Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love, Punctum Books, 2012.
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“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture. In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love.
In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives.
Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. Desire/Love takes us on a tour of all of the things that sentence might mean.
The Book of Love is sad and boring, no one can lift the damn thing . . .
I am a love theorist. I sometimes feel dissociated from all my loves. I sometimes ask them to hold more of an image of me than I can hold. By “sometimes” I mean all the times. The image is the regressed form, not the narrative noise that comes later to try to apply adhesive to the fantasy and its representation in objects, so that I know I am an event that lives in the world. The love and the images available for it are in a Thunderdome death-love match, yet we act as though affect could be held within a steady-state space like meat on a hook, or the image of meat on a hook, since actual meat turns green. Most storage lockers are cold enough to slow down that decay, as we know from narrative and domesticity. Aggressions and tenderness pop around in me without much of a thing on which to project blame steadily or balance an idealization. So it’s just me and phantasmagoric noise that only sometimes feels like a cover song for a structuring shape or an improv around genre. In love I’m left holding the chaos bag and there is no solution that would make these things into sweet puzzle pieces. See Phillips’ reading of attachment as the drive to return to the taste of another person: the “sweetness” love stands for binds itself to an infinity of objects and plots and strategies for investing the scene with a worthiness matching our intensity of a need for its nourishment. This is why, perhaps too, Laplanche uses the word “metabolize.”
This is a philosophical “I”. I don’t feel like using “we,” because I fall into the banality pit when I do. (See Derrida on film on love. He should have trusted his first instinct to say nothing, since what he says is nothing, but he was being a good boy, and trying to maintain his availability for the interviewer’s idealization, the death in life of the call and response: he was trying to be loveable. Maybe the phrases one offers as gifts are the best love because they metarecognize the demand for love in any call: but, in itself, the professor’s discourse is not an opening to the other’s inconvenience, and it is not love if it is not opened to that.)
Detachment on a good day, dissociation during the stressful ones, overwhelmed and awkward on the days that begin flooded, and when it works, a lot of imitative affect mixing optimism and protective coating so that, reliably, while the internal objects are splashing around the external ones are getting the best of it. The heart bursts, Nancy says, and love isn’t dialectical, some stupid unimaginative feedback loop. I find that part almost delightful.
Apostrophe is not only the condition of love but an ideal of self-encounter. Can the addressee make more of it than you can, she you who waits for the sentence of your existence to finish and, inevitably, to miss its mark? For the addressee, you are willing to make provisional clarities. For the addressee, you are willing to perform an openness that’s an optimistic brokenness. If you’re lucky, you’re a topos in your own world, although without the apostrophic phantom you cannot exist in the world. I am writing on a short story now in which the protagonist moves from telling his story as “I do x” to saying “you do x” because he is looking for some refuge in the general, a pattern of self-detachment that would feel less lonely than he feels, if language could pull it off, but language can’t pull it off entirely, which doesn’t mean that one should give up trying this or that. Something might happen and a structure might shift its symbolizations. That is the hope of love, the Eternal Sunshine to which you just have to say “ok” to walking awkwardly and falling down on the ice. The truth is closer to Amores Perros, in which love wounds so badly that all you can do is walk away. But if you carry the image with you it will itch you to put it next to other things in an almost return that renews, without repeating, love.
It isn’t an ethical problem, whether one or a population is held in the world as an idealizable image in the minds of others: it’s what’s needed for anyone, to have a world that can hold an image of them more complete than the image they can hold of themselves. We watched a clip cluster from Sex in the City, which was one after another scene of a woman demanding recognition from objects or persons whose job it was to become-objects, and no wonder why having a real doll is a dream, because you can make it say “I love you”,” “I desire you,” “I’m sorry,” “Does that feel good,” and “Why did that bastard say that to you?” in an eternal loop of distant listening, light touch reflection, magnification, and shrinkage, an archive of impacts whose success or failure depends more than anything on the timing of the effort to assimilate to the lie that the statement of love is not merely a proposition. I moved from I to you. Distortion is not falsehood. Blame it on the failure of language to hold perfect phrases for the states that have multiple aims but do not stop communicating regardless.
I have been reading Ariana Reines’ The Cow. Three students gave me this book within a space of six months, and then I’ve given it to people who I thought could bear it and not a single person has been able to, which I find interesting (I mean, my failed judgment of my intimates is interesting to me). When I gift a book or a film it is personal after all, more than buying clothes for someone: an imagination of someone’s pleasure in relation to a demand for their attention. Is it the kind of book my students give me because they sense that—actually, I don’t know. It is as though they perceive frustration beneath my apologetic pedagogic poetics (Oh come on, try, this is hard, I can brainstorm a hundred examples and maybe maybe then you can and maybe you can hear something and surprise yourself later, which is how Bollas describes “the unthought known” in relation to the aesthetic, which doesn’t represent what you know but provides a setting to encounter its impact.)
I am a love theorist, how did that happen? I was doing ideology critique and fell down the rabbit hole, the donut hole, the pipette. I have a book coming out with some older thought about all this, but the examples are all wrong. Always, the examples are all wrong, which is why love theory tends to be so conservative—ProustProustProustBovaryBovaryBovaryAbelardEloiseCourtly. It’s not that the classics can’t be wrong, it’s that they won’t be disgusting, and love theorists tend to have an aversion to the disgusting.
I sometimes feel dissociated from all my loves. “I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans.”
No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt – Heather Davis & Paige Sarlin
On the occasion of the inaugural Research in Culture Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, “On the Commons; or, Believing-Feeling-Acting Together” in May 2011, we sat down with guest faculty Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt to ask them about their use of love as a political concept. They each use the idiom of love to disrupt political discourse, as a means of thinking through non-sovereign social and subjective formations. Love, for both these thinkers, is transformative, a site for a collective becoming-different, that can help to inform alternate social imaginaries. But their notions about how this happens diverge. In his lecture at Banff, through a close reading of Marx, Michael Hardt proposed that substituting love for money or property as the means for organizing the social can open up new social and political projects. More generally he begins from the position of love as ontologically constitutive, or love as a generative force. Lauren Berlant’s description of love has attended to the ways in which love disorganizes our lives, opening us to move beyond ourselves. And so, for Berlant, the concepts of love and optimism foreground the sort of difficulties and investments involved in creating social change, understood as the construction of an attachment to a world that we don’t know yet, but that we hope will provide the possibility for flourishing. Throughout the interview Berlant and Hardt try on each other’s positions, organizing relationality through models of incoherence and multiplicity. In this, they speak to, reflect, inform and inspire activist projects of social change from queer communities to neo-anarchist organizers. It was breathtaking to watch these two brilliant thinkers engage in conversation with one another given the scenic view of the mountains that was framed in the window behind them. As they rallied back and forth, shifting, clarifying and providing counterpoint to each other, their exchange was a testament to intellectual generosity and the possibilities of dialogue and collective endeavors. What follows is an excerpt from that discussion.
Heather Davis: What is it about love that makes it a compelling or politically interesting concept?
Michael Hardt: One healthy thing love does, which is probably not even the core of it, but at least one healthy thing it does, is it breaks through a variety of conceptions about reason, passion, and the role of affect in politics. There are a number of other ways of doing this, but considering love as central to politics confounds the notion of interest as driving politics. Love makes central the role of affect within the political sphere.
Another thing that interests me is how love designates a transformative, collective power of politics – transformative, collective and also sustained. If it were just a matter of the construction of social bonds and attachments, or rupture and transformation, it would be insufficient. For me it would have to be a necessarily collective, transformative power in duration.
When I get confused about love, or other things in the world, thinking about Spinozian definitions often helps me because of their clarity. Spinoza defines love as the increase of our joy, that is, the increase of our power to act and think, with the recognition of an external cause. You can see why Spinoza says self-love is a nonsense term, since it involves no external cause. Love is thus necessarily collective and expansive in the sense that it increases our power and hence our joy. Here’s one way of thinking about the transformative character of love: we always lose ourselves in love, but we lose ourselves in love in the way that has a duration, and is not simply rupture. To use a limited metaphor, if you think about love as muscles, they require a kind of training and increase with use. Love as a social muscle has to involve a kind of askesis, a kind of training in order to increase its power, but this has to be done in cooperation with many.
Lauren Berlant: Another way to think about your metaphor, Michael, is that in order to make a muscle you have to rip your tendons.
I often talk about love as one of the few places where people actually admit they want to become different. And so it’s like change without trauma, but it’s not change without instability. It’s change without guarantees, without knowing what the other side of it is, because it’s entering into relationality.
The thing I like about love as a concept for the possibility of the social, is that love always means non-sovereignty. Love is always about violating your own attachment to your intentionality, without being anti-intentional. I like that love is greedy. You want incommensurate things and you want them now. And the now part is important.
The question of duration is also important in this regard because there are many places that one holds duration. One holds duration in one’s head, and one holds duration in relation. As a formal relation, love could have continuity, whereas, as an experiential relation it could have discontinuities.
When you plan social change, you have to imagine the world that you could promise, the world that could be seductive, the world you could induce people to want to leap into. But leaps are awkward, they’re not actually that beautiful. When you land you’re probably going to fall, or hurt your ankle or hit someone. When you’re asking for social change, you want to be able to say there will be some kind of cushion when we take the leap. What love does as a seduction for this is, and has done historically for political theory, is to try to imagine some continuity in the affective level. One that isn’t experienced at the historical, social or everyday level, but that still provides a kind of referential anchor, affectively and as a political project.
Michael Hardt: Let me start with the non-sovereign thing. I like that. If one were to think a political project that would be based on or include love as a central motivation, you say notions of sovereignty would be ruptured. That’s very interesting and powerful. I assume we are talking about a variety of scales here simultaneously, where both the self and the social are not sovereign in love.
When we engage in love we abandon at least a certain type of sovereignty. In what ways would sovereignty not be adequate in explaining a social formation that was grounded in love? If we were to think of the sovereign as the one who decides, in the social relation of love there is no one who decides. Which does not mean that there are no decisions but, rather, that there would be a non-one who decides. That seems like a challenging and interesting question: what is a non-sovereign social formation? How is decision-making then arrived at? These are the kinds of things that require modes of organization; that require, if not institutions, customs, or habits, at least certain means of organizing the decision-making process. In a politics of love, one of the interests for me is a non-sovereign politics, or a non-sovereign social formation. By thinking love as political, as somehow centrally involved in a political project, it forces us to think through that non-sovereignty, both conceptually, but also practically, organizationally.
Heather Davis: I’m really intrigued by the ways you both speak of how love is a project of non-sovereignty in terms of both the social and the self. If you’re trying to conceive of each of those layers with a certain consistency, then what is the difference between those formations and sovereignty?
Michael Hardt: I’ll start with some basic things. I think within the tradition of political theory it’s not at all clear what a non-sovereign politics could be. It’s hard to make such grand generalizations. But the tradition of political theory we inherit is fundamentally related to the role and decision making of the one, whether that one be the king, the party, the liberal individual, all of these. Here, decision-making can only be performed by the one, and so I think this is what Toni Negri and I have felt is interestingly challenging about the concept of multitude itself. How can a multiplicity decide? The organization of decision-making is central for me, for thinking politics or political theory. I guess I would apply this to the level of the individual too. How can an individual as multiplicity, and hence as non-sovereign, decide and not be just an incoherent helpless heap? What I think is required for that, now back again at the level of political theory, is understanding how collective structures, or structures of multiplicity, can enable social decision-making. We also have a long tradition of the possibility of the democracy proper – the rule of the many – but it’s a minor tradition, or sometimes a subterranean tradition. That seems to be one way of characterizing what’s at stake, or challenging in this.
Lauren Berlant: I think sovereignty is a bad concept for almost anything. It’s an aspirational concept and, as often happens, aspirational concepts get treated as normative concepts, and then get traded and circulated as realism. And I think that’s what happened with sovereignty. So, in “Slow Death” I say we should throw sovereignty out. But people are so invested in it [so] maybe we can’t because you can’t just decide ghosts don’t exist. You have to find a way to change something from within.
There’s another way of going at this that also has to do with a different relation to incoherence. Part of the reason I think that queer theory and love theory are related to each other as political idioms, is that queer theory presumes the affective incoherence of the subject with respect to the objects that anchor it or to which they’re attached. One thing that is very powerful for me to try and think about is how we could have a political pedagogy that deals with incoherence. Where the taking up of a position won’t be so that an individual can be coherent, intentional, agentive, and encounter themselves through their object, but that there would be a way that situational clarity can be produced without negating the incoherence of the subject. Training in one’s own incoherence, training in the ways in which one’s complexity and contradiction can never be resolved by the political, is a really important part of a political theory of non-sovereignty. But we still have to find a place for adjudication, or working out, or working for, or working over, which requires a pedagogy of attention, of paying attention to the different ways in which we engender different kinds of claims on the world, in our attachments or ways of moving or desires for habituation or aspirations . . .
I always have a phrase that I’ve decided is a placeholder phrase, as phrases often are in my life, which for a long time is a satisfying phrase, and then I realize I haven’t actually had that thought yet. For example, in a crisis culture we’re so excited about gaming the difference between zero and one that flourishing somehow gets bracketed. Survival looks like a triumph, and that’s a terrible thing. I want flourishing. But what do I mean by flourishing anyway? What are all of the synonyms I know for flourishing? There aren’t that many. Isn’t that interesting? The phrase you use is an increase in joy. But an increase of joy might not feel like increase. It might feel like relief, it might feel like I can be a mass of incoherent things and not be defeated by that.
Paige Sarlin: Why turn to this mode of imagining now? Why the idiom of love?
Michael Hardt: For me, with regard to the discourses of today, there seemed to me to be an excessive focus on sovereignty, on the state of exception, even as antagonists, I mean. Those discourses close immediately and unavoidably the vulnerable position of wanting more. The discussions about the enormity of the sovereign that we face, the near impossibility of confronting that power that’s both inside and outside the law, that puts us in the position of bare life, all of that obviates the problem of the vulnerability of wanting, of expressing the desire for the world to be different, almost by saying“of course it can’t be”, by saying “of course you’re powerless so it doesn’t matter what you want.” In that way, talking about love seems a useful challenge to what I perceive as a dominant mode of political theorizing and political discourse today. It also connects up with a series of things emerging today and kinds of political movements or the kinds of theorizing going on in political movements that seems to grasp that well. So the concept of love helps name an undercurrent that seems worth fostering in contrast to what I see as a dominant mode of theorizing.
Lauren Berlant: The discourse of political love has always, or long been, associated with religious idioms of thinking the social. Partly what we’re doing is trying to bring it back into the place of political action, where political action and new social relations happen in time with different types of practices. I think Michael is right that there’s already energy for that in neo-anarchists. And if you have a practice-based model of thinking in relation to other kinds of political work, it’s also saying that it’s not spirit over there and doing the material work of reorganizing life over here, but trying to find a synthetic language for both. In that way, it’s jarring in a good sense, it’s not just a mode of reflection but actually it’s a mode for action and also a description of what it would take for people to take the risk of new relationality - nomorepotlucks.org/
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, 2011.
Lauren Berlant wants you to break your New Year’s resolutions. Or at least she wholly understands your impending failure to keep them. So go ahead, smoke another cigarette. Smoke whatever you can find. Down a few more 100-calorie snack packs. Eat a whole goddamn box of 100-calorie snack packs. Fuck 100-calorie snack packs, find some actual cookies and eat all of them. Eat whatever you can find. Don’t give up caffeine. Don’t work harder. Slack off. Don’t get a promotion. Keep drinking. Drink more. Ignore your new gym membership. Pick up new bad habits. Hone your bad habits into an art form. Master the art of sustaining your bad habits, because your bad habits are what sustain you.
After all, bad habits are lifesavers we cling to in the face of the fraying and always already toxic “good-life fantasies” we wallow in, in the face of becoming totally unmoored. Are you really that guilty about your guilty pleasures? What exactly were you hoping for anyway?
In her new book Cruel Optimism, University of Chicago English professor Lauren Berlant describes the titular phrase as “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” We cling to the fantasy that “this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way.” This time she’ll really love you. This time you’ll lose the weight. This time you’ll make enough money. This time the candidate’s promises will last after election night. This time the mission will really be accomplished. This time, you will be happy. Except, you know, you won’t. At least not for long.
Happy fucking New Year.
Apropos to the purportedly apocalyptic year stretched out in front of what is apparently the last vestiges of humanity, Cruel Optimism heralds an existing age of swelling precarity. Although the experience is different across economic and social situations, we are, at least the 99 percent of us, the new precariat class. We are frantically digging to keep the tunnel from caving in — digging for air, not treasure. And what’s really hemming us in is an unwillingness to eat dirt, to embrace precarity “as the condition of being and belonging,” instead of clinging desperately to the paradox of predictability and security — “buy this car to go to work, go to work to pay for this car.”
Berlant locates the reader, you and I and herself, in the impasse of the present, the cul-de-sac in which we continue to strive for the “conventional good-life fantasies — say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work.” We circle ever more desperately, with an increasing awareness of the good life’s farcical nature. Berlant tracks the pain of everyday life — not clock-stopping trauma or crisis that denotes a shift in paradigm but the vague sense of doom we walk around with, the crisis ordinary. This is not apocalypse, more like slow-moving quicksand.
While other temporal interventions in queer theory have primarily focused on futurity — such as the optimistic focus on queerness as aspirational, a yearning for a not-yet-present utopia in José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, or the darker argument against the cult of the child in Lee Edelman’s canonical No Future — Berlant’s Cruel Optimism argues for the centrality of the affective experience of the present. Before being codified as a historical event, she writes, the present is felt as such, even if an “incoherent mash.”
This time-space is the habitat for the precariat as an “affective class” that includes both the lastingly and newly insecure, a group that finds commonality in their inability to believe in social democratic good-life fantasies. Her construction will no doubt draw some scoffs from a few of her less-imaginative fellow professional Marxists, but Berlant’s class construction is in line with the concession that we won’t be getting what we want anyway. Almost none of it, including and especially not an industrial proletariat, robust trade unions, or progressive wealth redistribution.Whatever else it is, and however one enters it, the historical present… is a middle without boundaries, edges, a shape. It is experienced in transitions and transactions. It is the name for the space where the urgencies of livelihood are worked out all over again, without assurances of futurity, but nevertheless proceeding via durable norms of adaptation. People are destroyed in it, or discouraged but maintaining, or happily managing things, or playful and enthralled.
Berlant thickly describes her close readings of texts that deal with “how best to live on, considering”: such novels as Was by Geoff Ryman, Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill, The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, art films like Gregg Bordowitz’s Habit, Laurent Cantet’s Ressources humaines and L’emploi du temps, and Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s La Promesse and Rosetta. Out of these diverse texts about precarious living, of consumptive dissatisfaction, economic desperation, of the slow death of obesity and the slowing death of HIV — all the things that sustain and destroy us — comes a mirror-like portrait of the precariat. There is a fine and hazy line between occupations and Air Jordan riots. Whether you’re camped out at Zuccotti Park or outside H&M for the new Versace collaboration, here we are, with every present moment slipping into the next, trying not to lose hold. Each adaptation to precarity a foothold in some epic metaphor.
Berlant doesn’t leave us with the instructive “Life sucks, eat some snacks,” but rather urges us to find our way out of the psychological burrow. How do we extricate ourselves from the irreparable and “cramped” fantasy of the good life, toward a “better good life?” How do we get out of relationships of cruel optimism, out of this prolonged sense of crisis, this sustained and boring code red? It is not a cul-de-sac of excess fat, blackened lungs, or wandering eyes but rather the structural impasse of capitalism we must fantasize our way out of. Berlant explicitly fails to offer a revolutionary program, opting instead to examine the habit of living in spite of everything that suggests one ought not. Potentiality is expressed in these times “in regimes of exhausted practical sovereignty, lateral agency, and sometimes, counterabsorption in episodic refreshment, for example in sex, or spacing out, or food that is not for thought.” If we stop projecting toward the future, then we can plan for the present that is already here and still coming tomorrow, even if we can’t quite make sense of it except in ways we can say. - Jenna Brager
“Even Adorno, the great belittler of popular pleasures, can be aghast at the ease with which intellectuals shit on people who hold on to a dream.”
Lauren Berlant is not shitting on you or your dream. OK, yes, her latest book is called Cruel Optimism and begins with a damning introductory explanation, “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Yes, the University of Chicago professor will break down everything you hold dear: food, love, politics, family, virtuous New Year’s resolutions. And yes, within a few pages, there’s that creeping sensation that, whatever makes you tick, it’s got you on the fast track to ruin and disappointment.
Nevertheless, a trip to Bluestockings and a few Sunday afternoons of heavy reading will reveal a surprisingly tender survey of the things people do and the attachments they form to get themselves through life's inadequacies. Cruel Optimism is less brutal analysis than a dark, lush still-life of American fantasies and our Quixotic lunges toward them. An affective portrait of the 99%.
In Berlant’s account, the 99% or precariat, eats, buys and loves not to build the future, but to mark the present with holding patterns of predictability and security. This despite increasing evidence that contemporary life is precarious, tumbling along with a “pacing of death,” where the majority of workers are nothing more than fleshy machines, jobs are fleeting, and quick-stepping entrepreneurialism is a new moral imperative.
We cope in this century by looking forward, by creating attachments and desiring, mechanisms of optimism which Berlant traces through texts like The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill, and films Ressources humaines by Laurent Cantet, La Promesse, and Rosetta by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne.
Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill is now on my required reading list. Berlant uses Gaitskill's novel to elaborate how food, sex, and intellect (smarts) permit a sense of agency despite crippling individual traumas for protagonists Justine and Dorothy. The girls self-harm in order to interfere with the female lives imposed upon them, but “even if one risks self-negation through such tendencies, not to be that [ordinary, failed person with that history] is an amazing thing” writes Berlant.
One of the few positive, programmatic initiatives of Cruel Optimism is to argue to “desubjectivize queerness and to see it in practices that feel out alternative routes for living” in opposition to the traumatic “heterofamilial, upwardly-mobile good-life fantasy.” But there is no larger, revolutionary call-to-action. Cruel Optimism’s work is mostly in its witnessing: “To admit your surprising attachments, to trace your transformation over the course of a long life sentence, is sentience.” - Caitlin Hu
Lauren Berlant
On her book Cruel Optimism
In a nutshell
Cruel Optimismis a book about living within crisis, and about the destruction of our collective genres of what a “life” is; it is about dramas of adjustment to the pressures that wear people out in the everyday and the longue durée; it is about the blow of discovering that the world can no longer sustain one’s organizing fantasies of the good life.I’ll focus here on three matters. The first is the concept of cruel optimism (what’s optimism, what’s cruel about it). The second is on a particular scene—the end of the postwar good life fantasy and the rise of neoliberalism in the U.S. and Europe—in which the consequences of cruel optimism are lived collectively. The third is about the need for a realism that embeds trauma and suffering in the ordinary rather than in a space of exception, given that the crises of exhaustion and knowing how to live are problems saturating ordinary life.
I define “cruel optimism” as a kind of relation in which one depends on objects that block the very thriving that motivates our attachment in the first place.
All attachment is optimistic. But what makes it cruel is different than what makes something merely disappointing. When your pen breaks, you don’t think, “This is the end of writing.” But if a relation in which you’ve invested fantasies of your own coherence and potential breaks down, the world itself feels endangered.
A destructive love affair is my favorite example: if I leave you I am not only leaving you (which would be a good thing if your love destroys my confidence) but also I leaving an anchor for my optimism about life (which is why I want to stay with you even though I’m unhappy, because I am afraid of losing the scene of my fantasy itself).
So this double bind produces conflicts in how to proceed, because massive loss is inevitable if you stay or if you go.
Cruel Optimism asks: Why is it so hard to leave those forms of life that don’t work? Why is it that, when precariousness is spread throughout the world, people fear giving up on the institutions that have worn out their confidence in living?
This is why I am interested in seeing optimism operate in all kinds of attachment: from intimacy and sexuality to things like voting, or the belief that capitalism is a meritocracy that rewards active competence.
In all of these scenes of “the good life,” the object that you thought would bring happiness becomes an object that deteriorates the conditions for happiness. But its presence represents the possibility of happiness as such. And so losing the bad object might be deemed worse than being destroyed by it. That’s a relation of cruel optimism.
The wide angle
My big question is: Why do people stay with lives, forms, and fantasies of life that don’t work?How do we learn to associate certain things with our fantasies of the good life? Shouldn’t there be more and better forms of life to attach to? What makes so many people desperate to live conventionally rather than experimentally, when the prevailing norms generate so much noise and evidence of their failure to sustain life? How do conventional ideas of the good life get implanted in our viscera, and how do we go about enabling changes in our visceral understanding of our objects and our potential flourishing?
So I think of Cruel Optimism fundamentally as a book about affect and unconscious fantasies in relation to ideologies of the good life that were made available for optimism in the post-war economic bubble. I am therefore interested in practices of democracy, labor, love and intimacy that sustain and diminish us at the same time.
A number of kinds of studying provide the context for this work. I’ll focus on three here: Marxist critical theory, queer theory, and critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition that, to explain personal and collective desire, uses resources from psychoanalysis, philosophy, and mass society theory and phenomenologies of embodied existence via feminism, trauma studies, etc.
Elliptically, then: my training as an affect theorist really derived from Marxist critical theory, from Raymond Williams through Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson, especially: and then reading Frantz Fanon blew my mind.
Most people think of Marxism as antithetical to any sensitivity to affect, as a mode of analysis focusing on capitalist processes of value extraction and exploitation. At the same time, though, Marxist thought has also provided a powerful account of fantasy: of how our senses and intuitions are transformed in relation to property, to labor, to presumptions about being deserving, and to enjoying the world.
The theorists I responded to see art as a place that clarifies the subjective and visceral aspects of structural social relations. We read artworks as a space where a variety of forces converge and become visible, including the fantasy resolutions we make to be able to live within contradiction. Fanon wrote about the ways bodies and minds under colonialism were “colonized”—broken and formed by having to find their ways in life amidst negating images and potentially defeating contradictions of power.
So I learned from the start to think that distinctions like public/private, impersonal/personal, structure/agency were false representations of how the world works. Feminism’s “personal is political” helped too, to develop a way of thinking that sees power infusing our very gestures and fantasies, our attachments to others as well as to our labor and our connection to the world.
Queer theory was a crucial development in this process. For those readers who are unfamiliar, queer theory is not a program for claiming that non-heterosexual identities are cooler, better, richer, or deserve special accommodations.
The point is double: to seek to open up understanding the relation between conventional patterns of desire and the way they are managed by norms, and to focus on patterns of attachment we hadn’t even yet known to notice, patterns in which sexuality and intimacy are enacted in a broad field of social relations that anchor us to life. Being a friend, a regular, a neighbor, a part-time lover, an ex-lover, an intimate; being gender dysphoric, or just plain gay or straight—all of it is seen as an effect of many causes and a complex, intimate practice of world-building. Its theorists include Judith Butler, Michael Warner, Eve Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin, Jack Halberstam, Elspeth Probyn, Jose Muñoz, Jasbir Puar, and many others.
Another way to encapsulate this is that queer theory sees sexuality as a process rather than a foreclosing identity. This meant that one constantly has to be attending to the action and development of one’s patterns of attachment. What is this object of desire standing for? A straight woman, for example, doesn’t want all men, just some: so why not rethink sexuality as the history of a patterning or style that develops over time, in relation to law, norms, and the accidents and incidents of ordinary life?
I came to all this working interdisciplinarily: across fields from anthropology, European sociology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and aesthetics; and also from feminist and queer activism.
All of this is background knowledge in Cruel Optimism: elaborating it is not its focus.
A close-up
Sometimes a book like mine makes people feel that, if they don’t know the films or novels or cases written about, they can’t read a given chapter or judge its claims.This is a theoretical book, but it floats its ideas by way of processes that are everywhere around us—processes of dependency, labor, fantasy, and intimacy—and then it uses political and aesthetic cases to exemplify their impacts.
I hope my storytelling is good enough that you can imagine the scene or situation that compels thought: often people read my work slowly and dreamily and puzzle over things.
I aim for the scene I’m describing to open up a question for you. If the questions become more vital and interesting in the reading, then I’ve done my job. If readers then encounter these questions in the world, they might have a different way to think and act in relation to them.
Changing the dynamic within relation might actually change things significantly, that’s my hope about the impact of a way of seeing world-building. We live in an emotionally charged time: seeing how the work of relational emotion shapes our very sinews might clarify a lot about what’s going on, what’s stuck, and what’s possible.
One example of the book’s challenge is its discussion of “normativity.” Some people think of norms and conventions as the unfair discipline of free people’s desires or as unimaginative clichés. Often norms are, and often conventions reduce complexity to simplicity. At the same time, though, norms and conventions are not maps toward an easy way of life: they’re aspirational anchors: especially for so many people whose tethers to the world are loose or unreliable.
Plus, the book argues that objects of desire are placeholders for a desire to more-than-survive. Being hooked to a norm or a convention is also an attempt to maintain a stable enough orientation so that life might be moved through flourishingly. See pp. 166-169, for example, the Rosetta chapter, although the whole chapter is about this, as are many others.
How to interrupt one’s reliance on toxic norms? The Two Girls, Fat and Thin chapter and the Intuitionists chapter engage how habits are formed and relied on and interrupted (through food, through conversation, through cruising, and so on).
Another thing I learned from the book is to think about optimism as noisy and often unbearable. The intro, the title chapter, and the final chapter on “Desire for the Political” are about art and political techniques of bearing optimism, and also about the racial, sexual, and economic distribution of affects of belonging.
For people not so art-inclined, the “Slow Death” chapter works through the obesity epidemic in terms of sovereignty and responsibility. How much does the pressure of contemporary capitalist working life put pressure on the small pleasures to sustain our survival? What is the relation between physical health and mental health in the process of moving through life?
Lastly
Many people read my books to find a language for the affective dimensions of structural inequality: in Cruel Optimism this is performed as a crisis in optimism about the prospects of living on.I am actually pretty lame at imagining a repaired world. What I provide best are depictions of what makes people stuck in the face of the ordinary pulsations of a fraying crisis. People have called the book the affective register of the 99%: and I think there’s something to that, as I am looking for what Raymond Williams called the “structure of feeling” of the historical present that that moves across individual, collective, and political life.
So Cruel Optimism tracks the rise of a precarious public sphere. It sees the world as in an impasse and a situation beyond the normative good life structures, where people have a hard time imagining a genre that makes sense of life while they’re in the middle of it. I’m saying that intense personal emotions about the shape and fraying of life are also collective, and have to do with an economic crisis meeting up with a crisis in the reproduction of fantasy. I talk about this as a waning of the “good life” genres.
These concepts matter to me because I want better objects for better optimism (there’s a slogan!). But to achieve this we need to move our analyses of the historical present into the exploratory mode that crisis, regardless, forces us to occupy. This is not a time for assurance but for experiment—to have patience with failure, with trying things out, to try new forms of life that also might not work—which doesn’t make them worse than what’s there now. It is a time for using the impasse that we’re in to learn something about how to imagine better economies of intimacy and labor.
Capitalist crisis has tightened up the time of the world: all over, people are in sync in their sense of contingency and social fragility, even if they might have wildly different accounts of it. Sometimes this recognition is unbearable and produces violence: because we know the change and the loss has already happened,and yet it is unbelievable and unbearable, while being borne. Cruel Optimism attempts to chronicle the dramas of adjustment—the dramas of consciousness and of mediated life—that force into being new recognitions of what a life is and ought to be.
Earl McCabe
Depressive Realism: An Interview with Lauren Berlant
In our moment of economic crisis, austerity, and unemployment, it seems especially important to be realistic about the objective constraints on life in our world. Lauren Berlant's1 attempts to engage these constraints through the lens of affect, sensibility, and consciousness open novel and refreshing ways of getting to know our present. These modes of engagement in turn demand an encounter with forms of political practice and the quest for practical forms of getting un-stuck, getting beyond the present. In other words, this process of getting to know our present is also a process of asking what to do about it. How can we fantasize a new reality? How can we overcome our attachments to lives that don't work? And how can we build a pathway to something new and better?Lauren Berlant: Is this the beginning of our interview? We need some context, I think. I’ve spent my career thinking about collective life as a sensed scene of affective projection and attachment, tracking how there comes to be such a sense across political, aesthetic, and everyday life registers. I’ve been interested in how being-in-common has developed, affected, and been stamped by normative and juridical activity while also generating affective infrastructures on the ground that take up quite a different shape than, and come to accompany and sometimes interfere with, the official and the normative.
This is what I mean by “sentimentality” when I say that I’ve written a “national sentimentality” trilogy. Sentimentality is not just the mawkish, nostalgic, and simpleminded mode with which it’s conventionally associated, where people identify with wounds of saturated longing and suffering, and it’s not just a synonym for a theatre of empathy: it is a mode of relationality in which people take emotions to express something authentic about themselves that they think the world should welcome and respect; a mode constituted by affective and emotional intelligibility and a kind of generosity, recognition, and solidarity among strangers. Another way to say this is that I am interested in a realist account of fantasy, insofar as the political and the social are floated by complex and historically specific affective investments. How do we learn to attach to (to identify the very sinews of our self-continuity with) abstractions like the nation form, the law, sexual identity, capitalism, and so on?
The essay “Starved” is about why people, including sexuality theorists, have tended to talk about relationality and kinship rather than remaining in the room with the idealization/perturbation/aversion for which sex itself inevitably and so complexly stands. “Depressive realism” is a phrase from psychoanalysis. I learned it from Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, which is an account of his depression in relation to other people’s accounts of it and theories of it. Solomon writes there that most people self-idealize, imagining themselves to be more beautiful and more efficacious than they are: and he says that this kind of self-optimism is genuinely adaptive. Depressive realists, in contrast, are more accurate: their sense of realism isn’t dark or tragic, but less defended against taking in the awkwardness and difficulty of living on in the world. So when I said I write as a depressive realist, I meant that I see awkwardness, incoherence, and the difficulty of staying in sync with the world at the heart of what also binds people to the social. What doesn’t work, makes no sense, or is ungainly always accompanies fantasies of the good life, and other clarifying genres of optimism, and the question of fantasy is centrally about how it helps people remain attached to worlds and situations (and find ways of thriving within them) that are also quite toxic, difficult, infelicitous, or just messy. I look at the ways people bear how life proceeds without guarantees. This positioning—as my blog and my next book, Cruel Optimism (2011), argue—asks “Why do people stay attached to lives that don’t work?” There, I am not interested centrally in asking how they could work, first; I am interested in how fantasies of belonging clash with the conditions of belonging in particular historical moments.
Depressive realism allows for an account of the utility of fantasy in maintaining but also imagining alternative modes of life. Cruel Optimism tells some pretty difficult stories about how people maintain their footing in worlds that are not there for them.
EM: I find your focus on affect as a force of reproducing present ways of life very exciting. There are however many other ways of thinking about this reproduction, the orthodox Marxist perspective looks for agentive domination by the bourgeois class (this quest for an intentional class seems to be shared by many on the right as well), an economistic perspective would ground the stability of the contemporary upon objective constraints on possibility determined by economic forms (i.e. people can’t stop working because then they can’t eat), or there could be a naturalistic account based on evolutionary psychological research on basic human nature (altruism is inherently limited because some Stanford students behaved badly on camera). Why do you think that investigating affective and emotional rhythms of attachment is such an important, if not superior, way to tell the story of the persistence of the present?
LB: I learned my affect theory first not from psychoanalysis or aesthetics but from Marx and Lukács and Raymond Williams, etc., so I don’t think your version of these alternative materialist or organicist explanations (I know you were being efficient) tells the whole story of any of them insofar as the dynamics they highlight here seem unrelated to each other as reifications of cause and effect. I am always interested in a methodology that tracks the overdetermination of an object/scene/relation that appears to us: so my tendency is to read widely and across disciplines.
In any case, Marxist cultural theory argues that the historical sense, the collective sense of the historical present, presents itself first affectively and then through mediations that help or induce people to navigate worlds whose materiality is overdetermined by many processes (means of production, social relations of production, normative traditions, etc.). Mediation shapes experience and imaginaries. For me, the focus on mediation links the aesthetic and the normatively social. The investment in certain forms for providing the continuity of life goes some way to explaining the stickiness of some kinds of injustice, inequality, and energy-siphoning that structure so much of the reproduction of life. It’s not a project about the ways feeling bad (tired from work, disaffected from being exploited, alienated from most strangers and intimates) is distracted from by feel-good fantasy, but the ways that fantasies of the good life themselves remediate (contribute new forms to) realist accounts of causality and of the social. I argue that affect theory, in this sense, is another phase in the history of ideology theory.
But there are other motives too. I have long been engaged in sexuality studies, which I have seen as bound up in material ways with comprehending the work of the nation form and capital at the point of production and consumption. Subjectification, subjectivization: how are the infrastructural activities of capital expressed in practice, experience, and subjectivity? How do the instabilities of sexual non-sovereignty work in proximity to the social, economic, and political ones? How does normative labor-related subjectivity (see the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject who sees gaming the system as freedom and autonomy; see the social democratic model of limited collective upward mobility) relate to the reproduction of heteronormativity in its molecular forms?
Finally, you mention the history of the present. Marxist historians tend to disrespect the present because political, social, and economic complexities are masked by appearance, and everyone disrespects “presentism” as a kind of shallow parochialism. I became an Americanist partly because, while teaching American literature in the United States, I discovered that my students thought they were learning something ontological about the United States—so I had to alienate the object, show it in its complexity as a magnet both of practices and fantasies, and think about the relation of those. The same goes for the historical present. It needs to find genres that enable its inhabitants to assess the relation of event to effect, of domination to creative life practices, of normativity to social imaginaries. I take that to be a central function of critical theory, art, and whatever work understands itself to be making a present from within it.
Illustration by Tom Tian
LB: It comes to queer theory through Foucault by way of Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological. Its importance to me and Michael Warner was to think not just about the statistical norm or the moral/conventional norm but the practices on which conventional modes of social intelligibility rest that become naturalized and moralized. Judith Butler calls them regulative norms. They govern by standing for common sense, by providing a tacit or seemingly foundational sense of scale and appropriateness for collective life. We wanted to call the regime of sexuality under which we currently live heteronormativity rather than heterosexuality, in “Sex in Public,” because the point wasn’t to attack people with a particular pattern of object choice but the whole social regime propped on that pattern, which saturates the fantasy of the good life so thoroughly and in so many domains of social existence that its very robustness seemed to atrophy the skills for imagining alternative social and economic relations and institutions of intimacy, let alone what it means when we identify with any pattern of desire.
In those days, as now, people tended to see sexuality as cordoned off from the infrastructure of nationality and capitalism; they tended to see its appearance in those contexts as a scandal rather than as a revelation of an ongoing situation. Suturing normativity to heterosexuality was an attempt to remedy that, as well as an attempt to continue integrating radical political critique with a sex positivity that was not pastoral, that did not subtract the dangerousness and strangeness of sex.
I am seriously opposed to the reproduction of erotophobia; I am seriously for dismantling heteronormative economic and legal hegemony. But the aim is not to blast heterosexuality out of existence; it is to make it merely one patterning among many. But as there is no collective life without norms, the question isn’t how to become post-normative as such but how to respond to the urgency to engender other kinds of anchors or magnets for new social relations and modes of life. The psychoanalysts talk about the inevitability of “taking up a position” within a normative structure but in my view the project of detaching from toxic norms that bind the social to itself in its dominant mode reveals how dynamic the normative reproduction of life is both in subjective and structural terms. Bifo Berardi talks about neoliberalism as a response to increasingly powerful demands by workers for social equality and democracy (and there is no equality in capitalist terms); likewise the “culture wars” are responses to the emancipatory activity of people of color, migrants, and sexualized subjects. All of those responses have had serious structural consequences politically and economically and in the sensoriums of the beings affected by them. So it matters to fight for better normative representations of the social, not just because they provide the affective satisfaction of being-in-common but because they affect the very infrastructure that organizes time, health, care, intimacy...
EM: Going back to my alternative materialist and organicist explanations, I appreciate your criticism and I meant them to only be caricatures. I was trying to bring out a difficulty, or at least unfamiliarity, that many have with your emphasis on politics in the symbolic realm as opposed to material concerns. For example, discussions around the labor movement today predominantly focus on the ways that unions impact wages, benefits, and financial flexibility, and less on the production of solidarity or class consciousness. In contrast to this you stated in your interview with Variant magazine that, “Developing symbolic practical infrastructures for alternativity is the task of progressive praxis.” Why do you (or in fact do you) think that the notion of “symbolic practical infrastructures” is so alien to dominant discourse? To what extent do you think your emphasis changes the forms of political practices you endorse? Are there any recent developments in Left practice you find particularly promising?
LB: This question is too big for me really to respond to fully here. What I’m gesturing toward is this: what is the purpose of critically engaged thought and practice that emerges not in a reformist mode—e.g. is trying to make the currently dominant relational infrastructures less bad for more people—but in a radical one, with the aim of providing what Deleuze would call genuinely new “planes of consistency,” modes of movement that shift the terms and therefore social and subjective potentialities. Now, I’m more vulgar and materialist, in that I don’t distinguish as much as some people do between conceptual models of being in common and the work of staying in sync that sociality involves, work that includes the syncope, the falling away from being bound to the social and sensing one’s belonging. So a “symbolic practical infrastructure” straddles the conceptual and material organization of life: It tracks what the impact of a concept (any field of relation that looks like an object would count here) could have on the work of living, which is simultaneously material (the reproduction of life as the struggles of politics) and fantasmatic (ideas of the political and the collective in relation to fantasies of agency, sociality and life-making).
I would want it to be our critical work to make alternativity imaginable, which includes livable; to induce glitches in the reproduction of the relation of effect to event, of cause to effect, of value to labor of all kinds. I would want to aim to remediate equality as a radically alive contingent relation and not just a process of authoritarian inversion (the story of who’s on top and who’s dominated). I don’t want to presume that x relation leads to y or is expressed in y; my aim is not to conclude that the totality has this shape or that; I want to see what’s to be made of the dynamic relation between the predictable and unpredictable (capitalism has its own genres of instability, after all, which is what makes it such a powerful inducer of existence, because it can absorb its own contradictions—until it can’t, as at the present moment). I would want our work to refigure the relation of prehension (grabbing history) and apprehension (organizing the potential for new developments) by attending both to the variations that “manage the situation” and the variations that open up other ways to carve out modes of sociality.
My analogy is often to return to the socialist feminism of the second wave: it wasn’t just a scene of solidarity based on critique of the political economy of the family or patriarchy, but was a genuine effort at imagining other living forms of relation and value transecting economy and intimacy. The autonomists are now doing this work of material/visceral organization, as are the queer activists, and the anarchists too, and it’s all really exciting, the amount of genre-transgression and genre-invention that’s going on behalf of reinventing what it means to have a life. This distinguishes them from the parts of the labor movement that were imagining expanding the middle class in such a way that reproduced the poor as the outside of democracy (which is what happens when people misrecognize capitalist modes of entrepreneurial subjectivity that’s trying to game the system as practices of equality and evidence of freedom). But the new social movements are not presuming prosperity, property, accumulation, and kinship as the grounds for making life. Reinventing work and care, they’re also attempting to change the affective resonance around dependency. In neoliberal normativity, to be dependent is to be non-sovereign: but in the era of austerity, it is the first step to solidarity.
Depressive Realism: An Interview with Lauren Berlant
In our moment of economic crisis, austerity, and unemployment, it seems
especially important to be realistic about the objective constraints on
life in our world. Lauren Berlant's1
attempts to engage these constraints through the lens of affect,
sensibility, and consciousness open novel and refreshing ways of getting
to know our present. These modes of engagement in turn demand an
encounter with forms of political practice and the quest for practical
forms of getting un-stuck, getting beyond the present. In other words,
this process of getting to know our present is also a process of asking
what to do about it. How can we fantasize a new reality? How can we
overcome our attachments to lives that don't work? And how can we build a
pathway to something new and better?
* * *
Earl McCabe: You wrote in “Starved” that you were writing from a position of “depressive realism,” whereby you attempted to sit “around a thing” for a while instead of moving beyond it. Can you elaborate on what you mean by depressive realism? Are you still writing from this position?
Lauren Berlant: Is this the beginning of our interview? We need some context, I think. I’ve spent my career thinking about collective life as a sensed scene of affective projection and attachment, tracking how there comes to be such a sense across political, aesthetic, and everyday life registers. I’ve been interested in how being-in-common has developed, affected, and been stamped by normative and juridical activity while also generating affective infrastructures on the ground that take up quite a different shape than, and come to accompany and sometimes interfere with, the official and the normative.
This is what I mean by “sentimentality” when I say that I’ve written a “national sentimentality” trilogy. Sentimentality is not just the mawkish, nostalgic, and simpleminded mode with which it’s conventionally associated, where people identify with wounds of saturated longing and suffering, and it’s not just a synonym for a theatre of empathy: it is a mode of relationality in which people take emotions to express something authentic about themselves that they think the world should welcome and respect; a mode constituted by affective and emotional intelligibility and a kind of generosity, recognition, and solidarity among strangers. Another way to say this is that I am interested in a realist account of fantasy, insofar as the political and the social are floated by complex and historically specific affective investments. How do we learn to attach to (to identify the very sinews of our self-continuity with) abstractions like the nation form, the law, sexual identity, capitalism, and so on?
The essay “Starved” is about why people, including sexuality theorists, have tended to talk about relationality and kinship rather than remaining in the room with the idealization/perturbation/aversion for which sex itself inevitably and so complexly stands. “Depressive realism” is a phrase from psychoanalysis. I learned it from Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, which is an account of his depression in relation to other people’s accounts of it and theories of it. Solomon writes there that most people self-idealize, imagining themselves to be more beautiful and more efficacious than they are: and he says that this kind of self-optimism is genuinely adaptive. Depressive realists, in contrast, are more accurate: their sense of realism isn’t dark or tragic, but less defended against taking in the awkwardness and difficulty of living on in the world. So when I said I write as a depressive realist, I meant that I see awkwardness, incoherence, and the difficulty of staying in sync with the world at the heart of what also binds people to the social. What doesn’t work, makes no sense, or is ungainly always accompanies fantasies of the good life, and other clarifying genres of optimism, and the question of fantasy is centrally about how it helps people remain attached to worlds and situations (and find ways of thriving within them) that are also quite toxic, difficult, infelicitous, or just messy. I look at the ways people bear how life proceeds without guarantees. This positioning—as my blog and my next book, Cruel Optimism (2011), argue—asks “Why do people stay attached to lives that don’t work?” There, I am not interested centrally in asking how they could work, first; I am interested in how fantasies of belonging clash with the conditions of belonging in particular historical moments.
Depressive realism allows for an account of the utility of fantasy in maintaining but also imagining alternative modes of life. Cruel Optimism tells some pretty difficult stories about how people maintain their footing in worlds that are not there for them.
EM: I find your focus on affect as a force of reproducing present ways of life very exciting. There are however many other ways of thinking about this reproduction, the orthodox Marxist perspective looks for agentive domination by the bourgeois class (this quest for an intentional class seems to be shared by many on the right as well), an economistic perspective would ground the stability of the contemporary upon objective constraints on possibility determined by economic forms (i.e. people can’t stop working because then they can’t eat), or there could be a naturalistic account based on evolutionary psychological research on basic human nature (altruism is inherently limited because some Stanford students behaved badly on camera). Why do you think that investigating affective and emotional rhythms of attachment is such an important, if not superior, way to tell the story of the persistence of the present?
LB: I learned my affect theory first not from psychoanalysis or aesthetics but from Marx and Lukács and Raymond Williams, etc., so I don’t think your version of these alternative materialist or organicist explanations (I know you were being efficient) tells the whole story of any of them insofar as the dynamics they highlight here seem unrelated to each other as reifications of cause and effect. I am always interested in a methodology that tracks the overdetermination of an object/scene/relation that appears to us: so my tendency is to read widely and across disciplines.
In any case, Marxist cultural theory argues that the historical sense, the collective sense of the historical present, presents itself first affectively and then through mediations that help or induce people to navigate worlds whose materiality is overdetermined by many processes (means of production, social relations of production, normative traditions, etc.). Mediation shapes experience and imaginaries. For me, the focus on mediation links the aesthetic and the normatively social. The investment in certain forms for providing the continuity of life goes some way to explaining the stickiness of some kinds of injustice, inequality, and energy-siphoning that structure so much of the reproduction of life. It’s not a project about the ways feeling bad (tired from work, disaffected from being exploited, alienated from most strangers and intimates) is distracted from by feel-good fantasy, but the ways that fantasies of the good life themselves remediate (contribute new forms to) realist accounts of causality and of the social. I argue that affect theory, in this sense, is another phase in the history of ideology theory.
But there are other motives too. I have long been engaged in sexuality studies, which I have seen as bound up in material ways with comprehending the work of the nation form and capital at the point of production and consumption. Subjectification, subjectivization: how are the infrastructural activities of capital expressed in practice, experience, and subjectivity? How do the instabilities of sexual non-sovereignty work in proximity to the social, economic, and political ones? How does normative labor-related subjectivity (see the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject who sees gaming the system as freedom and autonomy; see the social democratic model of limited collective upward mobility) relate to the reproduction of heteronormativity in its molecular forms?
Finally, you mention the history of the present. Marxist historians tend to disrespect the present because political, social, and economic complexities are masked by appearance, and everyone disrespects “presentism” as a kind of shallow parochialism. I became an Americanist partly because, while teaching American literature in the United States, I discovered that my students thought they were learning something ontological about the United States—so I had to alienate the object, show it in its complexity as a magnet both of practices and fantasies, and think about the relation of those. The same goes for the historical present. It needs to find genres that enable its inhabitants to assess the relation of event to effect, of domination to creative life practices, of normativity to social imaginaries. I take that to be a central function of critical theory, art, and whatever work understands itself to be making a present from within it.
EM: Could you elaborate a little more on the concept of “normativity?” Where did it come from, and why do you think it has such analytic purchase? How does it relate to the “realist accounts of causality and of the social” that fantasy remediates?
LB: It comes to queer theory through Foucault by way of Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological. Its importance to me and Michael Warner was to think not just about the statistical norm or the moral/conventional norm but the practices on which conventional modes of social intelligibility rest that become naturalized and moralized. Judith Butler calls them regulative norms. They govern by standing for common sense, by providing a tacit or seemingly foundational sense of scale and appropriateness for collective life. We wanted to call the regime of sexuality under which we currently live heteronormativity rather than heterosexuality, in “Sex in Public,” because the point wasn’t to attack people with a particular pattern of object choice but the whole social regime propped on that pattern, which saturates the fantasy of the good life so thoroughly and in so many domains of social existence that its very robustness seemed to atrophy the skills for imagining alternative social and economic relations and institutions of intimacy, let alone what it means when we identify with any pattern of desire.
In those days, as now, people tended to see sexuality as cordoned off from the infrastructure of nationality and capitalism; they tended to see its appearance in those contexts as a scandal rather than as a revelation of an ongoing situation. Suturing normativity to heterosexuality was an attempt to remedy that, as well as an attempt to continue integrating radical political critique with a sex positivity that was not pastoral, that did not subtract the dangerousness and strangeness of sex.
I am seriously opposed to the reproduction of erotophobia; I am seriously for dismantling heteronormative economic and legal hegemony. But the aim is not to blast heterosexuality out of existence; it is to make it merely one patterning among many. But as there is no collective life without norms, the question isn’t how to become post-normative as such but how to respond to the urgency to engender other kinds of anchors or magnets for new social relations and modes of life. The psychoanalysts talk about the inevitability of “taking up a position” within a normative structure but in my view the project of detaching from toxic norms that bind the social to itself in its dominant mode reveals how dynamic the normative reproduction of life is both in subjective and structural terms. Bifo Berardi talks about neoliberalism as a response to increasingly powerful demands by workers for social equality and democracy (and there is no equality in capitalist terms); likewise the “culture wars” are responses to the emancipatory activity of people of color, migrants, and sexualized subjects. All of those responses have had serious structural consequences politically and economically and in the sensoriums of the beings affected by them. So it matters to fight for better normative representations of the social, not just because they provide the affective satisfaction of being-in-common but because they affect the very infrastructure that organizes time, health, care, intimacy...
EM: Going back to my alternative materialist and organicist explanations, I appreciate your criticism and I meant them to only be caricatures. I was trying to bring out a difficulty, or at least unfamiliarity, that many have with your emphasis on politics in the symbolic realm as opposed to material concerns. For example, discussions around the labor movement today predominantly focus on the ways that unions impact wages, benefits, and financial flexibility, and less on the production of solidarity or class consciousness. In contrast to this you stated in your interview with Variant magazine that, “Developing symbolic practical infrastructures for alternativity is the task of progressive praxis.” Why do you (or in fact do you) think that the notion of “symbolic practical infrastructures” is so alien to dominant discourse? To what extent do you think your emphasis changes the forms of political practices you endorse? Are there any recent developments in Left practice you find particularly promising?
LB: This question is too big for me really to respond to fully here. What I’m gesturing toward is this: what is the purpose of critically engaged thought and practice that emerges not in a reformist mode—e.g. is trying to make the currently dominant relational infrastructures less bad for more people—but in a radical one, with the aim of providing what Deleuze would call genuinely new “planes of consistency,” modes of movement that shift the terms and therefore social and subjective potentialities. Now, I’m more vulgar and materialist, in that I don’t distinguish as much as some people do between conceptual models of being in common and the work of staying in sync that sociality involves, work that includes the syncope, the falling away from being bound to the social and sensing one’s belonging. So a “symbolic practical infrastructure” straddles the conceptual and material organization of life: It tracks what the impact of a concept (any field of relation that looks like an object would count here) could have on the work of living, which is simultaneously material (the reproduction of life as the struggles of politics) and fantasmatic (ideas of the political and the collective in relation to fantasies of agency, sociality and life-making).
I would want it to be our critical work to make alternativity imaginable, which includes livable; to induce glitches in the reproduction of the relation of effect to event, of cause to effect, of value to labor of all kinds. I would want to aim to remediate equality as a radically alive contingent relation and not just a process of authoritarian inversion (the story of who’s on top and who’s dominated). I don’t want to presume that x relation leads to y or is expressed in y; my aim is not to conclude that the totality has this shape or that; I want to see what’s to be made of the dynamic relation between the predictable and unpredictable (capitalism has its own genres of instability, after all, which is what makes it such a powerful inducer of existence, because it can absorb its own contradictions—until it can’t, as at the present moment). I would want our work to refigure the relation of prehension (grabbing history) and apprehension (organizing the potential for new developments) by attending both to the variations that “manage the situation” and the variations that open up other ways to carve out modes of sociality.
My analogy is often to return to the socialist feminism of the second wave: it wasn’t just a scene of solidarity based on critique of the political economy of the family or patriarchy, but was a genuine effort at imagining other living forms of relation and value transecting economy and intimacy. The autonomists are now doing this work of material/visceral organization, as are the queer activists, and the anarchists too, and it’s all really exciting, the amount of genre-transgression and genre-invention that’s going on behalf of reinventing what it means to have a life. This distinguishes them from the parts of the labor movement that were imagining expanding the middle class in such a way that reproduced the poor as the outside of democracy (which is what happens when people misrecognize capitalist modes of entrepreneurial subjectivity that’s trying to game the system as practices of equality and evidence of freedom). But the new social movements are not presuming prosperity, property, accumulation, and kinship as the grounds for making life. Reinventing work and care, they’re also attempting to change the affective resonance around dependency. In neoliberal normativity, to be dependent is to be non-sovereign: but in the era of austerity, it is the first step to solidarity.
- Interview by Earl McCabe hypocritereader.com/
Earl McCabe: You wrote in “Starved” that you were writing from a position of “depressive realism,” whereby you attempted to sit “around a thing” for a while instead of moving beyond it. Can you elaborate on what you mean by depressive realism? Are you still writing from this position?
Lauren Berlant: Is this the beginning of our interview? We need some context, I think. I’ve spent my career thinking about collective life as a sensed scene of affective projection and attachment, tracking how there comes to be such a sense across political, aesthetic, and everyday life registers. I’ve been interested in how being-in-common has developed, affected, and been stamped by normative and juridical activity while also generating affective infrastructures on the ground that take up quite a different shape than, and come to accompany and sometimes interfere with, the official and the normative.
This is what I mean by “sentimentality” when I say that I’ve written a “national sentimentality” trilogy. Sentimentality is not just the mawkish, nostalgic, and simpleminded mode with which it’s conventionally associated, where people identify with wounds of saturated longing and suffering, and it’s not just a synonym for a theatre of empathy: it is a mode of relationality in which people take emotions to express something authentic about themselves that they think the world should welcome and respect; a mode constituted by affective and emotional intelligibility and a kind of generosity, recognition, and solidarity among strangers. Another way to say this is that I am interested in a realist account of fantasy, insofar as the political and the social are floated by complex and historically specific affective investments. How do we learn to attach to (to identify the very sinews of our self-continuity with) abstractions like the nation form, the law, sexual identity, capitalism, and so on?
The essay “Starved” is about why people, including sexuality theorists, have tended to talk about relationality and kinship rather than remaining in the room with the idealization/perturbation/aversion for which sex itself inevitably and so complexly stands. “Depressive realism” is a phrase from psychoanalysis. I learned it from Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, which is an account of his depression in relation to other people’s accounts of it and theories of it. Solomon writes there that most people self-idealize, imagining themselves to be more beautiful and more efficacious than they are: and he says that this kind of self-optimism is genuinely adaptive. Depressive realists, in contrast, are more accurate: their sense of realism isn’t dark or tragic, but less defended against taking in the awkwardness and difficulty of living on in the world. So when I said I write as a depressive realist, I meant that I see awkwardness, incoherence, and the difficulty of staying in sync with the world at the heart of what also binds people to the social. What doesn’t work, makes no sense, or is ungainly always accompanies fantasies of the good life, and other clarifying genres of optimism, and the question of fantasy is centrally about how it helps people remain attached to worlds and situations (and find ways of thriving within them) that are also quite toxic, difficult, infelicitous, or just messy. I look at the ways people bear how life proceeds without guarantees. This positioning—as my blog and my next book, Cruel Optimism (2011), argue—asks “Why do people stay attached to lives that don’t work?” There, I am not interested centrally in asking how they could work, first; I am interested in how fantasies of belonging clash with the conditions of belonging in particular historical moments.
Depressive realism allows for an account of the utility of fantasy in maintaining but also imagining alternative modes of life. Cruel Optimism tells some pretty difficult stories about how people maintain their footing in worlds that are not there for them.
EM: I find your focus on affect as a force of reproducing present ways of life very exciting. There are however many other ways of thinking about this reproduction, the orthodox Marxist perspective looks for agentive domination by the bourgeois class (this quest for an intentional class seems to be shared by many on the right as well), an economistic perspective would ground the stability of the contemporary upon objective constraints on possibility determined by economic forms (i.e. people can’t stop working because then they can’t eat), or there could be a naturalistic account based on evolutionary psychological research on basic human nature (altruism is inherently limited because some Stanford students behaved badly on camera). Why do you think that investigating affective and emotional rhythms of attachment is such an important, if not superior, way to tell the story of the persistence of the present?
LB: I learned my affect theory first not from psychoanalysis or aesthetics but from Marx and Lukács and Raymond Williams, etc., so I don’t think your version of these alternative materialist or organicist explanations (I know you were being efficient) tells the whole story of any of them insofar as the dynamics they highlight here seem unrelated to each other as reifications of cause and effect. I am always interested in a methodology that tracks the overdetermination of an object/scene/relation that appears to us: so my tendency is to read widely and across disciplines.
In any case, Marxist cultural theory argues that the historical sense, the collective sense of the historical present, presents itself first affectively and then through mediations that help or induce people to navigate worlds whose materiality is overdetermined by many processes (means of production, social relations of production, normative traditions, etc.). Mediation shapes experience and imaginaries. For me, the focus on mediation links the aesthetic and the normatively social. The investment in certain forms for providing the continuity of life goes some way to explaining the stickiness of some kinds of injustice, inequality, and energy-siphoning that structure so much of the reproduction of life. It’s not a project about the ways feeling bad (tired from work, disaffected from being exploited, alienated from most strangers and intimates) is distracted from by feel-good fantasy, but the ways that fantasies of the good life themselves remediate (contribute new forms to) realist accounts of causality and of the social. I argue that affect theory, in this sense, is another phase in the history of ideology theory.
But there are other motives too. I have long been engaged in sexuality studies, which I have seen as bound up in material ways with comprehending the work of the nation form and capital at the point of production and consumption. Subjectification, subjectivization: how are the infrastructural activities of capital expressed in practice, experience, and subjectivity? How do the instabilities of sexual non-sovereignty work in proximity to the social, economic, and political ones? How does normative labor-related subjectivity (see the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject who sees gaming the system as freedom and autonomy; see the social democratic model of limited collective upward mobility) relate to the reproduction of heteronormativity in its molecular forms?
Finally, you mention the history of the present. Marxist historians tend to disrespect the present because political, social, and economic complexities are masked by appearance, and everyone disrespects “presentism” as a kind of shallow parochialism. I became an Americanist partly because, while teaching American literature in the United States, I discovered that my students thought they were learning something ontological about the United States—so I had to alienate the object, show it in its complexity as a magnet both of practices and fantasies, and think about the relation of those. The same goes for the historical present. It needs to find genres that enable its inhabitants to assess the relation of event to effect, of domination to creative life practices, of normativity to social imaginaries. I take that to be a central function of critical theory, art, and whatever work understands itself to be making a present from within it.
EM: Could you elaborate a little more on the concept of “normativity?” Where did it come from, and why do you think it has such analytic purchase? How does it relate to the “realist accounts of causality and of the social” that fantasy remediates?
LB: It comes to queer theory through Foucault by way of Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological. Its importance to me and Michael Warner was to think not just about the statistical norm or the moral/conventional norm but the practices on which conventional modes of social intelligibility rest that become naturalized and moralized. Judith Butler calls them regulative norms. They govern by standing for common sense, by providing a tacit or seemingly foundational sense of scale and appropriateness for collective life. We wanted to call the regime of sexuality under which we currently live heteronormativity rather than heterosexuality, in “Sex in Public,” because the point wasn’t to attack people with a particular pattern of object choice but the whole social regime propped on that pattern, which saturates the fantasy of the good life so thoroughly and in so many domains of social existence that its very robustness seemed to atrophy the skills for imagining alternative social and economic relations and institutions of intimacy, let alone what it means when we identify with any pattern of desire.
In those days, as now, people tended to see sexuality as cordoned off from the infrastructure of nationality and capitalism; they tended to see its appearance in those contexts as a scandal rather than as a revelation of an ongoing situation. Suturing normativity to heterosexuality was an attempt to remedy that, as well as an attempt to continue integrating radical political critique with a sex positivity that was not pastoral, that did not subtract the dangerousness and strangeness of sex.
I am seriously opposed to the reproduction of erotophobia; I am seriously for dismantling heteronormative economic and legal hegemony. But the aim is not to blast heterosexuality out of existence; it is to make it merely one patterning among many. But as there is no collective life without norms, the question isn’t how to become post-normative as such but how to respond to the urgency to engender other kinds of anchors or magnets for new social relations and modes of life. The psychoanalysts talk about the inevitability of “taking up a position” within a normative structure but in my view the project of detaching from toxic norms that bind the social to itself in its dominant mode reveals how dynamic the normative reproduction of life is both in subjective and structural terms. Bifo Berardi talks about neoliberalism as a response to increasingly powerful demands by workers for social equality and democracy (and there is no equality in capitalist terms); likewise the “culture wars” are responses to the emancipatory activity of people of color, migrants, and sexualized subjects. All of those responses have had serious structural consequences politically and economically and in the sensoriums of the beings affected by them. So it matters to fight for better normative representations of the social, not just because they provide the affective satisfaction of being-in-common but because they affect the very infrastructure that organizes time, health, care, intimacy...
EM: Going back to my alternative materialist and organicist explanations, I appreciate your criticism and I meant them to only be caricatures. I was trying to bring out a difficulty, or at least unfamiliarity, that many have with your emphasis on politics in the symbolic realm as opposed to material concerns. For example, discussions around the labor movement today predominantly focus on the ways that unions impact wages, benefits, and financial flexibility, and less on the production of solidarity or class consciousness. In contrast to this you stated in your interview with Variant magazine that, “Developing symbolic practical infrastructures for alternativity is the task of progressive praxis.” Why do you (or in fact do you) think that the notion of “symbolic practical infrastructures” is so alien to dominant discourse? To what extent do you think your emphasis changes the forms of political practices you endorse? Are there any recent developments in Left practice you find particularly promising?
LB: This question is too big for me really to respond to fully here. What I’m gesturing toward is this: what is the purpose of critically engaged thought and practice that emerges not in a reformist mode—e.g. is trying to make the currently dominant relational infrastructures less bad for more people—but in a radical one, with the aim of providing what Deleuze would call genuinely new “planes of consistency,” modes of movement that shift the terms and therefore social and subjective potentialities. Now, I’m more vulgar and materialist, in that I don’t distinguish as much as some people do between conceptual models of being in common and the work of staying in sync that sociality involves, work that includes the syncope, the falling away from being bound to the social and sensing one’s belonging. So a “symbolic practical infrastructure” straddles the conceptual and material organization of life: It tracks what the impact of a concept (any field of relation that looks like an object would count here) could have on the work of living, which is simultaneously material (the reproduction of life as the struggles of politics) and fantasmatic (ideas of the political and the collective in relation to fantasies of agency, sociality and life-making).
I would want it to be our critical work to make alternativity imaginable, which includes livable; to induce glitches in the reproduction of the relation of effect to event, of cause to effect, of value to labor of all kinds. I would want to aim to remediate equality as a radically alive contingent relation and not just a process of authoritarian inversion (the story of who’s on top and who’s dominated). I don’t want to presume that x relation leads to y or is expressed in y; my aim is not to conclude that the totality has this shape or that; I want to see what’s to be made of the dynamic relation between the predictable and unpredictable (capitalism has its own genres of instability, after all, which is what makes it such a powerful inducer of existence, because it can absorb its own contradictions—until it can’t, as at the present moment). I would want our work to refigure the relation of prehension (grabbing history) and apprehension (organizing the potential for new developments) by attending both to the variations that “manage the situation” and the variations that open up other ways to carve out modes of sociality.
My analogy is often to return to the socialist feminism of the second wave: it wasn’t just a scene of solidarity based on critique of the political economy of the family or patriarchy, but was a genuine effort at imagining other living forms of relation and value transecting economy and intimacy. The autonomists are now doing this work of material/visceral organization, as are the queer activists, and the anarchists too, and it’s all really exciting, the amount of genre-transgression and genre-invention that’s going on behalf of reinventing what it means to have a life. This distinguishes them from the parts of the labor movement that were imagining expanding the middle class in such a way that reproduced the poor as the outside of democracy (which is what happens when people misrecognize capitalist modes of entrepreneurial subjectivity that’s trying to game the system as practices of equality and evidence of freedom). But the new social movements are not presuming prosperity, property, accumulation, and kinship as the grounds for making life. Reinventing work and care, they’re also attempting to change the affective resonance around dependency. In neoliberal normativity, to be dependent is to be non-sovereign: but in the era of austerity, it is the first step to solidarity.
- Interview by Earl McCabe hypocritereader.com/
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