Frederik Tygstrup: Speculation and the End of Fiction?

17 December 2014: 
Prof. Frederik Tygstrup (Copenhagen University)
‘Speculation and the End of Fiction’?  

Lectures in Media / Art / Politics–organized by Pepita Hesselberth (Lucas & NICA)
Every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 17h in Leiden
Universiteit Leiden / Lipsius 148

Modernity’s propensity for speculation is well established. It ranges from the artifices of the “as if”, the  thrills of imagining that everything that  is might  also be different, codified  by Robert Musil as an inherent “sense of the possible,” to the daring  betting on  the  “what  if,”  invoking  better futures with  an  utopian spark  or grim  prospects to  hedge oneself against. The  twin  inclinations to  imagine the  different  and  to project the future  are the hinges of the modern imagination. In the early eighteenth century, three powerful media of speculation came into being  almost at the  same time: the calculus of probability, paper money, and literary fiction. In different  ways, they  enabled agencies of correlating what is and  what is not  – whether in terms of risk assessment, circulation of capital, or social self-fashioning. By the  beginning of the  21st century, these media of speculation seem to have  reached a point  of excess. With big data, probabilistic speculation is about to accustom us to read “what if”-questions in an altogether indicative mode, just as big finance has succeeded to reverse the hierarchy between value assets and the media of liquid capital. This then raises the  question of what happens to the  third medium of speculation in our late modernity, that  of fiction? In my talk, I will try and  diagnose the  fate of fiction in an age of hypertrophied speculation, how  practices of fiction-making migrate, how  the functions of fiction transform, and  eventually how  our  present notion of fiction is due  for a conceptual makeover.

Prof. Dr. Frederik Tygstrup is Head of Program of the Copenhagen Doctoral School of Cultural Studies, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, at the University of Copenhagen.

http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucas/news-events/lectures-media-arts-politics.html