Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

Fictioning in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate that which does not exist. 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. These relate to three specific modes of fictioning: performance fictioning, science fictioning and machine fictioning. In this way, Burrows and O’Sullivan explore how fictioning can offer us alternatives to the dominant fictions that construct our reality in an age of ‘post-truth’ and ‘perception management’. Through fictioning, they look forward to the new kinds of human, part-human and non-human bodies and societies to come.

Table of Contents:
List of FiguresAcknowledgements Introduction Section I. Mythopoesis to Performance Fictioning A. Mythopoesis: Against Control and the Fiction of the Self 1. Mythopoesis, Fabulous Images and Memories of a Sorcerer 2. Against Control: Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted 3. Overcoming the Fiction of the Self 4. Mirror Work: Self-Obliteration B. Performance Fictioning: Pasts, Presents and Futures 5. Residual Culture and the Magical Mode of Existence 6. Future-Past-Presents: Neomedieval Mappae Mundi 7. Fictioning the Landscape 8. A Journey through the Ruins of Colonialism 9. Scenes as Performance Fictions Section II. Myth-Science to Science Fictioning A. Myth-Science: Perspectivism and Alienation as Method 10. Myth-Analysis: Lessons in Enchantment 11. Myth-Science: Alien Perspectives 12. Afrofuturism, Sonic Fiction and Alienation as Method 13. Wildness and Alienation in the Networks of the Digital B. Science Fictioning: Worlds and Models 14. Feminist World Building and Worlding 15. The Inhuman Social Imaginary of Science Fiction 16. From Science Fiction to Science Fictioning 17. Non-Philosophy and Science Fiction as Method Section III. Mythotechnesis to Machine Fictioning A. Mythotechnesis: Promethean and Intelligence Economies 18. A Renewed Prometheanism 19. The Subject Who Fell to Earth 20. Financial Fictions 21. Post-Singularity Fictions as Mythotechnesis 22. Technofeminisms B. Machine Fictioning: Analogue and Digital Life 23. Loops of the Posthuman: Towards Machine Fictioning 24. The Radicalisation of Singularity 25. By Any Memes Necessary 26. Subjects Without a Body Afterword Bibliography Index

About the Author :
David Burrows is Reader in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. He has contributed to a number of book projects and his exhibitions include Micro/Macro: British Art 1996–2002, Mucsanok, Budapest (2003); Take Me With You, Circulo des Bellas Artes, Madrid/Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006); All Over the New Smart, FA Projects, London (2008); Waving From Afar, Star Space, Shanghai (2009); The Diagram Banner Repeater, London/Torna, Istanbul (2011); In Outer Space There is No Painting and Sculpture, Summerhall, Edinburgh (2014); The Birmingham Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2014). Simon O’Sullivan is Professor of Art Theory and Practice in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmith College, London. 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).

Review :
‘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. Almost written as a philosophical whodunit, the book ‘accelerates’ the reader through to the final outcome only to find herself at the end of the book together with the authors back at the beginning, as they, and I, still have questions. 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’. Reading Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy has brought me great joy ... Deleuzian scholars, historians and theorists of the avant-garde, postcolonial and feminist theorists, theorists of the posthuman, artists and occultists will, among others, all find something of value here ... Fictioning requires an active, if not informed, reader, this is because at the heart of it is a call to follow the paths it traces; to perform and to make our own versions of the rituals it brings to our attention; and to discover thresholds where we normally find barriers, as in the case of that most persistent fiction and which remains at the core of the text: the fiction of the self. Fictioning makes a strong and sustained case for the pragmatic intimacy of the technological and aesthetic dimensions and, by extension, the scholarly and the performative. They build their case upon a kaleidoscopic range of artists, philosophers and writers who have challenged normative understandings of human subjectivity, individuality and our co-dependency on technical, material and non-human systems and entities. The novelty of their approach is to transform ‘fiction’ the noun into ‘fiction’ the verb, emphasising the act of fictioning. Of course, all fictions are created. But what Burrows and O’Sullivan emphasise, in both their writing and performance works, is that fictioning is intentionally orientated to challenge, subvert and transform our experience and understanding of social, technical and natural reality. The authors bring this practical commitment to the reality-transforming effects of mythico-magical fictioning into complex alignment with several branches of contemporary philosophy and techno-scientific discourse, troubling conventional framings of art and science as methodologically distinct sets of practices. For them, science is as much a form of esoteric sorcery as art is a practical science of the sensory. 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.