Reality and Fiction Games

In the Centre for Research in Contemporary Literature and Literary Theory at the Faculty of Arts, University of South Bohemia, a team of researchers has formed to address issues related to literary history and literary theory. Their professional interest was to innovate and enrich thinking about literature with insights from post-analytical philosophy and neopragmatism, as these opened up new and little-explored space in the European context. In the course of several years of discussion, a number of studies on this topic were produced in both Czech and English, for example Inside and Outside of Texts (2024) or Literary Universe in Three Parts (2018), as well as other essays and monographs in Czech, for example Context in Motion (2018), The Traces of Pragmatism (2017) or Maxwell’s Demon (2017).

In 2016, I attended a lecture by Professor John Searle from the University of Berkeley, introduced by his friend and expert on his work, philosopher Josef Moural.

What Searle presented in his concept of institutional facts seemed to me to be very applicable in certain aspects to the field of literary history and the formation of the canon, or rather the manipulation of literary works in the process of their movement in the public sphere.

Inspired by Searle’s speech, I also read his books, such as Expression and Meaning and The Construction of Social Reality, where I found further sources of inspiration for literary studies, for example in the study ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’, which encouraged discussion about the relationship between literary text and external reality. This prompted the need to extend my thinking to other areas of analytical philosophy, such as the work of Donald Davidson, the need to return to Roman Ingarden’s classic work The Literary Work of Art, or to other models of thinking about the relationship between the work of art and reality in the work of Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and others.

In 2017, John Searle accepted an invitation from the Centre. He gave several lectures on institutional facts, speech act theory, and the Chinese room argument. Above all, however, the visit provided an opportunity for discussion on various topics related to his philosophical views, as well as literature and literary studies.

In 2017, Josef Moural arranged for John Searle to visit České Budějovice, and once again it became clear that his lectures were not limited to pure theory, but provided a wealth of practical ideas for questioning the relationship between human treatment of linguistic objects and objects in external reality that are touched upon by language. This was confirmed in informal discussions with both philosophers and initiated subsequent discussions within the team dedicated to finding new ideas for the development of literary theory. The discussions were never conducted just to celebrate the work of a famous philosopher, but rather to search for new starting points, aporias, and different paths that Searle’s logically modelled and, in relation to external reality and signs, highly distinctive thinking encourages.

The present monograph consists of studies inspired by these discussions on John Searle’s work, but also reflects long-term interests of the team of researchers who authored the individual essays. The texts capture various moments in Searle’s thinking that initiated essentially independent concepts, which do not copy the original inspiration in any way, but on its basis set out on different paths, on which there is a ‘paternal starting point’, to paraphrase Harold Bloom and his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973), is confronted with other types of thinking, often contradictory, so that, in the spirit of Bloom’s poetic metaphor, there are many variations of differentiation and ways of productive ‘misreading’. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his concept of perception of reality enter the game, alongside Baudrillard’s term ‘simulacra’, the confrontation of various theories defining art, Roman Ingarden’s place of indeterminacy, Umberto Eco’s semiotic concept alongside Wolfgang Iser’s theories of interpretation.

Our goal was never to switch purely to the field of philosophical language, but rather to allow ourselves to be freely inspired by certain ideas, terms, and concepts in order to create our own individual areas of thought and our own language, attempting to capture some classic questions of literary science in a new way. It was clear to the authors that their approach had to be sufficiently free and that, to a large extent, it would be what J. H. Miller defines in his collection of lectures published under the title New Starts in Taiwan. He was invited to the University of Taipei by students who were fascinated by American deconstruction and wanted to adopt it for themselves. Miller states that, unlike technologies, theories are not transferable and that what students understand by the term ‘method of deconstruction’ has nothing to do with what historically emerged in discussions at Yale University. Thus, deconstruction in Taipei is experiencing a new beginning – a new start that has nothing to do with the original belonging to another time and space.

The purpose of the texts in this book was not to analyse and deepen the theories and concepts developed by John Searle. With the sole exception of Josef Moural, our language is not that of philosophers, but that of literary science. Our primary concern was to test new possibilities for literary science by drawing on certain aspects of philosophy, with concepts and theories from this field serving as a springboard for the formation of our own thought models. The inspiration was so free that sometimes it was not a matter of explicitly referring to Searle, but rather that his theories prompted us to read and think about something from a completely different, perhaps contradictory field. So, even if the original source is not always referenced, this does not mean that it is not present in the background as a kind of starter for a certain intellectual movement among the authors of the individual texts.

The book is primarily intended for literary scholars and is supplemented by a study by a philosopher and expert on Searle’s work as a certain contradiction or comparison of two worlds, two different languages, which, however, are increasingly intertwined in the humanities.

Vladimír Papoušek

John Searle’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Perception in Relation to the Literary Text

Vladimír Papoušek

The way we refer to the real world in which we, as living beings, move and perceive it becomes problematic every time we want to refer to it in words or writing. Merleau-Ponty, in the introduction to his study The Visible and the Invisible (1964), articulates precisely this difficulty when he says:

We see the things themselves, the world is what we see: formulae of this kind express a faith common to the natural man and the philosopher… But what is strange about this faith is that if we seek to articulate it into theses or statements, if we ask ourselves what is this we, what seeing is, and what thing or world is, we enter into a labyrinth of difficulties and contradictions. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 3)

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Ludwig Wittgenstein utters a somewhat mysterious sentence: ‘What can be shown cannot be said’ (4.1211). The sentence does not fit into neighbouring sentences about true and logical sentences as an ‘image of reality’ or ‘existence or non-existence of atomic facts’.