Feeling the real: Lessons in unsentimentality from Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough (2019)

Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty of the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the foundation of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone the elucidation, of any conundrum – that is, any reality – so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality – for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person.

James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’, 1962

There’s a line in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, ‘’Philosophy means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains’’, to which Teju Cole responds in Blind Spot (2016) ‘Something less strident is needed… Instead of philosophy, this is a picture of fact… shadow, as well as colour, angle, horizon, and loss of balance.’ The enormous height of a mountain is inventoried as just one reddish-brown detail on the flat plane in the photograph Cole took near Piz Corvatsch, apparently Nietzsche’s favourite mountain.

Piz Corvatsch appears as an obscured blotch in the background, in a photograph that hovers between the eloquently mundane and deadpan resistance to the mountainous majesty. In Strange and Known Things (2016), Cole warns, ‘the more photographs shock, the more difficult it is for them to be pinned to their local context, and the more easily they are indexed to our mental library of generic images.’ A photograph is, after all, ‘nothing but surface’, and yet Cole equally insists on its potentially ‘transformative magic’. The camera, indeed, ‘is an instrument of transformation. It can make what it sees more beautiful, more gruesome, milder, darker, all the while insisting on the plain reality of its depiction.’

The question that seems to hang in the crisp alpine air, staring up at what could overwhelm us, is whether we are tough enough to take in the smallest, plainest, most common details, which might be an anchor to what is true and real about the moment. In Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (2017), Deborah Nelson tries to answer such a question about what aesthetic means are adequate to represent the political realities and historical atrocities of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The philosopher, Hannah Arendt is at the intellectual centre, while the writer Mary McCarthy and her friendship with Arendt provides an aesthetic and lived example. Philosopher and theologian, Simone Weil is their intellectual precedent while Susan Sontag is a successor whose powerful ‘unsentimentality’ wrestles with their legacy. Diane Arbus photographically illustrates what the others do in prose, while Joan Didion’s contrarian mentality makes her an oblique inheritor of the style.

How do we make sense of our reality in a way that is open to and shared with others, and also encourages independent thought and political action? The question is as timely as Nelson’s response is refreshingly unexpected. The argument is not to resolve what David Shields called ‘reality hunger’ by giving us more of what is ‘real’. It is instead a thoughtful engagement with how reality is presented. Nelson’s claim is that we should be unsentimental.

To clarify, Nelson assures us:

‘The austere rule of heartlessness, which seems to apply equally to friendship, politics and aesthetics, should not be confused with insensitivity. The aloneness [Arendt and McCarthy] cultivated does not entail desensitising but resensitising, becoming more open and more responsive to the facts of the world. It did, however, forbid being more responsive to others, to one’s friends and interlocutors, both public and private. The aesthetic of fact, practiced in the company of others, but without their intimacy, necessitated a peculiarly severe discipline of representation and of attention that was enabled not by solidarity but by solitude.’

The tensions in this paragraph make Tough Enough a provocative book about how we live with one another in a shared world. And Nelson’s chosen role models are, by her own admission, eccentric. They regard the ‘consolations of pain in intimacy, empathy and solidarity as anaesthetic. Their toleration for pain, indeed their insistence on its ordinariness, is part of their eccentricity. In discourses where pain is a serious ethical and political question, as it was for them, the explanatory authority of trauma has rendered unintelligible both ordinary suffering and the ordinariness of suffering.’ Such views put them at odds with a great deal of representations of political oppression and struggle, and the way in which they attempt to communicate by appealing to the suffering such oppression causes.

The deployment of those representations in the service of political aims – including feminism, de-colonialisation, and anti-racism – take place within the context of historically specific understandings of pain and suffering. Drawing on Talal Assad’s Formations of the Secular, Nelson notes how suffering has acquired the paradoxical function of being both de-humanising and the ground for a politics of empathy. The paradox might explain some of the perverse effects of what Lauren Berlant calls the ‘compassionate public sphere’ which ‘seems to be neither genuinely intimate nor effectively compassionate.’ Though we tiptoe to appease emotional sensitivities, our political cultures seem as cynically manipulative and brutally banal as ever.

Like compassion, pain and suffering ‘are neither grounds of politics nor a subject of knowledge.’ Nelson’s argument is more complex than merely dismissing emotional expression. Rather, like Sontag, Nelson is ‘troubled by the loss of faith in the senses and call[s] for a renewed commitment to aesthetic pedagogy’. This pedagogy requires facing up to reality in the way that photography for Cole confronts us with the visible: actual contact that is ordinary, yet contains a transformative dimension. In typical Sontag style, the mode of engagement with reality is vitally important. It cannot be over-saturated with demands for sympathetic solidarity, but should be accompanied by a reflective capacity that can respond to the discomfort of shared reality.

Nelson makes a point that is both obvious and pointed: ‘If facts alone could lead us to the promised land – facts about climate change, gun violence, terrorism, war, racial prejudice, economic inequality – then we already live in a paradise of facts. The problem is not that we do not know what is happening but that we cannot bear to be changed by that knowledge.’

The fact of the self

Precisely who is this ‘we’ that Nelson charges with being unable to face reality? Surely, as many have attested, oppressed groups face more than their share of painful reality. True enough, but political change is premised not on this fact, but rather on how it becomes recognizable, visible, intelligible. Just as photography’s transformative potential for Teju Cole exists in the shared moment, transformative politics requires people to face a shared reality.

Often, however, we are barely sensitive to our own reality, the fact of ourselves. Diane Arbus ‘liked to capture what she called ‘the gap’, which is the distance between a person’s intended and actual self-presentation.’ Making sense of others and the world might start with making sense of ourselves in all our discomforting reality. In moments of crisis, trauma and suffering, Nelson notes the ‘desire to retreat into a private and sheltered sphere’. In post-war culture, the attempt to reestablish ‘normalcy – often under coercively normalizing terms – was a post-traumatic effect, the outcome of decades of dislocation, deprivation, and loss…’ Didion’s unsentimental analysis of the cultural changes during the 60s and 70s as self-centred and immature are challenged by her experience of the personal loss of her husband and daughter. Like the others, Didion maintains her steely composure.

Sontag’s response to photographs of the Nazi concentration camps as a student ‘’cut me… sharply, deeply, [and] instantaneously.’’ But she challenges herself immediately in this passage from On Photography (1977) as to whether any ‘’good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs – of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve.’’ The photographs are like Arendt’s ‘’speechless horror’’. But, Arendt argues, when the reality of such a horror is replaced with ‘’sentiments’’, it removes access to event from the shared world and isolates its effects in the singular, inexpressible and inaccessible emotions of the sufferer. Sometimes the desire to say what a certain horror is like for us does not convey facts that are shareable and recognizable to those who might be best placed to help us.

It is a ‘tough’ stance, and each of these women were attacked by critics for their heartlessness, ‘called to account for failures of feeling.’ The history of emotional expression is also one of devaluation, often consigned to women who were (or are) considered dangerously sentimental. Despite their repudiation of sentimentality, they do not oppose emotion, only its distorted expression as a style of fact. Each in their own way aims to ‘democratise thinking as an activity of all human beings and to assert that thinking can arise out of any occurrence and among all walks of life.’

The question is not to eradicate emotion in thought. As Arendt writes in On Violence (1970),

‘’Detachment and equanimity’ in the view of ‘unbearable tragedy’ can indeed be ‘terrifying’, namely, when they are not the result of [self-]control but an evident manifestation of incomprehension. In order to respond reasonably, one must first of all be ‘moved’, and the opposite of emotional is not ‘rational’, whatever that may mean, but either the inability to be moved, usually a pathological phenomenon, or sentimentality, which is a perversion of feeling.’’

Mary McCarthy’s response to the death of her friend is an example of being thoughtfully moved. She jokes that Arendt had ‘’ankles that seemed to keep pace with her thought’’, but realizes, after attempting to ingratiate herself with a knowing gift of anchovy paste (such were the times): ‘’She did not wish to be known, in that curiously finite and, as it were, reductive way. And I had done it to show her I knew here – a sign of love, though not always – thereby proving that in the last analysis I did not know her at all’’.

McCarthy is true to Arendt’s own form of heartlessness that ‘carved out areas of reflection and practices of representation that she assumed would be painful – not merely clarifying or invigorating – but not so emotionally wrenching as to render the translation of experience into language pointless.’ McCarthy and Arendt practiced the kind of friendship characterized by frank, assertive honesty. Their independence from convention was mediated by their shared aesthetic and political sensibility. Lofty autonomy is only ‘’secured at the prince of truth… for without reality shared with other human beings, truth loses all meaning. Introspection and its hybrid engenders mendacity.’’ The fact of the self is best seen from the outside.

The fact of the other

Like Shakespeare’s Lear, there are those for whom exposure to others is intolerable. Extreme blindness to others is represented by the figure of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi functionary. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which reports and analyses his trial in Israel, demonstrates his staggering ‘solipsism’. By taking ‘Eichmann at his word’, in all his lying, boasting and ‘staggering incompetence in the use of language’, Arendt produces an ironic style that is ‘crucial to both her sense of his moral failing and her own attempt to do what Eichmann so conspicuously failed to do: view the world through the eyes of others.’

Although condemned and misunderstood for her use of irony in this charged context, Arendt used it ‘as an attempt at plurality, as mocking as it was.’ She writes, ‘’No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safe-guards against the words and presence of others, and hence against reality as such’… because he resists the kind of thought that would force him to face reality, which is the criminality of the regime on whose behalf he act[ed].’

But, just as Arendt drew a line between the two poles of emotional absence and the excess of sentimentality, the solution to Eichmann’s moral failure is not necessarily empathy. Sontag and Didion were scathingly skeptical of ‘feelings-rich but intellectually vacant radicalism’. Sontag criticized the anti-war movement as ‘’never sufficiently political… and it took considerable moral vanity to expect that one could defeat the considerations of Realpolitikmainly by appealing to considerations of ‘right’ and ‘justice.’’’

Sontag’s position challenges protests and political movements in general, finding the anti-war movement’s ineffectualness

‘to lie in its orientation toward feeling: its vanity in its innocence and virtue, its enjoyment of its capacity for sympathetic identification. She seems to hold in her minds two things: first, that powerlessness, by guaranteeing [innocent] virtue, was its own reward; second, that sympathetic identification carried with it the grandiosity of agency, which was measured not against effectiveness but against the agencylessness of the suffering Vietnamese.’

Sympathetic identification maintains the fantasy of virtue and innocence by remaining at a condescending remove from those it claims to support. The oppressed victims play an abstract role in such a ploy, but solidarity for Arendt did not mean ‘pity’ but dispassionate, deliberate contact. Teju Cole writes, ‘The general is where solidarity begins, but the specific is where our lives come into proper view.’

Arendt’s attitude towards ‘love’ is exemplary here. It is not something that can apply to an abstract, distant or collective body of people. She retorts to Gershom Scholemn’s attempt to tutor her in the proper emotional disposition towards the Jewish ‘people’: ‘’I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons’’.

With others, Arendt advocates ‘’the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, the resisting of, reality – whatever it may be’’, which ‘implies openness and defenselessness, a refusal to assemble in advance the tools or the categories to apprehend a set of facts that may defy both.’ Our capacity to be surprised and acknowledge our own limitations and vulnerabilities is an important aspect of approaching others. Instead of the isolating innocent virtue of sympathy, we must be willing to be changed by the fact of an other. The sense of each other we share is an ‘activity rather than knowledge; that is, it is something one does, not something one has. Moreover, [it] is not self-evident but self-altering.’

To encounter others and share with them a world, we must accept the possibility of being changed even as we resist the temptations of consensus. We do not achieve such a common world in any abstracted, philosophical sense of ‘the rational being’s possession of self-evident and natural truths but [rather through] an active and complex sharing of a necessarily partial view of the world… faced in a condition of exposure.’ As Lynne Segal reminds us in Radical Happiness (2017), being with others can be joyful, but it also involves developing the maturity not to be paralysed by their suffering, for their sake and our own.

It is also linked to an aesthetic sensibility in which, as Sontag puts it in Against Interpretation (1966) ‘’the function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means’.’ Description is a valuable (and hard) enough task for criticism, as the art historian Michael Fried argues (‘No Problem’, Representations, 2016). And so, an unsentimental, concrete presentation of the sense we have in common is part of sharing a world with others.

The fact of the world

Certainly, there is no single world; no ‘absolute truth’ that grounds solidarity or political action; ‘no ‘correct’ way to view reality – but there is, in [McCarthy’s] words, a ‘control instance’ against ‘error’…. Encountering difference is the lever of correction… The politics of plurality and common sense requires, then, something like an aesthetic of the fact, which is the discipline of perception as well as a practice of representation.’

Where a single reality dominates, padded with the promise of ‘meaningfulness and predictability’, there is totalitarianism. Arendt did not mean this term loosely, having herself escaped Nazi Germany. In such a condition, reality appears ‘utterly plastic and subject to the will. Given enough power and the time to use it, these men would remake reality into a fantasy of the leader… There is a thought married to power, and reality is transformed in order to conform to the idea. As Arendt explains, description becomes prediction… ‘Thought married to power means the destruction of plurality…’’ What leads to the disaster of fascism, as Arendt experienced it, was ‘not emotion or its lack but consolatory thinking that preempts the emotional volatility of unpredictability.’

What constitutes reality is precisely the ‘unplastic realm of the body and the world’, ways in which the self and others are limited in their agency. We are exposed to others in ways we cannot control, and others are reciprocally vulnerable to us. We rely on each other to share a world that is liveable. It matters what we chose to share, and how we do it. Nelson, like McCarthy, proposes the fact.

The fact is not defined by what it is, but rather by ‘what a fact does’, which is ‘its capacity to alter the observer.’ Confronted with a world whose reality we do not control, what matters is how we respond. In her journalism, fiction and criticism, Mary McCarthy argued that facts are ‘’dissident… insofar as they support thought, insofar as they are obstinately real… that is, positively rebellious to the structures mass-society and its media impose on them.’’ It is our task to recognise and represent these facts according to the principles of unsentimentality: ‘concrete, rhetorically minimalist, matter-of-fact (neutral, not affectless), and unself-conscious.’ Moreover, for McCarthy,

‘a fact does not resolve argument or close off political and aesthetic engagement but initiates them; facts begin conversation, exploration and contestation. The fact’s dissidence, as she calls it, lies in its revelation of the accident, the unexpected, the surprise, or the ‘miracle’ of everyday experience’.

Like an experience of art – hence Nelson’s use of the term ‘aesthetics’ – our experience is transformed by facing it with an unsentimentality that can be hard to muster. Art intensifies our sensible attention, and though it can be sentimental, it can also attune us to a reality that has passed unnoticed. To the poet James Schuyler, according to Douglas Crase in Lines from a London Terrace (2017), ‘reality would be the one thing that is not commonplace, and it would stand to reason that life cannot fully be lived until the reality is faced without embarrassment or flinch.’ (‘Everything is,’ Schuyler wrote, ‘by its nature, on display.’)

There is an image that might serve as an emblem of the ethical approach Tough Enough is trying to convey. It is of Arendt and McCarthy ‘standing together on a subway platform in uncomfortable silence’, an image in which ‘we might imagine a counter-tradition of ethical relation, one that seeks not to come face-to-face with the Other but to come face-to-face with reality in the presence of others.’

The unsentimental aesthetic Nelson describes in Tough Enough has both ethical and political implications. Politically, Tough Enough resonates with a line from Raoul Peck’s film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), in which James Baldwin says ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it has been faced.’ Teju Cole describes in Strange and Known Things Baldwin’s sense of ‘’estrangement’’, of being an ‘’interloper’’. Baldwin, like the women in Tough Enough, confronted a world that exiled him. But as Cole argued during an interview in Melbourne, we might better perceive reality not by being ingratiated and included, but by seeking ‘ventilation.’ Space to breathe, and think. Baldwin saw better the reality of white America (and colonial whiteness in general) by being outside.

Cole reflects on the sentimental saturation of social media, ‘we can also sense it crowding in on ongoing experience, imposing closure on what should still be open.’ Reflecting on photography’s transformative possibilities, he writes that though we often ‘’have strength enough to bear the misfortune of others’… What is hard is being vividly immersed in our own pain.’ Returning to Piz Corvatsch in Blind Spot, Cole reflects on the sinister attempt to obscure the portraits of black professors from the halls of a law school. The political and the ethical collide with what is perceivable: ‘with tarp you can blind a mountain... But not really.’ Cole is unsentimental; holds close the pain, makes visible the erasure.

Image credit: Teju Cole, ‘Corvatsch, Switzerland’, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/magazine/far-away-from-here.html