This essay interrogates recent materialist monisms, be they based on contingency, eliminativism, or objective phenomenology, on account of their metaphilosophical ramifications. It is argued that certain dualities must be retained, at least nominally, in order to have any explanatory purchase and escape velocity from philosophical circularity. Dyads such as “spirit” and “matter,” “manifest” and “scientific,” “living” and “dead,” or even “illusion” and “reality” are given an immanentist reading that treats them as equal parts of the Real. Following this revisionary metaphysics (...) that reviews the meaning of such terms as optical realities, the matter–spirit couple is specifically used to explain why reality cannot appear as just one thing, even if only in virtue of the illusion of at least two things. The consequences for philosophical monisms of all types, and for anthropocentric thought in general, are then examined in the light of the ethical effects of recent attempts to explain every thing through one medium alone. (shrink)

Everyday (mis)uses of deepfakes define prevailing conceptualizations of what they are and the moral stakes in their deployment. But one complication in understanding deepfakes is that they are not photographic yet nonetheless manipulate lens-based recordings with the intent of mimicking photographs. The harmfulness of deepfakes, moreover, significantly depends on their potential to be mistaken for photographs and on the belief that photographs capture actual events, a tenet known as the transparency thesis, which scholars have somewhat ironically attacked by citing digital (...) imaging techniques as counterexamples. Combining these positions, this paper sets out two core points: (1) that conceptions about the nature of photography introduce imperatives about its uses; and (2) that popular cultural understandings of photography imply normative ideas that infuse our encounters with deepfakes. Within this, I further raise the question of what moral ground deepfakes occupy that allows them to have such a potentially devastating effect. I show that answering this question involves reinstating the notion that photographs are popularly conceived of as transparent. The rejoinder to this argument, however, is that to take the sting out of deepfakes we must, once again, become skeptical of the veracity of all images, including photoreal ones. This kind of critical mindedness was warranted before the invention of photography for both pictorial imprints and written accounts from various media sources. Given this, along with the fact that photographic trickery is nothing new, deepfakes need not push us into a post-truth epistemic abyss, for they imply a decidedly old turn. (shrink)