Fabulations

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to open and cultivate the conceptual and methodological vocation of fabulation. Inspired by eclectic theoretical approaches to fabulation, variously conjured as critical (Hartman, 2008), hallucinatory (Bergson, 1954), inventive (Deleuze, 1993) and provisional (Berger, 2016), the session works from the premise that fabulation can be understood as a speculative “mode of attention, a theory of history and a practice of worlding” (Haraway, 2016: 213n.8). Likewise, the paper's argument is underscored by a sense that theories “are lent a certain situational consistency that works only insofar as it breaks down” (Doel, 2004: 452). To that end, the paper encourages conceptual interventions that animate and examine the onto-epistemic, as well as ethical, potential of fabulations. In so doing, we hope to assay how fabulation is an ongoing matter of concern for the geohumanities and beyond.