Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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The novelty of their approach is to transform ‘fiction’ the noun into ‘fiction’ the verb, emphasising the act of fictioning. Gezamenlijk met kunstenaars hebben we de urgentie van kunstproductie en distributie verkend, vooral in het licht van het zogenaamde ‘nieuwe normaal’ dat zowel in Nederland als daarbuiten in opkomst is. Others are far apart: enjoying no historical connection, they are linked together through the mode of fictioning to which they belong or which belongs, I should say, to them, as when Austin Osman Spare, Robert Smithson and Yoyoi Kusama are examined together in Chapter Four, ‘Mirror Work: Self Obliteration’. O’Sullivan (2019), Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

This is even more the case with recent tabletop roleplaying games and, especially, those written by communities and/or as part of an art practice. In the anthology Fiction as Method, a mixture of new and established names in the fields of contemporary art, media theory, philosophy, and speculative fiction explore the diverse ways fiction manifests, and provide insights into subjects ranging from the hive mind of the art collective 0rphan Drift to the protocols of online self-presentation. This is a book about loops, the fictional and the real, the virtual and the actual, the past that never was and the people yet to come – and how to occupy them, to live in the in-between, summon demons, talk to cats, compose new temporalities, all in the name of building a future so alien that none of us could even imagine what it might be like. 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 fact, both are—of course—needed, and, in fact, the two make the game, which is to say without the Game Master there is no world, or if there is, it is one that is chaotic, too spontaneous; and without the players the Game Master has simply penned a fiction.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. For them, science is as much a form of esoteric sorcery as art is a practical science of the sensory. A further roleplaying game on display at that group exhibition was Timothy Linward and Pete Wolfendale’s Dice Cult (2018), a very strange—mythopoetic—roleplaying game rule book which, in this context, brings a further resonance between role playing games and philosophical investigation (see also my comments above—in footnote 1—on Wolfendale’s philosophical reflections on roleplaying games (and their particular aesthetic), written with Timothy Franklin [Wolfendale and Franklin 2012]). This section is followed by a third and final part on ‘mythotechnesis’ and the related idea of a kind of machine fictioning, concerning ‘the ways in which technology enters into discourse and life’ (1) and attending to ‘technics of adaptation and cloning, as well as technologies of coding, compression and layering, and also editing, scanning, time-stretching and pasting ’(7).

We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience. On the other hand, you could see the book, as I have done, as a companion that urges you to look up these artists and emerge yourself in their fictioning worlds.This paper develops a concept of fictioning when this names, in part, the deliberate imbrication of an apparent reality with other narratives. Its purpose is to define and map instantiations of a concept or practice to which the authors, inspired by continental philosophy, give the name of ‘fictioning’. En we hebben geëxperimenteerd met manieren om een tentoonstelling te produceren waarbij zoveel mogelijk wordt voorkomen dat lichamen, ruimtes en middelen uitgeput raken. This looping back complies with what Burrows and O’Sullivan find to their own surprise is the “anamorphic aspect of the book”, being both an academic survey, but equally “a document of a journey, or itself a performance”, referring in a final note to Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors where a certain confidence about culture, knowledge and education is undone through the hidden, anamorphic skull.

This is certainly due to what the publisher describes as the "rich constellation of recent philosophical perspectivesincluding those associated with the speculative and ontological turns, non-philosophy, residual and emergent cultures, decolonisation and the posthuman" and its moving "through counter-cultures, performance studies, continental philosophy, anthropology, afrofuturisms, feminisms, science fiction, cybernetics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence.d: Tile (via briefbox, with bubble wrap), made loud sound when dropping, found out later it startled C and thought there was a breakin, until seeing T cycle away. See for example Lesley Guy’s work on roleplaying games and collective art practices and as part of the collective Totaller (Guy forthcoming). This disemvowelled sentence, the title of a group show Plastique Fantastique curated in 2012, reminds us that, beyond the sobriety of academic appearances and scholarly convention, there exists a mutating plasmate of unknown origin, whose creative unfolding we may never fully grasp or comprehend.

The Diagram is of Gilbert Simondon’s modes of existence to highlight connections between magic, aesthetics and philosophy. Exactly how the different myth-functions of ‘mythopoesis’, ‘myth-science’ and ‘mythotechnesis’ and their related modes of fictioning are differentiated from or relate to one another is difficult to perceive just from the few lines above, but the matter is elucidated the more one engages with the different sections of the book. There is another definition of LARPing that connects my comments in this essay—about tabletop roleplating games and fictioning—with QAnon and a wider politics of post-truth. We adopt this approach, which also necessarily involves a performance of fiction, not just to test our perspectives on reality, or as a therapeutic practice, but as a political mode with recognising that fictioning is a power that can have real effects, particularly when a host of forces can be mustered to enact a fiction.We can also track this logic of editing further forwards to Burroughs experiments with audio cut-ups and then to artists like Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth where the cut-up is applied to TV (so audio-visual material) and, indeed, becomes a mode of life (see P-Orridge 1992). When the two of them suddenly realised that this was not simply a game, but something else altogether. In their essay Wolfendale and Franklin make a convincing case that although this aesthetic might have similarities with others—painting, theatre, literature—it is the way in which it is uniquely collaborative and dynamic that singles it out, or, in their words: ‘We experience this depth when we see the consequences of our choices spiral out of our control, producing interesting and unforeseen results, suggesting new and exciting ways in which the world can be filled in’ (Wolfendale and Franklin 2012: 219).