. . . . . . . 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-sovereign subjectivity in a variety of scenes, like 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. Disinterest, a state of affect that can never be achieved, is the opposite of what I’m thinking about here, which looks at the process of detaching from objects (lives, worlds, scenes) as a problem in itself that’s both usual (in the activity of appetitive self-medication or self-interruption, for example) and catastrophic (when one is forced to become disorganized or lose one’s shape, forced to lose 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).

Another aspect of the blog’s animating project is to learn how to write: to experiment with narrating the ordinary via the usually lost moments of gesture, glance, and tonal intensity; to track aleatory experience; to figure out how concepts and encounters open up consciousness without having themselves to be dramatically memorable events; to understand better what an event is, and can be. This is a question of storytelling, remediating the stuff of paying attention. I want to think about how, in these encounters, people endure what’s overwhelming: being in the room with what’s structurally unjust, affectively impossible. Like all affective scenes, injustice is both a structural fact and a sense of something. I think that these wants are related.

Citations of this blog are invited according to the guidelines offered by Creative Commons.