Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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On the one hand home is a space of production of work, experiencing exhaustion and fatigue, and resting of the (tired) bodies.

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]). One in particular is worth mentioning here, Traveller, which was the Science Fiction equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons and, as such, involved more explicit world building (in terms of the flora and fauna, level of technological development, and so forth of a given planet). As in the previous chapters, the philosophical analysis is carefully woven into the discussion of a range of contemporary artists and works, notably the experimental music collective To Live and Shave in LA and the musician Rudolf Eb.

Diagramming and fictioning are mutually supportive, interdisciplinary bridging processes that connect the authors’ chosen modes of production. In style and structure, Fictioning is closer to the non-linear, rhizomatic model of A Thousand Plateaus, dissolving traditional disciplinary boundaries, fusing theoretical reflection with experimental writing and affirming its status as a work of art on its own terms.

This is part of Reed’s larger project—carried out across recent writings—to affirm ‘the difference between the making of a common world vs.O’Sullivan, Simon (2012), On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation, Basingstoke: Palgrave. As Eileen Myles has declared, biographical writing is ‘of course about me’ as much as it is about the ostensible ‘subject’. The third section, ‘Mythotechnesis to Machine Fictioning’, explores fictions about the interdependence and interpenetration of humans and machines and their collective techno-scientific ‘assemblages’. Written very much against the grain of canonical art history and theory – at least in its conservative, patriarchal and traditionalist modes – Fictioning functions more like a critical sourcebook for a visionary arts education yet-to-come.

Although it may appear to be a work of high-academic scholarship, it is also a kind of reality transforming spell.

And in this sense role-play might also have resonances with what Viveiros de Castro says about perspectivism (see Viveiros de Castro 2014). But it seems to me that tabletop roleplaying games might also provide some insight here, not so much into the material production (or simply the abstract working out) but, once again, in foregrounding the importance of the imaginary in the inhabiting of another world and the importance of emotions in engaging with it (so, a kind of in-between—or diagonal—between the material and the abstract). Bringing N Katherine Hayles’s conception of technogenesis to the ficto-criticism of Steve Goodman, the art of Ed Atkins and Jacolby Satterwhite and Greg Egan’s science fiction novel Permutation City, the authors attempt to answer the question: Can subjectivity exist without a body? We have sat in our rooms, gradually sinking into the fiction of ‘being at home’ in the world, and attempting to extend beyond it. The presentation of Fictioning Comfort is in thoughtful correspondence with the circumstances of our world today during the pandemic crisis.

Drawing on the work of Alfred Gell, Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner and Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, the authors elucidate a wide range of philosophical concepts that augment their theory of alienation as method. 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). Debord, Guy (1957), ‘Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action’, trans.Lilly Markaki, Royal Holloway, University of London, LSE Review of Books ‘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 Fantasique’s tunes for that matter. We might say in this respect—and to bastardise Marx a little—that hitherto the philosophers have only talked about building worlds in various ways. 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’.