Conversation published October 2024 on A-DESK

POETIC RECODIFICATION OF COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION
Resident Editor: Constanza Mendoza CM

FICTOPUS
Fictopus are Filippo Bertoni FB, Alice Cannava AC, Chiara Garbellotto CG,
Constanza Mendoza CM, Sybille Neumeyer SN and Sina Ribak SR


CM: I don't know if you remember that during our pandemic connections I shared it with you this video by Mckenzie Wark that was part of RIBOCA, “Ficting and Facting” (1). I think that the space that opens with the collapsing of the concepts of fact and fiction in Cosmo-grammatics could inspire our conversation. How did we, as a group, decide to call ourselves Fictopus? How does it continue to resonate in you after these two years?

FB: These days I am focusing on my fiction writing, which happens to be - like the FICT project (2) we started from - about alternate history. So, of course, it’s all about fictions and facts, and how these are similar active processes of articulation. In particular, I am dreaming up an alternate history in which the revolutions in scientific thought and technology that took place in Hellenistic times (after the death of Alexander the Great and before the formation of the Roman Empire) didn’t get lost. The historical importance of this period is only recently being rediscovered - first and foremost by Lucio Russo (3). For this historian of ancient science something that was crucial in the innovations of this period had to do with the emergence of linguistic conventionalism: the idea that associations between terms and their meanings are not necessary and natural, but can be established arbitrarily (like the anatomical structures described by Herophilos and Erasistratus). This realization also made space for a relativization of systems of meaning, and it is not surprising that such conceptual instruments emerged in the time of formation of an ancient cosmo-politics - not in the propagandistic version that saw the greeks at the top, but in the truly novel syncretistic, diasporic, transnational and transethnic sense of a world (or an ekumen, at least) that got closer together.
(...)There is the formation of the koiné, of a language as a kind of lingua franca that allows to talk across borders, but also a language that is different from what it used to be, that can be modified. So I do find there is something about this kind of different approach to language and the relationship between language and, you know, reality and the natural world that I find very fascinating here. In this sense, the notion of cosmo-grammatics made me think also of this: of how, you know, really this kind of cosmopolitics brings with it a need to simultaneously kind of focus on the grammar, but also kind of unhinge from its dreams of stability and continuity to instead infuse change into it. This creates a gap between language and meaning, a gap that lets through both facts and fictions.

CM: It's difficult for me to imagine how life forms can have a name embedded as well, maybe onomatopoeic or something like that…

FB: Indeed, it is hard for us to imagine a natural language, so deep is the conceptual facility of linguistic conventionalism. But, to me at least, I can imagine it through my experience of living in a part of the world that does not speak my native tongue. And getting by through a language that I don’t approach so much grammatically, but pragmatically, through speech - which gives me even more of a distance from any naturalization. For example, in Italian most words are gendered; but English allows this difference, this distance from the expectation in Italian that everything will have a gender. And this already, you know, even in a very non-conscious way, still positions you in a different experience. You know, it creates the possibility of seeing past this naturalized view of language in some ways. And this is especially fascinating to me if we imagine an alternate scientific knowledge that remembers its epistemological grounding in this non-natural language. (...) You know, I do see how in my own way of being before opening up to really different languages, also more deeply, I also had a different disposition towards myself, let's say. So this transformation also of the self that comes with it, I find fascinating. You know, I do think, for instance, that we do sound very different when we speak different languages. And I think that these kinds of things that, you know, we often too easily gloss over as translation issues are in fact, you know, deeper; they have this side of the relation in a way between a grammar or a language and lived reality, kind of almost ontological reality.

CG: Acknowledging the development of scientific language as arbitrary and conventional it’s a very refreshing thought, it reminds me of Barad’s cuts (4). It is an invitation to dismantle the ingrained naturalization of scientific language – its terms, concepts, metaphors – as stable mirrors of reality. Considering a language “system” as a shared convention that serves the scope of doing things with the world, not merely to represent it and govern it, brings us closer to its openness. Exactly because it is used in the world, language is thus changed by it, by the relations it is used in and by those that it creates. And these are not abstract relations occurring between purely cognitively thinking beings but are relations between bodies and materialities, immaterialities, environments…

CM: Also learning different languages makes you more conscious about the playfulness of the language because you know that you don't speak properly, whatever that means. And this idea that you don't have the absolute control of a language you are in a position to play with words. And I think this playfulness of the self is very important.

SR: What you just said, Filippo, about how we change in which kind of language we speak, it makes me think of the notion of dreaming as well as collective imagination. Living in multi-language worlds, dreaming in different languages of different things in different ways, creates different realities for me.
Another thought I have is to rethink Marija Gimbutas’s work on “The Language of the Goddess'' (5) through this perspective of cosmogrammatics while bringing the language of more-than-humans, so, both animal, plant but also the animistic and spiritual world into this concept. What are the possible conversations in different kinds of assemblies?
And this question of aliveness I see as the abundance and diversity of not only languages, but also cosmologies and worldviews. And in that sense, cosmosgrammatics are very necessary to have aliveness and life.

SN: I agree, Sina. This in mind, language is not merely a cultural tool, but some biocultural dynamics which in itself keeps shaping its relations, it is world building so to speak. And in this dynamic lies a big potential, some empowerment: if we modify our words and languages we can mobilise new or reactivate old knowledges. In my practice, it happened that in my early practice I changed words and meanings not by intention, but by not knowing the English language very well. Sometimes I ended up trying to find a translation for something that could be expressed in one language but not in the other. And I got stuck, had to find more poetic rather than literal translations, which kind of created openings or portals to different ways of expression. And at some point this became a consciously chosen method. With my background in linguistics, this then often brought me to look at the roots of a word, and to trace the transformation of their meanings over periods of time, influenced by beliefs, politics, and technologies. Unearthing and acknowledging their roots made me consider a word as a plant themselves. Returning to these roots, is again like another portal to alternate worlds; worlds in which these words formed and themselves were part of making relations. Through customisation to a specific way of using languages, and this happens mainly with the language that we grow up with, we tend to take it for granted, but then digging up these roots helps us to return to specific relations, and potentially our own roots.
Further there is a very anthropocentric conception of language which reduces an imagination of alternate forms of communication with other beings. It narrows language down to sounds and speech, while communication and language could be wordless, but rich in expressions of bodies, smells, movements. For me, when we talk about cosmogrammatics, I think of the many potential languages, gestures, words, sounds, as portals to open, to shift between worlds both by creating similarity or by inviting ambiguity also as well, by creating not binary juxtapositions but rather multiplicity within one poetic expression.

CG: This makes me think about our Fracto experiment (1), when we started imagining how the characters joining the trans-planetary conference could have developed a shared methodology to explore the messages they were receiving in their own timeline. We were asking “how come they all knew how to join the conference even if living in worlds where subjects, objects, urgent problems, technologies and stories are different? How did they find each other?” So words as portals sounds promising to me!

AC: What Filippo said about the situatedness of language made me wonder about what people are afraid of, or defending from, when they get angry about neologisms or grammar mistakes. It's something that triggers some people so much. I wonder what's at stake there. I also had to think about our name as a collective, Fictopus. Part of it came from a difficult situation: We were having issues with the FICT (2) project, and didn’t know how to proceed with it. We later decided to keep that negative component, that was ultimately also a founding moment, in the name, but we added the octopus and merged the two words. A bit like Paul B. Preciado kept the B. from their previous name, as Connie told us a long time ago.

SN: Yes, this was a moment of healing the group, in the sense of ‘making it whole again’. After the group had shrunk due to the project’s challenges we returned to our initial constellation, the cosmos as you name it, Connie. Becoming something new while returning to our initial formation, adding ‘Octopus’ to ‘FICT’ was a good way to both remember and transform experiences through naming.

AC: That 's true. I’m now thinking about a book I mentioned during our early days, “La Grammatica della Fantasia '' by Gianni Rodari (6), the internationally known Italian author of children's books. I recently found by chance a German translation of the book. It’s the only theoretical book he published, about inventing stories. Reading it is a bit like going behind the scenes of his methods and techniques: He played a lot with language, and the book is ultimately about the liberating potential of words. Again, I’m wondering what it means to choose a word, or to modify a word, to play with it. Rodari also made a book called “Il Libro degli Errori” (7), the book of mistakes, with stories built around spelling errors and word puns. His work found inspiration and references in milestones of modern art and poetry like Novalis and French surrealism. I’d like to work more on that with you one day. The fact and ficting and the non-linear storytelling threads that emerged from our conversations are very important to me, and informed my research and projects ever since. I'm very happy to talk about it with you again.

CM: What is this idea of imagination, dreaming and spirituality? Do you think it's maybe a thread that we could continue? It’s not that we need to decide now. What I like about our way to be collective is that it's not obsessed with production.

SR: I like the idea of this experimentation. With Fictopus we had a first episode of collectively reading in several languages at the Fracto event. I would like to experiment more with that, as you said, not to have these outcomes, but being able to experiment together and in these possibilities.

SN: During my “metamorphosis” reading sessions with ZKM (9) we also had it happen that people read texts in different languages. This now makes me think whether we need translations or not in order to gather and listen to each other.

In these sessions we also mixed texts from different genres, which opens to more questions about languages. In my recent project with Charité 3R, a medical institute that aims to reduce, refine and replace animal testing by alternative biomedical methods, I had the chance to speak with scientists. Here the translations happened – and often failed – between scientific, cultural, and spiritual expressions. The project allowed me to trace how that sciences are not merely feeding one-way into a cultural imagination, nor the other way around, but both are rather constantly co-evolving with each other. In this spiral of collective knowledge production we came back to these two questions: what needs to be re–membered and what needs to be imagined for creating alternate conceptions and realities of a more-than-human wellbeing? Allowing different groups of people to talk with each other beyond their language worlds became successful through sudden dialogues that unexpectedly came out from just offering a place to encounter, and experimenting with words as portals to find connections, relations and alternate worldviews.

AC: I remember the experiment we did with Sina during the reading group at the textiles event in ACUD (1). We read in different languages that not everybody knew. It made you immediately focus more on the performance, and it completely changed the energy. It's also a way to see a person from a different perspective. For me, when Sina speaks French, it's another Sina, somehow. A more radical version could be about improvising rather than reading, co-creating a story in different languages in real time, building on the parts you could understand, or just picking up a word with a nice sound and continuing from it. Back to the “Grammar of Fantasy” by Gianni Rodari: in the book he talks about how children like to hear the same story again and again. It’s common to think that children simply like repetition. But he gives us a more complex interpretation: As the child already knows the story well, they can focus on the performance, and on the performer. It's a good way to look very closely at the person reading to them – how the face is moving, the sound of the voice, and so on – as they don't have to focus on the content. It's an idea of performance that is not just meaning-based, maybe a good inspiration for a collective practice we could develop together.

SN: This reminds me of a game: one person is drawing something on a piece of paper, then folding it so the next person just sees some fragments of the drawing. From these another person continues the drawing, folds the paper again, hands it to the next person, etc. In the end you open the paper to see the full picture, which mostly creates unexpected transformations, new creatures and interesting connections. Performing a co-creation of a story despite sharing the language would be some kind of a nice verbal translation of this game, potentially creating a kind of linguistic chimera. In the end the beauty lies not in owning a language at all, but animating it together.

CM: When you learn a new language as an adult you feel like a baby. You repeat the first words you learn, and you repeat it and repeat it as if you were a baby. You make a comeback to this first moment of experimenting with your own physical experience with language, with this strangeness in your mouth that invades your body. When I started learning German I was repeating and repeating the first words I learned because I needed to masticate a whole world, you know?

SN: I just think it's very interesting what you just said because also as a child we learn about the world through learning the language. By doing so, we relate to it. And then when you later learn another language you mostly do it with the help of textbooks, in which there is a specific idea, an artificial, standardized structure of words and sentences through which you are supposed to relate to the world. On the other hand, someone who learns not from the textbooks but by traveling, will have a very different vocabulary that forms their priority, an individual route defined by what one needs and who one encounters. And then this way of learning a language, it's like making a drawing or better a memory of the world around you.

CG: I love your image Connie of “masticating a whole world”, it makes me think that sometimes you also find yourself spitting things out, that something else, instead, nurtures you and changes your metabolism. And yet another time you find yourself craving for a certain taste-world-language, you miss it, not much for the explicit and logic meaning you want to articulate but for the feelings attached to certain sounds and the implicit relations, inferences and possibilities.

To go back to what Alice mentioned, children enjoy repetition since it allows them to suspend the cognitive effort of processing the narrative, as a sort of trance state in which they can mute that and turn up other kinds of perceptive abilities, like learning about non-verbal movements and enjoying maybe the pleasure of acoustic sounds and sense of proximity. They kind of know exactly what they need in order to indulge in what they want, or at least they don’t shy away from actively expand an interaction as long as they enjoy it, proof of the existential drama when you force them out of it. So then we could speak about what this joy is about.

FB: I love this. And I also really like stressing this physical element: there is something about the performance and how you know, managing to perform certain sounds even beyond the meaning …like the kind of sounds that in different languages show that you are following. Like, “um oooh uh huh” that varies a lot across languages. And I love this performative side, non meaning-centered but still kind of semantic type of connection, which I think it links very well to all the questions of the dream and the imaginary or the kind of exchange also beyond the species boundary, but also the other kind of groupings and collectives that we make sense through. And this reminds me of what I was thinking about the origin of scientific thought as a protest, a detachment in some ways from language. This is fascinating because it kind of relies on linguistic experimentation, like poetry, which really depends on going deep into language, but not to get at Language, but to kind of go past it in some ways in kind of seeing things that can be shared also beyond meaning. Because of my interest in science, this is also clearly something that was key to the workings of the idea of science as something that could allow an exchange that is understandable to everyone, but that also goes past some of the limits of such a totalizing approach.

- Speaking of other non-humans, I need to let in the dog. Sorry…

CM: One of the connections with Cosmogrammatics is “Aesthetics of perplexity” that I took from Jack Halberstam (7). The idea of situating yourselves in the position of not knowing. You said Sybille before, the idea of not knowing without solving the problem but to navigate this perplexity. Perplexity as a method. I'm now more related with people from other practices like dance, performative work in general and they embrace this idea of perplexity. I am a more word-based person and it's difficult for me not to solve problems, even in the most bizarre ways, but these moments of perplexity are not good for me in general. So maybe this also connects with the idea of improvisation and dreaming as well, because it's not so linear. I'm very interested in how you all deal with the practice of science as problem-solving. Because you all are related to science.

CG: Your map Connie and the specific connection you trace between Cosmogrammatics and Aesthetics of Perplexity points to the existence itself of different languages, grammatics, worlds and the perplexity aroused by the confrontation with such multiplicity, which by some is coded as a sign of danger, a symptom of an “ill” situation, where the stability of one cosmos is recognized in its fragile conventionality, going back to what Filippo was saying at the beginning. So perplexity as a sort of vertigo, like the nausea some get traveling in cars, when more than one movement line is experienced at the same time. You are asking though, how to feel perplexity not as a frightful sign? Thinking about our common work for example, how can we articulate ambiguities and traffics of ficting and facting designing modes to explicitly stay in and with the perplexity?


SR: I'm an engineer, so my desire to solve problems is very present in my being which I have to unlearn all the time. I also found playfulness very, very helpful for that.
Recently, researching on our kin, the sponges, I had to look into phylogeny and evolution with all these kinds of natural science languages. Speaking with Alice, she was questioning if I had made up the “sister group of all animals” expression, which sounds quite nice, like sisterhood. But no, actually I didn't. This is what zoologists call it and I don't understand why.
When we look at the five kingdoms of life as described by Lynn Margulis, the kingdom is both a very masculine and powerful term. Why would life forms be organised in kingdoms and what kind of other terms could we make up? I was imagining a Fictopus workshop creating new words.


SN: An example for another, similar naming process in natural history is the ‘queen’ in the beehive, which initially was even regarded as ‘king’. Here as well ideas of politics formed grammatics and language and thus imposed anthropogenic structures of thinking and imagination on other-than-human beings. And I think that relates to the question you Connie asked about science. If science is “the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment” (10), tracing back the systematic part unveils where knowledge production are impacted by predominant structures, and in that sense cosmogrammtics is defined by cosmopolitics. Once one inscribes itself in the other, it becomes a vicious cycle that spirals relationships. One way out might be to break down the constructed binary and hierarchy between so-called Science and other ways of knowledge production. Bees for example know and communicate through dancing, there’s a lot of inspiration we can draw from non-human species and from more playful and embodied language. In the end using alternate languages as a portal is always an invitation to glimpse different perspectives on a shared world. Engaging with or even making up new languages is a collective, earthly performance then. Similar maybe to the performance of a word in poetry, as itself eluding a prescribed meaning, becoming within a constellation of other words, and as such reminding us that language is ever performative and alive, making and unmaking relationships and connections.


FB: I do love this idea. And I also want to react to what Connie was saying about this feeling of being too rational. It was nice to hear you say this because, you know, it's good to not feel alone in this. And then it allows you to also put a finger on it and realize: it's true that I kind of feel guilty of myself. And it allowed me to ask myself, do other people not do that? I don't know. I'm not fully sure. I think there is this kind of, it's just different universes or like different grammars of sense? But I do think that this attempt to kind of put things together is often present in some form. That's why, you know, then you get, for instance dance and all of its kind of world of different ways of approaching this. But I do think that (and I say that especially to myself) there is something about that that is also something that we imagine about ourselves. Because the way that some ways of thinking about the world are imagined or portrayed differently....

AC: I struggle a lot with the word-based, problem-solving attitude mentioned by Connie. While preparing textiles (1), we were first thinking about something like a village fair, with different stations and actions, a bit like pre-theatre, trying to go back to spontaneous, non-linear forms of performance and storytelling. As for what is science for me and how I connect with it: Darwin's evolution theory is something that came up frequently in my recent research and readings, and it's a good example in this context because evolution theory has a lot of issues with words, how those words were interpreted or where they come from, how they were maybe misunderstood or at least seen from different perspectives at different times. Another example is the use of monarchy metaphors for animals, for example for bees and other insects. I wonder how their story, and biology, could be told differently by using different words.

FB: I do love how this idea of performance as a different access point to, let's say, non-linguistic (or not only) ways of thinking about things. I think this is very fascinating and I love how you reminded us, Alice, about the beginning of what we wanted to do there also in a way, because it kind of points out how also space can then become part of this grammar of non-linguistic or not-only-linguistic ways of relating and communicating. Because indeed, really thinking of the arranging of space in certain ways and how this can allow for things, which I think also really reflects very well in Connie's work on the board, you know, on kind of a game board is a quintessentially kind of an organization of space that does something. So I think there is something there also to kind of play with.



—----------------- NOTES —-----------------------

(1) Wark, Mckenzie. "Ficting and Facting". RIBOCA2, Public Programme 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbInv9C1lY0

(2) Part of what originally catalyzed our group was a call to think through alternate history issued by the Fragmentary Institute for Comparative Timelines (FICT - fict.site), which translated, for us, into an event as part of Fracto, where we unraveled some alternate histories of transhuman becomings by pulling on different textile threads.

(3) Russo, Lucio. "The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn". Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2004.

(4) Barad, Karen. "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning". Durham: Duke University Press, 2007

(5) Gimbutas, Marija. "The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization", Harper & Row Publishers, San Francisco, 1989

(6) Rodari, Gianni. "La Grammatica della Fantasia". Introduzione all'arte di inventare storie, Einaudi Ragazzi Ed. 2011

(7) Rodari, Gianni, "Il libro degli Errori", Einaudi Ragazzi Ed. 2011

(7) Halberstam, Jack. "Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire". Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

(8) Metamorphosis – Reading Group. Re-Collecting Knowledge https://zkm.de/de/node/40497

(9) Oxford Reference https://www.oxfordreference.com/page/134#:~:text=Science%20encompasses%20the%20systematic%20study,scientific%20knowledge%20for%20practical%20purposes.