Ideation and Photography: A critique of François Laruelle’s concept of abstraction

Abstract

In Concept of Non-Photography (2011) and Photo-Fiction (2012), François Laruelle, outlines a theory of photographic abstraction that breaks completely with the debate on realism in photographic theory. Refusing to see photographic representation as involving any concession to resemblance (photographs have more in common with other photographs than with the objects they depict, he declares), he inflates the notion of the photograph as a symbolic entity into a transcendental theoretical domain. This is the result of his radical (non-philosophical) separation of appearances from truth (nothing stands ‘behind’ photographs he asserts). If this inflates photographs-as-abstractions as a form of rich ‘unlimited theoretical’ production, it also deflates them as social discursive entities, that ‘give and ask for reasons’. The result is a post-dialectical flattening of photographic appearances, in which images run in one-dimensional ‘parallel’ with the world. Laruelle’s attempt to release photography from mere appearances, produces a socially deracinated account of abstraction.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ This is principally an attack on Epicurus’ speculative critique of necessity. See Marx’s citation of Epicurus in his 1841 thesis, Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature: “It is a misfortune to live in necessity, but to live in necessity is not a necessity” (Marx and Engels 43).

² For a discussion of the trans-individual function of real abstraction, see Sohn-Rethel.

³ For a defence of the inferential role of representation, see Brandom (184).

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Notes on contributors

John Roberts

John Roberts is Professor of Art & Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton, and the author of a number of books, including, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (Verso, 2007), The Necessity of Errors (Verso 2011), Photography and Its Violations (Columbia University Press, 2014), Revolutionary Time and the Avant-garde (2015) and Thoughts on an Index Not Freely Given (Zero Books, 2016).