- The way I describe the
book is, in the blurb that
you all have, was keying in
on the problem of empathy.
And it turned out you write
books for long periods of time,
and when they land is
somewhat of an accident,
but it so happened, I think,
that things were very keyed
up around this topic,
this term, so I thought
I'd say a few things about
that as a way of framing
what I think is happening for my thinkers
in the way they're understanding the rule
of emotions in public life more generally.
So, I wanted to read you a few headlines
from the last couple years, so,
Empathy Is Dead in American Politics,
New York Magazine, 2017.
We Need Empathy in the Age of
Trump, Huffington Post 2016.
We're not even in the
age of Trump in 2016.
We Are Overdosing On
Empathy, The Guardian.
Shocker, Empathy Drops 40% in College
Students Since 2000, Psychology Today.
Is Empathy Dead? Forbes.
Empathy, The Most
Valuable Thing They Teach
at Harvard Business School,
Harvard Business Review.
In Syria Attack, Trump's Heart Came First.
So, what I want to indicate
by the locations of all these
things is how widespread
the interest in empathy is.
I want to suggest how
elevated our expectations are
for it's efficacy as a
political moral tool.
And I wanna suggest how confused we are.
In Syria Attack, Trump's Heart Came First.
The fact that the New
York Times can say this,
and think it's perfectly
self-evident that you can
bomb something out of your
heartfelt love for something,
is an indication of where we are in
thinking about the role of the heart.
In response, I put into
Google, in response to
teaching empathy, which
has been much discussed
in the academy for the last,
I would say almost 20 years.
There are 49 million hits,
so Harvard Business School,
actually, was running a course
on empathy and management.
And so, it's everywhere,
and I think it also is
maybe not fully digested as a term.
We have a lot of expectations for it
but maybe not a deep understanding of it.
So I wanted to tell you a little bit
about the history of that word.
Empathy is coined in
the late 19th century,
and it is meant to describe
a physiological capacity.
A capacity of the nervous system,
and it's 100% a physical thing,
and it's related to emotions,
it's a way that emotions
are conducted through the body,
and from bodies to other bodies.
It has no psychological
apparatus whatsoever.
That changes when, well,
it sort of changes.
In the early 20th century,
psychologists and aestheticians,
people thinking about art,
adopted the term to describe a,
describe the process of
projecting oneself into,
and identifying so wholly with an
object, that you fully understand it.
I want to just point out
that we're talking about
an object, we're talking
about Keats' Grecian Urn,
not other people, so it's about relating
to artworks, paintings,
books, whatever, music maybe.
It's not until 1946 that
the term starts to change
to its contemporary meaning,
the one that we recognize,
and first it's just in
the specialized discourse
of psychology, and it's
about entering fully
into the experience and
feelings of other people.
It then rockets upward
in usage in the 1950s,
and the rate of increase
in usage never slows down.
It doesn't plateau, we're still going up
this way in its usage, so it
became something, I think,
incredibly useful, and so part of my book
might address why in the
1950s and ever after,
very more rapidly, empathy
started to be a term
that we felt we had to use,
and seemed so valuable.
Because, in contrast, the
women of my book are going
to sense this turn toward
emotions as a political
and aesthetic tool, and resist it.
So the idea that we are
only now encountering
this flooding of the
public sphere with feelings
of various kinds, is not a
phenomenon, of the last 20 years,
but a phenomenon that actually dates back
to the emergence of tremendous,
overwhelming suffering after World War II.
Night, the Holocaust, for instance, is not
really properly started to grapple
with until the early 1960s, and Hiroshima
has perhaps never been
fully grappled with.
But we don't really treat
these things for about,
there's a kind of time lag
for how we treat enormous
and overwhelming suffering
that really begins
more or less in the early 1960s.
But indications of that
turn are fully visible
to different people, so I
chose, the reason I ended
up writing about the women
in my book is that I was
interested in the scandals
of tone that they produced.
I was suspicious myself
that empathy could do
all the things we think it can do.
And if you wanted to
look for scandal of tone,
it turned out you better
look for women writers.
You're not really gonna
find men castigated
for their failure of
feeling in very many places.
So the first, one of the first things,
I can't say actually this
was the first, but one of the
first things I looked at
was Eichmann in Jerusalem.
And the response to Eichmann in Jerusalem,
about which a great deal has been written.
And what interested me, and
this is where I wanna talk
a little bit about some of
the ideas that I gleaned
around unsentimentality from
these different writers.
What interested me was
Hannah Arendt's embrace
of the term heartless, that
was leveled against her
by a friend, Gershom Scholem, who
thereafter was less of a good friend.
So, he called her heartless,
and she said, "You're right,
I am heartless," and she defined
that in two different ways.
She said, "I don't have
a love for the people,"
and many of you may know
this particular quote.
"I can only love things
in their particularity."
And the heart is used
to cover, the tact of
the heart, which is one of its meanings,
is used cover up unpleasant realities.
One of her principle charges in Eichmann
and in much of her work,
is to face reality.
So what does that mean? For her, it meant
not facing the suffering of the other.
That this was actually not
where you got to the problem.
You got swept away in
certain kinds of emotional
complications, so two
things that she writes
right around the same time, she's editing
On Revolution, which is her book about
the French and American revolutions
as she is attending the Eichmann trial
and sending her first
dispatches to the New Yorker
which is where it was
originally published.
And so those ideas are
very present to her.
And so she's describing
what she understood
as the boundlessness of something
like empathy or sympathy.
So she thought that the
problems with empathy
were threefold, one,
that the heart, that it
was used to euphemize what was happening
in some real situation, and
that it was paying attention
more to the feelings of the
listener than the actuality
that you're trying to talk
about, so it was distorting.
She said it's always
unknowable, in On Revolution,
in that it produces a
problem of hypocrisy.
Her argument was that the heart is hidden,
and so the only way, you can't verify it.
And so it always, it actually
injects a kind of doubt
into the testimony of heart
because you can't verify it,
and then you get, the problem
of hypocrisy enters the scene.
And that empathy is
unpredictably motivating,
so that if the French
revolutionaries could be
overcome by feeling their
feelings for the masses
of poor in Paris, and that
that feeling could overwhelm
principal and lead to the terror, which is
basically her argument in On Revolution.
It was not similarly
motivating for the American
revolutionaries, that the suffering of,
black suffering in slavery was
not symmetrically motivating.
It had no role whatsoever in their framing
of the Constitution, now,
she actually approves of this
because she wants to argue for principal
and not for emotion as a
foundation of the republic.
But it is also important to
recognize that she didn't
think that suffering
would automatically elicit
any particular response,
much less a particularly
good one, that it was
actually highly volatile
in its effects, and highly
uneven in its ability
to compel a witness of some kind.
So that's one set of problems
that the book talks about.
As I was working on the book,
as I realized that there
really isn't an account
of unsentimentality
in literary criticism, cultural criticism.
We have massive bookcases full of accounts
of the sentimental,
and that really started
with feminist criticism
in the '80s reclaiming
the sentimental as something
worthy of examination.
So, basically, what do you
do with Uncle Tom's Cabin?
Perhaps the most significant
book of the late 19th century,
if you can't have an
account of what sentimental
literature does and how it works.
So then, ever since there's
been a great deal of interest
and discussion of this, but
no matter where you look,
also philosophers,
thinking about Adam Smith
in the 18th century and world sentiment,
there's all kinds of work in these areas.
But, even though from modernism til now,
unsentimentality is the
mode of serious work.
We don't know what it
is, and I wanna argue,
and I do argue in the
book, is that it's not
the absence of something,
it's not the absence
of inappropriate feeling,
it's not the absence
of exaggerated feeling,
it's not the absence of
maudlin or melodramatic feeling.
It's actually the presence
of something else.
And this is what I'm trying to articulate.
What actually is unsentimentality?
How could it be useful to us?
And the way I see it in different
ways throughout the book,
is that it's a sort of discipline
of perception and representation.
I think empathy has a
sentimental fantasy in it.
And I think empathy is used,
we don't say sympathy anymore
because we understand the
assymetry of sympathy.
We say, oh well, sympathy is
the powerful for the powerless,
but in fact empathy works exactly the same
way in the way that we use it.
Maybe not technically if you
went back to certain things.
So I think empathy is our
more sophisticated way
of pulling in the
vectors of sentimentality
into our emotional life and
our public emotional life.
Because I don't think it's
absolutely 100% identical
with sympathy and
sentiment, but I think it's
in the constellation of
concepts that go with that.
So empathy should technically
mean only one thing,
and that is that you fully understand
and perceive the other
person's point of view.
It doesn't say that you have any
particular feeling about what you see.
It should not technically
mean that you care,
or that you have, or that
you're motivated to action
by seeing this, it
really should be defined
by your ability, strictly speaking,
but that is not the way we use it.
That is not how it operates in our
contemporary public discourse.
It operates more around the empathy
would automatically compel a certain
kind of relationship to suffering.
And the point here is
that it actually doesn't.
So if on the other side
of this constellation
of concepts that belong
together with sentimentality,
empathy, sympathy, we have something broad
and undefined called unsentimentality.
And not everything, so you can say
something is nonsentimental,
which means it doesn't,
so you could say that the
emotions in a nonsentimental,
there are emotions in
the nonsentimental work,
but they're properly
scaled and they're adequate
to the situation, so
they don't suffer from
the scaler problem of
sympathy or sentiment,
which is that their
sentimental interest has
gone off the scale of
reaction between the situation
and the emotions exhibited
about the situation.
So nonsentimental would merely mean,
the emotion's there but it's good.
We approve of the way that it's used.
Where I would say unsentimental
is something different.
And when it fails, and
it fails with these women
frequently, that's why
you have the scandals.
It veers into the realm
of coldness, tactlessness,
brutality, as opposed to merely,
it moves towards the
other end of the scale.
So, I wanna talk about, here's one aspect
of Arendt's view of this,
I mean there's a lot more
in that book about the
style of representation
where she talks about
a particular witness's
report of his experience in the Holocaust
that she feels produces
something like an unsentimental
version of talking about, not suffering,
but the conditions that produce suffering.
So those style questions
go all through the book.
So, I wanna turn a little
bit to her good friend
Mary McCarthy, because
this, in the pairing
of McCarthy and Hannah Arendt we have,
we have Arendt sort of
articulating a political philosophy
of unsentimentality with
Arendt, with McCarthy
trying to understand
its aesthetic practices.
So, if Arendt would always say,
well you have to face reality,
McCarthy will talk about facing facts.
And McCarthy, do people
know Mary McCarthy's work?
She's less, some young people are like
I have no idea who you're talking about.
And older people are like,
of course, The Group.
So, McCarthy was an
essayist and a novelist
and a critic and an
autobiographer and memoirist,
and she's known today
principally for her memoirs
I think more than her fiction.
The Group is read pretty widely,
but not nearly as much as
Memoirs of Catholic Girlhood
or something like that.
So that's who McCarthy
was, but she was a really
important critic, and her friendship
with McCarthy was a
really interesting one.
So, facing facts is something
that's all through her work,
and I wanna talk a little bit about that,
but I wanna use an
image from that chapter.
From her encounter with
Hannah Arendt, to try to
describe what kind of relationship
they wanted to create.
So when Hannah and Mary met
each other for the first time,
they had a terrible encounter,
they were both mutually
offended and more or less
wouldn't speak to each other.
Six years later, they're
on a subway platform
after a meeting at Politics, so they were
constantly in each other's company.
At a meeting at Politics,
which was a little magazine
at the time, that's a
little magazine that's just
a small circulation magazine,
it doesn't mean it's tiny.
But those were very potent things.
And they met on the
subway, and Hannah Arendt
said to McCarthy, "We need to stop this,
we think too much alike,"
and it's been characterized
as their party of two,
McCarthy and Arendt.
But I like to think of
it through another phrase
that was used to characterize this scene,
which is that they were alone together,
and I think that this is
the kind of relationship
they wanted to create between
people who shared a world.
So the image is of them
looking out at the world,
waiting for the subway, but
doing it in each other's
compathy, looking outward, but together.
Alright so you're not
looking at each other,
and so much of our discussions
in the past 50, 60 years
about how to overcome some
of the problems of otherness
in the world, and power
differential, have come
out of the face to face encounter,
and they're actually
asking you not to reproduce
the face to face encounter,
but to share the world.
And sharing the world is one of
Hannah Arendt's most important concepts.
That's what Politics is,
is sharing the world.
From our different perspectives,
but, how do you do that?
And you can't just say, okay well
do it, what does that mean?
So McCarthy spent a lot
of time thinking about
what it would mean to face
the facts of the world.
And for her, facts are
really an interesting thing.
So I'm gonna just check
my list because it's
hard for me to remember, is that
a fact is not just a piece of information.
For her it can be an occurrence in history
like the death camps, an event in culture,
like a new art form or a new artist.
A fact can be a document like a novel
or a transcript of a
hearing, it can be a person
like Richard Nixon, or
a character in fiction
like Charles Bovary, and
these are all actual examples
I pulled from her work where
she said this is a fact.
So, you cannot possibly
know what a fact is
by the what of it, you can
only know it by what it does.
And so for her facts, are
these irreducibly disruptive
parts of our world that cause
us to change our opinion,
or cause us to revamp or
reconsolidate how we view
the world, and so they're
always irritating,
they're always impolite, and
she was, in the late 1940s,
early 1950s, working to
produce a magazine with
Hannah Arendt and other
people, called The Critic.
And the number one concern for her,
which I find so interesting
in light of our conversations
about fake news now, is that
she thought there wasn't
enough facts in our public
discourse, and that we
actually didn't, and were
unwilling to be disrupted by them
in the way that facts
should properly operate.
That you know that if
you're not in a little bit
of pain, you are not
actually absorbing that fact.
That you're not being
forced to alter yourself
or to alter your consensus
around something.
So they saw certain forms of solidarity
as actually anesthetic
because, so it protected
you from the pain of that encounter.
And the pain of that
encounter was the pain
of self-alienation, finding
yourself somewhat a stranger
to yourself as you absorb
some new fact about the world.
And I just find that,
so what that requires,
and I can go on and on
about what that requires
stylistically, but I
think that's just such an
important thing, is that
part of this discipline
of unsentimentality is going
to mean you are uncomfortable,
you are in pain as a reader
and also as a writer.
That this should, so she
tells this great story
in an essay that I think
many people know, but,
where she talks about a
short story she had written,
and how embarrassed she
was about herself after
she had written it because
she was trying to pretend,
she realized that she
had made company with
an antisemite in this
weird way, and she said
it was actually writing
the story and capturing
the details of that story, it's
the real facts of that story
that made her so
uncomfortable with herself.
And she thought it would
be uncomfortable for
the reader, which indeed it was.
So part of this mode of
fact-gathering, fact confrontation
in this unsentimental,
sometimes brutal way,
it means you are going to be
in a kind of perpetual state of
discomfort if you're in a proper
relationship to the world.
And, I think in some ways, Hannah Arendt's
and Mary McCarthy's
unpredictability on certain
kinds of issues was a result
of their relationship to facts.
They're willingness to
be altered by new facts.
Both of them are quasi-aligned,
or they're aligned
with the New York intellectuals,
but they were always pissing
off the New York intellectuals,
whether it was Eichmann in Jerusalem,
or Reflections on Little Rock, or whether
it was one of McCarthy's
short stories, or The Group,
and part of that was,
they were disruptive of
the consensus, and sometimes
an unspoken consensus.
So, I wanna turn to another pair.
You can kind of zigzag
anywhere in the book
from one or to the other of the writers
because they're all kind
of trying to work through
the same issues, but in
their quite different idioms.
I wanna talk about Joan
Didion, so Joan Didion
was actually very much a
student of Mary McCarthy,
and you can see in her early work,
most of you won't recall,
that earlier in her
career she was what she
called a utility infielder
for the National Review, William
Buckley's National Review,
and she was one of their literary critics.
And she is not nearly as
good as she becomes later.
You can see her figuring
out her own style,
figuring out her own
aesthetic, and you can see
her doing some, what I
think of Mary McCarthy bits
when she is trying to
work these things out.
But the very last essay she
wrote for the National Review,
which is sort of about
where she's gonna become
a highly visible person, so
it's like the early '60s,
she writes about contemporary
literature and its
failure to grasp the weirdness
of contemporary reality.
And basically her argument
is that the writers
improvise their way into a
cul-de-sac and then go limp.
So there's a little phallic
imagery in the description,
but what she actually
goes on to elaborate,
if you look at some other
work from around that time,
is that she wants to produce
a certain kind of directness.
Again, painful directness,
but it's in the realm
of syntax here, so she wants
writing shorn of qualification.
The ways that you're
hiding your actual opinion,
or you're trying to comfort the reader
by not giving them the full expression
of whatever thing it is you're to report
is causing you to kind of, the sentence is
kind of collapsing and being eviscerated
by your own lack of moral courage,
and your own unwillingness
to actually wound the reader.
Didion is very up front about the fact
that this is something you have to do.
That as a writer it's
your moral responsibility
to sort of, let's say, tell it like it is,
but interpret it like it is
and give it to the reader.
And if that disrupts their
self-delusion, so be it,
that's your actual job,
so she accepts the role.
I mean, I'm not sure
McCarthy fully took in
the fact that she was going to
produce a lot of discomfort.
She seemed to always be surprised by it.
Didion was never surprised by it, right,
she knew full well, so she writes a very
provocative essay in the
New York Review of Books
called Unsentimental Journey about
the rape of the Central Park jogger.
And, more or less, what
that essay is about
how deluded New Yorkers are about
the state their city is
in, and the fantasies
of being heroic for either the
perpetrators or the victim.
I mean, the perpetrators who
ended up, obviously as you know
being wrongly accused,
and rushed to judgment,
or the young woman, but in no way facing
the kind of conditions that
would produce such an event
in New York in Central
Park in the late 1980s.
One thing that goes through
these is the necessity,
your discomfort in reading the work,
which might speak to some of the scandal
that surrounds the work,
or some of this discomfort
that's in the reviews of
the work when it comes out.
And then I'm gonna turn
last to Diane Arbus.
Diane Arbus is one of the
most important photographers
of the late 20th century,
and her show, her posthumous
show was an enormous controversy.
It attracted more viewers
than any show at the MoMA,
Museum of Modern Art, had
attracted since something
called the Family of Man
exhibit in the late 1950s.
100,000 people waited in
line to go see this exhibit.
You know that not many
art shows produce lines.
I mean they weren't all
in line at the same time,
there weren't 100,000 people in New York
waiting to get into Diane Arbus,
but it was constantly
packed, oversubscribed.
And something like 200,000 copies of her,
of the exhibit catalog
sold, and that's just,
a popular selling museum
exhibit catalog is just not
a thing we know, it's just
not a thing that happens.
And part of it was, I
think, and I think it's
demonstrated in lots of the
reviews of this work is that
people could not figure out
what she was doing here.
Was she being nice or not?
Was she being cruel and voyeuristic,
or was she being kind and empathic?
And this debate has never
ended around Arbus' work.
Including, there was a show
in 2003, a retrospective
of her work, which reintroduced
many of the same issues,
but now they've been kind
of neutralized because
we say, well, she's a
genius, so we don't know.
But I've taken Arbus' work to represent
our confusion around how we look at
what we might perceive as suffering.
She did not necessarily see the subjects
of her photographs as sufferers,
but they were perceived
by the people who looked
at the photographs as sufferers because
she photographed sexual
outcasts, genetic anomalies,
nudists, and they were called freaks,
if you want to conglomerate most, that was
the accusation hurled at her work.
And at the end of her career,
or at the end of her life
I should say, she photographed some people
in a, what was called a home
for the mentally retarded
at the time in New Jersey,
and these photographs
are really, really interesting.
But Arbus had always said
that she was not empathic,
and I said, well why don't
we just take her at her word,
figure out what she
thinks is going on here.
And so, she actually
spent quite a bit of time,
if we look at her, the last retrospective,
figuring out how to make
the camera capture reality.
So she said one time in a
class, "I love Ansel Adams,
but I don't recognize
what's in his photographs."
She said, "His trees look
like Christmas presents."
You know it's like, I
don't have any objection
to Christmas presents,
but they're not trees.
And so she was saying
how can someone who's
reputation for clarity
could produce something
so unlike the world as she knew it,
she really thought the camera was not as,
it wasn't so obvious that the
camera could capture reality.
That a lot of work had to go into that.
And I'm not gonna belabor
all the different techniques
that she used, but she
actually spent quite a lot
of time thinking about
it and experimenting
to produce what she
thought was coming closer
to the reality of the situation than
accepting that distance and
aestheticizing that distance.
Yeah?
- Oh well you just answered
my question.
- Oh.
- Her objection was
that, she felt that Adams
was prettifying.
- That's right, exactly.
And she said, I mean,
in this way, she might,
so I talk a lot about
Susan Sontag's review
of her work here, but Sontag
said one of her axioms
on photography is the photograph
makes everything beautiful.
Her one caveat to that is that dwarves
are dwarves and not beautiful.
So Arbus was like the one
person who disrupted her system
which was really
interesting to me, but yes,
Arbus senses the same thing
that Sontag does, which is
that the photograph aestheticizes
whatever it touches.
So even if you take a
picture of a garbage can
heaped over with garbage, and
you do it in black and white,
and you have really nice
contrast, it's like beautiful.
It's not garbage anymore.
She wanted to make garbage
be garbage, or you know.
And I'm not saying her
photographs were of people
who are garbage, but she wanted
things to be what they were.
And she demonstrates how
technically difficult it is.
And so if you work through
some of those techniques,
and her various comments on the sociality
of making photographs,
she's basically saying
you have to get away from being nice.
And I think that her
argument ultimately was
that being nice makes
that other invisible.
Your niceness becomes
the frame of viewing,
not who they are and what they are.
And so she was trying to
work past her niceness,
not just as a social
form, but as a technical
and photographic problem,
so I'm gonna wrap
up here with just one comment.
One of the things, in thinking
through the techniques
and the reception of
this unsentimental work,
is that these real encounters
with reality, if you want,
left us, leave us without
certainty, predictability,
or consolation, we're denied
the gratitude of our sympathy.
Owed to our sympathy, or
empathy, since I'm saying
it's actually kind of
collapsed into the same thing,
and we're denied the
intimate company of others
in these pursuits, so
it's a pretty rigorous,
pretty uncomfortable
doctrine and practice,
but for all of that, it's
promising a more active
and possibly transformative
relationship to that reality
if you accept the terms
that you're offered.
Arbus liked to photograph celebrities too,
who are undeniably beautiful.
I don't think, I think she's that like,
I'll talk about Arbus
and then I'm gonna flip
back to Simone Weil, Arbus
came out of the fashion world.
And she was, I think
that's a deeply influencing
context for thinking about her work.
That fashion, so that
I think it's very clear
in her work that perfectability is
completely achieved through mediation.
In fashion photography you
make everyone look perfect.
So part of the argument
I'm making in this book
is that that perfectability
leaves anyone imperfect
as if they're stranded in
their own imperfection.
As if their imperfection is their fault.
That you should be perfect,
and so we do everything
to achieve that perfect outward look,
but in fact we're always gonna fail.
Arbus called that the
gap between what we want
to produce as people, just
walking around the world.
There's a gap right now
visible to you, but not me.
I am thinking I'm doing something,
and you're like, oh she's
doing something else.
So we always see that gap
between intention and effect.
And so she thought that was interesting
and she was always photographing that,
because she wanted to make that ordinary.
It's not unusual to have a
gap, everybody has a gap.
Everybody fails in
their self-presentation.
So it's not particularly, it's not,
it shouldn't be a lonely fact
of life that you're a failure.
That you can't achieve
the effect that you want.
And that effect is some
idealized version of whatever.
It's not, this condition
of failure is simply
a universal human, so you
can be completely beautiful,
but there's still gonna be a gap.
She has these great
photographs of socialites.
And they are quite beautiful,
but there's still the gap
there, and she wasn't, so I don't think,
and there's certainly a debate about this,
but I don't think the
point was, haha, I think
the point was, it's everywhere.
Even when you're a nudist,
you look like you're
dressed up because you're holding a pose
and you have a bracelet on,
and all of a sudden you realize
you're actually putting clothes on
the person when you're looking at them.
So there's really interesting,
I mean not because
you're disgusted, but because something
about the social posture
has produced a kind
of clothing for them,
so that I think she's,
I don't wanna say normalizing,
cuz I really hate that word,
because norm has some idea
of where you should be,
and I really mean, but I think it's
just ordinary that this happens.
And so, this was what
she was trying to get at
with all that work with the camera.
So now, on the flip side, Simone Weil,
maybe most of you don't
know who Simone Weil was.
She was a Jew turned Christian mystic.
She was a radical, part
of the anarcho-syndicalist
movement, now anarcho-syndicalist means
a kind of anarchist,
leftist movement, that was,
in relation to, but not
identical with communism.
So communism for her
was way too bureaucratic
and top-down, but she was a labor activist
all of her short life, she died at age 34
of tuberculosis and self-starvation.
She was an amazing writer, and
she was a weird, weird person.
Weird, weird doctrine, I should say.
When she had her conversion experience,
she never wanted to be
baptized, and there's
lots of different arguments
for her about baptism.
But she had a very, very severe notion
of what the meaning of Christianity was,
and it required the kind
of de-creation of the self.
So you were supposed to kind of disappear,
and so there's a lot of
different work in this.
But beauty is, so she
is very concerned about
the imagination, she thinks
the imagination pulls
us away from the reality of the world.
But beauty is not imagined,
the world is beautiful.
Many forms of human craft
and art are beautiful,
and they actually draw us to the world
and connect us to the world.
But the real emphasis
in her work is on pain.
Cause pain is the brute
materiality of the world,
making it unavoidably not you.
Right, so beauty doesn't
challenge the limits,
your limits in the same
way that pain does.
Pain makes you aware that you
are not everything, she says.
And our thinking that we are everything is
the root of injustice for
her, in very complicated ways.
But basically that's true, so beauty has
a place in the universe, it doesn't have
to be an ugly universe,
it just has to be real.
Original meaning of the word
aesthetics is, education by
the senses, it has nothing
to do with beauty whatsoever.
It's about having your self
changed and I suppose refined,
through the senses, through
hearing, music, through touch,
through sight, sound, and
its educating those by
training them with
different kinds of objects
that produce some relationship.
So it's really not about beauty.
It becomes about beauty
in the 18th, 19th century.
But it's not about
beauty in a Greek sense,
and all of them understand there's lots
of little bits where I talk about this
in the different
chapters, is really about,
and this is very true for Sontag.
It does not have anything
to do with beauty for her,
it has everything to do with the education
of the senses and the
training of consciousness.
So it's all about
encountering things that are
different that upend your
sense of norm, or reality.
It's being de-familiarized,
it's very modernist
in that sense, but she's
really talking about,
she even says, when she's
talking about Leni Riefenstahl,
what is beauty anyway,
cause you can make something
like the Nuremberg rallies gorgeous.
So beauty is something, so anyways,
she's trying to get us off
that way of seeing things,
so I think, in that
way, in that very, very
old-fashioned classical way
of thinking about aesthetics,
I would say it is an aesthetic project,
but it's not a project of
making things beautiful.
That is another branch of aesthetics,
but it's not the only branch, I would say.
So Arbus very much wants, I mean she works
really hard with the camera
to give almost a sense
of the tactile to her photographs.
She really exaggerates
certain kinds of lighting.
It's very, she used to say,
"I'm hyped on clarity,"
and she would experiment
with these different cameras
to get as clear a photograph as she could,
but that might produce
acne, and, you know,
it might make visible certain things that
a softer focus would eliminate.
This is a sort of personal story, but,
so when I went in, I was, my mother was
dying of a really gruesome
form of cancer, and I was,
I got really interested in
the notion of helplessness.
So you can have all the empathy you want,
but you can't do anything,
so what do you do with that?
That's a thing, the
Arbus chapter's very much
about helplessness, this kind
of pedagogy of helplessness.
How to be okay with helplessness.
So I was really interested in that.
And so I was looking for,
I think I was kind of
looking for people to
rescue me from some of these
things by giving me a
way to think about them.
And to see if,
- [Man] Try to find a crutch?
- Yeah I was looking for a crutch.
I was looking for relief
I think, actually,
cause then I can totally make it mental
and don't have to feel
anything, so that's something.
But, so I think I had a strong
sense of the possibilities
of some of the stuff, I
mean then your work leads
you in completely, that
was just one piece of it,
and then you just get
led in all these strange
directions by the things that you find.
And I looked at many
more people for this book
than are in here, like Janet Malcolm,
and Flannery O'Connor,
and Elizabeth Bishop,
and, oh, Talented Mr.
Ripley, Patricia Highsmith.
And maybe some others who
just, Elizabeth Hardwick,
who had elements of
this, but I didn't think
had the self-consciousness
about the project
that the people I ended
up writing about did.
They had a lot more, they
were much more attuned
to what they were doing,
and so it made it easier
for me to tinker around with their thought
because it was such a
self-conscious project.
So then it goes in different directions.
What I think I became
more aware of over time
was the cost of this project, right,
like this is not offering
you anything happy,
and part of the problem, the cost to them,
the cost to you, it's
not like, ooo we have
an answer, now we all feel good.
It's like, ooo we have an
answer, now we all feel bad.
That's kind of like what
happens in the book.
So, it's like, how do you
come to accept just that,
that is what it is, and if it, the pain
is just a part of your life.
There's just no getting away from it.
And it has some, and I'm not saying,
and I don't even wanna
get into the argument,
oh pain's good for you. No it's not.
It's terrible, but it's just there.
So how do you, what can
it do, what does it do,
how can you be aware of those things.
And not be afraid of it.
So there's an interesting, Simone Weil was
in her conversion, really understood a lot
of the problems in France at that time.
This was mainly in the
'30s when she's writing
in all these factory journals.
As part of it, that enlightenment progress
was a consoling fiction that we were all
headed toward a pain-free world.
And she thought this was
an incredibly dangerous,
and she thought this was
true of Marx as well.
That the paradise of the workers was,
what you're really looking at is paradise.
You're gonna get
paradise, you're gonna get
the pain-free world if you
go through all this struggle.
And so this is just a,
she thought this was
a deeply deluding
fantasy, and that without
accepting the world's
always gonna be painful,
that that is not the goal.
The goal is justice,
not the pain-free world.
There's lots of ways of being
pain-free that aren't just.
Or they're pain-free for a lot of people.
But her idea was that it
really required you to be,
to just embrace that,
I mean and so for her,
it might be the fallen-ness of the world
if you're gonna put it
into a Christian idiom.
But it was just a fact,
and she thought that
those fantasies of
progress to the pain-free
world were built around
an idea of sovereignty,
that you control your everything.
You control your law and to
yourself and all these things,
were among the most deeply deluded
enlightenment concepts that there were.
That in fact our lack of
sovereignty is what defined us.
That sovereignty is, being
non-sovereign is nothing
to be afraid of, that we all
are that in that we're mortal.
Our bodies can be broken, if not millions
of other things, but that's one of them.
So, one of the questions in that book is
why did the French revolution fail
and why did the American
revolution not fail?
And so, she's very enamored
of the founding fathers
and the documents they
produced to produce a society.
So it's really, like how did
they think through a politics?
How did they build a
framework so that you would
have a common world, and have
a functional political world
where you could make
decisions, and you had
mechanisms for voice for different people.
She was really, really, she says,
we hold, we hold these
truths to be self-evident,
and so it's a declaration.
We hold means we, there's a we,
and we together think something.
That is the foundation,
everything else that comes after
it is a way of conceiving
different aspects of it.
But the most important
two words is, we hold.
We hold. We together think.
And so that was for her,
just, that's where it
can all start, is in the we holding.
That's what I mean about
her wanting to share
the world with others, we
don't have to be looking
at each other, we hold,
you're looking at each other
saying we hold this about the
world. We together think this.
She's in no way deluded
about the fact that,
in fact this is so much about
what she's writing about,
is the complete evacuation of
the traditions of morality.
So in Nazi Germany, how
did people who believed
in the 10 commandments turn around
and work in the death camps?
How did their, what produced
that moral collapse?
That is absolutely
central to her thinking.
How did that collapse happen?
If you don't have these
traditions, where do you achieve,
how do you actually
arrive, how do you know
what's a moral act and what's not?
That was deeply interesting to her.
When she writes Salvador,
which is her early '80s book,
her whole philosophy of
writing gets destabilized.
And she even does a little
bit of this in the book,
where she actually imitates herself,
and basically she says
that the scale of pain here
defies my normal writing practice.
Because people are being
beaten in the streets,
and they're seeing all these dead bodies,
and it's just, people
being marched into the back
of trucks at gunpoint,
so she's in no way trying
to make you feel sad for the Salvadorians.
That's not the point,
like oh that poor boy went
in the truck, it's more,
this scale is so grotesque.
So she worked, when she
was writing let's say,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
and The White Album,
we're really in the mode of dread.
But when you get into the mode of fear,
she understands something's gone wrong.
That her forms of irony are not
adaptable to this kind of extreme.
So she and McCarthy are
actually aware of that,
that she can't communicate
in her usual forms
of irony to an American
audience who doesn't
understand the scale of disaster
going on in El Salvador.
So, but her relationship to the
pain, that's the difference.
You and I and Joan are
not supposed to have any
feelings about, that's not our job.
She's not trying to awaken feeling in you
and we're not supposed to share it.
We're supposed to see
what is going on there
as a form of US self-delusion that
we're participating in this atrocity.
Yeah, so yeah, Sontag's the same way.
You never get to share pain, that is
absolutely never permitted
for these people.
Alright, thank you, thank you very much.
(crowd applauding)
