Return to Saussure

New Media. AI image Introduction When a new technology enters the artistic field, it rarely does so quietly. More often, it unsettles hierarchies, redistributes authority, and provokes fierce resistance from those whose status was secured under older conditions. The current controversies surrounding large language models and generative images belong to this long historical pattern. A dramatic precedent can be found in Charles Baudelaire’s 1859 text Le public moderne et la photographie , where the poet launches a vitriolic attack against the newly emerging medium of photography. Reading this essay today, one is struck not only by the violence of Baudelaire’s language, but also by the familiarity of its argumentative structure. This article argues that contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence reproduce the same moral and aesthetic logic that informed Baudelaire’s denunciation of photography. Despite the apparent inversion of their complaints (mechanical realism in the nin...

Bertillon’s police mugshots. AI image Introduction: The Return of the Real The renewed exaltation of the photographic referent, particularly in current debates around synthetic imagery, reactivates a familiar anxiety about the status of visual truth. As new technologies appear, one feature of the previous medium is usually amplified and repositioned; in the present moment, the referent has been elevated to a criterion of legitimacy. Analogue traces and digital captures are invoked as guarantors of authenticity against images produced by generative models. Yet this intensified longing for the “that-has-been” can be illuminated through a different conceptual lens: Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum. Baudrillard describes four regimes of the image, not as a chronological history but as logical modes of relating appearance to the real. Used heuristically, these regimes clarify how photography has shifted, from its evidentiary origins to its artistic manipulations and, now, its...

  Introduction: The Return of the Photographic Question In Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes begins with what now seems a disarmingly simple question: what is photography? His answer, however, was not technical but existential. For Barthes, photography’s power lies not in its fidelity to reality but in its ability to puncture it, to let something escape that exceeds representation. This dual nature of the image, at once readable and wounding, structured his famous distinction between studium and punctum . In the contemporary landscape of algorithmic vision and synthetic imagery, Barthes’ meditation gains unexpected urgency. As large language models and generative systems simulate visual “understanding,” they also simulate affect, producing images that often contain unintended or uncanny details, what might be called algorithmic puncta. These visual accidents invite us to revisit Barthes’ theory through the lens of AI. Studium and Punctum Revisited In Camera Lucida , Ba...