The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy 9780226210438

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The Beauty of a Social Problem

Photography, Autonomy, Economy Wa lter B enn M ic ha e ls The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The Beauty of a Social Problem

Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-21026-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-21043-8 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226210438.001.0001 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015936984 o This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Ruth Leys and Michael Fried

Contents List of Illustrations ix Preface xi 1 Formal Feelings 1 2 Neoliberal Aesthetics 43 3 The Experience of Meaning 71 4 The Art of Inequality: Then and Now 105 5 Never Again, or Nevermore 153 Acknowledgments 173 Notes 177 Index 217

Illustrations illustrations illustrations

Plates (following page 98)

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Jeff Wall, Mimic (1982) Viktoria Binschtok, Wand I (2006) Viktoria Binschtok, Das große Medieninteresse (2008) Phil Chang, Two Sheets of Thick Paper on Top of Two Sheets of Thin Paper (2010) Phil Chang, Monochrome. Exposed (2011) Arthur Ou, View 1 (2008) Brian Ulrich, Circuit City, Ponderosa Steakhouse (2008) Amanda Gordon, “Liz Deschenes’s photograms reflect the crowd” (2012)

Figures

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Viktoria Binschtok, Spektakel (2008) 65 Frank Eugene, The Horse (ca. 1890) 86 Arthur Ou, Earthworks 1 (2007) 87 Arthur Ou, Untitled [Screen Test] 1 (2006) 89 Arthur Ou, On Every New Thing There Lies Already the Shadow of Annihilation (2006) 91 Brian Ulrich, Montgomery Ward Door Pulls (2011) 92 Arthur Ou, Test Screen 2 (2011) 96 Brian Ulrich, Retail 15, Chicago, Illinois (2002) 106 Brian Ulrich, Randall Park Mall (2008) 107

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Brian Ulrich, Dominicks (2008) 107 Brian Ulrich, Is This Place Great or What? (2012) 108 Walker Evans, Mrs. Frank Tengle (1936) 110 August Sander, Children Born Blind (ca. 1930) 117 Paul Strand, Blind Woman, New York (1916) 117 Walker Evans, Frank Tengle Family (1936) 121 Walker Evans, Allie Mae Burroughs (1936) 123 Walker Evans, Tengle Family Home (1936) 125 Michael Williamson, Pictures of Fred and Sadie Ricketts (1986) 126 August Sander, Photographer (1925) 128 August Sander, Porter (ca. 1929) 128 August Sander, SS-Hauptsturmführer (1937) 131 August Sander, Death Mask of Erich Sander (1944) 131 Walker Evans, Floyd Burroughs and Tengle Children (1936) 137 Walker Evans, Frank Tengle, Bud Fields, and Floyd Burroughs (1936) 138 Liz Deschenes, Untitled (2012) 145 August Sander, Unemployed (1928) 150 Sergej Strunnikow, Soja (1941) 165 James Welling, Poe (2007) 170

Graphs

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The top decile income share, 1917–2012 23 Net productivity and real hourly compensation of production/ nonsupervisory workers, 1948–2012 24 Median family net worth in dollars 105 Economy-wide returns on invested capital (ROIC), 1965–2009 184

Preface Preface Preface

This book began with a desire to write about what seemed to me some aesthetically ambitious works of art. At first, that desire was mainly reactive. I had just written two books, one primarily theoretical (The Shape of the Signifier, 2004) and the other entirely political (The Trouble with Diversity, 2006), and I wanted to write about art. But then, moving beyond the reactive, I started seeing some photographs and reading some books by younger artists whose work seemed to me really interesting. I wanted to write in particular about them. What attracted me was the simultaneous assertion of form and meaning—an interest in what it meant for something to have form and to be meaningful—and it was in light of this interest that the age of the artists seemed significant. All of them were born after 1965 (and most in the 1970s), which is to say they were born and raised and began to study and produce art in a world where artistic ambition—especially insofar as form might be thought to establish the work’s autonomy, or meaning might be understood as a function of the artist’s intentions— was often identified with the critique of both. It’s clear not only that all of the artists I write about below have been in important ways influenced by this critique, but also that sometimes (Tom McCarthy would be the exemplary instance) they understand themselves as completely committed to it. But it’s also clear (anyway, that’s part of my argument) that their work is also doing something different, by which I mean that their aes-

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thetic ambitions engage and push beyond the critique of autonomy and intentionality, the (naïve) valorization of the subject, and the (more sophisticated but just as bad) valorization of the subject position— beyond, more generally, the materialism-as-literalism of much recent theoretical writing and contemporary art practice. So part of what’s interesting about these artists is not only that their work would have been unimaginable without those theoretical commitments, but that it importantly both departs and dissents from them. The second thing that interested me (and here, again, age mattered) was that these artists have from the start been making art in an economy defined by an almost unprecedented rise in economic inequality. The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality where 0 represents perfect equality (everybody makes the same) and 1 represents perfect inequality (one person makes everything). In 1968, the US Gini number was 0.38; by 2011, it was almost 0.48. Of course, the rise in inequality isn’t the only marker of what is now standardly called the neoliberal turn, but, for my purposes, it is a crucial one because it highlights the importance of the conflicts that are constitutive of that turn. For example, the productivity of American labor is up by 80 percent since the end of the 1970s, while average wages (despite being inflated by the very high salaries of top management) are up by only about 8 percent. So labor’s share of income is down while corporate profits—both as a percentage of income and in absolute numbers—are higher than they’ve ever been. Capital’s gain has been labor’s loss.1 And (this is the other part of my argument) it’s in this context of structural conflict that the emergence in art (or at least in the work of some artists) of a new commitment to form and meaning as technologies of autonomy has new political meaning. The separation of the work from the world—from its subject (which is what form does) and from its reader or beholder (which is what meaning does)—functions here as an emblem of the relation between classes (rather than between people or subject positions; that’s the importance of structure) and also of the escape from that relation, of the possibility of a world without class. So

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it’s by asserting its difference from the world that the work establishes its relation to the world. The chapters that follow are an attempt to make both parts of this argument (the aesthetic and the political) and to make them more perspicuous and more concrete. Photography plays a crucial role because in photography the link to the world has also been identified with the primacy of the beholder’s response (think Barthes’s punctum as the reverse face of Peirce’s index), and so it’s in photography that we can see most vividly what it means to try to break that link and refuse that response. Hence, even in those chapters that are organized around literary texts, the photograph—because of the particular problems it poses for art and because of the solutions it thereby makes possible— remains central. Obviously, my goal here is not to defend the claims of photography as art; it’s been a very long time since anyone (not counting Roger Scruton) has denied those claims (although Barthes’s indifference to photography as art is not insignificant). Less obviously, although I take their work very seriously, my goal is also not (or at least not primarily) to make a case for the merit of the very small number of photographers (and writers) I discuss. It is instead to produce an account of the relation between aesthetic autonomy and political economy today, to show the usefulness of a certain concept of class for understanding the formal ambitions of some recent art, and to show the usefulness of a certain concept of art for understanding a society organized and increasingly stratified by class. This usefulness is, inevitably, a restricted one. If what you want is a change in policy, you’re not likely to get it from art, and particularly not from the kind of formally ambitious art I describe here. But if what you want is a vision of the structures that produce both the policies we’ve got and the desire for alternatives to them, art is almost the only place you can find it.

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1 Formal Feelings Chapter One Formal Feelings

The Death of a Beautiful Woman

“Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death—was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death then of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”1

This passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) is also one of the first poems in Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder (2005), a collection centered on the murder of Nelson’s aunt Jane in 1969, four years before Nelson herself was born. At the time and for a long while after, it was thought that Jane’s death was one of what were called the Michigan Murders, seven young women brutally killed in Washtenaw County, Michigan, over a period of two years. In 1970 a man had been arrested and convicted for what turned out to be the last of the murders; the assumption was that he had probably killed Jane too, and Jane itself is written on that theory. Almost literally as the book was going to press, however, Nelson learned that another man—with no connection to the Michigan Murders—had been arrested and accused of murdering Jane. Nelson’s subsequent book, a “memoir” called The Red Parts, is about the trial and conviction of that man, and Poe makes an appearance in it too. Watching a TV show (48 Hours Mystery) about

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the murder of a “beautiful Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga” (the producers of 48 Hours have given her a recording as part of their effort to get her to participate in a show about Jane), Nelson is “taken aback” to hear someone on the show explain his obsession with this crime by referring to Poe, “who once declared the death of a beautiful woman to be the most poetic topic in the world.”2 But Poe is only incidental to The Red Parts; he is more central to Jane. One way that Nelson herself imagines this centrality has importantly to do with Poe’s sexual poetic, which, she suggests in an interview, is an example of the “ethically unsound” practice of treating beautiful women as if their lives were “more grievable” because somehow more valuable than those of others.3 Hence it matters to her that Jane (unlike, say, the Peace Corps volunteer) was not particularly beautiful, and, at least partially to prove it, she puts Jane’s picture on the cover of the book (the only photo in the book, except for an author shot). But the picture plays another role as well, one that matches the other interest Nelson has in Poe. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” she tells the interviewer, Poe “was describing glibly and perhaps notoriously facilely how to make the perfect poem” (3). “Glibly” and “facilely” refer to the poem’s famous prescriptions (“what’s the perfect amount of lines? Oh, 100 lines”). But the ambition to make a “perfect poem,” which is, she says, also “part of the fight of my book” (3), is not so easily dismissed. The idea that a woman ought to be beautiful is one thing; the idea that a work of art ought to be perfect—that the beauty of the work of art is bound up with its perfection—is something else. Nelson herself insists on this difference in the poem called “A Philosophy of Composition (Reprise)” that comes near the end of Jane (almost as near the end as “A Philosophy of Composition” comes near the beginning; it seems clear that Nelson means them to have a kind of bracketing effect). “Does it matter if I tell you now / that Jane was not beautiful?” the “Reprise” begins; it goes on to describe Jane, her skin “white and chalky,” her eyes “set close together” (215). But the fulcrum of the poem is where it switches from describing Jane to describing Nelson’s “favorite photo” of her: “Her face and torso loom up / against

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a deep blue sky / a great, momentary albatross of cloud. . . . A bright block of light . . .” Her face here is half bleached out, a function of the structure of the photograph, and the point is no longer that Jane is “not beautiful” but that the picture “is”: the last words of the poem are, “The whole picture / is beautiful.” So the beauty of the photo is made out of someone who was not beautiful. More precisely, we will want to say that the kind of beauty the photo has has nothing to do with the kind of beauty the person it’s a photo of might or might not have. This is emphasized by Nelson’s insistence that it is the “whole picture” that is beautiful, where the invocation of the whole (especially, as we will see, in the context of Poe; his terms will be “totality” and “unity”) calls attention in particular to the form of the work of art, to its ambition to be “perfect” in a way no person can ever be. More particularly, we might say that just as the photograph of Jane must be made beautiful even though its subject is not, the poem Jane must be made into a “whole” even though the occasion of its production is loss—Jane’s death. So when Nelson thanks her teacher Mary Ann Caws “for her faith . . . that pain has, or can at least sometimes find, form” (223), she is describing the poem as an effort to turn her feeling into something else, to make her pain into poetry. Of course, what exactly it might mean to find a form for pain is another question. Is the goal to find a way of expressing the pain? Or is it to find a way of overcoming the pain, of releasing oneself from it? In Poe, these questions are forestalled by the fact that the death of the beautiful woman is imagined as the subject of the poem instead of (rather than in addition to) its cause. Indeed, the whole point of the essay “The Philosophy of Composition”—or at least, the thing that made it so notorious—was its effort to separate the writing of the poem from its author’s feelings. “The Raven” was composed, Poe says, “with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem,” and the reason it’s about death is not because the poet is sad but because he wants to make his readers sad.4 The “province of the poem,” he says, is the “effect” of “Beauty,” which “excites the sensitive soul to tears” (1377). Thus the most “legitimate of all the poetical tones is Melancholy,” and

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when you ask yourself, “Of all melancholy topics, what according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?,” the answer is “obvious”: the death of a beautiful woman (1378–79). The speaker in “The Raven” will thus have experienced the pain (of “sorrow for the lost Lenore”) and the reader of “The Raven” will (hopefully) be moved to tears, but the writer of “The Raven” remains calm. Taken together, then, “The Raven” and “The Philosophy of Composition” function to disconnect the speaker of the poem from the poet, the subject of the poem from its origin—which is just the opposite of what Nelson does. And in this she repeats Whitman’s reading of Poe in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and Dickinson’s enactment of the relation between pain and form in “After great pain” (“a formal feeling comes”). In Whitman, it’s the disappearance of the female mockingbird and the boy’s identification with the now “solitary” male mockingbird that marks his birth as a poet: “Demon or Bird . . . never more shall I cease perpetuating you, / Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, / Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me.”5 Poetry here is produced by loss, and poems (“the cries of unsatisfied love”) are the never-ending (“never more”) reenactment both of the loss and of the poet’s effort to overcome it, to bring the “she-bird” back. Form follows feeling in Dickinson also, but here the function of the poem is not so much to repeat the feeling of loss as to eliminate feeling as such. The organs of feeling, “the Nerves,” “sit ceremonious, like Tombs,” and, as its “Feet, mechanical, go round,” the poem imagines its own formal structure as a kind of anesthetic, producing “Quartz contentment, like a stone.”6 There is, then, in both of these texts something like a psychology of the poem and its origin; it arises out of loss or pain and it seeks either to reproduce and immortalize the consciousness of that loss (“the cries of unsatisfied love”) or to eliminate consciousness altogether—“First— Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.” Jane too has its psychology, although it’s not precisely aligned with either of those options. Substantial sections of it are adapted from Jane’s diary, and the very first diary poem (also the first poem in the book, “Dear”) begins, “I understand

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many people write for therapy—one’s own,” while the very last poem (at least, before the “Epilogue”) ends, Thank you. Therapy is over. Love Janie (218)

The idea here is that writing about your feelings is a way of helping you cope with them, maybe more like working through than letting go, since even though the diary does have what Nelson describes as “this kind of weird, very Emily Dickinson–esque thing where she leaves off with dashes,” in the main, she says, it’s “fairly trite” (interview, 5). But the fact that Janie, at least, imagines a curative power for writing doesn’t, of course, mean that Jane does. The last lines of the “Epilogue” (the last lines of the whole poem) are Above her, the sun is still trying to burn through the mist. Strange, she thinks, how the sun so often appears as a pale circle, not the orgy of unthinkable fire that it is. (221)

Whether or not you are tempted to think of these lines as embodying both the attraction and the limits of the effort to find form for pain, they certainly do present an image of the disjunction between the form of the sun (“a pale circle”) and the “unthinkable” thing that “it is.” That disjunction is at the heart of “After great pain,” where the poem appears as the repression rather than the commemoration of the experience that occasioned it.7 But it’s also at the heart of Nelson’s effort (what she calls her “fight”) to make Jane. For if one way to imagine form is as a kind of mediation—the pale circle that makes visible the unthinkable violence of what “is”—another way is to imagine it as itself a kind of violence: “the form was a fight,” Nelson says, a “fight” to make something “perfect.” And when she goes on to joke that “a less hip publisher than Soft Skull” would have made her call the book Jane: An Elegy, instead of Jane: A Murder, she is marking both the proximity and the distinction

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between the two different acts that her parallel construction—Jane: An Elegy/Jane: A Murder—has redescribed as two different genres. They both require a death, but only the murder understands the poem itself as a weapon. The point here is that a poem about Jane, like a photo of Jane, is obviously a way of remembering her, but a photo of Jane where the beauty of the “whole picture” replaces her lack of beauty is also a way of not remembering her, of replacing her with something else. The point would be exactly the same if Jane had been beautiful; a picture of something beautiful is obviously not the same thing as a beautiful picture. That’s why Poe insists, in effect, that even the beautiful woman has to die in order for the poem to be beautiful. And that’s why Poe and Nelson both invoke the ideal of perfection and why Nelson’s insistence on the beauty of the “whole” aligns her entirely with Poe’s declaration that “Unity” is “the vital requisite in all works of art” (1431). In fact, it is precisely because of the overwhelming importance of unity that Poe begins both “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle” by considering the question of the poem’s length and insisting that “the phrase ‘a long poem,’ is simply a flat contradiction in terms” (1431). The reason for this, he says in “The Poetic Principle,” is that a poem is “deserving of its title” only insofar as it “excites” “the soul,” and the soul can only take so much excitement—about “half an hour[’s]” worth. After that, it “flags—fails—a revulsion ensues—and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such.” In “The Philosophy of Composition,” time is also crucial, but it’s defined less in relation to excitement than to attention. “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting,” Poe says, it necessarily dispenses with “the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world intervene, and everything like totality is at once destroyed” (1375). Thus time is connected to unity because unity is understood to consist in the poem’s ability to make an “impression” on you or to have an “effect” on you, an effect that, when you stop reading, is necessarily dissipated. And “totality” functions as a marker of difference—between the work and the world, between the effects

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produced by the work of art and the effects produced by something else, between what is inside the work and what is outside it. There is thus a difference between the question of whether the person needs to be beautiful and the question of whether the poem ought to be perfect—the person belongs to the world; the poem—at least insofar as it strives for perfection—doesn’t. And this difference might plausibly be understood as the difference between a set of ethical or even political concerns and a set of aesthetic ones. For example, the question of whether some lives are or should be more “grievable,” which is to say more valuable, than others might be understood as political in a way that the question of the possible beauty or perfection of the work of art is not. But this opposition (emptying the aesthetic of the political) is certainly not one that Nelson would herself accept, and, in fact, we might better understand the politics of the grievable as opposed not to the aesthetic but to another politics (a politics for which the question of grievability would not arise). And we might understand the aesthetic of perfection as opposed not to the political but to another aesthetic, an aesthetic defined by its repudiation of the commitments that accompany the entire intellectual apparatus of perfection. Indeed, this aesthetic—the critique of perfection, of unity and totality—is today an entirely familiar one. We can see its origin in the terms suggested by Poe himself, that is, in his idea that it’s the “unity” of “effect” (1375) that’s spoiled when the affairs of the world interfere. For, from the standpoint of the twenty-first century—from the standpoint, that is, of a moment when the claim to unity has come to be identified with the claim to autonomy—unity and effect seem to stand in an aporetic relation to each other. Indeed, even in Poe, there’s a certain tension in his characterization of the unity of the work in terms of both its effect on the reader and its separation from the world, since the minute the effect of the work matters, the world does too—it’s only in the world that the work can have an effect, and it’s only the world that the work can have an effect on. So it seems that to separate the work from the world should be also to separate the work from its effects, and, of course, it’s precisely the refusal of this separation that has been at the

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heart of aesthetic theory—in particular at the heart of the critique of modernism—for the last half century. Thus, for example, it’s precisely insofar as modernism turned Poe’s separation from the world into a commitment not only to unity but to the work’s autonomy that what Douglas Crimp characterized as the “break with modernism” consisted above all in a critique of that autonomy, of the idea that “the art object in and of itself”could “have a fixed and transhistorical meaning.”8 And, of course, to unfix the work’s meaning is precisely to deny its unity by linking that meaning to the different effects it has in different times and places and on different readers and beholders. Thus, as Fredric Jameson put it in Postmodernism, “What we generally call the signified—the meaning or conceptual content of an utterance—is now rather to be seen as a meaning-effect,”9 and this imbrication of the meaning of the work with its effects—this insistence that the work of art is constituted by its external as well as or instead of by its internal relations—has been fundamental to the theoretical commitments of a wide range of writers, from Rosalind Krauss to Jacques Rancière. Perhaps the most elegant formulation of the basic idea, however, is Jacques Derrida’s gloss on what became, to his dismay, a kind of slogan for deconstruction—“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (especially when translated as “there’s nothing outside the text”). The gloss was his remark that he could just as easily have written “there is nothing outside the context,” which might have been, he said, less “shocking” but would have meant “exactly the same thing.”10 The idea, in other words, was not to choose between text and context, between what is inside the work and what is outside it, but to call into question the possibility of establishing a coherent distinction between them. Part of what’s striking about Jane, then, is its desire not to question but to assert this distinction (its desire for the “perfect” poem), a desire that, in the wake of the deconstructive critique, is understood as the desire also for a kind of violence—the death, precisely, of the beautiful woman. Indeed, it’s this fact that makes the photograph of Jane crucial to the poem and that has in the last half century (since, let’s say, the emergence first of Minimalism and then, more generally, of the

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postmodern) made photography itself crucial to the history of art. For before we even get to the issue of the photograph’s effect on the world (on its beholder), we can see that right from the start it is tied to the world by its relation to its subject. If, for example, Nelson’s Jane were a fictional character (someone who had never existed), there could still be a drawing of her on the book’s cover, like Doré’s drawing of Lenore in his famous edition of “The Raven.” But there are no photographs of Lenore. And the only reason there can be a photograph of Jane is because the real Jane was the photograph’s cause as well as its subject. That’s what the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce meant by calling photographs “indices.” “The index,” he said, “is physically connected with its object,” like smoke to fire, or a footprint to the foot, or a photograph of a person to the person.12 What distinguishes the photograph from the drawing, in other words, is its dependence on the thing it’s a photo of. And it’s this physical connection to its subject—the literality of its relation to the world outside itself—that has made the photograph both an emblem of the inseparability of the work from the world and, as we have already begun to see, a test case for the effort (by making the work a “whole”) nevertheless to separate them. 11

Photographs and Fossils

We can feel the power of this connection not just for theorists of the indexical but also for photographers themselves in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s decision to begin his History of History show (Japan Society, 2006)—which centered on five of his own photographs and included several other kinds of artifacts (like wood sculptures and hanging scrolls)—with a very different kind of object: a set of fossils of trilobites, ammonites, and sea lilies. What set the fossils apart from the other objects in the show, Sugimoto wrote, is that they “date to a time well before the rise of humanity” and thus before the creation of “the concept of ‘art.’”13 For precisely this reason, it might seem that, made by nature rather than humans, they not only predate art but also have nothing to do with it. For the fossils he chose are, it’s true, very beautiful, but so are

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some sunsets and some rocks and lots of trees. We don’t think of trees as belonging to the history of art. But Sugimoto says that fossils do; in fact, he says, they are “the oldest form of art.” And they are particularly relevant to his show, he thinks, because they provide a kind of genealogy for his own art, photography: fossils, he says, are a kind of “pre-photography.” So even though photography “is a novel medium of artistic expression, far newer than painting and sculpture, which date back to the early days of humanity,” it is also far older than painting and sculpture and older even than “humanity.” Photography is the first art, prehistoric, prehuman. There is an obvious sense in which this view is a little implausible— how can there be art without people to make it? How can there be photographs without photographers? But, as we’ve already begun to see, there is an even more obvious sense in which it’s not implausible at all. For fossils—like footprints and like photographs—are causally connected to the things they’re fossils of and hence are a standard example of indexicality. It’s for this reason that fossils make sense as a kind of emblem of the photograph and that they begin to explain, first, the doubts people have had about photography as a kind of art and, second, the problem (or opportunity) for art produced by the effort to undo the separation of the work from the world. They make sense as an emblem of the photograph because if you have the fossil of a sea lily colony, then you know that the colony played the same causal role in the making of the fossil that the fossil itself would play in the making of a photograph of the fossil. The thing the photograph is of, as we’ve already noted, is causally indispensable to the photograph in a way that the thing a painting is of need not be. That’s why Sugimoto thinks of his photographs of fossils as “another set of fossils,” as, in effect, fossils of fossils. And that’s why although there are paintings of unicorns, there are no fossils of unicorns and there are no photographs of them either. But the fossils also pose a problem for the idea of photography as an art, and for the same reason. A painting of a sea lily colony is a representation of it, a picture of it. The fossil of a sea lily colony is neither, anymore than a footprint is a

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representation of the foot that made it or smoke a picture of the fire to which it testifies. So when a theorist like Joel Snyder says that what he “fears” about the “causal stuff” (i.e., the insistence on the significance of indexicality) is that “it stops you from seeing the photographs as pictures,” his fear isn’t entirely misplaced.14 In fact, both as fear and as hope, the idea that the photograph is not a picture is central to the history of recent photography and to the history of recent art more generally. That idea is perhaps most influentially identified with Roland Barthes and with the opening sentences of Camera Lucida: “One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’”15 The point of the remark depends, of course, on the implicit comparison with painting. And the distinctive character of the amazement is a function of the fact that it has nothing to do with the kinds of amazement—at the skill of the artist, the brilliance of her conception, and so on—that might plausibly be produced by a painting. If paintings could show you the eyes of the emperor, then Barthes himself could have looked at them. But paintings can’t. That’s why Kendall Walton, coming from a different theoretical tradition, nevertheless makes the same point: “We do not see Henry VIII when we look at his portrait; we see only a representation of him.”16 To say that you’re seeing eyes that looked at the emperor is thus to say that you’re not seeing a representation of eyes that looked at the emperor. This is what Walton calls the “sharp break . . . between painting and photography” (253). The break is sharp because it is a break not between two different technologies of representation but between something that is a technology of representation and something that isn’t. The photograph, for both Barthes and Walton (and for Sugimoto when he’s equating photographs and fossils), isn’t. For some writers, this represents what James Elkins calls a “hope” and what Geoffrey Batchen calls a “desire”; the hope is “about the real world” and the desire is for some kind of access to it, “a real outside

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of representation.”17 And in Barthes it’s a desire that photography can’t help but fulfill, since as opposed to “the optionally real thing to which a [nonphotographic] image or a sign refers,” “the photographic referent” is “necessarily real” (76). It’s for this reason that photographs can count as evidence in ways that paintings don’t. I can hardly, say, accuse you of stealing my wallet and then offer as proof a little watercolor I’ve just made of you sneaking into my room. The watercolor would count more as a repetition of the accusation than as evidence of its truth, precisely because the reality of the referent—your entering my room—would be optional rather than necessary. And this would be true even if the drawing were remarkably realistic—entirely accurate in its depiction of your features, my room, and other details. The photograph necessarily shows what was in front of the camera; the painting shows what was in front of the canvas only optionally—and the option is the painter’s.18 Barthes makes this point by saying, “Painting can feign reality without having seen it” (76); Kendall Walton makes it by saying, “Photographs are counterfactually dependent on the photographed scene even if the beliefs (and other intentional attitudes) of the photographer are held fixed” (264).19 His point is that paintings are “based on the beliefs” (or, again, other intentional attitudes) “of their maker”; photographs are not. So my photograph of your stealing my wallet is evidence of your stealing my wallet, whether or not I believe that you stole my wallet. My watercolor is evidence not of your stealing it but of my intentional attitudes about your stealing it—perhaps that I believe you stole it or perhaps that I want others to believe that you stole it. To say the photograph is not a representation, in other words, is to say that it doesn’t represent either the thing it’s a photograph of or the intentional attitudes of the person who made it. The fossil is neither a likeness of the trilobite nor an expression of the trilobite’s beliefs. But it is good evidence of the existence of trilobites, and the photograph of an event is good evidence that the event took place. It’s not, however, definitive evidence. Even leaving digitality out of it for the moment, we all know that the realism of the photograph—its ability to show us what really happened, its ability to tell us the truth—is problematic. Photo-

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graphs, as Margaret Olin bluntly but uncontroversially says, “distort.” Which is why, as Jeff Wall has neatly put it, there are “two reigning myths of photography—the one that claims that photographs are ‘true’ and the one that claims they are not.”21 The point here would be that the photograph’s distinctive relation to the real doesn’t guarantee it any distinctive relation to the true. And the further point would be that it’s the problems and possibilities raised by the photograph’s relation to the real rather than the true that have made indexicality matter, that have produced both what David Green calls the “indexophobia” (244) of writers like Joel Snyder and a corresponding indexophilia in writers like Rosalind Krauss. What’s in question here is not the photograph’s ability to tell the truth but, first, its status as art and, second, the status of art itself. The first question, in other words, is can the photograph be a work of art? The second question is, if it can, what difference does that make to our idea of art? If the first question is about what a photograph must be in order for it to count as art, then the second question is about what art must be if a photograph does count as art. And if the first question emerged as a kind of challenge to photography, contesting its claim to be an art, the second has emerged as a challenge not to photography but to art and to the very idea of a work of art. Skepticism about photography as an art started early and was based from the start on Barthesian doubts about the causal contribution of the photographer. As Patrick Maynard summarizes them, the issues have centered on whether the photograph “sufficiently expresses or manifests intentional states of people, rather than other formative factors” like the “photochemical/electronic marking process.”22 Thus, as he puts it, “there will be effects in successful photos that one does not know how to attribute” (305), by which he means one doesn’t know whether or not they’re there on purpose. The standard example here is the profusion of detail in the photograph, the way in which it shows things the eye did not see. It is such details, Maynard says, that raise “the question of the kinds and proportion of controlled features relative to uncontrolled ones, as compared with drawing and painting” 20

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(305). On this account, the difference between the painting and the photograph, which Barthes understands as the difference between a representation and what he will call an “emanation,” is at the same time a difference between the kind of control available (and necessary) to the maker of representations and the kind of control neither available nor necessary to the maker of emanations—thus, for Barthes, photography is “a magic not an art” (88). What this actually means is that it’s a technology, not an art, and so what’s often described as the “automaticity” of the photograph is its indexicality approached from another angle: the more you see the photograph as made by the world, the less you see it as made by the photographer. For Barthes, of course, that’s the attraction—both the guarantee of “reality” (88) that counts as indexicality with respect to the referent and the limitations on the photographer’s control that derive from that reality and that therefore count as indexicality with respect to the agent. If André Kertész wants, as Barthes imagines, to take a picture of a violinist, he must also—whether he wants to or not—take a picture of the dirt road the violinist is walking on. The point here is that the indexicality of the photograph—its status as a trace of what was there—is identified with the critique of the photographer’s intentionality—his inability to control what the photograph shows. In a painting, the road would be dusty because the painter made it dusty; in the photograph, it’s dusty because it was dusty in the world. And if the “detail” that interests Barthes in the photograph turns out precisely to be the dirt road, it does so not despite the fact that it was unintended by the photographer but rather because it was unintended, because Kertész couldn’t help but include it. The “inevitable and delightful” detail “does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object (how could Kertész have ‘separated’ the dirt road from the violinist walking on it?)” (47). It is, in other words, delightful only because it is inevitable. The details that “prick” do so only because they are not supposed to; they are not even supposed to be there. And

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if they don’t prick, “it is doubtless because the photographer has put them there intentionally.” The name Barthes gave to this accidental effect is the punctum. The effects the photographer was actually going for he called the studium, and it is Barthes’s hostility to the studium, insofar as he identified it with “the photographer’s intentions,” that has made Camera Lucida—a book that is not at all about photography as an art, much less about art as such—so central to the history of art and of art photography. In particular, it has made Barthes a crucial figure in the debates over how we are to understand the history of art since Modernism. By which I mean not only the history of postmodernism but also of the art that emerged alongside of and/or in opposition to the postmodern, as well as (and especially) through it. That is, even though the straight-up theatricality of postmodern performance has almost completely lost its appeal, its critique of representation—its materialism or, more precisely, its literalism—has not. In fact, the appeal of both the literal and the unintentional, for better and for worse, is ongoing. To put the problem in these terms is, of course, to put it in Michael Fried’s terms. This is partially because Fried (albeit in opposition) essentially set the agenda for the postmodern, producing as critique what its partisans would embrace as a program.23 More particularly, it’s because Fried’s understanding of Barthes on the punctum is central to his own understanding of the interest of photography. For Fried, Barthes’s commitment to the punctum counts as the mark of his antitheatricality, and the fact that the punctum is (indeed, must be) unintended functions as the essential guarantee of the photograph’s absorptive status since, to the extent that it hasn’t been produced on purpose, it can’t count as a performance. Fried’s Barthes thus emerges as a champion of absorption; more importantly, photography itself emerges in the last thirty years as the site of the response to what Fried attacked in “Art and Objecthood”—theatricality and literalism. What identifies the unintentional with the antitheatrical is in a certain sense pretty straightforward: if you don’t (consciously or unconsciously) mean to be doing something, you can’t possibly be doing it

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for someone. The idea here is not just that the subject of the photograph isn’t posing, that the person in the photograph isn’t seeking to produce an effect on the beholder of the photograph. Indeed, part of what Fried calls Barthes’s originality is that photographs of absorbed subjects—photographs taken, say, when the subject not only is not posing but is completely unaware of being photographed—seem, to him “quintessentially theatrical.”24 Why? Because in these photographs, it’s the photographer who’s performing. So what Barthes requires is a radicalization of absorption; he transforms the insistence that the subject of the photograph not be seen as seeking to produce an effect into an insistence that the photographer not be seen as seeking to produce an effect. Actually, this is too weak a way to put it. The effects Barthes is interested in are not merely ones that seem to be unintended; they’re ones that really are unintended. And while this insistence on the unintended makes Barthes, as we have seen, a crucial figure for Fried and the critique of the postmodern, it also makes him a crucial figure for writers like Krauss who are committed to defending the postmodern. Indeed, what I have just described as the radicalization of absorption (the radicalization of the refusal of performance) turns out in Barthes to be dialectical: it turns the antitheatrical into pure theatricality; it turns what Fried called absorption into what was supposed to be its opposite: literalism. The reason for this is obvious and is already suggested by Fried when he notes that the punctum exists only “through a particular viewer’s subjective experience” and that the theatricality of literalist work consists above all in its dependence on “the experiencing subject.”25 The intended effect of a photograph does not depend on the beholder’s experience—it is what it is whether or not any viewer actually experiences it. But once the effect the photograph is supposed to have on the beholder (what the photographer intended) gets relegated to the studium, the only thing that can matter (the only thing left) is the effect the photograph actually has on the beholder. And this effect must of necessity be entirely a function of who the beholder is. No punctum for us, Barthes tells us in the Winter Garden photo of his mother; “at

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most” only “studium” (73). And, of course, no punctum for Barthes in the photograph of somebody else’s mother. The repudiation of the photographer’s intentions is in itself the appeal to the beholder’s experience. Once the structural (or theoretical) indifference to the beholder that Fried identified as absorption appears as indifference, not just to the performance of the person being photographed but to the performance of the photographer, its meaning is completely inverted. Instead of being irrelevant, the beholder is the only one who matters.26 The real point of the punctum is thus that it turns the photograph from a representation—something made by someone to produce a certain effect—into an object—something that may produce any number of effects, or none at all, depending on the beholder. We may find fossils beautiful or we may not; we may find the painting of a fossil beautiful, or not. The difference between them is that the painting is meant to be beautiful and we don’t (whether or not we find it beautiful) understand it as a work of art unless we recognize the intention. Whereas the fossil isn’t intended to be anything and there’s nothing about it as a work of art to understand; it’s not a representation. In the notion of the punctum, Barthes insists that the photograph is more like the fossil than it is like the painting of the fossil. Thus the photograph’s punctum does (by way of its relation to the beholder) what its indexicality does (by way of its relation to the referent). In suspending the question (or denying the relevance) of the photographer’s intentionality, they both make the photograph as a work of art—what Joel Snyder calls a picture—invisible. But if the disappearance of the work of art makes Snyder sad, it has also and for many years made many of his colleagues happy. When, in “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” Rosalind Krauss criticized efforts to treat the photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan as works of “Art,” displaying “aesthetic values” and belonging to “aesthetic discourse,” the object of her critique was Art, not O’Sullivan.27 Her point, made also in “Notes on the Index,” was that the indexicality of the photograph was indeed an obstacle to seeing it as a picture and that indexicality more generally was an obstacle to seeing things as representations, and that this was

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a good thing. Indeed, it was precisely because there was an important sense in which photographs were not pictures that they could play such a central role in the critique of modernism, here understood as crucially the critique of representation, of the picture and of the categories associated with it: “aesthetic intention,” “work of art,” “authorship,” and so on (4). So, if Snyder’s claim that the photograph is not indexical is an effort to hang onto it as a work of art, Krauss’s claim that it is indexical is an effort not to criticize the photograph but to criticize the very category of the work of art. In this way, although the critique of modernism by writers like Crimp and Krauss was a critique of medium specificity, and although photography was crucially deployed in the service of that critique, the medium specificity of the photograph was (and continues to be) crucial. For inasmuch as the idea of the medium is a fundamentally art historical one, what for many years defined the medium specificity of the photograph—its indexicality, its automaticity, the punctum, the problematizing of the artist’s intentionality—is what calls into question its capacity to count as an art. Fried, in “Art and Objecthood,” argued that theatricality (of the kind that I have identified here with the punctum) involved something more than the production of bad art. That is, theatricality threatened not just good art but “art as such.”28 My point here is that it was only as a threat to art as such (rather than as a medium in which both good and bad art could be produced) that photography came, still in Fried’s terms, to “matter as art as never before.” What makes the punctum important is that it undoes the opposition between good art and bad art by treating all photographs as if they weren’t art at all and so assessing them instead in terms of their effect. The idea here is not that the evaluation of works of art is rendered subjective; it’s not that the Winter Garden photograph is a great photograph from Barthes’s point of view but not so great from yours or mine. The idea rather is that for Barthes it’s deeply moving (because it’s his mother) and for the rest of us it isn’t. The difference is not, in other words, in our judgments about which photographs are great; it is instead in the kinds of affect produced in us by photographs of people

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we know and care about as opposed to the kinds of affect produced by photos of people we don’t know or care about. Indeed, we could have the same kind of difference without the photographs; if, before her death, Barthes’s mother herself had walked into the room, he might have been thrilled, whereas I might have been merely pleased. What’s being registered here is not the subjectivity of aesthetic judgment but its irrelevance. The fact that I respond to your mother differently from the way that you respond to your mother has nothing to do with the aesthetic. If, then, the conflict in painting of the late 1960s was “whether the paintings or objects in question are experienced as paintings or objects,”29 the point of the photograph in the years since 1967 is that it has become the site on which a new version of this conflict takes place. As long as we’re concerned about the punctum, the question about any photograph must be not whether it is good art or bad but in what sense it can be art at all. And it is this replacement of the opposition between good and bad art with the opposition between art and not-art that inserts photography at the center of art history in the last half century. For the imbrication of photography’s specificity as a medium for art and of the ontological doubts about whether photography can be an art produces a situation in which the effort to answer the modernist question—what is distinctive about photography as an art? what is it that makes it different from, say, painting?—produces as one possible answer the critique of modernism itself. There’s an important sense, in other words, in which the question about the painting—is it a painting or an object?—got radicalized as a question about the photograph. Not so much because the photograph can somehow be taken as the object it’s a photograph of (even if we think of the image of Barthes’s mother as an “emanation” of her body, we don’t exactly think that the photograph is her body), but because it can’t simply be taken as a picture of the object it’s a photograph of. That’s the point, again, of the fossil. We don’t experience the fossil of the trilobite as a trilobite, but we don’t experience it as the picture of a trilobite either. And if we understand photographs on the model of fossils, we cannot take for granted their status as works of art.

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The centrality of the photograph thus emerges out of a certain crisis of the picture because it is understood already to embody that crisis. So while Snyder is right to insist that what is at stake is our ability to see photographs as pictures, it obviously misses the point (misses what has made photography central in a way that it wasn’t and couldn’t be before the crisis of the picture) just to insist that photographs are pictures and to urge people to stop talking in ways that might distract us from this fact. But the opposite response—to say that photographs just aren’t pictures and that we’ve gotten beyond pictures—is equally beside the point, since it’s precisely the fact that photographs don’t automatically count as pictures that has made it possible for the photograph to become the site on which the question of what a picture is—what counts as a representation, what counts as art—is raised. It’s only because the photograph can’t be taken for granted as a picture that it becomes possible to seek to establish it as a picture. The Affairs of the World

We never see the Winter Garden photograph in Camera Lucida, and the reason we don’t see it is that for us, Barthes says, it would be nothing but “une photo indifférente.” We wouldn’t be interested in it because we aren’t interested in her, and it lays no claim (that’s the point of the punctum) to the impersonal interest of the work of art. But, as we’ve already noted, the picture of Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane is on the cover of Jane—everyone sees it—which goes against both Barthes’s practice (Jane was her aunt, not ours) and his theory. The photograph in Barthes is defined by its external relations, its adherence to the referent and therefore its effect on the beholder. But in Nelson it’s defined in terms of the internal relations—face and torso against the sky—that turn it into a “whole.” It is, in other words, the picture disconnected from the interest its beholders might have in a beautiful Jane (since it’s the beauty of the photograph, not of the person, that matters) or even in a Jane that they, like Nelson herself (or like Barthes for his mother), might mourn or be brought by the poem to grieve for. (The irrelevance of our

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grief is why the book is called Jane: A Murder, not Jane: An Elegy.) So our indifference to Barthes’s mother makes the picture of her an object of indifference and not worth reproducing, but our indifference to Maggie Nelson’s aunt is the desired response—it’s precisely the imagination of the beholder’s indifference (to the person Jane) that marks the ambition to achieve perfection (in the poem Jane). I noted at the beginning of this chapter a difference that we will shortly be able to describe as a tension in Nelson’s relations to Poe: her disapproval of the idea that the lives of some people (e.g., beautiful women) should be treated as “more grievable” than others, and her enthusiasm for what I’ve tried to show is a model of the work of art (the “whole”) for which the question of grievability never arises. But, before we get to that tension, it’s relevant to note that, as Nelson herself suggests, the question of Jane’s beauty and the critique of the idea that it should matter belong to a feminist politics and, more generally, to what she calls (in her book on women and the New York School) “the cultural moment of the triple ‘liberations’ of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay/lesbian rights movement.”30 Another, more international term for these developments might be the new social movements, but, especially for the United States, the commitment to equality mobilized around Nelson’s three liberations—the attack on discrimination, which is to say, the critique of the idea that difference should be deployed hierarchically, and the valorization of diversity, which is to say, the critique of the idea that difference should be converted into sameness—is definitive. And although the precise timing of the “moment” of these liberations might be difficult, it’s relatively uncontroversial to think of it as an extended one, with its first flowering somewhere in the late 1960s31 and, insofar as all the liberations remain incomplete, its full fruition not yet in sight. But if this cultural moment is defined by progress (however fitful and uneven) toward equality, the same period, understood as an economic moment, looks very different. We can see an epitome of this difference by thinking not, for a minute, about the poem Jane but about the person. “In 1969,” Nelson writes, Jane “was one of thirty-seven female law

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students in a class of 420” (Red Parts, 110). Second-wave feminism had barely arrived. But by the time Nelson wrote this, in 2007, 48 percent of first-year law students in the United States were women, and as I write this, in 2014, 48 percent of the first-year class at the University of Michigan Law School in particular are women.32 And although women continue to be underrepresented in large (and therefore high-salary) firms—they account for about 40 percent—the difference between now and then (“Women lawyers comprised only three percent of the legal profession as late as the 1960s”33) is obvious. No one knows, of course, what kind of law Jane might have gone on to practice, but Nelson says that in “the last few years of her life, she was “educating herself about civil rights litigation.” Indeed, her dedication was so marked that, “In the wake of her death, the law school established the Jane L. Mixer Memorial Award to honor students who demonstrate the most profound commitment to social justice and civil rights” (110). So, although it’s likely she would not have turned out to be a corporate lawyer in some white-shoe firm but instead a champion of civil rights, she could have taken justifiable satisfaction in the fact that women now can get such jobs and that many now do.34 But the civil rights advances in law firms tell only part of the story. For one thing, they are incomplete; the figures for African Americans are nowhere near as close to proportionate. For another, the relation between professionals like white-shoe lawyers and the rest of the population has changed. In 2007 the economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin, looking for a way to illustrate some of the economic shifts between the period they call the Treaty of Detroit (essentially from the end of World War II until 1980) and the period since (what they call the Washington Consensus), described the difference between the compensation of starting lawyers in “Wall Street firms” then (their data is from 1967, when Jane was still an undergraduate, two years before her death) and now (2005, the year Jane was published). “In 1967,” they wrote, “a new associate at Cravath, Swain and Moore earned about $49,500 in 2005 dollars”; in 2005, a new associate earned “about $135,000, excluding bonuses and fringes”—a lot more.35

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But the increase, in itself, is not what they see as the problem. Their interest is in the fact that the 1967 salary of starting associates was 14 percent more than the median income of the group they take as their baseline—all full-time male workers, ages twenty-five to thirty-four, with a postbachelor education—but by 2005 it was 120 percent more than the median income of that group. And my interest is in the fact that this growing economic difference has been coterminous with and, I will argue, both compatible with and a contributing factor to the triple liberations of race, gender, and sexuality. The cultural moment of increasing equality has been a financial moment of increasing inequality.36 Graph 1 gives us perhaps the best-known version of this story (the rapid rise, beginning in the late 1970s, in the share of total income taken by the top decile), but there are many other ways of telling it.37 For example, from 1983 to 2009 the average net worth of the bottom 80 percent of American households (in inflation-adjusted dollars) decreased from $65,300 to $62,900 while the average net worth of the top 20 percent

Graph 1. The top decile income share, 1917-2012. Note: Income is defined as market income (and excludes government transfers). In 2012, top decile includes all families with annual income above $114,000 (2012 data based on preliminary statistics).

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increased from $1,137,600 to $1,711,500. The difference in 1983 was already big ($1,072,300) and in 2009 was almost $600,000 bigger (see the Economic Policy Institute’s ongoing series The State of Working America). Or (still sticking with the invaluable work of the Economic Policy Institute38) you can get a sense not just of the growing gap between the rich and everyone else but also of its structure. Graph 2 suggests that the exceptional growth in American GDP has failed to produce significant growth in workers’ earnings because the extraordinary increase in labor productivity has not been matched by a commensurate increase in real wages.39 The figures here are for “production/non-supervisory

Graph 2. Net productivity and real hourly compensation of production/nonsupervisory workers, 1948-2012. Note: Data are for compensation of production/nonsupervisory workers in the private sector (in 2012 dollars); net productivity is for the total economy and is equal to the growth of output of goods and services minus depreciation per hour worked. Source: Economic Policy Institute analysis of unpublished Total Economy Productivity data from Bureau of Labor Statistics Labor Productivity and Costs program and Current Employment Statistics, and Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income and Product Accounts (graph originally at go.epi.org/2013-productivity-wages).

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workers” whose wages and productivity grew in tandem until the mid1970s (Levy and Temin’s Treaty of Detroit), and then began their current and intensifying divergence. Where did the returns on all that growth in productivity go? The primary answer is in what the author of this study, Lawrence Mishel, calls the “shift in how much of the income in the economy is received in wages by workers and how much is received by owners of capital.” Which is to say, “The share going to workers decreased.”40 But our interest here is less in the details of this story than in the juxtaposition of this decrease in one kind of equality with, as we’ve already noted, the increase in another kind.41 To deploy Nancy Fraser’s useful formulation, the progress we’ve made in solving the problem of recognition has not been matched by equivalent (or, really, any) progress in solving the problem of redistribution. Although this is sometimes treated as a question of emphasis—the left, for various reasons, has paid more attention to issues of identity than to class—if we focus on the relation between the politics of antidiscrimination (of the triple liberation, of recognition) and the economics of antidiscrimination, we can begin to see the limits of this way of putting it. That is, we can begin to see that the commitment to antidiscrimination that has been at the heart of a left or liberal politics is also at the heart of a right or neoliberal economics, and has been at least since Gary Becker argued in his first book, The Economics of Discrimination, that an employer’s racism could only add to his labor costs—since, for example, the refusal to hire black labor necessarily increased the cost of white labor. Becker’s exact words were “There is a remarkable agreement in the literature on the proposition that capitalists from the dominant group are the major beneficiaries of prejudice and discrimination in a competitive capitalistic economic system.”42 But, he goes on to say, “If W is considered to represent whites or some other dominant group, the fallacious nature of this proposition becomes clear, since discrimination harms W capitalists and benefits W workers” (21–22). If this conclusion seemed surprising when it was first announced, today, as the website of the Library of Economics and History puts it, the “idea that discrim-

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ination is costly to the discriminator is common sense among economists.”43 Whether this is true under all conditions is, of course, highly debatable, and whether (as some zealots argue) market discipline is itself sufficient (even in the very, very long run) to end employment discrimination is even more debatable. But the agreement that racism, sexism, and heterosexism are in the main obstacles to success in competitive markets is widespread, as is the stronger thesis that competitive markets are also technologies for enforcing equality. The exemplary instance here is globalization—the increased mobility of capital and commodities (e.g., NAFTA) and of labor (i.e., immigration) that requires both American corporations and American workers to compete not just nationally but also internationally. In an influential paper describing some of the effects of this increased competitiveness (“Importing Equality? The Impact of Globalization on Gender Discrimination”), the feminist economists Sandra Black and Elizabeth Brainerd acknowledge some of its negative consequences (it has heightened wage inequality in the United States by “modestly reducing the relative wages of less-skilled workers”) but only on their way toward announcing the good news: “statistically significant evidence” that “concentrated industries facing more competition from international trade increased the percentage of managers who were women.”44 And since more “women managers” means more well-paid women, the happy result is a narrower wage gap between the genders. So, more inequality between the rich and the poor, but less inequality between men and women. Here the argument from efficiency is indistinguishable from the ethical argument against preferring one prospective employee to another on the basis of any characteristic (sex, race, looks) that is irrelevant to the ability to perform the job in question. In other words, the economic commitment to the primacy of markets is accompanied by an economic and ethical commitment to equality of access to those markets.45 That’s the point of the claim that there is no connection between the commitment to equality embodied in antidiscrimination and the commitment to equality embodied in redistribution: the first is at the

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center of the effort to make markets more efficient; the second is at the center of the effort to combat one of the consequences of more efficient markets. Thus, instead of standing in opposition to neoliberalism, the commitment to antidiscrimination is at its foundation. Which is not, of course, to claim that discrimination has been eliminated; it is just to say that sexism and racism (and increasingly all inequalities of access to markets, like homophobia) are understood to be both unproductive and wrong. The inequalities produced by those markets, however, are not; exploitation, as opposed to discrimination, is not. By this I mean just that the increasing economic inequalities of neoliberal societies are a problem for neoliberalism only insofar as they are racialized or gendered, and those critics whose way of protesting economic inequalities is precisely to focus on the disparities between men and women or blacks and whites (think of every complaint about the disproportionate poverty of blacks or Latinos or women, every complaint about the glass ceiling) are defending neoliberalism, not criticizing it. It’s one thing to object to CEOs who make more in a day than the average worker makes in a year; it’s a very different thing to wish that more of those CEOs were women. The critics of disparity are protesting the ways in which the raced and gendered subject has been classed; they are not protesting the fact of class itself.46 Here we see the conceptual difference between identity (race and gender and sexuality) and class, and what it means for us increasingly to act as if, in Adolph Reed’s words, “only inequalities resultant from unfavorable treatment based on negatively sanctioned ascriptive distinctions like race qualify as injustice and warrant remedial action.”47 It’s not just that the unfavorable treatments we worry about (racism, sexism, heterosexism) do not themselves create economic inequality; it’s also that economic inequality is not exactly produced by something we can plausibly call unfavorable treatment. In the United States today, racism and sexism are capitalism functioning badly. The intensification of class difference is what you get when capitalism is working well. Employers who discriminate are behaving both unethically and ineffi-

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ciently; employers who exploit are just trying to make a profit—it has nothing to do with their (or our) feelings about whose lives are more or less grievable. Thus, just as the alternative to an aesthetic of the grievable is an aesthetic of indifference, the alternative to a politics of the grievable is a politics of indifference. Indeed, the political meaning of the aesthetic is the way in which it helps us to imagine that politics. Which it does in Jane by distinguishing between the appeal to the beholder (the question of whether Jane is grievable) and the assertion of unity (the question of whether the photo, as a “whole,” is perfect). Or, in the terms of the triple liberation and its inequalities, between the affective life of capital and its structure. The Politics of a Good Picture

What might a photograph of this structure look like? Jeff Wall’s word for perfect is “good,” and although he is a generation older than Nelson, his affection for the good—articulated specifically as his interest in the picture rather than and even in opposition to the picture’s subject—is more recent. In “his art of the 1980s,” Michael Fried has observed, Wall was engaged with “social issues,” but subsequently he has “tended to distance himself from the overtly political concerns that are front and center in works like Mimic.”48 Indeed, in recent interviews, Wall himself has insisted on this distance, remarking, for example, that “twentyfive years ago I thought subject matter had some significance in itself,” and going on to say that “Mimic was about racism in some way, about hostile gestures between races, but I’m glad the picture itself is good and it doesn’t need that to be successful. Now I try to eliminate any additional subject matter—those things are for other people, they’re not my problem.”49 Wall’s point here is not exactly that Mimic isn’t antiracist—actually, its antiracism is and remains so obvious and uncontroversial that a recent critic, Régis Michel, has complained that it “verges on political correctness.”50 The idea is rather that the success of the picture—the fact that it’s a “good” picture—has nothing to do with those politics. And although the implication may be that what makes

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the picture good has nothing to do with its or any politics, there is, as we’ve already begun to see, another possibility. Mimic (plate 1) was made in 1982 and is indeed about racism. More particularly, it’s about anti-Asian racism, which in Canada (as in the US, and it’s worth noting that Wall tends to speak of the two countries as if they belong to the same social and political formation) was not a new phenomenon; for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, Canadian immigration laws, like those in the United States, were designed to keep Asians out. But if racism toward the end of the century was not new, it was different; by the 1960s the exclusionary “White Canada” policy had begun to break down, and in 1967 it was completely scrapped for a points system that abandoned the old prohibition of “immigrants belonging to any nationality or race” deemed “unsuitable” or “undesirable owing to their peculiar customs, habits, modes of life,” and so on, and replaced racial or ethnic criteria of admission with new considerations like education and occupational skills.51 Following in the footsteps of the US Immigration Act of 1965, the new Canadian policy substituted economic desirability for racial desirability. And this restructuring of immigration policy had the same effect in Canada that it did in the United States: a rapid increase in Asian immigration. Before liberalization, Asians had accounted for only 3 percent of Canadian immigration; in the 1960s, that rose to 12 percent, and in the 1970s to one-third (in the 1980s and 1990s it would be over half). So the subject matter of Mimic is a relatively early artifact of globalization, of the increase in the mobility of labor that accompanied the increase in the mobility of capital, an increase made necessary by the fact that, as an article in the Canadian journal Rabble puts it, “contemporary capitalism, in its neoliberal form, relies on the concept of workforce mobility.”52 Much of that mobility, of course, as Rabble also points out, is deployed to fill unskilled jobs, but insofar as “the primary purpose” of Canadian immigration reform, Jeffrey G. Reitz writes, was “to boost the economy,” the primary technology for doing so was not just to bring in immigrants but to bring in immigrants with “superior qualifications,”

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immigrants whose educational backgrounds suited them for something more than unskilled labor.53 Thus, where European immigrants admitted to Canada before liberalization “had education levels that on average were well below those of the native-born population” (582), the “predominantly non-European” immigrants “arriving in the period after 1970 as a group possessed education levels significantly higher than those of the general population” (583). Which means that if one distinctive factor of anti-Asian racism in 1982 was that it marked a response to the neoliberalization of the workforce, another was that it could, with new plausibility, function as a vehicle for class resentment. And this resentment is prominently on display in Mimic, whose protagonist has been described by Wall himself as a “lumpenproletarian” (quoted in Fried, Why Photography Matters [255], and, more vividly if slightly hysterically, as “a white trash white man” by Daniel Soar54), and whose Asian target is missing only the pocket protector and slide rule that would complete his identification with the very non-lumpen white-collar technocracy of the 1970s and 1980s. There are thus two axes of social distinction at work in Mimic: racial difference and class difference, and, as we’ve already noted, the second as much as the first had been given new prominence by the economic developments of the period. It’s true that when it comes to economic inequality, Canada has lagged behind the United States, but it has nevertheless trended in the same direction: beginning with the census of 1981, the percentage of national income going to the top quintile has steadily risen, while the percentage going to everybody else has steadily fallen.55 If, then, Mimic’s representation of racial difference registers an increasingly important aspect of the constitution of the neoliberal workforce, its antiracism goes one step further. It not only acknowledges the immigration policies that produced the new workforce; it also contributes to an increasingly important strategy for managing that workforce—what Wall would later describe as “rhetorical multiculturalist ideas” (while hoping that his pictures are “free of that rhetoric”— that they are “good”).56 And his coupling of racial difference with class difference goes further still, registering another structural feature of

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neoliberalism, the increase in economic inequality, which may also (but differently) be understood to be managed by antiracism. For a more complete account of Mimic, however, we need not only this description, of what the photograph is of (the intersection of recognition and redistribution), but also a description of how it was made, of what kind of picture it is. Melissa Denes, the interviewer who elicited Wall’s repudiation of the ways in which Mimic is “about racism” (“those things are for other people”) describes it as looking like an “amazingly lucky street photograph,” and this response is virtually universal. (Wall himself calls it a “street picture” [188].) But, as she goes on to point out and as everyone knows, the outstanding fact about Wall’s practice (along with his commitment to making mainly transparencies displayed in light boxes) is that the scenes he photographs are “performed by actors in front of lights and a large-format camera.” So when Wall says that in making Mimic “I felt I could do something that resembled street photography, or at least had an interesting relation with what street photography was attempting” (280), the differences from street photography are as much in play as the similarities. One way to understand this relation is grounded in the story Wall tells about Mimic, that it’s based on something he saw, “a rather ugly incident,” and that in this way it’s typical: “A good deal of my pictures originate in events that I witnessed myself.” So there’s a sense in which the relation to street photography is that Wall is doing what street photographers do: photographing what he sees on the street. At the same time, however, he isn’t: “I begin by not photographing these events,” he says. “When I see something, I keep myself from photographing it.”57 So the relation to street photography is also a kind of refusal, a refusal to photograph what he sees as he sees it. And this distance from street photography is insisted upon by the picture itself. For one thing, of course, the kind of camera Wall needed to make the picture couldn’t easily be used on the street; as the notes to the Tate retrospective remark, “The large colour-print format that Wall favours requires a camera that is ill-suited to capturing fleeting moments.”58 For another, even if the camera could somehow be car-

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ried around and used to capture such moments, this particular picture leaves no room for the photographer who is supposed to be using it. Where are we to imagine him standing? And how could he be standing there without being noticed by the people who, whatever else they are doing, are about to walk into him? If Mimic has, as it certainly does, a significant relation to street photography, a crucial component of that relation is that it seeks to establish the ways in which, although it is of the street, it couldn’t plausibly have been taken on the street. The street scene that is its subject is not a scene that anyone actually on the street could see. Wall himself makes a version of this point when, talking about the ways Mimic brought street life into his work, he talks also about the importance of Caravaggio, Velásquez, and Manet as models for this kind of “dramatic” picture and for the ways in which the figures are “in the foreground,” “life-size,” and “close to the picture surface” (257). Many commentators on Mimic invoke Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day as well. Of course, Wall’s interest in modeling his photographs after paintings has always been regarded as a central feature of his work. But whichever painter is most relevant to Mimic and whatever the ultimate meaning of these painterly models for Wall’s work as a whole, the primary effect of that closeness of a life-size figure to the surface in this photograph is to push the photographer out of the space of the representation. If this effect is particularly striking in relation to the genre of the street photograph (since a primary feature of the street photograph is to include the photographer in the space of the representation), it also has a more general application, visible in photographers as different from Wall (and from each other) as James Welling and Andreas Gursky. For example, describing the effect of some of Gursky’s photographs and emphasizing the way in which their size and “the extraordinary profusion and fineness of detail they comprise . . . exceed the capacity of the human eye to register either,” Fried goes on to observe that “it seems patently impossible that the images are grounded in an originary perceptual experience on the part of the photographer, with which the viewer is led in turn to ‘identify’” (Why Photography Matters, 164). And

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looking at some much smaller pictures by James Welling—his aluminum foil series, for example—the viewer realizes that even though the foil is obviously an object that exists in the world and has played an essential role in the making of the photograph, the photograph does not record the photographer’s vision of it. Indeed, just as no one standing (somehow unnoticed) that close to the figures in Mimic could see their entire bodies (but the camera does), no one looking at Welling’s aluminum foil could fail to see the shape of the piece of foil (but the camera doesn’t).59 In each case, what this amounts to is a repudiation of the view, of the idea that what the photograph shows is something the photographer has been quick enough or sensitive enough or clever enough to notice, and that he can then bring to the attention of the beholder. It makes, in other words, both the photographer’s point of view and the beholder’s point of view irrelevant. There are several ways to understand this project. One way— entirely compatible with everything I’ve said here—would be Fried’s in Why Photography Matters, where he argues that art photography has reinvented the absorptive commitment to suspending “the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld.”60 Thus Mimic’s relation to street photography involves its reassertion of “the traditional strategy of capturing subjects who appear unaware of the camera” (this is the absorptive refusal of the theatrical pose), even as “the picture more or less openly proclaims its identity” as “a deliberate artistic construction” (240). Which is to say, in the terms elaborated here, that the disconnection of the photograph from the space of photographic representation (the fact that it shows something that can’t be seen) functions to assert its autonomy as a work of art. We might put the point a little less programmatically by saying that this disconnect functions to assert the internal structure of the photograph, at the expense both of its subject matter and the beholder’s relation to that subject matter. (Indeed, the technology of the light box—the light coming from inside—both enhances and thematizes this sense of internality, as if the picture’s very visibility were a function not of its relation to the world but of its relation to itself.) Or we might put it a little more provocatively by saying,

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as Wall does, that it makes the subject matter of the photograph, or at least our feelings about that subject matter, irrelevant as long as “the picture itself is good.” But while this insistence on the good picture seems to come at the expense of the antiracist picture, the good picture does, it turns out, have a politics of its own. One account of that politics is the one already hinted at in Regis Michel’s criticism of Mimic’s “political correctness”: “racism here,” he says, “is no more than a performance,” through which Wall “neutralizes politics” precisely by making his subjects into “actors . . . ruled by the camera’s eye” (63–64). Objecting that the white man’s racist gesture is “not addressed” to the victim but “to us,” Michel, wants the picture to be more like traditional street photography; he wants the racism unstaged and the beholder allowed into the picture to judge for himself, rather than kept out and, as he puts it, “compelled” to “condemn” (9). The problem for Michel, in other words, is that the picture’s antiracism is only for the beholder, and there is an important sense, I think, in which this is true, or at least in which Wall agrees with him; that’s presumably part of what Wall means when he says that “Mimic was about racism in some way, about hostile gestures between races,” but that he now realizes “those things are for other people, they’re not my problem.” Here both the racism that is the picture’s subject and the opportunity for disapproval it presents to “other people” (e.g., the beholder) are set aside. But if Michel wants the racism of the photograph to be less of a performance, and thus the antiracism it provokes to be less of a performance too, what Mimic actually does is produce a politics that cannot be entirely or even primarily defined by the choice between racism and antiracism. What Wall calls “American-type life” (290) involves them both. More generally, the mobility of labor essential to neoliberal-type life increases the occasions for racism and the need for antiracism and thus produces a “creole of bad and not-bad attitudes” (289–90), both of which “are good for making pictures” since “attitude is shown, is disclosed in pictures, in photographs” (290). Racism, obviously, is a bad attitude, antiracism a not-bad or even a “good” one. And Mimic shows

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one while soliciting the other. Indeed, racial difference itself—insofar as it cannot be anchored in biology, and however thoroughly institutionalized it may become—is a product of attitude. This is the meaning of the social construction of race, of the idea that both individuals and institutions reproduce the belief in racial difference, enforce the consequences of that belief, and thus give it the reality that both racism and antiracism reproduce and maintain. And it is a meaning insisted on by Mimic precisely because it is juxtaposed with a difference that is not in the same way socially constructed and because the refusal of street photography in Mimic—the exclusion of the beholder—is a refusal also of that analysis of social conflict that would understand it as a function of attitude. Insofar as the conflict between classes is structural rather than affective, it has nothing to do with attitude, by which I mean that it is real, whatever the attitude of the classes might be, and it would survive even if the white-trash man gave up his bad attitude and adopted the good one the picture correctly assigns to its middle-class beholders. This is the sense in which the picture is crucially not antiracist, or, to put it more precisely, neither antiracist nor racist. As an artist, Wall says, “I don’t choose between good and bad attitudes” (290).61 Thus Mimic’s politics consist not in selecting the right attitude (although, or just because, at the ethical level the right one is obvious), but in performing a certain indifference to both. Its assertion of its own structural autonomy functions to separate it from the lived world of neoliberalism and, by separating from it, to analyze that world. The politics of the good picture is thus a politics in which attitudes— other people’s racism, one’s own antiracism—are disclosed only to be displaced. Indeed, its politics are nothing but that displacement—the form that makes it a picture of contemporary capitalism and not (only) of the affective life that capitalism offers us. I want to end this section by trying to be as clear as possible about my claims. I am not claiming that the picture deplores the growing inequality produced by neoliberalism, or that it deplores the way in which the only objectionable inequalities have come to be the ones that

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are understood as a consequence of discrimination. I deplore both those things, but I don’t claim the picture does. What the picture does is assert the irreducibility of form to affect. That is, it depicts two axes of social distinction (race and class) and it depicts the (definitely bad) attitude their conjuncture has produced while at the same time making a set of formal choices (the staging, of course, but above all the turning away from street photography, the depiction of a scene that could not be seen and, hence, the assertion of the autonomy of the picture) that enforce the autonomy of structure in relation to affect. Thus, the difference between the two modes of social differentiation (one a function of “attitude,” the other not) is reproduced in the difference between two ways of imagining the photograph (one insisting on the subject position of both the photographer and the beholder, the other not). And that difference is represented as a conflict: a choice the artist has to make and has, in fact, made. The choice matters for Wall as an aesthetic one—it’s the commitment to the “good picture”—and it matters also as a political one because neoliberalism (in particular left neoliberalism) has chosen differently. “Race is one of the legal classes protected by anti-discrimination law,” as Adolph Reed reminds us. “Poverty is not.”62 Reed’s point here is not, of course, that race shouldn’t be protected by antidiscrimination law, but, crucially, it also isn’t that poverty should, since inasmuch as poverty isn’t a consequence of discrimination, antidiscrimination is not a remedy for it. The idea, in other words, is not that class inequality (a tautology) is somehow worse than racial or sexual inequality. It is instead that the inequality embodied in the difference between capital and labor has nothing to do with our attitudes toward them but is instead embodied in the very fact of their difference. That’s why class inequality is a tautology and that’s also why, if anybody still wanted an anticapitalist left, you could only get it by recognizing that today there is nothing the slightest bit anticapitalist in the attack on discrimination. Which is just to say what Mimic shows: for the critique of capitalism, a good picture is better than a good attitude.

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The Beauty of a Social Problem

In Canada at the beginning of 1982, the unemployment rate was 8.6 percent; by the end of the year, it was 13.1 percent, so it’s not hard to find a cause for the bad attitude disclosed in Mimic.63 Viktoria Binschtok’s series Die Abwesenheit der Antragsteller was made in a Berlin unemployment center in 2006, when unemployment in Germany was also very high, over 10 percent.64 That number in Germany has since come down, but, like Canada, both Germany and the United States have been not only susceptible to but highly tolerant of substantial unemployment for some time. (Indeed, in the US, the U6 unemployment rate, which includes part-time workers who want but can’t find full-time work, has been above 7.5 percent for all but two of the years since the measure was first instituted in 1994). And the reason for that tolerance is not hard to see: unemployment is a problem for some, but for others it’s more like a solution. It’s a problem, obviously, for the unemployed, who want work; it’s a solution for employers who not only want workers but also want the cheapest ones they can get. If, say, you’re looking to hire a salesperson (one of the largest occupations in the US), the reason you can get one for an average salary of only twelve dollars an hour is because there are a lot of unemployed potential salespeople out there. Which means, in turn, that unemployment is not just a problem for people who don’t have jobs, it’s a problem also for people who do. Because if you’re one of the millions who have that sales job, the unemployed are your competition; they may be worse off than you but you’re worse off because of them—they’re the reason you’re only making twelve dollars an hour. That’s what Marx meant when he called the unemployed (the “relative surplus population”) the “pivot on which the law of supply and demand in labor works.”65 But you don’t have to be a Marxist to see the utility (to employers) of unemployment. Or to see why the received wisdom is that we should not go below what Milton Friedman (not a Marxist) called the “natural” rate of unemployment, since, if we do, we

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run the risk of “accelerating inflation,” which is to say, the risk of having to pay the higher wages that could be demanded by salespersons if there weren’t a surplus of them. The inequality produced and maintained by unemployment is thus different from the inequalities produced by discrimination. On the Becker model, no one argues that we need a certain amount of racism or sexism to make the economy work. Just the opposite. Employers who won’t hire black or female workers are just strengthening the bargaining power of white men; they’re throwing away their relative surpluspopulation card. Unlike racism, however, the right amount of unemployment is good for profits. Indeed, it’s good for capitalism itself. Thus the inequality enabled by unemployment is, in a capitalist economy, a useful inequality, and the question of our attitude toward the unemployed (unlike the question of our attitude toward the victims of racism or sexism or any kind of discrimination) is both complicated and beside the point. It’s complicated because the closer we are to thinking of ourselves as members of the working class, the more our empathy for the unemployed (they get no wages) gets mixed with resentment of them (because they get no wages, we get lower wages). It’s beside the point because how we feel about the unemployed has no connection at all to anything we might do about unemployment. Capitalism likes it, whether we do or not. That’s why it’s important that Binschtok’s pictures of unemployment don’t have any actual unemployed people in them. In his notes to the scene of “The Song of the Great Capitulation” in Mother Courage, Brecht famously says that “if the actress playing Mother Courage invites the audience to identify with her,” it will be “disastrous” because the “spectator” will be deprived of the opportunity “to feel the beauty and attraction of a social problem.”66 What’s crucial here is Brecht’s distinction between how we feel about the victims of the social problem and how we feel about the social problem itself. If, to put the point in Binschtok’s terms, we think what matters about our relation to the unemployed is our ability to feel their pain, we’re making a mistake. And if we think that political art should provide identification rather than

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“beauty,” we’re making it again. Rather, to feel the beauty of the problem is precisely not to feel the pathos of the suffering produced by the problem; it’s instead to feel the structure that makes the problem. Thus in Binschtok, the refusal of identification is pushed one step further: Brecht’s Mother Courage is coming to make a claim on “the captain” for damage done by his soldiers to her stock; Binschtok’s photos are of Die Abwesenheit der Antragsteller—not the claimants but the absence of the claimants. There’s no one to identify with. What there is instead is a wall and the marks the people have left on the wall, leaning against it as they waited to be interviewed about their eligibility for benefits (plate 2). Brecht insisted that Mother Courage’s character—in particular, her “depravity”—be understood as something more than personal, since it was “not so much the depravity of her person as of her class.” Binschtok has not only eliminated the temptation of taking her claimants personally, she’s also taken the question of their character out of play. That is, her unemployed don’t have any character, depraved or otherwise. What they have instead is bodies. Furthermore, since their bodies appear only by way of the marks on the wall, the question of what kind of bodies they have is as unanswerable (in effect, as unasked) as the question of what kind of character they have. In other words, it’s not just that we can’t see whether they are lazy or hardworking, we also can’t see whether they are men or women or what their race is; in fact, we can’t even see (what Brecht wanted the audience to see in Mother Courage) their class. What the photograph shows instead is neither a group of people nor a social class but a mechanism—the “pivot”—that helps make the class system work. Which means that the effect of replacing the people with the marks they leave is less that of deindividualization than it is of de-personification; the marks represent, without personifying, not the structure as seen through the objects of affect but the structure itself. Although “represent” is a problematic term here, the scuffs and stains on the wall aren’t representations of the people who leaned against it; they’re traces left by their bodies. Nor is the photograph of the scuffs and stains a representation of them; it too is a trace—a trace

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of their traces. In this sense, the relation the photograph has to the unemployed is not that it’s a picture of them but that it’s a picture caused by them—an index of an index in Peirce’s terms, a fossil of a fossil in Sugimoto’s. At the same time, however, the photograph almost ostentatiously deploys a very different understanding of itself, one that turns the traces of the unemployed bodies into a kind of painterly abstraction (with a particular nod toward Cy Twombly). And this gesture toward abstraction—to something made by the artist rather than recorded by her—is another way of insisting on the function of unemployment rather than on the plight of its victims. It redescribes the bodies created by a capitalist economy as the structural principle that makes capitalism work. Principles are themselves abstractions; they leave no traces; they must be represented not recorded. A different way to put this would be to say that it’s the beauty of the photograph—a beauty produced not by showing the victims of unemployment but by not showing them, and by transforming the record of their presence into something that looks more like a color field painting than a documentary photograph—that is the mark of its politics. As a picture of the “relative surplus population” rather than of the unemployed, Wand 1 is not interested in eliciting our sympathy. Rather, precisely because this population performs its function without regard to how anyone feels about it, in order to see it properly we have to see it without appeal to any of the many attitudes either the employed or the unemployed might have about each other and about themselves. Of course, we all have such attitudes. But the social problem cannot be addressed by having better ones; indeed, it is rendered invisible by the very idea that our attitudes matter. Once we start worrying about whether the unemployed have made bad choices and are responsible for their plight or about whether they’re the victims of our racism or sexism and we’re responsible for their plight, we’ve forgotten the real social problem—that if everyone made good choices and there were no racism and sexism, there would still be unemployment because our economy would still need it. Thus the photograph establishes a distance from its subjects, and

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seeks to mirror that distance with the one it establishes from its viewers, making it impossible for us to identify by giving us no one to identify with, making the question of who its viewers are and how they feel as irrelevant as the question of who its subjects were and how they felt. What it wants instead is to establish a space of its own, to make itself autonomous. This is just the opposite of how we usually think about the relation between politics and art: that political art is supposed to attach itself to the world, showing us the victims of some dreadful abuse and reaching out to its viewers, inspiring in us compassion for the victims and a desire to correct that abuse. And we’ve tended to see art that doesn’t reach out in this way—art that tries to imagine its separation from the world, art that (more interested in perfection than in pathos) insists upon its form—as apolitical or even conservative, passionate perhaps about beauty, but indifferent to suffering. But maybe this has been a mistake. Maybe what’s needed is an art that’s less interested in the abuses of the system than in the system itself, and maybe it’s the very effort to produce something utterly selfcontained that enables us to see in art not just a reflection of our current form of neoliberal capitalism but also what Nick Brown has described as “neoliberalism’s other.”67 Unemployment is helpful here, precisely because it isn’t an abuse, because, from the standpoint of capital itself, it’s as much a feature as a bug. As profit margins have risen while the share of GDP going to workers has declined (people work cheap when other people aren’t working at all), it’s become pretty obvious that, for a growing number, having a job isn’t all that much better than not having one. That’s why it’s better to see the unemployed as marks on the wall than as people for whom we should feel compassion—our compassion is beside the point, not just because it’s useless (to them), but also because it’s mystifying (since we’re victims, too) to us. And that’s why it’s important for a picture like Wand 1—in effect, a picture of the labor market—to imagine its own autonomy from that market. More generally, that’s why autonomy’s indifference may be politically helpful. In one way, the work of art that declares its separation from the world also declares the irrelevance of our feelings. But in an-

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other, it makes its appeal to a different set of feelings, our feelings, as Brecht says, for beauty. Today, we might speculate, it’s only insofar as art seeks to be beautiful—seeks, that is, to achieve the formal perfection imaginable in works of art but not in anything else—that it can also function as a picture not of how, if we behaved better, we might manage capitalism’s problems, but rather of capitalism as itself the problem.

2 Neoliberal Aesthetics Works of art enchant us not because they are so natural but because they have been made so natural. He g e l , Aesthetics

Chapter Two neoliberal aesthetics Absorption and Intentionality

In his seminal text Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980), Michael Fried devotes several pages to a discussion of why Diderot didn’t value still-life painting more highly than (with the exception of Chardin’s) he did. The salience of the question is clear to anyone who knows Fried’s basic argument: that Diderot articulated an aesthetic committed to denying what Fried calls the “primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld” (93), and thus to valuing above all paintings of figures so deeply absorbed in their own activities—sometimes solitary (like Chardin’s Young Girl Reading), often in groups organized around some central action or figure (as in Greuze’s Filial Piety)—that they seem to be completely unaware of, oblivious to, the possibility of being observed. The great achievement of such paintings, according to Fried, was that, representing subjects who had no “consciousness of being beheld” (102), they established for themselves “a mode of pictorial unity” (76) (a removal from the world outside the painting) that sought to overcome what would otherwise seem the irreducible theatricality of painting—the fact that all paintings are made to be beheld. From this standpoint, the attraction of the still-life would seem to be obvious: no bowl of fruit runs the risk of looking self-conscious; no vase of flowers can be understood as posing for its audience. The subjects of still-life paintings are, as Fried puts it, “literally incapable of evincing awareness of the beholder” (102). So why didn’t Diderot like them?

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Fried gives two answers. The first is that precisely because the subjects of still-life cannot be aware of the beholder, they could not function “to deny his presence, to establish positively insofar as that could be done that he had not been taken into account.” Only paintings of “conscious agents . . . fully capable of evincing awareness of the beholder” (103) could count as denying the presence of the beholder, which is to say, as acknowledging the problem of the beholder and then overcoming it. The still-life cannot overcome it because it cannot acknowledge it. The second answer is that in a still-life, the elimination, or anyway the rendering irrelevant, of any question about whether the subjects are posing or performing or soliciting a certain attention (since they are inanimate) puts all the pressure on the painting itself, which is to say, on the artist: “inanimate subject matter,” Fried says, made “the artistic and presentational aspects of the painting itself all the more obtrusive by imposing almost desperate demands on technique and by calling attention to the fact that the objects depicted by the painter were chosen by him, arranged by him, illuminated by him, and in general exhibited by him to the beholder” (102). There is a sense, of course, in which this is equally true of all painting—how, without being chosen and depicted by the painter does anything ever get into a painting?—but the still-life, displacing attention from the figures in the painting to the painter himself, raises this question in an almost unanswerable way. It takes absorption’s “supreme fiction”—the denial of the “primordial convention that paintings were made to be beheld”—and reproduces it as the demand for a slightly different (but entirely compatible and even more dramatically counterfactual) fiction—the denial that paintings were made at all. It’s as if for the still-life to overcome its display of the way in which the painter is performing for an audience, it would have to replace the unawareness of the painted subjects (the girl reading, the family gathered around the dying man) with the unawareness of the painter himself. And it’s this demand—the demand that the painter be as unconcerned with producing an effect on the beholder as the young girl reading is—that seems too desperate.

neoliberal aesthetics

But, desperate though it may be, and whether or not it can ever be met, it’s this demand—articulated not just as an aesthetic preference but as a theoretical requirement—that has for the last half century been at the heart of aesthetic theory and a great deal of the most advanced aesthetic production. We can see its immediate prehistory in Fried’s account of the great formalist critic Roger Fry, and in particular of Fry’s enthusiasm for El Greco, who “as a singularly pure artist . . . expressed his idea with perfect sincerity, with complete indifference to what effect the right expression might have on the public.”1 What Fry means to emphasize, Fried argues, is that El Greco was concerned only “with the complete realization of an artistic idea and not at all with exerting an effect on an audience” (9). This is, of course, as Fried says, a deeply Diderotian or absorptive aesthetic, and the point of the essay is to argue that Fry’s formalism is an effort to understand and value paintings “owing to the play of forces internal to the work rather than because of a desire to appeal to the beholder” (16). The argument, in other words, is that the insistence on the unity of the painting and the insistence on the irrelevance of the beholder—and especially the opposition between the unity of the painting and the effort to affect the beholder—are all hallmarks of the formalist or absorptive critic, despite the fact that, as Fried reminds us, the effort to establish the unity of the painting must itself be understood as nothing but an effort to affect the beholder. “Needless to say,” he says (but he says it in parentheses), “the conviction of unity and necessity . . . is itself the product of an attempt to affect the beholder in a certain way” (19). If, however, this goes without saying for Fried, it’s not obvious that it does so for Fry. Indeed, what Fried immediately goes on to remark in Fry is his “characteristic and recurrent” (24) use of phrases like “almost unconscious” “and “half-conscious” in his descriptions of the activities of the artists he most admires.2 The point, as Fried puts it, is that Fry’s appeal to the unconsciousness of his artists is “both a displacement and a radicalization of Diderot; to the extent that an artist is imagined as having been aware of doing a particular thing, it cannot be claimed that he did it in order to make a particular impression on the viewer” (25).

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But if he didn’t do it to make some particular impression on the viewer, why then did he do it? This is a difficult question because the kinds of answers that come immediately to mind—the kind that Fried himself has already suggested in his discussion of establishing the unity of the painting—cannot really function as alternatives to the effort to make a particular impression on the viewer. You can’t, in other words, say that the artist is trying to establish the unity of the painting as opposed to trying to make an impression on the beholder since, as we have already seen Fried say, “the conviction of unity” is itself “a product of the attempt to affect the beholder in a particular way.” It looks, in other words, like once the absorptive commitment to ignoring the beholder is understood as the demand that the artist make no effort at all to produce any kind of effect, it becomes impossible to fulfill. It’s no longer enough for the painter not to appear to be trying to produce an effect; it’s no longer enough for the painter (“almost unconscious”) not to be aware of trying to produce an effect—now the painter must really not try to produce an effect. But how can you make a painting at all—how can you make something that looks the way you want it to look—without seeking to produce an effect? The radicalization (or literalization) of the commitment to absorption thus produces an antinomy: the works of art we value are those that seek to produce no effect on the beholder, but without the effort to produce an effect on the beholder (without the effort, as we might say, to make something that can be seen), there would be no works of art. To put the problem in this way, however, is also to begin to see a kind of solution, one already suggested by Fried’s addition of Roland Barthes to the canon of Diderotian critics. For Fried, as we saw in the previous chapter, Barthes’s attachment to the punctum and his dislike of the studium are entirely “anti-theatrical,” since where the studium is what the photographer tries to show you, the punctum is what the photograph makes it possible for you to see, independent of or even in opposition to what the photographer tries to show you. The very concept of the punctum thus depends upon the Diderotian distinction “between ‘seeing’ and ‘being shown,’”3 and its attraction consists pre-

neoliberal aesthetics

cisely in its being by definition something that is in the photograph, despite the fact that the photographer has not himself meant to put it there. Indeed, from the standpoint of this problem about the agency of the artist, photography looks like an exemplary medium—a way to resolve the antinomy described above. On the one hand, it does not dispense altogether with the artist—there are no photographs without the photographer; on the other hand, the fact that it characteristically displays images over which the photographer does not have complete control, thus making it possible to value precisely the unintended elements of those images, means that what the photographer has tried to do—the effect she or he has sought to produce—may have nothing to do with the beauty, value, or meaning of the photograph. The difficulty of imagining an artist who isn’t trying to create a work of art is resolved by imagining instead an artist whose efforts to create the work are irrelevant to its meaning. The photograph thus presents itself as a kind of theoretical antithesis to the Diderotian still-life, and of course, this view is by no means limited to Barthes. On the contrary, as we’ve already noted, the claims photographers have made to be artists have, since the nineteenth century, been contested by critics who deny that the photograph has enough “intentional meaning.”4 And Barthes is by no means the only recent writer to maintain some version of this position. But it’s a crucial fact about Barthes (unlike, say, the notoriously skeptical Roger Scruton) that his interest is not primarily in debunking photography’s claims to art, and not at all in claiming that because the photograph is not fully or adequately intended it cannot count as art. For in Barthes’ own writing, art itself—with literature as the exemplary case—had already been disconnected from the question of intentional meaning.5 Starting at least in the mid-1960s and emerging more fully in “The Death of the Author” (1968) and “From Work to Text” (1971), there is a crucial sense in which, for Barthes, the irrelevance of “the author’s declared intentions” and the “removal of the Author”6 more generally had come to be seen as constitutive, at the very least of modern aesthetic production and at the most of the idea of aesthetic production as such. “Writing begins,”

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Barthes says, when “the voice loses its origin” and “the author enters his own death” (142). Furthermore, as every student of literary theory knows very well—we learn it the minute we first read “The Intentional Fallacy”—this position was hardly unique to Barthes, or for that matter, to Barthes and the others (Foucault, Derrida, et al.) who held some version of it. Beginning in the mid-1940s, the idea that the meaning of a literary work was not determined by its author’s intentions was foundational for American literary criticism, providing the material (although this is not exactly what it was originally designed to do) for a potential theoretical solution to an aesthetic problem. The aesthetic problem was how to create antitheatrical works of art at the moment when the very effort to do so (indeed, any effort at all) had begun to register as theatrical. The theoretical solution was to deny not that those efforts took place but that they were in any way constitutive of the meaning of the work of art. It was the syntactic and semantic rules of the language, not the author’s consciousness, that determined the meaning of the work. Thus Fry’s strenuous but not very compelling attempt to imagine a kind of psychology for the painter’s desire not to produce an effect on the beholder (“half-conscious,” “almost unconscious,” “perfect sincerity,” “complete indifference”) is rendered supererogatory. The new theoretical anti-intentionalism rescues the critic from a psychological anti-intentionalism that, still committed to some account of the artist’s agency, can only register the artist’s actions as unconscious (and hence not fully actions) or as completely disconnected from all possible consequences (and hence, again, not fully actions). Now, the ontological irrelevance of the artist’s intentions, whatever they are, makes it unnecessary to deny that he actually had any.7 For our purposes, however, Barthes’s version of anti-intentionalism is more crucial than William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s, and for two reasons. The first is that Barthes’s is theoretical and aesthetic (in effect, the antitheatrical aesthetic creates the necessity for the antiintentional—i.e., theatrical—theory) whereas Wimsatt and Beardsley’s is theoretical and methodological. Barthes is defending certain aesthetic

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values; Wimsatt and Beardsley were seeking to establish the “public” and “objective” character of literary meaning. Their concern was with professional literary criticism.8 And the second, which follows from the first, is that insofar as Wimsatt and Beardsley were interested in establishing the public meaning of the text, they were just as opposed to considering the reader as they were to the writer; the companion to “The Intentional Fallacy” was “The Affective Fallacy.”9 Whereas Barthes is just the opposite; he explicitly links “the death of the author” to “the birth of the reader,” and he explicitly celebrates the refusal of what he calls an “ultimate” meaning, the refusal to “fix meaning” that the shift from writer to reader makes inevitable. Thus we have both an aesthetic solution to the problem of the artist’s agency—How do you avoid seeming to seek to produce an effect on the reader/beholder? Do nothing—and a theoretical answer to the question of the author’s agency—How do the artist’s actions determine the meaning of the work? They don’t. And just as, in Barthes, the theoretical answer immediately and (as I shall show) necessarily produces an appeal to the reader, so too does the aesthetic solution. That is, the theoretical solution to absorption’s aesthetic problem (the invention of an artist who could not be understood as performing for an audience because his intentions to produce certain effects were now understood as in principle irrelevant to the effects his work in fact produced) is simultaneously the transformation of absorption’s aesthetic indifference to the reader or beholder into (as I will also show) a programmatic appeal to the reader or beholder. In Camera Lucida, this is the whole point of the punctum; no one can intend it, hence it exists only in the experience of the beholder. That’s why Barthes, as we’ve already seen, doesn’t reproduce the Winter Garden photograph of his mother; it cannot have the effect on us that it does on him—for us, no punctum; for us, “no wound.” The punctum, in other words, functions as an absorptive reproach to the “artifice” of the photographer, resisting his inevitably theatrical efforts to produce a particular effect on the beholder while at the same time (and for the same reason) transforming the photograph into a work dependent entirely on the beholder—a purely theatrical object.

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The absorptive demand of indifference to the reader/beholder becomes an insistence on the absolute primacy of the reader/beholder. Theatricality is, from this standpoint, not exactly— or not only— the opposite of absorption; it is the inevitable outcome of the radicalization of the logic of absorption. Which is to say, the developments in the history of art that Fried would (in “Art and Objecthood”) identify with theatricality—literalism, minimalism, more generally, postmodernism—are the dialectical workings through of the logic of absorption. We can get a concrete sense of this claim by thinking about another major figure of Barthes’s generation. Probably no one would think to call John Cage an absorptive artist (in fact, in “Art and Objecthood” he’s the first example of the proposition that “Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre”10), but his description of his ambition for his music, especially in regard to his “silent” piece, 4′33″— “I was intent upon making something that didn’t tell people what to do”11—can only make sense in the context of the radicalization of the antitheatrical. “Why would anyone write music in which nothing is performed?” asks the critic and artist Larry Solomon.12 And although Solomon himself is not at all concerned with the Diderotian problem of performance, the relevance of a Diderotian answer is obvious: you write precisely in order to avoid performance, in order to avoid the effort to produce an effect on the listener, in order, that is, to avoid telling “people what to do.”13 In Camera Lucida, Barthes, illustrating what Fried rightly calls the “extremity” of his “antitheatricalism,” proclaims that “to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close one’s eyes” and goes on to insist that “the photograph must be silent,” not “blustering,” not, in other words, trying to get the beholder to respond the way the photographer wants him to respond. This “is not a question of discretion,” Barthes says, but “of music” (53–55). And 4′33″ is, of course, the “silent piece,” or at least, since, as is well known, Cage denied there was any such thing as silence, a piece in which the only sounds are “accidental.” Here the parallel with Barthes’s hostility to the photographer’s intentions is complete. “The essential meaning of silence,” Cage says, is

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not the absence of sound but “the giving up of intention” (Conversing, 189). That is, the point of 4′33″’s silence is not that the performance should actually be silent but rather that whatever sounds there are should not be controlled by or in any way come from the composer. Hence, as with Barthes, we have on the one hand the characteristically absorptive refusal of the effort to produce an effect on the listener— “there are no (intentional) sounds” (65). On the other hand, we have the inevitable primacy of the listener, since whatever sounds she happens to hear (during the famous first performance, the “wind stirring,” “raindrops pattering on the roof,” and, in the third movement, “all kinds of interesting sounds” made by the listeners themselves “as they talked or walked out” [65–66]) are the sounds that make up the piece. And just as this absorptive repudiation of intention involved in Barthes a repudiation also of the idea that a work could have a single or “final signified” (the “multiplicity of writing” required the refusal to “fix meaning” [Image, 147]), so in Cage the abdication of the composer’s agency is necessarily accompanied by an insistence on multiplicity: no two performances of 4′33″ can ever sound the same. Indeed, no one performance will produce a uniform effect on the members of its audience. When Cage hears the rain falling, it suggests to him “the love binding heaven and earth,” but he does not imagine that this response will “necessarily correspond with someone else’s. “Emotion,” he says, “takes place in the person who has it.”14 Emotion, like the punctum, is the response the artist cannot control. 4′33″ can thus be understood as an exemplary case of the way in which a radicalized absorption—produced by the refusal to impose one’s intentions on the listener/beholder/reader, the refusal to perform for an audience—becomes indistinguishable from an account of the work of art in which it is theatricality that’s radicalized—the only thing that matters is the audience’s response. The piece consists no longer in the sounds the composer or performer produces but in the sounds, whatever they happen to be, that the listener hears. The way Cage puts this is to say that for him and other composers “who have accepted the sounds they do not intend” (Silence, 11), the tendency is toward musical

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performance as “theatre,” which he values because it is the art that most “resembles nature” (12) and which he imagines would in its ideal form be indistinguishable from “everyday life,” so you could then “view everyday life as theatre” (Conversing, 101); art would, in effect, become indistinguishable from nature. The artist who begins with the fiction that his work is not made for the world (not made to be seen, not made to be listened to) ends by collapsing the work into the world—it’s whatever you see, whatever you hear. Nature and Theatricality

In the recent history of theory, as opposed to the history of art and music, the site on which this collapse is most vividly either embraced or refused is in the structure of thought experiments comparing marks produced by chance (which is to say, by nature, by the world) with identical marks produced on purpose (by somebody who means something by them). Richard Rorty’s response to Steven Knapp’s and my example in “Against Theory” of the wave-poem (marks that appear to spell out Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” produced not by some poet but by waves on a beach) was exemplary. “Anything,” Rorty wrote in 1985, “a wave pattern, an arrangement of stars, the spots on a rock,” can be “treated like” a sentence.15 The question of whether they were meant to be a sentence is irrelevant. Furthermore—and here Rorty was much more radical than Wimsatt and Beardsley or philosophers like John Searle, who argued that such marks meant what they meant in English regardless of what they were or weren’t intended to mean—Rorty imposed no requirement that the marks actually look like a sentence in some actually existing language. Any set of marks for which you could work out a set of semantic and syntactic rules that would give them meaning could count as a sentence. “‘Linguisticality,’” he famously observed, is “cheap. You can impute it to anything simply by working out a translation scheme” (133). The central idea here is that the question of whether a sentence is a sentence (or whether a work of art is a work of art) cannot be answered

neoliberal aesthetics

by an account of how or why or by whom the marks that constitute it were produced. Nature—the wave patterns and the spots on a rock—is just a name for the irrelevance of that account. Thus when, deploying a parallel example (monkeys on typewriters), Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin (1986) claim (contra Borges) that if the monkeys eventually produce a text identical to Don Quixote, it is in fact “the same text” open to the same “same interpretations” as the one “consciously inscribed by Cervantes”;16 their nature is just a more mechanized one than Rorty’s or Cage’s. As is Barthes’s photograph. The point each time is to insist that the way in which the marks were produced has nothing to do with what they are and that the question of whether the marks were intended to mean something has nothing to do with the question of whether or what they actually mean. But Barthes and especially Rorty understood the force of this point a lot better than Goodman and Elgin (or Searle) did. Goodman and Elgin thought that it’s not the author’s intentions but the marks themselves that determine the correct translation scheme; it’s what “En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme . . . “ means in Spanish, not what Cervantes meant by it, that matters. But Rorty saw that if we’re not interested in what Cervantes meant, there’s no principled reason for us to be interested in the rules of Spanish either. The reader who invents a different translation scheme (call it Spanish prime) for the marks made by the monkeys is just involved in a more labor-intensive version of the task performed by the speaker of Spanish: they’re both applying some translation scheme to random marks, and there’s no more reason to say that the marks are really in Spanish rather than in Spanish prime than there is to say (what Knapp and I said) that the spots on the rock are not really in any language at all. Thus, Goodman and Elgin’s idea that the monkey marks are subject to all the same interpretations as the text of Don Quixote is true (insofar as it is true) only if some reader finds it desirable to treat them, arbitrarily, as if they were seventeenth-century Spanish. They are also and equally subject to any meaning they might have in Spanish prime or in any other translation scheme a reader might come up with. More gen-

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erally, the theoretical indifference to the author (Cervantes may have spoken Spanish, but the monkeys don’t) requires the transformation of all marks into the equivalents of spots on a rock, intentional acts reconceived as natural events.17 Which is what makes the decision to treat them as any particular language, or as language at all, arbitrary. And which thus turns what they are—because what they are is what they’re treated as—into what they are for the reader.18 The emotions evoked in me by “nature,” Cage wrote, are, of course, evoked “unintentionally” (nature has no intentions)19 and, because “Emotion takes place in the person who has it” (because one person’s spots on a stone are another person’s Don Quixote), my “responses to nature are mine” (Silence, 10). The goal for Cage was an art that, rivaling nature in its refusal of intentionality, would therefore exist as an art only insofar as it existed for the viewer. It would be, in Fried’s terms, essentially theatrical, and since, Cage thought, theatre (more than music) is “the art” that most “resembles nature,” it would in fact be “theatre.” In the event, however, for reasons that our discussion of Barthes has already begun to suggest, photography would be as crucial as performance (and much more crucial than painting or literature) in the effort to imagine an art that, as unintended as nature, would belong to the world and to the beholder (rather than to the artist) and would thus undo what Jacques Rancière has characterized as the “modernist project of separation”—the project of separating the artwork from the world by separating it both from the things it represents and from the spectator to whom it represents them.20 Literature and painting can only achieve what Rancière calls “this inclusion of non-art,” he says, “by artistic means” (13). That is, a painting “can only imitate” non-art; it cannot actually be non-art. But a photograph can—in fact, must. Why? Because, on this view, a photograph is more like an object in the world than like a representation of an object in the world—more like a fossil of a trilobite than a drawing of one, more like a reflection of a person than a painting of one. Like the fossil and the reflection, the photograph has a causal connection to its referent that, unlike the painting or drawing, does not depend on the beliefs, desires, or in-

neoliberal aesthetics

tentions of some person. And this is true even though, in the case of the photograph (as opposed to the fossil and reflection), the photograph was almost certainly made by a person who did have relevant beliefs, desires, and intentions. Often, of course (especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), this structural limitation on the photographer—the fact that every photograph is causally tied to the thing it’s a photograph of in a way that almost no painting is21—was produced as an accusation. And more recently, when Roger Scruton writes that “in an ideal photograph it is neither necessary nor even possible that the photographer’s intention should enter as a serious factor in determining how the picture is seen,”22 he still means it as criticism. His idea is that our interest in a painting, even in a painted portrait, is an interest in how the artist saw the subject and in how he or she intended the beholder to see the subject. Whereas in a photograph, no matter what the photographer’s intentions, we see the subject for ourselves. And although one way of responding to such criticism has naturally been to point out the ways in which the photographer is, after all, able to assert some control over the picture, that defense is obviously not one that Barthes or Rancière is interested in making. Just the opposite. It’s precisely because the indexicality of the photograph (its causal connection to the thing it’s a photograph of) counts as an obstacle to the aesthetic intentions of the photographer (who, because of that causal connection, cannot and, more strikingly, need not saturate the photograph with his or her intentionality) that photography assumes its contemporary importance. Thus when Rancière praises the ability of the photograph to include “non-art” by non-artistic means, and when he insists on the inscrutability of the photographer’s intentions (“We don’t know what was going through Walker Evans’s mind,” he says of a famous photograph from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, “in framing his photo as he did” and, in particular, “the photo does not say whether it is art or not” [13]), he is preferring photography to painting in terms that echo, even if they invert, Scruton’s. It’s precisely its “poverty” as an art—not only the difficulty in deciding what some particular photographer’s intentions

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were but also the photograph’s structural openness to the possibility that the photographer “simply photographed what was in front of him without any particular intention”—that makes photography valuable in simultaneously postmodern and what Rancière characterizes as Kantian terms. Postmodern because it refuses what, in The Originality of the Avant- Garde, Rosalind Krauss called the claim to “Art” characteristic of the “aesthetic intention.”23 And Kantian for essentially the same reasons: “It is the order of the natural world that imprints itself on the photographic emulsion and subsequently on the photographic print.”24 So even when the photograph is made by someone who means something by it (even when, as Rancière says, it is “an intentional production of art which seeks an end”), what it gives you is nonetheless what the Kantian appeal to an art like nature requires: “the sensible experience . . . of beauty without end” (15). Put in these terms, we can say that the internal crisis of absorption— the transformation of the refusal of theatricality into the refusal of intentionality, the refusal, that is, of the effort to produce any effect on the beholder/listener/reader at all—was already in a certain sense prefigured in the pride of place assigned to natural beauty in the Critique of Judgment. Because the appeal to nature is both the refusal of the artist’s intentions and the embrace of the beholder’s response (in the absence or irrelevance of the writer, it’s the beholder who makes the spots on the rock linguistic), it undoes what Rancière calls the project of separation. The “big question of artistic modernity,” he says (explicitly following Fried), is the question of how “a work” can “be made coherent,” and the answer (again, following Fried) is “by excluding the spectator” (14). By contrast, the work that counts as unintended necessarily includes the spectator and thus cannot be made coherent. The invocation of Kant is thus in the service of the critique of modernity, which is to say, of intentionality, which is to say, of unity. But it’s Hegel, who, in Rancière, is called upon to provide an alternative (Rancière calls it a “reply in advance”) to a Fried-style account of modernist severing. And it’s Hegel’s reading of Murillo’s Beggar Boys that Rancière offers as a model for (or, at least, an instance of) the social

neoliberal aesthetics

or political project that he approvingly identifies with the refusal of modernist “severing.” What makes the Beggar Boys relevant is that, on the one hand, Hegel is struck by what Rancière paraphrases as the boys’ “total” “disregard towards the exterior” (in effect, what Fried would call their absorption), while, on the other hand, that disregard is not, he thinks, the kind designed to separate the painting from the world, to establish its coherence. Just the opposite. The Friedian “project of separation” is committed, Rancière thinks, to the representation of “characters absorbed by their task” (as in Fried’s reading of Greuze or in Jeff Wall’s Morning Cleaning), and what’s crucial to this project is not their activity but the way that activity produces their “passive absorption into the space of the painting” or the photograph. The figures are thus converted into a kind of formal device for establishing the coherence of the work: “What they are or do matters little, but what is important is that they are put in their place” (14). But the “disregard towards the exterior” of Hegel’s beggar boys, Rancière says, is very different, since what “shines forth” through their “poverty and semi-nakedness” is a “complete absence of care and concern.” Thus, calling our attention to the “one notion in particular” in Hegel’s description that, he says, most “grabs our attention”—“that of being carefree”—Rancière says that, far from being absorbed in some task, the boys are “doing nothing and not worrying about anything.” And this doing nothing not only saves them from passive absorption but aligns them with an art understood, not in terms of the “project of separation” from the world (from nature), but in terms of its non-instrumentality, an art that is thus identified with the world (with nature, which has no projects at all) and with the refusal to be put into place—whether that place is the formal space of the painting or the social space to which their position would seem to consign them. Thus the carefreeness of the Beggar Boys becomes for Rancière a kind of allegory of the refusal of art, an allegory that photography endorses by making art supererogatory. For just as the photograph requires no “artistic means” to include non-art (it doesn’t need to “imitate” non-art; it already is non-art), it also makes it possible for “the characters them-

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selves” to escape the (already-diminished) “art of the photographer” and “to play with the image of their being” (15)—to refuse to be put in their place. (That is, we don’t know and needn’t care what the photographer intended or whether, for that matter, he intended anything: recall the possibility, noted earlier, that Evans simply photographed what was in front of him without any particular intention.) After all, the “inner freedom” that Hegel sees in Murillo’s beggar boys is there only because Murillo put it there; the photograph—insofar as it’s open to every photographer to rid himself of the “attributes of the artist style”—makes it possible for the subjects of the photograph to themselves become its makers, “to introduce art into their sensible life,” to display their inner freedom on their own. And it’s not just inner. Even, or especially, when the subjects are “obscure beings,” the photograph’s inclusion of “non-art” makes it possible for them to “appropriate the aesthetic capacities that subtract them from a social identification” (13), to assert their freedom precisely in a way that “their social condition is supposed to forbid” (15). This “neutralization” of the “aesthetic hierarchy” functions also as a neutralization of the “social hierarchy” (14). That is, the photographer’s (structural and hence more or less inevitable) sacrifice of his own position in the “artistic hierarchy” liberates both the beholder and the subject, making it possible for us for us to begin to give up our “hierarchical vision of the world,” to stop seeing Evans’s “poor peasants” as if they had no capacity to make their own art and to begin looking at beggar boys as if they were Olympian gods. The aesthetic refusal of the modernist effort to establish the coherence of the photograph is, then, also a social refusal of the vision that devalues peasants and beggars. Where the modernist project of separation puts people “in their place,” Rancière’s critique of that project frees them from it or, more precisely, makes it possible for us to recognize and acknowledge that they are already free. Rancière’s critique of photographic form (the photograph’s critique of form itself) thus embodies an egalitarian social vision, one that is central not merely to Rancière’s own writing but also to the most successful social justice programs of the last half century. That is, the hi-

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erarchies it’s concerned to oppose are precisely hierarchies of vision, hierarchies produced by the way people see and treat each other. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987, 1991), Rancière’s particular target is the assumption by teachers of their own superiority; the pedagogical program articulated through his reading of Jacotot begins by recognizing “the principle of the equality of intelligence” and by describing the failures of mass education as a consequence of the refusal by a “society of contempt” to recognize that principle, its erroneous insistence on imposing a hierarchical vision of the distribution of intelligence.25 And in The Philosopher and His Poor (1983, 2004), it is the way in which philosophy (above all, in the form of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology) has reinforced, even as it seemed to question, the hierarchies of culture. But, especially in the US and the UK, the structure of such a critique is even more familiar (and, as we already began to note in the preceding chapter, more uncontroversially compelling) in the areas of sex and race.26 Feminism, for example, begins with the insight that women’s supposed inferiority to men is a product of the ways in which they have been systematically seen—and therefore treated—as if they were inferior to men. Women are inferior, in other words, only insofar as they are treated as inferior, and so the way to eliminate their inferiority is to begin by recognizing that it never existed in the first place, and thus to undo the hierarchy the vision created. The point is not, of course, that women have not been bound by real material conditions of inequality; it’s that those conditions are themselves the product of a falsely hierarchical vision. Thus the problem that feminism seeks to solve is sexism—a way of looking at the world and of women’s place in it—and the same thing is true of antiracism, which seeks to undo the hierarchies produced primarily by white people’s mistaken sense of their superiority to people of other races. The idea that “blacks are an inferior race” is what the philosopher Tommie Shelby calls a “social illusion,” an illusion that has subordinated blacks and that needs to be dispelled.27 More generally, antisexism, antiracism, and antihomophobia (Nelson’s triple liberation) argue for the replacement of one way of seeing the group in question (as inferior) with another way of seeing it (as equal). The core

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commitment of these projects is to the recognition of an equality that already exists but that our falsely hierarchical vision has kept us from seeing. And the increased centrality of the rise of antidiscrimination law is an effort to guarantee that even if we fail to get rid of our false vision, we cannot continue to act on it: I may still see you as inferior, but the law requires me to act as if I see you as equal. Indeed, even more radical pluralist efforts to extend the range of antidiscrimination beyond the perception of inferiority to the perception of difference as such (perhaps one should say to uncover and disallow the perception of inferiority hidden in the perception of difference as such) work the same way. Here the offense is not anchored in a mistaken judgment (she can’t do that job) but in the effort to impose a normativizing vision (she shouldn’t look or dress like that).28 The problem is different (it’s otherness, not perceived inferiority) but its source is the same: how we see people. And its solution is also the same: to get us to see them differently or, failing that, to make it illegal for us to act on the way we continue to see them. Rancière’s imagination of photography’s potential to disrupt our “hierarchical vision of the world” thus participates in a larger political and juridical movement.29 And this movement has been sufficiently successful that even those who think it hasn’t gone or even tried to go far enough (like Robert Post, the distinguished legal theorist and lead author of the tellingly entitled Prejudicial Appearances) are nonetheless prepared to characterize its first antidiscriminatory phase as having produced a “revolution in gender and racial relations” of which we should be “justifiably” proud and to hope that a refocusing and intensification of antidiscriminatory efforts will produce even greater results in the future.30 Which makes sense. But we can begin to remember the limitations of this revolution and of the conception of equality that has accompanied it by noting the difference between Rancière’s understanding of the “poor peasants” in Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Agee’s and Evans’s own understanding of them. In Rancière, what the photographs enable the poor to do is “appropriate the aesthetic capacities” they’re usually thought not to possess and thus to escape their

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“social identification.” Whereas in Agee and Evans, what matters is that the poor—as a consequence precisely of their being poor—really don’t possess any aesthetic capacities.31 There is “almost no such thing” as a “sense of beauty” among the three families, Agee writes, and he goes on to confess to “a strong feeling that the ‘sense of beauty,’ like nearly everything else, is a class privilege.”32 Where for Rancière the photographs are an occasion for the peasants to assert their aesthetic capacities, for Agee they are a kind of demonstration of what it is to be so “appallingly damaged”33 that you no longer have any such capacities, and the beauty of the photographs themselves makes its political statement, as we will see in chapter 4, insofar as and because it presents itself as art, as a beauty that their subjects could neither contribute to nor recognize. The crucial difference here is just the difference between seeing the beggar boys and peasants as damaged by our falsely hierarchical vision of them and seeing them as damaged by conditions that our vision may sanction or critique but did not produce. In other words, it’s one thing to insist that social hierarchies are illusory and therefore unjust; it’s a very different thing to think that, although unjust, they are very real. Or rather, it’s one thing to think that certain hierarchies are illusory and therefore unjust; it’s another to treat all hierarchies on this model. This is the point of Agee’s invocation of “class,” and it’s made vivid by the fact that his subjects are white farmers, not black. The distinctive damage to black tenant farmers is a function of the “illusion” of racism; the remainder, the damage common to black farmers and to white, is a function of capitalism. No illusion is required. More precisely, the damage done to the poor is produced by an economy, not a vision. Rancière’s insistence on the peasants and beggar boys as victimized by the false hierarchies of vision should thus be understood as part and parcel of what Slavoj Žižek has called the “degradation of the sphere of the economy” characteristic of all “the new French (or French oriented) theories of the Political,” a degradation that these theories share with their “great opponent, Anglo-Saxon Cultural Studies,” which focuses on the “struggle for recognition.”34 But, of course, it’s not just (or even primarily) Cultural Studies that has privileged a commitment to equal-

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ity that can happily coexist with economic inequality. The New Social Movements hailed in the 1980s by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and, in the United States, the revolution described above by Robert Post—the elaboration and extension of antidiscrimination law—have proven to be entirely compatible with the evolution in capitalism that has matched the increased intolerance of discrimination in all its forms, not just with an increased tolerance of but with an actual and spectacular increase in the gap between the rich and the poor. Or rather (since it’s no longer just Agee’s peasants who are falling behind), an increased gap between the rich and everyone else. Indeed, not only is an increased commitment to antidiscrimination compatible with increased economic inequality, it’s foundational for it: first for the Becker-style reasons I noted in chapter 1—it makes labor markets more efficient and thus helps to produce greater inequality— and, second, because it helps to legitimate the greater inequality it produces. The goal of antidiscrimination, after all, is not to eliminate or even mitigate the gap between the rich and the poor but to justify it, to make sure that the rich deserve their wealth and the poor deserve their poverty. In this respect, antidiscrimination functions not as the critique of contemporary capitalism but as its conscience, and both the New Social Movements and the flowering of civil rights law thus make a substantial contribution to a society that seeks not to hide its inequality but instead to wear it with pride. But their particular relevance for our purposes—that is, for the purpose of understanding the relatively recent history of theory—is neither the simultaneity of the rise in economic inequality and of the theoretical relegation of the economy to a secondary role,35 nor even the critique of discrimination and the deployment of that critique as a technology for legitimating all those inequalities that are not the consequence of racism and sexism. It is rather the relation between both the rise in economic inequality and the hegemony of antidiscrimination, on the one hand, and, on the other, the crisis of absorption and the emergence of a theory of the work of art that, imagining the escape from the artist’s intention, insists both on the primacy of the beholder

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and (especially in the photograph) of the subject. If, in other words, Rancière is right to see a certain egalitarian ambition in a photography that seeks to embrace its “poverty” (the limitations on the photographer’s intentionality) and its indexicality (the causal connection that links the picture irreducibly to its subject), it’s an egalitarianism of a very particular kind—a kind that’s critical of hierarchies of vision but has no purchase on the hierarchies embodied in rising Gini coefficients and the redistribution of wealth upward. Rather, the political meaning of the refusal of form (the political meaning of the critique of the work’s “coherence”) is the indifference to those social structures that, not produced by how we see, cannot be overcome by seeing differently. And it’s this refusal of form and embrace of vision that are at the heart of neoliberal aesthetics. Absorption and Invisibility

Viktoria Binschtok’s triptych Das große Medieninteresse (plate 3), made up of three photographs in her Spektakel series, is obviously in some sense an absorptive one. What we see in each of the photos are photographers, cameramen, and the boom mics of soundmen, most prominently the one with a windshield (a moplike cover that keeps wind from getting into the audio). We can’t, of course, see exactly what they’re all focusing on, but it’s clearly some celebrity or celebrities, and it’s clear also that the photographers’ absorption is serving to model photography itself as an absorptive activity. Thematically then, we might say, this photograph suggests a certain reservation about the identification of photography with vision—since its focal point is something that can’t be seen. And it also identifies photography not with the structural critique of absorption but with a kind of hyperbolic version of the absorptive—every figure in the photographs is intensely involved in some form of the recording process. Furthermore, the mere fact that it’s a triptych at least gestures toward a version of the severing (an assertion of the work’s form) that Rancière criticizes. In other words, Das große Medieninteresse begins to suggest

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a photographic practice that not only looks very different from the one imagined in Rancière’s “Notes on the Photographic Image,” but that could almost stand as a systematic critique of all the values associated with the primacy of vision. Almost, but only almost, since no one would think of identifying this picture—which so beautifully offers so much to look at—with a critique of vision. Indeed, as the other pictures in Spektakel (figure 1) series make clear, Das große Medieninteresse functions in the series as the emblem of a merely thematic invisibility. These pictures, extracted from videos (again of celebrities in a crowd of paparazzi), are (as the installation shot suggests) themselves extremely difficult to see. That is, it’s hard to see what they’re pictures of and it’s hard even to see them as pictures. Furthermore, the cause of this difficulty is photography itself. These pictures have been extracted from videos at moments when the apparatus required to make the celebrities visible—the camera flash— instead makes them almost invisible. The people taking the pictures, and especially the lights that make their pictures possible, here function as an obstacle to rather than a technology of visibility. Although their subjects are, in effect, performing for the camera, the camera functions both to efface the performance it has solicited and to jeopardize its own performance, its own production of a picture to be seen. This project is clearly an absorptive one—the harder the picture is to see, the greater its distance from the idea that it was made to be beheld. And if you were to make an object that was literally impossible to see as a picture, you would, of course, reproduce the crisis of absorption I described in the first section of this chapter: you would produce an object without any form, only this time by hypostasizing intentionality instead of refusing it. In fact, as the example of 4′33″ once again illustrates, the two go together. On the one hand, the idea of 4′33″ was to refuse to impose the composer’s intentions on the listeners; on the other hand, the first audience for the piece, which started walking out when the pianist didn’t play, “missed the point”—they “didn’t know how to listen” to the “accidental sounds” (the wind, the rain, their own talking) that took the place of the piano music they expected. When the

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Figure 1. Viktoria Binschtok, flash#5 (2008). C-print. 126 × 181 cm. From the series Spektakel. Courtesy of the artist.

crisis of absorption requires you to refuse intention and valorize accident, the thing you weren’t supposed to care about—the beholder’s or listener’s experience—becomes the only thing that matters. But when you seek to create a work in which only the accidents matter, then not only is the recognition of your intention to do that crucial, but also the audience’s actual experience becomes irrelevant—all that matters is that they recognize your intention. Indeed, insofar as no performance of 4′33″ ever sounds like other performances of 4′33″, we might say that the identity of the work consists in nothing but its “point.” Something like that chiastic structure is no doubt at the heart of the emergence of conceptualism, but for our purposes the relevant point

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is that Spektakel involves neither the repudiation of the photographer’s intentions (one way of refusing form) nor their hypostatization (the other way).36 Thus the difficulty in seeing the pictures in Spektakel is crucially the difficulty of seeing them as pictures, a difficulty only made possible by the fact that they obviously are pictures. (As objects, they’re easy.) Thus making something hard to see emerges as a distinctively photographic practice. Which is not to deny that the ambition to produce pictures that are so hard to see as pictures puts Spektakel near the limit of a recognizably photographic practice. But it’s what the limit is a limit of that makes the ambition relevant for the present argument. If for Rancière, in other words, it’s the refusal of form and the appeal to vision that constitutes photography’s recent interest, in Spektakel we see an instance of a photography that can be understood instead as something more like the assertion of form through the refusal of vision. And just as Rancière identifies photography’s critique of form with an aesthetic “vision” that imagines the “neutralization of the social hierarchy and the artistic hierarchy,” we can begin to imagine the politics that find expression in the assertion of form. Indeed, Rancière himself suggests what these might be in his discussion of Fried’s account of Andreas Gursky and particularly of Fried’s reading of the ways in which the human figures, the workers in Siemens, Karlsruhe, “although by no means hidden from sight, are easy to miss . . . they blend into the machinery.”37 For Fried, Rancière says, “It would be off-key . . . to see here any form of representation of capitalist dehumanization.” The difficulty in seeing them matters not because it signifies their victimization and thus demands our sympathy but, just the opposite, because it is one of the ways in which Gursky “resists or indeed repudiates all identification of the viewer with the human subjects of his images” (173). For Fried, in other words, the fact that the workers are so hard to see makes it (from one standpoint) impossible for the viewer to identify with them and establishes (from another standpoint) the separation of the photograph from the viewer. That is, not only do we not imagine ourselves as being in the position of the workers, we also don’t imagine ourselves—or anyone, including the photographer—as

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being in the position of the photographer. The way Fried puts this is to say that Gursky’s photographs characteristically make it seem “impossible that the images are grounded in an originary perceptual experience on the part of the photographer, with which the viewer is led in turn to ‘identify’” (164). Rather, the photograph is severed from the world precisely by being turned into something that no viewer—beginning with the photographer himself—has ever seen or could ever see in the world. Of course, the photograph itself is seen, but it’s seen as an intentional object, as form. It’s not only of something (e.g., lines of workstations, sometimes with workers at them), it’s about something (perhaps the invisibility of the worker in contemporary capitalism, or whatever you think it’s about), and its aboutness is what separates it from the things it’s of. Indeed, it’s the irrelevance both of the beholder’s point of view (what it’s about is not in any way determined by how the beholder sees it) and the photographer’s view (what it’s about is not necessarily what the photographer saw) that is the mark of its intentionality.38 In Rancière’s analysis, as we have already seen, this assertion of intentionality through the refusal of vision—that is, “the art of the photographer”—is just a way of putting “indifferent beings” like the workers “in their place,” denying their “freedom” and “interiority.” But we have also seen that the politics of that analysis—a politics in which the primary objectionable hierarchies are precisely those of vision—have proven, both in theory and practice, to be entirely compatible with the intensification of a hierarchy of wealth, a wealth that, not produced by how we see ourselves and each other, cannot be undone by how we see ourselves and each other. All of which is to say that in neoliberal politics, as in neoliberal aesthetics, the structural difference between capital and labor (a difference that no degree of identification can alter) is imagined out of existence. This is also to suggest how we might begin to understand the political meaning of those theoretical positions and especially those artistic practices that seek to overcome vision with form. My idea here is not exactly that ( just as the critique of form is the mark of a neoliberal politics) the assertion of form is the mark of an anti-neoliberal poli-

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tics—if only because, despite the hopes raised by the recent financial catastrophes,39 political and economic alternatives to capitalism seem as hard to conceptualize, much less to come by, as they did during the boom times (indeed, the upper echelons of the global economy seem to be doing even better than they did in the boom times). The idea instead is more modest, almost tautological: that the assertion of form embodies an alternative to neoliberal aesthetics and, in that alternative, the possibility and (for some) the desirability of an alternative to neoliberalism itself. My political point, in other words, is, first, that the crisis in absorption produced an aesthetics that proved to be deeply compatible with the changes in capitalism that originated theoretically in debates of the late 1930s, emerged politically in the late 1970s, and have flourished ever since. At the heart of these changes was a commitment to the importance of efficient markets and an egalitarianism defined as equality of access to those markets. That egalitarianism is violated by the refusal to hire workers because of their race or sex (refusal of access to the labor market) but not by the inequalities generated by the market itself— not, that is, by the exploitation of labor by capital.40 Indeed, the very concept of “labor” is here rendered problematic, since the worker is understood instead as a kind of capitalist—that’s the meaning of the wildly successful invention of the concept of human capital. Thus the very concept of class disappears from the analysis; as Dieter Plehwe discreetly remarks, “Neoliberals usually deny the existence of social inequality rooted in the capitalist class structure and instead prefer to speak of the diversity of individuals or possibly groups.”41 And it’s this denial of class that we see embodied in the critique of “hierarchies of vision.” Which is not to say, of course, that class can’t be seen; it’s to say instead that it isn’t produced by how we see and that its inequalities cannot be ameliorated by our seeing differently. Thus the emergence of a theory of the work of art (embodied, for our purposes, in a theory of photography) as offering above all the opportunity to see and be seen differently has its political role to play, simultaneously advertising the attractions of neoliberal equality and

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serving as its good conscience. And thus a photography that refuses the primacy of vision also refuses (whether it means to or not) to play that political role.42 More generally, we begin to get a radicalized anti-intentionalism— one that in denying the relevance of the artist’s intentions means not (as did Wimsatt and Beardsley) to provide a supposedly more “objective” basis for understanding the meaning of the work of art, but rather to collapse the work into the world and both repudiate the autonomy (separateness) of the work and refuse the distinction between art and “non-art.” In a 1967 essay on Minimalist sculpture, Clement Greenberg had already criticized the way in which versions of it “flirt[ed] with the look of non-art,”43 but what Fried called literalism instead of Minimalism (part of the reason he called it literalism instead of Minimalism) flirted not with the look of non-art but with its reality. If you thought of Minimalism as something like a style, you might think of people’s attraction to the “look of non-art,” for example, as “an episode in the history of taste” (148). But literalism was more than that—it was something that “deserve[d] to be called a position” (149). And what made it a position in Fried’s view was precisely its commitment to the work as an object—to objecthood not as a kind of art but instead of art. Another way to put this would be to say that literalism’s position was a theoretical one. Hence, for example, although we might plausibly understand Roland Barthes and John Cage as having two very different aesthetics (one absorptive and one theatrical, which is the way Fried understands them), it’s much less plausible to think of them as having two very different theoretical positions. It’s for this reason that, although Fried is surely right when he insists on the difference between what he calls “the inherently, necessarily dialectical status of antitheatricality as an aesthetic strategy and the (not at all Diderotian; rather more nearly Kantian) project of avoiding any manifestation of artistic intention, indeed of rejecting intention as such,”44 you can’t simply, as Fried himself makes clear, put someone like Barthes on the Diderotian rather than the Kantian side, since his aesthetic commitment to the punctum is distinguishable but not separable from his theoretical rejection of in-

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tention. In other words, it makes no sense to call Barthes an aesthetic Minimalist, but it makes complete sense to call him a theoretical literalist. In this context, the importance of the punctum has less to do with photography, less to do even with a kind of aesthetic, than it does (to redeploy Rosalind Krauss’s capital A) with the identification of Art with indifference to or separation from the viewer and with the critique of Art as the critique of its indifference to or separation from the viewer. Thus, as we will see in the next chapter, the most radical attacks on the hegemony of the postmodern as an aesthetic have also been attacks on a set of theoretical positions that have become so omnipresent they are often referred to simply as (this time marked by a friendlier capital) Theory. These new antiliteralist (although not necessarily antitheatrical) works not only embody the theoretical claim that the meaning of works of art is irreducibly determined by what Krauss (again, skeptically and disparagingly) called “aesthetic intention”45 but also find ways of asserting it. (The difficulty of seeing the picture—against the ease of seeing the object—in Binschtok’s Spektakel is one such way.) And the assertion of aesthetic intentionality—the insistence on the work as a work of art—has today its own politics. It’s not unprecedented. Rancière is right that the photographs in Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are of the greatest significance for art today, even if he is, in my view, wrong about what their significance is. But it is in the work of our own time, work produced under and against the twin signs of a postmodern ontology and a neoliberal meritocracy, that the claim to form becomes in itself the bearer of a class politics.

3 The Experience of Meaning Just as gravity is the substance of matter, so also it can be said that freedom is the substance of spirit. He g e l , Lectures on the Philosophy of World History

Chapter three the experience of meaning Literally Collapsing

About two-thirds of the way through Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, the narrator declares that “something very sad” has happened, “not in the normal sense but on a grander scale, the scale that really big events are measured in, like centuries of history, or the death of a star.”1 What’s happened is this. Just about to leave a gas station, he remembers that his windshield wiper reservoir is empty and gets one of the boys working in the station to fill it. But when he tries the “spurter button” to make sure that everything is working, no fluid comes out. He and the boys open the hood; despite having just been filled, the reservoir is empty. They fill it again; again it doesn’t work and again, when they check the reservoir, it’s empty. They look under the car to see if there’s a leak but there’s no sign of fluid. Its disappearance, he thinks, is like “a miracle.” Then he gets in the car, turns on the ignition and two liters worth of wiper fluid burst out of the dashboard, gushing all over him. What makes it a very sad thing is not that he has got himself covered with windshield wiper fluid but that there hasn’t been a miracle after all. Instead of having witnessed a “contravention of the very laws of physics” (174), the “laws that make swings stop swinging . . . and large, unsuspended objects fall out of the sky,” he’s seen a confirmation of them. The “triumph over matter” that seemed to have made it possible for the fluid to disappear into “pure, bodiless blueness” (as he thinks this, he looks up at the “blue and endless” sky) has turned out instead to be a triumph of matter, sending “watery debris crashing down to

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earth, turning the scene of a triumphant launch into the scene of a disaster.” And if this reminder of the law of gravity still seems to leave his sadness a little undermotivated, the invocation of large objects falling out of the sky provides a more personal cause, since the “accident” that is the condition of Remainder’s possibility was exactly that: “something falling from the sky” (3) and hitting him on the head, producing trauma, an abiding sense of unreality, and a large cash settlement.2 Remainder is about the narrator’s recovery and his effort to “feel real again” (67), an effort that, beginning with an episode of déjà vu, takes the form of recreating moments of his life before the accident, moments when he wasn’t “self-conscious” and “inauthentic” (24), when he felt himself to be living his life instead of “copying other people” (25) and “performing” (55) for them. But we are immediately alerted to the complexity of this ambition by the fact that the exemplary instance of authenticity is the performance (in Mean Streets) of the actor Robert De Niro, and by the fact that the narrator understands himself always—even before the accident—to have been “self-conscious” and hence inauthentic. He admires De Niro because “Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless. Whether it was lighting up a cigarette or opening a fridge door or just walking down the street: he seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it” (23). But, of course, every one of these “perfect” gestures is taking place in a movie. And the narrator insists that not only after the accident but “even before” it, “if I’d been walking down the street just like De Niro, smoking a cigarette like him. . . . I’d still be thinking, Here I am, walking down the street, smoking a cigarette, like someone in a film” (24). So the project of feeling “real again” is compromised from the start in two ways: first, by the fact that if you never actually felt real in the first place it’s hard to feel real “again”; second (and more importantly), by the fact that the ideal of the real is a representation, a performance in a movie. Indeed, from this standpoint, we can see that his unhappiness, when it turns out the windshield wiper fluid hasn’t just vanished into thin air, is an expression of a desire for the ideal understood in just this way. Up to this moment, what he’s been trying to do is recreate a memory

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from his pre-accident past—a scene that is “reproduced exactly” and an event that’s “re-enacted.” Now, however, what he wants is to recreate something not as it was, but as he wishes it had been. That is, he wants the fluid actually and not just apparently to vanish. “I want it so that it disappears,” he tells his assistants, “I want it to go up. . . . Disappear upwards. Vanish into sky” (182). The idea is that if in reality, there can be no “contravention of the very laws of physics,” in reenactments of reality understood as representations of reality, of course, there can. The law of gravity keeps windshield wiper fluid from rising of its own accord into the sky, but one of the distinguishing features of a representation is that you can mean what you can’t do. And even in a novel like Remainder, which accepts the conventions of realism, gravity need not apply; Remainder ends with the reenactor in a hijacked plane, refusing to let the pilot follow orders to return to the airport, flying aimlessly and feeling “really happy” (308). In the world, that plane will run out of fuel and fall to the ground. But in the novel’s representation of the world, it never does (and indeed, can’t, since then who would have told the story?). We can begin to feel the force of this distinction and of what it means for the narrator to refuse gravity by thinking about what it might mean to make the opposite choice and accept it. In, for example, some of the work of the artist Oscar Tuazon, gravity emerges as an issue precisely because the structures he makes are designed not to resist it; rather, what he wants, as he tells Julian Rose, is “to push materials to the point where they actually fail.”3 Rose’s idea here is that Tuazon’s installations—particularly in his use of the post-and-beam frame—address “the slippage between structural and representational concerns” introduced by that fact that “much of the frame structure’s appeal stems from the fact that it doesn’t just stand up, it looks like it should stand up” (221). One way to problematize this appeal would, of course, be to build a structure that looked instead like it shouldn’t stand up. But Tuazon’s interest, as Rose describes it, is not in making structures that look like they’re succumbing to gravity—rather, it’s in making structures where the question of what they look like has be-

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come irrelevant.4 The way Tuazon puts this is, “For me, the problematic is never one of representation.” The way Rose puts it is, “Tuazon’s most fundamental achievement, all the more profound for being so basic, is to build a structure that does not look like but simply is” (223). In Tuazon, then, the point of making structures that are “literally collapsing” is the “literally” (222); his refusal to resist gravity is a way of resisting representation instead. And the echo in Rose’s “does not look like but simply is” of the New Critical poem that “should not mean but be” suggests, inversely, what’s at stake in the reenactor’s desire to suspend gravity, in fact, what’s at stake in the whole idea of reenactment. On the one hand, the attempt by the narrator of Remainder to reproduce the first moment he remembers (buying a building that looks like the original, reconfiguring it so that it looks even more like the original, hiring reenactors to do what the people he remembers were doing) is an effort, as we’ve seen, to “feel real again,” a state that’s explicitly identified with McCarthy’s version of “simply is”: “De Niro was just being”; “It’s about just being” (24). On the other hand, the effort to achieve “just being” requires not an escape from but, as we’ve also seen, a complete commitment to the project of representation— not an alternative to “copying” but a requirement to copy—since the reenactment’s goal is to make the world just like it was. And the feeling of the real that’s actually produced when the reenactment succeeds is precisely the feeling of a representation, of something that looks like something else, of something that means. When, on the first reenactment, the narrator steps into the hallway—a hallway that’s been elaborately prepared (“scuffed down with sandpaper and smeared with a small amount of grease-diluted tar” (130) and then, when new lighting (more like the old lighting) is installed and there’s “too much sheen,” scuffed down again to get it “right”—the mark of success is the feeling not exactly of reality but of “an almost toxic level of significance” (148): “I’d walked down this stretch a hundred times before, of course—but it had been different then, just a floor: now it was fired up, silently zinging with significance” (142). Just a floor just is; only a reenacted floor means.

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The way the reenactor puts this is to say that nothing is there that isn’t “meant to be there” (128); nothing happens that isn’t “supposed” to happen. In the scene the narrator first remembers, some guy happened to be in the building’s courtyard, “tinkering with his motorbike” (138); in the reenactment, where he happened to be becomes “where he was supposed to be” because if he isn’t there, the reenactment won’t be “right.” In the remembered scene, there’s a crack in the bathroom wall; for the reenactment, because “cracks are sort of random,” it takes a full day of plastering to get it to set “in the formation we wanted.” The point, then, of the reenactments is not that they reconstruct a past in which the narrator felt more real, but that they turn the world from a place where people are who they are and do what they do into a place where who they are and what they do has “significance.” Contrasting Tuazon’s practice to the idea that architecture’s primary aesthetic goal should be “to represent symbolically” its relation to gravity, Rose remarks that “the relation of Tuazon’s structure to gravity is completely nonmetaphoric” (223). The reenactor’s practice reverses this. When, in reality, a man falls off his bike, trying to escape some other men, it’s because, the narrator says, “physics . . . tripped him up” (194). But when that same fall is reenacted and the man becomes instead “a symbol of perfection” (197), physics has nothing to do with it. There is no physics of symbolization. The reenactments thus assert the possibility of taking a world where nothing is meant and turning it into a world where everything is. Blank in Reality

But if the aesthetic of the reenactor is the exact opposite of Oscar Tuazon’s, the same can hardly be said for the reenactor’s creator, Tom McCarthy. In fact, McCarthy’s enthusiasm for what he calls “sheer materiality” and (quoting his fellow Necronaut Simon Critchley) for letting “matter matter” at least matches that of Tuazon and Julian Rose.5 From McCarthy’s standpoint, the narrator is not just mistaken to think that the “miracle” of the windshield wiper fluid—“vaporized, evaporated . . . matter . . . becoming unmatter—not surplus matter . . . but pure bodi-

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less blueness” (171)—has actually taken place, he is more profoundly mistaken in wanting it to have taken place, in preferring “unmatter” to “surplus matter.” It’s not for nothing that the website “dedicated to the work of Tom McCarthy” is surplusmatter.com or that McCarthy expresses his enthusiasm for Friedrich Kittler by calling him “The AntiHegel.”6 Or that Critchley is a huge fan of Jacques Derrida’s Signéponge and that McCarthy thinks that Francis Ponge’s Le parti pris des choses is “the greatest anti-idealist manifesto possible” since, in opposition to “Hegel and his followers” (for whom, he says, “the task of art is to abstract the world into pure concept”), Ponge “returns both world and concept to their rich material bases.”7 Setting aside the question of whether he’s right about Hegel, McCarthy’s enthusiasm for “sheer materiality” is more than a match for the reenactor’s desire for a miracle that would overcome it. And, in recent years, that enthusiasm has become contagious. Bruno Latour’s much cited “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004), for example, begins to answer its eponymous question by reminding us (as if he were McCarthy criticizing the reenactor) that critique (by which Latour means the redescription of the “objects of science” as social constructions) was always “useless against objects of some solidity,” like “neurotransmitters” or “gravitation.”8 And if, for Latour, the repudiation of critique is also something of a retraction—since, as he notes, his own work as a historian of science could be at least partially held responsible for the antirealism of the “bad guys” he deplores—part of its interest has been the way in which he participates in a more general effort (epistemological and aesthetic) to “cultivate” what he calls “a realist attitude.” Thus, in literary studies, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s influential introduction to the special issue of Representations titled “How We Read Now” ends by invoking Latour’s appeal to “real objective and incontrovertible facts” and is marked throughout by a suspicion of critics who, disdaining “objectivity, validity, truth,” do not “disclose the text’s true meaning but alter it.”9 But it’s as an account of the work of art, rather than as an expression of the (apparently perennial10) desire for ethical interpretation, that this formulation finds its

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real force. For the question of the work’s “true meaning” is raised by Best and Marcus in the context of an appeal to Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” and to her idea that the critic of a work should “show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than . . . show what it means” (10). The idea, that is, is not exactly that the critic should search on the surface for the work’s true meaning but that she or he shouldn’t search for meaning at all.11 And, of course, the claim that the critic should be interested in what the work is rather than in what it means is radicalized in Rose’s account of Tuazon, where it’s not just the critic but the artist who is indifferent to the meaning and where in fact the structure (which “does not look like but simply is”) can’t be said to have any meaning. It’s here that the exhortations to better epistemological behavior turn into the demand to let matter matter. For McCarthy, “this type of materiality lies at the heart of the practice of poetry,” a practice he also calls (in relation to his own work) “writing the earth,” and that he imagines as the inevitable failure of any cartographer to map any territory.12 The explorer Ernest Shackleton’s doomed effort “to conquer and map the blank, uncharted space of the southern polar region,” and how, as the water froze, “that very blank space itself, the tabula rasa of sea, turned material” and crushed his ship, is emblematic here. The attraction of the blank, of the sheerly material, is that it “resists” our mappings, it doesn’t allow us to “impose” our “readings on the land,” and so, if you’re a writer, it provides a model for “the moment when” (as an announcement of one of McCarthy’s appearances put it) “language threatens (or promises) to become illegible.”13 For such a writer, it’s not just that matter matters, it’s that the matter that matters is language (that words become ice or wood and steel). To some degree, we can see this progression in Critchley’s 2005 book on Wallace Stevens, Things Merely Are, which understands Stevens as committed to a “poetry [that] can be brought closer to things in their remoteness from us and our intentions.”14 The question is how close. It’s one thing to think of the “reality of mere being” as “without human purpose and human meaning” (75). It’s a slightly different thing to take

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as an emblem of one’s own poems a bird whose song, “like the cry of leaves, like the howling of the dove, is without human meaning and feeling” (74). And it’s still another thing to imagine one’s own poems as somehow able to succumb to the threat or fulfill the promise of actually being without meaning, of becoming illegible in a way that amounts, as it does for Tuazon’s structures, to “literally collapsing.” In literary theory, the most rigorous defense of this literalism (by which I mean the only defense actually to understand that it is a defense of literalism—most of the others think of themselves as defending the idea of multiple meanings) was the work of Paul de Man (like Sontag, invoked approvingly by Best and Marcus, and also by McCarthy). For de Man, meaning could only be an “illusion,” albeit an inescapable one; the closest language could come to the truth of what he took to be Kant’s radical “materialism” was in the poetic “dismemberment of language” that turned signs into sounds or marks or, better still, in the “blank” space between stanzas of a poem like Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.”15 In Remainder, both the appeal of this literalism and its limits are on display through the reconfiguration of Shackleton’s desire to fill in the “blank space” on the map as the dismay of the interior decorators who aren’t allowed to fill in the “blank stretches” in the reenactor’s plan. Seeking to reproduce as exactly as possible the original content of his déjà vu (the crack in the plaster, the sounds from the courtyard below, the look of the hallway outside his room, the people he encountered in that hallway), the plan calls for the “blank stretches” in the reenactor’s memory to be “blank in reality” (120). But the interior decorators don’t like blanks any more than Shackleton did. While the reenactor wants to recreate exactly the bits he remembers and to turn the bits he doesn’t into what he calls “neutral space,” with “doorways papered and cemented over, strips of wall left bare and so on” (120), they want to give the building what they think would be an appropriate “look” (“downbeat, retro . . . faux-flock wallpaper throughout”). So in the end, the decorators get fired and the reenactor replaces them with a set designer for movies, who works out perfectly, since in film “you only have

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to make the bit the camera sees look real; the rest you leave unpainted, without detail, blank” (120–21). But if the impulse to leave the blank parts blank looks plausibly like a way of refusing to “impose” one’s reading on the world, of remaining “passive in front of its materiality,” it functions in fact as a way of doing just the opposite. First, what the papering and cementing over make clear is that there can’t “in reality” be an equivalent to the gaps in memory. In the reenactor’s memory there is nothing (the blank is just not there), but in the reenactment there is something (paper, cement), and what that something does is not embody what isn’t but represent it. Because there can be no nothing, there is only the representation of nothing. (Because nothing cannot be, it can only be meant.) Second, in representing what has been excluded, the “blank stretches” represent the fact of exclusion itself. The blank doesn’t, in other words, just leave something out; it marks the difference between what is out and what is in, between what counts as reenactment and what doesn’t. From this standpoint, the blank is not what resists or lies outside representation, it’s the condition of representation’s possibility, the frame that instead of letting matter be matter, turns some matter into surplus. And it’s precisely this transformation that the reenactor seeks to produce. One of the things he can’t remember is the face of the concierge in his building. It came to him, he says, “only as a blank” so he requires the woman portraying the concierge to wear a hockey mask over her own face “to blank it out” (137). Here the frame that makes the representation possible has been incorporated into it, imported from the edge to the center, not to be blank but to represent (what is already a representation) blankness. On the day of the first reenactment, it’s as he approaches the “concierge” in the hall—with her “stumpy arms” and “white ice-hockey mask”—that he is exposed to the “almost toxic level of significance” (148)—the “tingling,” the “zinging,” the “intensity”— that identifies the experience of the reenactments as the experience of meaning. “Matter,” McCarthy says, “will always elude attempts to abstract it. There will always be a remainder.”16 But of course, it’s only abstraction—the blankness that turns something (a hockey mask, pa-

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per, cement) into the representation of nothing—that makes the very idea of the remainder possible. Meaningfulness Itself

Simon Critchley is not the only one to see in Wallace Stevens an exemplary instance of the tension between the work and its meaning. In a 2007 interview with Lynne Tillman, the photographer James Welling tells her that when he first “started taking photographs,” Stevens’s idea “that he wanted to delay the reading or the intelligence of the poem as long as possible” was “important” to him, and that in his own work he wants to “slow down that kind of recognition.”17 One way to understand this project was articulated early in Welling’s career by Rosalind Krauss when she described his work as “holding the referent at bay, creating as much delay as possible between seeing the image and understanding what it was of.”18 And it’s certainly true that photographs like those belonging to the aluminum foil series mentioned in chapter 1 do not instantly or easily read as pictures of aluminum foil, particularly when what the series is actually called is Untitled (1980–1981). Furthermore, it’s not as if figuring out what the referent is amounts to figuring out how to read the photograph; once we discover that they are photographs of a piece of aluminum foil, it’s not as if we’ve arrived at their meaning. Like Critchley’s Stevens, Welling here is flirting with a kind of alternative to “reading.” In Stevens, Critchley describes this as “the realist temptation,” the idea that “poetry is concerned with the rubbings of a reality” that is “alien to the poet” (85). In Welling, the fantasy is not exactly that of alienation, but when he wonders “what would happen if place were the work” and what it would mean to think that what photographers do “is make rubbings from places,” he too is imagining an art that is more like a trace of the world than a picture of it.19 The attraction of this realism, then, is not in the way the work looks like the world; it has to do instead with its causal connection to the world, a connection that photographs have to the thing they’re of whether or not they look like them. It’s this connection that is fore-

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grounded when Welling imagines delaying the recognition of what the photograph depicts and when that delay is radicalized in the McCarthystyle appeal to “sheer materiality,” to the work that declares itself a piece of the world precisely because, like the structure in Tuazon, it “does not look like but simply is.” And it’s in this context that we can see the importance of the photographs and photograms in Phil Chang’s 2012 series Cache, Active—works clearly influenced by Welling20—which not only don’t look like anything and which not only seem designed (like Tuazon’s structures) to insist on that fact but seem also to go one step further: it’s not just that they’re literal; it’s that they seem to become literal before your eyes. The way they do this is through a kind of performance. When you first see them, they are, essentially, wrapped in dark plastic and so not exposed to light. Made on photographic paper past its expiration date and left unfixed, the minute they’re uncovered, they start to fade and, after several hours, the image pretty much disappears, leaving behind a reddish brown monochrome (plate 5). There is thus an important sense in which you don’t just look at these photographs, you watch what they’re doing; that’s what I mean by calling it a kind of performance. And it’s more like a live performance than a movie or video since it’s not repeatable—you can’t just play it again once it’s over. But also—and here the performance model gets complicated—it’s not just over when it’s over. Something (the monochrome) remains. So what we’re being asked to pay attention to is not just the performance and not just the final object but the relation between them, the process that produces the remainder. This process is particularly vivid in a (for Chang not at all atypical) piece like Two Sheets of Thick Paper on Top of Two Sheets of Thin Paper (plate 4).What makes it typical for Chang and what links it immediately to the issues we’ve been discussing is the fact that the subject of the original image (the four pieces of paper) is both importantly like and importantly unlike its support (another piece of paper, the paper it’s printed on). When the plastic is taken off, the photo looks for a while as it does in plate 4, depicting several sheets of layered paper on another

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sheet of paper, the (untreated) photographic paper; that’s the likeness. Because of the layering, the surfaces depicted in the photogram have real volume (and the title suggests Chang’s interest in that fact). By contrast, the thickness or thinness of the paper that constitutes the object that is the photogram (a section of it is visible as black on the bottom) seems immaterial. There are, in other words, five pieces of paper visible in the photograph, four of them depicted. What we’re looking at is in fact only one piece of paper, but the question of its thickness or thinness is never raised. So what I mean by calling the weight of the photographic paper immaterial is, first, that the photogram renders the thickness of the paper it’s on irrelevant and, second, that this irrelevance—the difference between the paper it’s a picture of and the paper it’s on—is significant, is what the photogram is about. And significance is not a physical property of the picture; aboutness is not material. At the same time, however, the materiality of the photographic paper (not its volume but the fact that it’s expired and untreated) does very quickly begin to matter since, as the light begins to take effect, the depicted paper (the two thick sheets on top of the two thin ones) becomes harder and harder to see (plate 5). Which means not only that the contrasting colors and volumes of the paper are lost but also that the contrast between the (paradoxical) immateriality of the photogram as an object and the (inversely paradoxical) materiality of its subject also begins to disappear. Which means further that, insofar as we have thought of the photograph not just as embodying this contrast but also as being about it, it’s not only the contrast but also the aboutness that fades. The original photogram depicted sheets of paper; fading to reddish brown, it stops depicting anything. The original photogram was about the immateriality of the difference between a piece of paper and the representation of a piece of paper. The eventual monochrome may be understood as having lost or abandoned or repudiated (it’s hard to find a nonaffective verb) its capacity to represent, and as having thus given up the claim to be about anything. From this standpoint, it’s not hard to see in Cache, Active a photo-

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graphic version of McCarthy’s enthusiasm for “sheer materiality.” Fading away may not be exactly the same as falling down, but it does reproduce the “nonmetaphoric” relation to the laws of physics that Rose finds in Tuazon and that the reenactor gets from the windshield wiper fluid. And along the same lines as their materialism, where the goal is neither to look like something nor to mean something but instead to be something, a picture like Two Sheets of Thick Paper on Top of Two Sheets of Thin Paper may begin by both looking like and meaning (it looks like the sheets of paper it’s of; it’s about the relation between those sheets of paper and the paper it’s on), but it ends (in the reddish brown monochrome) by simply being. Seen this way, the transformations of Cache, Active don’t just exemplify the interest in the sheerly material, they enforce it. Turning a picture into a discolored sheet of used-up photographic paper, they don’t just let matter matter, they also make metaphor (and meaning and representation itself) into matter. So far, then, we have a photo that begins by being about the difference between what it is and what it represents, but, as the representation disappears, undoes that difference, leaving behind a remnant (or remainder) of the picture it began as. But when we put it this way, it’s not hard to see that an account along these lines can’t quite be sufficient since, if it’s possible to see the final monochrome as the culmination of the process through which a picture disappears, it’s also possible to (actually, impossible not to) see it as the culmination of the process through which maybe not a picture but certainly a work of art is created. How did Chang make the particular monochrome that is Two Sheets? By making a photogram on expired photographic paper, leaving the image unfixed and exposing it to light. Put this way, what I’ve been calling the work’s performance is nothing other than the causal account of its production, the kind of account you can give for any work of art. The difference is just that Chang has folded the process through which the work is produced into the experience of seeing it. But, of course, this is a difference that matters. For one thing, in a kind of paroxysm of medium specificity, it absolutely insists that the monochromes be seen as photographs. For another, in insisting that the way the monochromes

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have been made is crucial to our experience of them (in insisting that our experience of them would be inadequate if we didn’t know how they were made, or would be different if they had been made differently), it makes them into objects that have to be understood, objects that don’t resist interpretation but require it. What I mean by this is, first, that we see the final monochromes not only as being what they are but, more important, as also having a relation to what they aren’t (or, at least, aren’t any more). They are, in a certain sense, abstractions, but, in a variation on the old Lacanian formula—“the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing”21—they continue to bear a relation to the depicted things they have replaced. This relation is most obvious in some of the photographs where you can actually see a trace of the original image. But it’s just as important when you can’t, where (as in the photograms) the indexical trace of the image has been effaced and where what the monochrome marks is precisely that effacement. In both cases, the monochromes signify the absence of the original image, functioning either as a kind of screen behind which, or darkness into which, what once was visible can be imagined to have retreated, or, more directly, as a kind of epitaph for something that is gone. This signifying function marks an inversion of the demand for the thing that, instead of meaning, “simply is.” What we get here is a thing that in order to mean cannot simply be, i.e., a thing determined in its being as much by what it isn’t as by what it is. On this view, then, Cache, Active embodies an encounter not just with meaning but, to recall Michael Fried’s famous remark about the sculpture of Anthony Caro, with “meaningfulness as such.”22 The alternative to Caro, for Fried, was Minimalism. Fried called it literalism, and we have seen why—literalism names not a style but a theoretical position, the one exemplified in Donald Judd’s description of the neither “allusive” nor “descriptive” “central hole” in Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1962): “The black hole,” Judd said, “does not allude to a black hole; it is one.”23 But if, in one way, the parallel between Fried’s literalists and Tuazon, Rose, and McCarthy, on the one hand, and Fried’s modernists and Chang and

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the reenactor, on the other hand, is almost exact; in another way, it’s more than a little misleading. For one thing, the modernists Fried was defending had developed their own position prior to and independent of Minimalism, whereas Chang has never lived in an art world in which the appeal of the literal—call it postmodernism—was not being articulated in one form or another. Hence, although Chang’s position is not Judd’s (it’s closer to the opposite of Judd’s), it’s not Caro’s either, if only because of the way in which instead of ignoring (much less denouncing) the appeal of the literal, it can only establish itself by experiencing that appeal. The repudiation of what “simply is” in Cache, Active is thus made possible only by a certain intimacy with it. In fact, the fading of the image produces both the appeal of the literal (as a moment in the constitution of a work of art rather than as an object) and its critique (as something that needs to be overcome rather than refused), in ways unavailable either to postmodernism or to modernism. We can see another version of both the appeal and the critique—a version, in other words, of something that really is distinctively postpostmodern (and not just some new attitude toward irony) because it has only been made possible by postmodernism—in the work of Chang’s exact contemporary, Arthur Ou, and in the way, for example, that Ou’s Earthworks—produced in part by the application of bleach to the negative—equally but differently insist not exactly on their literality but on their relation to it. Of course, there’s a sense in which, from the scratching and painting of the Pictorialists to the scratching and burning of Marco Breuer, manipulation of the negative or the print has always been central—sometimes embraced, more often excoriated—to the problematic of art photography. And photographs like Earthworks seem locatable within that problematic. But if the point of a Pictorialist practice like Frank Eugene’s retouching the background of The Horse (figure 2) was to subordinate the materiality of the medium to the representation (Charles Caffin described Eugene as interested only in the “effect” and not at all in the means by which it had been produced), and the point of Breuer’s burning (in works like Untitled [C-287]) is to insist on the materiality of the medium as a way (in James Elkins’s for-

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Figure 2. Frank Eugene, The Horse (ca. 1890). Royal Photographic Society, Bradford. Photograph: SSPL/National Media Museum/Art Resource, New York.

mulation) to “undermine representation,” Ou’s manipulations (though obviously closer to Breuer than to Eugene) do something else.24 They’re closer to Breuer because the fact that they’re photographs (as opposed, say, to the etching that “The Horse” was always said to look like) matters to them, but they can hardly be said to participate in the project of “renouncing representation” that James Elkins describes. It would be more accurate to say that they foreground the representation. What you see is two forms, one some kind of sculpture, the other what one writer has described as “inexplicable dark shapes,” sometimes separate from the sculpture (as in figure 3, Earthworks 1), sometimes

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Figure 3. Arthur Ou, Earthworks 1 (2007). Gelatin silver print. 16 × 20 in. Courtesy of the artist and Brennan & Griffin, New York.

overlapping it and making almost a single (albeit composite) object.25 The shapes thus have a certain relation to each other as shapes—of similarity and difference—but the more fundamental relation between them is that one sits on the ground while the other doesn’t. Which is fundamental because it suggests the way in which they belong to two different orders of representation. The sculptural shape is an object in the world (like Eugene’s horse); it’s what the picture is a picture of. But the hovering one is not a picture of anything. It has been made not by the film recording its presence in the world but by the nega-

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tive being subjected to chemicals that erode the photographic emulsion. So when you’re looking at the sculptural form, you’re looking at an object the film makes visible; when you’re looking at the hovering one, you’re looking at the film itself. It wouldn’t exactly be right to call the Earthworks mixed media—both these elements are irreducibly photographic—but the ontological difference between the two central elements nonetheless constitutes a kind of mixing. The manipulation of the negative functions neither to enhance the representation (à la Eugene) nor to replace it (à la Breuer), but rather to produce a difference that’s not resolvable into either. In a parallel series, Screen Tests, this doubleness of the mixed medium—the different causal accounts of how the shapes were produced—is turned into a kind of contradiction. What you see (in figure 4, Untitled [Screen Test] 1, 2006) is both what the negative makes it possible to see (the lattice) and the negative itself, here understood as mutually exclusive. That is, you can see the negative only when, instead of making the world visible, it makes it invisible. Thus the ordinarily complementary relation between the photographic apparatus and the world it makes visible is rendered as an aporetic one. In these photos, the support makes its appearance as itself a kind of screen—making parts of the world invisible. Or, turning the relation around, we could say that the image acts as a kind of screen for the negative, as if only when the image is bleached out can we see past it to the material on which it was inscribed. Either way, what’s produced is a sense of the material relation between the image and the negative, which is to say, the feeling that the photograph has volume as well as surface, that the images have a depth, albeit not the depth of the objects they’re images of. This feeling is encouraged by the fact that Ou is interested in and sometimes shows his pictures in conjunction with objects that do have the density of the sculptures in Earthworks (or the somewhat different density of the lattices in Screen Tests); it marks the ways in which the eroded surfaces that produce the nonsculptural forms in the photographs are efforts to imagine the photographs themselves as sculptural, insisting on the density of the negative by removing something from it.

Figure 4. Arthur Ou, Untitled [Screen Test] 1 (2006). Gelatin silver print. 16 × 20 in. Courtesy of the artist and Brennan & Griffin, New York.

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Furthermore, in a complementary gesture, the objects exhibited in this way are sometimes framed in a shelf (figure 5) or, as with the one on the lower right, frame themselves, as a kind of allusion to the flat surface of the photograph. That is, insofar as the whole idea of the sculptural involves something you can’t see—the other side—an installation like this one thematizes the other side’s invisibility by presenting objects that (unlike the images in photographs) really do have other sides. These other sides, however, are inaccessible; the little objects are on shelves attached to a wall—you can’t walk around them. For a photographer, this attraction to the three-dimensional would seem a little unusual if we hadn’t already recognized the centrality in the art of the last half century of what Shannon Ebner (in a conversation with Ou) calls a “kind of frustration with the two-dimensionality of the image and the surface.”26 That’s what Judd liked about Bontecou’s black hole and why, more generally, he preferred “specific objects” located in “actual space” to the space defined by “paint on a flat surface.”27 Of course, the exemplary instance of Ebner’s frustration (made canonical by “Art and Objecthood”) was Tony Smith’s night ride on the “artificial landscape” of the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike and his subsequent realization that he no longer wanted anything he could “put a frame around” (Fried, Art and Objecthood, 157–58). But, as the prominence of the frame in Ou’s objects already begins to suggest, the differences are as meaningful as the similarities. Nothing could look less like the heroically industrial specific objects of Minimalism than the ceramicky knickknacks in Ou’s cabinet. If you want to hang something that looks a little more like Judd in the twenty-first century, you’re better off with Brian Ulrich’s Montgomery Ward Door Pulls (2011) (figure 6), and the whole point of them is that, like Montgomery Ward itself, the look of the machine-made in American art today is over. Today, China is by far the world’s largest producer of steel (the US share of production has dropped from a high of 36 percent to 6 percent; China’s is over 45 percent).28 It’s also the largest producer of knickknacks. Ou’s were made by a factory in Shenzhen, which, he says, “is purportedly the manufacturing capital of the world right now.” “Many

Figure 5. Arthur Ou, On Every New Thing There Lies Already the Shadow of Annihilation (2006). Ceramic, wood, glass. 32 × 30 in. Courtesy of the artist and Brennan & Griffin, New York.

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Figure 6. Brian Ulrich, Montgomery Ward Door Pulls (2011). Installation of found milledaluminum handles. Courtesy of the artist.

foreign companies,” he goes on to note, “are setting up manufacturing plants there.”29 One shorthand way to characterize the difference between the allure of three-dimensionality for Minimalism and its allure today, then, would be just to note that Minimalism antedates (albeit barely) the advent of the neoliberal globalization that’s the condition of possibility for Ou’s desire to imagine what is, in effect, a sculptural photography. But what matters most is the desire for the frame, not nostalgia for the trade surplus (the last time US exports exceeded imports was in

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1975). Indeed, one could hardly be nostalgic for Judd-style specific objects since they’ve actually proliferated rather than disappeared. Not coincidentally, the narrative of decline embodied in trade deficits has been matched by a more triumphalist story in which the economic success of the United States since the 1970s (in terms of GDP) has precisely depended on the ability to bring global capital to the US and thus get the rest of the world to finance those deficits. How was this accomplished? Between 1985 (as it happens, the year Ou’s family emigrated from Taiwan to the US) and 1990, the cost of labor in the US was held essentially constant, while its main competitors saw double-digit increases. And, as we’ve already seen, labor costs have stayed down. To this day, as Yannis Varoufakis says, American workers “have not even recovered their 1973 real purchasing power.”30 But, of course, the productivity of labor was increasing even if its cost wasn’t, so American corporations did very well. After all, to quote the ebulliently indignant Varoufakis again, “What happens when real wages fall, labour costs per unit of output remain stagnant and productivity booms? Profits reach for the sky!” (305). In this sense, the transformation of the industrial objects of Minimalism into Ou’s ceramic tchotchkes embodies not the decline of the United States and the rise of China, but the success of capital and the disciplining of the working class. Minimalism may have been (plausibly if somewhat hyperbolically) understood as a celebration of something that was distinctively American, but no one would think to identify capitalism with the US now, not because the US is any less capitalist than it was, but because China and the former USSR and East Germany are so much more capitalist than they were. Which is just to say that what globalization has been the globalization of is capitalism. But it’s not just the economic conditions that have changed; the theoretical ambition is different too. In Minimalism, the attraction to the third dimension was already the expression of a desire to resist representation, to make objects that had presence rather than meaning. And we can see that this ambition has been a persistent, in fact intensifying,

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one. For, on Rose’s view, the ambition in Tuazon is to criticize what seems to him the insufficiency of Minimalist materialism, to refuse Minimalist seriality (which, after all, is a kind of order and hence involves a kind of idealism) and replace it with “contingency” (224). Or, as Rose puts it, using terms like those he applies to Tuazon but speaking now of his own work, to “shift from material—that which is sublimated or invested with symbolic power—to matter—that which simply is.”31 In photography, this commitment to the photograph as a refusal of the symbolic can, as we’ve already seen, take two forms. The first (on the Peirce/Barthes/Kendall Walton model) is to understand the photograph as a trace or emanation of its referent rather than a representation of it (the fossil of a trilobite is not a symbol of a trilobite). The second insists not so much (or not only) on the photograph’s distinctive causal relation to its referent as it does on the possibility of separating itself from the referent—indeed, from reference itself. This separation is narrativized (even if ultimately refused) in the fading images of Cache, Active and exemplified in Elkins’s description of Breuer who, he says, produces an “acutely radical moment” in the history of photography because of his commitment to the “reality effect” of the photographs as “objects themselves.”32 What’s radical here is not the rejection of photography’s traditional relation to the referent but the redescription of it—once we think of the photograph as refusing the symbolic, we can think of the “object itself” as confirming rather than departing from a photography understood from the start as nonrepresentational. Of course, for the Pictorialists this was a problem. The great anxiety of Pictorialism was that photography couldn’t really be art because the world and the camera (not the artist) made the photograph; Eugene’s colleagues took as criticism what James Elkins means as praise when he says that Breuer’s work gives us “immediate evidence of the world,” “images made without human intervention.”33 But, of course, the relevant fact now is that Elkins does mean it as praise and that what his radical moment in the history of photography radicalizes is the shift from material to matter, the production of the photograph as an object in actual space. At the same time, however,

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it’s precisely this commitment to “renouncing representation” that has given new meaning to the possibility of affirming it. It’s only because there’s an important sense in which the photograph isn’t a representation and because that sense has been crucial not only to photography but, since Minimalism, to art history that establishing it as a representation has the meaning it does. Which is just to say that there’s all the difference in the world between an art that assumes its “symbolic power” and an art that, no longer making such an assumption, seeks both to establish and to thematize it. In Ou’s work, we can see this need to acknowledge the photograph as simultaneously a physical object and a representing one in the extraordinary barred photographs of the series Test Screens (figure 7), where the effect of depth of the photograph (as itself an object in actual space) is achieved by the relation between the eroded portions of the negative and the represented ocean and sky, so that the three-dimensionality of the photograph is not only embodied (how could it not be?) but also asserted (by the bars) and represented (by the way in which the sky and especially the ocean are made to seem as if they are visible both behind and through them). Instead of the ideality of two dimensions or the materiality of three, we have a conceptual rendering of their mutual imbrication. And if, in Test Screens, a version of the lattice that we first saw as the object of interrupted vision in Screen Test reappears (in the bars) as the structuring principle of the photograph itself, in View 1 (plate 6), the work of representation is performed by an actual paper-made lattice that serves both as the photograph’s subject and as an allegory of its conditions of possibility. Ou himself connects this picture with the tradition of the Chinese garden (characteristically understood as a threedimensional painting), and he identifies the lattice with the pavilion in the garden, “a framing device” through which one views the picture. Or rather, which makes the garden into a picture. But in Ou’s photograph, the dimensionality of the frame itself is insisted upon, both because of the angle at which we see it and because of the way in which the flowers pass through it. In other words, the frame marks the difference between

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Figure 7. Arthur Ou, Test Screen 2 (2011). Archival pigment print on silver rag paper. 41 × 51 in. Courtesy of the artist and Brennan & Griffin, New York.

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actual space and the space of the representation while belonging to both so that, instead of actual space being the thing that, as Smith said, you can’t frame, “you just have to experience,” it is turned here into a thing you can’t just experience. What View 1 is a view of is the frame itself, the non-identity of the physical frame and the conceptual one. It’s a view of something that cannot ( just) be seen—namely, the fact of form, the ontological autonomy of the work of art. It’s like in Remainder where, by the end, the reenactor has become so committed to making the reenactments “real” that he decides to relocate the reenactment of a bank robbery from an abandoned warehouse to an actual bank, to what counts, in the context of the novel, as “real space” (282). His understanding is that all bank employees have been trained to deal with robberies, so even though they haven’t been hired and rehearsed by him, he can count on their behaving in the ways they’re supposed to. Of course, for them it won’t be a “performance,” it will just be “a bank robbery,” as indeed it will be for the world. But the reenactments aren’t for the world; they’re not done for an “audience,” as the reenactor says, but “for me” (248). So insofar as the “re-enactment” can be “merged with the event” (265), the effect will be actually to separate the reenactor from the world (“second-hand and second-rate”) and enable him to “live in” its “core”—“seamless, perfect, real” (265). To want the perfect in the real is to want the frame or the form in the world, and in McCarthy (as in Nelson and Poe) this simultaneity of concept and matter is only made possible by death: “no beauty without violence,” says the reenactor, “without death” (191). Which is why Remainder’s final reenactment is both indistinguishable from—in the sense of subsuming—reality and fatal. What’s being reenacted is a bank robbery, but things don’t go exactly as planned: a reenactor robber trips instead of half tripping, and falls into the reenactor robber ahead of him, who tries to keep them both upright but—“gravity was against it”—fails, and, as they both fall, one of their guns goes off and shoots yet another reenactor dead. Earlier in the novel (back at the gas station, say), the intrusion of gravity would have been the mark of the failure

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to turn the world into a work. But no longer: “Beautiful!” (291), the reenactor whispers. The fallen bodies on the bank floor look to him like “sculptures” (292), and when the other reenactors realize that neither the bank’s employees nor its customers knew that this was a performance, and that therefore, as one of them says, “It’s real!” the “tingling” reaches its highest level ever: it “really burst its banks now; it flowed outwards from my spine’s base and flowed all around my body . . . I was weightless . . . I felt I was being elevated” (293). A world where the very thing that resisted the ideality of performance (“gravity”) can be incorporated into it and thus turned into its own opposite (“I was weightless”) is here understood as the impossible condition of art itself. Formless Feelings

The condition of art is impossible not because there can’t be art but because everything can’t be art. In the previous chapter, we described the way in which a literalized antitheatricality began to imagine that the work should be absorbed into the world and (in Fried’s terms) that art should become as unintended as objects are—in effect, that nothing should be framed. The reenactor’s project is just the opposite; what he ends up wanting is to turn his world into a place where everything counts as intended. And what that project requires above all is money, which the novel supplies first by way of a multimillion-pound settlement following an accident (“something falling from the sky” [3]) and then through the way it’s invested—in “telecommunications and technology.” The text tells us that the reenactor gets the settlement—eight and a half million pounds—in April. Since it only takes him “a few weeks” to make back the four million pounds he needs for the first reenactment, the financial pages tell us it’s 1999. That is, the novel’s action begins during the dot-com boom, a period during which companies like Psion (the British competition for Palm and one of the stocks he buys) increased sevenfold before reaching its peak in March 2000, which is when the novel ends. A headline saying “Shares Tumble” (302) is virtually the last thing the reenactor sees before he gets on the plane.

Plate 1. Jeff Wall, Mimic (1982). Transparency in lightbox. 198 × 228.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 2. Viktoria Binschtok, Wand #1 (2006). C-print. 120 × 160 cm. From the series Die Abwesenheit der Antragsteller. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 3. Viktoria Binschtok, Das große Medieninteresse (2008). Triptych; three C-prints. 59 × 82 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 4. Phil Chang, Two Sheets of Thick Paper on Top of Two Sheets of Thin Paper (unfixed silver gelatin print) (2010). 7.5 × 9.5 in. (Frame 15 × 19 in.) From the series Cache, Active. Courtesy of the artist and M+B, Los Angeles.

Plate 5. Phil Chang, Monochrome, Exposed (unfixed silver gelatin print) (2011). 7.5 × 9.5 in. (Frame 15 × 19 in.) From the series Cache, Active. Courtesy of the artist and M+B, Los Angeles.

Plate 6. Arthur Ou, View 1 (2008). C-print. 8 × 10 in. Courtesy of the artist and Brennan & Griffin, New York.

Plate 7. Brian Ulrich, Circuit City, Ponderosa Steakhouse (2008). Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 8. Amanda Gordon, “Liz Deschenes’s photograms reflect the crowd” (2012). Whitney Biennial reception, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photograph: Getty Images.

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So Remainder ends when the market crashes (Psion would quickly lose 95 percent of its value; the reenactor would have been wiped out) but before the plane does. Subject neither to physical nor to economic laws, language can defy gravity better than airplanes or stock prices can; a novel, as we have noted, can be narrated by a man who ought to be dead and it can make sure stock prices stay up just as long as it needs them to. Which is a good thing for the reenactor, since the reenactments cost a fortune and bring no return. Indeed, in a certain sense, the fact that they make nothing is part of their point, since the entirely absorptive aesthetic according to which they’re produced (no actors, no cameras, no audience) virtually requires that they generate no income. Thus, although he’s not exactly a rentier in the classical sense (since he isn’t collecting dividends) and not exactly a speculator (since he isn’t betting on fluctuations),34 the reenactor nonetheless has no relation to what today gets called the “real economy”; he’s a pure product of the financial sector. And even if the reenactments could, with a little ingenuity, be made into commodities as attractive as contemporaneous works like, say, Tracey Emin’s My Bed (shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 and subsequently bought for 150,000 pounds by Charles Saatchi), the crucial difference is that, designed to be neither seen nor sold, they don’t just make commodification difficult, they refuse it. From one standpoint, then, they fulfill a certain utopian dream, the one identified in Douglas Crimp’s description of Richard Serra’s ambitions for his site-specific sculptures of the 1980s as “the ability of the artist to defeat consumption” by replacing the experience of art as a “luxury commodity” with “the experience of art in its material reality.”35 In the era of the financial success of the Young British Artists, whose prices rose as spectacularly as those of tech stocks (and declined much less precipitously) and whose leading figure declared that “the art world’s about money,” the unsellable reenactments look like an effort to take Serra’s side. From another standpoint, however, a standpoint suggested by the title of Nick Brown’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Sub-

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sumption under Capital,” in refusing to be a commodity, the work refuses also to be a work of art.36 Imagining itself as somehow exempt from the penetration of capital, it actually provides, in a reversal that sounds more paradoxical than it is, not so much an alternative to the commodity as an epitome of it. We can begin to see how this works just by remembering what’s entailed when we privilege what Crimp here calls “material reality” or what McCarthy calls “sheer materiality” or what Rose—fearing that “material” is already too “invested with symbolic power”—prefers to call “raw matter.”37 The point of making matter raw is to divest it of that symbolic power. This is why the photograph has always played a central role and why its indexicality has always mattered. After all, the very definition of the index is that it’s not a symbol; the fossil of the trilobite is not a picture of it. Thus one of the things Peirce emphasizes about the index is its “dynamical” relation both to its object and to “the sense of memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign.”38 And hence, in Barthes, the punctum depends on the beholder, and, as we saw more generally in chapter 2, the effort to disarticulate the work from a meaning dependent on its producer necessarily (i.e., whether or not you want it to) replaces that meaning with the experience of the beholder. Which is, Brown argues, exactly what the commodity does. Its distinguishing feature, he emphasizes, is the fact that, produced only to be sold, what matters about the commodity is never what it is intended or supposed to do but only that it gets bought. As the producer of the commodity, in other words, I may make something for you to use in a certain way, but what matters to me as its producer is only that you buy what I made; what you actually do with it is your business. And if, in art, we’ve usually put the point in more positive terms (think of the critique of the artist’s intentionality as the celebration of the work’s indeterminacy, of the different experiences of its different beholders, and of the artist’s willingness to give up control), it’s nevertheless been the same point. Thus, when Cage describes himself as “intent upon making something that didn’t tell people what to do,”39 the something he’s

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talking about is a materialization of the work as art (none of the sounds you’ll hear in a performance of 4′33″ have an intended meaning; they’re just sounds), but it’s a kind of idealization of the work as commodity (because they’re just sounds—because the composer meant nothing by them—what you make of them depends on you). Of course, most commodities do tell us what to do with them. Almost all of the things we buy are designed to be used in a certain way, and that’s why we buy them; we understand that the stepladder is for climbing, and that’s what we do with it. But Brown’s point is that what we’re supposed to do with something has nothing to do with its being a commodity, and therefore nothing else we might do with it (say, use it instead as a bookshelf) can ever count as misusing it. It’s this impossibility of misuse that the work of art that “simply is” seeks to reproduce. “Form suppresses material,” Rose says (on his website, http:// www.formlessfinder.com/), and the work that seeks to let matter matter thus reproduces not the form but the lack of form that is the essence of the commodity. Just as, in other words, there’s no right or wrong way to use a commodity, there can be no right or wrong way to respond to the sheerly material work of art, no right or wrong interpretations of a work that, insofar as it “simply is,” demands no interpretation at all, replacing interpretation with feelings that are as formless as the work itself.40 Meaning, by contrast, is all normative all the time. That’s why (once more reading him against McCarthy), the reenactor’s commitment to making the world a place where nothing simply is requires that in Remainder no problem be more frequent than the problem of getting something “right.”41 The “patterning on the floor” “wasn’t right” (105), but the “spot” beside the door is “just right” even though the size of the door itself is “wrong” (107); it’s easy to find “the right type of large taps for the bathtubs” (130), but the bannisters, which look “right” in the catalogue, don’t look right when installed (121). The reenactor’s shirt brushes against the “kitchen unit” in a way that “wasn’t right”; he repeats the movement a couple of times until he gets “the shirt bit right” but realizes he’s still not moving exactly as he ought to, and so, he concludes, “I would need to practice” (141)—which he does, until,

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finally, everything goes the way it “was supposed to” (161). Just, in other words, as the reenactments create a world that’s “zinging with significance,” they also create a world in which everything is right or wrong. Only in a world that’s “meant to be” one way can it count as a mistake if things turn out another way. Indeed, the essence of reenactment is that it produces normativity where before there was none. There’s no right or wrong way for two men, about to shoot another, to park their car; they just park it. But when the men who’ve been hired for the reenactment park theirs, the “tingling” starts because “they’d parked it just right” (208). The reenactments are nothing but an effort to reimagine life itself as suffused with normativity and the world arranged so that only “what was meant to be there” (128) actually is there. If, then, the distinguishing feature of the commodity is that there’s no right way or wrong way to use it, the distinguishing feature of the reenactments is that everything is either right or wrong. And if the distinguishing feature of the present is that everything has been commodified, the fantasy of the reenactment is that nothing has been. But that’s a rentier’s fantasy, the fantasy of someone who experiences himself as neither investing his capital nor selling his labor and who can thus imagine the world itself transformed into the utopian image of his experience.42 The artist, as artist, does not live in that world. Whether or not he wishes there were no such things as commodities, he can’t, as an artist, want his art not to be a commodity—you can’t be an artist if you can’t sell your work, nor can you produce art if you don’t produce it for the market. What the artist can want, however, is for his art not to be just a commodity. There are things the artist can’t do. He can’t determine the price at which it sells or the uses to which it’s put; he can’t control the effects it generates. And in an art that imagines itself to affirm matter and refuse form, both the impossibility and the irrelevance of this control are thematized, not to say celebrated. But, of course, the work of art can also have one thing that the commodity and sheer matter cannot. And that one thing—the only thing about the work of art that is not determined by its buyers, the only thing about

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it that belongs only to it, the only thing about it that’s not reducible to the commodity it otherwise is—is its meaning. That’s why what I described above as Cache, Active’s insistence on the experience of meaning is both its aesthetic and its politics. On the one hand, it absolutely registers the appeal of the material and to the beholder. That’s what it means in Two Sheets of Thick Paper on Top of Two Sheets of Thin Paper for the objects represented (the four sheets of paper) to be collapsed into the representing object (the piece of paper they were printed on) and thus for the emergence of the material to count for the beholder as the loss of the image. It’s no accident that, overlapping with the Cache, Active show at LAXART, Chang was curating, at Pepin Moore, a show called Affective Turns? But on the other hand, it’s no accident either that the object we’re left with, which originally functioned as the site of a representation (it was what the image was on) now functions as a representation itself—the epitaph for the image it once bore. Thus our understanding of the transformation from image to object revises our experience of it. More precisely, our recognition of the inextricability of the pictures’ meaning, their materiality, and our desires is matched by an assertion of the irreducibility of that meaning to their materiality or to our desires. It’s the formlessness of the commodity that makes possible the experience of form.

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4 The Art of Inequality: Then and Now Chapter four the art of inequality

The Bloody Fingerprint

Brian Ulrich’s Copia project culminated in March 2012 with a show called Is This Place Great or What? Artifacts and Photographs. The project, documenting the life and death of big-box stores and malls, began during the very brief, shallow recession of 2001 and ended during the even shallower recovery from the long recession of 2007–2009, a period during which median US household income dropped 7 percent. But Ulrich thought of himself, entirely accurately, as documenting not just developments of the early twenty-first century but also what he called “an economic trajectory set in motion in the twentieth century”1 (plate 7). How Business Week magazine (focusing not on income but the more fundamental issue of wealth) depicted that trajectory is shown in graph 3.2

Graph 3. Median family net worth in dollars.

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Figure 8. Brian Ulrich, Retail 15, Chicago, Illinois (2002). From the series Copia. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 9. Brian Ulrich, Randall Park Mall (2008). From the series Dark Stores. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 10. Brian Ulrich, Dominicks (2008). From the series Dark Stores. Courtesy of the artist.

How Ulrich shows it—from Retail, the beginning of the project, to Dark Stores, its end—is exemplified by the photographs in figures 8, 9, and 10, as well as the artifacts in figure 11. How to interpret the juxtaposition of the photographs and the artifacts is an interesting question, as is the question of how to understand the artifacts in the gallery setting. The difference between the “Fast Food” sign and the George Nelson bench, for example, is not just that one has been disconnected from its instrumental function while the other has not; it’s also that— even (or especially) when it was being used for its original purpose—the sign belonged to a social world very

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Figure 11. Brian Ulrich, installation view from Is This Place Great or What? Artifacts and Photographs (2012), Julie Saul Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the artist and the Julie Saul Gallery.

different from the one such benches belong to. Which is to say that the difference between the sign and the bench points beyond the decline in median wealth and income to the feature of that decline that has been central to our analysis: its unevenness. After all, the years in which the vast majority of the American population has been getting poorer have also been, as Andrea Fraser has memorably pointed out in “L’1%, c’est moi,” years in which the portion of the population that buys art has done very well.3 The gallery was offering that sign for $25,000. And since the 1 percent, which back in 1962, when graph 3 begins, was 125 times richer than the median, was, by 2010, 288 times richer,4 they may well have gotten their price.

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But, setting prices aside, it’s worth noting that there’s a nonprofit art historical and textual precedent for the juxtaposition of photographs and artifacts in James Agee’s memorable ambition for his and Walker Evans’s response to an earlier great crisis in capitalism. “If I could do it,” James Agee wrote in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, “I’d do no writing at all here.” Instead the book would just be Walker Evans’s photographs (figure 12), plus “fragments of cloth, bits of cotton . . . phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement.”5 In other words, rather than describe what the tenant farmers ate and how their houses smelled, he would provide samples. It’s one thing to write that Sadie Ricketts wore a dress “made of coarse tan cotton” (277); it would be another thing to offer instead a fragment of the fabric. The writing, printed in ink, stands for the cotton material; the swatch of cotton cloth would be the material. But what about the photographs? Why did Agee think of photographs as somehow more like the objects they’re photographs of (like the dress itself, or like Ulrich’s salvaged sign) than like a sentence we might use to describe them? His answer was that writing was a form of expression, by which he meant that in writing—in a novel or in journalism—things have their “existence entirely through the writer.” And the writer can get them wrong. Indeed, journalism, he wrote, is nothing but a “form of lying” (235). But a photograph, Agee says, is a way of “recording,” not expressing (like a “phonograph record”), and what it records is “absolute, dry truth” (234)—not the kind of truth you might get from an honest photographer expressing himself (there are honest writers, too), but a kind you get from the camera regardless of the photographer’s ethics. Walter Benjamin, writing two years before Agee and Evans went to Alabama, had already made a version of this argument, aligning the “revolutionary” potential of the photograph with the ability of the Dadaist collage to present us with “authentic fragments of daily life” that “say” “more than painting” just as “the bloody fingerprint of a murderer on the page of a book says more than the text.”6 The way Agee puts it is this: “Words cannot embody; they can only describe” (238). This is

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Figure 12. Walker Evans, Mrs. Frank Tengle, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama (1936). 8 × 10 in. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

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both a strength—they “can be made to do or tell anything” (236)—and a weakness: they can describe or even name things that never existed. Agee’s text, for example, could have been produced without there ever having been a woman named Sadie Ricketts in a cotton dress. As, in fact, it was—the woman he called Sadie Ricketts was really named Flora Bee Tengle. But for Evans’s photograph, that woman in that dress, whatever her name might be, had to have existed. And because the photograph cannot refer to the dress without having been produced by the dress, it’s more, Agee thinks, like a record than a reference, more like a piece of the dress than a description of it. Thus the ambition to make a book without words, with only photographs and fragments of cloth, is the ambition to make a book that will not “use” its “materials” but will instead “give them as they were” (242). For Agee, then, the materiality of the photograph is an extension of the materiality of the thing it’s a photograph of. And, for our purposes in 2015, it’s worth remembering that what the photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were of was the “appallingly damaged group of people” (7) that in the summer of 1936 Fortune magazine had sent Agee and Evans to report on. Agee’s desire for a book without writing was thus also a desire for a book that wasn’t “a book about ‘sharecroppers’” because it wasn’t “about” anything—it was the thing itself. And although this ambition was obviously a hyperbolic one, a version of it survives in the objects that Ulrich deploys as a “record of the past decade of consumer culture.”7 But it’s neither in Ulrich-style objects nor in photographs of other objects like them that the aesthetics and the political economy of materiality (both the lure of the literal and the resistance to it) have recently found their most powerful expression. For insofar as Agee’s fantasy survives and even thrives today, the form in which it does is very different. What matters today, as we have already seen in the work of Phil Chang and Arthur Ou and as we will see in the work of Liz Deschenes, is not only what it might mean for the photograph to give the object as it was; it is also what the photograph as an object itself is. Indeed, Deschenes’s mirrored photograms might be proposed as

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a kind of limit case for materiality today. They’re made by exposing photosensitive paper outdoors and at night and then fixing the paper with silver toner, and they’re often described as abstractions or “photographs of nothing” because they don’t offer us an image of the world to which they’ve been exposed. But, of course, while there is an important sense in which it’s true that they’re “of” nothing (they’re not images of the world), they have the same causal relation to the world as photographs that are. That is, the world (the light to which they’ve been exposed) has played no less crucial a role in producing them than it did in producing the photograph of Sadie Ricketts. Which is just what is meant by saying that the photo is indexical, that its connection to the thing it’s of is more like the connection a reflection has to the person reflected than like the connection a painting or description has to the person painted or described. And which is just what Benjamin was saying when he aligned the photograph with the bloody fingerprint on the book rather than the text, and what Agee was saying when he imagined that a photograph of a dress had more in common with a bit of fabric from the dress than with a bunch of words about the dress. But Evans’s photographs (indeed most photographs, and even the fingerprint) are not only caused by a thing; they also look like that thing. Deschenes’s photograms do not. From this standpoint, they function in an almost Greenbergian mode to suggest that the causal connection the photograph has to the world is one of the “basic elements of photography”8 in a way that resemblance to the world is not. For example, both paintings and photographs can look like the things they’re of, but only photographs must also be caused by the things they’re of. Calling Deschenes’s photograms abstract thus misses the point, since they’re abstract only in the way that all photographs are abstract—none of them is a representation of the world any more than smoke is a representation of fire, or the reflection of a person in a mirror is a representation of that person. The question of whether the index happens to give you an image of the thing it’s an index of, in other words, is merely incidental. Mirrors do, smoke doesn’t; a picture of Sadie Ricketts that didn’t look like her

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would be just as causally dependent on her as one that did. The crucial thing about the photograph on this view is not that it looks like the thing it’s of, but that it’s caused by the thing it’s of. So, if Deschenes’s work is nonrepresentational, it is so in a way that works less to distinguish it from other photographs than to suggest something about the distinctiveness of photography itself. But, of course, Deschenes’s mirrored works do end up giving you an image of something. For, fixed with silver toner, the surface reflects as well as records, and what it reflects is not the world in which it was made but the world in which it is viewed—other objects in the room in which it’s being displayed and, of course, other people, including the people who are looking at it (plate 8). Matching the causal account of their production (they’re not representations of the night sky but effects of it) with a causal account of their consumption (they’re not representations of their beholders but reflections of them), these photograms double down on indexicality and in this respect, rather than asserting what they have in common with Evans’s photographs, assert something very different. What Agee hoped was that Evans’s photographs, like a piece of Sadie Ricketts’s dress, would give us Sadie Ricketts; Deschenes’s photograms give us ourselves. Evans gives us the world of an “appallingly damaged group of people”; Deschenes gives us the world of the Whitney Biennial. Not a Portrait

More neutrally (that is, forgetting for a minute the difference between rural Alabama in 1936 and the art world today), we could say, as Deschenes herself says, that she is interested in her work’s relation to the beholder, while Agee and Evans were interested in their work’s relation to its subject, in particular the human subject. Not every photograph in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is of the tenant farmers, of course, but Agee’s and Evans’s ideas about what it means to photograph the farmers and the farmers’ ideas about what it meant to be photographed— what Agee calls the “shame” they experience “in front of . . . the camera”

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(363)—are at the center of the project. Indeed, although it was feelings of “self-indulgence” rather than shame that he worried about, the question of how people felt about photographs of themselves and their families had already (in 1931) been a central concern of Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography.” On the one hand, the fact that (he’s quoting Alfred Lichtwark) “there is no work of art that is looked at so closely as a photograph of oneself, one’s closest relatives and friends . . . “ seems to him a problem; that’s the “self-indulgence” to which “commercial, conventional portrait photography” (519) caters. On the other hand, this indifference to photographs as art suggested what seemed to Benjamin a useful way of “moving the inquiry,” and indeed photography itself, “out of the realm of aesthetic distinctions and into social functions” (520). The point was not to give up photographs of people (“to do without people is for photography the most impossible of renunciations,” he wrote), but to do in photography what he thought the Russians had already begun to do in film—“put before the camera people who had no use for their photographs” (519), that is, people who were not “obsessed with going down to posterity in photographs.” Photography’s Eisenstein was August Sander, who was compiling “a series of faces . . . in no way inferior to the tremendous physiognomic gallery” of the Russians and who had thus begun to answer the question of what a picture of a person that was “no longer a portrait” could be. What Benjamin meant by claiming that the photographs in Sander’s Face of Our Time (1929) were not portraits was that they were made from “a scientific viewpoint”9 and their true subject was not individuals but the “social order,” which is something like what Evans (who reviewed the book in 1931) also said about them—that they were “a photographic editing of society, a clinical process.”10 But, of course, Sander had begun his career as a commercial portrait photographer, and it’s hard to be quite as committed as Benjamin was to the idea that Face of Our Time repudiated or transcended portraiture. Not only is every picture in the volume a more or less head-on shot of some person or small group of persons; there’s also an important sense in which the conditions under which they were made are those of what Weston Naef (describing

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German professional portraiture of the period in the catalogue for an exhibition of Sander’s work) calls the “‘at-home’ photographer,” who went “to the home, office, or garden of a client and tried his best to make that person seem natural in his or her environment.”11 Thus even a picture like the famous Three Farmers should, in Hilla Becher’s account (in the same catalogue), be thought of not, say, on the model of a snapshot or a street (in this case, country road) photograph, but as something constructed along the lines that professional portraits were. What Becher imagines is not exactly that Sander posed the farmers the way you would a client—“position a subject’s hand, turn the face, tilt the shoulders” (107)—but that having seen them standing in something like the position the photograph ended up depicting, he would have asked them “to repeat what he had just seen them do,” “like in a movie,” she says, “a second take” (115). And, continuing the discussion with respect to another very famous photograph, Girl in Fairground Caravan (1926–1932), she goes on to suggest that “the slower exposure time” (around three seconds) required by the camera Sander used guaranteed not only that his pictures did not have the qualities of spontaneous snapshots, but also that, because they required the subjects to “perform a role,” they were in a certain sense superior: taken in this way, “the picture comes closer to the personality than a snapshot” (126). Now anyone who’s ever had his or her picture taken will recognize right away that this description of the effects of a longer exposure—of requiring the subject to hold a pose—is hardly an inevitable one. Indeed, the photographer Martin Parr has sometimes asked his subjects to begin posing while he delays taking the picture in order to produce an effect very different from the one in Sander’s work: they “become self-conscious; their rigid postures register their discomfort.”12 But the point I want to emphasize here is not so much that there’s more than one way to understand the effect of a longer pose as that there’s more than one way to understand the relation between what Becher calls the performance of a role and the “personality” of the performer. The collaboration between the photographer and the subject—the one eliciting a performance, the other providing it—that in Sander is under-

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stood as desirable could be, and for Walker Evans was, understood as undesirable. A quick way of seeing the alternative to Sander is to juxtapose two pictures, one made by Sander ca. 1930 (figure 13), the other, first seen by Evans at about the same time (in the late 1920s) but made a little earlier, in 1916, by Paul Strand (figure 14). When Evans first saw Strand’s Blind Woman, New York, he remarked, “That really charged me.” “‘That’s the thing to do,’ he told himself.”13 The way Evans scholars tend to characterize this impact is to say that Strand provided him with a “direct, unsentimental, and anonymous” “model of portraiture” (111) and there is a real sense in which this is true. But Blind Woman obviously does more than that. Strand was interested not only in making portraits that did not sentimentalize their subjects (which Sander’s obviously don’t); his interest was in making portraits of people who were “not conscious” of being photographed. He often fixed a dummy lens to the camera while actually taking the picture at a right angle, something that Evans also occasionally did (as in the opening photograph in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). And, of course, Evans’s “Subway Portraits” were made by concealing the camera itself, painting “the shiny chrome parts . . . flat black,” and wearing it underneath his overcoat, “with its lens peeking out between two buttons,” and with “the shutter rigged to a cable release, a slender cord snaking down his sleeve and into the palm of his right hand” (107). For both Evans and Strand (and often Ben Shahn), the issue, then, is not so much an alternative style of portraiture as a refusal of one of the basic elements of the very concept of the portrait— the idea that the subject sits for it. Another way to put this would be to say that in Evans and Strand we see a photographic version of what, following Fried, we’ve already described as the absorptive or antitheatrical aesthetic, a commitment in its most basic form to the representation of subjects unaware of or indifferent to the fact that they are being beheld—so absorbed in playing their instrument, for example, or reading their book, that they do not notice the people watching them and cannot be understood as in any way posing for them. But if it’s pretty obvious that some version

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Figure 13. August Sander, Children Born Blind (ca. 1930). © 2014 Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln/Artists Rights Society, New York. Figure 14. Paul Strand, Blind Woman, New York (1916). Platinum print, 34 × 25.7 cm. Alfred Stieglitz Collection (1933). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photograph: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.

of this effect is what Strand and Evans are going for, it’s almost equally obvious that the problem of achieving it (the problem suggested by the deployment of false and concealed lenses as solutions) also transforms it, and this in two ways. First, photography literalizes the problem of the pose—since the question now becomes not whether the subject is represented by the artist as unaware of being observed, but whether she actually is unaware of being observed. And, second, it radicalizes or perhaps refocuses it—since antitheatricality consists now not in a state of absorption that makes you unaware of being watched but in one that makes you unaware of being represented.

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With respect to photography’s literalizing the problem of the pose, the point can be made clear just by noting its difference from painting. In painting (Gerhard Richter’s well-known Lesende would be an exemplary instance here), the question of absorption is not about whether the models were in fact absorbed but about whether the painter makes them look as if they were.14 Indeed, the question is not about the models at all—it’s about the subjects, a point that’s made clear by remembering that paintings in the absorptive tradition (made to produce an absorptive effect or, for that matter, a theatrical one) could, of course, be produced without any models at all. So the problem of the model’s awareness need not be solved or even raised—the painter doesn’t have to paint what he sees. With a photograph, however, the situation is obviously different. You cannot do without the literal presence of the photograph’s subject, and you can (at least sometimes) photograph people without their being aware of it. Strand’s and Evans’s efforts to do this thus not only mark their allegiance to the ideal of absorption but, more fundamentally, their commitment to the idea that what Fried originally described as a “theme” in painting should in photography be understood as a condition of the medium.15 Because the photograph requires a subject who can perform and because the presence of the photographer can be understood in itself to elicit a kind of performance, the task of the photographer must be to overcome or neutralize that performance. Thus, while Blind Woman is obviously a powerful piece of documentary, it is also an ingenious solution to an aesthetic problem: taking as its subject a figure who does not need to be deceived in order to be caught unaware. She is, in effect, ontologically unaware, unable to see that her picture is being taken and therefore unable to feel the temptation or necessity to pose for it, or even to try not to pose for it. Furthermore—and this speaks to the disarticulation of a specifically representational antitheatricality from absorption as such—her unawareness is in a certain sense specific to the camera. What I mean by this is just that she’s not in any sense unaware that people are passing by her in the street and may be looking at her. Quite the opposite; the

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whole point of the sign she’s carrying is to get them to do so. For the purposes of the photograph, what she’s unaware of is only the camera. To put this in the terms of Becher’s description of Sander, she is, like Sander’s subjects, “performing a role” (the role of a beggar), but, unlike Sander’s subjects, she’s not performing it for the photographer. The force of this difference is something we can begin to see in Children Born Blind, where—if only in the sense of being asked to hold their pose for the several seconds required by the camera—the children are performing and, furthermore, performing only for the photographer. The point here is not that Sander’s photographs are theatrical—it is instead that the relation between the photographer and his subjects (the relation that Strand and Evans understand as a problem) is for Sander a solution. The contemporary German photographer Thomas Struth makes the point well when he says that Sander’s portraits “were only possible” not because he made himself invisible to his subjects but “through the particular way he interacted with [them].”16 Struth here means to emphasize the importance of the photographer’s establishing a relation with his subjects, and it is a famous fact about his own portraits not only that they are almost invariably of people (usually families) with whom he is friends of long standing, but also that before he takes the pictures he characteristically has “extensive discussions with the sitters,” seeking, as Fried puts it, “not just to put the sitters at their ease but as much as possible to engage them as collaborators in the making of the portrait.”17 It’s as if the photographer’s personal relation with his subjects enables them to present themselves in ways that authenticate the pose by making it a performance of themselves rather than a performance for their audience. And although Sander was certainly not friends with the literally thousands of people he photographed, a version of this quality—his ability, in Becher’s words, to accept “the self-interpretation of his sitters”—can be seen even in his photographs of the blind children, where the question of what exactly their self-interpretation might be (their sense of how they wish to or should look) is at least an open one. Looking at these children, we are asked to feel not that they are unaware of the camera but that their

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posing for it represents neither a refusal nor a distortion of who they really are—Strand’s ontological unawareness is turned into a kind of ontological comfort. And this comfort in front of the camera—they are not trying to look a certain way just for and to their audience because they can’t even exactly look a certain way to themselves—is reproduced, albeit in a psychological rather than ontological form, in Struth’s own portraits, where he clearly seeks the kind of collaboration with his subjects that Sander sought to establish. But that Evans didn’t. In part, this might be understood as a personal difference. The tenant farmers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men not only did not feel at ease with Evans, they actively disliked him. Years later, Margaret Ricketts would remember that he “didn’t talk with them. He didn’t even talk down to them.” She would complain about “his indifference to them as people and his obvious loathing for the way they lived.”18 Her sharpest memory of the photographs he took involved not collaborating with him but resisting him. In one photograph (figure 15), according to Margaret, her sister Paralee “rebelled by keeping her eyes closed while the picture of their family was being made” (39). If, then, Evans’s aesthetic sought a kind of negation of the relation between the photographer and his subject, this is just what he didn’t get in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The farmers are (to use two of Agee’s favorite words from the period) “self-conscious” instead of “self-absorbed,” and a crucial theme of the book is the “shame” they feel in front of the camera. Where Sander’s way of addressing this selfconsciousness was by producing a relation with his subjects—Becher says he was “interested in people” and “made something of this”— Evans wasn’t interested in the tenant farmers, and his lack of interest is what he made something of. The difference here between Sander and Evans is clearly personal, but not merely personal. We have already begun to see how it also involved an aesthetic, and we can begin to see now how both the aesthetic and the personal—the perceived demands of photography as a medium and the personalities of the photographers as artists—begin to take on a social meaning. In particular, the self-consciousness of Evans’s farm-

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Figure 15. Walker Evans, Frank Tengle Family, Sharecroppers, Hale County, Alabama (1936). 35 mm nitrate negative. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

ers (and the use he made of it) is something more than personal. It’s not just the self-consciousness of the subject in front of the camera; it’s the self-consciousness of the poor in front of the (comparatively) rich. This point is made by Margaret Ricketts’s remark about Evans’s “loathing for the way” the farmers lived; the families’ resentment of the way in which they were represented by Agee and Evans is expressed in interviews with other members as well. George Gudger’s grandson, for example, describes his father as “angry” because they were “cast in a light that they couldn’t do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant.”19 What they didn’t like, in other words, was not just that the camera made them feel self-conscious, but also that it made them feel

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inferior, a feeling that Agee—who Evans said “had a great gift of making people not only like but love him”—tried with his great personal charm to dispel.20 But it’s one thing to make people like you; it’s another not to feel “superior” to them, or make them feel that you feel superior to them. And it’s yet another, very different thing not actually to be superior to them. Indeed, what Agee’s and Evans’s interest in the relation between the photographer and the photographed subject dramatizes is precisely this difference. It’s what Agee called the “cold absorption” of Evans’s camera, which represents a social difference that Agee’s warmth (his Sander-like ability to establish a relation with his subjects) cannot elide. The “fear” he ascribes to Mrs. Ricketts—standing “naked in front of the cold absorption of the camera in all your shame and pitiableness to be pried into and laughed at” (363–64)—cannot be allayed by the assurance of his “care” for her, his insistence that you “are not to fear us, not to hate us . . . we are your friends” (365). Not because this assurance isn’t sincere but because it’s irrelevant. Indeed, it’s because this difference between the photographers and their subjects has nothing to do with their feelings—it was not produced by enmity and cannot be overcome by friendship—that in these photographs it is underlined rather than erased. The point could be put more strongly, perhaps, by saying that the photographs are primarily photographs of this difference, a fact that was a problem for Agee and has continued to be for admirers of the book. It arises as a problem, however, not (as Sadie Ricketts feared) because people find the tenant farmers pitiable (on the contrary, that’s the morally desirable reaction—“compassion”), but because we find the pictures of them beautiful. If, for example, we take the portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs (figure 16) as (in W. J. T. Mitchell’s words) “a purely formal study of flatness and worn, ‘graven’ surfaces,” isn’t there, Mitchell asks, “something deeply disturbing, even disagreeable about this (unavoidable) aestheticizing response to what is after all a real person in desperately impoverished circumstances? Why should we have a right to look on this woman and find her fatigue, pain, and anxiety beautiful?”21 For that matter, why should Walker Evans have the right

Figure 16. Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife (Allie Mae Burroughs) (1936). Gelatin silver print, 20.9 × 14.4 cm. Purchase 2000 Benefit Fund (2001). © Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photograph: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.

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to demand that we see her in this way? More generally, and apart from the question of rights, what is the meaning of a photographic practice that, as Walter Benjamin complained about the New Objectivity in 1934, succeeds “in transforming even abject poverty . . . into an object of enjoyment,” a photography that, confronted with tenement blocks, refuse heaps, and cable factories, says only (to cite the title of Albert RengerPatzsch’s 1928 New Objectivist collection) The World Is Beautiful (775)? And, more generally still, what does it mean to seek out the misery of the Ricketts et al. and, as Agee (like Benjamin) disapprovingly puts it, to “use” these lives as “materials” for “art” (242)? Mitchell’s formulation here—“Why should we have a right . . .”—is useful in getting at the core of the problem (and, as we’ll see, the solution), because it convincingly suggests that the issue is not so much the possibility of taking a distinctive aesthetic pleasure in the artifacts themselves as it is who can and does take that pleasure. We wouldn’t, for example, think to dissuade the Ricketts from taking a distinctive aesthetic pleasure in photographs of the Gudgers or of themselves. We might, however (and Agee certainly would) question whether it would be possible for them to do so. It’s not just, for example, that the family snapshots on the Tengles’ wall (figure 17) don’t look like art. It’s that, even if they did look like art, we doubt that they would think of them as beautiful. Sometime in the 1970s, Margaret Ricketts was given two of Evans’s photographs, one of her father and one of her mother, as we can see in Michael Williamson’s photograph from 1987 (figure 18). No one who has read anything about the Ricketts family is likely to think that they functioned as art for her. Whether or not Bourdieu was right to suggest in 1965 that the “realization of the artistic intention is particularly difficult in photography . . . because, fundamentally, it is only with difficulty that photographic practice can escape the functions to which it owes its existence,”22 it is almost certainly true that the difference between these family photos tacked to the wall (which exemplify one of what Bourdieu thought of as photography’s founding functions) and the Evans pictures hung on it (which don’t) was not likely to be understood

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Figure 17. Walker Evans, Tengle Family Home, Family Snapshots on the Wall of a Room, Hale County, Alabama. 8 × 10 in. nitrate negative. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

in these terms by their subjects. Rather, the ambition of the Evans—the claim to an interest that transcends the interest one has in pictures of people one knows—is invisible to the subjects themselves. One could almost say here that Evans achieves what Benjamin said Sander had; he puts “before the camera people who had no use for their photographs” and so makes a picture that was “no longer a portrait.”23 Margaret Ricketts, putting up pictures of her mother and father, not works

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Figure 18. Michael Williamson, Pictures of Fred and Sadie Ricketts, Taken by Walker Evans, on the Wall of the Home of Their Daughter, Margaret Ricketts (1986). From Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, And Their Children after Them (New York: Pantheon, 1989).

of art by Walker Evans, should be understood in this light as seeking, mistakenly—because she cannot understand them in any other way— to return them to portraiture. And if to be skeptical about her ability to see Evans’s photographs as art is to sound condescending (the tenant farmers, Agee claims, have “no” “sense of beauty”24), that condescension (they can’t see the beauty in these pictures, we can) is just the flip side of Benjamin’s accusation—only the rich see the beauty of poverty. But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that the beauty of these pictures therefore compromises their political meaning. On the contrary, it’s what gives them their political meaning. It is only if you can see the photographs as art that you can see the “superiority” of

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the person who made them and of the people who admire them to the people who are in them. It’s only as works of art—their beauty invisible to their subjects—that they can inscribe on themselves the inequality that is the condition of their production. We can get a better understanding of the specificity of this project by turning from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men back to the photographic project of the period that Benjamin most approved, Sander’s People of the 20th Century. Sander’s ambition, as Alfred Döblin first described it in his introduction to Face of Our Time (1929) and as Benjamin reiterated in 1931, was sociological.25 Face of Our Time contained a sample of the work; the complete work, as Benjamin said, “comprises seven groups which correspond to the existing social order”: “The Farmer,” “The Skilled Tradesman,” “The Woman,” “Classes and Professions,” “The Artists,” “The City,” and “The Last People.” One place to begin to describe the difference between Sander and Agee and Evans, then, would be to note that where Sander represents many—in theory, all—classes of society, Agee and Evans, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, represent just one (aside from the initial shot of the landlord), the tenant farmers. But this, as we’ve already begun to see, isn’t quite right, since there are two class positions that matter in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—the class of the people being photographed and the class of the photographer (and of the intended viewers of his photographs, the viewers who can see their claim to be art). Which is just to say, the structural difference between the photographer and his subject (structural because it is built into every photograph) is also—and here also structural, since it is built into the ambition to make these photographs art—a social difference. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the photographs are of poor people by and for (comparatively) rich people. In Sander, by contrast, with his ambition to represent the entire social order, the relation between the photographer and his subjects is again structural, but the social difference between them isn’t. Why? Precisely because in Sander, the point is to represent all classes, all of society. Thus, for example, People of the 20th Century necessarily includes people who belong to the same class as the photographer and

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Figure 19. August Sander, Photographer (1925). © 2014 Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln/Artists Rights Society, New York. Figure 20. August Sander, Porter (ca. 1929). © 2014 Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln/Artists Rights Society, New York.

even includes, alongside the portraits of farmers, lawyers, and so on, a representative photographer, Sander himself (figure 19). Between Sander the photographer who takes the picture and Sander the photographer whose picture is taken (and placed between “Barman” and “Bohemians,” just a few pages away from “Porter” [figure 20]), there is no inequality. (It’s like the pictures the Ricketts and the Gudgers have of themselves.) The difference between the class position of the photographer and his subjects is thus made structurally irrelevant (or only anecdotally or biographically relevant). Since all classes are represented, it is, in other words, necessarily the case that the photographer

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will belong to the same class as some of the people he photographs, and to a class that is different from that of all the others. Both this difference and this identity are thus rendered incidental. So the structural drama of Agee and Evans—the drama of the way in which each photograph negotiates the problem of what it means for some people to be, as Agee puts it, “above” some other people (407)—is irrelevant. In fact, there’s an important sense in which the question of superiority is irrelevant not only to the relation between photographer and subject in Sander but also to the way in which he presents society itself. Michael Jennings describes this well when he says that Sander declines to “attribute mastery or superiority to one segment of society over another,” and Becher makes a version of the same point when, in relation to Girl in Fairground Caravan, she says that “he just saw these circus people as one group existing at the same level as other groups.”26 What these remarks and the logic of the work itself suggest is that, by contrast to Agee and Evans, Sander didn’t exactly have a concept of class or, more precisely, of class conflict.27 By contrast, not only do Agee and Evans insist on attributing superiority to one class over another; Evans’s photographs understand the relation between the photographer and the subject—the relation between the only two classes represented—as essentially conflictual, made so by the photographer’s ambition to make art out of subjects understood to be incapable of appreciating it.28 This is the opposite of Sander, where the relation between groups is essentially unconflictual in that each forms part of a whole—the social itself; if some are higher and some are lower, their relative positions represent a kind of hierarchy rather than an antagonism, a world in which one may be in some sense above another but no one lives at the expense of another. What I mean by this is that there is in Sander no implied relation to an egalitarian ideal, an ideal violated, as it is in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by the making of the photograph itself. The relation is rather to an ideal of inclusiveness, one that would be violated by leaving someone out, not by taking the photograph, but by not taking it. Hence, the goal is to make sure that everyone is assigned a place, that no one is left out.

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And although accounts of the politics of Sander’s project differ, the one thing everyone agrees on is that People of the 20th Century is meant to include those whom the Nazis were increasingly committed to excluding. Indeed, it’s not just that Sander finds a place in the social order for those (the Jews, “the sick, the insane”) whose position in it was threatened; he also finds a place for those who are committed to destroying it. For example, the “Revolutionaries,” who might be thought of as enemies of society, occupy in Sander a place within it. In Face of Our Time, they come a little after “Odd-job man” and a little before “The herbal medicine expert.” (In People of the 20th Century, they’re in the volume devoted to “The Skilled Tradesman”!) As Jennings puts this, Sander’s project is “sympathetic to every member of society,” a characterization that is, on the one hand, somewhat implausible: what can it mean to say that Sander is as sympathetic to an SS officer (figure 21) as he is to people like his son, who was in a Nazi prison at the time the picture of the officer was taken, who eventually died there, and whose death mask is the last photograph (figure 22) in the work? On the other hand, it isn’t at all implausible: the Hauptsturmführer was so pleased with his portrait that he ordered fifty copies to give as presents to his friends.29 The best way to understand Sander’s sympathy here is also the way to understand Evans’s lack of it—it’s structural rather than personal. The ability to interact with his subjects that Becher and Struth praise in Sander is the ability to locate them all within the social; it is (as Döblin’s and Benjamin’s and his own characterization of his work as a kind of sociology insists) society itself that is his true subject. And the acknowledgment of the position that every class (every group) should have within it is the politics of this sociology, or (and also—this is what Becher means by identifying Sander’s ability to accept the “selfinterpretation of his sitters” as the means to his “deeply convincing results” [158]) the politics of his aesthetic. There are thus two senses in which, as right as he was in understanding Sander’s importance and in identifying it with a sociology, Benjamin was mistaken in his explanation of that importance. He was

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Figure 21. August Sander, SS-Hauptsturmführer (1937). © 2014 Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln/Artists Rights Society, New York. Figure 22. August Sander, Death Mask of Erich Sander (1944). © 2014 Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln/Artists Rights Society, New York.

wrong to identify that sociology as a movement out of the realm of the aesthetic and into the social, and he was wrong to think of the Sander picture as “no longer a portrait.” Rather, for Sander (as for Agee and Evans), it is only in its aesthetic that the photograph has a social meaning. And (more specific to Sander) it only has the social meaning it has insofar as it continues to function as a portrait. For Benjamin, as we’ve already noted, the essence of Sander’s sociology was its ability to do for still photography what the Russians were doing in film, to “put before the camera people who had no use for their photographs.” This

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was the point of his endorsement of Döblin’s description of the project as “scientific”—the photographs were not personal or individual, not made for a bourgeois audience that wanted likenesses of themselves and their family members. And even though it’s obvious this was not literally true—in fact, many of the photographs were made and sold as portraits precisely for people who wanted just that—we can still feel the force of Benjamin’s attempt to set their origin aside in Sander’s own effort to set it aside, in his after-the-fact arrangement of his subjects into elements of a “social order” made up not of individuals but of types. Even though he was for many years a portrait photographer, by the 1920s, from this perspective, his project was no longer the production for a bourgeois audience of images of themselves. The SS officer who, as late as 1937, consumed his image in that way might perhaps be understood as a middle-class equivalent of Margaret Ricketts hanging Evans’s pictures of her family on the wall: what she can’t see as art, he can’t see as sociology. But it’s also true that it was the problematic of the portrait—of a photography that requires the sitter’s pose—that remained at the center of Sander’s work, and that it is this requirement (not the question of what he or the sitters did with the photos once he made them) that distinguishes him from Strand and especially from Evans. This is, after all, what it means to make portraits of the blind. In a certain sense, a photograph like Children Born Blind absolutely meets Benjamin’s criterion for going beyond portraiture: its subjects have no use for pictures of themselves, pictures they can’t see—and yet the pictures are entirely governed by the logic of the portrait, the logic of the pose. As would become obvious again if we were to contrast them to Evans’s best known pictures of the blind, in one of which the subject is (like Strand’s beggar) performing but not for the camera, in the other of which the couple, utterly unaware their picture is being taken, might just as well be subway riders photographed through a lens they can’t see.30 In this sense, Sander’s ability to produce a portrait of the blind is a kind of tour de force not of going beyond portraiture but of sticking to it, an overcoming of its original (as Benjamin saw it) individualizing social

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function on behalf of a collective one— a portrait not of the individuals who constituted what Benjamin thought of as bourgeois society, but of the groups that made up what Sander thought of as the “social order.” As we’ve already seen, it’s precisely that order that is put in question by Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where instead of producing a typology of the classes that make up the “social,” Agee and Evans reduce them to two, and where the notion of an “order” is itself transformed into a kind of structural antagonism. This is why what I earlier called Agee’s Sander-like efforts to include the farmers—identifying them as his “own people” (65), striving to and even succeeding at becoming their friend—function only to mark their irrelevance, the irrelevance of friendship, the irrelevance of a “people,” the irrelevance even of “society.” Picturing it as composed of many different groups (the professionals, the Jews, the farmers), Sander thought of the artist too as belonging to society. Picturing it as the site of class conflict, Agee thought of the artist as society’s “deadly enemy” (355). Romantic and easy to criticize, this formulation nonetheless gets at his sense that, just as exclusion from society is not the tenant farmers’ problem, inclusion in it would not be their solution. It’s not, after all, as if the working class has been left out of capitalism. So, while in Sander both artists and revolutionaries have their place in the social order, in Agee and Evans, the point of the artist is to reduce that order to nothing but the fact of inequality, and the goal of what Agee calls the “good revolutionist” would then be to destroy it. The project of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is thus the virtual opposite of Face of Our Time. If Agee and Evans seek, as Benjamin thought Sander did, to go beyond the portrait, they do so not to produce a new form of “sociology” but to refuse the very idea of the social. The Difference between White Men and White Men

The first account of any effort actually to make some photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men involves Evans and Agee meeting two landowners (one named Harmon and the other with a “French sound[ing]” name, whose “ancestors . . . had escaped an insurrection of negroes

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from Haiti” [26]) and getting permission to go out to their land to take pictures. Why they want to go is unclear, since Agee knows that “nearly all [their] tenants were negroes” and therefore, as he puts it, “no use to me.” His assignment from Fortune magazine is to report on the situation of white tenant farmers. Nevertheless, he and Evans go out to the man’s land, and the tenants they encounter are indeed black. Thus the first of many agonized encounters between Agee and his subjects takes place, not between him and the Gudgers or the other families eventually featured in the book, but between him and Walker and three black men “summoned . . . to show us what [their] music [is] like,” despite the fact that “we had done all we felt we were able to spare them and ourselves this summons” (28–29). A book that will be entirely about white people begins as a book about an encounter with black people. The black men are, in effect, commanded to perform for the white men (“I had been sick in the knowledge that they felt they were here at our demand”); they sing, Agee gives them fifty cents, and they walk away “into the sunlight.” What I mean by describing this encounter as agonized, of course, is just that it centers on the personal relations Agee attempts to establish with the people who will be the subjects of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and on his eagerness to overcome the intimidation or sense of social inferiority that he imagines these subjects (black or white) will experience in dealing with him. Here, as in the only other sustained encounter with black people that Agee narrates (his approach to a young black couple inadvertently terrorizes them), the guilt (“self-hatred”) he feels is specifically the guilt of a white man, the guilt of one of the beneficiaries of Jim Crow. But where his efforts to make the terrorized black couple know that he is their “friend” (42) are (even in his own eyes) doomed to failure, the situation is not quite the same with the white tenant farmers, who will eventually say things to him like “I want you and Mr. Walker to know how much we all like you, because you make us feel easy with you; we don’t have to act any different from what it comes natural to act . . . it’s just like you was our own people” (64). And to whom Agee can respond, “I wanted her to know how much

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I liked them, too . . . and that I certainly felt that they were my own people” (65). Of course, we’ve already begun to see the limits of such friendship (not only with respect to Evans, where it’s insincere, but also with respect to Agee, where it’s sincere but irrelevant), but the difference between black and white here is still striking. Where Emma Woods tells Agee that “it’s just like you was our own people,” the leader of the black musicians accepts his money, thanks him “in a dead voice,” and refuses to look him “in the eye” (31). And the black couple responds to his advances by retreating even “more profoundly behind their faces” (43). Shared whiteness seems to allow for a possibility of reciprocal identification (“our own people”) that the difference between black and white does not. If, then, there are no black tenant farmers represented in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, if there are no photographs of black people, it’s not only because the assignment from Fortune was to focus on whites but also because the black people who do appear in the book are understood to do so in a way that proclaims their unwillingness to be there and that, more strikingly, is imagined as successfully removing them from it. Thus, for example, the retreat of the black couple further and further “behind their faces” suggests that even if there were photographs of their faces in the book, there wouldn’t be any photographs of them—since they are behind their faces. And it’s not just that black people resist being represented; it’s also that their refusal to make themselves available to whites is regarded by Agee as admirable, while its converse is regarded as contemptible. Comparing the black singers who treat him and Evans as if they weren’t there to the Mitchell’s Christian Singers, he contrasts the “austerity” of the Christian Singers’ “harmonies” to the “mellow and euphonious Fisk Quartette style” (29). But the difference here is not just one of style. In fact, in his journals, Agee criticizes the Fisk Jubilee Singers for having abandoned their style, for having “shifted over” “their style into effects.”31 Everything in their music is devoted to “pleasing a benevolent white audience in its idea of what negro music should be.” By contrast, “There is not an ounce of effect in the Christian Singers . . . they are

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absorbed” (121–22). Thus, the refusal of the singers in the book to acknowledge the appreciation of their white audience—indeed, their refusal even to acknowledge that they are performing for an audience—is the mark both of the seriousness of their art and of their irrelevance to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. We might say that black people in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are essentially invisible, almost literally unphotographable. Heading out to the white man’s land, Evans asks him if it’s “all right to make pictures” and is told that he can “take all the snaps you’re a mind to” but only if he “can keep the niggers from running off when they see a camera” (25). The landlord’s primitivizing characterization here of black people’s resistance to the camera is in a sense endorsed by Agee in his own account of the failure of the white people to resist it: white people, Agee writes, “are much slower to catch on than negroes, who understand the meaning of a camera, a weapon, a stealer of images and souls.” “Walker made a picture of this,” Agee writes, “you didn’t know, you thought he was still testing around” (figure 23). The Ricketts are more easily fooled (more “undefended,” Agee calls them [9]) than the black people. And Evans made another picture (figure 24), even more “surreptitiously,” the day they first met Ricketts, Gudger, and Woods, not by pretending still to be setting up but by deploying one of the decoy lenses described earlier. In Agee and Evans, “catching on” to the “meaning of a camera” never quite rises to the level of really being able to defend oneself against it (even Paralee’s closed eyes are more an expression of defiance than a means of protection), but it does involve at least beginning to realize that one ought to be defended. In the comparative terms introduced by Agee himself, that means, for the white farmers, learning what, thanks to the structure of Jim Crow, the black farmers already know: their “inferiority.” But to learn that—both for the white farmers and (in a slightly different way) for the readers of the book that seeks to give them to us—is also to learn something more. The black farmers are the victims of racism; the white farmers are among its supposed beneficiaries. So Emma isn’t mistaken when she tells Agee that “it’s just like you was our own people,” and Agee isn’t lying when he

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Figure 23. Walker Evans, Floyd Burroughs and Tengle Chldren, Hale County, Alabama (1936). 35 mm nitrate negative. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

says how much he likes her and that he feels that way too. The lesson of post-Emancipation racism was that one’s own people were no longer “the family black and white” of the plantation but all white people, of every class. But just as we’ve already seen the irrelevance of Emma’s and Agee’s liking for each other, we now begin to see the limits of the identification asserted in “our own people,” not only the limits, for people like Emma, of racism’s benefits, but also the irrelevance in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men of racism itself.32 Perhaps the easiest way to understand this irrelevance—not just the text’s focus on white people but its willed insistence on the exclusion or withdrawal of black people—is by comparing Let Us Now Praise Famous

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Figure 24. Walker Evans, Frank Tengle, Bud Fields, and Floyd Burroughs, Cotton Sharecroppers, Hale County, Alabama (1936). 35 mm nitrate negative. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

Men to two other projects of the period. The poor in Agee and Evans do not, as they do in Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s contemporary and extraordinarily successful You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), have a distinctively regional identity. The first words of Caldwell’s text are “The South,” and the core of its critique is of the South’s “questionable” “culture.”33 But the difference between Agee and Evans and their poor, as I have described it, has nothing to do with either geography or culture. For one thing, of course, Agee himself was born and raised in Tennessee. For another more important thing, the book makes no attempt to understand its subjects as participants in a distinctive culture. There is no effort to represent their activities as a function of

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Southern or rural or working-class cultural difference. No banjos, no folksongs, no outsider art. They are “damaged,” not different. Indeed, insofar as something that we might think of as cultural difference appears in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it does so (as we have seen) only to disappear, embodied in the black singers and thus removed from representation by their resolute and hyperbolic antitheatricality—the indifference to their effect on white people that makes them invisible. The exclusion of black people from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is thus the exclusion also and crucially of questions of cultural difference and cultural authenticity.34 The fact that culture is racialized only highlights the more crucial fact that inequality is not—that Agee’s and Evans’s subjects, unlike Richard Wright’s in another important contemporary photographic text of the period, 12 Million Black Voices (1941), do not belong to a persecuted race. They are victims, but not of what Wright called the “paradoxical amalgam of love and cruelty” that is racism.35 Rather, the whole point of staging the exclusion of blacks from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is to depict a social problem that was not caused by cruelty and cannot be resolved by love. If, as Barbara and Karen Fields have recently argued, one of the consequences of the ongoing production of race (and of its affective technologies: racism and antiracism) has been to deprive Americans of any “legitimate language for talking about class,”36 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men might be described as an early experiment in seeking to provide, perhaps not exactly that language, but a kind of conceptual and aesthetic equivalent of it, a way of turning the lens on class by imagining what “the difference between white men and white men” would look like in a world where the difference between white men and black men had become irrelevant. That formulation, however—the difference between white men and white men—is William Faulkner’s, not James Agee’s.37 In July 1936, while Agee and Evans were meeting the landowner with the Frenchsounding name (the one whose ancestors “had escaped an insurrection of negroes in Haiti”), the story of the most famous fictional participant in the Haitian revolution was just about to go to press. But Thomas

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Sutpen doesn’t leave Haiti because of the rebellion; he leaves it because he has married a Haitian who, he discovers, is part black. If Let Us Now Praise Famous Men imagines a world without blacks, the world of Absalom, Absalom! (probably the most important American novel of the 1930s) is one in which blacks are imagined to be inescapable. The “mistake” Sutpen makes in marrying the part-black Haitian woman will become both the engine of Faulkner’s plot and the insuperable obstacle to the fulfillment of Sutpen’s notorious “design.”38 Not even the subsequent accumulation of hundreds of slaves and a vast Mississippi plantation (let alone a second, entirely white wife and two equally white children) can forestall the consequences of bringing black blood into his family. As Shreve says on the last page of the novel, the only thing left of the great design is “one nigger Sutpen” (302). If then, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men deliberately excludes black people in order to imagine a world without racial difference, Absalom, Absalom! even more deliberately introduces them in order to imagine a world entirely structured by racial difference. Indeed, if we continue to follow Karen and Barbara Fields in understanding racial difference as a technology for managing class difference, we can see in Absalom, Absalom! and in the fate of Sutpen’s “design” both an instance of that technology and a narrative of its deployment. Sutpen is brought up “poor white” in western (now West) Virginia (his stock, “Scotch-English,” is Gudger and Ricketts stock), in a world where, as Faulkner describes it, neither racial nor class difference exists. There are no black people and there is no property: “where he lived the land belonged to anybody and everybody and so the man who would go to the trouble and work to fence off a piece of it and say ‘This is mine’ was crazy” (179). He learns about both—or, rather, he learns about the one (race) as a way to achieve and mark the other (class)—when his family moves to the Tidewater and, sent by his father on an errand to “the rich man’s” (190) house, he is turned away from “the front door” by the rich man’s slave and made to go “around to the back” (188). It’s the black slave who teaches him the difference between white men and white men, and it’s at that moment he conceives the design, which is

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to stop being the kind of (“poor”) white man who can be sent to the back door and to become the kind of white man—one with “land and niggers and a fine house” (192)—who can do the sending. Whereupon, he “tiptoe[s]” out of his father’s house and heads to the West Indies, a place “to which,” he’d heard, “poor men went in ships and became rich” (195). Which he does. Why then is the design said to have failed? More precisely, why is the mistake that makes it fail his marrying a quadroon and fathering an octoroon? Why does having married and abandoned a black woman count as an obstacle to the acquisition of a plantation, slaves, and a fine house? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. The design that’s destroyed in Absalom, Absalom! is not the design that was originally conceived. What happens is that the desire to stop being a poor white (he just wanted “to be rich,” Quentin says) is reconfigured as the desire to perpetuate whiteness (“all I wanted was just a son,” Sutpen himself says [234]). And miscegenation, which represents no threat whatsoever to the class ambition, completely destroys the racial ambition. What Absalom, Absalom! does, then, is turn its interest in the difference between white men and white men into an interest in the difference between white men and black men. Where Let Us Now Praise Famous Men stages a kind of racial reduction and thereby seeks to imagine a world from which racial difference has been removed, Absalom, Absalom! imagines one where it is literally irreducible. This is what I meant in saying that it provides both a narrative and an instance of the racialization of social difference. It describes the transformation of the desire to establish one’s superiority over white men into the desire to preserve one’s difference from black men and—along with Faulkner’s other major texts of the period (especially The Sound and the Fury [1929], Light in August [1932], and Go Down Moses [1939])—helps turn the “amalgam of love and cruelty” that Wright identified as the relation between the races into the lens through which Americans would increasingly see not just their own society but also the very idea of the social.39 It’s through this lens that the effort to overcome racism (and discrimination more generally) has provided us with our most powerful political

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model of what it would mean to achieve equality, and that the ongoing fact of discrimination (racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism) has constituted for us the affective life of inequality. That affective life is not merely a consequence of inequality; it is, more crucially—because the inequality is produced by discrimination—a cause of it. Just as (to return to our discussion in chapter 2) the “illusions” of racism and sexism are functions of how we see, their cruelties and kindnesses are functions of how we feel. In the thought experiment that is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by contrast, the effort to imagine an inequality that is not a function of discrimination is, at the same time, an effort to imagine an inequality that is not in itself an effect of affect. It’s precisely because the poverty of the tenant farmers is not caused by how anyone feels about them that, as we’ve already seen, Agee’s desperate and successful effort to like and be liked by them functions in the text only as a display of its irrelevance. But this is also why Evans’s loathing for their way of life is not quite similarly irrelevant since, although it doesn’t cause a gap, it does mark the existence of a gap that would not be overcome even if the loathing disappeared (i.e., even if Evans were more like Agee or Sander). There is, we might say, something deeply impersonal about it. It’s like when Agee passed through Alabama in the summer of 1937, a year after his trip with Evans. He was traveling this time with his wife to be, Alma Mailman, and they stopped at the Gudgers who were, Agee wrote, “amazed and happy to see him” and who fed them dinner.40 A brilliant and characteristic passage in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men describes an earlier meal Agee had at the Gudgers, served to him late at night after his car had gotten stuck in a ditch. While Mrs. Gudger apologizes for the “awful plain, mean food” (413), Agee, torn between not wanting to cause her any trouble and “feeling it is better to keep them awake and to eat too much than . . . to let them continue to believe I am what they assume I must be: ‘superior’ to them and their food,” opts for eating too much—apparently the right choice since they are “surprised and gratified in my appetite” (414). On this return trip with Alma, he experienced no such indecision and,

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his biographer reports, stuffed himself. But “Alma went outside and vomited what she had eaten.”41 To paraphrase a remark Robert Smithson once made about Michael Fried, the quality of Alma’s disgust is high.42 It’s not an expression of her dislike of poor whites; it’s not an expression of her inability to tolerate cultural (here in the form of culinary) difference. If there’s one thing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is clear about, it’s that the relevant difference between Agee and Evans and the Gudgers and Ricketts is not cultural (again, that’s part of what’s insisted upon by the expulsion of black people). Rather, because Alma’s disgust is neither personal nor cultural, it acknowledges the superiority that Agee seeks either to conceal or to deny. And, in acknowledging that superiority, it also acknowledges the difference that we have already seen the photographs assert. It is the aesthetic fact of their beauty, a beauty not available to the “appallingly damaged group of human beings” (7) who are their subjects, that makes visible the social fact—and the distinctive social character—of the differences between the white men who made the book and the white men and women and children who are in the book. Self-Portraits

If you look again at the figures on income distribution in the United States in (graph 1, p. 23), you can see that 1936 was one of the most unequal years in a period marked by extreme inequality. The top 10 percent took home around 45 percent of American income. It’s by seeking to make poverty beautiful in a way that will be invisible to the poor themselves that Agee and Evans produce in their work not just this gap between the rich and the poor but also the conflict between them— the sense that the riches of the rich come at the expense of the poor. Furthermore, in making art out of the lives of people who (at least in their telling) have no understanding of art, they insist on the superiority of the beholders as well as the artists. It’s only because, like Agee and Evans, we can see in these photographs what Sadie Ricketts and her daughter cannot—a picture of her as art—that we can experience the

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society in which those pictures were made and in which they continue to be admired as fundamentally structured by the inequalities of class. That’s why their beauty constitutes rather than compromises their politics. It makes them pictures not just of poverty but also of inequality. And it means that achieving Agee’s goal—to give the farmers as they were—involved also foregrounding the difference between who they were and who he and his viewers were. But when we turn our attention back to the equally unequal present, and back in particular to Liz Deschenes’s mirrored photograms, that difference has been made to disappear—in principle and in practice. By this I mean that the difference between the beholder and the subject in Evans is thematic; it depends upon our understanding something about Sadie Ricketts’s portrait that she doesn’t—its claim to be art. But the lack of difference between the beholder and what we see in Deschenes’s mirrored photograms is literal. You can’t look at one of them without seeing yourself or, at the very least, the gallery or museum, the space you’re in. The way Deschenes puts this is to say that she “takes the idea of the mirror in photography and doesn’t make it a metaphor but actually makes it an object.”43 These terms are almost explicitly those in which the original debate over minimalism took place, and if, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, some of Ulrich’s artifacts have more than a passing relation to Judd-style specific objects,44 Deschenes’s recourse to minimalism goes a step further. That is, it goes beyond the juxtaposition of photographs and objects (with its implication of their shared status) and seeks to bring out the objecthood of the photographs on their own. Thus, for example, some of the works at the Whitney are positioned within the frame but at an angle to the wall and so to the viewer (figure 25), a positioning explained by reference to the architecture of the museum, but serving more generally to emphasize the degree to which the works’ materiality is the materiality of objects in the world, rather than of representations of the world. Precisely because they’re not metaphors, they provide viewers not with a “representation” but with a “physical object” they can “participate with.”45 A metaphor may solicit the reader’s response, but only in terms defined by its maker.

Figure 25. Liz Deschenes, installation view of Untitled (2012), Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery.

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Agee and Evans, for example, turn their work into a kind of mirror, but you can only see what they demand you see—the “superiority,” for better or for worse, of your class position. When you instead replace the metaphor of the mirror with a real mirror—when “the viewer,” as Deschenes says, “actually becomes an active participant in the work”—you see yourself not as Deschenes sees you but as you see you. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in other words, is about the difference between the class position of the beholder and the class position of the farmers. But Deschenes’s photograms are not “about” anything (that’s the point of literalizing the mirror—a mirror reflects you, but it isn’t about you), and in enabling each viewer to make a distinctive contribution, they replace the experience of the difference between classes with something more like the differences between individuals—between what the work is when it reflects you, and what it is when it reflects me. Which doesn’t mean that they have nothing to do with contemporary political economy. Just the opposite. One could easily say that in reflecting the world of their viewers (the museum, the gallery, the apartment of the person with enough money and taste to buy one), they give us our own individuality but precisely as members of the class that makes up the art world. So the difference from Agee and Evans would be not that in Deschenes there is no class, but that in Agee and Evans there are two where in Deschenes there is only one: the 1 percent (or at least the top 10 percent), c’est nous. But in this elimination of class difference, we can also see a more complicated relation to the question of inequality and perhaps a deeper difference from Agee and Evans. For what’s distinctive about our inequality today is that it’s been produced by a form of capitalism that refuses the very idea of class difference, by which I mean not that it denies the idea of economic inequality, but rather that it refuses to think of economic inequality as a function of the difference between classes. In chapter 2, I cited Dieter Plehe’s remark that “neoliberals usually deny the existence of social inequality rooted in the capitalist class structure,” but, looking back to Michel Foucault’s extraordinary seminars of 1978 and 1979, we can see how fundamental this denial

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is to the very idea of neoliberalism. In his analysis of the theoretical originality of economists like Becker, and in particular of the idea of “human capital,” Foucault in effect congratulates them for eliminating the concept of labor as such. Once, he writes, we begin thinking of our wages not as the price of our labor power but as “an income,” and we define income as “the product or return on a capital,” we can stop seeing ourselves as workers and start seeing ourselves as the possessors of “human capital.”46 On this view, labor and capital are no longer defined by their difference from each other; rather, the one is subsumed by the other: the worker becomes “a sort of enterprise for himself” and therefore “an entrepreneur of himself.”47 The point is not that inequality disappears but that it involves the differences between capitalists and capitalists, not between capital and labor. Here the formal egalitarianism of Deschenes’s work—every beholder is a participant; no matter who you are, it will always reflect your world—functions not to celebrate one class while neglecting the other, but to make class difference, and so class antagonism, disappear. The mirroring in Deschenes insists both on the irreducibility of the beholder (we cannot see anything without seeing ourselves) and on the differences between beholders (since, seeing ourselves, we each see something different). Thus both the world we see and our place within that world are individualized. If, when we look at the photograph of Sadie Ricketts, we’re looking at a world that has been reduced to nothing but class difference (a world in which difference is a product of the essentially impersonal forces of class conflict), when we look at Deschenes’s mirrored photograms in the Whitney, we’re looking at a world from which those forces seem to have been withdrawn. Our inequality—even greater today than it was in 1936—thus appears to us as a consequence, not of the conflict between labor and capital, but (if we seek to justify it) of the differences between us as individuals and (if we seek to criticize it) of our failure to provide each individual with the chance (paradigmatically, but not exclusively, in the form of education) to succeed. Either way—defending or deploring—the focus is not on an increas-

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ingly stratified society but on the mechanisms through which individuals find their positions in it. Or, to put the point the other way around, while the question of who benefits and who suffers from inequality is, of course, personal, the fact of inequality itself is not—rather, it’s built into the structure of our economy. And it’s this structure that our vision of ourselves in Deschenes’s mirrors makes invisible. Part of what’s important about Deschenes’s work, then, is that it brilliantly reproduces not so much the way we live as our understanding of the way we live. But another part of its importance is that it produces this understanding not as a solution but as a problem. For even though Deschenes tends to sound pretty upbeat about the participation of the beholder, the experience of actually looking at these works is a more divided one. This is in part because the surfaces of works like Black Mirror #5 are not only reflective but are also very beautiful and thus elicit two not entirely compatible responses: on the one hand, the ability to see the reflection; on the other, the desire to see through or past it, to see what the work would look like when we weren’t seeing in it traces of ourselves. There’s an important sense, in other words, in which, because the reflective surface functions to bring the real space of what’s in front of the work into play (the space the beholder occupies), the nonreflective elements function to suggest a space that this reflected world conceals. Looking at the work is thus reconfigured as looking into the work, and from this standpoint, the mirroring comes to seem as much an obstacle as an opportunity, as if the true surface of the photogram were somehow behind it, as if, in the same way that the black couple in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are behind their faces, the real subject of these photographs is behind (the reflection of) our faces. And thus as if the reflection were functioning to make the real work invisible, or visible only insofar as we can see past or through ourselves. Of course, this real work is only (to use Deschenes’s term) a metaphor. There is no other work behind the one we see; there’s just her allusion to the idea of one, as if what we can see is a figure for what we can’t, and as if what we can’t see is a figure for what we otherwise could. But that’s the other part of the point. Here it’s neither the physical

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object nor the participating subject that matters; rather, in the idea of a work that is not reducible either to the material it’s made of (it’s not literal) or to our experience of that material (it’s not subjective), we get a glimpse of a structure (the structure of class) that we didn’t produce but that we have tended unquestioningly and enthusiastically to reproduce. And finally, in this invocation of the simultaneously essential and irrelevant (or mystificatory) fact of our own presence, we see another way of exploring the desire, imagined by Benjamin, for a photography without portraits. What Benjamin admired in Sander was what he took to be the turn from the individual (defined precisely as a person eager for his or her portrait) to the social order. But of course, individuality in the 1920s and 1930s was on its way in, not out, and the groups that composed Sander’s social order would belong to a world to which the conflict of class seemed as irrelevant as it did to liberal individualism.48 At the same time, however (and at a place that returns us to one of the points with which this argument began), we can also begin to see how in Sander the conception of the social order composed of its many essentially complementary groups begins to break down. The last photograph in Face of Our Time (taken in 1928) is Unemployed (shown uncropped in figure 26). The unemployment rate in Germany that year was 8.6 percent.49 But by the time the book came out, it was 13.3 percent, and by 1931 it was 31.4 percent. If “in each of the 365 employment agencies in Germany,” Sander observed in one of his radio broadcasts that year, “one would simultaneously photograph the people there and join the results together, tagged with the year 1931,” this “tragedy,” would be “understandable . . . for all of contemporary and future humanity.”50 So there’s a sense in which (by what we might call Sander’s own standards) the single picture of the unemployed in Face of Our Time is insufficient to capture the magnitude of the tragedy; indeed, by the next year, not that far from half of the German workforce (43.8 percent) would be unemployed. The actual economic conditions would in effect be overwhelmingly the social taxonomy that Face of Our Time—with its farmers, locksmiths, engineers, and businessmen—sought to delineate, and what

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Figure 26. August Sander, Unemployed (1928). © 2014 Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln/Artists Rights Society, New York.

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we might describe as the intrinsic difficulty of thinking about the unemployed as (in Becher’s words) “one group existing at the same level as other groups” would be increasingly vivid. But the difference between the unemployed and the “other groups” is not just that there came to be more of them. It’s that the social order in which the unemployed have a role to play is not the order of equal or at least harmonious groups that Sander seeks to depict. It’s just the opposite: it is a society constituted by class conflict, and their role is to discipline one class (their own, labor) on behalf of the other (capital).51 That’s what it means to describe capitalist economies as having a “natural” rate of unemployment (ours has been placed anywhere between 4 and 6 percent). The utility of the unemployed derives not only or necessarily from the argument that full employment is impossible without serious and destructive inflation (this is a matter of debate) but also, as the great Polish economist Michal Kalecki pointed out many years ago, from the fact that full unemployment is “not at all to the liking” of “business leaders,” since it undermines the greatest buttress of their leadership, the ability to deprive someone of a job.52 From this standpoint, then, there is a qualitative—not just quantitative—difference between groups like the blind and the Jews and groups like the unemployed. And that difference is both political (the problem of unemployment is not a function of how we feel about the unemployed; it’s produced by capitalism, not racism) and aesthetic (the irrelevance of our feelings about the unemployed makes the photographer’s relation to his subject, which is to say, the fundamental problematic of the portrait, equivalently irrelevant). That’s why (as we saw in chapter 1), although the Berlin photographer Viktoria Binschtok went where Sander imagined going, to the unemployment office, she went only when no one was there; instead of all the faces of all the people at the 365 employment agencies in Germany, in Binschtok we see no faces at all. What we see instead are the marks left on the wall by the bodies of the people who leaned against it while standing in line, marks that testify to the irrelevance of their individual stories, not to mention their race and sex. Rendered abstract by the camera,

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the marks refuse the logic of the portrait, reminding us not only that we don’t need to see their faces but also that we can only understand the meaning of unemployment—its function in maintaining a society structured by class, and hence the way it marks us all as belonging to a class—if we don’t see any faces: theirs or (as the interferences produced by Deschenes’s reflective mirrors suggest) our own.

5 Never Again, or Nevermore Chapter five never again, or nevermore

In 2006, while Laurent Binet was writing HHhH (short for Himmlers Him heist Heydrich [Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich]; the subject is the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich by the Czech resistance), Jonathan Littell’s book Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) appeared. Heydrich plays only a minor role in Littell’s book, but the general subject matter of the two books—Binet describes Les Bienveillantes as “the (false) memoirs of an old SS veteran”]1—is, as Binet noted unhappily at the time, “fairly similar.”2 Why unhappily? Because Les Bienveillantes immediately became a publishing sensation in France, selling over seven hundred thousand copies, winning the Prix Goncourt and even the reluctant respect of Claude Lanzmann for its “formidable documentation”—he and Raoul Hilberg, Lanzmann said, were the only two people in the world who could sufficiently appreciate its accuracy.3 If you were yourself in the middle of a book about the Nazis, and you too were committed to historical accuracy, to knowing and saying “how things really happened,” you might understandably be nervous about how much attention would be left for you. Binet need not have worried. HHhH was also a big success, winning its own Prix Goncourt and, more interestingly, while acknowledging both Les Bienveillantes and Lanzmann’s praise for it, producing its own critique of that novel’s claim to truth. In fact, Binet takes on Littell directly, objecting especially to an early scene in which the brutal and drunken Kommandant of Einsatzgruppe C, Paul Blobel, gets driven off

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for psychiatric attention in his Opel. As with most of the characters in Les Bienveillantes, there was a real Paul Blobel, who did command Einsatzgruppe C, who was both a brute (he was hanged for war crimes in 1951) and an alcoholic, and who (like Littell’s Blobel) temporarily lost his command because of his drinking. So what’s the problem? How, Binet wonders, does Littell know that Blobel drove an Opel? And did Lanzmann, “before deciding that The Kindly Ones did not contain ‘a single error, a single flaw,’ check this detail?” “If Blobel really drove an Opel, then I bow before Littell’s superior research,” Binet writes. “But if it’s a bluff, it weakens the whole book” (HHhH, 226). Why would it weaken the whole book? The way in which Binet puts the point suggests that what is at stake is the writer’s commitment to truth: you should only say things about the past if you have good reason to believe that what you’re saying is true. Directed at historians, this injunction would seem reasonable but superfluous—trying to tell the truth about the past is for them not so much a virtue as a job description. But Littell, of course, for all his command of the relevant history, is a novelist. And it’s this to which, in the end, Binet really objects. Suppose, he says, it were discovered that Blobel really had been driven off in an Opel: “fundamentally, it wouldn’t change a thing.” Why not? Because, narrated as it is by a “fictional protagonist,” the SS officer Dr. Max Aue, the novel cannot tell us what we really want to know— “how things really happened.” What it tells us instead, Binet writes in “Missing Pages,” is how the “writer imagines Nazism.” Understood as an epistemological objection, this might sound naïve, at least to those historians and philosophers of history who would argue that there is no such thing as knowing “how things really happened” and that all history is in some epistemically significant sense imagined by the historian. But, challenged in this manner, Binet would probably have the better of the argument, since it’s hard to come up with a single sentence in any historical writing that doesn’t present itself as an effort to say what really happened, and since the possibility of historians disagreeing with each other (or, for that matter, agreeing) depends on their commitment to the idea that they are describing what

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really happened. If I imagine Blobel in an Opel and you imagine him in a Volkswagen, we have no quarrel with each other, and we can’t work one up unless we both believe that we are describing the world not only as we imagine it but also as it was. (Of course, at least one of us must be wrong, but that’s a different story.) In the event, however, Binet’s objection to Littell’s invented narrator—the Nazi Max Aue—turns out to have less to do with a commitment to truth than with a hostility to fiction, which he articulates on the very first page of HHhH by citing the novelist Milan Kundera’s sense of shame at “having to name his characters” (3). Nothing could be more “vulgar,” Binet agrees, than (out of some misplaced commitment to the “effet de réel”) giving “an invented person” an “invented name.” Thus, in HHhH, there are three unrelated people named Moravec, a confusing repetition that no “ordinary novel” (204) would ever allow. This is possible—or rather necessary—because not only are there no invented names, there are also, of course, no “invented persons,” no characters who need to be made realistic: the reason (unrealistically) there are three Moravecs is because (really) there were three Moravecs. In this respect, HHhH is like Sheil Heti’s much noticed How Should a Person Be? “It seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story,” Heti said in 2007. “I just—I can’t do it.”4 So instead she wrote a book featuring herself and her real friends in what she calls “a novel from life.” Binet’s word for making people up is “vulgar,” not “tiresome,” but he too wrote a novel from life, or at least from history. Not, however, a historical novel—he calls it an “infranovel” (206), by which he means he uses “all the resources” of the novel “except one: fiction.”5 Thus, if HHhH is in one sense not so unlike The Kindly Ones (where almost every realistic character is, like Blobel, a real one), the one difference is crucial; unlike Littell’s Aue (but just like Heti’s Sheila), Binet’s narrator is also not an invented person: “je ne suis pas un personnage” (214),6 he says, “not a character” (156), and the “he” who says it, the “je,” is Laurent Binet. Binet and Heti are by no means alone in their distaste for characters. In fact, one could argue that, without either a personality or a personal

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past, McCarthy’s reenactor has none of the psychological trappings of character that contemporary critics like James Wood continue to insist are crucial to the novel. And some of the hostile critical responses to The Kindly Ones, especially in the United States, were grounded precisely in the fact that Aue seemed to reviewers not really a character at all but rather, in Michiko Kakutani’s words, a “monster.”7 Binet’s and Heti’s hostility, however, is not to what Wood calls the novel’s commitment to interesting “the reader in the fate of the individual,” but to the fictional status of that individual.8 As the American writer David Shields puts it (describing his failed effort to write a novel modeled after Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being), “I couldn’t bring myself to give the two ‘characters’ jobs” or to “work up” any interest in their relations to the questions about “mass culture” his book was supposed to be concerned with. Why? Because “I wasn’t interested in imaginary beings’ friction vis-à-vis mass culture; I was interested in my own.”9 Setting aside the role played by Kundera in this ontological impatience, the relevant point here is not hostility to individuality but to fictionality, accompanied by—even as an occasion for—an interest in the writer himself or herself. And even though the subject of HHhH is historical, following Shields’s logic, it’s as much about Binet as The Kindly Ones is about Aue and as How Literature Saved My Life (2013) is about Shields. That is, it’s about what really happened—about Heydrich and the plot to assassinate him and the eventual capture and death of the heroic assassins—but, following the protocols defined by his search for the truth, it’s also about what Binet knows and how he came to know it and why he wanted to know it and how he feels about what he doesn’t know. Thus, for example, right after criticizing Littell for writing a novel that reflects the twenty-first century (Aue “is the mirror of our age: a postmodern nihilist,” 240), Binet begins what will be his lead-in to Heydrich’s actual assassination with “The moment is getting closer, I can feel it . . . something floating in the Prague air pierces me to my bones . . . I see the pigeons” and the Tyn cathedral, “so majestic that it makes me want to fall to my knees every time I see it . . .” (241). If Littell’s Max Aue is the mirror of our ethical epoch, Binet’s Binet mirrors

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himself, and thus, generically at least, provides a much sharper image of our literary epoch. For, concerned at least as much with Binet as it is with Heydrich and other characters, HHhH knits together simultaneously and without contradiction two genres, history and the memoir— relocating history (with its absence of invented characters) under the sign of the memoir (with its interest above all in the real narrator’s relation to the real people who replace the characters). In texts like these, what often has seemed like a tension between objectivity and subjectivity (between a commitment to the truth of what happened and a commitment to the writer’s perspective on what happened) begins to look more like a kind of collaboration, a demand for the truth as we know it. That’s why, when Binet criticizes The Kindly Ones as the “(false) memoirs of an old SS veteran,” he means not that they’re false in the way that, say, the memoirs championed by Oprah have more than once turned out to be false, but in the way that every novel is—they’re fictional. By contrast, it’s the refusal to be, like HHhH, creative nonfiction—the insistence simultaneously on historical accuracy and fictionality—that emerges as distinctive about The Kindly Ones. What this requires is that the book present itself in two ways. One is as what Peter Kuon calls “a one-to- one recounting of extracts from historical sources and compendia,”10 remarkably and even ostentatiously accurate: Littell knows what make of car his Nazis drove. The other, inseparable from but not identical to the first, is the rendering of its history in the fictional first person: the narrator’s responses are just as central as they are in HHhH, but they are entirely made up. Thus, for example, Littell produces an extremely accurate account of what happened at Babi Yar that is also and just as ostentatiously an account of how his narrator felt about what happened— from his response to the cold wind (“I regretted not having brought my sweater” [124]) to his desire to comfort a dying (and “beautiful” [129]) young woman with a bullet that “had come out beneath her breast,” to tell her that “everything would be fine,” when what he ends up doing instead is firing “a bullet into her head” (130). What makes this novel of the Holocaust different from a history of the Holocaust

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is not, in other words, that it’s unconcerned with the truth of what happened, but rather that it routes that truth through the subjectivity of its narrator. What makes it different from the memoir is that that subjectivity is false, fictitious. The memoir may or may not tell you the “objective” truth of what happened, but even when it fails to be objective, it gives you the truth of how the narrator feels; The Kindly Ones, at least equally committed to giving you the truth of what happened, cannot give you the truth about how its narrator felt. There is no such truth. It’s for that reason that its thousand pages of what Binet (in “Missing Pages”) dismisses as “interior monologue” can count not just (in the way they do for many readers) as the forced and unwelcome imposition of a morally obnoxious (i.e., Nazi) subjectivity, but also as the unwelcome and unnecessary imposition of subjectivity itself in relation to a topic that demands instead, W. G. Sebald wrote, a prose of “unpretentious objectivity.” Only such objectivity, Sebald argued, could embody allegiance to “the ideal of truth,” which was “the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce literature in the face of total destruction.”11 Thus, writing about representations of the Allied destruction of cities like Dresden and Hamburg, and particularly about Peter de Mendelssohn’s novel Die Kathedrale, Sebald complains about the “effect of kitsch” (56) produced by the nonobjective, “egomaniacal viewpoint” required by the novelist’s decision to center his narrative on a single figure, Torstenson. Everything, he says, is Torstenson: “Torstenson fears, Torstenson sees, Torstenson thought, had the impression that, was in some doubt as to whether, judged that, was at odds with himself, was disinclined . . .” (54). The problem seems clear: in the face of total destruction, why is the question of how Torstenson felt about it the one we should be concerned with? What’s objectionable, in other words, is the emergence of the narrator’s or central character’s relation to these events as the primary object of interest, and the justification of literature in the face of total destruction will require its ability to overcome this relation. Whether Sebald himself meets this standard is a question for a dif-

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ferent occasion, but Littell’s fictional memoir doesn’t even try. If Sebald was appalled by Mendelssohn’s Torstenson worrying that “in the dark his nailed boots” might “slip on the ebbing warmth of a woman’s crushed breast,” what would he have thought of Littell’s Nazi, carrying on about how “fabulously beautiful” this executed Russian partisan seemed to him, with the “Medusa crest” (179–80) of her hair making him feel as if turned to stone? Indeed, the fact that we know a great deal about this particular woman and about her death (she is the Russian partisan Zoya Kosmodemyanska, pronounced a people’s hero by Stalin and widely memorialized), accompanied by the fact that this is one of the few places in the novel where Littell replaces what we know did happen with something that didn’t—he has the Germans (entirely fictitiously) line up and pass before her, each one forcing her to kiss him, some “tenderly, almost chastely” (179), some taking her head in their hands and forcing their tongues into her mouth—function here to make the characteristic extravagance of Aue’s response even more egregiously the center of the novel. And of course, this relentless insistence on the egomaniacal viewpoint—when Aue’s turn comes, the experience he and the doomed girl are imagined to share is so intense that she has to turn her head away—is made even more repulsive by the fact that the viewpoint is that of a perpetrator, not a victim. But, I want to argue, it’s precisely this effort to insist on and even—by making him a perpetrator—to radicalize the egomania of the narrator that makes Les Bienveillantes a crucial intervention in the recent history of the novel, which is to say, in literature’s relation both to history and to the memoir (to what I will describe as its refusal of both history and memoir). And it is this effort also—in part because of its hyperbolic relentlessness—that actually makes possible in Littell the refusal of the subject and the access instead to the structures of indifference that I’ve been describing. Of course, the idea that Les Bienveillantes produces a certain indifference to the question of the subject may seem a little implausible, given not only the absolute centrality of Max Aue but also Littell’s interest in accounts of the Nazis that emphasize precisely what the German 12

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historian Klaus Theweleit described as their affective rather than their ideological or economic lives. Theweleit is the author of what Littell has described as the “brilliant” Male Fantasies (1987, 1989), and in the postface Littell asked him to write for his little 2008 study of the Rexist Leon Degrelle (Le sec et l’humide), Theweleit characterizes his own work as an account of Nazism that, instead of understanding it as “the monstrous fruit of an ‘ideology’” (translation mine, scarequotes around ideology his), understands it as a manifestation of the distinctive subjectivity of what Theweleit calls the “soldier males.”13 In other words, Nazism was an episode in the “relations between men and women” (117–18), not an expression of some set of “convictions” or “ideas.” Noting that Male Fantasies was “more warmly” received by American than by German academics, Theweleit speculates that it was perhaps through his connection to American “campus communities” (Littell graduated from Yale in 1989) that Littell came to know, appreciate, and eventually build on Male Fantasies. But he wouldn’t have had to read Theweleit to learn a history that “privileged the affects of history’s protagonists” rather than their “convictions.” Nothing has been more characteristic of postmodern American academic culture than our suspicion of “convictions” and “ideology.” Indeed, insofar as American writers have been announcing the end of ideology ever since Daniel Bell, and insofar as the redescription of disagreement as difference has been at the core of contemporary pluralism, Theweleit and many others might themselves be described (in reverse homage to François Cusset) as proponents of American Theory. And insofar as French Theory (at least if you accept my characterization of it in The Shape of the Signifier) found itself committed to a model of the performative that also turned differing ideas into differing subject positions, we might forget nationality altogether and replace French and American with Neoliberal Theory. More generally, and maybe at the same time more precisely, one could say that texts like The Kindly Ones and HHhH and How Should a Person Be?—with their simultaneous interest in the object and the subject, in truth and subjectivity—belong to a literature that is better understood as defined by its relation to a

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political economy (currently existing capitalism) than by its relation to any nation. But if (like Theweleit, like Die Kathedrale, and, more relevantly, like HHhH and How Should a Person Be?) The Kindly Ones insists on telling us how its narrator felt and feels, at the same time (and unlike those texts), it is even more insistent on asserting that it actually doesn’t matter how the narrator felt or feels; indeed, this might be said to be its central theme. On the one hand, the novel pays a great deal of attention to how people respond to and carry out orders, and (inasmuch as Littell follows Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men rather than Daniel Goldhagen’s Willing Executioners) those responses are varied. When it comes to killing Jews, Aue is a reluctant participant; others, like Blobel and especially Aue’s enemy the bloodthirsty Turek, are vicious and eager anti-Semites. And still others, like his Eichmann, are just ambitious bureaucrats. On the other hand, everyone does it: “whether you killed Jews because you hated them or because you wanted to advance your career or even, in some cases, because you took pleasure in it” (131), Aue says, was irrelevant; the state “se moquait profondement,” couldn’t care less, about your “pensées.” And even if, like Einsatz Kommandant Schultz, who both in the novel and in reality (as he later testified) “did not favor this kind of warfare,”14 you managed to get yourself transferred to other duties, you still played your part. Bureaucrats also were necessary for the war effort. Furthermore, it’s not just the state that doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Aue himself says that killing the girl instead of comforting her “came down to the same thing” (130) and announces his allegiance to what he describes as a “Greek” theory of responsibility, in which it’s the act “not the will” (592) that matters. Hence Oedipus, meaning to kill “a stranger” who had “insulted “ him but unwittingly killing his father, correctly holds himself responsible for parricide. Or, as Albert Speer, making the same point about his own participation in the genocide, put it, “In Sophocles’ Oedipus, he is horribly punished by Providence for having murdered his mother and father, although it was not his fault and any court today would have acquitted him. But, according to the

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moral precepts of ancient Greece, he is nonetheless called to account for it.”15 Speer, like Aue, endorses this view. “I cannot explain even to myself why I think that is right,” he says in a letter quoted in Gitta Sereny’s extraordinary book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, “but I do.” Speer is also a central character in The Kindly Ones, and it’s very likely that Littell is relying here on Sereny for Aue’s formulation of the thesis. Sophocles is relevant for Speer as a way of denying that he knew what was going on in the camps while at the same time, like Oedipus, accepting responsibility for it. From Sereny’s standpoint (the standpoint of the battle with truth), this acceptance of responsibility is something less than satisfactory. She doubts that he didn’t know and, more to the point, doesn’t feel that her doubts are made irrelevant by the fact that Speer has accepted responsibility and was in fact imprisoned for twenty years for what he did. For Sereny, Speer’s mode of taking responsibility—his allegiance to the “Greek” interest in what he was doing rather than what he was thinking—functions as a way of avoiding rather than confronting the real issue. What matters to Sereny, in other words, is not whether Speer should or shouldn’t be held accountable—he should, on both theories—and we might reasonably wonder (since he was) why she or we should care whether or not he actually knew. To which the answer is presumably that we’re interested not only, or even primarily, in his actions and their consequences but also in what neither the Greeks nor Littell’s version of the Nazi state cared about: his “pensées.” Which The Kindly Ones is (this is what it means to run the history through the subject) but also isn’t, since it produces people’s feelings about what they did (their eagerness to kill Jews or their reluctance) only so that its narrator can insist that those feelings (including and especially his own) didn’t much matter. For some readers, of course, this is a problem. The most frequent moral criticism of the novel is not exactly that Aue is insufficiently repentant but that Littell is insufficiently critical of Aue, that (in the words of the French historian Édouard Husson and his collaborator, the philosopher Michel Terestchenko) the author doesn’t sufficiently “indicate . . . to the reader” how

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the most “scandalous” of Aue’s observations are to be taken. What they want from the book is not so much the truth of what happened as the right attitude toward that truth. And it’s this insistence on the right attitude that produces the dominant form of kitsch today—ethical kitsch. That is, the valorization of subjectivity to which Sebald objected appears most powerfully as the expression of our desire to bask in our own disapproval—of the Holocaust, of slavery, of all the genocides. Binet’s hatred of Heydrich—since every imaginable reader of his text will also hate Heydrich—functions in this register. By contrast, The Kindly Ones can be found wanting not because it doesn’t disapprove of the Holocaust (no one really thinks that Littell is an apologist for the Nazis) but because it isn’t sufficiently interested in its disapproval. The book’s instantly famous opening lines promise a “real morality play,” yet it isn’t interested in condemning the morality of its narrator and thus flattering the morality of its readers. This is what Husson and Terestchenko are complaining about. Littell fails to indicate his distance from the narrator and thus to instruct the reader as to the distance he is expected to take. He doesn’t tell the reader what the reader already knows, and he doesn’t seek to make him feel what he already feels.17 This is especially striking because the first famous thing about those famous lines is their address to the reader: “Frères humains, laissez-moi vous raconter comment ça s’est passé.”18 And the second famous thing is how the reader’s response—“On n’est pas votre frère, rétorquerezvous, et on ne veut pas le savoir”—turns out to be a marker of the very thing that will keep us reading. For if the reader’s aversion is to hearing the executioner’s side of the story, the great effect (as Littell has himself remarked) of making the narrator and virtually every other character— with their personal, political, and professional fears and hopes—an executioner is to give the reader what Littell calls a “prise” (“Conversation,” 44), a way into the situation and into the book itself. You don’t have to feel you’re being taken yet again through some Holocaust museum and asked to muster the appropriate levels of sympathy and outrage. All you have to do is ask yourself, if I were in Aue’s position, “Moi, finalement, j’aurais fait quoi?”—what would I have done? This is what Aue means 16

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when he says, “ça vous concerne: vous verrez bien que ça vous concerne.” Browning’s ordinary men thesis—the killers in the main were people who, in more normal circumstances, would never have killed anybody—functions here not primarily as a historical description but as a literary device. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re convinced of its truth—as Aue says, “Don’t think I am trying to convince you of anything; after all, your opinions are your own business” (1). What matters is that the executioner’s narrative turns the question of whether the thesis is true into a question about you—what you would have done. And it doesn’t really matter how you answer. Just as the novel focuses on—but doesn’t care about—its narrator’s sense of what he’s doing, it solicits—but also doesn’t care about—its reader’s sense of how he or she would have behaved.19 The point of the question is that it gets its grip on you, gives you the “prise.” What The Kindly Ones wants, in other words, is not to convince you of Aue’s humanity or to congratulate you on your own; what it wants from you is your interest. It wants to be what Littell calls “littérature.”20 This ambition is given a certain point (at least retroactively) by Binet’s ambition for HHhH—that it not be “littérature.” HHhH begins with the declaration that Joseph Gabcik (one of the men who killed Heydrich) was a real person and that what Binet wants most is not to “reduce” him to a “character” and his acts to “literature,” and it ends with the reminder that “the people who took part in this story are not characters” (251) and that Binet’s original goal (even if he believes he hasn’t quite achieved it) was to write about them “sans faire de littérature” (433). This is the goal that I have identified generically with the subsumption of history by the memoir and with the interest in the subjectivity of both the writer and the reader. Littell by contrast describes Les Bienveillantes as his effort to “écrire un livre qui viendrait s’inscrire dans ce qu’on appelle la littérature.”21 And his identification of the moment of its origin—he began to think about the book, he says, when he saw for the first time a photograph of the dead partisan Zoya (figure 27)—aligns itself not with a refusal of the literary but with the very idea of it.

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Figure 27. Sergej Strunnikow, Soja (1941). Gelatin silver photograph. 9.6 × 13.8 cm. Photograph: Courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

What is extraordinary about this “image,” he says is “qu’on perçoit à quel point cette femme a pu être belle.”22 In other words, it’s not just the death of a Russian partisan out of which Les Bienveillantes is made but the death of a beautiful woman, the subject that Poe (in “The Philosophy of Composition”) called “unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” (1379). Littell’s word is “literature,” not poetry, but when he describes himself as an “writer,” not a “witness,” and says that his ambition is to produce “art,” not testimony (“Conversation,” 5), we see what it means for him both to have added the absolutely fictional kisses to this scene and to have made it all about Aue—for whom, he says, the dead woman’s body was a kind of “mirror.” The point here is not remembrance of the dead, much less identification with the murderer. It is instead their transformation into a work of art that—precisely in its claims to be a work of art—makes the subjectivity of both murderer and victim irrelevant. The novel tells us nothing about Zoya, except in

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terms of what she means to one of her killers, and it tells us about that killer only to insist that what she means to him doesn’t matter. So, although a critic like Kuon criticizes Littell here for “aestheticizing his documents” (he means both the fictional kisses and the elaborate account of Aue’s own response) and thus becoming “an accomplice of the perpetrator,”23 what the aestheticization in fact does is to make both the author’s ethical relation to the event (his possible complicity) and the reader’s ethical relation (our disapproval or approval) irrelevant. It is a refusal not exactly of history but of historicism—of both elements of Holocaust kitsch: the idea that everybody’s deaths should be remembered and the idea that remembering them is valuable to those who do the remembering, that, as Binet puts it, it’s “for us, the living,” that remembrance of the dead “means something” (179). More generally, it’s a refusal of the idea that we have any ethical obligation to history, that there’s any meaning either to the idea of respecting or disrespecting it. Aestheticizing history is here a way of consigning it to the past, a way, precisely, of not historicizing it. I’ve written elsewhere about why that seems to me a good idea, focusing in particular on texts like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where history is called upon to provide identities that biology cannot, and criticizing more generally the prominence of redressing historical grievances in supposedly progressive social movements. Why should accounts of how we came to be where we are function instead as accounts of who we are (which is to say, why should we turn history into identity)? And why should justice consist in restoring to people the wealth that ought to have been (reparations for slavery) or was (reparations for lost property) accumulated by their ancestors? Why, for example, isn’t the world better off with stolen art displayed in museums to be seen by everyone, rather than returned to the descendants of the people from whom it was stolen? But in The Kindly Ones, the Holocaust represents less an opportunity to repudiate the identitarian appeals of historicism than— remembering Adorno’s notorious remark that “to write poetry” after Auschwitz would be “barbaric”24—a challenge to art itself. Or, since

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that challenge has turned out to function more as an invitation, perhaps we should say The Kindly Ones represents an effort to take it more seriously. And to take seriously, too—remembering, perhaps, that the oft-quoted sentence is only a kind of throwaway line near the end of an essay in which Adorno also says, “The illusory importance and autonomy of private life conceals the fact that private life drags on only as an appendage of the social process” (158)—his argument that cultural criticism (the actual subject of the essay) must become what he calls “social.” So, one way to describe Les Bienveillantes would be as an effort to make poetry (“littérature”) not only after but also out of Auschwitz, and to show that such a project is barbaric—in its refusal to respect the dead and especially in its indifference to the moral self-respect of its readers. And another way would be to say that it’s also a critique of “the illusory importance” of private life, an illusion that became its own kind of anti-sociology in the years after Adorno wrote. Think Margaret Thatcher: “There’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families.” No literary theorist could better describe the fundamental commitment of the memoir, although a generationally updated version would probably add friends to family. And no literary critic could better explain Max Aue’s obsession with his family—from the sister he sleeps with to the mother he murders. But Les Bienveillantes is not a memoir; it’s the false—which is to say, fictional—memoir of a fictional Nazi, the point of the fiction being not that it isn’t true ( just the opposite, an astonishing amount of it is) but that it has what Littell calls “form” and that both the victims of the Nazis and the private life of the executioner/ narrator are deployed in an effort to make that form “parfaite,” perfect. “Perfection,” of course, is what Poe says the artist is seeking when he selects as his topic the death of a beautiful woman, but Littell invokes his own commitment to the perfect in the context of a question from an interviewer about whether he thinks the “holocausts” of the twentieth century have been the “ruin” of form. His answer is, in effect, maybe. That is, he says, the idea of the work of art that is “bien faite, qui tienne dans toutes ses dimensions, qui est parfaite” is “effectivement ruinée.”25 And we haven’t even needed holocausts to ruin it. When Shields says

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he can still see why certain works are “‘great’ or good or at least well made” but that he has “zero interest in doing something similar”(125), it’s the fact not even of murder but just of death that has made him prefer an art (on the model of Daniel Johnston’s music) that finds “a way to hot-wire his feelings directly into his tape recorder” and thus into his reader (38). But Littell’s sense that the parfaite has been ruined is, of course, compromised (not to say contradicted) by his own efforts in The Kindly Ones, and in particular by his characterization of those efforts: “je voulais faire quelque chose de bien construit” (12). Of course, we’ve already seen (in Jane) how murder, at least at the subgenocidal level, can plausibly be understood as an opportunity for rather than an obstacle to form. In fact, in the first of two poems called “Figment” in Jane, Maggie Nelson recounts her grandfather’s response to being told that she’s writing about her aunt—“What will it be, a figment / of your imagination”—and wishes she could show him the etymology of the word: “figment, from fingere, meaning / to form” (23). If that meaning, as she acknowledges, is “obsolete” (24), Nelson’s version of the documentary imperative—real names for real people—nevertheless understands the “perfect” as its goal. And even the idea of making the murder not just of one but of millions into the occasion for a distinctively aesthetic pleasure has its place in Jane. The poem right before “A Philosophy of Composition (Reprise)” works from a diary entry about Jane’s participation (as a member of “the costume committee”) in her high school’s production of the play Diary of Anne Frank. “The spirit of this play,” she writes, “has touched deep into my heart and I know / I shall never forget it” (213). By which she means, she “was thrilled to be a part of it all and thrilled / to just be there, amid the activity and fun. You can’t really enjoy / or understand this until you’ve been there.” This is, in a certain sense, the language of testimony, complete with the trauma-theory critique of representation and the idea that language cannot adequately transmit the experience. But of course, the experience here is not of the Holocaust; it’s of putting on a play about the Holocaust, and it’s “fun,” a fun produced by making the impending

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death of Anne Frank into art. No doubt Jane’s emotions—the last line of the poem is “I’m so happy” (214)—are less complicated than either Nelson’s (about Jane) or Littell’s (about, for starters, Zoya), but in both texts the ethical and emotional complexities of the writer’s (and reader’s) relation to the death are subsumed by the distinctive pleasure of the aesthetic (figure 28). But Nelson’s juxtaposition of Jane and Anne Frank is striking not just because of the personal analogy it suggests (Jane is to Anne as Maggie is to Jane) but because it moves the analogy beyond the personal. The significance of Holocaust remembrance today is not, for most of us, personal—it does not depend on our having known and loved someone who was murdered—but we are expected to treat it as if it were, as if we owed something to the victims and, hence, as if a book like The Kindly Ones needed to be judged on the degree to which it fulfilled that obligation. Thus, if it has been criticized for trivializing the Holocaust by making it “too literary,” it has also been defended on the grounds that its use of literary devices (like the “unreliable” Nazi narrator) is in fact a way of condemning the perpetrators. Either it fulfills its ethical obligation or it fails; either way, that obligation sets the bar. But the point I’ve been making is that the very idea of having a personal ethical relation to the Holocaust (good or bad) is what Littell’s ambition to enter into “literature” refuses. Rather, the ambition to form is deployed against the personal, against the reduction of the political to the ethical. Here the holocausts of the twentieth century figure less as causes and more as justifications for the “ruin” of form. That is, the double demand to be faithful to the object (what really happened) and thus to the subject (our ethical and affective relation to what happened) is not so much produced by those holocausts as it is emblematized in our relation to them. They function as one of the exemplary sites on which we play out the ambition to make everything part of our “private” lives, an ambition Shields brilliantly fulfills when he remarks, “No one from my immediate or extended family died in the Holocaust, and yet in a way that’s difficult to explain, it was the defining event of my childhood” (94). By contrast, Littell’s effort to make something perfect

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Figure 28. James Welling, Poe (2007). C-print. 31-1/2 × 25 in. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London.

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out of the Holocaust—to turn the “never again” of Holocaust remembrance into the “nevermore” of “The Raven”— embodies a refusal of the personal that refuses also not just a certain relation to the past but a certain relation to the present. Thatcher and the memoir can function as a kind of shorthand for the political and literary versions of that present, but not because of the supposed selfishness of the one and self-centeredness of the other. The problem, for example, with putting the question of grievability at the center of our politics is not that it’s self-centered; it’s not that it’s about how we feel. It’s that it’s about how everyone feels, about an antidiscrimination—antiracism, antisexism, antihomophobia—that seeks to eliminate all of capitalism’s inequalities except the one that actually constitutes capitalism. In an economy where the jobs being created include very few good ones (paying over twenty dollars an hour) and very many bad ones (paying around ten dollars an hour),26 the demand for a social structure in which the people who get those jobs can be understood as getting what they deserve (as rewards for making the right choices or punishments for making the wrong) grows more intense and more absurd. It’s intense because we want to be sure that no one is unjustly impoverished, that everybody’s individual merit is being registered. It’s absurd because, as more and more people become impoverished, the assurance that each of them individually deserves his fate becomes more and more beside the point. Why should we prefer justifying inequality to eliminating it? My point here is not, of course, that The Kindly Ones somehow articulates a class politics. If a class politics ever comes up in its nearly a thousand pages, it does so only in the chapter that pays homage to the famous “gazing into a mirror” (395) conversation between Liss and Mostovskoy in Grossman’s Life and Fate, in which (in Littell, as in Grossman) the difference between Nazism and Communism (between the centrality of race and that of class) is challenged rather than affirmed.27 My point is rather that The Kindly Ones has something more like a class aesthetic, that its commitment to the idea of form (up to and including the idea of “unité” embodied in Littell’s effort to present

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the book—organized into Allemandes, Courante, Gigues, etc.—as the world’s longest Bach suite) is a version of the various commitments to the separateness of the work that we have seen displayed in the preceding four chapters. In every case, we can understand these commitments only if we understand them as artistic ones, as efforts to produce better art, not a better society. But in every case also, we can only understand what it means to see the desire for a better art as a desire for the “perfect” if we understand the society in which and against which perfection has begun to look good. Sebald, again in his essay on Peter Weiss, says that Weiss was only able to compensate for his own feelings about the Holocaust—his “subjective sense of personal involvement”—by placing the “objective social conditions and preconditions of the tragedy at the center of his discourse” (187). My argument about the works described in this book has not been that they place today’s objective social conditions at their center, but that, in imagining a form that refuses the politics of personal involvement, they make those objective conditions visible. It’s in this context that the ambition to produce a perfect work of art has taken on the political meaning it now has. For the perfect work is the one that, asserting the difference between itself and the world, asserts both its own autonomy and the relative autonomy of that world—the irreducibility of social structure to our affective relation to that structure. That’s why it’s the production of art’s difference from the world that counts as the work it does in the world.

Acknowledgments acknowledgments acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the varied contributions—their writing, their reading, their conversation—of Jennifer Ashton, Nicholas Brown, Todd Cronan, Michael Fried, Ruth Leys, Charles Palermo, Adolph Reed, Anwen Tormey, Kenneth Warren, James Welling, and Daniel Zamora. More people than I can possibly list (sometimes, without my even knowing who they were, by way of a skeptical comment or just an eloquently raised eyebrow) offered useful insights or criticism. The list that follows is woefully incomplete, but I want at least to express my gratitude to Elise Archias, Jason Bartulis, Stephen Best, Michael Clune, Lenny Davis, Eugenio Di Stefano, Bridget Doherty, Stephen Engelmann, Lisa Freeman, Sam Gindin, Charles Hatfield, Rachel Havrelock, Doug Henwood, Hannah Higgins, Andy Hoberek, Anna Kornbluh, Jonathan Michaels, Nasser Mufti, Charles Palermo, Paul Preissner, Emilio Sauri, Lisa Siraganian, Bob Somol, Blake Stimson, Martin Stone, and Imre Szeman. Peter Hales and Reichii Miura also belong on that list. Like all their friends, colleagues, and students, I miss them. The participants in several graduate seminars at the University of Illinois at Chicago, along with the members of two quite different collectives—the editorial board of nonsite.org and the organizing committee of UICUF Local 6456 IFT, AFT, AFL- CIO, AAUP—played different but equally important roles in helping me see what I wanted to do. Although I am sure it is not adequately reflected in what the text, my

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sense at least of what this book ought to have been was significantly affected by my experience with all of these groups. It has, of course, also been affected by the artists I write about, and my indebtedness to them will be obvious from the text. But I want to mention here the impact on me of Owen Kydd’s durational photographs. The structure of The Beauty of a Social Problem got worked out before I knew Kydd’s pictures well, and I wasn’t ingenious enough to devise a way to fit them in. But anyone who is curious can get a sense both of the relevance of Kydd’s work and of its great power by looking at “The Force of a Frame: Owen Kydd’s Durational Photographs” (http:// nonsite.org/feature/the-force-of-a-frame). Earlier versions of portions of chapter 1 were published as “Photographs and Fossils,” in Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 431–50; as “The Politics of a Good Picture: Race, Class and Form in Jeff Wall’s Mimic,” PMLA 125, no. 1 (January 2010): 177– 84; and as “The Beauty of a Social Problem,” in The Brooklyn Rail (http:// www.brooklynrail.org/2011/10/art/the-beauty-of-a-social-problem) and (in somewhat different form) in Twentieth Century Literature 57, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2011): 309–27. An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph,” Nonsite.org (January 2011). An earlier version of one section of chapter 3 was published as “Meaning and Affect: Phil Chang’s Cache, Active” by LAXART (March 2012); a second section was published as “Arthur Ou: Framework,” Aperture, no. 206 (Spring 2012), 30–37. A version of chapter 4, “Forgetting Auschwitz: Jonathan Littell and the Death of a Beautiful Woman,” appeared in American Literary History 25, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 915–30. I am grateful to the editors for the guidance and encouragement they often offered. Sara Blair, James Elkins, Lauri Firstenberg, Jason Gladstone, Gordon Hutner, Jonathan T. D. Neil, and Dan Worden all pointed me in what turned out to be very fruitful directions. And while I’m mentioning editors, I want to thank Sara Bershtel and Pierre Rimbert, who had nothing whatsoever to do with this book but forever changed my idea of what writing (or, anyway, my writing)

acknowledgments

should be with the work Bershtel did on The Trouble with Diversity and Rimbert on La diversité contre l’égalité. Support from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago has been essential in making the reproductions possible, and the intellectual support of a series of deans— from Stanley Fish through Chris Comer to Astrida Tantillo—has helped make UIC, broke as we are, an exciting place to work. Finally, it was Alan Thomas’s idea that I write this book and I am very grateful first to him and then to Randy Petilos, Joel Score, and everyone else at the University of Chicago Press for helping to make it a reality.

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Notes

notes to chapter notes to chapter

Preface

1.

Like many others, I began paying real attention not just to the existence but to the growth of inequality when I first read “The Evolution of Top Incomes: a Historical and International Perspective,” an article by Emanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty that appeared as an NBER Working Paper in 2006. Today, of course, their data is deservedly well known and, with the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Piketty in particular has become the darling of American liberalism. For my purposes, however, it is not only the fact of inequality but the structure of the society producing it that matters. Hence the fact of class difference (which is to say, of the exploitation of labor by capital) and the desirability of a class politics (if that exploitation is to be challenged) is central to The Beauty of a Social Problem in a way that it clearly isn’t to Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It’s perhaps also worth mentioning here that although the term neoliberalism will often appear in the following pages, my use of it is meant to be minimalist, in the sense that I think Adolph Reed’s description— “capitalism that has effectively freed itself from working-class opposition” (“Adolph Reed, Jr. Responds,” New Labor Forum 23, no. 1 [2014]: 65)—pretty much gets at the heart of the matter. The one proviso I would make is that there’s an important sense in which neoliberalism has not just freed itself from working-class opposition but, as a system of thought, has sought to free itself from the very idea of the working class and indeed (with astonishing success and help from both the conservative right—think “bad choices”—and the liberal left—think “the precariat”) from the idea of class itself. Of course, class itself hasn’t actually gone away, and it’s in this context that art’s ability to make the idea of class visible (and hence its reality imaginable) has its political meaning.

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1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

Maggie Nelson, Jane: A Murder (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull, 2005), 26. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts (New York: Free Press, 2007), 70. Maggie Nelson, “Poetry Editor Jane Carr Interviews Maggie Nelson.” Small Spiral Notebook 4, no. 4 (Spring 2006): 4, http://www.smallspiralnotebook .com/summer05/maggienesoninterview (accessed March 18, 2007). Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays, ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1996), 1375. Subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text. Of course, it’s possible to imagine that Poe actually wrote The Raven as an expression of proleptic grief for his wife Virginia, who was already ill and would in fact die two years later. Indeed, as passionate a reader of Poe as Sergei Eisenstein argues that “The Philosophy of Composition” is itself a kind of detective story. But what’s distinctive about the text is precisely its indifference to this question. Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” http://www.poetry foundation.org/poem/178710 (accessed December 18, 2013). Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); also, http://www.poetry foundation.org/poem/177118 (accessed December 19, 2013). In fact, it’s also at the heart of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” where the poem imagines itself as an attempt to overcome the loss that produced it, “the word final, superior to all” that will enable the narrator to succeed, Pygmalion-like, not just in naming what he has lost but in bringing it back. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 17. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 16. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Sam Weber, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 136. The relevant point here is neither the idealism of the supposed reduction of things to texts nor (what I argue in The Shape of the Signifier) the actual reduction of texts to things. It is instead the impossibility (according to Derrida) of separating the work from its context, of separating the relations it has to itself from the ones it has to the world. It’s interesting in this

notes to chaPter one

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

context that (in The Art of Cruelty [New York: Norton, 2011]), Nelson cites Henry James’s remark that “really, universally, relations stop nowhere. The exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw . . . the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so” (246). The distinctive feature of the postmodern would be to literalize this claim, to redescribe James’s account of what should have been put in and what should have been kept out of Roderick Hudson as an account of what cannot be kept out of the work of art as such—its relation to its readers, to its referents, to what Poe calls “the world.” This is the point of the “as Art” in the title of Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Fried notes the “convergence” of his views and mine on this topic in the eponymously titled conclusion of that book, suggesting that, since he and I have been close friends for forty years and have been discussing photography, literature, art, etc., that whole time, our agreement is not all that surprising. From my perspective, the point would have to be put a little more strongly. No interesting thought I have ever had about art would have been possible without Fried’s work. The relation between The Beauty of a Social Problem and Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before will be obvious in the following pages, but there is an important sense in which all of Fried’s writing has been at least as influential. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 2, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 168. Hiroshi Sugimoto, History of History (New York, 2005). This unpaged brochure accompanied the exhibition at the Japan Society Gallery (September 23, 2005–February 19, 2006). Joel Snyder in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 155. Snyder’s remark is from a conversation including several other writers on photography; subsequent references to this conversation appear parenthetically in the text. An earlier version of some of the material in this chapter was published (as an afterword) in this volume. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 3. Kendall Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11 (December 1984): 253. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. In this context, it might also be worth noting that Sugimoto has produced photographs of portraits (including one of Henry VIII) and that part of the point of them is, no doubt, that you’re not looking at the eyes of the historical figure in question, or at

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17. 18.

19.

eyes that did look at him. What you’re seeing instead is a representation of those eyes—a fossil of something that is not a fossil. Elkins, Photography Theory, 201, 284. This distinction is one that can be troubled in lots of ways. Most obviously, the photograph can be doctored, or can in various ways be misleading. Almost as obviously, there are contexts in which the watercolor might also count as evidence. Suppose you had purchased special clothes in which to perform the theft and had disposed of them immediately afterward— the fact that I was able to depict them accurately would count as evidence that I had been there and seen you. How else would I know about them? It’s this kind of point that Snyder is making when he reminds us in Photography Theory that his mother would have a causal relation to a portrait of her. Her causal connection to her portrait doesn’t make us worry at all about whether the portrait is a representation of her—obviously it is. So why should the causal connection of a photograph to the thing it’s a photograph of make us worry about whether it’s a picture? On the other hand, we wouldn’t think for a minute that a reflection in the pond of Snyder’s mother was a picture of her. So what’s the difference between the reflection and the portrait? The answer is that the portrait requires a painter, the reflection doesn’t. Hence there are all kinds of questions we can ask about the portrait—is it meant to bring out the specificity of her personality? to allude to a general maternal function? to evoke a distinctively middle-class maternity?—that we can’t ask about the reflection. The reason we can ask these questions about the portrait is that they are about what the painter was trying to do, whereas in the case of the reflection there is no painter, no one to ask them about. What makes the photograph interesting, of course, is that there is a photographer, and yet there are important things about the photograph that are like the reflection—it shows things that the photographer need not have intended, that have no connection to what the photographer was trying to show. In Barthes, in fact, the things the photographer was trying to show get relegated to the studium. More generally, as we will see below, the question of the artist’s intentions and their relation to the meaning of the work of art is at the center of the current debate. Walton’s point, made in Gricean rather than Peircean terms, involves the distinction between “natural” and “nonnatural” meaning: “Spots mean N (mean naturally) measles . . . and the ringing of a bell on a bus means NN (means nonnaturally) that the bus is full” (265). The point again is that the

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20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

photograph is more like the spots than like the ringing bell, and the way of making the point is to say that our sense of what the photograph shows is not dependent on our sense of what the photographer meant it to show. Diagnosing the patient with spots is not a matter of figuring out what he means by them (he doesn’t have measles because he intends to). Of course, the question of the reliability of the evidence, of which is better evidence, etc., is irrelevant here. The point is only that the painting is routed through the painter in a way that the photograph is not routed through the photographer. Elkins, Photography Theory, 4. Jeff Wall, Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 152–53. Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 284. I’m referring here mainly to the way in which a critic like Crimp (in “Pictures” [October, no. 8, Spring 1979]) essentially accepted the terms of “Art and Objecthood” ’s denunciation of literalism while replacing the denunciation with appreciation. Fried, Why Photography Matters, 102. Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum,” in Photography Degree Zero, ed. Geoffrey Batchen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 156–57. This is an earlier version of the chapter that appears in Why Photography Matters. It’s for this reason that the punctum seems to produce the problem of subjectivity described by Elkins in Photography Theory. It is, “by definition, private” because it is by definition dependent on the response of the individual beholder. At the same time, however, it’s important to see that privacy isn’t really the central issue here. What about the photograph of Jerome and the eyes that looked at the emperor? You don’t have to be Barthes, you don’t even have to be French, to feel the prick of Napoleon’s mortality. The punctum, in other words, is not intrinsically private but can be shared with millions of others. What’s intrinsic to it is not its subjectivity but its independence of the intention of the photographer; it’s the thing that produces an effect even though it’s not supposed to produce an effect. Margaret Iversen makes this point when she refers to Benjamin’s discussion of the “double portrait of Dauthendey and his wife.” Benjamin says you “search the picture to find a flaw,” but this, as Iversen points out, “you can only do retrospectively, after the tragedy” (157). The photographer did not know that the wife would commit suicide; thus the effect the

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27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

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photograph has on you after the tragedy could not have been intended by the photographer (and if it somehow was intended by the photographer, it would belong to the studium rather than the punctum). But you don’t have to be related to the Dauthendeys to feel the effect, or even to know them—you just have to know about them. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant- Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 133–34. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 163. Fried, Art and Objecthood, 151. We might just as easily say, in connection with Barthes, as works of art or as persons, a way of putting it that reminds us of the relevance of the debate over anthropomorphism also at work in “Art and Objecthood.” Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), xxiii. Obviously the civil rights movement began earlier; the late 1960s would be the moment, rather, in which, linked to feminism and gay rights, it emerged most vividly as an element in and a model for something more general, a politics not just of antiracism but of antidiscrimination as such. http://apps.americanbar.org/abanet/media/release/news_release.cfm ?releaseid=268; http://www.law.umich.edu/prospectivestudents/pages /classstatistics.aspx (accessed April 22, 2014). Eli Wald, “Glass Ceilings and Dead Ends: Professional Ideologies, Gender Stereotypes, and the Future of Women Lawyers at Large Law Firms,” Fordham Law Review 78, no. 5 (2010): 2245–88, http://www.law.fordham.edu /assets/LawReview/Wald_April_2010.pdf (accessed April 22, 2014). The EEOC reports that 40 percent of the lawyers in large firms are women (about 4.4 percent are black, 4.3 percent are Asian). The most recent (2006) figure for women associates at white-shoe firms in New York is 45 percent. See “Diversity in Law Firms,” US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2003, http://www.eeoc.gov/stats/reports/diversitylaw/lawfirms .pdf (accessed April 22, 2014). Not insignificantly, the EEOC’s data, like the rise of the new inequality, goes back to 1975. At that time, the number of women was 14.4 percent. Frank S. Levy and Peter Temin, “Inequality and Institutions in 20th Century America,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics Working Paper Series, no. 07-17, June 27, 2007, http://ssrn.com /abstract=984330 (accessed April 22, 2014).

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36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

My basic sense of the relation between these phenomena (the commitment to ending discrimination and the indifference to ending exploitation) was summed up in the subtitle of a book I published in 2006, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. If I were writing that book today, its argument about that relation would, in at least one crucial way, be even more relevant than I thought it was at the time. For example, on the antidiscrimination side, in 2006 same-sex marriage was legal in only one state (Massachusetts); today (October 2014) it’s legal in over thirty. On the inequality side, the share of income going to the top decile set a record in 2006 (49.7 percent) and had risen yet further by 2012 (50.4 percent). But if the argument would be the same, the subtitle wouldn’t; today, unlike in 2006, everybody is talking about inequality. Whether anyone will do anything about it is, of course, another question but, for the purposes of my argument in this book, a basically irrelevant one, at least as long as the argument is couched in terms that amount to fine-tuning capitalism in the hope of making the numbers look a little more like they did in the good old days, say, the closing years of the second Clinton administration (1999, about 46 percent). Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2012 Preliminary Estimates),” September 3, 2013, http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf (accessed April 22, 2014). http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compensation/ (accessed April 23, 2014). http://www.epi.org/publication/top-charts-2013 (accessed April 23, 2014). http://www.epi.org/files/2012/ib330-productivity-vs-compensation.2012-04 -26-16:45:37.pdf (accessed April 23, 2014). In other words, I’m not trying to (and am not competent to) choose between the various accounts of the material conditions that produced these changes. Although it’s obvious that the rate of return on invested capital has been declining for almost the past half century, the reasons for this decline remain a matter of dispute. See graph 4, http://www.forbes.com /sites/stevedenning/2011/10/19/the-big-shift-or-shifty-statistics/ (accessed April 24, 2014). But the fact that a crucial way of coping with this decline has been for “firms across most of the advanced capitalist countries . . . to hold down, if not actually cut back, their employment costs by repressing wage growth, reducing the growth of jobs, and intensifying labour” is not

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contested. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London: Verso, 2009), 337. And it’s that coping mechanism that provides the conditions of possibility for the aesthetic developments I describe here.

Graph 4. Economy-wide returns on invested capital (ROIC), 1965–2009. Note: ROA begins at below 5 percent; BOIC 1 (less NIBCLs), above 6 percent; and ROIC 2 (less NIBCLs and cash), below 7 percent. Source: Compustat Deloitte analysis.

42. 43.

Gary S. Becker, The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 21. Becker’s “taste model” has by no means gone undisputed among economists, but a recent survey of the arguments has concluded that “variants” of it “remain dominant in the law and economics literature.” Jacob Gersen, “Market and Discrimination,” New York University Law Review 82, no. 3 (June 2007). Much of the debate has been around the more particular thesis (controversially ascribed to Becker but uncontroversially to writers like Richard Epstein) that markets, left to their own devices, will themselves eliminate discrimination and that the state should not intervene. Remembering Foucault’s insistence that in neoliberalism the state has a crucial role to play in maintaining competitive markets, we might describe these as arguments between right-wing neoliberals, nostalgic for liberalism before it was neo, and left neoliberals, eager to deploy the state (here in the form of antidiscrimination law) in the service of competition. Their shared commitment would be to the idea that, in efficient markets, discrimination is a problem, not a solution.

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44.

45.

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Sandra E. Black and Elizabeth Brainerd, “Importing Equality? The Impact of Globalization on Gender Discrimination,” Industrial & Labor Relations Review 57, no. 4 (2004): 555–56. John Donohue cites Jagdish Bhagwati’s use of Black and Brainerd in In Defense of Globalization, and he himself remarks that he takes their paper “as evidence that increased competition . . . can narrow the discriminatory wage gap.” Donohue, “The Law and Economics of Antidiscrimination Law,” John M. Olin Center for Studies in Law, Economics, and Public Policy Working Papers, no. 290, http://digital commons.lawyale.edu/lepp_papers/290 (accessed June 15, 2013). By “primacy of markets,” I do not here mean the primacy of unregulated markets. It’s widely recognized that the commitment to free markets and the commitment to government regulation can go hand in hand. Indeed, if you believe that neoliberalism is theoretically committed above all to competitive markets, it’s obvious that government intervention to create or conserve competition is essential (if only, for starters, to prevent monopoly). More generally, one of the things that distinguishes neoliberalism from liberalism is that it does not imagine that markets, left to their own devices, can flourish. Rather, as Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski put it, “neoliberalism is first and foremost a theory of how to reengineer the state in order to guarantee the success of the market and its most prominent participants, modern corporations.” Van Horn and Mirowski, “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009),161. One anonymous reader of the manuscript of this book suggested that when I describe “the left as interested (for example) in gender equality but as not worried too much about class, this is to paint a very large field of activists, scholars, and critics with too wide a brush—or, at best, to say something specifically about the US left and the state of politics in the United States, where political and aesthetic discourses have a specific character due to their position at the heart of empire.” This is helpful and may well be partly true, but it is not, I think, entirely true. For one thing, the United States has been remarkably successful in exporting both its sense of social justice and the actual injustices that sense so happily underwrites. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant make a version of this point in their classic “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason” (1999), and, more recently, the simultaneous increase in economic inequality and di-

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48. 49. 50.

versity discourse in France (not to mention the debate in France over the translation of my book The Trouble with Diversity [in French, La diversité contre l’egalité]), suggests not exactly a law but at least a hypothesis—as class inequality rises, so does the desire to talk about every other kind of inequality (racial, sexual, etc.). But for another, more basic, thing, while it’s certainly true that almost everyone on the left is indeed unhappy about economic inequality and thus might plausibly take umbrage at my suggestion that it’s discrimination, not exploitation, he or she really cares about, I think this too is a little misleading. Intersectional analysis, for example, although it often insists that class be understood alongside race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc., as bases of oppression, tends overwhelmingly to focus on discrimination, sometimes treating class as if it too were an opportunity for discrimination (classism), sometimes insisting that the harm of discrimination is that it enables disproportionate exploitation—black people are poorer than whites, women poorer than men. But the harm of exploitation is not that it’s disproportionate. For discussion of the role played by antidiscrimination in producing a politics that legitimates rather than resists neoliberal conceptions of social justice, see Walter Benn Michaels, “Identity Politics: A Zero-Sum Game,” New Labor Forum, http://newlaborforum.wordpress.com/2010/11/06/identity -politics-a-zero-sum-game/#more-29; “The Trouble with Diversifying the Faculty,” Liberal Education, http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-wi11 /LEWI11_Michaels.cfm; “What Matters,” London Review of Books (August 2009), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/walter-benn-michaels/what-matters; and “Believing in Unicorns,” London Review of Books (February 2013). And, for a brilliant analysis of the crucial role played here by what they call the discourse of disparity, see Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and its Analytical Discontents,” Socialist Register 48 (2012), 149–75. Adolph L. Reed Jr., “The ‘Color Line’ Then and Now,” in Renewing Black Intellectual History, ed. Adolph L Reed Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010), 271. Fried, Why Photography Matters, 64. Melissa Denes, “Picture Perfect.” Guardian (October 14, 2005), http://www .theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/15/art (accessed April 23, 2014). Régis Michel, “White Negro: Jeff Wall’s Uncle Tom on the Obscenity of Photopantomime,” Oxford Art Journal 3, no. 1 (2007): 63.

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51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

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Immigration Act of 1919, quoted in Freda Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration: Canada and Australia Compared, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill- Queens University Press, 1991), 7. Political Analysis Collective, “Immigration in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Rabble (January 9, 2008), http://rabble.ca/news/immigration-age-neoliberalism (accessed April 23, 2014). Jeffrey Reitz, “Immigrant Success in the Knowledge Economy: Institutional Change and the Immigrant Experience in Canada, 1970–1995,” Journal of Social Issues 57, no. 3 (2001): 582, 584. Daniel Soar, “At Tate Modern,” London Review of Books (December 15, 2005), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n24/daniel-soar/at-tate-modern (accessed April 23, 2014). Lars Osberg, “A Quarter Century of Economic Inequality in Canada: 1981– 2006,” in Growing Gap, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (April 2008), 7, http://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications /National_Office_Pubs/2008/Quarter_Century_of_Inequality.pdf (accessed April 23, 2014). In 1980, the top 20 percent earned 41.3 percent of the country’s income; by 2009, it was 50.6 percent, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca /2012/05/27/income-inequality-infographic_n_1548973.html (accessed April 23, 2014). Jeff Wall, Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 290. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Wall, quoted in Michel, “White Negro,”61. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Tate Modern, “Works in Focus: Introduction,” http://www.tate.org.uk (accessed October 2009). For a more extended discussion of Welling’s work in these terms, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 82–105. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 93. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Since most political art consists of nothing but choosing between attitudes, and, indeed, since political art might be defined precisely as the commitment to making such a choice, Wall’s indifference to doing so might be understood (even by Wall himself, for all I know) as an indifference to politics. But, of course, the point of my argument is that the politics of the picture are determined by its commitment to a certain notion

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62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

of form, not to an identification with some particular group or position. In other words, whether or not Wall has a class politics, his pictures have a class aesthetic. This is not to say, of course, that we don’t all (like the protagonists of Mimic) have the attitudes made available to us by Americantype life today. It’s just to say that neither our art nor our politics can be defined by them. Adolph Reed, “The Limits of Anti-racism,” Left Business Observer (September 2009), 3. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/canada/unemployment-rate (accessed April 9, 2013). It was, however, already coming down from 2005 and subsequently came down even further, almost to 5 percent. The meaning of this decline is controversial, since the government encouraged creation of so called “mini-jobs,” part-time work paying 400 euros a month or less (see http:// www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jan2012/germ-j10.shtml; http://www.reuters .com/article/2012/02/08/germany-jobs-idUSL5E8D738E20120208; accessed April 10, 2013). In the now standard Fowkes translation, the wording is “The relative surplus population is therefore the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work” (Karl Marx, Capital Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, with an introduction by Ernest Mandel [London: Penguin, 1990], 792). But the earlier Moore and Aveling “pivot” better captures the structural function I mean to emphasize (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks /Marx/mrxCpContents.html; accessed September 12, 2011). Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. John Willett, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Arcade, 1994), 122. Nicholas Brown, in conversation.

Chapter Two

1.

2.

Michael Fried, “Roger Fry’s Formalism,” http://www.tannerlectures.utah .edu/lectures/documents/volume24/fried_2001.pdf, 8 (accessed November 18, 2010). Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Indeed, the very distinction between the form of a work and its content becomes an instrument of unconsciousness. Fried quotes Fry’s remark that “It is one of the curiosities of the psychology of the artist that he is gen-

notes to chaPter two

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

erally trying hard to do something which has nothing to do with what he actually accomplishes.” The most common form of this dichotomy has the artist trying very hard to provide a certain content but succeeding instead in producing a certain form. It may be worth pointing out that Fried’s own account of Stephen Crane—thinking of himself as trying above all to represent Civil War battles while what he was really making visible was writing, not fighting—has something in common with Fry. Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. Unlike Fry, however, Fried is not exactly trying to save Crane for antitheatricality, and unlike the figures discussed below, Fried’s interest is in the structure of intentional meaning, not in an alternative to it. Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 100. Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 291. The fact that in Camera Lucida (first published in French in 1980) Barthes doesn’t deal primarily with photography as an art but rather with the photograph as such is thus somewhat misleading, since the claims he makes for the photograph as such are entirely compatible with claims he had already been making about the novel. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978) 160, 150. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. While this theoretical argument solves a certain aesthetic problem, it raises another—if the artist’s intentions never matter, how can any work of art be more (or less) absorptive than any other? Which is to say, this theoretical argument counts as part of the crisis in absorption, a solution that threatens to destroy rather than preserve the absorptive project. Furthermore, the most important criticism of their arguments—E. D. Hirsch’s “Objective Interpretation” (PMLA 75, no. 4 [1960]: 463–79)—shared this methodological goal; what Hirsch argued was that the rules of a language were insufficient to establish the objectivity they wanted and that, in fact, only the author’s intention provides this. More generally, the question of linguistic rules is crucial for Wimsatt and Beardsley in a way that it isn’t for writers (like Barthes) more concerned with the meaning of works of art as such than with the meanings of literary speech acts. Many philosophers of language may have agreed with Hilary Putnam’s claim that what looked like a caricature of Winston Churchill made by an ant crawling on

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9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

a patch of sand was not in fact a caricature of Churchill because it was not intended to be. There are no rules that can be understood, on their own, to make something that looks like a caricature count as a caricature. But many of the same philosophers have believed that the centrality of rules to language makes speech acts different. W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy,” both in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954). Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 164. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight, 1988), 74. The people who are not supposed to be told what to do seem in this conversation to be both the musicians and the audience, but in 4′33″, which Cage thought of both as his best and most “radical” (67) piece, it’s just the audience. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Larry Solomon, “The Sounds of Silence,” http://solomonsmusic.net/4min 33se.htm, 4 (accessed February 16, 2009). Solomon’s own sense of 4′33″ (which he regards as, “in part, a theater piece”) is interestingly antitheatrical. He criticizes performances in which the performers “mimed playing their instruments” and singing or otherwise focused “attention on the performers, intentional sounds, and extraneous actions” (15) (for example, that of the Geano Ensemble). He recommends that performers “avoid all distracting, extraneous actions, choreography, intentional sounds, etc. that could detract from focusing attention upon the environmental, unintentional sounds” (16). He takes seriously, in other words, Cage’s desire not to tell people “what to do.” This, he plausibly thinks, is what’s required of an art that has repudiated the “purpose of communication and expression”(6). John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 10. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy without Principles,” in Against Theory, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 133; subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Responding to Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory” (originally published in Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 [Summer 1982]: 723–42.) Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin, “Interpretation and Identity,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 3 (l986): 573. This is not, of course, what Goodman and Elgin (much less Wimsatt and

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18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

Beardsley) were going for; it’s just what, according to Rorty, they necessarily end up with. And here, Rorty’s position is identical to the one he’s attacking—except that where Knapp and Michaels think of this as a reductio ad absurdum, since it makes interpretation impossible, Rorty thinks of it as a discovery—since it shows that there really is no such thing as interpretation. Whether you regard this as a description of how interpretation actually works (which Rorty did) or as a demonstration of the impossibility of coming up with an account of interpretation that does not understand the writer’s intended meaning as its exclusive object (as Knapp and Michaels did) is another story. The central point here is just that, both for Rorty and for Knapp and Michaels, the idea that some set of linguistic rules can function as a constraint on what the text can (be used to) mean is a chimera. “Does not a mountain unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder?” Cage, Silence, 10. Jacques Rancière, “Notes on the Photographic Image,” Radical Philosophy 156 (July/August 2009): 14. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Which is not to say, of course, that indexicality is irrelevant to painting. All paintings have an indexical relation to the brush, the painter’s hand, etc. Indexicality (unlike linguisticality) really is cheap. And sometimes the particular character of that relation (the fact of how the painting was made) will be central to its meaning. Roger Scruton, “Photography and Representation,” in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 365. What Scruton means by “ideal” is just the distinctive logic of the photograph, in relation, say, to paintings. As we will see, however, for Rancière, a version of this ideal—represented as a kind of self-denial on the part of the photographer—will function in an aesthetic sense as well. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant- Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 3. Ibid., 211. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 70. The situation in France, a slightly less advanced neoliberal country, is in

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27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

some respects different, but the prominence of SOS Racisme in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the emergence of the indigènes de la république over the last ten years, not to mention the creation of more official organizations like HALDE (Haute autorité de lutte contre les discriminations et pour l’égalité), suggests a similar trajectory. Tommie Shelby, “Is Racism in the ‘Heart’?” Journal of Social Philosophy 33, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 415. Of course, with respect to race, it’s not just the sense of superiority that is a function of how we see each other; more fundamentally—if you accept the standard account of its social construction—it’s racial identity itself. That is, the social construction of race depends entirely on our seeing each other as members of a race, and here the contrast with class is illuminating. Many people think (albeit, in my view, mistakenly) that you are black (or white) if people treat you as black (or white). (See Walter Benn Michaels, “Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Why Race is Not a Social Construction,” Transition 73 [1998].) No one thinks that you are poor if people treat you as if you were poor. Class is neither a biological entity nor (although it is obviously produced by social conditions) a social construction. Thus, for example, the contributors (Robert Post with K. Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Thomas C. Grey, and Reva B. Siegel) to the volume Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) are more or less inevitably concerned with “stereotypes” and the ability to “rewrite” them, the “customary norms of gender appearance” (45), and the entire panoply of identitarian attributes. Once again, the contrast with class is useful—there may be norms of class behavior but it’s not your adherence to the norms that constitutes your belonging to the class and it’s not the enforcement of the norms that constitutes the advantage or disadvantage of economic inequality. Not to mention, of course, all the photographs and the innumerable other works of art—literary and theatrical as well as photographic—that share his ambition; my focus is on Rancière not because he is unique but because he articulates precisely a more general formation. Post, Prejudicial Appearances, 2. You get an immediate sense of the centrality of the question of how we look at and treat others in Post’s opening discussion of the famous Santa Cruz city ordinance designed to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “personal appearance.” Although “social identification” here is exactly the wrong term, since the question of identification is irrelevant—it’s the fact that they are poor re-

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32. 33. 34.

gardless of how they’re identified that’s the problem. Although, as the following pages suggest, the emphasis on identification produces its own problems. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 314. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 7. Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword,” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 75. Žižek’s discussion of Rancière is nonetheless largely appreciative; indeed, “Notes on the Photographic Image” plays so central a role in my own essay both because of its own interest and because of the importance of Rancière’s work more generally. Part of that importance is that, unlike the writers in the Anglo and especially American traditions to which Žižek refers, he is primarily interested in class rather than in racial or sexual difference—which makes it all the more striking that his understanding of the injustices of class difference should take the form of the demand to see the poor differently. A more extended discussion of this topic in Rancière might begin by focusing on the difficulties produced by the centrality of education to his work and by his resistance to the idea that equality in education could be achieved either by educating everyone (the rich and the poor) alike or by teaching the poor (increasingly the children of immigrants) in ways that were specifically adapted to their condition. Since both of these strategies function, he argues, to confirm and reproduce the intellectual inferiority of the poor, the correct response is to insist on equality not as a goal of education reform but as “a presupposition, an initial axiom” (Philosopher and His Poor, 223). With respect to the functioning of capital, however, and what Wendy Bottero (in her contribution to Who Cares about the White Working Class, ed. Kjartan Pall Sveinsson [Runnymead Trust, 2009]) describes as its tendency to generate “large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs with poor job security” (13), it’s not at all obvious that intellectual equality is the crucial question or, for that matter, that the most successful educational policy imaginable would make a difference. After all, those low-wage, low-skill jobs wouldn’t be made better if the people who held them were better educated. And the amount of education required to do them isn’t keeping even higher-skill jobs from becoming lower-wage ones: underpaid PhDs teaching English composition are as much the victims of neoliberal redistribution as underpaid checkout clerks at Wal-Mart.

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35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

Which is just to say, there’s no economic version of the axiom of equality. For further discussion of the irrelevance of education (and human capital arguments more generally) to the problem of economic inequality, see Walter Benn Michaels, “Dude, Where’s My Job?” PMLA 127, no. 4 (October 2012), http://nonsite.org/editorial/dude-wheres-my-job (accessed April 26, 2014). By the left but not, of course, by the right, which is just to say that neoliberals on the right have a better understanding of the ways in which the critique of hierarchies of vision seeks to produce equality of access to markets and thus to legitimate the inequalities that those markets themselves produce. Hence Joseph Kosuth’s famous dictum “A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that a particular work of art is art, which means it is a definition of art,” and his citation of Donald Judd: “if someone calls it art, it’s art.” Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 165, 163. The question of whether calling something a work of art counts as intending it to be a work of art is at least as much a question about what we think intentions are as it is a question about what we think art is. Fried, Why Photography Matters, 173. For an extended discussion of these issues—particularly in relation to photography and with special attention to the work of James Welling—see Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). See, for example, Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010) and Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman’s After Globalization (London: Blackwell, 2011). In using the term exploitation, I follow Doug Henwood who (in an interview with Jacobin) describes himself as “old-fashioned enough to call” the process by which “labor generates profits for capital” (i.e., paying workers “less than the value of what they produce”) “exploitation.” Not irrelevantly for the present argument, the next question in the interview is about Henwood’s “take on Walter Benn Michaels’s controversial critique of identity politics and the erstwhile anti-discriminatory spirit of neoliberalism.” “I think that Walter Benn Michaels doesn’t always phrase things to his advantage,” Henwood responds—“he aims to provoke, which is an impulse I deeply understand,” but the “valuable core of it . . . is that capitalism

notes to chaPter two

41.

42. 43.

44.

need not be racist or sexist. . . . What capitalism can’t live with is an end to class exploitation.” One could put the point in more historical (and hopefully less provocative) terms by saying that if American capitalism always needed racism to help make class exploitation possible, today it also needs antiracism to perform the same function. Bhaskar Sunkara, “An Interview with Doug Henwood,” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/05/an -interview-with-doug-henwood/ (accessed June 25, 2013). Dieter Plehwe, “Introduction,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 34. For a reading of another work that, as I argue in chapter 1, does mean to, see Mimic. Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 255–56. The remarks quoted here are from Fried’s brilliant new book, much of which is to devoted to what he describes as “the dialectical unfolding of the anti-theatrical current or tradition” (p. 5 in manuscript) and in particular from a lengthy footnote responding to the account of the crisis in absorption put forth in an earlier version of this chapter (identical in argument to this one), published on nonsite.org. Distinguishing between Diderotian antitheatricality and “the (not at all Diderotian; rather more nearly Kantian) project of avoiding any manifestation of artistic intention, indeed of rejecting intention as such” (the project that I identify here with both Barthes, who belongs, in Fried’s view, to the Diderotian tradition, and Cage, who does not), Fried goes on to say: “I am not sure to what extent this puts me in disagreement with the overall thrust of Michaels’s argument, but it seemed important to spell out certain basic differences between what the notion of crisis involves in his article and what it signifies in the present book. Let me go a step further and suggest that one way of understanding the crises in the Diderotian current or tradition represented by the art of later David or Géricault, or indeed by that of Daumier, Courbet, Manet, and Caillebotte (to go no farther, as one might), is that to a large degree that current or tradition consists precisely of successive, interlocked moments of crisis or its equivalent: at every dialectical turn the current or tradition is concerned with its possible—one is tempted to say its inevitable—dissolution. This suggests not only that the current or tradition can best be understood at its moments of crisis, but also that it

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most fully emerges as such—as a historically developing force—in those moments” (p. 19 in ms). Which, if the theoretical claim is true, all works of art must be. That’s what it means for there to be a “point” that even the audience of 4′33″ might miss.

Chapter Three

1. 2.

Tom McCarthy, Remainder (New York: Vintage, 2005), 173–74. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Many readers take the trauma to be central to the novel and understand the reenactments as a psychological response to it. In the most sophisticated version of this reading that I have seen, Pieter Vermeulen (in “The Critique of Trauma and the Afterlife of the Novel in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder,” Modern Fiction Studies 58, no. 3 [Fall 2012]) describes the novel as an ultimately or partially failed attempt to challenge the conventions of “psychological realism” and “to debunk the pieties of trauma fiction” (550) by adopting for its traumatized narrator “a tone of sturdy and affectless imperturbability” (562). Its failure is its inability—as “the narrator gets caught up in obsessively detailed reenactments of seemingly random scenes”—to maintain that tone. The result is that what sets out to be a critique of the modernist novel of consciousness is also a kind of modernist novel of consciousness (“the mimesis of a traumatic mind”), which produces in the reader—confronted both with the refusal of “(traumatic) realism” and its persistence—“a perception of nonfeeling that generates a dysphoric, nonsubjective affect” (563). But while Vermeulen is no doubt right to see in the reenactor’s trauma a critique of the psychological, his own commitment to the centrality of affect leads him, in my view, to misunderstand the terms of the novel’s antipsychologism. For example, Vermeulen reads the narrator’s inability to work up any enthusiasm for taking the settlement awarded him and using it (his sort-of girlfriend’s recommendation) for development projects in Africa as “a clear instance of McCarthy’s programmatic antipsychologism” (556). He just can’t “feel” anything for “these Africans” (37). But it’s not as if he can’t work up any enthusiasm for using all that money on reenactments or as if his feelings about them aren’t passionate right from the start. The issue, in other words, is not that he’s “neutral”; it’s what he is and isn’t neutral about. Rather than rendering him affectless, the trauma serves as a device for making any interest in

notes to chaPter three

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

the psychological sources of his affective life (Why doesn’t he care about Africans? Why does he care instead about getting that crack in the floor right?) irrelevant. The point is to focus attention on his actions, not on his character; on the project, not the motives for undertaking it. Julian Rose, “Structural Tension: The Art of Oscar Tuazon” Artforum (October 2010), 223. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Thus Tuazon says, “What something looks like is almost beside the point, or at least beyond my control” (223). The structure, in other words, can’t help but look like something (you can see it), but we’re supposed to understand that what it looks like doesn’t matter. Which is importantly different from what would have been the characteristically postmodernist claim that, insofar as what it looked like was not being controlled by the artist, the beholder was free to focus on whatever it looked like to him or her. It’s one thing to conceive the limits of your control as an invitation to the beholder, another to conceive the things that are outside your control as irrelevant to the work. This appeal to sheer materiality is from a roundtable discussion involving Jeffrey Kastner, Tom McCarthy, Nato Thompson, and Eyal Weizman, “The New Geography,” Bookforum, http://www.bookforum.com/inprint /016_01/3511 (accessed May 2012), and the citation of Critchley is from an article by McCarthy called “Book of a Lifetime: Le parti pris des choses, by Francis Ponge,” Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts -entertainment/books/reviews/book-of-a-lifetime-le-parti-pris-des-choses -by-francis (accessed June 2012). But you can find similar remarks throughout McCarthy’s writing; see especially and conveniently, Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, et al., The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), which in addition to variations on letting matter matter (like “letting things thing” [142] and letting “the orange orange” [65]), includes the declaration “what is most real for us is not form . . . but matter, the brute materiality of the external world” (224). Tom McCarthy, “Kittler and the Sirens,” http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011 /11/09/tom-mccarthy/kittler-and-the-sirens/ (accessed May 2012). McCarthy, “Book of a Lifetime.” Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225–48. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 19, 10.

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11.

“Surface Reading” cites E. D. Hirsch, whose Validity in Interpretation (1967) made the case for methodological intentionalism and whose The Aims of Interpretation (1976) made the case for an ethical intentionalism. It’s perhaps worth noting here that the intentionalism of “Against Theory” is neither methodological nor ethical. Interestingly, even the more moderate form of anti-interpretivism in “Surface Reading”—its commitment to “literal reading” or what one of its authors (Marcus) has called “just reading”—takes a kind of necronautically materialist form. Criticizing the practice of “symptomatic” readers who interpret, say, Jamesian ghosts as “symbolic of something latent or concealed” (3), they urge a reading practice that “sees ghosts as presences not absences, and lets ghosts be ghosts, instead of saying what they are ghosts of” (13). The inevitable reply to which is, of course, that what ghosts and texts (which is to say, signs) have in common is that to see either of them as what they are is necessarily to see them as what they are of. A more thorough consideration of this important and already influential text is obviously impossible in a note, but, in line with the more general argument of this book, it’s worth pointing out the at-best ambiguous status of what the authors of “Surface Reading” describe as its founding impulse— the sense that those of us who cut our intellectual teeth on deconstruction, ideology critique, and the hermeneutics of suspicion have often found those demystifying protocols superfluous in an era when images of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were immediately circulated on the Internet; real-time coverage of Hurricane Katrina showed in ways that required little explication the state’s abandonment of its African American citizens; and many people instantly recognized as lies political statements such as “mission accomplished.” Eight years of the Bush regime may have hammered home the point that not all situations require the subtle ingenuity associated with symptomatic reading, and they may also have inspired us to imagine that alongside nascent fascism there might be better ways of thinking and being simply there for the taking, in both the past and the present. Published in 2009, when people’s incomes and net worth were plunging, this inventory of political disasters makes no mention of the economic developments that had, beginning before they had teeth to cut and cer-

notes to chaPter three

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

tainly by the time they were writing, already produced a level of inequality unrivaled in the United States since the late 1920s and would soon produce one that was even worse. But my point here is not really to criticize “Surface Reading”—a text of considerable interest; it is instead to suggest that its own tensions and preferences (its simultaneous attraction to validity in interpretation and to not interpreting at all, its distaste for the heroic critic and affection for the ethically superior self-denying one) might best be understood as marks precisely of the crisis it does not mention. More generally, one might say that the crisis of confidence currently afflicting several generations of literary critics might be a product less of their belief that a critic like the arch-symptomatic Marxist Frederic Jameson was wrong about literature than of their sense that he may have been right about capitalism. McCarthy et al., “New Geography.” “A Certain Realism: Dirty Literature—Tom McCarthy and Francesco Pedraglio,” June 3, 2011, http://acertainrealism.blogspot.com/2011/06/dirty -literature-tom-mccarthy-and.html (accessed April 2012). Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (New York: Routledge, 2005), 84. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 89. For a discussion of de Man in this context, see Walter Benn Michaels, “Normativity, Materiality and Inequality: The Politics of the Letter in Paul de Man,” in The Political Archive of Paul de Man, Property, Sovereignty, and the Theotropic, ed. Martin McQuillen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 81–90. McCarthy et al., “New Geography.” James Welling in conversation with Lynne Tillman, http://jameswelling .net/assets/uploaded/pdf/tillman_lynne_in_conversation.pdf (accessed June 2012). Tillman’s own novels, especially American Genius: A Comedy (2006), would also be relevant to the concerns of this book, as is the poetry of Susan Howe (with whom Welling recently collaborated on a book, That This). In fact, an essay I wrote on Howe, “The Death of a Beautiful Woman,” http://www.cipa.ulg.ac.be/intervalles4/54_michaels.pdf, along with another on some of Christopher Nolan’s movies, also called “The Death of a Beautiful Woman” but with the subtitle “Christopher Nolan’s Idea of Form,” http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics /detective, were the beginnings of the project that has become The Beauty of a Social Problem.

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18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

Rosalind Krauss, “Photography and Abstraction,” (New York: Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, 1989), 66. James Welling, Hooks (2010), http://www.materialpress.org/limitededitions /2010/James/ (accessed May 2011). Chang, born in 1974 (like Tuazon and Arthur Ou, discussed later in this section and a close friend of Chang), is some twenty-five years younger than Welling, and although neither Chang nor Ou studied formally with Welling, both have worked with him in various connections. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 104. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 162. Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005), 178. Charles H. Caffin, Photography as a Fine Art (Hastings- on-Hudson: Morgan & Morgan, 1971), 108; James Elkins, “Renouncing Representation,” in Lyle Rexer, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (New York: Aperture, 2009), 270. Deborah Garwood, “Arthur Ou: To Preserve, To Elevate, To Cancel,” artcritical http://www.artcritical.com/2007/06/01/arthur- ou-to-preserve-to -elevate-to-cancel (acessed May 2010). “Shannon Ebner and Arthur Ou in Conversation,” North Drive Press #3, New York (2006), http://www.northdrivepress.com/interviews/NDP3 /NDP3_EBNER_OU.pdf (accessed May 5, 2010). Judd, Complete Writings, 184. World Steel Association, http://www.worldsteel.org/media-centre/press -releases/2012/12-2012-crude-steel.html (accessed November 2013). “Shannon Ebner and Arthur Ou in Conversation,” http://www.northdrive press.com/interviews/NDP3/NDP3_EBNER_OU.pdf (accessed May 5, 2010). Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe, and the Future of the Global Economy (London: Zed Books, 2011), 105. The reasons for this are several, and although the degree to which immigration has played a role in labor discipline is controversial, there is no controversy about the contribution of outsourcing, the threat of outsourcing, the political attack on unions, etc. Garrett Ricciardi and Julian Rose, “Statement,” formlessfinder http://www .formlessfinder.com/statement (accessed June 2013). Elkins, “Renouncing Representation,” 271.

notes to chaPter three

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 77. Pareto presents rentier and speculator as opposed, of course, but he’s interested in character, which, thanks to his accident, the reenactor doesn’t exactly have. The reenactor doesn’t have a psychology; he has a position in an economy. And it’s a crucial thing about his position that it doesn’t involve taking his labor to market. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 167. For the full statement of Brown’s argument, see “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption under Capital,” http://nonsite.org/editorial /the-work- of-art-in-the-age- of-its-real-subsumption-under- capital (accessed March 3, 2012). My understanding of the possible political meanings of aesthetic autonomy has also, if less directly, been influenced by Lisa Siraganian’s Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Ricciardi and Rose, “Statement.” Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 2, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 170. The combination of its unintendedness and its dynamical relation to the person for whom it serves as a sign is part of what makes the index so attractive to some as an emblem of the work of art’s appeal to its beholder. And that same combination is what makes the transformation of it into something utterly intended, and therefore with a meaning utterly independent of the experience of its beholder, so attractive to others as an emblem of the work’s refusal of that appeal. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight, 1988), 74. It’s thus no surprise that we find in Rose’s description of Tuazon a reenactment of the logic (described in chapter 2) according to which the literalization of the work makes the beholder a participant in it. Comparing a piece by Tuazon that viewers “are invited to walk” on with one of Carl André’s, Rose notes that “when you step onto an André piece, nothing much happens,” whereas, when you walk onto the Tuazon, “you feel as if you are breaking it”: “the weight and movement of your body are implicated in its destruction” (225). Rose understands this as an advance over what he calls Minimalism’s appeal to the “idealist” “subject”; Tuazon appeals only to “the body.” But of course, from the position I am arguing for here, what’s crucial is not the choice between the subject as mind and the subject as body—it’s the irrelevance of the subject as such.

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For McCarthy, Justus Nieland says, “Literature, or better, writing, is and has always been a technology not of expression . . . but of transmission, an act of broadcasting, a scattering of seeds, a dissemination without origin and within an undecidable horizon of listeners” (“Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Afterlife of Modernism,” Modern Fiction Studies 58, no. 3 [Fall 2012]: 579). This is indeed the kind of warmed-over deconstructive thing McCarthy himself sometimes likes to say, for example, in “Last Chapter: A Response to Ingo Niermann,” where he describes Niermann and Erik Needling as having a “more nuanced” understanding (than Paul Auster) “of what authorship and writing are: namely, the opening up of a set of possibilities rather than the dictating of a fixed reality” (Eric Needling with Ingo Niermann, The Future of Art: A Diary [Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012], 237). But what makes Remainder great is precisely its narrator’s attraction to a reality that’s entirely fixed—not in the sense that nothing unexpected can happen but in the sense that everything is always right or wrong. And his commitment not to an undecidable horizon of listeners, but to no listener at all. The Future of Art is also an interesting book, one that its makers understood to have a relation to Remainder (hence their invitation to McCarthy to contribute an essay) and that might, from my standpoint, be described as a variation on the ambition to make art out of the death of a beautiful woman: it’s the diary of an artist (Needling), who lives a year (March 1, 2011, to February 29, 2012) as if it were his last. On one interpretation, the point of the project is what might be described as the humanist one of enabling the protagonist to live his life “to the fullest” (14), as Niermann puts it: “The Last Year was meant to intensify Erik’s life in every regard” (203). On another reading, it might be understood as an attempt to frame his experience, to produce not a life intensely lived but a work of art, defined precisely by its difference from life. Niermann gets at this when, in response to Needling’s sense that the project had become so stressful that he sometimes thought about actually killing himself (“He wouldn’t have to give a damn about financial obligations anymore, and his place in art history would be automatically secured”), he points out that then he “wouldn’t have lived the year as if it were his last after all” (206). Suicide would be a kind of literalism; “as if” is the mark here of art. It’s hard to say which of these understandings the protagonists themselves subscribed to; maybe that’s what McCarthy means by the “more nuanced” idea of authorship and the set of possibilities rather than the

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fixed reality. In any event, the interest of the project doesn’t really hinge on our deciding between their two ways of understanding the last year— it’s the set of choices they produce rather than the one we might imagine them actually to make that gives the project its force (and that locates it in the discursive field I’m describing). Indeed, both their own attraction to the act and their uncertainty about how to understand it are essential to our understanding of it. Alternatively of course, it’s a worker’s utopia—no commodities because no capital. In that version, it wouldn’t be the case that artists couldn’t survive; it would be the case instead that there was no such thing as art—or no such thing as what we mean by sutonomy.

Chapter Four

1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

Brian Ulrich, “Statement” in conjunction with the exhibition Is This Place Great or What? (New York, 2011). The Copia project was also shown at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the statement appears also in the book that accompanied that show, Is This Place Great or What? (New York: Aperture, 2011). http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/06/12/chart-of-the-day-median -net-worth-1962-2010/ (accessed April 29, 2013). Andrea Fraser, “L’1%, c’est moi,” http://whitney.org/file_columns/0002 /9848/andreafraser_1_2012whitneybiennial.pdf. http://stateofworkingamerica.org/fact-sheets/wealth/ (accessed April 29, 2014). James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 13. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” (1934), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 2, 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 774. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Ulrich, “Statement.” Liz Deschenes, 2012 Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, http:// whitney.org/WatchAndListen/Exhibitions?context=&context_id=&play _id=665 (accessed April 29, 2014). Benjamin is here repeating and then quoting Alfred Döblin’s 1929 introduction to August Sander, Face of Our Time: Sixty Portraits of Twentieth

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

Century Germans, trans. Michael Robertson (Munich: Schirmer Art Books, 2003), 13. Walker Evans, “The Reappearance of Photography,” Hound & Horn 5, http://www.masters- of-photography.com/E/evans/evans_articles4.html (accessed March 2013). Hilla Becher, Claudia Bohn-Spector, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Davide Featherston, Sander Gilman, Ulrich Keller, Weston Naef, and Joan Weinstein, “Portrait of a People: The Photographs of August Sander,” in In Focus: August Sander (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 105. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Hope Kingsley, Seduced by Art (London: National Gallery, 2013), 91. Quoted in Mia Fineman, “Notes from the Underground: The Subway Portraits,” in Walker Evans (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), 111. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Although my primary interest here is not in the Richter, it should be clear that one of the things that makes this painting an easy example—the pure thematization of absorption—also makes it a bad one. As Michael Fried points out in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), no one can or is meant to imagine that this reader is doing anything other than performing absorption. On the one hand, then, there’s no way that one can simply identify this work as absorptive or Richter as an absorptive artist. On the other hand, however, the painting declares a significant relation to the question of absorption, and it’s worth noting that no painter could possibly have that kind of significant relation just by depicting scenes of absorption. Both in relation to Richter and to Wall’s Adrian Walker, Fried’s discussion of what he calls “to-be-seenness” makes the relevant argument here. It’s worth remarking here, first, that I’m talking about straight and predigital photography and, second, that the requirements of the medium are not merely physical or technological. What I mean by medium is what the photographers I’m talking about thought of as the medium, what their sense—if they had one—of its essential characteristics were. That this sense will have a relation to the technology is inevitable; that it will be determined by the technology is not. Quoted in Fried, Why Photography Matters, 197. Fried describes Struth as acutely interested in how his subjects “would like to be portrayed,” and Becher says of Sander that the key to what she calls his “deeply convincing results” was his ability to accept “the self-

notes to chaPter four

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

interpretation of his sitters, their chosen role in life, instead of trying to define their ‘character’ ” (138). Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, And Their Children after Them (New York: Seven Stories Press), 39. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Maharidge also reports that Emma Woods “disliked Evans. She saw him as a cold, rude bore and avoided him” (54). She liked Agee, however, and even though some commentators have been skeptical about Agee’s sense of the attraction between them, Emma told Maharidge that she thought Agee was “cute” and wondered “what it would have been like to become involved with him.” Quoted in David Whitford, “The Most Famous Story Never Told,” Fortune (September 19, 2005). Quoted in James R. Mellow, Walker Evans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 313. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 294. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 71. This text was published in French in 1965, and the interesting questions it raises about the class status of the medium itself probably have a greater relevance for Agee and Evans (and their loathing of the middle-brow) than for the art photography of the twenty-first century. That is, one could perhaps see class anxiety as well as what I’m describing as class superiority articulated in these pictures’ claim to art. My own sense is that this probably isn’t true, but whether it is or not, my argument depends more on Agee’s and Evans’s recognition of the primacy of the class structure than on their sense of their precise position within it. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 519–20. Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 314. “I have a strong feeling,” Agee says, “that the ‘sense of beauty,’ like nearly everything else, is a class privilege.” In a radio lecture of 1931, Sander said that he aimed to “create a physiognomic image of our nation and time.” Transcribed and published in August Sander, “Photography as a Universal Language,” Massachusetts Review (Winter 1978), 677–78. See also Leo Rubinfien, Art in America (June–July 2004). Michael Jennings, “Agriculture, Industry, and the Birth of the Photo-Essay in the Late Weimar Republic,” October, no. 93 (Summer 2000). The full quote from Becher is “Since Sander grew up in a society that was fairly

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27.

28.

diversified, he just saw these circus people as one group existing at the same level as other groups.” In Focus: August Sander (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 128. This is true despite the fact that during the 1920s, Sander was, if only because of his relation to the Cologne Progressives, exposed to at least as sophisticated an understanding of a Marxist account of class difference as Agee ever had (and more so Evans, who never had any intellectual relation to Marxism). At the same time, however, one might say that insofar as the Cologne Progressives understood themselves to be producing a distinctively Communist art, they tended to theorize their practice as an effort to produce the art that would come into being once class difference, and hence class conflict, had disappeared. Thus Franz Seiwert, criticizing the art put forward by the Association of Revolutionary Artists, which, he thought, identified revolutionary art with a mere commitment to “making statements about the struggle, solidarity and class consciousness of the proletariat,” went on to insist that truly revolutionary work could only be “created out of the collective consciousness where the self which creates a work is no longer in bourgeois individualistic isolation, but a tool of the collective consciousness.” Quoted in Martyn Everett, “Art as a Weapon: Frans Seiwert and the Cologne Progressives,” https://libcom.org /files/Art%20as%20a%20weapon%20Franz%20Seiwert%20and%20 the%20Cologne%20progressives%20-%20Martyn%20Everett.pdf (accessed September 2013.) In other words, the work of art must be produced by no class, which helps make sense of what Lynette Roth (in her invaluable Painting as a Weapon [Koln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008]) describes as his comparison of “the coming art of a classless society to the medieval ideal of a pre-capitalist collective” (53). Indeed, their and Sander’s attraction to the idea of the medieval guild may be understood as a way of imagining social difference in a classless society. For important accounts of the inequality between the artist and his subjects in Agee and Evans that take up the problem in terms that anticipate mine but reach different conclusions, see T. V. Reed, Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ ft6p3007r2 (accessed September 18, 2009), and Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). The other text that has been essential to me in thinking about these issues (in particular the importance if not quite, in her account, the distinctiveness of class

notes to chaPter four

29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

structure) is Paula Rabinowitz’s They Must Be Represented (London: Verso, 1994), particularly the chapter “Voyeurism and Class Consciousness.” Leo Rubinfien, “August Sander,” http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012 /07/theory-august-sander-mask-behind-face.html (accessed March 2013). See also the “Pedestrians” series for Evans’s interest in producing pictures that have at least some of the effects of the portrait—a single figure, isolated against a background of no intrinsic interest—but that are nevertheless determinedly not portraits. James Agee, James Agee Rediscovered, ed. Michael A. Lofaro and Hugh Davis (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 121. In contrast to the diplomatic characterization of the Fisk Singers in the published text, they are here described as “disgusting,” their performance marked by a “humble smugness.” In Cotton Tenants, the recently published draft of the Fortune article discovered among Agee’s papers, he makes a version of this point fairly explicitly, saying that although “one tenant in three is a Negro,” “this is not their story”: “Any honest consideration of the Negro would crosslight and distort the issue with the problems not of a tenant but of a race.” Cotton Tenants, ed. John Summers (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2013), 31. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 1, 5. For a very different reading of the question of culture in Agee and Evans, see John Dorst’s “On the Porch and in the Room: Threshold Moments and Other Ethnographic Tropes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” in New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans, ed. Caroline Blinder (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 41–69. The whole point of this essay is to read Agee and Evans as if they were anthropologists, seeking to gain “access to the interior of the Other” (49). From this standpoint, of course, difference trumps damage and culture makes class virtually invisible. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), 24. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012), 39. This reading of Absalom, Absalom! is, in effect, a summary of an essay I wrote about fifteen years ago, “Absalom, Absalom! The Difference between White Men and White Men” in Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Robert W. Hamblin and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 137–53.

207

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38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1980), 196. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. During the civil rights movement, and indeed for most of the second half of the century, Faulkner’s powerful subsumption of all social relations by the model of race relations no doubt contributed to his central place in American literature. The point here is not that he was a particularly strong supporter of the civil rights movement (in fact, his public statements were often equivocal), but that his vision of America as divided between black and white or, more precisely, as defined by the relations between black and white, was at the heart of the movement. And even when the great wave of late twentieth-century immigration jeopardized the defining power of black/white relations, the model of race relations— of the relations between identities—remained central. At the same time, however, it’s worth noting that Faulkner’s own most ambitious writing of the postwar period, the Snopes trilogy, explicitly (if even more equivocally) addressed questions of class, and that these novels have, in the twentyfirst century, become the objects of greater attention than they ever were when first published. It’s even more worth noting that Wright’s Native Son (as important to the 1940s as Absalom, Absalom! was to the 1930s) is almost certainly the most powerful fictional effort to think through the meaning of race in a class society (i.e., to think beyond the amalgam of love and cruelty). As reported in Laurence Bergreen, James Agee: A Life (New York: Penguin, 1985), 200. Ibid. What Smithson said about Fried is that “the quality of his fear (dread) is high, but his experience of the abyss is low” (Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996], 104). A sustained study of Smithson and Fried would be interesting to read. At the time (late 1960s, early 1970s), they seemed like and understood themselves to be deeply opposed to one another; today that opposition begins to look a little more like collaboration. Liz Deschenes, quoted in Lucy Gallun “Surface and Light: Liz Deschenes,” Inside/Out: A MoMA/MoMA PS1 Blog http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_ out/2012/07/12/surface-and-light-liz-deschenes/ (accessed September 2012). Think too of the Montgomery Ward door handles, also shown by Ulrich in 2012 (see fig. 6). Liz Deschenes, in a video produced by the Whitney Museum in connection

notes to chaPter four

46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

with the 2012 Biennial, http://whitney.org/WatchAndListen/Exhibitions ?play_id=665 (accessed September 2012). Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Picador, 2010), 224–25. The full quotation is explicit: “This is not a conception of labor power sold at the market price to a capital invested in enterprise; it is a question of capital-ability” (225). We can see a similar phenomenon in the empty but useful late twentiethcentury debates in the United States over the supposed tension between the importance of the individual and the importance of his or her culture, race, or gender. There never was any such tension, and in the twenty-first century that debate has more or less disappeared, while both the individual and the group function interchangeably as alternatives to class. To get a sense of what that means, in the US, at the height of the recent recession, it was 10 percent. As I write this, the most recent number (for December 2013) is 6.7 percent [U3], although the U6 number is 13.1 percent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines U6 as including “the total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force” (http://www.bls .gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm; accessed January 2014). In other words, it includes people who have unsuccessfully looked for work but are not currently doing so and people who want full-time work but have settled for part-time because it’s all they can find. August Sander, “Photography as a Universal Language,” in Seeing, Observing and Thinking, trans. Daniel Mufson (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2009), 27. Or, to put the point slightly differently and in terms that correspond more to the theoretical logic that has governed the effort to redescribe what is sometimes called Sander’s antimodernism as a reluctant postmodernism, this is where someone like George Baker’s “critique of Sander’s treatment of Others” (“social, ethnic and historical”) simply replicates the political terms of Becher’s praise (Baker, “Photography between Narrativity and Stasis: August Sander, Degeneration and the Decay of the Portrait,” October, no. 76 [Spring 1996], 106, 111). They both reproduce the pluralist logic of inclusion that indeed governs Sander’s project, the logic that would, in effect, see class as another name for group, see the unemployed as a version of the blind. For many years, of course, terms like labor and capital have seemed too crude to analyze the complexities of modern capitalism, and,

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52.

no doubt, they don’t capture the difference between, say, the well-paid professor and the badly paid janitor. But the intensities of neoliberalism have begun to make even those differences look a little less stark ( just imagine the well-paid professor as the much-less-well-paid adjunct he is increasingly becoming), and even left-liberal economists have begun to look once again at what they call “capital bias” and what Paul Krugman calls “a notable shift in income away from labor.” As Krugman puts it, “I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn’t seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism—which shouldn’t be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications” (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of -the-robots/; (accessed December 15, 2102). Michal Kalecki, “Political Aspects of Full Employment,” in The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 78.

Chapter Five

1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

Laurent Binet, “The Missing Pages of Laurent Binet’s HHhH,” Millions (April 2012). http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/exclusive-the-missing -pages-of-laurent-binets-hhhh.html (accessed August 28, 2012). Laurent Binet, HHhH, trans. Sam Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 227. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Marie-France Etchegoin,”Claude Lanzmann juge Les Bienveillantes,” Le Nouvel Observateur (September 21, 2006). Heti first produced this remark in a 2007 interview in The Believer with the art critic Dave Hickey (http://www.believermag.com/issues/200711/?read= interview_hickey; accessed January 2013), but it has subsequently been reproduced in many discussions of the book—How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life—in which she acts on her frustration and gives everybody their real names. Chloé Saffy, “Laurent Binet entre dans l’H(h)istoire,” Discordance, http:// www.discordance.fr/laurent-binet-entre-dans-lhhistoire-10767 (accessed January 2013). Laurent Binet, HHhH (Paris: Éditions Grasset, 2009), 214. Michiko Kakutani, “Unrepentant and Telling of Horrors Untellable,” New York Times (February 23, 2009).

notes to chaPter five

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008), 148–49. David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life (New York: Knopf, 2013), 123. Peter Kuon, “From ‘Kitsch’ to ‘Splatter’: The Aesthetics of Violence,” in Writing the Holocaust Today, ed. Aurélie Barjonet and Liran Razinsky (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2012), 36. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 53. In the same essay in which Sebald articulates it, for example, he finds himself, some fifteen pages later, trying to describe his sense since childhood that “something” about the world he had been born into “was being kept from” him (70), and he produces this sentence: “I know now that at the time when I was lying in my bassinet on the balcony of the Seefeld house and looking up at the pale blue sky, there was a pall of smoke in the air all over Europe, over the rearguard action in the east and west, over the ruins of the German cities, over the camps where untold numbers of people were burnt, people from Berlin and Frankfurt, from Wuppertal and Vienna, from Wurzburg and Kissingen, from Hilversum and The Hague, Naumur and Thionville . . . there was scarcely a place in Europe from which no one had been deported in those years” (71–72). Written in a version of the “documentary style” that Sebald approves as a technique for overcoming Holocaust kitsch and obviously without any recourse to the infant in the bassinet’s viewpoint, this passage nevertheless reproduces the structure of the egomania that its self-effacing style seeks to deny: the destruction of the war enters the text as an explanation of the feelings (“something was being kept from me”) of its author. And of course, Sebald’s great novel Austerlitz performs a version of this plot. Here the effort to avoid the reduction of total destruction to one’s own experience of it involves an elaborate structure in which the story is narrated by a first person who mainly repeats to us the narration of another first person (Austerlitz himself), who in turn is often passing on to us what was said to him by someone else (for example, his childhood nurse, Vera). Thus a sentence beginning “Maximilian had told her, said Vera,” carries with it the implicature “said Austerlitz to me and say I to you,” and the feeling the sentence describes—“that in the middle of this crowd, which had merged into a single living organism racked by strange, convulsive contractions,” Maximilian “had felt like a foreign body about to be crushed and then excreted” (168)—comes to us as if preserved in amber. That is,

211

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notes to chaPter five

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

how somebody (Austerlitz’s father) felt at a Nazi rally can be recounted only if it’s embedded in somebody else’s narration, which is itself embedded in somebody else’s narration, which is embedded in that of the actual narrator: he said, she said, he said, I say, writes the author. Nevertheless, it’s not at all clear that rendering the murder of the Jews only at second or third hand and by the effects it has on those who were not themselves involved (since after all, the true point of that sentence is not Maximilian’s response to the Nazis but Austerlitz’s response to that response) doesn’t relocate rather than escape the effect of kitsch. Jonathan Littell, Le sec et l’humide (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2008), 25, 117. Affidavit of Erwin Schultz, May 26, 1947, “The Einsatzgruppen Case,” http:// www.phdn.org/archives/einsatzgruppenarchives.com/mt/exhibit26.html (accessed February 2013). Quoted in Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (New York: Random House, 1996), 635. Édouard Husson and Michel Terestchenko, Les Complaisantes: Jonathan Littell et l’écriture du mal (Paris: François-Xavier de Guibert, 2007), 44. Dominick LaCapra gestures in the same direction when he worries that the “textual markers or procedures that provide the reader” with the “critical distance” needed to signal “the way complicity with the first-person narrator may be resisted, disrupted, or overcome” “may not be sufficient” (History, Literature, Critical Theory [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013], 99). Of course, as many critics defend Littell as critique him on this point. Thus, for example, Luc Rasson rightly insists that any “moral stand on the novel” requires us to see the ways in which Littell’s deployment of the literary (for Rasson, his creation in particular of Aue as an unreliable narrator) works in exactly the opposite direction, producing a “condemnation” rather than a “trivialization” of, much less an identification with, the Nazis (“How Nazis Undermine Their Own Point of View: Irony and Unreliability in The Kindly Ones,” in Writing the Holocaust Today, ed. Aurélie Barjonet and Liran Razinsky (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2012), 99, 103). My point, however, is that what makes the novel important has less (i.e., nothing) to do with its moral stance on the Nazis than with its lack of interest in taking such a stance. And in this, it’s not unprecedented. In Sebald’s extraordinary tribute to Peter Weiss, he describes Weiss, both a German and a Jew, as seeking “to identify with both the murder victims and the murderers,” an effort that has the effect of making “any kind of

notes to chaPter five

18.

19.

moralizing simplification out of the question” (187). And if we think of the pieces in Sebald’s own On the History of Natural Destruction (1999) and his novel Austerlitz (2001) as parts of a single project, we can see the degree to which Sebald himself was committed to a version of Weiss’s project. Austerlitz’s family is murdered by the Germans, but it’s the “devastation” of Germany by the English that’s the subject of the History, so the effect of the texts taken together is to make the Germans both perpetrators and victims. From this standpoint, the often-remarked resemblance between Sebald and Austerlitz’s narrator and between Austerlitz’s narrator and Austerlitz himself produces a kind of composite Jew/German—seeking, on the one hand, to know what was done to his family, and, on the other, to know what his family did. In Charlotte Mandell’s translation: “Oh my human brothers. Let me tell you how it happened. I am not your brother, you’ll retort, and I don’t want to know.” Mandell did a wonderful job translating Les Bienveillantes, but these sentences, unfortunately the first two in the book, are really hard. “Frères humains,” especially to someone who knows François Villon’s “Ballade des pendus,” produces an effect very different from “human brothers,” and “Let me tell you how it happened” more or less necessarily loses the force of “ça” in “ça s’est passé,” a force that Pierre Nora accurately characterizes when he says “the ça is marvelous because everything is in it” (“Jonathan Littell, Pierre Nora, Conversation sur l’histoire et le roman,” Le Débat 144 [2007]: 41). Littell has said (in the interview in Le Figaro) that he imagines he might have behaved much as Aue does (presumably minus the incest and matricide), but of course, the interest of the book in no way depends upon the accuracy of this assertion. In fact, part of the power of the question is that it’s more interesting than the truth of any answer—especially to anyone else. The French literary critic Pierre Bayard (best known in the United States as the author of How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman [New York: Bloomsbury, 2007]) has recently published a book called Aurais-je été résistant ou bourreau? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2013), in which he tries to figure out (that is, treats as a question you could answer by doing some research) what he would have done if he’d been a young man during the Nazi occupation of France (a kind of how to talk about things you didn’t do). His eventual and endearingly plausible answer (plausible not because it’s well researched but because it’s so banal as to make the very idea of research irrelevant) is that he

213

214

notes to chaPter five

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

would have joined the Resistance but only relatively late in the war and especially if he had thought it would impress some attractive young woman. Foreclosing both the plausibility and the banality of an answer like that, Littell exploits instead the power of the question. “Jonathan Littell, Richard Millet, Conversation à Beyrouth,” Le Débat 144 (2007): 18, 24. “I wanted to write a book that would take its place in what is called literature . . .” “Conversation à Beyrouth,” 18. In this particular passage, Littell is interested also in disclaiming any particular interest in French or any national literature, distancing himself from the national but without moving to the celebration—definitively criticized by Winfried Fluck in “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies)” (in Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz [Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2009], 69–85)—of its supposed alternative, the transnational. Stalin famously made the mistake of committing to socialism in one country; no one could possibly (the contradiction would be a logical one) make the mistake of committing to neoliberalism in just one country. From this standpoint, the idea of a literature independent of any nation has the merit of at least recognizing the universality of the problem (rather than thinking that universality is the problem) and thus suggesting the universality of any possible solution. Quoted in StellaMaris, “Les Bienveillantes” http://stellamaris.blog .lemonde.fr/2006/10/25/ (accessed February 2012). The interest in her beauty is reiterated in an interview in Le Figaro in terms of the contrast between “the beauty of the girl” and “the horror of the scene” (Florent Georgesco and Jonathan Littell, “Jonathan Littell, homme de l’année,” Le Figaro (2006), http://www.lefigaro.fr/magazine/20061229.MAG00000304_maximilien _aue_je_pourrais-dire-qu-c_est-moi.html (accessed May 6, 2009). Kuon, “From Kitsch to Splatter,” 37. In less interesting literary critical terms, this is also the major complaint of Husson and Terestchenko. Theodor Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 2003), 162. “Conversation,” 14, 15. What Littell is saying is that the ambition to make a perfect (“parfaite”) work of art (“bien faite,” “well made . . . in every dimension”) seems to have been destroyed by what he calls “an ideological will to make form implode” (14), but that, in his view, it hasn’t worked

notes to chaPter five

26. 27.

out so well. And all this comes after his description of his own effort to make sure that Les Bienveillantes was “bien construit” (12) and of his use of the elements of Bach suites (allemande, courante, etc.) to construct it. His implication is apparently that the critique of form is ideological in a way that his own commitment to form is not. From the standpoint of the argument of this book, however, this would be a mistake. The conflict between a certain critique of form and a certain commitment to it should today be understood as a conflict between ideologies rather than between ideology and something else. And in fact, as has already been suggested, it is the renewed insistence on form that actually makes it possible to bring to light political commitments that both the critique of form and the critique of ideology characteristic of the postmodern and the neoliberal had obscured. “The Low-Wage Recovery and Growing Inequality,” http://www.nelp.org /page/-/Job_Creation/LowWageRecovery2012.pdf?n (accessed May 12, 2014). In this conversation, in other words, we see an updating of the classic thesis of the equivalence of Nazism and Communism as twin forms of totalitarianism—an equivalence that goes back both to Hannah Arendt and to F. A. Hayek, extends through Foucault, and has been reinvented in the twenty-first century to include both the Republican Party and Islam. Increasingly, the point of producing totalitarianism as the problem is to produce liberalism as the solution.

215

Index index index

absorption: and Barthes’s punctum, 15–17, 46, 49, 51, 69; and the commodity, 99; in Diderotian aesthetics, 33, 41–70 passim, 116–22 accident: and Barthes’s punctum, 15; and chance, 52; and intention, 50–51, 64–5 Adorno, Theodor, 166–67, 214n24 aesthetic judgment, 17–19, 34, 47–49 affect: and Barthes’s punctum, 18–19; and class, 28, 35, 39, 142; and conviction, 160; and form or structure, 35–36, 39; in response to the Holocaust, 169, 172; and race, 139, 142; and trauma, 196n2 Agee, James: and August Sander, 131–33, 206n27; and class and race, 134–43 passim, 207nn31–32; and Liz Deschenes, 144–46; and photographs as objects, 109–13 passim; his relationship to farmers, 120–29 passim, 205n18, 205n22, 205n24; and Jacques Rancière, 55, 60–62, 70 agency, of artist, 47–49, 51. See also intention Alberro, Alexander, 194n36

allegory, 57, 59 André, Carl, 201n40 anthropomorphism, 182n29 antidiscrimination. See discrimination anti-intentionalism: and types of intentionalism, 48, 69, 198n10. See also intention antiracism. See race and economic inequality anti-Semitism, 130, 161–62, 212n12. See also Jews; Nazism antitheatricality, 189n2, 190n13; and Barthes’s punctum, 15–16, 46, 49; and dialectic of absorption, 46, 48, 50, 69, 98, 116–18, 207n44. See also theatricality Appiah, K. Anthony, 192n28 Arendt, Hannah, 215n27 attitude, 34–38, 40 Aue, Max, 154–56, 159, 161–67, 212n17, 213n19 Auschwitz, 166–67, 214n24 Auster, Paul, 202n41 authenticity, 72, 139 automaticity, 14, 18, 20

218

index

autonomy: and art’s unity or effect, 7–8; and Viktoria Binschtok, 41; and a class aesthetic, ix–x; and the commodity, 201n36, 203n42; and intention, 69; and Jonathan Littell, 172; and Arthur Ou, 97; and Jeff Wall, 33–36 passim. See also class aesthetics Aveling, Edward, 188n65 Babi Yar massacre, 157 Bach, J. S., 172 Baker, George, 209n51 Barthes, Roland, xi, 11–21 passim, 46–51 passim, 53–55, 69–70, 94, 100, 179n15, 180n18, 181n25–26, 182n29, 189nn5–6, 189n8, 195n44; and Napoleon, 11, 181n26; and Winter Garden, 16, 18, 20, 49. See also punctum; studium Batchen, Geoffrey, 11, 181n25 Bayard, Piere, 213n19 Beardsley, Monroe, 48–49, 52, 69, 189n8, 190n9, 190n17. See also antiintentionalism; intention beauty: and class, 61, 144, 205n24; of nature, 9, 17, 56; and political art, 41; and poverty, 122–27, 143, 205n24; of a social problem, 38–39, 42; of women or works of art, 1–4, 6–8, 20–21, 157, 159, 165, 167, 202n41, 214n22; and violence, 97 Becher, Hilla, 115, 119–20, 129–30, 204n11, 204n17, 205n26, 209n51 Becker, Gary, 25, 38, 62, 147, 184nn42–43 beholder: and art’s effect on, 8–9, 16–17, 20, 44–51, 56, 181n26; and class politics, x–xi, 35–66, 156,

146–47; and the commodity, 100, 103; in Liz Deschenes, Walker Evans, and Paul Strand, 143–48; and Diderotian aesthetics, 43–70 passim; and differences between, 8, 35–66, 100, 144, 146–47; and indifference to, x–xi, 17, 20–21, 33– 36, 45, 48, 50 being, 46–47, 58, 77, 83 belief, 35, 54–55; and artistic intention, 12 Bell, Anthea, 211n11 Bell, Daniel, 160 Benjamin, Walter, 109, 112, 114, 124–33 passim, 149, 181n26, 203n6, 203n9, 205n23 Bergreen, Laurence, 208n40 Best, Stephen, 76–78, 197n9 Bhagwati, Jagdish, 185n44 Bieger, Laura, 214n21 Binet, Laurent, 153–166 passim, 210nn1–2, 210nn5–6 Binschtok, Viktoria, 3–39, 63, 65, 70, 151; Die Abwesenheit der Antragsteller, 37, 39; Das große Medieninteresse, 63–64; Spektakel, 63–66, 70; Wand 1, 40–41 Black, Sandra, 25, 185n44 Blinder, Caroline, 297n34 Blobel, Paul, 153–55, 161 bodies, 39–40, 151, 201n40 Bontecou, Lee, 90; Untitled, 84 Borges, Jorge Luis, 53 Bottero, Wendy, 193n34 Bourdieu, Pierre, 59, 124, 185n46, 205n22 Bourke-White, Margaret: You Have Seen Their Faces, 138, 207n33 Brainerd, Elizabeth, 25, 185n44

index

Brecht, Bertolt, 38–39, 42, 188n66; Mother Courage, 38, 188n66 Brenner, Robert, 184n41 Breuer, Marco, 85–86, 88, 94; Untitled, 85 Brown, Nicholas, 41, 99–101, 188n67, 201n36 Browning, Christopher, 161, 164; Ordinary Men, 161 Burroughs family. See Gudger family (Burroughs family) Butler, Judith, 192n28 Caffin, Charles, 85, 200n24 Cage, John, 50–54 passim, 69, 100, 190n11, 190nn13–14, 191n19, 195n44, 201n39; 4′33″, 50–51, 64–65, 101, 190n11, 190n13, 196n45 Caillebotte, Gustave, 32, 195n44 Caldwell, Erskine: You Have Seen Their Faces, 138, 207n33 Canada, 29–30, 37, 187 capital: affective life of, 28; and art as commodity, 100, 102, 203n42; mobility of, 26, 29 capital and labor: and globalization, 93; and human capital, 68, 147, 194n34; and income, x, 25, 210n51; mobility of, 26, 29; structural difference between, 36, 67–68, 147, 177n1; and unemployment, 41, 151, 209n49 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 32 Caro, Anthony, 84–85 cartography, 77–78 causality, and the photograph, 63, 80; and fossils, 9–11, 54–55, 94; and the photographer, 13; and artistic production, 83, 88, 113; and medium specificity, 112

Caws, Mary Ann, 3 Cazdyn, Eric, 194n39 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 53–54 chance, 52. See also accident Chang, Phil, 200n20; Cache, Active, 81–5, 103; Two Sheets of Thick Paper on Top of Two Sheets of Thin Paper, 81, 83, 103 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon: Young Girl Reading, 43 China, 90, 93 Chowkwanyun, Merlin, 186n46 Churchill, Winston, 189n8 civil rights movement, 21–22, 62, 182n31, 208n39. See also triple liberation movements class: and globalization, 93; and identity, 21–27, 186n46, 192n27, 194n40, 209n48; and neoliberalism, 177n1; and neoliberal aesthetics, 34–70 passim; and unemployment, 37–38. See also class aesthetics class aesthetics, x–xi; and James Agee and Walker Evans, 60–61, 127–29, 133–43 passim, 205n22, 206n27, 207n34; and Viktoria Binschtok, 37–42 passim, 151–52; and Liz Deschenes, 146–49, 152; and William Faulkner, 139–41, 208n39; and Jonathan Littell, 171–72; and portraiture, 151–52; and Jacques Rancière, 57–64, 66–67, 70; and August Sander, 127–30, 133, 149–51, 206n27; and Jeff Wall, 28–36 passim, 187–88n61 Clinton administration, 183n36 coherence, 56–58, 63 Cologne Progressives, 206n27

219

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commodity, 26; as art, 99–103, 203n42 communism, 171, 206n27, 215n27 conceptualism, 65, 194n36 consciousness: and feeling, 4, 72, 196n2; and intention, 16, 53; and absorption in neoliberal aesthetics, 43–46, 48, 188n2; in class aesthetics, 115–16, 120–21; as class consciousness, 206n27 consumption, 99, 111, 113 conviction, 45–46, 160 Crane, Stephen, 189n2 Crimp, Douglas, 8, 18, 99–100, 178n8, 181n23, 201n35 Critchley, Simon, 75–76, 80, 197n5; Things Merely Are, 77, 199n14 Cusset, François, 160 Dadaism, 109 death, 1–4, 6–8, 97, 165–69, 202n41 deconstruction, 8, 198 n11, 202n41 Degrelle, Leon, 160 de Man, Paul, 78, 199n15 Denes, Melissa, 31, 186n49 De Niro, Robert, 72, 74 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 48, 76, 178n10 Deschenes, Liz, 111–13, 144–48, 152, 203n8, 208n43, 208n45; Black Mirror, 148; Untitled, 145 detail, 154, 196n2; and the photograph, 12–14, 32, 79 Dickinson, Emily: “After great pain” (“formal feeling comes”), 4–5 Diderot, Denis, 43–50 passim, 69, 187n60, 195n44 discrimination, 184n43; and class or identity, 25–26, 142; and inequality, 35, 38, 62, 142, 171, 183n36; and intersectionality, 186n46; and neo-

liberalism, 27, 186n46; and triple liberation movements, 21, 182n31; and vision, 60, 192n30 Döblin, Alfred, 127, 130, 132, 203n9 Donohue, John, 185n44 Doré, Gustave, 11 Dorst, John: “On the Porch and in the Room,” 207n34 Ebner, Shannon, 90, 200n26, 200n29 Echtegoin, Marie-France, 210n3 Economic Policy Institute, 24 effect, of the work of art: and absorption, 44–52 passim, 56, 118, 135–36, 139; and affect, 142; and Barthes’s punctum, 15–18, 20, 181n26; on beholder, 8–9; and causality, 113; and Frank Eugene, 85; and Edgar Allan Poe, 3, 6–7; and posing, 115 Eichmann, Adolf, 161 Eisenstein, Sergei, 114, 178n4 Elgin, Catherine Z., 53, 190nn16–17 El Greco, 45 Elkins, James, 11, 85–86, 94, 179n14, 180n17, 181n20, 200n24, 200n32, 201n33 emanation, 14, 19, 94 Emin, Tracey: My Bed, 99 emotion. See feeling employment. See unemployment Epstein, Richard, 184n43 ethics, 109, 156, 169; and accessibility of markets, 26–28; and ethical kitsch, 163; and grievability, 2, 7, 28; and history, 166; and “Surface Reading,” 76, 198n10, 199n11 Eugene, Frank, 85–88, 94; The Horse, 86 Evans, Walker, 55–61 passim, 70, 109– 46 passim, 193n32, 203n5, 204n10,

index

204n13, 204n18, 205n20, 205n24, 206n27, 207n30, 207n34; Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, 123; Floyd Burroughs and Tengle Children, 137; Frank Tengle, Bud Fields, and Floyd Burroughs, 138; Frank Tengle Family, 121; Mrs. Frank Tengle, 110, 126; “Pedestrians,” 207n30; “Subway Portraits,” 116, 132, 204n13; Tengle Family Home, 125. See also Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Everett, Martyn: Art as a Weapon, 206n27 evidence: and photography, 12, 94, 180nn18–19 exploitation, 68, 177n1; and discrimination, 183n36, 186n46, 194n40; and grievability, 28 Faulkner, William, 139–41, 207–8nn37–39; Absalom, Absalom!, 140–41, 207–8nn37–38; Go Down Moses, 141; Light in August, 141; The Sound and the Fury, 141 feeling, 78, 171–72, 196n2; and Barthes’s punctum, 51; and feeling real, 72–74; and formlessness, 101; and grievability, 28; and intentionality, 54; irrelevance of, 34, 38–42, 120–22, 142, 151, 161–63; and pain, 3–5, 169; and truth, 158. See also affect feminism, 21–26 passim, 59, 182. See also women’s movement Fields, Barbara, 139–40, 207n36 Fields, Karen, 139–40, 207n36 Fields family. See Woods, Emma (Fields); Woods, Thomas (Bud Fields) film, 72, 78, 88, 114, 131

Fineman, Mia, 204n13 Fluck, Winfried, 214n21 form: in Viktoria Binschtok, 63, 65– 66; and class politics, x–xi, 41–42, 68, 70; in Emily Dickinson, 4; in Walker Evans, 122; in Andreas Gursky, 67; in Jonathan Littell, 167–69, 171–72, 214n25; in Maggie Nelson, 3, 5; in Arthur Ou, 97; in Jacques Rancière, 57–58, 63; in Jeff Wall, 35–36, 188n61; in Walt Whitman, 4 formalism, 45, 188n2 formlessness, 101–3, 197n5 Fortune (magazine), 111, 134–35, 205n19, 207n32 48 Hours Mystery, 1–2 fossils, 9–11, 17, 19 Foucault, Michel, 48, 146–47, 184n43, 209n46 Fowkes, Ben, 188n65 frame, 79, 90, 92, 95, 97–98, 144 France, 153, 186n46, 213n19; French theory, 61, 160; SOS Racisme, 192n26; HALDE 192n26 Frank, Anne, 168–69 Fraser, Andrea, 108, 203n3 Fraser, Nancy, 25 Fried, Michael, 179n11; on Roland Barthes, 15–18 passim, 181nn25–26, 186n48; and Diderotian aesthetics, 15–18 passim, 43–57, 98, 116–19 passim, 187n60, 188–89nn1–3, 194n37, 195n44, 204n14; on Andreas Gursky, 66–67; on minimalism, 69, 84–85, 90, 182nn28–29, 190n10, 200n22; Robert Smithson on, 143, 208n42; on Jeff Wall, 28–33 passim

221

222

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Friedman, Milton, 37 Fry, Roger, 45, 48, 188n1, 189n2 Gabcik, Joseph, 164 Garwood, Deborah, 200n25 gay rights movement, 21, 182n31 genocide, 161, 163 genre, 6, 32, 157 Georgesco, Florent, 214n22 Germany, 37, 93, 115, 119, 149, 151, 159– 60, 188, 204, 211–13 Gersen, Jacob, 184n43 Gini coefficient, x, 63 globalization, 26, 29, 68, 92–93 Goodman, Nelson, 53, 190nn16–17 gravity, 71–76, 97–99 Green, David, 13 Greenberg, Clement, 69, 112, 195n43 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 57; Filial Piety, 43 Grey, Thomas C., 192n28 Grice, Paul, 180n19 grievability, 2, 7, 20–21, 28, 171 Grossman, Vasily: Life and Fate, 171 Gudger, Annie Mae (Allie Mae Burroughs), 122–23, 142 Gudger, George (Floyd Burroughs), 121, 136–38 Gudger family (Burroughs family), 124, 128, 134, 140–43 passim Gursky, Andreas, 32, 66–67 Haiti, 134, 139–40 Hartshorne, Charles, 179n12, 201n38 Hawkins, Freda, 187n51 Hayek, F. A., 215n27 Hegel, G. W. F., 43, 56–58, 71, 76 Henwood, Doug, 194n40 hermeneutics of suspicion, 198n11

heterosexism, 26–27 Heti, Sheila, 156; How Should a Person Be?, 155, 160–61, 210n4 Heydrich, Reinhard, 153, 156–57, 163–64 Hickey, Dave, 210n4 Hilberg, Raoul, 153 Hirsch, E. D., 189n8, 198n10 history: in the novel, 153–66 passim Holocaust, 157–72 passim Holocaust kitsch, 163, 166, 211n12 homophobia, 27, 59, 142, 171 Howe, Susan: That This, 199n17 Husson, Édouard, 162–63, 214n23; Les Complaisantes, 212n16 ideal, 178n10, 191n23; and minimalism, 95, 201n40; and order, 94; and perfect form, 6; and the real, 72, 76, 98 identity, 25, 27, 138, 166, 192n27, 194n40 ideology, 160, 198n11, 215n25 illusion, 59–61, 142, 167 immigrants, 29–30, 193n34, 200n30, 208n39 index: and automaticity, 14; and causality, 11; and Paul Chang, 84; and Liz Deschenes, 112–13; and fossils, 9–10; and intention, 55, 201n38; and neoliberal aesthetics, 63; and painting, 191n21; and Barthes’s punctum, xi, 17; and reality, 13–14; and representation, 17–18, 40; and the symbolic, 100 indifference: aesthetics and politics of, 28, 188n61; to attitude, 35; to the author, 54; to the beholder, 17, 21, 50, 70, 116, 139; and Walker Ev-

index

ans, 120; to exploitation, 183n36; and Roger Fry, 45, 48; to meaning, 77; to morality, 167; to social structure, 63, 159; to suffering 41, 178n4 inequality, economic, x, 139; and beauty, 38, 127, 143–44; and class difference, 30, 36, 140, 146–47, 177n1, 193n34, 206n27; and discrimination, 26–27, 36, 38, 62, 142, 171, 183n36, 186n46; and education, 147, 194n35; and empire, 185n46; and employment, 38, 149, 151; and hierarchies of vision, 58–70 passim; and human capital, 68, 147, 194n34; and immigration, 29–31, 193n34; and new social movements, 21, 61–62; and norms, 192n28; and poverty, 62, 142–44; and social order, 127, 133, 151; as structural, 35, 127–28, 148, 177n1; and “Surface Reading,” 199n11; and triple liberation movements, 23–28, 59, 171, 182n34 inflation, 23, 38, 151 instrumentality, 57, 106 intention: and absorption, 64–65; and antitheatricality, 69, 189n2, 190n13, 195n44; and Roland Barthes, 15, 17, 47–51, 180n18, 181n26; and conceptualism, 194n36; critique of, ix–x, 14, 18, 100; and nature, 52–56 passim, 191n19; and photography, 12–13; and politics, 82; and portraiture, 124; and theatricality, 15; and visibility, 62–63, 66–67. See also anti-intentionalism intersectionality, 186n46 Iversen, Margaret, 181n26

James, Henry: Roderick Hudson, 179n10 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 178n9, 198n11 Jennings, Michael, 129–30, 203n6, 205n26 Jews, 130, 151, 161–62, 212n12, 212n17 Johnston, Daniel, 168 Judd, Donald, 84–85, 90, 93, 144, 194n36, 200n23, 200n27 Kakutani, Michiko, 156, 210n7 Kalecki, Michal, 151, 210n52 Kant, Immanuel, 56, 69, 78, 195n44 Kastner, Jeffrey, 197n5 Kertész, André, 14 Kinglsey, Hope, 204n12 kitsch, 158, 163, 166, 211n12 Kittler, Friedrich, 76, 197n6 Knapp, Steven, 52–53, 190n15, 191nn17–18 Kosmodemyanska, Zoya, 159, 164–65, 169 Kostelanetz, Richard, 190n11, 201n39 Kosuth, Joseph, 194n36 Krauss, Rosalind, 70, 182n27, 191n23, 200n18; and the index, 13, 17–18; and intention, 16, 56; and meaning, 8, 80 Krugman, Paul, 210n51 Kundera, Milan, 155–56; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 156 Kuon, Peter, 157, 166, 211n10, 214n23 Lacan, Jacques, 84, 200n21 La Capra, Dominick, 212n16 Laclau, Ernesto, 62 Lamarque, Peter, 191n22 Lanzmann, Claude, 153–54, 210n3 Latinos, 27

223

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Latour, Bruno, 76, 197n8 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 55, 60–62, 70, 109–48 passim, 193n32, 203n5, 205n18, 205n22, 205n24, 206n27, 207nn31–32, 207n34, 208n40 Levy, Frank, 182; “Treaty of Detroit,” 22, 25; “Washington Consensus,” 22 liberalism, 149, 177n1, 184n43, 185n45, 215n27 Lichtwark, Alfred, 114 linguisticality, 52, 191n21 linguistics, 56, 58, 191n18 literalism, 198n11, 202n41; and Phil Chang, 81, 84–85, 111; and critique of representation, 15; and Liz Deschenes, 111, 146, 149; and dialectic of absorption, 16, 46, 50, 69–70, 98, 118–19; and political economy, 111; and postmodernism, 179n10; in recent art, x; and the subject, 9; and Oscar Tuazon, 74, 78, 81, 84. See also materialism; minimalism Littell, Jonathan, 153–71 passim, 212n13, 212–13nn16–19, 214nn20–22, 214n25; Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), 153–71 passim, 210n3, 212–13nn17–18, 214n22, 215n25n lumpenproletariat, 30 Maharidge, Dale: And Their Children after Them, 126, 205n18 Mailman, Alma, 142–43 Mandel, Ernest, 188n65 Mandell, Charlotte, 213n18 Manet, Édouard, 32, 195 Manheim, Ralph, 188n66 Marcus, Sharon, 76–78, 197n9 markets, 99; art’s autonomy from, 41, 102; and discrimination, 26–27, 62;

equality of access to, 68, 194n35; government regulation of, 185n45 Marx, Karl, 37, 188n65, 206n27, 210n51 materialism: as literalism, x, 15, 78, 83, 94. See also literalism materiality: in James Agee, 111; in Phil Chang, 82, 103; in Liz Deschenes, 112, 144; in Tom McCarthy, 77, 79, 81, 83, 100, 197n5; in Arthur Ou, 85, 95. See also literalism; materialism Maynard, Patrick, 13, 181n22, 189n4 McCarthy, Tom, ix, 71–84 passim, 97–101 passim, 156, 196n1, 197nn5– 7, 199n12, 199n16, 202n41; Remainder, 71–78 passim, 97–101 passim, 196nn1–2, 202n41 meaning, ix–x; and absorption as indifference, 17; and effect, 8; experience of, 79, 103; and intentionality, 47–53, 69–70, 100–101, 180n18, 189n2, 191n18; and literalism, 78, 93, 95; and materiality, 83–84; “meaningfulness as such,” 84; and norms, 101; and the perfect, 168; as political, 28, 63, 67, 126, 172, 177; and realism, 80; as social, 120, 131; and “Surface Reading,” 76–77 Mean Streets (film), 72 medium specificity, 18, 118, 120, 204n15 melancholy, 1, 3, 4 memoir: and Jonathan Littell, 153, 157–59, 164, 167, 171; and Maggie Nelson, 1 memory, 72, 78,–79 Mendelssohn, Peter de: Die Kathedrale, 158; Torstenson, 158–59 metaphor, 83, 144, 146

index

Michaels, Walter Benn, 52–53, 186n46, 187n59, 190n15, 191nn17–18, 192n27, 194n34, 194n38, 194n40, 195n44, 199n15, 199n17 Michel, Régis, 28, 34, 186n50, 187n57 Michigan Murders, 1 minimalism, 8, 70; and Liz Deschenes, 144; and Michael Fried, 50, 84–85; and Clement Greenberg, 69; and Arthur Ou, 90–93 passim; and representation, 95; and Julian Rose, 94, 201n40. See also literalism miracles, 71, 75–76 Mirowski, Philip, 185n45, 195n41 Mishel, Lawrence, 25 Mitchell, W. J. T., 122, 124, 190n15, 205n21 modernism, 8, 15, 18–19, 85 modernists, 19, 54, 56–58, 84–55, 196n2 modernity, 56 monochrome, 81–84 Moore, Samuel, 188n65 Morrison, Toni: Beloved, 166 Mouffe, Chantal, 62 movies, 72, 78, 81, 115, 199n17 murder, 1–2; and depiction, 84; and the Holocaust, 161, 165, 167–69, 212n12, 213n17; and poetic form, 6 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 58; Beggar Boys, 56–57 music, 50–54 passim, 64, 134–35, 168 Naef, Weston, 114, 204n11 NAFTA, 26 Nazism, 130, 154–71 passim, 212n12, 212n17, 213n19, 215nn27. See also anti-Semitism Nelson, Maggie, 1–9 passim, 20–22, 28, 59, 97, 168–69, 178nn1–3, 179n10,

182n30; Jane: A Murder, 1–6, 8, 20– 22, 28, 168, 178n1; The Red Parts, 1–2, 22, 178n2 New Criticism, 74 New Objectivity, 124 new social movements, 21, 62 New York School, 21, 182 Niedling, Erik: The Future of Art, 202n41 Nieland, Justus, 202n41 Niermann, Ingo: The Future of Art, 202n41 Nolan, Christopher, 199n17 norms, 101–2, 192 non-art, 54–55, 57–58, 69 Nora, Pierre, 213n18 objective, 49, 76, 158, 172 Oedipus, 161 Olin, Margaret, 13 Olsen, Stein Haugom, 191n22 ontology, 88, 118, 120; and autonomy, 97; and photography as art, 19 Osberg, Lars, 187n55 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 17 Ou, Arthur, 85–96 passim, 111, 200n20, 200nn25–26, 200n29; Earthworks, 85–88; Screen Tests, 88–89, 95–96; Test Screens, 95–96; View 1, 95, 97 pain, 3–5, 38, 122 painting and photography, 10–14, 109, 112, 180–81nn18–19; color field, 40; and Diderotian aesthetics, 33, 43–46, 48, 118; and fossils, 17; and medium specificity, 19; and nonart, 54–57; painterly abstraction, 40; and Jeff Wall, 32

225

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Parr, Martin, 115 participation, of the beholder, 144, 148–89 Pedraglio, Francesco, 199n13 Peirce, Charles Sanders, xi, 9, 40, 94, 100, 179n12, 180n19, 201n38 perfection, 41–42, 172; in Roger Fry, 45, 48; in Jonathan Littell, 167–69, 214n25; in Tom McCarthy, 72, 75, 78, 97; in Maggie Nelson, 5–8, 21, 23, 28 personal, as political, 169–72; and James Agee, Walker Evans, and August Sander, 120–22, 130–134 passim, 143; and Viktoria Binschtok, 39; and Liz Deschenes, 148 physics, 71, 73, 75, 83 Pictorialism, 85, 94 Plehwe, Dieter, 68, 146, 185n45, 195n41 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1–8 passim, 21, 97, 165, 167, 178n4, 179n10; “The Philosophy of Composition,” 1–4, 6, 165, 178n4; “The Poetic Principle,” 6; “The Raven,” 3–4, 9, 171, 178n4 politics: and art’s autonomy, x–xi, 35– 36, 57, 41, 63, 69, 172, 201n36; and beauty, 7, 38–39, 40–41, 61, 126, 144; and class aesthetic, 34–36, 63, 70, 103, 146, 151, 172, 201n36, 187–88n61; and discrimination or economic inequality, 25, 36, 38, 60, 140–41, 171, 177n1, 182n31, 194n40; and empire, 185n46; and ethics, 35, 163, 169; of grievability, 7, 21, 28, 171; of indifference, 28; and materiality, 111; and the nation, 161; and neoliberal aesthetics, 56–69 passim; of the personal, 130; of postmodern-

ism, 209n1, 215n25; and “Surface Reading,” 198n11 Ponge, Francis, 76, 197n5 poor, the: aesthetic capacities of, 58, 60–61; and discrimination, 26, 62, 186n46; and regional culture, 138; and the rich, 108, 127, 140–41, 143, 193n34; self-consciousness of, 121; and social construction, 192n27 portrait, 114–133 passim, 143–52 passim, 180n18, 191n16, 207n29 pose: and Roland Barthes, 16; in Walker Evans and Paul Strand, 116–18, 120; in August Sander, 115, 119, 132; and the still-life, 43–44; in Jeff Wall, 33 Post, Robert, 60, 62, 192n28, 192n30 postmodernism: and “Art and Objecthood,” 15–16, 50; and the beholder, 197n4; and conviction, 160; and critique of form, 215n25; and intention, 56; and photography, 8–9; and the post-postmodern, 85; and relationality, 179n10; and Theory, 70 poverty: and absorption, 57; aestheticization of, 122–24, 126, 143–44; and discrimination, 27, 36, 62, 142, 171; of the photograph as art, 55, 63 presence, 40, 44, 87, 93, 118, 149, 198n11 private life, 167, 181n26 profit, 28, 38, 41, 93, 194n40 public, 49 punctum, xi; and antitheatricality, 15– 16, 46, 49; as art, 17–20, 69–70; and commodities, 100; and emotion, 51; as private, 181n26 Putnam, Hilary, 189n8

index

Rabble, 29; and Political Analysis Collective, 187n52 Rabinowitz, Paula: They Must Be Represented, 207n28 race and economic inequality, 186n46; in class aesthetics: and James Agee and Walker Evans, 133– 43 passim; and Jonathan Littell, 171; and portraiture, 151–52; and Jeff Wall, 28–36 passim; in neoliberal aesthetics, 59, 63, 68, 192n27; and triple liberation movements, 23, 26–28, 182n31 Rancière, Jacques, 8, 54–67 passim, 70, 191n20, 191n22, 191n25, 192n29 193nn33–34 Rasson, Luc, 212n17 real, the: and causality, 80; and class conflict, 35; and Liz Deschenes, 148; and feeling, 72–74; as fixed, 203n41; and hierarchy of vision, 61; and historical accuracy, 153–57, 164, 210n4; and inequality, 59; as matter and materiality, 100, 197n5; and memory, 78–79; in perfect work of art, 97–98, 168; and psychological realism, 196n2; and representation, 11–15, 72–73, 94; and science, 73–77 realism, 12, 73, 80, 196n2 recognition: and economic inequality, 25, 31, 58–61, 205n22; and intention, 65; and photographic depiction, 80–81 record, photograph as, 33, 40, 63, 87, 109, 113 Reed, Adolph, 27, 36, 177, 186nn46–47, 188n62 Reed, T. V., 206n28

reenactment, 73–75, 78–79, 97–99, 102, 196n2 referent: and art’s relation to the world, 20, 179n10; and intention, 14, 17; and meaning, 80; in painting or photography, 12, 54; and the symbolic, 94 Reitz, Jeffrey G., 29, 187n53 remainder, concept of, 79–81 remembering: and form in Maggie Nelson, 5–6; and the Holocaust in Jonathan Littell, 165–67, 169, 171; and reenactment in Tom McCarthy, 72–79 passim Renger-Patzsch, Albert: The World Is Beautiful, 124 reparations, for slavery, 166 Republican Party, 215n27 Ricciardi, Garrett, 200n31, 201n37 Richter, Gerhard, 118, 204n14 Ricketts, Fred (Frank Tengle), 126, 136, 138 Ricketts, Margaret (Elizabeth Tengle), 120–25 passim, 132 Ricketts, Sadie (Flora Bee Tengle), 109–13 passim, 122, 126, 143–44, 147 Ricketts family (Tengle family), 122– 28 passim, 137, 140, 143 Rorty, Richard, 52–53, 190n15, 191nn17–18 Rose, Julian, 73–77 passim, 83–84, 94, 100–101, 197n3, 200n31, 201n37, 201n40 Ross, Kristin, 191n25 Rubinfien, Leo, 205n25, 207n29 Russia, 114, 131, 159, 165 Saatchi, Charles, 99 Saez, Emmanuel, 178n1, 183n37

227

228

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Saffy, Chloé, 210n5 salary, 22–23, 37 Sander, August, 114–133 passim, 142, 149–51, 203n9, 204n11, 204n17, 205–6nn25–27, 207n29, 209nn50–51; Children Born Blind, 117, 119, 132; Face of Our Time, 114, 127, 130, 133, 149, 203n9; People of the 20th Century, 127, 130; Three Farmers, 115; Unemployed, 149–50; Young Girl in a Circus Wagon, 115, 129 Scruton, Roger, xi, 47, 55, 191n22 sculpture, 10, 69, 86–90, 92, 98–99 Sebald, W. G., 158–59, 163, 172, 211nn11–12, 212n17 Seiwert, Frans, 206n27 sentimentality, 116 Sereny, Gitta, 162, 212n15 Serra, Richard, 99 sex, and gender: and accessibility of markets, 68; and affect, 142, 171; and class aesthetics, 36, 62, 152; economic inequality and sexism, 59–60, 62, 192n28; and exploitation, 195n40; and hierarchies of vision, 59, 193n34; and intersectionality, 186n46; same-sex marriage, 183n36; and triple liberation movements, 21–27; and unemployment, 38, 40, 152 Shackleton, Ernest, 77–78 Shahn, Ben, 116 Shelby, Tommie, 59, 192n27 Shields, David, 156, 167, 169, 211n9 Siegel, Reva B., 192n28 Siemens, Karlsruhe, 66 sign, 100, 198n11, 201n38 significance, zinging with, 74–75, 79, 102

signified, 8, 51 sincerity, 45, 122, 135 Sirganian, Lisa, 201n36 slavery, 140–41, 163, 166 Smith, Tony, 90, 97 Smithson, Robert, 143, 208n42 Snyder, Joel, 11, 13, 17–19, 179, 180n18 Soar, Daniel, 30, 187n54 social construction, 35, 76, 192n27 social problem. See under beauty social order, 114, 127, 130–33 passim, 149, 151 Soft Skull, 5, 178n1 Solomon, Larry, 50, 190nn12–13 Sontag, Susan, 77–78 specific objects, 90, 93, 144 speech acts, 189–90 Speer, Albert, 161–62, 212n15 Stalin, Joseph 159, 214n21 state, 161–62, 184–85, 198n11 StellaMaris, 214n22 Stevens, Wallace, 77, 80 Stimson, Blake, 194n36 Strand, Paul, 116–20, 132; Blind Woman, 116–18 street photography, 31–36, 115 Struth, Thomas, 119–20, 130, 204n17 studium, 27–29, 58, 180n18, 182n26 subjectivity: and the beholder, 16, 18–19, 149, 181n26, 196n2; and truth, 157–60, 172; valorization of, 163–65, 172. See also subject position subject matter, x, 28–29, 33–34, 44, 153 subject position: and class relations, x, 36, 66–67, 128–30, 201n34; and French Theory, 160; and hierarchy, 58, 66, 129; valorization of, x, 163 Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 9–11, 40, 179n13; History of History, 9, 179n13

index

Sunkara, Bhaskar, 195n40 superiority, 115, 122, 126–29 passim; and identity or class, 59, 141–43, 146, 192n27, 205n22 support, 81, 88 surface, 32, 82, 88, 90, 113, 122, 148 “Surface Reading,” 76–77, 197–98nn9–11. See also Best, Stephen; Marcus, Sharon Sveinsson, Kjartan Pall, 193n34 symbol, 75, 84, 94–95, 100 Szeman, Imre, 194n39 Tate Modern, 31, 187 technology: affective, 139; and economic inequality, 26, 62, 139–40; of representation, 11; use of in photography, 14, 33, 204n15; of visibility, 64 Temin, Peter, 182; “Treaty of Detroit,” 22, 25; “Washington Consensus,” 22 Tengle family. See Ricketts family (Tengle family) Terestchenko, Michel, 162–63, 212n16, 214n23; Les Complaisantes, 212n16 Thatcher, Margaret, 167, 171 theatricality, 43; and dialectics of absorption, 33, 50–56 passim, 69–70, 98, 117–19, 139, 195; and painting, 43; and Barthes’s punctum, 15–18 passim, 69–70. See also antitheatricality theory: aesthetic, 7–8, 45, 48, 62–63; American and French, 160; and intention, 47–54 passim, 62–63, 69–70, 189n7; and literalism, 69–70, 84; literary, 48, 78; postmodern, 70; trauma, 168

Theweleit, Klaus: Male Fantasies, 160–61 Thompson, Nato, 197n5 Tillman, Lynne, 80, 199n17 totalitarianism, 215n27 totality, 3, 6–7, 14 trace, and the photograph,14, 39–50, 80, 84, 94 translation, 52–53 triple liberation movements, 21–28 passim, 59. See also civil rights movement; gay rights movement; women’s movement Tuazon, Oscar, 73–84 passim, 94, 197nn3–4, 200n20, 201n40 Turner Prize, 99 Twombly, Cy, 40 two- and three-dimensionality, 90, 92–93, 95 Ulrich, Brian, 90, 92, 105–111 passim, 144, 203n1, 203n7, 208n44; Copia, 105–6, 203n1; Dominicks, 106; Is This Place Great or What?, 106, 108, 203n1; Montgomery Ward Door Pulls, 90, 92, 208n44 unemployment, 209n49; and discrimination, 37–41; and social order, 149–52 United States, x, 21–30 passim, 37, 59, 62, 90, 92–93, 105, 143, 156, 183, 185n46, 199n11, 209n48, 213n19 universality, 214n21 value. See aesthetic judgment Van Horn, Rob, 185n45 Varoufakis, Yannis, 93, 200n30 Velasquez, Diego, 32 Vermeulen, Pieter, 196n2

229

230

index

video, 64, 81, 208 Villon, François, 213n18 violence, 5, 8, 97 vision, hierarchies of, 58–70 passim; 194n35 Voelz, Johannes, 214n21 Wacquant, Loïc, 185n46 wages, x, 24–25, 38, 93, 183n41; and discrimination, 26, 185n44; and education, 193n34; and human capital, 147 Wald, Eli, 182n33 Wall, Jeff 13, 28–39 passim, 57, 181n24, 186n50, 187nn56–57, 187n61, 204n14; Adrian Walker, 204n14; Mimic, 28–37, 188n61, 195n42; Morning Cleaning, 57 Walton, Kendall, 11–12, 94, 179n16, 180n19 Warminski, Andrzej, 199n15 Warren, Kenneth, 186n47 Weiss, Paul, 179n12, 201n38 Weiss, Peter, 172, 212n17 Weizman, Eyal, 197n5 Welling, James, 32–33, 80–81, 170, 187n59, 194n38, 199n17, 200n19; aluminum foil series, 33, 80; That This, 199n17

Whitford, David, 205n19 Whitman, Walt: “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 4, 178 Whitney Museum of American Art, 113, 144, 147, 203n3, 203n8, 208n45 Willett, John, 188n66 Williamson, Michael, 124, 126, 205n18n; And Their Children after Them, 126, 205n18; Pictures of Fred and Sadie Ricketts, 124, 126 Wimsatt, William, 48–49, 52, 69, 189–90nn8–9, 190n17 Winfrey, Oprah, 157 women’s movement, 21–26 passim, 59. See also feminism; triple liberation movements Woods, Emma (Fields), 135 Wood, James, 156, 211n8 Woods, Thomas (Bud Fields), 136, 138 Wordsworth, William, 52, 78 Wright, Richard, 139, 141, 207n35, 208n39; Native Son, 208n39; 12 Million Black Voices, 139, 207n35 Yale University, 160 Young British Artists, 99 Žižek, Slavoj, 61, 193n34, 194n39