The Theory of Possibilities
an essay by Ewelina Woźniak-Czech, and Lem’s books that do not exist
SEVEN LINES
- The NarratorNo definition of literature has lasted. What lasts is its potential.
- The NarratorA turn does not send anyone off the stage. It changes the direction everyone faces.
- The NarratorEach reading settles one version of the work, and leaves the others possible.
- The NarratorThe reader no longer follows a plot. The reader walks a path, and the path is the reading.
- The NarratorTheory is not the audience here. It is one of the players.
- The NarratorA book that does not exist has not chosen yet. It keeps all of its possibilities.
- The NarratorIn 1973, bitic literature was a book that did not exist. Now it is being written.
HOW IT IS MADE
Ewelina Woźniak-Czech's essay argues that literary theory no longer has to choose one method. Every definition of literature has failed to hold, theories have multiplied rather than ended, and the field can be treated as a set of possibilities that coexist: old categories such as Ingarden's concretization and Derrida's play stay valid beside the turns of the last thirty years, concepts travel between disciplines, and in Anna Krajewska's dramatic theory the author, the work and the reader act together, with theory as one of the players. The essay ends on Stanisław Lem. His apocrypha, A Perfect Vacuum (reviews of books that were never written) and Imaginary Magnitude (introductions to them), are possibility in its purest form; and one of those introductions, to A History of Bitic Literature, described in 1973 a literature written by machines that is now being written. This film closes the Lab 7 collection: after the Cyberiad stories, Non Serviam, and five films on the bitic history, it reads Lem through a literary theorist. All narration is paraphrase. A script check compares every spoken line with the translation and rejects any run of six words in common; the short passages the essay itself quotes from Culler, Burzyńska, Bal and Lem are paraphrased too.
The picture is the study from the bitic films: the shelf, the lectern page, and the reader at the desk. Two things are added. Between the lectern and the desk a small stage is built, and concepts are its actors: robed figures whose heads are cards with their names. STRUCTURE, SYSTEM and MODEL face the young who arrive in 1966; the turns come on one by one; and on the line about turning, every actor on the stage turns round and none leaves. Later the AUTHOR lies dead, gets up, and speaks with the WORK and the READER, a concept walks off one wing and comes back by the other with a different name, and THEORY walks on to join them. The second addition is that the shelf changes in every scene. It fills with theories, then a library of books that do not exist rises above it with blank spines, and at the end the five volumes of the bitic history get their numbers and the shelves fill with books written by machines.
The page scenes stage one idea each. A list of definitions of literature is struck through until the last line is written in: its potential. A paragraph has four places left open; one reader fills them, another fills them differently, and the page then holds all the readings at once, flickering until a reader settles one. A hypertext is a hopscotch court on which two readers walk two paths. A Perfect Vacuum opens to its contents, the first review points back at the book itself, and the page holds a smaller copy of itself; then a review title over a page that is not written. At the end the bitic history is written by a machine on the ledge of the lectern, a prize waits on the desk with nobody to accept it, and the essay's last image, concepts colliding in an accelerator, runs as a ring on the page.
The timing file tq.json drives picture and sound together. It holds the start time of every spoken line and every cue. The picture code in tp2.js reads those times, and build_sound.py makes all the non-voice sound with numpy and scipy. The narrator is a different Kokoro voice from the bitic films' Rambellais.
FOR THE BENCH
Write a class Reading that holds one text with gaps in it, for example "A woman came in from the _ and set the _ down.", and a list of interpretations, each an array of fill-ins. Give it add(fills), which appends a new interpretation and never removes one, show(i), which prints the text completed by interpretation i, and a key that steps through them. Now write OneReading, which keeps a single array: add replaces whatever was there. Add three interpretations to each and print what each object can still show. What does the first program know that the second has thrown away? Which one is the theory of possibilities, and what does it cost in memory?
After Ewelina Woźniak-Czech, The Possibilities of Theory – the Theory of Possibilities, Przestrzenie Teorii special issue (2024), translated by Małgorzata Olsza, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, doi:10.14746/pt.2024.special.8. Narration paraphrases the essay. Download the film.
THE SCRIPT
WHAT LITERATURE IS
The Narrator. This film follows an essay by Ewelina Woźniak-Czech on the possibilities of theory. What you hear is a paraphrase of it.
The Narrator. Jonathan Culler notes that nobody can say exactly where literary theory ends. One reason is that literature keeps crossing its own borders.
The Narrator. Every attempt to fence it in has failed. Even Aristotle’s Poetics has a gap: the part on comedy is lost.
The Narrator. No definition of literature has lasted. What lasts is its potential.
The Narrator. Anna Burzyńska recalls colleagues who hoped she would announce that theory no longer exists. Instead it has multiplied: many theories, side by side, in alliance and in tension.
The Narrator. The essay proposes treating that crowd as the theory: a field of possibilities, in which no approach has to be thrown out.
THE OLD AND THE YOUNG; TURNS
The Narrator. Changes in literary study are called turns. Take the word literally: a turn changes which way you are going.
The Narrator. In 1966, at a conference in Baltimore, the young turned on the old, and poststructuralism began.
The Narrator. Structuralism had systems and models. The young brought back what those left out: reading, writing, pleasure, the event.
The Narrator. Then came more turns: cultural, affective, posthuman, performative, dramatic. Each one opened literature to something outside it.
The Narrator. A turn does not send anyone off the stage. It changes the direction everyone faces.
The Narrator. So the old categories stay in play beside the new ones, without having to win.
NEW ASPECTS OF OLD CATEGORIES: CONCRETIZATION
The Narrator. The oldest of these categories is Roman Ingarden’s concretization, from the 1930s.
The Narrator. A literary work leaves many places undetermined. Each reader fills them in while reading, and each fills them differently.
The Reader. I put in what the page leaves out.
The Narrator. Each reading settles one version of the work, and leaves the others possible.
The Narrator. Ingarden called meanings that will not hold still iridescent. In Jacek Dukaj’s novel Ice, a mathematician adds a third value to true and false: neither, because the thing does not exist.
The Narrator. The work stays open. A reader stops its flickering for a moment, and only for that reader.
DECONSTRUCTIVE HOPSCOTCH; LIQUID HISTORIES
The Narrator. For Derrida, language is a finite field, and because it is finite it allows endless substitution. He called that field play.
The Narrator. Sometimes the play becomes a real game. Mariusz Pisarski turned Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa into a hypertext, and Bruno Schulz’s stories became an online game in which the hero is simply you.
The Narrator. The reader no longer follows a plot. The reader walks a path, and the path is the reading.
The Narrator. The paths are only the ones the makers built. But each walk through them is a new event.
The Narrator. Zygmunt Bauman’s liquidity adds that nothing happens twice. Even the ice in Dukaj’s novel moves.
WHERE IS THE AUTHOR? THE DRAMATIC AND DRAMATURGY
The Narrator. The death of the author, announced by Roland Barthes, has been announced many times since.
The Author. I have been declared dead more than once.
The Narrator. Anna Krajewska’s dramatic theory of literature brings the author back, as one actor among three.
The Author. I write it.
The Work. I happen between you.
The Reader. I write it again when I read it.
The Narrator. Theory stops standing outside the text and starts to play with it. Its terms come from the theatre: scene, act, dialogue, event.
The Narrator. Mieke Bal adds that concepts travel between disciplines and periods, and change their meaning at every crossing.
The Narrator. Theory is not the audience here. It is one of the players.
(IM)POSSIBLE WORKS: LEM’S APOCRYPHA
The Narrator. Books that do not exist show possibility most clearly. Borges imagined a library holding every possible arrangement of letters: every book that could be written.
The Narrator. Stanisław Lem wrote a library of his own. A Perfect Vacuum, from 1971, is made of reviews of books that were never written.
The Narrator. All but one. The first review is of A Perfect Vacuum itself, and Lem reviews it as if another Lem, in another world, had written it.
The Narrator. So which book is in your hands? The title says vacuum, and the book is full.
The Narrator. A book that does not exist has not chosen yet. It keeps all of its possibilities.
The Narrator. Imaginary Magnitude, from 1973, collects introductions to books that do not exist, and begins with an introduction to writing introductions.
The Narrator. Lem jokes that scholars mostly write introductions, and that introductions outnumber literature, since they only announce from far off what literature tries to do.
The Narrator. Woźniak-Czech wants a theory that stops introducing from far off, and comes close enough to be tangled up with literature.
WHERE IS LITERATURE? BITIC LITERATURE
The Narrator. One of those introductions is to A History of Bitic Literature, in five volumes.
The Narrator. Bitic literature is writing that people did not make. Whoever really wrote it is not human, though a person may stand one step behind. Its study is bitistics.
The Narrator. In 1973, bitic literature was a book that did not exist. Now it is being written.
The Narrator. In 2016 a novella written by a computer was entered for the Hoshi Shinichi literary award. It did not win. But if it had, who would have gone up to take the prize?
The Narrator. In 2018 a French publisher issued a novel written by a program. In 2022 came ChatGPT, then fake books under famous names, and writers suing over their work being used to train it.
The Narrator. A library of Babel written only by machines is a matter of time. Whether it is the library we wanted is another question.
The Narrator. Lem has one of his reviewers say that in times of transition it is hardest to see the road behind and the road ahead.
The Narrator. The essay ends with concepts colliding like particles in an accelerator. Will a new theory come out of them? It is possible.