Speculative Realism by Tobias Madison

Frog song

“Pheasant, peasant? What a pleasant present!” – William Steig, Shrek!

Shrek!, (the children's book, not the feature film), consists precisely in a reconfiguration of an established genre of short story: the fairy tale (with fair maidens, noble knights, chivalrous (symbolic) orders, etc). The core invariant in the genre is the story of a woman who gets her phallic presence and the man who gets his lost part. The secondary valence of the terms themselves, as is familiar to most who have ever seen a Disney film, arrange themselves in configurations that in the 20th century became a set of commoditized codes in commercial marketing: beauty overcomes horror, noblesse rises above the base, good defeats bad, feminine synthesizes with masculine like yin and yang, etc.

Stieg’s version, written in the late 80s, is dripping with the slick irony that was a type of historical innovation (Pet shop boys, Bad Painting, Laurie Anderson, etc). What’s critical in Steig’s version of irony, like his compatriots, is that the invention consists precisely in finding those terms which can be dualized and still preserve the core invariant. The sexuated positions remain the same: It is a love story at the end but, somehow all the drab, dead ornaments,of the love story – the codes or “content” of the dominant culture – are suspended. I mean dual in a precise way: duality preserves composition. This definition is drawn from category theory: a functor between categories must preserve the composition of morphisms.

I have no intention of trying to unpack this, let alone demonstrate it rigorously here, so instead, I’ll append the following (admittedly insane) diagram. The circle, ○ , between love and story designates composition.

Any right triangle you can derive is a category and every double arrow is a functor; there are 10 categories of love-triangle:

See FIG 1

So, the important part about this notion of duality is that “it makes sense” precisely in that it preserves composition. The character of wit – very much Freudian witz – is anchored by the preservation of composition (the invariant) and the slipperyness of the reversals in the opposite category. There are endless historical echoes here: Beckett dualizes Joyce, Manzoni dualizes high modernism, Genet maybe dualizes Gaullist patrimony, Morrisey dualizes hetero virility, Act up dualizes the conventional repression of the moral majority, etc.

And each invokes a characteristic irony. Paul de Man (also in the same period) characterized irony as, at its core, a suspension: you can’t pin it to either side, it sort of wants to be both at once. The vacillation of the subject under irony is captured in dualization: if irony preserves composition in both categories and it relies on the articulation of both; you cannot have such a functor without both categories. So, the dualization of irony is precisely the suspension of transit between the source and target categories. (For example, between Shrek and The Knight). I would like to go much further here and draw limits (morphisms forming Cones over categories and show how such Cones “explain” the categories) all the way down to some final, late-Lacanian logic like this:

See FIG 2

But, tant pis, I can’t now; maybe another time, maybe never.

Ok, so: Why say all this about Shrek, about what are admittedly rather basic reversals? Because it’s a children’s story, and the value of children’s stories is that they make plain the invariants that are somewhat more complicated in the non-child’s world. Months ago, Tobi suggested this show “would be for children.” I dismissed it at the time as a du jour perversion. But now I suspect it is more of a pere-version or pere-vision. So, who are the fathers and who are the children? I don’t know, but I have some coordinates.

1. Today, we have a peculiar situation that has emerged in the field of art: There are some exceptions, but, on the whole, the historical tensions that drove the various discourses of art (to name a few and omit too many others: punk hysteria through managerial narcissism (Diedrichson), activism through ethnography (Foster), critique of institutions through institutional critique (Bulchloh), capital “P” painting in new york in the aughts (Joslit)) have been usurped by a type of neoliberal consequence of capitalism: Not unlike academia, you have talk the talk of the knowledge worker to provide value. This value (evaluation, a valuation) covers lack like one of those wonderful “chinese” waterfall paintings you used to see in restaurants in the US midwest.

2. At the same time, the globalized order has bounded off the diverse commons and bracketed its heterogeneous forms of surplus-jouissance (monetization!). Yanis Varoufakis has explicitly written about the feudal aspect of contemporary economics, he calls it Techno-feudalism, but he hasn’t yet remarked on the feudal aspect of contemporary culture. Who didn’t see the wash of sensitive figuration at Arco last weekend? There is an emerging spate of galleries that serve images of sensitive subjectivity, all generally good, and all generally familiar the way commissioned music in a spotify playlist is familiar and, also, generally good; accessible, not too complex but not too bad either. This is a consequence of the “democratization” advanced by techno-capital platforms: break down the boundaries and give free reign to the most immediately accessible forms of jouissance (usually, the scopic drive and its thirst for bodiessss; the thir$t trap).

Two false options then: plowshares in the fields of eFlux or (liberal-progressive) OnlyFans. If you could draw out the arrows between the morphisms among these terms, it would trivially follow that freedom is a functor.

– Tim Pierson, Content Provider,
for Speculative Realism
by Tobias Madison,
Figura Avulsa, Lisbon,
June, 2025.