| REVIEWS |
BOOKS
Futures & Fictions
Fiction as Method
What to make of two books tackling the subject of
fiction within contemporary art, politics and the
humanities emerging from the same London college
around the same time? Might these two collections
signal the stirring of reinvigorated oppositional
politics, interested in creating new propositions,
rather than merely rejecting the status quo?
Futures & Fictions, edited by Henriette Gunkel,
Ayesha Hameed and Simon O’Sullivan, features
an array of contributors including Oreet Ashery,
Kodwo Eshun, Mark Fisher, Laboria Cuboniks,
Harold Offeh and AUDINT. The collection grew
out of a series of public lectures organised by
the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths
College in the autumn of 2015. Fiction as Method,
edited by Jon K Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison,
builds on a conference of the same name, also held
at Goldsmiths, on 17 October 2015, and includes
pieces by Tim Etchells, M John Harrison, Mer
Roberts and Erica Scourti.
We cannot – and the editors do not – ignore the
fact that, since the events that gave these books
their genesis took place, the word ‘post-truth’ has
officially entered the lexicon (Editorial AM402).
These books emerge at a time where evidence of
the efficacy of right-wing deployments of fiction
through meme-magick and spurious post-truth
‘news’ circulations is rife, a time in which the US
president denounces any emergent story that
may be unflattering or inconvenient as ‘fake’.
And yet they also emerge at a time, at least in
the UK, when we feel we may be glimpsing an
increasingly effective and galvanised left. The
books seek to posit the importance that fiction
may hold in a positive political project in the face of
neoliberal stasis (what Mark Fisher terms ‘Capitalist
Realism’: the apparent fact that there is really is no
alternative – Reviews AM333)
Fisher, a political theorist and Goldsmiths
lecturer whose sudden death in January 2017 shook
the college’s Visual Cultures department (see ‘Mark
Fisher Remembered’ AM404), and to whom Futures
& Fictions is dedicated, provides one of the book’s
central texts. His conversation with academic and
activist Judy Thorne centres on naming a new
vision for the left: ‘Luxury Communism’. Fisher and
Thorne’s discussion revolves around a rethinking
of the meaning of these two terms when they
are brought together: ‘By clashing the concept[s]
together, you create a kind of libidinal energy,’
argues Thorne, ‘we need to invent fictions about
the future in order to then make them real.’ The pair
question and attempt to define what a non-capitalist
APR 18 | ART MONTHLY | 415
understanding of luxury might be.
A recurring reference point throughout the
book is the work of John Akomfrah. The Last Angel
of History, 1995, is the focus of a conversation
between Ayesha Hameed, Kodwo Eshun (who
features in the film) and Louis Moreno. The text
looks at the work of the Black Audio Film Collective
and delves into some of the mythology explored in
Akomfrah’s film. A future-oriented blend of fiction,
interviews and essay-film, it forges links between
Robert Johnson – who, according to legend, sold
his soul to the devil in exchange for ‘the secret
Black technology of the Blues’ – the space-is-the-
place mythologies of Sun Ra, Lee Perry and George
Clinton, and emergent cultural movements around
breakbeat, techno and jungle music.
Technology and its effects on our lives today
and in our immediate future are explored by Oreet
Ashery – who examines how we deal with death
in the digital age through reflecting on her project
Revisiting Genesis, 2016. Simon O’Sullivan looks
at links between digital technologies in the stock
market and in digital video-making. In Fiction as
Method, Scourti’s Profiles of You recounts the artist’s
experience of developing The Outage, 2015, a
ghostwritten fictional memoir created by granting
its author access to various online profiles and
password-protected data, including her email
account. Scourti (Profiles AM382) examines the
opportunities and anxieties that circulate around
online self-exposure and the construction of our
digital selves.
In their essay on the work of 0rphan Drift – a
‘collaborative artist’ that ‘operated as fiction from
[its] start’ in 1995 – Roberts and Delphi Carstens
explore the fertile concept of Hyperstition.
Developed by the Cybernetic Cultures Research
Unit (Ccru) in the 1990s, Hyperstition deals with
fictions that, through cybernetic processes, make
themselves real: latent elements of the future
submerged within the present. Hyperstitional
practitioners may work with fictions in order to
render them effective in the real.
Introducing Fiction as Method, editors Shaw and
Reeves-Evison argue that fiction offers an opportunity
‘to encounter others in all their irreducibility, and for
re-enchanting reality with the buzz of possibility’.
Fictions, they propose, reveal structures that surround
us or else act as ‘holes’ that let something else creep
in. They draw on David Garcia’s useful distinction of
fictions that posit ‘what ifs’ against those that operate
‘as if’ to explore the myriad ways in which fictions
may be found to operate in the worlds of philosophy,
literature, art and film.
Of the two volumes, Fiction as Method gives
more attention to literary fiction, featuring an
enthralling excerpt from a science-fiction work
by M John Harrison (‘Green Children’) and essays
by Justin Barton addressing Angela Carter’s short
story ‘The Erl-King’ and Dora Garcia on Philip K
Dick’s ‘The Man in the High Castle’.
Futures & Fictions adopts the feel and pace of a
reader on the subject, presenting essays alongside
‘in conversation’ pieces, with more directly fictional
parts towards the end. Here we find AUDINT’s
theoretical-fictional account of sonic warfare, ‘A
Century of Zombie Sound’, and Ursula K Le Guinn’s
absorbing and disquieting short story from 1973
‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’. Outlining
a utopian world, Le Guinn’s narrator challenges
readers to believe in its existence in spite of their
ability to know better than to entertain such naive
positivity. As the narrative unfolds it is revealed that
the blissful life of all citizens of Omelas rests on the
suffering of one child who must be kept in perpetual
misery. Most citizens, on learning this, accept that
this one atrocity is worth accepting for the greater
good. The ones who don’t and who walk away from
Omelas on learning its dark secret remain the point
of interest – where they go is unknown.
Given the framing here I am inclined to read the
inclusion of this parable as a critique of neoliberal
acquiescence. At what price are we enjoying our
comparable luxurious existence? Who must suffer
that we can live so well? Upon realising this, do we
accept the condition and continue to live in this
knowledge, or do we walk away? Where might
we go if we do walk away, and what kind of world
might we create instead? z
Future Fictions, eds, Simon O’Sullivan, Ayesha
Hameed, Henriette Gunkel, Repeater Books, 2017,
408pp, £9.99, 978 1 910924 63 1.
Fiction as Method, eds, Jon K Shaw, Theo Reeves-
Evison, Sternberg Press, 2017, 368pp, £20, 978 3
956793 64 6.
Tim Dixon is a writer and researcher based in London.
| 39 |
Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction
prohibited without permission.