Am Dienstag, den 13. Dezember (18 Uhr, GA 1/138) wird James Burton (Goldsmiths, University of London, derzeit Alexander von Humboldt Postdoc Research-Fellow am Bochumer IfM bei Prof. Hörl) einen Vortrag halten zum Thema:
»Conteracting Reality: The Fabulation of Social Life«.
Abstract:
Henri Bergson’s concept of fabulation, or the myth-making faculty, is at the heart of a series of stories he tells in his late work about the development of social life. These include a speculative account of the origins of religion; a tale of the emergence of moral sensibility from biological tendencies; a philosophical narrative of the relationship between intellectual reason and imaginative invention; a dystopian prognosis of the self-destructive potential of post-industrial human society. This talk will introduce these stories, and their basis in the concept of fabulation, through comparison with better-known treatments of the same themes among several of Bergson’s contemporaries (in particular, Durkheim, Freud, and Benjamin). In doing so, its aim is not only to draw attention to the potential value of a paradigm of fabulation for contemporary cultural theory and media philosophy, but to consider the ways in which the critical, diagnostic and transformative endeavours of such theoretical activity continue to operate through fabulative modes. What are the critical and ethical stakes for such a “folded” or “meta-” process of fabulation? If, as Bergson suggests, the function of fabulation is to counteract the destructive effects of a direct perception of reality, what does it mean to consider such reality as itself the product of past fabulations? These are questions for culture in general and specifically for a contemporary culture which seems increasingly to be characterised by the proliferation of simulacra, virtual realities and other modes of fiction.

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