. . . . . . . Supervalent Thought

This is Lauren Berlant’s research blog, tracking academic and random engagements with two scenes and concepts: ordinary life and attachment/detachment. I want to know why people stay attached to lives that don’t work. This is a political and a personal question. Psychoanalysis meets affect theory and Marxist critical theory. The projected book’s current title is Detachment Theory: its aim is to describe non-sovereignty in a variety of scenes. Anxiety, Limerence, Passive Aggression, Torture… Usually “detachment” points to liberal theories of consciousness, and is related to the exercise of reason and the potential for disinterest. That horizon of an affect that can never be achieved is the opposite of what I’m thinking about, which looks at detaching from objects (lives, worlds, scenes) as a problem and process in itself that’s both usual (in agentive modes of self-medication or self-interruption, for example) and catastrophic (when one is forced to lose one’s shape, one’s access to oneself as an object because of a structural transformation in one’s relation to the object world–death, divorce, ideological breach, war, imprisonment).  This book could also be called Bad Form.

Another aspect of the blog’s animating project is to learn to write: to experiment with writing about ordinariness; to figure out how concepts and encounters open up consciousness to aleatory experience; to understand better what an event is, and can be. I want to pay attention to paying attention. I want to understand attachment and the experience of being detached from objects, to ask the political question about why people stay attached to lives that don’t work in terms of the aesthetics of affect and bodily management. I want to track what happens when they give up the structuring badness; why it so often destroys assurance, confidence in oneself as a grounding object. I want to think about how, in these encounters, people manage enduring injustice. Like all affective scenes, injustice is both objective and a sense of something. I think that these wants are related.

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