Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

In artificial-intelligence (AI) and computer-vision research, photographic images are typically referred to as natural images. This means that images used or produced in this context are conceptualized within a binary as either natural or synthetic. Recent advances in creative AI technology, particularly generative adversarial networks and diffusion models, have afforded the ability to create photographic-seeming images, that is, synthetic images that appear natural, based on learnings from vast databases of digital photographs. Contemporary discussions of these images have thus far revolved around the political and social implications of producing convincing fake photographs. However, these images are of theoretical interest for the fields of art history and visual studies for additional reasons. AI-generated photographic images resonate with many of the classic themes in photography: nature and the real, the unconscious and the uncanny, and discourses of power. This article therefore seeks to answer the question: Can photorealistic AI-generated images be defined as photographs? I argue that AI-generated photographs do indeed belong within in the wider discourse of photography, given their form and interpretation.

L. J. Henderson was a central figure in Harvard discussions of the nature of science in the interwar period and served as a bridge between the sciences and the social sciences. Two key ideas were promoted by Henderson: systems and conceptual schemes, both of which spread quickly at Harvard and then beyond. In this article the focus will be on conceptual schemes, a term which had a distinctive origin in Henderson that accounts for some of the ambiguities in its adaptations. Henderson spoke as a scientist speaking to philosophers rather than doing philosophy and sharply distinguished his aims from those that followed from Immanuel Kant. Henderson’s model was the scheme of ancient Greek medicine, which had persisted for millennia and was replaced by modern medicine. This was differentiated from earlier neo-Kantian and later Kuhnian variations. Henderson’s account was distinctive in placing the origins of conceptual schemes in intuitions about patterns formed in practice by people operating on concrete phenomena. The resulting schemes, he thought, had to be accepted on faith by students, but were, as he put it, walking sticks to enable communication and understanding rather than exclusive dogmas. Henderson was an enthusiast for Vilfredo Pareto, who was vilified at Harvard during the war by Carl J. Friedrich, which led not to the disuse of his ideas but to the erasure of their origins.

This essay theorizes the concept of curiosity from a queer perspective. Examining the intersections between philosophical understandings of curiosity as a passion for knowledge and more everyday understandings of it as a euphemism for incipient homoerotic desire, it argues that queer curiosity emerges at the point where nonnormative sexual and gender practices meet and complicate particular forms of knowledge about the self. To support this line of argument, the article first examines the intellectual history of curiosity, as curiosity has, in different historical moments, been both celebrated as an epistemic virtue and denigrated as an antisocial vice. After examining this history, it analyzes the figure of the queerly curious subject in several gay short stories from the Nifty archive (an online collection of self-published queer erotica founded in 1992) and the Wachowski sisters’ 1996 lesbian (and arguably trans) neo-noir film, Bound. Ultimately, the essay suggests that curiosity’s characteristic openness—its appetite for novelty and experimentation, its refusal to be contained by existing categories of knowledge about gender and sexuality—makes it a useful tool for thinking through the limitations of modern queer identity and the homonormalizing tendencies of gay and lesbian identity politics.

Insofar as lyric has been conceptualized as the subjective genre of poetry—invested in inner processes and states of feeling and thought in distinction to epic’s investment in external action—critical interest has revolved around the lyric I and especially questions of apostrophe and address. The implications of this investment range from Marxist critiques of lyric and bourgeois individuality to theoretical debates about the relation between the historical and lyric subject. What would it mean, however, to consider the presence of a lyric it? In this essay I consider how it can disclose a diverse set of lyric conventions—conventions that begin at the intersection of grammar and rhetoric but come to bear on larger philosophical and literary questions. Rather than defining it, poets often withhold its meaning, mining the hyperflexibility of the pronoun, its ability to be referential or dummy, context-dependent or not. Poets do this to make affective claims on their reader. At the same time, it can track a process in which lyric speakers attempt to get outside themselves to grasp their own subjectivity.

This essay takes, as its starting point, Andreas Malm’s effort, in How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, to legitimize and normalize property destruction in the context of the climate movement. The sabotage of energy infrastructures, I counter, cannot make sense, for it poses a threat to coherence, removing without replacing the material and discursive conditions that grant the climate movement its meaning and purpose within late capitalism and late liberalism. Recent protests entailing the defacement of paintings share with ecocriticism an investment in an essentially liberal, pedagogical and moral covenant, one that urges witnesses to undergo an individual process of reflection in order to acquire or affirm values and priorities friendlier to the environment. Sabotage, by contrast, violates this covenant; blowing up a pipeline may be said to have met its goals by reducing and slowing the supply of oil, regardless of what the public learned from sabotage’s mediatization. Drawing on psychoanalytic accounts of aesthetic education, I argue that sabotage introduces absurdity into a category—action—that the climate movement otherwise insists is self-identical. Sabotage does this by subtracting the world wherein putatively future-bound actions, including having and raising a child, mean what they do. I test out this claim in a reading of Nell Zink’s novel The Wallcreeper and Benedikt Erlingsson’s film Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð), two absurdist comedies that formally amplify the semiotic crisis induced by sabotage and, in so doing, enable us to confront the necessary dislocation of politics from sense.

Becoming-animal in Franz Kafka has functioned as a conceptual inkblot test, read in practically opposite ways by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the one hand and animal studies on the other. The concept is introduced in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, a text with no particular interest in displacing anthropocentrism. On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari saw Kafka as an affirmatively anthropocentric writer who needed to have done with animals in order complete his anti-fascist accelerationist project. Yet ecocritical readers of Deleuze and Guattari have nevertheless found in becoming-animal a weapon against anthropocentrism. While Deleuze and Guattari attempt to purify Kafka of animality, animal studies for its part purifies both Kafka and Kafka of anti-fascism. The roots of this strange conceptual chiasmus lie in the manner in which the opposition nature-techne is thought and a certain shared Heidegerrian inheritance. A reading of Kafka’s The Castle focusing on a horse-drawn sleigh provides resources for a concept of animal machine that would ruin the opposition between becoming-animal and machinic assemblage (nature-techne) that governs Kafka and blocks access to crucial resources for countering fascism and anthropocentrism.

The company Braun is postwar Germany’s most prominent design-oriented manufacturer, and its 1950s collaborations with designers from the Bauhaus and the Ulm School of Design are part of the design history canon. Until now, its functionalist style has been celebrated as an expression of West Germany’s turn away from Nazism. I argue in this article that, on the contrary, Braun’s 1950s designs recalled the products that the company made for the Wehrmacht and the SS, and I show how the company built its brand identity during the Nazi era and used nationalism and antisemitism to sell its products in the 1950s. I embed my analysis in readings of two films in which Rainer Werner Fassbinder uses Braun devices as key elements in his mise-en-scène, and I show how looking at Braun through Fassbinder’s lens restores lost historical and political content to his films and to West Germany’s exemplary industrial design style.