The Beauty of a Social Problem

Photography, Autonomy, Economy

Walter Benn Michaels

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226421186, 9780226210261
• eBook ISBN: 9780226210438
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Bertolt Brecht once worried that our sympathy for the victims of a social problem can make the problem's "beauty and attraction" invisible. In The Beauty of a Social Problem, Walter Benn Michaels explores the effort to overcome this difficulty through a study of several contemporary artist-photographers whose work speaks to questions of political economy.

Although he discusses well-known figures like Walker Evans and Jeff Wall, Michaels's focus is on a group of younger artists, including Viktoria Binschtok, Phil Chang, Liz Deschenes, and Arthur Ou. All born after 1965, they have always lived in a world where, on the one hand, artistic ambition has been synonymous with the critique of autonomous form and intentional meaning, while, on the other, the struggle between capital and labor has essentially been won by capital. Contending that the aesthetic and political conditions are connected, Michaels argues that these artists' new commitment to form and meaning is a way for them to depict the conditions that have taken US economic inequality from its lowest level, in 1968, to its highest level today. As Michaels demonstrates, these works of art, unimaginable without the postmodern critique of autonomy and intentionality, end up departing and dissenting from that critique in continually interesting and innovative ways.  

1

Formal Feelings

The Death of a Beautiful Woman

“Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death—was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death then of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”1

This passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) is also one of the first poems in Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder (2005), a collection centered on the murder of Nelson’s aunt Jane in 1969, four years before Nelson herself was born. At the time and for a long while after, it was thought that Jane’s death was one of what were called the Michigan Murders, seven young women brutally killed in Washtenaw County, Michigan, over a period of two years. In 1970 a man had been arrested and convicted for what turned out to be the last of the murders; the assumption was that he had probably killed Jane too, and Jane itself is written on that theory. Almost literally as the book was going to press, however, Nelson learned that another man—with no connection to the Michigan Murders—had been arrested and accused of murdering Jane. Nelson’s subsequent book, a “memoir” called The Red Parts, is about the trial and conviction of that man, and Poe makes an appearance in it too. Watching a TV show (48 Hours Mystery) about the murder of a “beautiful Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga” (the producers of 48 Hours have given her a recording as part of their effort to get her to participate in a show about Jane), Nelson is “taken aback” to hear someone on the show explain his obsession with this crime by referring to Poe, “who once declared the death of a beautiful woman to be the most poetic topic in the world.”2 But Poe is only incidental to The Red Parts; he is more central to Jane.

One way that Nelson herself imagines this centrality has importantly to do with Poe’s sexual poetic, which, she suggests in an interview, is an example of the “ethically unsound” practice of treating beautiful women as if their lives were “more grievable” because somehow more valuable than those of others.3 Hence it matters to her that Jane (unlike, say, the Peace Corps volunteer) was not particularly beautiful, and, at least partially to prove it, she puts Jane’s picture on the cover of the book (the only photo in the book, except for an author shot). But the picture plays another role as well, one that matches the other interest Nelson has in Poe. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” she tells the interviewer, Poe “was describing glibly and perhaps notoriously facilely how to make the perfect poem” (3). “Glibly” and “facilely” refer to the poem’s famous prescriptions (“what’s the perfect amount of lines? Oh, 100 lines”). But the ambition to make a “perfect poem,” which is, she says, also “part of the fight of my book” (3), is not so easily dismissed. The idea that a woman ought to be beautiful is one thing; the idea that a work of art ought to be perfect—that the beauty of the work of art is bound up with its perfection—is something else.

Nelson herself insists on this difference in the poem called “A Philosophy of Composition (Reprise)” that comes near the end of Jane (almost as near the end as “A Philosophy of Composition” comes near the beginning; it seems clear that Nelson means them to have a kind of bracketing effect). “Does it matter if I tell you now / that Jane was not beautiful?” the “Reprise” begins; it goes on to describe Jane, her skin “white and chalky,” her eyes “set close together” (215). But the fulcrum of the poem is where it switches from describing Jane to describing Nelson’s “favorite photo” of her: “Her face and torso loom up / against a deep blue sky / a great, momentary albatross of cloud. . . . A bright block of light . . .” Her face here is half bleached out, a function of the structure of the photograph, and the point is no longer that Jane is “not beautiful” but that the picture “is”: the last words of the poem are, “The whole picture / is beautiful.”

So the beauty of the photo is made out of someone who was not beautiful. More precisely, we will want to say that the kind of beauty the photo has has nothing to do with the kind of beauty the person it’s a photo of might or might not have. This is emphasized by Nelson’s insistence that it is the “whole picture” that is beautiful, where the invocation of the whole (especially, as we will see, in the context of Poe; his terms will be “totality” and “unity”) calls attention in particular to the form of the work of art, to its ambition to be “perfect” in a way no person can ever be. More particularly, we might say that just as the photograph of Jane must be made beautiful even though its subject is not, the poem Jane must be made into a “whole” even though the occasion of its production is loss—Jane’s death. So when Nelson thanks her teacher Mary Ann Caws “for her faith . . . that pain has, or can at least sometimes find, form” (223), she is describing the poem as an effort to turn her feeling into something else, to make her pain into poetry.

Of course, what exactly it might mean to find a form for pain is another question. Is the goal to find a way of expressing the pain? Or is it to find a way of overcoming the pain, of releasing oneself from it? In Poe, these questions are forestalled by the fact that the death of the beautiful woman is imagined as the subject of the poem instead of (rather than in addition to) its cause. Indeed, the whole point of the essay “The Philosophy of Composition”—or at least, the thing that made it so notorious—was its effort to separate the writing of the poem from its author’s feelings. “The Raven” was composed, Poe says, “with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem,” and the reason it’s about death is not because the poet is sad but because he wants to make his readers sad.4 The “province of the poem,” he says, is the “effect” of “Beauty,” which “excites the sensitive soul to tears” (1377). Thus the most “legitimate of all the poetical tones is Melancholy,” and when you ask yourself, “Of all melancholy topics, what according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?,” the answer is “obvious”: the death of a beautiful woman (1378–79). The speaker in “The Raven” will thus have experienced the pain (of “sorrow for the lost Lenore”) and the reader of “The Raven” will (hopefully) be moved to tears, but the writer of “The Raven” remains calm.

Taken together, then, “The Raven” and “The Philosophy of Composition” function to disconnect the speaker of the poem from the poet, the subject of the poem from its origin—which is just the opposite of what Nelson does. And in this she repeats Whitman’s reading of Poe in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and Dickinson’s enactment of the relation between pain and form in “After great pain” (“a formal feeling comes”). In Whitman, it’s the disappearance of the female mockingbird and the boy’s identification with the now “solitary” male mockingbird that marks his birth as a poet: “Demon or Bird . . . never more shall I cease perpetuating you, / Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, / Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me.”5 Poetry here is produced by loss, and poems (“the cries of unsatisfied love”) are the never-ending (“never more”) reenactment both of the loss and of the poet’s effort to overcome it, to bring the “she-bird” back. Form follows feeling in Dickinson also, but here the function of the poem is not so much to repeat the feeling of loss as to eliminate feeling as such. The organs of feeling, “the Nerves,” “sit ceremonious, like Tombs,” and, as its “Feet, mechanical, go round,” the poem imagines its own formal structure as a kind of anesthetic, producing “Quartz contentment, like a stone.”6

There is, then, in both of these texts something like a psychology of the poem and its origin; it arises out of loss or pain and it seeks either to reproduce and immortalize the consciousness of that loss (“the cries of unsatisfied love”) or to eliminate consciousness altogether—“First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.” Jane too has its psychology, although it’s not precisely aligned with either of those options. Substantial sections of it are adapted from Jane’s diary, and the very first diary poem (also the first poem in the book, “Dear”) begins, “I understand many people write for therapy—one’s own,” while the very last poem (at least, before the “Epilogue”) ends,

Thank you. Therapy is over.

Love

Janie (218)

The idea here is that writing about your feelings is a way of helping you cope with them, maybe more like working through than letting go, since even though the diary does have what Nelson describes as “this kind of weird, very Emily Dickinson–esque thing where she leaves off with dashes,” in the main, she says, it’s “fairly trite” (interview, 5).

But the fact that Janie, at least, imagines a curative power for writing doesn’t, of course, mean that Jane does. The last lines of the “Epilogue” (the last lines of the whole poem) are

Above her, the sun is still trying to burn through the mist. Strange, she thinks, how the sun so often appears as a pale circle, not the orgy of unthinkable fire that it is. (221)

Whether or not you are tempted to think of these lines as embodying both the attraction and the limits of the effort to find form for pain, they certainly do present an image of the disjunction between the form of the sun (“a pale circle”) and the “unthinkable” thing that “it is.” That disjunction is at the heart of “After great pain,” where the poem appears as the repression rather than the commemoration of the experience that occasioned it.7 But it’s also at the heart of Nelson’s effort (what she calls her “fight”) to make Jane. For if one way to imagine form is as a kind of mediation—the pale circle that makes visible the unthinkable violence of what “is”—another way is to imagine it as itself a kind of violence: “the form was a fight,” Nelson says, a “fight” to make something “perfect.” And when she goes on to joke that “a less hip publisher than Soft Skull” would have made her call the book Jane: An Elegy, instead of Jane: A Murder, she is marking both the proximity and the distinction between the two different acts that her parallel construction—Jane: An Elegy/Jane: A Murder—has redescribed as two different genres. They both require a death, but only the murder understands the poem itself as a weapon.

The point here is that a poem about Jane, like a photo of Jane, is obviously a way of remembering her, but a photo of Jane where the beauty of the “whole picture” replaces her lack of beauty is also a way of not remembering her, of replacing her with something else. The point would be exactly the same if Jane had been beautiful; a picture of something beautiful is obviously not the same thing as a beautiful picture. That’s why Poe insists, in effect, that even the beautiful woman has to die in order for the poem to be beautiful. And that’s why Poe and Nelson both invoke the ideal of perfection and why Nelson’s insistence on the beauty of the “whole” aligns her entirely with Poe’s declaration that “Unity” is “the vital requisite in all works of art” (1431). In fact, it is precisely because of the overwhelming importance of unity that Poe begins both “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle” by considering the question of the poem’s length and insisting that “the phrase ‘a long poem,’ is simply a flat contradiction in terms” (1431).

The reason for this, he says in “The Poetic Principle,” is that a poem is “deserving of its title” only insofar as it “excites” “the soul,” and the soul can only take so much excitement—about “half an hour[’s]” worth. After that, it “flags—fails—a revulsion ensues—and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such.” In “The Philosophy of Composition,” time is also crucial, but it’s defined less in relation to excitement than to attention. “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting,” Poe says, it necessarily dispenses with “the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world intervene, and everything like totality is at once destroyed” (1375). Thus time is connected to unity because unity is understood to consist in the poem’s ability to make an “impression” on you or to have an “effect” on you, an effect that, when you stop reading, is necessarily dissipated. And “totality” functions as a marker of difference—between the work and the world, between the effects produced by the work of art and the effects produced by something else, between what is inside the work and what is outside it.

There is thus a difference between the question of whether the person needs to be beautiful and the question of whether the poem ought to be perfect—the person belongs to the world; the poem—at least insofar as it strives for perfection—doesn’t. And this difference might plausibly be understood as the difference between a set of ethical or even political concerns and a set of aesthetic ones. For example, the question of whether some lives are or should be more “grievable,” which is to say more valuable, than others might be understood as political in a way that the question of the possible beauty or perfection of the work of art is not. But this opposition (emptying the aesthetic of the political) is certainly not one that Nelson would herself accept, and, in fact, we might better understand the politics of the grievable as opposed not to the aesthetic but to another politics (a politics for which the question of grievability would not arise). And we might understand the aesthetic of perfection as opposed not to the political but to another aesthetic, an aesthetic defined by its repudiation of the commitments that accompany the entire intellectual apparatus of perfection.

Indeed, this aesthetic—the critique of perfection, of unity and totality—is today an entirely familiar one. We can see its origin in the terms suggested by Poe himself, that is, in his idea that it’s the “unity” of “effect” (1375) that’s spoiled when the affairs of the world interfere. For, from the standpoint of the twenty-first century—from the standpoint, that is, of a moment when the claim to unity has come to be identified with the claim to autonomy—unity and effect seem to stand in an aporetic relation to each other. Indeed, even in Poe, there’s a certain tension in his characterization of the unity of the work in terms of both its effect on the reader and its separation from the world, since the minute the effect of the work matters, the world does too—it’s only in the world that the work can have an effect, and it’s only the world that the work can have an effect on. So it seems that to separate the work from the world should be also to separate the work from its effects, and, of course, it’s precisely the refusal of this separation that has been at the heart of aesthetic theory—in particular at the heart of the critique of modernism—for the last half century.

Thus, for example, it’s precisely insofar as modernism turned Poe’s separation from the world into a commitment not only to unity but to the work’s autonomy that what Douglas Crimp characterized as the “break with modernism” consisted above all in a critique of that autonomy, of the idea that “the art object in and of itself”could “have a fixed and transhistorical meaning.”8 And, of course, to unfix the work’s meaning is precisely to deny its unity by linking that meaning to the different effects it has in different times and places and on different readers and beholders. Thus, as Fredric Jameson put it in Postmodernism, “What we generally call the signified—the meaning or conceptual content of an utterance—is now rather to be seen as a meaning-effect,”9 and this imbrication of the meaning of the work with its effects—this insistence that the work of art is constituted by its external as well as or instead of by its internal relations—has been fundamental to the theoretical commitments of a wide range of writers, from Rosalind Krauss to Jacques Rancière. Perhaps the most elegant formulation of the basic idea, however, is Jacques Derrida’s gloss on what became, to his dismay, a kind of slogan for deconstruction—“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (especially when translated as “there’s nothing outside the text”). The gloss was his remark that he could just as easily have written “there is nothing outside the context,” which might have been, he said, less “shocking” but would have meant “exactly the same thing.”10 The idea, in other words, was not to choose between text and context, between what is inside the work and what is outside it, but to call into question the possibility of establishing a coherent distinction between them.

Part of what’s striking about Jane, then, is its desire not to question but to assert this distinction (its desire for the “perfect” poem), a desire that, in the wake of the d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Formal Feelings
• 2 Neoliberal Aesthetics
• 3 The Experience of Meaning
• 4 The Art of Inequality: Then and Now
• 5 Never Again, or Nevermore
• Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index