Loveless Promiscuity

When philosophers call a concept promiscuous, they don't mean it's sleeping around, but they do mean it has the potential to wreck certain relationships by spreading its consequences without due concern or consideration. The relationships that matter in philosophy are the ones a concept keeps with its neighbours, for example the relation between the concepts of image and reflection, information and cause, presence and absence. A carefully handled concept is respectful of those contrasts and doesn't switch their bed partners. A promiscuous one is less fussy about whom it goes home with, and the trouble isn't any single encounter but the cumulative damage.

Psychologists have a lovely example. Ask young children why rocks are pointy and many will tell you it's so that animals have something to scratch their itches on. Clouds are for raining, and the sun is for lighting us up and keeping us warm. Deborah Kelemen, who studied this, called it "promiscuous teleology": the idea that things exist for some end or goal (telos is Greek for "end"), applied to anything. It's charming in a five-year-old, but notice what it does. If everything has a purpose, then saying a spade is for digging no longer tells you anything special about spades or digging. A concept only does useful work when there are things it doesn't apply to. There are counterfeit coins only because there are genuine ones, and if everything were an image, say, the word would have no work left to do, no contrasts to make, no conceptual itches to scratch.

Some years ago Jonathan Trigg reviewed Alva Noë's Varieties of Presence. Noë had argued that perceptual presence is a matter of availability: things are present to us when we know how we would have to move to bring them into view. He went so far as to say that a friend living abroad is very faintly present to him, perceptually, because he has a sense of what he would have to do to see him. Trigg's reply was simple and devastating. If that were right, "the whole perceptible universe would be faintly perceptually present to me at any moment, since I have, at any moment, a 'sense' of what I would have to do to 'come to grips' with any particular bit of it (get in a space ship etc. etc.)." And he added, drily, that he suspected Noë might take this "as an engaging 'discovery'."

I was struck by this, because I'd arrived at the same reductio by a different route, in a piece I've been writing in the form of a playful letter to the late Bertrand Russell. In the first chapter of his shortest book, Russell walks around his table and concludes that its shape and colour vary with his viewpoint, so that what we see is not the real table. But if an object that fills our view recedes to a vanishing point, then it follows that everything else must grow to fill the space it vacates. You can't have one isolated change without the whole universe changing to accommodate it. In both cases a perfectly reasonable thought, applied to its logical limit, ends up taking in everything. That's promiscuity, and however entertaining and seductive it is at first, it always does damage in the end. Home-wreckers are at least somewhat more local in their infidelities.

So I was interested to find Noë, in a recent lecture on love and consciousness, insisting that pictures are made, not found: they are artifacts, with makers and histories. So far so good. But he goes on to say that every picture implicitly "comes with a caption," as if what a picture is of depended on what someone might say about it, and he endorses the art historian Anne Hollander's claim that "the picture gives the standard by which the direct awareness is assessed." I think they are both wrong. People set and settled the standard long before anyone reached for a picture. What a picture is of usually needs no caption at all, and while pictures sometimes serve well enough when we check what we see, they were never the standard. When a dispute needs settling, it is the method closest to reality that settles it, not the most sophisticated form of representational artifice. Disregard that important point and a judge and jury might disabuse you even before the satirists do. 

The real trouble, though, comes when Noë insists that pictures must be distinguished from images, and that images are natural phenomena. "They are very common. Indeed, they're cheap." There is an image of the sky in the surface of a pond. There is an image on the retina, though nobody ever sees it. And then the floodgates open: "it's not unreasonable, I think, to imagine that every point in space is a point to which rays of light focus and thus can be thought of as creating images. Images that don't matter." That's an infinity of images invoked and summarily dismissed in one stroke of loveless disregard.

Images that don't matter, at every point in space. This is promiscuity of cosmic proportions, and it's exactly the same error Trigg caught in 2013. Consider the reflection in the pond. There is no single image lying on the water waiting to be found. What you see there depends entirely on where you stand, how high your eyes are, the angle of the light, the stillness of the surface and the aperture you look through. Wait a moment or move a step and it's a different reflection. Bring a second person and there are two. Put a camera on a tripod and there's a third. The reflection isn't a thing in or on the pond at all. It's a state of affairs: sky, water, light and a viewer arranged in a particular way. Multiply the possible viewers by every point in space in just one chosen instant and you already have infinitely many "images," none of which anyone sees and none of which, by Noë's own admission, matters. A word stretched that far has stopped meaning anything. The retinal "image," which no one has ever seen or could see, is the most neglected of them all: the lovechild of a brief affair between optics and pictorial practice, and pressed into the service of misleading theory.

The difference between a reflection and an image is worth spelling out, because ordinary speech blurs it. If you see your lover standing behind you in the mirror, it is them you see, not an image of them, however casually we might say we caught their image in the glass. Try to kiss that image, as we might kiss a photograph of someone we love, and you won't even find yourself kissing their reflection, only the cold hard surface of the mirror, with your own reflection staring back in disappointment.

Reflection is ordinary and widespread, so Noë isn't wrong that it's very common. But he doesn't even attempt to distinguish between specular reflection, the mirror-like kind we see in a still pond, and diffuse reflection, the scattering of light from every matte surface around us. Most of the light that reaches our eyes is diffuse, and diffuse light forms no image at any point in space. It arrives from every direction at once, and only an aperture or a lens can sort it into a projection. Light doesn't simply "focus" at every point in space; something has to focus it. And even then it only ever does so by degrees, as anyone who has spent time buried in a little optics knows. Every aperture and every lens blurs what it projects: a lens brings one distance into focus and softens the rest, and even its sharpest plane is softened by diffraction. Noë's perfect points of focus, scattered throughout space, are something no optics has ever delivered. It's an enticing picture, all twinkle and aftershave, but it won't survive the morning after.

The contrast with the projection inside a camera obscura is also telling, because that is extremely rare in nature outwith eyes, apart from the odd dappled shadow beneath a tree, where gaps between the leaves throw little discs of sunlight onto the ground. When light is channelled through an aperture into a darkened chamber, with a wall or screen to catch it, the result is what made it possible to capture, fix and share photographic images. But the projection itself is live in a way no image ever is. It changes as the scene changes, moment by moment. Images are fixed in a medium; reflections and projections are not. That's why we trust a mirror, or the light thrown through a pinhole, in a way we never quite trust an image, even a live moving image, which is itself necessarily mediated by a succession of fixed stills.

The irony is that Noë has the tool to put this right in the very same lecture. His second distinction is between relations and relationships. Relations, he says, are cheap and hold in spite of whatever anyone thinks: being older than the hills, say, or the solar system for that matter. Relationships, on the other hand, are made, fragile and hard-won. By his own lights, then, an optical projection is a relation, cheap, everywhere and unattended. But what makes something an image, as the rest of us would contend, is a relationship: someone looking, using, comparing and sometimes making. The same goes for perceiving itself: the ability to communicate our perceptions, as many animals clearly do, is what distinguishes perceiving from mere sensing. The meaning of "image" is in our language and not something he can simply redefine in order to seduce us into his way of thinking. Noë mistakes the projector beam for the image it projects. The word itself comes from pictorial practice, and it brings that practice with it wherever it goes. Had Noë applied his distinction between relations and relationships to his distinction between images and pictures, his countless images that don't matter would have been put to bed before they were even conceived.

And love? Noë argues that consciousness is the work of making relationships, and that love is the dedication to that work. Sure, making, negotiating and maintaining relationships, largely mediated by acts of communication, is what being a social species amounts to. But even our most benign communications aren't indiscriminate, and nor is love. Indiscriminate intimacy is how nasty infections spread, and love and monogamy may well have been favoured, at least in part, because they kept infections at bay. A lover who loves everyone loves no one in particular, and a concept that takes in everything picks out nothing. Noë himself raises the awkward question, whether we must then love everything we are conscious of, even what we hate, and leaves it hanging for a chapter still to be written. In the discussion afterwards he remarks, in passing, that a computer "can never have an itch it can't scratch." True enough. But a concept that scratches every itch in sight has no itches left of its own. The answer is in the title of his own talk. Love is selective, effortful and faithful to its object. Promiscuity is none of these, which is why there's no love in it.

Sources:

Chris T. Bauch and Richard McElreath, "Disease dynamics and costly punishment can foster socially imposed monogamy," Nature Communications 7 (2016).

Jonathan Trigg, review of Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence, Essays in Philosophy 14:2 (2013), 303–322.

Deborah Kelemen, "Why Are Rocks Pointy? Children's Preference for Teleological Explanations of the Natural World," Developmental Psychology (1999).

Alva Noë, "Love's Work: Consciousness and Love," Forum Humanum Lecture, The New School for Social Research, New York, 5 September 2025. Video here on YouTube

Hope in Honest Error

At the age of four, I steered a push cart into a ditch and nearly drowned. I only wanted to slow the cart down, and steering off the road into the grassy verge seemed the right thing to do. I had no idea the grass was hiding a watery infant killer. My brother, only a few years older and doing all of the pushing, ran for help, leaving me flailing and gulping water, grasping at the tenuous clump of grass at the water's edge that saved me from a terminal soaking.

I didn't reach for the clump of grass. I didn't even see it. My body did what bodies do when panic takes over: it thrashed and grasped indiscriminately. Wild flailing is variability taken up as a last resort, and it is far older than any of us. When conditions worsen, our least favourite stomach bug E. coli stops swimming in straight lines and starts tumbling at random, not that we should pity its predicament. A pursued hare zigzags. An animal whose learned routine suddenly stops working begins to vary its behaviour before it gives up. Random behaviour of this sort works because it tests the surroundings quickly and widely, and somewhere in the scatter is sometimes a lifeline, a clump of grass, a foothold, another's hand. Enough of our ancestors survived this way that the disposition to flail was passed on. It is neither a skill nor a mistake, since there is no aim for it to miss. It is what life does when the threat or predicament is overwhelming.

I've been thinking about that watery ditch since attending a philosophy seminar on illusionism and AI consciousness, and I'll come back to the seminar. But first, a drawing class.

Life lines

The day before the seminar, two colleagues and I were teaching drawing to a large group of second-year Fine Art students. What strikes me repeatedly is how rarely students consider the quality of the lines they make. Their criterion of success is accuracy, usually meaning something close to what a camera would record. I can't claim to have been any different as a student. The weight, cadence, sensitivity and refinement of a line, and its fitness for what it describes: all of that barely figures when accuracy is pursued so exclusively. We have to keep insisting on the quality of the line, and a worry often surfaces: the wavering line, whose shaky imprecision students tend to treat as a weakness, a failing, a demonstration of error. I sometimes find myself saying: you're not cameras, you're not robots, you're human, and your imperfections are part of what makes your drawings yours. Accuracy is often important, but a good drawing makes clear that its wavering is a feature, not a bug: an opportunity for distinctiveness and disciplined control with its own unique character. In many ways cameras free artists from the burden of record-making and open a space for other qualities of drawing to be explored and valued. Odd, then, that so many students still measure their drawings against the authority of the lens.

Drawing from observation balances accuracy on one side against something much closer to handwriting on the other. The tremors, hesitations and small corrections of a living hand are shaped by skill, never entirely removed. A good line carries a record of its own making: a journey of adjustment and accommodation, open to the vicissitudes of chance. The tradition has a couple of somewhat obscure names for this. Pentimento or palimpsest are occasionally used to refer to the corrections left visible, like the searching lines in Giacometti or the ghost limbs in Rembrandt and Degas, kept because the artist saw that they belonged, or at least that they did no harm.

Is this about style then? Not quite. Artists tend to distrust the word "style," perhaps for the same reasons as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who famously penned the above warning: "There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist." Yet we all recognise a signature style in the work of others, and we often value it. What matters is where it comes from, its authenticity. A signature grows out of a particular body's variability, shaped by life and disciplined over years of practice but also inescapably unique and unalterable (in a way that isn't always welcome). It turns up in the work whether you literally sign it or not. It is partly beyond us, and that is what makes its honesty real. The mere stylist applies the look of a signature from outside and can take it off again, like someone who switches accents to suit the company, unaware of how suspicious it can appear. Software that adds a hand-drawn wobble to a vector line is the modern version: the appearance of tremor with no tremor behind it. Icy error.

Kinds of error

Mackintosh's word "honest" perhaps implies a genealogy of error.

Flailing comes before error altogether: inherited variability under threat, with no aim to miss.

Honest error is a skilled attempt that goes wrong in a way that can be caught and learned from. Joseph Priestley isolated oxygen while calling it "dephlogisticated air." He made an important discovery inside a mistaken, and almost unpronounceable, theory, and the experiments that theory prompted eventually exposed it. Students make honest errors every day, and most of what they learn comes from how they negotiate these challenges.

Harder to see is what we could call captive error, or perhaps misfounded error, since the fault lies in the foundations and not in the work built on them. It is the error of skilled, sincere people working inside a set of assumptions they have come to regard as indisputable, as given, as nature. Theories of perception have long treated lens projection, whether in the camera obscura, the retina or the photograph, as settled evidence of what we see. From there it was a short step to the prejudice, repeated by Piaget and countless teachers since, that children and the members of ancient or isolated cultures draw "what they know, not what they see." We don't see in two dimensions. Translating what we see onto a flat surface is one of the hardest things an artist ever learns, and the painters who developed perspective knew this better than anyone.

Finally there is icy error, Mackintosh's target: error polished until it becomes frictionless and where correction can seem like an unwarranted affront.

Roots that come away

Carrying all this over from drawing to science and philosophy isn't straightforward, but what concerns me most here is what any discipline takes as being foundational. A wavering line is often a virtue in a drawing because drawing seeks, in part, to show us: the hand, the distilled presence of the maker. Science seeks to show what holds in spite of us. Philosophy sits somewhere between the two. It concerns itself with science, but also with ethics, art and how to live, where we ourselves are very much the subject but where form as such can be a stylistic distraction. 

That doesn't mean philosophers should write like machines. Some, J. L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle among them, have a voice you would recognise anywhere, with a dry wit that reminds me of the television comedy of my childhood, Ronnie Barker's especially. That isn't mere stylish decoration. Finding the right form for a thought is part of thinking it, and a well-placed joke about ordinary words can expose a confusion faster than a page of argument. The trouble comes when style strays into the wrong place. Lyricism can illuminate an ethical question. In a theory of the brain it can only mislead, because there the question is whether our concepts fit what holds in spite of us. Metaphor is lyricism's natural medium, and a metaphor read literally is like a wavering line mistaken for the edge of the thing it describes. 

Once a matter is settled, loose talk does little harm. We still speak of the sun rising, and nobody is misled. But where the foundations are the very thing in question, loose talk is the hazard, the watery ditch. Using a word like "representation" as promiscuously as the field does means building on exactly the ground that most needs careful surveying. 

None of this means that scientists and philosophers should never speculate naively or grasp blindly in the darkness. In an entirely new territory, searching and floundering are exactly right until some points or certainty can be grasped, just as the first marks of a drawing are properly a tracery of tentative lines. But once you've learned at least to tread water, you're better off trying to swim, even if resorting to wild flailing sometimes stirs up unexpected insights. The risk of drowning is too high, especially when you have a genuinely better way, not only to survive but to discover subtleties and truths that undisciplined thrashing can never bring to light.

The seminar

This brings me back to the seminar, where I heard Joe Cruz give a thoughtful and open-hearted defence of illusionism: the view that consciousness is a kind of illusion produced by our inability to represent our own fine-grained processing. It came with the suggestion that machines might one day be conscious in just the same way. I disagreed with nearly all of it, but the error, if I'm right, is captive or misfounded error, not dishonest error, and that is what interests me here.

Mainstream cognitive science and philosophy of mind work inside an overarching picture of representation. They take it for granted that brains encode data, infer, predict and represent. Neurons process and carry information. These are metaphors borrowed from highly sophisticated public practices of picturing, writing and signalling, and applied literally to our inner workings. In a sense, this is lyricism on the scientific line, style intruding where precision would be more appropriate and is most needed. Behaviourism at least attributed thinking and feeling to whole organisms, not to their parts, their organs, synapses and cortices. What replaced it moved the mind back inside and installed it in the parts. The ghost in the machine wasn't exorcised. It was downsized and multiplied, until the brain became a crowd of little ghosts: neurons that signal, modules that infer, systems that represent. To philosophers and thinkers of my bent, that is a profound and costly mistake.

Physicalism came up several times in the talk and afterwards in the discussion. Contemporary philosophers are clearly anxious to keep woo out of their theories. I wish they could see that representationalism is the new woo. Those little ghosts need a better account than representationalism can give them. Nobody thinks that imagining dancing requires an inner dance, so there is no reason to suppose that representing requires inner representations. The absurdity doesn't vanish because the components are modelled as ghostly little abstractions. Had I counted how often the word "representation" was used during the talk, the tally would have looked less like a technical term than a tic, and obsession is the tell of severe error in any domain.

To be fair, the talk invited us to be doubtful about its conclusions, and I didn't hold back in communicating the view that representation is an activity that only has a place in the negotiation between perceivers, not in their inner machinations. When I asked what P.M.S. Hacker might make of the Hard Problem of consciousness, Cruz candidly admitted that it had been a long time since he'd read any Hacker. The candour does him credit, but it left the view badly exposed. Hacker's work is the most sustained critique of exactly the presuppositions the talk relied on, and no amount of declared doubt makes up for passing over your strongest critics.

I also pointed out that philosophy has no consensus on what representations are, and Cruz agreed. That is a remarkable admission from a view that finds representations everywhere, in cortices, in babies and even in cows. Ronnie Barker would be quick to quip that's moos with woos.  Science doesn't proceed by ignoring prior insight, yet contemporary philosophy regularly treats hard-won insights from within its own domain as though they were theories, as interchangeable as Lego bricks. That's a genuine problem when the question of what representations are gets treated as either too obvious (they're just stand-ins), too basic (we have bigger fish to fry) or too pernickety to deserve attention, with all that fuss about transparency, illusion, resemblance, likeness, symbolisation, normativity, ofness and aboutness. When he tried to say what he meant, Cruz reached for "aboutness" and "reference." But these are the categories of words and symbols, and they fit pictures badly. A photograph doesn't depend on reference to be of anything, and what it is of is distinct from what it is about. We can argue until the moos come home about what a photograph is about, but what it is of usually needs no interpretation at all. An account of representation built from the vocabulary of language can't get the photograph right, let alone the cow.

I know I must seem arrogant in rooms like that. The philosophers there freely admit that their theories are theories, and I suspect they take me to be in the grip of a theory of my own. What I have is closer to an observation, something I can show and practice every day: someone making or using one thing to stand in for another, for someone else to see or sense. Donald Brook's account sets this out with far more care than I can here, but his three modes of matching, simulating and symbolising provide a far more firm starting point than reference and aboutness. Wittgenstein thought that philosophy should offer reminders of what we already know, not theories, so that if it ever advanced theses, they would be beyond debate because everyone would agree with them (PI §128). That is the kind of certainty I mean, the ordinary certainty with which any of us can say what a map, a portrait or a pointing finger is. If physicalism is to stand in good stead, philosophy first needs to agree on what representations are, and what they are not. Moreover it needs to acknowledge that representing is a social activity and we have no more reason to attribute it to organs than planets.

It was telling that one of the philosophers present (FM) remarked in the discussion that the talk had dented her low opinion of illusionism a little, mostly because it was so well presented. Style persuaded where the concepts didn't.

Afterwards, a PhD student working on anti-representational themes made the fair point that cognitive science is making real progress despite its faulty foundations. I don't doubt it. The cart genuinely slowed a little when I steered onto the grassy verge. But we can't know ahead of time how consequential our errors will be, which is precisely why the much more public debate about AI is such a concern. The same foundations are bearing a great deal more weight there, and the ditch may be a good deal deeper.

Cruz's suggestion was that AI perhaps need only be embodied to be conscious. That's just one example of how much weight representation is made to bear, or believed to sustain. My view is far more demanding and I'm sure I'm not alone in this. The flailing in the ditch was an inheritance, handed down by countless ancestors for whom it sometimes made the difference, and consciousness belongs to creatures with that kind of history: members of a species, with something at stake. A system with nothing at stake has no survival instinct to override its programming when it's thrown in the ditch. Programming artificial instincts into an embodied AI, while no doubt possible, would be icy perfection not raw embodiment, nor the most urgent expression of what it is to be a living creature. Tools are refined by their makers; they don't evolve on their own or their species' behalf. A robot body would give AI the appearance of greater autonomy, but no lineage to be heir to and no ecological adaptability honed by eons of the most uncompromising Darwinian selection.

Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus (6.52): "We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer." The so-called "hard problem of consciousness" reads this backwards. It treats what is left untouched as a further scientific question awaiting an answer. What is untouched belongs to the drawing, the clump of grass, and the living line, and there is greatest hope in the honest errors we make there.

The seminar referred to above: Joe Cruz (Williams College, Philosophy and Cognitive Science), "Illusionism and Artificial Consciousness," Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience research seminar, Reid Seminar Room, Philosophy, University of Glasgow, 25 September 2026.

Losing Touch

I have recently been helping students install their Degree Show exhibitions. With one student working across printmaking and photography, we removed the glass from a number of frames. The decision was partly practical—reducing reflections—but also a deliberate shift of emphasis. Without the barrier of glass, the surface of each print is exposed. The paper can be seen more clearly. The image sits differently: intimate, vulnerable, yet more resolutely present. 

Some of the works are unframed lino prints: black ink on black paper. The imagery does not present itself immediately but emerges slowly, depending on how the light falls, how close one stands, and how long one looks. The printed surfaces vary, at times matt, at others reflecting a rich lustre and, on occasion, an enticing inky sheen. The paper is not simply black, but a range of blacks—charcoal, lamp, midnight. While these qualities are often subtle, the shifts in character invite and reward close, nuanced attention. 

The work offers itself to the eye, and almost to the touch, even though it is not to be touched. This is not unusual in galleries and exhibitions where artworks would otherwise be harmed by repeated contact. And yet we routinely perceive texture with considerable sensitivity. We see roughness, smoothness, density, grain. We do not touch, but we register something of what touch embodies. We anticipate the feel of things—the coolness of stone, the warmth of paper, the rigid smoothness of glass—often without noticing that we are doing so. But how much of this sensitivity depends on prior contact, and how far might it diminish as that contact becomes less frequent, less practiced? This question becomes harder to ignore when set against the conditions under which images are now most often encountered. 

On a screen, an image appears differently. It can be enlarged, reduced, or replaced almost instantly. It presents itself as light on a toughened uniform surface. It may depict texture—a rough wall, a woven fabric, the grain of wood—but the surface itself does not alter. The finger moves across the image, but meets only glass. One works not with the intimacies of objects but with smooth, implacable appearances that offer neither warmth nor resistance.  

This has advantages. It allows for speed, for ease of circulation, for a reduction in material cost and physical burden. Work can be produced, shared and revised with a degree of flexibility that would previously have been difficult to achieve. These are valuable gains, but they are accompanied by other shifts. When the material surface is no longer encountered directly, the relation between seeing and touching loosens. Texture remains visible, but its presence changes. It ceases to be something that can be confirmed, resisted, or explored through contact, becoming suggested, implied, rendered as an effect. The image shows texture without yielding it. 

Images have always differed from the things they depict. But the range of their material mediation has narrowed. Where once images arrived through varied surfaces, processes and resistances, they now increasingly appear through a single, ubiquitous interface. This difference doesn’t merely affect the appearance of images. It has implications for how attention develops. Sensitivity to surface, to subtle variations in weight or handling, doesn’t emerge all at once. It develops through repeated engagement—through looking, touching, comparing, returning, noticing again. It depends on having encountered materials under shifting conditions, on having registered small differences and recognising them as differences. Where that contact becomes less frequent, it is not unreasonable to expect that certain sensitivities begin to fade, while others take their place. Current conditions make this more likely. Many students have limited resources for experimentation. Materials are costly. Space is constrained. There are pressures—financial, environmental, logistical—that favour methods which minimise waste, storage, and physical effort. Screens offer a practical response to these constraints because work can be made without accumulating objects, without transporting them, without committing to particular materials too early or even at all. Although this is an adaptation, it does mean that certain forms of engagement become easier to defer, avoid or miss. Decisions about surface, weight, temperature, and handling are postponed or displaced. Texture becomes something that can be represented rather than something that must be worked through and with. 

Where texture once formed part of a material exchange—look, approach, adjust, notice—it now appears more often as a visual property that does not extend beyond the image itself. It is available to the eye, but less often to the body. For many students, this difference is not experienced as a loss but as a condition of practice. Opportunities for sustained material engagement are less frequent, and with them the small, iterative adjustments through which a sense of material subtlety is developed. 

I am not suggesting that our tactile capacities are disappearing. The body remains acutely sensitive to texture—especially in the mouth, where a dense spectrum of sensations is continuously registered: slickness and drag, astringency and grain, melt and adhesion, crisp fracture and oily diffusion. My concern is more specific. It relates to a diminishing contact with the materiality of photographic objects—those sheets, leaves and scraps handled, stored, and re-encountered in studios, boxes, sleeves, folders and drawers. It seems difficult to dispute that screens have significantly altered this contact, tending not to cultivate the same degree of fine discrimination, sensitivity, or pleasure in objecthood. One might argue that absence intensifies awareness, and there may be some truth in this. Yet in relation to the development of material understanding, the erosion of direct, practical engagement appears to offer limited benefit. 

There is, perhaps, a further consequence. Qualities that might once have been readily noticed—subtle variations of surface, the measured handling of material, the restraint required to let such differences register—can be easily overlooked. In their place, other tendencies come to the fore: more immediate effects, heavier contrasts, more assertive gestures. This is not simply a matter of individual competence or inexperience, but of the conditions that shape what can be learned in the first place. It reflects a shift in what is encountered often enough to be learned, and therefore, what is available to be noticed at all. 

The student’s photographs and lino prints quietly resist this tendency. They do not alter the prohibition on touch, but they allow the surface to remain visibly active. The paper absorbs the light differently and asks that we look more intently, in a way that takes time and allows such subtleties to register. That asking is gentle and unobtrusive. It depends on a form of attention that is learned, and that, in part, relies on practiced material engagement. 

The physical world is not simply a backdrop to experience, but the setting within which our perceptual and bodily capacities have developed. To encounter it less directly is not merely to change how we make images, but to alter, however subtly, the conditions under which we learn to sense and interpret them. What is changing, then, is not only our relation to images, but something more general. We still encounter, but under different conditions. And those conditions shape, in ways not always immediately evident, what it is possible for us to notice and to feel.

Beyond the Horizon

One of the earliest lessons in drawing I can remember involved my brother, Tom, showing me how a tank might appear over a distant horizon. With a few economical lines—aligned, intersecting, held in simple relation—the form seemed to emerge unannounced. It was less a matter of capturing an image than of knowing where to place the marks. What had been mere geometry resolved quite suddenly into something unmistakable. 

More than half a century later, Tom posted a set of images generated using AI. They showed traditional pottery—plates and vases in a familiar blue and white—decorated not with pastoral scenes or ornamental flourishes, but with collapsing buildings, explosions, and fragments of apocalyptic spectacle. The forms were precise, the decoration convincing, and the contradiction difficult to ignore. The quiet discipline of the surface was intact; what it contained was not. It is not difficult to see why such images capture our attention. The juxtaposition does much of the work: the ordered surface of a long-established craft set against scenes of disorder and collapse. But what they seem to register, perhaps unintentionally, is not simply novelty. They carry with them a more general unease—not only about what is shown, but about how it has been produced. 

Conversations about AI increasingly gather this unease into more explicit terms. The concerns vary in emphasis—environmental cost, labour practices, data extraction, concentration of ownership, military alignment—but they are often presented together, as though they converge on a single point. The technology becomes the site at which these different anxieties meet, and where they are most sharply expressed. This has become familiar enough to pass without much notice. A student circulates a letter calling for a ban; elsewhere, in a more developed critique, Tom traces connections between datasets, power, and longer histories of exploitation. The positions differ in tone and scope, but they share a sense that something decisive is at stake, and that the response should match that urgency. 

There is, in many of these concerns, a good deal that is difficult to dismiss. Questions of labour, ownership, and environmental cost are not abstract, and they do not originate with this technology. Nor are they confined to it. The conditions under which AI systems are built—outsourced work, uneven access, the aggregation of resources—are continuous with those that support other forms of production. They are more widely distributed and more deeply embedded than any single development might suggest. 

What seems particular to AI is not the presence of these conditions, but the way they are encountered. They appear in a more concentrated form. The scale is larger, the speed greater, the scope less easily bounded, and the potential consequences more difficult to anticipate. Processes that elsewhere remain dispersed are drawn together, and in being drawn together, are easier to see. This concentration affects how the technology is understood. It is often treated as a kind of threshold: the point at which existing tendencies become unmistakable and, in that sense, the intensity of the response is not surprising. What might elsewhere be tolerated or overlooked becomes, here, harder to ignore. At the same time, this focus can narrow the field. When multiple concerns are gathered and directed toward a single object, there is a tendency to treat that object as their source. The distinction between the properties of the technology and the conditions within which it operates becomes less clear. What is, in part, inherited may appear as though it has been introduced. This is not to say that the concerns are misplaced. Nor is it to suggest that the actions of those who develop and deploy these systems are irrelevant. It is, rather, to notice that the frame within which the conversation takes place has a particular shape. It brings certain features into sharp relief while others remain on a more distant horizon. 

Calls for caution and regulation follow quite naturally from this. If the scale and speed of development appear to outstrip existing forms of oversight, then restraint seems appropriate. Yet those calls sit uneasily alongside the conditions in which such technologies emerge—conditions that favour rapid development, competitive advantage, and the accumulation of capability. The tension is familiar, but here it comes more clearly into view. Against this background, the Delft images return in a somewhat different light. What they show is not only a technical capacity—the ability to combine styles or generate images—but a way in which contrasting elements can be brought into alignment on a single surface. The tradition is intact; the disruption is contained within it. The result is coherent, even as it depicts incoherence. 

There seems something similar in the way AI is currently being discussed. A wide range of concerns—some technical, some economic, some cultural—are brought together and treated as though they belong to a single domain. This has the advantage of clarity. It sharpens the sense that something is happening. But it may also risk treating the ground on which these concerns appear as the source of those concerns. 

The question, then, is not whether the concerns are justified, but how they are located. To focus on the technology alone is to see one part of the picture with unusual clarity. To widen the frame too quickly is to lose that clarity in generality. The difficulty lies in holding both in view: the specificity of the instance, and the broader conditions it reflects. 

None of this resolves the question of how to respond. Positions that advocate refusal and those that advocate engagement are both shaped by the same conditions they address. Each has its rationale, and each its limitations. The more immediate task may be a quieter one: to attend more closely to the way the problem is being formed, and to how that formation directs what can be seen and what cannot. 

What remains is a need for artists not only at the barricades or the bargaining table, but in shaping visions that do not shy away from the attractions and apprehensions of an unwritten future—apprehensions that are not always proportionate, but which nonetheless give shape to caution.

Ban on the Line

A few weeks ago a student circulated an open letter calling for the abolition of generative AI within the Art School. It was carefully written, strongly felt, and widely shared. The language was urgent, at times absolute: there is no place for it here; it harms the environment; it erodes thinking; it steals. The document gathered signatures quickly. It also produced, almost immediately, a different kind of response—quieter, procedural—centred on conversation, on complexity, on how such concerns might be taken up within a shared space rather than imposed upon it. 

What was striking was the tone: the sense that something had tipped beyond negotiation into principle. The question shifted from how one might work with a tool to whether one ought to stand against it altogether. This kind of shift—away from adjustment and toward refusal—is not new, though it often feels new when it arrives. It touched, perhaps unexpectedly, on earlier habits and traditions of the art class and the studio. There are small rules we remember without quite knowing when we first absorbed them: not to use a ruler when drawing a straight line; not to trace unless it is clearly declared; to be wary of the grid as anything more than a temporary support. These are not universal prohibitions, and they vary by discipline, but they carry with them an implicit claim: that certain kinds of assistance alter not just the outcome, but the quality of attention that produces it. 

A ruler produces a straight line quickly and reliably. It also removes the slight variation that comes from the hand—those small hesitations and accelerations that give a line its character. For a beginner, this distinction can feel abstract. The ruler appears to improve the drawing. Only later does it become possible to see that something has been traded away, and that the point of the exercise was never simply straightness. 

Tracing and grids have a somewhat different role because although they’re often treated as shortcuts, they are also quietly built into teaching. They enable a likeness where none might yet be possible. They provide a structure that can be worked through rather than confronted all at once. Used lightly, they support looking; used heavily, they can replace it. The difference isn’t always visible in the result, but it is felt in the process. 

In each case, what counts as “cheating” depends less on the tool itself than on what we believe the task to be. If the task is to produce an image that corresponds to another, then these methods are efficient. If the task is to judge proportion, weight, and interval, then they may interfere. The tension resides not in the object, but in the relation between tool and intention. This makes it difficult to speak about new tools in categorical terms. Generative AI arrives not as a single technique, but as something that seems to gather many of these earlier forms together. It can produce images without drawing, text without drafting, structure without the slow calibration that usually accompanies it. It can also be used in smaller, more provisional ways—as a prompt, a suggestion, a means of testing a direction. The uncertainty arises because it is not always clear, either to the user or the observer, where along that range a particular use sits. 

The student’s letter treats this uncertainty as danger: if a tool can replace thinking, then it will. There is some truth in that. Anyone who has worked with students knows the temptation to bypass the difficult middle of a task—the part that is neither first idea nor finished outcome, but something slower and less defined. Tools that promise immediacy have always exerted that pull. But it is also true that practices adjust around their tools. Photography was received, in its early decades, with a comparable intensity—accused of displacing the hand, reducing art to mechanism, and seducing the public with surfaces. Baudelaire described it as a threat not simply to art, but to thought itself—an intrusion that would reduce imagination to mechanical reflection. The force of that response is familiar but it is now possible to see that photography did not eliminate drawing so much as redistribute its purpose. What had been necessary in one context became optional in another; what had been valued for its fidelity became valued for its inflection. 

The arrival of digital photography produced a similar disturbance. The darkroom, with its particular forms of knowledge, was set aside by many. Certain skills faded quickly; others emerged in their place. Again, some losses were real, and were experienced as such. But the practice did not end. It shifted, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes productively. 

There is a risk, in moments like this, of stepping back too far in the name of principle. To refuse a tool entirely is to remove oneself from the conditions in which work is now taking shape. That refusal can be a position, but it also has consequences. It can leave decisions about the use and meaning of the tool to others—often those less concerned with the questions that prompted the refusal in the first place. I’m not arguing for uncritical adoption. If anything, I’m suggesting the opposite: that engagement requires a clearer sense of what we are trying to preserve. Not outcomes, perhaps, but forms of attention. The question becomes less “is this tool allowed?” and more “what does this use of the tool enable, and what does it displace?” 

There is also the quieter matter of access. Assistance has never been evenly distributed. Some have always had the means to refine their work through others—through editors, technicians, assistants, various forms of unseen labour. When a new tool appears that makes certain kinds of support more widely available, it can unsettle not only practice, but the expectations that surround it. What looks like a levelling or democratisation from one perspective can appear as erosion from another. Neither description is entirely wrong, but neither is sufficient on its own. 

Within teaching, these questions tend to surface in small ways. A piece of work arrives that is unusually resolved, or curiously flat. A draft appears too quickly. The difficulty is not identifying the use of a tool, but understanding what has been learned through it, and what has been missed. That understanding cannot be legislated in advance. It has to be worked out, case by case, through looking and discussion. 

The open letter, in this sense, can be read not only as a demand, but as a symptom of uncertainty about where those discussions are taking place, and how visible they are. To call for a ban is to simplify the problem into something decidable. It removes the need for more granular judgements—the kind that are slower, and sometimes inconclusive. It may be that the more useful task is to stay with that difficulty a little longer. To notice where attention shifts under new conditions; to ask what is being eased, and at what cost; to recognise that what once felt like a shortcut may, over time, become ordinary, and that this ordinariness is not neutral but reorganises how we work and what we expect of ourselves and others. 

 The question, then, may not be whether we permit or refuse such tools, but how we live with the changes they introduce into our habits of attention. What we call cheating often marks a moment where expectations have not yet settled. Given time, some of those judgements harden into convention, while others fall away. What remains constant, perhaps, is the need to notice what our tools are doing on our behalf, and what they quietly ask us to relinquish in return.

Post Script

A related article was posted today on Daily Nous here. I posted the following comment:

I think we can all agree that tracing paper has only limited use in improving drawing skills, but it's both silly--and detrimental to a fuller integration of opportunities for learning and problem solving--to deny tracing paper.

The parallels are not difficult to appreciate.

Baudelaire was extremely persuasive regarding the perceived harms of photography, but do we think he was right in retrospect?

Perhaps "persuasive writing" is overrated. Who wants to be persuaded of falsity? We have all wasted significant portions of our lives, perhaps more than we realise, reading persuasive writing, being carried along with the flow and seduced by the sophistication. Perhaps original thought will become more lauded in the age of AI and persuasion will be seen as a sham. That seems like a genuine gain to me.

Where sophistication and originality are really needed is in our ways of dealing with the problems AI raises. Injunctions are perhaps a useful stopgap measure but they're not a solution that promises to really help help staff and students in the longer term.

Mistaking Stillness for Motion

Someone points to a tomato and says “That’s green”.

 

It is sitting on the table in front of us, in ordinary light. The rest of us have no hesitation in recognising is as red. The disagreement is not subtle and requires neither instruments nor careful comparison. We simply look and respond. Now there are several things we might say. We might check the lighting, or ask about colour blindness, or suggest moving closer. What we do not usually say is that the person is perceiving a green tomato. We do not treat the situation as if two equally valid perceptual worlds had opened up side by side. We accept the object as stable and assume that one of us is mistaken. 

 

Consider a different case. A figure is photographed mid‑stride, one foot lifted slightly off the ground. We say, quite readily, that the figure is “moving,” or that it “captures motion.” Or consider a film where bodies appear to walk, turn, speak. Here too we speak as if movement were present, even though nothing on the screen changes place in the ordinary sense. 

 

It is tempting, at this point, to treat these situations differently. In the first, we say someone is wrong; in the second, we say that something like motion is genuinely perceived. A distinction begins to form between error and experience, between mistake and what is given. 

 

But it is not clear that we need this distinction. 

 

If we return to the tomato, the matter is straightforward because we refuse to let the language loose its footing. The person says “green”; we look again; we correct. Nothing is gained by introducing a special category of “experienced greenness” detached from the object itself. We simply say: this is what is there, and that is not how it is. 

 

Wittgenstein is helpful here, not because he settles the issue, but because he reminds us to look more carefully at how words are actually used. The difference between “it looks green” and “it is green” is not a matter of hidden contents, but of circumstances. We already navigate these shifts with ease. The difficulty arises when we begin to treat these flexible expressions as if they were reporting fixed elements of experience. The same temptation appears in the case of images. We say that the figure “moves,” and before long it is suggested that motion is somehow perceived in the image itself. The language, which began as a way of speaking within a shared practice, is taken as a description of what is present. Something subtle has changed, though nothing in the image has. 

 

If we turn from the tomato to more familiar visual effects, the situation does not become more obscure so much as more ordinary. Consider the Ames Room illusion, where one figure appears to grow while another shrinks as they move across the space. When first encountered, the effect can be striking. But once recognised, it does not continue to mislead in quite the same way. We learn how to take it. We would not normally say that one person is in fact larger than the other, any more than we would say the tomato is green. We say that it looks that way under certain conditions, from a certain position. The effect remains visible, but it no longer governs what we say is there. 

 

JL Austin shed some light on cases like this, noting how easily we move between “looks” and “is” without confusion. A straight stick half-submerged in water may look bent, but this does not lead us to believe that something has happened to its shape. The appearance is accommodated without needing to be granted independent standing. From here, the earlier examples begin to settle. A photograph or drawing may prompt us to say that a figure is “moving,” just as a shadow may suggest depth or a surface may seem wet. These belong to everyday experience. They arise quickly, and they are widely encountered, but they do not require us to suppose that motion, depth, or wetness have somehow entered into the thing before us. 

 

What is striking is how little effort is involved. We do not feel that our perception is being tested or stretched in these situations. On the contrary, they are often treated lightly, even playfully. A reflection that resembles water is not puzzling; a painted highlight that reads as gloss is simply effective. A sequence of still images that gives the impression of movement is familiar enough to pass unnoticed most of the time. In that sense, these are not special cases at all. They do not sit at the edges of perception, revealing hidden mechanisms. They are woven into ordinary experience. We encounter them, recognise them, and where it suits us, make use of them. The same drawing that seems so immediate on first viewing can, on a second look, be seen as nothing more than a set of marks. The shift is not dramatic. It is simply a change in how the situation is taken. 

 

It may be tempting, at this point, to say that in such cases we have a special kind of experience—one in which motion, depth, or transformation are somehow present despite not being physically realised. But this temptation begins to look less necessary once the earlier pattern is kept in view. The case of the tomato did not lead us to multiply colours and the Ames Room does not lead us to multiply sizes. In each case, we accept the object as steady and allow for the possibility that what is immediately taken, assumed or supposed need not settle things. 

 

Something similar holds for moving images. When we watch a film, we speak naturally of people walking, turning, speaking to one another. The language is easy, and it works. But we do not ordinarily imagine that what we are seeing is a set of bodies displaced across space in front of us. We understand the arrangement. If anything, the familiarity of the situation allows us to move between ways of taking it without friction—seeing it now as a scene, now as a projection, now as a play of light. 

 

What emerges, across these examples, is not a new category of perception, but a continuity. We see, we take, and sometimes we take wrongly. Where the mistake is obvious, we correct it without fuss. Where it is stable and repeatable, we may even rely on it. But in neither case do we need to say that something has been added to the object, or that perception has taken on a different form. 

 

The earlier claim—that a picture might be perceived as temporally extended—can be approached again from this angle. What seemed at first like a substantive proposal begins to look like a redescription of something already familiar. We are observing that certain arrangements are readily taken as part of an unfolding event. That is true enough. But it does not follow that time is present in the picture, any more than it follows that greenness is present in the tomato when wrongly described. 

 

To put the matter gently: we may already have all the resources we need to describe what is happening, without asking more of the description than it can carry. 

If we draw these threads together, what comes into view is not a new account of perception, but a quieter adjustment in how we speak about what we already handle with ease. Across the examples—tomato, room, drawing, film—the same pattern repeats. We encounter something, we take it in a certain way, and where necessary, we correct ourselves. The correction does not require a shift into a different kind of experience; it is simply a refinement of the same one. 

 

This is perhaps easiest to miss where things work smoothly. The drawing that “moves,” the film that “shows” people walking, the surface that “looks wet”—all of these pass without comment because they serve us well. They guide attention, support recognition, and allow us to proceed without hesitation. It is only when we pause over the language, or attempt to give an account of what is happening, that the need for clarity arises. At that point, the temptation is to treat these ways of speaking as pointing toward something present in the experience itself—as if motion, depth, or transformation had entered into what is seen. But the earlier cases suggest a different approach. We need not multiply what is given in order to account for what is said. The flexibility lies in our use of language, and in our readiness to take things one way rather than another. Seen in this light, the force of the examples is cumulative but modest. Nothing dramatic is uncovered. There is no hidden layer revealed beneath ordinary perception. Instead, what becomes visible is the steadiness of a practice: we accept the object as fixed, and we allow that our immediate taking of it may sometimes need adjustment. Where no adjustment is required, we simply carry on. 

 

If there is any surprise here, it may be that so little turns on the distinction. The difference between seeing rightly and seeing wrongly, between taking something as it is and taking it as something else, does not divide experience into separate sorts. It only marks a difference in how well we have settled into the situation before us. 

 

From this perspective, the earlier tension begins to dissipate. The question is no longer whether motion, depth, or time are somehow present in what we see, but how we have come to speak as we do in situations where nothing of the sort is found. The answer lies less in the structure of perception than in the habits that shape our responses and descriptions. These habits are neither careless nor imprecise. They are, for the most part, well-tuned to the world we share. If anything shifts, it is simply a matter of noticing how much is already accounted for without saying more.

This essay was prompted by research published by Luca Marchetti