Confronting "Neoliberal Aesthetics": Part I

Since the mid-1980s, Walter Benn Michaels has been one of Michael Fried's biggest backers and most interesting interpreters. Yet, in a humdinger of a critical article from early 2011, Michaels lumps Fried and Jacques Rancière in with what he calls "neoliberal aesthetics." Is he serious? Is this all just some storm in a teacup drummed up to stir the pot, as it were? And what would does Michaels mean with that label anyway?

Let's back the boat up for a moment to the most interesting bits of Rancière's Notes on the Photographic Image, a piece singled out for scrutiny by Michaels.  Rancière introduces a meditation on Hegel's reading of Bartolome Esteban Murillo's Two Boys Eating Grapes and Melon (oil on canvas, ca. 1645; Alte Pinakothe, Munich), which we see at left. Hegel, Rancière reminds us, had called attention to the "carefree" attitude of Murillo's boys; they seem to possess such brio and nonchalance that they transfigure both the generic type of the picture and the low social class into which they would have been categorize by the elites of the ancien régime who commissioned such pictures. The boys' unexpected self-possession—this "suspension of the opposition beween activity and passivity" (14)—marks an important departure from the alienation of the beholder from the image that Rancière sees as the legacy of Michael Fried's absoprtive tradition. "Presenting the characters in the scene as completely absorbed by their task is, for him," Rancière writes, "the means by which the painters of that period ... posed and resolved the big question of artistic modernity: how can a work be made coherent by excluding the spectator from its space?" (14) 

Defining and defending the "fourth wall" of the picture-plane, painters of absorptive pictures were not simply attempting to compel visual attention by making their figures appear to flee in horror from the beholder's ambit—as Fried famously proposed of Gericault's Raft of the Medusa in Absorption and Theatricality. Instead, by Rancière's account, they were simultaneously imposing a conception of art as a disciplining mechanism, policing life inside and beyond the image. The logic of absorption, he contends, runs this way: "The active absorption of characters by their task is, ultimately, only their passive absorption into the space of the painting. What they are or do matters little, but what is important is that they are put in their place." (14) What he is proposing, I think, is a conception whereby art is made—or, art registers—the resistance between the aesthetic aims of the image-maker and the subject being depicted. 

And photography is privileged medium for this kind of confrontation as artist and non-art (photographic subjects) stare each other down so repeatedly in it. Thus, what we see when Walker Evans makes a pictorial masterpiece by photographing the kitchens of poor farmers in 1930s America is not only his compositional genius: "it is the correlate ability acquired by the characters themselves [that is, the poor farmers] to play with the image of their own being and of their condition, to post it to walls or to set it up before the lens." (15) Photographed subjects matter, Rancière claims; they help make the art. Far from being the extension of the modern tradition that puts beholders in their place by systematically excluding them, then, photography is "the bearer of this tendency to break the [alienating] historical complicity between the art of the photographer and the aesthetic capacity of his subjects." (15)

Fair enough, one might be tempted to say, but how does this have any bearing on neoliberalism? By what means can we draw connections between Rancière's conception of the photograph and a globally-diffused economic ideology privileging "privatization, deregulation, and financial and trade liberalization" (8) backed by the strong military force of an otherwise weak state, as one recent analysis defines neoliberalism? Yet, these are the connection for which Walter Benn Michaels tries to argue in a typically gnarly article. Taking up the kind of low-genre picture lionized by Rancière, Michaels begins with the seemingly innocuous question of why Diderot didn't like still life painting according to Fried. Rehearsing arguments from Absorption and Theatricality, Fried's Diderot appears either unmoved by the lack of difficulty in convincing the beholder that his/her presence had been effectively negated before a still life or, paradoxically, irritated by the theatricality that comes with the inevitable recognition that the painter must have set up this arrangement only to make a picture that would deny the beholder's presence. (2) For Michaels, this paradoxical demand "that the painter be as unconcerned with producing an effect on the beholder as the young girl reading [in the painting he has made] is" (2) has less to do with Diderot than with the post-modern present. In our times, it defines "an antimony—the works of art we value are those which seek to produce no effect on the beholder, but without the effort to produce an effect on the beholder (without the effort, as we might say, to make something that can be seen), there would be no works of art." (2)

Often conceived as split between nature and culture, man and machine, intent and accident, photography's great contemporary allure -- and especially that of Roland Barthes's concept of the punctum, the incidental photographic feature that idiosyncratically "wounds" a beholder by accident -- is that it offers a means of addressing the contradictory demands of this antimony in one coup. The fact that photography "characteristically displays images over which the photographer does not have complete control and thus makes it possible to value just those images (the punctum) means that what the photographer has tried to do ... may have nothing to do with the beauty, value or meaning of the photograph. The difficulty of imagining an artist who isn't trying to create a work of art is resolved by imagining instead an artist whose efforts to create the work are irrelevant to its meaning." (3-4) But, by arrogating Barthes and the punctum's unknowable effects into his absorptive tradition, Fried has made for himself some truly unholy alliances. "Probably no one would think to call John Cage an absorptive artist" (5), Michaels quips with wry understatement, before provocatively narrating the structuring parallels between Barthes's anti-intentional, "death of the author/birth of the reader" model of textuality and Cage's refusal to dictate to musicians and audience in pieces like 4'33", which leave composition to sonic concatenations of chance.

With the connection to Rancière's arguments now shifting into view, Michaels summarizes the position this way: "4'33" can thus be understood as an exemplary case of the way in which a radicalized absorption—produced by the commitment to not impose one's intentions on the listener/beholder/reader, to not perform for an audience—becomes indistinguishable from an account of the work of art in which it is theatricality that's radicalized—the only thing that matters is the audience's response." (6) Where Rancière had viewed photography as exemplary of art's fundamental co-production between artist and subject, Michaels sees resolution to the paradoxical demand that the effective work can't be intentionally made to work effects in the erasure of boundaries between work and beholder's experience of it—the very theatrical condition that Fried had abhorred in Minimalism!

All of this, we might imagine, could make Rancière very happy as his is a critique Fried's view of art. Yet, Michaels then turns the argument another way. Just as it is specious to massage the definition of effective art into that which has to be made free from the intent to produce effects, it is even more misguided to try to claim that embracing a view of art that ennobles to co-producer its degraded, down-trodden subjects thereby empowers them. The differences from the modernist tradition of, say, James Agee and Walker Evans are here stark: "Where for Rancière ... photographs are an occasion for the peasants to assert their aesthetic capacities, for Agee they are a kind of demonstration of what it is to be so 'appallingly damaged' that you no longer have any such capacities ... The crucial difference here is just the difference between seeing the beggar boys and peasants as damaged by our falsely hierarchical vision of them and seeing them as damaged by conditions that our vision may sanction or critique but that it did not produce." (12) Capitalist economics and not elitist "ways of seeing" have produced the misery depicted in these scenes and it is a piece of romanticizing clap-trap, Michaels claims to imagine that a theory of photography that gives agency to the represented dispossessed does anything to alter their dispossession.

What, though, is the connection between the crisis of confidence of Fried's absorptive object and Rancière's identity politics? According to Michaels, they are knitted together by the massive increase of economic inequality resulting from neoliberal policies of the post-War era. A neoliberal problematic thus informs:

"the relation between both the rise in economic inequality and the hegemony of anti-discrimination[,] on the hand[,] and the crisis of absorption and the emergence of a theory of the work of art which, imagining the escape from the artist's intention, insists on the primacy of the beholder and (especially in the photograph) of the subject, on the other. If, in other words, Rancière is right to see a certain egalitarian ambition in a photography that seeks to embrace its 'poverty' ... it's an egalitarianism of a very particular kind—the kind that's critical of hierarchies of vision but has no purchase on the hierarchies embodied in rising Gini coefficients and the redistribution of wealth upwards that is at the heart of neoliberalism. The political meaning of the refusal of form (the political meaning of the critique of the works's 'coherence') is the indifference to those social structures that, not produced by how we see, cannot be overcome by seeing differently. It's this refusal of form that is thus as [surely, should be "at"] the heart of neoliberal aesthetics." (15)

So, whereas Rancière's beef with Fried is for being to much of an elitist modernist whose absorptive tradition wants to keep the great unwashed out and put them in their place, Michaels's Fried is not enough of a modernist—who gives up on intentional form to quickly and capitulates to postures of identity politics that have been fellow travelers with a period of unprecedented accumulation of capital in the hands of the wealthy. Michaels fleshes this last point out instructively at the end of the article: "The crisis in absorption produced an aesthetics that proved to be deeply compatible with the changes in capitalism which ... emerged politically in the late 70s and have flourished ever since. At the heart of these changes was a commitment to the importance of efficient markets and an egalitarianism defined as equality of access to those markets. ... Thus the emergence of a theory of the work of art ... as offering above all the opportunity to see and be seen differently has its political role to play, simultaneously advertising the attractions of neoliberal equality and serving as its good conscience." (19)

Before I go back to read the portions of Fried's work on photography most under scrutiny here, I want to jot down the following question, which came to mind while re-reading this material. That is, the confusion of art and nature to which Michaels refers (6-10)—the demand that art aspires to the "condition of nature" whereby it seems to be formed without a purpose or intention—and the "perfect equilibrium" (13) between art and non-art to which Rancìere appeals ... all of these (often directly) betray debts to the aesthetics of Kant. Kant is more or less contemporaneous with Fried's hero, Diderot. But, he is also coeval with the prophets of economic liberalism like, say, Adam Smith. So, if Reaganism/Thatcherism produce the neoliberal conditions for the rebirth of this Kantian problematic, did Smith's classical liberalism in the late eighteenth century similarly produce the conditions for a Kantian aesthetics—or even for the emergence of the Diderotioan absorptive legacy itself?

The Cloven Image: Barthes, Bazin and Ellenbogen

Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida acts as a nearly talismanic force in recent writing on photography. No less influential in cultural studies of the 1980s, Barthes early work on the photographic image—work produced under the influence of major historical factors like the influence of structuralist linguistics, the force of abstraction in art, and the coming of American-style consumer culture to post-War Europe—has not stood up as well. That said, the writing of the early Barthes, like that of his contemporary André Bazin, betrays an interesting and enduring conception of the photographic image as importantly cloven, cleft in two.

This point becomes readily apparent in Barthes’s “The Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), an essay that heralds a by-now-totally-second-nature reading of visual strategies of mass-media advertizing images such as this one at left. There, Barthes shows us, text and "connotative" cultural values struggle to apprehend and give order to the fundamental, "denotative" order of photography, which amounts a primitive ostention of the real. “From an aesthetic point of view,” he writes, “the denoted image can appear as a kind of Edenic state of the image; cleared utopianically of its connotations, the image would become radically objective, or, in the last analysis, innocent.” (277)

This utopian possibility of image freed from cultural codes manifests uniquely in photography because of certain ontological considerations:

This utopian character of denotation is considerably reinforced by the paradox already mentioned, that the photograph (in its literal state), by virtue of its absolutely analogical nature, seems to constitute a message without a code. Here, however, structural analysis must differentiate, for of all the kinds of image only the photograph is able to transmit the (literal) information without forming it by means of discontinuous signs and rules of transformation. The photograph, message without a code, must thus be opposed to the drawing which, even when denoted, is a coded message. [...] [end 277] In the photograph—at least at the level of the literal message—the relationship of signifieds to signifiers is not one of ‘transformation’ but of ‘recording’, and the absence of a code clearly reinforces the myth of photographic ‘naturalness’: the scene is there, captured mechanically, not humanly (the mechanical is here a guarantee of objectivity). Man’s intervention in the photograph (framing, distance, lighting, focus, speed) all effectively belong to the plane of connotation; it is as though in the beginning (even if utopian) there were a brute photograph (frontal and clear) on which man would then lay out, with the aid of various techniques, the signs drawn from a cultural code. Only the opposition of the cultural code and the natural non-code can, it seems, account for the specific character of the photograph ... (277-8)

So, where painting, drawing or any other hand-made visualizing strategy can only ever move within always-already coded cultural planes, the “causal” role of the depicted target in photography means that it marks a confrontation between nature and culture, the pre-linguistic real and the orders of coded language. (278) As Bazin will do in even more high-flown ways, Barthes sees the photographic image as an epochal coupure—as necessarily and fundamentally other than those images made by hand. Photography finds “humanity encountering for the first time in its history messages without a code. Hence the photograph is not the last (improved) term of the great family of images; it corresponds to a decisive mutation of informational economies.” (279) And part of the point of this kind of semiotic analysis is to show how and why that otherness is being co-opted, subjected to the tedious banalities of commercial language to shift units in advertizing.

In his roughly contemporaneous “The Photographic Message” (1961) Barthes gives a concise mission statement for cultural interpretation of this kind: “The analysis of codes perhaps allows an easier and surer historical definition of a society than the analysis of its signifieds ... We can perhaps do better than to take stock directly of the ideological contents of our age; by trying to reconstitute in its specific structure the code of connotation of a mode of communication as important as the press photograph we may hope to find, in their very subtlety, the forms our society uses to ensure its peace of mind and to grasp thereby the magnitude, the detours, and the underlying function of that activity.” (210) So, rather than asking what a society believes, we ask instead how it implements or constructs those fantasies it wants to believe. That seems like an interesting and productive enough idea.

            But, in what follows, it is hard to know if Barthes is attempting to diagnose the ideological beliefs of post-War consumer society about photography or if he is “telling it like it is”? What he claims certainly stretches credibility: “What does the photograph transmit? By definition, the scene itself, the literal reality. From the object to its image there is of course a reduction—in proportion, perspective, color—but at no time is this reduction a transformation (in the mathematical sense of the term.” (196) The photograph is a “perfect analogon” from what it depicts, a message without a code. (196) Just as he frequently presents statements like these in incredibly cagey ways—undercutting them with subclauses like "so it seems" or "as it were", subtleties that Krauss usually effaces—so Barthes complicates this position somewhat. He separates the culturally-laded, connotative dimensions of photography (what will later be called the “studium” in Camera Lucida) from the denotative act (of the punctum). (197) Then, he likens the sight of photography to interpreting an ideographic language, “which mix analogical and specifying units, the difference being that the ideogram is experienced as a sign whereas the photographic ‘copy’ is taken as the pure and simple denotation of reality.” (207) Again, is he endorsing this view or is he just reporting? It's not entirely clear.

We might take Barthes’s formulation of “message without code” recited by Krauss as a useful shibboleth for parsing the pieces by Bazin and Ellenbogen. For, where Bazin wants to see photography as not only a message without a code but effectively a union of message and messenger, Ellenbogen casts photography as all code. Indeed, contrary to Barthes, Bazin is entirely committed; he begins “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1960) with a series of weird claims about how photography should be seen as an expression of an undergirding “mummy complex”—a drive to embalm, encase, or otherwise protect human life against the ravages of time. (5-6) If the arts from 1500 are marked by a new demand for “realism,” they are also ruptured by the invention of pictorial perspective—an “original sin” which puts into opposition the idealizing aesthetic demand for representation of spiritual ideas with the primordial, psychological demand for “the real.” (7) With the coming of photography and then film in the nineteenth century, this intolerable tension was relieved. Painting and sculpture could abandon representation entirely, while the photo-based media could satisfy this fundamental human need for “realism.” (7) For this reason, Bazin views photography as “clearly the most important event in the history of the plastic arts” (9) since it delivers something absolutely, qualitatively different from any other kind of visualization previously known: “Only a photographic lends can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer [so, indexicality of the physically-proximate/causal variety is very much in play]. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction: it is the model.” (8)

We get a very different story in “Camera and Mind” where Josh Ellenbogen examines Marey’s photographs of targets invisible to the human eye. Unlike the depictions of objects or people implicitly imagined in the photographic practices discussed by Barthes and Bazin, Marey’s events have a completely non-optical existence: 

“If we put the matter into Peircean terms, we can say the photographs are indexical relative to the events they picture, in that a causal link exists [end 92] between them and their referents, but that their status as icons has become problematic, at least as the idea of iconicity is typically understood relative to photography. That is, to the extent that by iconicity we mean a match with a sensory counterpart, such a match is not possible for photographs of the sort Marey made, as they have no counterpart that they can try to match.” (93) 

Indexes without iconicity, these images don’t represent the data that Marey wants to study; they are his data. Thus, contra Barthes: “Marey’s practice centers on interposing a code ... between the observer and the event he or she studies, creating a visual trace that makes the event register in a scientifically useful form. Minus this interposition, this willful presentation of events in a language of glowing lines and sinuous curves, Marey would have had nothing to examine.” (93) So, far from being a message without a code, Marey’s images can only be a message because they are encoded. While Ellenbogen goes on to make a convincing case for how Duhem’s conception of the idealization of objects into abstracted categories is necessary for scientific thinking can serve as a useful framework for understanding how and why Marey’s images were supposed to work, he makes some interesting comments on Duhem’s conception of translation. (101)