done storylines disgracing the belts, and
WWF Chairman Vince McMahon reportedly feared Hart would do the same.4 Thus, in
the main event of Survivor Series 1997, McMahon colluded with referee Earl Hebner and
Michaels to double-cross Hart during the match. When Michaels placed Hart in Hart’s
own signature submission maneuver, the sharpshooter, McMahon signaled the ref to end
At the time of the Screwjob, WCW, and its ascendant executive producer Eric Bischoff, had been given unlimited financial resources by TBS and Time Warner to directly compete with the WWF. Bischoff and other decision makers in WCW would often speak publicly of their desire to drive the WWF out of business.4 Debrah Anne Micelli, who wrestled as Madusa (shortened from “Made in the USA”) in the American Wrestling Alliance, the National Wrestling Alliance, and World Championship Wrestling, and as Alundra Blayze in the World Wrestling Federation, did just that when she jumped ship from the World Wrestling Federation to World Championship Wrestling: on the December 18, 1995 edition of WCW’s Monday Nitro, Micelli threw her WWF Women’s Championship belt into a garbage can on live television. Micelli wrestled for WCW until 2001, then began a separate career as a monster truck driver.
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the match prematurely, ensuring Hart’s defeat and guaranteeing that Hart would not leave
the WWF as its heavyweight champion. Hart, furious and disbelieving, began destroying
the ring, set, and cameras surrounding the ring to the crowd’s vocal approval. Before the
pay per view went off the air, Hart spit in the face of WWF chairman Vince McMahon—
who, at that time, was in WWF storylines only an announcer rather than an authority
figure—and began tracing the initials “WCW” (for World Championship Wrestling)
while standing in the WWF ring surrounded by the property he had just destroyed.
None of the above likely sounds particularly unusual to most individuals casually
familiar with professional wrestling—wrestling shows always have bad guys (“heels,” in
wrestling’s carnie argot) cheating to defeat good guys (“babyfaces”). Unlike these other
scripted incidents, however, the Montreal Screwjob was not part of the planned show’s
storylines, nor was Hart aware of what would happen. Instead, the Screwjob—the most
famous in-ring double-cross in professional wrestling history—was “real” life played out
in-ring and onscreen. Unlike prior true double-crossings5 where the public never figured
out that something untoward happened, the actual double-cross behind the Montreal
Screwjob was openly acknowledged on WWF television and became a key storyline after
the incident. Its subsequent influence on the performance of professional wrestling is
impossible to misinterpret, and the event’s later incorporation into storylines led to the
WWF’s greatest successes in both attendance and ticket sales.
5 There are numerous examples of this throughout wrestling history. We would like to direct your attention to two famous examples that help historicize this event: the 1985 WWF women’s championship match between then WWF Women’s champion Wendi Richter and The Spider Lady (legendary women’s wrestler and “shooter” The Fabulous Moolah under a mask) that ended when the Spider Lady rolled up Richter in a move called a small package and the referee quickly counted to three despite Richter “kicking out” of the pinfall attempt; and the 1925 championship match between Stanislau Zybyszko and Wayne Munn, which Zybszko won after “shooting” on Munn, legitimately pinning the world champion after agreeing to lose to him in the behind-the-scenes negotiations for the match.
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From the perspective of the philosophy of art, what is most significant about the
profoundly postmodern moment of the Montreal Screwjob is that it is a paradigm
example of how a practice can perform both its fictional storyline as well as the material
pre-conditions that allow for that storyline’s performances. Professional wrestling is not
unique in the extent to which propositions articulating the material preconditions can
directly contradict the very storylines being performed. What is unique about post
Montreal Screwjob professional wrestling is the extent to which viewers must be able to
track this contradictory reality in order to follow the storylines themselves. Shockingly,
this will entail that spectators must constantly balance two ontologies in order for
professional wrestling to succeed as an artistic genre. We dub these competing ontologies
the “shoot” (i.e., the reality of the performers behind the storylines) ontology and the
“work” (i.e., the fictional account of what’s going on in storyline) ontology.
To appreciate professional wrestling in the wake of the Montreal Screwjob, an
audience member, much like audiences of professional wrestling throughout the 20th
century, must be able to grasp its identity and individuation conditions as in other arts.
But unlike more traditional arts—be they pop art, mass art, or high art—post-Screwjob
professional wrestling demands different paradigms of spectatorship that have been
naturalized within audiences since 1997. After the Screwjob, every single performance of
professional wrestling is intimately engaged in questioning, complicating, and
reinscribing its identity conditions as it plays with audiences’ abilities to distinguish
between reality, the scripted event, and the material and political forces shaping the
writing of the scripts that govern the event in question. Where once wrestling was
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predetermined sport, since 1997 wrestling is and can only be meta-theatrical in
performance.
We contend that the differing ontologies operative within professional wrestling
have a meaningful impact on the types of spectatorships necessary to enjoy these
performances. In this paper we will begin the task of providing an ontology of
professional wrestling. Any such theory will be complicated by how spectatorship has
changed in the aftermath of the Montreal Screwjob given the way the Screwjob has
redefined the genre-relevant norms of professional wrestling. Because of this sea-change
we contend that for an audience to appreciate post-1997 professional wrestling’s
performance any attempt to articulate the aesthetic ontologies of contemporary
professional wrestling (identity and diversity) must be accompanied by a concomitant
account of the competing ontologies that inform contemporary professional wrestling’s
spectatorship.
II. Key Categories
In order to present our argument to the conclusion that spectators of professional
wrestling are actually watching two competing ontologies, we must first delineate some
of the key categories. We will begin by clarifying what it is that we mean when we refer
to professional wrestling and many of its key technical terms: match, moves, referee,
promotion, booker, storyline, card, babyface, heel, entrance, promos, skits, merchandise,
shoot, work, and mark. Rather than attempting to provide necessary and sufficient
conditions for all of these concepts, we will begin by implicitly defining them via a more
narrative description of the practice. If a person were to tune into an episode of World
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Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship show Monday Night Raw at 8:00 PM each Monday
night, or Total Nonstop Action’s TNA Impact show any Thursday at 8:00 PM, what
follows would almost certainly be true of the events that they would see.
At its most basic level, professional wrestling is a simulation of an athletic contest
(specifically a fight) between at least two performers: the performers are referred to as
wrestlers (or, in the case of the WWE alone, male performers are called “Superstars” and
female performers are called “Divas”), while the simulation is commonly referred to as a
match. Within each match wrestlers frequently subject each other to strikes using their
feet, hands, and joints (such as elbows and knees), submission holds that appear to put
performers limbs and joints under stress while nonetheless keeping an opponent’s face
and body visible to audiences and cameras, and assorted other performed attacks, often
referred to as “moves.” Wrestlers typically pull their strikes, feign submission holds’
lethality, and fall in such a way that the impact of their bodies on the canvas is evenly
distributed throughout their body and thus less painful, but this is far from a painless
event. While wrestlers minimize the damage done to each others’ bodies, no amount of
care can prevent injuries from accruing given the nature of the performances on display.6
These maneuvers are read as having a certain “meaning” in the match, largely determined
by the context within which the move is done.
One example of this would be a punch: in professional wrestling in America since
the mid-1990s, punching has been a “legal” maneuver in professional wrestling and a
staple of most professional wrestling matches. In All Japan Professional Wrestling’s
6 There is, ultimately, no truly safe way to wrestle given the types of performances that occur in matches. Although wrestling’s travails with steroids and other performance enhancing drugs have made news since the late 1980s, less attention has been paid to the chemical dependency issues that plague both active and retired wrestlers. When tallying only former WWF/E performers, 48 wrestlers have died before reaching the age of 50. In many (if not most) of these cases, the cause of death (where a cause of death is released) is typically either steroids, prescription pain pill overdoes, or a combination of the two.
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6/3/1994 match between Toshiaki Kawada and Mitsuharu Misawa for the Triple Crown
world championship, however, Kawada only punches Misawa after thirty minutes of
wrestling. Although this move frequently begins any number of other matches, given the
context of the championship match in Tokyo and the pride of both performers to win, the
move meant something decidedly different than it would have had it opened the match.
On that night and at that time, Kawada’s punch to Misawa—the only punch in the nearly
40 minute match—performed his desperation to hurt his opponent. It was only part of a
sequence of strikes wherein Kawada used every offensive strike in his arsenal of
maneuvers to try to hurt his rival, and the crowd in the Tokyo Nippon Budokan grew so
excited upon realizing that Kawada would risk an illegal strike to injure his opponent that
the thousands of fans in attendance began stomping their feet on the concrete floor in
appreciation.
Frequently, a match occurs before a live audience, although this is not necessarily
true of all matches.7 Often, these performances involve at least one other performer who
simulates officiating the athletic contest by enforcing its (sometimes) nebulously-defined
rules: the referee.8 Matches rarely occur in isolation when they are performed. Although
single matches might have been put on as a complete performance early in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries when championship matches could last for up to four hours,
7 In the Memphis territory, Memphis Championship Wrestling, Jerry “The King” Lawler and Terry Funk had one of the most famous matches that did not take place in front of a live crowd: the “Empty Arena” match of 1981 that was only aired on television. In 1999, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Mick “Mankind” Foley had a similar match that was taped in an empty arena and aired during the 1999 Superbowl’s halftime show on television only.8 Some matches, that are presented as “unsanctioned” matches, certain “street fights,” or matches that are otherwise “too dangerous” for a company to allow to appear on their television, do not have a referee to preserve the illusion that these matches are solely to settle a private issue between performers rather than a part of the show—even if the matches air on television of pay per view. Obviously, this is a fiction within the storyline given that these matches are invariably integrated into shows such that audiences can buy tickets or tune into specific television shows or pay per views to watch these unsanctioned matches.
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presently companies produce a slate of matches that are jointly labeled a card: audiences
buy tickets to see a group of matches performed by a single producing entity.
The producing entity is understood to be a company or “promotion” by audiences;
performers are signed exclusively to a given promotion, and their matches can almost
always only be seen on shows that are produced by a given promotion. This promotion—
whether through a single storyline writer (called “booker” in wrestling’s carnie argot) or
through an entire writing team dedicated to this purpose—determines the creative
direction of the company: this means that the situations that lead to matches, the results of
the matches, and the characters portrayed by the performers in matches are all
predetermined or fictions created by the producing entity. The booker or writing team
decides which wrestlers are champions, whether matches are championship matches
(matches where championships can change hands), and why any number of wrestlers are
wrestling each other rather than anyone else (“feuding,” commonly, although in prior eras
performers engaged in a long-term program would refer to this phenomenon as being
“married” to each other).
Although a given card might have eight matches, each of those matches is—on a
well-booked show—expected to serve a different role. An opening match is frequently
designed to excite a given crowd. Sometimes it does this through acrobatic maneuvers;
sometimes it does this through the pace at which the wrestlers do maneuvers; or
sometimes it does this by showcasing a fan-favorite wrestler. Using our eight match show
as a hypothetical example, subsequent matches would feature virtuous wrestlers
(“babyfaces”) in contests against evil (“heel”) wrestlers. After the opening match, the
show will “slow down” by featuring slower-paced, less exciting matches to avoid
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exhausting the crowd. After the opener, subsequent matches should consistently
crescendo until the final match of the evening to ensure that the main event match
receives the strongest reaction.
The above, of course, is only part of the story. While it certainly accounts for
much of the content of a given evening of professional wrestling, it does not account for
all of the things one sees at a live event or on television. The wrestler’s entrances to the
arena, irrespective of whether one is discussing their arrival to wrestle a match or to
simply appear before a crowd, are also an integral part of professional wrestling: music,
masculinist/feminist posturing, pyrotechnics, and dance are all synthesized into the short
performances that accompany wrestlers’ appearance on stage. Moreover, sometimes
wrestlers appear in the ring within which matches are contested or appear before the
crowd at the spot where they enter the arena with a microphone: rather than engaging in a
physical contest, the wrestlers perform direct address monologues to the crowd or
verbally duel a future opponent (wrestlers deem the act of performing a monologue or an
improvised scene “cutting a promo”). Shows frequently supplement the matches with
improvised skits between multiple wrestlers (either backstage or in the ring),
advertisements for wrestling-related merchandise (such as replica championship belts,
apparel, or DVDs of past wrestling events/matches), video packages that summarize prior
storylines, and assorted other things. Given all of the above, it becomes possible for
someone to say that they watched wrestling for three hours despite their being, perhaps,
only a few minutes of actual wrestling within the context of a match (or matches).9
9 According to Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer, the 3/1/2010 edition of WWE’s Monday Night Raw, for example, contained only 16 minutes and 35 seconds of actual wrestling. The remaining time of the show was dedicated to interviews, monologues, skits, video packages, and the like. Throughout much of 2010, both WWE and TNA relied primarily on non-wrestling content to fill their shows. The opposite seems to be occurring for WWE events in 2013.
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Much of the way wrestlers and fans talk about the practice comes from the argot
of 19th Century travelling carnivals, which often had simulated fights between an evil
strongman and a carnival employee pretending to be a local who would defend the honor
of the locale in which the carnival was performing. In carnival argot, a work is any
performance or trick that constitutively involves the audience’s ignorance. Audience
members who are fooled by the work (for example those who believe that the outcome of
the staged fights are not predetermined) are known as marks. In contemporary
professional wrestling performers are often called workers and the notion of a work is
often contrasted with that of a shoot, where a shoot fight is non-scripted and without a
pre-determined outcome.
III. Two Ontologies
When analytic philosophers attempt to provide an ontology10 of some genre of art they
are trying to isolate the features of entities that make them instances of categories
relevant to that genre. Isolating such features typically requires answering three
questions: (1) individuation (what differentiates entities of the relevant kind from each
other and entities of other kinds?), (2) persistence (in virtue of what are entities of the
relevant kind self-identical over time?), and (3) normativity (in virtue of what are
different objects better and worse instances of the relevant kinds?).
10 One can make all sorts of Whig histories leading up to the current resurgence in metaphysics among analytic philosophers. One canonical text that occurs in perhaps all such histories is P.F. Strawson’s 1959 Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Strawson’s “descriptive metaphysics” is an attempted articulation of the picture of reality supposedly presupposed by our common conceptual scheme. He contrasted this with “revisionary metaphysics” which might seek to change the way we think about the world. Pace Strawson, we find all metaphysics proper to be at least potentially revisionary, just because the metaphysician is interested in what there is as well as how it is and how it should be. And following Nietzsche’s original programmatic hermeneutics of suspicion, our explanatory job with respect to an age’s common sense might very well explain why its presuppositions are both widely held and false.
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While these clearly do not exhaust all of the philosophical questions one can and
should ask about various artworks, proponents of the centrality of ontology think that
these questions are fundamental in the sense that answering other questions will be
parasitic on them. For example, consider the debauched immoralist who claims that
movies that celebrate cruelty should be aesthetically cherished in virtue of celebrating
cruelty. An ethicist responding to this will do a much better job if she is familiar with the
genre relevant properties of movies. Are films really the kind of thing that celebrate or
encourage character traits such as cruelty? Is it even possible for a film to have this kind
of property? Assuming that there is a subgenre of films that manage to do this, what
differentiates instances of those films from other kinds of films? These simply are
questions of type (1) and (2). Finally, addressing type (3) questions will tell us what it
would be for such a film to succeed aesthetically. Answering these questions will not
automatically determine where we should stand on issues of moralism and immoralism
(or whether we should take a stand at all), but (in addition to clarity about a bevy of
ontological issues about human beings more generally) they are prerequisites for the
debate to get started.11
Before continuing we should note that the looseness, imprecision, and pragmatic
infelicity of many applications fundamental ontological categories (e.g. individuation,
identity, and normativity) is neither a bar to doing ontology12 nor something on its own
that requires replacement via a more precise language such as logic.13 Rather, the proper
11See Berys Gaut’s Art, Emotion, and Ethics for the recent canonical discussion of philosophical problems raised by possibly immoral art. 12 Anti-metaphysical trends in continental philosophy make far too much of different forms of vagueness. For a discussion and critique, see Raphaël Millière’s “Metaphysics Today and Tomorrow.” Though we have learned much from deconstruction and the French phenomenological tradition generally, we concur with Millière’s critique.13 Building on earlier work by Bertrand Russell and Rudolph Carnap, Gustav Bergmann developed “ideal language philosophy” in texts such as 1954’s The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism and imparted this
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metaphysical response to varieties of under-determination is to try to discern what reality
must be like such that our non-philosophical and ontological discourses involving
identity, individuation, and norms succeed and fail in exactly the way that they do. For
example, what must the world be like so that we can communicate as if word meanings
individuate in determinate ways, given that they manifestly do not.14 But we cannot really
understand the relevant kinds of under-determination unless we vigorously study the way
individuation, identity, and normativity work with respect to these kinds.
The overlapping genres and subgenres of art for which noted contemporary
analytic philosophers have penned recent book length ontologies include: mass art, horror
movies and literature, film,15 fiction,16 jazz,17 dance,18 and video games.19 But alas,
professional wrestling has yet to find its metaphysical apologist. To provide a satisfactory
ontology of professional wrestling, one would need to begin by rigorously addressing
questions (1)-(3) with respect to the technical concepts described in the previous section.
And of course we can do nothing approaching this in one paper. However, we actually
almost already have enough on the table to show the radical aesthetic novelty of
technique to a generation of students during the University of Iowa’s Department of Philosophy’s golden age. Recent work in this vein tends to take its impetus from W. V. O. Quine’s quip in 1953’s From a Logical Point of View that “to be is to be the value of a bound variable.” Though we both love logic, we find metaphysics following Quine’s stricture to be just one end of a false dichotomy with the deconstructionist’s anti-metaphysics mentioned in the previous footnote on the other end. Because of the fact that varieties underdetermination is properly a spur to further metaphysics (as we go on to note in the text above), none of the important work cited in the next five footnotes labors under either Quinean or deconstructive shackles.14 Mark Wilson’s Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior is the canonical discussion of just this issue.15 For the first three, see Noël Carroll’s canonical A Philosophy of Mass Art, his more focused The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, as well as The Philosophy of Motion Pictures.16 Most recent work in some manner responds to Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make Believe.17 See Robert Kraut’s Art World Metaphysics.18 See Graham McFee’s Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance.19 For a Waltonian account, see Chris Bateman’s Imaginary Games. For an account rooted in capacity metaphysics, see Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox’s Philosophy Through Video Games.
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contemporary professional wrestling. We must only complete one more bit of ontological
stage setting.
By the time Nicholas Wolterstorff published his canonical 1975 article “Toward
an Ontology of Artworks” analytic metaphysics of art had already developed a set of
broadly shared positions concerning the manner in which identity and individuation
conditions play a role in differentiating different genres of art.20 According to one part of
the consensus view, art genres divide into whether the artwork in the genre is a
“performance-work” or an “object work.” Performance-works are simply works that can
be multiply performed, where the same object (say a musical piece, dance, or play,
conceived abstractly) can be instantiated in different performances occurring at different
spaces and times. Performances themselves are discrete events spread out vaguely over
space-time. A particular performance, in its particularity occupying a region of space-
time, is not repeatable. What is repeated is the performance-work, which is an abstract
type shared by all of its performance instances. Wolterstorff notes that “The ontological
status of performances is relatively clear, however, while that of performance-work is
immensely perplexing,” and spends most of his article trying to discern an ontology of
performance-works.
For our current purposes, we need not address any deep metaphysical issues
involving the relation between abstract kinds and their instances. Nor do we need to
explicate the related distinction between an object-work (such as a painting, building, or
sculpture) and copies and castings of such works. Nor do we need to discuss the manner
20 As evidence of a consensus having developed on certain key connections between genre and individuation conditions, Wolterstorff cites R.G. Collingwood’s 1938 The Principles of Art, Margaret MacDonald’s 1952 “Art and Imagination,” R. Wellek and A. Warren’s 1956 Theory of Literature, C.L Stevenson’s 1957 “On ‘What is a Poem’?” Joseph Margolis’ 1965 The Language of Art and Art Criticism, and Andrew Harrison’s 1967 “Works of Art and Other Cultural Objects.”
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in which literary works might be taken to be both object works and performance works.
For we already have enough on the table to make our central ontological point.
In professional wrestling, the word “match” is systematically ambiguous,
denoting incompatible ontological types, depending upon the stance taken by the
spectator towards what is occurring. To illustrate this, let us introduce two fictitious
spectators, Bubba and Ian. Bubba grew up in Montgomery, Alabama during the bucolic
1970s. Every Saturday morning he watched locally promoted wrestling on television and
argued vigorously with friends at Jefferson Davis High School who thought the outcomes
of the matches were fixed. If you go to a chicken wings restaurant that shows
professional wrestling pay per views you might end up listening to Bubba discourse
extensively about how the wrestlers of his childhood (Ric Flair, Harley Race, and Dusty
Roads) could soundly defeat the entire card of the pay per view you are watching.21
Bubba is being sincere. He either has no idea that the outcomes are pre-determined and
many of the skits written by people in WWE creative, or he’s so internalized “kayfabe” (a
word from early carny pig Latin that denotes the sacred oath not to reveal that a work is a
work) that he will not give himself over to doubt. Fans like Bubba are sadly an
endangered species, though they have been common enough in the past to be given their
own sobriquet: “southern fan” (SF). Southern fans are delightful to talk with because they
have so little aesthetic distance from the spectacle. They have not suspended disbelief,
because there is nothing to disbelieve, dammit.
Now consider Ian. Ian grew up in somewhat reduced circumstances in Montreal,
Canada. Some of his happiest memories are of his father taking him to watch “Géant
21 It is worth pointing out that, since two of the three names listed as favorites of Bubba were all prominent bookers of professional wrestling while active performers, such beliefs seem to be empirically justifiable given how tough these wrestlers appeared to be throughout their careers.
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Ferré” (who would later become WWF superstar “André the Giant”) crush opponents in
the Montreal Forum. Ian is delighted when you tell him that when at the age of twelve the
real life André Roussimoff’s giganticism rendered him too big to fit on the school bus in
his childhood home of Grenoble, France, his neighbor Samuel Beckett (yes, that Samuel
Beckett) drove him to and from school. Ian has a Ph.D now and still enjoys the plays of
Beckett, but when you have him over to your house to watch pirated video tapes or
DVDs of Japanese professional wrestling, he just responds to the spectacle by saying
things like “that’s so fake” and laughing.
While the Southern Fan has no disbelief to suspend, Ian’s response to wrestling
now is that of the Interminable Critic (IC) who brings the hermeneutics of suspicion to
bear on everything. The IC is often a lovely person in all sorts of ways, but his or her
grasp of the material preconditions for many performance practices often interferes
radically with his or her ability to enjoy those practices. The IC is as stuck in disbelief as
the SF is in belief.
In truth, the vast majority of wrestling fans (F) put on both hats, as the suspension
of disbelief necessary for wrestling to work requires as much. While this is perhaps the
most pronounced with professional wrestling fans, it is not unique to wrestling. Most
people separate out Johnny Depp from Captain Jack Sparrow, and the ontologies relevant
to both are different. But one must look to the far corners of postmodern meta-fiction22 to
find genre of art where the two stances recursively interact in the manner in which they
now standardly do in professional wrestling.
22 In fiction, one recent paradigm example of just this is Jeff VanderMeer’s short story collection City of Saints and Madmen. The book’s typesetting, illustrations, and strategies of text delivery all work in concert to draw attention to the formal properties of literature as a discursive body of texts and the physical book’s status as an object-work.
18
Here’s a way that professional wrestling is not like film. Were a film equivalent
of the SF (say someone who thinks Pirates of the Caribbean is veridical history) talks
about a film, their ontological presuppositions about the individuation conditions of films
are no different from that of the film equivalent of the IC. The IC would only be
interested in talking about how much history is falsified by the film. But nothing is to be
gained from the claim that the SF and the IC mean something systematically different by
“film.”
This is not the case with professional wrestling. For the SF a match is a
performance in Wolterstorff’s sense. It is a unique individual event composed of and
related to other events, all with finite though vague boundaries in space-time. But the IC,
who focuses on the non-fictional elements (including the material preconditions and the
actual states of the world that might be considered to be represented by the work) of the
practice of professional wrestling a match is a performance-kind. This, of course, has real
bearing on how we understand professional wrestling. Although fans in the present are
conditioned to believe that the only results that matter occur on television, this was not
always a norm of professional wrestling performance. In the 1970s and throughout much
of the 1980s, wrestling television shows were not a revenue stream because, unlike today,
promotions did not receive money from TV stations to put on a wrestling show in
exchange for drawing a reliable audience of fans to increase Nielsen ratings: rather,
television shows were most frequently a loss leader. Promotions would pay a carriage fee
to get their television show on a local network, then use that show to promote live events
throughout the geographic area that could watch the show. Thus, on TV “The Nature
Boy” Ric Flair and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat might have a confrontation that leads
19
to a title match. But to see the title match, fans would have to buy a ticket to the
promotion’s next local event. Interestingly enough, however, is that this title match might
occur at every arena that receives a promotion’s television. Thus, fans in Charlotte,
Atlanta, and Charleston might all see Ric Flair lose his NWA heavyweight championship
to Ricky Steamboat. Indeed, if a fan bought tickets and traveled to all three shows, she
would see Ric Flair “lose” his title three separate times because the same match (even if
some of the moves are different) was repeated at each show. Irrespective of the actual
moves that the performers improvised in front of three separate crowds, the matches
would end the same way.
It is clear that, unlike with the case of film, the SF and IC have two ontologies,
inconsistent with one another in how they interpret the individuation conditions of what
is perhaps the key category of professional wrestling, the match. Following the meaning
of shoot and work, by “work ontology” we mean to denote an account of the way the
world would be if the fictional elements in wrestling were not fictional.23 In contrast, the
“shoot ontology” is an account of the way the actual world is such that all of the elements
of wrestling (fictional and non-fictional) can be performed. The SF is a mark, who does
not (or in some cases cannot) distinguish work from shoot. The IC is stuck on the fact
that the work is a work, and appeals to facets of the shoot ontology in her refusal to
suspend disbelief.
Again, one can do something like the IC with respect to other representational
media, refusing to enjoy historical fictions that depart too much from the way we take
23 Note that we do not deny that a work ontology is “real.” This is not just because one of us has fairly strong ontological commitments concerning the reality of ficta. Given the physical sacrifices involved in the performances, we also find it to be astonishingly cruel to tell a wrestler that what they do is “fake.” This is exactly what David Wills was referencing when he, during a famous question and answer session with old and injured wrestlers, cried out “It’s still real to me Dammit!”
20
things to have really been. But debates between a film IC and SF will not potentially
change the SF’s ontology of film, for the fictional world of films in no way constitutively
presuppose false views about the actual nature of film. But the fictional world that the SF
wrongly takes to be actual does falsely presuppose that there is no performance-kind
notion of match. In virtue of this, the wrestling fan’s suspension of disbelief has always
had to be more sophisticated than that of other performance arts. There is just too
fundamental a metaphysical clash between the reality viewed by the disbeliever and the
fictional reality presupposed when that disbelief is suspended.
IV. The Screwjob Revisited
Now we have the machinery to understand the Montreal Screwjob, and hence the
postmodern condition of post-Screwjob professional wrestling. Our three kinds of
spectators (SF,IC,F) form a recursive hierarchy of aesthetic distance. The SF has no
aesthetic distance. The IC only has aesthetic distance. The F is able to be distanced from
her distance, suspending her disbelief for the purpose of enjoying the spectacle.
However, in wrestling the F’s distanced distance is considerably complicated by
the way professional wrestling fandom works. For just as there are two notions of
“matches” there are two kinds of ontology relative to “rooting.” Even the most intractable
IC, Ian from Montreal, can have happy memories about individual performers such as
André Roussimoff. For example, when Roussimoff convincingly played a gentle giant in
the Princes Bride and was then reinvented as a wrestling baby face, Ian was ecstatic.
Though Ian would not watch his wrestling matches and root for the fictional character
21
André the Giant, he continued to root for André Roussimoff’s success and was genuinely
sad when the health problems from Roussimoff’s acromegaly ended his life prematurely.
Normal wrestling fans end up combining the SF’s rooting for the characters to
win their matches with rooting for the performers to “get over.” For example, a fan of the
wrestler Ric Flair could, on the one hand, want Ric Flair to win his matches on television.
On the other hand, a fan of Ric Flair could want the performer who plays Ric Flair,
Richard Fliehr, to be a successful performer who excels at his craft on television: this
might involve winning a given match, but it could extend to cover such things as being
happy when Fliehr performs an effective promo, being pleased with Fliehr loses in such a
way that the performance of the character is strengthened despite the character losing in
the ring, or even being happy that other fans are beginning to cheer for Richard Fliehr’s
character. Ric Flair might “get over” by winning a title, but Ric Flair could also “get
over” when his character becomes more central to the stories being told on television or
when other fans begin expressing their love or passionate hatred for Fliehr’s performance
oas the character. Again, this happens with fans of films also rooting for actors to be
successful in their personal lives and in their ability to get good roles. But it is not a
constitutive part of the aesthetic experience for film. Indeed a fan that was rooting for
Johnny Depp while watching Pirates would have a degraded aesthetic experience, since
it would intrude on her imaginative complicity with respect to the fiction.
By way of contrast, the aesthetic experience of most wrestling fans today is
considerably heightened by combining the shoot and work ontology while watching the
match. Consider the 2012 return of former Ultimate Fighting Heavyweight Champion
Brock Lesnar, an outstanding amateur and professional wrestler who left the profession
22
to become a mixed martial artist and became the biggest PPV draw in (non-boxing)
combat sports history. Lesnar was brought in with a contract that gave him unparalleled
control over the marketing of his character: Lesnar’s wrestling attire retains the corporate
sponsorships he received while a mixed martial artist, and his gear emblazoned with the
Jimmy Johns corporate logo is striking on WWE television given WWE’s unwillingness
to allow any other performer to receive corporate endorsements. When Lesnar began his
feud with John Cena, the WWE worked carefully to preserve the illusion that Lesnar was
a fighter rather than a professional wrestler: interview segments with Lesnar intentionally
imitated the cinematography of Ultimate Fighting Championship’s “UFC Countdown”
specials when Lesnar was heavyweight champion, confrontations with Cena and Lesnar
would devolve into fights where Lesnar would throw real elbows at Cena in an attempt to
cut Cena’s face and lip so that blood would appear on television, and so on. The final
match between Cena and Lesnar was similarly challenging: throughout its 15 minutes,
Lesnar was clearly hitting Cena with real punches, knees, and elbows. Although the
ending of the match was predetermined and Cena was victorious, everything that
preluded the finish of the match was uncomfortably real. Even now, one year after
Lesnar’s return to professional wrestling, his (albeit rare) appearances on WWE
television causes crowds to go crazy because, to quote Lesnar’s in-fiction manager Paul
Heyman, “Brock Lesnar is for real.”
Although Lesnar’s presence is a rare occurrence on professional wrestling
television shows, the treatment of his character may well be a paradigm example of post-
Screwjob wrestling: as you can see from the above, this recursive intertwining of levels
of distance gains another level. While the F experiences little tension while inconsistently
23
presupposing both ontologies while rooting simultaneously for character and performer,
the postmodern fan (PF) is made acutely aware of the inconsistencies precisely because
propositions about the shoot ontology become presupposed in the fictional universe of the
work ontology. Prior to the Screwjob it was possible to be a SF and not miss anything
going on in the fictional world. After the screwjob this is no longer the case given the
ways in which the work ontology and the shoot ontology began to commingle at the level
of storyline. For any fan to understand why Vince McMahon, the shoot owner of the
WWF but worked announcer of the WWF, could go on television in the weeks following
the Screwjob and discuss contract negotiations, his ability to end a match prematurely,
and assorted other things required a fan to understand that the work ontology was, at
heart, a work: the storyline that naturally developed around McMahon as an evil
corporate executive who hates the working class could only make sense if fans were
aware that, at some level, there is something going on outside the work ontology that
informs the gaps within the work ontology.
What is distinctive of the PF then is a necessary suspension of the suspension of
disbelief, which is not the same as disbelief! If the F must distance herself from the IC’s
aesthetic distance, the PF must again distance herself from the F’s distanced distance.
And this is a common requirement on fandom in post-Screwjob professional wrestling;
with the internet and the Wrestling Observer too many fans are obsessively following the
shoot ontology, and often the shoot ontology’s “storyline” (an attempted description of
the performer’s actual lives) is much better what the writers are coming up with in an
wrestling company.24 When this tension becomes too great WWE writers will bravely 24 Indeed, much of Neal Hebert’s forthcoming dissertation, Professional Wrestling: Local Performance History, Global Performance Praxis addresses the ways that what we call the shoot ontology has complicated the performance and reception of professional wrestling throughout the twentieth century. Gender performativity, labor relations, the status of immigrant identities within the larger United States
24
contradict the previous work storyline in a way that, as we will argue in our concluding
section, forces fans face to face with their post-modern predicament.25
[Neal- Edge and Lita or some good example of where this has happened post
Screwjob. Also make it clear some ways in which professional wrestling fans are
actually fairly sophisticated. Maybe bring in deconstruction of gender norms, satire
of political movements, etc. and footnote your own work, even unfinished
dissertation!]
V. Chiasmatic Postscript
One of the most compelling characters in the Judeo-Christian religious milieu is Jacob,
renamed Israel (“he who struggles with God”), who wrestles all night with a figure
indeterminate between man, angel, and God. This creature can’t defeat Jacob, so at the
end of the match he pulls a typical heel move, gratuitously injuring Jacob’s thigh. And let
us be absolutely clear about this. Using magic powers to injure an opponent is at least not
in the spirit of fair play as encoded in the rules of professional wrestling.26
The problem here is much worse than the normal one of the referee looking away
as the heel cheats. For if it might be God that Jacob is wrestling with, and the entire Old
community, as well as numerous other issues, have all been embodied in rings irrespective of whether they were ever acknowledged within the work ontology. 25 Examples of this are numerous, but perhaps of most interest would be a situation that occurred in 2005. Fans who followed WWE wrestler Matt Hardy were aware that he and Amy “Lita” Dumas were a couple both in storyline and in real life; their engagement was publicly acknowledged on Matt Hardy’s Web site, and Hardy routinely engaged with fans on-line. Readers of Hardy’s Web site learned, in early 2005, that Hardy broke off his engagement with Dumas due to her infidelity: she had been having an affair with WWF performer Adam “Edge” Copeland for months, and Hardy outed her on his personal Web site. The WWF, unhappy with Hardy’s online behavior, released him from his contract. Fans of Hardy were upset with his release, and they began disrupting WWE television tapings with loud chants whenever Dumas or Copeland appeared on television: fans would chant “You screwed Edge” at Dumas, and Copeland, then a fan favorite, began getting booed at every arena the WWE 26 Discuss DDT magical spell. Kane summoning fire.
25
Testament is the story of God’s belated and often sorry attempts to be a good referee for
the entire universe.27 But for familiar reasons one cannot be both participant and referee.
If one can change the rules to suit oneself whenever it is advantageous, then there is no
content whatsoever to the notion of a rule. Is it then any wonder that the true nature of
Jacob’s opponent is a metaphysically indeterminate man/angel/God, or that at the end of
the passage (Genesis 32:22-32) Jacob is able to demand a blessing from this creature? Is
it any wonder that in the Jewish ordering of the Old Testament books God’s very last
appearance among us is his temper tantrum response to Job (e.g. “Have you made a pet of
Leviathon for your daughters” (Job 41))? God can only cease being a monstrous
man/angel/god heel when he departs. His blessing of both Jacob and Job is to leave them
alone. And only here does God’s final turn become apparent, now as an eternal baby
face,28 like famed luchador El Santo, who of metaphysical necessity can never be
unmasked.
If there is anything to the so-called “postmodern turn” it is that Jacob’s story is
everyone’s. The entities we wrestle with are revealed to be fictions, absent, but no less
real for all of that. To consider the possible ubiquity of this we must turn back to the
standard view of the nineteenth century hermeneuts of suspicion: Nietzsche, Marx, and
Freud. All in their own ways attempted to elucidate the material preconditions for
people’s commitment to religious ontology. That is, they sought to buttress a work
ontology with a shoot ontology, not explaining why the actual world is as described by
27 See Jack Miles’ God: A Biography.28 We can’t be the only ones who found deep insight in the dinner table theological discussion in the movie “Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Ricky Bobby can only pray to his vision of the baby Jesus. Literal baby faces are themselves metaphysically impossible, somehow Winston Churchill made cute and lovable.
26
the work ontology but rather giving an ontological account of what reality must be like
such that people are led to embrace the work ontology in the first place.
It should be clear here that the stereotypical religious believer is SF while the
debunking hermeneut of suspicion is IC. Most people never attain the epistemic
sophistication of the normal wrestling fan. In fact David Hume’s admission that he
forgets his skeptical philosophy while drinking beer and shooting billiards is precisely the
admission that he vacillates between SF and IC. But what would the F be here? Someone
whose philosophy leads her to suspend disbelief without really believing in any robust
sense. Faithfulness, after all, is not reducible to the desiccated philosopher’s picture of
faith as believing a proposition for which one has little evidence.29 Pace the 19th century
hermeneuts of suspicion, we suspect that this most charitably describes the vast majority
of actual religious “believers” who are fans, not southern fans. However, in some ways
this kind of fandom is different from that of professional wrestling. The professional
wrestling fan embraces both the shoot and work ontology while rooting for
performer/characters. It is not clear to us what a religious analogy would be.
But the PF is arguably the central figure of contemporary radical theology. If
Nietzsche is correct that the Christian valorization of truth leads to embracing a shoot
ontology inconsistent with the Christian work ontology, then the Christian can only stay
Christian by articulating an inconsistent work ontology, exactly as is being done (for
these very reasons) by postmodern theologians such as John Caputo.30 Caputo’s absent
29 We should note that we do not think this epistemic stance is proscribed by the Roman Catholic tradition or liberal forms of Protestantism. Philosophers gravitate to conservative Protestant accounts of faith as believing in some proposition without sufficient evidence precisely because contemporary philosophers are so concerned over what beliefs are true. 30 See for example, Caputo’s recent The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps.
27
God who insists but does not exist is motivated precisely by a fidelity and moral
temperament he takes to be essential to Christianity.
Following contemporary radical theologians, we posit that postmodernism proper
is always the result of the inscription of a practice’s shoot ontology into its work ontology
in a way inconsistent with the work ontology. But this does not destroy the work
ontology precisely because there is no alternative. [Neal. Put in thing from book about
postmodernism. Don’t worry about tying it back to Wolterstorff.] To the extent that
there is a “postmodern condition” then, it is because of the ubiquity and necessity of
contemporary professional wrestling spectatorship practices in educated society at large.
The manner in which aspects of a shoot ontology inconsistent with a work
ontology become constitutive of that very work ontology iterates. Remember that SF
takes the work ontology to be a shoot! But what then of IC’s shoot ontology? Might it
also be a work in some deep sense? Perhaps one embraces the postmodern condition
precisely when one realizes that a given shoot is also a work. That is, whatever
hermeneutics of suspicion leads one to see one’s favored work ontology as a mere work
will also double back on the very shoot ontology being used to show that the work is a
fiction. In the case of wrestling, we note that one’s identity as a performer performing a
character also involves performing the very identity as a performer. But this realization
radically alters how one views so-called “real sports” as one begins to see the extent to
which the athletes themselves are characters. This of course leads to Howard Cosell’s
epiphany that “Professional wrestling is the only real sport,” [Neal. Put in correct quote,
which is much funnier than this, and citation.] precisely because it forces the fans to
confront the fact that a work is a work.
28
But here is the tension. If it is clear that a work is a work, then the work is in great
danger of no longer working as a work. The wrestling fan must persist in this chronic
instability, and commentators worry about the future of the practice as a result of this.
[Neal, put in guy ripping on way Daniel Bryant is being marketed.] But this may be
absolutely general. That is if postmodernism is true, we all must persist in the same
chronic instability.
We would like to conclude with the above thought about the possible ubiquity of
professional wrestling spectatorship norms, but we must issue one final clarification.
Nothing we have said is a concession to relativism, which is just the reduction of
everything to sociology. Clearly, if sociology is a work, then you can’t reduce everything
to it. Moreover the postmodern realization of the ubiquity of fictional elements only leads
skepticism or relativism if one’s philosophy of fiction dictates that fiction does not reveal
anything about the actual world, the world there before there were any people and that
will remain after we are all gone. While the equation of fictional and “unreal” has been a
shibboleth of contemporary debunking “theory” at least since the 1980s and is
presupposed among contemporary analytic “fictionalist” anti-metaphysicians, we find it
to be radically implausible.31
This is exactly where metaphysics must buttress ontological investigation. If the
PF is the epistemic exemplar of our age, what does this reveal about non-epistemic
reality? Metaphysics here might very well be the frustrated attempt to discern a final
shoot ontology to explains all works. But if the postmodernist is correct that such a thing
is of necessity itself a work, this must be understood to reflect something fundamental
31 For an extended critique of this see Jon Cogburn and Mark Ohm’s “Towards an Object-Oriented Literary Theory.”
29
about reality without humans. The end of this paper is no place to address this question,
but we should note that much recent European speculative metaphysics can be
reconfigured so that one might understand it as situating itself precisely in this problem
space.32 While we have said nothing to address this problem, we are happy to have shown
the manner in which professional wrestling is a paradigm case of it. Anyone who doubts
that there is (actual) truth in fiction will themselves have to wrestle with what we have
said.33
32 For some relevant discussion of how speculative realism and object-oriented ontology are instances of this see again Jon Cogburn and Mark Ohm’s “Towards an Object-Oriented Literary Theory” as well as Graham Harman’s contrast of his own view with that of Quentin Meillassoux’s in Harman’s Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Harman’s discussion of how he and Meillassoux each keep and externalize distinct aspects of our Kantian heritage is beautiful. Harman keeps Kantian finitude and begins the construction of a metaphysics by de-anthropomorphizing it. If understood in a Sartrean context, Meillassoux can be seen as doing something analogous with respect to freedom, which is likewise de-anthropomorphized, argued to hold as the radical contingency of the non-human universe. 33 We dedicate this paper to Ian Crystal, who would have found it hilarious and also help to make it much more so.
30
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