Fictive Certainty Underwrites Writing

Abstract

This paper will propose that fictive certainty (the production of a certainty where none exists strong enough to orient thought and behaviour) plays a major role in self-organising models of biology, a role that has not been recognised. As a consequence, genres of expression would be linked to the realisation, or attempts to realise, fictive possibilities such as the autonomy of the organism, the imaginary anatomy, or any image of totality or wholeness including for example: time, space, nothingness, Language, and Perspective. This inquiry positions fictive certainty on the line between metaphor and transformation, between influence and inflection, between effect and affect - a line that traces all the way to the border between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. To this end, I will strategically examine notions imported from philosophy, literature, art theory and biology. Maturana and Varela’s work in theoretical biology, particularly on autopoiesis and self-organisation, provides key insights that many contemporary practitioners have found applicable to their creative approaches. With this in mind fictive certainty is not proposed as a state of being, a truth structure (or effect), or as a description of structures or objects in the world (such as metaphors). It should be considered instead as an activity tied to our embodied dispositions and to the actual use we make of structures and objects in the world, especially our own mechanisms of meaning.