Aesthetics of Indifference
A conversation with Walter Benn Michaels
There are a lot of critiques of identity politics, “wokeness”, left neoliberalism - whatever you might call them - circulating, so I want to start out this conversation with probing into what I think sets you apart from some other critics. The late Mark Fisher, for example, wrote in Ghosts of my Life, that “The disarticulation of class from race, gender and sexuality has in fact been central to the success of the neoliberal project – making it seem, grotesquely, as if neoliberalism were in some way a precondition of the gains made in anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-heterosexist struggles.” Now what your writing in contrast often seems to imply is that there is not even a necessary connection between these that would need to have been “disarticulated”
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That’s a complicated question. First because it has an important empirical dimension. Fisher is writing about Britain. Right away, the United States are marked by the history of slavery in a way that Britain was not and therefore was marked by the presence of a racialized population long before Britain was. So what I would want to say about the United States is that there certainly was a period in modern American history, starting in the 1930s and the early 1960s, of an early form of a Civil Rights movement, where central figures were at least equally committed to antiracism to an egalitarian economical project.The obvious examples in the US would be A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin - nonsite, where I’m part of the editorial board, recently published a bunch of Bayard Rustin essays https://nonsite.org/author/brustin/.
But, second, the fact that anti discrimination could be and was for awhile linked to a socialist or at least a social democratic project didn’t mean it had to be. And, in fact, the history of anti-discrimination since the 60s is a history of those two things coming apart. So here I agree with Fisher, what neoliberalism does is undo the connection between anti-discrimination and anti-exploitative politics, and it does so by in effect rendering hegemonic a liberal view of what equality is. In the US, that takes the form of the rise of equality of opportunity, which was central to Lyndon B. Johnson’s notion of equality in the Civil Rights act in 1964, and was completely central to neoliberal economists like Gary Becker. In fact, Becker’s first book was called The Economics of Discrimination and the difference between what he called “good” inequalities (like between the hard-working and the lazy, the smart and the not-so-smart) and “bad” inequalities (the ones imposed by racism and sexism) would always be foundational for him. The neoliberal ideal is to get rid of the bad inequalities so that the good ones can flourish. So some people ending up super-rich and most people ending up not rich at all is fine — as long as no one’s a victim of racism or sexism, everybody’s getting what they earned. And you have an identification of neoliberalism - in its utopian form - with anti-discriminatory politics, and with an economics that not only tolerates but, arguably promotes increasing inequality. So on the one hand, a commitment to anti-discrimination, on the other a justification and rationalisation of inequality of outcomes.
In other words, in our period anti-discrimination has been weaponized against equality. My point, of course, is not that the left should be for discrimination. And it’s not that the left should be carrying on about identity politics or “wokeness.” Woke isn’t the enemy; the enemy is exploitation. The point is that anti-discrimination is crucial to a left politics but can’t be at the center of a left politics. Because, if it isn’t accompanied by a commitment to economic equality, it can be made into the center for a right politics.
So in a way, if you don’t address the economic structure, you’re not only not on the left, you’re on the right. Or another way to put it is that the liberal left is the HR department of the right. In fact, historically, the rise of equal opportunity in the US is closely associated with the development of Human Resources as an autonomous branch of management. While the point of a Union is better pay for all, the point of Human Resources is better pay for some. And of course, it has nothing to so with equalizing the relations between labor and capital. On the contrary, it is associated with a certain kind of fairness — the meritocracy — that is entirely in the service of making a profit. So what you get from a certain part of the left, the liberal left, is an ideology of Human Resources.
Could this liberal left ideology be interpreted as a new “spirit of capitalism”? In the sense that it almost becomes your duty, if you belong to a group facing historical or contemporary discrimination, to excel in the workplace?
That might be true. It’s certainly there in the constantly repeated story of the black parent telling his child you have to work twice as hard as a white guy to succeed. And, yes, the idea that a commitment to anti-discrimination is foundational really is a new spirit of capitalism. So if it’s the queer black guy who is best at selling whatever your company sells, he should be running the sales operation. And this completely goes together with neoliberalism because another major event in workplaces in the last half century has been - and this is by no means unique to the US - the multi-racialization of the workforce. The population of the US for most of the 19th century was plausibly described as black, white and indigenous, though maybe you had to make some allowances for the Irish. But by the end of the 19th century, you have a massive rise in immigration, and you have a period of 30 or 40 years in which the category of whiteness becomes complicated, because Jews didn’t count and also Greeks and Italians didn’t quite count, and Chinese and Japanese for sure didn’t count, although there were very few of them. But, as Malcom X said, American society turned out to be a way of manufacturing white people.
So when the first Jew arrived in Ellis Island in the 1880s or 1890s from Ukraine or some place, and all his life he has been a despised Yid and he is fleeing pogroms, fleeing antisemitism, and what’s the first thing he discovers when arriving in the US? That he’s white! And what makes him white? Black people. Everybody who wasn’t black got made white. So the US in effect had a mechanism for producing a black-white binary. But that’s very much undone in the post-64 period. In the last half century, the US has had even higher levels of immigration than in the periods before, - huge Asian populations, east Asians, south Asians, huge immigration from Latin America. So what you get is a multiracial workforce which is now recognized as multiracial. And this requires new techniques of management. What used to be called multiculturalism was about the management of a multicultural workforce. Now we call it DEI, but it’s doing an updated version of the same work. These are programs for more effective management but liberals treat them like a replacement for socialism!
If you want a transformation of the workplace, you’ve got a better shot with unions than with HR. I
I was on the bargaining committee of my faculty union for our first contract, and in the US, when you do bargaining, it’s customary that you try to find some easy areas to agree on at the beginning of your negotiations so you can show some progress. Naturally, the very provisions in the contract we agreed on were about diversity and anti-discrimination. Why naturally? Because our bosses are no more interested in discrimination than we were. But it took a year and a half of further negotiations and a strike to get them to sign off a very basic increase in pay and in security of employment for the non-tenured parts of the faculty. When you say we don’t want racism or sexism, the boss says sure. When material interests come into play, when you want to run things on your own and you want more money for it, that’s when the boss says fuck you. So that’s a fundamental difference.
A related aspect of your work and that of your collaborator Adolph Reed Jr. is the critique of the metamorphoses of “race”, from a biological to a cultural notion, which you both reject. Why is it that capitalism seems to need some form of the category of “race”?
Well, in the US, for a couple of hundred years, it needed both race and racism. Now it seems to need both race and anti-racism. And what race does both times is obscure class. To take an obvious example, think of the way racial representation works. I remember giving a talk years ago in Berlin at the Kennedy Institute where someone asked me whether I didn’t think it was a good thing for black people that we now had more black professors. And in some sense, of course, it is a good thing — no one should be kept by racism or any other form of discrimination from being eligible for a good job. But the only black people it’s good for are the ones who get the good jobs. Imagine someone telling poor white people that they should be happy because there are so many white professors at Harvard and Yale! Why should poor black people be happy because some black people are rich? The work race does for capitalism is that it takes your class enemy and turns him into your racial brother. It’s pure ideology.
And that’s why it continues to flourish, even though almost everyone stopped believing in the biology of race over a half century ago. What we’ve done is replace it with race as a social construction. But it’s not like when people realized there were no such things as unicorns, they started talking about the social construction of unicorns. The difference, of course, is that class societies need race. For much of American history, we needed racism to help us believe that enslaving certain people was just. Now we need antiracism to help us believe that, as long as we aren’t racist about it, exploiting certain people is just.
You are a respected and anthologized literary theorist, but lately, you have shown a growing interest in visual arts, and your writing on this subject is marked by the diverging logics of race and class as well. To me, it seems like your commentary on the scandal at the 2017 Whitney biennial around Dana Schutz’ rendition of Emmet Till’s funeral, and your analysis of Viktoria Binschtok’s work Die Abwesenheit der Antragsteller (en: the absence of the applicants) in The Beauty of a Social Problem show two poles of representational strategies with quite different political content.
Brecht famously said that if the actress playing Mother Courage got the audience to sympathize with her, you lost something crucial — what he called the beauty of a social problem. Schutz’s painting is entirely a
n appeal for that sympathy. The controversy it aroused was whether she, as a white woman, had any right to make that appeal but that’s not the real issue. The real issue is the idea that the fundamental political problems have anything to do with how empathetic we are or aren’t. One of the attractions of racism as the problem liberals want to solve is that it’s precisely about our empathy, or lack of it — a painting like Schulz’s presents political economy as a moral choice.
Obviously a big difference from the Binschtok is that there are no faces. Emmett Till’s mother famously decided to make the funeral open casket, saying “Let them see what they did to my boy.” In the Binschtok, there’s no one to see. Because the social problem she’s interested in is unemployment not racism, the victims won’t look particularly striking and she’s not even interested in showing them in their ordinariness, the way, say, the great photographer August Sander was. The idea in Binschtok is that unemployment is produced not by bad racists but by capitalism — it’s the way the labor market works. So if you think the solution is empathy, you don’t understand the problem. And I’ve been increasingly interested in artists whose work embodies an aesthetic of indifference and refuses the consoling but misleading aesthetic of sympathetic identification.
