Domenico Quaranta, “From Worldbuilding To Worlding. On Second Order Reality”, in Daniela Cotimbo, Ilaria Gianni (eds), Second Order Reality. Carola Bonfili, NERO, Roma 2024, pp. 84-87
“The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” Heraclitus1
In his short essay “Schizofrenia & the Book of Changes”, written in 1965, writer Philip K. Dick offers some glimpses on one of the foundational concepts of his narrative: the distinction between what he calls the idios kosmos, the personal world, and the koinos kosmos, the shared world of consensus reality. Dick borrows this notion from the presocratic philosopher Heraclitus through contemporary psychology, but with a fundamental shift: while Heractlitus connects the idios kosmos to the state of dreaming asleep, and the koinos cosmos to wakefulness, Dick argues that the distinction almost disappears in so called “normal”, adult humans, surviving, in different ways, in children and schizophrenics. Differently from most life forms, whose newborns are thrust into the shared world almost immediately after their birth, according to Dick a human child “still has years of a kind of semireal existence ahead of him: semireal in the sense that until he is fifteen or sixteen years old he is able to some degree to remain not thoroughly born, not entirely on his own; fragments of the idios kosmos remain, and not all or even very much of the koinos kosmos has been forced onto him as yet”.2 The full burden of the koinos cosmos comes with psychosexual maturity, and is described as the beginning of a “long winter.” Only the schizophrenic is saved from a permanent leave, but with a price: as the private world, for him, will always fall apart, and the shared world will never be fully accessed.
Neither idios kosmos nor koinos kosmos perfectly match what we call “reality”. They are, both, ways of bringing order to the chaos of reality – one subjective, the latter collective, with consequent claims to objectivity and authenticity. They are, to use the jargon of philosopher Federico Campagna, reality-systems, “contingent conglomerates of metaphysical axioms” whose “modification is always possible”.3 Campagna calls our current, ruling reality-system – the one that has been dominant in Western countries for centuries – Technic, and finds its core features, following Martin Heidegger and others, in its reduction of reality into a “stock-pile of standing-reserve”, “the accumulated instrumental value of everything and anything”;4 and in the victory of language and information over things in themselves. Yet today, carried to its extreme consequences by liberal capitalism, this reality-system has led to a form of metaphysical nihilism, a sense of paralysis and the collapse of the very fabric of reality. The antidote to this crisis of reality is identified by Campagna in an alternative reality-system, which he calls Magic, an alternative cosmology rooted in the recognition of the ineffable dimension of reality, and its irreducibility to language and product.
Although referring to different things, Dick’s idios kosmos and Campagna’s Magic have some foundational features in common: they remind us that there is not one single World, and that, when reality collapses, there’s always a way out; that an alternative cosmology doesn’t need to be collective, shared and consensual from the start, but can be the outcome of an individual, intimate act of world building; and that all this can be better understood by younger humans, not yet stuck in the shared world we so easily confuse with reality. As Campagna writes in his second book Prophetic Culture, significantly subtitled Recreation for Adolescents: “A child’s metaphysics is radically different from that which they shall develop later in life: a cosmogonic narrative where a toy, or the darkness of a room, is endowed with agency and entitled to constant negotiations, is an ‘otherworld’ to a cosmos where the boundaries of life and non-life, reality and un-reality are more harshly delineated.” Then, as Dick also noticed, this otherworld collapses, and “the young adolescent, as a post-apocalyptic subject, has to make do with any precarious form of worlding that they may be able to devise. They scavenge among the ruins of the lost world of childhood, searching for some inspiration; or they resort to imitating just about any available metaphysical narration, in the hope of a pseudomorphosis.”5
Dick returns to the concepts of idios and koinos cosmos in 1975, in a letter to Malcolm Edwards. There, discussing his novel Ubik, he borrows from Edwards the idea of the existence of “shared idios kosmos-es”,6 that we could describe as manufactured realities that offer the illusion of a common world, without being one; collective hallucinations, forged by the state (as in Ubik) or by other subjects interested in taking advantage from the disorientation and lack of stable references in post-apocalyptic subjects. It’s exactly here, upon the ruins of our former reality-system (or koinos kosmos), under the influence and the potential threat of “any precarious form of worlding”, that resorting to our individual inner world, or involving children in strategies of worldbuilding, can become a crucial strategy for shaping the future. It’s here that Carola Bonfili, with her project Second Order Reality, joins Dick and Campagna in turning worldbuilding – a strategy commonly used in narrative and videogames to design fantasy worlds to inhabit and interact with – from a form of escapism out of the desert of the real into proper worlding, that is the shaping of a new reality-system.
Second Order Reality started as a short narrative loosely inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony, yet evolved into its current status through a series of workshops that involved teens and preteens. It’s there that the story of the Mirror Giant – carving masks that change the identity of those wearing them – spawns the Stone Monkey and branches out into a new, unexpected story line: the one of the little monkey who faces the tragedy of her own transformation into stone and survives it by listening to the music that takes shape in her head, triggered by her casual interactions with the world. The story later evolved into a deliberately fragmented storytelling, including a CGI video conceived as a videogame trailer, a virtual reality environment, a series of concrete sculpture reminding action figures and other ones recalling physical renders, digital objects used in 3D modeling to display texture samples; and, finally, with an installation paying a tribute to Walt Disney’s Multiplane Crate,7 a device using sliding glass plates and a moving camera to add three-dimensionality and realism to old fashioned, analogue animation.
One may wonder why a work that finds its roots in children’s propension for magical thinking, and their native ability to shift out of consensual reality into alternative worlds, ends up paying so many tributes to mainstream, commercial (and commodified) culture, and to the hyped outcomes of a technological culture so entangled with what Campagna calls the reality-system of Technic, from VR to videogames. One answer may be found in the cosmogonic potential of entertainment, as well as gaming and simulation technologies;8 another one in their propension for immersion, that allows the participants – formerly known as spectators – to evade from the plethora of stimuli flooding them in the polluted contemporary information ecosystem – and to focus on the constructed world they’re temporarily inhabiting, or on their inner world. Finally, another answer may lie in their abilities to generate imaginaries that, outside of any copyright regime, younger generations are able to inhabit as if they were places, and cultivate as if they were gardens, generating subcultures and fandoms that expand much beyond the narrow limits of the original artifact, just like lush tropical rainforests.
One thing is for sure: the Stone Monkey is now flesh and fur again. All but one paw. And that’s perfectly fine.
1 John Burnet (ed.), Early Greek Philosophy, A. & C. Black, London 1920, p. 140, fragment n. 95.
2 Philip K. Dick, “Schizofrenia & the Book of Changes”, 1965. Published in Lawrence Sutin (ed.), The shifting realities of Philip K. Dick. Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, Pantheon Books, New York 1995, p. 175.
3 Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic. The Reconstruction of Reality, Bloomsbury, London 2018, p. 7.
4 Ivi, p. 24.
5 Federico Campagna, Prophetic Culture. Recreation for Adolescents, Bloomsbury, London 2021, pp. 19-20.
6 Philip K. Dick, “Letter to Malcolm Edwards”, January 29, 1975. In Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York 2011. Edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem.
7 Cf. “Walt Disney’s MultiPlane Camera (Filmed: Feb. 13, 1957)”. https://youtu.be/YdHTlUGN1zw.
8 As Campagna himself recognizes in his podcast series Overmorrow’s Library: https://overmorrows-library.simplecast.com.