A piece of paper falls off the table. It has boxes drawn on it and word balloons. The figures they’re attached to look better than stick, but there’s a not lot of detail. His father says, Don’t you see, when you’re 35 and you’ve been in the Super Bowl, you’ll have the skills of a 35 year old man, not a 9 year old boy, and when you’re 35 and a cartoonist, you’ll have the skills of a 9 year old boy?

They call it a skill set, the father says.

The father’s friend joins them at the table and they begin to write a statement for a grant. They’re tossing sentences back and forth, throwing the dough high. The language of the grant sounds like the lesson the parent learned once and is trying to impart to his son, to fulfill the demand of the world to produce optimism attached to plans. The kid puts his head on the table. He’s long faced and wiry, with no fat I can see. The father’s friend looks over and says, get up! You have to focus to get anywhere in the world, here, let me give you something real to do. Write down the first thing you think. The boy says something soft, I can’t hear it. The friend says to the father, you’re raising someone who can’t think? And to the son: You have to think on your feet in this world. The boy looks around wildly, and you could call it a smile if his mouth weren’t so wide open and mobile, like those Claymation mouths I remember scooting around from childhood. He’s not looking for escape, or dreaming revolution. He is scanning the space without focus. I put my fingers loudly in my ears to make them shut the fuck up. They look at me hard, and pityingly, I thought, thinking, what a buzzkill old woman asshole, which, in reality, I was trying to be.

You have to know that in Hyde Park this is a common café occurrence, a man or woman on the make taking up the aural public space and giving everyone within earshot a shot of philosophy and self-publicity. As the recession’s expanded, this man or woman could be any adult, in any city café, thrown onto entrepreneurialism and holding onto a dream through an insistent twisting of talk. I come from a family of café dreamers, as my grandmother used to joke, with big plans. All you need for the precarious present is a Bluetooth headset, a laptop, and a pitch. In the office the café has become, the capitalist dream finds succor, attracting the creativity of people desperate to demonstrate that they already have the life for which they are scrambling. They’re selling real estate, or have a pyramid scheme, or a program for youth. They make music videos and shoot weddings on the side. They can’t lose, they have an idea for a cross-platform citywide computer game that kids could first play online, later converging face to face. They’ve made it into a board game too, here take a look, take a copy, here is my card. All of these Eleanor Rigbys are keeping the business card industry in business. They have a fantasy to enhance the fantasies of others by showing up with a monetizing plan. Everyone wins, and they’re the hero, distributing scenarios everywhere like a fairy looking for wishers.

But the kid, what’s the kid going to do? I thought about giving him the card in my wallet for 10% off at the local comics store. I thought of saying, as I have done in the past–when I’m working in a café and talked to by a bored, wandering kid  who’s often waiting for a working parent, or an adult who’s on the phone–do you want some pens and paper to draw (I always have lots of pens)? But my meter ran out, and there I was, left to give the kid a grin and a low five when he walked by to get some free ice water from the trays stacked in the back.

******

Cheers to my Facebook friends for the discussion that followed the first post from this event. Normally I spend many months on a post, but this time I wanted to capture the collective mood of its prior circulation. People wrote great phrases about “parental pronoun confusion syndrome”: Kid: Why do you want to give up on my dream?; Kid:  Dad, Why did you give up your dream to play in the NFL?; Kid: Dad, I am not your dream.  Father: Son, you are my dream.; Kid: “If only I had a father like that. Maybe I would have come to something”; “Send the kid secret hand signs that say: “Escape!”

Then I realized that throughout I must have been haunted by the phrase that provides this post’s title (“Father, can’t you see I’m dreaming?”/Why do you want to give up on your dream?”)  Much has been said about the dream of the burning child that Freud relates, and Lacan’s revision of its meaning. They converge in the rhythm of the phrase, the transmission of desire in the form of a loving/punishing superego, the association of maturity (and masculinity) with a pedagogical realism that has borne, but can’t bear, its own lesson, in the spectacle of the father facing down the picture of his own paternal/parental non-sovereignty and the need for him nonetheless to repeat it in the son, so that the son must die again in the dream so that the dream can keep off the present. Needless to say, additionally, anyone who has ever attended, overheard, or paid attention to her own office hours would also face this scene with an uncanny shiver.

745. Affecting Affect Theory is scheduled to take place at 1:45+3:00 p.m. on 08-JAN-12 in 615, WSCC; Washington State Convention Center, 800 Convention Place (Pike St. and 8th Ave.)

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Affect Theory Roundtable Questions, MLA 2012

Authors:  Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Jonathan Flatley, Neville Hoad, Heather Love, José E. Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o

I. Genealogies of Affect Theory 

1.  How do we think about the different trajectories of affect theory now, especially as the Deleuzian/Massumian project/idiom has become so important to its critical circulation?  How do we think the proximity of public feelings, minor affects, psychoanalysis, Sedgwickian syncretism (Buddhism, Tomkins, Klein), and affective labor’s version of affect-as-immateriality in relation to the Spinozan tradition?  How to keep the event of affect open to maintaining the multiplicity of traditions, trajectories, tendencies, and critical tactics? Is spanning all traditions important to ways we think about addressing future problems?

2. Affect vs/alongside mood, feeling, emotion etc. What are the stakes of synthesizing these different ways of talking to our about states of the sensorium?

3.  Cavell (a great affect theorist who is not often included in the genealogies of affect theory) says that professional philosophy has been emancipated from an obligation to be therapeutic, but that it should be haunted by that very emancipation.  What about the critical work we do: what about questions of theory and utility, of reparativity, of failure?

4. In response to thoughts about genealogies and the increasing institutionalization of Deleuzian affect studies, I would like to take the chance to think in some detail about genealogies for public feelings/feel tank type affect studies. The Cavell thing got me thinking about other possibly overlooked figures. And I have also been thinking a lot about the fact that the affective turn in Sedgwick comes with the turn to Tomkins—perhaps we could think about this moment less in terms of what Tomkins has to offer specifically and more in terms of the question of periodization (which Sedgwick already sort of does…). Sedgwick highlighted cybernetics as a key framework, but for me it would be interesting to think about social psychology, microsociology, anti-psychiatry, social interaction studies, kinesics, and other related fields that might figure into alternate or unthought genealogies for some of the work we do.

5.  Lately I’ve been thinking about the historicity of the affective turn (to follow up a little on the question of periodization in question 4).  What are the historical situations for the impressively wide and cross-disciplinary turn toward affect as an object of inquiry in the 1990s?  What role did the widespread and much discussed use of a new generation of anti-depressant medications play in the turn to affect?  To what extent is the interest in affect related to the increasing importance and changing function of affective labor?  My own initial thought is that one way to start thinking about this question is to ask what the mood/Stimmung of the affective turn is.  One of the moods of the affective turn would certainly seem to be depressive, but perhaps there are several moods to the affective turn, different affect theories having their own moods or modes of being attuned to particular historical situations, problems or contexts.  Might this then be another way to sort through different affect theories?

6.  To continue the line of inquiry from the questions above, I am wondering too about Sedgwick/Tomkins vs. Massumi/Deleuze and the set of unresolved (and irresolvable?) terminological issues that come along with sorting through the different paradigms, theories, and traditions.  For example, do we need or want to agree on what “affect” refers to as opposed to “emotion,” or “mood” or “feeling”?   Or, at least, do we want to agree about what we are disagreeing about when we don’t agree?   Is there less terminological agreement in affect theory than elsewhere?  How are the conceptual problems affect theory faces distinct from other kinds of conceptual problems?

7. Affective Turns

Is this term useful and what does it mean? Like others, I’m interested in how and why we might articulate multiple locations and lineages for the affective turn(s), while also acknowledging how Deleuzian theory and terminological distinctions among affect, emotion and feeling have helped to move forward the project of thinking about embodied and sensory experience.  What other resources and lineages are useful?  Of late, I’ve been thinking about the ongoing legacy of lesbian separatism, consciousness-raising (and the relations between therapy and politics), the sex wars, and other messy feminist histories that produce emotionally charged and divisive conflicts.  And I’d also like to discuss how new vitalisms, animal studies, ecocriticism, cultural geography, neuroscience and other fields converge around revised understandings of the relations between mind and body, humans and objects, the biological and the material.

II.  The Historical Present/ The Way We Feel Now

8.  Neoliberalism and Affective Labor We might want to think about Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect and its claims that the flows of financialization are saturating fictional worlds such that a new realism appears not in plot or representation or relations to objects as such but in relation to time and movement as affective performances. What kinds of contribution do our different orientations or approaches to affect theory make to thinking the historical present and how it gets represented?  How are we historicizing neoliberalism in relation to affect, atmosphere, and mediations of presencing?

9.  Market Feelings

The ambient rhetorics/ metaphorics of the economic crisis are saturated with affective language: ebullience, depression, and the one I find the the most interesting “greed.” I have struggled with greed for a long time – particularly its imagined self-evidence – in other venues. Economic historians have long-debated whether the British empire was actually profitable, yet the imagining of the drive to self-enrichment remains the default psychological explanation for appropriation, exploitation, conquest. I see greed everywhere as the vernacular of critique across the political spectrum – the bankers were/are greedy, public unions are greedy, governments are greedy. What is greed, both categorically and substantively? Is the term being calibrated somewhere between an appetite and a feeling? An over-compensatory repetition compulsion driven by extremes of lack and scarcity (Lauren’s fort/da question at the end of supervalent thought’s blog post?) or a plenitude of desire? What are the antonyms of greed? Need? Restraint? Self-sacrificing generosity? Overlaying feeling and appetite in relation to greed there also seems to be some idea of secular sin in a world of proliferating religiosity: invisible hands are everywhere clutching, grabbing, pulling??

10.  Life Might affect become a tool in relation to conceiving of “life” or the “philosophy of life”?  Are we participating in a new vitalism, a new humanism, a new universalism? Is it necessary to think about what’s in common (life, the commons) given the crisis of the reproduction of the world? How can the central questions about affect get us to a place that might enable us to say something transformative about singular and collective being?

11. The Untimely in Contemporary Black Aesthetics

This is a book project, I’m pretty sure, that tries to revisit and extend the ‘afrofuturist’ formulation that has spurred so many innovative theoretical, artistic and musical projects in recent years, by looking more broadly (or is it more narrowly?) at the question of the untimely in general. I.e. it seems to me that much of what goes by the way of afro-futurism is, variously, retro-futurism, utopianism, apocalypticism, hermeticism, melancholia, anachronism, and antinomianism. The technological and posthumanist fetish that most readings of afro-futurism gravitate towards seem therefore to be part but not all of what has to be said about the untimely, feeling or imaging out of sync or out of time with the present. Here I will be drawing on José Muñoz’s work on utopia, of course, and also some other contemporary critics of black aesthetics, including Paul Gilroy, Fred Moten, and Kara Keeling, who emphasize the melancholic and fugitive frequencies of the theoretical register. I’m also engaged with Steven Shaviro’s work on post-cinematic affect: he and I share an obsession with the untimely aesthetics of Janelle Monáe.

(Note: Another project on Donny the Punk and the cultural politics of the Seventies also has a connection to affect, I am sure, but I cannot get my way to what that connection might be at the moment. And I’ve presented on Donny enough recently that it might be good to withdraw into the archive for a bit.)

12. Political Feelings:  Dialectics of Hope and Despair

The activities of various Public Feelings groups in Chicago, Austin, and New York emerged in the context of 9/11 and the Bush presidency. To what extent, especially when viewed as ongoing rather than event-based and not just catastrophic but ordinary, have more recent political conditions – Obama’s election, Arab uprisings, financial collapse, Occupy movements — generated new feelings?  Does the category of “political depression” remain relevant, especially if it was meant to remain in conversation with hope, utopia, possibility?  Are the ups and downs of feelings and movements another form of “market feelings” and are there other ways to think about the co-existence of hope and despair?

13. Archives and Public Memory

Where are we now with the production and critical discussion of cultures of public memory? How is critical work on archives, ephemera, and other related categories enabling new reparative practices? What is the transnational scope of this work and can it offer any alternatives to “human rights” (or does it exhibit the same necro/trauma-philia queried above)?  Is there a value to remembering and archiving histories of activism and, if so, how can theories of affect facilitate better versions of activist histories (and other forms of collective action)? In the “Occupy” moment, what affective histories are a resource?

III.  Further Questions

14. What is the affect in affective labor?  Relatedly, how do we think of the multivalence of the concept “object” in relation to immaterial/affective labor?  What can object relations psychoanalysis tell us about the material object/thing?  How has the materialist account been modified by accounts of life in contemporary capitalism that take on the sensorium, and how does analysis through affect articulate with psychoanalysis?  What is the relation between necessary labor time models of value constitution and the fantasmatic investments in objects and object worlds?  Clearly we’re thinking the autonomia tradition here: but also how does a Latourian problematic, which sees objects (including subjects) in proximity as making transformative epistemologies and worlds potentially change the ways affect theory takes on materializing the historical present? Would anyone like to speculate about Graham Harman…

15.  Biopolitics Many of us work in proximity to biopolitics–especially sexuality and race–and mobilize the orientations of affect theory. How can we think about being-in-common in relation to certain particularities without making difference into an irreducible property, or an affective fact?

16.  Performativity What has happened to performativity?  What should happen?

17. Feeling Numbers

I was horrified (and embarrassed that I did not know something so basic) to learn this summer that birth and death registration for black South Africans started in 2003. Small wonder HIV/AIDS death statistics were so contested in the moment of AIDS denialism. As I panic about surveillance, privacy settings on facebook, Big Brother etc, it might be salutary to be reminded of sovereignty’s indifference, that what Keith Breckinridge calls “documentary citizenship” is really a privilege, and then yesterday someone reminded me of the etymology of privilege – literally “private law.” I am teaching Appadurai’s “Fear of Small Numbers” this semester. I had forgotten that its subtitle is “An Essay on the Geography of Anger.” In it Appadurai describes ethnic violence as a kind of “folk vivisection.”  What were/are the public affective dimensions of will-to-knowledge projects: being counted, uncounted, discounted, lumped, split, moved?

18. Public Feelings and Human Rights

Does the contemporary practice – more than the idea – of human rights need to make ordinary violences extraordinary? The numbers question returns here. The piling up of bodies needs to become pornographic spectacle in order to engender the geographically stratified and necessary sympathy/shame, witness/perpetrator, victim/testifier dialectics intelligible. Do human rights institutions stand in something like a pharmakonic relation to “necropolitics,?” Is this kind of hypertheatricality the only tonality left for political agency? Is the end point of this spectacularizing inevitably “AIDS, Famine, X fatigue?”

19. Mood: Many of us work on mood in conjuncture with affect:  involving a relation of Heideggarian Stimmung to a psychoanalytic model of a haunted affected state, for example.  The gestural, the ephemeral, the occasional, the episodic:  the transindividual or social, the atmosphere or movement. Moods and modes challenge the melodrama of the emotional event without being simply static or comic.  What does thinking about scenic relations of liking, flirting, cruising, playing, stuckness, or being-with, or moods involving the playful, the aleatory, the neutral, or the fatalistic do to how we think about affect? How do analyses of gesture impact our comprehension of the affective event?  How is our capacity to be affected a capacity to be in a mood related to plotting, to narrative, to having aims?  (Is there a like plot the way there’s a love plot?  If a state doesn’t induce a plot what else could it induce?)

20.  On negativity:  how does the historical location of the subject in its encounter with its own internal incoherence matter?  What does it mean to encounter what’s unbearable in one’s own negativity when that encounter confirms one’s own habitation and fantasmatic formation in the ordinary, one’s own political location and movement in the social?

21. Abstraction: How do different scales come into play? What is the place of the experiential, the material?  What genres could be better mobilized alongside of the autobiographical, the aesthetic, the performed, and how would they change the conversation?  Is sound the privileged mode of affect’s transmission, as Teresa Brennan suggests?  Are illness and health? This would point to concepts like “atmosphere” and “uncanny” as central topics for research.  Where are other different senses in relation to the mediation of impacts?

22. Glee and the Uncovering of the “American Songbook”

This is a prospective essay? short book? op-ed? about what the show Glee teaches us about precarity in contemporary American adolescence, particularly the “management of stigma” (Goffman reference intended). I want to look at two things: 1) how the show ‘universalizing’ stigma by suggesting that everyone has it, at least potentially, and 2) how the show then proposes the cover song, often the most clichéd, inauthentic option, as the truest route the expression of authentic feeling. What I am mulling over here, in a way I can’t yet formulate as an argument, is how the show simultaneously serves to goad the right — with its Hollywood liberal tolerance of teen pregnancy, homosexuality, transvestism, Lady Gaga — and depoliticize a broad range of social issues on the left, by converting them into grist for a competitive mill (use your stigma to excel at regionals, nationals, etc.) Some of this latter will no doubt riff on Jack Halberstam’s new work on being a loser, which is a value the show repeatedly, and deceptively, extols.

23.  Theoretical Self-Fetishizing or, Bad Habits So many of our anchors are really shorthands.  How do we avoid the shuffling of the cards, how do we keep the discourse from sedimenting?  What are the habits we already have that have become normative, under the radar, what goes without saying: and are there ways anyone has thought of to interrupt x norm or y knee-jerk presumption? What do we wish our work could reach that it doesn’t do but might?

Topics we don’t know how to write questions for:  sanity; academic labor; the idea of a life; depression and the medical; happiness studies; professionalization and politics; mastery and non-mastery; pedagogy; writing…

How do we have the conversation where we really engage each other not only in the places where our work is strong but also where it feels willful or unworked-through, where it is more organized by a desire to sound a certain way or be a certain way? (Is the question about Glee a version of this question?)   Or whether we could look in to our own work and list the kinds of limits we think are constitutive of it.  How can we foster a genuinely engaged atmosphere of collective criticality that doesn’t make this or anything look like a flattery-fest but that produces the respect of a critical engagement for which each of us is a resource? (Is there a way to ask this question, really, at MLA?)

24. The Queer and the Affective I am interested in the way that queer studies has morphed into affect studies, temporality studies, geopolitics, and other things—this is the “After Sex” moment where sexuality studies does not require sexual minorities or sex or subjects at all. Yet queer studies names a field nonetheless. I wonder if affect studies as it ages might start to have a similar trajectory: can work that has happened under the sign of affect continue to flourish even if feeling itself becomes less of a specific focus? Has a field constellated around affect that might not “need” affect per se? I am thinking about this a lot as I am working on a project that is inconceivable without that body of recent work, but is actually about coldness, the lack of affect, etc. But also I think work on affect has opened up other questions about pedagogy, ethics, the conditions of academic life, reading methods, etc.

25. What is the Affect in Affective Labor? This is a supplement to question 8.  What is the function of mood/Stimmung in relation to affective labor?   Do particular kinds of affective labor require as their precondition being in a certain shared mood?  Might mood function as something of a means of production in this sense?

26.  The Neuroscientific and the Affective I am persistently fascinated by affect theories from neuroscience and psychiatry, such as the recent work on mirror neurons.   Even though that work is engaged with phenomenological traditions, for example, I still find it very difficult to figure out how to make use of it in my own writing.   Part of the problem, I suppose, is the very different nature of the epistemological claims in scientific work.   But still, it seems like this kind of cross-disciplinary work should be easier.  Has anyone else had this experience, or better yet, had luck in making use of work on affect from the ‘sciences’?

27. Queer Feelings  How would we describe and account for the specific contributions of queer theory to affect theory?  Many recent topics of discussion have a strong affective dimension – reparative reading (in which affective responses complicate critical ones), the anti-social thesis (a debate which is partly about the efficacy of negative affects and the relation between negative and positive affects), queer temporalities (which are about affective relations to history), and critiques of homonormativity  and neoliberalism (in which notions of happiness, intimacy, and kinship are contested). What is important about these intersections of queer theory and affect theory and to what extent do they get picked up on or circulated outside of queer studies?

28. Writing Feelings To what extent has Public Feelings been a project about writing?  What new forms of descriptive and critical prose and what methods of inquiry are necessary in order to describe ordinary feelings, sensory life, and the way things are? In Austin, for example, we have done a number of writing workshops and salons over the past year, and a number of us have now produced books and collections that have emerged from our collective discussions. What new forms of creative practice and intellectual collectivity have we sought to produce?  What further desires might we have?  How does this work also entail better histories of creative practice and of the intersection of art, politics, and social intimacies?

29.  Archives and Public Memory Where are we now with the production and critical discussion of cultures of public memory? How is critical work on archives, ephemera, and other related categories enabling new reparative practices? What is the transnational scope of this work and can it offer any alternatives to “human rights” (or does it exhibit the same necro/trauma-philia queried above)?  Is there a value to remembering and archiving histories of activism and, if so, how can theories of affect facilitate better versions of activist histories (and other forms of collective action)? In the “Occupy” moment, what affective histories are a resource?

I spent most of the summer reading the kind of fierce poetry that moves fearlessly into barely inhabitable breathing space three beats beyond the object that was supposed to anchor attention.  A poetics of associology whose noise world sits me down in disbelief at the rare freedom of other people’s minds. Not because attention gets things right (any more than attachment guarantees love), and not because there’s always in operation productive energy that can never be tamed but because—in these poems, and for me–revolt requires curiosity, a tipping over on a verge.

I can’t remember how I heard of  C. D. Wright; this book written from within incarcerated space seems to have migrated onto my desk from a lateral impulse I must have had once. People who liked this also liked. It’s been in a pile of revealed intention that I’ve been reading up and down.

Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit is one version of the commons: C.D. Wright includes it as a kind of acid irony.  After all, the next line, si bleu, si calme, isn’t available as realism to the incarcerated–or the manumitted for now who swerve around aggressively while looking down at their feet, or anyone with a stomach overfull of the indigestible. I read this book and my brain clicked around over it all summer: glory hole, dream hole, peephole.

My decoupled brain collected holes.  An episode of Louie begins with him in a bathroom looking at a hole in the wall captioned HEAVEN in black magic marker whose magic is not apparent to him.

An older conservatively dressed white man comes in, washes his hands, and turns to insert his penis in the hole.  Louie asks him, “Why would you do that?”  The man says, “HEAVEN, it says right there!”  Louie, after a beat:  How do you know something terrible’s not going to happen to you, why would you take that risk?” The stranger:  “I don’t know, you have to have faith.”  The rest of the show explains why he doesn’t have faith.  In the end it’s exchanged for ethics and a donut.  Not having faith is here propped on not being sucked off or sucking off, not reaching with your dick toward heaven, a rough-edged hole on the other side of which, who knows?  The atmosphere of this whole series involves its fearless projectile extension of situations into the place where something might happen to interrupt the familiar’s sour reappearance. Oh it says HEAVEN, so put your dick there, because not risking is so much worse than wrapping it all up so tight in the blanket of one’s own homestyle timidity. The show goes where Louie can’t.

It’s even more intricate than this:  the HEAVEN episode follows an episode where Louie is fellated. He has gone to a gentle dentist’s office, an office for people who fear oral penetration and care. So of course under sedation Louie dreams of convincing Osama bin Laden that he is an asshole, at the same time as his gentle dentist outside the dream is sticking his dick in Louie’s mouth, aka HEAVEN, the hole out of which all of his beautiful intelligence comes.  Accepting another man’s dick in his mouth is a fantasy that moves throughout this series, in the absence of which many other things are put there, like ice cream (formless) and donuts (defined by the hole).  There’s a bit where he says it’s too late in life for him to do three things:  fighting, blowing guys, and skiing . . . . Who starts blowing guys at 42?” Louie can’t process his own swerve toward fellating with men but he can’t not go there either, and the frankness is of a quality I can’t stop admiring. As Sedgwick says in Epistemology, “Many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don’t do, or even don’t want to do” (25). His object choice could be disavowed–or it could be in an attachment to his swerve away at the limit that is also a hole.  As my father used to say in Yiddish about women, Louie is a hole that can never be filled–in the absence of which he fills up the hole of the world. Foucault writes, “My way of being no longer the same is, by definition, the most singular part of what I am”: Louie is in between not being the same and being something else.

In this show, what would usually induce fatalism always gets another beat, another scene or two, to interrupt the hard end one more time.  But as one of his friends says, he’s afraid of life.  Yet the verge Louie shimmies on is the failure of the failure to thrive.  He is astonished at how massively awkward he is at living.  But he is desperate to not stop trying to have a style of becoming different.

Desire punches a hole in the wall.  Yes it does.

In Wright’s prison poem the dream hole must mean something beautiful (attuned) about the way being revolts against being controlled: the dream hole is what you’re willing to destroy your body for if it might light up a new something to follow through to, and the question of “ultimate consequences” gets left on the side of the road. The incarcerated people Wright listens to experience the proliferation and richness of desires, in the absence of access to which they keep punching holes in the world.  They get caught for the holes they punch and put up for life.  She is either witnessing or recording the cushionlessness they navigate. The privileged usually get protected and bailed out, you know, after they punch holes in the wall of the world.  And sex remains one of the main places where the aggression and desire to have a simple and chaotic pleasure, to be and to punch the hole, gets replayed as a tableau always violently underdescribed by the unambivalence of any adjective.

Awhile ago a student killed himself and all I could do was take his parents to dinner—it was a nice dinner. Later a friend offed himself and all I could do was take his “next of kin” to lunch and to miss him. Then over a year ago, a lovely, lost while alive ex-student whose people I don’t know killed herself and all I could do was to email mutual friends and protect the loved ones who don’t know me from me for fear of a stranger’s extending a wound, which isn’t worth it.  Then my friend seems to have left her car a shell on a bridge with the keys still in it. She vaporized, although her daily friends reported that in recent sightings she was exuberant. A bipolar friend of mine calls us academics all extroverted introverts. Exuberant was the name of my first blog, which was a failure. In sum: a mood is neither anchor nor plot. (. . .)

II.  The Nervous System

Supervalent Thought has been, among other things, a project that tries to reintroduce dissociation as a mix of psychoanalytic, formal, affective, and performative modalities of detachment from the scene and sense of expressive continuity between outsides and insides, spaces that, like public and private, are effects rather than causes, differentially produced, and existing in projected perceptions of origin and event.  I wanted no longer to presume some naturalized feedback loop between inside and outside, as has been endemic to affect theory, missing the spray of things.

I called the project “detachment theory” originally because I wanted to get at the modes of relationality that dissociation demands, to point to the longing, anxiety, and relief of proximity over against the sense of continuous overpresence that enlarges our sense of the event of nervous system performance. Why I’ve been loving Latour and the Speculative Realists:  arranging being on the outside.  Why the fictocritics and Deleuze: thinking of the subject as composable or decomposable according to the effects of affectus, and thinking about effects not as a line between causes and impacts but rather having autonomous existences of their own, their own resonant patinas or atmospheres (“percepts”) that can be encountered and expressive without being the expression of anyone in particular. (Representing these scenes is one of the great gifts of Katie Stewart’s work.)  Likewise here are Marxist and psychoanalytic conceptualizations of subjectivity as an effect, as extimate, relational; likewise understanding normative identity as propositional and aspirational (this is what Cruel Optimism charts, one might say, the work of fantasies like normativity within the non-sovereign movements of ordinariness).

Affect theory, as I’ve argued, is also a new phase in understanding ideology:  delineating the subject and the world, a mood, a structure of feeling that articulates the personal and the impersonal by symbolizing them in all kinds of zone.  To study affect is always to embark on serious referential (not causal) speculation, since one is always having .to radiate guesses about an overdetermined and striking here that seems to have forced one’s sensorium to focus in a particular way.  I’m summarizing a few years’ work on this blog about mood and atmosphere; see also Jonathan Flatley’s Heideggarian work in Affective Mapping; Teresa Brennan’s atmospherics in The Transmission of Affect.; Mick Taussig’s work in The Nervous System and after, Katie Stewart’s moodish Ordinary Affects, Steve Shaviro’s affective architectures in Post-Cinematic Affects; Rei Terada’s work on “offbeat perception” in Looking Away; Madalina Diaconu’s work on atmosphere, patina, narrative…

III. . . .

Amidst all this, the non-survival of attention is not necessarily affect or defense, but minimally technical, a relief from experiencing the states of self-organization. We are not always banging into atmospheres and moods and getting focused and we’re not always haunted dramatic marionettes. None of the work on ellipsis has really dealt with its aggressive recession. The fragile propping of life onto the forms available for it is at the heart of the ellipsis that is comedy, where the inside joke stretches out into the joyous or comforting feeling of having dodged a bullet and delivered instead belonging and discernment .  The comic is defined by communicating the sense that it could have gone a different way. This is around Virno’s great political point about jokes in particular too, although his account is not nearly overdetermined enough about the multiplicity of transactions saturating the event of otherwiseness that he wants the joke to open. He is not really a theorist of ambivalence or incoherence. He is making a simple formal point about the drive to innovate against which language cannot defend and from which resistance and revolt are made.  In the slapstick ethics I’ve been developing here, the jarring of relationality finds a bearable version of a destabilizing recognition, whatever else it is: but sometimes the batteries just don’t take the charge.

This poem is astonishing and boring,  although this segment is something else, that line about the mouth as stripped down an emblem of the fragility of attachment to life as I’ve ever seen: I’m not sure I’ve read it yet.

(By the way, the title for this segment, as generally in this series, is another phrase that’s working its way through my system, from Susan Schultz, Dementia Blog.)

At Banff a group of us who liked each other turned out to have in our backgrounds the overlap of Oberlin and eating disorder, and I got the impression that the back is not too far a ground from the front for some of us. The curse of recidivism attaches to predators and eating disorders.  The revelation of that form of fort/da appeared in this group of people otherwise professionally linked when someone commented that another of us who had just walked by was surely bulimic, and the assurance with which she said this made me ask how she knew, and it was interesting.  She saw semi-circles around mouths and eyes. We were all eating at the time, which seemed to be proof of something, although it was proof of nothing.

I thought of all the things I know about the “deepest problems of modern life” that “flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life,” and I thought about another kind of impact I’d been amassing as I continue to think about contact as the intensification of the encounter with non-sovereignty, so of course this series twist happened without quite being a project.  All summer I have been taking pictures of phrases that hit me and induced reveries and reorientations that made me both stupid and more alive.

I don’t feel responsible to teach you the entire thing once it’s already in me like a splinter. Simmel is an astonishing affect theorist, although the piece makes claims that I don’t buy about the difference between the rational and the appetitive. But when he’s describing the small waves, the turns toward and away from the too closeness of the world, his attention is just beautifully, finely and capaciously attuned to “the resistance of the individual to being levelled.” What a phrase. I reread this essay often and it always induces a dream state, because its sentences about dullness as fidelity to life are so intense with background affect that they deepen out all of the ordinary words. “There the phrase went beyond the content.” He doesn’t seem to censor much or earn space by expertise.  He is trying to explain something: how it could be that ordinary modes of attaching to the life that presents itself force on us a kind of life drive psychosis, a radical splitting that makes it possible to live on by leaching the intensity that ordinary contact otherwise engenders.  I am trying, as you know, to understand how people stay attached to lives that don’t work, and I am moving into looking at flatness.

At lunch we talked about triggers and what remains.  It was really enervating, and I commented at some point that there must be something to learn from this, about the impossibility, really, of knowing the difference between fort and da, and about how for Lacan the death drive and the life drive were part of each other’s sustaining cycle—although then I told a story about a friend whose son suffers from bulimia, from which she had also suffered.  She said to me: this boy would butter his bacon.  We all sat there grappling with the taste the phrase left on our tongues. I can’t get its wedge out of my head even now.  It teeters on the edge of a shelf.  All I can think to make a place for it is the sentence, “I used to joke that if they autopsied me, they’d see decades of Tab stored in my fat.” The joke is reciprocity and a deictic, but toward what, who knows.

What is fort/da, actually?  Refusing scarcity and performing plenitude in all phases of what’s imaginable returns us to sex, to optimism, to intimacy, and to the possibility of something other than negating negation in the construction of the subject who returns to the scene of the crime of not knowing whether a gesture builds or destroys. “Maybe there’s one more in me, let’s find out.”

The problem of writing about this play is that any substantive discussion of it will make it more wonderful than any minute of seeing it. This is what critical engagement does: it adds value through staging interest that’s been magnetized to a form. It converts the event of form into a situation. In reading with a thing a transitional environment emerges that changes what attention can attend to. The encounter makes change prehensible, resonating toward a leavening sense of a concept whose potentiality is virtually affirmed even if the encounter itself fails to have much afterlife. But what I am trying to do is to think about the downsides of potentiality modes when they are tethered to a simplifying desire for emotions already normatively held in common to provide a foundation for (aesthetic or political) transformation.

And indeed, the writing was bold and vital; and the actors too were fearless, perfect in their mold/mode/moaning.The leading man—personifying Blake’s Songs of Innocence—seemed bigger than life-size, like a Bread and Puppets monster; the woman—exemplifying Songs of Experience—was like Zelda in Scooby-Do. He was the romantic, she was the reality principle, complete with a tumor cooking within her that gave her a month to live. Their transgression was to get so carried away by teaching Blake’s lyrics that they fucked on the campus commons in plain sight of everyone.  The dramatic problem was that the “Dean” of the “College” was demanding an apology.  The Dean was a nebbish who turned out to be one of those adorable romantic stalkers, like in What About Bob? He has a broken-heart attack on stage but only fake dies. The lovers break up and get back together, choosing to repeat their act of sex in public, but the lights go down as they embark on their striptease. So the questions the play posed were: which is better, the positivity of love or the negativity of fucking?  The positivity of profoundly crafted lyric poetry or the negativity of sentimental claptrap?  Negativity wins. But the play cannot bear its own commitment to releasing form to affect the commons.

Oobleck’s atmospheres always arise from outrage at destructive absurdity, yawning existential suffering, and above all a fear that the impact of alternativity or art won’t feel impactive.  But the friend with whom I went said, “This play was for people who don’t read books.” Its noisy aesthetic made it possible not to acknowledge the quiet menacing threat of non-sovereignty that threads through any encounter that seeks relationality:  watching it, you’d think that becoming undone-in-relationality is what only lovers, not audiences, or the rest of us, risk all the time. This play, in any case, was for people who want their events to feel like events, so that they feel solid amidst the scene of aesthetic/affective transaction and to confirm that they were around something important, as if events ought ideally to be hammers striking awfully hard in the vicinity of one’s head.  The image that I had was of a foam-encased mallet banging on simulated dirt.

Hating, as I’ve said, is a protest against airlessness. This was a play about love that tried to love love but chose sex, and then tried to love sex but found it too unbearable and thus ended up defacing both of its optimistic anchors. What’s left is the poetry whose membrane creates the atmosphere of heightened significance, but it was not given any air to create surprise or transformation:  Blake’s standing at the convergence of art and revolution was a condiment, really. What was convincing was the play’s desire to access the desire to break through normative form for genuine transformation through love and sex; but what was sad was that it could only deliver timidity, bluster, and (really) eloquent gesture.

You might protest that this encounter did what aesthetic encounters are supposed to do, produce a feeling in you that resonates toward a concept through which you can encounter a difference in the capacities of the world and beings in it. But it’s that whole desire for what kind of that-feeling-in you that worries me here.  This is what stuck in my throat also in the last post on Lingis, the desire that contact will produce a transformative recognition that is immediately self-idealizable. Needing to gain reassurance that you are in you awesomely produces so much destructive aggression that—in the Oobleck play’s idiom–if love and lyric and sex don’t work, there better be a tumor in the wings to establish interiority’s object permanence, at least in the negative. The only real contact is contact with that tumor. The tumor is a stand-in for the transformative event that produces fearless being confronting life without guarantees. Here it’s a hollow, though, confusing noise with the leap of collective transformation.

Lots of art and theory misrecognize their gestures, inducing variations in conventionality and seeing them as originality and profundity, and seeing the achievement of simplicity as profoundly clarifying complexity. Mass modernity trains us to do that, but it’s also something fundamental in attachment, the drive to want anchors to be on the ground, not in the water.  We learn clichés about profound relationality and then learn to project all of our desires onto their teeny hooks. I want to not presume to know how it feels to be in common.

This post has gotten a little long so it’s going to split into two. I had no intention to write about this play: I was going to write less aggressively about a different aesthetic atmosphere I encountered in which I so respected the discipline of the artwork’s engagement with love and suffering and music and lyric, and where also the question of survival is central. What I’ve just described is not a negative case but a normative one trying so hard not to be, as was the Lingis too,where the affects of belonging staged in scenes of contact are reified in modes of emotional self-exemplification and self-recognition that make contact a comfort rather than an event. I realize I wanted to call this “(Sensus communis 2)” but we are in the middle not exactly of a series but a cluster of gestures that mean to feel out how attention to an affective event held in common might engender a freed-up sense of the collective sense from within which we could move toward a different kind of anchoring trust in collective life.

Maybe mumblecore is right, that all life needs is a “whatever” at the points where it seems impossible—a gesture of optimism that can’t bear a lot, but that can indicate an otherwise that could become the something stacked right above the nothing.  Life, friends, is gestural. We must not say so.  A gesture is the performance of contact that makes a conjuncture of the abstract and the immediate.  Contact is a potential anchor, a movement that makes a moment stick or become passable, sometimes shaped toward the possible. Those haps can be a mere flicker or can build into atmospheres and environments for affective, imaginative, and politically collective activity, whether or not we pay attention to them. In the next few posts I’m going to engage some different ways of mediating contact’s gestural structuration of affect, its presentation of an opportunity to encounter the affective event. The aim is to brainstorm some extensions of the “structure of feeling” concept toward different aspects of the sensus communis that will undergird my next two books.

Under the skin, below the radar, beneath attention, but not attunement. Does making genres for contact matter, and how? I’m not referring to the endless discussion of things like web 2.0 world-making intimacy here, but activity prior to what gets taken in and becomes affectively reliable. Lingis focuses on the impact of voice, in a kind of direct but diffused overhearing: “What an extraordinary power, this power of the voice to put us in contact, not with our own mental images but with persons and things themselves! We catch on to the purring of the kitten, the frantic cries of the bird, the snorting of the distrustful horse, the complaint of the caged puma. We pick up the tone of the blackbird marsh, the hamlet meditating in the Himalayan mountainscape, the shifting dunes under twilight skies. As our words form, the tone of these things and events resounds in our voice.…[H]ere is this really amazing fact: it happens every day that someone exterior to me approaches and makes contact with me—the real me, the core me, whatever I can take to be me.”

I love that his casting of voice equals the tone of things and events in the world resifted and conjoined through speech—(but maybe not just speech). I often think, though, that Lingis believes too strongly in the continuity between his experience of his body and the concept he derives from it. But that is his thing, maybe the anthropologist’s thing, to believe that their affective perceptions are attuned enough to patterns that they can count their percepts as evidence of a reliably performative collective convention. I trust my body less as a generalizable clarity machine.  Aesthetic attention similarly requires tracking repetitions, calling them form, and assessing the affective conventions around them, the conventions of address and impact that might also bear a normative burden, or not; but the perception of form’s affective work does not require actually breathing it in  or assuming its form in the encounter’s real time. Attunement does not have to feel attuned, I think, if one’s relation to poetics comes via the aesthetic rather than from fully embodied observation. The form moves through the loose cluster of perceptions in which I move around, and I can sense something without taking it personally.  It is as though my method is about proximity, not polemics; I’m thinking of words like orthogonal, oblique, asymptote.  I am noting the toxic normative extension of the oblique to obliquity (that’s where the polemicist awakens). I’m not sure how hard this epistemo-professional distinction can be made to be, though, as my training comes from learning to pay attention in ways that cross the aesthetic, the ethnographic, and the psychoanalytic.

He could have said the opposite, in any case: it could be not that the world makes contact with the real me, but that whatever I take to be me is where I sense the impact of the gesture of the world, so that what’s “real” is not me or the continuity I rely on that the noise I make is “me,” but that I am a collection of gesture’s outcomes. I am what remains. The burden of personality, indeed, is in part to separate out habit’s active take-up from the ego’s task of protecting one from most of one’s self-experience.

You would never know this from Lingis. Lingis writes that the experience of the self as an effect of contact makes one “thoughtful,” and he says the we honor the appellations that we ascribe to ourselves, when we take up the gesture of having been found and wanting that version of “me” to stick. But sometimes the thought passes.  Thoughts pass. We may wish that they pass into an archive so that we might really add up to something and have potential but who’s to say?  The mystic writing pad is a thing and a metaphor.  Even when we were committed to them, even when we paid attention, we could often not remember quite what they were, those gestures that reached us yesterday, the ones from others and the ones we made through which we encountered ourselves.In the pattern of contact called love, even, we pay attention sometimes not just to make memories (that’s rare) or to be good (that’s uneven) but to make a mood, a moment, or a potential event pass so that later forgetting will be possible. The forgetting of contact can be a sign of what’s wonderful or what’s horrible about love. Not adding up to something amidst all the things that hit us is also something, but it’s hard to narrate.  (This is what I love about Lyn Hejinian, but that’s another entry.)

When contact contributes to an archive of incomplete gestures for one to take up, it’s like a game my brother and I used to play, where we’d draw a fragment and then turn over the egg timer and have to finish it on separate blackboards or pieces of paper in any way we could in three minutes. There was no winning, there was just appreciation of the other’s swift ingenuity. Completing the gesture did not guarantee fidelity even when it seemed huge, like a revolution. Attending did not foreclose self-forgetting, but it also wasn’t “mere” seriality. Where did I hear that, what conversation was it where the woman, I think it was, across a table, I’m sure it was, said that she was writing on labia, which made her think about snails, which she then did some research on? I recalled this when I was trying to sense what the political reactionaries were imagining as they threatened to defund the pap smear, which is the same thing as trying to outlaw their own abjection–a futile, though fertile, passion, that. The connections seem obvious but they were not successful. Someone’s report of her own gesture toward something enabled an instance of self-contact that hallucinated an unrealized thought. It’s not just the slime/disgust/sex file of associations that got delivered:  it’s something about the tragedy of the unbearableness of sexuality and the ordinariness with which it rises up again and again as misogyny and erotophobia. But it was also sitting across the table and hearing someone grab for something, a concept yet unformed between two examples, and being moved by that. Thinking about impact and gesture and association, sometimes it is as though I have never talked, never slept.

In the airport I put a banana in my stomach, which was a wager with hunger and an error, but because bananas are about to become extinct I felt that the event deserved attention. Then today in the Times I read that bananas are radioactive, which changes the banana in me.

I had begun to address my life with a flat voice. It was bad: usually I can get by with my drive to remain tethered to the potentially good event while meanwhile the infrastructure stumbles along. The causes of this sudden synthesis toward a dark plateau were, anyway, so overdetermined as to induce an affective semicolon.  The correct analysis of a symptom does not reveal, produce, point to, or give confidence about the shape of its cure, which is why so much work in the humanities limps along in the phrases that follow out the description of a problem.

Two new big classes and a paper deadline and a vast job search and the students spilling out all late into December because we ask them to be intellectuals but give them no time to do it, inculcating in the upcoming professional class a fatigue autoerotics along with a shamed and confused awareness that these labor conditions allow only tumbling down a hill and then revising it later to look like a plan, when it was only doing what you could do at the time (my epitaph) in an act of blind hope.  A cab driver today told me about all of the men he knows who beat women.  I can’t remember why, it was like a dream. We talked of how hard it is to unlearn habits of intimate violence–not just to others but to oneself–since assuming a gender requires violence and shame and competence anxieties that never leave, and people can exhaust (fade or inflate) after a while of showing up for the audition. I promise that next year will be different: I won’t try to finish a book. I will be rolling around in a beginning that has already started. Meanwhile I felt I could crack into permanent consistency, although I don’t know what that would mean, if I didn’t take a day off.

Cold turkey was the only way, and yet I failed, because I decided to watch Greenberg. Goldmine! It turned out to be a film about a man trying to do nothing, which I found hilarious.  When I type that I find something hilarious I think of Oskar in Jonathan Safran Foer’s astonishing Incredibly Close and Extremely Loud—how could he have written such a tender book—because Oskar is always cracking up, and when he does it it is so tender because it reveals his aloneness in the world, and his sense that he might fall over permanently if somebody doesn’t manifest a delight in observing the world right now. The book is about the history of his shame at having had a moment of hesitation. Greenberg is technically a comedy in that sense.

The stone-voiced and bitter Greenberg has relinquished compulsory ambition. This means in the film that he’s incapable of an attachment to anything that breathes, pets or persons.  So he has to figure out what it means to live without building a life; so of course he’s a carpenter who has a feel for domestic infrastructure without having a feeling for it: first he’s in the doghouse, then he builds a doghouse, then he takes a dog to a house. So of course the film’s homeopathic alter to the career melodrama that blocks his access to the good life  (he coulda been a contender) is heteropathic, a  l o v e p l o t. The DIY generation that doesn’t mind being kind of mediocre at what it does teaches him to ratchet things down.  An imagination wrote this that is so tiny a fruit fly would feel like an empty nester.

But I really liked it. I like Matthew Broderick films too, where he’s so abject I just marvel at the brave defenselessness of the acting.  I like the Stallone of First Blood who forgot to put skin over his skeleton.  I like dark acting that would have been slapstick if the filmmakers were dishonest. Greenberg is the meeting point between two affective/aesthetic idioms, mumblecore recessiveness and the indie-style of irony-admitting-it-was-melodrama-all-along.  Stiller meets Greta Gerwig (and many other mumblecore stalwarts, who coproduced the thing too). But the portentous Noah Baumbach directed it, and as I was called portentous once, because I said I hated the way someone thought, I will think of him as my brother. Hate doesn’t equal love.  It is a protest against airlessness.

There’s a dog with an autoimmune illness in the film, in case we needed more allegory.  Blue Valentine also opens with a dog who comes to a bad end. They ask: if loving a dog is too much responsibility where are we headed?  Has the imaginary for sociality come down to that measure? Everyone seeks an intimacy of proximity, or indirection, but (as Blue Valentine demonstrates) love demands more than wanting the dog to flourish; it requires knowing when to open the cage and when to keep it closed. Or else it’s just one blurt after another: “You seem really fine doing nothing,” says Gerwig’s character. “I want to be doing nothing. I’m doing nothing deliberately,” says Stiller. “I don’t know if I could do nothing and be that cool with everything,” Greta responds.  Then she invites him to fuck. I believe in the math of that conversation that fucking=doing cool nothing. Score! But neither of them mean what they say, not that they know what they mean.

“I should be with a divorced 38 year old who has teenaged kids and low expectations about life.” he says.  He writes enraged letters to institutions that disappoint him and he personalizes their failures. He’s a total bore. What does it mean to aspire to love someone who aspires to sheathe his sensorium in stale drama repetitions while handing  off the non-sovereignty of attentive responsibility to the unfortunates who happen to be around? Ok, he learns to call the taxi to help him show up more or less on time. But it’s just another way of encountering the end of the good life fantasy in the guise of an emotional austerity that dresses itself up as profound realism, and in the absence of an analysis of what kinds of loss should replace the usual ones, we get the risk of couple love as the habit we must treasure as fidelity to life itself.  (Indeed the aspiration is for couple love to be as tender as pet care.)  So life goes on, and cruel optimism is allowed another chapter, and the question of how really to have a life continues its slouch. There’s also the dog in Wendy and Lucy. When I type “just another way” I mean this is where we are, tilting on the end of genre, among other things that indicate the pathetic state of relationality, among other things.

This post would be Combover 5 but it would also be Flatness 2 and Ambition 3. Things are taking shape! At least they are just, here.

What appears to be a daughter flings this dirt at what appears to be her mother, and for the millionth time, it sounds like: but it’s an empirical question, a queer question, I say to myself, what the relation actually is. It’s as though their sheer look-alikeness established the right to bicker mercilessly and in public–in this case, the airport gate waiting area. There’s a tenderness in all of it, too, though, and pride in ownership, with a worn-out kindness that the company perhaps shouldn’t have registered seeing. But I looked up. The older than me woman, thick with cake makeup so maybe not, tilts toward me and says, “Why do I do things like that? You should write about people like me,” and I said, “What would you want people to know?” and the younger woman says, deeply, “Don’t ask!” and we all laugh because Don’t Ask is always tragicomic.

Don’t Ask echoes Katie Stewart’s anecdote about someone saying I could write a book. “People are always saying to me “I could write a book,” she writes:

What they mean is that they couldn’t and they wouldn’t want to. Wouldn’t know where to start or how to stop. The phrase is a gesture toward a beginning dense with potential. They have stories, substories, tangles of association, accrued  layers of impact and reaction. The passing, gestural claim of “I could write a book” points to the inchoate but very real sense of the sensibilities, socialities, and ways of attending to things that give events their significance. It gestures not toward the clarity of answers but toward the texture of knowing. What a life adds up to is still a problem and an open question. An object of curiosity. (129)

I could write a book also means Don’t Ask. It is an offer to tell and a defense against telling. You don’t want to know, its secret partner, is about doubt that you could bear what the speaker has borne. Phrases like this are prophylactics against the reproduction of suffering that point to the threat nonetheless, protecting the present from having to absorb a  story whose impact would be overpresent. I have suffered something no stranger can sense; I have survived experiences beyond belief; I have a rich inner life that the world could not bear, that I have held back to spare others.  It would show how hard things are, which everybody knows but not in the way I know it. My composure holds us all together.The film Winter’s Bone is full of women who would say, Don’t ask, but they’d say it with a  look. In this case, also, the younger woman is protecting me from infection by the older woman’s story, although it’s too late for both of them.  It’s like Dorothy Parker’s, “Just say ‘I knew a woman once…”, to which the proper response is a nod that pretends to be, and might be, knowing.

My neighbors asked me if I were a writer, since I was sitting there typing. I said, not the kind that people read for pleasure; the kind that people are forced to read in school. The older woman looked at me and said, kindly, “Don’t give up, I’m sure you could write a best seller!” And I said, “I doubt it; I write about not understanding things.”  They thought that was hilarious—why would you do that?–and asked for an example. I said, “For example, if I were to write about you, I’d have to say I couldn’t guess a thing about you! Are you related? Are you best friends? Are you a family? I can’t even tell how old you are!” And they laughed, and the mother told her daughter about the Ivory Liquid ads, and they pretended to be hand models, and the kids looked up quizzically at them laughing because it was morning and it had already been a very long day.
***
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—coincidentally—got repealed last month, and a toxic form of secreted life was finally released from its incarceration by the law. It’s a bitter irony that this Clintonian stupidity gets undone while the US state tortures, solitarily confines, and leaks homophobic paranoia around Bradley Manning and the UK imprisons Julian Assange on sex charges (without bail, momentarily, which is what makes it politically suspicious even if the charges are true): meanwhile many democracies are intensifying the search for mechanisms that would legalize  more info-foreclosure. The ongoing democratic fight is in full throttle to maintain genres and media for free representation and free association, without which people cannot adequately participate in the operation of state/institutional power.  But it’s complex:  even free association, in the psychoanalytic sense, can only be an aspiration.

Plus, I’m not against secrecy. States, like people, need it, a hoard: a cushion where people can work out ideas and fail at an aim without the whole structure of personhood/policy collapsing in the shame/delegitimation of exposure to the kind of attention that can’t take in the whole context of deliberative action. The battle is really over how the state military/security apparatus should be protected from public oversight and what kinds of convergence there are and are not between state/national interest and the interests of democratic culture. Even though some nominate the “right to narrate” as a central feature of democracy, the right not to narrate, to keep it to yourself, is equally important for living freedom. Don’t ask. But when governments claim to require these spaces while denying them to citizens, we should take up the incitement of Anonymous to perform acts of karaoke citizenship, lip-synching back to the state its own words, refusing it our right to discuss amongst ourselves.

Amitava [Kumar] originally called this panel “The Message Chain.” Its idea was to ask some scholars who see themselves as writers, how, for them, a particular space becomes a “locale” for writing, an event that requires not just attention and consideration but a decision to write outside of the usual academic idiom or medium. This was to be a panel about crossing over, not into death, but toward a bigger life for writing. A spatial impact becomes-event in this view when it induces a communicative action–writing, teaching, and performing–you know, the kinds of things that our careers are made from, although few of us would admit to having the career as our ambition. But that is because ambition is one of the obscene affects of capitalist culture. It’s hard not to think about it, though, when someone asks you to talk about “crossover” writing: when you’re crossing over it’s because your ambition isn’t hiding in a repetition but in sincerity, in the desire to do something for an audience whose relation to reading is unprofessional or outside of the norms our professions perform.

It would not be too strong to say that the capitalist subject is distinguished by its education in judging ambition.

What is a good, or healthy, ambition? When is a lack of ambition a sign of moral balance or political resistance; and when is detachment from ambition’s arc a sign of depression or downheartedness, the fatalism of a felt placelessness in the world? Isn’t the whole alibi of “the good life” that stands as the object of imaginable capitalist futurity a way of normalizing ambition into a vague neutrality? The pedagogy of judgment around good and bad aspiration and the tactics of object/scene/lifestyle pursuit turn ambition into an open secret, under the membrane of which desires are exposed to public judgment and the judgment of conscience about whether a person or institution’s fidelity to a certain arc of action is really about what it says it is or overinvested in proving itself. We would prefer that the career seem like a good kind of side-effect, not an organizing principle of action; we would prefer that the career be a mere market-organic consequence of making knowledge. I hope that question “what do I want to clarify, to change?” that I ask when I write is the same thing as “what is my ambition?” but the register the latter question opens up is a scary one about desire about which few people are reliable reporters.

At this moment of crisis in the value of a university education, at this historical conjuncture, work cast as crossover usually decides to assume the stance of direct action, through peppy, unjargoned, and normatively-framed storytelling into which the good writer translates material that another way of writing would have obscured. The “public intellectual” seems legitimated by the clarity of aim,  the embrace by the market, and or the seductions of polemic. The itch to do this is an economic, institutional and ethical pressure on the academic who communicates for a living, and who is now forced to plead not only for the value of the thing she does but also of the kind of thing she does.

As long as the state sees its mission as guarding and funding privatized wealth, its preference for the mode of production over the modes of interpretation will prevail, and no brilliant number crunching about how we interpreters are really not expensive will neutralize the other truth, which is that we are, in the long run, not the best servants for expanding the field of capital. For many of us, the difficult work of producing barely-read interpretation was already half-located in the haunted echo chamber of why bother, what’s the point, and what’s the value? (The other half was in the quiet room that collects the times when ideas had an impact that felt like an opening.) Now, added to that, we face the question of what would best make the case that archival and interpretive labor is instrumental for institutions and states, and not the trace of an earlier era’s idea that the soul’s self-development had something to do with cultivating exegetical capacity and historical knowledge.

Michael Hardt has recently argued that we should anchor our funding claims in the fact that we make good immaterial laborers! Anything that does not serve to sustain the next phase of capitalist optimism will be deemed properly a threat and extraneous. This is what crisis means. In a prosperous mood capitalist culture can absorb lots of benign variation, but that is not the mood of the moment. My point today is that it’s not enough to make good arguments to sustain the system. We have to debate our ambitions and not to presume that crafting the broadest crossover or the most normative plea is the best defense.

Just as a crisis to the security and sovereignty of a democratic polis ought to produce more democracy, not less, so too I want the crisis in the value of interpretation to induce more commitment to describing the world and inducing displacements through the new associations that scholarship can induce. (I’m in solidarity with Latour’s dream of “associology” here; and remembering Spivak’s “descriptive/transformative.”)

In my own work I have been cultivating an experimental critical practice that would like to turn interpretive synthesis into a kind of writing without sacrifice of any kinds of knowledge or voice. Indeed, I was included on this panel not because of my books, but because I have been pursuing this ambition on my blog—it’s also the method of the blog, to take encounters as metaproblems about how to narrate in relation to knowledge. I call this object of analysis and case production its scene. Amitava asked us to think about a scene that induces writing about a place, and what it means to write from a locale in order to move the meaning of it somewhere. Scene brings many resonances to this panel: the urban, the institutional, the affective, the bodily, the familial, the ethno-communal, the national and transnational; the political. I want to add: the academic.

Like all genres, the scene is a suspension bridge, defined not by events but by wobbly atmospheres in proximity to a disturbance. So, if a scene appears as a shift within the ongoing, the happening becomes-event in its prehension, what we’ve grasped without understanding it–not in facts or narratives that come to stand as facts, the story about x. In the psychoanalytic sense, as in “primal scene,” subjects become conscious of their nonsovereignty in an encounter with a threatening situation and get stuck in the affective atmosphere. That is what then constitutes the context for the becoming-event, the perturbing data that never quite makes it to knowledge. The scene in this affective sense shares a lot with the scene of the crime, too, as the yellow tape of the latter denotes a situation of causality and action in excess to the materiality of the known act and the objects left there to become the event, since what constitutes evidence is something only ever determined later and that meanwhile leaves a suspicious atmosphere (suspicion is what makes noir realist). Contemporary cities, picking up on the 60s vernacular of the scene that gets made, tap into this uncanniness. During the late capitalist era urban lifeworlds have been famously sustained by an experience economy made from a small set of scenes (the neighborhood-in-transition, the festival-as-event, the creative industries) that promise to afford one’s sensorium a scene of moderate excitement in proximity to what’s uncontrollable in urbanity’s risky spaces of anonymity, where vast differences in wealth produce unpredicted convergences when the appetites are opened up and tapped into.

My ambition has not been to detail the everyday as a social scientist or cultural studies journalist, though (studying other people’s scenes), but rather to make scenes for encountering the ordinary of the historical present in the gestural, the aleatory, the lateral move, the half thought, the compulsively hypervigilant observation, and above all fantasy, the ambitious fantasy of being able to continue to make sense in the places that test the senses and overdetermine the object relations that make a world material for its inhabitants. The scene’s claim on me as an analyst is to make a genre that will hold it, which is why I work on realism, which for me is the same as genre, e.g. the mode by which something becomes manifest in its factishness (Latour’s word merging the fact and the fetishistic investments in it). I typed “mode,” but the more clarifying point is that all mediating modes are moods, and a mood is one of the primary historical genres, the affective trace that violates the self-evidence of the contemporary; it’s a in politico-somatic event, tracking into the scene the unfinished business of other times, it makes present the contingency and non-sovereignty of activity that is also intending, ambitiously, to keep things together, not too easy when so much around you is giving out.

All of this is a performance of the crisis of the reproduction of life that used just to shape what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “the undercommons” but which now penetrates everything touched by the collective encounter with the global crisis in finance capital. There is a lot to say about this crisis and its implication for what we do for a living: the crisis throws into audible relief many fugitive ambitions. Here are a few other ambitions to be retheorized.

The state: Zizek’s great analysis of end time discourse points to “four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures.” These scenes, he argues, must be stripped of fantasies and subjected to a new communist necessity. To do this he believes that people must withdraw from the state and from populism and make infrastructures for the shared “substance” out of which the sustainable social may be grown.

Katie Stewart and I have been calling this situation The New Ordinary. My part of this is to point to the difficult materiality of transition across fantasies of ongoingness (see the forthcoming Cruel Optimism). Amidst all of the fraying among which people live now, and facing the depletion of fantasy amidst the stressed out and unraveling conditions of labor, environmental disaster, crumbling material and social infrastructure, people do not end but live on.

How do they do that once they have lost the anchors for life-extensive fantasy, becoming archaic to ways the capitalist/domestic everyday was sold as movement toward an ideal? Is this collective archaism the source of the resurgence of the American paranoid style? Is conservative paranoia both about the state and the poor as equal threats to freedom a revelation that can be directed away from the constriction of the social imaginary? In the contemporary U.S. the state’s security function and its resource-distribution function imply clashing conceptualizations of democracy: the appearance of that contradiction as the public confronts its class antagonism in relation to economic and patriotic fairness does not actually prophecy the end of a statist imaginary but the end of a phase of contradiction about what states should provide, to whom, and whether the economic problem of the state can be resutured to the project of democracy in an expansive, and not defensive way. We need to make more capacious fantasies for this kind of transition. I once wrote “Nations provoke fantasy.” The correlation is “fantasy induces infrastructure.”

On top of all this is the crisis of the university. All over the world education is suddenly deemed too expensive for the state to bear reproducing: and in the university, only the potentially profitable arts and disciplines, like economics, continue to magnetize the desperate hope for generating a new labor revolution for the expansion of value or at least the maintenance of the system that there is now.

The crisis of the university is the crisis of publicness, of whether there is a general public worth investing in. What does it mean for a person or a population to be deemed a bad public investment? This has been the central question for the disposition of wealth in liberal societies since the Enlightenment. The crisis of the contemporary university is whether it is really an edu-factory, a genuine privilege, or a space for experimentation, and not just information transmission. In my view the interpretive arts have to take on the claims for experimental thought, for generating new combinations and ecologies of relation. Research is not a mode of production but a mode of experimentation: but to believe this must be to rethink our pedagogies, our idioms, and our own genres to induce the atmosphere that respects that.

What is the relation between choosing a crossover genre and choosing a project of inducing experimentality in the interpretive arts and sciences? What is the relation between discourses providing clarity and truth and a focus on the problem and the enigma of the problem? How do we respond to the explanatory demand and the justification for expertise about matters that are all themselves, by being hard, only properly the subjects of experimentation? What can thinking things (re)make? Are we holding on to the 19th century discrimination between the people who theorize and the people remanded to the body? But more importantly, who gets to try and fail? Experimentality requires learning from failure, as any scientist knows: an experimenter has to risk failing. We know we are in a general crisis when there is no cushion for failure, except for the very privileged. For the rest is the public spectacle of confronting how thoroughly the good life was fantasy, not realism. So the crisis of the present is to rebuild the respect for, which is to say to make cushions for, the experimentality that imbues action with optimism for the worlds built by it. That cushion is not just psychic. It actually matters to people’s lives if the system has no give for them, and that’s just as true to the life of thought.

Speaking of failing, the ASA cancelled the grad student session, Plan B, a session on what to do when there is no world to hold economically and institutionally the people who have gone into debt teaching and thinking with us. To not meet on the failure to maintain fidelity to the people with whom we work is one instance of what I call the combover. We all know what a combover is; we are its subjects, having styled our own hair to conceal our flaws. A combover subject looks in the mirror, just so: he stills the world. In that stilling he becomes a still life encountered at its perfect angle, and by keeping the world out and neutralizing the inconvenience of other people he performs a mock realism with respect to himself on which he can not only build pride but make a foundation for getting through the day, the stress of life.

Without a look at the combover that sustains fantasies, especially of graduate education, at this and every session, our optimism for worldmaking through scholarship is an act of violence against the people on whom universities depend, including ourselves. There is no plan B, why have a session about it? No doubt it would be an unsatisfying meeting: but satisfaction now would be obscene. It would have been better to admit that our only available cushion, amidst an economy in which there are not enough jobs to justify the narrow model of investment that incites people into paying the huge fees to become the future managers of America, will come from venting and brainstorming our way through and making transitional holding environments for entertaining the sensed, but not yet articulated, thoughts that could become ambitious plans into which we could collectively tap to continue these vital and vitalizing scenes of absorption, curiosity, experimental mediation, and wild, productive—even when failed–conversation.