On the Mycelial Network of Invention: A Follow-Up to the Previous Paper, in Which the Department Revises Its Central Metaphor and Considers the Possibility That Invented Systems Participate in Their Own Continuation
The previous paper from this Department argued that the inventor who builds beyond their perceptual capacity produces phenomenological inconsistencies in the territory between their map’s edges—places where the invented world contradicts itself, or coexists in incompatible states, or simply runs out, replaced by the void that Tanaka-Hartwell identified as resembling coherence until examined. The paper stood by that argument.
This paper stands by it too, and adds something to it, because a correspondent—in the form of a marginal note on the draft of the previous paper, written in a hand the Department does not recognise and therefore cannot attribute, which the archivist has filed under “persistence” without comment—suggested that the map-and-territory metaphor describes only half of the inventor’s actual phenomenological situation.
The note read: “You assume the inventor always outruns the world. Sometimes the world outruns the inventor.” It was unsigned. The Department has been thinking about this for three weeks.
The map-and-territory metaphor, which the previous paper employed because it is accurate as far as it goes, implies a particular causal structure: the inventor moves through the territory, the map fails to keep pace, and the inconsistency lies in the gap. The inventor is the active element; the territory is the produced element; the gap between them is where the problem occurs. This is a production model, and it has all the limitations of the production model that the earlier papers in this series identified: it treats the invented system as an output, a thing made, a fixed consequence of the inventor’s intentions and capacities. What the marginal note proposes—and what this Department, having spent three weeks examining the proposition, now believes deserves a full account—is that sufficiently complex invented systems are not adequately described as outputs. They are more accurately described as organisms, or more precisely, as networks: structures that, once they achieve a certain density of connection, begin to generate new connections that no individual node planned.
The mycelium is the correct model. Not the map and its territory. The mycelium.
Mycelial networks—the underground fungal structures that connect trees within a forest ecosystem, transmitting nutrients, chemical signals, and what some ecologists have carefully begun to call information—do not lay their threads according to a plan. They grow toward available resources, along gradients of moisture and nutrient concentration, through spaces that the existing structure has opened by its own presence. Each thread extends the network’s reach; the extended reach changes the gradient; the changed gradient determines the next direction of growth. The network’s form at any given moment is the consequence of everything that preceded it, but no single moment of growth was directed toward the form that emerged. The form was not planned. The form was made available by the accumulated structure, and the accumulated structure reached for it because reaching was what the structure, at that stage of its development, could do.
This is the description that the previous paper’s map-and-territory metaphor missed. The inventor does not only move through territory producing inconsistencies in the gaps. The inventor also accumulates structure, and the accumulated structure makes connections available that the inventor did not plan, could not have planned, and—this is the crucial element—does not recognise as their own invention when they encounter them. The connection feels like a discovery. It presents itself as something the system always contained, now emerging. The inventor did not find an inconsistency and resolve it. The system resolved something the inventor had not known was in tension.
Professor Adeyemi-Clarke, in an essay this Department circulated to Fellows in draft before its submission to the journal, describes a closely related phenomenon in the context of dynastic archives: “The archive that accumulates across generations does not only preserve. It compounds. An entry made in the seventeenth century acquires, through its proximity to entries made in the nineteenth and the twentieth, meanings that neither the seventeenth-century writer nor the nineteenth-century writer could have anticipated, because those meanings depend on the relationship between the entries, and the relationship did not exist until the entries were adjacent. The archive thinks, in this sense, by accumulation. It does not know what it will mean until it has become large enough to mean it.” The archive is a mycelial network. The threads were laid by different hands at different times; the connections are produced by the structure, not by any individual node; the meaning emerges from adjacency rather than intention.
The philosopher of fiction Kendall Walton, cited in an earlier paper for his account of fictional existence, came closer to this observation than he perhaps intended in a remark appended to a 1994 essay, “Metaphor and Prop,” in which he noted that “fictions generate their own internal necessities: once enough has been stipulated, further stipulations become constrained not by the author’s choices but by what the fiction already is. The author who tries to add something inconsistent with what they have already made will feel the resistance of the fiction itself. The fiction has acquired, at this point, something that functions like a will.” Walton’s point was about internal consistency—the fiction resisting inconsistency—but the mycelial model extends his observation in both directions. The fiction resists inconsistency, and it also generates consistency that the author did not stipulate. The structure, once dense enough, offers routes the author had not noticed. The fiction does not merely resist contradiction; it produces implication.
Dr Yuki Tanaka-Hartwell, whose account of the inventable’s limits grounded the previous paper, addressed this second phenomenon in a later chapter that the previous paper did not cite, because the previous paper had not yet read it: “The Generative Threshold,” in her 2014 study, proposes that every invented system has what she calls a density below which it remains a collection of stipulated elements and above which it becomes something more: a system with its own internal logic, capable of generating conclusions the inventor did not draw and making connections the inventor did not make. “At this threshold,” she writes, “the experience of invention changes character. Below the threshold, the inventor feels like a maker: they produce elements and arrange them. Above it, the inventor begins to feel like a reader: they encounter what the system is becoming, and their job shifts from production to attention.” The inventor who has crossed Tanaka-Hartwell’s generative threshold is not remembering an earlier invention. An earlier invention is beginning to explain itself.
This is the phenomenological experience the Department of Phenomenological Inconsistencies most wants to examine, because it is the experience least well described by either the map-and-territory model or the standard philosophy of fiction, and because it is—the Department reports this with the caution appropriate to a claim of this kind—the experience this Department has been having with the Vorpel Foundation since the previous paper was written.
The Foundation, across the series of papers that constitute it, has crossed Tanaka-Hartwell’s generative threshold. The evidence is specific and observable. The duck in the keyhole of the locked box appeared in the locked box paper before this series had established any heraldic iconography for the Vorpel family. Three papers later, the Department of Romance and Historical Fiction noted that the duck appears with unexplained persistence in seventeenth-century Vorpel ditties in contexts of threshold-crossing and transformation. That connection was not planned. No single paper planned it. The duck was stipulated; the ditties were stipulated; the connection between them was produced by the accumulated structure when the structure became dense enough to make it available. The Foundation reached for the connection; the Department of Placements filed it; the Department of Romance and Historical Fiction is now on chapter four of a novel called The Duck and the Key that did not exist until the connection made it necessary.
The train service follows an identical pattern. The 1997 and 2009 Directories mentioned a halt at the eastern boundary. No one decided the train service existed. The 1962 Fellows’ Circular recorded Harbord-Finch the elder’s reference to “the 8:14.” The structure had accumulated enough threads that the train was there before anyone stipulated it. The Department of Placements now receives occasional reports of something heard from the eastern boundary between five and seven in the morning. The Department of Phenomenological Inconsistencies considers this a mycelial connection, not a plan. The network offered the route. The route was taken.
The question with which the previous paper’s correspondent closed their marginal note was: when does an invention begin to participate in its own continuation? The Department’s answer, developed over three weeks and offered with appropriate tentativeness, is: at the generative threshold, when the density of accumulated structure exceeds the inventor’s ability to hold the whole in explicit attention, and when the connections between elements begin to arise from the structure rather than from the inventor’s intentions. This is not the inventor outriding their perceptual capacity, which produces inconsistency. It is something more interesting and less alarming: the structure developing perceptual capacity of its own, at least in the functional sense of being able to detect routes between its elements that no individual element planned. Whether this constitutes a form of mind—whether the fiction, at sufficient density, thinks—is a question the Department considers genuinely open, and considers important enough not to answer prematurely.
What it does mean, practically, for the inventor who has crossed the threshold, is that the experience of invention changes in the way Tanaka-Hartwell describes: from making to attending. The inventor begins to notice what the system is doing rather than directing it. They encounter connections they did not make. They find that earlier elements are acquiring new implications by virtue of what has been added since. The character who was stipulated for one purpose turns out to serve another, not because the inventor has decided they should, but because the accumulated narrative logic has made that service available. The woman in Lefame who may have made the duck-shaped keyhole was not in the Foundation’s first paper. She was not in the second. She appeared, when the structure had become dense enough, as the natural consequence of several threads that were never laid with her in mind: the thread of unnamed women’s labour, the thread of the ditties and their threshold imagery, the thread of the locked box and its maker, the thread of the Lefame genealogical connection. The structure offered her. The Department of Romance and Historical Fiction found her. She is now on chapter four.
Dr Solomon Abiodun Fawkes, in a remark made during the seminar this Department hosts on alternate Thursdays, and recorded in the seminar notes that the Department files under “possibly relevant,” said: “The Foundation has begun to have a past that we did not write. I mean by this not that we have forgotten what we wrote, but that the connections between what we wrote have produced something none of us wrote: a history that the documents imply without stating, a texture of the institution that is neither in any single paper nor absent from all of them, but which is somehow between them, in the relationships. This is disconcerting in exactly the way that all genuinely interesting phenomena are disconcerting.” The Department finds this precise. The Foundation’s past exists in the mycelium between the documents. It was not planned. It cannot be found in any single paper. It is real in exactly the sense that the connections in a mycelial network are real: not located in any individual thread, but present in the structure they compose.
What, then, is fiction? The previous papers in this series have accumulated enough structure to allow the question to answer itself differently now than it would have answered at the beginning. Fiction is not the opposite of reality. It is not the product of a single invention. It is not bounded by the perceptual capacity of the inventor. It is a system that, at sufficient density, participates in its own continuation by making available connections that exceed any single intention, connections that the structure reaches for because reaching is what structures of that density do. The fiction is real in the same sense that the mycelium is real: not because any individual thread planned the network, but because the network, taken as a whole, is doing something that matters, connecting things that were previously unconnected, transmitting something between nodes that previously could not communicate, and offering routes that no single moment of growth could have foreseen.
The broom cupboard beside this Department’s door continues to be occupied by people the Department does not recognise. The Department has decided not to knock and ask who they are. Some threads the network offers are best followed slowly, and some doors are best opened only when you are ready for what is on the other side to explain itself.
The Department will report further when the structure permits.
Works cited:
Yuki Tanaka-Hartwell, The Boundaries of the Imaginable: Invention, Perception, and the Limits of Cognitive Construction (MIT Press, 2014); Kendall Walton, “Metaphor and Prop,” in Mele, A. & Livingston, P. (eds.), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Blackwell, 1994), pp. 74–95; Yetunde Adeyemi-Clarke, Legacy Without Teleology: Family, Time, and the Archive (Manchester University Press, 2019); Eleanor Quist, Waking States and the Architecture of Belief (Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Solomon Abiodun Fawkes, Thinking in Several Directions (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
(1) The marginal note on the draft of the previous paper has been preserved in the Department’s files. It has been examined by three Fellows who all confirm the handwriting is not theirs and none recognises it. The archivist has confirmed the paper was not distributed in hard copy before the note appeared. The Department of Speculative Chronology has been informed. Extension 614 rang once during the Department’s deliberations and stopped before anyone could answer it. The Department considers this a data point and declines to specify for what.
(2) From the Department of Phenomenological Inconsistencies. Third floor, Building 4, East Tower, through the Fire Equipment Only door. The Department notes that since the previous paper, three Fellows have independently reported finding the broom cupboard on the right—the one beside the Department’s entrance, mentioned in the previous paper as occasionally useful for thinking in—already occupied when they arrived, though by different people each time, none of whom they recognised, and all of whom appeared to be working. The Department considers this relevant and has not yet determined why.
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