Dispatch from the Future: Science Fictioning (in) the Anthropocene

Abstract

In the essay “Da ficção” (“On Fiction”), Vilém Flusser (1966) posits that the world is “a fiction set and invented by us”. As Flusser points out, the world itself is not a fiction, but rather, our human explanations for the world are nothing but a series of fictions. Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) recognize the fictional character of those all-too-human regimes of representation that have come to think on our behalf, asserting philosophical thought itself should be read as “a kind of science fiction” that does not seek to imagine the future of philosophy, but rather aims to invent a philosophy of the future. Transposed to our “post-truth” moment, one defined by the full-on weaponization of nonsense and “alternative facts”, and in light of the Anthropocene, wherein the planet has receded from the image of the world’s givenness to human thought and analysis, this paper asks what role fiction might play in (re)inventing future realities.