1

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

2

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,

however, in the marquee match (or main event) of the show. 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

3

In what follows we 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.3 Although less than a year before

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.3 World Championship Wrestling (hereafter WCW), was owned by Ted Turner from its inception in 1990 to its purchase by Vince McMahon’s WWF in 2001. This purchase became possible when Jim Crockett Promotions (JCP), a wrestling promotion based out of North Carolina that eventually controlled the international National Wrestling Alliance, went bankrupt attempting to challenge McMahon’s newly-formed, newly national World Wrestling Federation. Turner purchased JCP because wrestling programming had been a key ingredient to the success of Turner Broadcasting Service’s TBS Superstation.

4

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

of $1.5 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 $2.5 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.4 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

At the time of the Screwjob, WCW, and its ascendant executive producer Eric Bischoff, had been given unlimited financial resources by TBS and Time Warner to directly compete with the WWF. Bischoff and other decision makers in WCW would often speak publicly of their desire to drive the WWF out of business.4 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.

5

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—

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 particularly 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-crossings5 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.

5 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.

6

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

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—post-Screwjob

professional wrestling 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

7

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

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

8

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 (or, in the case of the WWE alone, male performers are called “Superstars” and

female performers are called “Divas”), while the simulation is commonly referred to as a

match. Within each match 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 performed 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.6

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 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.

9

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

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 upon realizing that Kawada would risk an illegal strike to injure his opponent 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.7 Often, these performances involve at least one other performer who

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

rules: the referee.8 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,

7 In the Memphis territory, Memphis Championship Wrestling, Jerry “The King” 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.8 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.

10

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

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,” commonly, although in prior eras

performers engaged in a long-term program would refer to this phenomenon as being

“married” to each other).

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

11

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 or appear before the

crowd at the spot where they enter the arena with a microphone: 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).9

9 According to Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer, the 3/1/2010 edition of WWE’s Monday Night Raw, for example, 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. The opposite seems to be occurring for WWE events in 2013.

12

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 Ontologies

When analytic philosophers attempt to provide an ontology10 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?).

10 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.

13

While these clearly do not 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 will not

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

(or whether we should take a stand at all), 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.11

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 ontology12 nor something on its own

that requires replacement via a more precise language such as logic.13 Rather, the proper

11See Berys Gaut’s Art, Emotion, and Ethics for the recent canonical discussion of philosophical problems raised by possibly immoral art. 12 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 deconstruction and the French phenomenological tradition generally, we concur with Millière’s critique.13 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

14

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.14 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

movies and literature, film,15 fiction,16 jazz,17 dance,18 and video games.19 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

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.14 Mark Wilson’s Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior is the canonical discussion of just this issue.15 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.16 Most recent work in some manner responds to Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make Believe.17 See Robert Kraut’s Art World Metaphysics.18 See Graham McFee’s Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance.19 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.

15

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.20 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-

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 need not 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

20 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.”

16

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.21

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 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 there is nothing to disbelieve, 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

21 It is worth pointing out that, since two of the three names listed as favorites of Bubba were all prominent bookers of professional wrestling while active performers, such beliefs seem to be empirically justifiable given how tough these wrestlers appeared to be throughout their careers.

17

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 (yes, that 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 video tapes or

DVDs 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 his or her

grasp of the material preconditions for many performance practices often interferes

radically with his or her 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

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-fiction22 to

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

now standardly do in professional wrestling.

22 In fiction, one recent paradigm example of just this is Jeff VanderMeer’s short story collection City of Saints and Madmen. The book’s typesetting, illustrations, and strategies of text delivery all work in concert to draw attention to the formal properties of literature as a discursive body of texts and the physical book’s status as an object-work.

18

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. This, of course, has real

bearing on how we understand professional wrestling. Although fans in the present are

conditioned to believe that the only results that matter occur on television, this was not

always a norm of professional wrestling performance. In the 1970s and throughout much

of the 1980s, wrestling television shows were not a revenue stream because, unlike today,

promotions did not receive money from TV stations to put on a wrestling show in

exchange for drawing a reliable audience of fans to increase Nielsen ratings: rather,

television shows were most frequently a loss leader. Promotions would pay a carriage fee

to get their television show on a local network, then use that show to promote live events

throughout the geographic area that could watch the show. Thus, on TV “The Nature

Boy” Ric Flair and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat might have a confrontation that leads

19

to a title match. But to see the title match, fans would have to buy a ticket to the

promotion’s next local event. Interestingly enough, however, is that this title match might

occur at every arena that receives a promotion’s television. Thus, fans in Charlotte,

Atlanta, and Charleston might all see Ric Flair lose his NWA heavyweight championship

to Ricky Steamboat. Indeed, if a fan bought tickets and traveled to all three shows, she

would see Ric Flair “lose” his title three separate times because the same match (even if

some of the moves are different) was repeated at each show. Irrespective of the actual

moves that the performers improvised in front of three separate crowds, the matches

would end the same way.

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

inconsistent with one another in how they interpret 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 be if the fictional elements in wrestling were not fictional.23 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 (or in some cases cannot) 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

23 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 session with old and injured wrestlers, cried out “It’s still real to me Dammit!”

20

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 the

postmodern condition of post-Screwjob professional wrestling. 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 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 to “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

21

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

sad when the health problems from Roussimoff’s acromegaly ended his life prematurely.

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.” For example, a fan of the

wrestler Ric Flair could, on the one hand, want Ric Flair to win his matches on television.

On the other hand, a fan of Ric Flair could want the performer who plays Ric Flair,

Richard Fliehr, to be a successful performer who excels at his craft on television: this

might involve winning a given match, but it could extend to cover such things as being

happy when Fliehr performs an effective promo, being pleased with Fliehr loses in such a

way that the performance of the character is strengthened despite the character losing in

the ring, or even being happy that other fans are beginning to cheer for Richard Fliehr’s

character. Ric Flair might “get over” by winning a title, but Ric Flair could also “get

over” when his character becomes more central to the stories being told on television or

when other fans begin expressing their love or passionate hatred for Fliehr’s performance

oas the character. 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. Consider the 2012 return of former Ultimate Fighting Heavyweight Champion

Brock Lesnar, an outstanding amateur and professional wrestler who left the profession

22

to become a mixed martial artist and became the biggest PPV draw in (non-boxing)

combat sports history. Lesnar was brought in with a contract that gave him unparalleled

control over the marketing of his character: Lesnar’s wrestling attire retains the corporate

sponsorships he received while a mixed martial artist, and his gear emblazoned with the

Jimmy Johns corporate logo is striking on WWE television given WWE’s unwillingness

to allow any other performer to receive corporate endorsements. When Lesnar began his

feud with John Cena, the WWE worked carefully to preserve the illusion that Lesnar was

a fighter rather than a professional wrestler: interview segments with Lesnar intentionally

imitated the cinematography of Ultimate Fighting Championship’s “UFC Countdown”

specials when Lesnar was heavyweight champion, confrontations with Cena and Lesnar

would devolve into fights where Lesnar would throw real elbows at Cena in an attempt to

cut Cena’s face and lip so that blood would appear on television, and so on. The final

match between Cena and Lesnar was similarly challenging: throughout its 15 minutes,

Lesnar was clearly hitting Cena with real punches, knees, and elbows. Although the

ending of the match was predetermined and Cena was victorious, everything that

preluded the finish of the match was uncomfortably real. Even now, one year after

Lesnar’s return to professional wrestling, his (albeit rare) appearances on WWE

television causes crowds to go crazy because, to quote Lesnar’s in-fiction manager Paul

Heyman, “Brock Lesnar is for real.”

Although Lesnar’s presence is a rare occurrence on professional wrestling

television shows, the treatment of his character may well be a paradigm example of post-

Screwjob wrestling: as you can see from the above, this recursive intertwining of levels

of distance gains another level. While the F experiences little tension while inconsistently

23

presupposing both ontologies while rooting simultaneously for character and performer,

the postmodern fan (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 given the

ways in which the work ontology and the shoot ontology began to commingle at the level

of storyline. For any fan to understand why Vince McMahon, the shoot owner of the

WWF but worked announcer of the WWF, could go on television in the weeks following

the Screwjob and discuss contract negotiations, his ability to end a match prematurely,

and assorted other things required a fan to understand that the work ontology was, at

heart, a work: the storyline that naturally developed around McMahon as an evil

corporate executive who hates the working class could only make sense if fans were

aware that, at some level, there is something going on outside the work ontology that

informs the gaps within the work ontology.

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 in an

wrestling company.24 When this tension becomes too great WWE writers will bravely 24 Indeed, much of Neal Hebert’s forthcoming dissertation, Professional Wrestling: Local Performance History, Global Performance Praxis addresses the ways that what we call the shoot ontology has complicated the performance and reception of professional wrestling throughout the twentieth century. Gender performativity, labor relations, the status of immigrant identities within the larger United States

24

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.25

[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!]

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.26

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

community, as well as numerous other issues, have all been embodied in rings irrespective of whether they were ever acknowledged within the work ontology. 25 Examples of this are numerous, but perhaps of most interest would be a situation that occurred in 2005. Fans who followed WWE wrestler Matt Hardy were aware that he and Amy “Lita” Dumas were a couple both in storyline and in real life; their engagement was publicly acknowledged on Matt Hardy’s Web site, and Hardy routinely engaged with fans on-line. Readers of Hardy’s Web site learned, in early 2005, that Hardy broke off his engagement with Dumas due to her infidelity: she had been having an affair with WWF performer Adam “Edge” Copeland for months, and Hardy outed her on his personal Web site. The WWF, unhappy with Hardy’s online behavior, released him from his contract. Fans of Hardy were upset with his release, and they began disrupting WWE television tapings with loud chants whenever Dumas or Copeland appeared on television: fans would chant “You screwed Edge” at Dumas, and Copeland, then a fan favorite, began getting booed at every arena the WWE 26 Discuss DDT magical spell. Kane summoning fire.

25

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

the entire universe.27 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

face,28 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

27 See Jack Miles’ God: A Biography.28 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.

26

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 stereotypical 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.29 Pace the 19th century

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

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

this kind of fandom 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.30 Caputo’s absent

29 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. 30 See for example, Caputo’s recent The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps.

27

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

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.

28

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

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.31

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

31 For an extended critique of this see Jon Cogburn and Mark Ohm’s “Towards an Object-Oriented Literary Theory.”

29

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.32 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.33

32 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. 33 We dedicate this paper to Ian Crystal, who would have found it hilarious and also help to make it much more so.

30

Bibliography

Bateman, Chris. 2011. Imaginary Games. Blue Ridge Summit: Zero Books.

Bergmann, Gustav. 1959. The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism. Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press.

Caputo, John. 2013. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press.

Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. London:

Routledge.

Carroll, Noël. 1998. A Philosophy of Mass Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carroll, Noël. 2007. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Cogburn, Jon and Mark Silcox. 2008. Philosophy Through Video Games. London:

Routledge.

Cogburn, Jon and Mark Ohm. 2013. “Towards an Object-Oriented Literary Theory.”

Speculations V.

Gaut, Berys. 2009. Art, Emotion, Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects.

Chicago: Open Court Press.

Harman, Graham. 2011. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press.

Harrison, Andrew. 1967. “Works of Art and Other Cultural Objects.” Proceedings of the

Aristotelian Society 68: 105-28.

Kraut, Robert. 2010. Artworld Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

31

MacDonald, Margaret. 1952. “Art and Imagination.” Proceedings of the ARistotelian

Society 68: 205-26.

Margolis, Joseph. 1965. The Language of Art and Art Criticism. Detroit: Wayne State

University Press.

Mcfee, Graham. 2011. Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance. Hampshire: Dance Books

Limited.

Meltzer, Dave. 2010. “March 8, 2010 Wrestling Observer Newsletter: Mir Controversy,

Umaga Death, Kong vs Bubba, Flair 911 details.” Wrestling Observer/Figure Four

Online, March 8.

Miles, Jack. 1996. God: A Biography. New York: Vintage.

Millière, Raphaël. 2012. “Metaphysics Today and Tomorrow.” Trans. Mark Allan Ohm,

Workshop on Contemporary Metaphysics and Ontology at the École Normale Supérieure,

http://atmoc.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/milliere_metaphysics_today_and_tomorrow1.p

df (accessed January 8, 2013).

Okrent, Mark. 1991. Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique

of Metaphysics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Philipse, Herman. 1998. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Quine, W.V.O. 1980. From a Logical Point of View. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Stevenson, C. L. 1957. “On ‘What is a Poem?’.” Philosophical Review 66: 329-62.

Walton, Kendall. 1993. Mimesis as Make Believe: On the Foundations of the

Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

32

Strawson, P.F. 1990. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London:

Routledge.

Wellek, R., and Warren, A. 1956. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace and

World.

Wills, David. 2010. “It’s Still Real To Me…Damn It. Dave’s Story of Spartanburg.”

World Wrestling Insanity, January 26.

http://www.worldwrestlinginsanity.com/artman/publish/article_1683.shtml

Wilson, Jim and Weldon T. Johnson. 2003. Choke Hold: Pro Wrestling’s Real Mayhem

Outside the Ring. Bloomington: xlibris.

Wilson, Mark. 2008. Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

VanderMeer, Jeff. 2008. City of Saints and Madmen. New York: Spectra.

Wollheim, Richard. 1968. Art and Its Objects. New York: Harper and Row.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1975. “Toward an Ontology of Art Works.” Nous 9: 115-42.

Youtube. 2006. “It’s Still Real To Me Dammit.” Last modified May 1, 2006.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvTNyKIGXiI