It is only evidence that she has been somewhere at the same time that her camera’s been there. There’s a pig in a doorway, a street, a man from behind. The places seem akimbo, as though executed by the fist of a small, tight child. The problem of a book is that it is fixed. But “archive” senses a strewn thing, of stuff and gesture moved by weather systems. Will we want to know later that the insurgents at the skirmish wore brightly colored jeans? We can imagine the folders into which they will go, each according to his palate.

The contact sheet is a record of no memory. The images track flooding, the cruising that hits a thick and then proceeds. Some details point elsewhere. Shoes are worn, uh huh. A side show with only some memorable moments, it’s hard to get vitalist about that; hard not to melodramatize; hard not to calcify the world into still life and shit. They were fighting with their fingernails, but there was no event. Is it all a gift waiting for a future? Sometimes it’s blurry when the camera swerves–or overfocuses. The body is a contact sheet with a nervous system.

That girl in profile, for example, smiles and covers her lower lip with her teeth, which in the next frame retreat all stained and mottled, an abject grin extra that’s tender, too. There are pictures of sweat and (I swear) bleeding through. Groups of people look around for prey or are trying not to be prey. There is an image of a nothing you can be sure of. But not all of the untimely is uncanny. Because presence isn’t overpresence it can sit there a like a meal’s full feeling. To witness struggle is not always to be in suffering.

But you want to get the atmosphere. The caption states, “Someone was smoking pot.” You can’t help but breathe deeply while reading that phrase, wanting to inhale the head of the world. Doesn’t revolt require lubrication and interruption–that’s why it’s sexy–to release the fish tank into its swerve? RETURN THE WORLD TO THE RAW. USE LAVA SOAP. WHEN YOU RUB SOMETHING ROUGH ON WHAT’S ROUGH IT GETS SMOOTHER. Politics moves across the surface like sex with its friction, disturbance, arousal, boredom, and minor sensation. If you can skim it (and you must) it isn’t there/here quite yet.

(with Susan Meiselas, Roberto Bolano, Karl Marx, Chris Taylor, Eduardo Cadava)

I open my hand and a small cluster of people peer up at me out of it silent and bug-eyed. I draw them out of my palm like taffy, but there is no snapping sound and no lost teeth. In a minute the crowded room buzzes harshly, wondering why it had bothered one more time to show up for nothing but an exhausted optimism. I was lucky to be the dreamer because the dreamer never stops being interested. People know when they haven’t said enough, that’s why they dream. Or that’s not why they dream, but why they continue loving.

When I met him he was raking leaves, in his tiny yard; usually they’re across some table in a room. And what of the very bald one who practices his Foucault Face™ in the mirror each day? If I try to write the story of someone who worked hard in case he showed up to work, what is the plot? She played touch tag by saying a thing then running into a field of noise. The delay architecture is so deliberate I can feel the shot-reverse-shot, the voiceover, and the signs of truth tattooed on my often-entered vagina.

I am experiencing a novel now–not really reading it. That’s still a big ambition. I knew she would write “debauchery.” Was it because it followed “Hollywood?” Then near the highway there was a high pitched hill–a “steep embankment”–so steep that the squirrels had more bad luck than you’d predict, tumbling down from a vast misreading of how hard the dirt was packed. Or was it scrambling up, as on the way to the wedding–their wedding?–the lovers’ car had broken down and a taxi had to be flagged? Hitchhiking ensued, as in It Happened One Night.

A location shot does not ensure realism; nor does the strong, bared leg; nor does the drama of mass unemployment. Full of souvenirs of specific blunders, reenactment doesn’t solve the crime. It would be great if the fossilized air in a bubble rereleased the history it floats. The cat on the bathroom floor welcomes the cool without being grateful to it. The fly darts out of the cracked window you make without sending a thank-you note. Three things remain: her voice was hideous, she extracted herself from the phone, and she said, “I’ve gotta go. People have to eat.”

Should we show the body? She’d smelled something burning, but that’s not evidence, although the stench of hair was unmistakable. She’d run from a killer who’d reached for her “cunt,” with which she’d momentarily thought about bargaining, if you can call scrolling through scenarios “thought.” When there’s no other room to run to is when we scramble or get committed. This is what people will do, desperately: anything to induce sweat and a conceptual opening. Now I’m forced to leave the room whenever I hear, “Each time it’s different but what’s the same is how moved I am every time.”

(Barbara Browning, Aimee Mann, Kate Lilley, Gil-Scott Heron, Katie Stewart)

The best a thought can do, after all, is to make itself available to be found, by documenting its encounter with something so well that it shifts things into a new proximity, as though words in a dictionary had suddenly slid down into each other’s definitions. That’s not too eloquent, but the event of eloquence has only a little to do with meaning emerging. I was researching what a “scene” is while editing Diana’s piece for a “special issue on the case,” which the University of Chicago Press refused to make into a book because they thought it wasn’t “sexy.”

When the man from the Press said this to me I sat outside and watched the yellowjackets hover over my Diet Coke, wishing, probably, that they could want actually to drink it, then giving up, then coming back, then giving up, then coming back to hover. Living with a cat has enlightened me to the acute state of wanting to want. The flight attendant just walked by with his US magazine, whose back cover says RETURN YOUR BRAIN in bright yellow capitals on a red page with the word BRAIN crossed out by a straight line that looks like bacon.

Before Diana, when I thought of the “scene” I saw it as eloquent beyond meaning. An opening scene, after all, sets the stage atmospherically, stretched across the words. At that point, which will eventually become “the beginning,” it is all noise. The scene–primal, crime, whatever–always entails a pressured accompanying sound that is probably the rushing of adrenalin at the disruption of confidence in what the world is disclosing. In my head its paradigm is the opening paragraph of The Golden Bowl, where The Prince walks down the street while his people work out the details of his marriage.

The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he recognised in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to either of those places that these grounds of his predilection, after all sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned with him, guided his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, into Bond Street, where his imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories. The young man’s movements, however, betrayed no consistency of attention–not even, for that matter, when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the Prince’s undirected thought was not a little symptomatic, since, though the turn of the season had come and the flush of the streets begun to fade, the possibilities of faces, on the August afternoon, were still one of the notes of the scene. He was too restless–that was the fact–for any concentration, and the last idea that would just now have occurred to him in any connection was the idea of pursuit.

The “scene” one makes is often in a city: the drug scene, the queer scene, and the hipster scene, for example, raise the expectation that bodily intensities and theatrics become heightened somewhere so that a group can find each other and be a certain way. Insider knowledges, phatic beings, styles, and in a way that induces envy. People don’t talk about “the housekeeper scene” or the “construction worker scene” even though it has been documented that in certain cities maids and men have also congregated for pleasure, expertise training, note comparing, minor entrepreneurship, seeing and being seen, and the like.

Then there are the primal scene and the scene of the crime, about which I have since written, all of which are defined by what can not be anchored in words, given an overwhelmed sensorium that knows that it cannot comprehend what is happening or has happened there. An incident collects and disperses. What is the event? If I can come up with phrasing and I try it out until it generates its concept. I could write a hundred pages on the opening paragraph of The Golden Bowl. It is a breathtaking crypt for so many former forms of life.

Fantasy dogwhistles, that’s what it does. It has little to do with plots, and everything to do with shaping the dynamic attachment of subjects to worlds and worlds to their mediations. Even if I am actively fantasizing, and in my fantasies I am talking, fantasy is very quiet. It is not what I think is making me get up and walk around the room. It is a structure of adhesion, sticky but not binding, very quiet, nothing more quiet–yet this is what I mean by noise–and with it I feel the limits of my senses, sovereignty, conceptualizing force.

All of which are grazing the world and sensing where action is and isn’t. But a scenario, that’s something different.  A scenario is the opposite of a scene, or more precisely, a scene turned into its opposite. In Taylor’s work a scenario is a scene that you imagine actively, a game of “What If?” If you play that game and spool out the consequences, it might actually change your relations to the objects you’ve moved with in the game. In The Golden Bowl the Prince is too exhausted to play “What if?” : that is the event of page one.

There is another organizing event, too, though.  Even as the Prince’s “undirected thought” provides the scene of page one, James’ narrator can’t bear being near it, his own creation, his own experiment. So the narrator—compulsively, one might say– pays more attention to the world in movement than his character can. He performs in a small space a person-and-a-half’s concentrated attention to potential anchors, which is why the writing is barely readable. He must see, must show, what The Prince can’t, won’t see. The scene is of a looking that is not a seeing. This teaches me something about teaching.

If you can bear to open yourself to playing “What if?”, the very proposition opens the object. But even more intensely than that, if you have power when you play the game of “What If?,” for example if you are a bully on the playground, or a colleague at a meeting, or a narrator, or a dude with a bomb, your capacity to make a scenario can change the world as it unfolds before you and all on whom you have impact. And not just politically, but in the dust made from many destroyed objects over centuries and also recently.

I know that sounds very heavy-handed. When realism is not free indirect but controls resources, the scenario expresses the weight of a heavy hand. A scenario in Diana Taylor’s view is not the same thing as a storyboard of a fantasy world laminated onto the real: it is power, not psychosis. It is not Proustian, either; nor Bergsonian, evoking memory’s thick secretion (see “The Game(1)”).  The scenario’s heavy hand on the real makes all fantasy realism the way in Brazil a dream is actionable in some community courts. It is an act seeking collective percepticide, a self-blinding to protect seeing.

Dick Cheney imagined a bad world, and then wargamed on an actual world. Cheney made war on the unbearable thing his imagination made, a tendency which is at the heart of conservative cultural politics too.  He tripped up as he fell into the fantasy where he still floats happy.  Argo is also a classic authoritarian scenario of the conversion of fantasy to a world held up by the “right” violence (It reveals this in reverse). Sometimes I wish for scenarios so hard that my eyes are squinting lemons desperate to unbear themselves into sugar.  But writing is harder than that.

(for Pam Thurschwell)

There’s a can of blueberries at the back of the shelf amid dust and flour mites or whatever it is that gets into the rice, like an old writing file where you made a deposit in the darkness of a late style. As though berries too syrupy even for ice cream and the cheesecakes your mother never got to make were just waiting around for you to be found, like that child in the game.

In the game you do this first: close your eyes in front of people. And that isn’t even the test.  You are probably sitting when you take it. But when you close your eyes in front of people they can watch the ambivalent magnet of your face melt away into whatever it is when you’re truly not caring, which is not like not giving a shit, but unfocused. Close your eyes and imagine yourself as a child in a room. At once everyone in the room and the world is alike and different, because if the word child does mean something, to everyone the scene is both singular and general, and the child you imagine is a and that child, you in a space at a time at an age, wearing something, probably, distinguished by details, and if we all drew it we would all also be distracted by how sketchy our skills really are, for even the richest writer just makes stick figures, by which I don’t mean, like Lydia Davis, that I’m bored by other people’s imaginations: other minds are great, the greatest, it’s just that all of the gathering and attending are so imprecise and seat of the pants it’s not clear what close seeing and reading and listening can tell us about any other thing than what it was that hit us while we pretended it was out there all along with its own ontology or history of mattering.  But when you close your eyes it’s not just any child but yourself as a child, which you may have forgotten. Then you imagine the child in the room and you imagine yourself as an adult walking into the room, and the chances are good that the adult walking into the room is not you at this moment either, in the sense that it’s wearing something other than what you’re wearing now and also that its face, in contrast to yours, is focused and determined, maybe on the act of walking into the room, or maybe on the project of not tripping and falling, because the floor on the outside is uneven with the inside floor whose metal strip hasn’t tamed the linoleum’s warping. Or maybe it’s because you’ve never practiced seeing yourself meeting a kid who is also you, who is also wearing something different, probably, than it ever wore but that you saw on another kid once, or in a magazine.

You are walking into a room, let’s face it, more adult than you ever were before, because at this moment what makes you, what distinguishes you more than any other fact about you or all of the work of history is that you are not that kid now. But upright, you’re like an evolutionary ape who’s left the line of apes that keep getting taller before they turn into “man” because it, you, have to walk into the room to see the small being that is both you and yet too not exactly a version of yourself. How’s your hair, anyway? Is it a good hair day? Are you wearing a jacket and boots, or are you unremarkable, a box of tissues? You walk into the room as an adult and see yourself there as a child in the room. “Room” turns out to be as labile as child or a swarm of bees. Your eyes are closed but you can see the room and the door and yourself, and is there any furniture? Are there windows? Or is the light in the room from something overhead? But maybe you’re porting your childhood light, which was ambient: maybe there was no electricity or the adults preferred indirect light, with its silky muted atmosphere.You locate yourself and the child in the room, and what do you do? That is the game. All of the rest of everything I’ve described is the unconscious preparation for the game that is defined by the event of an action, which is you walking into the room as an adult to find the child version of yourself and then watching, in your mind, what you do, which is to say, admitting that your mind is a theatre of fantasy and admitting that the sentence “you imagine” is a big desperate fake, since you’re as surprised by what happens in your head as the next guy, or maybe not surprised, because you’ve decided that adults should not be surprising.

Actually, there’s a little more to it than that, although I’m not sure that there’s more because the game- maker imagined it or because I’ve played it so many times with so many people that it has developed some other limbs autonomously. So when you as the adult, by which I mean anyone, walks into the room and sees themselves as a child, there’s the question of what one does but also, what does the child do, because remember, you’re both alive, and the child was there first, being somewhere and probably not stiff or even playing corpse the way it’s probably universal that any kid does when it is floating in water and has enough abdominal control and confidence to keep floating. Probably the child, however old it is, is in the room and has a history of moving, maybe recently, and maybe the adult discovers that the child is doing something and joins in, or perhaps the adult–but now you’re not imagining you anymore because no one imagines themselves as “the adult”–does something and themselves as a child joins in, or maybe there’s a standoff, like when the hospital worker comes and speaks in an intimate voice that no one’s earned yet, not that anyone can do much more than show up, whatever that means, with their limited repertoire.

(for Lynn Wardley)

If one of this blog’s aims was to fold research space into the ongoing time-suck of administration, teaching, and advising, another aim has been to free up my writing so that the first response to it isn’t so often That’s hard. You have no idea how much background knowledge someone needs to get through a sentence of yours.  All sentences demand that we bring whatever we know to the encounter:  so much converges on even the most ordinary staging. Even frank writing requires a reckless leap of faith into a vastness of partial knowledge, which is why one cultivates aesthetic patience along with the courage for curiosity.  At the same time, though, one needs skills for making that leap worth it. I’ve spent my whole career learning to how help sentences hold something out there. But I’ve been bad at it, they’re right about that, desperate about what I don’t know about how much to explain, exemplify, rephrase or vary.  I’m curious about how to leaven and extend things. The struggle continues, as we say in many contexts.

At the same time, I don’t think that male theorists are asked nearly as often to lubricate the reading experience.  People who write from the bottom or the outside are always being asked to be pleasing, soothing, perky, comic or melodramatic, status-enhancing, and available. I can’t tell you how boring it is to write it and feel it again, again. Just this morning Claudia Rankine was telling me about collecting stories of the racial impasse, about her black friends’ encounters with vaguely well-intentioned ordinary white cluelessness and entitlement. The stories are at once too clear and already known and, though enraging, yet still confusing. But this is what happens, and we cycle through the voices of flat withholding, searing sarcasm, rage, whispering, exhaustion, p e d a g o g y, and consultation.

Consultation interests me as a genre of political vitality:  those phases when we check in with each other with an “am I crazy?” and “not again!” In the last year queer and feminist disbelief-consultation has really hepped up. For we have re-entered, during the hiatus of this blog writing, a new era of the old wedging of the political into women’s sexual and reproductive bodies. It is no longer plausible to make Janet Halley’s claim in Split Decisions that governmental feminism has won the battle, while the social is still up for grabs.  How many essays on rape culture and rape jokes have I read in just the last year?  How many sexual foreclosure projects are on offer in our legislatures and media?

We refuse to be worn out is our secret motto, but that’s why we consult with each other, to generate energy for the re-encounter, and the long life of a pedagogy whose content can change but whose presence is a sign of the attachment to life.  It’s not just the pressure of economic precarity that motivates/disturbs/exhausts us, not just the pressure of our rageful disidentification with national power and the law as it drones on wearing out life wherever the empire seeks order and racializes compulsively, not just the ongoing labor of insisting that the work of identity politics is not over and still inspiring, but also a strong wave of constant disgust at the ordinariness of gay-hatred, misogyny and erotophobia. Occupy Misogyny?  Never left it. The pervasive and intense austerity of the moment sucks the air out in a slow oxygen leak that makes asthmatics of us all. Politics is not just for genres of demonstration and demand.  It requires also genres of checking in to provide a little breathing space that allows for redistributing and disturbing  negative affect, de-isolating ourselves-in-damage, and hatching strategies for not reproducing the violence, for moving the scene of life to an alter-real.

***

“Politics, Teaching, Art and Writing: an Interview with Lauren Berlant,” in Jennifer Cooke, Challenging Intimacies: Legacies of Psychoanalysis, Textual Practice 27: 4 (2013). [Any month now.]

David Seitz and Lauren Berlant, originally called “Queer Optimism,” now on the Society and Space website.

Lauren Berlant, “On her book Cruel Optimism,” 5 June 2012, Rorotoko.

Affect in the End Times: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant, Lauren Berlant and Jordan Greenwald, Qui Parle Spring/Summer 2012.

Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejic; , Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanovic; edited by Jasbir Puar, The Drama Review 56:4 (T216) Winter 2012.

Yubraj Aryal, “Interview with Lauren Berlant: Affect and the Political,” Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary InquiryVolume 7, Number 17 (2012).

Heather Davis and Paige Sarlin, Interview with Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt: 2 versions, “The Risk of a New Relationality” in BRIC (2011) and “No One is Sovereign in Love” in No More Potlucks (2011): http://nomorepotlucks.org/editorial/amour-no-18.

“Love as a Properly Political Concept,” in Cultural Anthropology (2011): Vol. 26, Issue 4, pp. 683–691.

Jay Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: An Interview with Lauren Berlant,” Biography 34, 1 (Winter 2011): 180-187. (See Jolly below)

Lauren Berlant, Gesa Helms, Marina Vishmidt, “Affect & the Politics of Austerity: An Interview Exchange with Lauren Berlant,” Variant 39/40 (Winter 2010): 3-6.

Earl McCabe, “Depressive Realism:  An Interview with Lauren Berlant”

See also special issues of Biography ed. by Margaretta Jolly, and of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, eds. Kamrath and Deem ); special online forums at Social Text and the Barnard Center for Research on Women related to Cruel Optimism.

See also the free download Desire/Love.

Clint Eastwood:

I would just like to say something, ladies and gentlemen.
Something that I think is very important.  It is that, you, we
– we own this country.
(APPLAUSE)
We — we own it.  It is not you owning it, and not
politicians owning it.  Politicians are employees of ours.
(APPLAUSE)

   And  — so — they are just going to come around and beg
for votes every few years.  It is the same old deal.  But I just
think it is important that you realize , that you’re the best in
the world. Whether you are a Democrat or Republican or whether
you’re libertarian or whatever, you are the best.  And we should
not ever forget that. And when somebody does not do the job, we
got to let them go.

Mitt Romney:

Many of you felt that way on Election Day four years ago. Hope and Change had a powerful appeal. But tonight I’d ask a simple question: If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn’t you feel that way now that he’s President Obama? You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.

The President hasn’t disappointed you because he wanted to. The President has disappointed America because he hasn’t led America in the right direction. He took office without the basic qualification that most Americans have and one that was essential to his task. He had almost no experience working in a business. Jobs to him are about government.

***************************************************************************

Many of you would say that Donald Trump was excluded from the Republican convention, has no traction as a political candidate, and is generally viewed as a clown whose spewing occasionally hits in the vicinity of an opinion that a reasonable person could defend.  But I am here to tell you that he actually won the Republican nomination and is dominating the airwaves during this election season.  He is not doing this with “dark money” or Koch-like influence peddling.  He has done this the way the fabled butterfly does it, as its wing-flapping sets off revolutions.

Trump has trumped how we think about political representation. The voice of The Apprentice, now ingrained throughout the U.S. memory bank, is in the declarative performative, “You’re fired!”  Eastwood channels it: body politic is the capitalist, the president a part of his workforce.  Romney channels it: the government is a business that should be run by a businessman who understands markets, and not a complex political project attending to material and aesthetic processes that shape being collective.  If a president can not do the job about jobs, he should be out of one. The president is reduced from a symbolic and policy-oriented figure to a C.E.O., with citizens as stockholders demanding evidence of upward mobility in the form of quarterly profits. Denuded of any imaginary component, excluded from the assessment of co-present strengths and weaknesses, the president is recast as an employee.  “Employee” now means “temporary.”

We have heard before this time the reductive and empty debate about the statecraft of lawyers versus the skill of businessmen. What makes it newly powerful, tragic, and dangerous, it seems to me–and I don’t inflate my terms lightly—is the banalization of firing that this puts into place as an affective demonstration of political freedom.

I have argued elsewhere that, under the pressure to justify austerity amidst vast global wealth, democracy has begun to be redefined as the equal exposure of all persons to the virulent excisions of the market.  Democracy is no longer imaginatively a counter-force to market forces.  A bad employee, throw her out.  A clumsy employee who is otherwise a good employee, throw him out.  Like a felon, they have lost the right to democracy.  This is a world where “right to work” means no right to unionize.  This is a world where seeking protections from employer exploitation is recast as being privileged and self-interested.  The worker is cast as greedy while the capitalist is cast as generous. In this view, equal vulnerability to swift, efficient, structural judgment is seen to constitute fairness.  No matter that austerity is the punishment of the many for the appetites of the few.  In this view, the general exposure to market swings and disturbances equals democracy.  We are at the end of Enlightenment liberalism, which is an end that some of us wanted.  But the other side also wants it.

Obama: He Sucks Less Bad is the best slogan I can scrape up on this go around, although I still credit him absolutely for awakening U.S. civil society from its passive slumber.  Even the Supreme Court:  let’s face it, he’s going to appoint people like Cass Sunstein to it, who is nice to gay people and believes in animal rights, but whose support for the reduction of political speech to market speech and enthusiasm for an anti-porn, pro-shame jurisimaginary are not to be underestimated.

Better than the other, I can’t believe it’s not butter, but really they’re not identical: and the way to see that clearly might be to think about time.  In a Republican win, the victory of neoliberal economics and the privatization of the public sphere will be swift and ruthless, under the banner of freedom, with its expanded instruments of choice. “You’re fired!” expresses the fantasy of agency being sold by the right as the scene of the experience of democracy.  Everyone a sovereign!  In a Democratic win, the victory of neoliberal economics will be slower and more uneven.  Slow, uneven dissolution and development buy us more time to reroute, refunction, and rethink capitalist and politically affective social relations.  It gives us more time (and we have been using our time very well these last years) to build infrastructures for new relationality.

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.”

My mother died of femininity.  I told her that I would say this about her. She had said, “Will you write a book about me?”  and I asked if she wanted me to. She said “Yes. I want you to say that I left the world a better place because I had you!” I said I thought that this was a bad idea: people would think it an excuse to write about me.  She said, “Can you think of another topic?”  I offered this phrase about femininity, and explained why.  My brother-in-law thought that it would be better to say that my mother died from vanity rather than from femininity. I can see why he would prefer that story; it’s interesting to see how a label shifts the implication.

In her late teens she took up smoking, because it was sold as a weight-reduction aid.  When she died she had aggressive stage 4 lung cancer.  In her teens she started wearing high heels, to enhance the back arch and ass-to-calves posture whose strut transforms the whole body to a sexual tableau, shifting between teetering and stillness. Later, she had an abortion and on the way out tripped down the stairs in those heels, hurting her back permanently.  Decades later, selling dresses at Bloomingdale’s, she was forced to carry, by her estimate, 500 lbs. of clothes each day. Shop girls, you know, are forced to dress like their customers. They have to do this to show that they understand the appropriate universe of taste, even while working like mules in that same universe, carrying to their ladies stacks of hanging things and having to reorganize what their ladies left behind on the dressing room floor. She liked this job, because she liked being known as having good taste.

These tasks threw her back out anew, and the result of this was an overconsumption of painkillers that ultimately blew out her kidneys.  She had to go onto dialysis: she died three days after turning off her dialysis. In the meantime, more comically, she had two fingers partly amputated because her nails got infected by a “French wrap” gone wrong, and she was too ashamed to tell anyone about it, numbing the pain of infection with Anbesol, which she had also used for many years to avoid going to the dentist. This is not the half of it: ok, maybe it’s half.

Her name was Joanne.  She asked me whether knowing this story might change any woman’s relation to her health:  I said I didn’t think so, although you never know.  First, no one thinks they’ll be defined by disaster until they are. They can sense it on the horizon, but the gamble is a gamble, and you never know.  Second, things are so bad, so minimally imaginative for sexual relations, that people tend to do the thing they heard about doing just to keep things going, and if it means poisoning themselves and wearing out their bodies, or being over- or understimulated, even, they’ll do it. I do it. I make better decisions but not different kinds of decision.

Once scavenged, we take habits on as beloved objects, as partners in the project of getting by, as ways of gaming the situation of making a life. I learned to think about this from Michael Eigen: you wake up, you see the world, it’s your eyes that are seeing that thing, you breathe, you sense your next breath. Those are your feet, your skin, your hands. You begin to read beyond the body. A singular world is there, it’s your partner, fixing in images the sense of continuity you carry around. Which is why loss is actually loss whatever else it is—even if it’s also a relief, a victory, an occasion for sentimental self-encountering, or a thud, almost nothing, as it is also the loss of a revitalization of sense that was bound to the image, which was itself just a stand-in for relation as such.

This is why deriving modes of attention and conceptualizing skills matters to me, you know. Once you see all objects as placeholders for the encounter with the world, as organizing the process of moving through the situation of the ordinary life, they become enigmas alongside of the ways they gain specificity through use, over time. You can rely on them and have curiosity about them, and not only be scared of the way you don’t understand them. The fact that a thing is an enigmatic relation means not that the thing is replaceable, because it isn’t: but that it changes when it’s close to other things.  Take a glimpse of this modernist phone I shot, for example.

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?