Web viewThe World Wrestling Federation, or WWF, was the name of Vince McMahon, Jr.’s northeastern wrestling promotion from 1979 until 2002. Prior to McMahon Jr.’s

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It’s Still Real to Me, Dammit! Performed Ontologies and Professional Wrestling

DRAFT: NOT INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION

Neal Hebert

Ph.D. Candidate (Theatre History), Louisiana State University

Jon Cogburn

Associate Professor (Philosophy), Louisiana State University

American Society for Theatre Research

Performance and Philosophy Working Group

10/01/2013

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On November 9, 1997, the 20,593 professional wrestling fans who packed Montreal’s

Molson Centre—plus approximately another million fans watching around the globe on

pay-per-view—gathered together to watch the World Wrestling Federation’s Survivor

Series Pay Per View.1 The majority of the show proceeded as expected with nothing

amiss, the standard progression of matches, improvised skits, and direct address

monologues that jointly comprise the spectacle of contemporary professional wrestling.

Sometimes the heroes prevailed against villainous adversity, and sometimes they failed to

overcome the odds against them but nonetheless vowed revenge. Things changed in the

marquee match, or main event, of the show, however. The outcome of the fight between

Canadian hero and reigning WWF Champion Bret “The Hitman” Hart and “The

Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels would change professional wrestling forever. This

event, later christened The Montreal Screwjob, would make explicit the implicit

conditions of possibility for the instantiation of professional wrestling’s fictional

ontology and in so doing radically alter that ontology.2

1 The World Wrestling Federation, or WWF, was the name of Vince McMahon, Jr.’s northeastern wrestling promotion from 1979 until 2002. Prior to McMahon Jr.’s purchase of the promotion between 1979-1980, it was called the World Wide Wrestling Federation, and was promoted by Vincent McMahon, Sr. From 2002 until the present McMahon Jr. renamed the company the World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE. This change was not McMahon’s choice: in 2002 the World Wildlife Fund successfully sued McMahon and his company for trademark violation. According to a deal McMahon signed with the World Wildlife Fund, the initials “WWF” were the exclusive trademark of the World Wildlife Fund within Europe. McMahon’s Web site, WWF.com, and company logo from 1999-2002 both violated this agreement, and the company was ordered to change its trademarking. Throughout this paper, we refer to Vince McMahon’s company as the WWWF if we are referring to events that occurred between the company’s establishment in 1963 and its namechange in 1979, the WWF if we are referring to events that occurred between 1979-2002, and WWE if we are referring to events that occurred between 2002 and the present.2 At the outset we should note that throughout this paper we will follow analytic philosophers who tend to use “ontology” and “metaphysics” interchangeably to denote our theories of the nature of reality, though our preferred usage would be that “ontology” denotes answering the three kinds of questions raised in Section III of this paper and “metaphysics” denotes the study of what reality must be like such that one’s answers to these questions are true. Analytic philosophers differ from Heideggerian usage, for whom the ontological concerns being while the merely ontic concerns particular beings. What Heidegger actually meant by “the problem of being” is rich, multi-faceted, and probably actually names several distinct philosophical problematics (cf. Herman Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being). In contrast with Austrian phenomenologists who saw their labor as a necessary precursor to metaphysics, Heidegger and the French phenomenologists who followed him came to be sharply critical of “metaphysics,” though they tend to identify this with a manner of thinking that historically leads to an overly reductionistic scientific world

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In what follows we will argue that spectators of contemporary professional

wrestling must keep track of two competing ontologies, which we label “work” and

“shoot,” the former being the reality presupposed by the fictional elements of the

performance and the latter being the facets of the actual world that make the performance

possible. As we will show, even prior to the Screwjob, anyone who knew that the

outcomes of the matches were predetermined was forced to view a professional wrestling

performance through these inconsistent lenses. But only after the Screwjob did aspects of

the shoot ontology recursively nest within the work ontology. This leads to a new kind of

incoherence in the work ontology itself, one arguably paradigmatic with respect to all of

our postmodern interactions with reality. If this is correct, then professional wrestling is

not just something of which one can develop a metaphysical account, but is rather

metaphysics itself.

I. The Montreal Screwjob and Why it Matters

Viewers of the 1997 Survivor Series Pay Per View knew that Hart, despite spending

more than a decade with Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation, had been

released from his WWF contract and would soon wrestle exclusively for the rival

wrestling promotion World Championship Wrestling. Although less than a year before

Hart gave an emotional speech live on Monday Night Raw affirming that he had signed a

WWF contract guaranteeing his employment for the next 20 years (with a rumored salary

view (for an excellent discussion of how Heidegger’s critique of this is central to the so-called Kehre, see Mark Okrent’s Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics). Just to forestall confusion, we should note that we both endorse Heidegger’s critique of objective presence and the manner in which this critique undermines scientistic reductionism, but (with Graham Harman in his Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects) we do not think that either of these things undermine metaphysics understood in the traditional manner. Rather, they show that normative questions lie at the very heart of correct metaphysics. Our discussion below is entirely consistent with this.

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of $1 million per year as the downside guarantee), WWF chairman Vince McMahon

released Hart from his contract because of the company’s inability to honor the contract

given a lack of revenue. As such, Hart was allowed to enter negotiations with Eric

Bischoff’s World Championship Wrestling and jump promotions without a non-compete

clause—which meant Hart could immediately begin appearing on television for the rival

wrestling company.

After receiving an offer of nearly $3 million each year of guaranteed money from

World Championship Wrestling, Hart gave his notice to the WWF while WWF

champion. Hart was scheduled to become an active member of the WCW within a few

weeks. DUring this time, the real-life promotional war between the WWF and WCW had

caused numerous wrestlers to jump from one promotion to the other, and Hart was by far

the highest profile performer to change companies. Other wrestlers, who had switched

promotions while holding championships had done storylines disgracing the belts, and

WWF Chairman Vince McMahon reportedly feared Hart would do the same.3 Thus, in

the main event of Survivor Series 1997, McMahon colluded with referee Earl Hebner and

Michaels to double-cross Hart during the match. When Michaels placed Hart in Hart’s

own signature submission maneuver, the sharpshooter, McMahon signaled the ref to end

the match prematurely, ensuring Hart’s defeat and guaranteeing that Hart would not leave

the WWF as its heavyweight champion. Hart, furious and disbelieving, began destroying

the ring, set, and cameras surrounding the ring to the crowd’s vocal approval. Before the

pay per view went off the air, Hart spit in the face of WWF chairman Vince McMahon—

3 Debrah Anne Micelli, who wrestled as Madusa (shortened from “Made in the USA”) in the American Wrestling Alliance, the National Wrestling Alliance, and World Championship Wrestling, and as Alundra Blayze in the World Wrestling Federation, did just that when she jumped ship from the World Wrestling Federation to World Championship Wrestling: on the December 18, 1995 edition of WCW’s Monday Nitro, Micelli threw her WWF Women’s Championship belt into a garbage can on live television. Micelli wrestled for WCW until 2001, then began a separate career as a monster truck driver.

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who, at that time, was in WWF storylines only an announcer rather than an authority

figure—and began tracing the initials “WCW” (for World Championship Wrestling)

while standing in the WWF ring surrounded by the property he had just destroyed.

None of the above likely sounds that unusual to most individuals casually familiar

with professional wrestling—wrestling shows always have bad guys (“heels,” in

wrestling’s carnie argot) cheating to defeat good guys (“babyfaces”). Unlike these other

scripted incidents, however, the Montreal Screwjob was not part of the planned show’s

storylines, nor was Hart aware of what would happen. Instead, the Screwjob—the most

famous in-ring double-cross in professional wrestling history—was “real” life played out

in-ring and onscreen. Unlike prior true double-crossings4 where the public never figured

out that something untoward happened, the actual double-cross behind the Montreal

Screwjob was openly acknowledged on WWF television and became a key storyline after

the incident. Its subsequent influence on the performance of professional wrestling is

impossible to misinterpret, and the event’s later incorporation into storylines led to the

WWF’s greatest successes in both attendance and ticket sales.

From the perspective of the philosophy of art, what is most significant about the

profoundly postmodern moment of the Montreal Screwjob is that it is a paradigm

example of how a practice can perform both its fictional storyline as well as the material

pre-conditions that allow for that storyline’s performances. Professional wrestling is not

unique in the extent to which propositions articulating the material preconditions can

4 There are numerous examples of this throughout wrestling history. We would like to direct your attention to two famous examples that help historicize this event: the 1985 WWF women’s championship match between then WWF Women’s champion Wendi Richter and The Spider Lady (legendary women’s wrestler and “shooter” The Fabulous Moolah under a mask) that ended when the Spider Lady rolled up Richter in a move called a small package and the referee quickly counted to three despite Richter “kicking out” of the pinfall attempt; and the 1925 championship match between Stanislau Zybyszko and Wayne Munn, which Zybszko won after “shooting” on Munn, legitimately pinning the world champion after agreeing to lose to him in the behind-the-scenes negotiations for the match.

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directly contradict the very storylines being performed. What is unique about post

Montreal Screwjob professional wrestling is the extent to which viewers must be able to

track this contradictory reality in order to follow the storylines themselves. Shockingly,

this will entail that spectators must constantly balance two ontologies in order for

professional wrestling to succeed as an artistic genre. We dub these competing ontologies

the “shoot” (i.e., the reality of the performers behind the storylines) ontology and the

“work” (i.e., the fictional account of what’s going on in storyline) ontology.

To appreciate professional wrestling in the wake of the Montreal Screwjob, an

audience member, much like audiences of professional wrestling throughout the 20th

century, must be able to grasp its identity and individuation conditions as in other arts.

But unlike more traditional arts—be they pop art, mass art, or high art—professional

wrestling in the wake of the Montreal Screwjob demands different paradigms of

spectatorship that have been naturalized within audiences since 1997. After the Screwjob,

every single performance of professional wrestling is intimately engaged in questioning,

complicating, and reinscribing its identity conditions as it plays with audiences’ abilities

to distinguish between reality, the scripted event, and the material and political forces

shaping the writing of the scripts that govern the event in question. Where once wrestling

was predetermined sport, since 1997 wrestling is and can only be meta-theatrical in

performance.

We contend that the differing ontologies operative within professional wrestling

have a meaningful impact on the types of spectatorships necessary to enjoy these

performances. In this paper we will begin the task of providing an ontology of

professional wrestling. Any such theory will be complicated by how spectatorship has

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changed in the aftermath of the Montreal Screwjob given the way the Screwjob has

redefined the genre-relevant norms of professional wrestling. Because of this sea-change

we contend that for an audience to appreciate post-1997 professional wrestling’s

performance any attempt to articulate the aesthetic ontologies of contemporary

professional wrestling (identity and diversity) must be accompanied by a concomitant

account of the competing ontologies that inform contemporary professional wrestling’s

spectatorship.

II. Key Categories

In order to present our argument to the conclusion that spectators of professional

wrestling are actually watching two competing ontologies, we must first delineate some

of the key categories. We will begin by clarifying what it is that we mean when we refer

to professional wrestling and many of its key technical terms: match, moves, referee,

promotion, booker, storyline, card, babyface, heel, entrance, promos, skits, merchandise,

shoot, work, and mark. Rather than attempting to provide necessary and sufficient

conditions for all of these concepts, we will begin by implicitly defining them via a more

narrative description of the practice. If a person were to tune into an episode of World

Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship show Monday Night Raw at 8:00 PM each Monday

night, or Total Nonstop Action’s TNA Impact show any Thursday at 8:00 PM, what

follows would almost certainly be true of the events that they would see.

At its most basic level, professional wrestling is a simulation of an athletic contest

(specifically a fight) between at least two performers: the performers are referred to as

wrestlers, while the simulation is commonly referred to as a match. Within each match

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wrestlers frequently subject each other to strikes using their feet, hands, and joints (such

as elbows and knees), submission holds that appear to put performers limbs and joints

under stress while nonetheless keeping an opponent’s face and body visible to audiences

and cameras, and assorted other simulated attacks, often referred to as “moves.”

Wrestlers typically pull their strikes, feign submission holds’ lethality, and fall in such a

way that the impact of their bodies on the canvas is evenly distributed throughout their

body and thus less painful, but this is far from a painless event. While wrestlers minimize

the damage done to each others’ bodies, no amount of care can prevent injuries from

accruing given the nature of the performances on display.5 These maneuvers are read as

having a certain “meaning” in the match, largely determined by the context within which

the move is done.

One example of this would be a punch: in professional wrestling in America since

the mid-1990s, punching has been a “legal” maneuver in professional wrestling and a

staple of most professional wrestling matches. In All Japan Professional Wrestling’s

6/3/1994 match between Toshiaki Kawada and Mitsuharu Misawa for the Triple Crown

world championship, however, Kawada only punches Misawa after thirty minutes of

wrestling. Although this move frequently begins any number of other matches, given the

context of the championship match in Tokyo and the pride of both performers to win the

move meant something decidedly different than it would have had it opened the match.

On that night and at that time, Kawada’s punch to Misawa—the only punch in the nearly

40 minute match—performed his desperation to hurt his opponent. It was only part of a

5 There is, ultimately, no truly safe way to wrestle given the types of performances that occur in matches. Although wrestling’s travails with steroids and other performance enhancing drugs have made news since the late 1980s, less attention has been paid to the chemical dependency issues that plague both active and retired wrestlers. When tallying only former WWF/E performers, 48 wrestlers have died before reaching the age of 50. In many (if not most) of these cases, the cause of death (where a cause of death is released) is typically either steroids, prescription pain pill overdoes, or a combination of the two.

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sequence of strikes wherein Kawada used every offensive strike in his arsenal of

maneuvers to try to hurt his rival, and the crowd in the Tokyo Nippon Budokan grew so

excited that the thousands of fans in attendance began stomping their feet on the concrete

floor in appreciation.

Frequently, a match occurs before a live audience, although this is not necessarily

true of all matches.6 Often, these performances involve at least one other performer who

simulates officiating the athletic contest by enforcing its (sometimes) nebulously-defined

rules: the referee.7 Matches rarely occur in isolation when they are performed. Although

single matches might have been put on as a complete performance early in the late 19th

and early 20th centuries when championship matches could last for up to four hours,

presently companies produce a slate of matches that are jointly labeled a card: audiences

buy tickets to see a group of matches performed by a single producing entity.

The producing entity is understood to be a company or “promotion” by audiences;

performers are signed exclusively to a given promotion, and their matches can almost

always only be seen on shows that are produced by a given promotion. This promotion—

whether through a single storyline writer (called “booker” in wrestling’s carnie argot) or

through an entire writing team dedicated to this purpose—determines the creative

direction of the company: this means that the situations that lead to matches, the results of

the matches, and the characters portrayed by the performers in matches are all 6 In the Memphis territory, Memphis Championship Wrestling, Jerry Lawler and Terry Funk had one of the most famous matches that did not take place in front of a live crowd: the “Empty Arena” match of 1981 that was only aired on television. In 1999, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Mick “Mankind” Foley had a similar match that was taped in an empty arena and aired during the 1999 Superbowl’s halftime show on television only.7 Some matches, that are presented as “unsanctioned” matches, certain “street fights,” or matches that are otherwise “too dangerous” for a company to allow to appear on their television, do not have a referee to preserve the illusion that these matches are solely to settle a private issue between performers rather than a part of the show—even if the matches air on television of pay per view. Obviously, this is a fiction within the storyline given that these matches are invariably integrated into shows such that audiences can buy tickets or tune into specific television shows or pay per views to watch these unsanctioned matches.

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predetermined or fictions created by the producing entity. The booker or writing team

decides which wrestlers are champions, whether matches are championship matches

(matches where championships can change hands), and why any number of wrestlers are

wrestling each other rather than anyone else (“feuding”).

Although a given card might have eight matches, each of those matches is—on a

well-booked show—expected to serve a different role. An opening match is frequently

designed to excite a given crowd. Sometimes it does this through acrobatic maneuvers;

sometimes it does this through the pace at which the wrestlers do maneuvers; or

sometimes it does this by showcasing a fan-favorite wrestler. Using our eight match show

as a hypothetical example, subsequent matches would feature virtuous wrestlers

(“babyfaces”) in contests against evil (“heel”) wrestlers. After the opening match, the

show will “slow down” by featuring slower-paced, less exciting matches to avoid

exhausting the crowd. After the opener, subsequent matches should consistently

crescendo until the final match of the evening to ensure that the main event match

receives the strongest reaction.

The above, of course, is only part of the story. While it certainly accounts for

much of the content of a given evening of professional wrestling, it does not account for

all of the things one sees at a live event or on television. The wrestler’s entrances to the

arena, irrespective of whether one is discussing their arrival to wrestle a match or to

simply appear before a crowd, are also an integral part of professional wrestling: music,

masculinist/feminist posturing, pyrotechnics, and dance are all synthesized into the short

performances that accompany wrestlers’ appearance on stage. Moreover, sometimes

wrestlers appear in the ring within which matches are contested with a microphone:

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rather than engaging in a physical contest, the wrestlers perform direct address

monologues to the crowd or verbally duel a future opponent (wrestlers deem the act of

performing a monologue or an improvised scene “cutting a promo”). Shows frequently

supplement the matches with improvised skits between multiple wrestlers (either

backstage or in the ring), advertisements for wrestling-related merchandise (such as

replica championship belts, apparel, or DVDs of past wrestling events/matches), video

packages that summarize prior storylines, and assorted other things. Given all of the

above, it becomes possible for someone to say that they watched wrestling for three hours

despite their being, perhaps, only a few minutes of actual wrestling within the context of

a match (or matches).8

Much of the way wrestlers and fans talk about the practice comes from the argot

of 19th Century travelling carnivals, which often had simulated fights between an evil

strongman and a carnival employee pretending to be a local who would defend the honor

of the locale in which the carnival was performing. In carnival argot, a work is any

performance or trick that constitutively involves the audience’s ignorance. Audience

members who are fooled by the work (for example those who believe that the outcome of

the staged fights are not predetermined) are known as marks. In contemporary

professional wrestling performers are often called workers and the notion of a work is

often contrasted with that of a shoot, where a shoot fight is non-scripted and without a

pre-determined outcome.

III. Two Ontologies8 According to Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer, the 3/1/2010 edition of WWE’s Monday Night Raw contained only 16 minutes and 35 seconds of actual wrestling. The remaining time of the show was dedicated to interviews, monologues, skits, video packages, and the like. Throughout much of 2010, both WWE and TNA relied primarily on non-wrestling content to fill their shows.

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When analytic philosophers attempt to provide an ontology9 of some genre of art they are

trying to isolate the features of entities that make them instances of categories relevant to

that genre. Isolating such features typically requires answering three questions: (1)

individuation (what differentiates entities of the relevant kind from each other and entities

of other kinds?), (2) persistence (in virtue of what are entities of the relevant kind self-

identical over time?), and (3) normativity (in virtue of what are different objects better

and worse instances of the relevant kinds?).

While these clearly don’t nearly exhaust all of the philosophical questions one can

and should ask about various artworks, proponents of the centrality of ontology think that

these questions are fundamental in the sense that answering other questions will be

parasitic on them. For example, consider the debauched immoralist who claims that

movies that celebrate cruelty should be aesthetically cherished in virtue of celebrating

cruelty. An ethicist responding to this will do a much better job if she is familiar with the

genre relevant properties of movies. Are films really the kind of thing that celebrate or

encourage character traits such as cruelty? Is it even possible for a film to have this kind

of property? Assuming that there is a subgenre of films that manage to do this, what

differentiates instances of those films from other kinds of films? These simply are

questions of type (1) and (2). Finally, addressing type (3) questions will tell us what it

would be for such a film to succeed aesthetically. Answering these questions won’t

9 One can make all sorts of Whig histories leading up to the current resurgence in metaphysics among analytic philosophers. One canonical text that occurs in perhaps all such histories is P.F. Strawson’s 1959 Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Strawson’s “descriptive metaphysics” is an attempted articulation of the picture of reality supposedly presupposed by our common conceptual scheme. He contrasted this with “revisionary metaphysics” which might seek to change the way we think about the world. Pace Strawson, we find all metaphysics proper to be at least potentially revisionary, just because the metaphysician is interested in what there is as well as how it is and how it should be. And following Nietzsche’s original programmatic hermeneutics of suspicion, our explanatory job with respect to an age’s common sense might very well explain why its presuppositions are both widely held and false.

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automatically determine where we should stand on issues of moralism and immoralism,

but (in addition to clarity about a bevy of ontological issues about human beings more

generally) they are prerequisites for the debate to get started.10

Before continuing we should note that the looseness, imprecision, and pragmatic

infelicity of many applications fundamental ontological categories (e.g. individuation,

identity, and normativity) is neither a bar to doing ontology11 nor something on its own

that requires replacement via a more precise language such as logic.12 Rather, the proper

metaphysical response to varieties of under-determination is to try to discern what reality

must be like such that our non-philosophical and ontological discourses involving

identity, individuation, and norms succeed and fail in exactly the way that they do. For

example, what must the world be like so that we can communicate as if word meanings

individuate in determinate ways, given that they manifestly do not.13 But we cannot really

understand the relevant kinds of under-determination unless we vigorously study the way

individuation, identity, and normativity work with respect to these kinds.

The overlapping genres and subgenres of art for which noted contemporary

analytic philosophers have penned recent book length ontologies include: mass art, horror

10See Berys Gaut’s Art, Emotion, and Ethics for the recent canonical discussion of philosophical problems raised by possibly immoral art. 11 Anti-metaphysical trends in continental philosophy make far too much of different forms of vagueness. For a discussion and critique, see Raphaël Millière’s “Metaphysics Today and Tomorrow.” Though we have learned much from deconstructionism and the French phenomenological tradition generally, we concur with Millière’s critique.12 Building on earlier work by Bertrand Russell and Rudolph Carnap, Gustav Bergmann developed “ideal language philosophy” in texts such as 1954’s The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism and imparted this technique to a generation of students during the University of Iowa’s Department of Philosophy’s golden age. Recent work in this vein tends to take its impetus from W.V. O. Quine’s quip in 1953’s From a Logical Point of View that “to be is to be the value of a bound variable.” Though we both love logic, we find metaphysics following Quine’s stricture to be just one end of a false dichotomy with the deconstructionist’s anti-metaphysics mentioned in the previous footnote on the other end. Because of the fact that varieties underdetermination is properly a spur to further metaphysics (as we go on to note in the text above), none of the important work cited in the next five footnotes labors under either Quinean or deconstructive shackles.13 Mark Wilson’s Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior is the canonical discussion of just this issue.

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movies and literature, film,14 fiction,15 jazz,16 dance,17 and video games.18 But alas,

professional wrestling has yet to find its metaphysical apologist. To provide a satisfactory

ontology of professional wrestling, one would need to begin by rigorously addressing

questions (1)-(3) with respect to the technical concepts described in the previous section.

And of course we can do nothing approaching this in one paper. However, we actually

almost already have enough on the table to show the radical aesthetic novelty of

contemporary professional wrestling. We must only complete one more bit of ontological

stage setting.

By the time Nicholas Wolterstorff published his canonical 1975 article “Toward

an Ontology of Artworks” analytic metaphysics of art had already developed a set of

broadly shared positions concerning the manner in which identity and individuation

conditions play a role in differentiating different genres of art.19 According to one part of

the consensus view, art genres divide into whether the artwork in the genre is a

“performance-work” or an “object work.” Performance-works are simply works that can

be multiply performed, where the same object (say a musical piece, dance, or play,

conceived abstractly) can be instantiated in different performances occurring at different

spaces and times. Performances themselves are discrete events spread out vaguely over

space-time. A particular performance, in its particularity occupying a region of space-

14 For the first three, see Noël Carroll’s canonical A Philosophy of Mass Art, his more focused The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, as well as The Philosophy of Motion Pictures.15 Most recent work in some manner responds to Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make Believe.16 See Robert Kraut’s Art World Metaphysics.17 See Graham McFee’s Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance.18 For a Waltonian account, see Chris Bateman’s Imaginary Games. For an account rooted in capacity metaphysics, see Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox’s Philosophy Through Video Games.19 As evidence of a consensus having developed on certain key connections between genre and individuation conditions, Wolterstorff cites R.G. Collingwood’s 1938 The Principles of Art, Margaret MacDonald’s 1952 “Art and Imagination,” R. Wellek and A. Warren’s 1956 Theory of Literature, C.L Stevenson’s 1957 “On ‘What is a Poem’?” Joseph Margolis’ 1965 The Language of Art and Art Criticism, and Andrew Harrison’s 1967 “Works of Art and Other Cultural Objects.”

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time, is not repeatable. What is repeated is the performance-work, which is an abstract

type shared by all of its performance instances. Wolterstorff notes that “The ontological

status of performances is relatively clear, however, while that of performance-work is

immensely perplexing,” and spends most of his article trying to discern an ontology of

performance-works.

For our current purposes, we needn’t address any deep metaphysical issues

involving the relation between abstract kinds and their instances. Nor do we need to

explicate the related distinction between an object-work (such as a painting, building, or

sculpture) and copies and castings of such works. Nor do we need to discuss the manner

in which literary works might be taken to be both object works and performance works.

For we already have enough on the table to make our central ontological point.

In professional wrestling, the word “match” is systematically ambiguous,

denoting incompatible ontological types, depending upon the stance taken by the

spectator towards what is occurring. To illustrate this, let us introduce two fictitious

spectators, Bubba and Ian. Bubba grew up in Montgomery, Alabama during the bucolic

1970s. Every Saturday morning he watched locally promoted wrestling on television and

argued vigorously with friends at Jefferson Davis High School who thought the outcomes

of the matches were fixed. If you go to a chicken wings restaurant that shows

professional wrestling pay per views you might end up listening to Bubba discourse

extensively about how the wrestlers of his childhood (Ric Flair, Harley Race, and Dusty

Roads) could soundly defeat the entire card of the pay per view you are watching. Bubba

is being sincere. He either has no idea that the outcomes are pre-determined and many of

the skits written by people in WWE creative, or he’s so internalized “kayfabe” (a word

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from early carny pig Latin that denotes the sacred oath not to reveal that a work is a

work) that he will not give himself over to doubt. Fans like Bubba are sadly an

endangered species, though they have been common enough in the past to be given their

own sobriquet: “southern fan” (SF). Southern fans are delightful to talk with because they

have so little aesthetic distance from the spectacle. They have not suspended disbelief,

because they believe, dammit.

Now consider Ian. Ian grew up in somewhat reduced circumstances in Montreal,

Canada. Some of his happiest memories are of his father taking him to watch “Géant

Ferré” (who would later become WWF superstar “André the Giant”) crush opponents in

the Montreal Forum. Ian is delighted when you tell him that when at the age of twelve the

real life André Roussimoff’s giganticism rendered him too big to fit on the school bus in

his childhood home of Grenoble, France, his neighbor Samuel Beckett drove him to and

from school. Ian has a Ph.D now and still enjoys the plays of Beckett, but when you have

him over to your house to watch pirated C.D.s of Japanese professional wrestling, he just

responds to the spectacle by saying things like “that’s so fake” and laughing.

While the Southern Fan has no disbelief to suspend, Ian’s response to wrestling

now is that of the Interminable Critic (IC) who brings the hermeneutics of suspicion to

bear on everything. The IC is often a lovely person in all sorts of ways, but their grasp of

the material preconditions for many performance practices often interferes radically with

their ability to enjoy those practices. The IC is as stuck in disbelief as the SF is in belief.

In truth, the vast majority of wrestling fans (F) put on both hats, as the suspension

of disbelief necessary for wrestling to work requires as much. While this is perhaps the

most pronounced with professional wrestling fans, it is not unique to wrestling. Most

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people separate out Johnny Depp from Captain Jack Sparrow, and the ontologies relevant

to both are different. But one must look to the far corners of postmodern meta-fiction20 to

find genre of art where the two stances recursively interact in the manner in which they

now standardly do in professional wrestling.

Here’s a way that professional wrestling is not like film. Were a film equivalent

of the SF (say someone who thinks Pirates of the Caribbean is veridical history) talks

about a film, their ontological presuppositions about the individuation conditions of films

are no different from that of the film equivalent of the IC. The IC would only be

interested in talking about how much history is falsified by the film. But nothing is to be

gained from the claim that the SF and the IC mean something systematically different by

“film.”

This is not the case with professional wrestling. For the SF a match is a

performance in Wolterstorff’s sense. It is a unique individual event composed of and

related to other events, all with finite though vague boundaries in space-time. But the IC,

who focuses on the non-fictional elements (including the material preconditions and the

actual states of the world that might be considered to be represented by the work) of the

practice of professional wrestling a match is a performance-kind.

[Neal- put in great stuff about the same match being performed!]

It is clear that, unlike with the case of film, the SF and IC have two ontologies,

inconsistent with one another in how they the individuation conditions of what is perhaps

the key category of professional wrestling, the match. Following the meaning of shoot

and work, by “work ontology” we mean to denote an account of the way the world would

20 NEAL- need example of novel that in some way illustrates recursive self-referential awareness of itself as a novel.

18

be if the fictional elements in wrestling were not fictional.21 In contrast, the “shoot

ontology” is an account of the way the actual world is such that all of the elements of

wrestling (fictional and non-fictional) can be performed. The SF is a mark, who does not

distinguish work from shoot. The IC is stuck on the fact that the work is a work, and

appeals to facets of the shoot ontology in her refusal to suspend disbelief.

Again, one can do something like the IC with respect to other representational

media, refusing to enjoy historical fictions that depart too much from the way we take

things to have really been. But debates between a film IC and SF will not potentially

change the SF’s ontology of film, for the fictional world of films in no way constitutively

presuppose false views about the actual nature of film. But the fictional world that the SF

wrongly takes to be actual does falsely presuppose that there is no performance-kind

notion of match. In virtue of this, the wrestling fan’s suspension of disbelief has always

had to be more sophisticated than that of other performance arts. There is just too

fundamental a metaphysical clash between the reality viewed by the disbeliever and the

fictional reality presupposed when that disbelief is suspended.

IV. The Screwjob Revisited

Now we have the machinery to understand the Montreal Screwjob, and hence, our

postmodern condition. Our three kinds of spectators (SF,IC,F) form a recursive hierarchy

of aesthetic distance. The SF has no aesthetic distance. The IC only has aesthetic

21 Note that we do not deny that a work ontology is “real.” This is not just because one of us has fairly strong ontological commitments concerning the reality of ficta. Given the physical sacrifices involved in the performances, we also find it to be astonishingly cruel to tell a wrestler that what they do is “fake.” This is exactly what David Wills was referencing when he, during a famous question and answer sessions with old and injured wrestlers he cried out “It’s still real to me Dammit!”

19

distance. The F is able to be distanced from her distance, suspending her disbelief for the

purpose of enjoying the spectacle.

However, in wrestling the F’s distanced distance is considerably complicated by

the way professional wrestling fandom works. For just as there are two notions of

“matches” there are two kinds of ontology relative “rooting.” Even the most intractable

IC, Ian from Montreal, can have happy memories about individual performers such as

André Roussimoff. For example, when Roussimoff convincingly played a gentle giant in

the Princes Bride and was then reinvented as a wrestling baby face, Ian was ecstatic.

Though Ian would not watch his wrestling matches and root for the fictional character

André the Giant, he continued to root for André Roussimoff’s success and was genuinely

sad when the health problems from Roussimoff’s acromegaly took him from us.

Normal wrestling fans end up combining the SF’s rooting for the characters to

win their matches with rooting for the performers to “get over.” [Neal- explain this!]

Again, this happens with fans of films also rooting for actors to be successful in their

personal lives and in their ability to get good roles. But it is not a constitutive part of the

aesthetic experience for film. Indeed a fan that was rooting for Johnny Depp while

watching Pirates would have a degraded aesthetic experience, since it would intrude on

her imaginative complicity with respect to the fiction. By way of contrast, the aesthetic

experience of most wrestling fans today is considerably heightened by combining the

shoot and work ontology while watching the match. [Neal- say more?]

After the Screwjob, this recursive intertwining of levels of distance gains another

level. While the F experiences little tension while inconsistently presupposing both

ontologies while rooting simultaneously for character and performer, the postmodern fan

20

(PF) is made acutely aware of the inconsistencies precisely because propositions about

the shoot ontology become presupposed in the fictional universe of the work ontology.

Prior to the Screwjob it was possible to be a SF and not miss anything going on in the

fictional world. After the screwjob this is no longer the case. [Neal- describe bit about

how the story line after the screwjob only makes sense if people have shoot ontology

knowledge inconsistent with the story line prior to the screwjob. Please also describe

how this led to McMahon as the heel boss and Steve Austin punching him.]

What is distinctive of the PF then is a necessary suspension of the suspension of

disbelief, which is not the same as disbelief! If the F must distance herself from the IC’s

aesthetic distance, the PF must again distance herself from the F’s distanced distance.

And this is a common requirement on fandom in post Screwjob professional wrestling;

with the internet and the Wrestling Observer too many fans are obsessively following the

shoot ontology, and often the shoot ontology’s “storyline” (an attempted description of

the performer’s actual lives) is much better what the writers are coming up with at WWE.

When this tension becomes too great WWE writers will bravely contradict the previous

work storyline in a way that, as we will argue in our concluding section, forces fans face

to face with their post-modern predicament.

[Neal- Edge and Lita or some good example of where this has happened post

Screwjob. Also make it clear some ways in which professional wrestling fans are

actually fairly sophisticated. Maybe bring in deconstruction of gender norms, satire

of political movements, etc. and footnote your own work, even unfinished

dissertation!]

21

V. Chiasmatic Postscript

One of the most compelling characters in the Judeo-Christian religious milieu is Jacob,

renamed Israel (“he who struggles with God”), who wrestles all night with a figure

indeterminate between man, angel, and God. This creature can’t defeat Jacob, so at the

end of the match he pulls a typical heel move, gratuitously injuring Jacob’s thigh. And let

us be absolutely clear about this. Using magic powers to injure an opponent is at least not

in the spirit of fair play as encoded in the rules of professional wrestling.22

The problem here is much worse than the normal one of the referee looking away

as the heel cheats. For if it might be God that Jacob is wrestling with, and the entire Old

Testament is the story of God’s belated and often sorry attempts to be a good referee for

the entire universe.23 But for familiar reasons one cannot be both participant and referee.

If one can change the rules to suit oneself whenever it is advantageous, then there is no

content whatsoever to the notion of a rule. Is it then any wonder that the true nature of

Jacob’s opponent is a metaphysically indeterminate man/angel/God, or that at the end of

the passage (Genesis 32:22-32) Jacob is able to demand a blessing from this creature? Is

it any wonder that in the Jewish ordering of the Old Testament books God’s very last

appearance among us is his temper tantrum response to Job (e.g. “Have you made a pet of

Leviathon for your daughters” (Job 41))? God can only cease being a monstrous

man/angel/god heel when he departs. His blessing of both Jacob and Job is to leave them

alone. And only here does God’s final turn become apparent, now as an eternal baby

22 23 See Jack Miles’ God: A Biography.

22

face,24 like famed luchador El Santo, who of metaphysical necessity can never be

unmasked.

If there is anything to the so-called “postmodern turn” it is that Jacob’s story is

everyone’s. The entities we wrestle with are revealed to be fictions, absent, but no less

real for all of that. To consider the possible ubiquity of this we must turn back to the

standard view of the nineteenth century hermeneuts of suspicion: Nietzsche, Marx, and

Freud. All in their own ways attempted to elucidate the material preconditions for

people’s commitment to religious ontology. That is, they sought to buttress a work

ontology with a shoot ontology, not explaining why the actual world is as described by

the work ontology but rather giving an ontological account of what reality must be like

such that people are led to embrace the work ontology in the first place.

It should be clear here that the stereo-typical religious believer is SF while the

debunking hermeneut of suspicion is IC. Most people never attain the epistemic

sophistication of the normal wrestling fan. In fact David Hume’s admission that he

forgets his skeptical philosophy while drinking beer and shooting billiards is precisely the

admission that he vacillates between SF and IC. But what would the F be here? Someone

whose philosophy leads her to suspend disbelief without really believing in any robust

sense. Faithfulness, after all, is not reducible to the desiccated philosopher’s picture of

faith as believing a proposition for which one has little evidence.25 Pace the 19th century

hermeneuts of suspicion, we suspect that this most charitably describes the vast majority

24 We can’t be the only ones who found deep insight in the dinner table theological discussion in the movie “Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Ricky Bobby can only pray to his vision of the baby Jesus. Literal baby faces are themselves metaphysically impossible, somehow Winston Churchill made cute and lovable.25 We should note that we do not think this epistemic stance is proscribed by the Roman Catholic tradition or liberal forms of Protestantism. Philosophers gravitate to conservative Protestant accounts of faith as believing in some proposition without sufficient evidence precisely because contemporary philosophers are so concerned over what beliefs are true.

23

of actual religious “believers” who are fans, not southern fans. However, in some ways

this kind of fanship is different from that of professional wrestling. The professional

wrestling fan embraces both the shoot and work ontology while rooting for

performer/characters. It is not clear to us what a religious analogy would be.

But the PF is arguably the central figure of contemporary radical theology. If

Nietzsche is correct that the Christian valorization of truth leads to embracing a shoot

ontology inconsistent with the Christian work ontology, then the Christian can only stay

Christian by articulating an inconsistent work ontology, exactly as is being done (for

these very reasons) by postmodern theologians such as John Caputo.26 Caputo’s absent

God who insists but does not exist is motivated precisely by a fidelity and moral

temperament he takes to be essential to Christianity.

Following contemporary radical theologians, we posit that postmodernism proper

is always the result of the inscription of a practice’s shoot ontology into its work ontology

in a way inconsistent with the work ontology. But this does not destroy the work

ontology precisely because there is no alternative. [Neal. Put in thing from book about

postmodernism. Don’t worry about tying it back to Wolterstorff.] To the extent that

there is a “postmodern condition” then, it is because of the ubiquity and necessity of

contemporary professional wrestling spectatorship practices in educated society at large.

The manner in which aspects of a shoot ontology inconsistent with a work

ontology become constitutive of that very work ontology iterates. Remember that SF

takes the work ontology to be a shoot! But what then of IC’s shoot ontology? Might it

also be a work in some deep sense? Perhaps one embraces the postmodern condition

precisely when one realizes that a given shoot is also a work. That is, whatever

26 See for example, Caputo’s recent The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps.

24

hermeneutics of suspicion leads one to see one’s favored work ontology as a mere work

will also double back on the very shoot ontology being used to show that the work is a

fiction. In the case of wrestling, we note that one’s identity as a performer performing a

character also involves performing the very identity as a performer. But this realization

radically alters how one views so-called “real sports” as one begins to see the extent to

which the athletes themselves are characters. This of course leads to Howard Cosell’s

epiphany that “Professional wrestling is the only real sport,” [Neal. Put in correct quote,

which is much funnier than this, and citation.] precisely because it forces the fans to

confront the fact that a work is a work.

But here is the tension. If it is clear that a work is a work, then the work is in great

danger of no longer working as a work. The wrestling fan must persist in this chronic

instability, and commentators worry about the future of the practice as a result of this.

[Neal, put in guy ripping on way Daniel Bryant is being marketed.] But this may be

absolutely general. That is if postmodernism is true, we all must persist in the same

chronic instability.

We would like to conclude with the above thought about the possible ubiquity of

professional wrestling spectatorship norms, but we must issue one final clarification.

Nothing we have said is a concession to relativism, which is just the reduction of

everything to sociology. Clearly, if sociology is a work, then you can’t reduce everything

to it. Moreover the postmodern realization of the ubiquity of fictional elements only leads

skepticism or relativism if one’s philosophy of fiction dictates that fiction does not reveal

anything about the actual world, the world there before there were any people and that

will remain after we are all gone. While the equation of fictional and “unreal” has been a

25

shibboleth of contemporary debunking “theory” at least since the 1980s and is

presupposed among contemporary analytic “fictionalist” anti-metaphysicians, we find it

to be radically implausible.27

This is exactly where metaphysics must buttress ontological investigation. If the

PF is the epistemic exemplar of our age, what does this reveal about non-epistemic

reality? Metaphysics here might very well be the frustrated attempt to discern a final

shoot ontology to explains all works. But if the postmodernist is correct that such a thing

is of necessity itself a work, this must be understood to reflect something fundamental

about reality without humans. The end of this paper is no place to address this question,

but we should note that much recent European speculative metaphysics can be

reconfigured so that one might understand it as situating itself precisely in this problem

space.28 While we have said nothing to address this problem, we are happy to have shown

the manner in which professional wrestling is a paradigm case of it. Anyone who doubts

that there is (actual) truth in fiction will themselves have to wrestle with what we have

said.29

27 For an extended critique of this see Jon Cogburn and Mark Ohm’s “Towards an Object-Oriented Literary Theory.”28 For some relevant discussion of how speculative realism and object-oriented ontology are instances of this see again Jon Cogburn and Mark Ohm’s “Towards an Object-Oriented Literary Theory” as well as Graham Harman’s contrast of his own view with that of Quentin Meillassoux’s in Harman’s Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Harman’s discussion of how he and Meillassoux each keep and externalize distinct aspects of our Kantian heritage is beautiful. Harman keeps Kantian finitude and begins the construction of a metaphysics by de-anthropomorphizing it. If understood in a Sartrean context, Meillassoux can be seen as doing something analogous with respect to freedom, which is likewise de-anthropomorphized, argued to hold as the radical contingency of the non-human universe. 29 We dedicate this paper to Ian Crystal, who would have found it hilarious and also help to make it much more so.

26

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