A SYNOPSIS OF TRIVIALITIES

A Synopsis of Trivialities is an interdisciplinary publisher aimed at demonstrating and developing a practice of conceptual installation. Through collaboration and facilitation of artists, writers and thinkers ASOT attempts to present a performance of thought within the Laruellean genre of philo-fiction: a philosophical artistic genre that strives to make a work with pure and abstract thought.

Laruelle’s non-philosophy presents an expansive proposal for a new practice of thought that utilises philosophy as a material through which to think alongside and on behalf of the real. By removing philosophy’s seemingly unconquerable attachment to a position of transcendence in favour of a program of radical immanence, non-philosophy implies a complete democracy of kinds of thinking. ASOT aims to utilise this flattened plain of thought to cross previously restrictive boundaries. The call to arms of Laruelle’s non-philosophy is to ‘Invent Philosophy!’. ASOT intends to answer that call through a series of publications that bring together people across disciplinary divides to develop novel practices of thought.

The initial motivation for this project is born out of an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s concept of aesthetics and a subsequent consideration of this concept as paradigmatic of his philosophy. Aesthetics as understood here refers to a set of ways by which we interact with, represent and interpret the world around us. It refers to a style of thought most common in aesthetic discourse that is descriptive. It places things side by side so as to reveal certain features conveyed by reasons which are ‘further descriptions’ that serve to justify ones perspective. This style of thought can be seen as analogous to Wittgenstein’s own philosophical practice. His enigmatic remarks on diverse subjects and scenarios are perhaps best understood in this way. As sketching out the shape of a thought aiming to cultivate a synoptic understanding. His method understood as a synopsis of trivialities.

ASOT intends to put forward a variety of possible non-philosophies, philo-fictions which functions diagrammatically across a variety of mediums. Non-philosophy is perhaps unthinkable as a thought of thought but does work as a vision of thought. The vision is a diagram. Modelled under this concept of a synopsis of trivialities, the text, the diagrams, the images, the sound, the x… all function simultaneously not as analogies to textual theory but as thought in themselves. They function to sketch out an image of thought, a synopsis of trivialities or rather a conceptual installation that both articulates and demonstrates a new way of performing thought.