The blog

[Message to the participants]

Dear participants

The ‘[FIC]/Fiction’ workshop. 10-14 June at the IKKM, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, co-organized by Bruno Latour (Sciences Po) and Antoine Hennion (CSI, MINES-ParisTech), as part of an IKKM project in conjunction with the ERC AIME programme, the ‘inquiry into the modes of existence’ (see Latour’s book Enquête sur les modes d’existence, Paris: La Découverte, 2012).

Before sending out a more detailed program, we would like to share you a few ideas about what we envisage for the workshop. It will be a very practical workshop in keeping with the spirit of the pragmatic sociology developed by Antoine Hennion and the empirical philosophy being tried out in the AIME experiment led by Bruno Latour. This is just an opportunity for you to give us your feedback as well as to propose some other ideas.

Organisation
The workshop will have 20 participants, half of them chosen by Antoine Hennion, half by the AIME team.
From Monday to Wednesday we will work on the documents, materials and experiments that you will have brought in. Together, we will devise a procedure for following the exercises that we will do later, in such a way that they will shed some light on the inquiry into the modes of existence. In addition, we will document and archive the exercises for further treatment. On Thursday we will work with the researchers at IKKM to offer alternative accounts of the experiences and then on Friday we will attempt to draw up a summary of our investigation that presents the mode of existence chosen for the workshop in a new way.

The goal then, is not to have an academic discussion with papers read and then discussed. Rather, the idea is entirely organized around the documents and experiences that are then collectively accounted for. In this way, we follow the AIME protocol: is the experience shareable? Is the account of the mode or of the crossing between modes acceptable? Is there a better account? Can this new account offer a better definition of the other modes? Finally, is it possible to come to some sort of agreement on the description of the beings of [FIC]? An agreement that will be later used, at the end of the project, to rewrite the original proposition from the book.

Theme
A little caveat: what we mean by [FIC] or more precisely the ‘beings of [FIC]’ is not conveyed very well by the ambiguous word ‘fiction’. Beyond the use of the word fiction in the contemporary institutions of art, creation and culture, what we try to capture through the beings of [FIC] is much more open, much older and more versatile than the institutions of art and culture. It precedes human beings by hundred of thousands of years since it largely generates them. So the idea of the workshop is to shift attention away from art and to dig further into the highly specific attributes of those beings: figure, figuration, invention, form, story, works, works of art, formal, formalize, etc. The goal is to exploit the richness of this diversity while remaining attentive to the idea of listing the specifications of this mode.

The risks taken in the various exercises should help us render much more precisely what has been defined as a relationship between form and materiality by making the participants attentive to, through the use of various mediums, the agency that belongs to the beings of [FIC]’s. Why is it that they reside in matter without exactly being material? Why do they need to be held up and taken up, over and over again, to be sustained? What is their highly specific form of objectivity? How do we handle their varying degrees of consistency? How come we are so good at defining what ‘holds’ or what ‘does not hold’ and yet need long elaborations to formulate our tastes and judgments? What is this ‘appeal’ or ‘hold’, as Souriau says, that this work has on those whom it transforms, etc? In brief, we will be engaging in a group exercise to learn from one another on how to speak properly about these sorts of beings. On Wednesday night, Bruno Latour and Antoine Hennion will give a joint lecture on Souriau.

Procedure
As you can see, you are not asked to give a formal presentation but to invite the other participants to share in an experience of the beings of [FIC] especially devised to reveal some of the original features of their ontological status (which necessarily means, contrasting them with other modes). You should then, be prepared to come with revealing experiences able to leave shareable traces over the possible category mistakes that make you hesitate the most. This means that it is impossible to focus on the mode [FIC] without some interest with other modes, especially [MET], [TEC], [REF], [POL] and [ATT]. To capture this original mode, you will need to make the participants attentive to the crossings, bifurcations, moments of hesitation, dispersions, losses, or on the contrary, the consolidation of the effects left behind by the beings of fiction.

AIME is just a proposition that should be transformed, over the course of the workshop, into another proposition, better adjusted to the experiences that you have accepted to share with the other participants. This is what is called, in the AIME protocol, ‘diplomatic encounters’, a type of workshop that will be tested for the first time in Weimar and which is entirely distinct from the discussion and critique of an author’s text.

Practical workshops we see as being a priority (please don’t hesitate to add new ones)
- judgments of taste and what they reveal about the properties of objects/subjects (it should be given quite a lot of space to shift attention away from high art); -the objectivity of judgment of art in the making (objectivity is of course a 'faux ami' that should be reworked); contrary to French expression ‘in matters of taste and colour there can be no disputes’ such matters are a constant source of debate; the exercises should be done in several settings and media -film, music, literature- and from three standpoints: that of the maker, the public, and with and without the help of critique (this is quite important since the institution of critique should be foregrounded — for example, Antoine Hennion’s case on wine and an exercise at SPEAP that we did earlier this year). -an ideal place for exercises is to take up again their presence in scientific literature — what Deleuze calls the ‘little delegated characters’ — we should work on this collectively (Bruno Latour has a long experience of doing these exercises through his thesis writing exercises and the semiotics of scientific texts; see also the work of Frédérique Ait-Touati). -another ideal place is the design question; where the question is not taste but all of the vocabulary used for talking about functions, market, law etc., which is a great way to show the penetration of fiction everywhere. These workshops will require a procedure that needs to be carried out as well as documented: they should be filmed or at the very least observed and followed by other people specialized in capturing their results and traces. This is especially important, as they will be used as additional documents on the AIME platform.

Topics brought by the participants (list to be modified)
Below, you will find a tentative list of the areas to be covered. To give you an idea of what we have so far: storytelling, heritage, TV series, how an electricity bill is calculated, contact-dancing, nanotechnology, carbon credits, the Web, narratives combining art and science, the effectiveness peculiar to rituals, L’Oeuvre à faire, design, the characteristics of programme writing etc.

Alongside theories of art (Haskell, Marin, and a thousand others), literature (Greimas, Pavel, Eco, etc.,) performativity (Austin), Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?, or still performance as Goffman puts it, (all of this to avoid falling into excessively canonical debates on fiction/reality in the theory of the novel, or the on the role of the sign in semiotics and analytic philosophy), which this may be an opportunity to have another look at, as well as emphasize the chapter dedicated to [FIC] in Bruno Latour’s Enquête (§2-ch9, pp. 237-260), as well the nearby modes [TEC], [REF], [ATT], [MET] and [POL], without of course forgetting the book’s overall argument. We can also examine De l’Oeuvre à faire, the excellent text from 1956 that Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour took up again in their new edition of Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence (PUF, 2009). Along the same lines, if any of you have an unexpected and powerful text in mind, particularly one that tackles themes from other areas (such as Netz on Greek geometrical diagrams), please do not hesitate to let all of us know!