{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020671834625323, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0068906115417743325, 'mean_word_length': 5.11578947368421, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
No Ideas but in Things: Photography at Learning's Limit

Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film La Chinoise is rife with images of books and reading: students with books in their hands or engrossed alone with a text, tableaux of couples entwined with each other and their slim volumes, the actress Anne Wiazemsky peeking, gun in hand, through a wall of Mao's little red books, creating an unforgettable visual link between violence and knowledge. Godard's interest lies in a critique of comfortable bourgeois students playacting at violence and revolution, but it also connects to issues of learning, pedagogy, and the levels of inherent or underwriting coercion they contain. La Chinoise was also the title of a 2002 gallery exhibition. The show began a conversation between the two authors of this essay, a project that resulted in the two distinct but interdependent essays that follow. Subsequent encounters with the photographs of Rainer Ganahl and the text Towards a Philosophy of Photography, by Vilém Flusser, furthered the exchange. The alternating structure of this paper allows common queries and sources to circulate through two associated and separate voices.