ALSO BY PATRICK NATHAN
Some Hell
For my friends
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION - LET THEM EAT A PLAGUE
I - WHAT A TIME TO CALL THIS ALIVE
II - WE HAVE ALWAYS WRITTEN WITH LIGHT
III - LITTLE SYMPHONY FOR THE BODY
IV - THE “RESISTANCE” AND OTHER STORIES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LET THEM EAT A PLAGUE
The fence was a place to hang our roses but it’s gone now, dismantled and cast into a ravine. To confuse visitors, the roads have new names. But anyone can find the photograph: the rails and wooden X’s at what looks to be sunrise, shot so they tower over the rocks and dirt and prairie grass. It’s meant to look desolate. The fence’s blush among the blue of morning is meant to evoke the windchill of eastern Wyoming. Published on the cover of Time in October 1998, Steve Liss’s photo tries to say, “A murder like Matthew Shepard’s must never happen again.” Ultimately, it’s a beautiful photograph. Ultimately, like any photograph, it can’t say anything at all.
Once, I thought it could. To me, that photograph said how it would feel to flirt with two strangers, only to be taken and beaten and left to die alone in the night. I thought it said, This is what happens if they find out. But photographs don’t speak. They don’t demand or insist or chastise, despite a strange and pervasive assumption that they should. With social media and digital photography, this assumption—that images have meaning—is both widespread and increasingly dangerous. In ceding to photographs and other images the kind of authority that belongs to language, we risk destabilizing our relationships not only with one another but with reality itself.
Assuming that images can speak—that we can, as with social media, use them in substitution for what we wish to say to others—is what opens the door to fascism, an ideology that requires a schism with reality. If we begin replacing our language with images, it is fascism that will finish this process—that will replace reality itself, including the reality of human beings.
I never thought I’d write a book about photographs and fascism because I knew nothing, I thought, about photographs and fascism. These are realms of what is called expertise, a term meant to dissuade those who seek to educate or inform themselves without borrowing large sums of money. This is the trap of “none of my business,” in which we surrender authority over what is indeed our business: living our lives alongside others. In our relationships with one another, with technology, with public health, and with government, there is no objective or neutral. In place of objectivity or neutrality, there is, it turns out, right and wrong, and it is both disastrous and immoral to allow what is wrong to perpetuate simply because it falls under someone else’s intellectual or professional jurisdiction.
Seeing is the primary metaphor for human understanding, for being in the world. But it’s only a metaphor. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine observed (that is, he “saw”) how we don’t use the other senses to describe sight: “We do not say, hark how it flashes, or smell how it glows, or taste how it shines, or feel how it gleams; for all these are said to be seen.” But we do say, “See how it soundeth, see how it smelleth, see how it tasteth, see how hard it is.” It’s tempting to interpret, as Augustine does, this primacy of sight as the presence of the divine. It is, after all, what is divine—derived from *dyeu, “to shine”—that brings light and makes sight possible. It is God, as Augustine knows, who let there be light, whatever God may be.
I mention Genesis as a work of literature, a shared story—one that places concepts like light and seeing and existence in context. It narrates the separation of the world into forms—not only where this meets that but how they came into being. While not religious, I refer to Christianity as one of many common moral frameworks that remind us of the ethical responsibilities of being human. One of these responsibilities is to see or try to see things, people, and situations as they are: where they end and begin, how they attach themselves to others, and how they are presented and represented to those who are meant to see or not see them. This has nothing to do with isolated images and everything to do with how they connect or relate. If the cliché “seeing is believing” carries any merit, it is definitely not in a world where we view the image as a kind of currency for consuming or collecting information. It is by misunderstanding “seeing is believing” that the fascist imagination—predicated on division, isolation, and elimination—takes hold.
And these are fascist times. I don’t know whether to be grateful or alarmed that no one, any longer, calls me hysterical for saying this. And while the most visible aspect of this fascism is, without a doubt, an omnipresent, autocratic bigot whose every photograph and tweet and facial gesture is consumed and interpreted in myriad ways—a kind of image-meth scarcely anyone can stop using—to call Donald Trump this fascism’s alpha and omega is to give him too much credit. If anything, he’s just a mutant created from our nuclear waste, a C.H.U.D. from the political sewers we could no longer keep hidden underground. Outside the White House, fascism runs as deep as America itself, and—following the river of corpses floating atop the Atlantic—back into Europe and European history. Individuals in society learned to treat one another like images, like objects to collect or discard, long before some mediocre idiot made it a national platform. Part of undoing this, of resisting this, is to understand it.
In American mythology, the story goes, we are not here to be protected. But we are free to protect ourselves. Isn’t that our “right,” as citizens of the United States? Doesn’t each of us have the freedom to draw a line, to place a boundary on how much of ourselves we choose to give or risk? Isn’t it a “choice” to work or not work, to make money or remain poor? To maintain a “healthy lifestyle” or get sick? In American life and art, the individual is the nexus of choice—of risk, of pain, of joy, of incomparable punishments or rewards. More anciently, Christianity calls this “free will,” which so often translates into fault, into blame. With respect to our freedoms or rights in America, so much of what is narrated—in art and in politics—is our isolation. Fascism’s lodestar is loneliness.
Somewhat recently, we perhaps saw this most clearly in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, an information-event rich with unique and interpretable (that is, meaningless) images. “In an epidemic,” Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power, “people see the advance of death; it takes place under their very eyes.” But in those days we saw few, if any, American bodies piling up in journalistic photographs—certainly nothing like the corpses newspapers showed us a few years earlier, when Ebola struck several West African nations. Instead, we saw voids. In Italy and New York, the famously packed museums were deserted. In Beijing, home to twenty-one million people, the streets were empty. Nobody was at the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower, and in the subway stations of dense cities worldwide, one might’ve heard a pin drop. Looking at them now, these images recall apocalyptic films depicting cityscapes and interiors after the imagined collapse of civilization, or even photographs of real places now abandoned by human inhabitants, such as Matthew Christopher’s images from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or Yves Marchand’s images of libraries, theaters, schools, and train stations in Detroit.
But they also don’t resemble them, not quite. A ruin is ravaged, sometimes by war, usually by time. Ruins are human-made structures fallen into disrepair. Yet nothing in the images of empty cities and museums is destroyed or crumbling. In Alessandro Grassani’s photograph from March 2020, published on the front page of The New York Times, thirty-two small, identical plastic chairs are spaced six feet apart in the massive baroque courtyard of the Palazzo Marino in Milan. Measures are being taken, the photograph, if we were to read it, might suggest. Yet that the chairs are empty—that even
they, medicinally distant from one another, are void of human beings—suggests these measures will fail.
Instead of disease or nuclear war or even climate change, these photographs of emptiness suggest that we simply disappeared. In those days, with our public spaces erased of people, everyone in physical isolation could look at a newspaper or magazine or computer screen and feel like the last person on earth.
Of course, these deserted spaces appeared alongside other, more familiar and immediate images of emptiness: ransacked shelves. Not only was there a sudden lack of options after a lifetime of redundant plenitude, but we saw, repeatedly, this scarcity. The emptiness had arrived in our cities, in our own neighborhoods, in our marketplaces. We could no longer buy or sell what we used to freely buy and sell: what was really dying, these images seemed to say, was a certain transactional way of life.
This was reinforced by various calls to consumption, themselves images of normalcy, of how to “survive” (assimilate) a pandemic. Amid self-imposed quarantine or stay-at-home orders lurked a sense of consumerist opportunity: Waiting out the virus? A book blog has recommendations for you. A magazine wants you to make these soups. An app invites you to learn a new language. It was the perfect time, a retail chain nagged me in one email, to tackle those household projects I’d been ignoring. Never mind that laid-off workers were perhaps not in the mood to shop, or that parents had to homeschool their children, or that some families had to take care of sick and ailing relatives. Never mind that most adults working from home inevitably found their working hours spread over the whole of the day in an “office” they could never leave.
Meanwhile, a magazine said, “We’ll get through COVID-19 together”—especially if you subscribe. “It’s a hard time,” quipped a sex toy retailer—a great reason to spend money. “What you need now,” a newspaper threatened, “is the truth.” Whether to instill apocalyptic dread or convince us to keep calm and carry on shopping, it should shock no one how quickly a global pandemic was assimilated as content. The virus gave every commercial entity a reason to reach out, to check on consumers. The more emotional the tone, the better, be it a mournful note about family or a joke about missing all that dick you used to get. Even the imagination of apocalypse, it turned out, could be personalized, branded, and marketed to specific demographics.
That COVID-19 would be an occasion for personal consumption and a source of daily entertainment via memes, language games, and jokes was inevitable. Something, after all, must fill the space left empty by the restaurants and bars that once defined our nights and weekends, by the clothes we’d bought for others to notice, and above all by images of our own we could no longer share—images of food we didn’t prepare, of drinks we didn’t make, of ourselves smiling in faraway places our friends and followers may never be able to afford to visit themselves.
If we aren’t, after all, experiencing desires and making overt, visible choices based on those desires, are we still us? Am I, without perpetually modulating my lifestyle, still me?
Like images, illnesses mean nothing. The attempt to interpret COVID-19, to build meaning around it—to ask what it can teach us, what it reveals about us—has nothing to do with the virus itself and everything to do with how nations, corporations, and individuals chose to react to it. So too with images. The photographs of vacant streets and shelves, then and now, mean nothing. They are not messages, diagnoses, prognostications, or warnings. All images rely on context—where we see them, how we see them, and who has shown them to us.
Being trapped at home was, we were told, a “surreal” moment. The empty streets and shelves were surreal. It’s a word Americans often reach for when something destabilizes the ongoing transactions of daily life, when life seems not itself. This life almost always means one’s role within the economy. To be pushed into surreality in America is to suddenly notice the strangeness of one’s relationship to producing and consuming. It is at last to narrate for oneself, This is really my life and this is how I’m living it.
In 1966, Max Kozloff, a critic at Artforum, distinguished Surrealism from its ideological contemporary, Expressionism: “Whereas Expressionism wanted to wrest the viewer’s involvement into the rhythms of violent paint handling, Surrealism . . . sought to engage him with the visualized spectacle of his inner life.” This suggests a direct line connecting the immense and lasting popularity of the surrealist ethos with how capitalism, by isolating and aggrandizing the importance of individual choice and desire in every relationship we have, depletes us of the capacity for an inner life.
Surrealism, Kozloff argues, “opens up the possibility of a wholeness and personal integration on a behavioral level from which its artistic embodiment will only seem to trail behind.” Today, that “integration on a behavioral level” manifests as a near constant stream of individualistic content meant for public consumption, mined from the recesses of the personal. These are the fragments we broadcast to followers as well as those we scroll through, an algorithmically sorted, polyvocal stream of consciousness that always promises, but never offers, coherence. Our social media timelines are always, it seems, just about to mean. What surrealism explored in art for individuals to contemplate—Here is the total contents of the artist’s inner life; make of it what you will—social media now encourages everyone to practice, not as art but as daily, self-guided distraction: here are the contents of my thoughts, shattered into isolated units and mixed alongside yours and everyone else’s, like coins at the bottom of a well.
In surrealist thinking, the imagination of existence is not unified, interrelated, continuous, imbricated, or ongoing. It is instead atomized into interchangeable units. Despite their appearance together, your thoughts and mine—your life and mine—are not imagined as related. Similar to surrealist paintings, novels, or films, these inner lives are presented in an equal, uniform register. Aspects of human life and personality are presented, copied, and distributed as if existence were confined to an endless tableau of clashing thumbnails; the illusion is that we can see what we want of others—and when—and ignore the rest. This is not conversation, as many social media platforms would have it, but consumption—the spectatorship of each other, and thus deeply antisocial.
So too in the way COVID-19 was shown to us: those images of emptiness invited us to consume a disaster in isolation, our attention drawn not to the way these images might be related but to how they are individual, and thus unrelated. We were, as ever, offered a choice: How do I want to experience the novelty of a global pandemic?
Just as a highly contagious disease revealed our bodies to be in some way connected—even if some of those bodies were in luxury apartments while others slept in housing projects or on sidewalks—it revealed the social limits of consumerist activity. Years spent collecting “experiences” with one another—fitness classes, drag brunches, bars and restaurants so loud that conversation is discouraged, escape rooms, viewing parties, and whatever else can be photographed and uploaded for later—have damaged our capacity for experiencing one another on nontransactional terms. Without the ability to spend money and call it “having fun,” we found ourselves as empty, as abandoned, as the train stations and supermarket aisles drifting through our timelines.
“The element of contagion,” Canetti goes on, “which plays so large a part in an epidemic, has the effect of making people separate from each other . . . It is strange to see how the hope of survival isolates them, each becoming a single individual confronting the crowd of victims.” This is what we’ve come to see, even before the pandemic, in our social media feeds: individuals confronting the crowd, staking their hope on remaining apart, viewing one another as distant spectacles. Yet unlike the inner isolation fostered by consumerism, the isolation of quarantine became a physical—and highly visible—reality. Without our public spaces (“public” meaning, in that American way, private places where you can be among others as long as you spend money), it became easier than ever to see our conceptual, spiritual isolation—each of us a
private and lonely last person on earth. Confronting the spectacle of others with little to no contact or shared transactional space burst the last illusory bubble that consuming others as images was ever social at all. As Americans, we saw, for perhaps the first time, the extent of what the fascist imagination had done to us.
One of surrealism’s clichés is that it is “the art of the dream.” It seems, now—not only after a pandemic, but after fascism moved from our consumptive habits into the streets (and into the White House)—as if a long dream has ended. Rather than being pushed into the surreal, we have been for the first time in decades dislodged from the surreal. We now have a crucial opportunity to confront and accept reality.
Here’s another cliché. In 1927, Fred Barnard, a manager at Street Railways Advertising, placed an ad for his agency’s services in Printers’ Ink. Hiring a calligrapher, Barnard declared that “One picture is worth ten thousand words,” beneath, presumably, this same phrase in logographic Mandarin, as well as the assurance that this was a “CHINESE PROVERB.” Barnard later admitted he made this up: there was no Chinese proverb (yet many continue to attribute the phrase to Confucius).
The intimation in Barnard’s oft misquoted phrase—an image now devalued to one thousand words instead of ten—is that one picture can replace those words, just as a single Euro, as I write this, can replace approximately $1.20. But the currency of words is more fluid than the cliché assumes. Each word, itself an abstraction, is an image in and of itself tangled up with other words: they’re not so easily traded as commodities. Even in Barnard’s ad, it’s this connection of the words to the image above them that gives the image its meaning: they are the caption that articulates the action the image demands. Without its caption, Barnard’s proverb has no language—and no politics.
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