Mohammad Salemy

Among the French intellectuals of the 20th century who are still consequential for our time, Gilles Châtelet is yet to receive his deserved spotlight in the English-speaking world. The highly anticipated publication of To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies will likely end his obscurity and serve as a corrective.

Amongst all technologies, the clock and the camera are distinct in providing humans, and more recently machines, two universal metrics for measuring and restructuring the world. Therefore it shouldn’t be a surprise that, once synthesized into cinema, their impact on humans was exponentially multiplied beyond their original scope. What is not discussed often in the 20th-century history of cinema—as the simultaneous reproduction of time, movement, and space on a flat surface—is how film was able to successfully obscure its alien function behind a familiar human face. Film approached the world just like humans. Not only did it see and record the changing world according to humans, it chose to focus on humanity by inheriting its long love affair with performance and narrative.

Can we identify photographic social media, and particularly Instagram, as an instance of François Laru- elle’s concept of non-photography? Is Instagram not a clearer symptom of Laruelle’s aesthetic theory than the art of contemporary photographers like Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, who often reverse engineer in their works the 20th century’s prevalent modes of reading art—di- alectics, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and herme- neutics—in order to secure a meaningful relationship between their oeuvre and the World? Can abandoning contemporary poesies and instead engaging with mod- ern-day techne, to adopt the Greek categories, help us come to terms with Laruelle’s thoughts on the photo- graphic essence of Western philosophy?