As If, But Differently: Meditations on the Realisms of Our Times, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia, Bulgaria, December 1–2, 2023

As the ongoing planetary crises intensify and make plain their extensive interdependencies, forms of art and criticism evolve in turn to establish a surer grasp on the variety of material and semiotic lives in crisis. All life is in crisis, always; one could say that life itself is crisis, a metastable boundary between phases of flux. Crises are now impossible to ignore as they permeate all domains, scales, and modes. New forms of realism are needed to come to terms with this conception of the real as a metastable and precarious condition; not a collection of well-defined entities that can be reliably represented, but rather sheathes and knots of forces that may seem stable and predictable enough when configured locally in space and time—until they are not. In his influential study of literary forms, Amitav Ghosh has termed as the great derangement humanity’s collective inability to adapt to unexpected large-scale changes—reflected in its dominant cultural forms and their corresponding bias toward assuming a world of stable states across space and time, gambling that bourgeois realism is indeed the most inclusive and revealing way of representing the world.1 Reality has thoroughly disproved this form of realism. But then, what new artistic and critical forms of representing “reality”—and more importantly of engaging with it—are available to us today?Kim Stanley Robinson has proposed one form of realism for our times: science fiction (SF).2 The 2023 conference As If, But Differently: Meditations on the Realisms of Our Times took Robinson’s statement as its motto and rallying cry in order to explore more specifically the idea that any cultural form is a contender for the descriptor of “realism,” provided it operates in a regime of imagining things “as if” the world were more dynamic and open to surprise than hegemonic forms allow it to be. From this flipped perspective, as-if narratives are always already engaged with the real since their logics—be they scientific (or “cognitive” as per Darko Suvin’s requirement),3 fantastic, absurdist, or other—register and thematize precisely the differences between the actual “as is” and the thinkable “as if.” The conference call for papers invited established scholars and students to submit their own meditations on how different modes of inhabiting the as-if register those differences, what aspects of these modes might be foregrounded and interpreted, and how such modes or forms can be historicized. The academic forum was dedicated to the 135th anniversary of Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski and to the 95th anniversary of its Department of English and American Studies. As such, its main topics were also meant to invite a dialogue on the changing role of academic pedagogy.The conference’s two plenary talks, by Paweł Frelik (University of Warsaw) and Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London), provided extended case studies on the pliability of art forms when the latter are faced with the task of making visible what has until recently been banished from the political imagination. Frelik’s talk, “As If but Doubly Differently,” interrogated SF as the discourse most suited to frame technomodernity, focusing on so-called minor media forms, such as weak-narrative video games, interactive environments, short films and VFX game engine demos, illustrations and maps, cybertexts, and unbuilt architectural designs. Forms like these, Frelik argued, have not yet become settled into their own “narrative grooves” and accordingly are characterized by a self-reflective foregrounding of their own toolboxes while also showcasing their hackability and ephemerality. Weak narrativization makes it easier in many cases for the consumer of the art form to focus more attentively on their own cognitive toolbox and its interaction with that of specific media. In the case of weak-narrative games, for instance, game mechanics come to the fore, to become their “procedural rhetoric.”4 The perspective of the player, then, is made visible as a kind of technology for framing the world, including the ludo-narrative dissonances encoded in it. Minor media forms such as these expose the cognitive pitfalls that are routinely masked and ignored through habituation in the context of major forms. They examine the micro-physics of cultural production and consumption, which is an indispensable effort if forms are to truly engage with as-if scenarios in authentically different regimes. Frelik contextualizes the digital artwork entitled “Engine Maintenance” (2014) by Polish digital artist Maciej Rebisz, in terms of the invisible and unexamined ubiquity of fossil fuels in the art of petromodernity. Rebisz’s work, Frelik argues, exposes what Mark Bould has recently called the “Anthropocene unconscious.”5While Frelik focused on reinventing the mechanics of play and interpretation, Edwards’s talk, “The Weird Eroticism of Elemental Aesthetics,” was interested in the scope of “as-if” art forms: the content these forms engage with; and more specifically the representation of entities and processes variously called “nonhuman,” “ahuman,” or “inhuman.” Elemental aesthetics, Edwards argued, works against the insistence, found in most works of art, “to remain human” so long as the category of “the human” remains so narrowly understood and performed as it has been. These art works pull seductively on psychic inner spaces, resituating the human subject within a transformed landscape where a radically enlarged multiplicity of beings and forces are allowed to access and change one another. Artistic interventions of this kind might not be immediately recognizable as utopian (or dystopian), as they shift the perspective through which the world is perceived as such, making the task of value judgment difficult, often impossible, and even futile. Shifts of this sort, however, work to challenge and subsequently to expand the boundaries within which collective subjectivity might be constructed and enacted. Such shifts are thus essential to the development of both innovative literary forms, and to forms of political dreaming and activism. Edwards provided several cases of engagement with the aesthetics of different “elements”: of fungi, as seen in the Japanese film Matango (1963) and in British writer Aliya Whiteley’s novel The Beauty (2014); of the autoerotic Black female body diffracted through the materiality of plants in the work of Kenyan visual artist Wangechi Mutu; of the utopian possibility of subjective metamorphosis to be found in the direct contact with lithic forces, as interpreted through the Icelandic TV series Katla (Netflix, 2021). Weird eroticism changes the affective landscape of art forms and allows characters (and possibly readers and spectators) to “dilate with desire,” to use Edwards’s phrase, to the shapes of other beings and worlds. Seduction of this kind, being elemental and therefore disruptive, works against ideologies that fix what can be objectively known and what must be excluded from the purview of the utopian effort, such as the oculo-centricity of modern science. Keeping close to those elemental desires requires invention at the levels of both content and form, which seems a fitting project for utopian thinkers and artists working in the vein of processual utopia and critical utopianism.Conference panels interrogated a wide array of works that experiment with the design and function of narrative (and weak narrative) forms, situating these experiments in an overtly politicized context of multiply nested crises (such as climate change, economic inequality, or the rapid development in AI). Many presentations thus engaged with utopianism, utopia, and dystopia explicitly, but even those which did not floated fundamental questions pertaining to the nature of fiction and the imagination, which sit at the heart of what is thinkable in utopian forms. Many speakers suggested that utopia is essentially a question of expanding the limits of what can be represented or delineated—the as-if—rather than a question of representing the what-is. For example, Emilia Ganeva’s (Sofia University) paper, “Tackling the Apocalypse in the Cli-fi Novels The Water Knife (Paolo Bacigalupi) and New York 2140 (Kim Stanley Robinson)” compared these two texts—the former dystopian, the latter utopian, arguably—with regard to potential for political transformation. Each literary form, Ganeva showed, is partially determined by the balance between human and nonhuman actors in actor-networks. Beatrice Masi (University of Bologna) offered further consideration of the impact of nonhuman spatiality and temporality upon human art. Her paper “Irrealism and Uncanniness in Is Stacey Pregnant? Notes from an Irish Dystopia by Tomás Mac Síomóin,” read that novel, clearly modeled on George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), as an encounter of neoliberal spatio-temporal categories against the rhythms of Irish peat bogs; an encounter that produces such irrealist and uncanny effects as the out-scaling and disordering of human subjects by planetary time.Other papers explored the evolution of forms in light of utopian and/or dystopian potentialities. Alexandra Glavanakova (Sofia University) speculated on the future of reading in terms of the changing capacity of readers to formulate metacognitive hypotheses, which is crucial to the interpretation critical utopias/dystopias and their dialectical negotiation between different perspectives. Bogdan Groza (Siena University) and Bozhidara Boneva-Kamenova (Plovdiv University) each examined ecological dystopias in the works of Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and Octavia Butler; Adela Mirolevska (Sofia University) traced the “evolution” of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Gilead from its first appearance in literature to its subsequent cable-television adaptation in the post-2016 political context. The pressure of history on form was also addressed by Robert A. Emmons Jr. (Rutgers University-Camden), director and producer of the documentary Game of Nim (2023), which was screened at the conference (and continues screening at festivals through 2024). Emmons discussed the ironical framing of the history of video games such as Nim within the conventional documentary form as a way of commenting on dystopian aspects of current US politics, and of demonstrating the potentially unlimited fluidity and applicability of forms.Still other panels turned to the past of the utopian genre. Vesselin M. Budakov (Sofia University) looked at nineteenth-century utopian narratives about eugenics; Federica Moscatelli’s (University of Bologna) discussed how visions of possible futures run against the Western narrative grain. The novel, Tejer la Oscuridad [Weave the Darkness] (2020) by Mexican novelist Emiliano Monge (b. 1978), was featured in Moscatelli’s analysis of the narrative’s nomadic resistance to the capitalist language of progress and of apocalyptic threat. A pair of papers by Alexander Kiossev (Sofia University) and Philip Stoilov (independent researcher) focused on the work of Soviet writer Andrei Platonov and his “cosmological utopias” in novels such as Chevengur (1928) and The Foundation Pit (1930). Platonov, who was strongly influenced by the movement of Russian cosmism, posed a radical task to utopias: to achieve the unimaginable, to unify heaven and earth, to resurrect all beings that ever lived. His utopias of the total engineering of the world inevitably ran afoul of the limits of the possible, exposing utopia’s internal paradoxes and the necessity for radical utopias to be always reflexive. Mihail Atanasov (Sofia University) moved in a similar direction: in “Exploitation of the Subconscious: Utilitarianism and the Individual in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven,” Atanasov developed a theoretical framework for interpreting Le Guin’s novel as an exploration of possible (utopian and dystopian) worlds, limited by the capacities of thought and the imagination. Atanasov’s framework is built on a theory of narrative modality developed by “the Bulgarian Guillaumist school” and elaborated further by Darin Tenev6; this approach Atanasov demonstrated, makes possible a linguistically informed description of possible conflicts along the utopian-dystopian axes.A final cluster of papers were preoccupied with new forms and languages for the expression of radically new concepts, possibly of different conceptions of the utopian novum. My own paper, “The Novel as Novum: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon,” offered a hermeneutic framework which, while based on Samuel R. Delany’s notion of the trivalent discourse7 of SF’s interplay between the “real” world and a nonexistent world, extended Delany’s model to apply to all fiction: I argued that fiction generally contains at least one explicit or variously repressed utopia. The example of Pynchon’s novel dramatizes this characteristic weave of the indicative and the subjunctive. Similarly, Darin Tenev (Sofia University) introduced a framework comparable to William James’s notion of a radical empiricism to understand, as he puts it in the title of his talk, “The Fantasy of Matter in the Work of China Miéville.” Tenev draws on theories of the phantasm in psychoanalysis and deconstruction to explain how matter’s resistance to comprehensibility, its inherent fantastical quality, is a necessary condition for the formation of subjectivity (and therefore the capacity for fantasizing) in the first place. Finally, Severina Stankeva (Sofia University) read the video game Disco Elysium (2019) in terms of Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the metamodern condition. Stankeva demonstrated that the game plays with forms of (self-)reflexivity to achieve a kind of radical historicism in which truth is to be found in the unending, post-ironic oscillation between opposites such as seriousness and fun, empathy and laughter, modernism and postmodernism—a point of convergence, perhaps, with the Derridean inhabiting of the boundary between the series of the phantasm, and the Pynchonian oscillation between the indicative and the subjunctive.These papers problematized issues of language, representation, and “truth” as crucial to the capacity of artistic forms to deal with critical questions of contemporary crises. These issues are relevant to utopian forms as well if we understand utopia to be the process of bringing the seemingly impossible into the realm of the imaginable. The aspiration of the As If, But Differently conference was to put into focus the intensifying interplay of form and content as a response to the unfolding planetary crises. The research presented at the forum and the attendant discussions spotlighted multiple zones where formal innovation is entangled, perhaps even co-constituted, with an abrupt widening of subject matter. Searching for new forms of realist representation—newly invented, or recovered through an archaeology of culture—necessitates a rethinking of the question “What is real?” and of its answers. Utopian thought is intimately related to these issues, as it must always work with concepts such as “world,” “subject,” and “truth.” Approaching the “as-if” differently can have significant repercussions for the development of utopian art and thinking not simply as an alternative to the actual, but as a scene upon which the conditions for the “as-is” can be illuminated, and the possible changes of the “as-if” might be translated, narratively or otherwise, and translated into actionable imaginaries.