Fictionality

Fictionality, as it appears in Kornbluh's Marxist film theory, names the property of cinematic (and by extension, ideological) representations whereby their constructed, non-real status is not a defect to be overcome but the very condition that makes their ideological functioning legible. Acknowledging that a film is fiction does not simply dissolve its hold on the subject; rather, it opens onto a differentiated field of subject-positions toward the fiction: one may suspend disbelief (naively inhabiting the fiction as real), feign belief (performatively acting as if one believes without endorsing it), or attribute belief to others (the "subject supposed to believe" structure, in which the fiction's power is maintained by projecting credulous belief onto an anonymous other). These three registers are not merely aesthetic stances but psychic-political mechanisms through which ideology reproduces itself even under conditions of ironic or critical distance.

Fictionality is thus dialectically positioned: it is neither pure illusion to be unmasked (a simple idealist error) nor transparent non-issue. Precisely because the film-as-system is acknowledged as fictive, the question of how subjects relate to it — through suspension, feigning, or attribution — becomes the operative question for ideology critique. The internal contradictions of film form (what Kornbluh calls the "system") are not merely aesthetic tensions but sites where ideological interpellation works through and because of the acknowledged fictiveness of the work, rather than in spite of it.

In anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019, fictionality occupies a hinge position between formal analysis and ideology critique. The concept is an extension and specification of several of the corpus's canonical terms. It connects most immediately to Fetishistic Disavowal: Mannoni's "I know very well, but nevertheless…" is structurally reproduced in the three modes of relating to fictionality — suspension of disbelief (the "nevertheless" side), feigning belief (the performative enactment of disavowal), and attributing belief to others (ideology's displaced subject who is supposed to really believe). Fictionality thus translates fetishistic disavowal from a clinical-perverse mechanism into a cinematically specific and socially distributed logic.

It equally draws on Ideology, Contradiction, and Gap. The gap internal to the film-as-system — its formal incompleteness and internal contradictions — is precisely what ideology both exploits and conceals; fictionality is the name for the subject's variable relation to that gap. Where the canonical concept of Dialectics describes how contradictions within film form are productive rather than resolved, fictionality specifies the mode through which the subject is inserted into that dialectical movement: through the modalities of belief and disbelief that ideology manages. Fictionality is therefore not merely a property of texts but a site of Mediation between the film's internal formal contradictions and the subject's ideological positioning — making it a key concept for Kornbluh's argument that Marxist film theory cannot rest with either pure formalism or pure contextual critique, but must dialectically hold both together.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.106)

acknowledging fictionality also entails assessing whether the consumer/critic suspend their disbelief, or feign belief, or attribute belief to others, which are all key registers of the functioning of ideology

The quote is theoretically loaded because it identifies three structurally distinct subject-positions — "suspend disbelief," "feign belief," "attribute belief to others" — each of which maps onto a different psychoanalytic-ideological mechanism (naïve investment, performative disavowal, and the "subject supposed to believe" respectively), demonstrating that "acknowledging fictionality" is not ideologically neutral but is itself a field differentiated by the very logic of ideology it might seem to escape.