Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Carol Armstrong reviews The Beauty of a Social Problem

Walter Benn Michaels. The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 240 pp.

Review by Carol Armstrong  

14 April 2016     

Taking its title from Bertholt Brecht's notes on Mother Courage and her Children and following on Michael Fried's refitting of the theatrical-absorptive binary to the regime of contemporary photography, Walter Benn Michaels's The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy looks at photographic pictures made by artists such as Jeff Wall, Viktoria Binschtok, Phil Chang, Arthur Ou, Brian Ulrich, and Amanda Gordon in relation to what neoliberal capitalism will and will not admit into its ideological system and social paradigm.  In order to put those two discrepant entities together—in other words, contemporary "picture" photography and neoliberal capitalism—the book turns on a complicated syllogism or, perhaps it would be better to say, a complicatedly dialectical, syllogistically interlinked series of syllogisms. 

First, in the part covered by the subtitle's "Photography," there is the syllogism that says that the very ties that bind photography to the "Real" both distinguish it from the rules of the game of "Art" and qualify it for a special engagement in the political arena.  (That already-complicated syllogism depends, in turn, on two other linkages, one between the "real world" and said political arena, and the other between "art as such" and autonomy, which in turn brings with it yet another value, that of the totalizing internal coherence of the work of art.)  Second, in the part covered by the subtitle's "Autonomy," there is the syllogism that says, in some contradiction to the first, that contemporary photography, with its multifarious embracing of the rules of "Art," is newly political, because it can also be seen to embrace a new/old version of an Adorno-style notion of the political possibilities of the aesthetic regime; which is to say, putting a frame around the "real world" equates a totalized understanding of that same world's social system.  Third, in the part covered by the subtitle's "Economy," there is the syllogism that says that, since contemporary neoliberalist capitalism is inimical both to the working class and to class politics, and friendly both to the capitalist class (which in turn is friendly to racial and sexual others) and to identity politics, for photography of the present neoliberal moment to be both beautiful and properly political it must expose and analyze one or more of those syllogistically related facts in its totality.  Not so that we, as art viewers and citizens of the neoliberal order, can have the proper feelings about—a "right attitude" towards—social and economic inequity, but so that we can see that the "beauty" of a "good picture" lies in a detached comprehension of such a totality.

Fourth and finally, there is the main syllogism of Michaels's argument, covered by the Brecthian title "The Beauty of a Social Problem," which says that contemporary photography's political mission lies precisely in its aestheticizing of its indexical ties to the "Real," which necessarily means putting a beautiful frame around the foregoing social truths of neoliberal capitalism, such that the neoliberal commitment to identity politics at the expense of class politics will be turned on its head by this new form of immanent critique.  The trouble with this complex formulation lies not only in its complications and contradictions, nor only in the often questionable presuppositions that lie at the root of its syllogistic linkages, but also in the presumption that syllogism is adequate to reality, to art, to politics, or to the relations among those terms. 

Some of the premises and conclusions of The Beauty of a Social Problem I can accept, even embrace.  Yes, it is worthwhile to observe that the famous indexicality of the photograph hinges on its causal relation to the real—to the world that it depicts—rather than either its realist look—its resemblance to that world—or its truth claims, which can easily be falsified.  Yes, it is true that class relations and what we call identity politics are not the same thing, and indeed are often incommensurate with one another.  Certainly I think it is true that the ideology of neoliberal capitalism is much more amenable to the latter than to the former.  And finally, I would whole-heartedly concur that a "good" photograph can (and perhaps even ought to be) both beautiful and sociopolitical.  These are all salutary points to make about current trends in artful photography.  There are others, however, with which I part company, even more adamantly.

Never mind the facts that though it is perhaps true that neoliberal capitalism should be able to embrace women and racial minorities as equals, it often fails to do so, or that neither racial nor sexual discrimination can be reduced to—and then discredited as—matters of so-called identity politics, or that women are often underpaid or indeed unpaid workers in a system that is also a patriarchal one.  Never mind the further facts that women make up roughly half of the working class, and that a higher percentage of black than white people inhabit the ranks of neo-liberal capitalism's underclass.  And never mind the final fact—at least I would take it as a "fact"—that there is an "intersectional" rather than a mutually exclusive relation between these different categories, or classes, of human being. 

And never mind that one man's totalizing understanding of either art or politics is another woman's misunderstanding, or fiction, or mere opinion; or that it is doubtful whether any such understanding, right or wrong, amounts to any kind of effective intervention, political or otherwise.  The doubt that settles out from all of this very clever reasoning about photography, autonomy and economy is whether the logician's syllogism has anything at all to do with anybody else's messy, flawed and partial reality, at any level: photographic or aesthetic, racial, sexual or economic, social or political.  Personally, I would have said that, photographically speaking, the "beauty of a social problem" lies precisely there, in wrestling, both aesthetically and politically, with its messy flaws and partial realities.  For neither the social problem nor its photographable beauty are reducible to a mathematical equation, such that (a + b) = (x - z).  That is merely a philosopher's dream.