Contenu du sommaire : La fiction-enquête

Transhumanism is a cultural movement that promotes the modification of human by non-conventional and high tech technologies. It advocates that human transcend his species condition and take care of his evolution. In order to legitimize their project, the defenders of transhumanism develop discourses and rhetorical arguments. This research presents and discusses four topoi. By using rhetoric's tools and from a critical perspective, this paper examines the transhumanist's rationale and shows how transhumanist's discourses legitimate power and are conductive to reinforce inequalities.

The American poet C. Reznikoff, (1894-1976) has lived through the lives of many people. His work as a journalist and lawyer, his observation of reality led him to the construction of the volume Testimony: The United-States 1885-1890 (1965), a montage of texts written from court reports. Impressed by the reading of Témoignages, and by a recent work of translation of the volume Way (1988) by the poet L. Scalapino (1944-2010), we will explore the singularity of these two poetic surveys from American modernity, where the verse, essential tool and deep aesthetic decision, carries a formal device of restitution and a thought of the world. The recitative proposal for one and the relation of derealization by the effects of sampling and editing for the other, present how a fiction is woven into the writing resulting from this heterogeneous material and extracts of reality, real setting and process of the poem.

In radio programming schedules, fiction is a separate niche, kept away from journalistic genres such as news programmes or documentaries. Based on the example of Doodle killed me, the article seeks to show to what extent fiction can expand the repertoire of documentary gestures and inform societal issues with larger acuity. By mobilizing interactionist sociology as much as the history of poetry, the information sciences and especially radio practice, it will be a question of showing why fiction should not be held in disjunction with the testimonial regime. While the development of fact-checking risks cutting us off from these issues, the most authentic testimonies, highlighted by a more or less explicit poetics, remain of an always questionable sincerity.

Foresight, or Futures Studies, is a practice and a discipline that uses the future as a means to imagine and enable transformative actions in the present. It is currently undergoing what may be called a “fictional turn”, which aims to better explore radically disruptive futures, to make the practice of foresight more inclusive, and to enable individual participants to become conscious of their capacity to transform their environment. This paper relates an experiment that uses fiction to explore the futures of work. Between 2018 and 2020, three workshops have tested different approaches with participants from within different corporations. They have shown that fiction is a powerful tool to establish dialogue within heterogenous groups; that it helps individuals to distance themselves from the dominant narratives about the future; and that it helps them see themselves as possible agents of change. However, knowledge and methods remain to be developed in order to articulate the act of imagining alternative futures and that of building concrete transformation roadmaps.

How does theatrical fictionalization shift the perception, in both substance and form, of a social contention among positions, cultures and interests that may diverge ? Building on a weekend of research organized by the ANR FORCCAST team with stage actors-writers (“écritures de plateau”), I will study resources specific to theatrical fiction and its incarnation as it grapples with an ethical debate. The focal point will be the creation of composite characters and a dramaturgy of the undecidable, with plays on the emotional and intellectual attention of the audience through effective resources to arouse active thinking. As well as a matter of exposure to dilemmas; the summoning of the intimate while exploring the phenomena of identification and disidentification; exercises of intertwined thought in acts and emotionally complex propaedeutics.

This article presents the results of a pedagogical experiment that invited engineering students at Télécom Paris to produce a fictional artistic creation in order to report on a social controversy. This experiment involved about a hundred students over seven years. After presenting the experimentation, we draw on feedback from the students and the teaching staff to show the links that the students make between the work of investigation and the work of fiction: the horizon of the fiction leads to a deepening of the work of investigation and also creates a collective dynamic that the intellectual work alone cannot produce.

Climate change is a global and complex issue, generating multiple uncertainties, extended over time and space, and whose current impacts require the adaptation of human and natural systems. However, adaptation faces a variety of barriers – technical, social, cultural, cognitive – which may partly be removed by the driving force of narratives, imaginaries, and fiction. This article constitutes an original state-of-the-art interrogating the benefit of collective and prospective imaginaries for adaptation to climate change. We conclude that further trandisciplinary research is needed on participatory citizen backcasting, especially when it's established on existing local narratives, enriched with positive imaginaries of the future, and guided by fictionalisation tools.

From 2013 to 2020, the Telecom Paris team led a project dealing with the fictionalisation of controversies. We shall here be going back over what was transposed into a film, play or novel: the transhumanism controversy (2018-20). These productions derive, in the first case, from students, in the second, from actors, and in the third, from a researcher-teacher. What does fictionisation bring, and in which way? In the analysis of the content of these productions, it emerges that fictionalisation constructs a dialogue. Thorny protagonists cross the empathy wall rather than digging out a trench between two camps. We thus arrive at the hypothesis that fictionalisation creates a deconstruction of the ego/hero: the characters are inclusive partners in problems, in other words stakeholders in issues and open to otherness, including the most off-putting of kinds, in order to construct some common ground.

This article focuses on the media construction of the dangerousness of the radical figure in prison. This construction is considered through the textometric and semio-discursive analysis of the portraits of so-called radicalized individuals proposed by three magazines since the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. The analysis shows the way in which this figure is expressed in media narratives, served by an intertextual mesh, by a narrative focused on the so-called radicalized person who is the central character and by photographic scenes. In so doing, a common axiology is reinforced to the detriment of a debate on the social contradictions that constitute this world.