Image Control

by Patrick Nathan

  The obsession with visibility in criminal punishment is why Bentham’s Panopticon remains the ideally organized prison—and why, too, that prison has spilled over, in spirit, into the daily life of nearly everyone on the planet. The genius of the Panopticon, Foucault says, is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power . . . surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.” A key feature of the victimized criminal—and the victimized person overall—is a total depletion of privacy. Victims require surveillance. To prove innocence—to prove that you didn’t deserve what has happened to you, where you’re at in life, what you have to show for yourself; or to prove the inevitability, the circumstances, of your actions—those capable of passing judgment upon you must have access to myriad sources of knowledge to produce their truth: they must know, we must know, everything about you.

  Again, criminal “justice” leaves its economic mark: privacy is now a luxury in capitalist nations, and the poor are deprived of it in almost every capacity.

  As Canetti points out, one of the rare opportunities to escape one’s visibility—one’s being seen as a victim—is to vanish into a crowd of others: “One of the most striking traits of the inner life of a crowd is the feeling of being persecuted, a peculiar angry sensitiveness and irritability directed against those it has once and forever nominated as enemies.” The crowd offers a relief from the burdens and fears of being isolated, literally or visually. It lends political strength to an individual long deprived of it—whether legally, as with persons who’ve committed felonies and others liquidated of their citizenship, or economically.

  This, of course, is why autocrats work so hard to convince their crowds that they’ve been wronged, that someone has stolen from them or assaulted them or otherwise sinned against them. It is in his interest that they feel traumatized. “Anyone who wants to rule men first tries to humiliate them,” Canetti writes, “to trick them out of their rights and their capacity for resistance, until they are as powerless before him as animals . . . His ultimate aim is to incorporate them into himself and to suck the substance out of them.” Canetti’s metaphors are of eating, of domestication and consumption. The victim is “seen as meat whilst it is still alive, and so intensely and irrevocably seen as meat that nothing can deflect the watcher’s determination to get hold of it.” He evokes the trapping of animals through the power of transformation, through disguise—the wolf, as it were, in sheep’s clothing—which “may be termed flattery. The animal is told ‘I am like you. I am you. You can safely let me come near you.’” To remain controllable, the animal, the victim, must remain visible; it must not be allowed to change, to disguise itself, to hide, to grow, to heal. While it may come with a little prize of its own—protection, excitement, even just a cheap thrill—to belong to a victimography is to lose agency over one’s own life, almost always for the benefit of some nearby, watchful predator; it is to be rebranded and sold as a commodity for someone else’s profit. Which confronts us all with interesting, important questions. What use am I, for example, and who is profiting from my trauma? How has my pain, and pains adjacent, been weaponized and turned against others to stoke greater conflict?

  Conflict is profitable. Not only is this obvious in two hundred years of U.S. foreign policy, but in millennia of art and entertainment: escalation is dramatic, and drama, if it doesn’t affect us directly, is cathartic. There’s a reason journalists crank the apocalypse up to eleven every time the president tweets. It keeps readers coming back. Resolution, however, is unprofitable. A played-out resolution is not a drama but an education. Resisting this is not easy, fast, or efficient—three “values” Americans cherish. To be conflicted, to explore one’s accountability in a relationship—this is not what makes an individual spectacularly eligible for compassion. Only victimhood opens that coffer, and whoever screams loudest gets the prize.

  What is needed is a queering of compassion. To move beyond the truly rare (but extant) binaries of perpetrator and victim, it’s important that every individual recognize their existence in a continuum of conflict, and seek to resolve and repair rather than escalate and destroy. We—and here I do mean we—must question individual guilt, which is rooted in action, rather than shame, which is entrenched in identity. Because when we insist upon the binary—that everyone is either perpetrator or victim—the cost is literal human life.

  To see this, one need only look to all the Black Americans murdered by police, summoned by a white neighbor’s perceived victimhood, amplified by the aesthetics of entertainment.

  Is it so revolutionary to say that every human being is eligible for compassion? That persons of any gender or sexuality, any skin color, any ability, any legal or migratory status, any age, receive the same compassionate understanding as any other, responsible only for their actions and not the identities coerced upon them by others? The we I want to belong to is the we that recognizes our vast diversity of pain—the we that understands we’ve been assigned this pain for someone else’s profit, and that we need no longer give them want they want. To reserve compassion only for victims deemed eligible is to accept an arbitrary division, one in which the state can deem some of us worthy of aid and exclude others, meanwhile ensuring that the victims never speak to one another, competing as they must to remain in their places, and the “perpetrators”—the property of the state—never speak at all.

  These cartographical metaphors—a mythography, a victimography—come easily to a culture in which the human experience of space has come to outweigh (or outvalue) so significantly the experience of time. To imagine identities fixed on a map is to call attention to Western culture’s obsession with space—which, unlike time, can be seen, or at least imagined in visual registers. Even a clock doesn’t show time as an accumulation—only as a coordinate, only where one is at in time.

  The hand, as Canetti writes, is inextricable from language: “As a man watched his hands at work, the changing shapes they fashioned must gradually have impressed themselves on his mind. Without this we should probably never have learnt to form symbols for things, nor, therefore, to speak.” It is human hands that made shadows—that told stories—upon cavern walls. It is hands, as Canetti writes, that spark the transformative imagination: “The hand which scoops up water is the first vessel. The fingers of both hands intertwined are the first basket.”

  To be socially human is to be neither exclusively spatial nor temporal but both, equally and always—beings-in-time. If this seems unrecognizable or unintuitive it’s because our culture has been deeply, disturbingly warped by an overwhelmingly spatial sensibility—the image, the commodity, the boundaries of our plots or properties, of our cells. As Walter Benjamin wrote from Weimar Berlin, photography “freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech.” However, because these works of art were no longer discrete objects, they lost their individual “presence in time and space,” their “unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” This uniqueness Benjamin calls the “aura,” and the aura is precisely “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction.” This is exacerbated by “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly . . . Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.” Ultimately, this changes the way art is made: “To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.” This pushes art away from its mystery, its ritual or spiritual nature of creating an aura. “The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production,” as is the case with photographic negatives, “the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to b
e based on another practice—politics.” Transformed into a reproducible commodity, art’s economic fetishization has political and, ultimately, spiritual consequences.

  None of this is a surprise in a culture as capitalistically totalitarian as ours. It is capitalism, after all, that divides our labor so systematically, so categorically, as Lukács writes, that “it reduces space and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space.” This, too, is why we tend to imagine ourselves, our lives, our days as containers—how much can we have? how much can we be? how much can we learn? how much can we collect? These translations of time into volume affect the corporate vocabulary we tend to employ in organizing—in scheduling—our lives. Are we productive? Are we managing ourselves? Are we maintaining our capital—intellectual, social, and emotional—with procedures of “self-care?” Are we making the most (i.e., maximizing efficiency) of our lives? You only live once: In the spatially imagined life, how much life can you fit? CF. P90

  With corporatized language, even the most temporal aspects of life or of art can be reimagined as space. In my own life, I started noticing this phenomenon when I began to add “listen to music” to my to-do list. Simply putting on an album and enjoying it—something that used to seem so natural, so automatic—had become difficult. I missed listening. At some point, I’d become a customer—or, in the vocabulary of technology companies, a user.

  In one room, I have a turntable and sixty or seventy vinyl records. In other rooms, I have speakers connected to wireless receivers. What this means is that I can listen to my records in only one room, but I can listen, conveniently, to one of 16,656 files in any room. The files themselves I select and sequence primarily to match an activity—reading, cooking, drinking—and only secondarily on what the artist has made. This is music as décor.

  Like most tech platforms, iTunes is marketed as access but is in practice a bureaucratic briar patch that often leaves me with a song I’ve settled for, not sought. Which is how these platforms are supposed to work: they manage what content their sponsors prefer you to see, hear, or read. Netflix, too, hasn’t given its users what they want so much as shaped how they engage its content, allowing a significantly reduced catalogue (but only after wiping out its competition).

  Apple, Inc., has always been transparent about this. In the late nineties, Steve Jobs told Businessweek that “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” In every speech Jobs ever gave, you hear the echo of the drug dealer, promising amazement in exchange for cash, for becoming hooked on something new. His legacy infects every platform people in capitalized nations use on a daily basis: each algorithm serves its dealer, not its user. All we have to do is give away as much labor as we can to refine these networks of advertising and surveillance. To do otherwise would be to inconvenience—even isolate—ourselves.

  It’s in listening that I remind myself of the passion in sharing time with music, which has nothing to do with the way I’ve been trained by tech companies to use it. This is why I keep the records. This is why, in being alone with analog music, I remember a freedom iTunes has always lied about: I remember what it’s like to feel.

  Admittedly, it’s difficult to write this outside of nostalgia’s haze. The vinyls are proxies for the CDs I grew up with, purchased from incense-smogged stores in strip malls and big-box chain retailers. Their booklets I’d flip through as I lay in bed. This is how I learned to be angry, how to think, to amplify and articulate my moods, to speak against, and ultimately to write. Music is the teenager’s doorway to poetry; and for me poetry opened door upon door. I did this by listening.

  I want to be careful. I’m not saying younger generations don’t know how to listen to music, nor that physical media are somehow more real. But something has happened to our relationship with music, and we are emotionally impoverished because of it. It’s easy to misattribute this shift, as Bono did in an interview with Rolling Stone: “Music has gotten very girly.” You may recall one of the band’s more recent albums if only for its sudden appearance in your iTunes library as a “gift” from Apple. If you listened to it, you heard the gap between the band Bono seems to think he’s a part of and the audial décor they are. But what does he mean by “girly”?:

  Hip-hop is the only place for young male anger at the moment—and that’s not good. When I was 16, I had a lot of anger in me. You need to find a place for it and for guitars . . . The moment something becomes preserved, it is fucking over. You might as well put it in formaldehyde. In the end, what is rock & roll? Rage is at the heart of it.

  Beyond Bono’s gendering of emotions, he does have a point. When it comes to mainstream music, hip-hop is the sole locus not only of anger but of despair, powerlessness, isolation, protest, frustration, lust, and dynamic joy. Hip-hop is where mainstream music allows feelings. Nearly everything else—from Katy Perry to whatever Bon Iver is supposed to be—is cleansed of difficult emotion, of hard-to-hold feelings. There are exceptions—individual, highly successful artists who give far more than what little we expect from them. But overall, hip-hop is the only genre of mainstream music that hasn’t been gentrified.

  Gentrified music is music that sidesteps the artful expression of rage, depression, loneliness, and suffering. These are difficult feelings, and to empathize with them would be to recognize our own sidestepped sufferings. Music purged of these feelings is accessible, marketable—not necessarily for the musicians but for the corporations distributing their music, including Apple. With iTunes, music is more tediously classified, tagged, and commodified than ever, complete with playlists catered for eerily specific activities, such as “pure yoga,” “study beats,” or “get up and go.” This algorithmic approach to music maximizes profit, and so does its inherent downplay of music’s seriousness as art. If a protest song, say, is divested of its cultural significance, it’s just entertainment, a way to fill space. It deflects away from the power structures it criticizes, as those structures benefit from music’s commodification and distribution. Rage becomes “noise.” Sorrow and grief become “depressing.” Emotional complexity becomes impolite, vanishing not only from our public spaces—restaurants, shopping centers, the radio—but even our private ones. Why feel when you could motivate yourself, when you could get up and go? Why spend so much time being sad, being angry?

  It’s no shock that hip-hop resists gentrification. “Like few other musical forms before it,” Kevin Young writes in The Grey Album, “hip-hop is almost painfully aware of its own history. More like baseball, or boxing, hip-hop believes that its history, filled with struggle, early triumph, and exploitation, is also the history of America; and as in the national pastime or the sweet science, hip-hop insists that any view of history must include race in the mix.” To gentrify hip-hop would be to eliminate it, tethered as it is not only to Black culture but to Black culture’s critique on America’s ongoing segregation, oppression, and extermination of its Black citizens. Even white rappers, permanently conspicuous, can’t gentrify hip-hop. Nor can particularly wealthy musicians—such as Jay Z, whose ownership of a streaming service contributes to the way music is used rather than listened to—dismantle the aesthetic of resistance innate in hip-hop. If anything, hip-hop has aggressively worked to ungentrify cities, or at least delay gentrification. Today, it is hip-hop, more than any other genre, that demands rage against suffering and racism, against policy that favors wealth over human beings. It is hip-hop that amplifies grief as our government continues to abandon the poor to drugs, disease, starvation, and violence, not to mention as it continues to murder Black men, women, and nonbinary persons with impunity.

  An appreciation of hip-hop is Young’s last “chorus” in The Grey Album, a unique exhumation of how Black culture shaped and still shapes American life as we know it, right down to language: “The black vernacular is not a site of marginalization but of imagination and even infiltration, helping invent the music and meaning of the language we might best call American . . . It is black cultur
e that is the dominant culture. English broken here.” Young’s book convinces us, without any doubt, that “American culture is black culture.”

  As opposed to the “harmony” of music-as-décor, hip-hop makes as much noise as possible: “Too often black folks are the noise in the culture seen as sonorous without us. If only they’d keep it down!” Tracing AAVE, Young observes that Black Americans are “not immigrants but imports to this experiment . . . in our very outsiderness to the language, we forged a sense of belonging.” Rather than try to blend in, to homogenize with the part of America that believes itself to be “white,” Black culture sets itself apart. Proclaiming difference—loudly—is the basis for resisting gentrification; it is the line that cannot be blurred, crossed, or erased. It’s the graffiti that keeps those afraid to feel on the other side of the freeway, in emotional exile.

  This is important because music has a unique role in the United States. It’s our art of tough times. It’s music that speaks of the allures and anxieties of the sixties, and it’s music that separates Reagan’s white eighties of dance and drug-fueled, glitzy rock from its contemporaneous hip-hop critiquing state-sponsored terrorism against Black communities.

  Now, entering the third decade of this new century of crumbling civil rights, a resurgence of fascism has reawakened a politics of protest in mainstream music. In January of 2017, The New York Times interviewed the duo Run the Jewels, who thread “social commentary and politics into their giddy homages to psilocybin and marijuana.” Coming away with a playlist of protest songs “given the current wave of discontent on both sides of American politics” (emphasis mine, since journalists continue to frame the former president’s Nazi base as misunderstood), the Times piece reflects on music as a medium not only of political consciousness but of things that aren’t easy to hear.