Spare was famously a proponent of sigil magic, an ancient occult practice rooted in medieval hermeticism and updated by Spare in the early twentieth century, through which one’s secret wishes can be made to have real world effects. This can happen, of course, with reading fiction, but with role playing games two other things are also in play. The paper proceeds through analysing four case studies of this fictioning: Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy; Justin Barton and Mark Fisher’s On Vanishing Land; Steve Beard and Victoria Halford’s Voodoo Science Park; and the Otolith trilogy by The Otolith Group. Reflecting upon these early experiments, they lay out a theoretical framework for accessing the deeper layers of mythopoesis, guided by the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon and his notion of a ‘magical mode of technical existence’.

Het collectieve project Fictioning Comfort bevat werken die een maatschappijkritische positie innemen door ‘fictioning’ (de handeling van verbeelden en uitbeelden) in relatie te brengen met verschillende gebruiken rondom ‘comfort’. As in the previous chapters, the philosophical analysis is carefully woven into the discussion of a range of contemporary artists and works, notably the experimental music collective To Live and Shave in LA and the musician Rudolf Eb.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. Fictioning’ is the word Burrows and O’Sullivan use to describe a mode of making, writing and thinking that operates, like their own, between multiple fields of creative practice and philosophy. In this sense, it is a distinctly academic work, even if the academy it imagines does not yet exist in reality (as commonly understood).

Its purpose is to define and map instantiations of a concept or practice to which the authors, inspired by continental philosophy, give the name of ‘fictioning’. We might say in this respect—and to bastardise Marx a little—that hitherto the philosophers have only talked about building worlds in various ways. In style and structure, Fictioning is closer to the non-linear, rhizomatic model of A Thousand Plateaus, dissolving traditional disciplinary boundaries, fusing theoretical reflection with experimental writing and affirming its status as a work of art on its own terms. Diagramming and fictioning are mutually supportive, interdisciplinary bridging processes that connect the authors’ chosen modes of production.Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.

He is the co-author (with David Burrows) of Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); author of 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 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). Although this is true for any academic (or para-academic) essay—the idea of a single author as origin of ideas is certainly a myth (as partly implied by the present essay)—I want to acknowledge the various conversations and discussions I have had around tabletop roleplaying games and world-building, especially as the games themselves foreground this kind of collaborative and distributed knowledge production (if I can put it like that). Moving from Sun Ra to the Afrofuturist and sonic fictions of Kodwo Eshun, Black Audio Film Collective, Martine Syms and others, the authors unearth a self-alienating science fictional method connecting Afrofuturism to the Feminist world-building philosophies of Donna Haraway, Claire Colebrook, Isabelle Stengers, among others, making detours through the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the fictions of Mary Shelley, Ursula Le Guin, Peter Watts and Brian Catlin, the art of Carolee Schneeman, Orphan Drift and John Russell, and arriving finally at the non-philosophy of François Laruelle. 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 . The essay, however, opts for understanding these imaginary artists with " real " careers as a means to discuss and negotiate the complex function of artists' identities in the contemporary art world.Het is om deze redenen dat ideeën en gebruiken rondom ‘comfort’ cruciaal zijn bij het verbeelden van een alternatieve toekomst. Guy, Lesley (forthcoming), ‘Temporary Totalities: Creating Spaces for Collective Contemporary Art Practice’, PhD Dissertation, University of Northumberland. Unlike Art in Theory, however, it has no pretentions to be a comprehensive compendium of historical sources for a general readership. 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.

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’. The slight puzzlement about what we were doing (the game was initiated by an older boy) and then the moment it all fell into place—again, the penny dropped.This is part of Reed’s larger project—carried out across recent writings—to affirm ‘the difference between the making of a common world vs. 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, [End Page 99] knowledge and education is undone through the anamorphic skull. As the article from where the above quote is taken suggests, Q—who ‘drops’ information—is then not an individual, but a plot device that keeps the fiction going. 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’.