Julian Bleecker refers to a backgound reality, the diegetic spatiotemporality of the design fictional artefact. The virtuality of this everyday normal of the science fictional universe is one from which design fictions might be
actualized as physical fictions. This background reality of a science fictional world can be referred in Deleuzian terms through a relation between subjectile and objectile:
[S]ubjectile in French means the layer as basis for applying paint, so when one primes the wall before painting it means preparing the subjectile. It is a technical term, mostly used in industrial painting. However, the subjectile also refers to a redefinition of the subject. If one would consider the subject as a surface, then one precisely has the relationship between the specific technical meaning and the philosophical meaning ... (Bernard Cache, in Balkema & Slager 1999:27).
If the Californian and a British or European version of design fiction might be contrasted here in the actualisation and assimilation, not of novum objects,
but of 'new normal' ones as subjectile-objectile, then, for the background surface Dunne draws from the concept of the infra-ordinary (1997:53). Containing an echo of Duchamp’s infrathin or l’inframince, (Adnock 1983)186 the thinner than thin, and in terms adopted by this thesis involving a
pataphysical clinamen: the smallest possible movement/thought. Duchamp said that l’inframince could not be precisely defined but only approached:
le bruit ou la musique faits par un pantalon de velours côtelé comme celui ci quand on le fait bouger [the noise or music made by corduroy pants like these rubbing when one moves]; “Pantalons de velours—/ leur sif otement (dans la) marche par/ frottement des 2 jambes est une/ separation inframince signalée/ par le son [velvet trousers—/ their whistling sound (in) walking by/ brushing of the 2 legs is an/ infrathin separation signaled/ by sound].
The examples given above in Craig Dworkin's (2013: 18) translation, and whose thinking on Duchamp is significant for its highlighting not only the impossibility of definition, but that with the expression ‘infra-mince’, Duchamp introduced a reminder of the pataphysical clinamen, of an ambiguity, the infrathinness of categorical distinctions the either/or and dyalogic distinction between reality and fiction, and, tellingly:
that ‘Duchamp recognises that the exemplary inframince form of the
single leaf of paper, if studied, can be seen as a sculptural, three dimensional space […] and that “in the next breath [Duchamp]
continues: je pense qu’au travers de l’inframince, il est possible d’alier de la seconde à la troisème dimension [through the infrathin, I believe,
186 see also Doove, Edith M, (unpublished PhD thesis) Laughter, inframince and cybernetics -
Exploring the Curatorial as Creative Act, Plymouth, 2017. Doove provides a thorough literature review of published sources on Duchamp’s infrathin and in which she interestingly notes of Duchamp's concept as the 'possible'.
it is possible to go from the second to the third dimension]” Dworkin
2013: 18
Of his methodology, Duchamp would write that "allegory (in general) / is an application of the infrathin" (Duchamp 1980 n 6). Writing on the infraordinary Virilio, in the Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991) describes the way familiar things transform into the unfamiliar, though whether Dunne invokes the infraordinary with Perec or Virilio as his source remains unclear.187 The
passage on the infra-ordinary in Hertzian Tales, curiously, develops alongside Dunne’s further engagement with Baudrillard. It is, though, uneccessary to draw the distinction for the infraordinary is a concept developed jointly by Virilio and Perec whilst collaborating in their editorial contribution to Cause
Commune.188
In The Aesthetics of Disappearance Virilio notes the evocation of co-
presence, of "familiar things" and "something else of an unfamiliar nature" in Magritte, and speaks of "the passage from the familiar to the unfamiliar", in Bernadette de Soubirous's fugitive apparitions "those surprising moments that precede epileptic absence [...]perceiving the kind of infra-ordinary reality".189 Some may find this suggestion of the infra-ordinary strange – alluding, as it also does, to the kinds of mysterious and mystical apparitions of The
Aesthetics of Disappearance, whilst at the same time possessed of the
aesthetics of cold war bunker archaeologies.
By imagining the object in use, Dunne, and by inference Bleecker, suggest we become absorbed in the bizarre world of the infra-ordinary. Virilio also
associates Proust's literary vision with this sense of an `infra-ordinary reality' as a blurring of `inside' and `outside' reality suggestive of Ballard’s zones of
187 Neither Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974),, nor Virilio’s Aesthetics of Disappearance
(1991) form part of Dunne’s bibliography, whilst each of these authors are otherwise referenced.
188 Viriilio and Perec were on the editorial board together between May 1972 and February
psychological escape. Perec's infra-ordinary reality, itself a product of the OuLiPo, a ‘sub-committee’ of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, is therefore deeply invested in the study of the science of imaginary solutions. That an Oulipian constraint is a pataphysical clinamen, and that Perec should
establish a pataphysical fiction of architecture as the constraint for a book in the methodology of the Knight’s Tour, and that the Oulipo would establish a further workshop dedicated to an alliance of constraint and the subgenres of crime fiction, the OuLiPoPo (Police Procedural), suggests a syzygy of
pataphysical clues.