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 &lsquo;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 &lsquo;obedience of the
            machine' in photography is no &lsquo;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 &lsquo;obedience of the machine' in
            photography is no &lsquo;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.
