Gentrification is a unique tool of capitalism. It replaces reality with a consumable image, and this is why we, too—ourselves, our politics, our art—are rapidly becoming gentrified. Totalitarian means total; its goal is total, and that includes your consciousness and mine. This is why privacy has become a luxury. It is meant to be more than we can afford, because to be private is to protect something—be it your financial information, your browsing history, your consumption habits, or your ideas, your beliefs, your thoughts, your feelings—from assimilation. It is to say that something in your life is not for sale.
Pragmatically, this means realizing that everyone requires protection from eviction and starvation, from succumbing to or suffering from easily treatable or preventable illnesses, from civic mutilation by punitive courts, from becoming trapped in jobs or careers that are exploitive, even abusive (such as Amazon’s brutal regulations of something as basic, as intimate, as going to the bathroom, forcing employees to choose between disobedience and the deepest humiliation). All are protections easily and immediately provided through legislation—or taken through direct, collective action—guaranteeing universal basic income, Medicare for all, decriminalization of drugs and sex work, and cancelation of predatory debts, to name only a few examples.
We cannot afford to believe privacy is a luxury. If the capitalist ethos is to treat us as resources to exploit, we must imagine ourselves as resources to protect. While the extremely visible resistance of protests and civic disruption are crucial anti-fascist tactics, an ecology of consciousness is a daily, constant resistance—the foundation of all other forms of resistance. To demand that capitalism has no right to exploit your inner life is to realize that exploiting oneself for the sake of “resistance” burlesque is self-defeating, a sociopolitical Trojan horse. Timber, after all, wasn’t irreplaceable to the companies who logged the forests; it was irreplaceable to the forests, which certainly wouldn’t have logged themselves only to make signs mocking the logging companies. In the same way, we are irreplaceable to ourselves, and must demand conservation, protection; to stop capitalism’s totalitarian movement, we must imagine—and demand—that our inner lives are off-limits to capitalist predation. We must believe ourselves and one another to be precious and scarce.
Irreligiously, we must believe in the sanctity of our souls.
A crucial word for all of us is and. One cannot live in moral purity, and yet one wants to live (for now). I can be afraid; I can be angry; I can be a vicious critic of a cruel administration; and I can spend a long weekend enjoying my life. It’s hard to get through a day without thinking of the end, whether by bomb or the slow strangulation of climate change; and, in the summers, I spend hours nurturing tomato plants and herbs, carrots and onions. Politically, one half of the United States government would wish to erase the vibrancy of my gay and loving life; and, next summer, I will meet my friends on the beach or by the pool. We will pour ourselves a drink. We will have a beautiful day.
I wrote this book as a person, as someone worried not only over my inner life and what was happening to it, but worried for the lives—inner and actual—of everyone around me. It began with images, with photography and its ubiquity, its saturation in our lives. As Sontag writes, “the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” I’d begun to see my life as a place—a destination dead as Venice, where nothing could be changed or altered, only photographed. Then I began to notice—that is, I began to see—how important it was, from the perspective of those wealthier and more powerful than me, that I believe this. That I “touch nothing” in the gallery of my life.
“The capacity to look can no longer be seen as a personal property,” Azoulay writes, but as “a complex field of relations that originally stem from the fact that photography made available to the individual possibilities of seeing more than his or her eye alone could see, in terms of scope, distance, time, speed, quantity, clarity.” Her citizenship of photography is “without sovereignty, without place or borders, without language or unity, having a heterogenous history, a common praxis, inclusive citizenship, and a unified interest.” Azoulay’s metaphor still seems to me of utmost importance, as it’s hard to believe in the stillness, in the immutability, of an image if we remind ourselves to watch rather than look. Not only does it slow our judgment, but also our consumption; we give more of what is most precious—our time, our selves—to what is no longer a commodity but more visibly, more understandingly, an act of confinement, of cruelty, of reduction. To watch is to allow the captured lives of others to better tell their stories, to establish a dialogue rather than acquire more information.
As a child, Albert didn’t recognize herself in the books she read. “The characters that were allowed to have adventures and allowed to have redemption were boys, from Huck Finn to Tom Sawyer to Oliver Twist to Peter Pan. What were the girls? They were princesses.” To be a girl in a book meant to be a photograph, an image that doesn’t change. To be a boy meant one could grow. In her fiction, which began as phone calls to a crisis hotline, Albert translated her pain into a boy’s pain, her abandonment into a boy’s; alongside everything else her books did, her fiction gave her life a way to complicate itself. “I think some people take it for granted to be acknowledged and not overlooked,” she added. “My experience was to be completely ignored and disregarded and disdained.” When readers found out she wasn’t JT, they disregarded and disdained her, and her experience, all over again.
This is what becomes of judgment in a culture—in a population—abused by consumerism. To see a person’s life as the one action most marketably despised or distrusted—to make of them a victim, a monster, a martyr, anything but themselves—is to disallow that person’s experience of time. It denies their capacity to change, and confines them to life as a commodity. To participate in this confinement is to carry out the will of a punitive state that sees people as its property. Whatever the social intentions, to delete or discard the stories of others, to narrow ambition to one’s own identity matrix, is not justice. It is not progressive. It is a denial of recognition—that readers or viewers may confront some part of ourselves we’d rather not. It is, consciously or not, the work of the fascist imagination, and must be, like all expressions of fascism, aggressively resisted, be it in the streets or in our deepest relationships with ourselves.
None of this, of course, is to say that people—or their actions, their creations—cannot be criticized, even protested. We owe it to one another and ourselves to critique, alongside the aesthetics of our works, the politics and ethics of our lives. This is to say, however, that in a culture or context where it’s possible to reduce one’s humanity to a product, it’s important to criticize that culture or context alongside the actions it fostered. Because it all flows together. In your acts and in your works, and in the acts and works of others, the risk of seeing your reflection runs in the same river as other recognitions: joy, pleasure, spirituality, longing, hope, the sublime; and fear, disgust, horror, revulsion, despair, hatred. This is your time, whether you want it or not. In that river, you’ll want to tell yourself that you resisted—that you went under as slowly as you could.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Pieces of this book have appeared, in very different forms, in several publications. For their guidance, precision, and generosity, I’m in immense debt to Ted Scheinman at Pacific Standard; Christian Kiefer and Nadja Spiegelman at The Paris Review; Rob Horning and Nathan Jurgenson at Real Life; Jess Bergman at Literary Hub; Allison Conner and Nathan Goldman at Full Stop; Dana Snitzky at Longreads; Taylor Davis-Van Atta and Jeffrey Zuckerman at Music & Literature; the editors at 3:AM Magazine; and Jonathon Sturgeon at The Baffler.
So much of this book I owe to Erik Hane, who texted me and said it was about fascism; to Dan Smetanka, who endured a plague of exclamation marks sent over email like digital locusts; and to Dawn Frederick, who championed its earliest version and held a lot fewer doubts about it than I ever did.
<
br /> Thank you, too, to everyone at Counterpoint for your patience and hard work while I said, over and over, “It should look like this.”
I’m grateful for Joseph, Chris, Steven, Veronica, Conner, Roy, CJ, Foster, and Peter, all of whom read pieces of this book at one time or another and said, in their own way, to keep going. I’m grateful for my friends, who’ve helped show me how wonderful life can really be, and for my parents, who gave me that life. And I’m grateful above all for Michael, who has been more supportive than any reasonable person could ever expect.
I meant it when I said, on page 4, that I never thought I’d write a book like this. It means the world to me that I have, and I couldn’t have done it without all of you.
© Michael O’Laughlin
PATRICK NATHAN is the author of Some Hell, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Republic, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, The Baffler, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis. Find out more at patricknathan.com.
Image Control
Copyright © 2021 by Patrick Nathan
First hardcover edition: 2021
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nathan, Patrick, author.
Title: Image control : art, fascism, and the right to resist / Patrick Nathan.
Description: Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020047991 | ISBN 9781640094536 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781640094543 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Propaganda. | Images, Photographic—Social aspects. | Fascism.
Classification: LCC HM1231 .N38 2021 | DDC 303.3/75—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/202004799
Jacket design by Dana Li
Book design by Jordan Koluch
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Image Control Page 22
