Fiction, too, is first created through and within the play. Perhaps there needs to also be an interpersonal experience, that is, the experience of communicating with someone else in a pretend mode and thereby sharing a fictional world that is different from the normal environment. (Peter Fonagy, for example, represents this thesis.) Perhaps, the experience of being held in different worlds suffices to play with differences. In any case, environment and fiction are both constructs of poiesis: the environment that creates a life and by which environment creates itself, and, let us say, the novel. Both constructs are metastable, except that the normal environment is borne by everyday actions, whereas the ecology of a novel is borne by a specific affective intensity caused by the particular metastability of fiction. In Modes de existence, Bruno Latour calls this metastability N-1.
To put it bluntly: The poietics of the environment and the poietics of a novel differ mainly from the fact that the first poietics has to prove itself in everyday actions and the second poietics in that it has something that strives to be shared”, as Kant says in the “Critique of Judgment” (§19). Unlike for the environment, we do not forget the metastability of the novel. There may perhaps even be something active coming from this metastability, a force that emerges because it has to hold itself, as it were, always in the act of appearing, it does not stand still. Such an activity can, of course, also come from a picture or a poem or music. It is, as though that which shows its ability to create itself as agencement, awakens a solidarity in us or even concern, a compassion which applies to the appearance itself, not to the appeared. Maybe we even feel this in moments of perceiving a landscape, a flower, the movement of an animal, all of which is part of natural beauty.