2 Emergence in Retrospect

One of the most prominent forms of the documentary aesthetic was the New Journalism. While the music documentaries in the previous chapter articulate neoliberal structures and subjectivities and the possibilities beyond them, the New Journalism often focused on the dissolution of postwar liberalism and civil society. New Journalists both embrace and mourn the political changes underway during the counterculture’s increasing centrality to American culture and neoliberalism’s shift from intellectual project to public policy from the 1960s to the 1980s. Indeed, for many New Journalists writing in the 1960s and 1970s such as Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson, literary nonfiction fused countercultural aesthetics with politics. This connection was a kind of survival mechanism, as many New Journalists and their readers witnessed the increasing failures of the New Left to produce the changes that it envisioned in the face of rising conservativism and increasing neoliberal reforms in the United States and internationally. And while the New Journalism typically refers to a group of writers who published important nonfiction works about the drug culture, antiwar movement, and hippies of the 1960s and 1970s, it is just one of many documentary movements prominent from the postwar era to the present. There are also conceptual art projects fueled by documentary methods, such as Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, discussed later in this chapter. Photography played a significant role in this emerging aesthetic, from street photography to large-format landscape photography. Then there are the popular memoirs, hip-hop autobiographies, and documentary films, such as Patricio Guzmán’s Chile, Obstinate Memory, with which I conclude this chapter. In short, the documentary aesthetic that I am tracing is an aesthetic because it traverses media forms yet retains a singular focus on linking subjective experience to structural conditions through experimental modes of nonfiction writing and image making. The documentary aesthetic modifies and recalibrates all manner of media, in response to the erosion of New Left utopianism and the coterminous emergence of the neoliberal fragmentation of collective imaginaries. This chapter explores how Joan Didion, Hans Haacke, Patricio Guzmán, and Milton and Rose D. Friedman represent the emergence of neoliberal culture, broadly, and neoliberal U.S. foreign policy, more particularly, across documentary media forms.

Joan Didion, Fragmentation, and Neoliberal Policy

Perhaps no New Journalist better exemplifies the fragmentation that emergent neoliberalism generated than Joan Didion. In what seems by now to be a ubiquitous postmodern gesture, but one that is also an elegant encapsulation of the New Journalist’s role as survivor and witness, Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” begins with the assertion, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”1 Following this general statement about the narrative construction of reality, Didion narrows her scope to the personal, shifting from the plural pronoun “we” to the singular “I” and detailing her own experience: “I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971.”2 This introduction foregrounds narrative, the author’s voice, and the breakdown of language’s hold on reality, all central to Didion’s prose.3 “The White Album” was published in the 1979 collection of Didion’s journalism of the same name, and the essay itself was a compilation of shorter fragments, mostly essays published in the Points West column that Didion shared with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in the Saturday Evening Post. One of Didion’s most well-known essays, “The White Album” reproduces these Saturday Evening Post columns along with other autobiographical fragments. In the collage essay, Didion juxtaposes memoiristic passages about her vertigo and personal life with fragments of reportage, as she covers, among other things, Huey P. Newton’s 1968 trial for the shooting of John Frey, the Manson murders, the Doors recording their third album, Waiting for the Sun, and the 1968 student strike at San Francisco State College. Complimenting this focus on the breakdown of narrative is Didion’s account of her own vertigo and nausea, which connects the author’s body to the text and the larger world that it represents. What interests me about “The White Album” is the way that Didion periodizes her vertigo—1966 to 1971. While this might lead the reader to guess that Didion somehow comes to terms with her experiences and develops a narrative that can explain and account for all of these disparate fragments by the 1970s, her own prose does not bear that out. Instead, Didion develops cultural disorientation, physical ailment, fragmentation of experience, and lack of narrative into a narrative itself. “The White Album” chronicles the specific disorientation induced by the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s at the same time as it accounts for the emergence of Didion’s own literary style as she seizes upon fragmentation as a documentary form.

When critics write about Didion, the question of style inevitably comes up. For Deborah Nelson in her book Tough Enough, Didion is a writer who is poised between two modes: emotional identification and ironic detachment: “Her reputation now alternates between two diametrically opposed characterizations: one as an anxious and emotionally fragile sensitive and the other as an unsentimental, ironic, and unsympathetic critic.”4 Part of this opposition has to do with how Didion represents emotion. What seems or even feels personal is often represented in Didion’s works as part of a larger structure. As Nelson puts it, Didion often represents feelings in a way that is “depersonalized and exteriorized, less her own than a part of the social effluvia, something ambient, shared between and passed from individual to individual, community to community.”5 With Didion, we see the world through her ironic and critical distance, yet we also inhabit the same landscape and its attendant structures. That is, we identify with Didion, just as we see the world through her detached perspective, stoic and hardened. What Nelson does not account for, in her formalist explication of Didion’s style, is the broader cultural and historical role that Didion’s writings—and by extension Didion as a persona—have played in postwar American culture. To understand what Didion and documentary art more generally offer us today, I will focus on the intricate workings of her prose style, as well as the larger structures that her style connects to and makes visible.

As was made evident in the announcement and subsequent coverage of the fashion company Céline’s 2015 ad campaign featuring Didion and iconic Didion photographic poses, Didion’s style is not just a matter of diction and syntax. It is also a matter of subject position and embodiment. Writing about the ad campaign in Vogue, Alessandra Codinha captures the attachment to Didion’s style: “Let’s talk about Céline’s just-debuted ad campaign featuring French dancer Marie-Agnes Gillot, model Freya Lawrence, and none other than immortal intellectual-and-otherwise dream girl Joan Didion. Well, did you just feel the collective intake of breath shared by every cool girl you know? Did you feel the pulse-quickening vibrations of every recent college grad and literature fan? Did you sense the earth trembling beneath your feet? Do you have two eyes and a heart?”6 Didion serves, today, as a relay for connecting the past to the present, the 1960s to the twenty-first century, the self-styled outsider perspective to the toughness and resolve of internet culture’s self-help visions of femininity. Even in ads that didn’t feature Didion, some of her iconic poses and accessories, like her Corvette Stingray, are replicated. Yet, as Didion pointed out to the New York Times, 2015 was not her first fashion campaign.7 She appeared in a 1989 Gap campaign with her daughter Quintana Roo, photographed by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Didion has been iconic for some time, and she encapsulates a curious interplay between cool detachment and intimate identification in our time. This dualistic function is emblematic of the cultural history she has documented since the 1960s: the emergence of neoliberalism and the emergence of a distinctly post-1960s documentary aesthetic.

Fragmentation works in Didion’s prose in a number of ways. First of all, fragmentation operates at the level of content. Her work as a journalist includes essays about disparate topics, as my above summary of “The White Album” suggests, and her fiction draws upon her journalism quite explicitly, be it in the meditations on California highway and water systems in Play It as It Lays (1970), the descriptions of the renamed Salvadoran setting, Boca Grande, of A Book of Common Prayer (1977), or the dramatization of the CIA presence in Vietnam in Democracy (1984). In keeping with the first-person style of many New Journalists, Didion details her own life as a journalist in her nonfiction, as she bounces from city to city and country to country on assignment and as the only stable places in the United States and beyond become nonplaces such as hotel bars and airport lounges. Similarly, her fiction is written in the first person, with a female narrator who is consciously writing the story being read, often troubled by her inability to make sense of the events and relationships that she is narrating. Both Didion’s journalism and her fiction can then be read as experiential guides to U.S. culture and U.S. international entanglements in the late twentieth century, from San Francisco, Malibu, and Miami to Bogota, San Salvador, and Saigon. The interconnectedness of her fiction and nonfiction shatters any conventional literary taxonomy that would make a distinction between the real and the imaginative, the journalistic and the novelistic. Secondly, fragmentation informs her literary style and the form of her prose as an organizing principle, bouncing between images and moments, denying the reader any singular or totalizing framework or explanation. This pastiche might produce a sense of totality within fragmentation, perhaps, but Didion leaves the resolution of the fragments to the reader. Lastly, her nonfiction prose circulated originally as single essays, published in glossy magazines or literary reviews and only later collected in book form. The unifying principle that underlies all of these varied types of fragmentation is literary style, the first-person voice that Didion adopts in both her journalism and fiction. This tension between style and fragmentation, between a unified, coherent narrative voice and that voice’s dissolution as it articulates disparate and irresolute events, produces a literary form that captures key facets of neoliberalism: the privileging of entrepreneurial individualism, the privatization of public resources, and the proliferation of new, niche markets. In its complication of traditional literary taxonomies, its fragmentary pastiche, and its origin in magazine features, Didion’s writings helped to establish the documentary aesthetic in prose.

By reading Didion in this way, I hope to demonstrate how we can think broadly of the postwar era, and especially art and literature from the late 1960s to the present, as the era of the documentary aesthetic, and concurrently as shaped by finance capitalism and neoliberal culture. Briefly, neoliberalism is free market ideology, a set of economic, political, and social policies that limit government regulation of the economy, endorse the privatization of public services, and seek to dismantle the modern welfare state in the name of efficient markets. As noted earlier, neoliberalism was developed by Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek during and after World War II, and later by the economists of the Chicago School, especially in the influential works of Milton Friedman. Its baggy confederation of intellectual commitments to the free market was championed by the United States and European nations from the 1970s to the present day, though our current wave of populist nationalism seems to be complicating the long-standing neoliberal consensus across major political parties in the U.S. and around the globe. As such, neoliberalism names the economic and political worldview of major economic institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.8 It has led to a widespread erosion of government institutions that provide public services, the reduction of financial regulations, and the waning of labor unions and other forms of worker’s rights in the name of the free market. Moreover, neoliberalism is more than a cluster of policy positions. As Philip Mirowski has chronicled, neoliberalism is a plural enterprise, and its flexibility makes it both difficult to define across national and historical contexts and also powerful as a worldview that reshaped business and society in the late twentieth century: “Neoliberalism cannot be easily defined on a set of 3 by 5 cards and needs to be understood as a pluralist organism striving to distinguish itself from its three primary foes: laissez-faire classical liberalism, social welfare liberalism, and socialism. . . . Neoliberal intellectuals understood this general goal to imply a comprehensive long-term reform effort at retatting the entire fabric of society, not excluding the corporate world.”9 In her journalism, Didion records a series of fragments that can be read as a literary genealogy of neoliberalism and its rupturing of categories like the state, the nation, and the subject, from the 1960s counterculture in the United States to the neoliberal reforms implemented in Central America in the 1980s and 1990s.

In her nonfiction, Didion explicates the radical revisions to the way in which the individual is privileged as the basic unit of economic and social life under neoliberalism, as well as the ways in which neoliberal economic and political reforms collapse space not by connecting it through communication networks, transportation systems, and global finance but instead by fragmenting it. In her prose, Didion articulates how space and time are broken in the late twentieth century, in ways that lead not to homogeneity or totality, multiculturalism or trickle-down prosperity, but to the collapse of sense and meaning. The individual ascends, while society wanes. Didion’s prose grapples with this zero-sum game, a game that we can identify now, retrospectively, as neoliberalism.

Like many New Journalists, Didion privileges impression over fact, though she denies the kinds of analyses, interpretations, and summaries of events common to Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson, both of whom had political aspirations. Mailer ran for mayor of New York City, Thompson for Sheriff of Aspen County, Colorado. In The Armies of the Night, for example, Mailer compares the 1967 March on the Pentagon to a Mathew Brady photograph of a Civil War battlefield. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), Thompson likens Las Vegas’s Circus Circus casino to what the world would look like if Hitler had won World War II. These comparisons are meant to orient the reader historically and politically. They interpellate the reader into the left conservative or libertarian-on-mescaline positions adopted by Mailer and Thompson, respectively. In contrast, Didion’s prose resolves little and privileges a meditative production of disparate figures. Didion focuses on how the inexplicability of an event constitutes the meaning of that event. For example, in her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion explains her move to San Francisco in 1967: “All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves ‘hippies.’ When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967 I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while, and made a few friends.”10 This situatedness without purpose carries the rest of the essay and much of Didion’s writings about the counterculture. The open-endedness of her account, though, is complicated when one looks at the context in which her writings, and especially “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” originally appeared.

In its original published form, as a feature article on the “hippie generation” with accompanying photographs in the September 23, 1967, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, the essay has an immediate context that overwrites Didion’s ambivalence about the counterculture. In this feature article form, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is an exposé in the magazine that is perhaps best known for its iconic 1950s Norman Rockwell covers, though the Post was using photographs on its covers by the 1960s when Didion became a regular contributor. In the Saturday Evening Post, Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” appears alongside advertisements for washer-dryer machines, an album titled Anthony Newley Sings Songs from Doctor Dolittle, hemorrhoid cream, and denture glue. The essay serves a clear documentary function, capturing the reality of the younger generation for what is clearly an older, more conservative readership. The photographs by magazine photojournalist Ted Streshinsky that accompany the essay feature members of the hippie generation, with long hair and John Lennon–style round glasses; many of them are long exposures with blurry subjects, connoting the marijuana and LSD hazes through which the hippies perceive the world. The essay concludes with one of a series of anecdotes, about a mother named Sue Ann who is yelling at her toddler when she catches him chewing on an electrical cord, while everyone else in the house is “in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard damaged in the fire” caused that same morning by the toddler.11 In the essay’s original magazine context, reinforced by a photograph in the feature article of a mother and toddler at a dance club (fig. 9), the essay’s closing account of a child in danger while most of the adults search the kitchen for Moroccan hash seems typical of an exposé of all that is wrong with the hippie generation.

This moralism, though, is complicated when the essay is taken out of that context and repackaged, without the accompanying photographs, in the 1968 collection of Didion’s essays also titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem. There, the final paragraph resonates differently, as a moment of negligence and misguided values, to be sure, but also as a moment of possibility. As Didion remarks earlier in the essay, what captivates her about the hippie generation is the way in which it stages rebellion without a clear sense of what that rebellion will entail, without a language to express their rebellion: “This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. . . . These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. . . . They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.”12 In this light, Didion is writing less of an expose and more of a meditation on the possibilities and challenges of the younger generation. Here, the child chewing on the electrical cord is less the sign of the hippie generations’ immaturity and irresponsibility than their troubled search for a way to articulate rebellion. The child is the hippie generation’s failure and its possibility, an image of danger and neglect but also of curiosity and a willingness to pursue threatening agency. This juxtaposition of potential harm and naive action is left deliberately unresolved at the essay’s conclusion. This irresolution registers with Susan Sontag’s account of what she called the “new sensibility” in a 1965 essay in Mademoiselle, later collected in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966). In the essay, Sontag claims that the “new art,” which ranges from Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, and Robert Rauschenberg to the Supremes, Budd Boetticher, and Jean-Luc Godard, “demands less ‘content’ in art, and is more open to the pleasures of ‘form’ and style,” making it “less snobbish, less moralistic—in that it does not demand that pleasure in art necessarily be associated with edification.”13 What Sontag details in her essay as 1960s art’s rejection of a genteel aesthetic sensibility is, I think, central to understanding not only Didion but also the documentary aesthetic.

Didion’s deeply ambivalent and uncertain representation of the hippie generation is part of Sontag’s new sensibility, which ignores or even critiques edification and moralism in art of all sorts, from literature and painting to film and music. What is curious, though, is the way in which postmodernism has been codified as precisely the opposite of what Sontag claims in 1965, an early moment in the formation of postmodern styles and theories. From Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographical metafiction” to Jameson’s “third-world allegory,” postwar literature—and especially the postwar novel—has been read either as moral, in its production, for example, of hybrid figures that destabilize systems of oppression, or as becoming incoherent, paranoid, or nostalgic in the face of late capitalism, and thus registering moral resentment at the losses of identity, home, and history.14 These losses and possible recovery from them become the moral center of postmodern literature, whether present as textuality or absent and therefore the object of paranoiac speculation. Didion provides an alternative view, as she represents not what was and what will be (or, at least, the struggle to imagine the latter in light of the former) but instead the possibilities of her own situation and the limitations of her own historical moment. The way that Didion represents fragmented space and experience documents emergent neoliberalism, and the privileged perspective afforded to the individual in her essays about the counterculture—not to mention the individual’s own simultaneous involvement in and skeptical detachment from the events that she witnesses—allegorizes the role of the individual in a neoliberal order where national identities and state sovereignty have broken down.

This is particularly evident in Didion’s 1983 Salvador, a nonfiction account of the Salvadoran Civil War. The Salvadoran Civil War began with a leftist coup d’état in 1979 and concluded with the Chapultepec Peace Accords in 1992. Didion’s trip to San Salvador took place during the “reign of terror” period of the Civil War between 1981 and 1983, a period when the conflict was at its most violent. As Paul Almeida notes in his study of resistance movements in El Salvador, “between 1979 and 1983, some thirty thousand to forty thousand civilians fell victim to government and/or paramilitary groups—a veritable genocide.”15 Didion’s Salvador was originally published in three parts in the New York Review of Books during November and December 1982, then packaged together as a small book in 1983. In Salvador, Didion examines how the Salvadoran Civil War produces a sense of terror that isolates the individual, and in the text, Didion becomes an interlocutor who can account only for absences and unevenness rather than totality. The strength of neoliberalism’s emergence, then, as Didion’s Salvador emphasizes, lies in its presence in absence, its subsumption within fragments rather than its coherence as an ideology. Mary Louise Pratt has placed Didion’s Salvador in the long tradition of imperialist travel writing, yet she notes: “The grand aspirations of the imperial powers reduce here to a bureaucratized wish for ‘management.’ Welcome to the 1980s!”16 Didion’s vision of El Salvador, and the Salvadoran Civil War itself, marks a shift from older imperial models of colonization to a neoliberal focus on management. This neoliberal rationality was difficult to understand and criticize in the 1980s, even though it was operative. Largely a series of policy decisions made behind closed doors, neoliberal reforms in El Salvador would only begin to be singled out by activists in the country as a problem in the late 1990s. By then, it was difficult to roll back measures recommended and, indeed, mandated by international organizations like the International Monetary Fund, with whom the Salvadoran government signed its first accord in 1982, resulting in wage freezes and a devaluation of Salvadoran currency.17 Neoliberalism remade everyday life before it could be named in everyday life; neoliberalism is an ideology that could only be recognized as such after the fact.

Didion’s Salvador begins in the El Salvador International Airport, which is forty miles from San Salvador and designed to feed tourists into a resort district that was never completed. Didion reads the airport and its surroundings as a vertiginous space, like the Bonaventure Hotel in Fredric Jameson’s famous account of postmodernism,18 that repeats the same patterns over and over again yet might also reverse or change its structure at any moment: “In the general absence of tourists these [Salvadoran resort] hotels have since been abandoned, ghost resorts on the empty Pacific beaches, and to land at this airport built to service them is to plunge directly into a state in which no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse.”19 The play on the word “state” here invokes both Didion’s subjective experience of being in El Salvador during the Civil War and the evaporation of the “state” itself as the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military and ruling party, consolidated into ARENA, fought against the FMLN, the guerilla leftist group that had, at the time, retreated to the countryside after being driven back from San Salvador. The evaporation of the “state” registers in Salvador uniquely. It had been widely reported in the U.S. that the Salvadoran security forces, many officers of which had been trained in the United States or in El Salvador by the CIA, had formed unofficial “death squads” that had committed a number of brutal crimes. The two most notable, for Didion and others, were the assassination of leftist leader Archbishop Romero and the murder of four American missionaries, both taking place in 1980. What registers here, then, is the dissolution of the state of El Salvador, but also the state of the United States, as Reagan continued to support the Salvadoran security forces despite these widely reported crimes, undermining Cold War rhetoric that made the United States’ support of democracy worldwide a centerpiece of foreign policy. The trip to El Salvador also plunges Didion into “a state” that allows her to witness the dissolution of liberalism for the sake of destabilization and privatization. From our contemporary vantage point, it is clear that Salvador chronicles how Reagan’s anticommunism was also, at the same time, emergent neoliberalism, and how the Salvadoran Civil War allowed for the production of individualism outside of any identifiable state, the kind of free-market ego idealized in neoliberal thought.

Didion describes El Salvador, at times, as entirely foreign and other. She even uses an excerpt from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) as the book’s epigraph. The famous passage about Kurtz’s report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs ends with Kurtz’s “scrawled” note: “Exterminate all the brutes!” This quotation resonates, in the early 1980s, with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now, adapted from Heart of Darkness to the context of the Vietnam War, and with Hunter S. Thompson’s 1966 Hell’s Angels, a New Journalist account of the infamous motorcycle club, which concludes with the same quotation. In Apocalypse Now and Hell’s Angels, Kurtz’s scrawl becomes the American response to both international and domestic threats, the spread of communism and the challenges of the counterculture. What, for Conrad, was a maddening engagement with the other in Africa becomes, in the context of Didion’s Salvador and this chain of citations, a realization that the other and the self have folded in on one another. The difference between El Salvador and the United Sates, leftist revolutionaries and the Hell’s Angels, a military dictatorship and the Reagan administration, blurs. As Didion remarks in “Insider Baseball,” an essay on the 1988 presidential race, the categories that we use to understand the world lose their meaning as they are continually redefined by powerful elites toward “the invention of a public narrative based at no point on observable reality.”20 The connection Didion draws between El Salvador and the U.S. is often elided in critiques of Salvador, which, as Patricia Stuelke points out, tend to fault Didion for the detached mode through which she approaches “the problem of representation confronting 1980s solidarity activists and artists, the question of which affective modes could ethically and effectively inspire solidarity with Central Americans struggling against US-backed dictatorships and death squads.”21 Didion’s detachment, though, does allow her to register neoliberalism’s emergence, as an impersonal force that binds the United States to El Salvador at the level of economic policy if not at the level of political solidarity.

Because of the Civil War and because, as Didion claims, “terror is the given of the place,” El Salvador is not only in flux but without a past or future.22 Instead of seeing ruins or museums, Didion learns to see details that matter in the war-torn environment, adjusting her perceptions: “These are the details—the models and colors of armored vehicles, the makes and calibers of weapons, the particular methods of dismemberment and decapitation used in particular instances—on which the visitor to Salvador learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future concerns, as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue.”23 This perpetual present—the “amnesiac fugue”—undoes not just historical context but also individual security. Didion, for example, describes having dinner while watching two armed strangers across the street: “Nothing came of this, but I did not forget the sensation of having been in a single instant demoralized, undone, humiliated by fear.”24 This debasement of personal security is the “mechanism of terror” in the Salvadoran Civil War, and it is also symptomatic of the broader stripping away of security, that is, the protections of the welfare state, under neoliberalism. During Didion’s stay in El Salvador, the president was Álvaro Magaña, who, Didion notes, “studied in the United States, at Chicago.”25 The University of Chicago was the crucible for the development of neoliberalism in postwar America, and the mention of Magaña’s alma mater is followed by an interview with an unnamed Salvadoran elite. Didion writes: “‘Don’t say I said this, but there are no issues here,’ I was told by a high-placed Salvadoran. ‘There are only ambitions.’ . . . That this man saw la situacion as only one more realignment of power among the entitled, a conflict of ‘ambitions’ rather than ‘issues,’ was, I recognized, what many people would call a conventional bourgeois view of civil conflict, and offered no solutions, but the people with solutions to offer were mainly somewhere else, in Mexico or Panama or Washington.”26 The book’s final clause clarifies where these solutions lie: “The State Department announced that the Reagan administration believed that it had ‘turned the corner’ in its campaign for political stability in Central America.”27 Didion’s account positions the Salvadoran Civil War as a conflict between elites, educated and trained in the United States, yet also as a conflict that has no clear political stakes because of this orchestration. It is a contest between individual ambitions rather than political viewpoints—a contest that Paul Almeida identifies as the first stage of neoliberal reform in El Salvador, followed by a wave of privatization, national debt, and mandated government austerity measures.28 Moreover, this privileging of the individual over politics, ambition over policy, is a transformation that Didion associates with the 1960s and that accompanies and facilitates neoliberalism. First-person narration and individual subjectivity are the only available frameworks to experience the world, and even that journalistic subjectivity is incapable of organizing, analyzing, and packaging events into historical coherence. Didion’s documentary prose elevates the individual only to demonstrate the individual’s tentative and fleeting hold on a reality that itself lacks any coherence, as categories like “state,” “nation,” and “citizen” lose their referents.

In “On the Morning after the Sixties,” an essay originally published as “A Generation Not for Barricades” in the June 5, 1970, issue of Life and collected in The White Album, Didion catalogs the remains of the 1960s. She identifies the sixties as a failure but one that she is unable to leave behind. According to Didion, the central idea of the sixties was radical personality: “We were all very personal then, sometimes relentlessly so, and, at that point where we either act or do not act, most of us are still. I suppose I am talking about just that: the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood.”29 When this passage is read alongside Salvador, Didion’s historical perspective becomes clearer. The radical individualism of sixties politics results in stillness, in inaction, in “historical irrelevancy.” This individualism is also fostered by neoliberal reform, which emerged as a theory and practice of the United States in the era that Didion is writing about—and, especially, as foreign policy by the early 1980s, when Didion wrote Salvador. Through her New Journalistic style, Didion struggles with the fact that the individual is all that we are left with, yet the individual is rendered meaningless not by social institutions but by their erosion. For Didion, those who experienced the 1960s “are survivors of a peculiar and inward time.”30 Her journalism is an attempt to recognize the losses that allowed for the survival of the personal. These varied, multiple losses—of society, of politics, of utopia—are registered through the persistence of the New Journalism, as personal style becomes, in a privatized, neoliberal culture, both hegemonic and the only available tool of critique.

Hans Haacke, Finance, and Juxtaposition

Similar to Didion’s representation of life and experience in pieces, Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holding, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 solidifies the difference and incompatibility of experience and structure, life and history. However, it does so in a way that inverts Didion’s privileging of fragmented experience. Haacke’s conceptual art installation emphasizes structure and system, capturing the fluidity yet monopoly of ownership in the New York real estate market. Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. consists of two large maps, 142 photographs of properties in New York with accompanying text descriptions, and six charts tracking business transactions (fig. 10). All of the materials in the work chart the real estate holdings and transactions of the Harry Shapolsky family, from roughly 1951 to 1971. Haacke chose to document the Shapolsky family because, as he states, “They represented the largest concentration of real estate under the control of a single group. They were owned by about seventy corporations and were frequently sold and mortgaged among them.”31 Haacke’s accompanying text describes Shapolsky’s legal troubles, which include a 1959 conviction for rent gouging, an indictment for bribing building inspectors, and, in the words of a New York assistant district attorney, “ruthlessly exploit[ing] the shortage of housing space” in Manhattan.32 Infamously, the Guggenheim Museum rejected Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. and cancelled an exhibition of the artist’s work in 1971, six weeks before the show’s planned opening. According to then-director of the Guggenheim Thomas Messer, Haacke’s documentary work was not art. Messer described the installation as “an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism.”33 As Messer stated elsewhere, Haacke’s work “reduce[d] the work of art from its potential metaphoric level to a form of photo journalism concerned with topical statements rather than with symbolic expression.”34

While the Guggenheim Museum’s objection to Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. branded the work mere journalism and therefore not art, Haacke’s reception since 1971 has proven otherwise. Indeed, Shapolsky et al. has been cast by Benjamin Buchloh as an important work of sculpture, one that is ultimately valuable not because of its documentary framing but instead because it “contest[s] the transhistorical validity of the traditional sculptural aesthetic of ‘pure’ materials and process.”35 While this argument is compelling insofar as it places Shapolsky et al. in the context of conceptual art, this focus on sculpture as a medium displaces the work’s political and social critique with the rarefied status of a traditional art medium. It is hard to imagine how a work about the financialization of real estate could not figure as being about economic realities just as much, if not more, than it is about the idea of sculpture. Contrary to Buchloh, Rosalyn Deutsche has argued that Haacke’s work made visible the “economic and social conflicts” that undergird the art museum. Moreover, as Deutsche argues, Haacke’s photographs of buildings and vacant lots in Shapolsky et al. undo any romantic conception of tenement photography that museumgoers might expect from an exposé of a slumlord. Instead, they “reinforce at the level of individual structures the impression of the city as an economic product. Shot from street level, looking up at the buildings, the photographs have borders that coincide with property lines, emphatically refusing compositional devices that might identify the buildings as historically or aesthetically interesting structures rather than as real estate.”36 The 142 identically sized photographs tell the viewer nothing about the experience of living in one of those buildings. Instead, the photographs display with seeming indifference the building’s front, sometimes with a parked car, trash cans, or passing pedestrians out front. The photographer did not even wait for the scene to be clear. These survey-like photographs, then, are mere documents, interesting not because of their composition but because of the absence of aesthetic qualities. Accordingly, the work as a whole is where Haacke’s documentary aesthetic is to be found. In the conceptual linkage and presentation of mere buildings as commodity values to be swapped, mortgaged, refinanced, and swapped again through the Shapolsky family’s many shell corporations, the buildings are important not as buildings but as the material traces of increasingly abstract financial dealings, dealings that Haacke makes visible in the six charts in Shapolsky et al. that trace the family’s shell corporations and mortgage operations.

First exhibited in the United States at the University of Rochester in 1972 and then exhibited as part of Haacke’s “Unfinished Business” retrospective in 1986 at the New Museum, Shapolsky et al. was also shown as part of the opening exhibit at the new Whitney Museum of American Art in 2015, an exhibition fittingly titled “America Is Hard to See.” This title is fitting because Haacke’s Shapolsky et al is a work of art that hinges on the elision of experience and feeling and the replacement of familiar modes of engaging with corruption and crime by systemic analysis and investigative documentary. Reviewing the Whitney’s show in the Nation, Barry Schwabsky took Haacke’s work as an occasion to reflect on the Lower East Side, where many of Shapolsky’s holdings were located:

I couldn’t help noticing that many of the buildings Haacke pictured were in my own neighborhood, the Lower East Side, so I decided to make an expedition around my environs to see what had become of those buildings over the last 44 years. The Lower East Side is a very different place than it was in the 1970s and ’80s. . . . In fact, some of the buildings featured in Haacke’s piece no longer exist: There’s a school playground where 216 and 218 Stanton Street must have been; 209 and 211 Eldridge Street were replaced in 1988 by a New York City Housing Authority project called Lower East Side I Infill. At the same time, many of the properties look—at least from the outside—as if they’ve risen in the world, and some of them have upscale bars and cafes on their ground floors. But such appearances can be deceiving: 42 Rivington Street is the site of a charming little French restaurant and wine bar where I’ve whiled away a happy hour or two; but the entrance to the apartments above it is filled with graffiti, and a “no trespassing” sign posted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office suggests that there’s been serious trouble recently. A Google search turns up many recent violations, including reports of no heat or hot water.37

Schwabsky’s response to Haacke’s work is to embrace the role of flâneur, to walk his neighborhood and see what has changed, what hasn’t. Yet this leaves the art critic a bit at a loss:

It’s hard to know what goes on behind the facade of a building, today or back in 1971 when Haacke was making Shapolsky et al. The piece takes a documentary form, but only to remind you that it is really a formal exercise revealing how little a work of art—or the name of a building’s owners—can reveal. Haacke’s piece exposes a fraudulent real-estate system, according to the Whitney’s accompanying wall text, but not really. Rather, it exposes a system of ownership that lacks transparency, but as to what end that opacity was cultivated we can only speculate. And it tells nothing about the lives of the people who lived in those buildings.38

Schwabsky views Haacke’s work, then, as failing to have any content. Instead, it is a “formal” exercise, a conceptual work, about meaning and the work of art. Yet this formal exercise is much more than that if we expect documentary art to provide not a transparent account of subjectivity but instead an account of the tensions and gaps between subjectivity and structure. Indeed, Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. does not neglect experience so much as it presents a system of financial transactions that cannot be experienced, that elide explanation. After all, even after studying Haacke’s documents, it is not really clear how the Shapolsky family operates, how they make money, how the shell corporations and mortgage swaps produce profit. And it’s not clear that any of those financial transactions have anything to do with the buildings themselves, with the leases and maintenance needs that the Shapolsky family also exploited for profit.

The Structure of Neoliberalism’s Emergence

The gap between experience and system is indicative of how neoliberalism operates in our own age and how it operated from its emergence in postwar America. In Haacke’s 1974 work Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, the relation between finance, art, and neoliberalism is made even clearer. In this work, consisting of seven printed panels, Haacke traces the connections between the Guggenheim family, the Guggenheim Museum’s board of trustees, and their shared interests and roles in corporations. As Rosalyn Deutsche details: “For the multinational Kennecott Copper Corporation—which counted a Guggenheim family member and two museum trustees on its board of directors—Haacke presented information about the company’s investments in Chile and included a statement by the country’s deposed and murdered president Salvador Allende. . . . Kennecott was later named in hearings on the destabilization of the Allende democracy by United States interests.”39 Like El Salvador, Chile was one of the countries in which the United States would test out neoliberal economic and political policies under the secrecy provided by the Cold War. What Haacke’s documentary art and what Didion’s first-person reportage make visible, then, is not the reality of neoliberal culture’s emergence but instead the ways in which that emergence was not visible. Today, after the 2008 financial crisis, we remain in the same relation to economic and political structures, unable to understand the ways in which economic models failed in what Phillip Mirowski has described as the “conceptual debacle” that resulted in the retrenchment of neoliberal policies and neoclassical economic models in the twenty-first century.40

This curious retrospective relation to neoliberalism’s emergence is captured in Patricio Guzmán’s 1997 documentary film Chile, Obstinate Memory. In the film, Guzmán returns to Chile after fleeing during the 1973 military coup that included the assassination of Salvador Allende. In its conclusion, Guzmán screens his 1979 documentary The Battle of Chile for people who participated in Allende’s movement and a group of college students who were small children during the coup. After watching the film, they respond, often in tears, and reflect on the terrible violence of the coup. One man says, through tears, “I was a child. I remember the 11th September [1973, the date of the military coup]. I was on my bed, happy not to have to go to school. Having seen that [the film], I don’t understand how people can be so barbaric. Killing a family because it doesn’t think like you. You understand. Would you kill the dreams of history because you don’t like art?” The painful juxtaposition here, between a childhood memory of happiness and a realization of the violence that occasioned that happiness, is transformed in his reflection to an account of ideological struggle. “Art” and the “dreams of history” are conjoined, as The Battle of Chile seems to capture the utopian imaginary of Allende and his supporters as well as its brutal suppression by military forces in the service of early neoliberal policies propagated by the United States. Chile, Obstinate Memory documents not the “dreams of history” but instead the relation between those past dreams and the present, the distance between experience and the structures that facilitated that experience.

The film’s framing is echoed in Milton and Rose Friedman’s memoir Two Lucky People, in which they document how the “Chicago Boys,” a group of economists from the University of Chicago, served as economic advisers to the Pinochet regime. The memoir represents Milton Friedman’s visit to Chile as fleeting. That his trip resulted in protests against him for supporting a military junta is the subject of some bemusement: “I never could decide whether to be more amused or more annoyed by the charge that I was running the Chilean economy from my office in Chicago.”41 Yet the Friedmans also view Chile as proof positive of free market economics’ beneficent effect on society. Ignoring the human rights violations committed by the Pinochet regime—according to the Valech Commission, the number of “recognized victims” is 40,01842—the Friedmans instead view Chile as a triumph: “More than twenty years after the Chicago Boys were given authority . . . real income per capita multiplied more than two-and-a-half fold, inflation fell from 500 percent per year to 8 percent, the infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births fell from 66 to 13, and life expectancy at birth rose from 64 years to 73 years. And authentic political freedom has been restored with the turnover of power by the junta to a freely elected government.”43 For the purposes of this book, what is interesting in the Friedmans’ account isn’t the accuracy of their claims but, instead, the framework that they use to make them and the elisions they are constructed around. On one hand, the Friedmans defer to their own experience to claim that Milton Friedman did not, in fact, control the Pinochet regime’s economic policy. He is personally baffled by that claim and recounts meeting Pinochet only once “in a session that lasted perhaps three-quarters of an hour or so and in which I had to communicate through interpreters.”44 Yet Chile’s economic and political history over twenty years is, at the same time, evidence that Friedman and his colleagues held valid ideas that were put into practice in Chile. The Friedmans both aren’t personally responsible for the Pinochet regime and are responsible for the structural changes to the Chilean economy and society. What the Friedmans ignore is precisely the accounting of trauma and violence that Guzmán’s documentary names “obstinate.” In keeping with their neoliberal ideology, the Friedmans view Chile as both a personal experience and a theoretical exercise. The costs to civil society and to 40,018 humans is ignored in a framework that cannot connect personal experience to the realities of structural change, that can only think in either the terms of personal experience or structural abstractions.

This disjunction between system and experience, structure and history, is the reality that we live in, and it is one with which works in the documentary aesthetic grapple. Since the 1960s, works in the documentary aesthetic have sought to make sense of both experience and systems. Our neoliberal moment has made this a feat that requires art to make reality newly visible as a project of collective making. Yet, as Didion’s signature style makes clear, the project of collective imagination is complicated by our neoliberal culture’s privileging of personal experience and individual will as the barometer of value. In Haacke’s conceptual art and Guzmán’s reflection on neoliberal reforms in Chile, the documentary aesthetic makes visible the distance between economics and subjectivity, the ways in which our subjective frames are determined by structures that we can understand, perhaps, only retrospectively. Yet that backwards glance opens up the possibility of an interruption. The next chapter further explores the valences of neoliberal individualism and political possibility.