Seeing What Happens

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It's hardly ever the case that, when I find a quote that matters to me, I have discovered it in its original context, and this one is no exception. In this case the quote I have slightly misremembered as "Beauty is the promise of happiness" is, in Stendhal's original French, La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur, and hails from chapter 17 of De L'Amour. But to me it continues to be first and foremost the epigraph to Ted Chiang's "Liking What You See: A Documentary," a formally experimental short story for which Chiang declined a Hugo nom, and which I'll outline very briefly below. Anyway, the original French translates more nearly to "Beauty is only the promise of happiness"—emphasis added. But when I see beauty, I don't feel an assurance of happiness. I feel threatened—perhaps terribly, perhaps wonderfully—with a loss of autonomy.

Here is what I intend to do here. First, make an ornery rejoinder to that fateful "only"; what else might beauty be? Further, solve the following problems: that poems seem to have some relation to the truth despite the fact that they supposedly promise a happiness that is likely not forthcoming; that the contours of our response to beauty are more complex than a promise of utopia and its failure; that we call both our hot exes and our favorite works of art beautiful; that it hurts when people we find beautiful do not reciprocate; that sometimes we do violence on our beautiful people and things because we resent them for their beauty; that beauty seems to be a tool of domination and yet somehow also is reputed to have revolutionary potential; that beauty is often reduced to the contours of desire when, in fact, I think beauty is actually a tool for us to think with.

It was hard, once I grasped the concept, to imagine that the epigram "beauty is the promise of happiness" could be refuted. I have always had trouble with the idea of beauty. In particular, I have a fetish whose fundamental core is a horror of having my one-sided admiration be known by its object, which is also a desire to be known in this way; I am turned on by someone knowing they are turning me on against my will, and the more I struggle against being turned on, the more turned on I get. Like many people, my vision of utopia is the opposite of my fetish, and it's a vision that is suggested in Chiang's short story, in which advances in neuroscience have made it possibly to easily and reversibly deactivate the part of one's brain that evaluates faces for how beautiful they are. We don't have to see faces as beautiful or not if we don't want to. Understanding beauty as the promise of happiness helped me understand why the story made me cry; the power of the idea that we could consent (or not) to finding people beautiful lies in the fact that, for beauty to be a promissory note—for it to promise happiness—it must know what would make us happy, before we have had a say in the matter. Therefore, when our brains perceive beauty, they seem to enter into a contract that relies on a commitment to a naturalized end goal. Our protestations that this is not the road to happiness are ignored. This is related to the fetishistic horror of the natural we find in Tiptree and which lies buried near the surface of much other trans literature. The invasion of privacy that the perception of beauty represents is a version of what could be called the argument from intimacy (Ada Palmer came up with this term in a conversation): you know you feel this way, you know you want this. The body's response to beauty can feel a little bit like sexual violence because it implicitly says the same things that a rapist says, in a voice that feels true. The conflation of beauty, the quality/aspect, with a beauty—a beautiful person, often female—sets up its own complex fantasy within the (male-coded) onlooker's mind in which a beauty has power over him, a power that, as it actually plays out, is often devilishly difficult to wield safely.

Since I'm going to be talking in one breath about hot people and good poems, some fundamental work needs to be done to establish that there even is a unitary term 'beauty' that's worth talking about. Is the beauty of attractive people the same as the beauty of poems? It's easy to claim that beauty in poems leads to truth (though hard to substantiate), but are we moved closer to truth by the wrenching in our guts when our exes post particularly gorgeous profile pictures? To answer this, it might be helpful to take a brief detour through the ethics of hot people.

SO HOT YOU'RE HURTING MY FEELINGS

When someone hot is not interested in you, it feels like an assault. There is a feeling of fear; whether or not you have external genitalia, your bodily autonomy is already compromised insofar as your flutters prevent you from judging effectively whether the hot person likes you back. Mistakes will be made. One proto-theory of beauty, therefore, goes that we are in fact all constantly assaulting each other to varying degrees. Adherents to this view either excuse beautiful people for these uncontrollable assaults, or condemn them for them. This latter approach is particularly visible in incel and incel-adjacent communities, wherein the rage at one's own non-reciprocal vulnerability is substituted by or displaced into a rage at women for using their own sexual power to their own advantage, rather than constraining it and showing mercy to their "looksmatch." What is essentially a discomfort—which may be rage, fear, or hurt—with the potential to be led astray by a beautiful face is displaced into a resentment at a faux-concrete cucking that is supposed to have actually happened. A sort of non-identity problem obtains when a hookup that has never happened, that was never going to happen, has purportedly been stolen—by the Stacy, the Chad, congenital hypergamy, the sexual revolution. It is specifically the identification of reasons for involuntary celibacy that allows it to be classed as a harm, and that's true in incel-world and outside it. This is why the incel worldview is not merely "disjunct from reality" but also disjunct from a reality check, from concrete interactions that could complicate it: because it is the attempt to concretize a fundamentally abstract, potential harm, to read the fact of vulnerability as an assault.

Calls for a redistributive approach to sexual politics therefore fetishize the sexual marketplace, and capitulate to a market worldview under the guise of a half-sincere socialism; only under the cover of a fungible sexual satisfaction can the supposed injustice of not getting fucked be formulated on a mass scale. All this is not to say that we should ignore or mystify the misery of not getting fucked. Not having a decent place to live is a condition of misery, too, but the expropriations involved in providing everyone with a decent place to live can happen primarily at the level of the surplus, of accumulation disjunct from everyday life; it is the fact that sex is not capital or even property, that it cannot be detached without compulsion from the desired person or thing, that makes its supposed product (sexual satisfaction) difficult to redistribute without harm. Most people can get good homes without very many people having to lose theirs (and without anyone having to be homeless), but in a system of sexual redistribution, people must be found to fuck everyone to whom sex is being redistributed. This is not a problem that cannot be ameliorated without fungible-izing sex but current attempts to do so assume an equivalence of exchange between a lack of sex and the presence of a sex partner that radically elides individual specificity.

I mentioned two approaches to whether it is ethical for hot people to exist (which is what we are discussing here!): the other, more 'feminist' approach, excuses hot people from their assaults. The mainstream feminist take sympathizes either with the lover or with the beloved, and if blame is assigned at all, it is centered around either consent or grossness. If it sympathizes with the lover, this sort of implies the idea that "everyone is constantly exerting violence on others." By living, you prevent others from living, you divert resources, you breathe air that others could be breathing; we all exist in a network of inescapable violences, but we all have defenses against that violence. No one is responsible for the violence they exert against others unless they actively make them drop their defenses. Imagine a community living deep under the sea in diving helmets. No one is responsible for the pressure everyone feels (beauty is external to the beautiful, is intersubjective) unless you go up to someone and open their helmet, letting the crushing ocean waters in. This analogy is about when someone communicates to you that they are into you and you allow yourself to be vulnerable to them and their beauty—but then later, crushingly, they claim they were mistaken, were not in love or lust at all. The person who allowed themself to become vulnerable is allowed to be hurt and even angry. Here the feminist intervention is to clarify the terms of these mutualities. This feminist take is about identifying the fundamental inequalities which must be considered when retrospectively interpreting whether contracts were legitimate (is all intercourse rape?), and in identifying the ways in which one cannot bind oneself—most saliently, the revocability of consent. This approach presumes that, to the extent that beauty can be said to constitute a harm for ethical purposes, it is so because someone's defenses were taken down when they shouldn't have been. To the extent that beauty is preconsensual (if not nonconsensual), to the extent that the pain happens whether or not you give yourself license to believe in the promise of happiness, this harm is submerged into the same uninsurable blob of unknowability that contains lightning strikes and earthquakes. Beauty, when it attacks, is an act of God.

Alternatively, a feminist take might sympathize with the beloved, with the beheld, and these takes are more interesting because, rather than trying to relegislate how we want and pursue things, they focus overwhelmingly on sympathy or empathy itself (I'm not using the terms precisely here) directed towards the targets of infatuation, lust, or love. This is not a refutation of the other feminist approach discussed above, the framework that attempts to determine when it is okay to develop feelings for someone. Instead, it's a recentering that focuses on evoking a history of traumatization, self-discovery, interest, power, play, and precarity which is underrepresented by the former discourse, which aims to simply draw borders around what those in the role of the lover may licitly attempt or expect. This is representational politics, but it's also affective politics, a system of affects spread by images and descriptive language with political import. This latter form of mainstream feminism is, unsurprisingly, most clearly found in art and memes; Ortberg's reanalyses of classic paintings on the Toast, art writing like Machado's, and Roupenian's "Cat Person" (and this is what Junot Diaz is trying to do in Oscar Wao as well), relatable memes about being an anime girl/e-girl/whatever (honestly just a huge swathe of leftish memedom), some of Ozy Frantz's blog posts, Carly Rae Jepsen/Sia's "Boy Problems" video, Dua Lipa's "New Rules." These works focus on the experiences a person who is often the target of desire can have that are not about being such a target—or, at least, that are very much not about being receptive to that desire. They can also explore the experiences people can have who aren't usually the object of desire, but, perhaps, are expected to play the role of self-objectification. When blame is assigned in this affective politics, it is assigned under the rubric of grossness—a visceral condemnation, and a condemnation of the abject, harder to fully disidentify with when you find yourself on the receiving end than the legalistic approach of the first take. Men are omnipresent in this politics—even when absent, their absence is conspicuous—but their subject (both senses) is not men. Some of these works are targeted in part towards men—Ozy Frantz has some such posts—but much of them are not, and instead work to explore the other problems or relatable moments that someone who might be perceived as beautiful can experience, decentering the experience of perceiving beauty and moving instead on the periphery of relevant structures. Venmo me $10 and see what happens. It is always better to go sideways than to beat one's head against a wall.

But this approach can't escape the fact that beauty as an evaluative metric is externally decided and imposed, pressed down from above; that our confessions of admiration are gasped out with a boot on our chests. So proponents claim either that everything is beautiful under the right rubric (the pragmatic approach) or beauty is to be devalued or eliminated as a metric at all (the less common utopian approach, suggested by Chiang's short story). At the risk of seeming a bit deconstructionist, both the "everyone is beautiful" and "beauty is fake" approaches appear to enshrine normative beauty in negating it, which leads to normative beauty either shifting in content (the rise of white women with big butts) or becoming impossible to address in the social situations it nonetheless shapes. With regard to this last possibility, a particularly interesting affect is when beautiful people talk about how garbage they are, or the pseudo-wholesome disaffected hypersexuality of Doja Cat's "Bitch I'm a Cow," the nude sent, or responded to, with "lol". Beauty still matters a lot, but now we have to laugh at it too. Relatable and fuckable converge here, both signifying potential forms, -ables. Relatable refers to "content", and fuckable to people, but both are equally mediated through "content" and personhood. And both signify the promise of harm or of happiness, of being restored or destroyed—we are, after all, personally attacked by this relatable content. Both point to a coming cataclysm strangely disjunct from the real-life consequences of relating or fucking. Both relatable and fuckable are adjectives that show how the noun they're attached to has made itself available for enjoyment (in the Coca-Cola sense) by the perceiver, the knower—unlike feminine fuckability's negated masculine category, the pathetic. Both are media effects easy to destroy by doing or saying the wrong thing. Both relatable and fuckable, it seems, are arguments from intimacy, and both approached with a certain dissociation that, if poked at, will yield a performance of sincerity and pain. In the end, this ironic treatment of beauty may provide a common language for beautiful/ugly women in the integrated circuit, but it does not do away with the silent distribution of attention and validation to the beautiful at the expense of the ugly. A twenty-year-old woman still looks at me dourly and says, "Kit, you're talking to a beached whale."

All these approaches are wildly insufficient as consolation or explanation of where this hurt comes from, but to address this, it's necessary to contend with the current state of the art: the idea that beauty's pain is caused by a social ill. All of the viewpoints described abve subscribe to this point of view: for the incel, it's the breakdown of traditional sexual and romantic norms; for the lover-sympathizing feminist, it's the inadequacy of current norms around how we approach people's intimacy and vulnerability; for the beloved-sympathizing feminist, it's patriarchal beauty norms. So another reading of what's going on with beauty has to either provide another systemic/structural source or to admit to being self-help. Actually, both the incel and the feminist approaches are self-help, but in the plural: they offer visions of solidarity—for the incels, solidarity in death (see Contrapoints); for the feminists, solidarity against the strikingly abstract antagonist of the patriarchy.

A successful third answer to the question of whether hot people should exist would need to achieve some of the explanatory and normative power of these systemic arguments. It would also need to fix some of their deficiencies. None of these theories leave much room for beauty to have a relationship to truth, so their proponents kind of just bracket them or leave them implicit when they want to talk about the truthfulness of an art object. The "beauty norms" version does allow you to say "good representation is truthful representation" but it ends up being an impoverished form of truth that follows politics rather than leading it. Our theory needs to fill this and other gaps. In addition to saying something about how beauty relates to truth, it might say something substantive about how it could have happened that unrequited limerence hurts as much as it does, beyond "everyone experiences unrequited love sometimes"; it might suggest something that beauty adds to the world, rather than naturalizing it and treating it as a given, or defining it as a superstructural projection of political oppression; it ought to explain something about the structure of aesthetic appreciation AND link that to the power and perceived violence beauty causes. This last needs to go beyond "we need to try harder to give good representation" and also beyond "facial symmetry"/"formal innovation." For the purposes of this essay—that is, if this essay has a well-defined purpose—I need to clear one more hurdle: I need to show that there is a link deeper than homonymy between the beauty the incels and feminists are interested in and the beauty in poems. To do this, I need to fill in a gap, namely that it is not obvious whether beauty in poems hurts the way hot people do. Sure, sometimes people say a poem's language is "so beautiful it hurts," but is this the pain of catharsis, or the pain of abnegation/degradation?

Boy Problems

Isn't our relationship to poems different from our relationship to hot people? After all, one presumably can't be a poem; nor can one have a poem in the same way that one can have a lover. So there seems to be a big difference between appreciating the beauty of a work of art and the reaction we have to the beauty of another person. And, in particular, and especially among incels and others prone to resentment of the beautiful, the latter experience actually fails to distinguish clearly between wanting and wanting-to-be; there is a sort of violent and vulnerable flicker that threatens to collapse possessor and possessed into one term entirely. The metastasized incel does not, perhaps, explicitly or publicly want to become feminine, and yet he clearly deeply resents women for their supposed power, and, insofar as his worldview naturalizes promiscuous hypergamy in the absence of patriarchal suppression of women's sexualities, he would rather be the hammer than the nail. Andrea Long Chu has explored how this perceived power dynamic bleeds into the sissification/forced-fem fetish, and how that bleeds into transness, and trans lesbianism in particular. It's not immediately clear how to map this dynamic onto the terrain of poetry, with its distinction between reader, writer, poem, and subject; what would a resentful "poemcel" want? To settle down with a single poem only he could read? To be achingly filled with an almost sublime assonance?

Except, actually, poetry readers are often disturbed by the promiscuity of the poems they read; the sense, for example, that others are reading (satisfying) this poem better than you, that there is something vaguely embarrassing about being drawn to the same poems everyone else is, that those studs who have already plowed the curvaceous terrain of the canon are so superior, so far ahead, that it might be better just to lie down and rot. Poetry appreciation, in short, is so often about so much more than one's own pleasure and the poem's own meaning. In contemporary male desire, there is a kind of imagined pornographic perspective operating in sexual attraction: not only how does this make me feel but also does the onlooker, the viewer of the imaginary video of this encounter, wish he were me right now? Such that what is often assumed to be scopic desire is often actually a desire to be looked at in a particular way; just as wanting and wanting-to-be are collapsed, so are the pleasures of looking at and being looked at. This is, sadly, very often the way of it with poems: not only this poem is giving me pleasurable sensations but also I am, or appear to be, the sort of person whose position I wish to have in society; I am smart, I am perceptive, I am sensitive, I am educated. We see this same situation playing out in schools, where the denigration of most students' poetic capacities—their ability to satisfy, or interpret, a poem, as well as the relationships they already have with poetic artworks like poems, songs, and raps—is so pervasive that most students develop a block against being able to enjoy poetry at all.

Resentment is the enemy of legibility. We fail to read what we resent. White people, for example, often seem to be unable to understand what a person of color has just said, whether it be instructions at the Post Office or a post about theology on Facebook. (I'm drawing on my own experiences with these examples.) Thomas Jefferson once received a letter from Benjamin Banneker, the Black astronomer, surveyor, and naturalist, in which Banneker urged Jefferson to sympathize with the plight of his race, and along with which he enclosed an almanac he had written. Jefferson wrote back politely to Banneker, but in a letter to a friend of his he ridiculed the latter's writing, calling it stupid and incomprehensible. It's difficult to know Jefferson's psychology in this moment, but I have certainly experienced being unable to read a person of color's writing when it was both perfectly comprehensible and very much helpful. This phenomenon seems related to that known as "racist listening." Of course it is reasonable here to ask what in Banneker could have possibly done to provoke the resentment of Jefferson, who was immeasurably better off and in no way materially damaged by the former's existence. One answer is found in Banneker's letter itself, where he appeals to Jefferson's sense of justice as expressed in his "Declaration of Independence." Banneker, having outlined the idea, in a greater number of words, that all men are created equal, attempts to prevail on Jefferson's sense of logical consistency:

Sir, if these are Sentiments of which you are fully persuaded, I hope you cannot but acknowledge, that it is the indispensible duty of those who maintain for themselves the rights of human nature, and who profess the obligations of Christianity, to extend their power and influence to the relief of every part of the human race, from whatever burthen or oppression they may unjustly labour under, and this I apprehend a full conviction of the truth and obligation of these principles should lead all to.

Here the more consistent argument is intended to force Jefferson's hand: surely, if you accept these basic presuppositions, you cannot help but concur. This is where the principles lead. So on a literal level, Jefferson resents Banneker because he has taken the high ground of consistency; he has poked at Jefferson's rationality and the high value he claims to place on principles. But it's worth looking briefly at the principles that Banneker lays out. He claims to be able to "apprehend"

[...] that your Sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are that one universal Father hath given being to us all, and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also without partiality afforded us all the Same Sensations, and endued us all with the same faculties, and that however variable we may be in Society or religion, however diversified in Situation or colour, we are all of the Same Family, and Stand in the Same relation to him.

Banneker uses Jefferson's own rhetoric to make a disturbing claim: that his experience is of fundamentally the same type as Jefferson's, that, indeed, they both have the same daddy. Here Jefferson is under assault, personally attacked by this relatable content; he is not so much the object of vision as the object of personal, private knowledge. Banneker can "apprehend" what Jefferson must think. Banneker can predict the logical, happy outcome of his thoughts; Jefferson's own logic, like the brain assenting to the promise of happiness, has gotten him into a contract whose outcome he would not have consented to on his own. He is on the receiving end not only of the force of the better argument (bad enough from an inferior) but also of an argument from intimacy. So, later that month, Jefferson has to reinterpret what is being communicated to him, has to transvaluate Banneker's work, assign it the sign of plagiarism and stupidity.

In my own experiences, these impasses have happened most often when the person of color in question has been someone those intellectual prestige has seemed higher than my own, and therefore the problem seems to stem from a sense that my status is low in a way incommensurate with my racial due. This has happened in moments where race was not a factor, as well; for example, in my first year of college, I found several books incomprehensible not because they were confusingly written but because being made to read them made me think about about how ill-read I was, and, in a few cases, because their stories were about young people whom I feared I resembled. When we are threatened by a speaker—and, in particular, when that speaker threatens to say something true about us, threatening our control—the weapon we turn to is our own illiteracy, an (often-subconscious) refusal to read, refusal to understand what is being told to us—including a refusal to read the subtleties of another's experience. Insofar as this incomprehension is located in/projected onto the Black or otherwise threatening speaker, there is a slippage between illiteracy (as I have termed it) and illegibility, and illiteracy/illegibility as a combined term becomes the site of violent resistance to perceived threats, the refusal to read recast as a incompetency to be read. Much clarification should not be needed as to how the violence of illiteracy can turn into other, more deadly, forms of violence.

Love the Way You Lie

So much of beauty-as-it-happens, beauty in the moment when it is perceived and appreciated, plays out along these tragic lines, where imaginary violence in one direction leads to literal violence in the other. And yet there are those moments of stillness when you look into your lover's eyes, or at their sleeping form, and are filled with an overflowing sense of amazement, that this person is here with you, that this beautiful moment has come to pass. It's not that either of you are not under threat; you know, having been around the block a couple times, that most relationships end in heartbreak, and many in cruelty. But in these moments you feel, rather than a full suspension of the power dynamic of beautiful/ugly, a sense instead that your descent into the gravity well of the other person's beauty is, though inevitable, not tragic, that, indeed, the powerlessness you feel before their beautiful form is a vulnerability that opens you to yourself, that brings you so much into the present moment that you can see what happens, what is happening, and perhaps, that it is able to open you to yourself precisely because it draws your ego out of you and into the living space between you and your partner, because it leads you to identify not with yourself, but with the event of love. This is why there are moments in old love affairs that we would not give up even if it meant we could also get rid of the pain of the breakup. These are moments where love is not blind, and yet does not alter when it alteration finds. Kinnell writes "When the lover goes, / the vow though broken remains, / that trace of eternity love / brings down among us stays, / to give dignity to the suffering / and to intensify it." And it is, or can be, this way with poetry too. I remember getting to Section 42 of Song of Myself (in Kinnell's Franken-version, as it happens) and having to stop to clutch the book to my chest, so grateful that Whitman had done this thing for me, for all of us, had changed the world in this way.

So it's insufficient to say that beauty is the promise of happiness, unless our collective definition of happiness is particularly kinky. I want to propose instead (this is the big one) that beauty is either/both (a) the threat of the loss of free will or/and (b) the potentiation of an escape route from oneself to an intersubjective or supersubjective perspective where the question of free will is no longer important (here by "supersubjective" I mean including both the experiences of subjects and non-subjects while remaining more local than global). It will not escape the interested reader that these are, in a sense, two ways of looking at the same thing. Beauty functions both as a threat and a consolation; it operates equally, though not simultaneously, as a projection of the future and a extratemporal fait accompli.

Unlike the marriage contract or Elizabethan spousal, in which it is imagined that two free subjects freely and simultaneously enter into an agreement that results in their transubstantiation into one flesh (Marc Shell), beauty's promise, on its face, does not seem to be spoken by the beautiful, nor is the assent to relinquish one's control voluntarily given by the looker—and of course this promise (threat), unlike spousals, is necessarily one-sided; even when two people find each other beautiful, beauty's structure always demands that it be more processual and less transcendental than a true two-way promise like that of marriage or transubstantiation would suggest. There is a naturalizing point of view that says that beauty is the product of a genetic and social process, a development of norms and concommitant development of phenotypes through cultural change and sexual selection such that, rather than a beautiful person speaking the threat of loss of control, that genetic/social process is in fact speaking through the beautiful person, or even speaking over them, writing checks in their name that they can't or don't want to cash. This is certainly an easy conclusion to come to when we hear of hot friends who cannot attend professional networking events without everyone with whom they wish to network, married or not, falling in lust with them.

And yet despite the fact that beauty seems to operate at a more cyborged or supersubjective level, integrated with the systems of life and tech and domination that we are part of, hot people are still personally implicated. Beauty is always a co-creative process; a beautiful person may not be able to fully avoid being beautiful, but they can lend their expertise in self-presentation (makeup and so on) to their beauty, or detract from it. In this way, beauty is intimately connected to universality; the creator of beauty is always a co-creator of beauty with all the establishments of beauty that go before them. And also in this way, beauty—the stakes of it, the way it can be tested by "using" it to threaten people—is a crucial tool for investigating the social and evolutionary structures that produce the conditions for the threat-violence that underlies and enables it as an intersubjective process. In other words, by learning makeup and hairstyles, we learn something about how the face is structured and also how the face, and the beautiful face, are constructed in the society and species we're a part of. And clearly we learn something similar about language when we write poems. This relationship—where the individual adds something to the establishment of beauty—is actually in some ways borne out by research into human facial attractiveness, which suggests that the most attractive faces are, apart from being highly symmetrical, similar to an average of all the faces the beholder has seen while still having a few distinctive features. This is one of the most significant ways in which beauty helps us think—it seems to possess some force that differentiates between expressions, whether poetic or lipstick, that take form under specific structures of valuation. Creating beauty forces us to engage with the structural conditions that enable the violences that underlie it; the "force" there comes from the stakes of beauty, from the reason we would have to choose to create it, from the fact that it can legitimately threaten to remove someone's control over their own body, narrative, and life, and this force—this danger—makes beauty useful in the laboratory of the poem.

Q.U.E.E.N.

Having just laid down the central pillar of my argument that beauty in the general sense can be used to find the truth, I want to pose a kind of obnoxious question: Where is beauty? I have ventured a preliminary guess a couple times here as to what general county it resides in; beauty is an intersubjective process, which is to say that it is something that happens and that happens between people. Regarding being "something that happens": beauty, in my view, mostly makes sense as a process, one which involves threat, violence, resentment, and, sometimes, a sort of release from egoistic self-identification. It certainly does not make sense as a purely perfect-aspect, completed promise, as I have characterized (strawmanned?) Stendhal's account. At the same time, there are moments where beauty seems best read as a term, or a character in a story, rather than a process, and when you read it this way, the answer to the question "Where is beauty" is "Next to ugliness." This is true on a basic level, insofar as beauty is opposed to ugliness, and so in a semiotic sense they are 'next to each other' as opposed terms, like white and black squares on a chessboard. But beauty is not a companionable seatmate to ugliness. Rather, beauty exists once more relationally, constituted by its violence towards ugliness. One theory about the importance of facial symmetry to facial beauty is that symmetry is a kind of costly signal, that only an organism with a very strong immune system and a history of good nutrition and little trauma would be able to construct so fearful a symmetry, and that therefore that symmetry functions as a kind of certified, honest communication about the organism's health. According to this theory, beauty extends its empire by stamping the chaos of ugliness out. Beauty operates similarly in other contexts; for example, in the experience of someone trying to be beautiful, the force of beauty may lead to violence against those parts of the person coded as ugly, like adorable belly rolls. Thus beauty plays out not only intersubjectively but also intrasubjectively. In a sense, beauty-as-a-term functions as a kind of mythological telos or goddess of beauty-as-a-process; as a commander of the armies of threat and consolation, the term Beauty orders the destruction of ugliness, which in its multitudinous nature can never match Beauty's distinctiveness, but, unable either to order itself without losing itself or to select the correct stroke of deviation to accent the symmetry, can also never hope to match it by self-purification. In this sense, the "disfigurement" committed by Beauty against ugliness makes ugliness less of a figure. Simultaneously, ugliness never fully goes away, it always remains outside the boundaries of the beautiful; the best that could happen is that Beauty would be put in temporal order after ugliness, as ugliness's inevitable evolution, like in Scott Westerfeld's Uglies books—in which case all that is ugly would eventually become beautiful, just as all developing countries must eventually become developed (/s). Of course, this mythological/teleological framing is both a blessing and a curse; on the one hand, it aligns our understanding with the way the goddess Beauty is deployed against the formless in the ideology of colonization, but on the other hand, in sacrificing the processual understanding, it stops us from focusing on how beauty actually interacts with/uses/is used by oppressive power—of which colonization and slavery are the most dreadful examples—and even risks naturalizing that usage. If beauty is intimate and instrumental with truth, then it must not be fully determined by oppression; beauty must possess force of its own, must be in league with the kind of truth that will set us free. So hewing to the processual seems advisable, at least for a while.

The understanding of Beauty as costly signal that I mention above gets at something of why beauty is a threat to free will. Beauty functions in part as a kind of certificate, like a security certificate online. An evolutionary biologist might suggest that it certifies fitness in some way, whether that be through the lack of scarring from childhood illness or facial symmetry through good nutrition. But beauty is no less a certificate in the case of a poem, where these questions of fitness are even less clear-cut. (What are poems for, anyway??) Beauty may suggest other markers of health or well-builtness but insofar as it functions as an intersubjective process what is important is that it certifies its own authenticity. Beauty's power of certification is to impress upon us that we are dealing with the real thing. This contentless undeniability is part of what underlies its aspect as the threat of loss of control. After all, you could point out that beauty is not simply the threat of loss of control, but the reality of it, since people often do make fools of themselves, lose resources, etc in the face of beautiful but untrustworthy things. But in this case, credible threat (credible because the editor got up from her reading desk, walked into the kitchen, and told her spouse "honey, this is the real thing") and reality are inseparable. The threat of loss of control happens because beauty forces us to depersonalize, in a metaphorical sense. Our inability to deny beauty leads us, through long habituation, to assume that we are in fact in a scripted situation determined by our powerlessness before beauty. In other words, we fall into a script, losing the complexities of embodied experience; we feel like, as people encountering beauty, we must act in particular ways because that is how one acts. (This is a gendered and raced phenomenon. The man raised by wolves in the comedy film is guilelessly fascinated by the white woman in the family who takes him in.) In becoming besotted with someone or something else, we have forgotten about the things that make us personally worthwhile. Succinctly, beauty in its aspect as threat strips us of particularity without stripping us of our identification with ourselves; beauty in its aspect as consolation disidentifies us with ourselves while restoring to us our particularity.

Work

But all this talk of beauty as a struggle within the self, as a pattern of self-losing and self-destruction, as a costly signal and a certificate of authenticity has got me thirty, thirsty for something more systemic. Anyone who's ever spent too long inside a shopping mall can agree that depersonalization has something to do with consumption: not only labor but the work of social reproduction is alienated. But depersonalization is an outcome here, not the mechanism. The function that drives the form of a shopping mall is the manipulation of attention—the mental real estate which is also widely acknowledged as the ultimate scarcity and needful resource in the world of online commerce. Shopping malls manipulate our attention; the flashiness makes it difficult to zoom out and focus on the bigger picture of our finances, our needs, our chances of finding goods elsewhere. Like the Tinder deck, they show us dazzling things one by one, in strictly local/immanent context. At the same time, they impress and exhaust us with their unendingness, and pull our attention in many directions, making it eventually almost impossible to do the hard work of choosing well. Shopping malls do have a quintessentially postmodern aesthetic structure full of many beautiful fragments within fragments that together make a dubiously finite and not-quite-beautiful whole. But that's not what interests me here. Rather, I'm bringing up this example to point to the effect of making the commodity both beautiful and desirable, an effect achieved through the manipulation of attention.

This is not an isolated connection. Beauty is generally connected with attention—attention is one reason hot people go on Tinder, for example. But the connection isn't clear-cut: there are things that draw our attention without being beautiful, and beautiful things that don't get much attention, and things that don't seem beautiful until we pay attention to them. So does beauty create attention? Does attention create beauty? Are they somehow related but mutually independent? Answering this question is useful in part because, when we understand beauty as an intersubjective process operating on an interplay between universality/particularity and threat/consolation, it's quite difficult to explain how beauty can be used by, incorporated into, or structured like flows of capital—but understanding attention as part of capitalism is not only possible, but very very necessary. So maybe by dancing with the concept of attention, we can understand how beauty can operate on a mass scale.

I once asked an acquaintance, an artist named Louise, as she and I sat out in the garden one afternoon, what it felt like to be seen as beautiful. I remember her response as being surprisingly intimate and focused on consent; she talked about the people whom she allowed to see her as beautiful, that it was something shared—talked, especially, about learning to be beautiful to women rather than men. I said I had become interested in moments when it seems like the whole world is bending close, rapt with attention, to you and object of your amazement, as though god had shed his grace on the two of you. She said she thought of it differently. She lifted her stubby beer bottle, now almost empty. She asked me to focus on it as she described the icon of a bear embossed on its side, surrounded by a thin circle; the small, toothlike outcroppings ringing its base; the gentle curve from its squat body up to its narrow neck. As I looked at the brown glass bending the sunlight, I felt astonished at how lovely it was, and the image stayed in my mind for several months.

For a while I was amazed at how well Louise's combination of hypnotic suggestion and directing my attention had worked. But as time wore on, I started to think more about the circumstances in which the spell had been cast. We were together at an unsubsidized artist's residency in the North of France, which charged a low daily fee for housing; we were participating in a ten-day queer event. It was possible for me to come to France and do this because I had a remote teaching job that I got through a connection at Harvard, and because a large financial firm connected with Deutsche Bank was funding a scholarship for me in the coming fall, meaning I didn't have to worry about saving as much, and could use some of the few thousand my grandfather had left me. The scholarship was because of Harvard as well. And so, indirectly, was my presence at the residency, which I learned about through a former writer at my magazine, a magazine I became involved with through a Harvard friend. Of course the residency, too, was created by networks of funding, although it felt like a commune: an old convent, it was not, as land, productive of food or material goods, but was supported by flows coming in from many national and private grant-giving organizations, in the form of the at-cost rent payments by its itinerant artist inhabitants. The experience of leisure and self-determination I had there were possible precisely because that leisure time was being neatly segregated away from the moneymaking opportunities that enabled it. Embeddedness in the European network of art and education funding enabled the institution to continue to exist, while social relationships (including obvious racism) filtered who could get access to it. All of this came together to clear the space for that bright, slow afternoon when Louise described the beer bottle to me. The previous summer, when I was struggling to scrape together money for food, I'm not sure that experience would have been possible.

In this case, it's pretty clear that artistically directed attention created, or illuminated, an event of beauty—complete with a tinge of resentment: could I make someone feel that way about an empty beer bottle? And it's pretty clear that that attention was only possible under particular, unjust systems of the distribution of leisure and togetherness. But the more broader takeaway is that the idea of oppressive beauty norms, that art is there to make the oppressors beautiful and remind everyone of their wealth, is only half the truth. That version focuses on oppressors as identity groups who want to be beautiful for beauty's sake, or (less of a strawman) to maintain hierarchies, for example around inheritance in slave societies and consequent access to wealth. I'd like to flip the script, and look at the supply side. To do this, I'm going to reframe one more time. I'm going to appeal to a witchy metaphysics of beauty. In this way of looking, art-making is like a spell that simultaneously creates and reveals worlds of beautiful truths about objects (beer bottles, for example). All working spells include a gesture and a price. If you can't pay the price—if you don't have the capital—it is very hard to get the spell to work with the gesture alone. Art, including 'fine' art, can change the world in a big way, but only with the addition of material resources. The cruel stereotype of the pathetic art student who deludedly hopes to change the world exists not simply because young people overestimate their abilities, but also because that student is crushingly unlikely to find the money to actually attempt it. But, simultaneously, capital doesn't determine art's magical capabilities. What it does do is, like the architecture of the shopping mall, corral the attention and contextualize the meaning of the artworks involved.

Seen through this lens, it's clear that art-making today is twisted against itself. One day, we think our poems can change something; the next, night seems to come early, and it's obvious that's a ridiculous hope. The art that does make it big is mostly either a sign of unattainable power or a claustrophobically closed sign of our disenfranchisement. The closedness of these signs of disenfranchisement is important politically: even in this moment of rising anti-capitalism we are still ever so slightly holding our breath, not quite moving our shoulders. Low art (including memes) is ferocious, critical, pornographic, relatable, but also rootless; either its production is compromised, its authorship is stripped, or its distribution is nil. It's getting harder to capitalize on a successful work. The creation of small "organic" resourceless communities, which trade broad relevance for the promise of big-fish-small-pond prestige, or the fetishization of commodified artworks are the only options, notwithstanding the fact that the boundaries between the two have become more porous. Crowdfunding has had some positive consequences, but its main effect is to heighten the mental schism, the doublethink (loaded term, but I refuse to use the word "schizophrenia"): we feel closer to the content creators in our better moments, but on bad days we know we're many miles below them. The fine arts are no better off. "Useless" mass humanities education makes us feel intimate with "great" artists of the past, but the mechanisms that first made them available to a mass audience no longer exist. The words we use to express great beauty ("symphony," "poetry"), often in non-musical/poetic contexts, are a sign of what's absent; they refer to arts we only engage with when we have sufficiently steeled ourselves to handle our resentment—i.e., arts we can muster the "energy" (a term deserving of its own essay) to engage with a few times a year. The poetry and literary fiction scenes have come to resemble something like an elaborate game. The idea of recapturing popularity by allowing people to whoop and cheer at art music concerts is an example of expecting a magical gesture to work without the price, a problem that exists beyond that corner of the music world. The prospect of a neat division between art-as-therapeutic-hobby and art-for-others is a nice thought, but it's a chinese wall most can't maintain. Meanwhile, music creation and especially poetry, with the rise of Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, have become practically the vernacular of young people's communication: we are writing poems constantly, but they legally don't belong to us and we aren't allowed to call them that. We are living in a time of universal art under conditions of scarcity. Everyone is making art constantly, but we have no resources for it except our underemployment, nor access to recognition; art-making is associated with changing the world, but it's also obvious that our art, and our acquaintances' art, is not doing that, and, holding this contradiction in our minds, we privatize it, and convert it into guilt.

Tool for You

What exactly happened to that beer bottle? Let's make the magical account more precise: the readymade and the composition are opposed to one another from the point of view of casting a spell to make something beautiful. The beer bottle is a readymade, while the made-up face is a composition; with the readymade, the gesture is outside the object made beautiful, with the composition, the gesture is embodied within the object of the spell. The readymade and the composition can be literally opposed, not just conceptually; the work of making the readymade has to contend with the composition, while the composition, especially in the case of makeup, may directly try to struggle with, escape, or alter the strictures of the spell of the readymade. This is what is happening when makeup is used to achieve an effect of nonbinary gender performance when no such category has already been established. When the straight men start sliding into your DMs, that's an effect of the social counter-spell. Determining the spellcaster, and whether we're looking at a readymade-spell or a composition-spell, is a troubled task in which an individualist approach is a trap. As was discussed above in the paragraph on the use of the "force" of beauty in determining truth, making beauty is a co-creative process with powers far greater than the individual makeup artist. Sometimes the composition and readymade find themselves in collaboration against the artist; spells have a mind of their own.

There is a strange fact about the structure of this spellcasting as a whole: on the one hand, it appears that the sole goal of the work is to create beautiful things. The whole structure I described of how beauty helps us find truth says that we are drawn on by our instinct for what kinds of compositions (or readymades) will threaten people with the loss of their free will. This seems to imply that threatening people's free will is the goal—and, indeed, people do want that, in hopes that it will make them/their objects (1) valuable and (2) safe. But that's not the justification we give for making beauty: we say it's to create something relatable, to speak truth to power, to reveal one's "true self"—or to illuminate the "natural order." Nor is it the only major effect of beauty-making: making things beautiful changes what can be made beautiful in the future. In the act of casting the spell, both the gesture itself and the environment in which the spell is cast are altered. Thus representation can change who it is possible to imagine and therefore shift the boundaries of who it is possible to be. This is all in addition to the portal-effect of the spell, in which a path to a particular perspective of truth is opened. The fact that beauty is, when it works, a contentless undeniability, a certificate of nothing but itself, paradoxically makes it disappear when it becomes the instrumental goal of the spell. The side effects, all of which are relational and entangled, become more important than the stated objective. This is not to say that art is for art's sake—it's the opposite. The use of beauty as the instrumental objective makes art, when the price can be paid, uniquely capable of creating political change in a way that goes beyond instrumentality, and in a way that can be filtered by censors but cannot be predetermined. This change is where the price goes.

Buzzcut Season

One night, when we were lying in bed together, I asked my girlfriend, Nastya Panichkina, the same question I asked Louise: what does it feel like when people see you as beautiful? She said that she didn't like how they might see her as beautiful in a different way than how she sees herself. According to my notes, she continued:

I don't have any control over how the other person is picturing me. I don't own that image anymore. And maybe they're picturing me in a way that doesn't comport with my own way of looking at myself. And maybe I start thinking of myself that way. But also I change every day and they change every day and I can't control whether I'll stay beautiful to them.

Other than the sense of being in danger here, so different from Louise's positive outlook, what jumps out at me is the language of dispossession—which, I'll admit, might have just been an artifact of how I wrote down the language. Here the phrasing is I don't own that image anymore, I can't control whether I'll stay beautiful to them. This should remind us of nothing so much as the dispossession of the proletariat. One's own image is torn away; not only that, but if you choose to invest in that image, there's no guarantee that your claim to your investment will be honored: a kind of rent-to-own imagination. There may be something universal and fundamental and timeless about the fact that other people will imagine you otherwise than you'd prefer, but it's hard to argue that we don't live in a time when images are systematically removed from their subjects: for example, nudes (and memes based on out-of-context images) are constantly circulated without regard for the pictured person's image. Meanwhile, the images of everyone's bodies—it's most noticeable with trans, fat, intersex, disabled, POC bodies, but it's happening to everyone all the time—are constantly being redefined by a process of the readymade that dispossesses people before the image has even been made concrete in a JPEG.

[... conclusion/rest to follow I guess... I'm not sure how to work out the remainder of the thoughts... and doubts...]