Modern society distinguishes between fact and fiction, between truth and the imagination. Fictional works of art differ from lies and dreams in that the fictional transgressions of social reality are conscious and voluntary acts, open to view for everybody. As a social institution, aesthetic fiction creates a space in which social reality as a reference of the speech act is suspended. While the lie means to deceive, aesthetic fiction does not hide its own fictitiousness. Instead, it is a play–to various degrees–with transgression. And in contrast to the dream, the worlds set up by fiction are products of the alert mind. They originate in a sense of intentionality of the creator, despite the fact that she might not be able to control every aspect of it with the conscious mind.
The institution of fiction holds a special place in a world that is oriented toward facticity and the “reality principle” (Cornelius Castoriadis). Yet the existence of the institution of fiction as part of social reality shows that society reserves meaning and importance for fiction, which goes beyond the yearning for entertainment. As a social institution, fiction has brought forth a more or less stable pattern of recurrent practices, expectations, norms, and values. It has brought forth social roles such as artists, critics, and audience, as well as structured fields of production and reception, all of which give aesthetic fiction the authority to be a recognized institution of society. However, the truth of fiction escapes definition.
If fiction does not tell us facts, which truth can we gain from it? Or: How can we be moved by fiction, if we know it does not exist? The latter question has provoked a notable debate about the “paradox of fiction”1 among philosophers of art, who tried to solve the problem of true emotions in the absence of true events. Kendall Walton is probably one of the most prominent spokespersons in the controversy, and his concept of make-believe postulates that–just like children in play–we make-believe that what happens in a novel or on screen is true. This suspension of disbelief generates quasi-emotions, which differ from real emotions in that they lack a motivational force which makes the recipient behave in accordance with the experienced emotion. The emotions raised by fiction, Walton suggests, depend on submitting to the play of make-believe proposed by fiction (Walton 1990).
The paradox of fiction, which has been poignantly framed in “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” (Radford and Weston 1975), is also at the heart of this work. What position does fiction hold in the constitution of the real? If aesthetic fiction explicitly transgresses the boundaries established by society’s “reality principle,” why do we repeatedly witness large public controversies that originate within fictional works of art? Controversies of this kind cannot lay claim to being based on rational argument and irrefutable facts; indeed, they cannot be tested on social reality. And yet, these controversies participate in shaping society’s symbolic framework, despite the fact that fiction exceeds what is perceived as reality and truth. Central to my research is the question of how fiction has an impact on the social. Not in the sense of the strength of a fictional artwork’s effects, but in the manner through which it transforms the symbolic order. What role does fiction play in the constitution of the social, which the “discourse of reality” cannot fulfill?
Fictional artworks (or “aesthetic fiction”) have no meaning in and of themselves. The term “aesthetic fiction” derives from the act of cutting the sign’s world reference in fiction, which leads to the artwork’s subjection to the rule of form (structures, patterns, figurations) and aesthetics understood in a broad sense as sensual or sensory perception . Fiction can only become meaningful for society in the process of interpretation, which is the act of closing the indeterminacy inherent in the fictional text. This claim was put forward by the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser in his inaugural lecture, which was published as Die Appellstruktur der Texte. Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Iser 1970). Accordingly, literary texts always contain gaps in the semantic framework, which can only be filled by the recipient, and which are in fact necessary, so that the recipient can connect her own life experience with the literary text and bring it to life. The work’s final meaning is therefore a result of the recipient’s active participation in the creative process of aesthetic fiction. Simultaneously, this means that since a work of art is continually read anew, its meanings are as manifold as the number of readings it has been subjected to.
In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser perceives the literary text as a performance which is never stable and which cannot be thought of without the act of interpretation. An interpretation of a literary text in fact performs the artwork in its contextual specificity (Iser 1993, esp. pp. 281–296). Following these claims, the social meaning of fiction–from a sociological standpoint–can never be researched without taking into account its manifold interpretations, which are always bound up in a time-space framework. It is only with interpretation that a work of art realizes itself as a particular manifestation of itself, and the interpretation is informed by the social, political, and cultural situation of the recipient. Therefore, if we want to find out how a fictional work of art impacts on the meaningful constitution of the social, we have to look at those instances where interpretation takes place, since it is here that the fictional text is brought into a relation with social reality.
As a result of these reflections, I have searched for a social institution in which a collective interpretation of artworks takes place. Every society which values the institution of art as it is discussed here is in need of a discursive space in which the collective interpretation of artworks can take place. If art is deprived of a space in which “reading guidelines” for understanding an artwork can be developed, it becomes meaningless. The location and concrete appearance of this discursive space, however, varies over time and across space. The West German Feuilleton, the feature pages of the national daily and weekly newspapers, combines some characteristics which make it exceptionally interesting for analysis. First, it served as a platform for negotiating the symbolic framework on a nationwide basis. The Feuilleton’s sphere of influence coincided with the country’s political boundaries. Second, although the Feuilleton is the part of the newspaper that is primarily dedicated to cultural journalism, it transcends this limitation and becomes a platform for debates pertaining to the definition of society’s self-image. This is due to the fact that the West German Feuilleton is an intrinsic part of the regular newspaper and hence participates in social and political controversies taking place beyond the limits of a narrow definition of cultural journalism.
Third, as a politically diverse platform, the Feuilleton takes the shape of an opinion-forming social institution and is geared toward controversy and dispute, which makes it especially significant for making visible the conflicts traversing the social. Controversies and conflicts are events of dense symbolic interaction, providing me (the researcher) with a good site for looking into the processes and dynamics of the transformation of social meaning, which go hand in hand with transformations of the social order. The role played by the public sphere and the feature pages of certain kinds of national daily and weekly newspapers in the constitution of the social will be further explored in the next chapter, which develops the theoretical framework.
Controversies and conflicts that have been initiated by a fictional work of art are those incidents where society appropriates a work of art and incorporates it into its symbolic order. It is the moment of the interaction between aesthetic fiction and social reality, in which society negotiates and eventually settles on an artwork’s meaning provisionally. This is, however, always to be thought of as preliminary in the performative sense proposed by Iser. With Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as well as Jacques Rancière, a social conflict may be conceptualized as the encounter of the sedimented practices of the social and the transformative aspirations of the political; or, as the encounter of two or more social identities locked in a struggle to define social reality, in which one side defends the status quo, while the other side envisages a transformation. The social, from this perspective, is constituted by struggle and conflict–by the political–and through scrutinizing these conflicts, the dynamics of social development and transformation becomes visible. Social conflict is always an instance of the political. Examining cultural controversies is therefore not only a means of detecting an artwork’s socially given meaning, but more importantly, it contains information about how society digests and makes fictionality productive for the political constitution of the social. The question to be addressed here may therefore be reframed as: How does aesthetic fiction impact politically on social relations?
The central theoretical presupposition to this work is provided by the social philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, whose theorizing of the social as founded in the imaginary establishes the link between the materialized institutions of the social and the human psyche. The imaginary is social creation in its most fundamental sense and the engine for the tension that exists between the movements of institution and institutionalization, between conserving what is and the constant transformation of social reality. Social conflict is always oriented toward the formation of meaning, toward how a society imagines itself. With Castoriadis, it becomes possible to understand aesthetic fiction as a meaningful social practice, which is not an accessory to social reality, but can become constitutive of it. The political struggle of social identities becomes an act of the imagination.
I have selected and analyzed cultural controversies that took place in West Germany in the period between the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 and the time of Germany’s reunification in 1990. The period under consideration in this research is confined to the “old” Federal Republic of Germany so as to draw the already diverse case studies from a more or less unified social field. I have deliberately excluded the period after reunification since it substantially changed the field and the significance of the Feuilleton as a national platform. It simultaneously coincided with the loss of influence of the German Feuilleton due to the structural transformations of the media landscape since the 1990s.
The rise of the internet as well as the structural transformations of the newspaper industry since the early 1990s have fundamentally transformed the functioning of the public sphere. The public reception of cultural works of art has diversified and currently lacks national hegemonic spaces such as the West German Feuilleton in the period from 1950 to 1990. This, however, makes the “old” Feuilleton an all the more crucial field for analysis, because it allows for a scrutinizing of the processes of social reception of artworks in a condensed setting.
Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) has been applied to the material and it has brought forward the “paradigm of art/interpretation” as the central category of the research. The paradigm of art/interpretation is a derivative of Ra...