Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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Haraway, Donna (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. O’Sullivan’s book On The Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) is constructed upon series of diagrams drawn from philosophy and psychoanalysis. At stake is both a more vivid—and present—world within this one, but also an agency with that world (and even a sense of freedom that can come with this).

Biographical Fictioning, an Art Writing Spring School Open Masterclass (7-8 April 2022), focused on creative approaches to biographical, memoir, and life-writing.That said, I have recently taken on the role of a Games Master for my own two sons and have now watched them enter into what always seemed to me another space-time. Debord, Guy (1957), ‘Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action’, trans.

These interactions include exhibiting and selling works, giving interviews, publishing books, or doing performances under their own names.After ‘mythopoesis’ comes a section on ‘myth-science’ and science fictioning, where the practices of Sun Ra, a human musician and an alien from Saturn, as well as that of Mundane Afrofuturists and Xenofeminists are, among others, shown to be productive of ‘alternative perspectives and models, [by] revealing habits of thought […] as yet more myth’ (what ‘myth-science’ is about) (1). It is these, really, that need to be brought in to encounter with any abstract reasoning about world construction (and here, crucially, it is the question of agency that needs closest attention).

Fictioning’ is the word Burrows and O’Sullivan use to describe a mode of making, writing and thinking that operates, like their own, between multiple fields of creative practice and philosophy. Or, more simply, they bring a different kind of world making to the fore, one that is then occupied, or imaginatively lived out if I can put it like that (it’s also in this sense that they foreground the idea of the ‘fiction of the self’ insofar as they enable the taking on of other fictions). The text finishes by predicting a future in which parafictional artists will become ubiquitous, and their growing numbers a possible threat. The structure of Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy seems at first glance very neat and straightforwardly organized-three main sections each divided into two subsections with four to five chapters covering what the authors indicate as the three myth-functions of contemporary art and philosophy: "Mythopoesis to Performance Fictioning, " "Myth-Science to Science Fictioning" and finally "Mythotechnesis to Machine Fictioning. Fictioning" here alludes to "an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence" and thus not to fiction writing per se, but the book turns out to be just as unputdownable as the best novel you can lay your hands on or as hypnotic as Plastique Fantastique's tunes for that matter.In this extensively illustrated book containing over 80 diagrams and images of artworks, David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan explore the technics of fictioning through three focal points: mythopoesis, myth-science and mythotechnesis.

e. incomplete although sometimes connected to reality and caught between a perfectly faceted realist description and complete fiction. The multi-dimensional, trans-disciplinary practice of fictioning, whose geneology and peerage the authors chart over five hundred pages, has important precedents in the work of Gilles Deleuze and his predecessors Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, a philosophical tradition that O’Sullivan is very close to, having published several earlier works on it. Along the way they have not been afraid to tread on dangerous terrain, which especially seems to be the case with Prometheanism and its potential consequences, but as they state throughout the book, it is rather through affective fictionings and not through rule-bound philosophies that they suggest a people to come can emerge. As the article from where the above quote is taken suggests, Q—who ‘drops’ information—is then not an individual, but a plot device that keeps the fiction going.

Although this is true for any academic (or para-academic) essay—the idea of a single author as origin of ideas is certainly a myth (as partly implied by the present essay)—I want to acknowledge the various conversations and discussions I have had around tabletop roleplaying games and world-building, especially as the games themselves foreground this kind of collaborative and distributed knowledge production (if I can put it like that).