Seeing in-photo: Non-photography as Positive Barbarism

Abstract

Technology was already an analysis and reconstruction of perception, already an artificial perception […] Let us extend this experience in the form of an experiment within a matrix that imitates the photographic apparatus and what it hides or houses within its entrails, an experimental dispositive of the transformation of the most intellectual of perceptions that must abandon its machinery and determinism. François Laruelle 2 Benjamin's claim that modern technologies reveal the poverty of the conventional notion of experience, and thus initiate a new kind barbarism, appears at first sight to be a negative judgement of the effects of modern life. However, he uses the term 'barbarism' to indicate a new, positive, concept, proposing that the 'poverty of experience' does something productive for the barbarian: It forces him to start from scratch; to make a new start; […] Among the great creative spirits, there have always been the ones who begin by clearing a tabula rasa. They need a drawing table; they were constructors. 3 Benjamin cites philosophers (Descartes), scientists (Albert Einstein), avant-garde artists (the Cubists, Paul Klee) and science-fiction writers (Paul Scheerbart) as taking such 'barbaric' approaches to their respective creative practices, indicating that poverty of experience can yield constructive results across diverse regions of knowledge production. This article seeks to add another name to this list-that of François Laruelle-and to explore the ways in which Laruelle's contemporary experiments in 'non-philosophical' or 'non-standard' thinking similarly constitute a levelling of the grounds of thought which radicalizes experience, and resonate with Benjamin's own ideas about experience and technology. Laruelle characterizes his theoretical stance as a 'heresy' in relation to standard philosophy, and it perhaps seems 'barbaric' to some; 4 indeed, Jacques Derrida suggests that Laruelle's unorthodox method holds what appears as a kind of 'terror' over philosophy. 5 However, the ultimate aim of Laruelle's heresy is to introduce a radical democracy into thinking, setting philosophical concepts into a broader paradigm by supposing the equality of all genres of thought. Here, I will argue that non-philosophy can thus be understood as an example of the positive barbarism that Benjamin calls for.