Theoretical Fiction
Who was it that came up with this term: theoretical fiction or ficto-criticism?* At any rate, it was under the influence of Jacques Derrida’s and especially Roland Barthes’ writing and the wave of French theory just hitting our shores in the mid-to-late 1970s. At the time I might have called it peripheral criticism. Today we would call it performative criticism.
This was the second path, a deviation from the work of art that became a drift of its own. The “theory” was elaborated in my pamphlet Peripheral Drift and enacted in “Exits” and “Breach of Promise.”
Soon after, this type of writing was “suppressed” as I turned my efforts to the project of creating a history of contemporary Canadian—more properly Toronto—art, which then led again to my becoming a curator and having to perform a responsible type of writing. Performativity came back into my writing in the 2000s, in Repetition, he said, she said, for instance [click to read] and in many of my books: Disassembling the Archive, and while I have been lying here perfectly still, Project for a New American Century, and Glamour is Theft.
*Jeanne Randolph started writing what she called ficto-criticism in 1983 but the late 1970s Toronto’s underground art scene was the fertile ground of its development. The question was where this odd writing, “the carefree anarcho-poetic textualism of the seventies” (as François Cusset called it in his book French Theory) belonged—and who would publish it. It was not supported by any art magazine but by Toronto’s artist-run magazines such as General Idea’s FILE, Eldon Garnet’s Impulse, and Victor Coleman’s Only Paper Today where the borders between art and writing were blurred. It was in FILE in 1977 that AA Bronson published his “anarcho-poetic,” Anti-Oedipus-inflected ode to punk, “Pogo Dancing in the British Aisles.” It was in Only Paper Today in 1979 that Judith Doyle edited an insert she called “Theoretical Fiction” that included my “Theoretical Dance: This Body is in Creation” and her “Model for a Prose Algorithm.” Doyle’s Rumour Publications put out my Peripheral/Drift the same year.† Between 1980 and 1982, Impulse and FILE published what could be termed my performative art criticism, which were really allegories of facing works of art. Thereafter in the mid-1980s, it was carried on in Toronto, but in a very different intellectual and cultural milieu, by Randolph, who was not reliant on French theory, and the artist Gordon Lebredt, who in his writing was in thrall to Derrida.
Artist magazines played the role in Toronto’s art community that François Cusset identified as happening elsewhere in the United States: “Thus the diffusion of what was not yet called French theory occurred on the edges of the countercultural space, on the still blurry dividing line between the campuses and sites of dissidence.” In Toronto, this writing was not art criticism per se, or at least what had been known as art criticism; it was not yet cultural studies in the academic form that it would become in the 1980s. In late-seventies Toronto, there was no interaction between the art and academic communities. It marginally took place later as represented by the journals Border/Lines and Public, beginning publishing respectively in 1984 and 1988.
† See my book Is Toronto Burning?, pages 228-235, for a discussion of this context.