Abstract
The procedure of the preceding review is disconcerting. Normally, academic reviews begin with description, then move to evaluation, implicitly suggesting that the reviewer knows the subject better than the author and could have written a better book. Professor De Cock, an honourable man, has done the opposite. He begins with disagreement and then moves to a charming description of our humble little effort (Hamilton and Parker, 2016). A cunning ploy, because by the end of the text, his airy clouds of flattery obscure our differences. Because we do have differences, but must respond to this review in the same tone, our edge blunted by his sweet talk.
So we can’t say that he is a bad reviewer, a poor scholar who needs to do more time in the library or a vengeful careerist with an axe to grind. We can’t accuse him of anything much, because we want you (gentle reader) to accept his suggestion that you should buy the book. The problem is even worse, because (as he cleverly quotes) we explicitly aimed ‘to write a book that allows a wide range of people to be able to read this book easily, and find something useful in it’. We can hardly complain then if a reader does find something else in the text, even if it is disagreement. If the authors are dead, then a reader can write whatever they want on the headstone. Disarmed by his flattery and our consistency, we must proceed with care.
His main disagreement concerns the ‘as-if’ nature of literary texts. He claims that the disclosure of their own fictionality necessitates an attitude different from that adopted toward fictions that hide their fictionality. Let’s begin by agreeing that organizations are fictions that hide their fictionality. They require that we believe in them, invest in them, in order that they can function at all (Parker, 2016). Their very real consequences are only possible if we agree that they exist in the first place. This might sound radical, but it’s no more than a restatement of the idea that the social world is constructed, not revealed. So how does this differ from the realist novel?
Bear in mind that we are comparing the Bank of England to the realist novel, not to all literary texts. That is to say, with a text that pretends to the real, and uses various devices in order to achieve that end. Of course, it might be subtitled ‘A Novel’, and arrive in a book or on an e-reader, or episodic serialization with no author’s name attached (as was the case in Defoe’s day). But our point is that such a text only works if we give it credit. How could we be pulled forward by plot, care about characters, respond to place, if we were always treating the text as a lie?
This question of lying is important. It’s a term that De Cock baulks at, but we use it deliberately to provoke. If a lie is an intentional deceit, then of course the novel is a lie. The author knows what they are doing. This caused problems for many who wanted to make a living telling stories during Defoe’s period, so no wonder that they had to pretend the lie to be a truth. It’s a more difficult term to apply to the founding of institutions, because projectors must begin with the idea that they are establishing a truth that will endure. However, it’s not ontologically inaccurate in the sense that the projector must necessarily conjure something from nothing. They must arrange matters—money, people, things—in such a way that a collectively agreed fiction is created and they do this intentionally.
Lying here is not to be understood as a word which brings with it any particular moral condemnation. It’s more like the condition of possibility for the novel and for the projection of an organization. Both are fabulations, intentionally conjured from nothing to produce effects. In Defoe’s time, just as writers of fiction were regarded to be suspicious characters involved in deceit, so were projectors understood as potential charlatans, people who might make and lose fortunes. Nowadays, both characters have been rehabilitated. The writer of stories is a culture hero, and the projector has become the lionized entrepreneur. But in Defoe’s time, we can see that the ontology of organization and the ontology of the novel weren’t really that different. Both were fictions, necessary deceits, which began with ‘as-if’ and then proceeded to deny their status as inventions.
One of the lessons of our book might be that if we remember that all institutions began with a lie, we might be able to treat them more like stories. Remembering their contingent nature, we can imagine that the world could be told differently. When we look now at the Bank of England, set solid in rusticated stone, we can easily forget its origins in ship wrecks and coffee shops. De Cock reminds us that some ‘as-ifs’ come conveniently labelled and others don’t. True enough, but we think that our book encourages readers to look beyond the labelling, and consider Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1817) ‘suspension of disbelief’ as a necessary condition of more than just literature. In chapter fourteen of his biography, at the beginning of a discussion of different forms of literary realism, Coleridge suggests that his endeavours were aimed at producing ‘a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’. Later in the same chapter, Coleridge suggests a procedure for thinking about difference: The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy.
It seems to us that De Cock has managed the first procedure, but not the second, and is therefore still in danger of thinking that the shadows of his imagination are real. His review, however, is excellent, for De Cock is an honourable man.