chair / Jonathan Fardy, Idaho State University
The work of theorist François Laruelle has in recent years inspired a wealth of scholarship and served as a stimulus for a diverse array of art practices. This panel session invites proposals from scholars and artists that examines Laruelle’s concept of “non-aesthetics” in light of contemporary theoretical debates and artistic practices. Non-aesthetics is a call to rethink the standard relation between art and philosophical (or theoretical) aesthetics by treating aesthetic philosophy and art theory as creative and aesthetic practices in their own right, while also taking art and aesthetic practices seriously as modes of theoretical thinking. We are specifically interested in proposals that engage the concept of “technique” in innovative ways as a mode of making and thinking that opens spaces beyond the limits of established philosophies of art and aesthetics.
Jonathan Fardy is Assistant Professor of Art History and Director of Graduate Studies at Idaho State University. His research examines the aesthetic strategies that underwrite the constitution and argumentative structure of contemporary theories of art and politics. He is the author of three books: Laruelle and Art: The Aesthetics of Non-Philosophy; Laruelle and Non-Photography; and Althusser and Art. His current book project The Real is Radical: Marx after Laruelle is due out next year.
A.6.1 The Genealogy of Non-aesthetics: Intensive Life, Simulacrum, Techne
Ian James, University of Cambridge
This paper proposes to examine the theoretical concept and pragmatics of non-aesthetics through an examination of its genealogy in the some of the contexts from which François Laruelle’s non-philosophy emerged. In particular, it will examine the relation of art to philosophical thought such as it emerges in the work of Pierre Klossowski and will do so in parallel with the phenomenological questioning of techne (variably technology, art, technique) to be found firstly in Heidegger’s thinking and then in that of Michel Henry. Klossowski and Henry, to varying degrees, play a decisive role in the formation of Laruelle’s non-philosophical problematic in the early stages of his career. Klossowski’s writing on Nietzsche and his understanding of ‘simulacra’ produced in both art and philosophy as expressions of the intensive drives of embodied life will provide an initial point of reference. Henry’s account of techne as founded in the life of the body and its immanent auto-affection will provide a second. Tracing these points of reference into Laruelle’s early work and highlighting their importance for the emergence of non-philosophical technique in general will allow for the theoretical innovation and the extraordinary performative force of Laruellian non-aesthetics to be specified.
Ian James completed his doctoral research on the fictional and theoretical writings of Pierre Klossowski at the University of Warwick in 1996. He is a Fellow of Downing College and a Reader in Modern French Literature and Thought in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge.
A.6.2 A Brief Survey of Non-Aesthetics in Canada: Percy Nobbs, IAIN BAXTER&, Ian Carr-Harris, and Jessica Eaton
Adam Lauder, OCAD University; University of Toronto
Informed by the non-aesthetics of François Laruelle, this paper undertakes a brief survey of Canadian artists’ engagements with the materiality of light. Standing at the head of this strange lineage of counter-illumination is the Montreal architect and sportsman, Percy Nobbs (1875-1964). The revered author of stately buildings on the campus of McGill University, Nobbs has largely fallen into respected obscurity, though his innovative theorization of illumination in the built environment strikingly foreshadows the contemporary speculations of Laruelle. Taking his cue from the tranquil interiors of the seventeenth-century Dutch genre painter Pieter de Hooch, Nobbs proposed that “composition in light and shade” should be considered an art in its own right. Fast-forward half a century to a series of large-format Polaroids produced by conceptual artist Iain Baxter (a.k.a. IAIN BAXTER&) in the early 1980s, that incorporate collage elements re-photographed using a portable SX-70 camera. Sometimes integrated into the larger 50 x 60 cm images jarringly out of scale, these anti-illusionistic interventions undermine the sufficiency of photographic verisimilitude in a manner strikingly anticipatory of Laruelle’s theorization of “non-photography.” Like Baxter’s Polaroids, Laruelle’s non-photography subverts philosophy’s attempted capture of lens-based media as vehicles of illumination. A series of luminous dioramas from the 1990s-2000s by Ian Carr-Harris simulate the natural light cast by windows obstructed at their initial sites of display. Like the incandescent installations of James Turrell (and the interiors of Percy Nobbs), the vibrant grids of Carr-Harris are perplexingly opaque. Finally, the otherworldly multiple exposures of the Saskatchewan-born, Montreal-based Jessica Eaton bring into visibility additional facets of Laruelle’s non-photography. Eaton’s 2016 series Pictures for Women reveals a deepening engagement with identity that recalls Laruelle’s privileging of the photographer’s embodied “stance.” These compressed case studies offer insights into artists’ ingenious technical deployments of light and photographic media consistent with Laruelle’s methodological theses on non-aesthetics.
Adam Lauder graduated with a Ph.D. from the Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto in 2016. From 2017 to 2019, he was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at York University in Toronto, where he employed the non-aesthetics of Laruelle to study Canadian information art in the 1970s, as artists began exploring new scientific frameworks and modalities of “fiction.” In 2018, he organized an exhibition devoted to the lost public art of Rita Letendre at YYZ Artists’ Outlet in Toronto. In 2017, he curated the Laruelle-inspired exhibition Futurisms at Western University’s McIntosh Gallery. He has contributed articles to scholarly journals including Amodern, Canadian Journal of Communication, Imaginations, Journal of Canadian Studies, PUBLIC, The Journal of Canadian Art History, and Visual Resources as well as features and shorter texts to magazines including Border Crossings, C, Canadian Art, e-flux and Flash Art.
A.6.3 Aisthesis, Inaesthetics, Non-Aesthetics: Comparing Recent French Aesthetic Theory
M. Curtis Allen, Western University
This presentation surveys the aesthetic theories of three of the most important living French philosophers: Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and François Laruelle. Each thinker has quite disparate (seemingly incompatible) views about the current status and function of art and its relationship with philosophy and history. Rancière sees the ‘aesthetic regime of art’ emerging out of modernity and affecting the whole ‘distribution of the sensible,’ modulating the apprehension of our social and political existence. Badiou, by contrast, declares the eminent failure of the 20th and 21st centuries to construct ‘schemata’ for contemporary art, while nevertheless affirming the singularity of art’s truth. In this absence, his inaesthetics is a way to gesture toward a new schema (distinct from didacticism, romanticism, classicism) that overcomes the crisis of ‘saturation’ and ‘closure’ endemic to the postmodern or contemporary. Laruelle’s non-aesthetics treats the relation between philosophy and art itself and attempts to loosen the grip of philosophy on art by allowing art to operate on philosophical materials, turning the work of philosophy itself into a work of art, a philo-fiction. Laruelle aims at a ‘conjugation’ of the methods of art and philosophy according to a ‘scientific model’ of the generic within which, he claims, aesthetics receives a ‘vectorialization’ of the imaginary. Non-aesthetics becomes, through this conjugation, what Laruelle calls a ‘photo-fiction’ of the Real. Finally, after examining these three frameworks, I will briefly elaborate what I take to be their most pressing potentialities for contemporary art and criticism. These are, roughly: 1) the sensus communis of the aesthetic regime for the production of new modes of perception; 2) the need for normatively-laden intra-aesthetic schemata to garner uniquely aesthetic value; 3) the idea that art (or aesthetic experience) affects not just philosophical aesthetics but the entire breadth of philosophy. It teaches us about the real, and therefore, philosophy cannot legislate art’s ‘meaning.’
M. Curtis Allen is an interdisciplinary theorist with an arts background whose research is located at the intersection of the philosophy of language/mind, aesthetics/art theory, and political economy. He is Instructor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies at OCAD University in Toronto and in Art History and Contemporary Culture at NSCAD University in Halifax. He is currently completing doctoral work in the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University under the title Sense and Genesis: The Metaphysics of Modernism and the Aesthetics of Reason, elaborating the consequences of the concept of 'sense' in Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilles Deleuze as it comes into contact with recent problems across the theoretical humanities. He is also interested in contemporary forms of rationalism and their relation to art and politics. He was Chief Editor of Chiasma: A Site for Thought (2017–20) and has been published in Open Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, WOPOZI, and elsewhere.
A.6.4 Photo-Fiction & The Amenable Object: Complementary Models of Indeterminacy
Zach Pearl, University of Waterloo
In a 2012 presentation at Goldsmiths University, François Laruelle conducted a thought experiment in which he invented a fictional device capable of elucidating his theory of non-aesthetics. He named it “photo-fiction.” Laruelle addressed his invention as a prosthetic “chaos” that simultaneously functioned as expected—an illusory technics of optics—while alternately dismantling and betraying itself, revealing its own technicity and artifice. In particular, Laruelle explicated the indeterminacy at the core of photographic devices, which, by simulating past ‘elsewheres’, re-inscribe absence and underscore the fictive nature of representational thinking. Remarkably, Laruelle’s photo-fiction shares multiple valences with the practice of fictocriticism, a mode of writing that works theoretically in parallel to an object-text in order to blur the boundary between literature and literary criticism. Fictocriticism has an especially rich history in Canada—one of only two countries in the world where the ‘genre’ has taken root, the other being Australia. In particular, Laruelle’s ideas find kin with those of Jeanne Randolph, the woman who coined the term “ficto-criticism” and subsequently developed a theory of the “amenable object”—another kind of theoretical device bent on indeterminacy. However, coincidentally, for Randolph the amenable object performs its self-deconstruction exclusively in relation to art and the immaterial labour of aesthetic interpretation. This paper-presentation examines in detail the critical overlaps and differences between Laruelle’s photo-fiction and the Canadian development of fictocriticism, holding in mind that both seek to undermine the legitimation of knowledge via conventional understandings of aesthetics. Furthermore, Heather Kerr’s theorization of fictocriticism as an “anti-aesthetic methodology,” which flouts the division between ethics and aesthetics will be considered as an important bridge between the theoretical work of Laruelle and the practical concerns of Canadian media artists laboring in a ‘post-truth’ media landscape.
Zach Pearl is an American-Canadian designer, curator and writer with a focus on the intersection of art, science and technology. Since relocating to Canada, Zach has produced programming and texts for the Art Gallery of Ontario, Textile Museum of Canada, Vtape, the Gladstone Hotel and InterAccess, among others. He is the former Artistic Director of the Subtle Technologies Festival (2015-18) and Managing Editor of KAPSULA (2013-18), a digital publication for experimental arts writing. Currently, he sits on the board of Mechademia, a biannual journal for Asian popular cultures, and teaches sessionally at OCAD University in Integrated Media and Graphic Design. He earned his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (2006) and his MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD U (2012). Zach is presently a doctoral candidate in the English program at University of Waterloo where his research explores fictocriticism as cybernetic literature.
