. . . . . . . Supervalent Thought

My recent work is about resistance to change, but tracks optimism, I think, because its persistence points to a glitch in the subject’s commitment to repeat that cluster of habits she recognizes as “her” personality. A glitch, as I say in my newest chapter, is an interruption amidst a transition. Ever since that Nation episode (see entry below)  I’ve been torn, torn, torn. Do I want to write more like that? I’ve had an offer to do more. So part of my brain has been phrasing whatever I think in the idiom of the memorable, the pithy, and the visceral. I am having terrible polemicist envy.

If I were to do the journalism, I would want to be thinking about recasting what the good life might come to mean in the face of the bad life facing us down, the shocking, ordinary overpresence of violence in and toward bodies politic, and the increasing scarcity of nature-as-resource. I would want to be imagining how to produce a pragmatic world for an imaginary that sustains a better image of social reciprocity, a version of the kinship of care without the xenophobia of so much easily imagined belonging. And to produce a greater attachment to the kind of economic justice that would make the rich poorer, and the poor more secure.

All of that’s not yet in my vernacular skill set, however. Work is always in regress before it’s in progress. But, in that register, I can say something uncynical about political affectivity–that is, about normativity and its others, about how viscera are trained, bodies calibrated, vigilance honed, mixed feelings managed, toward remaining fluid in and making sense of a world that is both crumbling and enduring, full of obstacles and lubricants, as people make ways to live on in it.

I may follow this with versions of two columns that might or might not end up there. I feel very mixed about them, but they’re about feeling mixed, so I guess I’ll take the risk in public. They feel trivial. They are trying to explain some small politically intense moments in the present political situation. I am also about to write some redactions of my Critical Inquiry pieces on the case as event and on the obesity epidemic for more nonacademic audiences too. This seems to be the season of shorter sentences and of starting out where other people are, in a rhetoric that nudges. Maybe I’ll post those things too, in a few weeks; these developments seem so strange to me, and I need to make some decisions about the register in which my work appears, and then re-take control once my school-year obligations are fulfilled. I am so anxious about this that when my cat woke me at five this morning (sneezing on my face, his new form of aubade), I couldn’t get back to sleep.

But another thing that Eve Sedgwick taught me is to have ideas in public, in real time; not to hoard, but to revise by way of conversation and incited response. It’s not clear that political journalism is the best use of my time, though, my limited time for reading, thinking, and writing. Since March I have been researching constantly this next project!–but you wouldn’t know it, because everything has been speedy and fleeting. There’s been little capture time for remembering the clarity I can sometimes weed out amidst the noise of the work-for-others that I also do (e.g. teaching, editing, reviewing books and essays, reading tenure cases, etc.).

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I thought I’d close by telling you about another encounter I had recently, and as the encounter archive is backed up with eye-opening episodes, more to come in that register too, as skill-building toward anecdotal exemplification is also part of this blog’s writing project.

It’s mid-April, the transitional season, a week beginning in snow and ending triumphant in the sun. I returned home from my wild U. Vermont residency in time to attend a party for my haircutter, Meseret Mahlum, who cuts at 57th Street Hair Salon. It was such a wonderful thing, a surprise for her and a really interesting experiment in strangers meeting each other simply because they were patrons of a place, a person, and a scene. I heart Meseret, and I must not be alone. Seventy or eighty people came! Drinking, shmoozing, being curious: it was great.

I was conversing happily with a lawyer who works with troubled juveniles. An acquaintance of hers came up to us and joined in, and we got deep into thinking about what it means to try to convince violent kids to become nonviolent. The lawyer pointed out that these kids have never enjoyed an institutional margin of error, a margin of permission to fuck up, the ways privileged children and adults regularly do.

Then the newer interlocutor turns to me and says, I am so glad to meet you after hearing about you all these years! I say, Oh! Do we have friends in common? No, she says. I’m also a psychiatric social worker, and I’ve had students of yours as clients, along with many others from your department.

I fold into myself. I say, Oh. I don’t know what to say to that. I’m not always that bad. She says, don’t be defensive, they respect you and trust you but fear you, and I tell them, Lauren Berlant is just like my husband! You’re frank and you kick ass.

I stay folded in. Later, as we leave, she says, again, I’m so glad finally to attach a face to the name, after all these years. I remain a bobblehead. Later still, in an email, she says, I’m so glad to meet you after hearing about you after all these years.

I’m dumbfounded for sixty reasons. None have to do with surprise at the content of what she says. She says, you have no idea how bad the other ones are, I have heard some stories. My body takes the hits not just of her phrases but of the phrases I’m not saying back.

I am having an amusing physical problem now–lex talionis, almost literally. My tear ducts periodically clog and swell, as though some ungrieved grief has decided to mark my head with a little deadpan realism. Of course since I think it’s funny I’m not learning the lesson I should.

Anyway, in the mornings and evenings now I put a hot compress on my eyes for 10 minutes. Then I wash them with baby shampoo (also ironic, as they promise “no more tears”!). I find the 10 minutes excruciating and useless (which is also funny and ridiculous): so I have been trying to find distractions, such as listening to films to understand the atmosphere and environment of action apart from what’s embodied in spectacle, character, and flesh. But this morning I listened to the Fresh Air interview with Christian Mungiu, director of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and the amazingly paced The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a remarkable film about a bad day during a bad period of life, Romania 1987, during the regime of Nicolai Ceausescu. People talk about it as an abortion film but Mungiu finds this thematization irritating: clearly, he thinks that the melodrama of abortion in the U.S. oversaturates too often our capacity to see the fact or event of it as a case of something, a sign of the encounter of a few machinic logics in an ethico-political field in the ongoing historical present. His principle of realism is to track the extended present of the phrase “Things happen like this.”

Here is what he said about what the case of abortion stands for (along with standing for state-invested blockages to women’s sovereignty), more or less accurately transcribed.

“The suppression of abortion was the suppression of moral action, practices of decision-making, and intensified contexts of friendship, and solidarity. . . You know, whenever you have a strong enemy in front of you and you have a problem which is common for a group of people, the solidarity belonging to the period is going to be much more important. . .It’s a film about decision-making, and responsibilities in life, and freedom during that period, and compromise, and friendship and solidarity . . . The story came to me with all the details and with all the emotions, but not with the all the motivations, because people don’t know why they acted the way they acted, they just acted.They just reacted to a specific situation…It has to do with the situation, and it has to do with the kind of friendship that they were having. “

Mungiu thinks that abortion isn’t that great, either. “It is said that nearly half a million women died in the process of having illegal abortions between 1966 and ‘89 but at the same time after 1990 when abortion became illegal we had a million abortions a year because people were uneducated [about ordinary birth control and self-responsibility].” He tells an amazing anecdote about cascades of irresponsibility.

An abortionist tells a potential client about the contract she’s entering. She pays him to do the abortion. But there’s a second stage. He shows the client two barrels near the table where the procedure will take place. One has water in it, the other acid. If things go well, “in the water you’re going to wash yourself and walk back home. if things don’t, I’m going to put you in [the barrel full of acid] and bury you and no one will know.”

Mungiu seems to think that state suppression of abortion is immoral because it atrophies ethical skills in individuals and in the body politic; women’s run to abortionists after abortion became legal again also exhibits immorality toward something (health? consequences? fetuses? unclear). But mainly what the film and the anecdote show is that when things are forced underground the provider of the illegal service wields ungodly unethical power over the needy clients, by performing pseudo-ethicality, acting as an arbiter of pseudo-liberal contractual responsibility.

Like the man with the two barrels, Mr. Bebe in the film does this: if I do x, you must do y, as though in choosing y the subject is practicing her freedom. The abortion day in the film is a day where people in need bargain with people who are not in the same situation of need but who are also unfree in a situation of so many other kinds of constraint. But the people requiring the illegal aid are so terrified of being on the bad end of the bargain they feel that they can not not make that all that remains is the promise of a solidarity amongst survivors, and no more than that. Treading water against drowning is not an ethical act. But in this film fidelity to an ideal of the open secret is, which shows you something of what happens to moral and political action under vicious regimes. Democracy is not excluded from this demand for fidelity to the open secret.

Mladen Dolar talks brilliantly about the pseudo-freedom of “forced choices”, but I don’t know of other writing that talks about state discipline producing ethical atrophy amongst citizens. I don’t even know what I think about it. I’m more comfortable with Ranciere’s view that the masses are always exercising a sovereignty that is disrespected by elites, an exercise of desire and identification that he calls democracy. Yet Mungiu’s claim makes me pause.

Mungiu joined Terry Gross from “Radio Guerilla”; this reminds of the great stations “Radio Ragazza” and “Radio Phoenix” from Lizzie Borden’s brilliant Born in Flames. I’ve always utopianized the pirate radio from that film, the mobile revolutionary ferocity and joy for organizing counterpublics that the creatives incited. AI Weiwei, in a recent Believer, says something about this energy too: he says “fuck is the reality” and “fuck you” has to be the ethical commitment of the radical artist who refuses in advance to accommodate the comfortable hegemony in any politics. Part of the thought behind Detachment Theory is that it’s a lot harder to live a serious fuck you than the flipness of the flip-off would predict.

And how hard it is to do. I tried, in the last post, to say something about secrecy.

I don’t even care about secrecy, usually, because the scenario of exposing what’s unjustly censored has always seemed overdramatic to me, a distraction: all communication amounts to a defense, a performance of knowledge management that approximates some parts of reaching out to a thing while bracketing out others; and when information is hoarded to consolidate power, often the fact of the hoarding is overemphasized (Lies and Lying Liars, etc.) relative to the substance that was hoarded in power’s treasury (see etymology in the last post).

Think about the word “disclosure.” In the event of the revelation of the secret it just feels big because it reveals that control over history and the present has already been stolen from you (or the body politic), and thus the revelation delivers a quadruple shock (we discover and are forced to adjust to the news that we have not known a particular thing, nor known how to read the world, after all).

But I’d read an article that had excited me, and I wanted to report on how reading a thing had opened me up to a cluster of associations and bridging energies to do with my older work on the new state realism that embraces coping with terrorist secrecy by copying it and papers I’m going to write this spring countering some traditions of everyday life theorizing about encountering the present. The event of the secret, its meaning and force, is, paradoxically, how it’s shared. That was the animating revelation for me.

But my mood was at so many removes from my writing. I could barely stay focused on feeling out the thing. So the writing in the last post sucked in such a deeply familiar way (my fingers typed “failed” and “familial” before they allowed the word they intended). Clotted. I was unhappy at how long it took to say a thing, anything, about the privilege of state secrecy and secrecy in love. So because I couldn’t write with the energy I actually had I had to invent a new genre of riffing, the side effect. Yet even in that incarnation it feels, still, too heavy, each phrase adding a weight rather than folding in light.

Then today I’m rereading Eve Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading” and “White Glasses” essays, the former of which I find such a strange combination of careful and willful argument and which I treasure for what it wills to hold out when it replaces “depressive position” with “reparative reading” on behalf of its commitment to creating, through writing, luminous part-objects or potentialities for gathering up qualia, intimate and associative knowledge. It is trying to convince itself that anger and paranoia can be not the whole story, that they can be interrupted by theory, an orientation toward an affective tendency to appreciate disorienting juxtapositions, mistakes, tenderness, and sweetness. Ideally there would be no compensations, one could just appreciate what’s now. But that’s not the plot of the thing, that’s not the energy of repair.

I am writing this in a cafeteria of sorts. I smell french fries, and when I leave I will smell of french fries. That is not the vehicle I imagined myself being. Sedgwick: “If every refusal is, finally, a loyalty to some other bond in the present or the past, refusal is simultaneously preservation as well” (”White Glasses,” 258). What did I want to be the transistor for, then? She cites Michael Moon’s claim that this refusal is not just of all the sexualities with which one doesn’t identify but a whole range of perversions that we deny without mourning. But is the sensual richness of polymorphous porousness merely amputated when one finds some comfort in being organized? Is the pleasure of form, of becoming oriented, only a defense against the pleasures of desire’s perversity? Is mourning a structuring appetite, a structuring hunger from not being or having everything? (My old shrink said once, “You’d want everything too, if you thought you could get it.”) Is the appetite for optimism the same thing, the slow and manageable leakage of a kind of exuberant animal greed that refuses the finality of loss? I don’t intend these as rhetorical questions.

What lightens me most about Sedgwick is the need to connect, “the bitterness of not doing so” (260), and the need to make theory give permission to bunt one’s head toward the beyond of what feels impossible. The style of “White Glasses” is to reiterate phrases and elaborate on them, to produce a kinetic energy to find new shapes of potentiality for the rageful, destructive, self-shredding affects. I want to build my skills for patience to stay longer than that in the transitional spaces, to not be overwhelmed while I pay attention to what’s cracking irritatingly and inconveniently, to what’s opening, what’s confusing, and what’s flourishing in the transitioning cracks. (The history of the present-in-transition.)

Read a great and useful piece on secrecy: Shersow and Michaelson, Is Nothing Secret? Does “secret” in the title mean deliberately to dogwhistle “sacred,” and what does that suggest? Or does it point more to that other great pronouncement of ethical failure, “Have you no shame?”, a near-rhetorical question that accuses someone else of losing moral discipline or withdrawing from a commitment to normative ethical views and acts. Have you no x? You should have x. If this is a rhetorical question, you don’t even deserve to have heard it.

The shamelessness of political antinormativity: terrorism, now, has become defined as a commitment to hoard knowledge from the state of any political views and intentions. For pro-HUAC politicians the shame was secreting communist affiliations and for people like Joseph Welch (who famously accused McCarthy of shamelessness) it was McCarthy’s embodiment of the state’s equation of democratic freedom with citizen transparency. The fear of the citizen’s opacity rubbed up against the ideology of individual sovereignty. Absent somebody’s discipline by a sense of duty, somebody’s shame was supposed to relax the contradictions, one way or another. I learned the word “dogwhistle” from Amanda Macdonald, by the way. In Australia, it refers to a connotation that’s inexplicit in an utterance but seeks to confirm solidarity with a specific kind of ideologically-defined ear/subject/being/population.

I also learned from the learned essay something I ought to have known, and shame on me. The etymology of privilege is “law of the private”–privus lege–by which we can understand here less the modern sense of privacy (the law legitimating possession of that which can be called personal) than the traditional sense (the law legitimating the sovereignty that derives from ownership). The law of the private, or privilege, points to the sovereign rights of any individual, but historically that individual was the Pope, who had ecclesiastical privilege. But knowing this history puts a new penumbra around accusations of privilege, for now they can be understood as accusations that someone or some institution has asserted a private law that self-benefits or benefits a class. It reminds that the property word title organizes a sense of an actual entitlement.

Secrecy, hoard, trust, title–this reminds me of Aristotle’s always startling revelation of how often the terms of ethical discourse derive from the economic. Maybe that’s why I’m as suspicious of ethical as of capital logics of value: I don’t trust most self-privileged guarantees of good intentionality or the normativity of most forms of reciprocity.

Meanwhile, to secret the loss of your commitment to normative ethics, to not tell the world that you have withdrawn from the normative agreement that x behavior will denote y moral state, practice, or commitment, is to assert a privacy that the state/your interlocutor can’t bear, these days. The body politic is petit objet a, and has to be beaten for it.

It’s one thing when people hoard transparency from each other: usually it is a betrayal of trust to violate the intimate’s promise to be transparent enough. These departures into opacity are inevitable, though, and anyway much secreting of alterity can actually come from motives of care, to protect the big picture of love from malign variations of mood. But that doesn’t mean that exposure will not be an event: it’s always an event to discover the alterity of the lover that was always and will always be there, and is there right now.

But the politics of who gets to secret the secrets–this is what Kim Scheppele wrote about a decade ago, and what Michaelson and Shersow are thinking about. In “The Epistemology of State Emotion” I argued that the state defends its own opacity from accusations of antinomianism by claiming that the terrorist practices of secreted secrecy force the state into mimetic overdrive. Here’s the view of The New York Times.
Michaelson and Shersow’s real aim is to explain secrecy in terms of Derridean-inflected genre theory, and to approach the Constitutional history that made the Patriot Act seem legal. Of course it should have been called the superfluous, supernumerary state secret act, since it legalized already legal suspensions of due process. Bush/Cheney were angry that they had to ask permission to do what they wanted, claiming that speed of execution in an era of rational paranoia is a priority over the boring business of supervision. But perhaps one ought to save the word “supernumerary” for its best phrase partner, “nipple.”

Here’s a bit of what Michaelson and Shersow have to say:

In any case, a secret evidently can—or must—be shared by more than one; and yet, to remain faithful in any sense to its own concept, it cannot be shared by every one. . . . In those cases that are called, in English, “open secrets,” and in French, “les secrets de Polichinelle,” only the sharing of the secret is secret, not the secret itself; and even such sharing remains always suspended just this side of a necessary limit which it may always encounter in, for example, the voice of a child proclaiming an emperor’s nakedness. Are these problems of number and limit (as such phrases and examples seem perhaps to indicate) the source of the faintly comic note that seems to play, as we shall see, around the whole idea of the secret, even in its most serious (and secretive) political form? We will also suggest that this question of the secret is a kind of ghostly double of the question of democracy itself, to which it remains inescapably linked by exigencies at once practical and theoretical. Democracy and the secret pose a sort of double problem whose two sides can be denoted in French by the single phrase plus un (cf. Derrida, Politics 101). How many can share a secret? The secret replies, so to speak: this many, but no more. And how many [End Page 125] can join in a democracy?

This passage calls up Jodi Dean/Zizek’s argument too: that democracy produces an evidentiary crisis. Who has the information that organizes life? The enmeshing of “openness” with democracy, equality and freedom requires suspicion on all sides, and a play between the sovereignty and injustice of kept secrets, open secrets, fetishes of transparency on all sides, and a suspicion that things are never equal, which they aren’t. Intellectuals can fetishize the circulation of knowledge, as though knowing all equals an even playing field. But rather than be cyncial about it, let’s turn to Ranciere’s work, where democracy is a desire and a process of opening and claiming that refuses the norm/law of class privilege, and it’s not the same thing as openness or equality, which is a measure in a moment. Secrecy might be anti-democratic, a treasury or hoard of value, but transparency is a fantasy horizon that does not guarantee or constitute democracy. We know that and yet the impotence of the truth and the seduction of the wish remains, that a sense of openness equals openness of access to power, resources, and indeed privilege, with all the unimpeded mobility of impact its etymology suggests.

Below I’m starting a new genre for riffing, for keeping suggestive connections alive. Interruption is my stylistic ethics: to self-interrupt, to force openings in my own habit of self-tracking and self-regard, to be idiomatically non-monogamous, as you would predict. Adultery, fantasy, philandering, swerve (I read an article today about adultery, where the commentators kept saying “she got her swerve, he got his”).

Side effects: Secrecy may dissolve or engender solidarity, paranoia, and love. Its genre is the stage whisper. Secrecy may induce constant surprise at leakage. Be prepared, ask your doctor. It can perform coercive binding, as when, after information is “shared,” the speaker says, “You mustn’t say a word about this,” as though by listening you had already consented to pretend not to have heard or been changed by the event of the dirt. It may induce pervasive skepticism about the meaning of gifts and of love. It may make one long for stupefied and stupefying defenses against any assurance at all. See extimacy. See also political depression. Unimaginative and thrilling inversions can develop, too, as in: retaliatory acts of openness, disloyalty to that open secret which shields privilege from experiencing its own fragility, compulsive uncaring frankness, or gossip (the sublation of once-hoarded information to pseudo and then actual performative authorlessness). Hearing commentary on you that open with phrases like “people say” may lead to an adrenalin rush, the sensation of being tipped over, and generalized hate or love, depending. People who are cruelly made to discover that they have been out of the loop, discourse fellowship, or sentimental holding chamber of insiderness may go crazy on you: do not open up the treasury while driving a vehicle. Secrecy may cause more hoarding, more secrecy, more informational auto-poesis or lying. It may cause diarrheas of deniability, falsely innocent assertions of not having known, not having been on the inside, and not having had a will to the death of the other from whom x was kept and who could not therefore understand or shape the condition of their lives. Refusals to protect the secrecy of the open secret dissolve the assurance of others, and may create a will to saturate all sensual fields not in kind but with acts of reason or pseudo-openness that really amount to an ungiving turned-away back. Sinthomo-epistemology may induce vomiting. I thought some of this during a meeting at school a few weeks ago. Why bother going to the gym when I’m getting so much exercise rolling my eyes while keeping my face straight? Composure uses up glucose. Writing keeps me from flying off into the air from all that fluttering.

My friend Katie wrote me that she was struck by the relation of optimism to humor in this blog. After yesterday I’d say to the humors, as I was steamy, then, with optimism drain–blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, acidic energy generated by my frustrated desire to have a whole thought amidst institutional avalanches of need, demand, passive aggression, aggression, and obligation. Some things just won’t just flake away through inattention.

But mainly, I was so bollixed up by all I wanted and failed to say in the last entry that I hadn’t even gotten to say what I’d been thinking about that very thing: that is, humor, laughter, the comic, and their relation to the psychoanalytic and political interests of this project’s aim to understand problems of detaching from normative, durable, reliable forms of life. Laughter is a form of dissolution that would seem to indicate an attachment to a situation that generates pleasure. But not always, maybe not even usually.

Here’s a start toward another research thread. Even a suggestion of the comic puts me in a good mood. Thanks, Katie! (Katie even thinks that maybe these should be called The Optimism Papers, although that wouldn’t predict, say, the chapter on torture. On the other hand, torturing is the state’s ridiculous optimism about controlling the real, isn’t it? And yet, there are questions of tone: the structure and affect of optimism aren’t identical, and being precise about those divergences matters.)

All throughout writing The Female Complaint comedy haunted me, comedy as a subordinated subculture’s or overwhelmed individual’s lubricant for being in the room with and figuring out how to survive what’s presently overwhelming about the real. But I could only talk about the comic as an intensity, an extremity on the other side of melodramatic heightening, as in the Dorothy Parker chapter: “Listen, I can’t even get my dog to stay down. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government?” This couplet cracks me up. But even Parker claims that comedy isn’t a weapon, but a failing shield. It’s hard for me not to feel all mixed up around Parker’s humor, sensing the fear and defense that radiates in the atmosphere of her sharp observation. But sometimes comedy is just a cigar, or whatever: delight, unmixed relief to be stretching out without a sense of wearing out.

People dissolve into laughter and into tears, among other things, I’d been thinking: the dissolution of bodily composure was always part of this research (Losing It and Unraveling were other early handles for this project) . Last Thursday I realized that Detachment Theory had to start with thinking about laughing. Maybe that would be the chapter on Lamb’s She’s Come Undone and Ellman’s Doctors and Nurses. But there’s so much in the archive for this book that could be about comedies of dissolution that are not merely Rabelaisian inversion.

In the Affect Publics reading group this week we read Bergson’s Laughter and Baudelaire’s “The Essence of Laughter.” Neither of these attended enough to ambivalent laughter, because I’m most interested in the knot that undoes someone’s sense of formal control in an enduring way, not just as an involuntary pulse. But Bergson’s interest in adjustment as the scene or situation of laughter seems a perfect referent for that part of this project. He writes that inelasticity and inflexibility on display produce laughter, as the subject being laughed at can’t adjust to his situation: he talks about the comic spectacle of “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” Bergson’s sense that the comic is produced by inelasticity where we would expect or even need to see adaptation works well with John Limon’s great prediction: “the appeal of comedy may be traced to its imposition of geometrical perfectionism on compounded liminality.” Limon ends up talking about queer precision.

As I was reading I kept thinking about dissolving into tears/laughter, where the bodily fact one always faces in laughter involves watching someone live through this, exerting control and letting go, tipping over and getting back up. When getting back up happens, I mean.

Dissolving can take on so many forms of bodily action: for example, bending over in laughter. I knew a woman once who was so stiff that her laughter looked like a threat to her bodily integrity: we were all actually scared when she laughed, we wanted it to go away, because we were afraid that in the aftermath she would just be broken, a stick dissolved into splinters.

She was a teacher of ours. Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve had two depressive teachers like this, whose laughter wasn’t a relief but a release of something the person really could not contain but could not survive the release of. The other one would shake side to side like a possessed metronome. Both were high composure, high WASP, very controlling women: one suicide, one now debilitated, mentally alive when she is, but not pedagogically, professionally, or personally too functional. She can laugh at ducks, and occasionally at talks.

Mood, a shallow, shadowy rancidity interrupted by adrenalin when needed. Cheery! Fakeness actually works. I started this post right before school started on Jan 7. These first three sentences summarize what’s to follow.

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A few posts ago, I asked, “What happens to the life drive when it finds no traction for its optimism?” I learned about the life drive from an essay conversation on trauma between Peggy Phelan and Cathy Caruth, a beautiful thing. (Cultural Values 5, 1 (January 2001): 7-27). Caruth talks about fort/da not just as Freud’s symbolization of the traumatized subject’s attempt to experience affectively what she does not actually have, mastery over loss (the child’s father is away at war; the mother is out of the room). To Caruth, the child’s game with controlling and losing control of the top also demonstrates a drive to sustain life in the face of death. To face and to turn away from death is not to disavow anything, or to drown out contingency and vulnerability with the noise of play and presence, but to become two-faced. To face and turn away from death (vulnerability, contingency, the thinning out of fantasy) makes possible living on without guarantees.

Indeed the main consolation the life drive provides the traumatized subject is its assurance that there are no guarantees, since she otherwise feels bound by the guarantee of the repetition of her impossibility. The life drive offers the possibility of repetition’s interruption (however low the bar–as mere variation, for example, a vacation), of a surprise, an unpredicted affect, within trauma. This suggests the possibility in advance that the subject might, sometime, be detached from the imaginable field of experience now clotted with the desperately predictable activity of affect management.

And yet. Talking to my lonely friends on New Year’s Eve, I was reminded to stay aware that there’s a corollary question to do with another optimism of which traumatic repetition itself can be a ground, shaped by resignation and its corollaries–treading water, not stopping, being around, being homeless, drowning, being detached not as a relation but an enduring condition, the numb whatever of a humming defense. As we know, sometimes a defense represents the last stand of sphincteral control over personality’s mirage of intention.

A few of the people I talked to on New Year’s week were lonely. But they embrace their refusal of optimism about becoming otherwise. One is chronically ill, and has gotten quite fat and short of breath. The other is chronically depressed, and has been digging a hole to nest in righteously. The former’s life shuttles between depression and spectacle. She only overcomes when she’s going to be on display–a high school reunion, a family celebration—events for which she can prepare to be fabulous, and to hold the gaze and center stage.

Until now, anyway: now, she’s giving up even that inclination to interrupt her depression, isolation, and mentalized life. She’s post-fakeness. She says that she has accepted herself, by which she means she embraces expressing her cruelty and disappointment. She tells me that as a feminist I ought to be against fakeness. What I say is that her survival matters: her fakeness produced for her reminders of what the life drive felt like, a grandiosity that relaxed her enough to provide some time for the other pleasures, involving looking around and being curious about things, and being interested in what she saw and, frankly, telling me about it. The reports from her intelligence were always interesting. They didn’t amount to confidence or self-love or trust of others or the world, so it wasn’t everything. But her attentiveness drew her along through life, made the performance of observational intelligence seem like a good, a contribution to things, a call that could get responses.

I’ll talk about the other friend in some other post. But I’ve been thinking about Peter Kramer’s Against Depression, and his rage at the romance of depression that confuses the disease with authenticity and the subject’s dissolution with creativity: and I see this not only in the adolescent and intellectual embrace of depression as higher intelligence and realer realism but also in a massive disrespect for optimism as something that’s somehow unethical.

Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long conversation about what the point of networking amongst “friends” is. The person was so skeptical because to her stranger and distance-shaped intimacies are diminished forms of real intimacy. To her, real intimacy is a relation that requires the fortitude and porousness of a serious, emotionally-laden, accretion of mutual experience. Her intimacies are spaces of permission not only for recognition but for the right to be seriously inconvenient, to demand, and to need. It presumes face to faceness, but even more profoundly, flesh to fleshness. But on Facebook one can always skim, or not log in.

My version of this distinction is different of course, and sees more overlap than difference among types of attachment. The stretched-out intimacies are important and really matter, but they are more shaped by the phantasmatic dimension of recognition and reciprocity–it is easier to hide inattention, disagreement, disparity, aversion. On the other hand it’s easier to focus on what’s great in that genre of intimate and to let the other stuff not matter. There’s less likely collateral damage in mediated or stranger intimacies. While the more conventional kinds of intimacy foreground the immediate and the demanding, are more atmospheric and singular, enable others’ memories to have the ethical density of knowledge about one that is truer than what one carries around, and involve many more opportunities for losing one’s bearings. The latter takes off from a Cavellian thought about love–love as returning to the scene of coordinating lives, synchronizing being–but synchrony can be spread more capaciously and meaningfully amongst a variety of attachments. Still, I think all kinds of emotional dependency and sustenance can flourish amongst people who only meet each other at one or a few points on the grid of the field of their life.

Thinking about yesterday’s reciprocity entry, I said to her that one point of Facebook is to inhabit the social as a place of play, of having a light impact, of being ordinary, of being acknowledged, of echoing and noodling, where the bar for reciprocity is so low that anyone could perform it by clicking. It’s a place where clicking is a sign that someone has paid attention and where dropping a line can build toward making a life. You know someone has imagined you today, checked in. You’re not an isolate. Trying to accommodate to my positive explanation, she said, I guess it’s like when churches organize prayer circles for impaired strangers, sending out love into the spirit world–it can’t hurt, but is it deep? Me: people value different evidence of having had an impact and of mattering to the world they’re imagining belonging to, and who can say what’s deep from outside of the transference? But I realized that I may be incoherent about this, and of course this problem, of figuring out how to talk about ways of being that are simultaneously openings and defenses, is central to this project. When people talk about modes of belonging they talk about desire but less so about defense.

I sense that Facebook is about calibrating the difficulty of knowing the importance of the ordinary event. People are trying there to eventalize the mood, the inclination, the thing that just happened–the episodic nature of existence. So and so is in a mood right now. So and so likes this kind of thing right now; and just went here and there. This is how they felt about it. It’s not in the idiom of the great encounter or the great passion, it’s the lightness and play of the poke. There’s always a potential but not a demand for more.

Here is how so and so has shown up to life. Can you show up too, for a sec?

How can the “episodic now” become an event? Little mediated worlds produced by kinetic reciprocity enable accretion to become event without the drama of a disturbance. The disturbance is the exception. And that’s what makes stranger intimacy a relief from the other kind, which tips you over.

For the last few years I’ve been writing about aspirational normativity—a concept that describes individuals’ motives for belonging to a general culture as something other than a will to power, ideology, or shallowness. Instead one can view it as an affective need or drive to feel held by the social world. To sense that one is held durably by the world is not a very high bar, just a specific one. It does not mean to feel recognized in the full range of your being. Nor does it mean merely to be acknowledged—bump into anyone on the street, act like an asshole, have a conversation with anyone, and you can feel that you have an impact without feeling especially welcome in the world. Sometimes feeling a connection is a relief from a general state of disconnection.[i]

Instead, to feel held in this sense is to have an expectation that there will be some kind of confirming reciprocity in one’s exchanges and an experience of a confirming reciprocity that does not have to be personal or even feel good explicitly, and yet engenders satisfaction and optimism toward a better-than-survival kind of living. The expectation of good conversations or kind glances with strangers is a good example of a structure of reciprocity that is also the feeling of it. So is hearing that your taste for x is also someone else’s. But so much more than repetition of the same is involved in achieving and managing reciprocity. Finding in the world or in others what’s important to you releases you from the loneliness of your singular attachments, the attachments engendered by autonomic or instinctual moves toward the something that looks promising. Leo Bersani describes most beautifully the delicacy of such gestures toward self-extension.[ii]

But achieving an attachment that feels compelling is just one part of reciprocity: it could also be stalking! As we will see. The other part is expecting a return, in being able to be returned to, in expanding the idioms of return. The other part is the fear of return. In the project whose record of construction I’m making here, I’m writing about living with a drive to create conditions of reciprocity in a world where it cannot be presupposed—and not just because people have bad “caretaking environments” when they’re little. Reciprocity is not just in kind, a literal trade. To study it is to look for the idioms of exchange that work and what happens when they don’t. It is to look at the terms through which people make bargains with life subjectively–politically and affectively, without knowing it, often. I have been stunned in the last few years to collect a huge archive of aesthetic mediations of this situation—works that find people in a world where they can’t find a person, an intimate public, a political world, any durable conditions for sustaining optimism. And maybe they don’t want to, maybe sometimes being alone is a relief from the obligations of being durable. My claim is that this situation is both singular to individuals and increasingly sensed as a structural abandonment by general social worlds and political institutions.

Questions: What happens to the life drive when it finds no traction for its optimism? Is this why is there so much crankiness—anxious attachment disorder? Why do people feel that they won’t be heard capaciously and generously, and what are the effects of the presumption that one’s gestures will be ejected except by an intimate public? I am always shocked by the optimism that brings people back to the world one more time, to make connections with strangers that are hard to maintain with full intimates. At the same time I sense that even what Katie Stewart calls “little worlds” are desperately held on to, because to encounter the reciprocal feels rarer and more precious and more a function of stranger intimacy than of personal, face to face, biography.

I was in a Walgreens last night, on the way to picking up dinner for the cancer family I’m staying with, the family of my partner, and the whole experience of it is so noisy aurally and emotionally that my hypervigilance feels both sharp and dull. The father needed a stress ball to squeeze, to raise his blood pressure, which is scarily low. Orthostatic hypotension, qu’est-ce que c’est? You stand up, your blood rushes to your feet, the rest of you crumbles or tumbles. The man in front of us in line was arguing with the cashier about whether he was allowed to use a credit card to buy a phone card. The cashier was a very tall, deep-voiced African-American man–eloquent, ironic, combative, and really patient. He wore a black vest and shirt with a small American flag decal. The argument flustered both men, and the consumer left without his card or his receipt. The aggrieved cashier saw this and panicked, and ran out of the store after the man. We heard him get outside and whistle quite loudly, the kind of whistle that you know requires your fingers. When he returned, I gave props to his volume, and asked him how he learned to do that, as I’d spent my childhood trying to and faking it, and my adulthood not trying it. He told us a story about elementary school. He said, he had a math teacher who insulted and shamed him. One day she was using him as an example, and he just put his fingers in his mouth and blew.

Think about a phrase that resonates. A supervalent thought is a thought whose meaning resides not only in its explicit phrasing, but in the atmosphere of intensity it releases that points beyond the phrase, to a domain of the unsaid. A supervalent thought produces an atmosphere in the world, makes an opening in the potential for apprehension, consciousness, and experience.

It’s a concept from Freud’s Dora. Freud uses it to describe an expressed thought (I don’t love you) that covers up a concealed thought that is its opposite (I love you). But in supervalentthoughtland, I get to redefine things any way I want.

Heh heh. I promise to be responsible.