“An embryonic cybernetic power is vainly trying to put language under the control of the machines it controls, in such a way that information would henceforth be the only possible communication.”
Guy Debord, “All the King’s Men” (1963)
Part 1: Infidelity
The “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” (hereafter the Report) is, arguably, many things: an elaborate group selfie; a puzzling attempt to purify the humanities of postmodernists and “official” relativists; a hidebound call to reclaim a version of analytical philosophy as the ends and means of humanistic scholarship (I’ll get to that); a glimpse into an epistemic future of categories clicking into place under an algorithmic sky.
Let us start with the obvious (at least for this humanist): the Report is an argument in which the authors display a vested interest in particular methodological norms (and not others) and advance a particular vision of humanistic scholarship (and not others). It is not subtle in proclaiming how the world is in essence and how we should think and conduct ourselves in that world. Indeed, with Clifford Geertz (1966) as my witness, I would even go so far as to suggest that the Report smells like a religious document in its coordination of metaphysics and ethics for those who would choose the righteous path.
Near the beginning of the Report the authors confirm their good faith with words that could well serve as copy for a thank you card from Advancement or an email blast to the parents of admitted full-pay students:
The humanities and the social sciences take as their subject matter human culture and society, in the past, present and future. Their common aim is to help us understand the human world and to develop in their students the capacity to participate intelligently in society, to comprehend their place in history, to appreciate the great works of the imagination, and also to identify the most significant defects in human life and their sustaining causes.
The Report’s vaunted stand on the value of values of a humanistic education is hard to argue with. The stand, however, is a pretext for a familiar lament about the corrosive nature of politics upon scholarship, ironic given that the Report will surely provide cover for administrators and politicians looking to control and cut humanities programs.
In any case, the Report makes a very big deal of recent scholars deemed to be behaving badly. Readers are repeatedly warned that “postmodernist views of knowledge and truth [now] have the status of unquestionable orthodoxy in vast swaths of the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.”
Sins within these swaths are manifold: inappropriately criticizing fellow scholars for being insufficiently reflexive, saying strident things about the authors’ core beliefs or else making outrageous and indecipherable arguments about capitalism or colonialism or race or affect, ignoring the evidence in front of their faces and rejecting the very concept of evidence, carelessly and viciously wielding ‘non-epistemic reasons’ for their flimsy arguments, writing in ways that deliberately obfuscate—such scholars are a threat to all that is good and decent.
In terms of its style of presentation, I felt a paranoia simmering beneath the veneer of the Report’s steady calm—the infidel among us must be exorcized, their linguistic trickery banished from the republic, their magical thinking seen for what it is—a “tradition” of scholarship akin to “astrology” whose “official” allegiances to relativism and refusals to be reasonable disqualify them as serious contributors to the academy’s mission.
If such “confusing,” “distorted,” and “patholog[ical]” work were allowed to stand, that is, for it to remain “fair game to assess academic scholarship on political and social grounds,” the authors are positively apocalyptic. “To the extent that views of this sort have taken hold,” they grimly intone, “they represent a catastrophe for the humanities and the social sciences understood as academic disciplines.”
And it is this relentless, selective, and at times ridiculous conjuring of infidelity that makes it tempting to read this document as wholly political in precisely the way that the authors of the Report deny—a white paper to assuage an anxious donor and political class (the problem down below has been identified and it will be addressed by the higher ups), or alternatively, as itself an anxious performance of measured objectivity delivered with immense sincerity, always the genre of true religion in these United States.
All this reminds one of those evangelicals in the nineteenth century who bent over backwards to distinguish “true religion” from all that was infidel—bad religion, to be sure, but also suspect politics and corrupt epistemologies. Atheism, irreligion, women, racial minorities, occultists and the licentious were, by various definitions, asystematic, inconsistent with either “organic laws of the State” or “any laws whatsoever.” That which was “contrary to the nature of religion” was also contrary to nature and “subversive” of “virtue, morality, and good manners” (Modern 2008; Baird, 273).
According to the Report, the specter of a “tradition” of “scholarship that speaks the language of postmodernism and officially repudiates the rhetoric of truth and objectivity” is haunting their empire of signs. For the authors of the Report, to question, really question, “the rhetoric of truth and objectivity” amounts to a repudiation of something sacred. A violation of a taboo. There is either affirmation or repudiation. Nothing in between. Acceptance or disavowal. Nothing in between. No space for certain types of questions. No space for suspending the either/or demands of their own language game.
The Report’s authors conclude that knowledge and free inquiry become impossible if there is “no such thing as a purely epistemic reason for believing something.” Such strawman arguments cast a wide net of contempt based on examples of heated political claims from the last few years—which is to say, that while there may be problematic arguments being made in the American Anthropologist, why not then tend to the problem in those arguments by engaging them in a sophisticated and subtle manner?
The Report’s bad faith logic comes to the fore when the authors earnestly expose the fraudulence of the unwashed by pointing out the hypocrisy of those “postmodernists” who “officially” foreswear objectivity yet proceed by gathering evidence and creating a rationale for their claims regardless.
If someone really believed that all knowledge claims depend on contingent background non-epistemic values, they would have to admit that while they believe that climate change is real, given their progressive values, the MAGA folks might be entitled to believe that climate change is a hoax, given their conservative values. Similarly, for claims about how many sexes there are, or whether race is real, and so on.
Gotcha Derrida! Take that Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out Judith Butler! Roll over Marx and Freud and tell Friedrich Nietzsche the news! All you relativists gonna lose because you can’t have your cake and eat it too!
I exaggerate for laughs here. But seriously, what the hell is going on with the Report’s logical steps and conflations of significantly divergent perspectives across decades? Whither the curiosity? The due diligence? How is it that such strawman reasoning passes as objectivity? And who are these barbaric scholars of which they speak, these poets in disguise, these uncouth wearing power suits?
To be clear, I am not dismissing this Report because it is political and quite invested in changing humanistic institutions according to a particular understanding of what constitutes the ends and means of a humanistic education. I am dismissing Report because its description of the infidel position borders on self-caricature:
This tradition takes itself to have learnt that what passes for right-thinking common sense about the social order in any given moment is ipso facto suspect: a likely manifestation of ideology in its original sense, and hence a suitable candidate for critique. Needless to say, it is possible to overdo this sort of thing.
Clearly, there has been a breach in etiquette for these authors. This sort of thing has overstepped. Not here, in polite company, they whisper. They earnestly do not like it when Marxist, or Nietszchean, or Freudian readings go too far. But what does that even mean? Who takes things too far? Who is to say when things are overdone? What are the author’s criteria for excess? And how far can too far go? The latter being the name of a great song and a question for the ages, worthy of more consideration than allotted for in this document. In any case, aren’t these questions that any humanist might want to consider?
My first thought is that you might have to push a little bit on the project of “unmasking” if one were to consider, uh, I don’t know, questions of mediation or power or language or desire or how we might live together with dignity in this doomed vessel? Might you have to overdo “this sort of thing” when the shitshow assault upon higher ed institutions include politicians, oligarchs, tech-addled parents and their kids, the forces of corporatization and economic optimization as well as an empty yet consequential document that I have been sitting with for a couple of weeks now. It is all very depressing. Times are tough. And with friends like these….
As philosopher Jason Stanley has argued in a rather devastating critique, the Report is “not an honest piece of work with glaring philosophical inconsistencies . . . If it is settled science that ‘genuine facts about the world’ are independent of moral and political concerns, then analytic philosophers have yet to hear this.” Similarly, legal scholar Brian Leiter notes the Report’s (singling out one of its authors, K. Anthony Appiah) “disingenuous responses to being confronted with the evidence of serious philosophical arguments for varieties of epistemic relativism.”
If you could not tell already, I am not an analytic philosopher.[1] But I have enjoyed learning a little bit from Stanley and Leiter about the overreach of the Report’s lead author, Paul Boghossian and the fault lines within his subfield. And it has been thrilling to have had the slow realization that the Report, among other things, is largely a rehashing of Boghossian’s contested take down of relativism from 2007.[2]
To be clear, I have no problem with the appearance of Boghossian’s conflict of interest but am taken aback by the Report’s haughty dismissal of “interest” when it comes to any scholarly claim. How is it possible that Boghossian ignored his critical interlocutors, and then blithely proceeded to write—TO EVERYONE IN THE HUMANITIES—as if his specialized argument against relativism was “settled science” in his own subfield?
The very fact that other philosophers have challenged and pointed out the limits of the Report’s claims stands as prima facie counter evidence against the Report’s “disinterested” inquiry. Deliciously, the fact that Boghossian has recently felt compelled, after Stanley issued his Substack essay, to defend himself and to clarify his definition of relativism suggests that there may be non-epistemic reasons to consider after all!
I don’t have a dog in that disciplinary fight but I would bet that politics, moral considerations, and personality are involved in the skirmish.
Part 2: Religious Studies as Counter Example
I, too, am worried about threats to the humanities. And I do not agree with all of my colleagues. But many new studies in religion tend to their archives with care, caution, and commitment. They read them closely and they read in between the lines. They argue about their archives and with each other about them. They intervene in long-standing conversations with new evidence or new readings of old evidence. They respond to one another, ever attentive to the questions as to what constitutes religion or evidence for it.
Trigger warning: the very term “religion” is contested within the academic study of religion. And that is OK. We are not relativists. We strive to be reflexive, ill-at-ease with the common sense of a status quo that is severely fucked up at the time of this writing.
To point to a trend within Religious studies (my home discipline, splendidly full of politics, moral considerations, and personality), a Foucauldian and decidedly post-colonial strain of genealogical critique has flowered in recent years with the recognition that secularization involves not the decline of religion but rather a non-linear series of developments that made religion something in the world that could be chosen or not, something that could be known, studied, categorized, consumed, feared, weaponized, etc.
In its most simplistic iteration, the payoff of the so-called “genealogical turn” has been to understand secularization as an advertisement for the propriety of its own definitional desire. The reception of anthropologist Talal Asad (2003) within Religious studies has done much to show how the relationship between the religious and the secular became both a metaphysical and practical matter within various arenas of European Christianity. Rather than posit a thing called religion that recedes or becomes re-entrenched or undergoes a revision to its essential nature, Asad insists upon attending to the practices and ideas that contribute to new concepts of religion. In his focus on the co-articulation of religion and secularity, Asad interjects the question of Foucauldian discourse into longer-standing conversations about the scholarly imagination of religion.[3]
For those who have come to participate in the so-called genealogical turn in the study of religion, their approach is anything but relativistic. Instead, it requires a steely-eyed attention to conceptions of religion and the work that those concepts have accomplished in the world. The rigor of genealogy requires reflexivity and a responsibility to address the presence of language in the worlds written about and the language used to write about the subjects of those worlds. In demonstrating that religion is a discursive effect is to grant it materiality but also to refuse its singular calculability.
This is not relativism. For it is an abandonment of neither reason nor evidence. It is critique, that is, a responseto this human-ness of the human world without the comforts of a measuring stick. This does not mean an anarchy of reason or the jettisoning of the stick but rather, the ability to offer “purely epistemic reasons” tentatively, without believing in them. It means measured logic accompanied by new questions—about, say, what is constituted by that specific phrase or how to compare a chemical fact and a statistical fact, a historical fact and a geometrical one, etc.
Although this movement in Religious studies was not included in the experimental design of the Report, we are told, and I quote at length, that similar
scholarship in this tradition is often confusing — marshalling reasons while denigrating reason — and often obscure, sometimes as a matter of principle. (The fetish for “clarity” and “rigor” associated with analytic philosophy and the hard sciences is widely taken to be just another rhetorical technique to be eschewed in the name of authenticity.) But of course the same could be said for poetry, which is not a form of scholarship (despite its important place in many universities). Scholarly writing of this sort, even if it can be evaluated by standards of this “non-objective” sort, risks becoming unrecognizable as scholarship by standards at work elsewhere in the university.” [my emphasis]
This seems overblown and incredibly cliched at this point, an offense to every working artist and musician that I know.[4] But the nod to “elsewhere in the university” is telling. Although I imagine the authors had in mind the natural sciences or a trade paperback in evolutionary biology, it does smart that they did not even consider entire swaths of the humanities—despite their “importance.” I would also want to ask whether theirdesire to be legible to the natural sciences is also a need—psychological, social, affective, moral, political, economic, metaphysical, whatever, unjustified by “epistemic reason” alone—to be legible to the computer. In more pointed terms, I want to at least open up the question of whether their desire has something to do with cleaning up the data of the humanities, for inspiring swaths of community to provide cleaner data for AI training models, all in the service of some future capacity to recognize nonsense when they see it.
AI is a clear and present danger to the viability of the university in general and the humanities, in particular, as people practice their thinking and produce their knowledge in new and dangerous ways.
So I want to address the elephant in their room, a similar elephant that prompted the Situationist Mustapha Khayati to write in 1966 that “from its advent, the triumphant bourgeoisie has dreamed of a universal language, which cyberneticists are today trying to achieve via technology” (223).
A similar elephant prompted Gabriel Hankins to observe that the authors of the Report, themselves, really did not do the reading required for the kind of authority that they have assumed. Hankins points out the Report’s reliance upon “shoddy mixed-method data analyses” of the seven disciplines under scrutiny, their entire exercise in hand-wringing exhibits “dangerous failures in method.” And I cannot emphasize enough his good point that “the actual epistemological crisis we are entering now is one better exemplified by the Vanderbilt report’s AI-generated analyses: automated data collection, sloppy analysis, and a growing sprawl of LLM-generated pseudo-evidence.”
Part 3: Nice Theory of Epistemic Reason You’ve Got There: It Would be a Shame if it Were Nothing but an Allegory of its AI Conditions of Production
Needless to say, the authors of the Report offer a less than convincing case that they have sufficiently considered the culture that contains them.
The Report gives lip to “external conditions” but no service whatsoever. But what else, I ask, can a humanist do except to think about and think through the many forms and formations that mediate our cognition, our practices, and our beliefs? According to these authors, however, that is not the righteous path but rather the road to epistemic oblivion. You are either for the possibility of purely epistemic reasons (who said God was dead!) or you are ridiculed and reduced to the position of card-carrying relativist.
So in addition to their ignorance of internecine fault lines within a range of disciplines (including their own), there is little consideration in the Report of vagueness, power, complicity, culture, history, capital, technology, saturation, the air we breathe—all those “human” things that are supposedly being studied within the humanities.
No wonder, then, that their plea for a revived humanities sounds a lot like a pitch deck—a buy-in to create much cleaner data sets so they might be better used to train the multi-modal AI systems that when they begin to replace the professor set, there will be no relativists, official or otherwise, in their midst.
False consciousness ain’t what it used to be.[5] At present there is much money afoot, not to mention technological and political power, invested in a day when pretty much everything will be understood, taught, and talked about according to the ‘intelligence’ of artificial neural networks. There is an overdetermined and often desperate will to believe in the algorithm and its promise to one day offer prompt, verifiable facts about any question that you may pose, the best epistemic reasons that money can buy.
A world is now being imagined into being at an astonishing clip, a world of multi-modal personal assistants applying their “intelligence” across different sensory and epistemic domains. Algorithms and their sensors achieving total and coordinated capture of the biological and material environments the affective, spiritual, and metaphysical registers, the ideas and practices that together comprise human sociality. Every register, variety, and microcosm embedded into multidimensional vector spaces. Every relation related to every other. A device in every pocket (that’s a metaphor!) for retrieving an answer to any question you may have that is universal because it is all-encompassing.
Current multi-modal AI systems create an epistemic universe in which all manageable units of input (tokens[6]) are imagined as fungible with one another. No room for human meddling or sex, for the unconscious, for ideology, for unreason or animality, for the gods of negative theology. The entire material universe imagined and acted upon as if it were an endless expansive grid. The supposed genius of AI is framed as its ability to see across the landscape of reality as if it were a flat Texas plain while undisclosed training techniques perfect this fungibility across modalities through richer and more efficient integration of data streams, feature fusions, and leveraging self-attention mechanisms (Tian et al. 2012). All in order to secure natural (what scholars call ‘ontological’ tech bros call self-evident!) non-linear and multidimensional connections between tokens from different modalities.
In the act of compressing gaps and jags of these data into a seamless puzzle that has been tackily glued together and framed, something may be gained in terms of linguistic context sensitivity but something worth considering has also been lost in compression.
The Report finds a formal resemblance and perhaps even a common cause in the approach to language that underlies LLMs. Both fail to comprehend, at a fundamental level, that when you are making sense of human practices and values you are not dealing strictly with the laws of physics, or code, but reasons infused with those human practices and human values.
Like your garden-variety LLM, the Report preaches what it practices, calling on all humanists to take up its call for more computation and less interpretation, to walk toward the light in the form of epistemic horizon of grid-like precision.
Grids are the product of smart people who have a hard time taking seriously any suggestion that humans are estranged from themselves or that the very phrase “purely epistemic truth” might be a mediation, shot through with history and culture and words (so many words!) and limited in its purchase to those things that they choose to count.
Similarly, large language models amplify, in a massive way, what constitutes the surface, doing so in no small part out of a hostile desire to contain anything which cannot be contained with a relatively sharp edge of computational difference. To paraphrase the art critic Rosalind Krauss on the grid within twentieth century aesthetics, LLM’s operate according to a “flattened, geometricized, and ordered” version of language. Statistical distributions of pattern as far as the eye can see. The output of their intelligence is “antinatural, antimimetic, antireal.” Their order of things displacing the (dis)order of the things themselves. This is what language and intelligence look like when they turn their back on nature, disemboweled of something crucial, devoid of what could potentially disrupt (Krauss 1979, 50). All the bumps and bruises of being in the world, all the minor moments of stupefaction, all the debris slide of Cyrillic script or Latin letters, of narrators reliable and otherwise.
Another way to put this is to say that AI-driven systems eviscerate a certain order of human appreciation to the extent that they instantiate their autonomy.
In this admittedly paranoid reading, the Report stands as an assembly of AI shock troopers—zealous true believers in the hard distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic reasons, preparing the ground for the AI invasions to come. Consequently, the Report is clear evidence that this moment demands a critical reckoning with humanists who have overdone the digital humanities and peddled LLM-addled research methods and conclusions as authoritative. Such an inquiry would, at the same time, address the politics built into the training of AI systems and the epistemic assertions instantiated with every FLOP.[7]
The Report is foreboding on many levels, not least because it gives insight into just how easily a measure of the statistical distribution within a set of training data can become determinative of a community’s common sense.
In summary, the Report is a speech act that excuses us from having to do the reading (or listening) and serves as a perverse sacrifice to the altar of “frictionless knowledge” (Goodlad and Stone). Versions of the hubris and dull analysis of its authors are now being operationalized by tech oligarchs and other rapacious capitalists for the express purpose of thinking for you. At a moment when practices of cognition and intellectual expression are under such severe “external” pressures, the Report stands as political capital and a siren song for those who have never given much thought to the historicity or politics of thinking in the first place.
John Lardas Modern is Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He is the author, most recently, of Neuromatic; or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain (Chicago 2021).
Bibliography
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Baird, Robert. Religion in the United States of America, or an Account of the Origin, Progress, Relations to the State, and Present Condition of the Evangelical Churches in the United States with Notices of the Unevangelical Denominations. Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1844.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Story-Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov,” translated by Harry Zohn. Chicago Review1 6, no. 1 (1963): 80-101.
Boghossian, Paul, et al. Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. Commissioned by Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, 2026.
Boghossian, Paul. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.
Fessenden, Tracy. Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University press, 2006.
Geertz, Clifford, “Religion as a Cultural System,” Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Banton, 1-46. London: Tavistock, 1966.
Goodlad, Lauren and Matthew Stone, “Beyond Chatbot-K: On Large Language Models, ‘Generative AI,’ and Rise of Chatbots—An Introduction,” Critical AI 2, no. 1 (2024).
Hankins, Gabriel. “Kwame Anthony Appiah Hasn’t Done the Reading.” Chronicle of Higher Education. July 16, 2026.
Khayati, Mustapha, “Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary,” in Situationist International Anthology. Edited and translated by Ken Knabb, 222-28. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
Krauss, Rosalind, “Grids,” October 9 (1979): 50-64.
Leiter, Brian. “How Strong Is the Intellectual Case Against Relativism?” Letter to the Editor. Chronicle of Higher Education. June 15, 2026.
Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986.
McCutcheon, Russell T. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Modern, John Lardas. “Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan.” Church History 77, no. 4 (2008): 801-876.
Modern, John Lardas. Neuromatic; or, a Particular History of the Brain. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
Smith, Jonathan Z. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Stanley, Jason. “On the Philosophical Muddle that is The Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences.” June 9, 2026. https://jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com
Tian J, Cheng W, Sun Y, et al. “Gesture Recognition based on Multilevel Multimodal Feature Fusion.” Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems: Applications in Engineering and Technology 38:3 (2012): 2539-2550.
Discography (a playlist can be found here)
Laurie Anderson, “Three Songs for Paper, Film and Video.” United States Live. Warner Bros. Records, 1984.
Syd Barrett, “Religious Experience (Singing a Song in the Morning).” Recorded with Kevin Ayers, 1969. On Kevin Ayers, Joy of a Toy (Expanded Edition). Harvest, 2003.
The Beatles, “I’m Looking Through You.” Rubber Soul. Parlophone, 1965.
The Boomtown Rats, “I Don’t like Mondays.” The Fine Art of Surfacing. Columbia, 1979.
Can, “Dizzy Dizzy.” Soon Over Babaluma. United Artists, 1974.
Chain and the Gang, “I’m Not Interested in Being Interested, Part 1.” In Cool Blood. K Records, 2012.
Chain and the Gang, “Rome Wasn’t Burned in a Day.” Experimental Music. Radical Elite Records. 2017.
Alex Chilton, “Underclass.” No Sex / Underclass / Wild Kingdom. Big Time Records, 1986.
The Cramps, “How Far Can Too Far Go?” A Date with Elvis. Big Beat, 1986.
Betty Davis, “Politician Man.” Recorded 1969. The Columbia Years 1968–1969. Light in the Attic / Columbia Records, 2016.
Devo. “Secret Agent Man.” Duty Now for the Future. Warner Brothers, 1979.
The Dirtbombs, “I Can’t Stop Thinking About It.” Horndog Fest. In the Red, 1998.
Dorothy Collins, “Why Do I Have a Shadow?” Experiment Songs (Ballads for the Age of Science). Motivation Records, 1961.
Bo Diddley, “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover.” Bo Diddley. Checker, 1962.
The Fall, “Repetition.” Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!. Step-Forward Records, 1978.
The Fiery Furnaces, “My Dog Was Lost but Now He’s Found.” Blueberry Boat. Rough Trade, 2004.
Gang of Four. “Capital (It Fails Us Now).” B-side of To Hell with Poverty. EMI, 1981.
Gap Dream, “College Music.” This Is Gap Dream. Burger Records, 2016.
Joe Glazer, “Automation.” Sings Labor Songs. Collector Records, 1982.
The Hollies, “The Very Last Day.” Hollies. Parlophone, 1965.
Holly Golightly, “Satan Is His Name.” Do the Get Along. Damaged Goods Records, 2018.
Woody Guthrie, “My Id and My Ego.” Recorded circa 1950. Woody at Home: Volumes 1 + 2. Woody Guthrie Publications. 2025.
Darryl Hall & John Oates, “Gotta Lotta Nerve (Perfect Perfect).” Voices. RCA, 1980.
Health Club, “Emale” Hellth Klubber Lang. Whirl-a-Sage Records, 2019.
Hot Tuna, “True Religion.” Burgers. Grunt Records, 1972.
Human Sexual Response, “What Does Sex Mean to Me?” Fig. 14. Passport Records, 1980.
Le Tigre, “Get Off the Internet.” From the Desk of Mr. Lady. Mr. Lady Records, 2001.
The Lost Souls, “I’m Not Busy, It’s Just the Phone.” Recorded 1967. The Lost Souls. Lion Productions, 2007.
Loretta Lynn, “Who Says God Is Dead!” Who Says God Is Dead! Decca, 1968.
Mr. Science, “Hey Mr. Science.” Recorded 1978–1979. Mr. Science: 1978–1979. Family Vineyard, 2016.
The Nielsen Family Band, “Lobster.” Eat the Light. Self-released, 2021.
Thee Oh Sees, “The Static God.” Orc. Castle Face Records, 2017.
PAL, “Alphabetter.” PALS. Self-released, 2023.
Charlie Parker Quartet, “Now’s the Time,” Now’s the Time. Verve, 1953.
Pavement, “Debris Slide.” Perfect Sound Forever. Drag City Records, 1991.
Liz Phair. “White Babies.” Girly-Sound: Yo Yo Buddy Yup Yup Word to Ya Muthuh. Self-released, 1991.
Prince and the Revolution, “Computer Blue,” Purple Rain, Warner Brothers, 1984
Lou Reed and John Cale, “Trouble with Classicists.” Songs for Drella. Sire/Warner. 1990
Silver Apples. “I Have Known Love.” Contact. Kapp Records, 1969.
Sister O.M. Terrell, “The Bible’s Right.” Columbia Records, 1953.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “As You Sow, So Shall You Reap.” Sister On Tour. Verve Records, 1961.
Spacemen 3. “Hey Man.” Sound of Confusion. Glass Records, 1986.
The Specials, “You’re Wondering Now.” The Specials. 2 Tone Records, 1979.
Unit 5, “Gracefully and Ladylike.” Sharkskin Records, 1980.
[1] I am grateful to Nicky Kroll for illuminating conversations about analytical philosophy and its ecosystems.
[2] As the ad copy from two decades ago reads, “In recent times, relativist and constructivist conceptions of truth and knowledge have become orthodoxy in vast stretches of the academic world…”
[3] For earlier threads of categorical inquiry, see Smith 1982, Long 1986, McCutcheon 1997, Fessenden 2006.
[4] I am, frankly, put off by easy expectations of transparency and immediacy in a world that is anything but, and the outrageous conceit that history speaks in our voice, addressing us in measured and measurable tones, with a will to communicate its lessons to us. I wish to practice a more humble epistemology as a form of resistance to what Walter Benjamin called the ethos of “prompt verifiability” (1963).
[5] This moment is part and parcel to what I have previously called a history of the “neuromatic” brain (2021). The neuromatic paradigm has long inspired those who fund, build, and dream of machines that might capture the all but infinite complexity of the world, that could process what they had captured, and could then recognize deep and abiding patterns about the world and each of its parameters.
[6] Tokens include words, characters, or subwordings but also other outputs like colors, shapes, textures, pixels or patches of pixels; individual frames from a video vectorized in succession; compressing raw audio data and chopping it into a series of low-bitrate, information-rich latent representations such as timber, pitch, loudness; joint positions, velocity, movement over time, stillness; verbal descriptors such as pungent ties with tokens representing the physiochemical structures of the odor molecules.
[7] One FLOP is equal to one act of addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division or two decimal numbers. The perceptron, in its rudimentary ability to distinguish visual patterns, was trained using 695,000 floating point operations (FLOP). With the introduction of backpropagation in the 1980s, ANNs could be trained using hundreds of million (106) of FLOP. Current ANN’s are now being training using more than 1023 individual calculations (100 sextillion, or approximately how many stars are estimated to be in the universe).
