Image Control

by Patrick Nathan

  Conversely, music that looks away from politics and pain is rightfully suspicious. Writing of Killer Mike’s 2012 track “Reagan,” El-P tells the Times that “everyone has to choose a side. An ethos. You stand up for what you think is right . . . You don’t stand there and you don’t watch violations of humanity go uncontested.” Of another song—Prince’s “Sign of the Times”—he recalls how “it was the first time I had really heard him say anything this directly. It opened me up a little bit, turn my brain a little bit more . . . He’d already taken me this far. When the moment came for him to say, ‘Now I need you to listen,’ I was right there.” This sudden shift seems a tradition in Black art, from Beyoncé’s “Formation” to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” in which an artist who seems apolitical (read: comfortable for white people) is suddenly political, even confrontational.

  In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Y. Davis identifies this split: “As long as Holiday’s work appeared to be without manifest social content, she was praised lavishly by critics . . . Since ‘Strange Fruit’ was designed unambiguously to prick the conscience of those who were content to remain oblivious to racism, it was inevitable that many critics would dismiss it as propaganda.” But because Holiday came to music at a “moment characterized by an accelerated process of individualization in the black community,” the listening public was able to identify Holiday’s personal pain within the song, her voice itself bearing witness to lynching in a nation that didn’t see her as a person. She could not have done this, Davis argues, without first establishing herself as “a jazz musician who worked primarily with the idiom of white popular song.” These cliché laments of love and loneliness, rendered in her haunting voice, gave her white America’s ear. Once she had it, she sang what they didn’t want to hear.

  Commodity fetishism has been at the heart of the music industry in America since its conception. Listeners have always been, in part, users: selecting the mood for a dinner party, or shying away from explicit lyrics for gatherings with people you don’t know well. But what Apple, Spotify, and other corporations have done is simplify our usage of music, marketing its use primarily for mood or activity rather than artistic quality or critical acclaim. (Spend fifteen minutes with a group of gay men armed with a Bluetooth speaker and you’ll see what I mean.)

  The most significant change is that it’s easier than ever to pay money to use what you do not own. One need not purchase a single album, or even know anything about jazz, to transform an apartment into a “piano bar” or “jazz club”—to decorate with “chill jazz.” This lack of ownership is troubling: our playlists and libraries of music now resemble “our” tweets or Facebook posts—that is, not ours at all but a corporation’s, leased to us for creation, curation, and usage. There are people, of course, who still purchase albums digitally and physically, but for the first time in history the majority of listeners are streaming music they do not own. According to Nielsen, streaming services (not including internet radio) now account for 54 percent of all audio consumption. To call this gentrification shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been gentrified out of owning a home, consigned instead to renting someone else’s property; nor should it shock a nation now gentrified out of healthcare, renting our health from insurance companies.

  Again, I’m reminded of Wojnarowicz, dying of a disease his government refused to acknowledge, doing time “in a rented body.” In Close to the Knives, he reflects on “renting” his life: “Ever since I was a kid I couldn’t shake the realization that life was essentially a series of activities designed so that one could pay out money to keep from dying; if one stopped paying, one died.” His work remains shocking, enraging, bereaved, and unforgettably beautiful. Reading him, looking at his artwork, offers nothing useful, but it’s a shove into a disorienting emotional landscape you never forget.

  It is the spatial imagination that maps our mythographies, our victimographies—that imposes or suggests any kind of confinement to an identity, whether we want to belong to it or not. It is the spatial imagination that commodifies human beings and replaces them with lifestyles—that, in other words, gentrifies a person by replacing them with a consumer-category. It is what suggests, coerces, or polices how one should look, act, buy, and live. Obviously, as I’ve tried to relate with the way music is consumed, these facile, consumer-friendly categories aren’t limited to ideas we’re supposed to fear or denigrate: they can work their way into every aspect of our lives, even those we enjoy—or need—most.

  Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, for example—which looks to the ways socioeconomic and political oppression can intersect with gender discrimination—is one of the most useful, powerful, and empathetic philosophies for thinking against oppression; and yet many well-intentioned people seem to use it as a way to graph their identities on a matrix—to point at a hierarchy and say, I am here. Once commodified like this, intersectionality can begin to seem competitive, a quest to recognize the “most marginalized,” which is antithetical to using one’s overlapping privileges—even as a marginalized person—to protest, lobby, and legislate toward a less oppressive society.

  That theories like Crenshaw’s are reduced and demeaned is not because of human stupidity or oversimplification, but co-optation, or the overwhelming assimilative power of capitalist consumerism. Those who misuse political -isms and -alities, even out of good will, tend to denigrate, devalue, or ignorantly pollute these terms until they mean little or nothing, neutralizing their anti-capitalist power. To be intersectional, in this naïvely co-opted language, starts to sound as if one shops at many different stores to supplement one’s variety of overlapping identities. As it goes with art, this diluting of critical, even revolutionary ideas is a gentrification of politics, whereby a consumable image of an idea, a historical event, or a political belief replaces the real-life complexity of that idea or event or belief. And ours, it’s no surprise, is an unbearably gentrified era of political thinking.

  To take an annual example from Pride celebrations across the country: Who decides what a group of queer individuals should look like? How do other queers intuit what is appropriate and what is not? Every year, a small subset of the LGBTQ+ community voices its displeasure over fetish gear and other “hypersexual” outfits at Pride celebrations, often likening it to sexual assault or child sexual abuse. In 2019, Matthew J. Phillips, a writer and literature professor, spoke out against these complaints: “To argue—falsely—that [seeing BDSM gear] is a violation of your consent is to argue that the public sphere must be policed and certain expressions of behavior and sexuality excluded,” Phillips wrote. The argument in favor of “respectability politics” at Pride events is quintessential, Phillips says, of the “cis-hetero-patriarchy”—a powerful social apparatus that legislates what is normal and what is not among sexuality and expression.

  It’s similarly depressing, to say the least, to see LGBTQ+ individuals using children as rhetorical props, since an imagined threat to children has been, for centuries, the easiest way to convince the public to dehumanize queer people.

  This heteronormative impulse—this othering of LGBTQ+ persons by their own peers—is not isolated to arguments over sexual expression. Witnessing a parallel behavior is, after all, what led Schulman to write Gentrification of the Mind. In late 2010, Schulman met with several young queer artists who were curious about the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Instrumental in publicizing AIDS as a crisis, the members of ACT UP “had created change through confrontation, alienation, and truth telling,” and had found admirers among this new generation of queer artists. Still, these younger artists’ “professional instincts led them in different directions: accommodation, social positioning, even unconscious maneuvering.” In other words, this new generation had “depoliticized” and “depersonalized” their queer experiences. Like many young queer people—and like I had done when I’d decided, long ago, to avoid referring to myself in professional settings as a gay or queer artist—they had
internalized the “normalcy” of queerness in mass culture, including entertainment and advertising, which allowed them to forget the more radical and consequential elements of queer history, as well as hide or soften any high-register queer representation within their own work or public life.

  CF. P85

  Schulman’s metaphor for this thinking is gentrification. By erasing “complexity, difference, dynamic, dialogic action for change,” she argues, gentrification becomes “a kind of institutionalization of culture,” and identity becomes a commodity. The metaphor is apt, especially in a country whose mythology intimates that anything can be bought, even a new life. In cities, gentrification is what happens to neighborhoods when they no longer resemble what made us want to, or able to, live there. Those who live happily in gentrified neighborhoods patronize the same establishments one finds in gentrified areas nationwide. Luxury apartments built over demolished, once-affordable housing resemble those in other cities, filled with furniture and décor from the same retailers. Bars, restaurants, clubs, arcades, and breweries siphon activity from public spaces, which go neglected and underfunded. The densest and busiest urban spaces in America assume the trappings of suburbs, even gated communities.

  Key to gentrification is replacement. Those who seek the neighborhoods described above seek suburban comfort in an urban environment, with people of color and those living in poverty placed at a distance via private transit (personal cars and ride-sharing apps), pricing (tickets and cover charges), and aggressive policing. This is not how a person is meant to live in a city; but, in photographs, it certainly looks as if one is living in a city. Gentrification is the replacement of city living with an image of city living, often informed by social media or entertainment. It is performing, for one’s own benefit, a consumer identity—city dweller—at the expense of a neighborhood that other people once called home.

  Just as replacing urban life with an image of urban life is an act of gentrification that affects vulnerable persons, so too is the replacement of lived queer sexuality with a consumer image (rainbows, nuclear units, “love is love”) a parallel harm. Those left out of the image of what palatable queerness looks like are often poor, people of color, trans, and so on. Schulman isn’t the only one to see this connection. Writing for Harper’s in January of 2018, Fenton Johnson observed how “The evolution from ACT UP and Zen Hospice to state-sanctioned marriage is precisely analogous to gentrification—the creative outliers do the heavy lifting, and when a certain level of safety has been achieved, the assimilationists move in, raise prices, and force out the agents of change.” Standing with a clipboard and asking strangers to “legalize love,” a young person can assume the image of a political activist. But championing marriage as the solution to bigotry erases a more radical history in which a neglected, marginalized community “insisted,” in Johnson’s words, “that we had something to offer, that our world, where we formed enduring relationships outside the tax code and the sanction of the church and state, where we created and took care of families of lovers and friends and strangers alike . . . was richer, more sustainable, and more loving.”

  Instead of this queer alternative to an institution entrenched in property rights, the movement to legalize gay marriage retreats into a reduced, simplified image: The queer family is identical to the heterosexual family. And with that image, what was once queer and radical capitulates to the same capitalist hierarchy that, only thirty years ago, watched tens of thousands of LGBTQ+ people suffer and die, often alone, because they were different. And with this new image of the safe, wholesome queer couple or family, we also have new differences. Families, so pictured, are not trans, they are not polyamorous, they are rarely Black or Indigenous or Latinx, and—at least in advertisements—they are certainly not poor.

  As this process continues within queer politics, so too are all political ideas vulnerable to gentrification. This shouldn’t be a surprise in a country where socialism is still often discussed in the narrow terms of a specifically totalitarian species of Communism, nor in a country where identity politics is misconstrued and then swatted back and forth among septuagenarian politicians and pundits like a shuttlecock.

  To use simplified or flattened images in place of a more nuanced, complex reality is an isolating, ignorant approach to both the past and the present, and confronts us with a significant threat. In a word, that threat is fascism. Historical fascist movements—including Mussolini’s capital-F original—often arose to “protect” land and factory owners, i.e., the gentry, from proletarian revolutions. Fascism is a politics that guards the privileged from those they oppress. A violent and autocratic perversion of populism, fascism is the apotheosis of gentrified politics: its promises, ideas, and policies are almost totally cleaved from reality—images all.

  Before his death in 2014, the political philosopher Ernesto Laclau observed that populist movements, whether from the left or the right, are predicated on an “idea of a fullness which unfulfilled demands constantly reproduce as the presence of an absence.” There is no meeting fascist demands because these demands are never clear; they are inevitably framed outside of the present, disseminating a nostalgic image of the nation’s past or a “perfection of man” in some unreachable future. There is no “great” America to restore into being, only an image gentrified by decades of political rhetoric and popular entertainment. When our national politics is replaced by a gallery of images—“Main Street versus Wall Street,” “illegal” immigrants, latte-sipping cosmopolitans, the “white working class,” coastal elites, hardworking Christian families, and so on—that politics becomes irreconcilable with reality. Yet, voted into office, our senators and representatives, our governors and presidents, use these images to inform policy decisions that affect the real lives of their constituents. And one only has to look to Flint or to Ferguson, to trans women murdered in our cities or to the concentration camps at the southern border, to understand how, through inaction, neglect, or corruption, our elected officials often affect those lives by ending them.

  It is because of gentrified thinking that fascism in the United States is not only possible but, for four years, could rule from the White House. The American taste for commodifying ideas and identities—of shelving nearly everything that can be thought or believed in a market of interchangeable, consumable images—has all but welcomed it. Because once the fascist imagination acquires the strength of the state, the state begins replacing reality with its promised, simple, easily grasped image of that nation, eliminating whatever doesn’t fit within its frame: notably, human beings.

  Talent was blazing through the columns and onto the coffee tables. The physical-assault metaphors had taken over the reviews . . . ‘Gut-busting’ and ‘gut-wrenching’ were accolades. ‘Nerve-shattering,’ ‘eye-popping,’ ‘bone-crunching’—the responsive critic was a crushed, impaled, electrocuted man.

  —RENATA ADLER, Speedboat

  The imagination of gentrification is also one of cleanness, of sanitization—which of course, as an imagination, exists on a scale as wide and varied as “getting rid of garbage left in the streets” all the way to “getting rid of people who don’t look like us,” including the “messiness” of politics. To the gentrified neighborhood or belief or work of art or idea, nothing is added, only subtracted.

  The early twenty-first century vogue for minimalism is a gentrification of what a lifestyle looks like—purged of all “excess,” including, for the most part, all color.

  In How to Kill a City, P. E. Moskowitz details the rapid and racist degradation of neighborhoods into unlivable real estate storehouses. Gentrification, they write, is “a void in a neighborhood, in a city, in a culture. In that way, gentrification is a trauma, one caused by the influx of massive amounts of capital into a city and the consequent destruction following in its wake.” Contrary to the myth of “gentrifiers,” Moskowitz clarifies that “gentrification is not about individual acts” but finds its roots in “systemic violence based on decades of rac
ist housing policy in the United States” as well as “a political system focused more on the creation and expansion of business opportunity than on the well-being of its citizens.” Ultimately, “gentrification is a system that places the needs of capital (both in terms of city budget and in terms of real estate profits) above the needs of the people.” Gentrification trains citizens—through consumerism, relocation, and the myth of agency—to see differently, to spend differently, and, most importantly, to civically engage differently (usually by aligning themselves with police rather than their neighbors).

  But gentrification also happens outside of cities. In Olivia Laing’s meditation on art and isolation, The Lonely City, she recalls sleeping in a room off Times Square, now “populated by Disney characters and tourists and scaffolders and the police.” Laing imagines none other than Wojnarowicz, a spirit from an older New York, inhabiting a previous Times Square, its hotels full of “rotting mattresses and doors sawed two feet from the floor, so that any creep could crawl in while you slept,” and, outside, “the panhandlers, the hustlers, the damaged and hungry bodies.” Laing doubts the gentrification of New York was in any way “driven by a wish to improve or make safe the lives of people on the margins.” Instead, rhetoric demanding “safer cities, cleaner cities, richer cities, cities that grow ever more alike” is borne of “a profound fear of difference, a fear of dirt and contamination, an unwillingness to let other life-forms coexist. And what this means is that cities shift from places of contact, places where diverse people interact, to places that resemble isolation wards.” The pain of others becomes unclean; poverty and suffering must be swept from the streets in order for money to be spent happily. In ourselves, too, loneliness and discomfort must be medicated and controlled: “Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings—depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage—are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice.” If we deny others the right to express their suffering, we deny it to ourselves: our unmet needs and aspirations scar over into shame that only transactions can keep hidden.