Pink skies on a cloudless day at noon
I should be more tolerant and patient, I am aware, but whenever I read or hear someone say ‘AI is not neutral’, I want to cry, ‘Of course it’s not neutral. No media, no form of language ever is. That is a tautological statement!’ ‘Tautology’, apologises Roland Barthes (1972 [2006]: 153) for including the word at all in Mythologies, ‘is an ugly word. But so is the thing […] one takes refuge in tautology as one does in fear, or anger, or sadness, when one is at a loss for an explanation.’
There is so much in the way of an explanation, both in terms of how dynamic machine-learning technologies are trained and function in the world and, perhaps more widely, how and why tautology has become so prevalent. We live, says Anna Kornbluh (Hochuli, Hoare and Cunliffe, 2024), in ‘a culture of speed’ where ‘instant transfer, direct access, on demand, and so on, is a whole kind of style… of ways of knowing, of ways of moving, of ways of receiving information, and ways of receiving goods especially, that also gives birth to this kind of aesthetic style’. An aesthetic style that favours the tautological: ‘A vote is a vote’ (Saatchi & Saatchi, 2016); ‘Brexit means Brexit’ (Theresa May, 2016); ‘It is what it is‘ (Donald Trump on the COVID death toll, 2020); and more recently, ‘The whole world is watching and they can’t believe the power, strength and brilliance. They just can’t believe what they’re seeing. They – leave it to your imagination, but they can’t believe what they’re seeing, the brilliance of the United States military.’ (Donald Trump on the Iran War, 2026). The final example contains a Möbius strip of meaninglessness. Nothing to counter, nothing to deny. The reader must ‘absorb’ (Babich citing Anders, 2019: 8) the empty it, leaving her entirely impotent since there is nothing to perceive (Ibid: 11) and therefore nothing to claim as one’s own. There is no information received with which to build a response.
The political statements above reflect a wider aesthetic style, which is not an aberration in the sense of being unusual. Arguably, they are expressions of a dominant cultural mode: a clickbait-driven condition that demands flat rather than round narratives (Prescott-Couch 2026), since surface-only is what flows most easily through 21st-century channels. Flat, and let’s not forget LOUD, in order to garner attention. And as any marketing executive knows, redundant repetitiveness – tautology – is a key advertising tool.
Alexander Prescott-Couch (2026), champions a form of writing, specifically in the social sciences, that favours literary techniques such as ‘foreshadowing, irony, metaphor, telling details’, which science and lately the wider culture via social media, has flattened out. He argues that round or thick narratives can act as a corrective to habits of schematising, which have made us lose touch with the real while only trusting pure abstraction. Reductionism – bullet points, charts, systemising frameworks, analysis dashboards – can help with the ‘acquisition of concepts needed to grasp explanations‘ (2026), but when delinked from the messy, smelly real, trends toward alienation and, eventually, derogatory tropes. Without the round, human beings are rendered points on a chart, meme-ified into factoids, dehumanised, or flattened entirely into pithy jokes.
Speed and flatness inform our ‘instant transfer’, ‘always-on’, mode of immediacy (Kornbluh, 2023), a situation in which we ourselves are so enmeshed with our images that there is no time or space for mediation, with or without humour. (When we become part of the mediation, how can we hope to step back?) Dr Daniel Rubinstein (2019) points to flatness as a 21st-century ontological state mediated via the screen, especially now that the industrial age has become sedimented as history:
The demise of the industrial age is curtains for the spectacle of representation: visual surveillance is replaced with predictive policing, industrial processes replaced with trading algorithms, armies replaced with remote controlled killer robots and perspectival geometry replaced with the flat topology of the computer screen.
(Is it too obvious, too literal to suggest that the flat topology of the computer screen, built on the history of the flat photograph, may be one of the reasons so much photographic documentary seems to generate flat narrative? Perhaps a topic for another entry.)
For Kornbluh, the demise of the value of mediated representations, which maintain the possibility of distance, is a key condition for the generation of tautology (as is Prescott’s thick and rounded narrative). If we are shifting to a ‘beyond-literacy era’ (Mullen, 2025), what happens to our ability to parse complex signification? Representation, despite its many documented troubles – including the over-schematisation discussed above – also provides us with the opportunity to open up space away from the object in question. Representation, as well as being potentially reductive, linear and patriarchal, behaves as a mediator, hence the word media. To reject schematising representation is not to reject representation in its entirety; it is to insist that representation, to do its work, must remain in contact with the messy, smelly real it mediates. (Kornbluh expresses some scepticism about drawing on the messy, smelly real too enthusiastically which I have addressed elsewhere; to be published, June 2026.)
I wrote about tautology and the Saatchi & Saatchi advert, ‘A vote is a vote’, in 2016 at the start of my visual culture studies for an exercise that asked me to read and make notes on Roland Barthes’ (1972 [2006]) Myth Today. I recall being really taken with Sherrie Levine’s (1981) After Walker Evans at the time. Levine photographed Evans’ photograph (no longer protected by copyright, although her copy remains so still) without adding any further interventions. She thereby exemplifies a state of affairs in which – ‘A picture is a model of reality’ (Wittgenstein, 1918:2.12) – while prompting us to consider what happens to the state of affairs when the only reality there is one in which pictures correspond to other pictures? Barthes’ (1972 [2006]: 154) answer may be ‘Tautology creates a dead, a motionless world’.
Levine’s intervention is said to be a response to Barthes’ (1977) The Death of the Author, in which he explores how modern technologies enable a reconfigured understanding across modern culture regarding whose voices can and will be heard, while also producing the conditions for ‘a dead, a motionless world’. (Which implies eventually no-one’s voice is heard, and given the absolute cacophony of indiscriminate information we are all bombarded with, perhaps we are closer than ever.) After Walker Evans, however, also illuminates the tautological nature not only of the photographic process – which, as Levine’s project demonstrates, may be structurally and unavoidably tautological – but of the wider media ecology in which the photographic sits. The work comments on an already image-saturated present while pointing toward a not-so-distant future in which code underpins most images, visual as well as auditory.
Levine foresees the kind of ‘digital autism’ (Babich, 2019) that our society, so heavily influenced and informed by advertising and its use of the photographic – pictures of pictures of pictures – exhibits. They just can’t believe what they’re seeing. They — leave it to your imagination, but they can’t believe what they’re seeing.
Babich (2019: 1) draws on audio technologies like the radio and phonograms, while pairing media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1999) with philosopher Günter Anders (1956), who describes us moderns as living in ‘an autistic culture of distraction, displacement, and self-driven surveillance’. Kittler (1999: 1) states that ‘Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound or voice’. This builds on Wittgenstein’s conception of the image as auditory as well as visual. Since today, it is almost impossible to avoid entering the systemised number matrix, the digital substrate, if one wants to stay warm and fed, get paid, have a bank account, see a doctor, never mind watch television, read the news, or doom scroll, we too become number. It may be, therefore, nigh on impossible to avoid being rendered one of Anders’ ghosts: speaking in echoes, liking posts, seeking likes, all flat little pictures bouncing from picture to picture to picture. This is Babich’s ‘digital autism’.
There is much to complain about in our world. To state that X is X, however, is simply not going to get us anywhere. The pictures may get flatter and flatter, so flat that we can no loner tell where we and they begin or end. Then what? By playing along, all we are doing is adding to the spectacle, to the glut of indiscriminate and overwhelming information that renders us increasingly absent, while we render ourselves increasingly impotent, and bleeding our existence of any meaning at all. Patience for that is hard to justify.
Refs:
Kittler, F.A. (1999) Gramophone, film, typewriter. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press (Writing science).
Babich, B. (2019) ‘Radio ghosts: Phenomenology’s phantoms and digital autism’, Thesis Eleven, 153(1), pp. 57–74. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513619863852.
Barthes, R. (1972 [2006]) Mythologies. 47. [print.]. Translated by A. Lavers. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.
Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. 1977. Image, Music, Text: Essays. 13. [Dr.]. London: Fontana.
BBC News (2016) ‘What does “Brexit means Brexit” mean?’, 14 July. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36782922 (Accessed: 26 April 2026).
Field, S.J. (2016) ‘Project 3.1 (b): Rhetoric of the Image’, UVCSJF, 8 June. Available at: https://uvcsjf.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/project-3-1-c-rhetoric-of-the-image/ (Accessed: 26 April 2026).
FiscalNote (2026) Donald Trump Delivers a Prime Time Address on Iran – April 1, 2026, Roll Call. FiscalNote. Available at: https://rollcall.com/factbase-transcripts/ (Accessed: 26 April 2026).
Fontcuberta, J. (2014) Pandora’s camera: photogr@phy after photography. London: MACK.
Hochuli, A., Hoare, G. and Cunliffe, P. (2024) /458/ The Society of Pure Vibe ft. Anna Kornbluh | Bungacast. Podbean. Available at: https://bungacast.podbean.com/e/458-the-society-of-pure-vibe-ft-anna-kornbluh/ (Accessed: 25 April 2026).
Holschbach, S. (2026) Media Art Net | Levine, Sherrie: After Walker Evans, Mediun Kunst Netz. Media Art Net. Available at: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/after-walker-evans/ (Accessed: 25 April 2026).
Kittler, F.A. (1999) Gramophone, film, typewriter. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press (Writing science).
Kornbluh, A. (2023) Immediacy, or The style of too late capitalism. London New York: Verso.
Levine, S. (1981) Sherrie Levine | After Walker Evans: 4 [Photograph]. Available at: https://whitney.org/collection/works/10247 (Accessed: 26 April 2026).
Mullen, J. (2025) ‘The Loom and the Weavers’, After Literacy, 5 June. Available at: https://jacmullen.substack.com/p/the-loom-and-the-weavers-part-one (Accessed: 11 June 2025).
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984,” April 21–August 2, 2009.
Prescott-Couch, A. (2026) ‘The Politics of Nuance’. PPE Seminar, Institute of Philosophy, London, 23 April.
Rubinstein, D. (2018) What is 21st Century Photography? | The Photographers Gallery, The Photographer’s Gallery. The Photographer’s Gallery. Available at: https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/photography-culture/what-21st-century-photography (Accessed: 17 April 2026).
Stewart, H. (2016) ‘EU referendum poster aimed at minority ethnic vote causes controversy’, The Guardian, 25 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/25/eu-referendum-poster-minority-ethnic-voters (Accessed: 26 April 2026).
Wittgenstein, L. (1918) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (English) – The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project, The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project. Translated by F.P. Ramsey and C.K. Ogden. The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project. Available at: https://wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English) (Accessed: 26 April 2026).
Articles about 21st-century dynamic technologies worth reading:
Babich, B. (2023) ‘Nietzsche and AI: On ChatGPT and the Psychology of Illusion’, The Philosophical Salon, 19 June. Available at: https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/nietzsche-and-ai-on-chatgpt-and-the-psychology-of-illusion/ (Accessed: 20 April 2026).
Smith-Ruiu, J. (2026) AI Is Making Us Smarter. Available at: https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/ai-is-making-us-smarter (Accessed: 20 April 2026).
This entry was updated on 12/06/2026