Text page
jon-k-shaw-fiction-as-method-1
A theory-fiction text that refuses the border between conceptual writing, scene construction, and speculative narrative.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central move of theory-fiction is to treat style and concept as inseparable. Fiction is not illustrative garnish placed on top of theory; it is one of the ways theory begins to operate materially.
These texts work by montage, compression, fictional carriers, and unstable voices. They build scenes, entities, markets, or atmospheres that behave like conceptual machines rather than like examples waiting to be decoded.
That matters because a great deal of the archive's originality lies in form. The writing does not merely report on cyberculture and modernity; it engineers new ways of sensing and narrating them.
How to read this text
Read the title, opening burst, and recurring terms before trying to flatten the text into a normal argument. Orientation comes from motifs and relays, not from a single thesis statement.
Track where journalism, fiction, market language, and philosophy contaminate each other. That contamination is the method.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 53
0’Sullivan’s essay for this book, “Non-philosophy and Art Practice (or, Fiction as Method) ,” outlines his initial forays into the work of Francois Laruelle, in particular the notion of non-philosophy and its pertinence to aesthetics.
Definition · paragraph 53
0’Sullivan’s essay for this book, “Non-philosophy and Art Practice (or, Fiction as Method) ,” outlines his initial forays into the work of Francois Laruelle, in particular the notion of non-philosophy and its pertinence to aesthetics. Again, the question being engaged with is how an outside can be dealt with directly, without the prioritization of a lower-order inside.
Definition · paragraph 53
This shift in subjectivity is expressed in explicitly Deleuzian terms as a refolding of the outside, and not least of “*new’ folds of silicon with carbon.”®? 0’Sullivan’s essay for this book, “Non-philosophy and Art Practice (or, Fiction as Method) ,” outlines his initial forays into the work of Francois Laruelle, in particular the notion of non-philosophy and its pertinence to aesthetics.
Definition · paragraph 57
In the nonhierarchical, productive sociality that is collaboration—with human and nonhuman others—possibilities emerge for different relations to the future, different assemblages of kinship, and different relations to the Planet. Far from “mere” escapism, then, the stakes of thinking of fiction as method are, again, the highest.
History · paragraph 69
See, for example, Simon O'Sullivan, “Deleuze Against Control: Fictioning to Myth- Science,” Theory, Culture and Society 33, nos. 7-8 (2016): 205-20. Dani Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson (London: Athlone, 2000), 56.
Appears in sections
Theory-Fiction and Cyberstyle Primary section
How theory-fiction, cyberpunk prose, and anti-academic style became part of the archive's method.