Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Data science has grown explosively in higher education, offering undergraduate degrees in the US on a “core and domains” curricular model that overlaps with—and in an intriguing way—replicates the multidisciplinary model of liberal arts education. This essay treats data science as a pathfinder for the continuing evolution of American higher education from the liberal arts to a post-liberal arts centered on applied knowledge, including today’s new modes of predictive/generative knowledge. The essay builds toward a consideration of how the post-liberal arts university can teach students both to apply knowledge and to know the meaning (historical, intellectual, and social) of application. A key for the post-liberal arts university will be to teach preprofessionalism in ways that do not just acknowledge the historical exclusion of the people of applied knowledge (at the social margins and global peripheries) from liberal arts education for the “free man” but turns such acknowledgement into new forms of liberal arts knowledge. Data science, the essay concludes, has the potential to contribute novel ways of conceptualizing intersectionality in general and in relation to applied knowledge. But data science is also constrained in this regard on the global scene where data power belongs to many regions and actors without a shared tradition of liberal arts education and thus a framework for a post-liberal arts carrying on shared ideas and practices of freedom.

As fertility rates have declined globally, discourse and advocacy around forgoing reproduction have ascended. While this trend has received scholarly and media attention, the process of wondering and the cultural forms it takes have not. This essay examines white women wondering, with a focus on Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018), to identify the political stakes of indecision and the racial privileges it engenders. In the novel, the dilated process of wondering yields grammatically contorted sentences circling around negation and the verbs to want and to have that speak to the unsettled terrain of reproduction. As wondering linguistically performs reproductive desires, it reads as indecisiveness that is willful in Sara Ahmed’s sense and that irritates along multiple grains. The irritating grammatical contortions in Motherhood indicate how race and class adhere to what Emily Owens calls “the scene of pregnancy” even when the text elides these conditions. At the same time, irritation usefully demonstrates the difficulty in finding a coherent language for procreative decision-making outside of choice and freedom, the limits of which reproductive justice scholars and activists have powerfully described.

Cuteness envy designates the site at which the less cute or not cute subject expresses envy for a paradigmatically cute subject, whose coveted position the envier cannot achieve but versions of whose aura and cachet the envier can osmotically enjoy through forms of proximity—sometimes benign, sometimes malignant. With a focus on the television series Better Things as a central case study, I detail how cuteness envy may operate and with what—perhaps surprisingly—sanguine effects (though I also chart, concisely, comparative abuses against which Better Things’s more salutary uses of cuteness envy are valuably weighed). I first offer a descriptive and interpretive account of work by Barbara Johnson and Sianne Ngai, setting the stage for an elaboration of what ideas may be generated through a mashup of their key words and concepts. That is, in shifting from the thinking of envy then and there and of cuteness here and now—in thinking, rather, of cuteness and envy together in their conjunction as cuteness envy—I am making three other shifts: from the things on which Ngai fastens in her theorization of cuteness as a minor aesthetic category to the persons envied by cuteness’s enviers; from the identification with the cute object, which obtains for the subject interacting with that object, to the alternatives to identification, ranging from self-assertion to empathy and group formation, that obtain for the enviers of cute subjects; and from the muteness entailed or implied in some makings of cuteness to the soundings manifested in certain iterations of cuteness envy.

The devastation of World War II left German libraries partly in ruins, collections and catalogs lost or destroyed, prompting a need to reconstruct and reimagine the library system. This article shows how interlibrary loan, conceptualized as a form of academic traffic, played a crucial role in postwar reconstruction efforts, facilitating the exchange of resources and information among libraries. The creation of a cohesive system was meant to compensate for missing books by bringing disparate libraries into one network. This article focuses on the elaborate procedures librarians developed to create union catalogs. These catalogs, which listed the holdings of several libraries in a single alphabetical order, served as the backbone of the interlibrary loan system, facilitating access to resources across disparate institutions and laying the groundwork for a more interconnected library landscape. This article also traces the idea of this form of “virtual union” of libraries back to the eighteenth century, but this peculiar postwar formation was shaped by thinking about networks, traffic, and copy machines. Drawing on insights from media infrastructure research, this article unpacks the material realities and logistical challenges inherent in rebuilding the interlibrary loan system. It explores how librarians grappled with the complexities of managing physical collections, navigated logistical hurdles, and harnessed emerging technologies to streamline information exchange. Moreover, interlibrary loan emerges as a catalyst for reimagining knowledge itself, challenging static conceptions of scholarship by emphasizing its dynamic and relational nature.

This article probes the links between facial recognition technology and contemporary Chinese portraiture. Its starting point is a recent paper published by two AI researchers based in China. The article introduces a facial recognition algorithm apparently capable of predicting the status of an individual as a convicted criminal with almost 90 percent accuracy using only a driver’s license-style photograph. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the paper attracted a furious backlash, as commentators around the world pointed out its unabashed parallels with the long-discredited pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology. Less obvious, though equally intriguing, is the relationship between this branch of facial recognition technology and the practices of art making. To explore this rapport, I turn to the work of contemporary painters Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun, whose experiments in the domain of portraiture mirror in inverted, mocking ways the operations of machine-learning software that attempts to read the human mind and predict its behavior. Ultimately, these parallels matter because they point to the fact that many facial recognition technologies are brazen forms of visual media. They are interventions in the domain of policing and control that borrow outrageously from traditions of portraiture, old and new. This recourse to art, the disdained domain of subjectivity, within the supposedly impartial field of affective computing shakes the latter’s foundational myth: namely, that our identity is genomically predetermined in ways that only the most objective methods can disclose.

The implications of the recent bilingual turn in psycholinguistics have not yet been fully explored in translation studies, a discipline that has bilingualism at its very center. Addressing this gap has far-reaching implications both for translation and for broader debates in comparative literature that invoke translation in the discussion of an ever-broader array of literary works. This article argues that linguistic relativity—the notion that a language can influence, though it does not determine, its speakers’ perception and thought processes—offers a novel perspective on the inherent differences between original writing and translation. By virtue of relying on an original text written in a different language—its defining characteristic—literary translation represents a distinct source of literary value that, far from approximating what the author may have written in the target language, could not have arisen from an original writing process. This article thus calls for a more concerted study of the translated text as a distinct kind of literature and reevaluates, starting with self-translation, the relationship between literary translation and other forms of literature. In doing so, it creates a precedent for an approach to all literary texts that is grounded in its cognitive-linguistic origins.