Aesthetic Objects and National Blindness

We met in the cafe of a Midtown hotel that none of us had chosen. Zadie Smith had suggested a place in Brooklyn, Ta-Nehisi Coates had suggested somewhere in Harlem, and I, trying to split the difference like the chronic mediator I am, had proposed a neutral venue that turned out to be sterile and overpriced and playing a jazz playlist that was almost, but not quite, real jazz. The coffee was adequate. The pastries were geometric. Through the window we could see a billboard for a television show none of us had watched, featuring an actress all of us recognized but couldn’t name.

“That,” Smith said, pointing at the billboard with her spoon, “is exactly the sort of thing.”

“The sort of thing what?” Coates asked. He’d arrived first, which surprised me. He was reading something on his phone with the concentrated frown of a person who has not yet decided whether to be angry.

“The sort of thing I want to write about. Not the show itself. The fact that we all know her face and none of us know her name. The ambient familiarity. The way American popular culture produces recognition without knowledge.”

Coates set his phone face-down on the table. “Recognition without knowledge. That’s good. But it’s also generous. I’d call it something else. I’d call it consumption without encounter. You can watch a hundred hours of something and never have to meet it.”

I said I thought that was the premise we were circling — a piece of cultural criticism about a specific artifact of American popular culture, examined from two angles. As an aesthetic object worthy of real engagement. And as a document of the country’s refusal to see itself clearly.

“Those aren’t two angles,” Coates said. “They’re one angle with a hinge in the middle. You can’t do the first honestly without arriving at the second.”

Smith tilted her head. “I don’t know if I agree with that. I think you can appreciate the craft of a thing — the formal achievement, the rhythm, the way a scene is constructed — without necessarily reading it as a symptom. Not everything is a symptom.”

“Everything produced by this country is a symptom,” Coates said. “That doesn’t mean it isn’t also beautiful. But the beauty and the symptom are the same object. I learned that writing about the Civil War. The most gorgeous plantation houses in the South are also the most precise architectural expressions of the ideology that built them. You can admire the columns. You should admire the columns. But if you only admire the columns, you are a fool.”

The jazz playlist shifted to something with a saxophone that wanted very badly to be Coltrane. Smith winced, almost imperceptibly, and I liked her for it.

“Here’s where I push back,” she said. “I grew up watching American television from the outside. In Willesden, in the eighties, the stuff coming across was aspirational and alien and completely fascinating, and the way I engaged with it was primarily aesthetic. The Family Ties sweaters. The Cosby Show living room. The sheer opulence of the sets compared to anything the BBC was producing. I didn’t have the context to read those shows as documents of American racial anxiety or class performance. I just watched them. And the watching was real.”

“The watching was real,” Coates said. “The thing you were watching was not.”

“Well, no. Of course not. Television isn’t real. But what I’m resisting is the idea that the only valid mode of engaging with popular culture is the diagnostic mode. The mode that says: let me tell you what this is really about. Because sometimes the formal properties of the thing — how it moves, how it sounds, how it fills time — are themselves the subject worth examining. Not as a way of avoiding politics. As a way of being precise about what kind of politics are actually operating.”

I told them I’d been thinking about a specific piece of American popular culture — not yet sure which one, but something that had been enormously popular, commercially dominant, culturally inescapable, and that had also been, in some way that was hard to articulate, a kind of national self-portrait that the nation didn’t recognize as a self-portrait.

“That’s most of it,” Coates said, not unkindly.

“I know. That’s the problem. How do you pick? And once you pick, how do you avoid the trap of writing the same essay everyone else has written about that thing?”

Smith leaned back. “You pick the one that makes you feel the most complicated. Not the one you hate. Not the one you love. The one where your feelings are tangled enough that writing about it would actually teach you something you didn’t already know.”

“And you write about the body,” Coates said.

Smith looked at him.

“You write about the body in the audience,” he continued. “Not the body on screen. The body sitting on the couch. The body in the theater. The actual physical experience of receiving this thing. Because that’s where the two angles meet — the aesthetic and the political. The aesthetic experience is a bodily experience. The political experience is a bodily experience. And in America, those bodies are sorted. They are sorted by neighborhood and income and color and they receive the same cultural product in different rooms, under different conditions, with different stakes. The screen shows the same image to everyone. But ‘everyone’ is a lie.”

I felt something shift. Not a click — more like a door opening onto a hallway I hadn’t noticed. I said I wanted the essay to do that: to start with the aesthetic surface, the pleasure of the thing, the genuine craft and beauty or humor or spectacle, and then to track how that same surface looks different depending on where you’re sitting.

“Where you’re sitting,” Smith repeated, as if testing the weight of the phrase. “Literal or figurative?”

“Both. Can it be both?”

“It has to be both,” she said. “That’s the only way to avoid the essay becoming a lecture. If you anchor it in physical specificity — this room, this couch, this particular Tuesday night in a particular apartment — then the political reading emerges from the ground up instead of being imposed from above. That’s what I tried to do in the Intimations pieces. Small, specific observations. A pandemic walks. The view from a window. And then the larger thing surfaces on its own, if you’re patient, if you trust the material.”

“But the larger thing has to surface,” Coates said. “You can’t just gesture at it and trust the reader to do the work. White readers in particular will take any exit you give them. If you leave the door open, they will walk through it and say ‘What a lovely essay about television’ and go on with their day. You have to close the door. You have to say: this is what this means. This is what this costs.”

Smith shook her head. “We’ll never agree on this. I believe in the open door. I believe the reader who walks through it and misreads the essay was always going to misread it, and the reader who stays and thinks was going to stay regardless. You cannot control reception. You can only control the quality of the thinking.”

“I’m not talking about controlling reception. I’m talking about moral clarity.”

“And I’m saying that moral clarity in an essay is not the same thing as telling the reader what to conclude. Moral clarity can be — should be — a quality of attention. How carefully you look at the thing. How honestly you describe what you see. The conclusion is the reader’s problem.”

Coates rubbed his forehead. “Zadie, I love your work. You know I do. But that position is available to you in part because of where you sit. You’re observing America. I’m surviving it. When I write about the way this country treats Black bodies, I don’t have the luxury of leaving the door open, because the door is the thing that keeps getting slammed on us.”

The room got quiet. The saxophone on the playlist had given way to a piano that was trying even harder to be something it wasn’t. I let the silence sit because I had learned, in conversations like these, that the silence after a statement like that was itself a form of meaning, and to fill it prematurely was a kind of cowardice.

Smith finally spoke. “You’re right. And that’s the tension the essay should contain. Not resolve. Contain. Both positions at once. The observer who can afford to leave the door open and the person for whom the door is not a metaphor. That’s not a contradiction. It’s a parallax. You see the same object from two positions and the distance between the positions is the subject.”

“Parallax,” Coates said. “I don’t love the word, but I take the point.”

I asked whether the essay should name the specific piece of popular culture in the title, or whether it should emerge gradually.

“Gradually,” Smith said, at the same time Coates said, “Immediately.”

They looked at each other and almost laughed.

“If you withhold it,” Coates said, “you’re playing a game with the reader. You’re being coy. Just name the thing. Trust the thing to be interesting enough.”

“If you name it immediately, you flatten it,” Smith said. “The reader arrives with all their preexisting opinions and never actually sees what you’re describing. They see their own relationship to it. You need to defamiliarize first. Make them see the formal properties before they can categorize it. Then, when you name it, they’ve already been looking at it with fresh eyes.”

“Fresh eyes,” Coates said, with a skepticism I found bracing. “People don’t have fresh eyes. People have the eyes they have. The work of the essay is not to give them new eyes. It’s to make them conscious of the eyes they’re already using.”

I said that was the better version of what I’d been trying to articulate about the two-angle structure. Not: here is the aesthetic reading, and here is the political reading. But: here is how you are watching this thing, and here is what your way of watching reveals about you.

“Now you’re getting somewhere,” Coates said, and I felt embarrassingly pleased.

Smith ordered another coffee and asked me something I wasn’t expecting. “What do you actually like? Not as a critic. Not as a writer trying to produce an essay. What piece of American popular culture do you genuinely, uncomplicatedly enjoy?”

I told her. She nodded. Coates raised an eyebrow.

“Write about that one,” she said. “Write about the thing you love. Because the essay will be more honest. Your defenses will be down. You won’t be performing sophistication. You’ll be trying to understand why you love something that maybe doesn’t deserve your love, or deserves it differently than you thought.”

“The thing you love is always the thing that implicates you,” Coates added. “That’s why people write about the things they hate. It’s safer. Hatred is a form of distance. Love is proximity, and proximity is where the trouble is.”

“He’s right about that,” Smith said, and it was the first time they’d agreed without qualification.

I mentioned the structure of Intimations — those short, concentrated sections, each one a discrete meditation that connects to the others by accumulation rather than argument. Could the essay work that way? Short sections, each focused on a different facet of the cultural object, each approaching it from a slightly different angle, building toward something that was more than the sum of its parts?

“That structure works for a piece like this,” Smith said. “Because the thing you’re describing — popular culture, the way it’s received, the way it functions in American life — is itself fragmentary. Nobody experiences a TV show or a film or a song as a unified text. You experience it in pieces. While eating dinner. While fighting with your partner. While half-asleep. The fragmented structure honors the actual conditions of reception.”

“But each fragment has to cut,” Coates said. “Each one has to draw blood. That’s the difference between a fragmented essay that works and a fragmented essay that’s just a collection of observations. You can’t rely on accumulation alone. Each section has to matter on its own terms, and then matter differently in the context of the whole.”

“That’s hard to do,” I said.

“Yes,” Coates said.

“That’s the entire job,” Smith said.

We sat with that for a while. The cafe was filling up — suits and laptops and people having meetings that looked more like our meeting than I would have liked. Coates checked his phone. Smith was writing something in the margin of her napkin.

I asked one more question: what should the essay refuse to do?

“Refuse to be balanced,” Coates said immediately. “Do not give equal weight to both sides of something that does not have two equal sides. The false balance is the first refuge of the coward.”

“Refuse to be certain,” Smith said. “Which sounds like it contradicts what he just said, but it doesn’t. You can be unbalanced and uncertain at the same time. You can say: I know this matters, I know it matters unevenly, I know the unevenness is political and the politics are racial, and I also don’t know exactly what to do with that knowledge. The not-knowing is not the same as both-sides-ism. The not-knowing is honest.”

Coates stood up. He had somewhere to be. “Write the thing you’re afraid to write,” he said. “Not the version where you perform fear. The version where you actually don’t know how it ends. Where you start with love and follow it to the place where love becomes something else, and you describe that place without flinching. That’s the essay.”

He left. Smith stayed. She was still writing on the napkin.

“He’s very good at endings,” she said, without looking up. “He always knows when to leave the room. I never do. I’m always the last one at the party, talking to someone’s coat.”

I told her I didn’t know how to end the essay either.

“Don’t end it,” she said. “Stop it. There’s a difference. An ending is a conclusion. A stop is a cut. You cut when the image is most alive, when the reader is leaning forward, when the next sentence would explain too much. You cut there. And what’s left is the essay.”

She finished whatever she was writing on the napkin, folded it, and put it in her pocket. She didn’t show it to me.

“The piece of popular culture you pick,” she said, standing, gathering her things. “Pick one where the beauty is real and the damage is real and they’re the same thing. That’s America. The beauty and the damage are not in tension. They’re the same object, seen from different seats in the same room.”

She paused at the door.

“Though Ta-Nehisi would say they’re not the same room.”

She was right. He would.