Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy
May 15, 2018, 7:45 am
Filed under:
affect,
Attachment,
Belonging,
class,
feminism,
pedagogy,
supervalent_thought,
teaching | Tags:
feminism,
intimacy,
pedagogyYesterday Corey Robin wrote a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “The Erotic Professor,” and in it he positively mentions a piece of mine called “Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy.” Quite a few people have written me to find it: here it is. I don’t especially think that Corey, whom I respect deeply, has fully captured the problem of clarifying what it means to be professionally responsible in the scene of attachment that can grow from close collaboration between people working together in institutions, especially when the attachments grow from projects of knowledge where talking things through might change not just ideas, but forms of life. I could go on about this–but I basically agree with his critique of the self-regard blazoned by people who think their own responses and attachments to students are and should be indexical for all transferential relations. What strikes me is both that attachment styles vary a lot (some students want to be known as biographical persons; some want close intellectual work not to include information about their lifeworld; some want intellectual work to be less close and more casual, and so on.). But the ambition to have a personally saturating mutual intimacy between feminist/queer students and teachers is what my 1997 article argues against, anyway, as it considers how the couple form model of teacher-student relation reproduces inequality under current conditions of precarity.
I would write about the institutional and economic contingencies of the historical present differently now. For another time. Meanwhile, the two pdfs below are from xeroxes made 21 years apart, which I find funny.
Berlant feminism institutions intimacy
Berlant new xerox of feminism and the institutions of intimacy
The Predator and the Jokester
December 12, 2017, 2:59 pm
Filed under:
affect,
Belonging,
comedy,
depression,
economy,
feminism,
non-sovereignty,
queerness,
sexuality,
supervalent_thought,
trauma 
“Pop!” from jakelikesonions.com
Al Franken has said he’ll resign. If so, he will be gone from the Senate not because he was a vicious predator but because there was a bad chemical reaction between his sexual immaturity, his just “having fun” with women’s bodies, and this moment of improvisatory boundary-drawing that likens the jokester to the predator. What’s going on?
Lots of people are worrying about this. Some are using the language of the “witch hunt,” which is a term people use when they feel women coming after men as though the worst guy is the typical one. Some queers are reviving the language of the “moral panic,” in fear that this moment justifies and amplifies erotophobia, an already pervasive hatred of sex that ends up harming women, LGBTQ-identified people—anyone whose sexuality or body or appetites have been historically disparaged by the state, the hygienic bourgeoisie and the religious.
Everyone has appetites: yet many people think their own aversion to sex or ways of managing desire are evidence of moral virtue. Nowhere is this more evident than in how they process the casual pleasures. Continue reading →
Big Man
Around Thanksgiving Tavia Nyong’o asked me to write about the Big Man for the Social Text blog and so I sat there wordlessly for awhile then wrote this about his Big Sovereign Electorate (BSE), then edited it, then felt its belatedness, then decided to follow my own principle, which is that you have to show up with whatever you have to fight the unacceptable situation. This is what I had. http://socialtextjournal.org/big-man/.
Today I woke up writing protest slogans in my head, though, as though my genre flailing is on autopilot at this point. La Lucha Continua, people!
Also, for those unfamiliar with this site, on the left hand side of this page, under “Pages,” are conference papers for which people have asked –entire panels, including other people’s papers.
Trump, or Political Emotions
August 4, 2016, 7:05 am
Filed under:
affect,
Belonging,
economy,
emotion,
Ordinariness,
Politics,
sovereignty,
supervalent_thought,
teaching | Tags:
Democrats,
political_emotion,
political_rhetoric,
sentimentality,
TrumpI wrote this column in case anyone’s going to be teaching the election this fall.
***
Trump, or Political Emotions
Dear America, if I read one more article about the Danger of Political Emotions in an election season, I might take my own life. If I do that and fail, will the state bring me up on charges the way it’s considering to do for Chelsea Manning, whose recent suicide attempt might be prosecuted?[1] If Obama has an ounce of decency in him he’ll make that possibility quietly go away.
If x had an ounce of decency, x would deliver justice. Such bad math, so emotional. But politics is always emotional. It is a scene where structural antagonisms—genuinely conflicting interests sustaining regimes of power and value—are described in rhetoric that intensifies the fantasy of vulnerable and possible worlds.
Here is the thesis of this piece, which is about the contemporary United States. People would like to feel free. They would like the world to have a generous cushion for all their aggression and inclination. They would like there to be a general plane of okayness governing social relations. It is hard for some to see that the “generous cushion for aggression” might conflict with the “general plane of okayness.”
When I listen to Donald Trump, I think he’s not wrong about some things, especially the awful neoliberal-Clintonian trade deals and bank deregulation that sold out the working class in the US because of a muddled idea that any wealth at all is a general social benefit. But Donald Trump is our current best exhibit of two other pretty solid truths about politics, thinking, and feeling.
One is: A Good Account of a Problem Predicts Absolutely Nothing About the Value of a Solution.
I am a professor. I have read three decades of essays that set up problems beautifully and then fall apart in the what is to be done section. Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism’s unfairness. Then what? Then Trump’s response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad. Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet—and this is key—the noise in his message increases the apparent value of what’s clear about it. The ways he’s right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the ways he’s blabbing. Plus, apart from rebooting capitalism, nobody in mainstream politics is that visionary about what to do, because everyone has to be patriotic toward capitalism, since that’s come to stand for freedom.
Two: the second thing about Trump is that Trump is free.
You watch him calculating, yet not seeming to care about the consequences of what he says, and you listen to his supporters enjoying the feel of his freedom. See the brilliant interviews on Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, where RNC conventioneers say, over and over: We’re for Trump because he’s not politically correct, PC has harmed America, and you think, people feel so unfree.[2]
Let’s sit with that.
Continue reading →
I went back 2 the violent room for the time being
April 28, 2016, 9:16 am
Filed under:
affect,
Affect Theory,
ambivalence,
Attachment,
Belonging,
class,
Craziness,
Encounters,
non-sovereignty,
optimism,
pedagogy,
potentiality,
supervalent_thought,
teaching,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
figuration,
pedagogy,
prince,
writingPrince was at the cusp of my unclenching. I’ll never be able to tell the story as long as people are still alive but I won’t tell a cover story either. I mean, I won’t intentionally tell a cover story, but all stories are cover stories: you can’t say everything, even if you would. But if you are not free all the way through you can still build from a space where your freedom’s not entirely crushed. Comedians call it commitment to the joke. Where the lung’s even a little unencumbered, possession and dispossession are just bad memories.
So for the moment, let’s say it’s been seven hours and thirteen days, divided by your weight in dog years, say. Frankness stands in for facts. Thunder sounds out what the lightening speaks. I was driven to tell you something simple. Forgive me if I go astray. Continue reading →
Time Out
December 17, 2015, 7:31 pm
Filed under:
affect,
ambivalence,
Attachment,
Craziness,
flatness,
Mood,
sovereignty,
supervalent_thought,
teaching,
Theory of this Blog,
writing For the last 24 hours I’ve been unscheduled. I had taken a gig in Amsterdam scheduled right after the term so I could interrupt my habits of working, working out, professing, sleeping a little & waking up, opening the window so that the cat could smell the world and then sitting down at the desk with my habitual combo of detox tea and coffee, because who am I if not balanced, before I extend myself to become unbalanced. The great thing about writing is that it is flat even when it’s other things too.
I never take vacations, and days off are rare failures to be very off at all, as I narrate here yearly if I manage actually to try–it just occurs to me now that my drive to keep my infinitives unsplit (so that your verbs will be strong, I tell my students) has something to do with my drive to hold myself together too, as an action figure of a cool figuration otherwise than to be/not to be but feeling out attachment heuristically. With all this work, I am a slow reviser: I have been ahead of many curves, but now some curves are ahead of me and it doesn’t matter, I hope, because a curve’s curve requires lots of leaning one way by many people before it becomes a thing that’s banking as a stability and not just a longing for solidity at the end of some road, like a home. Continue reading →
This Week in Shakes (more Hundreds)
June 9, 2014, 9:31 pm
Filed under:
affect,
Affect Theory,
ambivalence,
Attachment,
class,
Craziness,
food,
Love,
Mood,
non-sovereignty,
psychoanalysis,
queerness,
sexuality,
supervalent_thought,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
experiment,
food,
intimacy,
poetry,
sentimentality,
the _body,
writingMy friend Martha Howard asked me to post my experiment with shakes. I might post others. There’s a lot of variety among them, as you can already see from the last few posts.
*****
This Week in Shakes
Monday
The protein drink is a chalky substance diluted and well-enough flavored that a small store sample persuades you that you would drink it at home–only to find at home that, no matter how much attention you’d paid at the time, you can’t get the makeup to look as good or the hair to fall again the way it did at the original moment of optimism. I had committed to two tubs of vegan breakfast powder. One recalled the fleck of inhaled bugs and the other a bully pushing my face down thoroughly into tough wet dirt.
When it comes to experiments I commit my mouth. Five months of unquenchably pasty tongue prison ran out finally and I leaped to acquire seven new shake packs full of promise and percentages. Today: Vega One all-in-one nutritional shake in French Vanilla: 50% of daily intake vitamins & minerals, 15 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber & 1.5 grams of omega 3, plus antioxidants, probiotics and greens. Dairy, gluten & soy free, no sugar added, and 135 calories. Complete daily essentials to help you thrive. Good for your body and the planet: clean . . . without compromise. The ampersand’s shortcut efficiency figures negativity baroquely.
My shake was green. The world has not enough water for everyone, nor amounts sufficient to dilute this shake so that its flavor could be rejoined at the party after the chaos of getting in, finding the room with the coats, and moving outside for a quick smoke. Vanilla is a tart baby when you drink it from the bottle and a teasing allusion if you bite the bark. Vanilla is also the sex you slide into, the pleasant-event of that hand again there, or the feeling of feet arching. My tongue sought out but never landed.
Tuesday
The dread of another virtue-breakfast was nuked today by politics, a painful turn of need and interest towards hypervigilance. There was a Punch and Judy Show with all the thrill and erotic boredom of your average sexual antagonism. Punch called Judy a vampire, and then Judy threw her feminism hard, knocking his need to eat the brains he also finds repulsive. The mob of tweeting lurkers verged with stakes for theory’s heart.
Disgust and love keep me very quiet. The chocolate version of yesterday’s foul mud was eleven additional calories, which will today be soundly punished for my own good.
Wednesday
Last night was spent battling the cat’s episodic loneliness and so this exhausted morning’s Vega Energizing Smoothie was an especially dreadful prospect, reminding me that the verb “to stomach” shows that bodies have not only their own ideas but radically private sovereign tongues. Vanilla Almondilla offers as its main gift what it doesn’t have: dairy, gluten & soy free, no sugar added. In the Coke Zero era the ideal contribution of a food is its subtraction of dark consequences from pleasure. 90 calories, 10 grams of protein. Xanthan gum is the aspartame of the health shake, which is also green.
Thursday
The iPad reads aloud in the kitchen this morning while I pull things together. Voice Dream offers a woman’s halting, nasal phonetic literalism to relay a scholarly book on comedy, preferring spectacle’s excesses to narrative’s enchainments. My naked partner enters the white room holding the ginger cat. He wonders, is it the Russian model of narrative where y is the effect of x or the Aristotelian one of intensities, reversals, and consequences? Raw Protein Beyond Organic Protein Formula features Bob Marley Brand coffee: it is free of gluten, dairy, soy, fillers, artificial flavors, and good ones. I can’t stop laughing.
Friday
I spent the last night alone and so the morning was like a hotel morning with its shapeless offer of waking without obligation to be a particular way. The noise of a mind open to a limited formlessness makes breathing and blinking worth nothing in particular, and I considered taking a break from breakfast altogether because of the quiet. But the night’s move through finitude required some pause after I lifted my head up and laughed at how turtle that everyday stretching is. I say to myself get ahold of yourself. The Vega Energizing Tropical Smoothie was wonderful, a wonder.
Saturday
I’m well-acquainted with the genre of the Skype dinner date with old lovers. After recipe hunting left me numb, today’s shake was my dinner protein, Vega Reparative in Berry–a revoltingly sweet attempt at Nestle’s Quick Strawberry. I reenacted to my love a scene from Domestic Violence of an old white woman telling stories on her husband, a college professor who had so abused her that she saw an angel flying round her room looking down kindly from the high white ceiling to offer advice. “I know I’m crazy,” she says softly, with her rice-paper skin like mica, pixillated, awry.
Sunday
The woman with Parkinson’s swims everyday and each day seems to diminish a little, which I sense because she always wears the same pants, of a slightly burnt orange hue. Bending stretches things out, so don’t presuppose, I tell myself, knowing that in the future a snapshot of this naked gym tableau might well portray a secret no-one could have known. We used to talk about her bad back, which we now have nostalgia for. She laughs at my Amazing Meals shake, with its grainy and delicious austerity. I dash it down as though it matters that it gets somewhere.
