Photography: gravitation of the demos

Abstract

The article draws on François Laruelle’s conception of non-photography elaborated in his book of the same name. His basic assumption may be developed in the following manner. Any semiotic or aesthetic reading of representation as something endowed with hidden – transcendental – meaning proves dramatically insufficient. Instead, photography should be treated as a new “science” that gravitates towards community understood in an almost physical sense. Community is the expression of the forces of life or a synonym of togetherness that “precedes” any type of representation whatsoever. It is the task of the critical thinker (to remember Walter Benjamin) to reveal the traces of this presymbolic “presence” in symbolic forms that do everything to repress, distort or neutralize it. Despite its unique certifying power photography is no exception in this respect. Yet redefined as a science of forces, a new theory of photography will be closer to physics than to aesthetic theory in the classical sense. Reviewing various theories of photography the paper shows that photography has no essence of its own. Instead, it allows one to decipher the imprint of bodies and their interactions, which is very close to the Spinozian notion of (clear and distinct) Ideas. Be it from the viewpoint of epistemology or that of political philosophy, photography invariably displays its ability to certify. Only from now on it is not “reality” that it references but the physics of bodies, which, again in the spirit of Spinoza, proves to be the measure of politics itself.