Meaning—or narrative—isn’t always what we see, or even look for, in images. In 1868, following the International Exposition in Paris, the Italian novelist and essayist Vittorio Imbriani published “La quinta promotrice,” a collection of his observations and theories on contemporary European art. This included his theory of the macchia, which Teju Cole describes as “the total compositional and coloristic effect of an image in the split second before the eye begins to parse it for meaning.” Approaching a painting, one is most likely to see before anything else its arrangement of colors, shapes, shadows, and space, and only afterward begin to understand those colors as flesh or flora, those shapes as human, or as stone. This visual macchia (“stain”) acts, Imbriani says, upon the nerves before the consciousness can interpret it; like anything primal, it readies the human animal before the human being. “Imbriani’s was an argument for the inner life of pictorial effect,” Cole writes, “not so much about the way in which visual organization transcended subject matter but the way in which it preceded subject matter.” This seems to embrace Impressionism down to its most subconscious, emotional level—one’s passions excited prior to understanding, which Edmund Burke described as the sublime.
When You
See It. By Patrick Nathan. Bookforum,
August 18, 2021.
Americans,
generally, aren’t so good at history. It’s tempting to think our propensity for
dramatizing wars, disasters, and other so-called tragedies onstage and in
cinema has been detrimental to our understanding of events, populating
“collective memory” with individual stories, as if episodes from an epic. In
episodic narratives, nothing ever changes—everything is normal in the
beginning, terrible in the middle, and resolved by the end. Characters and
settings are comfortably static. With respect to real-life atrocity, this is
how the United States has “lost its innocence” at least half a dozen times,
from the Civil War to 9/11 to Trump’s election. Everything that happens is a
“shock” to the nation. This is how our “never again” becomes “ever again”: an
innocence déjà perdu.
History,
after all, is heavy. For many Americans, it’s something to leave behind. We say
we’re post-race; we say same-sex marriage put an end to homophobia. To do this
we tell stories of slavery and civil rights, of the AIDS epidemic. These are
photos we snap and label as past. Indeed, history itself is something our
nation, as an idea, tried to escape—the entrenchments of Europe, the legacies
of Kings, and whatever else the wealthy white men who created our country on
paper promised themselves.
In
truth, we are history; our unique pasts exist only in the present. In forsaking
them for prescriptive memory, particularly without interrogating who has
prescribed us these memories, we place a tenuous hope in what writer and
psychotherapist Adam Phillips calls “a redemptive myth.” We believe, he says in
“The Forgetting Museum,” that “remembering done properly will give us the lives
that we want.” In saying, Look what happened, there is an optimism that the
image itself will carry the pain and do the work, all in a gamble that atrocity
will look the same when and if it reappears. That, ultimately, is prescriptive
memory’s weakness; even two real, literal photographs taken of the same person
are never identical. To rely upon images instead of contextualized history is
to guarantee getting lost.
Not that
we’re always meant to find our way. Some memorials, for example, are
particularly careful images of the past. Their aesthetics harbors a desired
emotional, not intellectual, understanding: Viewers and visitors are meant to
feel, not think. At the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, the aesthetics of absence—two
seemingly bottomless black pools surrounded by the names of the thousands who
died—alongside recovered detritus, burned clothing, rubble, and the final voicemails
of those trapped inside, all frame a narrative of destruction that points to a
strangely opaque other: Al-Qaeda. Absent altogether is Osama bin Laden’s long
relationship with the United States government. To contextualize him among the
names, faces, and voices of the dead—especially as a CIA-funded militant in the
Soviet–Afghan War—would politicize something more easily remembered as tragedy.
Yet
there was nothing apolitical about the destruction of the World Trade Center,
and to expunge politics from the memorial is its own political act, the effect
of which is to stir grief, incite rage, and mobilize Americans against an
ambiguous enemy. As I write this, what is still branded “the War on Terror” has
surpassed its nineteenth year, its sixth trillionth dollar, and the end of
anywhere between half a million and two million lives. “Never Forget” is
laughable if, from the start, there’s no genuine history to remember; and “Never
Again” means nothing when victims are aestheticized as propaganda, when our own
government uses them to amplify retributive terror.
*
Americans
are also bad at propaganda—that is, at recognizing it. As producers and
consumers of propaganda, the United States outperforms every other nation in
the world. For most of us, the word connotes negatively. It’s the “odor” to
advertising’s “scent,” a reputation created by propaganda of our own: the way
propaganda is portrayed, for example, in history and in fictions of the
U.S.S.R. and the Third Reich, not to mention countless dystopian futures
imagined by authors and filmmakers. But propaganda, as Andrew O’Hagan wrote for
T magazine a few months after the 2016 elections, does not necessarily come
from one man in power who “supplant[s] what is true with what they wish to be
true.” Instead, propaganda stems from “an impulse to choose a side and press
its case with wily elegance,” and what it “sells” is a way of life, or “a
series of values, traits and skills that others might do well to emulate.”
O’Hagan’s
words are precise—might do well to emulate—and reflect how propaganda excels.
It doesn’t demand or dictate so much as suggest, aggressively. “Manipulating
human belief might sound like an alarming project for governments and designers
to undertake,” he adds, but it’s one of the oldest professions in the book, and
corporations, religions, entertainers and doctors, to say little of
politicians, are dedicated to the art of making you think what you ought to
think. Populism is based on the notion that people can think for themselves,
but most people can’t and don’t want to; they need team colors and a direction
of play that is worked out by other people . . . For good or for ill, the art
of propaganda must set out to persuade them of what they think.
Indeed,
it’s this “for good” that has been most overlooked in the United States, even
though we see “good propaganda” at work every day, and have for decades—in
certain commercials, for example, when nearly every race and gender and sexual
orientation is equally represented in its consumption, say, of heartburn
medication; or in film after film where money, no matter how hard the rich man
tries, can’t bring him what he wants, not even happiness.
It was a
little more obvious, O’Hagan notes, during World War II, when it was
“considered by most of the Allies to be something of a gentle and spirited
approach to the survival of the species.” In 1943, the United States Department
of War produced a short film called Don’t Be a Sucker. The film features
one-dimensional Americans going about their lives, yet reminds us that this is
a country full of “free people” of many different religions who go to their own
churches and form their own opinions. But, the film’s narrator says, “There are
guys who stay up nights figuring out how to take that away.” The film cuts to a
middle-aged man, sour with anger as he preaches from the steps of a government
building. “I’m just an average American,” this man says, “but I’m an American
American . . . I see Negroes holding jobs that belong to me and you.” He rants about
what must be done, who must stick together and who must be excluded, while two
men in the audience debate his speech. “He seems to know what he’s talking
about,” the younger of the two says, but his perception is quickly dismantled
by the older man, whose Hungarian accent connotes an authority on “what this
talk can do.”
In
America, he says, “we have no other people. We are American people.” He informs
the younger man how the Nazis came to power, how their rhetoric divided the
populace. “We human beings are not born with prejudices,” he says. “Always they
are made for us. Made by someone who wants something. Remember that when you
hear this kind of talk. Somebody is going to get something out of it. And it
isn’t going to be you.” The film is a brilliant piece of anti-fascist,
pro-American propaganda, appealing not to the sympathies of others but to the
young man’s self-interests: the focus is not on the fate of minorities in
fascism’s crosshairs, but on how fascism won’t bring prosperity to the young man,
only those using him as a pawn.
After
the War, however, American propaganda began to differentiate itself from
state-driven efforts in countries designated as political enemies—an executive
strategy seen as incompatible with “the freedom of the individual.” O’Hagan
cites the CIA’s famous covert literary magazine, Encounter, as one example to
“win the hearts and minds of the English-speaking world,” as well as
Hollywood’s decades-long project to “churn out pro-war propaganda and sexist
assumptions as if they were catnip to the people.” Whether funded by the
government or not, these corporate propaganda systems reinforce the image of
the United States the government has established, which in turn benefits
wealthy donors and lobbyists whose funding influences legislation that
complements this propaganda.
During
the Trump presidency, state-driven propaganda returned to the limelight,
complete with slogans, an emphasis on loyalty, a racially based isolation of
who is elevated as “American” and who is not, and a flagrant disregard for what
is true in place of what one man in power wishes to be true. In fact, the
phenomenon of Donald Trump embodies not only how propaganda functions in this
country today, but how an image’s politics depends entirely upon context. Not
only does one see the tenuous, even fragile relationship between images and
language, there is an increasing acquaintance with the relationship of images
with other images, whose juxtapositions become a language in and of themselves.
I’m thinking of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign ad, in which the iridescently
lit faces of children filled the screen while actual footage of Donald Trump
played out on the televisions they were presumably watching. “What will our
children think?” Clinton’s voiceover asks while Trump degrades immigrants and
women and Muslims and persons with disabilities to enthusiastic cheers. It was
a beautiful and earned work of propaganda, giving context to an image (Trump)
by placing it against another (children, shorthand for America’s future).
But so
too was the president’s lexicon of epithets (“Crooked Hillary” Clinton, “Lyin’
Ted” Cruz) a successful deployment of propaganda, and so too his talent for
slogans. Above all—by focusing on crime in border states, Islamic terrorism,
the legitimacy of President Obama’s birth, and “urban” violence—it was his
aggressive suggestion that whiteness in America was under attack that proved
most successful among a vicious and victorious minority of voters. Through
propaganda, Trump overtly politicized whiteness in a way Americans had not seen
in a presidential election since George Wallace’s pro-segregation campaign in
1968. Unlike Wallace, he won. This didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve been
learning to see “fascistly” for decades; it’s only now that our government
reflects it so brazenly.
Excerpted
from Image Control : Art, Fascism, and
the Right to Resist. Counterpoint Press, 2021.
“Americans
Are Bad at History.” At the Fault Lines of Memory and Propaganda. By Patrick
Nathan. LitHub, August 19, 2021
Today’s
interview with Patrick Nathan, as thoughtful and original a writer as you’ll
find, pairs him with Claire Foster, longtime reviewer for Foreword and author
of two award-winning short story collections. In their starred review of
Patrick’s Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist, Claire points
to some alarming realizations about how we are shaped by the photographs and
images around us, and we were dying to hear more. As you’ll see, there’s no
doubt these two have earned each other’s respect.
At a time when social media analytics—not necessarily depth, artistry, or even talent—guide consumer and industry decisions, why is it important to acknowledge how images or simplified communication erases real meaning?
PN : Because meaning influences our behavior—and our behavior is our politics. Or simply our lives. I think “erases,” too, might be the wrong metaphor. Uninterrogated images—images used in place of language, or language used as images (tweets, slogans, aphorisms, etc.)—eclipse meaning. The meaning is still there. It’s just that something very small, but from our perspective very large, is blocking out what is real, what is true.
In a solar eclipse, it could certainly seem as though the sun had been destroyed or drained of fire. That night had fallen in the middle of the day, and perhaps permanently. We know this is not the case. Ideally, our day to day experience with images (on social media, most obviously, but also traditional media, our interactions with others, and most importantly in the way people assimilate media into their speech, their thoughts, their lives) would carry the same measure of calm, the same understanding that what we’re seeing is not what is happening.
Of course the eclipse metaphor fails when you consider the impetus behind the eclipse, as far as the majority of reductive images, slogans, and so on are concerned. A solar eclipse is an astronomical event. An image eclipse is a political event: someone has put it there to deliberately occlude meaning, usually for profit. And the greater the profit, the more wealth becomes concentrated; and the greater wealth is concentrated, the easier it becomes to occlude meaning. I don’t think it’s coincidental that wealth and the reliability of truth are simultaneously more unequal, more destabilized, than they’ve been in this country for a hundred years, nor that “free speech” is both blade and wound in these mutual degradations—the enforcer and the casualty of truth; the enforcer and the casualty of determining whose speech is heard. And this has always been a function of fascism wherever it appears: to concentrate wealth and deplete the world of truth.
Like your muse Susan Sontag, you also wrote a novel (Some Hell, Graywolf Press, 2018). How does Image Control square with your understanding of fiction, and why do you think so few authors do both forms well?
PN : Somewhere toward the end of Image Control, I say something like “A crucial word for all of us is and.” For me, fiction is that “and.” For someone else, it might be movies; for someone rather different, it might be God. While writing this book, I realized it couldn’t only work in one direction. It couldn’t only demystify; I had to respect the impulse toward mystification, the desire to eclipse or occlude. While the book begins in political urgency, it arcs toward spiritual activity, toward insisting that there is something human (necessary) in wrapping ourselves in darkness.
As a novelist, talking about fiction is how I can relate this in a nonfiction project like Image Control. I want us to understand and not understand. Fiction—like all art—is a place, and what we do there is play, experiment, rest, rejuvenate, and otherwise practice our emotional and spiritual relationships with ourselves, our environment, and each other. This is what I think certain authors—at least the ones who aren’t obviously disingenuous—mean when they say their novels are “apolitical.” It’s not that politics aren’t in the novel, and it’s not as if they stake no political claim in the world. It’s just that what they seek is more than politics. Politics is not a totality; otherwise we wouldn’t cry, to our own shock, over certain sunrises or chord changes or the way one character in a film looks at another. These are meaningless experiences that often change our lives. Art is always about that more, about that and.
Which perhaps answers the second part of your question: why so few authors succeed in both the essay and the novel (or the story). Obviously a memoir isn’t an essay, though their opaque and chunky emulsion into the “personal essay” must be confusing for a lot of readers, and has much more in common with fiction, but the essay seems, to me, like a journey that must be completed. A work of fiction doesn’t have to arrive, but an essay certainly does—meaning that the author, by the end of it, has to know what they think. Most American fiction writers don’t seem to know what they think. Which is a very American thing, to not know what you think. It’s hard to talk about this without mentioning the institutionalized obsession, over the last sixty years or so, with the aesthetics of “craft,” with the “rules” of fiction and so forth. Obviously they’re going away. I think the politics of craft, thanks to Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World and the perspectives of other long-marginalized writers, is finally becoming visible for what it is: conservative, reactionary, and ultimately in the service of white supremacy and imperialism.
At a time when social media analytics—not necessarily depth, artistry, or even talent—guide consumer and industry decisions, why is it important to acknowledge how images or simplified communication erases real meaning?
PN : Because meaning influences our behavior—and our behavior is our politics. Or simply our lives. I think “erases,” too, might be the wrong metaphor. Uninterrogated images—images used in place of language, or language used as images (tweets, slogans, aphorisms, etc.)—eclipse meaning. The meaning is still there. It’s just that something very small, but from our perspective very large, is blocking out what is real, what is true.
In a solar eclipse, it could certainly seem as though the sun had been destroyed or drained of fire. That night had fallen in the middle of the day, and perhaps permanently. We know this is not the case. Ideally, our day to day experience with images (on social media, most obviously, but also traditional media, our interactions with others, and most importantly in the way people assimilate media into their speech, their thoughts, their lives) would carry the same measure of calm, the same understanding that what we’re seeing is not what is happening.
Of course the eclipse metaphor fails when you consider the impetus behind the eclipse, as far as the majority of reductive images, slogans, and so on are concerned. A solar eclipse is an astronomical event. An image eclipse is a political event: someone has put it there to deliberately occlude meaning, usually for profit. And the greater the profit, the more wealth becomes concentrated; and the greater wealth is concentrated, the easier it becomes to occlude meaning. I don’t think it’s coincidental that wealth and the reliability of truth are simultaneously more unequal, more destabilized, than they’ve been in this country for a hundred years, nor that “free speech” is both blade and wound in these mutual degradations—the enforcer and the casualty of truth; the enforcer and the casualty of determining whose speech is heard. And this has always been a function of fascism wherever it appears: to concentrate wealth and deplete the world of truth.
Like your muse Susan Sontag, you also wrote a novel (Some Hell, Graywolf Press, 2018). How does Image Control square with your understanding of fiction, and why do you think so few authors do both forms well?
PN : Somewhere toward the end of Image Control, I say something like “A crucial word for all of us is and.” For me, fiction is that “and.” For someone else, it might be movies; for someone rather different, it might be God. While writing this book, I realized it couldn’t only work in one direction. It couldn’t only demystify; I had to respect the impulse toward mystification, the desire to eclipse or occlude. While the book begins in political urgency, it arcs toward spiritual activity, toward insisting that there is something human (necessary) in wrapping ourselves in darkness.
As a novelist, talking about fiction is how I can relate this in a nonfiction project like Image Control. I want us to understand and not understand. Fiction—like all art—is a place, and what we do there is play, experiment, rest, rejuvenate, and otherwise practice our emotional and spiritual relationships with ourselves, our environment, and each other. This is what I think certain authors—at least the ones who aren’t obviously disingenuous—mean when they say their novels are “apolitical.” It’s not that politics aren’t in the novel, and it’s not as if they stake no political claim in the world. It’s just that what they seek is more than politics. Politics is not a totality; otherwise we wouldn’t cry, to our own shock, over certain sunrises or chord changes or the way one character in a film looks at another. These are meaningless experiences that often change our lives. Art is always about that more, about that and.
Which perhaps answers the second part of your question: why so few authors succeed in both the essay and the novel (or the story). Obviously a memoir isn’t an essay, though their opaque and chunky emulsion into the “personal essay” must be confusing for a lot of readers, and has much more in common with fiction, but the essay seems, to me, like a journey that must be completed. A work of fiction doesn’t have to arrive, but an essay certainly does—meaning that the author, by the end of it, has to know what they think. Most American fiction writers don’t seem to know what they think. Which is a very American thing, to not know what you think. It’s hard to talk about this without mentioning the institutionalized obsession, over the last sixty years or so, with the aesthetics of “craft,” with the “rules” of fiction and so forth. Obviously they’re going away. I think the politics of craft, thanks to Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World and the perspectives of other long-marginalized writers, is finally becoming visible for what it is: conservative, reactionary, and ultimately in the service of white supremacy and imperialism.
In
short, we’d probably have a lot more writers in the United States who could
give us great novels and great essays simultaneously were it not for the CIA’s
“literary man,” Paul Engle, and his outsized role in establishing and
standardizing the MFA workshop throughout the country. This is also, I think,
why poets are the strongest moral authorities in contemporary American
literature. American poets have never seemed terribly interested in rules.
Speaking of Sontag, she seems to be a presence in Image Control. What was her creative influence on this project for you? Did you have a particular message or north star when you set out to write this book?
Speaking of Sontag, she seems to be a presence in Image Control. What was her creative influence on this project for you? Did you have a particular message or north star when you set out to write this book?
PN : For a few years now, Sontag has been my little bump of coke. When my attention flags or I get tired or feel stupid, I turn to one of her books—the second volume of her journals is particularly “pure” in this regard—and I feel reinvigorated, reenergized. I’ve listened to her hourlong lecture on classical pornography from 1964 about ten or twelve times, usually while cooking or cleaning, and it still gives me something. Same with her three-hour appearance on C-SPAN during the Iraq War. Unfortunately this sometimes manifests as a dependence. “There’s this Sontag quote,” I find myself saying, or “It’s like that time Sontag told an interviewer…” and so on. But then, so much of her own thinking—on art and politics, on literature, even on spirituality and being “against interpretation”—is pastiched from other writers, usually writers she was reading in French at the time. And so alongside Sontag I have Berger, Teju Cole, Sarah Schulman, Adorno, Angela Davis, Barthes, Maggie Nelson, Harold Rosenberg, Ibram X. Kendi, Foucault, Geoff Dyer, Arendt, Baldwin, Edward Said, Boris Groys, Hal Foster, David Graeber, de Beauvoir, Valeria Luiselli, and dozens of other “idea” writers whose books I’ve underlined and scrawled in and filled with articles and essays I’ve clipped out of newspapers and magazines; and I feel less dependent.
Perhaps what sets Sontag apart for me—and Teju Cole, for that matter, and Valeria Luiselli—echoes back to your previous question. The Volcano Lover is a phenomenal novel, a work of art. Open City and Lost Children Archive are works of art. These are writers who know what they think and whose “and,” whose “more,” is what I aspire to.
Since images (like RuPaul GIFs and thirst traps) often supersede meaningful writing, it was a pleasure reading a longer meditation and analysis of the influence social media has on our ability to communicate. Image Control is a wonderful example of how well-crafted sentences can break through the fascism of simplified language. What other recommendations do you have for readers who want to re-embrace semantic complexity?
PN : Before I answer that: [heart-eyes emoji]. Thank you so much! It always means the world to me when someone notices the language for what it is, so thank you, for real.
As for instructive or illuminating writers (for un-reductive writers), I want to zero in on a single poet and essayist: Joseph Brodsky. Obviously you could read all the writers above and get a deeper sense of language, especially as it affects our thoughts and feelings, our ethical impulses, but with Brodsky the experience is not only unique, but uniquely edifying. And if you have to sample Brodsky in one individual essay, I think “On Grief and Reason”—his ultra-close reading of four Robert Frost poems—is your essay. For most of my life, Frost was another Edward Hopper, someone whose work, I assumed, didn’t really merit close attention, didn’t seem to me dynamic enough or complex enough, mostly because of its cultural associations—quotable, accessible, “American” in all the wrong ways. Worst of all, “common.” Yet just as Olivia Laing, in The Lonely City, brought a depth and sympathy to Hopper’s paintings I never could have anticipated, Brodsky’s intense appreciation for Frost’s work—particularly “Home Burial”—at last gave Frost’s poems to me. Brodsky teaches the magnetism of language magnetically, its push and pull, its energetic charge in each gap. After thousands of books, I’ve never read anyone with an eye like his. You really have to cherish that, when it happens. And to keep your own eye open for those cherishable writers.
Reviewer Claire Foster interviews Patrick Nathan, Author of Image Control : Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist. By Claire Foster. Foreword Reviews, August 27, 2021
Early in
Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist, novelist and cultural
critic Patrick Nathan admits, "I never thought I'd write a book about
photographs and fascism because I knew nothing, I thought, about photographs
and fascism."
Image
Control is, unmistakably, the work of an autodidact. Nathan's curiosity is
evident on every page; so, too, is the breadth of his interests. He writes
about photography in both its professional and social-media forms, yes, but he
also discusses epic poetry, gentrification, literary citizenship, Donald
Trump's tweets, the decay of magazine journalism, and much more. These objects
of study may seem scattered, but Nathan effectively weaves them into a sharp,
passionate, and frequently scathing plea for artistic ethics in what he calls
"fascist times."
In order
to track Nathan's ideas, it is necessary to get on board with his habit of
invoking fascism broadly, emphasizing its aesthetic and imaginative tendencies
over its concrete manifestations. Of course, the latter rely on the former;
Nathan notes that fascism works via "division, isolation, and
elimination," none of which are possible among a citizenry that considers
itself united. Per Nathan, living in fascist times does not necessarily mean
living under a fully fascist regime. Rather, it means existing in a nation
that, first, teaches people to "discard and be discarded" and,
second, denies the social interdependence that Nathan takes as a core human
truth. According to Nathan, no life is coherent or comprehensible in isolation.
"We are all," he writes, "each other's context."
Images
need context as much as people do — or, really, more, since we can talk. One of
Nathan's biggest concerns is the contemporary habit of "ceding to
photographs and other images the kind of authority that belongs to
language." He refers first and foremost to political or moral authority;
The New York Times, he argues, acts as if photographs of suffering Syrian
children could impel readers to oppose Assad's regime, when in fact they have
no such power. But the authority of language is, fundamentally, just the
ability to convey meaning. Words can do it; pictures can't. Images, no matter
how striking or upsetting, cannot make claims or express ideas — but
increasingly, we act as if they could do both.
Nathan
explains this error readily enough. "The consumption and creation of
images," he writes, "like the usage of language, are political: every
choice has behind it an ethics." Yet language can not only contain but
convey ethics; images, no matter how much the viewer may sense their intention,
cannot. According to Nathan, it is impossible to truly learn from an image, to
debate one, or to forge a real connection with one. He draws this idea through
a nuanced condemnation of social media, a "surrealistic environment"
that numbs users to suffering and turns their friends into "a catalogue of
images to consume, reject, and discard." Later, he argues that literary
culture has a similar effect — which seems a stretch at first, or hardly
relevant to Image Control's preoccupation with visual art, but his suggestion
that market pressure on authors to commodify themselves creates cynical
literature is compelling. After all, if a writer has to sell their image in order
to sell books, a library or bookstore suddenly becomes yet another catalogue of
frozen, silent people to accept or reject.
Nathan
often makes this type of associative leap: social media to literature,
Romanticism to Trumpism, Kill Bill gifs to Homeric metaphor. Not all his jumps
are easy to follow, but every one works. His intellectual roving, chaotic
though it may sometimes feel, renders Image Control not only fascinating but
genuinely exciting. It can be a real pleasure to watch Nathan build scaffolding
between his ideas. In one excellent chapter, he draws on the great writer and
activist Sarah Schulman's broad body of work, which he combines with Run the
Jewels' hip-hop, Kimberlé Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality, and more, to
argue that Americans have entered a "gentrified era of political
thinking" in which "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." This insight would be both true and useful without its
varied antecedents; with them, it becomes powerful.
Image
Control can be frustrating at times: polemical, hyperbolic, messy. But the
book's aggravating moments stem from, and are redeemed by, its intelligence,
originality, and heart. Cultural critics rarely frame their work as explicitly
ethical, and Nathan's insistence on doing so is refreshing. He transforms the
idea that images need linguistic context — which could be reduced to a defense
of wall text in art museums — into an ethical system that defends human
complexity against the ever-flattening pressures of both consumer capitalism
and creeping fascism. As proof of concept, Image Control more than succeeds.
'Image
Control' Is A Plea For Artistic Ethics In What Author Calls 'Fascist Times'. By
Lily Meyer. NPR, August 30, 2021.
Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist (Counterpoint), the new book by novelist and essayist Patrick Nathan, is one that looks at looking. The lens, as it were, through which he views the sociopolitical role of the image was ground by Marxism, queer theory, and the thinking of Sontag, Arendt, and Adorno, among other philosophers. The result is fiercely argued, fascinating, brilliant. It is also sometimes maddeningly abstruse. Nathan is good at getting us angry about fascism’s darkly insidious ways and means. He is less convincing about how we might counter it. Being made to understand the mechanisms of a deadly problem when we have so little ability to affect them is, to this reader at least, depressing in the extreme. For starters, the genie of visual propaganda’s digital amplification is not going back in the bottle.
It’s shaky theory to connect photography with the urge to totalitarianism. It vilifies a medium, which in itself is neutral, on behalf of its singular deployments. Nathan’s initial assertion—that we are “ceding” the authority that belongs only to language (because it alone conveys meaning) to photographs, which “can’t say anything at all”—is tenuous. Art “says” plenty of things. It just doesn’t happen to use words. This is analogous to the common claim that other animals don’t have language; of course they do. Much of it is visual: rich, subtly variegated, and largely unknown to us. What other animals don’t have is what we understand as speech.
Nathan goes on — and here we’re only on page two — to state that our “assumption” that images can act as a suitable replacement for more thoughtful means of communication (itself an assumption) “opens the door to fascism, an ideology that requires a schism with reality.” He’s right that fascism operates through filling the void it first creates by isolating a society from sources of truth. But visual art, notably photography, does not intend to assist this severance from reality. If a photograph cannot mean, it cannot intend either.
The proliferation of images shared on social media, a mass personal addiction with a secondary benefit to digital media companies of rendering them the stickiest places in our attention, is another thing entirely. Nathan is on solid footing in explaining that when we allow human relationships to be reduced to consumption of two-dimensional representations, we practice becoming collectible, then disposable—as capitalism requires.
The author relies heavily on Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) to consider the nature of photography, as well he must. He correctly identifies it as eerily contemporary: more than 40 years ago, she seems to have identified the smartphone camera’s work in service of creating each individual’s “atomized reality.” But do photographs “always” aestheticize suffering, reordering it as a preordained “what is meant to be”? Does viewing a photo of an atrocity always preemptively relieve the need to do anything, giving us a hit of restorative sorrow before we move on? True, every picture is framed, contained, and past. But perhaps it is less what is pictured than where: digital media is structured to be endless, an ongoing question without answer. The storytelling instinct toward narrative (beginning, middle, end) is never fulfilled, only met with further yearning for completion. Hence doomscrolling. Hence hour after hour of mindless consumption of visual empty calories. It makes us the pigeon that, in B. F. Skinner’s experiment, was trained to peck 10,000 times on the same spot for a single pellet of feed.
Our brains evolved to scan the visual field quickly for danger and make decisions—there was no time to ponder whether that shadow was a cloud or mountain lion. As a result, we “read” images far more rapidly than text. Their emotive power is immediate. Good for art, bad for the rise of the meme. (Nathan faults both right and left for use of “noise and merchandise” to sell ideology: “I wish I could say otherwise, but the aesthetic of resistance is no different—equally noisy and commodified, right down to the T-shirts, the slogans, and stupid tweets.”)
Image Control is packed with insight, digression, observations both original and rehashed, exegesis of a spectrum of works from Greek myth to Twin Peaks; it is passionate, disorganized, philosophical in both the best and worst ways. Its rants are written as if Trump were still president, which is more true than most of us would like to admit. It’s a “difficult” book, tough to read and at times tough to make sense of. But that is another way of saying necessary: what are we here for but to confront every difficulty? Proponents of fascism are masters of making life a trial for anyone who doesn’t fall in line. To resist is to start by comprehending the mechanisms by which they do so. That is the purpose that Patrick Nathan’s book fulfills.
Not that he gets there straightforwardly. The author often arrives at stunning interiors through broken doors. In a discussion of music apps’ playlist function—its tendency to package and bland down music into a form of aural décor, yet another way the untidy, organic, or thoughtful is capitalistically “gentrified” (a process of commodification applied, as Nathan explains, to many aspects of culture)—he apparently forgets there’s always been bubblegum pop, elevator music, and other types of comfort sound. Since I occasionally play lo-fi in the background have I somehow become a cog in the machinery of corporate dehumanization? Well, I have, but not because of the music. He goes on to make a case for hip-hop as the sole music that embodies resistance, buttressed by Kevin Young’s argument that “American culture is black culture.” The revelation here (with an assist from Freud) is that whatever is most forcibly suppressed necessarily becomes dominant: it must be heard somehow. Black experience preceded everything America was or became.
Image Control is more successful when it is descriptive than when it attempts to be prescriptive, but that might be my cynicism talking. What does Nathan believe is to stop our slide into unthinking collaboration with power systems that require a pliable and unitary populace that will accept subjugation to corporate dictatorship—the endgame, I would maintain, of fascism?
“What is needed is a queering of compassion,” he avers. “To move beyond the truly rare (but extant) binaries of perpetrator and victim, it’s important that every individual recognize their existence in a continuum of conflict”—conflict being the primary driver of the capitalist marketplace and thence autocracy.
But how to accomplish this? How to dislodge the image from its current primacy in the public sphere, with its reductive and capitalist-friendly gentrification of the difficult and different? Can it really be as simple as . . . words?
He’s not proposing a law that all photos be accompanied by captions of a minimum of 300 words. Rather, our redemption, and our resistance, will come from literature. Imagining ourselves into the lives of others is the wellspring of compassion, Nathan believes.
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.
That fiction is requisitely complex and essentially human is indisputable. Yet here Image Control unwittingly promotes another binary, the very structure the book is devoted to dismantling. It might be hard, but it’s humane to take it case by case. Image bad, writing good? No, it’s all good. Except when it isn’t.
Photography and Its Hidden Power. By Melissa Holbrook Pierson. Hyperallergic, September 8, 2021.
