Image Control

by Patrick Nathan

  Introducing her ideas on pornography, Sontag mentions the relationship between the deadpan and slapstick in comedy, both of which produce “a deadening or neutralization or distancing of the audience’s emotions.” So too does this apply in conventional porn: “The principles of underrating and frenetic agitation make the emotional climate self-canceling, so that the basic tone of pornography is affectless, emotionless.” Porn, like comedy, is interminable in spirit, “a perpetual tableau. Even though things do happen, really nothing happens. Everything is repeated.” There are no consequences because there is no suffering, there is no change. She contrasts this with tragedy, in which “we believe in the reality of suffering. We believe in the reality of death.”

  These are distinctions worth observing: there is something we seek in comedy and in pornography that tragedy does not, perhaps cannot, provide. But, as with any consumption, there are risks. A contemporary risk of this sensibility is—again—found in social media, particularly as it intersects, even enmeshes itself, with the news cycle.

  The surrealist ethos of social media, wherein an image of a mass shooting is structurally equivalent with the image of a friend announcing a new job, replicates exactly the kind of ongoing, interminable “frenetic agitation” and deadpan lack of response one finds in Sontag’s characterizations of comedy and pornography. This was especially apparent with the forty-fifth presidential administration, whose ongoing spectacle, amplified and magnified by social media, left its audience both incredulous and numb. In life under a Trump presidency, nothing changes. Despite the daily threat of apocalypse, each day is almost identical to any other. Caught between affectlessness and total, constant hysteria, it’s difficult to even pretend one can feel like oneself when using these platforms, and yet—participating as one does as an image—that self is increasingly confined. Sometimes seriously, sometimes jokingly, but always honestly, we call this space of confinement a “brand.”

  Here, again, is a technology or sensibility that offers a glimpse of transcending the personality or escaping the capitalist atomization; and yet it withholds that possibility. It fails us. Social media platforms are built for advertisers; they are profit-generating machines, just like the conventional pornography and formulaic, socially narcotic comedy Sontag describes. This, again, is the “traumatic failure of modern capitalism,” as well as its unique ability to assimilate as a visible commodity nearly everything it encounters. We still have few outlets, little language, and only the rare subversive system of thought to provide or pursue an ancient and necessary spirituality. We have little left outside the realm of transactions. We are losing what is “sacred.”

  In his Confessions, Augustine recalls losing a close friend at a young age. This is prior to his ascetic relationship with God, at a moment in his life when his habits, patterns, and supports were crumbling: “Whither should my heart flee from my heart? Whither should I flee from myself? Whither not follow myself?” Ultimately, it’s only in God’s truth—in the “perfect man” of Christ—that Augustine finds his peace: “Our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”

  Like Heidegger’s Dasein, Augustine wants to be guided, and places this desire—let’s call it his soul—in the imagined heart of Christ, which, by the grace of Augustine’s own will, guides (or pulls) Augustine forward through life.

  The sincerity of Augustine’s gratitude is palpable, enviable. For most of my adult life, I’ve never perceived or allowed myself to have a soul. It’s difficult to read these Confessions and not crave Augustine’s assurance that there is something beyond the body’s chemistry of neurons and amines, its meat and memory. Of course, this is why one believes—why I believe—so adamantly in the necessity of art, and why another might believe in the necessity of meditation, and why a third might find it spiritually crucial to cause and prolong unbearable suffering in others—even those they’ve never met—in order to “save” them.

  As an atheist, I’ve shied away from “soul” for so long that to say it sincerely feels transgressive. But what kind of idiot resists the extraordinary gift of having, and claiming, a soul? In most languages, “soul” is derived from the breath or breathing, the air pushed in and out of the body; it is the soul that, as the Greeks imagined, gives wings to our words. In Véronique, this breath is everywhere: condensing on mirrors and windows, heaved out of her body during sex, wrenched out while grieving, and, above all, pushed through her lungs to make music it’s hard to believe any human body can make. In fact, one might envision that Weronika, onstage in her first and final performance, pushed that soul too hard, that she sang it right out of her body.

  So too do our societal phrases—“Thank God”; “Bless you”; “God willing”—make me cringe when they automatically leave my lips. Like a militant idiot, I repent when I say them, as if I’ve sinned against language. This cynicism limits the creation of art as well as one’s capacity for experiencing it as totally, as ecstatically, as possible.

  But the soul is also light. As Véronique wakes from a nap, a glow flitting across her face, she goes to the window and sees a boy with a mirror, teasing her from a neighboring balcony. She smiles; he and his mirror retreat into his own apartment. “So easily does the sensation of an invisible world dissolve,” Esposito remarks, but when Véronique turns back inside, the light remains—“dancing in the corner.” As she approaches it,

  the shot changes: we are looking down at her . . . As though seized with a premonition Véronique jerks her head up, she stares into the camera. It tilts in response. The realization is immediate. It’s a point of view shot. I’m seeing from the point of view of that yellow light. Which can of course only be the point of view of Weronika . . . Every other mystery in Véronique has some explanation. But not this one. There is no source for the second light.

  Depicting the soul as breath or light: These are ancient metaphors fossilized in language. Yet we don’t seem to tire of them. In Twin Peaks: The Return, Carl Rodd witnesses the hit-and-run killing of a young boy. As the boy’s mother screams for help, Rodd sees a blur of light lift out of his body and ascend into the clouds. The soul floating up to heaven: the stuff of Looney Tunes, and yet in Lynch’s hands, so masterful one doesn’t know whether to grieve or rejoice.

  So, too, at the end of Fire Walk with Me, when Laura Palmer meets her angel in the waiting room. Instead of cringing at this cliché, one is overcome with a feeling of immense grief, and of gratitude. Witnessing Palmer’s joy—sobs that turn into laughter—is one of the most inexplicably moving experiences I’ve had in front of a screen. In what is possibly the greatest triumph of the human imagination over its animal chemistry, it makes me unafraid of death. Reposing there, my heart is at rest. CF. P100

  After praising the “incantatory” power of art, Sontag, in one of her earliest essays, creates a critical binary: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Perhaps inevitably, art is taught at the grade school and university levels as a system of codes, as a language neat with definitions. What does the whale signify, in Moby-Dick? What does Velázquez’s placement of the king and queen say about the Spanish monarchy? What are these books and paintings and films and photographs really about? It’s this obsession with aboutness, in the hermeneutical tradition, that seems inseparable from art itself—that speaks art, whereas art itself seems silent.

  Sontag’s alternative would function quite differently: “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more . . . The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” Sontag challenges the critic to embrace the ecstasy of trying to satisfy an insurmountable desire to understand. Hermes, the messenger god, decrypted Olympian mysteries so that humankind could understand. To channel Eros—child of Love and War—is to lose control over one’s language. An erotics is a celebration of art’s power to knock us dumb.

  Erotic theory is a visualization of desire, of the path or c
ircuit desire takes. An experience of desire is a contradiction in time, in selfhood, and in language—so much so that Sappho, as Anne Carson writes, coined a new word: “The moment when the soul parts on itself in desire is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses. On Sappho’s tongue, as we have seen, it is a moment of bitter and sweet . . . Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded.” This anticipation of reasoning applies not only to love but to the pursuit of knowledge, of experiences, of life, and of art: “In letters as in love, to imagine is to address oneself to what is not.” Without desire, there is no struggle against time. To want for nothing is to float as flotsam in time’s river until your life is washed out to sea and forgotten. CF. P145

  In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson describes an unstable triangulation of seeing: “Writing about desire, the archaic poets made triangles with their words. Or, to put it less sharply, they represent situations that ought to involve two factors (lover, beloved) in terms of three (lover, beloved and the space between them, however realized).” Desire itself opens up a new dimension: what should be a simple connection between two points is complicated by a third. That third dimension—the space between lover and beloved, reader and text, audience and artwork—is what destabilizes a flat, orderly, linear universe.

  This is art, a rupture in space—the very instability of which demands its closure as quickly as possible. Here is where that effort to interpret comes from, or to explain, to name, to categorize, to pull back the curtain, to reduce this magic to smoke and mirrors. The universe is torn and seeks to sew itself shut. With art, something inexplicable, yet magnetic, is happening, and as long as it exists—as long as the spell of it lingers—there is not only our world as we understand it but our world and whatever this is, whatever’s out there defying all we know. It’s the mark of a long-lasting work of art to keep that unstable space open, dangerous, exciting, uninterpretable.

  Without interpretation, there is no language. An experience of art we don’t understand is not “like” anything we’ve seen. In fact, there’s something about it we’re not seeing—no other half to reach for and pull close until what is delightful becomes banal, ready-made, repeatable. Our words are left unfinished.

  Where Eros reigns, Hermes cannot follow. The ruptures art tears open are dark. Experiences of desire, as Carson points out, are terrible; its metaphors are of “war, disease and bodily dissolution.” For these poets, “Change of self is loss of self.” To desire is to melt or collapse, to blend or break. The boundaries of self—and the body imagined alongside it—are violated; there is no longer a skin to point to, in a sense, that shields whatever “you” are from whatever the rest of us, or the world, may be.

  In contemporary life, where more of what is tangible is retreating into a digital dimension of its own, to fall under art’s spell may become increasingly important—and, in certain capacities, increasingly dangerous. There are people—me included—who find great pleasure in being so changed, so destroyed. Twin Peaks, for example, is without a doubt my Véronique—the closest experience I’ve had to believing in something resembling a soul. Like the Black and White Lodges depicted in its universe, it opens a space within me, a cavernous sanctuary wherein I feel safe, expansive, limitless, loved. This does not mean, of course, that I imagine myself—or that anyone experiencing a work of art imagines oneself—within the universe or realm depicted; only an idiot would “feel safe” in Twin Peaks. This is not what I mean by the opening of space. Instead, what is between me and Twin Peaks is a field of great tension, and it’s this tension which opens something new, that charges itself like a great energy field, that gathers to itself an unfathomable gravity, like a singularity, and which offers me some place to hide or leave a part of myself—if not forever, for as long as the portal, let’s call it, is open. For as long as the singularity, let’s call it, pulls and bends my light toward it.

  And there are people—again, me included—who make it their life’s ambition to similarly tear such holes in the universe, who wish always to remind others of the unseeable and unknowable, the unnameable.

  Unfortunately, this same magnetism applies to aesthetic projects which employ erotic tension (that is, which seduce) without an ethical compass—or those which deliberately smash that compass. Benjamin, in the 1930s, wrote that “the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics.” It is, he said, a political system that gives “the masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” Even Goebbels himself reflected that politics was “the highest and most comprehensive art.” To mention erotics in combination with fascism, especially National Socialism, usually refers to the eroticized aesthetics of fascism. But the true seductive power of fascism is not aesthetic at all, no matter how eroticized these aesthetics may be. In fact, these aesthetics hide fascism’s vast and absolute erotic intensity—its capacity to unendingly withhold release or relief or satisfaction from every single one of its believers.

  Populism, writes Ernesto Laclau, “requires the dichotomic division of society into two camps—one presenting itself as a part which claims to be the whole.” On a political level, this is the field of tension Carson describes—the imagined completeness of one “camp” frustrated by seeing its own incompleteness reflected back. In the populist crowd, especially the fascist crowd, “there is the experience of a lack, a gap which has emerged in the harmonious continuity of the social. There is a fullness of the community which is missing. This is decisive: the construction of the ‘people’ will be the attempt to give a name to that absent fullness.” Fascism is a political art that wraps itself around darkness, that pulls its believers inward and intensifies their desire for “order” (death) and “greatness” (destruction) by ever prolonging, delaying, and denying that desire. Fascist theater is a masterpiece of erotic art, and—as we’ve seen—one of the most dangerous works of art there is.

  Of the practice of art, including experiences as total and as deadly as fascism, what I think is that we are all looking for places to leave these pieces of ourselves, and that it’s somehow imperative to us that we don’t understand where these places come from, nor even, with any predictability, where to find them. What I think is that we are all looking to fill what is dark—what is terrifying, what is delightful, what is sublime—with the immense, inexhaustible light of our souls. Whereas Heidegger imagined one’s consciousness as “thrown” and that the conscience calls it back, what I think is that one’s conscience throws the soul—into art, into religious experiences, into sex, into whatever ecstasy translates for us—and the call is that which calls us forward. This, I think, is why poets create words, why social media users make memes, why lonely people write books: we drag ourselves through time by throwing our souls forward, by projecting them into ideas or experiences that hold us under the intensity of their spells, and we then imagine they call us, beckon us. And when the magic is over, we cast these souls into something new.

  Creation is how we allow ourselves the experience of time without the trauma of seeing it as space. It is how, in Azoulay’s terminology, we watch ourselves as we live, and how we teach ourselves to watch others as they live alongside us.

  IV

  THE “RESISTANCE” AND OTHER STORIES

  We need writers,” Jennifer Egan wrote for Time at the end of 2018, “and we need them badly. Literature, like democracy, is built of a plurality of ideas . . . By writing and reading, we remind ourselves of the value of empathy, subtlety and contradiction.” It’s an easy wish to understand: that by the assumed virtue of writing, some truth is attained, an elemental and unignorable human compassion.

  I love Egan’s work, but her portrayal of the writer in America is a fantasy. A writer, in reality, has the same duty to feel as superfluous and humiliated as anyone else caught in this country’s downward spiral of cultural and economic decline. Writers write, and if they’re lucky they publish in magazines and newspapers and books—an industrial model equally subject to the realities of
American capitalism. That is, equally in decline.

  While Egan’s defense arrives in terrifying times, it creates just as much of an “opioid effect” to believe in the image of the writer as it does to feverishly share the image of an incompetent, cruel president. If writers were the solution, or even part of it, a white nationalist would’ve never made it past his first primary: America is rich in writers, and always has been.

  To put it another way, it’s increasingly laughable to be called necessary in a culture with fewer and fewer places to even approach with ideas, much less hope to sell them. American culture—even American literary culture—does not revere its writers. With few exceptions, our writers are less the province of ideas or guidance than they are a container for aspiration: expensive notebooks with pre-printed quotations in the margins, fountain pens, writing programs that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and books that are more enthusiastically instagrammed—that is, visually collected and displayed—than they are read or discussed.

  Photographs commit the present to the past, and the idea of the writer in America has long been photographed—an impotently nostalgic romance. It’s this romance writers now buy. Like so many other victims of capitalism, writers have been downgraded to a species of consumer. What is expected of us is merely our attention and participation, not our feedback, and never our dissent. Our essays are personal. Our novels are lyrical. The “I” in our poems is the “I” in our profile. Writers are commodities to be bought, hoarded, or sold—and usually on such a niche market that we’re mostly buying, hoarding, or selling one another. Clipped of politics and isolated on some pedestal of eternal truth or goodness or empathy, the romanticized, fetishized writer is a disarmed, declawed, defanged writer—little more than someone’s rigorously trained pet.