Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

Product Information

Exactly how the different myth-functions of ‘mythopoesis’, ‘myth-science’ and ‘mythotechnesis’ and their related modes of fictioning are differentiated from or relate to one another is difficult to perceive just from the few lines above, but the matter is elucidated the more one engages with the different sections of the book.

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.And the business of being a twin—of having your ‘double’ occupy the other position—also raises interesting questions and insights as regards the shuttling between different perspectives which is partly what these games seem to allow. It is a deceptively scholarly tome, like a Health and Safety-tested psychedelic trip conducted in a university lab with funding from the AHRC. We are always already involved in role play—or, put differently there is always something else playing us. This essay discusses the work of a series of imaginary artists who are, nevertheless, able to function as authors in the contemporary art world. Simon O’Sullivan is Professor of Art Theory and Practice in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmith College, London.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Fictioning the landscape” also refers to the way in which these different space-times need to be performed in some way, for example with a journey through or to some other place as in a pilgrimage.This, of course, is not an accidental quality of the book, but its true face: Burrows and O’Sullivan are not collaborators in writing and thinking alone; they also partake, together with others, in practicing collective fictioning under the guise of Plastique Fantastique, and this experience is both before and behind Fictioning. 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 mythopoesis, myth-science and mythotechnesis. This whirlwind of references (of which the bibliography of 26 pages is evidence) is further combined with what the authors state as the book's "necessarily different methods and speeds, operating on a variety of registers," which they feel is due to the fact that it is a collaboration.

In relation to this—and, indeed, the footnote above—I should also say that the following comments are indebted to a wider ‘community of interest’. 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?Again, one might say that a reading experience is also shared, between presumed author/narrator and reader. And then there are the players who then enter into that world and, with that, continue the world building or give it another dimension. Fictioning in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence. I’m thinking here of David Blandy’s The World After (2019) that allows for all sorts of non-human avatars and, more generally, foregrounds multispecies role-play (so allows a closer relation to non-human imaginaries).

There are also the computer games they play—screens being a ubiquitous element to all aspects of their lives—and in which another kind of world building and role playing (to a certain extent anyway) is at stake. There is, finally, what seems to me to be the biggest difficulty of all, which consists in finding a way to make this book manageable for the purpose of reviewing it, without diminishing its spirit and complexity and without betraying its poetic sensibility. 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). Reading Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy has brought me great joy; its review, however, not so much.For specialists in the fields traversed this may be frustrating and Fictioning is unlikely to satisfy those hoping to deepen their knowledge of the philosophers it addresses.