currentissuearchiveimage.jpg] Leo Bersani "Ardent Masturbation" (Descartes, Freud, and Others) R. John Williams Tekhnê-Zen and the Spiritual Quality of Global Capitalism Evan Kindley Big Criticism Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss and the Cybernetic Apparatus Daniel Morgan Max Ophuls and the Limits of Virtuousity: On_the_Aesthetics_and Ethics of Camera Movement Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson "Way Down in the Hole": Systematic Urban Inequality_and The_Wire Patrick Jagoda Critical Response I. Wired Kenneth W. Warren Critical Response II. Sociology and The Wire Linda Williams Critical Response III.  Ethnographic Imaginary: The Genesis and Genius ofThe Wire Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson Critical Response IV. The Wire's Impact: A Rejoinder Ricardo L. Nirenberg, David Nirenberg Badiou's Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology When an English translation of Being and Event appeared in 2005, Alain Badiou took the opportunity to reminisce about the initial French publication some twenty years before: "at that moment I was quite aware of having written a ‘great' book of philosophy." He located that greatness in four "affirmations" and one "radical thesis." Joseph DeLappe, David Simpson Visual Commemoration: The Iraqi Memorial Project Except under extraordinary circumstances, most of us do not look forward with any eagerness to our own deaths. That said, one of the few positive thoughts that can accompany the prospect of dying is the possibility of being remembered with affection or respect. Those of us living ordinary lives out of the public eye would expect to be lamented by our loved ones and commemorated in their living memories and perhaps by some modest headstone or plaque in a place that had meant something to us or to those we leave behind. Few of us anticipate a future in which there are no memories of who we were and no record of at least our names. Sandra Laugier Introduction to the French Edition of Must We_Mean_What_We_Say? Must We Mean What We Say? is Stanley Cavell's first book, and, in a sense, it is his most important. It contains all the themes that Cavell continues to develop masterfully throughout his philosophy. There is a renewed usage of J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, and, in the classic essay "The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy," he establishes the foundations of a radical reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein (later taken up in The Claim of Reason), the connections among skepticism, acknowledgement, and Shakespearean tragedy (which one finds in Disowning Knowledge and, in a positive form, in Pursuits of Happiness); there is the reflection on the ordinary that runs throughout his later works (In Quest of the Ordinary and A Pitch of Philosophy); and, finally, there is the original aesthetic approach that defines Cavell's work, through his objects which range from William Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett and pass through Hollywood comedies and melodrama, and opera and, above all, through his style and method. Susan Gubar In the Chemo Colony When I first agreed to undergo chemotherapy, I found myself haunted by Franz Kafka's parable "In the Penal Colony." The grisly short story was easy to translate into language pertinent to my ominous sense of the standard treatment of advanced (and thus probably incurable) ovarian cancer. About to be attached to a remarkable piece of apparatus, the condemned woman tastes fear rising off her tongue as she finds herself led forward into a maze of equipment, but is assured that the machinery should go on working continuously for six hours or six days. If anything were to go wrong, it would only be a small matter that could then be set right at once by the uniformed technician. So my variation began. Stefan Helmreich What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies What is life? A gathering consensus in anthropology, science studies, and philosophy of biology suggests that the theoretical object of biology, "life," is today in transformation, if not dissolution. Proliferating reproductive technologies, along with genomic reshufflings of biomatter in such practices as cloning, have unwound the facts of life. Gil Anidjar The Meaning of Life The starting point of this essay is that there is a contradiction at the heart of our current and hyperbolic understandings of life. To be more precise, on the one hand there is the historical novelty of biology as a modern science and set of technologies. On the other hand, life is simultaneously understood according to biological protocols that seem void of history. Mark Seltzer The Official World The great microsociologist of social interaction rituals, Erving Goffman, notes, in the opening part of his underknown collection of essays Forms of Talk, this little moment in the "gamelike back-and-forth process" between a speaker and a respondent: "In this case, [the respondent] ignores the immediately preceding sentences to which he has probably not paid attention since his idea occurred to him, and he interrupts to present his idea despite the non-sequitur element of his sentence." David Antin hiccups Jerome Rothenberg A Round of Renshi and the Poet as_Other:_An_Experiment_in_Poesis I first heard about renshi from Hiromi Itō, a remarkable and justifiably celebrated Japanese poet and writer, who has also been our neighbor in Encinitas, California, for most of the last two decades. Her presence among us goes back to 1991 and to my first visit to Japan, a contact I hadn't had before but have been able to repeat six times since then. Jennifer Scappettone Tuning as Lyricism: The Performance of Orality in_the_Poetics_of Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin Tuning might be the figure best suited to joining this pair of apparently incongruous texts, tuning in the sense defined by David Antin as "a negotiated concord or agreement based on vernacular physical actions with visible outcomes like walking together," as opposed to understanding, which is predicated, Antin contends, "on a geometrical notion of congruence." Gertrud Koch Eulogy for Miriam Hansen Miriam and I were born in 1949, only a month apart. The world we were born to was deeply marked by then-recent history. Our playgrounds were the rubble fields in the streets and the extended woods between Frankfurt, where I grew up, and Darmstadt, where Miriam grew up, some twenty-five miles apart. William Connolly Critical Response I -  The Complexity of Intention Ruth Leys starts with accounts that reduce emotion to a few simple states and emphasize the degree to which it is genetically wired (see Ruth Leys, "The Turn to Affect," 37 [Spring 2011]: 434 72). She then argues that other cultural theorists who emphasize the role of affect are driven in this direction, too, even when they wish to avoid such a trajectory. Much of the argument revolves around the charge of "anti-intentionalism" against us. Because of limitations of space, my response concentrates on my own thinking in this domain, though I suggest some lines of connection to other theories of affect. I will not always try to unpack Leys's views but will focus more on where mine deviate from her account of them. Ruth Leys Critical Response II -  Affect and Intention: A_Reply_to_William_E. Connolly William Connolly is in error when he remarks that I begin my article with a discussion of scientific accounts that reduce the emotions to a few genetically wired categories and that I suggest that the cultural theorists who are interested in affect are driven in the same reductive direction (William E. Connolly, "The Complexity of Intention," 37 [Summer 2011]: 792 99). Andrew F. March Critical Response - Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking for_Muslims In a recent article, Saba Mahmood has presented an intriguing account of what was at stake morally and emotionally for a large number of Muslims in the Danish cartoon controversy (Saba Mahmood, "Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?" 35 [Summer 2009]: 836 62). In doing so, she offers a framework for thinking about such instances that takes the place of accounts that portray the conflict as one between a liberal, secular commitment to free speech and a religious commitment to combating blasphemy. W.J.T. Mitchell Poetic Justice: 9-11 to Now The author, Editor of , discusses our new website and the changing face of criticism in the age of terror. Elias Khoury Rethinking the Nakba On the representation of the Nakba in regional literature and film. Meir Wigoder The Acrobatic Gaze and the Pensive Image in Palestinian_Morgue Photography The topic of my essay is Palestinian morgue photography in the wake of the Israeli air strikes and the ground invasion of Gaza, during Operation Cast Lead. I especially focus on a fashionable angle that is prevalent among the local Palestinian press-photographers.  I term it the acrobatic gaze: from the heights of the fridges in the morgue the photographers try to be omniscient absently-present witnesses that are capable of combining in a single composition both the faces of the standing relatives and the faces of the supine bodies. These photographs raise ethical, aesthetical, and political questions about the representation of the dead who are displayed to their families and to the photographers for propaganda reasons as well.   Gavin Arnall, Laura Gandolfi, Enea Zaramella, Jacues Rancière Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Rancière In this interview, Jacques Rancière describes the character of the aesthetic regime and the relationship between politics and aesthetics in his work, along with the role of artistic practices, technological innovations, and the institution of the museum in the redistribution of the sensible and the similarities and differences between his theories and Walter Benjamin's work on modernity.  Rancière argues that the aesthetic regime entails both a rupture with what came before it and the possibility of recycling and reinterpreting works of the past, what Benjamin described as the surrealist practice of evoking the outmoded.  While emphasizing the political and military preconditions to the aesthetic regime over technological or economic considerations, Rancière also warns against drawing strict parallels between aesthetic regimes and political presuppositions of equality or inequality.  Furthermore, Rancière refuses to privilege Marcel Duchamp's readymades in the aesthetic regime's redistribution of the sensible, pointing, instead, to Emile Zola's Le ventre de Paris and the creation of the modern institution of the museum as key moments that broke with preexisting distributions of the sensible.  Rancière also distinguishes his discussion of novelistic realism and narration from Benjamin's characterization of modernity as the decline in the ability to narrate experience, critiquing Benjamin's nostalgia for the past while recognizing as fruitful his linking of new possibilities in aesthetic experience to the creation of new technologies. Richard Moran Kant, Proust, and the Appeal of Beauty Beauty is a contested concept insofar as it seeks to mark a categorical distinction among the sources of pleasure, typically in terms of oppositions such as objective/subjective, universal/ particular, necessity/contingency.  Kant represents a culmination of this tradition in defining the judgment of beauty in terms of the requirement for universal agreement, modeling the judgment of beauty as closely as possible to ordinary factual judgments.   A different tradition of thinking about beauty, however, while still seeking to mark a categorical distinction by reference to the idea of necessity, finds the relevant sense of necessity not in conditions of agreement but necessities of erotic love and the sense of requirement felt toward its objects.  This paper explores the consequences of taking this other tradition seriously, using Proust as a representative exemplar, as a way both of making sense of some of the features Kant ascribes to the concept of the beautiful, while avoiding the paradoxes stemming from his focus on the conditions for universal agreement.  Adélékè Adéè̇ó From Orality to Visuality: Panegyric and Photography in Contemporary Lagos, Nigeria # A new line of self projection magazines that started blooming in Lagos, Nigeria, about the mid-1990s defined itself by filling almost completely every issue with photographs that depict politicians, businesspeople, sports and show business stars enjoying fruits of their extraordinary achievements on festive occasions. The magazine's cozy coverage of the rich and famous irks a lot of serious cultural and literary critics who believe that this style resembles praise singing too closely. This paper, unlike mainline criticisms of the pictorial magazines, takes praise singing to be a serious subject. Its central proposition is that the Nigerian magazine culture embraced these magazines because they have successfully translated into photography the panegyric tendency that pervades popular, self-projection arts in the underlying Yorùbá cultural environment of southwestern Nigeria. The sub-genre of Yorùbá panegyric that the magazines rework into the photographic medium is oríkì bọ̀rọ̀kìnní, or praise chants of the eminent. The paper analyzes sample issues of Ovation magazine to outline ways of placing contemporary African cultural forms in a long perspective and to propose an example of how inter-mediality operates today in popular cultures. In the concluding section, the essay proposes that a "poetic" understanding of photography, as opposed to "theatricality" and or melancholic substitution, represents the best way to think about the type of festive portraiture practiced in Ovationand its imitators.     Responses to "Badiou's Number," by Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg (Summer 2011). Alain Badiou Critical Response I: To Preface the Response to the ‘Criticisms' of Ricardo Nirenberg and David Nirenberg   A. J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens Critical Response II: Neither Nor   By Ricardo L. Nirenberg, David Nirenberg Critical Response III: Reply to Badiou, Bartlett, and_Clemens     Responses to "Against Literary Darwinism," by Jonathan Kramnick (Winter, 2011)   Paul Bloom Critical Response I: Who Cares about the Evolution of_Stories?   Brian Boyd Critical Response II: For Evocriticism: Minds Shaped to Be_Reshaped   Joseph Carroll Critical Response III: An Open Letter to Jonathan Kramnick   Vanessa L. Ryan Critical Response IV: Living in Duplicate: Victorian Science and Literature Today   G. Gabrielle Starr Critical Response V: Evolved Reading and the Science(s) of_Literary Study: A Response to Jonathan Kramnick   Blakey Vermeule Wit and Poetry and Pope, or The Handicap_Principle   Jonathan Kramnick Literary Studies and Science: A Reply to My_Critics   Erwin Panofsky On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works_of_the_Visual Arts In the eleventh of his Antiquarian Letters, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing discusses a phrase from Lucian's description of the painting by Zeuxis called A Family of Centaurs: ‘at the top of the painting a centaur is leaning down as if from an observation point, smiling' (ano de tes eikonos hoion apo tinos skopes Hippokentauros tis …). ‘This as if from an observation point, Lessing notes, obviously implies that Lucian himself was uncertain whether this figure was positioned further back, or was at the same time on higher ground. We need to recognize the logic of ancient bas-reliefs where figures further to the back look over those at the front, not because they are actually positioned above them but because they are meant to appear as if standing behind.'1   · 1. The passage is in George Lessing, Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts (Berlin, 1778), p. 81. Panofsky's discussion does not note that the original text of Lucian (Zeuxis or Antiochus 3) makes clear that what is described is a copy of the original painting (already said by Lucian to be lost). This means that some of the issues of misunderstanding situated by Lessing and Panofsky in Lucian's court may in principle be attributable to the copyist. This makes no difference to the conceptual thrust of Panofsky's case. Trans. Jaś Elsner, Katharina Lorenz The Genesis of Iconology Erwin Panofsky explicitly states that the first half of the opening chapter of Studies in Iconology his landmark American publication of 1939 contains ‘the revised content of a methodological article published by the writer in 1932', which is now translated for the first time in this issue of .1 That article, published in the philosophical journal Logos, is among his most important works. First, it marks the apogee of his series of philosophically reflective essays on how to do art history,2 that reach back, via a couple of major pieces on Alois Riegl, to the 1915 essay on Heinrich Wölfflin.3 Under the influence of his colleague at Hamburg Ernst Cassirer, the principal interpreter of Kant in the 1920s, Panofsky from 1915 on exhibits in his work ever more Kantian thinking and language.4 But Logos was not an art-historical review or one dedicated to aesthetics but a principal mainstream journal of the philosophy of culture. So ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts' has a good claim to be the culmination of Panofsky's philosophical thinking in his German period under the Weimar Republic.   · 1. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; New York, 1967), p. xv; hereafter abbreviated SI. See Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst', Logos 21 (1932): 103 19; trans. Jaś Elsner and Katharina Lorenz under the title ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts',  38 (Spring 2012): 467 82; hereafter abbreviated ‘P'. · 2. See the discussion in Carlo Ginzburg, ‘From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method', Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London, 1990), pp. 17 59, esp. pp. 36 41. · 3. See Panofsky, ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst', Deutschsprachige Aufsåtze, ed. Karen Michels and Martin Warnke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998), 2:1009 18; ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens',Deutschsprachige Aufsåtze, 2: 1019 34, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder under the title ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition', Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 17 33; and ‘Über das Verhåltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: Ein Beitrag zu der Erörterung über die Möglichkeit kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe', Deutschsprachige Aufsåtze, 2: 1035 63, trans. Lorenz and Elsner under the title ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art',  35 (Autumn 2008): 43 71. · 4. On neo-Kantianism in pre-Nazi Germany, see Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago, 2000), pp. 25 37; Éric Dufour and T. Z. R. Créteil, ‘Le Statue du singulier: Kant et le néokantisme de l'École de Marbourg', Kantstudien 93 (Sept. 2002): 324 50; Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture  (Princeton, N.J., 2008), pp. 22 51; and Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), pp. 52 86. Specifically on the Cassirerian Kantianism of Panofsky, see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 181 82; Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), pp. 91 92, 147 52; Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce (New Haven, Conn., 1989), pp. 174 77, 182 84; David Summers, ‘Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline', in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside, ed. Irving Lavin (Princeton, N.J., 1995), pp. 9 24; Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 68 77; Paul Crowther, The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History  (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 70 73; Allister Neher, ‘"The Concept of Kunstwollen", Neo-Kantianism, and Erwin Panofsky's Early Art Theoretical Essays', Word and Image 20 (Jan. Mar. 2004): 41 51; Georges Didi- Huberman,Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park, Pa., 2005), pp. 4 6, 90 138; and Lorenz and Elsner, ‘Translators' Introduction', 35 (Autumn 2008): 33 42, esp. pp. 38, 40 42. Tommie Shelby The Ethics of Uncle Tom's Children How should one live? This central philosophical question can be separated into at least two parts. The first concerns the conduct and attitudes morality requires of each of us. The second is about the essential elements of a worthwhile life; it's about what it means to flourish, which includes meeting certain moral demands but is not exhausted by this. Answering this two-pronged question traditionally falls within the subdiscipline of ethics, broadly construed. Philosophers have also sought to explain what makes a society just or good, to specify the values and principles by which we are to evaluate institutional arrangements and political regimes. This is the traditional domain of political philosophy. This essay addresses a question that arises where ethics and political philosophy meet. Mark McGurl The Posthuman Comedy According to Wai Chee Dimock, scholars of American literature should study it in a bigger historical context than the one beginning in 1776 or even 1620, freeing themselves in this way from the narrow-minded nationalism that has so often drawn a border around their research. To view American literature in light of the longer durée of ancient civilizations is to see Henry David Thoreau reading the Bhagavad Gita, Ralph Waldo Emerson the Persian poet Hāfez, and rediscover in these and other extensive sympathies the kinship of American literature with world literature. Dramatically expanding the tracts of space-time across which literary scholars might draw valid links between author and author, text and text, and among author, text, and the wide world beyond, the perspective of deep time holds the additional promise, for Dimock, of reinvigorating "our very sense of the connectedness among human beings" and of dissuading us, thereby, from the wisdom of war.1 At the very least we might hope that American soldiers wouldn't look idly on, as they did on 14 April 2003, as the cultural treasures of the Iraqi National Library which are the treasures of all humankind were looted and burned.   · 1. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, N.J., 2006), p. 5; hereafter abbreviated T. Andreas Mayer Gradiva's Gait: Tracing the Figure of a Walking_Woman Many patients were surprised or confused by their first visit to Dr. Freud's office. Lying on the famous couch, they found themselves surrounded by a plethora of objects and images they would never have associated with the business of the psychoanalytic cure. Statuettes, masks, and portraits from ancient times were arranged in showcases, on the shelves and on desks within a room whose walls were covered with depictions of mythological scenes and portraits of Freud's mentors (fig. 1). The patient's first impressions of this peculiar display, which has been faithfully preserved by Anna Freud in their last London home at Maresfield Gardens, were frequently strong ones. One of the most articulate of Freud's patients, Hilda Doolittle, herself a lover of antiquities, did not hesitate to tell him how "overwhelmed and upset" she was to find him "surrounded by these treasures, in a museum, a temple." During her own analysis, a variety of these "toys," as she called them, seemed to act as replicas or "ghosts" of the figures appearing in her dreams or memories: "We are all haunted houses."1   · 1. H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], "Advent," Tribute to Freud (Boston, 1974), pp. 119, 146. Fabien Locher, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz Modernity's Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity We believe that a historical understanding of past environmental discourses is essential for contemporary social and green theory because the dominant narratives used to reflect upon the contemporary environmental crisis are too simple. There is an assumption shared by most postmodern thinkers today that for about two generations we have been experiencing a complete transformation of our relationship with the environment. After three centuries of frenetic modernism, we entered, at last, an enlightened era of environmental awareness. Landmark writers of social theory have coined new labels to name our epoch and express its radical novelty: risk society (as opposed to industrial society), reflexive modernization, second modernization, or high modernity, while philosophers have reflected on the recent transformation of the nature of human action.1   · 1. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London, 1992); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif., 1991); Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory, trans. Rhodes Barrett (New York, 1993); and Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Jonas and David Herr (Chicago, 1984). Chris Lorenz If You're So Smart, Why Are You under_Surveillance?_Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management Although universities have undergone changes since the dawn of their existence, the speed of change started to accelerate remarkably in the 1960s. Spectacular growth in the number of students and faculty was immediately followed by administrative reforms aimed at managing this growth and managing the demands of students for democratic reform and societal relevance. Since the 1980s, however, an entirely different wind has been blowing along the academic corridors. The fiscal crisis of the welfare states and the neoliberal course of the Reagan and Thatcher governments made the battle against budget deficits and against government spending into a political priority. Education, together with social security and health care, were targeted directly. As the eighties went on, the neoliberal agenda became more radical smaller state and bigger market attacking the public sector itself through efforts to systematically reduce public expenditure by privatizing public services and introducing market incentives. At the same time the societal relevance of the universities demanded by critical students was turned on its head to become economic relevance to business and industry in the knowledge society. Hannan Hever, Lisa Katz The Post-Zionist Condition In the summer of 1991, the first issue of the Israeli journal Teoria Ubikoret (Theory and Criticism) published an essay of mine on Anton Shammas, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who wrote the Hebrew novel Arabeskot (Arabesques).1 In this essay I traced Shammas's subversion of the Jewish ethnocentrism of the Hebrew literary canon.2 Shammas's novel reveals how the Hebrew canon in Israel, in the guise of the apparently neutral term Hebrew Literature, which only apparently bases itself on the Hebrew language as the common literary language of Jews and Arabs, has in fact imposed an exclusionary policy. That is, in order to enter its realm, those who write in Hebrew must be Jewish. Shammas, I argued, sought to de-Judaize the Hebrew language and turn it into a language shared by all Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike. Now, twenty years later, Teoria Ubikoret has published a different essay of mine, this time on Tuvya haholev (Tuvya the Dairyman), Dan Miron's Hebrew translation of the great Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem's novel Tevye der Milhiker. I claim that while Miron's Hebrew indeed Hebraicizes Aleichem's Yiddish, it also moves in the opposite direction; it Yiddishizes Hebrew, giving Yiddish a prominent presence in the Hebrew translation and thus decentering Israeli subjectivity and undermining the cohesive force of Hebrew.3   · 1. See Anton Shammas, Arabeskot (Tel Aviv, 1986); trans.Vivien Eden under the title Arabesques(Berkeley, 2001). · 2. See Hannan Hever, "Ivrit be-eto shel aravi," Teoria Ubikoret 1 (Summer 1991): 23 38, "Hebrew in an Israeli Arab Hand: Six Miniatures on Anton Shammas's Arabesques," The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford, 1990), pp. 264 93, andProducing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation Building and Minority Discourse (New York, 2002), pp. 175 204. · 3. See Hever, "Tuvia haholev beivrit," review of Tuvya Haholev by Shalom Aleichem, trans. Dan Miron,Teoria Ubikoret 36 (Spring 2010): 227 30. Cecelia Watson Points of Contention: Rethinking the Past, Present, and_Future_of Punctuation The rule books, though they claimed to heed only the call of logic, were nonetheless bound by their historical context: punctuation guidelines have been heavily indebted to intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic trends. No matter what analytical authority rule books claimed, their codifications had at least as much to do with their historical context as with syntax. When punctuation is properly contextualized, it can yield insight into problems that transcend disciplinary boundaries: it asks us to consider how we communicate within the disciplines and beyond them and how disciplines create and maintain interpretive norms. It is this account of punctuation that I begin to develop here. I want to track the much-maligned semicolon and its fellow punctuation marks as rules for their usage were established and evolved. I consider the consequences of the nineteenth-century explosion of systems of grammar rules by way of the story of a semicolon in a statute that deprived Bostonians of late-night liquor from 1900 1906. The "Semicolon Law," as it came to be known, exemplifies problems of interpretation still live in legal theory. I contrast the demands of legal formalism with the expectations of close reading in the humanities and social sciences. I conclude by attending to the inheritance left to us by nineteenth-century grammarians' impassioned attempts to bring order to English: The Chicago Manual of Style. I raise some critical questions about our attitudes towards rules, and consider how those attitudes influence our approach to punctuation and our passions about semicolons. Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen Introduction: Photography between Art History and Philosophy The essays collected in this special issue of are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly the subject of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2003), Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) (2005), or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA (2006 7). Indeed, Wall's most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels (2011), situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography's increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate's first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way. Jeff Wall Conceptual, Postconceptual, Nonconceptual: Photography and the Depictive Arts I would like to set aside, for now, the distinction between art and art with a capital A because this distinction may not exist, except as a polemical tool or an expression of personal opinion. Fifteen years ago, in "Marks of Indifference" I proposed that it was the dialectic of negation in which conceptual art implicated photography that paradoxically breached the final, most subtle, barriers to the acceptance of photography as art. That implied, I think, that photography played some central role in the elaboration of conceptual art, what I am going to call the conceptual reduction of autonomous art. I don't know whether I meant to imply that or not, but, if I did, I shouldn't have because photography had nothing to do with the success of conceptual art; photography played no significant role in it. Photography was a sort of passenger on that trip. We can put it even more strongly and say that the very presence of photographs in works or discourse distracted or diminished the logic of the arguments conceptual artists were making. The most rigorous conceptual artists had little or nothing to do with photography because they had no need for it and recognized that, as depiction, it could contribute nothing to the reduction they were seeking to establish. Carol Armstrong Automatism and Agency Intertwined: A Spectrum of Photographic Intentionality A concatenation of forces surrounded the rise of the photographic to the center of contemporary art practice. During the sixties the author-function was seriously critiqued. Roland Barthes announced the death of the author in 1967, and Michel Foucault answered his own question, what is an author? deconstructively in 1969, replacing what William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley had already termed the intentional fallacy with a model of the cultural constructedness of all notions of creative agency. At the same time, notions of automatism generated by psychoanalytic models of mind and dada and surrealist conceptions of artistic and literary practice joined forces with sixties anticanonical, postexpressionist notions of the artwork as the deskilled, mechanical product of a consumerist society whose forces yielded the fantasy of individual will. Meanwhile, also during the sixties, painters such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg began to use found photographs very overtly either as part and parcel of the generative process of their work or inside their work along with other kinds of materials. And thus the medium-specific boundaries between the photographic and the painterly, just to take the two, began to crumble for good, though the art-school disciplines and museum departments dedicated to these two media continued to hold sway. Patrick Maynard Arts, Agents, Artifacts: Photography's Automatisms By the time photography was introduced to the public at the end of the 1830s, the fine arts idea was already exhibiting resilience through shifts of both extension and meaning. As to extension, one of Immanuel Kant's candidates, oratory, dropped out quickly. Music has always posed a problem for the mimesis constituent. In intension or cognitive meaning the components soon began internecine jostling, with shifting alliances rather like ancient Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Persia. Famously, the mental- content constituent, arising from "genius," expanded in meaning and importance, at notable expense to craft and mimesis thus the emergence of romanticism, as a popular term for creativity and self-expression. This is already well exemplified in John Stuart Mill's 1833 essays on poetry and genius, which demoted craft and deemphasized mimesis in favor of what he called "the expression or uttering forth of feeling." Thirteen years later, Edgar Allan Poe responded with a craft-rhetoric put-down of genius and self-expression, although he later emphasized beauty. As for the aesthetic component, while Mill was willing to finesse a case for beauty in terms of self-expression, by the end of the century Leo Tolstoy's self-expression approach in What Is Art? would banish Poe's beauty from the answer as decadent hedonism. The pace did not slow in the twentieth century, when, leaping ahead, R. G. Collingwood explicitly demoted craft in favor of expression, thereby taking down mimesis as were artists of the time while Benedetto Croce placed beauty in the mental expression of the beholder. We scarcely need reminding of what came next: the historic phase of aesthetic or formalist counterattacks against mimesis later, even against self-expression with which religious thinkers such as Jacques Maritain had shown little patience from the start. Robin Kelsey Playing Hooky/Simulating Work: The Random  Generation of John Baldessari As traditional patronage gave way to new markets in the modern period, artists went in search of a public. The public sphere, driven inward by the private interests of capitalism, increasingly offered art a pure exchange-value and the role of a luxury good (something to match the couch). Artists, seeing no place else to go, pursued an endgame, sustaining art's vitality through inventive, elemental, and critically intelligent forms of negation. A key question was how to contend with the sham of taste and artistic subjectivity more generally as a refuge or antidote to the crass engines of the market. Susan Laxton As Photography: Mechanicity, Contingency, and Other-Determination in Gerhard Richter's Overpainted Snapshots Of the generation of post-1960s artists who looked to photography for a new set of conceptual tools, Gerhard Richter stands apart because he has uniquely professed a desire to "use painting as a means to photography," that is, to bring painting to the structure and sensibility of the photograph.2 To ascribe sensibility or perceptive acuity to a process so mechanical as photography may strike the reader as either romantically fey or even offensively anthropomorphizing, given that the aesthetic questions at stake have exactly to do with philosophy's "mind-independent" designation of the medium. But the metaphor has pedigree among historians of photography, having been articulated by Walter Benjamin in his "Little History of Photography," where he characterizes photography as a medium possessed of an "optical unconscious," a nature specifically "other" in its ability to present the "spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject."3 It is precisely on the basis of this picture making outside of human agency, Benjamin insists, that "the dubious project of authenticating photography in terms of painting" fails, for it is an attempt to "legitimize the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of overturning."4 Certainly, it is from this premise of photography's revolutionary capacity that the first critical assessments of the work of "artists using photography" proceeded in the 1970s and continued through the 1980s into the present decade.5 This is particularly important to keep in mind when assessing what has been called the recent turn to the pictorial in photographic practices because this move has been accompanied by, on one hand, a general pulling away from easily legible, unambivalent documentary content in photographic practices a tendency that may itself be considered part of a quietly growing, renewed interest in the critical capacity of painting among a new generation of artists and, on the other, a nuanced exploration of the appropriative lessons of postmodernism, manifested in recent interest in the repurposing of found, or what Benjamin might call "other-determined," imagery.6 Margaret Iversen Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean It is only now, with the rise of digitalization and the near- obsolescence of traditional technology, that we are becoming fully aware of the distinctive character of analogue photography. This owl-of-Minerva-like appreciation of the analogue has prompted photographic art practices that mine the medium for its specificity. Indeed, one could argue that analogue photography has only recently become a medium in the fullest sense of the term, for it is only when artists refuse to switch over to digital photographic technologies that the question of what constitutes analogue photography as a medium is self-consciously posed. While the benefits of digitalization in terms of accessibility, dissemination, speed, and efficiency are universally acknowledged, some people are also beginning to reflect on what is being lost in this great technological revolution. In this context, artists' use of analogue film and the revival of early photographic techniques should be regarded as timely interventions, although these may strike some as anachronistic. This essay does not attempt an ontological inquiry into the essential nature of the analogue; rather, it is an effort to articulate something about the meaning of analogue photography as an artistic medium for contemporary artists by paying close attention to its meaning and stakes for particular artists. Instead of presenting a general survey, I want to consider the work of just two artists, Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean, both of whose work is concerned with what is being lost. As Leonard put it: "New technology is usually pitched to us as an improvement. … But progress is always an exchange. We gain something, we give something else up. I'm interested in looking at some of what we are losing."1 Tellingly, both artists have produced exhibitions simply called Analogue. Leonard gave the title to a large project she did between 1998 and 2009 consisting of 412 silver gelatin and c-prints of local shop fronts in lower Manhattan and poor market stalls around the world.2 Dean used it for a 2006 retrospective exhibition of her films, photographs, and drawings. Diarmuid Costello Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanely Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts How might philosophers and art historians make the best use of one another's research? That, in nuce, is what this special issue considers with respect to questions concerning the nature of photography as an artistic medium; and that is what my essay addresses with respect to a specific case: the dialogue, or lack thereof, between the work of the philosopher Stanley Cavell and the art historian-critic Rosalind Krauss. It focuses on Krauss's late appeal to Cavell's notion of automatism to argue that artists now have to invent their own medium, both to provide criteria against which to judge artistic success or failure and to insulate serious art from the vacuous generalization of the aesthetic in a media- saturated culture at large.1 Much in the spirit of ‘Avant- Garde and Kitsch', paying attention to the medium is once again an artist's best line of defence against the encroachment of new media, the culture industry, and spectacle. That Krauss should appeal to Cavell at all, let alone in such a Greenbergian frame of mind, is surprising if one is familiar with the fraught history of debate about artistic media in art theory since Greenberg. Cavell's work in this domain has always been closely associated with that of Michael Fried, and the mutual estrangement of Fried and Krauss, who began their critical careers as two of Greenberg's leading followers, is legendary.2 I have written about the close connection between Fried's and Cavell's conceptions of an artistic medium before.3 Whereas Fried's and Cavell's early conception of an artistic medium was in a sense collaborative, emerging from an ongoing exchange of ideas at Harvard in the latter half of the 1960s, Krauss's much later appeal to the ideas of automatism and the automatic underpinning Cavell's conception of the photographic substrate of film from the early 1970s is not. In what follows, I try to clarify both the grounds of this appeal and its upshot. Does Krauss's account shed new light on Cavell's, or is she trying to press his terms into service for which they are ill-served? Both could of course be true, the former as a consequence of the latter perhaps. Conversely, do the art historical and philosophical accounts pass one another by? Note that even if the latter were true, its explanation might still prove instructive in the context of an interdisciplinary volume seeking to bring art historians and philosophers into dialogue around the themes of agency and automatism, which is precisely what Krauss's appeal to Cavell turns on. Dominic McIver Lopes Afterword: Photography and the "Picturesque Agent" Even as art theory and analytic philosophy have failed to connect in their studies of photography, the two disciplines have joined in tying conceptions of the specific character of photography to ideas about automaticity and agency.1 In rough caricature, the philosopher reasons: "An item is a work of art only insofar as it is the product of agency, so a photograph is not an art work insofar it is not the product of artistic agency. After all, in Lady Eastlake's colorful words, the ‘obedience of the machine' in photography is no ‘picturesque agent.'"2 This much is accepted both by philosophers who go on to conclude that photography is not an art and also by those who defend the contrary.3 The reasoning on the side of theory and criticism often goes, again in caricature, as follows: "Art works sometimes result from a suppression of agency, and the distinctive ‘obedience of the machine' in photography is no ‘picturesque agent,' so the automatism of the photographic machine shapes the distinctive profile of photographic art." The triadic assemblage of the medium, automatism, and agency is clearly more than a trope in writing on photography; it regulates and structures reasoning about photography, even as it sends that reasoning off in remarkably divergent directions in different disciplines. In the spirit of the nudge towards convergence that this special issue represents, this afterword develops some thoughts that are sparked by and that offer a friendly challenge to the preceding papers. In brief, the triad that controls thinking about photography across disciplines depends on some rather demanding conceptions of agency and automatism. As it turns out, less demanding conceptions of agency and automatism pave the way to a new and more modest conception of the specificity of photography as an art medium. If our common ground is what keeps us apart, perhaps we should find some new common ground? Adam Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson Like-Minded Ruth Leys ("The Turn to Affect: A Critique," Critical Inquiry 37 [Spring 2011]: 434 72) raises a number of important questions about the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of the affect theories that have emerged in the critical humanities, sciences, and social sciences in the last decade. There are a variety of frameworks for thinking about what constitutes the affective realm (neurological, psychological, social, cultural, philosophical), and there are different preferences for how such frameworks could be deployed. We would like to engage with just one part of that debate: the contributions of Silvan Tomkins's affect theory. We take issue with Leys's formulation that Tomkins's work along with that of Brian Massumi, William Connolly, and Paul Ekman form a group of like-minded theorists. We do not believe this represents an accurate account of the conceptual and empirical commitments of these various authors. By bundling their work together, Leys misses much of what is compellingly critical in each of these writers, and she overlooks what is most invigorating in the debates amongst them. In addition, the specificities of Tomkins's work have been badly served in Leys's essay. In four volumes stretching from 1962 to 1992 (and elaborated in various other empirical and theoretical papers) Tomkins laid out a complex and captivating theory of the human affect system, in which mechanisms of neurological feedback, social scripts, and facial behavior coassemble as affective events. Our response to Leys's essay is motivated by a wish to see more detailed engagements with this theory the distinctiveness of which we believe has yet to be fully explored in this new affective turn. Charles Altieri Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth_Leys One does not have to share William Connolly's vitalist affiliations in order to have serious reservations about Ruth Leys's essay and response.1 Simple phenomenological concerns will do to make one suspicious of her core claim: From my perspective, intentionality involves concept-possession; the term intentionality carries with it the idea that thoughts and feelings are directed to conceptually and cognitively appraised and meaningful objects in the world. The general aim of my paper is to propose that affective neuroscientists and the new affect theorists are thus making a mistake when they suggest that emotion or affect can be defined in nonconceptual or nonintentional terms.2 I worry about the difficulty of defining the boundaries of a notion like conceptual, especially since on the next page Leys claims an equivalence between cognition and signification. There seems at least a tendency toward tautology in equating "nonconceptual" with "nonintentional," as if one could be used to define the other. But then signification enters the picture, although criteria for signification involve simple recognition and do not implicate the awareness of logical connectives that seem necessary for conceptual and cognitive appraisal. And the Wittgenstein in me worries even more why Leys thinks that intentionality should be confined to only one set of traits despite the fact that a great variety of language games depend on something like intentional awareness. Ruth Leys Facts and Moods: Reply to My Critics The purpose of my article, "The Turn to Affect: A Critique," was to show that the theorists whose work I analyzed are all committed to the mistaken idea that affective processes are responses of the organism that occur independently of cognition or intention.1 My aim was not to emphasize the differences among the authors under consideration differences that, as I noted in my article, of course do exist but rather to demonstrate that those theorists share certain erroneous assumptions about the separation presumed to obtain between the affect system on the one hand and intention, cognition, and meaning on the other and to lay out the unfortunate consequences of their doing so. If Adam Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson wish for another kind of essay than the one I have written an essay that would stress the divergences between the ideas of Silvan S. Tomkins and those of the other affect theorists I consider, especially those of Paul Ekman, in order to show what was distinctive about Tomkins's contributions let them write it. But in such an essay they will have to acknowledge certain facts about the relationship between Tomkins and Ekman that, in their haste to separate Tomkins's theories from Ekman's, they are in danger of neglecting or misrepresenting. W. J. T. Mitchell Report from Morocco Every once in awhile an academic drudge gets to visit a place that dreams are made of. We all know the little game in which American scholars compete to mention the exotic locations they have been to: Paris, London, Beijing, Mumbai. But I have never aroused such open jealousy in my colleagues until I uttered the word "Casablanca." For knowledgeable tourists, this is something of a puzzle. Casablanca is routinely disrespected by the guidebooks for its lack of an authentically ancient medina or a labyrinthine souk, and its paucity of museums leaves the tourist with relatively few obvious destinations. One suspects that much of the aura surrounding the city's name comes from the wholly fictional movie and the associated mystique of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Moroccans are notably marginal in the film, which, in a kind of doubling of colonial occupation, treats Casablanca as an outpost of the Vichy French regime under the thumb of the Nazis. Rick's Café Américain never existed until quite recently, when a retired American diplomat decided to capitalize on the legendary bistro with a simulacrum. The real city is quite modern, with the relics of 1920s colonial art-deco-French architecture serving as a main attraction, along with the thoroughly contemporary mosque of Hassan II, designed by a French architect and finished only in the 1990s. There is also the Corniche, with its surfing beaches and exclusive cafés, clubs, and hotels. James Williams Editorial Note We would like to announce the addition of two coeditors to Critical Inquiry. Haun Saussyis University Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1993) and Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (2001), and he has edited or coedited a number of volumes, including Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (with Perry Meisel; 2011). He is currently working on a book about the concept of rhythm in psychology, linguistics, literature, and folklore. Patrick Jagodais Assistant Professor in  the Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His research examines how contemporary American literature, film, television, and new media deploy different forms to render the complexities of global networks. We would also like to announce the latest additions to our editorial staff. First, Hank Scotch has been hired to replace Irene Hsiao as our new manuscript editor. Previously an editorial assistant at the journal for three years, Hank is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He has just completed his dissertation entitled Oceanic America. Andrew Yale, a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, rejoins the staff as an editorial assistant. Finally, Jason de Stefano joins Louis Sterrett as our newest editorial intern.