The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory

Abstract

ing about the social functions of literature. The Fictive and the Imaginary, the culmination of his reflections about the art of representation, does not explicitly engage the question of the politics of literature, and its emphasis on the value of play and the as if might seem to disengage the aesthetic experience from worldly concerns. What Iser means by play, however, is a profoundly important social activity that would facilitate productive uses of difference to create forms of community among decentered human beings whose dissonances and dislocations resist unification. As an instrument for staging various kinds of open-ended exploratory interactions, Iser's notion of literature offers a model of the emancipatory uses of power in the service of communicative democracy. The politics of Iser's theory of nonmimetic representation foregrounds the role of the as if in producing, questioning, and overturning different forms of life. The playful, nonteleological functioning of fictive acts of staging in turn makes possible the reciprocal but nonconsensual exchange of power on which democratic mutuality depends. The Fictive and the Imaginary engages the question of power in representation in order to affirm the liberating and community-building capacities of literature in a perpetually unstable, decentered world. It is thus an important response to the political challenges of our time. The Fictive and the Imaginary moves beyond Iser's earlier concern with reading to offer a general theory of textuality in the service of what he calls literary anthropology. Two questions drive this anthropology: Why do human beings seem to need fictions? And what does the capacity to make fictions reveal about the being of human being? Iser approaches these questions not by undertaking a transcendental phe nomenological reflection but by looking for patterns in several histori cally and culturally specific domains that he thinks provide especially illuminating examples of how human beings have made and thought