Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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O’Sullivan, Simon (2012), On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation, Basingstoke: Palgrave. This certainly resonates—but, I think, also adds something—to, for example, Donna Haraway’s interest in ‘string figures’ and communities of world building (Haraway 2016). that is, in a more appropriate form to what is happening in those worlds and with those children (and in my own late childhood) especially when on the cusp of adolescence (which, it seems to me, is when our imaginaries are predominantly formed). 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.

One is the Games Master who has initially built or, really, written the world—even if they are using a pre-prepared scenario, they need to add detail, narrate the encounters, bring the world to life (I should also say here that my experience was that these worlds were always more successful when written by the Games Master). As the kind of fictioning that is discussed by necessity moves away from what is already known, this fascinating and enriching journey, or performance, is strongly future-orientated and thus maybe not surprisingly influenced by Deleuzian notions of becoming, including the interest in a ‘people to come’. Naast deze voortdurende uitputting als gevolg van (over)productiviteit, is uitputting ook een gevolg van onrechtvaardige sociaal-politieke en economische structuren die productiviteit altijd bovenaan plaatsen. The acronym refers to ‘live action role playing,’ but on /pol/, it has a more specialized meaning: a LARPer is someone who pretends to be a well-placed source with confidential information about current events, which they then leak to the anons.

The authors mention more often than not relatively obscure artists and the small black and white illustrations don’t do these justice. 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. The structure of Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy seems at first glance very neat and straightforwardly organized-three main sections each divided into two subsections with four to five chapters covering what the authors indicate as the three myth-functions of contemporary art and philosophy: "Mythopoesis to Performance Fictioning, " "Myth-Science to Science Fictioning" and finally "Mythotechnesis to Machine Fictioning. Especially in the cases where Burrows and O’Sullivan mention sound artists, even larger or colour illustrations would obviously not suffice anyway and so I ended up, for instance, turning Sun Ra on as a soundtrack which is extensively referred to in their chapter on ‘Afrofuturism, Sonic Fiction and Alienation as Method’.

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. The structure of Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy seems at first glance very neat and straightforwardly organized—three main sections each divided into two subsections with four to five chapters covering what the authors indicate as the three myth-functions of contemporary art and philosophy: "Mythopoesis to Performance Fictioning," "Myth-Science to Science Fictioning" and finally "Mythotechnesis to Machine Fictioning. 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. Like Deleuze and Guattari – a philosopher and a militant psychoanalyst who wilfully lost their individuality in the act of writing – Burrows and O’Sullivan have co-created an anti-conventional textbook in the spirit of sorcerous artist-activists. His work explores the legacies of colonialism, psychoanalysis and surrealism in art, cinema and popular culture from ethnographic, science fictional and social psychology perspectives.

Reading Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy has brought me great joy .

His free jazz style, questioning known structures and instead promoting endless creativity and expression in pure awareness of a current state of affairs, is in more than one sense illustrative of what this volume tries to do (listen for instance to, amongst others, his ‘Space is the Place’ or ‘Nuclear War’).Sutcliffe, Jamie (2021a), ‘Vocal Cord Parasite’, essay written as part of ‘Trouble in Outer Heaven: Portable Ops Plus’, Southwark Park Gallery, London, 15 September to 31 October 2021. It is certainly within the realms of art—broadly conceived—that we see explorations of and experiments with these other imaginaries (our own work focussed on Science Fiction and the more non-human imaginaries in play there [see Burrow and O’Sullivan 2018: 275-93]). In Audre Lorde’s 1982 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, ‘biomythography’ was proposed as a new (auto)biographical form ‘combining elements of history, biography and myth’. That said, I have recently taken on the role of a Games Master for my own two sons and have now watched them enter into what always seemed to me another space-time.