📝A Theory-Fiction Reading List

A Theory-Fiction Reading List

Posted on November 3, 2018

In Place of a Preface (Update, 2023):

On multiple occasions I have been asked how I would go about updating this list, and I have occasionally considered which works would merit addition. But if the brief introduction I originally wrote for this list was ambivalent, my position today must be more critical. It is apparent now that the addition of yet more examples of theory-fiction would be insufficient, because it would continue to presuppose the existence of a genre without adequately articulating that existence. Certainly there are other works with a family resemblance to those already on this list, but this work of analogy can be no substitute for genuine analysis. The slipperiness of the term may have served it well in the marketing of post-Ccru literary productions, but if we are to take seriously Fisher’s call to dissolve the opposition of theory and fiction we might first ask whether this division was ever particularly rigid or in desperate need of demolition.

This question may be posed in two ways:

(1) Firstly, to what extent does fiction-writing already possess a tendency toward theoretical thought, autoreferential constructions, and a testing of its own conceptual limits?

This can only be answered by contending with the conceptuality of art, which has in my estimation been most productively theorised by thinkers such as Hegel, Collingwood, Adorno, and Jameson, all of whom the post-Ccru theory-fictioners were unable to reckon with due to their reactive dismissal of ‘idealism,’ ‘dialectic,’ ‘ideology,’ etc. Far from being a privileged domain of uniquely ‘theoretical’ fiction, theory-fiction only registered a general capacity of artistic works to convey conceptual content, which was misapprehended as a novelty.

(2) Secondly, is it possible to speak of philosophical or theoretical thought as separate from its written form, which must necessarily introduce the problematics of metaphor, image, and narrative, i.e. fiction?

This question is the more uncomfortable one for the philosopher, for whom theory-fiction neatly designates a border-zone between fictive writing and a supposedly non-fictitious form of theory. But it is also on this point that the notion of theory-fiction as a novelty shows itself to be the deadest of horses. We are today decades past Derrida’s discovery of the force of metaphor in philosophical writing, Hayden White’s analysis of narrative fiction-making in factual discourse, and Gillian Rose’s dissections of style in post-Kantian philosophy. Where, then, can we find non-theoretical fictions and non-fictive theories so that we may do away with them, again? What use is a theory of theory-fiction which constructs itself in opposition to fictions of its own making? The theory-fiction of this millennium arrives late to the battle, and erects bulwarks on a ground that has already been thoroughly undermined.

The serious study of the intersection of theory and fiction, for which we may dispense with the hyphen and name it simply philosophical writing, must begin not with the presupposed division of theoretical and fictional works but with their conceptual unity—the idea and the style of a work being indissolubly joined, not form and content but the content of the form. The object of theory-fiction thus dissolves, and leaves in its place a poetics of theoretical and fictional writing as divergent articulations of a common substance. The starting point for this work of criticism would not be Fanged Noumena, but Frye’s Anatomy, Auerbach’s Mimesis, Benjamin’s Elective Affinities essay, the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and Vico’s New Science. Its genealogy would dispense with Burroughs and look further back to the tradition of conceptually-motivated writing (let’s call it allegory) that encompasses Dante, Spenser, and Milton, who would, incidentally, be my additions to the list if I were to write it today.

Introduction

What even is theory-fiction? In short, it is the intersection of theory and fiction, and also the “dissolution of the opposition itself” (Fisher 1999, p 156). In this hybrid style, theory is torn down from its pedestal, the real power of fiction is affirmed, and both are released from the high forms of the academy.

Whatever theory-fiction may be, the works listed here emerged from disparate locations for manifold reasons: some are motivated by frustration with toothless academic theory, others by the prophetic powers of fiction, and still others by an aggressive disregard for any established form. Recently, Simon Sellars spelled out the issue quite nicely: “I don’t think theory-fiction is a genre, it is more like an attitude The world is so chaotic that no overarching theory can ever hope to explain it. So, the form itself leaks and cracks.”

The goal here is to locate these leakages, and to give an overview of the interzone between two established forms. The first half of the list deals with theoretical titles which utilise fictional forms, while the second half is fiction with theoretical content. The middle sections occupy a space between these two, including the texts out of which “theory-fiction” emerged as a concept. The sub-divisions are of course tentative, and many of the titles could have been placed elsewhere

Poetic Theory (Theory which foregrounds its artifice)

Søren Kierkegaard — Fear and Trembling (1843)

Georges Bataille — Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)

Theodor Adorno — Minima Moralia (1951)

Paul Virilio — Speed and Politics (1977)

Maurice Blanchot — The Writing of the Disaster (1980)

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari — A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

Jacques Derrida — The Post Card (1980)

Simone Weil — An Anthology (1986)

Jean Baudrillard — The Ecstasy of Communication (1987)

Lawrence Rainey, et al. — Futurism: An Anthology (2009)

Thomas Ligotti — The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010)

Villem Flusser & Louis Bec — Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (2012)

Claudia Rankine — Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

Dawn Ades, et al. — The Surrealism Reader (2015)

Donna Haraway — Manifestly Haraway (2016)

Narrative Theory (Theory told through narrative form)

Lucretius — On The Nature of the Universe (55 BC)

Kamo no Chōmei — An Account of My Hut (1212)

Moses de León — The Zohar (1305)

Friedrich Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891)

Pierre Klossowski — Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969)

Walter Benjamin — One-Way Street and Other Writings (1970)

Hélène Cixous — The Third Body (1970)

Klaus Theweleit — Male Fantasies (1977)

Luce Irigaray — Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1980)

Manuel De Landa — A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997)

Catherine Keller — The Face of the Deep (2003)

Michel Serres — Biogea (2012)

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing — The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015)

Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (Theory-fiction as cultural hype)

J D Bernal — The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (1929)

Stanisław Lem — Summa Technologiae (1964)

Nick Land —Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (2011)

Arthur Kroker — SPASM (1993)

Orphan Drift — Cyberpositive (1995)

CCRU — Writings 1997-2003 (2015)

Kodwo Eshun — More Brilliant Than The Sun (1998)

Sadie Plant — Zeros + Ones (1998)

Mark Fisher — Flatline Constructs (1999)

Reza Negarestani — Cyclonopedia (2008)

Edward Keller, et al. — Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium (2012)

Baylee Brits, et al. — Aesthetics After Finitude (2016)

Benjamin H Bratton — Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution (2016)

Cergat — Earthmare (2017)

Nicola Masciandaro — Sacer (2017)

Elizabeth Sandifer — Neoreaction: A Basilisk (2017)

Sci-Phi (Low fiction, high theory)

Ueda Akinari — Tales of Moonlight and Rain (1776)

William Burroughs — The Soft Machine (1961)

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky — Hard to Be a God (1964)

Ursula K Le Guin — The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Monique Wittig — Les Guérillères (1969)

J G Ballard — The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

Angela Carter — The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972)

Thomas Pynchon — Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

Samuel R Delany — Triton (1976)

Giorgio De Maria — The Twenty Days of Turin (1977)

Philip K Dick — VALIS (1981)

William Gibson — Neuromancer (1984)

Kathy Acker — Empire of the Senseless (1988)

Umberto Eco — Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)

Octavia Butler — Xenogenesis (1989)

Christine Brooke-Rose — Amalgamemnon (1994)

Alexis Pauline Gumbs — M-Archive: After the End of the World (2018)

Theoretical Fiction (1: Fiction as theory)

Margaret Cavendish — The Blazing World (1666)

Laurence Sterne — The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767)

Denis Diderot — Jacques the Fatalist (1796)

Thomas Carlyle — Sartor Resartus (1836)

Samuel Butler — Erewhon (1872)

Alfred Jarry — Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911)

Franz Kafka —The Great Wall of China (1931)

Virginia Woolf — The Waves (1931)

James Joyce — Finnegan’s Wake (1939)

Robert Musil — The Man Without Qualities (1943)

Samuel Beckett — The Unnamable (1953)

Jorge Luis Borges — Labyrinths (1962)

Italo Calvino — Invisible Cities (1972)

Eva Figes — Light (1983)

William Gaddis — Agapē Agape (2002)

Olga Tokarczuk — Flights (2007)

Eimear McBride — A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013)

Laurent Binet — The 7th Function of Language (2015)

Anne Garreta — Sphinx (2015)

Joanna Walsh — Worlds from the Word’s End (2017)

Theoretical Fiction (2: Self-writing as theory)

Augustine — Confessions (400)

Michel de Montaigne — Essays (1580)

Clarice Lispector — Agua Viva (1973)

Georges Perec — W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975)

Roland Barthes — A Lover’s Discourse (1977)

Fernando Pessoa — Book of Disquiet (1982)

W G Sebald — The Rings of Saturn (1995)

Svetlana Alexievich — Voices from Chernobyl (1997)

Chris Kraus — I Love Dick (1997)

Sara Ahmed — Queer Phenomenology (2006)

Virginie Despentes — King Kong Theory (2006)

Paul B Preciado — Testo Junkie (2008)

Laura Oldfield Ford — Savage Messiah (2011)

Maggie Nelson — The Argonauts (2015)

Simon Sellars — Applied Ballardianism (2018)

Theoretical Fiction (3: Poetry & plays as theory)

William Blake — The Book of Urizen (1794)

Sarah Kane — Complete Plays (2001)

Jena Osman — The Network (2010)

Keston Sutherland — The Odes to TL61P (2013)