Neoliberal Nonfictions

The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z

Daniel Worden

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813944173
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

With the ascendancy of neoliberalism in American culture beginning in the 1960s, the political structures governing private lives became more opaque and obscure. Neoliberal Nonfictions argues that a new style of documentary art emerged to articulate the fissures between individual experience and reality in the era of finance capitalism.

In this wide-ranging study, Daniel Worden touches on issues ranging from urban poverty and criminal justice to environmental collapse and international politics. He examines the impact of local struggles and global markets on music, from D. A. Pennebaker's infamous Dylan documentary Dont Look Back to Kendrick Lamar's breakthrough album Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. He details the emergence of the hustler as an icon of neoliberal individualism in Jay-Z's autobiography Decoded, Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcom X, and Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo" journalism. He looks at how contemporary works such as Maggie Nelson's memoir The Red Parts and Taryn Simon's photography series The Innocents challenge the moral simplifications of traditional true crime writing. In his conclusion, he explores the dominance of memoir as a literary mode in the neoliberal era, particularly focusing on works by Joan Didion and Dave Eggers.

Documentary has become the aesthetic of our age, harnessing the irreconcilable distance between individual and society as a site for aesthetic experimentation across media, from journalism and photography to memoir, music, and film. Both a symptom of and a response to the emergence of economic neoliberalism, the documentary aesthetic is central to how we understand ourselves and our world today.

1

Money Trees

In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson famously uses the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles as a metaphor for “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”1 Jameson seeks to make clear that the vertiginous experience evoked by the hotel’s symmetrical towers, rounded lounges, and glassed elevators is not unique but instead an emblematic condition of postmodernism. To make this claim, he juxtaposes the Bonaventure Hotel with an account of helicopter flight from Michael Herr’s 1977 work of literary journalism about the Vietnam War, Dispatches. In his reading of Herr, Jameson argues that the book’s lexicon, which “fuses a whole range of contemporary collective idiolects, most notably rock language and black language,” typifies the breakdown of narrative in the late twentieth century: “This first terrible postmodernist war cannot be told in any of the traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie—indeed, that breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown of any shared language through which a veteran might convey such an experience, among the principal subjects of the book and may be said to open up the place of a whole new reflexivity.”2 Herr’s refusal of fictional tropes gestures, in Jameson’s account, to a proto-articulation of a “whole new reflexivity,” later to be described as “something of the mystery of the new postmodernist space.”3 From our vantage point today, it seems rather clear what aesthetic form this “new reflexivity” has taken: documentary.

Dispatches opens with the abdication of objective journalistic standards: “We knew that the uses of most information were flexible, different pieces of ground told different stories to different people.”4 What this means is not that reality has no meaning, but instead that there is, in Herr’s words, “not much chance anymore for history to go on unselfconsciously.”5 In his reflexive prose, Herr positions himself centrally among the soldiers he interviews and travels with, often juxtaposing official narratives released by the U.S. government about the war with the messy experiences of soldiers on the ground. This juxtaposition produces the book’s own methodological rationale, an argument for the necessity of the documentary aesthetic in the 1960s and 1970s. As Herr notes, if “conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it,” then Herr’s focus on personal experience and emotion strives to represent the war in its reflexive, mediated complexity.6 Indeed, Herr describes his role as that of documentary storyteller: “So we have all been compelled to make our own movies, as many movies as there are correspondents, and this one is mine.”7 By blending techniques from film into prose, Herr captures the juxtapositions that define what we can now think of as a failed precursor to the more secretive U.S. military engagements of the 1970s and 1980s. Jameson’s negative comparison of Herr’s Dispatches to the “war novel or movie” only underlines what makes this reflexivity unique: in its combination of narrative breakdown, first-person experience, and vernacular language, and in its origins as long-form, impressionistic war reportage for Esquire, Dispatches is a work in the documentary aesthetic.8

That the category of “documentary” was not used by Jameson in the 1980s and early 1990s to describe postmodern aesthetics is understandable. After all, documentary was often critiqued during postmodernism as a naive, exploitative mode in photography and film.9 Similarly, its literary equivalent of the period, in which Herr was often included, the New Journalism, seemed opposed to postmodernism in its sometimes archconservative politics and in its insistence on the role of the author as a major mediating force. Yet for Jameson, Herr’s documentary prose marks something like an attempt at cognitive mapping through its collective vernacular, even if it ultimately represents less a totality than vertigo in his reading. Indeed, as Jameson’s invocation of Herr implies but does not examine, a whole swath of documentary art from the 1960s to the present has aimed to create new modes of conceiving the relation of subject to structure, exploited to totality. Documentary art—ranging from works like Herr’s Dispatches to conceptual artworks like Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75)—emerged to represent poverty, exploitation, and modes of being in the postwar United States while also using experimental modes to critique the older tradition of documentary that, as Rosler argued, “has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.”10 The “moralism” that Rosler points out is indicative of both New Deal–era documentary’s polemic messaging and the logic of formal purity that came to be associated with modernist aesthetics. With Rosler and others working in the documentary aesthetic, documentary art moves beyond these origins and limits. Today, documentary experiments continue in an even more prominent fashion, including celebrated literary works such as Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015); photography projects like Trevor Paglen’s Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes (2010), Taryn Simon’s Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015), and Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo’s Border Cantos (2016); installation art projects by Ann Hamilton and Fred Wilson; and digital documentaries like the video game Kursk (2018) by the Polish game studio Jujubee and the web-based Offshore (2013), an interactive documentary by Brenda Longfellow, Glenn Richards, and Helios Design Labs.

As Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg argue in their book Documentary across Disciplines: “Contemporary documentary practices reach across media and across disciplines to form a rich site marked by imperatives at once aesthetic and political. Far from any notion of ‘fly-on-the-wall’ immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity, such practices understand documentary not as the neutral picturing of reality, but as a way of coming to terms with reality by means of working with and through images and narrative.”11 If contemporary documentary art exists in an expanded field—no longer defined by medium specificity or simple binaries of truth and fiction—then it may be that documentary offers a framework for representing our immediate history and contemporary moment in a way that can make visible the structures of exploitation emblematic of the present.12 When critics like Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle or Walter Benn Michaels, in very different ways, find in film and photography a renewed assertion of cognitive mapping or aesthetic autonomy, what they may be noticing is less a commitment to the concepts of totality or autonomy than it is documentary form itself. The documentary aesthetic is newly prominent today but has a history of documenting both subjective experience and structures of exploitation that coincides with the emergence of finance capitalism in the 1960s.13 Therefore many seemingly postmodern works might have different meanings if viewed as works in the documentary aesthetic.

For example, Jeff Wall’s well-known 1982 photograph Mimic (fig. 3) would not be classified as documentary under traditional definitions, but by thinking of it as such, I hope to make the point that documentary form is a mode of artistic production today that surpasses its earlier, more rigid definitions. Mimic uses the aesthetic of a documentary genre, street photography, even though it is a posed and carefully composed photograph restaging an incident that Wall witnessed on a Vancouver street. Walter Benn Michaels has argued that this photograph represents the difference between individual feelings, ambitions, and expressions, and the economic system that, in his view, renders those sentiments irrelevant and even harmful to the pursuit of economic equality. The photograph represents an act of prejudice, a tense encounter between a white, seemingly working-class couple and an Asian man. The Asian man represents, here, a new, educated, upwardly mobile immigrant class, resented by the white man as his prospects point downward. Wall’s photograph, for Michaels, asserts its autonomy as a photograph, and in turn the photograph’s form “assert[s] the autonomy of structure in relation to affect.”14 Racial difference and class difference do not correspond and are indeed in an inverse relationship in the photograph. Yet the irreducibility of prejudice to exploitation is made available through the photograph’s documentary presentation, through the use of a mode of photography that we expect to represent subjective experience as evidence of a structure of exploitation.

Figure 3. Mimic, Jeff Wall, 1982. Transparency in lightbox, 198 × 228.6 cm. (Courtesy of the artist)

In Michaels’s view, Wall rejects the generic conceits of street photography. This rejection makes it all the more compelling to read the photograph’s form as a refinement of documentary aesthetics, a shift away from the familiar genre of street photography and toward a more rapacious documentary aesthetic. What has led critics to think of Wall’s photograph as postmodern is how the subjective experience of prejudice, to borrow Douglas Crimp’s phrasing in his landmark essay “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” is “a function not of presence but of absence.”15 That is, the racism expressed by the photograph’s white male subject represents resentment and hate but does not immediately represent the economic and racial structures that have produced that feeling. As a restaging of an experience, Mimic documents an act of prejudice that becomes, in the photograph, evidence of a shift in economic relations, as the prospects of the white working class begin to dwindle as manufacturing and industry are reconfigured under globalization. Yet the value of the photograph as documentary is that it can only represent this structural condition by representing something else, a feeling produced by exploitation but one that exceeds its cause. The personal feelings and ambitions captured in the photograph are central to the project of documentary. Emotional and personal relations are not a false front for structural analysis to topple over. The feelings of the subjects in Mimic are visible alongside the structural relations of those very subjects, and the photograph captures this tension. Just as Herr’s Dispatches places experience in relation to other, official discourses about the Vietnam War, Mimic juxtaposes feeling with structure, and in so doing it participates in the documentary aesthetic by presenting an account of the social world.

Documentary practices have expanded since the 1960s, and this expansion has been facilitated by the untethering of documentary from narrow constructions of political perspective, factuality, and medium specificity. Important documentary projects of our age cross media—they include journalistic writing classed under the headings of the New Journalism, literary journalism, and submersion journalism; conceptual and archival art practices that critique the museum as an institution and seek to break down the walls that separate the museum from society; memoirs that have populated bestseller lists from the 1990s on; major works of comics nonfiction like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991) and Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1996); and popular music across genres that trades in personal authenticity. Documentary produces a way of thinking of everyday life’s distance from social structures as a site for aesthetic experimentation amid what seem to be intractably compromised conditions. Turning everyday life, real objects, and the structures that exploit and give them meaning into art through documentary form presents the contradictions of our contemporary moment as operating through both the unprecedented ubiquity of finance capital in everyday life and a surplus of subjective experience determined by, yet sometimes in excess of, those structures.

In this chapter, I will focus on works that foreground the tensions between individuality and systems beyond individuals in ways similar to Herr’s Dispatches and Wall’s Mimic. These works cross media forms, and they are particularly in sync with neoliberal culture, as they foreground the ties between personality and economy. In D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film Dont Look Back, Charlie Ahearn’s fictionalized film about graffiti and hip-hop culture Wild Style, Ed Piskor’s comics series Hip Hop Family Tree, and Kendrick Lamar’s album Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, individual styles are bounced off of consumer culture, collective imaginaries, corporate exploitation, and global capitalism. These works are part of rock and hip-hop cultures, arguably the now-universal languages of our time, and they capture how experience and structures work in a negative relation under finance capitalism.

Cultures of Resistance

D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back chronicles Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour in England. As a work of cinema vérité or “direct cinema,” the film records overheard conversations rather than direct engagements with the camera or filmmaker. In one striking moment in the film, though, the agency of the filmmaker is more apparent than usual. Interviewed by a reporter from the BBC’s African Service, Dylan is asked how he got started as a musician: “How did it all begin for you, Bob? What actually started you off?” Dylan responds with an “um,” and then in an unprecedented bit of editing, the film cuts to a younger Dylan playing “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the assassination of Medger Evers, in front of a group of African Americans in a rural setting. Keith Beattie details that this scene—“which was filmed in early 1963 during a voters’ registration rally at Silas Mage’s farm in Greenwood, Mississippi—was shot by Ed Emshwiller while working on a television programme dealing with civil rights.”16 The applause at the ...