Image Control

by Patrick Nathan

  Fiction, of course, is just another casualty of a culture in which most persons responsible for that culture (writers, artists, journalists, politicians, filmmakers, “influencers,” entrepreneurs, and so on) present themselves as images. If the reader’s expectation is trending toward character = author, it’s likely because authors have become accessible images—first as celebrities, now collected as friends or followers. Enabled by the contemporary publisher’s abandonment of the author to the management of their own brand, readers grow familiar with, even interact with, that brand: the persona associated with the author’s books when seen in stores, at libraries, online.

  I’m sure I’m hardly the first to be uninterested in a new book not because of its jacket copy or critical reception, but because of how its author behaves on social media.

  Here, “JT LeRoy” is instructive. Albert refers to JT as her avatar, alluding to digital personifications in online role-playing games. But so too does avatar’s Sanskrit ancestor, अवतार (avatāra), conjure deities embodied, beings who “cross over” into visibility. It connotes a risk, an opportunity to be caught in the flesh—a risk Albert took until she was, in effect, caught. Yet it wasn’t, she told The Paris Review, just a trick to make money: “I published everything as fiction. JT was protection. He was a veil upon a veil—a filter. I never saw it as a hoax.”

  And it’s true that each of Albert’s books was published as fiction, that Jeremiah and Cherry Vanilla are only characters. But what “JT” seems to have been is a visible incarnation of those characters—“he who crossed over” from a novel’s world into this one. It’s natural, pleasurable, for the human mind to make connections or identify patterns; and those who fell in love with LeRoy’s books chose to see him as his characters. And nobody intervened. Nobody said, It isn’t like that. Literature often elicits this resemblance to love, or love’s shadow. LeRoy, uniquely, became someone readers could target with that love, an imitation—a fiction—of intimacy.

  To impassioned fans, LeRoy wasn’t an avatar. Once this image was exposed—or deciphered, or explained, or interpreted—the person readers had adored became someone else, an unmasking that never, in any relationship, goes well.

  It’s for this reason, I think, that contemporary writers perceive a cultural desire for fiction that is or seems to be autobiographical. It’s why, I think, “autofiction” is, if not popular, a popular topic of discussion. While Smith is right to suggest a fear or distrust of colonialism, of invading another’s experience and profiting as if it were one’s own, the greater risk is to cast the shadow of love upon an avatar created by a person who may one day hurt you, whether they know it or not. To read fiction is to risk being moved by someone who may have done or said terrible things. It is to risk facing the wholeness, the humanity, of those whose actions may have harmed us or others. It is to risk knowing that no one can be seen as in a photograph, consumed in a glance.

  To read fiction is to risk sharing, without profit, the most precious thing you have: time.

  Honestly, the institutional isolation of American writers shouldn’t be a surprise in a country where small talk with strangers begins with “So what do you do?”—a question that means, What are you for and how does your function relate to mine? Where are you, we want to know, within capitalism?—where can I find you on its map? In this context, “writer” or “author” is often insufficient, and we are more specifically labeled: poet, novelist, journalist, memoirist, theorist, essayist, academic, playwright, or whatever it was we borrowed all that debt to study or simulate.

  Obviously this isn’t law. There are many poets who write novels, many novelists who write essays, and so on. But there is a pattern, and one to criticize—particularly in the schism between “creative” and “academic” writers; or the difference that “Fine” can make in whatever Arts you’re certified Master of.

  Overall, any carefully cultivated specialization is isolating—and purposefully so, not only a necessary precursor to fascism but an organizing tenet of capitalism. “Craft,” in writing, is capital at work. Here’s where that literary genre comes from—novels full of barking dogs, dying parents, horny professors—the kind of thing Lukács called a “caricature” of the novel, “bound to nothing and based on nothing.” The C.V. novel, out of the way so one can teach others about the “tools” of writing.

  “Anybody in Europe can do forty different things,” as Gary Indiana once told an interviewer, “but here you’re supposed to be a specialist in one thing. I find that American writers more than American artists are really provincial people. They don’t mind being just writers because they live in this very clammy, creepy little world—writer’s conferences and PEN and all that stuff.” This isolation—the split between creative and academic on a cultural scale—is contemporaneous with the gradual disappearance of criticism from the public sphere (measured against, say, the sixties and seventies). During the Reagan years, writers seem to have publicly turned away from what were traditionally writers’ concerns: politics, the relationship between art and the public imagination, the role of storytelling on a national scale.

  Writers, in short—with plenty of help from insidious, well-financed, expertly aimed conservative propaganda—have grown cynical about literary citizenship. Our careers are most successful when we are encouraged to write our lyrical novels or self-reflective poems or personal essays; but to write exactingly about art or literature—as opposed to appraising visual or literary products for consumption—is unmarketable. (Some editors admit this openly.) As Hal Foster writes in Bad New Days, “The relative irrelevance of criticism is evident enough in an art world where value is determined by market position above all; today, ‘criticality’ is frequently dismissed as rigid, rote, passé.”

  As Josh Jones writes for Open Culture, the CIA found an ally in Paul Engle, the “self-appointed cold warrior” and director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, whose dominance remains “lamented for the imposition of a narrow range of styles on American writing.” The “rules” of writing popularized by the Iowa model, Jones adds, “have become so embedded in the aesthetic canons that govern literary fiction that they almost go without question . . . What is meant by the phrase [‘good literature’] is a kind of currency—literature that will be supported, published, marketed, and celebrated.”

  But criticism, Foster adds, is not merely a crucial part of the public sphere: “In some ways criticism is this sphere in operation.” Critical writing is dialectical: by revering literature and holding individual works accountable to aesthetic, ethical, and political standards, it pulls the form, and the culture with it, forward and open. Otherwise, novels and other artworks simply appear. Without a multitude of accessible (read: affordable) platforms for intelligent feedback, the books one reads and the movies one sees become just another part of an individual’s matrix of choices, or tastes—more commodities, more images to consume as part of one’s lifestyle. And one can’t produce, market, or distribute commodities in this country without participating in its profit-driven race to the bottom: of cost, of quality, of reputation, of value. Confining literature to aesthetic concerns—to craft—has been this country’s extraordinarily successful and multidecade degradation of literature’s relevance as a public art form.

  It was Adorno, too, who says, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Often misread as an indictment, Adorno’s concern is not methods of expression so much as the will toward compartmentalization that made Auschwitz possible. To pursue and create beauty after the revelations of the Holocaust is barbaric, but that doesn’t mean one can’t do it. It means that “barbarism”—usually a filter meant to hide whatever we don’t like about humanity outside of its frame—is inseparable from our culture. Barbarism is the repulsive part of our adaptability.

  Later in life, Adorno returned to this idea. In his Negative Dialects, he observes art’s license to do what it will even in this most artless, most deathful, of worlds:

  Perennial sufferin
g has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living . . . By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.

  To be happy or to pursue happiness among so much suffering is to become complicit in the creation and perpetuation of that suffering. This is what it means when “we” go on shopping, go on meeting for brunch, go on buying plane tickets, despite the bleaching of reefs worldwide, the rising of the oceans, and the annual burning of landscapes almost incomprehensibly vast. The only real end of this complicity is death, which calls to mind so many of Auschwitz’s survivors—including Primo Levi, Paul Celan, and Jean Améry—who died by suicide decades after they escaped. It evokes Virginia Woolf, who never saw the war’s end, or Stefan Zweig, for whom the world became too terrible in 1942. Walter Benjamin, arrested on his way to America in 1940, gave himself a fatal dose of morphine.

  This summary, of course—this image—elides suicide’s complexity. Yet depression is immensely sensitive to external pressure. In the early-morning hours of November 9, 2016, for example, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline experienced record surges of phone calls. It’s hard not to think of all the lives we began losing to despair, after 2016. And of course it’s impossible, in our era of “security,” not to think of Auschwitz itself, where more than 1 million people were bureaucratically murdered, including, on August 17, 1942, Irène Némirovsky, whose Suite Française is still missing its final three movements.

  Fascism trades in death. Its currency is death—hence its attraction to aesthetics, to the imposition of images. So fixed in our places, we are imagined as dead before dying; our deaths “make sense.” As concerns the United States of America in the twenty-first century, here is where Schulman’s distinction between conflict and abuse becomes the greatest societal urgency in human history.

  The Republican party of the United States, championing Islamophobia, denying and exacerbating climate change, stripping trans and nonbinary persons of their rights, supporting police brutality against the Black community, destroying Indigenous access to ancestral land, incarcerating immigrants and separating children from their families, downplaying or subverting information about a global pandemic that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans—in short, committing crime upon crime against humanity, all of which is not only visible but meant to be visible—is a global terrorist organization. It sinks its roots not only in white and Christian supremacy, but the supremacy of wealth. Its hate is intersectional, and must be dismantled intersectionally—not only in identity politics, but in class warfare, or simply in the aggressive insistence that human beings across the planet have the unilateral, unquestioned right not to drown or burn or starve. To tolerate everything—or anything—that the Republican party stands for or to excuse it as “just politics” is to tolerate genocide.

  We live in a misogynistic, racist, homo- and transphobic, ableist, violent, and viciously unequal country whose relatively small population (4.4 percent of the world) and vast wealth (25 percent) leave us, individual voters and protestors, responsible for the fate and future of this planet as its oceans rise and reefs die, as its air grows increasingly contaminated and water less potable. To feel so powerless and yet accountable for the future of the human race means that the sheer number of traumatized persons living in America is staggering. We are rooted in a country created by two concurrent genocides and supported by two centuries of wars, spectacular terrorism, theft, and global oppression. What’s worse, as Schulman argues, traumatized persons, through their actions, amplify and spread trauma to others by shunning, bullying, silencing, scapegoating, and threatening; they cling to what little they’re given as payment for their complicity in worldwide destruction at the profit of a small minority of white, wealthy men.

  This is why we have learned—why we have been trained—to treat one another, to consume one another, as images. We are learning to discard and be discarded.

  “Dictators understand very well,” Egan writes, “that the strength of thought and analysis that literature embodies is a threat to the mind control that is an essential feature of tyranny.” She’s right, of course—but she may as well be describing the last several decades of American economic conditions, which are an isolating, mind-controlling tyranny of their own. Curiously, it’s only because of this president that Egan’s article exists, a phenomenon familiar to many magazines and newspapers. This autocratic spectacle provides a wellspring of oppositional content, all framed as necessary under tyranny, as resistance you can buy. But this is mere reaction, a marketing opportunity. Any media organization that seeks to widen its profits in the shadow of fascism will soon find fascism a desirable shadow in which to widen its profits; and any writer who stakes their value on this kind of “resistance” shrivels into a pundit.

  Meanwhile, ceding to writers a vague and priestly importance, in place of criticism we get what Foster calls fetishistic discourse: “Any operation whereby human constructs (God, the Internet, an artwork) are projected above us and granted an agency of their own, from which position and with which power they are more likely to overbear us than to enlighten us (let alone to delight us).” By imbuing the creative author, for example, with a fetishistic degree of authority or authenticity, publishing, as an industry, leaves little or no authority to the critical author. This reverence is another flank of cynicism, a turning away from literature’s anchor in our daily lives—and the renunciation of literary citizenship.

  By literary citizenship, I mean having a sociopolitical awareness of writing literature—not, say, volunteering to read manuscripts at a magazine only writers read.

  And why shouldn’t citizenship be a key, even radical issue for writers, as it is for everyone else? After all, no conscious person in twenty-first century America has the right to be shocked at how totalitarian capitalism destroys the individual capacity for citizenship. Do you, as an American, have time to participate in your democracy? Or is that time indebted to some other task? As a reader, do you have time to practice enriching your reading with poetry, even if you prefer biographies? If you are a writer, do you have time to give to a new kind of project—one your publisher isn’t likely to recognize as part of your skill set?

  From the perspective of citizenship, it is radical to resist not only the commodification of art, but the commodification of oneself. It’s here where criticism offers a very different form of resistance: an anticynicism, a turning toward, a meeting of the gaze. There is no universal truth; but via aesthetic, political, and ethical criticism, there is dialectical truth. In the rushing flow of commodities, a dialectical approach to the art we make and the relationships we forge is the rock in the river, the stick in the spokes. Interrogating failures alongside pleasures, criticism resists reducing our works and ourselves to consumable images. Criticism fosters a sensibility of plural validation: a book is this and that, an author’s vision successful, challenging, and problematic. It recognizes works and persons as existing in time and capable of change—the concept upon which all radical hopes are built.

  Alongside an active, critical citizenship, another metaphor may be crucial. An “ecology of images,” as Sontag mentions in On Photography—or a kind of “image control”—is a tall order in our culture, in which the image is the supreme currency. This is especially troubling in the digital era, in which the creation of images is effortless and the costs of which, no longer tied to film, are invisible. In a few years, we’ll be living among ten trillion photographs, and nothing about it will feel different—we won’t feel as if we’re wasting our resources to take
and share these images. To ask of ourselves and others, Don’t post that, or to request that corporations scale back their image-production and dissemination, is not only unfeasible and useless but practically impossible. After all, it’s not images that are in danger. It’s us.

  What we must imagine is an ecology of the human mind, an ecology of consciousness.

  The eighteenth-century concept of rights—the philosophical and legal framework upon which many of this nation’s laws are founded—is primarily positive, the right to. Negative rights (the right not to) are far harder to uphold, as the last several decades of Supreme Court decisions—many honoring “religious freedom” (i.e., the right to inflict ideological harm rather than the right not to experience such harm), corporate citizenship, and so on—have shown. In the United States, it’s much harder to demand freedom from harm rather than freedom to harm, making the concept of rights something in between an antiquation and—with respect to things like the Fifteenth Amendment and Black voter suppression, or the Eighth Amendment and the sex offender registry—a fucking joke.

  An imagined demand for the “right” to participate as a citizen would, in all likelihood, be met with an argument that one already has this right, provided one has enough capital to avoid working oneself into exhaustion, or that one has not entangled oneself within the criminal punishment apparatus, or that one is not Black and living in a district that suppresses Black voters, or that one has access to affordable childcare in order to go to neighborhood or city meetings, or that one simply tells one’s boss “It’s Election Day and I have the right to vote” without any fear, imagined or real, that exercising one’s right to leave work for two hours will reflect poorly on your ability to “be part of the team”—the provisions are endless. The right to participate would, like so many of our rights, look met on paper, yet in reality succumb to the right of corporations—the heavy artillery of totalitarian capitalism—to push us into debt and poverty, to deplete us not only of the capacity for citizenship but of the capacity, as our exploitation via images has shown, for an inner life, the capacity to be a person.