Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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Numerous examples, among them Fernando Pessoa, James Baldwin, Robert Glück, Gary Indiana, Peter Handke, Dodie Bellamy, Édouard Louis, Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy, Eileen Myles and Chris Kraus, demonstrate that the (auto)biographical is not absolute, that it is, by necessity, provisional, unanchored and contingent. A similar point might be made in relation to tabletop roleplaying games which are also more all-encompassing (although, again, age—pre-adolescence—has a role to play here). We admit to proceeding as if fiction were reality; that is, proceed like Austin Osman Spare would have us do, through experimenting with believing in what we know might not be true. 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 in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate that which does not exist.

Given the inter-dependent entanglement of all things in multiple, intersecting networks of heterogenous agency, the fictions of a consciousness entirely freed from the physical may seem untenable. Along the way they have not been afraid to tread dangerous terrain, especially with Prometheanism and its potential consequences, but, as they state throughout the book, it is rather through affective fictionings than through rule-bound philosophies that they suggest a people to come can emerge. 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).

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. And we have experimented with ways of producing a show that attempts to avoid, as much as possible, the exhaustion of bodies, spaces, and resources. Het is om deze redenen dat ideeën en gebruiken rondom ‘comfort’ cruciaal zijn bij het verbeelden van een alternatieve toekomst. Explored at some length in the book’s introductory pages, ‘fictioning’ is a term that, very simply put, aims to denote ‘invention in the realm of life (a technology of immanence as it were)’ (2). While creating and producing this project, our homes have acted as sites for production, rest, and rethinking comfort.

The deadpan cover of David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan’s Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the authors’ parallel lives as the creators of Plastique Fantastique, the performance art group whose multi-sensory, neo-pagan, anarcho-sci-fi performance-rituals have been warping art audience sensoria since 2004. Described as parafictional artists, the article emphasises the capacity of such active practitioners as Donelle Woolford, The Atlas Group, Reena Spaulings and Barbara Cleveland to interact with the art world in a plausible manner, regardless of the disclosure of their imaginary nature. Again, one might say that a reading experience is also shared, between presumed author/narrator and reader. It is a deceptively scholarly tome, like a Health and Safety-tested psychedelic trip conducted in a university lab with funding from the AHRC.Fiction’, the noun, is conventionally used to describe a specific kind of literary production representing imaginary people, events and things. We feel the need to investigate comfort in a way that goes beyond constructed and capitalist ideas; comfort is more than just the process of rejuvenation for the purpose of maintaining a certain level of productivity.

Both exhaustion and ‘comfort’ can be understood as states, performances, landscapes, and conditions that constantly shape our understandings of the world around us – they all influence the ways in which we inhabit, and make space in it. 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’. Roleplaying games also demonstrate the ability we have, at least to some extent, to take on other fictions more generally. Although it may appear to be a work of high-academic scholarship, it is also a kind of reality transforming spell.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’.