Art and Utopia

​by ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY

Leyla Murr - 'Utopia' 

​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: 

Imagine a photographer tired of using light to render his "subject" or whatever other objects were before him. Imagine that this photographer was crazy enough to want to render the light as light. If so, this would not be the light from distant stars, but a light without stars, without source no matter how distant or hidden, a light inaccessible to the camera. Should the photographer abandon his technique and find another? Or should he generalize his technique across the various forms of the darkroom, the white cube, and the camera obscura in order to proliferate the angles, the frames, the perspectives, the openings and shutters used to capture (or perhaps to seduce) the light itself? Would he not be making, in essence, the kind of work that Turrell makes?

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: 

Non-standard aesthetics is creative and inventive on its own terms and in its own way. Non-standard aesthetics is a fiction-philosophy [philo-fiction], a philosophico-artistic genre that tries to produce works using only pure and abstract thought. It does not create concepts in parallel to works of art-like that Spinozist Deleuze proposed, even though Deleuze himself was very close to embarking on a non-standard aesthetics.

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}: 

"Stance'' -this word means: to be rooted in oneself, to be held within one's own immanence, to be at one's station rather than in a. position relative to the "motif' If there is a photographic thinking, it is first and foremost of the order of a test of one's naive self rather than of the decision, of autoimpression rather than of expression, of the self-inherence of the body rather than of being-in-the-World. A thinking that is rooted in rather than upon a corporeal base.

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:

It's this strange device (the page, the two hands with their different roles, lengthened by pencils, the fingers with an extended power) that captures and immediately redistributes the surrounding forces that are both musical ​and pictorial, or rather neither entirely musical nor entirely pictorial. A complex device, it registers variations more than things, different line widths, different rhythm, the changing gradients of a curve rather than simply its contour.

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":

To draw is no longer to follow the finite outline of a thing or the infinite curve of an Idea that resists its own manifestation. To draw is merely a registration: like a seismograph scratching out its uncountable jolts and undulations, or like an encephalogram torn up into a kaleidoscope of little pieces .... To register means to manifest as a whole, with the expectation that it would be without remainder, the real itself, in this case music.

​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, 

These kinds of romantic theories founded on imagination mark the beginning of the modern and nihilist degradation of art, that is, an aesthetic shift founded on the principle of a successive privation or destruction of the codes of representation in its classical sense: start with the free play of the imagination, an art "without concept;' and end up with a kind of painting without painting, without canvas, without color, etc .... Von Briesen reverses kantian aesthetics; he only dispenses with the objects of perception and the techniques of classical representation, the "concept" and the "end;' in order to reaffirm the ideal play of art as such-in other words (and to repeat) of truth as such.

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, 

we have the free-market deliria of cyberpunk, which assumes that capitalism is itself a kind of utopia of difference and variety. I think this failure of imagination on the left can be attributed to the assumption that computers are enough to "take care'' of totalization: that the well-nigh infinite complexities of production on a global scale, which the mind can scarcely accommodate, are mysteriously ... resolvable inside the computer's black box and thus no longer need to be dealt with conceptually or representationally.

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 ​