oh my god my life.

Counterfactual Definiteness

MIT on Counterfactuals and Counterfactual Fallacies

Counterfactuals and truth on/according to Triple Canopy:

Much as the actual untruth of the proposition is irrelevant to the conclusions drawn in the result clause, so the truth of the crime (in name only) hardly matters by the time we come to the end of the sentence. Though out of time, the if clause sets in motion a provisional series of events. Something appears from what is now not not not the case—or, rather, from what was not not written. 

I was reading these essays by Renee Gladman, and I came across these passages about the space(s) of narrative and the distinctions between Poetic Time vs. Time of the “Object World.” 

“Recently, I had found that to talk about something that was in essence everything was simply too exhausting, and that the only way around it was to talk about the question of the thing rather than the thing itself, since in the end, it would become both. “Narrative—” I went on with my talk, “Was anybody still interested? I didn’t want to open my eyes to it. I hadn’t wanted to think about narrative at the same time that I was conscious of my body lying in the object world. It was a problem of space similar to what Martha and I were discussing yesterday: Was it possible to say that something was gathering outside of a thing with the intention of meeting something else when this something else was the larger space in which that first thing existed? Could I talk about narrative as I was operating within it?” 

“I wanted to tell her that the problem of poetic time was not a fiction, as I’d been, for years, calling it. Fiction did not concern itself with problems of time. If there was a problem inside a fiction—a problem of any nature other than what’s happening inside the plot—then the whole thing would swell and small holes would form across the surface and the swellings would become as large as mountains while the holes would fill with water and become river valleys and soon we would be so far from the surface of the water that we’d recognize the picture of the mountains and valleys as a part of a geological map and recognize ourselves standing in an object world much larger than the object world in which we’d been lying when we began this essay.” 

She dives more into explanation of Poetic Time and Language Space in this interview:

LI: What should you be doing with your writing?

RG: If I were a really good drawer I would give up writing and just make beautiful line drawings, or at least for a while that would suffice, but I don’t draw well enough to abandon writing. Sometimes I go around and talk about the sentence and prose, and for a while I was really stuck on how thoughts exist in a preverbal way. I was thinking about how in our minds we have many things going on simultaneously, as images, half words, gestures, partial marks, and from that multiplicity we go into the single line of articulation, of expression. I kept trying to point back to that threshold moment, that translation or becoming. The linguistic selection process, what you decide to privilege, is fascinating to me, but it’s hard to know what to say about it. It makes writing a very interesting space. Writing is not a map, but something that comes after mapping.

…

LI: Why prose?

RG: I came up through poetry, but I am a sentence writer. I don’t know if it’s so much creating narratives as narrative space. I’m interested in time and experience and the sound of telling a story as opposed to the story itself. I have a love and deep interest in fiction, especially fiction in translation, so I teach that. But often in my workshops now I’ll bring in texts that are hybrid, cross-genre works. It’s useful as a way to get students to take more notice of language. I have students read poetry and then enter it from a sentence space.

LI: So the poem also contains the sentence?

RG: You can’t avoid narrative in any kind of language space. And poetry is interested in experience; time is there, and the day. There are places where it pushes toward documentation and begins to remind me of what you might do in prose. Maybe not fiction. But in prose, how you might build sentences around an abstraction or feeling rather than plot points. I think it can only benefit literature for fiction writers to employ various degrees of compression in their approach to narrative.

LI: At the risk of going backward, what’s the difference between fiction and prose?

RG: Fiction is interested in a certain kind of unfolding or sequence of events. Time is more intact in fiction. Prose, I think, introduces the element of the awareness of yourself in language as you are unfolding things in time and allowing yourself to be distracted or interrupted, allowing yourself to question the difficulty of what you’re doing and be stalled, not to move. I want more fiction to do this, because it changes the way we read and understand story. With fiction that repairs all doubt and interruption and experiment by being fluid, coherent; what we expect doesn’t leave much room for me as a reader. But I think the more you talk about these categories, their distinctions, the quicker they break down. Ultimately, what I want is for there to be a blur over everything.

IL: One trope of Project Projects’ book designs is the effort to make visible or expose the issues being dealt with by the contents, whether through typographical selection or the physical construction of the book.

PK: A book ought to not only document its contents but actually perform or enact its contents. In an ideal case, those things are so seamlessly integrated that sometimes it’s hard to tease out the content from the form.

…

IL: I’m curious about your comment that the best space for contemplative long-form reading is still the physical book, in light of Triple Canopy’s attempt to make a case for an immersive digital reading experience.

PK: One of the things I find commendable about Triple Canopy is that it questions and is critical of accepted paradigms, and is trying to create a Web space for reading that is contemplative. But this doesn’t always work better than the codex, and there are many text pieces in Invalid Formatthat are much more legible in this form. Of course, there are also interactive pieces on the website that are quite hard to translate to print. In those cases, the book becomes a reference. Hopefully this sense of translation between mediums will work in two directions—there is artwork that obviously can’t be represented in a black and white book, and so you end up being led back to the website. The experience becomes richer and more recursive through this.