by ​ Yvette Granata​

‘The lamprey’ is the name given to any fish of the order Petromyzontiformes. It is most commonly known as a parasitic, jawless fish that latches its fanged mouth onto other fish in order to suck the blood of its host. A google search of ‘lamprey’ brings up a series of digital photographs that show its ‘toothed, funnel-like sucking mouth’ prominently featured in the results. When asked, via the search field, what a lamprey is, then, google also answers the question, ‘what does a lamprey look like?’. It responds to us, ‘Here is a photo of a lamprey’ and ‘here is a photo of many lampreys’ and ‘this is what a lamprey looks like’. The toothed, sucking mouth is both the image of and the encounter with the lamprey.

Yvette Granata, Google Image Search Results, ‘Lamprey’ (2016). Screenshot.

Google’s search results in this way present to us a theoretical position on both the lamprey and on photography. Like Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious, google image search returns photographs of the lamprey as if to reveal lamprey mouths and teeth that we perhaps have never seen, the real lamprey in photographic stillness. For Benjamin, the camera revealed the unseen, whereby the photographic offered an indexical print of reality through the capture of the surfaces of objects. This ‘unseen’ was embedded in the experience of daily life, and the technology of the camera showed us what we did not see in our daily experience, ‘with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious’ (Benjamin, ‘Little History’, 512). Through the photograph, and through the image search engine, the objects that we have never seen are shown to us.

Yvette Granata, WhatIsALamprey? (2016). Video.

The photograph of the lamprey that google presents is an image of an animal body and of its fangs. It is a snapshot of an animal-object as parasite that threatens to latch upon the viewer. The image of the lamprey as an image of ‘the parasite’ reveals that the parasitic is classed by the human as a negative, rather than an essential characteristic for survival. The search results do not show, for example, an array of perspectives of the lamprey in its context, but images of fangs, jaw-less toothed mouths, bites, blood. It is a critique of the parasite, or a definition of the parasite as what it might do to us, a threat-mouth object, a thing that will suck on you.

A corollary to Roland Barthes’ myth, in which something is always ‘added to’ the sign, the ‘photo of’ the lamprey is an amplification of lamprey teeth. It produces a mythic threat by centering the lamprey teeth. Through this ‘photograph of’ the lamprey, a reduction of a species also occurs: lamprey = parasite = teeth. While the objectifying gaze of the camera and the politics of its images have been thoroughly critiqued since the invention of photography, and while the invention of digital photography and software editing practices have pushed contemporary critique beyond an analysis of the material of the index, there nonetheless remains a particular phrase that lingers in the everyday use of media—the ‘photograph of’, the ‘image search for the photograph of’.

In his work on non-photography and photo-fiction, François Laruelle gives a method for moving away from this phrase. Instead of the photograph of an object, photo-fiction ‘is about rendering the photographic act immanent, of interiorizing it, and rendering it real without an external realism, of destroying philosophical and perceptual sufficiency without denying the necessity for perception’ (Laurelle, Photo-Fiction, 7). One of the main tenets of Laruelle’s thought is a critique of philosophy’s separation of thought and immanence. He claims that by thinking about immanence, philosophy has always separated itself from it, calling out philosophy’s auto-position to make claims about immanence or the Real.

The auto-position of philosophy, or the self-assignment of its authoritative position, is what allows philosophy to legitimate itself (decisionism). What Laruelle attempts to construct instead is thus a method for thinking with immanence and not about it. Similar to his critique of philosophical decisionism overall, whereby he exposes philosophy’s proclivity to pathologically conflate thought with representational access to the Real, with photo-fiction Laruelle gives the method for looking at the photographic process as its own proclivity to expose and render itself, as opposed to its captured object.

Following Laruelle’s line of thought, then, the photographic image is merely the mimesis of its technological prerogative—the process of capturing light bouncing off of objects—not the revelation of objects. The camera captures light particles, and gives us in turn, an artifact of its internal image—the photographed. The photographer who ‘captures’ the world—Laruelle posits—is working within a ‘photographic finitude’ in which ‘finitude does not mean the reception of an external given, but an impotency in regard to oneself, a powerlessness to leave oneself so as to go amongst things or—a vision condemned to see according to itself’ (Concept, 15). He goes on to suggest that ‘this stance consists less in situating oneself in relation to the World…than in definitely abstracting oneself from it, in recognizing oneself from the start as distant, as the precessor’ (Concept, 15). The photographer is not unaware of this, but works within naiveté and accepts the a priori position of a separation between subject/object—the precess of the subject—thus agreeing to stand apart from the world.

Like photography, we may also view Google’s image search as bolstering this notion, replicating a similar photographic precessing of images through the internal prerogative of its search algorithm. It makes a claim on the ‘real lamprey’ by accepting the position of its function, assuming its ability to find and retrieve an image object as the same as presenting the realness of an animal. It likewise conflates the animal in the world with its act of returning to us the range of lamprey teeth out there on the internet. The result is produced merely from an acceptance of the naiveté of its own technological operation.

Neither photography nor Google give us a mimicry of a lamprey. They do not reveal an internal operation similar to the lamprey. They do not mimic that which they show nor do what the parasite does, thereby making us understand a parasitic process. By comparing the notion of being shown a parasite versus doing what a parasite does, we can better understand photography as its position, its precess. Moving away from the prerogative of photography then, we might ask—what is a photo-fictional lamprey?

The animation project Processing/Lampreys is a series of animated lamprey surfaces, structures, movements, and terrains crafted from digital images of lampreys made with the Processing coding language, Javascript, and After Effects. It looks to Laruelle’s notion of photo-fiction as a different realism of photography—realism not as an overdetermined representation, but as an ‘under-determined chaos’ in which the camera is one variable within a fusion of variables. It aims to create a method of photo-fictional chaos through image processing that crafts new worlds from the digital data of lamprey images in order to produce an under-determined chaos.

Yvette Granata, Processing sketch (running) (2016). Screenshot.

While the Processing/Lampreys project induces the digital process of coding as a photographic medium, it begins with an appropriation of lamprey photographs from the google search results. The scripts create 3-D extractions, surface textures, abstract stretchings and motions of the lamprey image, turning the photograph of the lamprey into a digital array. The processing code itself cannot capture light on the surface of a lamprey, the way a camera does.  It must be fed digital data from an image’s pixel information; it needs another photograph to latch onto. In this way, image processing code as a photographic medium is necessarily a parasite. For example, with a camera, one need only to push a button and it will work, it will create a photo of anything in front of the camera. With the processing code, on the other hand, if one hits ‘run’ on the program without  having the photograph contained within the program data file, the program will fail. It returns the words ‘NullerPointerException’ and tells you ‘the file is missing’.

Yvette Granata, Processing sketch failure (2016). Screenshot.

The program code and the effect scripts are selective of their hosts. Just as a lamprey cannot suck on a twig or a cardboard box for nourishment but requires animal flesh, the program cannot produce effects with any-object-it-selects-whatsoever.  The data is taken from a specific image-object, from a .jpg or .png, and is broken down into more specific data, such as the color data or the position of the pixels, and arranges the data differently. All of the data from the original .jpg or .png is there, but rearranged and redirected according to the operation of the code, its interior process. In this way, the internal technological prerogative of this conceptual camera is similar to a camera; however, it is exactly this internal operation that one works with—its operation constitutes the object.

Yvette Granata, Processing/Lampreys (2016). Animation still (Processing/After Effects layered).

Just as the parasite becomes entangled with its host and becomes a part of the host-thing-itself, the ‘image of lamprey’ becomes a part of the process of the technological apparatus. With the lamprey photo as a part of the internal process of the apparatus, this conceptual camera precludes the notion that there is a photographer-subject able to be detached from the world, precessing and rendering the objects in the world for us. Instead there is a host material and a transformation of the material of the host into different types of images and energies, like a parasite-machine. Similar to what Laruelle calls a non-photographic vision, it is an image ‘parallel to the World; a photographic process which has the same contents of representation as those that are in the World, but which enjoys an absolutely different transcendental status’ (Concept, 19). Through the execution of the code and the rendering of effects, the image is no longer recognizable as a lamprey nor as a photo of a lamprey. Instead an alien scenario or scenography emerges, a photo-fiction, as the image process crafts a strange world devoid of a grasped-object, or without a stable representation. It uses the data of the photograph of the lamprey as the source for crafting a realism of an underdetermined world.

Yvette Granata, Processing/Lampreys (2016). Animation still (Processing/After Effects layered).

In other words, to move from precessing to processing, the lamprey photograph as a photo-fictional scenario moves us away from the ‘showing of’ an object or animal, and instead creates an image of an entangled technological apparatus. This entanglement is a parasite aesthetics.

Through engaging with coding image processing as a parasitic entanglement, can a post-anthropomorphic image, not of, but with the world emerge?

Yvette Granata, Processing/Lampreys (2016). Animation still (Processing/After Effects layered).

With digital image processing, we are more like the lamprey. This is not a negative understanding of, nor a critique of the parasitic, but is a reposition the frame of practices of ‘the parasite’.  It is not to say that a parasitic practice is a negative one, but that it is a practice that can apply to the lamprey, the human, and the digital. Parasite aesthetics is therefore not about the formal qualities of images of parasites, nor the representation of the parasitic. It moves away from aesthetic experience ‘of an object’ and moves towards reframing aesthetics as an entangled process.

Parasite aesthetics produces an image of its conceptual-photographic act. It is defined by its modus operandi, like the parasite. The aesthetics are in the practice, in the entanglement of technological operation and the object, not the results. This is another realism of photography, whereby photo-fiction is a replacement for ‘real lampreys’. Photo-fictional lampreys instead grow out of the relation of human worlds, animal worlds, and digital worlds, framing them under the non-negative understanding of the parasitic.

Yvette Granata, Processing/Lampreys (2016). Animation still.

To immanentize photography, one can no longer take a ‘photograph of’, but can only photographize. With a photographized image, we are no longer the human center subject with lamprey animal as a threatening parasite object.

Yvette Granata, Processing/Lampreys (2016). Animation still.

The subject-taking-photo-of-the-object recedes into a de-centered position as one of many variables, a non-positional alterity.

Yvette Granata, Lamprey1.1.1.1.2 (2016). Video.

The anthropocentric position is spread out or moved, de-positioned through the digital practice of parasite aesthetics and becomes positioned on the same plane as the lamprey. Such a non-positional alterity is a photography without the finitude vision that Laruelle says is condemned to see only according to itself.  It is an attempt to move from the distance of precessor to the embeddedness of a parasitic processor.

​References:
​
Benjamin, Walter. ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2. 1927-1934, trans. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings et al. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999.
Granata, Yvette. Processing/Lampreys Archive.
Laruelle, François. Photo-Fiction, A Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. Drew S. Burk.Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012.
Laruelle, François. The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay. New York: Sequence Press, 2011.

The article is taken from:

by ​Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen

‘A being is special if it coincides with its own becoming visible, with its own revelation.’
(Giorgio Agamben)

What does it mean to be a contemporary artist today and can we describe this mode of existence? First of all, we must situate the contemporary artist within the space of the generalised human existence. Artists are just like all other humans: they have a body, are social and temporal and in search of ecstasies in whatever form. At some point in their lives they enter into the art world with a mature body, committing themselves to some kind of artistic output generated by the act of social positioning. This entering is a fundamental gesture towards life; it is a choice that becomes absolute, because it transforms a human body into something specific: that of an artist in a social world. From this first decision comes a specific existential power: the power to place a whatever within the art context. This power is not automatically given once and for all, and it does not happen with the same intensity for all artists at the same time. For example, the budget to produce art for a Tate Modern Unilever project is only given to artists who have already established themselves, and never given to an artist who is still a student. Both are contemporary artists, but with a different power to exist, and situated differently. To exist in the art world as a contemporary artist is not the same experience for all its agents. 

In order to understand the subtleties of being an artistic agent, a person who does something within a social field, in this case the art world, we must develop a hyper-reflection regarding the artistic existence. We must on the one hand grasp the condition of being situated within the metaphysical knot – own, given and final being – yet on the other hand understand the institutional transformation of the artist into someone specific: a generic singularity. Generic singularity as a concept points towards the double-sided aspect of being a human agent incarnating generic categories and yet being an absolute singularity. It is a being who becomes special by coinciding with his own becoming visible in a social world (Agamben). For example, my generic properties are those that I share with a number of other people depending on which context I inhabit, such as being male, white, Western, educated, middle-aged, father, brother, son, neighbour, consumer, artist, but my singularity in the art world derives from my specific power to exist as a human: a contemporary artist who has become known for a specific output. Only one person is incarnated into my flesh with my name right now. I am the one who in specific contexts (the art world) stands out from the crowd as that person known for this or that and who has the right to choose whatever to become works of art. The power I have to exist is partly derived from the generic institutional qualifications I have acquired and the exhibitions and works I have done as the total sum of competences I have accumulated over the years, for example, the papers and documents from certified institutions stating I have an MFA degree in Art or an MA degree in literature. These titles are generic in nature – thousands of other people also have these degrees – but I am the one with this specific outlook because of the artworks and projects I have made. I am at once generic, qualified through institutions, and a singularity. Thus the singularity I have achieved as a living artist today takes place against a background of generic categories: I am categorised as a contemporary painter educated at the Royal Danish Art Academy who has exhibited in art institutions of various formats. The category ‘a contemporary painter’ is generic, meaning it represents an abstract field of possibility where nothing about the actual content or formal output is said. It means that I mainly work as a painter and my work has a contemporary outlook – a description that I share with thousands of other contemporary painters. But, following the argument of this book, I would also say that being a contemporary painter means I am aware of possibilities other than painting. I have experimented with video, installation, photography, sculpture, performance and interventions. I am aware of all these possibilities within each medium or way of engaging with space, and if the right idea or appropriate context is there, I do these non-painterly activities.134 I don’t have to paint, but I paint because I want to. For me, there are still many ideas in painting and ways of creating spaces of reflection to be explored.

So, to the art world I am first and foremost a contemporary painter, but to my three children I am their father, and to my neighbours I am the man next door. To the local café I am the good customer, to the guy in the video rental shop I am the one who watches TV series, but to the clerk at the embassy I am a Dane, to the woman in the local municipality office I am a citizen with social rights and obligations, to the vendor on the main square in Marrakesh trying to sell me a wooden snake I am just another Western tourist whom he will overcharge, to a dog barking at me I am simply an unknown human. Depending on my context, I slip into different generic categories that construct operative spaces within and around me. There is no escape from the maze of categories, but I can act and behave differently according to each situation. Throughout all these encounters three transversals remain the same: that I exist in my body, and that I am present to a social situation in time. The transcendental foundation of my human existence is the intertwining of three essential dimensions of being: own, given and final being. The body, the social and time are all co-present in my life right now and in all situations I have ever experienced. Yet the number of categories, their inherent intensity and power over my existence is not the same, because the components feeding into the three dimensions change throughout life. As my listing of different generic categories reveals, the way I engage with the situations is not a given. I am granted the possibility of reflecting upon my relation to these three dimensions, which gives contemporary life an element of chance, indeterminacy and vitality. 

I have become something specific in an art world, because I have pushed myself in a certain direction. I have decided to become an artist and insisted on this existential form for more than fifteen years. My power to receive but also produce the world is derived from this initial gesture towards my life. I am a contemporary artist as a specific instantiation of a generic singularity existing alongside a huge number of other generic singularities. My artistic output is being tracked, recounted and is public in a new way due to the internet and my personal website. A totality of works and projects and writings is accumulating, generating a direction, a sense of where I am heading and which interests I have been pursuing. Yet, at any moment I might make a radical ‘jump’ almost as in quantum physics, where electrons leap between energy levels in an atom. From one day to the next I can make a fresh start, place myself differently in the way I make art if I really want to. I can re-invent myself and this is often the case for artists who stay in the game a whole life: they keep on moving. I have so many possibilities of becoming inspired by either historical or living artists and through my positioning and the absorption of concepts into my own existence. I can always become a displacement to myself and to the history of contemporary art. This is the radical freedom of art that derives from the radical contingency of art: that everything and anything is (still) possible.

As a conceptual person the generic singularity has certain traits or components feeding into the specific empirical situation. Each generic singularity within the field of contemporary art represents a development of an artist-being, of a way of living a life as an artist: being visually talented, with an ability to execute projects and meet deadlines; being conscious of one’s public appearance; having the will to keep going and overcome defeat and rejection; being conscious of the art world as a social system with internal differentiations; living a bohemian lifestyle; being part of an educational environment, either as student or teacher; developing an artistic project while pursuing a specific interest. There is a fundamental self-care in the way artists manage and develop specific relations to all these aspects of life, because a generic singularity develops an ethos for life that contains an element of honour but also risk. The honour manifests itself whenever I am invited to do something, when I am praised for my artwork, when I am included in a prestigious collection, when I am associated with other established artists or when I am critically assessed in a written text or speech. The risk I am running is the possibility of poverty and precariousness. I have no fixed income, my work is not paid for by the hour, I might not receive recognition for it in my own lifetime (or never at all) and be considered a failure in the eyes of others or more successful artists. 

These aspects constituting the space of the generic singularity as a mode of existence have developed over a long period of time and might have a historical origin. For example, there are many contemporary artists who live a bohemian lifestyle, yet this way of living was not invented by the contemporary artist. I might be inspired by art movements from the 1960s or an artist from the 1980s: within me there are many sources of inspiration. I, just being the bricolage of these sources, never a pure repetition. This is the verticality of my existence: that I can go back in history, find sources of inspiration, which I translate, superimpose into and upon the present. This constant refolding of the past into the present is what aligns the latter with a sense of raw energy: we never know when the past will suddenly reappear in the present in a different disguise, coming back like a ghost with a forgotten message. 

My being as a generic singularity is an acquired existence in the sense that I have struggled and fought for it to be. I chose to become an artist, and I applied out of my own free will to an art academy, which accepted me as a student. Thus, behind the appearance of any kind of generic singularity an act of will reigns. It is a fundamental gesture towards a life to be lived. As a will it manifests itself in the public, declaring: I want to be an artist; I am an artist. And it is a will continuing through time, making me endure the initial choice to be an artist that I made a long time ago. With the being of an artist comes a being-ability of an artist, although, in the space of contemporary art and its radical contingency, there are no precise definitions of what such a being-ability should consist of. Unlike medical students, for example, who must appear before a examination board of authorities and show their abilities – knowledge of how the body functions on an anatomical, bio-chemical and physiological level – there is no judge that can fail an art student of today. The being-ability of an artist could be anything – from working a material, to sitting at a laptop, drawing on a computer, developing ideas via Skype – nobody can limit the space of contemporary art. Whatever is decided upon, which project or interests or possibilities to pursue, contemporary artists will ultimately develop the needed being-ability to make the artworks real. And if the projects exceed their knowledge, they
​will contract experts, hire assistants, get friends and family to help them. Then they become a manager, someone who must organise the time and output of others. This is one of the effects of Minimal art on contemporary art: the moving away from the traditional idea of the artist as a craftsman in a classical sense. It doesn’t mean that the craftsmanship of art disappears, it means a new kind of craftsmanship arises: that of developing ideas, convincing curators, contracting workers, considering the installation, organising employees etc. 

In Generic Singularity (2014) I developed this concept in order to explain how humans become something specific in their lives. My investigation was only limited to the cultural field of the contemporary artist and only included components that I saw as significant at that point. In five years time, I will probably include new aspects. For any other cultural field, the components are different and have another depth, the process of developing a specificity not being the same in each field. For example, there is a difference between the work process of a film director and a poet, architect and actor, novelist and set designer etc. 

For me, there is a reflective power within each generic singularity, because they have thought about what kind of life they want to live and they have taken inspiration from the past, aligning themselves with art movements, re-introducing actions and events to the present, not only thinking, but also actively pursuing a specific position in life. Each generic singularity has taken powerful decisions with repercussions far into the future. Every generic singularity thinks for himself, from his point of being in a body in a social context right now in time (situated). Every thinking derives its force from the epistemic rupture it has been through and surpassed. 

excerpt from the book: NON-PHILOSOPHY AND CONTEMPORARY ART by Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen

​by ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY

​In the early 1990s Laruelle wrote an essay on the artist James Turrell titled "A Light Odyssey: The Discovery of Light as a Theoretical and Aesthetic Problem". Although it briefly mentions Turrell's Roden Crater and is cognizant of his other work, the essay focuses on a series of twenty aquatint etchings made by Turrell called First Light (1989-90). Designed to stand alone as fine art prints, First Light nevertheless acts as a kind of backward glance revisiting and meditating on earlier corner light projections made by Turrell in the late 1960s, in particular works like AfrumPronto (1967)

For the exhibition of First Light at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1990, "the aquatints [were] arranged in groups based on the white shape that hovers in the dense black field of each print. In the installation, with light projected onto the images, the shapes appear to glow and float; viewed in sequence, they seem to move. The effect, from print to print, is tracelike and mesmerizing."

"I am dealing with no object;' Turrell said in a lecture a few years after producing First Light. "I am dealing with no image, because I want to avoid associative, symbolic thought ... I am dealing with no focus or particular place to look. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at?" Indeed the object of First Light is perception itself, as Turrell was the first to admit. 

No object, no image, no focus-no wonder Laruelle was drawn to First Light. It represents the very core principles of the non-standard method. For Laruelle, Turrell's art poses a basic problem. "Light makes manifest;' he acknowledges. "But what will manifest the light?"4 Systems of representation reveal aspects of the world to perceiving subjects; this is how light makes manifest. But is it possible to see light in itself, not in relation to a perceived object? Is it possible to manifest the rigorously immanent genericness of light itself?

Laruelle's essay on Turrell makes two essential claims, one about perception and the other about light. Regarding the former, Laruelle asserts that we must think perception, not think about perception. Regarding the latter, Laruelle wishes to discover the non-orientable nature of light. 

​There is a light of orientation, a philosophical light. But there is also a light that does not seek to orient perception along a particular set of lines. It is this second kind of orientation that intrigues Laruelle and that appears in the work of Turrell. (Taking advantage of a play on words, Laruelle sometimes labels this kind of non-standard orientation "occidental" to differentiate it from what he sees as the endless orientalism of philosophy.) 

Laruelle explores these two essential claims by way of three different themes stemming from Turrell's work: discovery, experimentation, and identity. Just as Deleuze did in his book on the painter Francis Bacon, Laruelle assumes from the outset that Turrell and his art are theoretical in themselves, that they are performing theoretical work as such. Laruelle's is not a theoretical interpretation of a nontheoretical artwork; the work itself enacts the non-standard method. In Laruelle's view, Turrell himself discovered a non-phenomenological solution to the problem of light. Turrell "has discovered a new aesthetic (and theoretical) object: light as such, the being-light of light".

In an attempt to describe what he means by discovery, Laruelle draws attention to the subtle differences in meaning embedded in Turrell's title: "Turrell's title 'First Light' is ambiguous and can be interpreted in two ways. In the weakest sense it means just what it means, first light, the first among many, its own relative position in a continuous order in which it is included. In the strong sense it means light first, all the light given at once, without residual or supplement, without division or 'plays-of-light".

This second sense, the strong sense, is most appealing to Laruelle, because it indicates the identity of light as a kind of first givenness, light as raw discovery or invention without supplement. Part of Laruelle's aim is to move away from the conventional manner in which light appears in ​philosophical discourse, for example, in phenomenology, which tends to think of light through the digital process of withdrawing and revealing. As we saw in the previous chapter, Laruelle's light is thus not so much white but black, generically black. "The black immanence of this light . . . lets it escape from all phenomenology stemming from the greco-philosophical type".

In order to describe the radical nature of Turrell's non-standard art, Laruelle poses a hypothetical scenario: 

Turrell's light is a light that doesn't come from the stars. Laruelle gives it an unusual label; he calls it a "photic materiality".

Being both non-cosmic and non-ontological, Turrell's light does not orient the viewer. Instead, according to Laruelle, Turrell's light performs experiments on perception and retrains perception according to alternative logics. This mode of experimentation produces what he calls an "aesthetic generalization'' of perception in order to unilateralize the conventional prohibitions placed on perception by philosophy. Instead of philosophy or photography setting the agenda, "light acts instead ... like a drive that has its own 'subjedivity' or like an a priori force". Turrell's experimental mandate, therefore, is to allow both the artist and the viewer to test perception, not to probe the limits of perception, not to mimic the way in which perception is normalized by philosophy, not to think about perception, but to think according to perception. 

In this sense the artist and the viewer are strictly identical, allowing for an auto-testing of perception. It is not that one party-whether artist, viewer, or critic-is in a privileged position to arbitrate Turrell's aesthetic experiment. Instead, all parties are identical.

This brings us to the final theme in Laruelle's essay on Turrell, that of identity. Tµe key question for Laruelle is how. to see light itself, light's identity. For Laruelle the only way to answer the question is to break the vicious cycle of worldly self-manifestation. "There is a paradox at the heart of aesthetic sentiment;' Laruelle remarks. "The paradox is the following: on the one hand light remains to a certain degree in itself. It does not lose its identity in an object ... but on the other hand, light 'radiates:"10 There is no solution to the paradox, of course, because if belongs to the basic generative paradox fueling of all philosophy. Nevertheless the paradox provides Laruelle with raw material for non-standard intervention. Simply unilateralize the paradox and put both light and its radiation into immanent superposition. Such a move defangs the transcendental tendencies added to light by philosophy and reveals a purely immanent light.  

Given the unusual and somewhat counterintuitive nature of the nonstandard universe, Laruelle is forced to speak in circumlocutions: light is a radiation-without-rays, or light is a reflecting-without-reflection. This might sound like jargon, yet Laruelle's "without" coinages are necessary in order to designate the superimposition or unilateralization of the rivenness of the world. They aim to show "light discovered in its radical identity".

Photography, fiction, and utopia. We spent some time in the previous chapter looking at photography in the context of light and color. Now let's return to photography and amplify what was already said. Laruelle's two books on photography, The Concept of Non-photography and Photo-Fiction: A Non-standard Aesthetics, include material written over a span of two decades. Intended as companion pieces, the books pose a number of questions. What is seen in a photo? What is light? What is the photographic stance? And, perhaps most enigmatic of all, what does Laruelle mean by fiction?

''Aesthetics was always a case of tracing art within philosophy, and likewise of art understood as a lesser form of philosophy". For Laruelle aesthetics involves a convoluted and somewhat circular interaction between art aµd the contemplation of art. Art beckons contemplation. 

And contemplation seeks its art to behold. Following this reciprocal interaction, art and philosophy co-constitute each other in terms of lack, for each completes the absence contained in the other: "Without art, philosophy lacks sensitivity and without philosophy, art lacks thought:' 14 This kind of mutual digitality or mutual distinction is part and parcel of the philosophical process. Art and philosophy are separated and reunited, then policed as conjoined but distinct. A strange logic indeed, yet for Laruelle the logic is evident in everything from Plato's Republic to Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? It is, in fact, the central logic of the standard model. 

Photography is "a knowledge that doubles the World;' he writes in the first of the two photography books. As an aesthetic process, photography is philosophical in that it instantiates a decision to correlate a world with an image taken of the world. When photography doubles the world, it acts philosophically on and through the world.  

Admittedly Laruelle does not discuss light much in The Concept of Non-photography. But light appears in the second book, Photo-Fiction, particularly in the context of philosophical enlightenment and the flash of the photographic apparatus. Laruelle uses two terms, eclair and flash, to mark the subtle variations in different kinds of light. Laruelle associates eclair with Greek philosophy. "The flash {eclair} of Logos;' he remarks, "is the Greek model of thought". He uses flash more commonly when discussing the physical apparatus of the photographic camera. Yet it would be hasty to assume that Laruelle poses the two terms in normative opposition-eclair bad and flash good-because by the end he specifies that both kinds of light are philosophical and that both need to be unilateralized. 

​As in his other writings, Laruelle accomplishes this by subjecting photography to the non-standard method. He proposes a principle of aesthetic sufficiency and shows how art and aesthetics have traditionally been allied with philosophy. Likewise he describes a principle of photographic sufficiency, indicating how photography is sufficient to accommodate all possible images, at least in principle. And, in an echo of how deconstructivists spoke of philosophy in terms of logocentrism, Laruelle labels photography's sufficiency a photo-centrism, and discusses how philosophy conceives of thought itself as a kind of photographic transcendental. 

The process of non-standardization goes by several names and is defined in different ways. In recent writings Laruelle has begun to speak of the non-standard method in terms of fiction. Fiction means performance, invention, creativity, artifice, construction; for example, thought is fictive because it fabricates (although only in an immanent and real sense). 

Fiction might seem like a strange word choice for someone wishing to depart from the endless alternations of representation, yet Laruelle devises a type of fiction that is nonexpressive and nonrepresentational. Laruelle's fiction is purely immanent to itself. It is neither a fictionalized version of something else, nor does it try to fabricate a fictitious world or narrative based on real or faptastical events: 

To subject philosophy to the non-standard method is to create a fiction philosophy. Likewise to subject photography to the same method produces a similar result. "The fiction-photo [photo-fiction] is a sort of generic extension or generalization of the 'simple' photo, the material photo".

As he said previously in The Concept of Non-photography, "The task of a rigorous thought is rather to found-at least in principle-an abstract theory of photography-but radically abstract, absolutely non-worldly and non-perceptual".

This begins to reveal the way in which Laruelle's views on photography synchronize with his interest in utopia. Photography is not oriented toward a world, nor is it a question of perception. Rather, by remaining within itself, photography indicates a non-world of pure auto-impression. Bored by the peculiarities of particular photographic images, Laruelle fixates instead on the simple receptiveness to light generic to all photography. Yet receptiveness does not mean representability or indexicality, That would revert photography back to philosophy. Instead Laruelle ​radicalizes photic receptiveness as such, focusing on the non-standard or immanent nature of the photographic image. 

​Rather than a return to phenomenology's notion of being in the world, Laruelle proposes what he calls "being-in-photo". By this Laruelle means the aspect of the photograph that remains radically immanent to itself. Such an aspect produces a kind of objectivity without representation, a radical objectivity, " [an] objectivity so radical that it is perhaps no longer an alienation; so horizontal that it loses all intentionality; this thought so blind that it sees perfectly clearly in itself; this semblance so extended that it is no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation, a 'representation' of what is photographed".

But the photograph is not the only thing recast as non-standard immanence. So too the photographer, a philosopher who thinks photographically about the world. Laruelle elaborates this aspect through what he calls the photographer's stance {posture}: 

Here is an illustration of Laruelle's theory of utopia. Yet he inverts the conventional wisdom on utopia as a non-place apart from this world. Laruelle's utopia is a non-world, yet a non-world entirely rooted in the present. Laruelle's non-world is, in fact, entirely real. Revealing his gnostic tendencies, Laruelle's non-standard real is rooted in matter, even if the standard world already lays claim to that same space. The non-standard method simply asserts the real in parallel with the world. Using the terminology from chapter 3 on digitality, the utopian real is a parallelism.

In Laruelle the aesthetic stance is the same as the utopian stance. In the most prosaic sense, non-philosophy describes a kind of non-place where conventional rules seem not to apply. To the layman, the nonphilosopher appears to use complex hypotheses and counterintuitive principles in order to journey to the shores of another universe. Yet that doesn't quite capture it. As Laruelle says, insufficiency is absolutely crucial to utopia: "We are not saying one has to live according to a wellformed utopia .... Our solution lies within an insufficient or negative utopia". The point is not to construct bigger and better castles in the sky, transcendental and sufficient for all. Rather, utopia is always finite, generic; immanent, and real. 

But non-philosophy is utopian in a more rigorous sense as well, because the structure of the human stance itself is the structure of utopia. Utopia forms a unilateral duality with hunian imagination; our thinking is not correlated with the world but is a direct clone of the real. This begins to resemble a kind of science fiction, a fiction philosophy in which the human stance is rethought in terms of rigorous scientific axioms. 

It makes sense, then, that Laruelle would call himself a science fiction philosopher.

Drawing music. Yet even with these discussions of light and photography as prologue, Laruelle's aesthetics remains elusive. So before moving on to some more general claims about realism and immanence I address Laruelle's two essays on the little-known Hungarian artist August von Briesen, an emigre to Paris who worked primarily in painting, illustration, and pencil drawing.24 Von Briesen is a particularly interesting case, because, despite being . relatively obscure, he attracted the pen of a number of other prominent thinkers in addition to Laruelle, including Michel Henry, who wrote a long essay on von Briesen prior to undertaking his important book on Kandinsky, and Marcelin Pleynet, the influential critic and author involved for many years with the journals Tel Quel and L'Infini. The analysis of von Briesen further illustrates how Laruelle is essentially a thinker of utopia, and that the best way to understand Laruelle's aesthetics, and indeed his larger non-standard method, is as a theory of utopia. 

The portion of von Briesen's corpus that interests us here is a series of pencil drawings devoted to music (see August von Briesen, Drawing of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22, the frontispiece of this chapter). Von Briesen's pencil drawings give graphical form to musical sounds. He had been drawing music his whole life, in fact, the myth holding that, at the age of seven during a musical dictation session, the young von Briesen "refused to transcribe the sound into notes, and transposed them instead into abstract drawings".

As an adult in Paris, von Briesen had a habit of attending classical music recitals, and he was known to be a devotee of the Theatre des Champs Elysees. But shunning a comfortable seat in the audience, he would crouch deep in the orchestra pit, amidst the musicians, frantically drawing the music that engulfed him. By 1980 he was attending approximately two hundred concerts per year, drawing passionately. He made so many drawings of music that it would have been impossible to keep them all. "For example in 1980 he only saved about 2,000 drawings out of the 10,000 drawings that he made". He drew images of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, and many other works of music, both classical and modern. 

The drawings were typically made on small pieces of paper at approx - imately fifteen inches square.28 Using a pencil on plain white paper, von Bries en would inscribe the page with a series of lines, dashes, points, and other markings displaying a wide variation in length, line width, orientation, and curvature. Sometimes the repetition of hatch marks create a uniform texture, other times a swelling wisp of line overwhelms the page like a cloud. 

Von Briesen was a "crucified listener;' in the words of Henry; as a youngster during World War II he had been separated from his parents, and during the Soviet occupation had known "all the terrors of existence:'29 For Henry, von Briesen's drawings were not so much renderings of music, but portraits, self-portraits that bring to light "a certain kind of suffering". As von Briesen himself admitted, "I draw my own suffering" -in fact he considered all art to originate from suffering: "90% suffering and 10% joy. No, 10% is too much, 1%"!

Because the music possessed him so thoroughly, von Briesen never simply drew with one hand, but with both hands at once. As Laruelle describes it, "The left hand acts as a kind of device with two feet that glides over the paper, giving direction, and above all changes in direction, to the other hand". At the same time the right hand, the writing hand, acts like the "point at the end of a cone;' funneling and focusing the music from out of the air:

As Henry recounts, von Briesen would stare off into the distance or close his eyes entirely while drawing, "meaning that each graphical mark made on the paper is totally independent of the marks made around itwhether above or below, the marks are indifferent to their neighbors".

​In his analysis of the artist's drawings, Marcelin Pleynet compares von Briesen's method to the literary technique of automatic writing that itself had influenced surrealist and abstract expressionist painting. Yet at the same time Pleynet stresses that such an "automatic" method does not mean mere transcription. Von Briesen is not simply a conduit who hears music and then marks it down in notational form, like a secretary taking dictation in shorthand. Instead, von Briesen's drawings reveal "a common current of intelligence and sensibility" that Pleynet calls a "syncretism between drawing and music".

Laruelle too described von Briesen's technique in terms of automatic inscription: "To put it in more exact language, we can say that the automaton is not lacking conscious thought, and certainly at times it can be extremely lucid, but its consciousness concentrates and focuses itself out into the moving points of the fingers and pencils .... The automaton is an explorer who is both blind and deaf'36 The orchestra pit itself functions as a kind of black box, a music box for blackness, and von Briesen takes his seat inside the black box rather than poking and peering at the box from the outside.

Nevertheless Pleynet's description of von Briesen's project in terms of what he calls "correspondences" would likely be too devoutly philosophical for Laruelle's taste. "There is no syncretism in this art work:' Laruelle argues, contradicting Pleynet, "only a prodigious synthetic force:' So although Laruelle 1uses the term automatic, he does not mean a kind of neosurrealist technique in which the hand and stylus become a conduit for subhuman flows. Rather he evokes the notion of automatic drawing as a way to suspend or collapse the notion, borrowed from phenomenology, of the perceptual distance between artist and object. "Von Briesen wants to cancel the distance entailed in consciousness or reflection, that is, any kind of hesitation or imprecision that might insinuate itself between the music and its rearticulation in drawing". This is where the seer and the blind man fuse in common: neither see mere reality, but both have a direct sense of the real. 

The placement of the listener is thus of utmost importance for von Briesen. Both Laruelle and Henry comment on it. Von Briesen locates himself in the orchestra pit, but his placing, as a listener and as an artist, is more complicated than simply breaking the fourth wall or trying to merge with the musicians themselves. Collapsing the distance between artist and object, or between the eye and the hand, means that the normal focal orientation of art will also necessarily change. The frame of the page ceases to be a window or a door, but rather "an infinite depth, a galactic expanse" that obeys new laws of depth, relation, and spatiality. The key is found in the gesture of drawing itself, or what Laruelle calls the "registration" of a line":

​As an aesthetic practice, automatic registration is not passive or mechanical; the simile of the seismograph here is not meant to evoke a passive, merely technical transcription of a signal coming from somewhere else. Von Briesen is not a translator or chronicler of the world around him. Registration means that the sufficient potency of the world is suspended, not that of the artist (someone who never had any such potency to begin with). 

Laruelle doesn't much deploy the non-philosophical vocabulary in the essays on von Briesen because in 1985 he hadn't entirely invented it yet. But it would be keeping within the overall thrust of his analysis to describe a principle of sufficient art, in which the musical sources lay absolute claim to the inspiration of the listening artist. This is precisely what concerts halls are meant to do: evoke feeling, energy, fear, pity, and other aesthetic sensations in the listener. The art source is that thing that is sufficient in all instances to lay claim to the aesthetic relation. And of course the surrealists' automatic writing and its derivative techniques, from the repetitive and blank descriptions of the nouveau roman to the wanderings of psychogeography, are marching in lock step with the principle of sufficient art.

Hence, the references to automatic registration must be understood not as a desubjectification or depotentialization of the artist, much less any kind of nihilist or modernist profanation of the human, but as a diminution of the power of the aesthetic. Registration a la seismograph is merely a kind of surface symptom for a combined music-drawing, fused in unilateral duality and neutered of its own philosophical potency.

For Henry, the kind of abstraction evident in von Briesen has nothing to do with normal modes of abstract art, instead von Briesen displays a form of abstraction that, "issuing from the unrepresentable Ground of being without form, object, or world, is capable of reproducing a more universal structure of pathos". Such a "generality" or "perfect indifference" of music is the key to von Briesen's special form of abstraction.

But before continuing with von Briesen and fleshing out Laruelle's ambitions for the work, we pause for a moment to address the larger context of aesthetic theory. For there exists in Laruelle an original conception of art that withdraws from the standard model of aesthetics and posits a parallel logic of relation, perception, and sense. 

Thesis XI: Laruelle's aesthetics are an aesthetics without representation, that is, an aesthetics of the immanent rather than the transcendental. If we are to consider aesthetics strictly from a theoretical point of view, the twentieth century witnessed a single great death and transformation, the death of representation and its transformation into a new form. Such a transformation has appeared under a number of different names in recent years: the end of critique, the crisis of mimesis, the posthermeneutic turn, the new materialism, or the end of representation. But the seeds of this contemporary phenomenon were planted much earlier.

To be sure, the question of nonrepresentationalism in art (namely, abstraction) has been around for some time, yet the question of nonrepresentational aesthetics is something quite different. For even nonrepresentational art contains a sensual element that it reveals to a solicitous viewer, no matter whether that sensual element has a referent in the ​world. Abstraction can still be mimetic even if it isn't a picture of nature. Nonrepresentational aesthetics is something else altogether; it abandons the age-old question of reference (or indexicality, to use current parlance), but so too abandons the this-that structure of representation in its entirety, reducing aesthetics to a form of fused immanence. 

From Plato's hypomnemata to McLuhan's extensions of man, much of aesthetic theory is essentially metaphysical. Much aesthetic theory tends to posit a baseline relation between an entity and its disclosure to another entity. Even the most sophisticated post-structuralist positions will agree on the essential relation, that entities will form relations of difference with other entities (self with other, integral entities with heterogenous entities, and so on). In short, much of aesthetic theory conforms to the media principle-the communicational is real and the real is comm1:1nicationaland the descriptions of the standard model offered already in the open-ing chapters. 

But starting in the 1970s and '8os a shift in aesthetic theory becomes evident, first with Deleuze but then quickly afterward with Henry and Laruelle. Something changed in France very rapidly in 1980 and 1981; by 1985 it was already complete. To be sure, immanence is a perennial theme in art theory.47 And the relationship between realism and art is a complex topic in its own right, complicated by the many different meanings of the term realism. But in general the prevailing aesthetic theory in France at the time was resolutely irreal, and tended to favor non-immanent epistemological frameworks such as hermeneutics, representation, referentiality, authenticity, and so on. Art theory from Sollers or Barthes or Debord was a question of semiotics, or textuality, or perhaps even the dialectic. The coin of the realm was interpretation, demystification, ideology, or spectacle. Art theory at the time was not a question of thermodynamic energy transfer, as it would be in Deleuze's realist aesthetics, or the depiction of the immanence of an internal spirit as in Henry, or the art of an insufficient and generic ontology of the one as in Laruelle. 

Undoubtedly Deleuze accomplished it first in the early 1980s. References to art, literature, and aesthetics permeate nearly all of Deleuze's writings. Yet with his important 1975 collaboration with Guattari on the literature of Franz Kafka and then later with subsequent books published in the 1980s, Deleuze deals with aesthetic themes in a more systematic way, first with painting, then with cinema, and the Baroque. Henry and ​Laruelle followed soon after: their respective essays on von Briesen (1985), Henry's book on Kandinsky in 1988,49 and a trail of other pieces by Laruelle since the mid-198os. 

All of these writings have something in common: they all firmly reject what was then the reigning techniques of semiotic and post-structuralist interpretation of art in favor of an aesthetics rooted in immanence and strong nonrepresentationalism. Where many of their compatriots considered art an essentially epistemological pursuit, Deleuze, Laruelle, and Henry placed art firmly in the category of ontology. Where others haggled over the details of interpretation, meaning, and form, they took up the questions of expression, affect, and immanence.

​As we saw in the previous chapter, Heidegger poses a basic question for aesthetics. What is the relationship between hermeneutics and immanence? Many who have written on Heidegger have explicitly or implicitly taken a position on these two terms. There are those who claim adamantly that Heidegger is the consummate thinker of hermeneutics, for in his version of phenomenology we are continually grappling with a world that is only partially knowable at best, continually withdrawing from our being, remaining forever at a distance, a cryptographic world that is only tolerable through a kind of mystical submission to its sublimity. And, in many ways, this is the prevailing view. Yet there are others who champion the poetic Heidegger and hold him aloft as proof of an immediate relationship to truth. This is Heidegger as a philosopher of sincerity and authenticity, the romantic Heidegger who places humankind at the center of a world and asks it to stretch out its arms in order to remain within the world. Indeed part of the appeal of reading Heidegger, and a partial explanation for his enormous legacy, is due to the fact that he does not clearly adjudicate the question of hermeneutics and immanence. 

Yet the aesthetic question takes a different form in Deleuze. If Heidegger queries after the relationship between hermeneutics and immanence, Deleuze asks a different question: What is the relationship between immanence and multiplicity? In fact Deleuze considers both terms at the same time. There is the Deleuze of immanence as well as the Deleuze of multiplicity. For him the two components fit nicely together. Guided by the principle of univocity, Deleuze describes a world of pure multiplicity in which all multiplicities are equally immanent within nature. Thus there is no sender-receiver logic in Deleuze's theory of expression, only ​immanent transformations within a set of virtualities. Likewise there are no entities per se in Deleuze. But just as Whitehead spoke of "occasions;' Deleuze describes specific gatherings of heterogeneous multiplicities, dubbed "assemblages;' that occasion themselves as blips of singularity on an otherwise smooth plane.  

​So on the one hand Heidegger is forever locked in the heroic throes of hermeneutics, which, though ultimately shackled to the basic phenomenological contract, also cherish immanence as some sort of ideal (even if it be unattainable both practically and theoretically). But on the other hand Deleuze breaks definitively with the legacy of phenomenology, pursuing instead the great compromise between immanence and multiplicity, forging an alliance between univocity and difference.

​In either words, the twentieth century offers two basic options for any aesthetic theory: either Heidegger or Deleuze, either aesthetics as representational correspondence or aesthetics as nonrepresentational expression. Henry and Laruelle appear in the shadow of Deleuze, in the shadow of the nonrepresentational night to which he introduced them. 

​Yet to pose the choice as that between Heidegger or Deleuze is not merely to evoke their respective aesthetic theories, or at least not entirely. Any Deleuzian will tell you that the books on cinema or painting are merely the most convenient volumes, but certainly not the first and last, for gaining an understanding of his philosophy of time, movement, and image. And likewise Heidegger's many writings on art only feed into his account of Being in general, an account of Being so "poetic" that one hears Holderlin wafting between the lines of the most hard-nosed passages on pure ontology, perhaps even more so than the essays explicitly about art, such as "What Are Poets For?" or" ... Poetically Man Dwells ... ".

Deleuze was not the first to consider the topic of immanence, of course, not even the first to think aesthetics as immanence. And neither Henry nor Laruelle was merely mimicking the course taken by Deleuze. The three do not agree on what form immanence should take. But they do agree that representation is bankrupt, that the transcendental must give way to immanence, that aesthetics must cease to ape the logic of metaphysics, that the universe is not digital at its core. Instead they suggest that aesthetics follow a more mundane logic. For Henry it is the internal logic of spirit. For Deleuze it is the productive capacity of matter. And for Laruelle it is the immanent and generic logic of the real. Because of  ​this, Deleuze, Henry, and Laruelle are the three key theorists of aesthetic immanence today. 

Still, Deleuze does not fully embrace immanence, at least judged against Laruelle's strict requirements. And on this point Laruelle refuses to compromise. Any form of immanence worth the name would have to reject difference entirely. Any true form of immanence would, in fact, be forged from identity rather than alterity, commonality rather than difference. This is the secret to Laruelle's nonrepresentational aesthetics'. And to avoid confusing it with Deleuze, we call it by its proper name, a nonstandard aesthetics.

A realism for art: from weak immanence to strong immanence. Let's return now to von Briesen and generalize slightly from the particularities of gesture, tone, rhythm, or line and think more broadly about the principles necessary for a non-standard aesthetics. Although his language would change in later work, we cede now to Laruelle's own vocabulary from i985, and consider three concepts: difference, reversibility, and truth.

 Difference. Although those already cognizant of Laruelle will likely be jarred or confused by it, Laruelle indeed uses the term difference in his description of von Briesen. "The notion of "difference" Laruelle suggests, "allows us to evaluate in a precise way the originality, or rather the singularity, of von Briesen"; or, as he says later, "von Briesen is the inventor, in the philosophical and aesthetic domain, of what we will call Musico-graphical Difference."Given Laruelle's treatment of the concept of difference in Philosophies of Difference, which was published only a year after the von Briesen essays, it seems confusing that he would speak here of difference in positive terms. A few points might elucidate this potential confusion. Beyond the rather banal biographical fact that this is still relatively early in the evolution ofLaruelle's own non-philosophical vocabulary, we note the two very different lineages available in this period for the concept of difference: the Derridean difference and the Deleuzian difference. The two have almost nothing in common, and Laruelle is almost certainly exploring the latter, even if he is not entirely adopting it. Derrida's difference means supplement, deferral, or alterity. Deleuze's concept of difference-resolutely not Derridean; deconstructivist, or even post-structuralist-is "a pure difference ... a concept of difference without negation:'54 Laruelle is picking up the trail from Deleuze, only extending it. Laruelle's difference means unilateral superposition of two fused terms, that is, difference as an "indivisible relation between two terms in which one-here drawing-is the relation itself'. Admittedly Laruelle's language is not yet fully honed in this early text, yet the same logic is evident here that would eventually be described in terms of cloning and unilateral duality. Drawing is the unilateral clone of a "suspended" or nonmimetic relation between drawing and music. Laruelle is therefore attempting to unilateralize difference in his essays on von Briesen, and-again perhaps parroting Deleuze at some level-to abduct it from its philosophical origins, calling difference "a veritable synthesis that is real and non-imaginary".

Reversibility/Irreversibility. Von Briesen does not create an "equivalence'' or "exchange" between music and graphical art, but "what certain contemporary thinkers ·influenced by Nietzsche refer to as a 'reversibility' -in this case between the musical and graphical". Von Briesen's synthesis of music and drawing is not a synthesis in the Hegelian sense, a mutual encounter and cancelation of two antonyms elevated into a higher form. "This is not a making equivalent or a translation from one into the other"; rather, von Briesen shows that there is an "irreducibility of the graphical, and reciprocally too [an irreducibility of the musical] :'58 Thus, when allowed to be absolutely reversible to each other, music and drawing in fact become irreducible or irreversible. In other words, the secret to a non-standard conception of difference is found in the elimination of any kind of logic of exchange, correspondence, supplementarity, trace, or remainder. In his later writings, he ups the ante even further and, for what he quite permissively labels "reversibility" here, begins to speak more militantly in terms of irreversibility alone. But the two concepts, though ostensibly antonyms, should be understood in a similar sense: irreversibility is merely the more rigorous conception of what is here described as an endless reversibility. Within this kind of hyperreversibility, representation's circuit of exchange-music represented as drawing, or drawing represented as music-is invalidated. The "strict reversibility" of music and drawing means, albeit somewhat counterintuitively, that the two elements are superimposed on each other and irreducible one to the other. So though in his later work Laruelle calls such logic an "irreversible duality" here in 1985 his language is still evolving ​and he speaks instead of a kind of suspended or metastable "reversibility:' Whichever word, though, the point is ultimately the same.

Truth (as Fusion, Superposition, or Metastability). "What is he drawing?" Laruelle asks of von Briesen-and the answer is simple: "Truth itself'59 Von Briesen is looking for an aesthetic criteria of truth, not simply of technicity, resemblance, etc. "In the last instance, the object of art is truth:'60 But what does this mean? Although truth is not a particularly important category in Laruelle, as it is for, say, Heidegger or Badiou, the use of the term here signifies a finite or fused relation of pure immanence. In short, truth means the one. Using the logic of difference and reversibility, and extending and radicalizing them to an almost unidentifiable degree, an aesthetics of truth is one with a direct and immediate image of the real. Hence von Briesen's drawings are directly in the real of the music (because they are that musico-graphical relation itself, that in itself). "Von Briesen's secret goal is to show how every graphical phenomenon immediately represents a musical phenomenon, itself given over to another graphical phenomenon-and reciprocally as well:'61 This is a "suspension" or "short circuit" of the typical cycle of art in which composers create the music and listeners appreciate, experience, or interpret it. Von Briesen is not representing or signifying a truth that's in the music. Instead, von Briesen proves that there can be a "circularity of interpretation" in which drawing interprets music and music interprets drawing. Thus the essence of the work resides in what Laruelle previously termed "Musico-graphical Difference, that is, in the tension of forces that are always both musical and graphical". It's the reversibility of music and drawing that ensures that truth does not concentrate itself in one side or the other-because that would simply be a return to the classical conception of truth as philosophical sufficiency. Rather, through a logic of metastability or superposition, the truth of art is realized through the perpetual withdrawal or virtualization of truth.

​Through such techniques-hyper-difference, irreversibility, and truth as superposition-we arrive at an image of Laruelle's non-standard aesthetics. His aesthetic theory is not so much the weak immanence of phenomenology or even the immanence of Deleuzianism, but a strong theory of immanence entirely devoid, at least according to Laruelle, of any kind of philosophical or metaphysical residue.

​As such it deviates from the modern tradition of aesthetic theory, initiated by Kant and continuing through all manner of varying and often incompatible permutations, from romanticism and modernism to postmodernism and beyond. Von Briesen forces us to reconsider Kantian aesthetic theory, radicalizing and unilateralizing the classic notions of "judgment without concept" and "finality without end;' formulations that seem practically non-philosophical already despite their metaphysical core. As Laruelle puts it, 

Von Briesen's drawings are, in this way, not exactly abstraction, nor are they modernist, and they certainly have nothing to do with the tradition of modern nihilism. "Von Briesen's work a priori invalidates this entire critical and aesthetic apparatus". Instead-and here the influence of Henry is clear-Laruelle describes a "recurrent force" that relies upon an "identity" or an "aesthetic common sense, a faculty of the imagination that limits or hampers radically the notorious 'free play' of representations:' This "common art" or "generic art" is the necessary outcome of a realist aesthetics. In fact, the only kind of art possible for non-standard philosophy would be a common (namely, generic) art. 

In the wake of this discussion, and to summarize what is meant by a "realist;' "immanent;' or "non-standard" aesthetics, we might recapitulate a number of points culled from both this chapter and the previous one. First, light and the alternations of light and dark are central to the standard model of philosophy. Thus the previous chapter was devoted, in part, to an exploration of light and dark as immanent (not philosophical) phenomena. This led to the work of James Turrell and the notion that light might be approached as such, not merely as a means of illumination or a vehicle for something else. A pure black-or alternately a pure bright-produces a crypto- or non-standard ontology in which nothing is philosophically revealed to anything else. Laruelle labels this a "uchromia;' a non-color or color utopia. 

In both this chapter and the previous one we also discussed photography as a typical, albeit not special, non-standard art form. Like von Briesen's own drawing technique, the photographic apparatus inscribes the real automatically and "mechanically" and thus directly enacts the unilaterial duality of the one. This led to a discussion of von Briesen in terms of an "aesthetics without representation;' that is, a superposition of music and drawing into a suspended or noncommunicative relation. This is the last and most important detail of the entire discussion. The "non-musical aspect of all music" is an a-synthetic relation between two things, a relation without a synthesis. Laruelle's aesthetics is based on a unilaterial logic in which two terms are subsumed not by a third, but by the one term. In other .words, the two terms and the relation are immanent to the one term (with the second term as the unilaterial clone of the one). This is, in essence, Laruelle's single greatest discovery as a thinker: a new concept of relation that is neither dialectical nor differential; a relation that is not digital.

"There are no great utopian texts after the widespread introduction of computers," Fredric Jameson remarked recently, "the last being Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia of 1975, where computers are not yet in service".

1975 was a year of crisis. Saigon had fallen that spring, marking the end of the war in Vietnam. A few years prior, OPEC's oil embargo had sent price shocks around the world. The boom years of the 1950s and '6os had given way to new economic crises by the early to mid-197os. And these crises would, in part, usher in a new economic regime that would place the digital computer at the heart of value production.

​It was the time of waning modernity. In Jameson's estimation, it was the last time one might propose a kind of non-place apart from this world, a utopia in which alternative axioms generated alternative worlds. Indeed, the years since have been marked by a failure of imagination, particularly arriong progressives, during which it has become impossible to conceive of viable alternatives to the new cybernetic universe. 

Today, instead of utopian texts, 

The end of the utopian text thus signals for Jameson an end to representation. Or at least it indicates that representation, as complicated or flawed as it might be under otherwise normal conditions, has been interrupted and outsourced to another domain entirely (digitality and computation).

​Does Laruelle contradict Jameson's argument, the argument that no great utopian texts exist after digital machines enter everyday life? Not at all, it ratifies it all the more. Laruelle's work confirms a particular kind of historical periodization: formerly existing as narrative or world or image, utopia perished by the end of the 1970s; but, where it perished as narrative, it was reborn as method. Such is the key to Laruelle's utopianism. For him utopia is a technique, not a story or a world. 

Utopia means simply to decline to participate in the philosophical decision, to decline the creation of worlds. Counterintuitively then, Laruelle's refusal to create alternative worlds is what makes him a utopian thinker, for his non-standard world is really a non-world-just as utopia is defined as "non-place:' To abstain from the philosophical decision is to abstain from the world. And thus to discover the non-standard universe is to discover the non-place of utopia. (Or, using the parlance of media aesthetics: the pre-197os utopia is a diegetic or worldbound utopia, but the Laruellean utopia is a non-diegetic or non-worldbound utopia.)

Cold comfort for Jameson however, because Laruelle's marginality today-his recent exposure in the Anglophone world a burst of visibility after thirty-plus years laboring in obscurity-is but further evidence of the marginality of utopian thinking. Indeed the chief difficulty lies in the fact that a "utopia of difference and variety" is no longer the goal, ever ​since big business has become so adept at selling these many different and varying worlds. When difference enters the mode of production, as it has under post-Fordism, it is no longer possible to conceive of utopia as difference. Rather, the chief challenge for utopian thinking today is to force the generic condition in the here and now, a utopia not of another place, but of an impoverished and finite common real. Such is the task of the two remaining chapters. 

excerpt from the book:  Laruelle (Against the Digital) by  ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY ​

(Marcel Duchamp)

​(Merleau-Ponty) 

1. The question raised by the contemporary artist as a non-philosopher is first and foremost: what is the relation between the generic singularity and the artistic project as a form - content proposition? Within this question we find three basic aspects of that which constitutes the thought-space of a contemporary artist. Firstly, we have the generic singularity as a mode of existence: a human being who becomes something within a generic space of social categories. Secondly, we have the artistic project as a system of competing interests that designates how knowledge is not only embedded but also operative in the artistic agent. And lastly, we have the form-content proposition as the specific artwork-event, which designates what is actually produced and made real in institutional contexts. A generic singularity is a human being who develops his own knowledge and insights through the mode of existence, the artistic project and the actual artworks produced throughout his life: artwork-events appear, from one to thousands, that in their totality are a life’s work. All these artwork-events, which sum up the artistic output of a ​life lived as a gesture towards art and life in general, present their own kind of thinking in action: a non-philosophy. In three words, we can sum up the nature of this non-philosophy: self positioning, investigation and intervention. Some kind of self positions itself within the art world, some kind of investigation through a system of competing interests is carried forth, and finally the artwork-events intervene into some more or less established contexts for presenting art. Self-positioning, investigation and intervention are here understood as taking a position and emitting objects, gestures, signs, situations or environments that are received in a more or less defined context for viewing art. It is a non-philosophy because the contemporary artist thinks, but in a personalised way, through his experiences, the position he has taken, whatever artworks he has made and finally, what is stated about them. 

3.1. In order to outline a fundamental ontological29 insight regarding the relationship between non-philosophy and contemporary art, I need briefly to clarify the historical background of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of non-philosophy. According to the philosopher, classical systemic philosophy reached its metaphysical endpoint with the Hegelian master-narrative of the spirit becoming absolute self-consciousness through the unfolding of the system itself. History – as the progression towards emancipation – having reached the stage of the modern democratic state, ensuring the freedom of the individual, had also come to an end in an abstract sense. This is not to say that historical events would no longer take place, but that the substance of the spirit as freedom had now become real as a rational structure within historical reality. ‘What is rational, is real, what is real is rational,’ is the infamous quote from the introduction to Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts (1820). One of the ways for philosophy after Hegel to escape his dialectical prison was to turn him upside down by thinking about that cleavage in the system that negates this totality: the individuality of experience. In Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel, Merleau-Ponty quotes two pages from Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) where what is called ‘experience’ is defined: ‘This dialectical movement, which consciousness exercises (ausübt) on its self – on its knowledge as well as its object – is, in so far as the new, true object emerges to consciousness as the result of it, precisely that which is called experience. ’Experience for Hegel is the development of ‘new, true’ knowledge after it has been sent to the testing-ground of the real. In the encounter with something outside the system, the system of knowledge breaks apart, has to enlarge itself, and in this movement expand its understanding of the world. Experience becomes a rupture (Bruch-erfahrung): it breaks me apart and forces me to reconsider my being in the world. I am forced to interrogate the relation between the system and that which goes against it. That which goes against also holds the potential of something new. ‘The experience, that is to say, the effective assumption of a being, is capable of giving space to a dialectic, because it alone is the opening towards something that can reveal itself, that has its depths, a latency, and that can become a space for an ecstasy from where a true novelty may emerge.’ (Merleau-Ponty). By designating the possibility of such a point within the space of consciousness (and that it can be ripped apart: ‘Zerrissenheit’, Hegel is also opening a back door for those who later came to insist upon the absoluteness of experience. There are experiences that cannot be surpassed and integrated into the transcendental system. They designate a specific encounter between a subject and something other to it: concrete experiences happening to the individual. This insight will become integral to my understanding of the power of contemporary art today. Ultimately, contemporary art takes place in that corridor between the already established world of signs and conventions and that fringe of the other, the unforeseen, the virtual, that excess of being that points towards something beyond me. Contemporary art is visibility with infinite depth, because the contemporary artist has moved into the space of contingency: he has been ripped apart from the conventional space of art and into a new state of mind (epistemic rupture); he contains within himself that specific experience of being able to think himself and the world differently. And because epistemic ruptures happen all the time, opening up towards situations of contingency, we never know what exactly will happen in the space of contemporary art. In this state of mind I locate the fundamental thought-power of the contemporary artist as a non-philosopher.

1.4.

​I propose to think of the contemporary artist – who has been around for almost 100 years as a conceptual person – as a non-philosopher. As a starting point, the contemporary artist has the radical contingency of art. Art as an essential phenomenon tied to certain ideas, genres or media no longer exist. Artworks only exists as propositions about art: ‘This could be art.’ And he who makes the proposition is the contemporary artist, because it is in the act of making art that he becomes contemporary. The contemporary artist is he who proposes artwork from an absolute background of the virtual. He proposes the artwork as an offering to art, because this is the only way in which art attains a presence.40 But this absolute freedom of the contemporary artist does not relieve the artist from his embeddedness in the generalised space of human existence: a body, a social world and a being in time (the metaphysical knot). A contemporary artist is situated in life, because he exists as the specific instantiation of the metaphysical knot: as someone who has transformed his relations to a specific body (the monstrous body) appearing within a social context (the art world) at a point in historical time (historicity). Contemporary artists become generic singularities because through their life trajectories they are framed by institutional and ideological regimes of discourses, but nonetheless have a sovereign right to their individual interests, to be proactive and to develop new ideas for future artworks. Simply put, the contemporary artist exists with a right and a power to make art. And here, ‘to make art’ is understood in a narrow semiotic fashion: the ability and will to produce whatever signs, objects and events and make them circulate within contexts of viewing art. Artists can authorise their artworks simply by proposing and presenting them to an audience. From this perspective, even the most minimal, conceptual or collective art project is expressive because it originates from somewhere and has a destination. To be able to express is to have the power to exist as the ability to produce difference in a social environment.

1.5. The proposition I am trying to present here is that a contemporary artist can be seen as a nonphilosopher because from his embedded situation he is confronting contingency. From this position he develops and presents a thought-space that is personalised as a specific way of engaging with the fact that everything is possible. It is a thinking in the sense that certain aspects of an artist’s thinking can be externalised and communicated (the interview, statement or projectdescription), but most importantly, it is an operative thinking, because the artist does something in this world: he produces form-content propositions – the whatever artworks that burst into the future and one day crash into our present. This demands a level of thinking infused with some kind of knowledge and certain skills to make interesting artworks. But, it is not a knowledge that follows the same criteria as the production of scientific knowledge, such as the possibility of iteration, verification and systematic study. It can be knowledge infused with desire, memory, ambition, but also a sense of uncertainty and joy in experimenting. It can be knowledge informed with the intention of making a statement. It can be knowledge infused with a white energy of freedom and exuberance. Ultimately, it is a thinking-knowledge infused with transformed experience. Firstly, the experience of having encountered numerous artworks and projects (perceptual); secondly, the experience of producing one’s own artwork or initiating collaborative art projects (pragmatic); and finally the experience of being transformed and inspired by other artists and life in general (radical). I have lived with art, and this living in all its totality has become a complex experience that fuses with my position as an exhibiting artist. My field of experience as an artist is that of having ideas for exhibitions and projects, putting artworks on display, of presenting them to a public and receiving a response. ​I have experienced knowledge of how this can be done, and which rhetorical possibilities exist as to how to install, to present and to mediate artworks, exhibitions and gestures. 

1.6. Not all artists of today are contemporary artists. There are many artists still working in traditional media, who do not reflect on their art practice, who do not engage with any of the insights or breakthroughs that have happened in that massive space of art that was opened with Duchamp’s readymade. The extreme version of the non-contemporary artist, who states he is an artist but makes art in the basement without any knowledge of contemporary art and with no audience from the contemporary art world in mind, is not a contemporary artist. Thus, I disagree with the all-inclusive position on the contemporary artist: that all artists and artworks of today are contemporary, the argument being that all art being made is always contemporary, since it comes into being in time and is thus present to the time of its own making. I disagree, because I believe that to be a contemporary artist is a state of mind, the result of a specific reflective operation, and thus a change of consciousness. A contemporary artist is aware of other contemporary artists and produces art for a contemporary art-world context. So, a contemporary artist has consciousness of the contemporary as a cultural field, and also wishes to participate in that specific art world that constitutes the contemporary. Knowledge and desire produce an intention: the contemporary artist wants to make art that is presented at institutions or exhibition spaces showing contemporary art. To be a contemporary artist is to belong to a contemporary art world. A contemporary artist exists within the post-medium condition (Krauss).45 This condition has its origins in the radical contingency of art that Duchamp revealed with his readymade urinal, and that later Merleau-Ponty designated as the condition for philosophy to become non-philosophy. The post-medium condition is the situation in which the institution of art as a system allows for whatever object or event to appear and become designated as an art object. As Arthur Danto states in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: ‘Something is an artwork if it satisfies certain institutionally defined conditions, though outwardly it may appear no different from an object that is not an artwork.’ Contemporary artists might be working with certain materials or be framed by their media, such as being categorised and labelled as a painter, sculptor, photographer or media artist, but these artists are aware that other possibilities exist, and that there is no absolute hierarchy between the different material outputs. Contemporary artists are no longer defined by the material support of the media with which they are working. 

1.7.

These reflections presented here are an attempt to show that contemporary artists are thinking beings both through their act of being contemporary and through the way they establish their artistic projects. I believe that there is a relation between the condition of non-philosophy and that of contemporary art. Contemporary artists present a vision of the world that is equivalent to a way of thinking; a non-philosophy in action. Non-philosophy is a mode of existing that becomes a mode of vision: a gaze that entails a theory of seeing and perceiving, but most importantly is ‘externalizing a way of viewing the world.’ (Danto). Inspired by Merleau-Ponty, non-philosophy is the name I want to give to this specific way of thinking about the world, which has exploded since the early historical avant garde. In the following pages I will try to demarcate the nature of this thinking and why contemporary art has become one of the more potent sites of enacting non-philosophy. Thus this book consists of two sections. The first section, The Depth of Experience, attempts to describe Merleau-Ponty’s idea and conception of non-philosophy through a reading of his manuscripts from the period of 1957–61. Here, key ideas are the role and power of experience, the turn towards the lived experience, and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh. Thereafter, I develop my own thoughts on the body, existence, position and method of a non-philosopher. Finally, I present some thoughts on Merleau-Ponty’s actuality for contemporary art as a position and practice. The second section, Aspects of Contemporary Art, deals with the space of contemporary art in relation to institutions and the agent producing art: the contemporary artist as a generic singularity. Important aspects are the artwork as a proposition, the system of competing interests, the art of contemporaneity, the framing of art through institutions, nihilism, experimentation and the notion of systemic hysteria. These are attempts to encircle different elements of the force-field constituting contemporary art and thus not attempts to convey the absolute truth about contemporary art. I end the book by presenting my thoughts on the future of contemporary art.  

1.8.

I view these reflections as a presentation of a poetics for my own practice and existence as a contemporary artist and non-philosopher. They are aspirations for my life; thoughts and ideas that push me further, force me to re-consider my practice and the way I exist in the world. My writing transforms me: it feeds back into my mind as insights that I have to acknowledge are part of me and thus confront me with an understanding I did not know existed. They are the trace of an experience of thinking something beyond me. I am a contemporary artist and in the position of a non-philosopher. It is a state of mind. 

Introduction from the book: NON-PHILOSOPHY AND CONTEMPORARY ART by Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen