Make-Believe : Parafiction and Plausibility

Author(s): Carrie Lambert-Beatty

Source: October , Summer, 2009, Vol. 129 (Summer, 2009), pp. 51-84
Published by: The MIT Press

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 Make-Believe:

Parafiction and Plausibility*

CARRIE LAMBERT-BEATTY

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life;

we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at
the last one pause: through infancy 's unconscious
spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence, doubt
(the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief
resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If
But once again gone through, we trace the round
again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eter-
nally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor
no more?

- Herman Melville l

Istanbul, 2005

When the artist Michael Blum arrived in Istanbul to prepare for that city
Ninth International Biennial, he discovered that the apartment building that h
been home in the early twentieth century to the teacher, translator, commun
and feminist Safiye Behar was slated for demolition. A remarkable, if little-kn
historical figure, Behar (1890-1965) was a Turkish Jew who enjoyed a long frie
ship - some say a romance - with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turk
Republic. The two met in 1905, in the heady atmosphere of the Zeuve Birahan

* Parts of this essay were presented at ThreeWalls Gallery and DePaul University in Chicago
the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. Feedback from Huey Copeland, Blake Stimson, Jonathan K
Tom Williams, Claire Bishop, Eve Melzer, and Taylor Walsh, and readings by Helen Moleswo
Jennifer Roberts, and, especially, Julia Bryan-Wilson, helped me tremendously. An early versio
some of this material was published in Talking With Your Mouth Full: New Language for Socially Engaged
(Chicago: ThreeWalls Gallery and Green Lantern Press, 2008). Special thanks to Michael Blum, W
Raad, and Aliza Shvarts, and to my students, particularly David Andersson, Austin Guest, Tr
Martin, and Jack McGrath. Finally, while working on this paper I had the benefit of reading Ve
Maimon's important essay "The Third Citizen" published in the current issue of October. I hope
the conversation beffun in these paees will continue beyond them.
1. Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851; New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 602.

OCTOBER 129, Summer 2009, pp. 51-84. © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Tech

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 52 OCTOBER

a bar owned
building in th
of the Sultan
corresponden
their letters
crucial period
the new rep
same year Saf
translator of T
Blum, who t
practice, gave
He construct
placed from
Palas," or "P
from various historical societies and archives, as well as from Behar's descendants,
he set up vitrines featuring her letters, photographs, and books, and arranged
original furnishings in the rooms of the apartment, to be peered at over Plexiglas
barriers. He relayed Behar's life story with both bilingual didactics and a certain
flair for stagecraft (a side table bore a dish of roasted chickpeas, Kemal's favorite
snack). A video interview with Behar's grandson, Chicago architect Melik Tutuncu,
brought her family legacy up to the present.
Recovering the forgotten life story and unacknowledged historical role of a
female figure from an ethnic minority, this project, A Tribute to Safiye Behar, partici-
pates in a project of revision whose foundations are in the feminist and civil-rights
movements of the 1960s and '70s. Splitting History into histories (and herstories),
it also builds on the postmodern critique of metanarratives, while nodding to the
discourses on identity and hybridity of the 1980s and '90s. Yet Blum's project was
very much of its own moment. Under cover of the highly conventional visual lan-
guage of the house museum, Blum was able to address two publics, and two
political situations, at once. For the local, Turkish audience, the frank discussion
of Mustafa Kemal's likely affair with the Jewish woman, and her influence on his
reforms, served as a critical intervention in the official hagiography of the leader
that continues to saturate public life in Turkey. The exposure of a previously
repressed history signaled a critique of that state's penchant for secrecy (most
infamously, its continuing denials of the Armenian genocide). Meanwhile, for the
large contingent of international visitors brought to Istanbul by the Biennial in
2005 - a moment when Turkey's potential membership in the European Union
was being hotly debated - the life story of this secular, cosmopolitan, internation-
alist, and progressive woman, with her feminist organizing and her love letters in

2. Blum received a master's degree from the University of Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne, prior to
attending the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie in Aries. Born in Jerusalem, he is currently based in
Vienna.

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 53

French, cut into stereotypes about Turkey as backwards,

(perhaps reminding them, for instance, that Turkish wom
earlier than their sisters in France).3
A Tribute to Safiye Behar, then, was both historical and po
tion that the former is inevitably the latter as well). But i
again. For, arguably, the most substantial thing about the
that Michael Blum made it up.
To some viewers, the fictionality of the installation's centr
by details like the imperfectly pasted-on cover of the book of
on which Behar was credited as translator, or the coincidence
blocked, or remote, could never quite be made out in any o
on display.4 There is also a trace of overacting in the vid
humor, as when Safiye 's grandson describes the death of his
in a freak accident in 1966 - a convenient tragedy for Blum
otherwise have gone on forever (and a personally coinciden
the year of his own birth). But though subtle clues were p
meant to be convincing. While several writers on the exhib
fiction, some otherwise astute critics seemed to accept the exh
ing Safiye Behar a fascinating figure but the artwork itself f
reaction varied according to the media outlet. The progressive
ive interview with the "Austrian historian" about Safiye
Turkish history, and only at the very end of the long piece r
tion, recategorizing Blum as an artist.6 In other publication
of this project to both Kemalist and Islamicist conservative fo
tered more clearly (one writer joked that only Behar's fict
assassination).7 For his part, Blum always maintained, if press
to me." Curators and official exhibition publications kept

3. It intervened in yet another way when the project was exhibited

Contemporary Art, Athens, in 2006.
4. Additionally, knowledgeable viewers knew something was amiss w
Behar's sons married a granddaughter of (the childless) Emma Goldman.
5. Reviews of Blum's installation include: Elena Crippa, "Michael Blum,
2005, 9th Istanbul Biennial," e-cart 7 (March 2006), at http:// www.e-cart.r
Demos, "9th International Istanbul Biennial," Artforum 44, no. 3 (Novem
Caroline Williams, "Istanbul Biennale," Artlink 26.
6. "Atatiirk's lover Safiye," Radikal, August 28, 2005. I am grateful to Mer
on the Turkish press reaction, to Unver Rustem for English translations, an
tive discussions during my research on the Behar project. All Turkish translati
7. Entry on Safiye Behar in the online alternative encyclopedia Sour
username terranovanian, October 9, 2005.
8. Vasif Kortum, Biennial co-curator, says that he tended to present the
arose he would go no further than calling Safiye "probable." E-mail to the au
to co-curator Charles Esche, Blum and the Biennial staff sometimes replied
ticity by saying "well, she isn't documented," a phrase that emphasizes the
record while allowing the questioner to assume what she would about wh
someone like her - had or had not lived (while evoking immigration po
Safiye 's story). Esche remembers sometimes saying that he wasn't sure himsel
since "by that stage Safiye had a life of her own." Charles Esche, e-mail to the

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54 OCTOBER

she has acquire

her among oth
Blum or to art
be demolished
ordinary view
with some tak
ous degrees. O
once they hear
The shorthan
Fiction or fic
a paramedic a
quite a memb
art. It remain
clinics of lite
tion's fact-b
personages an
parafictional
toward the pr
ious duration

9. This article a
news outlet Haber
10. Thanks to Be
the building in 2
11. Marc Spiegle
One Turkish vie
Sourtimes/Ekflis
12. I mean the te
designate true st
discussed by Bru
169-78), from wh
ed with Jerzy Gr
artist Peter Hill,
differs from th
Barthelme or Pyn
on previous ficti
sea of texts that
recapturable past
boundary 2, 5, n
cases I'll describe
cal, epistemologi
various writings
experiments act
Krauss mobilized
be called criticis
which put the d
here are somewh
lar: it's not histo
oftheAvant Gard

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 Michael Blum. A Tribute to Safiye
Behar. 2005. From bottom: house
museum installation; Safiye deliver-
ing speech at the 12th Women s
Congress, Istanbul, April 1935
(Collection Women s Library and
Information Center, Istanbul);
plaque at site of Safiye s home,
Hamalbasi Caddesi No. 18, Beyoglu.

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56 OCTOBER

They achieve
pioneer P. T.
All of which
project deceiv
the possibilit
viewers to b
uncomfortab
strange kind
truthful way
Between 1998
ucts, a not-
never-made
abortions, a s
tionable mili
made-up mon
fake artists,
collaborative E
seen the term
valorizing mo
text,15 while
mode of polit
Brass Eye per
interacting w
racism, extre
If such expe
wonder. Here
Fake rational
ing a fake e

13. In the 2005

arrangement of
Phil Collins's reu
14. The parafict
the faux or part
tional might be
ers, Michael Na
Workshop and
Contemporary A
Aesthetics," Fri
Impulse," {Octob
David Joselit's
Contemporary
Visuality," {Ar
("Doubt/Fear," A
15. Not all inter
term emerged m
Sphered MassMo
16. Along with l

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 Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 57

movie star became governor and the government starte

own action movies, casting real soldiers like Jessica Lync
bat heroes and dressing up embedded journalists as fake

This catalogue of events from 2003 is just part of Canad

Klein's sad litany in support of her claim that it had been "th
Every modern period may consider itself less honest than th
Klein is not alone in feeling that the first decade of the twe
special claim to being, if not a more lie-prone era, then on
have had especially catastrophic effects. The slew of recen
describe or explain this condition ranges from philosophical
ethics of the lie," to moralist warnings about our entry into "th
impassioned calls for renewed personal and public honesty.18
sans in the US made a sport of cataloguing one another's d
were Liberal Lies and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them). T
headline "Untruths and Consequences" on its cover in July 2
President Bush; two years later a much-needed term was ad
cal lexicon, when satirist Stephen Colbert identified Bush's
"truthiness" - truth measured by conviction rather than accurac
Of course, periodization itself is a kind of fiction, and p
an invention of the past decade. Contemporary instances li
legacies of hoax, prank, blague, Trickster myth, and parod
recent history there is a whole series of questions to be aske
this work to its precedents (in Dada, in conceptual art and
brilliantly undecidable actions of Andy Kaufman, in the
Agusto Boal, and in prankster activism from the Situationist
ACT-UP). Andrea Fraser's docent tours were in this mode (ah
gave them up in 1998), while related tactics in work by
Dunye, and Zoe Leonard allowed them to imagine the lives o
ical individuals while simultaneously marking their erasur
record.19 Of course, Marcel Duchamp lurks behind all of
whether or how this recent work re-imagines his legacy is a
however, I am primarily interested in a horizontal history,

17. Naomi Klein, "The Year of the Fake," The Nation, January 26, 2004. T
bit like one Baudrillard could have made, I'll be suggesting that the more
the recent past are performative: rather than a representation with no
attempts to launch something false into quasi-truthfulness.
18. Jean-Michel Rabate, The Ethics of the Lie (New York: Random House, 2
Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life (New York: Macm
Plague of Mendacity: A Plea for Truth, Trust, Altruism," http://ihabhassan.c
of essays in Cream City Review 28 [2004] and in An ABC of Lying: Taking Stock i
Dobrez, Patricia Dobrez, and Jan Lloyd Jones [Melbourne: Australian Schol
19. A note from director Dunye at the end of her 1996 film Watermelon
filmmaker researching the life of the title figure, a black lesbian star of 193
issue with perfect concision and ambiguity: "Sometimes you have to crea
Watermelon Woman is fiction."

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 58 OCTOBER

Top: 01. ORG (F

and Public Netbase. Nike Ground. 2003.
Bottom: 01.ORG. Rendering of proposed
monument. 2003.

between experiments in dissimulation and linking them to certain broad histori-

cal shifts of the recent past. For despite their many precedents, paraflctions
interest me because they are so powerfully and uniquely appropriate to our histor-
ical moment - which is to say, powerfully and uniquely troubling.

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 Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 59

Vienna, 2003

One October night in 2003 a flatbed truck delivered

white information booth to a plot of grass on the nor
Vienna's Karlsplatz. Printed on one of the booth's broad
Nike "swoosh," a web address, and three words: "Nikeplatz (formerly
Karlsplatz)." Visiting the URL, accepting one of the flyers distributed the next
morning, or entering the booth to talk to Nike representatives, one learned that
much as cities have sold the naming rights of sports stadiums to corporate spon-
sors, Karlsplatz would soon be changing its name. A monumental swoosh
sculpture would appear in the shadow of the Karlskirche in what would, as of
January 1, be known as "Nikeplatz." As the slickly animated Web site put it: "You
want to wear it, why shouldn't cities wear it too?" On the park side of the infor-
mation booth, a schematic map of Europe had broken out in orange dots,
indicating that the Vienna initiative was part of a new international campaign. A
Nikestrasse, Nikesquare, Nikestreet, or Piazzanike was coming soon to a
European city near you.
As reporters learned with their first calls to Nike Austria, however, none of this
was the company's doing. The infobooth, Web site, and marketing campaign com-
prised an art work titled Nike Ground: a collaboration between the Italian artistic duo
Eva and Franco Mattes, who go by the name 0100101110101101.ORG (hereafter,
"01.ORG"), and the innovative Austrian new media/ art platform Public Netbase.20
Many of the passersby interviewed by the artists simply shrugged: since com-
panies like Nike were taking over cities anyway, some said, they might as well pay
for the privilege.21 Part of this is a credit to the artists, of course. The design of

20. See Vera Tollmann, "Becoming Nike: The Fake Behind the Swoosh," trans. Timothy Jones,
Springeren (April 2003, net section); Ol.ORG's Web site on the project at http://
www.0100101110101101.org/home/nikeground/intro.html, which provides links to international media
coverage of the intervention and a link to an archived version of the project website nikeground.com; and
"An Interview with Franco and Eva Mattes aka 01.ORG," {Culture Jamming, http://www.culture-
jamming.de/interviewlle.html). Clemens Apprich, "Intermission at the Combat Zone: A Review of Public
Netbase's Urban and Symbolic Lines of Conflict," Public Netbase: Non Stop Future: New Practices in Art and
Media (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2008), online edition at nonstop-future.org; Brian Holmes, "Let it RIP:
Obituary of an Endless Myth: Public Netbase, 1994-2006," Netbase / tO: Institute for New Culture
Technologies, http://www.netbase.org/tO/intro/04.
21 . Nike Ground illustrates both the power and the problems of culture jamming, the genre of symbolic
guerrilla warfare" (Eco) that emerged as an important form of activism in the 1990s. Culture jamming is
generally oriented against corporate globalization, but typically focuses on its manifestations in the global
North, such as the commercialization of public space, the loss of local specificity, or the depletion of values
like originality and rebellion when they become so many advertising slogans. Its most frequent form is
"subvertising," attempting to undermine a corporate brand's meaning and value with semi-convincing
manipulations of its visual identity (paradigmatically, billboard alteration, like the Billboard Liberation
Organization's subtle edit of an Apple ad sporting the visage of the Dali Lama, from "think different" to
"think disillusioned"). Often knowingly drawing on Dada, especially the critical photomontages of John
Heartfield, as well as situationist detournement, culture jamming expresses - and stimulates - a desire for
freedom from commerce's incursion into mental and physical landscapes. It consolidates identities and
collectivities around an anti-corporate perspective, and it can be a kind of gateway to critiques of labor
conditions, environmental damage, and other less symbol- and humor-friendly corporate affronts. On the
other hand, given that exposure is a crucial part of branding, and that the youth-oriented brands most

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60 OCTOBER

the Web site

bright - was b
rounding it, a
circa 2003. Th
neling of the
known how m
parafiction th
current infor
tion with Lut
at the URL v
tion was work
The Nike map
triumphant fo
notations, but
to occupy Karl
are called Nike
the age of life
from actual ta
accept the cam
already accepte
vant here tha
addicts. Bold p
(to great prot
have been will
what would ha
gains made in
One unfazed
renaming plan
sort of thing
incursion was
So it was, too
pleasure. A th
of us who enc
ingly include
second-degree

likely to be subver
ing displayed in p
more than harm
their mosquito-lik
22. "Luther Bliss
continues to be as
Bologna has publ
23. In debunkin
makes it impossib

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 61

possibly a limit on their efficacy.) The project functions d

these groups; moreover, it creates movement between them
who accepted the renaming as inevitable and later discover
slips outside the consensus that the parafiction's plausi
rather, the consensus that it calls into being as such.
Like "I christen this ship," or "I do" in a wedding ce
"Nikeplatz (Formerly Karlsplatz)" on the information boo
category of performative utterances. Specifically, it is a ca
called the "unhappy performative" - speech acts that don't
movie says, "I now pronounce you man and wife," the spe
but "infelicitous.")24 Parafictions in general are perfor
understood to mean that they effect or produce something
or denote it. They are unhappy performatives insofar as
wedding, are only "make-believe." But insofar as they make
ever temporarily or ambiguously, they trouble the distin
and unhappy performativity.
Notably, 01.ORG didn't discuss its goals in terms of el
branding or curtailing privatization. Rather, most of the te
their own right to use Nike's name and logo. The logic wo
since, with the rise of offshore and contracted manufactu
tion now arguably produces not shoes and shirts but ideas
those ideas and feelings live on our bodies, in our minds, an
of our cities, "Nike" belongs to us. If a private interest co
and physical space, perhaps it becomes quasi-public. Ol.
formed this proposition too. Whether it would prove to be
left in the hands of the corporation. In this case, Nike took
project down - which is to say, to police the public-private
aggressive marketing like its own has worked to collapse.

Sydney, 2002

This third story actually begins in the spring of 1999, when an experimental
fiction writer and computer programmer who came to call himself Andy
Bichlbaum and a new-media artist who became known as Mike Bonnano, then
working together as the anti-corporate corporation ®™ark, came into possession
of the domain name GWBush.com. The upcoming US presidential election was to
be the first in which the Internet would be a significant factor, and as primary sea-
son ramped up, Bush strategist Karl Rove had already attempted to forestall
online opposition by buying up anti-Bush URLs like "bushsux.com."25 The ®™ark

24. Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University
in 1955, ed. J. O. Urmson and Maria Sbisa, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 14.
25. He had also purchased domain names that the campaign might want so that they would not
have to buy them back later from "cybersquatters." See Jim Puzzanghera, "Online Race for Political
Domains: Bush Outpaces Gore in Snapping Up Sites," San Jose Mercury News, ]une 7, 1999.

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62 OCTOBER

team, howeve
technology a
Ol.ORG's Vatic
official URL
GWBush.com
mirroring the
cio, its goal w
the self-procl
polluting stat
drug possessio
This was the
tity correction
World Trade O
parodic change
ally used by p
and it is then
traditional par
They returne
dent to speak a
a subordinate
ticipated in a
Hulatberi rep
activists on C
(proposing, am
that don't abu
This is correc
really like (acc
target's polici
clusions. Thou
the Yes Men's
they generally
target entitie
that) from th
in terms of r
conditions can
was to realize

26. The Yes Men,

True Story of the
14. Versions of the
27. After having
developed and rel
website (they calle
World Trade Orga
joke and just repea

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 63

The Yes Men. End of

the WTO. 2002.

positive identity correction, the target is made to announce strategies and trans-
formations that are salutary from the point of view of the corrector, and that th
actual person or entity must then choose to ignore or deny.28
This brings us to Sydney in May 2002, when a WTO representative by the
name of Kinnithrug Sprat arrived to address the Certified Practicing Accountant
Association of Australia. He spent nearly an hour summarizing research tha
shows the failure of the WTO's operative principles: the link between cash-crop
export and drought; the decrease in the income of the poorest forty percent o
populations under trade liberalization; the failure of foreign direct investment t
stimulate third-world economic growth. In light of this evidence, he explained
the WTO had decided to disband. It would reconstitute itself as the Trade
Regulation Organization, an entity devoted to making trade "help people in
of businesses."29

While the Yes Men's seemingly outrageous exaggerations of the WTO's

actual stances had failed to get a rise out of audiences already aligned with its

28. On November 12, 2008 thousands of people in New York, Washington, and other cities received
complimentary copies of The New York Times, with the bold headline, "Iraq War Ends." Co-created by The
Yes Men, The Anti-Advertising Agency, Not An Alternative, CODEPINK, Improv Everywhere, "many oth-
ers, and hundreds of volunteers," the "special edition" nodded to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "War is
Over (if you want it)" billboards of 1969-70, though here the parenthetical clause was implied simply by
the preponderance of progressive visions in the headlines ("Maximum Wage Law Passed"; "Secretary
Apologizes for W.M.D. Scare"). While the faux edition projected an ideal world in which the effects of the
Bush years were rolled back, it got its special charge from the paper's initially convincing appearance. It
certainly didn't fool anyone. But thinking of the money and effort put into writing a full newspaper's
worth of stories in the right diction and style, printing it on newsprint paper of the right type and size,
with the right ink and images, and then mobilizing hundreds of volunteers to hand it out in the street -
rather than simply writing about the imagined changes in an essay or poem or blog - makes clear part of
the difference between parafiction and other types of representation. There is surplus truth-value pro-
duced by that labor - a kind of performative residue. See www.nytimes-se.com.
29. The Yes Men, "End of the WTO," http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/sydney; Shane Wright, "Fed:
WTO hoax snares Aust's CPA," AAP News Feed, 27 May 2002.

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64 OCTOBER

basic princip
sions that lar
accountants
"TRO" serve
appointed - b
anti-corpora
Here is how
cally progres

Could it be
world, what
a sustained a
one - even
think of as
consensus if

What they di
distribution
what can be
seen, felt, an
tants can sud
trade to the b
new distribut
In many cas
depends on t
priest not rea
this country
ally an author
authority itse
political pote
between aut
happy and u
ized that th

30. Jacques Ranc

(London: Conti
monality of pol
explicitly politic
ing configurati
caught between
the radical unca
31. A few of th
(1971), trans. S
University Press,
Routledge, 199
Routledge, 1993
Performance (N

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 65

The Yes Men. Might

Makes Right. 2001.

acts - as long as the speakers were "in positions of author

authority, but given a URL and a change of clothes, they could
convincing some people, some of the time, that they had it.32
doxically, both to use and to undermine the authority they tar
this way: "It seems people can accept just about anything if yo
Toward the end of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler wrote th
stantiality of gender is itself

... a constructed identity, a performative accomplishm

mundane social audience, including the actors them
believe and to perform in the mode of belief .... Gend
ther true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither
derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, howeve
also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible.34

Here belief becomes the crux of the performative. The Yes

sides of that realization. On the one hand, free-trade ideo
of its proponents are denaturalized, made "radically incred
viewer's credence (and secondary audiences' witnessing
becomes a synapse between the imagined and the actual.35

32. Or one could say that they exaggerate the lack that is at the center
formative iterations that construe it as substantive. Such points aside, t
men from the global North. To what degree is parafiction a sport of th
hand, the theory of performativity would be useful in a discussion of the
the Yes Men's pranks. Sarah Kanouse has made an argument about the ph
activism in "Cooing Over the Golden Phallus," Journal of Aesthetics and Prot
33. Dennis Roddy, "Liar's Poker," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 12, 2
34. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 141.
35. Earlier, 01.ORG demonstrated the role of belief in the performative, though problematically, when
during their papal stint they freely granted e-pardons to petitioners who tried to contact the Pope through
their fake Vatican website. When a priest says "I absolve you," your spiritual state has changed; when a few
smartass artists say it, it has not. But if you believe you were pardoned by a priest, does it matter if it was

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 66 OCTOBER

Imagine a hy
vaguely opp
factual and w
learns there
viewers, Safiy
But the para
same ones at
as real would
ity itself is
about the w
both to feeli
fictions as "
is done and what can be done."37
The efficacy of positive identity correction - and the poetry - turns on this
power to shift something into the range of the plausible. Such shifts can be deeply
moving. In what may be the most famous intervention by the Yes Men, a represen-
tative of Dow Chemical agreed to an interview on BBC World TV on the twentieth
anniversary of the Union Carbide chemical spill at Bhopal, India, which devas-
tated the region in 1984, killing at least twenty thousand people and sickening
untold thousands more. Since Dow has categorically refused to take responsibility
for cleaning up the environmental damage or compensating the victims since
absorbing Union Carbide in 200 1,38 it was a surprise to hear Dow's Jude Finisterra
announce that the chemical giant had decided to make reparations to the victims
and to remediate the toxic site, at a cost of 12 billion dollars, in what he called
"the first time in history that a publicly owned company of anything near the size
of Dow has performed an action which is significantly against its bottom line sim-
ply because it is the right thing to do." Even today, knowing that it only took the
BBC two hours to detect and unveil the speaker as an imposter, it is electrifying to
watch the text below the talking head change to "Breaking News: Dow accepts full
responsibility" (as it was for Dow's stockholders, in a different way: its stock price
immediately dipped).39 For those two hours, the world believed that there would
be something like justice in Bhopal; for that time, there existed a different model
for corporate decision-making, an ethical as well as financial bottom line.
But parafiction is itself ethically risky. As many have pointed out, the victims
of Union Carbide in India were also among those taken in by Finisterra's

actually an imposter? For you it matters utterly (that's why this particular parafiction seems so cruel) while
for the nonbeliever observing you it matters not at all (that's why it also seems relatively pointless).
36. Michael Blum, email to the author, March 23, 2009.
37. Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics, p. 39.
38. Some victims had received $300-500 from Union Carbide in 1989, equivalent to five years of
medical care, according to the Bhopal Medical Appeal (www.bhopal.org); Bhopalis continue to devel-
op toxin-related illnesses twenty-five years later. Dow has a website, the "Bhopal Information Center,"
giving its positions at www.bhopal.com.
39. A clip is available on YouTube.

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 67

The Yes Men. Dow Does

the Right Thing. 2004.

announcement (fitting that his name combined the patron saint of impossible
causes and the world's end). One can only imagine their joy and corresponding
disappointment when they learned that they still awaited justice.40 Moreover, from
some points of view any purposeful deception is inherently injurious. Consider
the argument, which Sisela Bok put in ecological terms in 1978, that "... trust is a
social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we
drink."41 Though the Yes Men may have outsmarted Rove in 1999, in some ways
the work they went on to do is itself a "funhouse-mirror" of that operative's infa-
mous techniques. Surely, the performativity they deploy is the jester's version of
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."42 Such simi-
larities can lead you to side with Bok and others who call for a return to honesty
in personal and political communication. Or they can leave you agreeing with the
Yes Men that precisely in such a climate, "we need to be devious in order to
achieve a condition of honesty."43 (Just what social trust, after all, do we imagine
we would preserve, in arguing against the use of deception in cultural-political

40. The Yes Men admit to "nagging doubt" about this and have apologized to the people of Bhopal.
They have also responded semantically ("For 20 years, the victims of Bhopal falsely hoped that Dow and
Union Carbide would do something to ease the suffering that they'd caused . . . those who heard our
announcement didn't falsely hope, they were falsely certain that their suffering was at long last over")
and pragmatically: "If the deaths, debilities, organ failure, brain damage, tumors, breathing problems,
and sundry other forms of permanent damage caused by Dow and Union Carbide aren't enough to
arouse your pity, and the hour of "false hopes" we caused is - fantastic, we won! Go straight to
Bhopal.net and make a donation." (http://theyesmen.org/faq).
41. Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books,
1999), p. 26. The Yes Men are less ambivalent about this critique than the "false hope" charge. Since
the BBC immediately and prominently retracted the story, they say, "There was no net misinformation.
In fact there was significantly more information as a result, since more people knew about Bhopal and
Dow, especially in the US" (http://theyesmen.orff/hijinks/bbcbhopal).
42. Senior Bush adviser quoted by Ron Suskind in "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George
W. Bush," The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.
43. The Yes Men, "Frequently Asked Questions," http://theyesmen.org/faq.

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68 OCTOBER

work?) For my
parafictioneers
fact that parafi

New

On Thursday,
year student e
Aliza Shvarts's
press release f
had used dona
month, on the
tions to induc
vaginal bleedin
of which would
Had this mul
might never h
Shvarts's real
announcement
Shvarts story o
dred and eight
reports of the
stream media r
incited especial
the National R
fringe, anti-Sem

44. Martine Power

17, 2008. The state
carriages. I create
and agreed to com
the fabricators wo
needless syringe, I
insure the possibil
which I would exp
number of fabrica
specific abortifac
This telling can t
which there is no
lished as a guest co
ment to members
45. All eight init
freedom of expres
46. Lexis Nexis's b
April 17, and a hun
up by the mainstr
Washington Post, N
47. http://www.f

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 69

ening hate mail in this vein as well),48 even as others likene

the artist came in for critique from the left as well. A NARAL
project insensitive and offensive, Yale pro-choice groups distan
liberal bloggers worried (perceptively) that the project would o
nents: "It's as if someone came up with a formula that incorpo
bugbears: Irresponsible sluts, frivolous abortions, liberal academ
performance art."51 A common theme for the more moderate
ject was that the acts she described could have been ph
harmful.52 And so, nearly across the board, there was condem
versity for allowing it.53
That same day, a university spokesperson issued a statem

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art pr

visual representations, a press release and other narrat
She stated to three senior Yale University officials today
deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she
any miscarriages.

The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction de

attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and
woman's body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself th

mance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical stand
and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.54

48. http://newsfromthewest.blogspot.com/2008_04_l 7_archive.html, accesse

Tellingly, Newsfromthewest, which appears to be completely dedicated to virulent anti-S
"the Internet's most dynamic truthsite." The language of unveiling truth and disabusin
everywhere in hate speech on the Internet (and of course long before it, from the
Holocaust denial ).
49. http://sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/alicia-shvarts-is-an
mengele-was-a-doctor/
50. Executive Boards of the Reproductive Rights Action League at Yale (RALY)
Students for Reproductive Justice, Letter to the Editor, Yale Daily News, April 21, 2008.
51. Lindsay Beyerstein, "'Abortion as art' a hoax?" Majikthise, posted April 17
through Newstex/Lexis-Nexis August 6, 2008).
52. This was particularly the case for anti-choice writers, for whom the belief th
women long-term mental anguish is an increasingly used argument.
53. Rick Rice, Brutally Honest, April 17, 2008. Michelle Malkin tried to lash this buddi
the culture wars of twenty years before: "Move over, Andres Serrano and Karen Finley
smearing Yale art student Aliza Shvarts," Michelle Malkin, April 17, 2008, http://m
/2008/04/17.
54. "Statement by Yale spokesperson Helaine S. Klasky," Yale University Office o
April 17, 2008, http://opa.yale. edu/news/article.aspx?id=2262; reported in Zach
Thomas Kaplan, and Martine Powers, "University calls art project a fiction; Shvarts
claim," Yale Daily News, April 17, 2008.

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 70 OCTOBER

The first nota

phrase the o
surprisingly,
initial descrip
one can say w
happen . . . b
This led Yale
reported her a
No wonder,
ity (those "se
seems more t
more clear, ho
ent in plausib
historical mu
tionery of an
business suit.

The Yes Men hijack that authority, but Shvarts claimed no power other than
her own. Instead, authorities swooped in to submit a plausible, if disturbing story to
the order-restoring category of the hoax.57 Or, to try to. According to the university,
if she was lying in her initial statements, and had never inseminated herself, then her
right to say she had done so was protected as artistic expression. If she was not lying,
and had done what she said she did, she would be liable for moral sanction, perhaps
treatment. In this situation, only her right to lie was protected.
In a final twist, Shvarts was told that she could exhibit her thesis only if she
signed a statement testifying that it was a fiction. This coerced speech act would,
of course, have destroyed the piece, which is sited in the state of uncertainty just
as much as a sculpture might be specific to a particular physical location. In
choosing to name her bleeding as "period," "miscarriage," or "abortion," each
person who describes her project demonstrates its central point that what we
take as biological facts are constructed in language and ideology.58 But what

55. Forms of this classic "liar's paradox" are a theme of Rabate's Ethics of the Lie (see especially ch. 4,
"Lies and Paradox," pp. 193-258).
56. Shvarts, Yale lash over project, Yale Daily News, Friday, April 18, 2008. Shvarts's project can't be
securely categorized as a hoax - or even a parafiction - since it remains unclear what was or wasn't true
about her story. But it partakes of the parafictional, because the question about veracity is fundamental to
its structure.

57. And to fulfill perfectly the role of normative, institutionalized patriarchy the project was
designed to challenge.
58. Her statement about the project was published as "Shvarts explains her 'repeated self-induced mis-
carriages,'" April 18, 2008, at http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/printarticle/24559. "Because the
miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains
ambiguous whether there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself
and for the audience, is a matter of reading. This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification
or naming - the act of ascribing a word to something physical - is at its heart an ideological act, an act that
literally has the power to construct bodies. In a sense, the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns
the term 'miscarriage' or 'period' to that blood."

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 71

makes her project matter beyond its illustration of this idea is

conflated with the parafictional questions of whether she h
said she had, whether an ovum had ever been fertilized,59 whether she had lied
to the Yale officials. With these, the project mapped the action of the artist con-
trolling her work onto that of a woman controlling her body.
Shvarts refused to sign the statement, ensuring that her project would exist
as it does: as a story.

The stories told here involve a diverse range of practices and practitioners,
from highly regarded contemporary artists to a student, and from gallery art to
tactical media and political activism. They concern a range of somewhat exotic
places - Istanbul, Vienna, Sydney, cyberspace, and a uterus - and they vary
widely in terms of their complexity, their formal means, their visual languages,
and especially the outcomes they seem to favor. Sometimes the revelation of the
parafiction is key to the operation. This is when they come closest to simple
hoax - but also, to effective activism. Sometimes such a revelation is either with-
held or impossible to provide, and this is probably when they come closest to
what is conventionally considered art. A complete typology of the parafictional
and its tools would tell us much; however, for the time being I want to maintain
that the commonalities between these projects tell us at least as much as the dif-
ferences. Here, then, are some provisional conclusions, or what we might as well
call the morals of the stories.

Globalization "Immanence"^

Nike is a target for culture jammers like 01.ORG not only because of its
branding success and ubiquity, but also because it is a corporate-globalization
morality tale.61 And of course the two sides of the company - its branded iden-
tity and its outsourced sweatshops - are connected: the explosion of branding
over the last twenty years depends on the loosening up of capital via

59. Theoretically this empirical question could be answered by testing the blood either for a second
set of DNA or for the presence of the hormone hCG. But in fact given the limits of testing it would be
impossible to say conclusively whether fertilization had occurred or not (leaving aside the question of
whether that fact would determine whether or not a life had been conceived). See Melissa Lafsky, "Can
Science Get to the Bottom of the Aliza Shvarts Abortion Fracas?," Dicoblog, Discover Web site,
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/04/18/can-science-get-to-the-bottom-of-the-
aliza-shvarts-abortion-fracas/ .
60. As indicated below, this term is taken from Pamela M. Lee, "Boundary Issues: The Art World
Under the Sign of Globalism," Artforum 42, no. 3 (November 2003); Lee's mobilization of the term
"immanence" to discuss art and globalization in turn references Hardt and Negri's Empire, as well as
Deleuze and Spinoza.
61. Choosing a specifically American corporation, the faux-takeover of Karlsplatz was structurally
and thematically concerned with models of economic imperialism.

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72 OCTOBER

outsourcing.6
haps best kn
documenting
tracting in In
My Sneakers
Jakarta, and
went to Istan
But neither o
part of the g
Jakarta a jour
sourcing in a
world to glob
and collectors
and transit, b
zon are indivi
international
standing in
"part of broad
both careers
just-in-time p
specific and i
colonial subje
artist mobiliz
And so, of co
context and r
story specific
biennial visit
Turkish moder
Parafictione
opposed to ac

62. While the his

ry, the change in
od (the Wall Street
ciations - is incre
company whose v
on Brand Equity,"
18, 2009). Klein po
uct companies at
own factories, w
2001), pp. 4-5, 22
63. Lee, "Bound
64. Siireyyya Evr
(January, 2008),
Turkish art. This
the parafietional.
65. The project a
looking that it re

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 73

Blum. Two stills from My

Sneakers. 2001.

with viewers, whose various configurations of knowledge and "horizons of expe

tation" determine whether something is plausible to them. While something simi
is true of any artwork - that its meaning is produced in the encounter with th
spectator - a parafiction creates a specific multiplicity.
No one has done this more powerfully than The Atlas Group, an organiza
tion dedicated to "researching and documenting the contemporary history of
Lebanon," particularly the civil wars of 1975-91 (it was also, until recently, th
identity under which Walid Raad exhibited most of his art). The first video ma
for this project was Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (#17 and 31)_English Version (2000), a
testimonial by former hostage Souheil Bachar, who was held by Islamic militan

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Walid Raad. Hostage: The Bachar
Tapes (#17 and #31) English
Version. 2000. ©Walid Raad.

Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery.

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 75

in Beirut from 1985 to 1995. 66 For some months he share

Anderson, Benjamin Weir, and three other victims of what
as the "Western Hostage Crisis." While each of these other
lished a memoir about his hostage experience, this video
documentation of Bachar's. It opens with English text ex
made fifty-three testimonial tapes with The Atlas Group, bu
#31 are the only two tapes he makes available for screening
We then hear a man's voice introducing himself in Arabic a
titles translate his words to English.
Like all the documents in The Atlas Group Archive, Hosta
lems of history-writing (the patchiness of documents, the "
first-hand accounts, the work of interpretation that goes
them); traumatic experience and the ways it both compels
and the particular epistemic conditions of the Lebanese civil
plicity of combatant groups, its unreliable sources of i
nightmarishly extended duration (indeed historians disagre
year the war "ended"). Onto these, Hostage maps questions
and sexuality, as Bachar (or a woman voicing his words i
English) describes his cohabitation with the Americans, and
taneous attraction to and repulsion by his body, which
ambiguously forced sexual encounter in their cell.
Sometimes speaking posed against a jury-rigged cloth b
testimony evokes the videotapes of hostages made by their
reverse those coerced speech acts, here the former hostage
charge of his testimony. The tape starts with instructions f
its making. Bachar explains how he should be translated: th
the official language of the country where they are shown, E
US, French for France, Arabic for "the Arab world." He is alw
"neutral-toned female voice" (which thereafter chimes in). W
tles should be in white type on black or "if you prefe
Mediterranean," he makes it so (performatively) : the black
ently fades to blue.
Bachar not only tells his own stories, but also controls t
dissemination. The fact that he allows only two tapes to
Lebanon casts these as a message for foreign audiences. Thi

66. Based in part on Raad's research for his 1997 Ph.D. dissertation on th
University of Rochester, the tape was made during a postdoctoral residency at
Beirut in 1999-2000, and completed in 2000. It was first shown informally in
mental video festivals in Europe and the United States (Raad, email to the aut
67. The coerced videos haunt his testimony in Hostages most striking pas
two minutes, twelve seconds in which all information is withheld except for
of the rippling surface of a body of water (which is sometimes hard to dis
Afterward, Bachar explains that the shot had been the average duration o
forced to make as a captive.

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76 OCTOBER

for the view

video doesn't
at times the
opposite to B
sexual encou
English voice
guage, what
complicating
ancy between
Likewise, wh
trolled testi
captivity, the
simple opposi
fade from bl
introduces th
he who takes t
Raad had ori
done in diffe
lated within t
the voice and
Bachar's auth
tions between
as the global
ject Michael B
As in Blum's
viewers are a
eign cultural
down primar
Bachar an act
expatriates, a
viewers who
English-only
determine wh
Similarly, Ra
depending on

68. Raad, email

complicate "the c
69. Had Safiye B
captures someth
wondered, when
freedom / You ha
70. Though Raad
titious - Hostage
contain documen
zations" - he has

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 77

started working in this vein, to years - such as 1948, 1967, and

different turning points in modern Middle Eastern history. In
work alters and is altered depending on geopolitical location.7
must be understood as more than spatial: it includes the institu
geographical site in which a viewer sees the work; her location
her personal history of dislocations. Such "locations" within an
institutions, nations, languages, and history determine which
are available to a given viewer at a given moment. And this in
the spectatorial modes such as disbelief, belief, suspicion, cer
that epistemologists call - in what here becomes a pun - "creda
With its range of different, shifting, but localized respon
video responds to conditions specific to the Lebanese Civil War
shifting factions, its manifold points of view). But also (and wi
is possible to say that because of this specific multiplicity Hos
The Atlas Group work seems also to acknowledge the conditio
into which they emerged: one fully enmeshed with globalizat
demands for local specificity and global inclusion, and its tens
ity, audience, and language.72 Fittingly, Hostage first reached w
it was shown at Documenta 11 in 2002. Though created befor
this level of international art world recognition, it turns out t
ing into and out of credibility differently for viewers depending
multiple) geopolitical locations - was uniquely well-suited to t
an exhibition both assumes and creates.

Internet Epistemology

Caroline Jones has argued that epistemologically complicated recent work such
as Raad's performs a crucial service, inculcating a habit of critical doubt in order to
counter the atavistic fearmongering that has characterized the "war on terror."73 I
largely agree: the experiences of deception and doubt we are put through by parafic-

71. Raad now insists on complicating these terms: "I think it is safe to say that there may have been
a time when I thought I knew what I meant by 'presumed historical knowledge of the viewers in a
given location.' This proposition has become somewhat blurred to me." E-mail to the author, March
15, 2009.
72. It is important here to note - though it is obvious - that "globalization is not a single process,
period, or entity. For instance, very different geo-political and economic pressures are at play in the
entry of various regions or nationalities into the "global" contemporary art world (or rather, into visi-
bility for Euro-American art institutions, media, and scholarship).
73. Writing at the height of the Bush-Cheney era in 2003, and trying to diagnose that administra-
tion's success in leading a nation past logic and fact into a disastrous and unnecessary war, Jones stress-
es the coolly cognitive aspects of neo-conceptualist work like Raad's, and the rationality and criticality
that its "aesthetics of doubt" encourage in the viewer. I admire this argument but part ways with it
slightly (part of the difference is simply that we are not considering exactly the same phenomena - the
only case we both discuss is Raad's). Parafiction encourages critical thought, but I believe that in doing
so via experiences of discomfort, embarrassment, confusion, and often anger, it refuses to separate the
epistemological and the emotional. And I am less confident than Jones that this work can be complete-
ly opposed to the culture of deception.

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78 OCTOBER

tional experim
and therefore
but to media c
rapid mainstre
MacArthur Fo
current and
Google - are t
and a proclivit
ated by the Ye
Leja calls "loo
exploration be
However, in
lantly skepti
censure of tr
the ocean of
inquiries (and
be less how t
sufficiently s
something is
criterion - tru
tion from s
relativism of
tional hangs
fictional, but
along with th
terer; but t
Parafictions tr

74. Though the I

it was after the
Western Europe,
has now, and beg
on a mass scale. 1
that Apple debu
mind), and then
75. Henry Jenki
"Confronting the
19, 2006), The Jo
found.org/site/c
76. See Michael Le
University of Cal
77. Paul Virilio, S
78. Most of the p
ment in which th
ventions of object
locking texts wer
arise from this in
years in forms lik
79. Aliza Shvarts

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 79

Of course the relationship between parafiction and the

causal - parafiction long predates digital networks. But to do pa
to engage with this condition of communication, knowledge, ev
don't think it is a coincidence that 01.ORG and new-media
Netbase picked a structure for their Vienna infobooth that, wi
dows displaying layered visual and textual information, rese
walk-in computer monitor. In fact, the infobooth was a custom
the "Cocobello," a modular structure by Munich-based architect
whose vision included multiple booths popping up all around an
ment, "plugged into the existing communications network,"
network of spaces."80 Likewise, even though it was not primar
based project (nor strictly a hoax), it makes sense that Aliza
shows up in a list of top Internet hoaxes.81 Parafiction's nat
blog, the discussion board, or the wiki, where information is b
form and material in effect. As it challenges viewers to assess the
ability, then, even a project like Safiye Behar, which had no Inte
speak of and took a distinctly pre-digital form, could be consid
live-action experiment in Internet epistemology.
By this I mean that it challenges viewers to assess the forms of i
from the font to the URL at the top of the page - with as much care
and that it trains them in both skepticism and belief. But I also mean
some of the structure of an information economy. The viewer positi
tion are multiple, but they are not equal. The people who have th
going in, or are the most astute information-interpreters (or, if the
who are literally well-connected) avoid being duped; and their e
piece may include the slightly sadistic fun of watching others in the
cal struggle. That is to say, the viewers of parafiction are classed.82

Parafiction, for Art 's Sake

Let's return to A Tribute to Safiye Behar, and step back to wond

anyone believe it in the first place? After all, it wasn't in a history m
university, or any other site even putatively dedicated to the pur
truthfulness. It was in an art show. By all reports most viewers

80. Peter Haimerl, "Cocobello- Mobiles Atelier," Detail 6 (2004), pp. 676-77.
81. Pareene, "5 Bullshit Stories the Whole Internet Fell For," Gawker.com, M
most bloggers registered the possibility of "hoax" from the beginning. The fact th
powerful resonance even when discussed in the key of "if" is another indication of
complicates the distinction between happy and unhappy performative.
82. Class intersects these stories in multiple ways, in fact. For instance, Shvarts
as an Ivy League student seemed to drive some of the disgust with her project. A
has pointed out to me there is also a powerful class component to the Yes Men's hij
viewer's relation to the cast of characters (whether one is positioned closer to t
Yes Men target and impersonate, or to the workers or the poor who are usually
impacted by them).

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 80 OCTOBER

assumption t
course - but
notion of ar
financial and
of functiona
century hav
sloughing of
and the aesthetic.

But that distinction refuses to go away. It undergirds the Yale statement

about Shvarts: had her acts not been art, it concludes, they would have had real
consequences. What is elided is the possibility that it was art and she did what she
said she did. And this isn't just a matter of lay critics expressing outdated assump-
tions. The contradiction is built into parafictional art. After all, while the
acceptance of art's co-extensiveness with the real explains why Safiye Behar works,
it's precisely the opposite idea about art that explains how Blum got away with it.84
You can speculate, make up facts, blend different types of facts, or even lie
in art because it is understood as a fundamentally frivolous zone. (Of an artist
who has produced functional firearms, one magazine breathlessly wonders
whether what he is up to is "something . . . sinister," or "just art.")85 It's this atti-
tude that underlies the immediate and recurring accusation lobbed at Shvarts
that her project trivialized abortion and miscarriage. As if to literally put your
body through the procedure of insemination, to undergo possible termination
of pregnancy (however early), to encounter and experience these "issues" in
your own physical and mental being, and to repeat all of this for nine months
were less serious than, say, writing a term paper about the abortion debate. The
project may be many things - dangerous, counterproductive, perhaps even
immoral - but trivializing it is not. Yet the fact that it was interpreted this way is
in itself telling of the strangely unshakeable assumption that art is a category
defined against reality, unencumbered by - and unempowered by - real conse-
quence. Alan Beiber put it perfectly when he asked 01.ORG whether being
labeled "artist" was like getting a "jester's license."86

83. Psychologists also talk about an inherent human "truth bias."

84. Perhaps it is this interrogation of the question of utility rather than the fake Wanted posters,
pseudonymns, and so on that links Duchamp to these parafictional practices. See Stephen Wright,
"The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade: An Essay on Use Value and Art-Related Practice," Parachute
117 (January-March 2005). Wright's discussion of art and use value in recent collective practice in this
essay (based on the catalog essay for his Apexart exhibition "The Future of the Reciprocal
Readymade," in Spring 2004) is extremely helpful for thinking about art and politics (as is his term
"art-related practice"). The artist and critic Sarah Kanouse has a wonderful phrase for the way art's
autonomy is being used in practices similar to these: she calls it art's "tactical irrelevance." Sarah E
Kanouse, "Tactical Irrelevance: Art and Politics at Play," paper presented at the Conference of the
Union for Democratic Communication, Boca Raton, FL, May 20 2006, at http://www.readysubjects.org
/writing/kanouse_artpolitics.pdf.
85. Melissa Milgrom, "Target: AVL," Metropolis (May 2000).
86. "How to provoke today?? Alain Bieber interviews 0100101110101101.ORG on Nike Ground,"
RebeliArt Magazine, April 1, 2004, archived copy at http://www.0100101110101101.org
/home/nikeground/interview.html.

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 Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 81

The critic Brian Holmes, though, has the metaphor mo

current discussion. In his essay titled "Liar's Poker," he accu
politically-engaged artists of playing a bluffing game. The fris
type of cultural capital that museums desperately need, and
vide, he argues, using the example of Documenta to claim t

must ask its cultural producers for the ace of politics, w

the while (with the help of the police, if need be) that t
ly a bluff, that it is really a king .... And yet it is thro
game that new symbolic possibilities for conceiving an
ways we live - what Nietzsche might have called "the tr
all values" - can be distributed on the scale that an exhibition like
Documenta offers.87

Art institutions lie, and turn cultural producers into liars, by asking artists
for the winning hand of real politics (the ace), while all the while framing what
they do as without consequence (the king). If this is indeed the only way we have
to propose new possibilities for living and thinking - for re-distributing the sensi-
ble - then this goes a long way toward not only explaining, but justifying the fact
that we have seen a rise in parafiction: in art built on the contradictions between
art's ability to move into and change the world, and art as a space of only symbolic
relevance. Blum, at least, seems to have implicitly recognized something of the
kind when he ended the wall text in the Safiye Behar museum this way:

In 2005, as Turkey and the EU are playing liar's poker about their com-
mon future, Safiye might prove to be a helpful guiding model for current
and future generations. A product of both the East and the West, she
stood up for her ideals and devoted a lifetime to what she believed in.
She was a global thinker before the term was coined, seeing the world
beyond the narrow conceptions of borders, nations, and states.

The "Safiye" in this paragraph might simply be the character of Behar; "guid-
ing model" might refer simply to the progressive ideals to which she devoted her
life. But as Blum's winking reference to the politics of deception suggests, it might
also be Safiye the exhibition - parafiction itself - that could serve as a guide. What
would this mean? Walid Raad has an interesting way of phrasing what art like his
can do: "the way an artwork can maintain and work different kind of facts alive
[sic] (historical facts; sociological facts, economic facts, emotional facts, aesthetic
facts, etc. . . . )."88 If this destabilizing of "fact" shares a bit more ground than is
comfortable with "truthiness,"89 it resonates with Blum's insistence that Safiye is

87. Brian Holmes, "Liar's Poker: Representation of Politics/Politics of Representation," Springeren 1

(2003).
88. Walid Raad, e-mail to the author, March 22, 2009.
89. By registering a generic connection I do not mean to collapse terms. Raad is talking about the
proliferation and protection of different kinds of fact, while "truthiness" describes the substitution of
one kind of fact for another.

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 82 OCTOBER

real to him; w
ties, and with
of realism, e
rethinks them
territory of p
ble the way w
and belief. As
ing error, art
fortuitously t
paranctional.
resuscitates hi

Epilo

Recall the de
Blum's install
perfectly the
in the plausibl
air of the labo
coats, and vie
the paranction
unwitting view
museum; mar
based installat
out of audien
"Perhaps a rum
"Scurrying" al
tional spectat
epistemologic
who asks a sin
he was one of
art historian, p
historical figu
vanity. It cha
changes one's
ference is a certain critical outlook, but one that should be differentiated from

90. Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of
Concern," Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004), p. 231.
91. In Stanley Milgram's behavioral experiments at Yale University in the early 1960s, subjects were
told they were participating in a study about learning, when in fact the goal of the experiment was to
see how far they would go in inflicting pain on another person when commanded to by a figure in
authority (the scientist).

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Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility 83

models of criticality as skepticism. Ranciere talks about a "p

opposed to "critique as suspicion."92 Something like this at
think, as a post-parafictional alertness to the possibility of
ics of knowledge, like the parafictional, "gives value to the
acts"). Art works, lectures, books, exhibitions, and of co
they shimmer slightly, possibly plausible, plausibly possible
However, this can be particularly destabilizing for scho

Blum. Detail

of A Tribute
to Safiye
Behar. 2005.

how thoroughly I've researched the stories I've told here, I'm aware of the provi-
sionality of my report. Have I pulled back all the onion-skins of fiction? How
much research would be enough? And must I unveil every aspect of the works I've
uncovered, if to do so would damage their future functioning? While parafictional
art and activism respond to broader areas of cultural practice, it seems imperative
to examine their lessons for the endeavor at hand. For the epistemological prob-
lems I've been describing don't pertain only to parafictional art. They are the
conditions for the enterprise of scholarly study of contemporary art in general -
for this strange practice of trying to think historically about the present. Doing
this work we approach the parafictional all the time, relying on memories and sto-
ries to build our histories - only a step away from gossip, it sometimes seems.93

92. Jacques Ranciere and Davide Panagia, "Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques
Ranciere," Diacritics 30, no. 2 (Summer 2000), pp. 113-16; and Ranciere, The Names of History: On the
Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
93. For a discussion of scholars' involvement with their subjects, see Julia Bryan-Wilson, "Working
It: Contemporary Art, Gendered Labor, and Prostitution," forthcoming in differences: A Journal of
Feminist Cultural Criticism 21, no. 2 (Summer 2010).

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84 OCTOBER

Our argumen
and being shap
always a step
because, as pa
We have the
transnational
demonstrates
art-historical
think, teach,
What to do?
tend Nike We
scholarship? W
art history we
mizing som
1989 - maybe
no one of us
encourage us n
collaborativel
understandin
"provisions,"
texts. We mig
We might em

94. Walid Raad,

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