Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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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).

For them, science is as much a form of esoteric sorcery as art is a practical science of the sensory.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). De sociale en politieke druk om continu productief te zijn heeft een prijs: een nooit aflatende stroom werk én overproductie, met als resultaat de consumptie van gevoelige lichamen en allerlei andere middelen.

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).Full fiction is, therefore, by definition the expression of nothing or with respect to ideal languages (mathematics), the expression of contradiction.

In passing it is interesting—for me at least—that universally it was my twin brother who would function as Game Master whereas I would be the player (or one of them). Diagrams and the diagrammatic are shared concerns of the authors independently of their collaboration on Fictioning.I want, if I can, to move a little deeper in, to shift, perhaps, from the realm of memories and images into something more theoretical. He is the author of the monographs On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (Palgrave, 2012) and Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Palgrave, 2005), and is co-editor (with Henriette Gunkel and Ayesha Hameed) of Futures and Fictions (Repeater, 2017) and (with Stephen Zepke) of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

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’. Het verbeelden van andere opvattingen over comfort betekent het verbeelden van andere sociopolitieke leefregels en manieren om ons tot de wereld te verhouden; het is een handeling met politieke urgentie. The presentation of Fictioning Comfort is in thoughtful correspondence with the circumstances of our world today during the pandemic crisis. Fictioning in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence. We aanbidden het produceren, maar zien de uitputting en vermoeidheid die hierop volgt over het hoofd.So, first of all, I mentioned ‘world creation’ above and, clearly, with tabletop roleplaying games there is a kind of world making that goes on beyond fiction per se. 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.