Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy by David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan (review)

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." Within this seemingly clear structure, however, all chaos breaks loose. This is certainly due to what the publisher describes as the "rich constellation of recent philosophical perspectives—including 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 research, electronic music and other digital practices." 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. Burrows, a reader in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art, and O'Sullivan, a professor of Art Theory and Practice in the Department of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, also regularly collaborate with several others as Plastique Fantastique, a collective described on their website as "a mythopoetic fiction—an investigation of aesthetics, the sacred, popular culture and politics—produced through comics, performances, text, installations and shrines and assemblages," which has clearly informed the current publication.

"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 Fantastique's tunes for that matter. Almost written as a philosophical whodunit, the book "accelerates" this reader through to the final outcome only to have her 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 comports with what Burrows and O'Sullivan find to their own surprise is the "anamorphic aspect of the book," its being both an academic survey but equally "a document of a journey, or itself a performance," referring in a final note to Holbein's painting The Ambassadors, where a certain confidence about culture, knowledge and education is undone through the anamorphic skull.

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 oriented and thus maybe not surprisingly influenced by Deleuzian notions of becoming, including the interest in a "people to come." At the end of the journey—or, if you want, at the beginning, to stay in keeping with the book's topsy-turvyness—Burrows and O'Sullivan are refreshingly not too certain about things to come. 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.

If there's one point of criticism I might have, it is the poor quality of the illustrations. Accompanying mentions of more-often-than-not relatively obscure artists, the small black-and-white illustrations don't do the artists justice. On the other hand, you could use the book, as I have, as a companion that urges you to delve more deeply into the artists Burrows and O'Sullivan mention and immerse yourself in their fictioning worlds, especially in the case of sound artists. I...