The “uncleanness” of suffering might be why photography is the preferred window to the pain of others. Just as seeing attained even more cultural dominance during the COVID-19 pandemic, the primacy of sight establishes a safe and visible distance between people in pain and the people who, politically, have a hand in causing it. One’s pain cannot contaminate the other.
Against difficult emotions, the gentrified imagination distrusts the body, from which the deepest, most difficult, least neatly labeled emotions tend to bubble up. Few today, from a scientific perspective, would seriously argue the Cartesian schism. Yet in a great deal of discourse—particularly on art—the sincerity of the body is disingenuously absent. Even in its most cerebral, image-distant forms (such as literature), art has the capacity to provoke bodily responses. Some of these are acknowledged—adrenaline, with respect to horror; tears, with respect to melodramas—while others are kept secret. While he may lament his “shattered nerves,” no critic would mention the very real erection inching across his lap during an arousing scene in a film or novel that’s supposed to be serious.
The most bodily feelings—sexual—reveal, in the lingering suspicion of pornography among critics and artists, just how gentrified even theater and cinema—even literature—have become. Like the most ecstatic experiences with art, pornography—good pornography—excites passions that anticipate reasoning. Something deeply emotional within the body is made palpable via the intellect’s abandonment of its pretensions, its expectations. Of its control over the experience of the experience.
The most privately consumed of all arts, pornography promises a self-transcendence relatively unimpeded by cultural frameworks that reinforce images of how a person like you should be—at least until it’s no longer private. The shame built up around pornography is not exclusive to its sexual acts or imagined partners. A video clip watched alone may bring undiluted ecstasy (literally: “out of place”), but bring a friend into it, even someone to jerk off with, and that same clip becomes ridiculous: the dialogue laughable, each moan an embarrassment. Watching porn with a friend, one surveils oneself as a consumer—a triangulation we perform automatically, especially the more visible we become as consumers. Should you become dislodged from the mythographical coordinates in which capitalism has mapped you and your behaviors, it no longer knows how to sell to you. To understand you as a market, capitalism must reduce you, eliminating not only what’s extraneous but what is transgressive from your life and personality. This kind of porn, capitalism trains your friends and lovers to say, just isn’t you. It selects against your complexity, your multitudes.
Enjoyed privately, porn is the most transgressive art there is in capitalist and fascist societies, which is precisely why, alongside queerness, it is targeted by authoritarians. If nothing else, porn’s sheer plenitude, especially its amateur contributions, illustrate just how many people there are in the world who love sex and aren’t ashamed to show themselves loving it. I think of this when I scroll through an inexhaustible supply of images, all these men across the world who display themselves with men, for men, and how they’ve taught me nearly everything I know about sex—its kinks, its dynamics, even its anatomical mechanics. Like any art, porn has the capacity to enlarge life. It embraces pluralistic and contradictory experiences of the world.
Yes, porn has its own myths, many of which are reductive, even harmful, but here is where its quality and its ethics are important. Just as classical theater, realist novels, and the Hollywood blockbuster excel when they “cross into new territory”—i.e., when they escape genre—pornography is at its best when it leaves the masquerade of masc and femme behind, when characters become authentic, when the actors convince us that what is felt is genuinely felt (even if it’s not). The transcendence we come to seek in porn is of human beings appearing to experience unregulated, unchecked, ungentrified, and even unobserved pleasure, an authenticity that mirrors the “realism” of character or action in other, less controversial forms of art.
Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the word “god” is more common in porn than in scripture. Experiences of self-transcendence, of ecstasy, are imagined as being face-to-face with god, as stepping outside of this world to meet god, where god may simply be our word for looking directly at the self—the deep, unsocialized self. Like cherished art, great porn dramatizes the human experience of the self looking at the self, of what is possible when all that is social, cultural, and historical is seared away. It shows us the possibility, but never the proof, of what our vocabulary can only call a soul. Without risking this kind of vulnerability, it’s almost impossible to see the violence in the most unsolicited image there is: a civilization predicated on imprisoning these radiant selves behind masks, on blocking out each individual’s light.
The frequency with which we resort to religious metaphors to describe extreme states of consciousness has introduced a ruthlessly limiting cynicism into art and art criticism. Even in this book, filling itself with souls, faith, ecstasy—mentioning, even, cathedrals that art seems to carve out from the fleshy interiors of our bodies, creating a kind of sanctuary—it’s hard for me not to feel ashamed. Yet just because I don’t believe in God doesn’t mean I can’t want there to be something like it.
It’s the wanting that’s important, the sense that this something should be there, or perhaps, even, that it is there. The religious or spiritual impulse is a craving for unverified, unverifiable knowledge, even if we know that knowledge, or feel it, to be right or real. This is why so much art, even the most fantastical, fictional stories, feel true. Art and experiences like it beckon the call of the conscience.
A person’s conscience is their “with-knowledge” within, a sensibility that can be developed or demeaned over time, depending on how often one listens to its call. Conscience, according to Heidegger, discloses: “If we analyse conscience more penetratingly, it is revealed as a call. Calling is a mode of discourse. The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein [one’s own ‘Being-there’] by calling it to its own most potentiality-for-Being-Self; and this is done by way of summoning it to its own most Being-guilty.” Why guilty? Unlike shame, guilt recognizes action from being: it accepts time as a potential source of change, rather than confining one’s identity in the permanence of imagined space. Shame is; guilt is right now. A person is guilty because of their actions—what they’ve said, what they’ve done, even what they’ve thought. Often, these actions are at odds with that person’s belief in who they “really” are—“who I am deep down,” “who I’ve always been,” and so on. “To the call of conscience,” Heidegger goes on, “there corresponds a possible hearing. Our understanding of the appeal unveils itself as our wanting to have a conscience.” One wants, in other words, to be guided, even if by one’s own innermost self or life or voice or soul, or—if not—by some outward manifestation of that same moral compass, be it God, an ideology, a practice, a relationship with the natural world, a belief system, or—it should be said—be it an easily understood, omnipresent, abusive bigot who tells you everything is going to be okay if you just support him unconditionally, unquestioningly.
Speaking of conscience, I’m aware of Heidegger’s notorious politics—namely, his collaboration with the Nazis as they swept through German universities, which is not only unconscionable but mysterious. That is, there’s a darkness between Heidegger’s written moral clarity w/r/t the conscience, the inner life, the soul, and the moral failure of his actions. That a person can articulate so richly and magnetically (that is, so frustratingly unclearly) the inner workings of the conscience and ignore their own is, at the very least, a warning.
Dasein (again, one’s own “Being-there”) is an entity “which has been thrown.” For Heidegger, thrown-ness is a kind of separation from the inner life: “‘Being-thrown’ means finding oneself in some state of mind or other. One’s state-of-mind is therefore based upon thrownness.” The conscience, then, is the call back—the plea to return. The st
ate of mind of the self has, perhaps, taken too much of its surroundings or environs into itself. In the vocabulary of this book, the self understands itself as an image, as fixed space. Heidegger calls this the “they-self”—the assimilation of what others say, what others believe, what others want, into one’s own consciousness: “Dasein, as a Being-with which understands, can listen to Others. Losing itself in the publicness and the idle talk of the ‘they,’ it fails to hear its own Self in listening to the they-self.” To rectify this with a call of conscience, with a return to a focus—a grasp—upon the inner life, Dasein “must first be able to find itself—to find itself as something which has failed to hear itself, and which fails to hear in that it listens away to the ‘they.’ This listening-away must get broken off . . . The possibility of another kind of hearing which will interrupt it, must be given by Dasein itself.” The person who wants to listen to their conscience—the person who wishes to develop the sensibility (and sensitivity) of the conscience—will place themselves at risk of experiences that may provoke the call. These experiences—art, religious relationships, intense sexual contact or fantasies, hallucinogens, psychotic episodes, extreme terror, and great jokes—are all bodily experiences; they aim themselves at what we will feel before we understand it. One seeks these experiences because they are unique and intense, and often in some inexplicable way reaffirming: “In understanding the call, Dasein is in thrall to its own most possibility of existence. It has chosen itself.” Later, Heidegger likens this call of conscience to “care”: in developing our sensibility, our conscientiousness, we care for ourselves.
These impressions, which Edmund Burke identifies as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger,” must remain at a distance in order to feel sublime. They are, he writes, “delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances.” The sublime “anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.”
It isn’t the right word, but no one “understands” this like David Lynch, the most visible director whose films are not only popular but resistant works of art. That is, they wrap themselves around a provocative darkness and demand, relentlessly, that the viewer’s Dasein call to itself. In Twin Peaks, for example, the Black and White Lodges seem to be the realm of what must be art. Though dressed for a hike, Dale Cooper enters the waiting room in his impeccable black suit. Laura Palmer, first seen in the series as a pale, sand-flecked corpse, wears an elegant dress. The waiting room itself—furnished with black leather chairs and art deco lamps—is the antithesis of the town’s northwestern kitsch of mounted fish, knickknacks, overstuffed sofas, and overwhelming plaid. Instead of the haunted fifties bop of the diner’s jukebox, the Black Lodge features a soundtrack of slow, dark jazz with vocals by the otherworldly Jimmy Scott. Here is the Venus de’ Medici; in the hallway, the Venus de Milo. The curtains conjure a stage. Simply being in the Lodge indicates that one is both participating in and witnessing some kind of performance, where conversation, spoken backward and reversed to create a doppelgänger of English, becomes a script.
Lynch’s work holds a special magnetism for moths like me—those drawn to darkness, to what cannot be seen. His strobe-lit hallways, shadows, emotional juxtapositions, and uncanny doubles are cinema’s imposing Rothkos—the macchia, to return to Imbriani’s word, that excites our passions. Often, our emotional relationship with such art is an imaginary or extradimensional room of its own—one we don’t know how we’ve entered, one we don’t know when we’ll leave. In The Doubles—a passionate, genre-dismantling memoir told through film criticism—Veronica Esposito likens this space to the subconscious. Cinema, in particular, has a “unique gift” for piercing one’s core: “If music is the most euphoric art, literature the most contemplative, and painting the most prophetic, then film,” she writes, “is the most psychological. It crashes through the bottom of the soul and forces a reckoning with those long-hidden things.”
Again, Lynch’s aesthetics and erotics seem aimed at the inner life Heidegger describes: “The caller [of conscience] is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the ‘not-at-home’—the bare ‘that-it-is’ in the ‘nothing’ of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self.”
This question of the soul is an undercurrent in Esposito’s book. Contemplating Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique—specifically the director’s “trust in mysteries that bend our paths”—she recalls a familiar image: “How many times has it been said that the cineplexes are our civilization’s cathedrals? Are these enormous, perfected, glamorized faces not heroes appropriate to a technologically learned humanity?” In dedicating her attention to film, Esposito feels herself “beginning to sketch out the counters of this faith that draws us to the arts. We become ourselves by what deluges us. Humanity is ritualistic, the world is the sum of our rituals.”
Faith, ritual, meaning. The soul. While The Doubles is restless, the essay on Véronique, the film from which Esposito chose her first name, is the book’s heart, its axis of being. It is not only where “art tread[s] upon worship’s grounds,” but where film’s power to shape one’s artistic sensibilities is most thoroughly explored: “Could any other art form instill the belief in a soul?”
In Véronique, a young woman in Kraków, Weronika, falls over dead in the middle of a transcendent vocal performance; the camera pans above the audience “in what can only be the vantage point of the young woman’s soul as it departs.” From that point on, for Véronique (played by the same actress) in Paris, life loses its joy and direction, its narrative. She quits her music lessons, withdraws from relationships, and loses interest in her young students. Despite—or because of—a lack of total understanding, Véronique, Esposito says, “opens every last door in my skull. It assures me that life is not the world.” Under the film’s spell, she finds herself believing in, or at least sensing the existence of, something not only unseen and unproven but unseeable, unprovable. Split into that dual existence, Esposito’s double goes where she cannot, a place where reason is subservient to feeling.
One word for this experience is “incantatory.”
While Sontag was a staunch atheist (she once called herself 200 percent secular), there is from her earliest essays onward an understanding and a nurturing of the spiritual impulse in human beings—of the craving for the “incantatory,” to be put under a spell and held there. Shortly before her death, she sat for a televised three-hour interview on CSPAN. To one caller, concerned over George W. Bush’s admiration of Christ above all other philosophers, she confessed her ongoing temptation to fortify her moral compass with “one of the great religious traditions.” For decades, Sontag engaged the religious imagination and its metaphors—often directly, as in her writings on pornography, silence, and asceticism. The second sentence of Styles of Radical Will is a parenthetical definition of spirituality, a word she introduces in the first with scare quotes:
Every era has to reinvent the project of “spirituality” for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural conditions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.)
A great deal of these “painful structural conditions” Sontag attributes to “the capitalist world-view, in which the environment is atomized into ‘items’ (a category embracing things and persons, works of art and natural organisms), and in which every item is a commodity—that is, a discrete, portable object.” It’s this attribution that led her to criticize photography itself, its surreal shatteredness as discrete and portable pieces of the world. The photographer collects what they see—an extension of the colonial, capitalist imagination.
We are psychically wounded, in a sense, by our confinement into categories; and our poor attempts at healing—bad pornography, mediocre art, a reliance upon religious metaphors, and so on—reflect “the traumatic failure of modern capitalist
society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend ‘the personal’ is no less profound than the need to be a person.” To transcend the self, we often seek “total” experiences, which “tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.” Even today—especially today—there remains very little room, in language, for the sublime or divine apart from the debris of harmful, often oppressive institutions; even contemporary attempts at spirituality are quickly poisoned by slogans, marketing, social media, and cultural colonialism—“mindfulness,” for example, or “being present,” or a white suburbanite evangelizing their latest journey into savasana.
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