In-Stance: Generic Encounter in Everyday Urban Landscapes

Abstract

This inquiry draws from François Laruelle’s non-standard thought by way of intersection with the urban theory of everyday life and the practice of encounter in urban landscapes. The convergence is motivated to experiment with occasions of non-standard stance in the encounter of the urban otherwise, in such a way as to “look” through the saturation of capital’s ascendancies acting upon urban practices. Non-philosophy is posed to operate immanent-to urban everyday materiality and generate pathways approaching urban conditions unable to be detected or deciphered by conventional tools of thought and their sufficient reason. This paper therefore disregards the limits of established urban discourse that remains geographically and epistemologically trapped in the neoliberal city, and instead entangles urban thought with the non-philosophical for access to a faint glimmer of life unmitigated by capital’s totalizing and colonizing drives. What follows contextualizes and describes how non-standard stance shifts boundaries of “the possible” when urban everyday landscapes and the modes of life they sustain are encountered non-philosophically. Nonphilosophy stimulates practices to think and write with non-philosophy rather than think and write about it, so this paper orients towards the use of non-philosophy in urban encounter rather than explication of Laruelle’s project per se. However, Laruelle’s eccentric ecology of thought, idiosyncratic syntax and intratextual lexis can confound intelligible access and bearings. Consequently, as this paper is intended for those unfamiliar with Laruelle’s practice, I am obliged on this occasion to use writing to elucidate this project, rather than perform it.