Constructs like “black-led movements,” the “black freedom movement,” or the “black radical tradition” often strip black life and politics of complexity and, of course, contingency by imagining that our positionality as oppressed people insulates black Americans—like no other human beings, ever—from all proximate cultural, economic, and political influences except for racism and sexism.

The bottom line, though, is that the political gains black Americans have made have always been the product of contingent, utilitarian, cross-racial political coalitions or agreements. This is among the reasons the scope of blacks’ conceptions of both inequality and equality, how blacks conceive the obstacles confronting them, what black Americans perceive to be social justice, along with the terrain on which the fight for a just society can and will be fought, are different depending on when and where you are talking about.

Many writers discussing Artificial Intelligence argue that what a Large Language Model produces are not sentences with truth-values but rather “stochastic parrotings” that can be interpreted as true or false, but in the way that Daniel Webster interpreted the Old Man in the Mountain as a sculpture by God with a message for humanity. Steffen Koch has argued that names used by LLMs refer in virtue of Kripkean communication-chains, connecting their answers to the intended referents of names by people who made the posts in the training data. I argue that although an LLM’s uses of names are not connected to human communication chains, its outputs can nonetheless have meaning and truth-value by virtue of design-intentions of the programmers. In Millikan’s terms, an LLM has a proper function intended by its designers. It is designed to yield true sentences relevant to particular queries.

Photographing ordinary subjects with no particular drama was a response to what sometimes appeared to me as a limit: the fact that the photographs I made in the context of news events drew their strength from that of the situations themselves. I thought this was too simple, that ultimately a powerful subject weakens the image. What creates the irreducibility of the photograph is the mechanical trace of the experience, which gives it a value of enunciation. A photograph is the product of a gaze, a moment, and things; it’s the actualisation of presence. But the technical determination of the photographic tool on the one hand and the subordination to the contingencies of the real on the other reduce the perimeter of “making” and give the unconscious a major role. In a way, all that remains for the photographer is the unconscious.

Why was the left so unsuccessful in crafting a powerful alternative to the agenda of the city’s business elite? A partial answer to this question can be found in the balance of class forces in the city after Katrina, where the very constituencies who might have written a different story of recovery—public workers, unionized teachers, and public housing residents—were banished from New Orleans.

The obstacles public housing residents faced were not accidental or due to government foul-ups or inefficiency. Rather, they were intentional and made perfect sense in light of the blueprints drafted by political and economic elites for a new New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

What the storm and the sheer devastation wrought in its wake made possible was the consolidation of this ideological transformation virtually overnight—as city boosters, public officials, wealthy developers, private contractors, multinational hotel chains, anti-poverty researchers, entertainment conglomerates, and charter school advocates coalesced to promote a vision of wholesale privatization.