Aesthetics, particularly since Hegel, is the claimed domination of philosophy over art by which philosophy claims to unpack its meaning, truth, and destination after the event of art’s supposed death. … Art, for its part, resists this enterprise and rebels. We propose another solution that, without excluding aesthetics, no longer grants it this domination of philosophical categories over works of art, but limits it in order to focus on its transformation. It’s about substituting for the conflict of art and philosophy the conjugation of their means. … It is a so-called “generic” extension of art to aesthetics; the moment when thought in its turn becomes a form of art. It is a new usage of their mimetic rivalry, their conflictual tradition, which is finally suspended for a common oeuvre, a new “genre.”
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I propose considering every art form in terms of principles of sufficiency and no longer in terms of descriptive or theoretical or foundational historical perspectives. To do this, one must construct non-aesthetic scenarios or duals, scenes, characters, or postures that are both conceptual and artistic and based on the formal model of a matrix. … These scenarios, by their inventive and constructive aspects, correspond to veritable theoretical "installations.” I propose an aesthetics in the form of conceptual installations of a new genre.
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Aesthetics was always a carbon copy of art in philosophy and subsequently art was always understood as a deficient modality of philosophy. It is the phenomena of self-modeling of philosophy in regards to art, where philosophy finds its model in art, but a model which is philosophically pre-formed or pre-decided. … [W]ithout art, philosophy lacks sensitivity and without philosophy, art lacks thought, but also within the mode of excess, of overlapping, of mixtures and specular reflections. … Can aesthetics become a second power of art itself, can art engender or determine its own aesthetics instead of suffering it as being philosophically imposed upon it?
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Non-standard aesthetics is creative and inventive and its genre is that of a philo-fiction, a philosophical artistic genre that strives to make a work with pure and abstract thought, but not to create concepts parallel to artistic works. … Non-standard aesthetics is characterized overall as 1. an aesthetics, no doubt, with a conceptual materiality which is its technological or technical core; 2. equipped with an artistic and thus somewhat specific technological modeling; 3. but deprived of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy, as a duplication of transcendence.
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We could ask, why should we thereby deprive ourselves of the benefits of philosophy? in reality, we are in no way whatsoever deprived of its benefits. Philosophy still serves to formulate photo-fiction and enters into it as an essential part of its materiality. We are only deprived of the excess of philosophy’s pretentions of the absolute. And, in the end, this is only to protect human subjects from philosophy’s sufficiency. For example, photo-fiction is efficient and produces fiction, which is to say a thought less sure of itself than philosophical discourse.
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In photo-fiction, the objective appearances are materially the same as in the photo, but they do not auto-confirm themselves according to sufficiency; photo-fiction is lived (vécu) as an art without any bit of realism and it is in this way that it forms an even more intense chaos by the absence of the world or of its own sufficiency.
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In this inversion of the object and its equal theory, the object that is first theorized by philosophy becomes the model for the constitution of a new, more complex, theory. A discipline to be created at a second level of which the standard philosophically received aesthetics is nothing more than the first level, or in any case, the symptom, the material, and in the end, the model. … Far from being a deficient, imaginative, and literary form of writing, fiction in its own way becomes a complex art, an art of interweaving disciplines as if imagination would acquire a more superior dimension of complexity by practicing an already existing art, in its form, material, and effects.
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A spontaneous objection is inevitable from philosophers who, for their part, cannot get around the elementary simplicity of their conception of philosophy and do not see its doubled nature. According to them, it would be useless to want to create a supplementary art that is apparently parasitic on what already exists.
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It is fundamental for aesthetics to follow the movements in contemporary art in the most profound manner, not in order to describe the changes under the same codes, but to import these types of changes within aesthetics itself, and to build scenarios that are themselves “theoretical installations.” Instead of rehashing concepts of mimesis, we instead extend the ideal of art to the thought of art itself, obviously with a respect “within philosophy” for the new conditions of this transfer. The problem of a non-standard aesthetics or thought-art, is to treat this semantic block as an indivisible whole, including art and thought within a holistic apparatus. … It is no longer a question of a mixing (métissage) of art and philosophy without rules, left to the arbitrariness of taste and talent. These two poles conserve their material autonomy and local syntax, but they form an indivisible entity between each other.
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To think “aesthetics” in the form of scenarios, quantically conjugating a variety of arts and philosophies, would enrich and liberate possible productive forces and would justify the existence of art not as thought, as was talked about with post-modernists, but a veritable thought-art, entirely specific and worthy of being called “contemporary.” … If there is a possible veritable invention of the order of thought-art, it must be the object of a concentrated revival (reprise), of a decision between utopia and heresy, under the gaze of what we call futurality rather than history.
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Philo-fiction is a gushing (jaillissant) and subtractive usage of the means of thinking, of philosophemes-without-philosophy, of mathemes-without-mathematics, and from here, all of the dimensions of philosophy rid of their proper all-encompassing finality, an insurrection against the all-too great superior finalities. Language is a simple productive force without its superior or over-totalizing finalities, but with its immanent finalities, quartially (quartiellement) instituted. The artist of philo-fiction that refers to the photo, to the painting, or to music, knows how to stop at this insurrectional and creative plane of art, creative precisely because its most dominant finalities are taken out of play.
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In the photo as in fiction, images or concepts are produced an in one sense, they are the same, but they are interpreted differently. They are still appearances of the world and objects, and thus on this point there is no difference between them. But in the photograph these appearances of the world refer to the world in a certain deterministic and realist relation (principle of sufficient photography) where the world returns and over-determines objective appearances, whereas in fiction the conceptual images remain objective appearances which are no longer lived as in themselves or are not reorganized a second time by the cosmic order. In fiction, the objective appearances are materially the same as in the photograph (the photograph of philosophy since philosophy is a photograph of itself) but they do not auto-confirm themselves according to sufficiency, and it is in this that they form a probable chaos via the absence of the world and its sufficiency, via hesitation or indeterminacy.
-François Laruelle, “Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics” (trans. Drew S. Burk)
