Feminist Formations Dossier on Object Lessons

Introduction

Zahid R. Chaudhary

Feminist Formations, Volume 25, Number 3, Winter 2013, pp. 129-134(Article)

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©2013 Feminist Formations, Vol. 25 No. 3 (Winter) pp. 129–134

INHABITATIONS: A FEMINIST FORMATIONS DOSSIER ON ROBYN WIEGMAN’S OBJECT LESSONS

Introduction

Zahid R. Chaudhary

While spending a semester in London last year, I happened to have started reading Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons (2012) around the same time that I revisited Karl Marx’s grave. Only on the occasion of writing this short introduc-tion, which has taken me back into the thick of Wiegman’s book and somehow to that autumn in London, am I starting to make sense of my two visits to Marx’s grave. The first time I had visited the gravesite was over a decade ago, when I was a graduate student and had made a special pilgrimage from my abode in deepest south London to Highgate Cemetery in the north. Once I arrived at the grave, I awaited the epiphany that I thought must surely come; Marx was singu-larly important to me, and I had braved two bus connections and a sweltering Underground journey. Detecting no signs of an imminent epiphany, I snapped a picture of the tombstone because, well, it was unclear what else was to be done. I read and reread the epitaph, which is in two parts: on the top it says “Work-ers of all lands unite”; on the bottom, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.” After having snapped some more pictures and examined the names of the lucky few buried immediately around Marx, I reflected on this epitaph, allowing the passion of the first part, from the Communist Manifesto, to color my reading of the second part, from Theses on Feuerbach. Workers of the world must unite because the aim is to change the world, not merely to interpret it. I took this reading of the epitaph as inspiration and ignored the suspicion that by means of this flat-footed reading I had managed to convert the epitaph into a platitude. If an epiphany was not forthcoming, I was determined to have a helping of inspiration, even if it came in the thought-equivalent of kitsch (which is, of course, to be valued).

When I revisited the gravesite last autumn, I did not arrive with the expec-tation of an epiphany because the grave had already disappointed me on that score ten years ago, and I had since learned a thing or two about epiphanies and knew they could not be summoned. So I reflected once again on the familiar

130 · Feminist Formations 25.3

epitaph, and this time I was taken by its second part. Dwelling on its meaning as an epitaph rather than a polemic (which is how the statement is deployed in the Theses, and how it resonates in The German Ideology, for which the theses were an outline), I found the epitaph poignant because Marx would spend the rest of his career returning to the interregnum between these two relations to the world: interpreting it/changing it. Or, to phrase it in theoretical parlance, theory and praxis. If the “point” is to change the world, then the book in which Marx makes this point amply demonstrates that one must also interpret the world. After all, Marx arrived at this abyssal insight while interpreting the limits of Young Hegelians and their philosophical idealism. But return-ing to the statement in its form as epitaph, its resonances are both mournful and bittersweet—mournful, because the relationship between interpreting the world and changing it remains a conundrum that my beloved object, Marx-ism, cannot resolve for me (and Marx could not do so for himself); bittersweet, because the gap between theory and praxis remains a generative and rich hiatus that enables thought instead of cutting it off. So thought itself is no longer merely interpretation, but a kind of reaching and a form of search—open to the world and its changes, but also unsettled because it risks being discrepant with respect to its goal.

As I mentioned, around the same time that I revisited Marx’s grave, I had begun reading Wiegman’s recently released Object Lessons, which was teaching me a great deal about wanting things from my objects of study. I wanted more of Marx and ten years ago, faced with the silence of his tombstone, I took from him what I could concoct. I did the same last year. Object Lessons has taught me about the magnetism between ourselves and our objects of study. It also is concerned about what happens in the gap between interpreting the world and changing it—or, to put it in Wiegman’s terms, between producing knowledge and producing social justice. Object Lessons is an extended meditation about the abyss between those two acts, but it implicitly transforms Marx’s formulation because it argues that social justice is always on the side of desire, as the goal that lends direction to knowledge production. It asks us leftist critics to suspend—for the sake of thought, as well as for the sake of the world we would have changed—the movements animated by our political desires, so that we inhabit these desires before acting out from them. If we confuse interpreting the world with changing it—that is, if the desire for social justice is satiated by the production of knowledge that aims to bring social justice to pass—then critical thought risks trapping itself in rabbit holes of its own making. If leftist criticism finds itself dissatisfied with its objects and replaces them with “new” ones (for example, “sexuality” replaces “gender,” which replaced “women,” and so on), then it must not assume that the replacement is a progress in thought, but it might do it some good to consider the dissatisfaction—the other side of desire—that animates the replacement of such objects. As the attentive reader will have noticed, Object Lessons is not a book that seeks to answer the question “What is to be done?”

Zahid R. Chaudhary · 131

Instead, to read Object Lessons means to submit to a certain danger akin to a feeling of having been cast adrift. In its account, there are no safe harbors because the pat solutions of leftist criticism are precisely the objects being pulled apart, recomposed, and held in abeyance. So, seemingly self-evident coordinates can no longer be taken at face value, and the only certainty that emerges in the book is as indisputable as it is tricky: that critics desire their objects of study. This certainty is a tricky one because desire can hardly be the basis for certainty, since it can constitute the object of desire itself or become blind to itself in the force of its transference, and, more critically, the critic’s desire can become blind to the object’s own autonomy. Indeed, the certainties in Object Lessons take the form of double binds:

Objects and analytic categories are always incommensurate with the political desire invested in them. (42)

No identity knowledge—indeed no minoritized identity form, no matter how self-critical and anti-identitarian in political commitments—can actually succeed in dismantling the target of its resistance without fundamentally undoing itself, and that undoing is ambivalent at best. (334–35)

The double bind is the fundamental thought-form of Object Lessons, and insofar as this is the case, the book is rigorously poststructuralist in its willingness to inhabit the double bind rather than resolve it. It would seem that resolution, or even a guarantee of a certainty beyond the checkered itinerary of desire (itself uncertain), would violate not only the aims of the book, but also work against some of its critical insights. After all, the objects of the book’s own ambivalent desire are institutional and disciplinary formations. Object Lessons uncovers the workings of political desire: on the one hand, an attachment to the “good objects” (women, gender, sex, for example) that paradoxically commits one to the “enemy” that aims to disfigure the object; and on the other, the force of desire that risks the destruction of the objects themselves, whose autonomy, in turn, is endangered by this same desire. So Object Lessons, in order to do justice to its own objects—institutional and disciplinary formations, the movements of political desire—cannot and indeed must not offer directions for the turnings of our political desire. It has to refrain from offering a prescription through which we might become good subjects worthy of our good objects; such a prescription would disable the book’s own most valuable insights.

This has two critical implications: one, that the risks of desire are as unavoidable as desire itself is inevitable; and second, the book challenges us to consider what it might mean to take the nonidentity of objects seriously. By nonidentity, I am referring here to Theodor Adorno’s category that poses an epistemological challenge to all thought—that our concepts can never be adequate to the objects they seek to apprehend. All objects are nonidentical to their concepts. The fantasy of a fit between concept and object, of a kind


of total knowledge, is both fascistic though also generative, since this fantasy (on which so many disciplines depend) provides a direction for thought. Object Lessons reminds us that this fantasy also provides a direction for the movements of the desire to know, and therefore to become intimate with, the object, and in that intimacy knowledge can become a means of doing justice, of “reinventing the world” (20). Object Lessons teaches us why it might be productive to hold in abeyance this fantasy of a total capture of the object by the concept. The book’s circling around the double binds that it uncovers is not an avoidance of desire’s movements, but a performance of the captivation that rivets it. This circling itself provides a kind of solution, and I read it as the book’s commitment to nonidentical thinking.

Wiegman herself calls this commitment inhabitation, and at one point makes it clear that inhabitation is not the same as resolution (265)—in fact, it is precisely not resolution. At the risk of turning Wiegman’s term into a kitschier though equally valuable one, inhabitation is a more cerebral form of sitting with it. And the place that Wiegman would have us inhabit is the uncomfortable one of the double bind, which operates in Object Lessons at the macro- and micro-levels simultaneously. It is instructive to consider three criti-cal neologisms and reinventions from the book, since these concern the entire book and their very formulation asks us to inhabit paradoxes: critical habits, political desire, and identity knowledge. The book is interested first and foremost in the political desire that underwrites the organization of identity knowledges (women’s studies, American studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, whiteness studies, intersectionality), and it seeks to make us aware of the critical habits that result from such desire when identity knowledges are produced (n.b., but not in order to change them). Critical habits is itself a paradoxical term: habits are lived almost unconsciously because they are precisely acts that arise from a lack of reflection—they are not, in that sense, critical. Critical habits, then, implicitly signals the urgency with which critics need to consider how solutions to the impasses that identity knowledges face are often habits in the guise of critical solutions, a reflection that risks misrecognizing reflex action for critical practice. Identity knowledge as a term appears to me as a slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to a set of knowledge practices that go about producing the truth of gender, race, or nation and tend to arrive at versions of the same familiar solutions, and all the while, the future in which social justice might be realized necessarily disappoints these knowledges because it keeps receding. Identity comes from the Latin word for “sameness” (identitas). Such knowledges, essentially knowledges of the self-same, risk producing the same conclusions no matter how strenuously they reject any notion of identity. As knowledges go, they seem somehow unaware; this is so, in part, because identity knowledges have not taken an inventory of the political desires that compose them. Object Lessons asks us to consider such an inventory. And political desire, as Wiegman reinvents the term, signals the interpenetration of libidinal cathexes with the

Zahid R. Chaudhary · 133

social, and also with an anticipatory future in which the present expression of political desire in academia might contribute some condition of that future’s possibility. It also signals the risk, mentioned earlier, that desire might destroy the object it is directed toward. As Wiegman writes: “What conditions my inquiry here is something else. Call it a wish that our objects and analytics of study might survive even our most impassioned use of them” (54).

So how does one engage a project that asks us to sit still for a moment and inhabit the paradoxes and double binds in which our critical practices are caught—how, for example, to account for “the crucial difference between a field’s discourse of the political and the operations of the political that constitute it”? (17). What this dossier demonstrates is that such inhabitation is not at all the same as immobility; if inhabitation is not resolution, it is most certainly not defeatism either. The commentaries in this dossier are all, in their own ways, forms of the kind of inhabitation that Object Lessons calls out for. The authors come from a wide range of fields and critical paradigms, and their extensions and elaborations of Wiegman’s argument are examples of what inhabitation might look like. For the purposes of the authors contributing to this dossier, Object Lessons has become an auxiliary object for their own diverse political desires, as it certainly has for my understanding of Marx. As such, Wiegman’s (erstwhile?) beloved object, her book, might well reflect back to her in this dossier as an uncanny object, with all of its intimate and familiar attraction coupled with a certain fright, which, no doubt, might also be worth inhabiting, for her as well as for you (her response to the dossier will follow). I will not reduce the richness and variety of this dossier of responses to Object Lessons by summarizing them, but will offer one very brief example of the kinds of questions that inhabitation might generate from the vantage point of my own field, which roughly falls under postcolonial studies.

I read Object Lessons as a continuation, in some ways, of Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) analysis of subalternity. As she reminds us in the first sentence of her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” the original title of it was “Power, Desire, Interest.” These are the three animating principles of Object Lessons, and its commitment to nonidentical thinking reveals desire to be at the heart of our attempts to lend speech to our objects. Since Spivak’s now canonical intervention, recent turns in postcolonial thought have sought to understand the worlding of the Earth outside of secular paradigms. If secular institutions like the state-form, for example, might be foundationally inadequate for realizing the aims of social jus-tice, how might postcolonial thought account for subjects for whom the terms of recognition and self-narration are nonsecular? The representational challenges faced by postcolonial thought in the face of religious experience, for example, are not easily overcome through the standard narrative of a secular unfolding of freedom and justice. This is the place where Object Lessons’ account of political desire speaks to postcolonial studies; it allows us to ask these questions: What are the animating desires of postcolonial theory? Is its turn to the nonsecular a


moment in the transferential dialectic of difference and repetition? If so, how might this turn be doing an injustice to the “obsolete” and less sexy objects like the nation-state, class, and so on? And finally, what is the precise import of this new libidinal investment in the nonsecular, nonliberal, re-enchanted world? From what position do we critique secularism? This inflames, of course, the old irritation surrounding the whole problem of what “we” might constitute in the aftermath of critiques of the sovereign subject.

Object Lessons orients this analytic free fall because all of these questions would need to take as their starting point the deceptively simple question, a double bind worth inhabiting: “What, after all, fuels the fierceness of our objec-tion to we: the wish it reveals or the fact that the wish has yet to come true?” (13; emphasis in original). While the essays gathered in this dossier constitute we only in the most general sense, they nonetheless collectively inhabit the chal-lenges of Object Lessons by conjuring their objects of desire with the optimism and ambivalence that inevitably attends them. In doing so, each author finds him or herself addressed by this object called Object Lessons in various ways, and this dossier makes this object itself its addressee.

Zahid R. Chaudhary is associate professor of English at Princeton University, and the author of Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-century India (2012). He can be reached at [email protected].

References

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Risking Justice: Women’s Studies Beyond Measure

Miranda Joseph





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Risking Justice: Women’s Studies Beyond Measure

Miranda Joseph

“That justice exceeds law and calculation . . . cannot and should not serve as an alibi for staying out of

juridico-political battles . . . justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst for it can always be reappropriated

by the most perverse calculation. . . . And so incalculable justice requires us to calculate. . . . we must take it as far

as possible. . . . Politicization . . . is interminable.”

—Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law” (1992)

In finding my way and making my peace with a (so far) nearly twenty-year career as a full-time faculty member in women’s studies (with a substantial secondary affiliation with LGBT studies) while sustaining fundamentally anti-identitarian theoretical, political, and methodological orientations, Robyn Wiegman’s thinking has been importantly enabling. Her essays on women’s studies envi-sion the possibility of commitment to these spaces as infrastructure for serious and unconstrained intellectual endeavor, shameless in its engagement with Theory. In a passing remark from the audience of a conference session, Wieg-man urged that we in women’s studies, as we embrace and debate the inter- and transnational as rubrics for our work (from the repurposed domestic buildings on the fringes of campuses in which we are so often located), not ignore, but rather engage the larger and better-funded internationalizing projects of our universities in their fancy, new, centrally located buildings on our campuses. This imperative has stayed with me, inspiring my own recent effort to engage across substantial theoretical, methodological, and political differences with those doing a large and well-funded policy- and media-ready social science


project in a fancy new building down the block.1 That is, I have taken Wieg-man to be offering an expansive and empowered mode of inhabiting the field and the university.

At the same time, Wiegman’s works incisively identify and assess the con-straints against which we must be vigilant. In Object Lessons (2012) and her ear-lier women’s studies essays, she recognizes the neoliberalization of the university that has been the focus of much of the recent critical work on the academy.2 But she has chosen to focus on explicating the constraints of our own making, those we project/construct as necessary to the fulfillment of our desires, our political desires specifically. While Wiegman has never, to my understanding, rejected the aspiration of feminist scholars to contribute to the cause of social justice, she has identified and criticized interpretations of “the political” that narrow our field of view and action, confine the temporal and methodological range of our knowledge projects, and ultimately limit our potential contribu-tions. In her response to Wendy Brown’s “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies” (1997), which she pointedly titled “The Possibility of Women’s Studies” (2005), Wiegman suggests not that women’s studies is inadequately feminist, but that contemporary feminism might not be adequate to women’s studies (41). As she explains in Object Lessons (2012):

Many of my own critical inquiries of the last decade have . . . been tracking the range of despair that might be said to turn U.S. academic feminism “against itself.”3 Throughout this work, I have been developing an argument . . . that contemporary U.S. feminism in not adequate to the knowledge project of Gender or Women’s Studies, which means that I have been refusing to con-sign the itinerary of the interdisciplinary project feminism inaugurated to any public political manifestation of it. My goal has been to argue instead for the importance of differentiating among feminism’s various and incommensurable deployments. (115–16)

Wiegman’s position has reminded me of a defense of basic science (now disparaged as “curiosity-driven science”)—and the unpredicted though potent discovery—in the face of relentless pressure to produce knowledge that can be immediately commercialized (Joseph 2010, forthcoming). In a stricter analogy, she would have been arguing against the imperative to undertake “policy-ready” research, which has been explicitly advocated by some in gender/women’s studies and is powerfully compelled, whether we like it or not, by the demands of priva-tizing “entrepreneurial” universities for grant- and contract-funded research. But Wiegman’s concern has been less with the imperative to “applied” (usually quantitative) research than with the qualitative attention to individual suffering (perhaps tied to direct, hands-on social-service provision rather than policy) and to an imagined relation of intimacy and identification with the object of study. Against the imperative to intimacy, I have gratefully read her to be working to make our fields less claustrophobic and more ambitious.

Miranda Joseph · 137

In Object Lessons, as Wiegman expands her domain of examination from women’s studies to a broader range of identity knowledges, including queer studies, whiteness studies, and American studies, she continues to offer inci-sive, smart, and constructive insight into the diverse and creative ways that we manage to get in our own way, repeat ourselves, and erect disciplinary boundaries and constraints. Overall there is less optimism and a stronger sense of frustration and disappointment than in her earlier women’s studies essays. Nonetheless, Wiegman continues to provide analyses that are tremendously useful for those of us for whom these fields support our work as scholars, teach-ers, and, at this stage of the game, leaders (in our “service” or administrative roles) in our academic institutions, positioned to meaningfully engage the infrastructure itself.

The central concerns of Object Lessons (2012) are ones that I certainly share (and that I suspect many of us may worry over privately, even if we do not dare admit it to ourselves or others). Taking all the fields under her purview to be fairly well-established and no longer primarily engaged in the battle to give birth to themselves (6), she asks us to consider whether critique specifically or our critical practices more broadly actually make any meaningful contribution to social justice; whether our endless pursuit of the more perfect (perfectly interdisciplinary) method or correctly named object (women, gender, women of color, the inter- or transnational process) actually makes the work we do any more likely to make that contribution.

These are not merely matters of midlife self-doubt for the fields or any one of us individually; the question of the relation of knowledge production to justice is absolutely crucial—crucial because of the huge role that knowl-edge production has played in advancing and legitimating injustice. Whether through quantification (categorizing, measuring, ranking) or qualification and narration, the routines of many disciplines and the substantive contributions of most academic knowledge projects have been handmaidens to exploitation, colonization, and the production and sustenance of racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies and violences.4 That is, while we in women’s studies might wonder whether we are having delusions of grandeur in analogizing our critical practices to state practices (a question that Wiegman addresses directly, as I discuss below), there is no question that mainstream disciplinary knowledge production has been not analogous, but integral to state (and other) violences. As she notes, it is constitutive of our fields that we strategize to avoid aiding and abetting this work, strive to intervene and interrupt such practices, or even, most ambi-tiously, seek to make knowledge for justice by offering different accounts. And as she explicates over the course of the book, we must fail in all respects: we will aid and abet, we will supplement as we seek to intervene, we will not achieve justice. And per Wiegman, our failures will be overdetermined: to the extent that justice is defined as commensurability, we inhabit an aporia in which we cannot achieve it, but also cannot escape participating in reduction, reification,


equation, and measurement. Therefore, to the extent that justice is defined as incommensurability, again, we cannot achieve it, even as we cannot escape its constitutive force. Let me unpack this a bit.

As Wiegman explains in a long footnote:

For some scholars and in some disciplinary traditions, social justice will always be measured by a state-oriented outcome, with the transformation of law and policies signifying its political resolution. In others, the juridical solution is absolutely rejected, along with the terms by which dissent is managed in a liberal order, such that justice is always excessive of constitutional orders and governmentality of any kind, being the eternally postponed figure of what is to come. (3n4)

She claims that she is “less interested in measuring the strength and weakness of different understandings than in exploring the way that identity knowledges take their commitment to some version of justice as a self-constituting fact” (ibid.). But she clearly participates in the view that justice is beyond measure, beyond the juridical calculation of debts to society: she values intervention over discipline, equates true (rather than imitation) radicality with becoming radically undone (12), and strives to “differentiate social movements from the institutionalized projects founded in their names in order to appreciate their incommensurabilities” (27; emphasis added). Her position emerges in several different arguments in various locations through the book.

In the first chapter, “Doing Justice with Objects,” Wiegman takes up the effort of women’s studies to do justice to/with its object, through the endless refining of our naming of and analytic approach to that object. Here, justice seems to mean properly measured as in the French juste, with its connotation of fitting nice and tight—just so, just right.5 This effort, she argues, produces a series of determinations: political commitment determines the institutional/disciplinary form, which determines the object, method, rhetoric, and narrative, such that the object of study must match the political referent, and the task of scholarship (in a mode she calls “critical realism”) is to measure (or, in the humanities mode, to explicate) the object properly, exactly, justely. Inevitably, we cannot quite get it just right; our scholarly work is necessarily incommensurable with the worldly objects it purports to measure. Moreover, the effort crafts not a fashionable suit, but a straightjacket, juste a little too tight no matter how many times we adjust the tailoring. “How many times, after all, have we read or written that this critical practice (always the one we are engaged in) is no mere intellectual exercise but a transformative critique that can expose, resist, or undo the normativities, violences, and injustices within which and against which we speak?” (80; emphasis in original).

As she discusses in the second and fifth chapters, the aspiration to legal justice (“the lure of judgment” as she calls it [258]) can become another form of straightjacket; and the domain of law has been a rich terrain for those scholars


(including Wiegman) working to develop a vision of justice as excessive to any juridical accounting. Most famously, Jacques Derrida argues, in “Force of Law” (1992, 5), that law is the site of force, “always an authorized force, a force that justifies itself or is justified in applying itself.” Law is inhabited by force not only when it is organized to serve “the economic and political interests of the domi-nant forces of society,” he argues, but also because “the founding and justifying moment that institutes law implies a performative force” (13), an inherent, ungrounded, constitutive force that is in evidence again in each implementa-tion of the law. “Justice” exceeds the law, then, depending on a “decision” that cannot be fully guided or guaranteed by applying the law, although “it is just that there be law” (16).

In Object Lessons’ (2012) second chapter, “Telling Time,” on the relation between feminism and queer theory, Wiegman explicates and builds on (law professor) Janet “Ian” Halley’s “Queer Theory by Men,” which makes claims for queer as a vehicle for justice beyond law. Halley, in arguments that resemble Wendy Brown’s in States of Injury (1995) regarding the disciplining, subject-constituting implications of installing identity in law, argues through/against a legal (divorce) case in which the woman was empowered and “won” by inhabit-ing subordination/injury as a woman. Wiegman (2012) finds Halley’s identifica-tion of this legal structure/strategy with feminism to be reductive, a mis-measure of feminism in its multiplicity and diversity, a straw-woman in Halley’s advocacy of queer, thus exemplifying a persistent pattern in which we reify identities and politics precisely in our effort to transgress and transcend them. Wiegman is nonetheless moved by Halley’s commitment to recognizing and opening space for divergence (and for performative, world-making decision) by “attacking [the] equivalence and commensurability” necessary for convergentism—that is, the requirement that feminism and queer theory, or feminist movements and feminist academic knowledge projects, tightly align (99).

In chapter 5, “Critical Kinship,” Wiegman crafts her own critique of the attachment of women’s studies to legal or law-like justice. She reminds us of the origin, in a legal context, of the now ubiquitous affirmation of intersectionality, noting Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term to discuss “Black women’s experience” vis-à-vis antidiscrimination law specifically (245), and its subse-quent universalized deployment to provide “critical discernments” that aspire to “deliver” justice where the state has not (247). Wiegman suggests that this latter practice is haunted by that origin: “Its power emerges precisely from its origin in law and in rhetorics of address to the state that generate the juridical imaginary that govern it even as its analytic limit is reached in the equation it repeatedly exacts between critical practice and legal justice” (248). Against the constraints that women’s studies imposes on itself by its fidelity to this particular legal origin, she returns to the legal context herself to read a case that, she claims, refuses generalizability, currency, and the circulability and universalizability that comes of commensurability. In doing so, Wiegman seeks, in chapter 2, to more fully


realize the implications of Halley’s argument for divergence—here, between feminism and queer theory—and against “equivalence and commensurability” (99): “while [Halley] takes divergence as a critical commitment we can choose to pursue, I will read it as the constitutive operation that underlies identity’s historical sojourn altogether” (101).

Even if we would, we could not achieve incommensurability by trying—by “queering,” for instance—“given . . . the world’s haunting ability to resurrect, against our best intentions, its version of itself” (120). As Wiegman persuasively argues, we will reinstitute the order of the same—of identity, of discipline, of measure—in the very act of breaking with it. So what do we gain by learning the lesson that incommensurability is constitutive? Is the payoff a release or reprieve from striving toward yet another impossible goal, another always-out-of-reach horizon? I think not. The prize here is rather the revelation that the aporia is not a dead end, but a machine driving interminable creativity and world-building. Rather than being paralyzed by fear of complicity, we can only appropriate our complicities as potentially useful connections and sources of derivative value (Martin 2011a, 2011b). We have no choice but to boldly take the next (mis-)measure of our objects, converging with our antagonists and diverging from ourselves. Constituted by the pursuit of justice, as Wiegman rightly argues that we are, we have no choice but to endlessly risk failing justice, by endlessly risking unjustifiable decisions for justice.

Miranda Joseph is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Depart-ment of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Against the Romance of Community (2002) and Debt to Society: Accounting for Life Under Capitalism, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press (2014). Her recent articles include “Neoliberalism and the Battle Over Ethnic Studies in Ari-zona,” co-authored with Sandra K. Soto, for which they received the 2010 National Education Association Excellence in the Academy Award: Democracy in Higher Education. She can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1. I have had a fascinating and productive experience working with Joyce Serido and Soyeon Shim on their “APLUS” (Arizona Pathways to Life Success for University Students [http://aplus.arizona.edu]) project on what they call “financial attitudes and behaviors,” as I have been doing my own cultural/queer/gender studies scholarship on entrepreneurial subjectivity and the financialization of everyday life. One product of that collaboration is my “Gender, Entrepreneurial Subjectivity, and Pathologies of Personal Finance” (2013).

2. In a footnote in chapter 1 (70n23), Wiegman lists several contributions of this kind, including Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University (2008) and Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades’s Academic Capitalism and the New Economy (2004)—both key texts in my view. Other important contributions include Randy Martin (2011a,


2011b); Eli Meyerhoff, Elizabeth Johnson, and Bruce Braun (2011); and Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie (2009). See also my “Accounting for Interdisciplinarity” (2010), which will appear in substantially revised form in my forthcoming book Debt to Society: Accounting for Life Under Capitalism.

3. Wiegman provides a footnote at this point in her text listing her relevant essays (1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005).

4. Critique of this kind of knowledge production is woven into and serves as the springboard for so much of the work of the fields that Wiegman discusses that I would not know where to begin or end giving examples here. My own most recent engage-ment with this problem is in my chapter titled “Accounting for Justice: Beyond Liberal Calculations of Debt and Crime” in my forthcoming book.

5. Written with fond memories of my conversation with Ira Livingston about this word.

References

Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

———. 1997. “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9 (3): 79–101.

De Angelis, Massimo, and David Harvie. 2009. “‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities.” Historical Materialism 17 (3): 3–30.

Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, 3–67. New York: Routledge.

Joseph, Miranda. 2010. “Accounting for Interdisciplinarity.” In Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice: Revisioning Academic Accountability, edited by Joe Parker, Ranu Samatrai, and Mary Romero, 321–52. Albany: SUNY Press.

———. 2013. “Gender, Entrepreneurial Subjectivity, and Pathologies of Personal Finance.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 20 (2): 242–73.

———. Forthcoming. Debt to Society: Accounting for Life Under Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Martin, Randy. 2011a. “Taking an Administrative Turn: Derivative Logics for a Recharged Humanities.” Representations 116 (1): 156–76.

———. 2011b. Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Meyerhoff, Eli, Elizabeth Johnson, and Bruce Braun. 2011. “Time and the University.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 10 (3): 483–507.

Newfield, Christopher. 2008. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Wiegman, Robyn. 1999a. “Feminism, Institutionalism, and the Idiom of Failure.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11 (3): 107–36.


———. 1999b. “What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion.” Critical Inquiry 25 (2): 362–79.

———. 2000. “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures.” New Literary History 31 (4): 805–25.———. 2002. “Academic Feminism Against Itself.” NWSA Journal 14 (2): 18–37.———. 2003. “Feminism’s Broken English.” In Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing

in the Public Arena, edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, 75–94. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

———. 2005. “The Possibility of Women’s Studies.” In Women’s Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, edited by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Agatha Beins, 40–60. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

———. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

The Object as Usual

Anjali Arondekar





http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.arondekar.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.arondekar.html



The Object as Usual1

Anjali Arondekar

Object lessons. At a moment when it would be difficult to account for the epis-temological commotion that “objects” of study (failed or otherwise) have created in critical theory, and at a moment when we seem, as critics (particularly those of us who work within minoritized field-formations), to be constantly battling against the saturated resilience of objects of study we seem to have dislodged, or at least wearily decentered, we are invited here to consider why such insti-tutional attachments to objects persist and what analytical habits they beget and/or endanger. Analytically, narratively, and ideologically, Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons (2012) carefully flags the precarious objects causing such critical tumult, situating them within the porous and emergent “field imaginaries” of identity-based studies: women’s studies, queer studies, and American studies, to name a select few. Throughout, one is struck by Wiegman’s commitment to revitalizing our relationship to identity-based objects of study as a subject of serious inquiry, even a political paradox, and as a spur for the occasion of her own writing.

In what follows, and in the spirit of object lessons and object relations, I want to turn Wiegman’s text into our constituted object here and trouble some of the analytical habits that enable its own questions. Object Lessons, for the most part, mobilizes an effective structure of negative dialectics, advocating persuasively for the potentiality of immanent critique as a mode of productive undoing rather than analytical paralysis. The book espouses a rousing ethics of pedagogy, urging us as readers to attend to how objects have come to matter, and to learn from the uneven waves of reaction and anticipation surrounding their emergence. Wiegman’s critical aspirations speak directly to the seismic shifts in feminist scholarship over the past few decades, a period of acute “identity crisis,” if you will, where the incursions of minoritized field-formations, such as women’s, ethnic, queer, masculinity, and whiteness studies, have both revital-ized and deadened intellectual debates around gender, race, class, and sexuality.


Such shifts, I would add here, have further led to a robust engagement with the ethical and political quagmire of the “double bind,” of a critical vernacular that enables the possibility, not a consummation, of a political vision (what Wieg-man calls “social justice”), while at the same time placing that impulse under erasure. Such a politics of the double bind is, of course, most spectacularly seen today in the work of affect studies, but, more substantially, I would also suggest in the work of postcolonial and black studies: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her call to an aesthetic education and Frederick Moten in his refusal of black pessimism, to name just two exemplary meditations.2 The challenge for all of us, as Wiegman also reminds us, is how to engage objects within relationalities that do not add value through their salvific promise, but rather through their stubbornly nonredemptive and yet reparative scope. I would wager that the current recuperation of queer negativity (Lee Edelman), queer failure (Jack Hal-berstam), and cruel optimism (Lauren Berlant) are all attempts—with varying degrees of success—to sustain that impulse in the face of, or rather because of, our embattled political horizons.3

Yet, these idioms—and Wiegman’s book is an exemplary case in point—draw our attention to the recursive forms at work within our political endeavors, whether they be cast in analytical habits that constitute objects only to disperse them or to situate them within field imaginaries like American studies, in a sort of feedback loop that even as it turns on itself, still returns to itself. We are all, it seems, keenly aware of the failed seductions of a liberatory hermeneutics, and yet, we return over and over again to the flight of the object as the only sightline worth following. Is there an outside to this plangent object lesson of recursivity and return that is so routinized in any critique of political excess, or are we doomed to lessons of repetition without rupture? Can we imagine instead a counter-lesson that foregoes such a diagnostics of recognition and pushes against the pressing legibility of an object to hold or to destroy?

Let me say more about what I mean. In my own work, I have grappled with such questions of recursivity by thinking about our recuperation of the histori-cal archive, about the hermeneutical demands placed on objects of sexuality, such as those in South Asia that entangle with questions of colonialism and race, and about the multiple double binds and potentialities that emerge from archival engagement. I have written about the press of multiple minoritizations of race, sexuality, and empire that appear to demand archives as objects/guaran-tors of presence, rights, and representation, rather than as places of analytical “stuckness” that are often ordinary, efflorescent, and even unreliable.

My questions for Wiegman are thus drawn from my preoccupations with the analytical and political itineraries that such recuperative historiographical methods travel and the object lessons they bypass or leave behind. I am struck, for example, in the current work I am doing on capital, sexuality, and collectiv-ity in colonial Portuguese India, by how objects assume their more salutary or salvific forms precisely in the service of collectivities, such as minoritized ones

Anjali Arondekar · 145

that tally up what they do not have in relation to other communities. Let me be clear here: I am not repudiating such salvific models, instantiated as they routinely are in the language of rights and representation; rather, I am more interested in asking Wiegman to think through how minoritized collectivities wrestle with the recursive forms that such salvific objects demand, and, in doing so, how they assemble idioms that self-consciously activate the compensatory mechanisms that such objects should or will produce. The challenge here is to engage a critical language that paradoxically adds value to a sedimented recursive object—in my case, minoritized archives that must be resurrected, found, and produced for future gains—precisely by staging interest in its modes of reproduction. In the case of the devadasi collectivity about which I am writ-ing, the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, there is a canny kala or aesthetics, indeed anticipation, within its archives of object lessons and their place within a longer, routinized, and politico-mythical demand for salvific forms. By privileging fic-tion and self-consciously bypassing “veracity” genres like memoirs, testimonials, and biographies, the archives of this samaj focus on the modalities of archival representation and recognition to record, as it were, the staging of a record (Arondekar 2012). In so doing, we are asked to recapitalize our political com-mitment to reparation through an embrace of object lessons and double binds in less agonistic terms than their iteration in Wiegman’s text. Elizabeth Povinelli (2011a, 2011b), for example, has also alerted us to precisely such strategies of survival where indigenous collectivities shift the emphasis from the optics of loss under late liberalism to the ongoing nature of social worlds that refuse the shock of structural inequity.

Of equal import here is Wiegman’s account of US academics’ constant and worthwhile efforts to convince ourselves, despite or against our own inbuilt cynicism, that what we do with our critical tools does and should produce a relationship to social justice. The “we,” as Wiegman reminds us, does not have to be ceded to the violations of a corruptive universalism. Such an orientation toward social justice joins identity knowledges to a wider transnational world of praxis and democratization through an embrace of the politics of failure and loss. Wiegman explicitly situates her deliberations within the context of American studies, using the field’s struggles to unmoor itself from histories of empire as a case in point. So far, so good. But what happens if we move Wiegman’s object lessons elsewhere, to postcolonial sites like South Asia where the force of the university as a place of social justice has never been a place of contestation. I do not mean to suggest India, in this instance, as a place of exemplarity, but more as a location that expands the questions that Wiegman raises. Women’s studies departments in India, for example, are one of the largest growing field imaginar-ies and are directly involved in law-making, policy debates, and even electoral politics. There is very little soul-searching about why Indian academic feminists need to pursue social justice; instead, a more routinized and often moribund embrace of the role of the public intellectual reigns (John 2008). Yet, there are


object lessons to be found there as well—except in this case, they are crafted more through a language of subalternity that challenges critical aspirations of access and representation. For feminist/women’s studies departments in India, the challenges have come not from a troubled institutionalization nor a self-annihilating politics, but instead from local subaltern formations that eschew identity-based knowledges as a solution to structural inequity. The emergence of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University in India’s capital, New Delhi, is a case in point.4 Founded in 2007 and named after the formidable Dalit activist, vision-ary, and scholar, the university does not wed its Dalit genealogy to a rhetoric of exceptionalism and/or difference that privileges Dalit studies or the general amelioration of Dalit lives. Bypassing the increasingly troubling mobilization of the Dalit subject as the limit case for difference, the university’s outlined project uses Ambedkar’s humanist philosophies to found a new pedagogy of the subject, Dalit or otherwise. Thus even as more Dalit students flock to the multiple Ambedkar university campuses now opening all over India, there are equal numbers of non-Dalit students who are doing so as well, and the same can be said of instructors and administrators. In many ways, a space like Ambedkar University complicates Wiegman’s cautionary object lessons on two counts: it cannot be rendered an object of identity knowledges, and it is thus never willing to become the subject or agent of an object lesson. My point in turning to this example is not to predictably argue that every object lesson has geopolitical roots or to facilely note that Wiegman does not speak to extra-US academic sites of knowledge production; rather, the example of the Indian context delineates between what is residual and tenacious, between what material conditions makes objects appear and what discourses matter more. Such an emphasis on the geopolitics of objects, or the emergence of geo-objects if you will, supple-ments our understanding of the transnational. In so doing, we move beyond enlivening or enlarging the already big project of American studies or queer studies and so on to thinking more about how objects are not recognizable or even available in quite the same way.

Anjali Arondekar is associate professor of feminist studies and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, colonialism and historiography, with a focus on South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan (India), 2010), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. Her second book-project, In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Sexuality, Historiography, South Asia, grows out of her interest in the figurations of sexuality, ethics and collectivity in colonial British and Portuguese India. She may be reached at [email protected].

Anjali Arondekar · 147

Notes

1. My title plays rather vulgarly with D. A. Miller’s well-rehearsed meditations on “the novel as usual” and the genre’s necessary, and thus ordinary, reliance upon narrative and affective structures of surveillance. To read the novel is to cede to such structures. See Miller, “The Novel as Usual: Trollope’s Barchester Towers” (1988).

2. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globaliza-tion (2012), and Fred Moten’s In the Break (2003) and “Black Op” (2008).

3. See Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004), Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2010), and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2012).

4. See the university’s website at http://www.aud.ac.in/. The available vision state-ment of the university reads: “The Dr. Bharat Ratna Ambedkar University in Delhi was promulgated in 2007 and started functioning in July of 2008. The university’s primary focus is on teaching and research activities in the field of Social Sciences and Humani-ties (in keeping with Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s principles and life’s work). The university aims at promoting equity and social justice and has established a number of schools and education centres so that higher education combined with practical knowledge can be disseminated throughout India. The schools and centres offer postgraduate diploma, Masters’ and research programmes in social sciences, humanities, mathemati-cal sciences and liberal studies. The School of Human Ecology focuses on the social dimensions of environmental change and sustainable development. It aims at creating competencies and sensitivities relating to the environment and development among future policy makers, leaders of civil society initiatives, advocacy groups and admin-istrators. The School of Liberal Studies concentrates on languages and more classical disciplines in specialised areas, including translation, social history, labour economics and comparative religion, among others.”

References

Arondekar, Anjali. 2012. “Subject to Sex: A Small History of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj.” In South Asian Feminisms: Contemporary Interventions, edited by Ania Loomba and Ritty Lukose, 244–63. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berlant, Lauren. 2012. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.Halberstam, Jack. 2010. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.John, Mary. 2008. Women’s Studies in India: A Reader. New Delhi: Penguin.Miller, D. A. 1988. “The Novel as Usual: Trollope’s Barchester Towers.” In The Novel

and the Police, 107–45. Berkeley: University of California Press.Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.———. 2008. “Black Op.” PMLA 123 (5): 1743–47.Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011a. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance

in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.


———. 2011b. “The Woman on the Other Side of the Wall: Archiving the Otherwise in Postcolonial Digital Archives.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22 (1): 146–72.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Tarrying with the “Private Parts”

Robert F. Reid-Pharr





http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.reid-pharr.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.reid-pharr.html



Tarrying with the “Private Parts”

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Two-thirds of the way through Object Lessons (2012), Robyn Wiegman’s pro-vocative study of the institutional and ideological development of what she names identity-based modes of inquiry in US colleges and universities, the author recounts a 2003 trip she took to Leiden to attend the inaugural meeting of the International American Studies Association. There, she was regularly met with the claim that American studies, at least as it is practiced by citizens and long-term residents of the United States, was deeply provincial and too caught up with rehearsals of the humdrum difficulties of American social and cultural life, particularly our always fraught conversations about race, gender, class, and sexuality. American studies in both its old and new substantiations was imagined as not sufficiently “in the world,” far too eager to reiterate the basic assumptions underlying so-called American exceptionalism, even as basic geo-political realties clearly demonstrated that the United States, if not exactly America itself, was rightly understood as but one nation among many.

The most obvious approach to this particularly meaty bone thrown to us by Wiegman is to suggest that there is nothing especially radical or even expansive about the rhetoric that she describes. I am not certain that the meeting in Leiden represented so much an internationalization of American studies as its Europeanization. American studies programs and associations exist in England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe. Similarly formalized and reasonably well-funded American studies institutions are quite difficult to find elsewhere, even in the rest of the Americas. Like Wiegman and many others, then, I would make the point that what we think of as the new internationalism in American studies is more often than not established along those routes of power and influence, which are themselves some of the most rigorously guarded and celebrated artifacts of the cold war. Imagine a none-too-liberal US president with an always-already absent Kenyan father and skin not a bit fairer than mine stumbling his way into a quiet Irish


village, the great might of the White House press corps in tow, only to shake hands, kiss babies, and share a pint with his willing, grinning—and never to be seen again—ruddy-cheeked relatives. Or to reiterate what we know already, our president, and the many people of color whom I take him to represent, can be seen to have conquered his provincialism precisely to the extent to which he genuflects not so much toward the universal or the global, as toward the European and the white.

One of the things that is most exciting about Wiegman’s work in Object Lessons is the attention that she pays to not only the institutional histories of women’s and gender studies, whiteness studies, queer theory, and American studies, but also the ways in which these fields, these processes of institution-alization, have often gone far beyond the original intentions of the individuals who helped to found them. Wiegman precisely names the methods by which insurgent modes of inquiry have at once restructured traditional disciplines and been deeply marked by them in return. Indeed, the academic and intellectual practices that Object Lessons examines are at their best when then they unsettle calcified notions about where the proper distinctions between various types of inquiry lie. I say all of this as a way to provide myself some sort of stage upon which I might announce one of the few quibbles I have with Wiegman’s work in Object Lessons. While I found her rehearsals of the theoretical and programmatic histories of the several fields she examines to be always interesting and, at times, brilliant, I was not convinced by her use of the term identity knowledges. I think that it gives far too much away to suggest that sexuality studies, gay and lesbian studies, Asian studies, Latin American studies, African American and Africana studies or postcolonial studies somehow concern themselves with identity, while those fields to which we most (un)consciously pay allegiance—English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch, to name the most obvious—do not. On the contrary, I suspect that one of the things announced by attaching the ugly label studies to identity knowledges forty years after they were first introduced into American universities is to reiterate the notion that not only are they still “emerging,” but also that they can never be recognized as having arrived, never be understood to be fully engaged with “the universal” until they forthrightly substitute European and American provincialisms for their own cultural and ideological specificities. This is perhaps just another way of noting the fact that, in truth, much of the everyday struggle that each of us encounters around can-onization and curricula breaks down rather precisely along lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality. While to introduce a course on African authors into the curriculum is imagined in many locations as additive, new, special, and liberal, to teach a course dealing with only an expected assortment of Victorian literature is but the continuation of our most cherished cultural legacies.

My suspicion, then, is that practitioners of the identity-based fields that Wiegman celebrates have been far too timid in their critiques of what passes as the main currents of American intellectual life. It is one thing to be provincial; it

Robert F. Reid-Pharr · 151

is quite another thing to refuse to acknowledge provincialism, while establishing a shocking array of apparatuses that work against full recognition of the reality that American humanistic studies are made stale and irrelevant precisely to the extent that they encourage clumsy and simplistic re-articulations of presumably universalist values—values that with only the gentlest of prodding might be revealed to be nothing more than the most humdrum Euro-American conceits. Indeed, the strength of so-called identity-based intellectual practices in Ameri-can colleges and universities turns on the fact that while many of our colleagues retreat in the face of increasingly vicious attacks on the humanities, claiming that the reasons for their existence is the training of students in so-called critical thinking or perhaps imparting to them the timeless values of the Enlighten-ment, many people operating in the fields that Wiegman discusses have been long accustomed to articulating the ways by which culture operates in complex social, political, historical, and economic systems. That is to say, we forward an activist understanding of the ways that culture and society work. Moreover, although many are loathe to admit it, we have demographics on our side.

In my nearly twenty years in this profession, I have never taught at an insti-tution that had degree-granting programs in African American studies, women’s studies, or American studies. This is the case even though I have taught in the very black, very female, and decidedly American cities of Baltimore and New York. My irritation about this matter stems not only from the obvious unfair-ness on display, but also from the ways in which these “omissions” cheapen our endeavors as scholars, making us rightly vulnerable to the charge that our efforts represent a dangerous aloofness, an obscene inability to engage with the social worlds that support the institutions in which we work. I would push Wiegman, then, to remind her that her instincts are correct. Her examination of the basic discursive and ideological structures on which identity knowledges have been established comes at a time when many of our colleagues contribute to the various crises besetting US colleges and universities by retreating behind fearful and vision-less obstinacy, instead of seriously asking themselves how the work they do might speak directly to the quick-moving changes in the basic economic, discursive, and cultural structures of contemporary societies. What I would suggest to Wiegman, then, is that she leave off with some of the rhetorical timidity that marks Object Lessons. She writes:

Object Lessons is not, then, a critique. It is not even a critique of critique. It is not an intervention. I am not trying to make us conscious of critical habits so that we can change them. It is not an argument against other arguments, nor a dismissal of what others have said or done. It is not a new theory. It offers no new objects or analytics of study. It is an inhabitation of the world-making stakes of identity knowledges and the field imaginary that sutures us to them—a performance, in other


words, of the risk and reward, the amnesia and optimism, and the fear and pleasure sustained by living with and within them. (35)

I have to admit that I do not really believe Wiegman here. Indeed, after reading Object Lessons, I felt less like imagining the risk, reward, amnesia, opti-mism, fear, and pleasure of working within African American studies, queer studies, and American studies, and more like throwing my fist up and leading anyone who might follow in a chorus of “Fired Up. Won’t take no more.” Part of what troubles me about the type of rhetorical gesture that Wiegman makes here is that I suspect it has as much to do with the considerable frustration that one encounters when struggling to enact institutional change as with the develop-ment of some solidly established belief that performance represents an advance over critique, intervention, and theory. Perhaps, then, what I am attempting to do is simply to explain why I cannot rid myself of a certain hurt I experience when reading Object Lessons, a sense that one of the none-too-friendly ghosts that haunts these pages is our awareness of the fact that so much of the work we do is carried out in environments that encourage pettiness, complacency, and cannibalism. One wonders, then, if the many heated field-changing arguments that Wiegman describes were worth the considerable damage done to individu-als and communities when the arguments were made. Still, I am encouraged by this text precisely to the extent that it emboldens me to imagine that the time is ripe for those of us who have made our careers in these arenas of inquiry to tack toward the center, to strenuously challenge the conceptual hold that so-called traditionalists have on both the vocabularies and institutions that support our profession.

Moreover, I would remind Wiegman and her many fans that she is not alone in her efforts to examine the architecture of the discursive and ideologi-cal structures we have established inside American academia. Indeed, Object Lessons ought to be read as but the knife’s edge of a wider impulse to assess the current status of our decades-long intellectual and institutional struggles. Sara Ahmed’s excellent study On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012) makes plain the ways that the rhetoric of diversity is often put to the service of the revivification, however clumsily, of the apparatuses of capitalist domination. Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012) explains how what he calls interdisci-plines not only challenged the dominant structures of academia and the state, but also helped to establish them. Like Wiegman, both Ahmed and Ferguson are fretful about the ways that the struggles around identity knowledges have both challenged and supported dominant social structures.

What I leave you with, then, is the belief that the almost simultaneous appearance of Object Lessons, On Being Included, and The Reorder of Things is itself indicative of the fact that the fields and procedures that these works’ authors discussed have reached a point at which their vocabularies and

Robert F. Reid-Pharr · 153

procedures are obviously inadequate for the work they have been designed to do. Indeed, this may be their greatest strength. This state of frustration, this sense of having hit institutional and conceptual walls should be understood not solely as a sign of debility, but also as an indication of the obvious need for practitioners of American studies, ethic studies, and gender studies to redouble their efforts. If American academia is in crisis, then this allows students of identity knowledges and interdisciplines an opportunity to fundamentally affect, however imperfectly, the basic intellectual structures of this country. The very fact that Wiegman, Ahmed, and Ferguson see so clearly that our insurgent efforts have been so easily co-opted suggests that moving forward, we might knowingly utilize our intimacy with the machine, our closeness to its “private parts” in order to achieve fundamental progressive change.

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Distinguished Professor of English and American stud-ies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (1999); Black, Gay, Man: Essays (2001); and Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (2007). He lives in Brooklyn. He can be reached at [email protected].

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ferguson, Roderick. 2012. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


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Antonio Viego





http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.viego.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.viego.html



The Madness of Curing1,2

Antonio Viego

Some readers of parts of my seemingly constitutively uncompleted manuscript The Life of the Undead: Latino Health and Disease have responded in ways that seem to suggest that they think there is something fundamentally sick in its approach to questions about Latino mental and physical health and disease due to the choices it makes for the handling of its objects. These choices are seen as reflecting a general indifference to suffering, an indifference that has been rather unambiguously and predictably attributed to the psychoanalytic theory the project draws on. Its author seems overly unconcerned with social justice, which is not entirely untrue, since The Life of the Undead is, in fact, not trying to make social justice for Latinos the point that legitimates it as an intellectual project, nor is it trying to make a case for the usefulness of psychoanalysis for conceiving a politics of resistance of whatever sort. There is, nonetheless, some temptation for me to want to challenge the age-old charge that psychoana-lytic theory is “useless,” that psychoanalysis is “fraudulent” even. But I would have done so not for reasons motivated by the express intent of reversing the negative valuations that psychoanalysis will never care to live down, since, honestly, psychoanalysis does not really—to borrow the sage words of Joan Jett (1980)—“give a damn about [its] bad reputation,” but rather for the reason of illustrating that in one’s defense of psychoanalysis, one is communicating one’s continual resistance to it—not one’s belief in it. We should not be “enthusiasts” of psychoanalysis, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (2006, 6) cautions: “When psychoanalysis is being wholeheartedly valued it is not being taken seriously. . . . To accept psychoanalysis, to believe in psychoanalysis is to miss the point.” It has taken me more than a day to agree to write the sentence you are reading at this moment because I was convinced I might be able to say something about social justice that was analogous to what I had just said, through Phillips, about psychoanalysis, but I could not be sure that “to believe in social justice is to

Antonio Viego · 155

miss the point,” or that “when social justice is being wholeheartedly valued it is not being taken seriously.”

It strikes me that the readers of The Life of the Undead I mention make their diagnoses based on criteria that they assume to be the criteria of the field of study that the project is seen to emerge out of—Latino studies. These readers are probably right. They seem to know something about identity knowledges and political desires and social justice; or I should say that they know what they may reasonably feel entitled to expect of work in identity knowledges—specifi-cally, that this work has recognizable political desires for social justice. In Object Lessons (2012), Robyn Wiegman deftly explores a range of “identity knowledges . . . in order to consider what they have wanted from the objects of study they assemble in their self-defining critical obligation to social justice” (3). Because “identity knowledges are animated by political desires,” she argues “that each has sought quite explicitly to know itself and to assess its self-worth by situat-ing its object relations as a living habit of—and for—social justice” (4). I find Wiegman’s terms helpful in clarifying for me why The Life of the Undead might seem to put some readers ill at ease and why, additionally, I do not recognize myself as an identity-knowledge scholar described in the two passages from Object Lessons cited above. You cannot talk about health, illness, and disease among ethnic-racialized groups and not have a considerable readership balk at the author’s decision to say openly that the critical practice it performs does not rationalize its existence as born of a concern with the fact of, in my example, Latinos’ health and disease, whether psychological or physical. Additionally, its author is not going to spend any time figuring out what kind of policy-minded intervention he should feel pressured to make that might somehow assist Lati-nos in living less—as the “epidemiological paradox” might compel one to put it—long deaths or helping quell their allegedly systemic anxiety or cheering them toward the light that their supposedly rampant depression daily obscures from view.3

Object Lessons informs this reader, who works in Latino studies spiked with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, that what is particularly distinct about fields of study like Latino studies that study identity—whether they be affirmative or critical of the notion of identity—are the ways in which they seem animated by powerful political desires for social justice in ways that are more pronounced than in other sites of knowledge production in the humanities. Additionally, the practice of critique appears to these scholars as the path toward fulfilling these political desires. This is to say that its scholars are encouraged to believe and/or assume that the objects and object relations that constitute their study and research are not only the means for realizing these desires for social justice, but are already somehow instances of its realization.

Identity-knowledge fields have become the sites where one might study the narcotizing effects of the notion of the Good, of the cure in the humanities. However, it is more often the case that these fields simply become the sites


where one supposedly delivers on the promise of the Good, where cancer is cured in the humanities, and not where one asks after the “madness of curing.”4 Object Lessons asks in a rather nonpunitive manner: What are the objects of study for the practice of political desire in identity knowledges, and why do its scholars believe that they are actually satisfying this desire with these objects? My sense is that what has “enabled, or emboldened, allowed or encouraged” (4), as Object Lessons puts it, some of us who work in identity knowledges to believe that justice can be achieved through the study of identity, and social injustices cured through critique, requires that we first be lured into confusing the object of desire with the object of satisfaction and need—that we take, in short, the object of biology as our object and, in the process, forget the symbolic dimensions of desire. Some of you may recognize the psychoanalytic riff I am playing here: it is Jacques Lacan’s critique of “object relations theory” in his seminar Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, delivered in 1953–54. Translating what I mean more directly into the terms of Object Lessons, I might say that what ends up counting as the object of identity knowledges’ political desire is confused with the object of an institution’s need.

As the “desire for critical practice to do emancipatory work” (34), to use the language of Object Lessons, more often than not finds some of us disappointed in our objects’ inability to do what we keep teaching and being taught that they would do, and if you can manage not to catch the gaze of the disappointing objects staring back at you suggesting that you failed them, you might avoid the paralysis that would prevent you from trying to find ever newer objects in which to be disappointed. This scenario perversely impoverishes the psychoanalytic definition of desire: for if desire is the desire for something else, the desire for desire, the desire operative in critical practice is always the desire for something else that is disappointing, something else that fails us. This may help explain why the critique of the institutionalization of identity knowledges most often takes the shape of a lamentation that naturalizes sadness, grief, and sorrow as the affective properties of the objects and not, as Wiegman argues “the disci-plinary demands that govern what we expect our objects and analytics to do” (337; emphasis in original).

What might Object Lessons look like as an object of study for Latino studies, and will it help satisfy, in some way, Latino studies’ own defining critical obliga-tion to social justice? At my home institution, where my five years as director of the program in Latino studies are apparently to be counted in magical-realist dog years, five years is the equivalent of a hundred years of solitude spent bark-ing at the moon. As an identity knowledge at my institution, Latino studies has only ever existed as a crisis of its institutionalization, where crisis is the low-grade fever with which you keep having to show up to work because you are not quite feeling wretched enough to call in sick, despite the fact that you still feel like shit at the end of the day. I would like to consider briefly a case study of the institutionalization of Latino studies to think about what feels to


me like a peculiar and disarming disciplining of identity that the apparatus of the university has operated on Latino studies. My example’s use of the term institutionalization sits somewhere between what Object Lessons intends and does not intend when it uses the term: “I do not mean departmentalization per se. . . . Institutionalization points instead to the generative influence of identity knowledges across the disciplines” (Wiegman 2012, 7). I cannot say that the field has or has not been institutionalized at my university according to Object Lessons’ understanding of institutionalization. Its generative influence across various disciplines is reserved to an understanding of the field as having taken shape as a failed endeavor, as one perpetually in crisis—half-dead, half-alive. The administration, deans, and scholars from various disciplines in the humani-ties speak in a knowing way of Latino studies, but their articulations are without content if I consider that they know very little about the field, that some seem willful in continuing to know very little about the field and act surprised by the content missing from their speech when it is provided to them, at the same time that they invoke it readily as a sickly identity-knowledge entity in the university. They are surprised both by the content that they cannot seem to memorize for the life of them, and surprised by the fact that their speech has, in the first place, been identified by others as missing content. This—what? I am not at all certain what to call it—this invocation of Latino studies is what constitutes its generative influence across the university. In this example, Latino studies, to use some of my earlier unfortunate language, becomes less the site for curing injustices, and more simply the site where social justice is served by pithily noting Latino studies’ crisis-like existence as an identity-knowledge field at this particular university. It is a budget-friendly, well-groomed plantation approach that requires no experts, no future hires in Latino studies, but only well-intentioned concerns voiced by what are obviously very good people who, if they were reading this sentence, have already forgotten the first and last name of the field—Latino studies, remember?—in question.

So, in what ways are The Life of the Undead and Object Lessons both uncon-cerned with the cure, as we might say? I am curious to know first, for some reason, if Object Lessons counts itself as belonging to the range of identity knowledges that it explores, identity knowledges that have served it as objects of study, and that have presumably served to satisfy its own wants, its own political desires for social justice? Another way of formulating this question would be to ask what kind of object is Object Lessons for Object Lessons? The pesky sense that I need to know first how to locate the text is, as Object Lessons might say (and I would agree with it), internal to the requirement of social justice that identity-knowledge fields are expected to meet. Early in the text, as it is introducing itself, Object Lessons tells its readers what it is by what it is not: it is not a “com-pendium” for identity knowledges, not “an encyclopedia” either “nor a status report” (1–2). Reading these nots in concert with the psychoanalytic resonances that Object Lessons’ title inspires, one might be coaxed into being reminded of


psychoanalytic theorist D. W. Winnicott’s ([1951] 1992) theory of transitional objects—specifically, their status as the first not-me objects that human subjects invent and use to mark a place that belongs neither to internal or external reali-ties. The transitional object constitutes a new type of object for psychoanalysis. Unlike Freud’s object, which is always a refound object as he famously writes in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ([1905] 1949), “Every finding of an object is in fact a refinding of an object” [222]), Winnicott’s transitional object is discov-ered, invented, or created by the infant and put to inventive, creative uses, and then one day is abandoned though not lost ([1951] 1992, 232–33). Phillips (1988, 116) explains that “[u]nlike every other object that figures in psychoanalysis it is neither lost nor internalized; it is not a substitute for anything else, anything prior, nor is it substituted.” Perhaps this is the kind of object that Object Lessons is for Object Lessons, and I wonder whether it might not also be a transitional object for Latino studies. As I continue to think about what kind of object of study Object Lessons might be for the identity-knowledge field of Latino studies, I am embarrassed to be pestered by the following questions I want to ask Object Lessons: Seriously, are you with us, or not? Has that “daunting hope” rattled and inspirited you as well? Has the critique you practice been adequate to the political commitment that inspired it? What do I call you? Is Object Lessons short for Transitional Object Lessons? Do you have a nickname, like Part Object? Are you as worn down by the political desire for social justice that functions as an edict for those working in identity-knowledge fields as I am?

Antonio Viego is an associate professor in the Program in Literature and in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. He also directs Duke’s Program in Latino/a studies in the Global South. His first book, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies was published in 2007 and he is currently com-pleting his second book manuscript, The Life of the Undead: Latino Health and Disease. He teaches courses in psychoanalytic theory, Latino/a studies, and sexuality studies. He can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1. Dedication: para Claudia Milian.2. Short parts of this essay appear in an article called “The Nightgown,” in CR:

The New Centennial Review Vol. 14, Iss. 1, 2013, pages 29–51. Copyright © 2013 by Michigan State University Press.

3. See my “The life of the undead: Biopower, Latino Anxiety and the epidemiologi-cal paradox” (2009) for a more expansive and detailed account of the notions of Latino mental and physical health in the contemporary psychotherapeutic and epidemiological literatures than I am able to provide here.

4. The term madness of curing is lifted from a passage in Jacques Lacan’s “On Psychoanalytic Discourse,” a talk he presented in Milan in May 1972. The full passage reads: “Psychoanalysts are like that, they admit all to you . . . they admit all . . . and all


they recount proves that obviously they are very good people. It is crazy that they like the human being, that they wish its good, its normality—it is incredible, finally, isn’t it? It is incredible this madness of curing, curing what?” (4). Thanks to Michael Swacha, who first drew my attention to this in April 2013.

References

Freud, Sigmund. (1905) 1949. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychology Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, translated and edited James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

Jett, Joan. 1980. “Bad Reputation.” In Bad Reputation (album). Boardwalk Records.Lacan, Jacques. 1972. “On Psychoanalytic Discourse,” talk presented in Milan, May 12,

1972. Translated by Jack W. Stone. http://lacanianworks.net.———. 1991. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique,

1953–1954, translated by John Forrester, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton.

Phillips, Adam. 1988. Winnicott. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.———. 2006. Side Effects. New York: HarperCollins.Viego, Antonio. 2009. “The life of the undead: Biopower, Latino Anxiety and the

epidemiological paradox.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19 (2): 131–47.

Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Winnicott, D. W. (1951) 1992. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” In

Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis, 229–42. New York: Routledge.

The Church, the State, or a Corporation: An Object Lesson

Janet R. Jakobsen





http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.jakobsen.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.jakobsen.html



The Church, the State, or a Corporation: An Object Lesson

Janet R. Jakobsen

Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons (2012) raises any number of questions about academic work. Wiegman does so through a set of epistemological explorations of fields she terms “identity knowledges”: gender studies and queer theory, white-ness and American studies, internationalism and intersectionality (1). Although Wiegman’s questions are focused on the specific fields that the books explores, they also have implications for academic work itself, no matter what the field in which it takes place. In fact, one of the central insights of the book is that even in fields that understand themselves as potentially resistant to or subversive of the dominant problems of the academy, the work produced in these fields is still complicit with various academic relations, including dominating rela-tions—whether the class-stratification of working “in the knowledge factory” (Tokarczyk and Fay 1993) or its sexism, nationalism, or racism. Specifically, Wiegman provides an analysis of the complicity of identity knowledges in the very structures of power and oppression that these knowledges critique.

The question of complicity is, of course, one deserving of much discussion, and it has been usefully canvassed in many of the fields that interest Wiegman. For example, Miranda Joseph and David Rubin (2007) suggest in a survey of research from the Sex, Race and Globalization (SRG) Project at the University of Arizona that the question of complicity can be promisingly taken up if it is not short-circuited by “the common understanding of complicity that it is bad” (436). Alternatively, Joseph and Rubin suggest a reading of complicity “not so much as a hindrance to political and intellectual work per se, but rather as an embodiment of power relations where relationality is at stake, where the dimen-sion of alterity is at play, where the chance for reiteration-with-a-difference resides” (436–37).

Janet R. Jakobsen · 161

Object Lessons takes up the challenge of an analysis in which complicity is not necessarily a negative moral category, but is, rather, the marker of histori-cal imbrication, including imbrication in the history of the academy. In Object Lessons, it is as much the desire to be without complicity that presents moral problems, as it is complicity itself. This desire is an enabling fantasy—it enables the production of knowledges that depend on hopes for knowledge that is not oppressive. But it is also a dangerous fantasy. The fiction of living and working outside of complicitous relations can obscure ongoing participation in under-determined relations of oppression, leading one to miss the very ways in which something else might happen. In thinking that women’s studies or American studies are different than dominant academic undertakings, one could miss the ways in which these fields are not so different, as well as the ways in which they might be different.

I am trained in ethics and therefore have long been interested in these ques-tions. But they have become even more pressing for me in my current position as director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW). BCRW’s main focus is on connections between activism and the academy, and it develops research projects with collaborative partners, mainly activist organizations in New York City. These activist partners mostly understand themselves within the framework of social justice feminism and queer and trans activism. And yet, it is no great analytical insight to see that neither Barnard College, nor Columbia University with which it is associated, could accurately be called social justice organizations. What, then, to make of the fact that the projects sponsored by BCRW are bound to be complicit in academic institutions whose existence is predicated on some of the very social hierarchies and capitalist imperatives that projects with organizations like Domestic Workers United (DWU) or Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ) would resist and undo? Does not Columbia’s position as one of the largest landlords in Harlem (Bradley 2009) mean, for example, that it is a very direct agent of oppression for many of the poor women, queer, and trans people who are the constituencies of both DWU and QEJ?1

I hope that these brief examples show why I found it so helpful that Object Lessons deeply considers the question of complicity between the production of academic knowledge and the production of social hierarchies. In considering the various fields that are the subjects of her chapters, Wiegman helps the reader to address questions like: What is the relation between the political desires and aspirations of academic work and the effects of that work? Or even more directly: What are the political effects of academic work? How do we know? And, given the various relations and disjunctions between desire and effect, what kind of ethics is possible for academic practice?2

Wiegman very helpfully details the ways in which the realization of our desire, for example, to critique the nationalist violence of state networks of power may be dependent on fields of knowledge that reinforce state power and even enable state violence. This complicity does not mean that critique


is meaningless, but the framework of critique does not mean that identity knowledges escape implication in power relations. So, for example, the aspira-tion of (some versions of) American studies may be to critique the nation-state, even as the undertaking is both predicated on and has the effect of reinforcing that very social formation. Wiegman traces the various relations between US nationalism and the move on the part of critical American studies scholars to internationalize in the age of neoliberal globalization. Internationalization is supposed to “provincialize,” in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2007) term, American studies, thus providing leverage out of complicity with US imperialism. If American studies is not internationalized, then all narratives about the United States and its relations to the world emanate from the United States, effectively covering the world in US imperial power. (Think of how often we talk about “coverage” in the university.)

Wiegman shows, however, that in an age when the university is part of larger neoliberal projects organized under the rubric of globalization, the move toward internationalization might very well extend, rather than critique, US nationalism. Moreover, internationalization can extend the conceptual hege-mony of nationalism itself. Internationalization focuses on a politics of place that preserves non-US national identity as a necessary counter to US power. One of the lessons offered by Object Lessons, then, is that the critical frame of a field cannot by itself disengage either scholars or the knowledge they produce from US national power or global capitalism. Insofar as it is precisely US national power and global capitalism that makes possible the institutions of the US academy, and the work sponsored by these institutions, we remain implicated in that power in various ways.

If you work at a college or university in the United States, you work for one of only three types of institution: the church, the state, or a corporation (whether nonprofit, for profit, or some hybrid of the two). In addition to the direct influ-ence of church or state or market, the structure of the academy itself is tightly controlled in the United States. Much like the requirements for nonprofit status for activist organizations, any institution of higher learning must submit to the organizational structures required for accreditation, as well as for tax-exempt status from the federal government. These requirements for accreditation include the existence of a “governing authority,” “professional staff,” “standard operational practices,” and so on. Even radical institutions, such as the Union Institute with its founding vision as a “university without walls,” are part of the accrediting institutions that enforce these requirements.3 The critique of nonprofit governance structures has become a crucial part of understanding the limits of social activism in this form (Halley, Kotiswaran, Shamir, and Thomas 2006; Ho 2008; INCITE! 2007). So also, the analysis of Object Lessons suggests that the power relations that enable the academy and that are enforced by the structure of accreditation, to name just one such relation, must remain part of any analyses of identity knowledges and their aspirations and effects.4


My suggestion, following on the analysis offered by Object Lessons, is that perhaps we should give up imagining that academics can find a frame, a practice, or a theory that will allow us to escape complicity. This is not to say that new frames or theories might not offer possibilities that are foreclosed by current academic practices, but that these possibilities are not those of finding a space safe from complicity, nor is it to say that we can know for certain how the com-plicities in which we find ourselves implicated will play out. We cannot, in fact, know in advance what the effects of our theories or practices will be, nor even what it is that we are doing now. It might seem, given the fields that Wiegman has chosen to consider, that the force of her critique would be directed toward the identity of identity knowledges; however, the critique offered in Object Les-sons really runs to the question of knowledge itself. Knowing fully what one is doing requires self-knowledge. In other words, it requires self-presence, and the impossibility of such self-presence makes it impossible to be fully conscience of what we are doing in creating knowledge, or of the desires that drive this knowledge creation, much less of the effects that academic practice will have.5 Despite the depth of its critique, Object Lessons nonetheless suggests that we can inhabit the various complicities of our work.6

What would it mean, for example, to acknowledge the fact that much of what Left-progressive academics value about the US academy was made possible by the cold war? Much of what progressives value about the university system in the United States (and that is cited as a potentially vanishing good in the face of increasing neoliberalism in university policies and administration) was enabled by cold war funding, including funding for basic research, the expan-sion of the university system to make higher education more widely available, and identity knowledges, including American studies certainly, but also fields that are related to social movements like feminist studies (Coogan-Gehr 2011; Lowen 1997). As Wiegman points out, not only were the fields of study associ-ated with social movements implicated in the cold war, but so also were the movements themselves. She cites the growing field of historical work that shows how the social movements that created the possibility for identity knowledges could be implicated in cold war structures of US power, even as the movements struggled to change these very power relations (226). Yet, since these movements were often directed toward the US nation-state or took place in the US “public sphere,” how could it be otherwise?

Does this complicity necessarily compromise these movements, or mean that any movement directed toward the state is doomed to failure—at least in moral terms? Given Wiegman’s argument, one would have to say “no” because there is no site of noncomplicity that could provide a measure of how and why complicity is always and everywhere wrong. Take, for example, a set of move-ments that are famous for resisting implication with the state: the recent Occupy movements, with their anarchist influences and active refusal to make demands on the state. I would argue that Occupy has made important contributions to


the possibilities for social change, but despite its resistance to the state and even to capitalism, it also remains implicated in those structures of power. As the original Occupy Wall Street protests were taking place, there were a number of blog posts that provided critiques of the fact that the metaphor of occupation is itself tied up in settler colonialism, including the settler colonialism that has placed the world’s preeminent financial center on indigenous land (Yee 2011).

The complicities of Occupy can be found on more mundane levels as well. It is not just that the pizzas that fed the occupiers during the autumn 2011 pro-tests in Zuccotti Park came from neighborhood pizzerias—capitalist ventures one and all—but the ways in which the Occupy movement (and any social movement) remains complicit in the structures it also critiques are even more apparent in the efforts of Occupy Sandy in 2012. The day after the storm, which came to be known as Superstorm Sandy, devastated much of the East Coast in October 2012, a group of activists that had been part of Occupy Wall Street came together to form a “mutual aid” society in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, including Red Hook, Clinton Hill, and the Rockaways, that were not the first focus of governmental relief efforts, which seemed to be directed mainly toward the wealthy areas of lower Manhattan. Focusing on the ways in which “mutual aid is not charity,” Occupy Sandy organized and distributed needed supplies and labor to help with the recovery, such as cleaning mud out of houses and repairing other damage wrought by the storm. Occupy Sandy set up a “bridal registry” on amazon.com through which people from anywhere could contribute needed goods to the relief effort.7 The Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, was listed as the wedding site on the registry, and along with churches in other neighborhoods, it served as a distribution center. As cleanup and rebuilding efforts continued over weeks and months, Occupy Sandy came to collaborate with the New York City government—even with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

These efforts were not without controversy. Occupy activists engaged in debates about shifting the focus of movement away from income inequality and dominant (and dominating) financial institutions. Some of these debates focused precisely on the question of complicity with the city, especially the New York Police Department and the offices of the mayor and the speaker of the city council (Nir 2013). The reason I find this movement so fascinating is, in part, because Occupy Sandy activists chose to collaborate not just with the city, but also with churches and with the global behemoth that is Amazon; in other words, with the very sites of complicity that also haunt academic efforts—church, state, and corporation. For the activists who supported the efforts of Occupy Sandy, some crucial distinctions made a difference in how they understood its moral and political valences. The distinction between mutual aid and charity is perhaps foremost on the Occupy Sandy’s Facebook page—this, despite working through churches, which are the preeminent charitable institutions in the United States, as organizing and distribution sites.8 As actors


and analysts, what are we to make of the relation between this dependence on church property and the queer subversion for organizing purposes of Amazon’s bridal registry and of churches as “sites” for weddings? Weddings and the gifts that they require are not just a billion dollar part of global capital, but they also work to privatize social provision through the structure of the “family”—often as legitimized by religious institutions. But the occupiers turned this type of privatized provision on its head. Such subversion clearly makes a difference, but what kind of difference?

The question that these efforts raise in relation to Object Lessons is whether it is possible simultaneously to subvert, resist, challenge, and even revolt against oppressive systems of power while also remaining implicated in these very systems. And, to reverse the question: Is it possible to avoid implication while making revolution? Moreover, even if we say that it is impossible to avoid such implication, how do we know which paths of action to go down? Are distinctions like that between mutual aid and charity enough to guide us?

Object Lessons suggests that such distinctions will not save us; as precise as we, as students and scholars, might be in our formulations or in our specification of objects, we will not gain enough critical language to remove ourselves from complicity with the institutions that make these efforts possible. But this con-clusion does not mean either that such distinctions are useless or that critique is neither needed nor helpful; rather, one possibility is that knowing that we cannot be saved, we might give up on narratives of salvation or perdition (I use the Christian metaphors advisedly here), and also on some romantic narratives of what it is that we do as either students or employees of academic institutions. The narrative that seeks a site completely outside of complicity depends on a vision of purity that is ultimately part of an apocalyptic narrative: we are either saved from complicity or all is lost. But these are not the only options.

Some of the work that Object Lessons does is to trace specific complicities that identity knowledges face. Building on this type of analysis, we can therefore ask: What conditions make it possible for us to do specific work, such as that done in the fields of identity knowledge? What are the limits created by these conditions, but also what are their possibilities? The question is not what is our object of study, but instead what is our object in undertaking study?

At the BCRW, our object is to create knowledge in support of social justice, and to do so with both activist and academic partners. Such a project does not by itself a revolution make, but neither does our work, or any academic work, occur in isolation. The very conditions that connect us to broader structures of power, like those inhabited by Barnard, also open possibilities that could not be realized at the college itself. We could look to the connections, such as those with community-based organizations, that might make a contribution, if not to revolution itself, then, at least, to revolutionary possibilities. It may be that even the organizations with which the BCRW collaborates are not in themselves revolutionary, but they, in turn, may create possibilities for thought


or action that are more radical than those that can occur within the space of an organization. Thus one way to articulate the BCRW’s object in studying is to create knowledge that, in turn, contributes to possibilities.

Object Lessons is a book that asks questions more than it provides answers. The question that it leaves with me is whether one can create an ethics of aca-demic practice that emphasizes the contribution to possibilities—not a practical ethics (Singer 1980), which maximizes goods within given conditions of pos-sibility, but an ethics that challenges those conditions while also recognizing the materiality of possibility. Blogger Peter Marcuse (2012) distinguishes the Occupy movements, including Occupy Sandy, from nineteenth-century utopian communities, which sought to perfect a model of living by removing community members from the wider world. Occupy, on the other hand, “realizes the essen-tial interrelationship between what its adherents are doing and the world.” And yet, Occupy also contributes to possibilities that could be viewed as utopian: that democracy could actually be horizontal and inclusive, or that mutual aid rather than disaster capitalism could mark social responses to calamities.9 For academic work, one way to make contributions to this possibility is by connect-ing to others engaged in such projects; for the BCRW, these connections have primarily been with community-based organizations.10 I have argued elsewhere that academic work is important in relation to activism not because of what we know, but because of what we do not know (Jakobsen 2012). Similarly, activism is important to academic work because of what is not yet possible, but might be.

Acknowledgments

I am honored to be participating in this forum. Object Lessons is a book that takes on under-discussed topics so as to broaden their conversation. Therefore I would like to thank the organizers of this forum for recognizing the importance of continuing this conversation, and for inviting me to be part of it.

Janet R. Jakobsen is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexual-ity Studies and Director of the Center for Research on Women at Barnard College, where she has also served as Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development. She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics. With Ann Pellegrini she co-wrote Love the Sin: Sexual Regula-tion and the Limits of Religious Tolerance and co-edited Secularisms, and with Elizabeth Castelli she co-edited Interventions: Academics and Activists Respond to Violence. Before entering the academy, she was a policy analyst and organizer in Washington, D.C. She may be reached at [email protected].


Notes

1. For publications and background materials from the project with Domestic Workers United, see http://bcrw.barnard.edu/publications/nfs5/; and for the project with Queers for Economic Justice, see http://bcrw.barnard.edu/publications/nfs7/.

2. On the relationship between ethics and politics, see Janet Jakobsen (1998, 15–19).3. This description is from the Union Institute’s website, available at http://www

.myunion.edu/About/UnionAtAGlance.aspx.4. While a full analysis of the social relations that make for the contemporary

university is well beyond the scope of this brief essay, I would like to note some of the recent analyses that have been directed toward analyzing the ways in which the academy as an institution and academic knowledge are complicit in racism and neoliberalism: Sara Ahmed (2012); Joyce Canaan and Wesley Shumar (2008); Roderick A. Ferguson (2012); Naomi Greyser and Margot Weiss (2012); Grace Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson (2011); Jodi Melamed (2011); and Sandra K. Soto and Miranda Joseph (2010).

5. On the critique of presence, see Jacques Derrida (1976); and for a very helpful application of this critique to normative political theory, see Iris Marion Young (1990, esp. chap. 4).

6. I am grateful to the editor of this forum, Zahid R. Chaudhary, for pointing out the relevance of this particular formulation.

7. See Amazon’s “Occupy Sandy and Occupy Sandy’s Wedding Registry,” available at http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html?ie=UTF8&id=2X8MYB6E2U97C& type=wedding.

8. See Occupy Sandy’s Facebook page, available at https://www.facebook.com/OccupySandyReliefNyc?fref=ts.

9. On disaster capitalism, see Naomi Klein (2007).10. For others, these connections are made with artists, performers, or other (sub)

cultural producers; see, for example, Judith Halberstam (2005) and José Esteban Muñoz (2009).

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bradley, Stefan M. 2009. Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Students Power in the 1960s. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Canaan, Joyce E., and Wesley Shumar. 2008. Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University. New York: Routledge.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Coogan-Gehr, Kelly. 2011 The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion: Excavating a Feminist Archive. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.


Ferguson, Roderick A. 2012. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Greyser, Naomi, and Margot Weiss. 2012. “Introduction: Left Intellectuals and the Neoliberal University.” American Quarterly 64 (4): 787–93.

Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press.

Halley, Janet, Prabha Kotiswaran, Hila Shamir, and Chantal Thomas. 2006. “From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work, and Sex Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism.” Harvard Journal of Law & Gender 29 (2): 335–423.

Ho, Josephine. 2008. “Is Global Governance Bad for East Asian Queers?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14 (4): 457–79.

Hong, Grace Kyungwon, and Roderick A. Ferguson, eds. 2011. Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed. 2007. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Jakobsen, Janet R. 1998. Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

———. 2012. “Collaborations.” American Quarterly 64 (4): 827–31.Joseph, Miranda, and David Rubin. 2007. “Promising Complicities: On the Sex, Race

and Globalization Project.” A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 430–51. New York: Blackwell Publishing.

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador Books.

Lowen, Rebecca. 1997. Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Marcuse, Peter. 2012. “Occupy Sandy: Social Change through Prefiguring Action,” Peter Marcuse’s Blog, November 15. http://pmarcuse.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/blog-23-occupy-sandy-social-change-through-prefiguring-action/.

Melamed, Jodi. 2011. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press.

Nir, Sarah Maslin. 2013. “Storm Effort Causes a Rift in a Shifting Occupy Movement.” New York Times, April 30. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/nyregion/occupy-movements-changing-focus-causes-rift.html?pagewanted=all.

Singer, Peter. 1980. Practical Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press.Soto, Sandra K., and Miranda Joseph. 2010. “Neoliberalism and the Battle over Ethnic

Studies in Arizona.” Thought & Action: The NEA Higher Education Journal (Fall): 45–56.

Tokarczyk, Michelle M., and Elizabeth A. Fay, eds. 1993. Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.


Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Yee, Jessica. 2011. “Occupy Wall Street: The Game of Colonialism and Further National-

ism to be Decolonized from the ‘Left,’” Racialicious.com (blog), September 30. http://www.racialicious.com/2011/09/30/occupy-wall-street-the-game-of-colonialism-and- further-nationalism-to-be-decolonized-from-the-left/.

Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lessons from Object Lessons

Elizabeth Freeman





http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.freeman.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.freeman.html



Lessons from Object Lessons

Elizabeth Freeman

“Gender” instead of women, “sexuality” instead of only gender, “whiteness” instead of universality, the “transnational” instead of America, “intersectional-ity” instead of singular identities, “heteronormativity” instead of homosexual-ity. I cannot imagine not having experienced such critical conceptual break-throughs during the past twenty-odd years. And yet, in Object Lessons (2012), Robyn Wiegman indexes how deeply normative are the desires that animate these moves. From our identity concepts, we want all the things we have also deconstructed: supercession, intentionality, coherence, completion, a radical avant-garde, untroubled collectivity. And, as Wiegman makes abundantly clear, we want these things for anti-identitarianism also.

Having charted the objects and wishes of Wiegman’s masterful book, the task is not to sit back smugly and declare everything to be properly decon-structed and thereby politically unimpeachable (or impossible), nor is it to leap out into the streets or behind the lecterns with better terminology. Instead, the book’s point is precisely that “what to do” may be the wrong question. Object Lessons challenges its readers to unpeel critique from the assumption that it is coterminous with immediate political efficacy, with the accomplishment of social justice. It has this suspicion of the properly political in common with Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004) but only this: Object Lessons believes in a complex form of futurity.

In other words, the problem that Wiegman’s book makes clearest, and that it reframes, is temporal. The fantasies of transcendence, willed directionality, legibility, formal innovation, and togetherness that traverse our identity knowl-edges are bound by one overarching fantasy, that of fulfillment—the fulfillment of politics in a concept and of the concept as, itself, a political achievement. But any fantasy of fulfillment, as Martin Hägglund reminds us in his lucid Dying for Time (2012), is a fundamentally temporal one, less about the spatial ideal of full presence that we are used to thinking through deconstruction than a longing

Elizabeth Freeman · 171

for immortality. And while we may think we desire immortality, our actions often speak of a more fundamental desire: namely, our wish to simply survive in earthly time and on earthly terms. This insight is crucial, and crucial to what I think of as the constructive, as opposed to only the critical, horizon of Object Lessons. In other words, reading Hägglund has made the stakes of Wieg-man’s project emerge more fully to me, even as I think Wiegman also offers a way to think about Hägglund’s project in terms of American Left politics: if we understand fulfillment as temporal, we can think about time, and perhaps identity knowledge, otherwise.

Fulfillment suggests immediacy not only as absolute presence, but also as absolute alacrity. Its opposites are, on the one hand, a spatial lack and, on the other, a temporal deferral, but its alternative, survival, is more promising. In diagnosing our dreams of fulfillment, Wiegman offers up a powerful figure for all identity knowledges with her phrase “the desire for gender.”1 Object Les-sons, of course, takes up not only the desire for gender, but also the desire for queerness, the desire for anti-imperialism or transnationalism, the desire for post-supremacist whiteness, the desire for intersectionality, the desire for anti-normativity. Read through a Lacanian framework, this phrase “the desire for X” (Wiegman 2012, 91) would signal the lack of being at the heart of gender and any other identity or political stance. But read through Wiegman, the desire for gender, or the desire for so many forms of justice that gender stands in for, is something different. Her project is less to deconstruct gender than to reconstruct political desire.

Wiegman has another felicitous turn of phrase that I think indexes what a desire for X, a desire without lack (and without the concomitant fantasy of fulfillment) and without the equally historically empty notion of endless deferral, might look like: she refers to “telling time.” In part, this move entails understanding how we retroactively construct things as both prior and failed in order to empower the new; this is, of course, how feminism came to be cast as a big drag in relation to queer. But telling time also refers to two other things. First, it names the necessary impossibility of understanding historical praxis from within its own present: our analysis of an action as historical, or as the proper application of a theory of history, cannot coincide with our doing it. And second, telling time enjoins us to, and here I quote, “decipher . . . the transformations produced by, with, and to identity as it moves into academic institutional form, becoming other to itself” (95). In other words, an identity knowledge, once entered into the academy, may become unrecognizable to its social movement version of itself. Both of these examples—of not being able to simultaneously do and analyze (which renders “historical praxis” an oxymoron), and of tracking identity’s changes as it moves from site to site (which may undo the very things that grounded it as identity)—suggest that telling time involves exploring, inhabiting, and embracing coincidence and non-coincidence.2 Conversely, feminism and queer may coincide in some ways


and not others, but their points of non-coincidence do not have to entail positing the former as historically prior and superceded or the latter as the fulfillment of the former. Coincidence and non-coincidence do not establish relationships of cause and effect, or before and after, potential and realiza-tion; if I am reading Wiegman right, her desire for gender is less about the necessary lack in the object than about the non-coincidence of the object with what we think we want from it—which, if I am reading Hägglund right, is precisely what sustains us and it.

When it comes to gender, that non-coincidence of the content of our desire with the object toward which we aim it is, in Wiegman’s words, lusty, open-ended, proliferative, and transitive; here, gender is on the move and about motion. Wiegman’s signal contribution to a theory of gender is her recognition that gender is never intransitive, never going nowhere nor attaching to noth-ing, never so completely coincident with itself that it stops, not even in its most heternormative versions. To read the formulation through Hägglund again, gender cannot coincide with itself because, like every other object of desire, it is temporal; it differs from itself insofar as any given instance of it must appear only on its way to passing away, or else it could not appear at all. Without time, in other words, there is no difference or division, but this difference/division is not a binary between one and zero, appearance and disappearance; rather, it is arrayed on a continuum of becoming that is not cumulative. There is, of course, a late-capitalist version of this that would insist that gender’s non-coincidence with itself is ever-generative of newness and radical departure—Wiegman calls this “the quest to outrun the familiar” (326)—but I do not think that is the point or that it is even true of non-coincidence. Rather, to turn back to Hägglund (4) again, our formulations of gender—indeed, identity tout court—is open to loss because it is necessarily non-coincident with itself. Crucially, then, we desire gender not because it purports to offer us fulfillment, a transcendence of time, and not because it slips endlessly forward into the future through deferral, another escape from the concrete messiness of time actually lived. We desire gender because we know (however unconsciously, however much we disavow, repress, or foreclose this knowledge) that whatever fulfillment it seems to offer is temporary and transitory, is in and of earthly time. In Hägglund’s analysis, this movement is what desire is, and he calls it “chronolibido” (1). Wiegman (2012, 134) says that “what we think we want rarely satisfies us in the end,” but there is, actually, no “end” in which we could reach that satisfaction, fulfilled. And yet, the fact that there is no destination does not mean that there is also no itinerary of pleasures and disappointments.

What Wiegman’s desire for gender is about, it seems to me, is less a wish that gender fulfill our political intentions for it, coincide with and thus ameliorate the conditions of all those whom it claims to describe, than that it continue in some form or another—in many forms and in incomplete form. Another way to put this might be that the desire for gender is not a desire that, say, the

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male/female binary be either immortal or completely illusory, but that gender survive, meaning that it leave historical traces for some future iteration to take up, for some future person to bind to. In this sense, the desire for gender is not unlike Judith Butler’s (2006, 45) formulation of gender as a sign that remains open to resignification. The desire for “women” worked/works the same way, and these very traces are what make gender itself thinkable, such that gender cannot be said to supersede “women” so much as to dimensionalize the concept. If Hägglund is right that desire is less about lack than about the anticipation of a necessary though less-than-total loss, then I think that we can desire many of our identity objects in the way that Wiegman asks us to do for gender. Citing the inevitability of “strategic foreclosure,” or the ways that disciplinary formations, in constituting their very objects of analyses, will always leave something or somebody out of the frame, Wiegman (2012, 335) writes that “there is always good reason for refusing to acknowledge what the survival of our desire requires us to ignore.” I wonder though: Could we acknowledge that the survival of our desire might not require us to ignore the temporal condi-tion of its object? Knowing that gender or any other object of such desire is sweetly ephemeral, and yet not for that without a futural trajectory of some kind, could be the form that desire takes or the thing that desire is. I am less interested here in citing the inevitability of our objects letting us down—that is, in the Lacanian way of understanding desire that Wiegman seems sometimes to embrace and sometimes to reject—than in the question of what actually enjoying contingency and ephemerality might do for us. Might the desire for X be a devoutly, earnestly campy way of regarding knowledge itself in the same way that performers simultaneously elevate, love, and destroy, say, Cher? Does not the pleasure of constructing an object of knowledge, a theory, a paradigm lie precisely in the hope that someone might make something out of it that we could not make ourselves in our own historical moment?

Can we, then, desire the objects that are identity knowledges in this way so as to counter the program of planned obsolescence that animates both leftist critique, with its shaming logic of supersession, and the corporate university, with its hunger to shut down or weaken the power of identity programs because they are no longer timely? Can we counter the fantasy that there is some identity concept that will fulfill our political aims in the moment of its constitution? Can we be invested in, and insist on institutional investment in, what we will inevitably lose in familiar form? Can we love something that might not fulfill our every wish for it, might not translate into political efficacy in every moment and at every turn? Can we live with the reality that the passing on of identity knowledges is a passing away too, and vice versa? Is it not a condition of our own survival that, as Wiegman puts it, the “anxieties of completion that the priority of critique is meant to heal” (337) are temporal and historical—that the work that a concept does not do is the condition for the next moment of doing? In the wake of Object Lessons, I am going to bet on it.


Elizabeth Freeman is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She has published two books with Duke University Press, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (2002) and Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010). She has also edited a special issue of GLQ (2007), “Queer Temporalities.” She now serves as co-editor, with Nayan Shah, of GLQ.

Notes

1. See Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons, chapter 6, which is a revision of her “Heteronormativity and the Desire for Gender” (2006).

2. On coincidence and non-coincidence, see Tom Boellstorff’s A Coincidence of Desires (2007).

References

Boellstorff, Tom. 2007. A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hägglund, Martin. 2012. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wiegman, Robyn. 2006. “Heteronormativity and the Desire for Gender.” Feminist Theory 7 (1): 89–103.

———. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Justice Regained: The Objects and Lessons of Object Lessons

Shannan Lee Hayes





http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.hayes.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.hayes.html



Justice Regained: The Objects and Lessons of Object Lessons

Shannan Lee Hayes

In an understated footnote on page 3 of Object Lessons (2012), Robyn Wiegman opens her text with a measured caveat: while centrally concerned with the role that “justice” plays in identity-based disciplines, Object Lessons makes no claims toward answering the question of what justice entails. Instead, it addresses the compulsory desire for justice that undergirds much intellectual work. Wiegman is keen to pause her reader here, a step prior to defining justice, at the cusp of its pursuit. In the unchallenged idea that social justice can be attained through critical analysis, we discover a phenomenon of perpetual disappointment that is only ameliorated by repeatedly replacing our objects of study with new ones. “In its broadest stroke,” Wiegman writes, “Object Lessons aims . . . to attend to the daunting hope that underlies [this tendency]: that if only we find the right discourse, object of study, or analytic tool, our critical practice will be adequate to the political commitments that inspire it” (2–3).

From broad strokes to details, Wiegman’s deft writing holds together the incommensurabilities produced by nuanced analysis, while asking her readers to consider rather than conclude. Why, for example, are we so convinced that our objects should satisfy all of our intellectual and political desires? How has “the political” become a disciplinary imperative within identity fields that have his-torically positioned themselves as critical of disciplinary knowledge? Moreover, how does the field-forming desire/compulsion to be political limit that which we recognize as political? How do we fortify our critical-political subjectivities through our investments in chosen objects and practices, even as we remain committed to changing the worlds on which these objects and practices depend? What, in Wiegman’s words, have identity studies wanted “from the objects of study they assemble in their self-defining critical obligation to social justice?” (3). Wiegman pursues these questions in a reflective, meta-theoretical analysis


of the political desires that animate identity-based knowledge practices within the US academy.

Object Lessons offers a vantage point from which to view the critical habits and political ambitions that both Wiegman and we, fellow justice-seeking thinkers, tend to overlook. It does so through an inquiry that functions both within and across the field formations of women’s, ethnic, queer, whiteness, and American studies by mapping these disciplines’ affective relationships to their shifting referents. Tandem to each disciplinary object, one finds the critical subjectivities and political investments that make up a field. Wiegman notes, for example, the way that gender takes the place of women as the conceptual means by which women’s studies defines itself as a justice-seeking endeavor, and that with this shift, a new feminist subjectivity arrives to ensure the field’s political futurity. Objects, subjects, and political desires form a triangulated relation in each chapter, and it is at this second level—across chapters—that Object Lessons explores three privileged objects of its own—namely, identity-knowledges, the political investment in progress, and the habitus of critique. Between these three objects, Object Lesson clears what I take to be one of its most significant contributions: a space to think more slowly than is typically recognized as productive by the futural politics that provide us coherence. In what follows, I take seriously the opportunity to delay our critical claims and to think slowly about the objects that Object Lessons renders salient.

Beyond designating a group of academic fields, the term identity-knowledges advances a foremost object for consideration; it signals two simple, yet key, ideas. To start, we are reminded that the practice of knowledge production tends to be organized in relation to an object of analysis. Such a relation typically involves either identification with or the rejection of one’s chosen object. In the case of identity-knowledges, this relation fashions the political legitimation of a field. For example, while the project of women’s studies has tended to define itself through the validation of women, whiteness studies finds its political force in analyzing race through disidentification with the culturally privileged category white, just as queer studies has established a critical orientation in opposition to the objects hetero- and homo-normativity. Identity-knowledges also draws atten-tion to the unique set of problems that arise when a field is organized around the object identity. Indeed, Wiegman suggests that identity occasions the fecund irresolvability that perpetuates knowledge production.

As a nonce concept, identity never finally settles on either side of the tension between generals and particulars. Knowledge practices that seek to do justice to identity-based objects must dependently rely upon both the living realities of those included in a given identity and the reductive fantasies that have been generated by political and self-interested goals mobilized on the group’s behalf. Concepts of identity can be both useful and frustrating to this end: they serve to mark a group’s difference and highlight its specificity

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by paradoxically diminishing the significance of difference within the group. Identity, as an object, thus provides an inherently unresolvable problem for identity-knowledeges to attend to. Practitioners may continually approximate a resolution by drawing and redrawing the lines that constitute their object. As Wiegman explains, the conceptual framework of identity allows field practitio-ners to perpetually “organize the target from [or toward] which they most self-consciously diverge [or associate] into the very coherence that is articulated in turn as the target of their critique” (321). Put another way, identity-knowledges help disclose reality through a process of cohering, flattening, and subsequently rejecting objects once considered vital in the hope that a fresh, new object may bring with it the justice that has not yet come. Evidence for such transference spans the chapters of Object Lessons and indicates our first lesson.

A second central object—the political promise of progress—correlates with the belief in a not-yet-but-better future characteristic of identity-knowledges. Wiegman describes four principles within our intellectual habits that structure the possibility of this progress narrative: failure, dependence, incorporation, and disavowal (52–53). We see these at play, for example, in the account of gender replacing women as the primary object of women’s studies. At the moment when women gets scripted as conceptually and politically inadequate due to its presumed universalization (failure), gender slips in to offer the promise of both diversity and particularity. Not only does gender occupy this space by ignoring the race critique launched against it (disavowal), its value contradictorily lays in the same fault (dependence) that motivates the abandonment of women—that is, universalization. Gender promises the conceptual rigor of both difference and inclusion by reductively positioning women as a stable category and critiquing its stability. Hence, the intelligibility of gender remains indisputably tethered to maintaining the category women (incorporation).

This is not an isolated case. Wiegman describes how these facets of prog-ress occur again in queer studies, with gender’s supposedly mobile corrective to hetero-normativity’s supposed fixedness. We find them once more with inter-disciplinary discourses, which establish their own disciplinary mechanism in a compulsory political-ness animated by the same desire for total knowledge that disciplinary-knowledges are supposedly guilty of, although only now achieved through an array of perspectives rather than a premise of mastery. Wiegman expounds this point:

Women, gay and lesbian, gender, feminism, queer: none of these categories were ever as stable and knowable as the critical discourses that claim diver-gence from them have tried to suggest. This is true of queer theory’s divergence from feminism . . . as it is of Gender Studies’s analytic supersession of women’s exclusive universalism as it is of Transgender Studies’s divergence from queer theory. . . . And it will be true of future divergences. (321–22; emphasis in original)


If we take only one part of Wiegman’s labor back to our work and relation-ships, it might be this lesson: that critique marks a “device used to discern how other people’s ideas are inadequate to the desires we have invested in them” (314; emphasis in original), more often than it reveals any solid knowledge about the object or establishes a corrective relationship to justice. Despite our disciplinary narratives, the imperative to critique might, in fact, have very little to do with our objects’ need for redemption. Why, after all, do we so thoroughly denounce them in order to justify the idea that they, and not our vested aspirations, falter? Wiegman encourages us to begin to see failure as a constituent part of our unreasonable desires, relations, and survival mechanisms.

Could a more acute observation be made about the inevitable disillusion-ment and territorializing force of desire? It is such an ordinary tragedy that in desire we frequently overestimate the promise of our object at the start, only to underestimate and overdetermine its possibility after the fall. Yet, it is also such a necessary intoxication to be propelled into the world-making promise of a future that could be otherwise, by an agency uniquely channeled through desire. Object Lessons can be taken on the terms of just this contradiction: that we must want what will disappoint us. Hurt me once, object—shame on you. But hurt me twice? Shame on me.

Yet, rather than shame us, Wiegman simply wants us to learn. She seeks less to critique the operations of the progress narrative or the researchers who subscribe to it than to show how, time and again, it produces a field’s imaginary (89). The promise of progress allows us to invest in the political potential of our objects while ensuring that they will never live up to our hopes. Our future as critics is ensured by this unresolved work. And herein lies the next lesson: the intensity of the promise that we invest in our objects is directly matched by the inevitability of their failure. But rather than weaken our efforts, this zero-sum loss provides the perpetuating engine that allows our intellectual practices to endure under the sign of political critique, continually searching for the adequate object that will materialize a better world.

Wiegman’s analysis acts as an ethnographic witness to the speed of underestimation and abandonment found within much critical thought in the humanities. If, after Object Lessons, we think more slowly about critique itself as our final object, we may begin to recognize this habit without replicating the need to fix or condemn it. Rather than initiate a methodological paradigm shift, our capacities may be better suited to shift our attention to the peculiar faith we place in critique’s ability to usher a complete, not yet though certainly better future. Following Wiegman’s lead, we could begin to inhabit the irre-solvable tensions between our desires and the objects to and through which we might do justice. This will provide some important breathing room in an academic milieu that is oriented toward progress and measured by productivity. Justice might even begin to look less like a promised object and more like the unfashionable practice of persistence.

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What if we remained determined to keep the complexity of past objects present rather than foreclose their possibility? Or if we recognized that the new is not all that different from the old? What if, in the very least, we considered the extent to which our provisional desires and need for intelligibility shape the agential relationships we have with our objects? What, in Wiegman’s words, would it mean to resist the disciplinary imperative to “move on,” even when it becomes clear that ours are impossible needs? Object Lessons opens these considerations by tracking the affective fantasies that drive our academic tendency to maintain relevance through critique and dismissal. But for all its labor, the reader must still ask: Does Object Lessons make it any more possible to do intellectual work that self-reflectively inhabits the limited agency of trying to seek justice?

Wiegman fosters no interest in taxonomizing approaches to justice. She does not tell her reader how to be a more mindful critic nor how we might replace our progress narratives. What Wiegman’s analysis does do, however, is lucidly demonstrate deferral as a necessary part of justice’s pursuit. Justice, much like desire, is impossible to satisfy. Moreover, both are formed by this impos-sibility: they occupy the suspension of their arrival. Justice and desire thrive in fantasy, anticipation, disappointment, and postponement. Justice indeed may be nothing other than this différance, kept active by the habit that we nonetheless invest our full belief in the necessary quest for a possession that cannot be met. No doubt, our objects will always be inadequate to our desires, but a concept of justice that consists in pursuit, struggle, and irresolvability productively betrays the binary framework of justice to come versus justice failed that tempts us to deaden current objects in favor of the new.

And yet, what will provide us the sustenance to endure this struggle? It seems that at least a bit of agential pleasure remains verdant in those stale binary frameworks and dismissive habits. For even here, with the lessons we take away, we may continue to find a worthy home in the idea that this time, things will be better.

Shannan L. Hayes is a PhD student in the Literature Program and Women’s Studies Program at Duke University. She earned a masters degree in continental philosophy with a certificate in women’s & gender studies from Stony Brook University in 2012, where she also completed a masters of fine arts in scuplture and new media in 2009. She has received research fellowships for her work in non-profit contemporary art galleries in New York City, as well as for teaching women’s studies and foundations of studio art. Hayes’s research interests include the relation between art and life in modern political and aesthetic theory; philosophies of time; and feminist theory.

Reference


The Object of Object Lessons: Thoughts and Questions

Nick Mitchell





http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.mitchell.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.mitchell.html



The Object of Object Lessons: Thoughts and Questions

Nick Mitchell

Objects

One of the most curious claims to be found in Robyn Wiegman’s Object Les-sons (2012, 35) is that it “offers no new objects or analytics of study.” For how might we speak of what Wiegman refers to as “identity knowledges” without understanding it as a new object, singular-plural?1 And what might we make of the way that Wiegman teaches us to read the disciplinary force that motivates the commitment of identity knowledges to make knowledge do justice, if we do not understand it as a new analytic? What Object Lessons accomplishes, that is to say, is already caught up in the sway of the new, even though the political imaginary endowed with the capacity to “marshal the discourse of the new” (78) has been among its author’s most abiding critical concerns (see, for example, Wiegman 2002).

Part of what marks Object Lessons as new has to do with the moment in which it emerges, a moment that, thankfully, no one has yet sought to package as a “turn,” but that nevertheless operates the tropology of one, with its sights set on reversing the gaze. Over the past decade, scholarly attention in identity-related domains has moved increasingly toward the questions of how we got here—now, in the university and the social order—and what we might make of our attempts to know these domains. It seems important to acknowledge that the effort to study the field-making histories and protocols of identity studies seems to be inseparable from a broader desire to know (and an anxiety about what might come of knowing) what our fields have become in the university today.2

What makes identity knowledges an object, and not just a name, emerges, in part, out of Object Lessons’ analytic practice of reading multiple fields in

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relation to one another. It is an outcome, therefore, of history, of variously articulated institutional and epistemological relations, and of interpretive practice. This practice responds not only to the implied need to investigate the post–civil rights project of institutionalizing the study of marginalized and dominant constituencies, but also to the value of studying these formations as a whole—that is, as the kind of historical phenomenon that only comes into view when we view them together. The methodological conundrum that accompanies an understanding of identity knowledges as a whole provides one of the most productive tensions to be found in Object Lessons, a book that wants, at once, to say something definitive about identity knowledges writ large while nevertheless grounding its claims in a particular constellation of identity knowledge–related fields, objects, debates, and analytics. It is, perhaps, a fitting irony that a book that takes such painstaking care in reading the ways in which fields negotiate the tensions between particularity and universality should be animated by a particularity/universality, or particularity/generality, problem all its own. The question here is: What can we learn by attending to the specific constellation of identity knowledges offered in Object Lessons?

The claim on which this question is based is simple: identity knowledges, as an object, does not precede Object Lessons; rather, identity knowledges is invented in its pages, as it will inevitably be reinvented as the book encounters a readership and as its analytic sensibilities travel more broadly. In this brief response, my claim will be that the constellation of objects, analytics, and field imaginaries with which Object Lessons engages is enabled by its situating of aca-demic feminism both as a field imaginary of its own and as a scene of mobilizing agency. This distinction between field imaginary and mobilizing agency, in the case of academic feminism, I think is crucial to understanding how Object Les-sons makes its object (identity knowledges). What renders identity knowledges into the form of a whole has to do with the performance of a critical mobility that transports us as readers from field imaginary, to field formation, to analytic practice, and back again. What makes this performance particularly gripping is the way that throughout this itinerary, Wiegman finds herself so much at home—although sometimes uneasily so—with the intimate ways of thinking and doing that make these fields feel familiar to their practitioners, even as she wrestles with the problematics that underwrite them.

With this said, my contention that the figure of academic feminism func-tions to organize the object identity knowledges may appear a bit strange. After all, only Object Lessons’ first chapter, which analyzes the optimistic investment in the category of gender to resolve and to transcend the political problems ascribed retrospectively to the category women, addresses itself directly to feminism’s own institutional materialization in the project of women’s stud-ies. Yet, I would suggest that academic feminism supplies the privileged set of object relations through which Object Lessons’ major concerns are routed and organized. This is perhaps most apparent in the book’s first two and last two


chapters, where academic feminism marks a site of departure: a site that departs itself (in its travels from women, to gender, to intersectionality as sites of critical and political investment), and a site whose objects provide, finally, a point of return (in the final chapter’s deliberations on queer studies and the desire for gender). And, as chapter 5’s discussion of intersectionality’s circulation shows, aspirations generalized to identity knowledges writ large are indexed in Object Lessons as “field conversations collated to feminist ends” (240).

Indeed, even chapters 3 and 4, on whiteness studies and American studies, respectively, mirror to significant extent themes and problematics that Wiegman first explored in the context of academic feminism. I am thinking here specifi-cally of how her article “Academic Feminism Against Itself” (2002) serves as a crucial moment of transition between Wiegman’s 1999 “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity” and its appearance, over a decade later, as Object Lessons’s third chapter, “The Political Conscious (Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity).” For it is in “Academic Feminism Against Itself” that Wiegman brings into critical view the question of the “status of the subject of consciousness as the ever present and hence definitively authenticating methodological figure through which academic feminism can affirm its politi-cal content and mission” (28). And it is this article’s explicit methodological approach to consciousness, not as a moment of political resolution, but as a problematic sign of academic feminism’s own disciplinarity that appears in the rearticulated focus of chapter 3’s (and arguably also chapter 4’s) investigation of the “emphasis on conscious political subjects that attends identity projects that take aim at majoritarian objects of study” (2012, 139). From here, then, I think it is possible to venture the claim that no field formation, no constellation of objects and political imaginaries, determines Object Lessons’ lines of flight so thoroughly as does academic feminism.

Genres

If academic feminism overwhelmingly structures the interior logic of the object that Object Lessons names identity knowledges, and the itinerary by which we come to know it, it is Wiegman’s chapter on whiteness studies, however, that offers an implicit contrast, allowing us to glimpse that object’s outer limits. Whiteness studies is perhaps the only identity-knowledge formation that Object Lessons explores exclusively in the past tense—the only field that is distin-guished not by its successful self-renovation through and in the wake of criticism, but by the ways in which it “has lost most of its critical appeal” (141). Indeed, if academic feminism serves implicitly as a model—as in exemplary—minoritized knowledge formation, its exemplarity is attributable, at least partly, to the field’s demonstrated ability to ensure the longevity of its critical and institutional project, doing so through its enactment of a form of critical mobility that Wieg-man calls “inexhaustibility.” The performance of inexhaustibility operates by


way of “processes of divergence that remake objects of study, shift theoretical commitments, forge new methodologies, transform canons, elaborate archives, define new analytics, change names” (122). But, in contrast, whiteness studies, to state the case somewhat ironically, appears in Object Lessons to exemplify an identity-knowledge formation that cannot quite shed its skin so as to participate in the traffic of inexhaustibility.

This is interesting for a few reasons that pertain not only to whiteness studies, but to the shape of identity knowledges more broadly. First, what it suggests is that if inexhaustibility is a defining feature of identity knowledges, the positive regenerative institutional capacities that accrue to inexhaustibility have not been shared equally by all fields that the term identity knowledges endeavors to describe. Second, because, at the close of the book’s third chapter, Wiegman’s analysis of whiteness studies opens onto a consideration of ethnic studies more broadly. Showing how scholars in whiteness studies sought to preserve the field’s basis of inquiry by claiming for it a genealogy originating not with white scholars in the academy, but rather the nonwhite radical political traditions that ethnic studies engages, Wiegman asks:

What are the consequences of figuring “nonwhiteness” as the means of carrying critical whiteness studies forward, given the assumption here (and elsewhere) that the political consciousness it represents is free of the power of the object it seeks to isolate and interrogate? This is an important and difficult question, in that it challenges not just white antiracist investments in nonwhiteness as the means of exacting postwhite political affiliations, but the political imaginary that brought Ethnic Studies into being, which rhetorically forwards its attachments to objects and analytics of study as an engaged project of antiracism, not a historical formation of one . . . Whiteness Studies and critical whiteness studies, like Ethnic Studies itself, are evidence of the historical formation of antiracism, steeped not simply in the political cultures in which they seek to articulate themselves but in the culture of the political that organizes the terrain on which the legibility of their social and critical actions inevitably rests. (195–96)

Crucial questions, no doubt. But the extrapolation from whiteness studies onto ethnic studies writ large moves almost too quickly for us to grasp why these questions are being posed to ethnic studies in particular. Given that this moment stages one of Object Lessons’s few explicit forays into the field formation of ethnic studies—or, at least, into a version of ethnic studies that is not already overwritten primarily by academic feminism’s field imaginary—its engagement with the latter’s field imaginary is a bit jarring in its sparseness. After all, can we really say that ethnic studies was inaugurated by a single political imaginary named antiracism, and not by a complicated, internally divergent, multiple temporality inhabiting concoction of them that would include not only sov-ereignty, anticolonialism, Black Power, decoloniality, antimilitarism, uplift,


cultural nationalism, and community liberation, but also Marxism, feminism, and, if somewhat controversially, a liberalism that may not have been exclusively white? Antiracism is perhaps too generic a moniker to inhabit any of the field formations that have been placed under the category, much less the animating questions or understandings of the political that have animated such fields. Yet, and this is the third point I wish to register, to point out the difference between this generic rendering of ethnic studies knowledges in the form of antiracism and the political imaginaries that might become visible at closer scrutiny is not to claim for the latter a truth that the former does not bear. Instead, it is to suggest that the generic rendering is already one of the institutional forms that marks the extent to which ethnic studies has diverged from itself—that is, the extent to which it has become productive outside of the field imaginary that its practitioners might seek to claim for it.

Academic feminism’s object relations cast their shadow here as well. In “Curricular Objects: ‘Women of Color,’ Feminist Anti-Racism, and the Con-solidation of Women’s Studies” (2012), I have argued that antiracism as a generic production has been central not only to academic feminism’s progress narratives, but also to the consolidation and material reproduction of women’s studies in the neoliberal university. While not historically inaccurate, the now common practice of deploying an insurgent activist narrative as the origin of women of color as an organizing rubric within the field, I suggest, often provides a cover for the part of the story in which women’s studies’ commitment to women of color is also an effect of the integrationist politics of late cold war liberalism, with its desire to generate antiracisms marked by their decisive distance and difference from the politics and praxes of community self-determination. Because it is set toward the proliferation and incorporation of gendered racial categories—through strategies of addition (of studies of women indexed to spe-cific racial populations) and flexible reconfiguration (that is, the curricular and scholarly emphases on women of color, or third world women, or postcolonial feminisms)—the generic commitment to antiracism, in this context, supplies academic feminism with a figure of inexhaustibility incommensurate with what ethnic studies formations could generate. Crucially, this generic commitment to antiracism was staked on its explicit aim not only to include nonwhite women and scholarship by them, but also to create self-conscious, white antiracist feminist subjects. Unlike whiteness studies, which Object Lessons locates in the 1990s, however, tracking this formation requires attending to the inaugu-ral moments of women’s studies in the US university, a genealogy that should leave little surprise that one of the most enduring analyses of white privilege and power was penned before the turn of the 1990s by a professor of women’s studies (McIntosh 1988).

All of this is to say that it is not only ethnic studies, but also academic feminism itself that can be read as evidence of the historical formation of antiracism—particularly inasmuch as the latter leans upon nonwhiteness as a


source of legitimation. It is also to say that antiracism, as a generic and flexible marker, may provide a more accurate description of the specific institutional forms in which academic feminism has articulated its critical and curricular projects. And, moreover, it is to suggest that academic feminism’s now long-standing pursuit of conscious subjectivity as a means of political transformation may have been part of the knowledge architecture that made whiteness avail-able, in the academy more generally, as an object of critical interrogation. The move from a feminist desire to occasion male self-interrogation to an antiracist desire for white self-transformation is palpable in sentences like the following, which appears in Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (1988, 1): “As we in Women’s Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, ‘Having described it what will I do to lessen or end it?’ ”

Pasts

Yet, the contrast is striking: if one can speak of academic feminism as a knowl-edge formation exemplary for its institutional and intellectual achievements, whiteness studies becomes notable as one that, at least in terms of academic infrastructure, has been largely exhausted. Wiegman’s (2012) explanation for the relative demise of whiteness studies suggests the likelihood that “what worked to deliver Whiteness Studies to its twenty-first century tomb was the force of commodification that threatened its political intentions and under-mined its critical tone” (192)—a commodification, specifically, of the field as “a white academic endeavor” with decidedly “segregationist effects” (193). Still, no identity-knowledge formation is separate from the larger set of institutional and market imperatives that make identity reproducible and consumable by way of the commodity form, and that commodification has been the basis of a critique of identity knowledges for nearly their entire tenure in the academy. It is notable, then, that in Wiegman’s engagement with whiteness studies, we find an example where commodification fails, instead of secures, the reproduction or extension of the field, even while, as Wiegman shows, its field imaginary remains (partly) intact.

I would wager a slightly different explanation here: that it is not commodifi-cation itself, but rather the anxiety-riddled perception that sustained investment in such a commodity will have “segregationist effects,” troubling the political claims on which whiteness studies staked its inquiry (in threatening to place white scholars at the visible core of a field committed to undoing the centrality of whiteness) and promising little of the return on investment that the university has come to expect identity knowledges to deliver: namely, more inclusiveness and more diversity. The commodification that made whiteness studies an identity knowledge could not be translated directly into a form of institutional capital. The field was undermined by the way that its political imaginary converged


with the norms of intelligibility that confer institutional value upon identity knowledges, norms that situate whiteness as that which lacks and therefore needs nonwhiteness to operate as both object and measure of diversity.

Whiteness studies is not, of course, the only identity-knowledge formation to encounter, or to be hampered by, the calculus that doomed it to premature expiration. In fact, the anxiety attendant to the charge of segregation supplied one of the major arguments against the institutionalization of black studies during the late 1960s and early ’70s, in a moment when black studies was under-stood by many of its critics—both black and white—as indistinguishable from a political tendency toward black separatism. In a 1969 New York Times article by Fred Hechinger, Roy Wilkins, who at the time was the executive director of the NAACP, went as far as to associate the push for black studies with what he called the “clamor of some black students for self-created apartheid.”

The political-institutional calculus that sent whiteness studies to the grave, then, is perhaps indicative of norms that have governed identity knowledges from the start, marking their birth in the drama that made integration a lan-guage flexible enough to accommodate national progress narratives of various stripes. To be sure, the deployment of anti-segregationist arguments against the institutionalization of black studies in the era was always of questionable faith, since its conflation of the desire for separation—or the refusal to invoke the concept of integration as an unquestioned good—with the historical formation of segregation ignored the extent to which the latter had been backed by the entire legal, cultural, and institutional armature of white supremacy. But as the progress implied by the language of integration moved from staging debates over institutional priorities to the governing logic of institutional norms, integration emerged as that which provided an answer to questions including not only “How best to promote racial harmony on campus?” and “How best to institutionalize black studies?” but also “How to quell campus radicalism?” and “How best to discipline black students into producing themselves not for the revolution but for the market?” (Thelwell 1969).3

If the specter of segregation defined whiteness studies’ inability to secure the institutional capital necessary to garner it a stable place in the univer-sity’s economy of knowledge production, and if that specter was one that had undermined the inaugural efforts to institutionalize black studies, what do we make of the case of academic feminism’s instantiation in the form of women’s studies, which Wiegman (2002, 24) has called “perhaps the most successful institutionalizing project of its generation”? Women’s studies, after all, took shape in an historical context marked by the presence of feminist separatisms of various kinds, although perhaps separatisms that were never quite burdened by the accusation of rehearsing Jim Crow. As a provisional first step in answering such a question, I would borrow a lesson that I learned from whiteness studies and rewrite “success” as privilege, regarding the former as the outcome of the latter’s provisioning.


By introducing the problematic in this way, I am attempting to bring into critical view the institutional politics that attend the political imaginary that Object Lessons makes visible in its deliberations on the analytic life of intersec-tionality. As Wiegman demonstrates, intersectionality, de-referentialized from its inception in black feminist legal studies, now circulates within academic feminism “as a critical aspiration and analytic tool . . . [that] provides a relation to the universal that does not have to be . . . feared” (242; emphasis in original). Indeed, through intersectionality, Wiegman argues, “feminist commitments to justice can be disarticulated from the errors of women’s overreach to pursue the possibility of a critical practice that never excludes” (242; emphasis added). But what happens when the promise of a kinder, gentler universalism becomes a measure not of academic feminism’s critical values, but of the value it gener-ates for the institutions it inhabits? Or, to return to my discussion above of the conundrums attendant to the institutionalization of black studies, whiteness studies, and, even more recently, Mexican American studies in Arizona (Soto and Joseph 2010), what are the consequences of academic feminism’s pursuit of institutional forms that promise nonexclusion—this, in light of the ways in which race and ethnic studies continue to bear the mark of a dangerous and outmoded segregation? And what are the consequences of the ways in which the convergence of academic feminism’s political imaginary with institutional politics enables the neoliberal university, by association, to claim academic feminism’s pursuit of justice as coterminous with its own?

Frames

It would be absurd, of course, to suggest at this point that academic feminism in the academy today does not provide a crucial location, a home even, for the critical study of race and ethnicity. In raising the questions above, my inten-tion is to inquire into the particular ways in which the convergence between the political imaginary and the institutional projects of academic feminism articulate themselves through a particular means of converting difference into institutional capital. This difference is not simply one articulated in an implicit appeal to the university’s imperative to diversify, although that is certainly a key factor in the calculus also; but the point here is that the difference that has underwritten academic feminism’s institutional strategies has also been, implicitly though importantly, a difference from other identity-knowledge fields.

What this means is more significant when framed by something that Object Lessons teaches me to recognize: namely, that no field of study comes into being out of its practitioners’ own volition, and that to take a field as an object of analysis is to attend to its historical embeddedness in a larger field of relation-ality. From the above deliberations, I would add that no field—and especially no identity field of study—can produce the kind of infrastructure necessary to survive in the neoliberal university without a means of instrumentalizing


its practice, or the bodies of its practitioners, as a means of generating capital. Those means of generating capital, including the “cultural capital garnered in the name of the political” (Wiegman 2012, 123), indicate the extent to which the very move toward the political, in identity domains, has become profession-alized. And it is that scene, where political critique is habituated and sustained by a context of professional reproduction, that anchors the object that Object Lessons teaches us to read. I have attempted to deliberate on the particularity of the book’s rendering of that object in order to consider further the asymmetrical ways in which academic feminism has been positioned in relation to other fields that the term identity knowledges is deployed to organize.

Object Lessons is a remarkable, powerful work. It has the potential to give occasion to long overdue and heretofore unlikely conversations among students, teachers, lovers, and stakeholders of identity knowledges, conversations on what we want our work to do, on what our work actually does, on what our work demands of us, on what our work demands in spite of us, on what our work promises to us, on how promising constitutes our work (even in our moments of critical despair), on what, ultimately, the substance of our work is. I have read Object Lessons as a confrontation, most centrally, with the generativity of the promise that structures the critical act, and with critique as an unquestioned good. It is a confrontation that plays the game of critique so well that it can refuse to go where a critique of critique would logically lead—to the promise that there is something beyond critique that will be adequate to what we have invested in it. This also means that Object Lessons will not necessarily satisfy what I have come to want in the course of reading and re-reading it: a way of confronting the consequences of the installation of critique as “both the figure of justice and the agency through which it can be achieved” (81). Critique has overwhelmingly come to define what it means to use our collective capacities successfully. But what would it look like to put critique into the service of using the collectivity that emerges through our fields, practices, and classrooms toward different ends?

Nick Mitchell teaches African American studies, feminist studies, and critical theory at the University of California, Riverside. His current book project, Disciplinary Mat-ters: Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Neoliberal University, develops an archival approach and conceptual framework that considers black studies and women’s studies formations since the 1970s as sites where the neoliberal university first learned to do business. He can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1. There is an unruliness to the singular-plural form, grammatically and otherwise, that we approach, for instance, when speaking of these United States, women’s studies, ethnic studies, and so on. In the interest of mitigating somewhat, identity knowledges (in


the singular) draws attention to the objectness of the object itself; in the plural, identity knowledges refers to the array of fields that the term conjoins.

2. Kelly Coogan-Gehr (2011), for instance, troubles the now commonsense origin narratives that locate the origin of academic feminism in New Left, feminist, and civil rights struggles in the United States, linking US academic feminism’s emergence with larger “transformations in higher education associated with the Cold War era” (1). Danielle Bouchard (2012) claims that academic feminism’s embrace of difference is inseparable from a political imaginary that transforms difference into a problem to be managed. Mark Chiang (2009) forays into Asian American studies’ political-intellectual crisis of representation, putting pressure on the field’s attempts to regard “itself as a site of extraterritoriality, somehow figuratively outside of the institution despite being literally inside” (5). Noliwe Rooks (2006) investigates the strategies of institutionalizing black studies that have conscripted the field to an instrumental—that is, diversifying—function.

3. Mike Thelwell (1969) cites a “joke,” printed in the New York Times and circulated mirthfully at a meeting of administrators of the United Negro College Fund, which had to do “with a student applying for a job and being told by a computer that his training in black studies had prepared him only to pick cotton” (704). Talk about the antithesis of a progress narrative!

References

Bouchard, Danielle. 2012. A Community of Disagreement: Feminism and the University. New York: Peter Lang.

Chiang, Mark. 2009. The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University. New York: NYU Press.

Coogan-Gehr, Kelly. 2011. The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion: Excavating a Feminist Archive. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hechinger, Fred. 1969. “New Challenges to the Value of Separatism and Black Studies.” New York Times, January 19.

McIntosh, Peggy. 1988. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Working Paper 189, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley, Mas-sachusetts. http://www.welcometable.net/archivedsite/documents/white-priv.pdf

Mitchell, Nick. 2012. “Curricular Objects: ‘Women of Color,’ Feminist Anti-Racism, and the Consolidation of Women’s Studies.” Unpublished manuscript.

Rooks, Noliwe. 2006. White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. Boston: Beacon Press.

Soto, Sandra K., and Miranda Joseph. 2010. “Neoliberalism and the Battle over Ethnic Studies in Arizona.” Thought & Action: The NEA Higher Education Journal (Fall): 45–56.

Thelwell, Mike. 1969. “Black Studies: A Political Perspective.” Massachusetts Review 10 (4): 703–13.

Wiegman, Robyn. 1999. “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity.” Boundary 2 26 (3): 115–50.

———. 2002. “Academic Feminism Against Itself.” NWSA Journal 14 (2): 18–37.———. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Objects, Objects, Objects (and Some Objections)

Michael O’Rourke


Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/ff.2013.0041


Access provided by Duke University Libraries (19 Dec 2013 18:32 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.o-rourke.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.o-rourke.html



Objects, Objects, Objects (and Some Objections)

Michael O’Rourke

Diffractive Reading (or Why This Will Not Be a Critique)

The theoretico-pedagogical aims of Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons (2012) could not be clearer from the very beginning. At the end of an introductory chapter, tellingly entitled “How to Read This Book,” Wiegman informs us that her book “is not, then, a critique. It is not even a critique of critique” (35). This dossier piece of mine is not a critique either—of Wiegman’s work, of the book—for reasons I will, hopefully, go on to make clear (they have ethico-theoretico-pedagogical stakes of their own). However, I want to tarry a little at the outset with why my essay is “a critique of critique.”

In a much cited article from 2004, the French sociologist Bruno Latour asserted that critique had “run out of steam” (225), and, for my part, I no longer accept invitations to critique the work of others. This is because critique no longer interests me, and, as Karen Barad explains, “critique is over-rated, over-emphasized, and over-utilized, to the detriment of feminism” (Barad, qtd. in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 49). Critique is just another way we teach our students or our readers to trash the work of another author, to pick holes in their oeuvre, their arguments, and their concepts. It has very little to do with close reading or “serious engagement,” since very often critique is just too easy or plain lazy.1 Barad points out the negative critical valences of critique and warns that it is “all too often not a deconstructive practice, that is, a practice of reading for the constitutive exclusions of those ideas we cannot do without, but a destructive practice meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put someone or something down—another scholar, another feminist, a discipline, an approach, et cetera” (ibid.).

Michael O’Rourke · 191

In place of this all too automatic form of dismissal, Barad suggests we employ diffractive practices of reading, modes of attention which are not moti-vated by the hermeneutics of suspicion, but are rather “suggestive, creative, and visionary” (50). This piece answers Barad’s urgent call for diffractive, intra-active reading which would oppose itself to the pernicious (and nonreparative) operations of critique, and it does so for ethical, as well as pedagogical, reasons. What I wish the reader to take away from this article is an attentiveness to Object Lessons, and a different patterning of engagement to the claims and arguments the book makes. Diffractive reading is not close reading (at least not in the traditional sense), but neither is it simple dismissal; rather, my diffractive reading practice (elsewhere I call it just reading), which is reparative in the last instance, proceeds through scenes of engagement and intra-active readings of texts, figures, and archives. It might not always be clear why I have chosen the scenes I have (however, I do hope that it is) because, as Barad (2010) explains, in this way of reading

[s]cenes are neither discontinuous nor continuous with one another (or themselves). (They are not wholly separate, nor parts of a whole.) There is no smooth temporal (or spatial) topology connecting beginning and end. Each scene diffracts various temporalities, iteratively differentiating and entangling, within and across, the field of spacetimemattering. Scenes never rest but are reconfigured within and are dispersed across and threaded through one another. . . . The reader should feel free to jump from any scene to another (is there any other way to proceed?) and still have a sense of connectivity through the traces of variously entangled threads and of the (re)workings of mutual constitution and unending iterative reconfiguring (of sections, reader, writer, ideas). (244–45)2

Each scene below discusses, as Object Lessons itself does, a particular object relation or set of intra-actions and entanglements. My first object is Wiegman herself.

Objects of Affection

So, with all that necessarily laid out, let me reiterate: I cannot critique Robyn Wiegman because for as long as I can remember she has been an object of theoretical affection for me. I can call to mind exactly the primal scene of reading her work. It was in the summer of 2002 when I encountered an essay in Signs, which also bore the same title as her most recent book, Object Lessons. The subtitle then was “Men, Masculinity, and the Sign Women.” At that time, my own writing and research was concerned with the historicization of queer masculinities, but also with the theorization by a straight male of a nonhetero-normative theoretical optic for thinking through heteroerotic sexual practices.3 The article in Signs contained all of the signatures I have come to associate with


Wiegman as a reader: thoughtful, probing, provocative, generous, careful. One can see there the developing lineaments of Object Lessons as Wiegman worries over the appellations women’s studies, gender studies, and masculinity studies, and, as always, she is particularly concerned with the formations of particular fields, which she will call identity knowledges in the later book. Compellingly, she concludes that “the theoretical inadequacy of women is, in fact, an important critical achievement; rather than rushing to do away with it, in a replacement fantasy of categorical completeness, we might consider the intellectual uses to which its inadequacy can be put” (2001, 383). Wiegman’s engagements with her objects, here as elsewhere, always work the productive incoherences of “identity objects of study” (380):

In tracking the theoretical elaboration of men and masculinity as objects of study, this article demonstrates how feminism’s critical interrogations of gender have productively disassembled the normative cultural discourse that weds masculinity to men and thinks about women only in the register of the feminine. Such “unmaking,” if you will, of the category of men importantly remakes masculinity as pertinent to, if not constitutive of, female subjectivity, thereby complicating feminism’s ability to negotiate the distinctions and inter-connections among sex, sexuality, and gender. Given such critical possibility, why would anyone hesitate to redefine feminism’s institutional domain under the sign of gender [emphasis in original]? My answer to this question takes shape [emphasis added] in the article’s final section, where I return to the prob-lem of representational coherence to consider how feminism as a knowledge project can never fulfill the demand to do justice to identity. (357–58)

Who would hesitate? Well, Wiegman would. She always does over her objects, and in doing so, she always takes her time.4 That is also to say that Wiegman’s projects unfurl and take shape over the longue duree. We might note that the questions posed in this 2001 essay had already been treated in Feminism Beside Itself (coedited with Diane Elam [1995]), American Anatomies (1995), and Women’s Studies on Its Own (2002). We will come back to this point about the gradual development of Wiegman’s oeuvre and its preoccupations, but it is also worth mentioning two further things about this essay: firstly, it signposts Wiegman’s longstanding interest in historical, political, and institutional time (long before queer theory’s so-called temporality turn) and the idiom of failure (long before queer theory’s so-called failure turn);5 Secondly, its “thinking homosociality” (2001, 363) with Eve Sedgwick prefigures her renewed interest in Sedgwick’s work in “Eve’s Triangles: Queer Studies Beside Itself” (forthcom-ing; a text we will return to shortly). And we might take further note that the title of this recent essay on Sedgwick harks back to the title of Wiegman’s first edited collection Feminism Beside Itself (1995). That might be one way of describing Wiegman’s corpus or what it does, what it performs: it puts fields of identity objects beside themselves. A not insignificant by-product of this


theoretico-political displacement is that readers are also beside themselves as they start to rethink their own relation to their objects and their desire for (or fantasies of) coherence. Another word for the experience of reading Wiegman might be fascination (a fascination that is shared) as her work shapes and reshapes what you think you already knew.6

Cover Story: Wiegman’s Shapes Project (1999–present)

It has become something of a queer theoretical commonplace to discuss the cover art for one’s book, and to make specific claims about what that image says about or does for the content of the text. We might mention, to take some recent examples, Judith Halberstam’s discussion of Judie Bamber’s “I’ll Give you Something to Cry About (Dead Baby Finch)” in The Queer Art of Failure (2011, 105–6, 116–18); Lauren Berlant’s note on Riva Lehrer’s “If Body: Riva and Zora in Middle Age” in her book Cruel Optimism (2011, 264–67); and Annamarie Jagose’s prefatory remarks on Jannick Deslauriers’s “Typewriter (Crinoline, Lace, Organza, and Thread)” in Orgasmology (2013, xvii).7 In this scene, I want to dwell on the cover of Object Lessons (and by dwelling, I am, of course, gesturing towards what Wiegman has to say in that book about inhabitation) and some of the lessons it teaches us about the span of Wiegman’s work.8 The cover art, by the artist Allan McCollum, is titled The Shapes Project (2005–Present), which seems apt since, as Wiegman tells us, the six chapters gathered between the binds have been taking shape and been reshaped over that long period (with 1999 being the year in which the first version of chapter 3, “The Political Con-scious,” on Whiteness Studies appeared). In Object Lessons, she pays a great deal of attention to shapes, but she particularly interrogates the critical ambitions that have shaped and sustained US identity knowledges for the last forty years. There are countless uses of the words shape and shapes in Object Lessons, but one instance is, I think, especially salient for the ways in which it maps Wieg-man’s intellectual sojourn (another favorite word of hers) and the contours of her academic work since 1995. She writes that

I attend to the critical and institutional complexities that have shaped iden-tity’s academic sojourn. By focusing on the political animations [another favorite word of Object Lessons] of various academic fields and the institutional contexts that attend them, each chapter explores a specific object relation in order to consider how it shapes a field’s political pursuits: in Women’s Studies, gender; in Queer Studies, antinormativity; in Whiteness Studies, antiracist whiteness; in American Studies, internationalization; and in nearly all of the fields I write about, intersectionality. (8; emphasis added)

Object Lessons, and the title of its cover image, tells us a lot about Wieg-man’s own critical habits and ambitions, from her very earliest publications right up to this one. If Object Lessons can be described as looking at the distinct,


yet overlapping institutional itineraries (another of Object Lessons’s keywords) of the study of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, then we can see that Wieg-man has always been analyzing the “political desire” that underwrites women’s studies (Feminism Beside Itself [1995]; Women’s Studies on Its Own [2002]), ethnic studies (American Anatomies [1995]), sexuality studies (AIDS and the National Body [1997]), and American studies (The Futures of American Studies [2002]). Later, on the same page as the quotation above, she writes that “in its various explorations of identity knowledges, Object Lessons takes shape as both an answer—‘nothing’—and a proposition: that the work ongoing on [sic] is as fantastic and incalculable as the belief we generate from it” (2012, 8; emphasis added). The cover image speaks to us about the “ongoingness”—for Wiegman and for her readers—of working over and through identity knowledges. The project is “fantastic” but “incalculable,” without coherence or any guarantees; more importantly, these are arguments that are always worth having.

Diagramming Queer Theory

Queer theory is something that Wiegman has been arguing for and about for a long time because she believes it has a future and one that is worth investing in.9 Object Lessons’ chapter 5, “Critical Kinship” (on intersectionality), ends with an admission about what interests Wiegman most. This is “not theoretical resolution, as if any of us can master the meaning of the relations we inherit from worldly actions we did not intend. If I am convinced of anything, it is that no matter what we do, mistakes will happen—and that knowing this is no compensation for the fact that living means living unprepared” (300). One of the key lessons of the final chapter, “The Vertigo of Critique (Rethinking Heteronormativity)” on queer theory, is that the queer theoretical endeavor is, for Wiegman, an open project, one that is alive, lively, and incapable of theoreti-cal resolution—and we must be prepared for that provisionality and reiterability rather than filing away queer theory as over and done with. Among the many things I have learned from Wiegman and Object Lessons is the inextricability of queerness, living, and writing. In a recent essay on the much-rumored death of queer theory, Michael Warner (2012) also attends to the ways in which the theoretical intermeshes with ways of living, writing that

[m]uch of the social effervescence [of queer theory] is only felt indirectly on the page. But it has always been also there on the page, in the work of writing. That might seem like an odd thing to say, since for mainstream journalists (as for Larry Kramer) queer theory is the extreme case of “difficult” academic prose, and Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick were both singled out for mockery by the self-appointed guardians of accessibility. We are often told that queer theory lacks “clarity.” But technical clarity and journalistic accessibility are not the same, and the attack on difficult style has often been a means to


reassert the very standards of common sense that queer theory rightly chal-lenged. Moreover, even the most difficult prose has given people room for being serious in ways sanctioned nowhere else. And so much of the writing is remarkable. Think of Sedgwick’s bristling, coiled paragraphs; or Berlant’s ability to work so unpredictably across registers to produce a knowledge that is both live and speculative (as in “Beyonding is a rhetoric people use when they have a desire not to be stuck”); or all those astonishing shoes-on-the-table moments like the opening sentence of Bersani’s still-controversial essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?”: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.” (n.p.)

Object Lessons and Wiegman’s writing—she tells us that her seventh-grade teacher taught her the value and “serious love” of and for the shape of a “well-diagrammed sentence” (2012, 9n9)—are filled with “bristling, coiled paragraphs.” Here is just one example from the final page of her introduction, which has a Sedgwickean axiomatic feel to it:

Object Lessons is not, then, a critique. It is not even a critique of critique. . . . It is not an intervention. I am not trying to make us conscious of critical habits so that we can change them. . . . It is not an argument against other arguments, nor a dismissal of what others have said or done. . . . It is not a new theory. It offers no new objects or analytics of study. . . . It is an inhabitation of the world-making stakes of identity knowledges and the field imaginary that sutures us to them—a performance, in other words, of the risk and reward, the amnesia and optimism, and the fear and pleasure sustained by living with and within them. (35)

It is characteristically modest of Wiegman to claim that Object Lessons “offers no new objects or analytics of study.” This really is not true, because she has the rare gift, which few other critics possess, for feeling out critical tempera-tures or atmospheres. For example—and let’s stick with queer theory as our object—Wiegman has put forward, in the closing chapter of Object Lessons, a compelling case for an anti-antinormativity which would, in its effects, be field de-centering.

As well as her well-diagrammed sentences and paragraphs, Wiegman also has a remarkable Berlant-like ability to work “unpredictably across registers” to produce knowledges that are “both live and speculative”; for example, “the problem, then, is not what we cling to, but the way we convince ourselves that we don’t” (125). And, of course, there are lots of “astonishing shoes-on-the-table moments” (as well as some moments in the book just about shoes). Here is one of them: “Not just: how were we fucked by gender, but also: was it possible to fuck without fucking with gender?” (129). And another, this time in Bersanian show-stopping mode: “queer inquiry cannot have the sex it says it wants without losing what it wants most from having had it” (342–43).


Eve’s Triangles

Most recently, as her editor, I have fallen in love with my first object all over again. In her chapter “Eve’s Triangles: Queer Studies Beside Itself” (which is forthcoming in a book I am editing titled Reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Gender, Sexuality, Embodiment), Wiegman takes up another shape, the triangle, which she deploys to diagram the calculus of Sedgwick’s own writing projects and pedagogy.10 In Sedgwick’s oeuvre, for Wiegman, the figure of the triangle, has points as a “narrative form, [a] critical hermeneutic, [an] affective terrain, and [a] political project” (forthcoming). I was reminded as I read this essay, read through Object Lessons, and thought about Wiegman’s and Sedgwick’s disciplinary attachments, of a present I received a year or so ago from my friend Rosemary Deller. She made a set of triangles behind each of which appears a quotation, which I was challenged to identify, from a text by Sedgwick. In a note which accompanied the triangles, Rose explained: “in honour of your talk of me folding thoughts of Eve into tiny triangles, and a 12 year old I know who too loves to fold paper—a gift-game to help you to melt all the Michaels that have, and forever will, circle around Eve.”

It is telling that for the French, object lessons refers to the French kinder-garten school methods leçon de choses, which include hands-on learning, field trips, finger-painting, and crafts. In her chapter, as Wiegman circles around Eve’s triangles, takes a peri-performative field trip around and beside her queer theoretical grammars, touches her again, and inhabits the archive she has bequeathed and breathed to us, I cannot help but wish (aspiration is another of Wiegman’s favorite watchwords) such a gift-game, using sentences from Wiegman this time, into existence.11 After all, through Wiegman’s capacious attentions to her, Eve’s objects, her writing, live on. Coming after Eve, wanting Eve, with Wiegman is the crafting of yet another shapes project, one which is always ongoing.12

Curious Reading

Remember that for Sedgwick, queer is relational and strange. The last of my objects is the book Object Lessons itself and an objection I wish to raise to a curi-ous review of it in Feminist Theory by Sara Ahmed (2012).13 Ahmed admits early on that “this is a curious book: a book that responds to our own programmes and institutions with curiosity. There is an ethics to this curiosity” (345), but Ahmed seems unable to invest herself fully in the world-making aspirations and lively speculations of Object Lessons. In particular, she sets up Wiegman’s book (in a fashion which undoubtedly would puzzle the author herself) as somehow associated with the “object turn” in contemporary post-continental philosophy, which Ahmed has been vehemently opposed to. In an endnote, Ahmed explains that “I am referring here to an area of philosophy known as object orientated


[sic] philosophy (OOP) or object-oriented ontology (OOO),” and she suggests that Object Lessons helps us to “speculate what lessons might be learned from how objects become our object” (348; emphasis added). But Ahmed is weirded out by and unwilling to take up that pedagogical, speculative challenge. The final paragraph of her review is worth quoting at length:

I was left uneasy by some aspects of the book (which is not necessarily a cri-tique: who would want to be left easy by a book?). Object Lessons continually evokes or refers to itself in such a way that the book is attributed with agency: “in the context of Object Lessons’s overall intentions” (306); “Object Lessons has sought to convince” (318); “from the vantage of Object Lessons” (326); “Object Lessons has spent no time” (326); “Object Lessons has been interested” (326). Even the opening sentence of the book refers to the book by title, “If Object Lessons accomplishes what I want” (1). One wonders with Marx: does something become an object (one might specify: a commodity object) through reification, that is, by cutting off the object from, say, the body of the writer/labourer? Of course writing depends on these cut-off points . . . as a reader it can end up feeling as if the book has become about itself: that the book is the creation of an-itself. Perhaps this bookish sense is how the book performs the argument that Wiegman is making: objects come right back at us, just when we think we are letting them go. (ibid.)14

Given that my own work is currently focused on the entanglements between feminism, queer theory, and object-oriented ontology, I could not help but be taken up by, and feel easy with, Wiegman’s many (almost Latourian) invocations of her book as a “thing.”15 Warner’s argument about the boldness of queer inquiry gets it right in so far as the very best of queer writing—or any writing—is alive. We might go even further and suggest, with Eileen A. Joy, that all texts are sentient, actants that are (to Ahmed’s horror) “attributed with agency,” which is the point I was earlier trying to make about the cover of Object Lessons. In “Weird Reading” (2013), Joy reaches for the very heart of the matter:

My own purpose in crafting speculative reading modes follows from a desire to capture the traces of the strange voluptuosity and singular, in- or post-human tendencies of textual objects, but without mystifying texts and/or risking some kind of new sanctity, or theology, of texts, which are always co-agential with us in “earthy ways”—which is to say, enworlded with us. Our consciousness is as much formed by real-world experience as it is by experience in imaginary world, and the lines between the two are so entangled as to be impossible to separate. . . . I’m influenced by Jane Bennett’s “vibrant” materialism in which objects, which could be texts, are seen to “act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” outside of human will and design—the quasi here is important because it helps us to see the ways in which something, including a human or a text, is neither fully a subject nor


fully an object, but a sort of “constructor of intersubjectivity” (which could also be interobjectivity), a “station” or “relay” between being and relation, between the “I” and the “It.” Persons are thingly, too, after all. (30)

Weird reading, speculative reading, or even just curious reading is what Wiegman calls inhabitation.16 In a flat ontology where persons and things are enmeshed and co-constitutively enworlded, we can begin to privilege a “weak theory.” And this is what Wiegman always does as she fashions nonparanoid modes of reading and builds what Joy calls “a welcoming pavilion of thought” (34). As Kathleen Stewart (2008, 72) explains, this is Sedgwick’s reparative thought—as opposed to paranoid or strong theory—which does not try to set up an opposition between “the analytic subject, her concept, and the world.” Stewart’s weak theory sounds just like Wiegman’s ambitions for Object Lessons, or even the book’s ambitions for itself: “for me, then, the point of theory is not to judge the value of analytic objects or to somehow get their representation ‘right’ but to wonder where they might go and what potential modes of know-ing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them as a potential or resonance” (73).

And this, of course, brings us back to curiosity. In a recent (2013) interview in Society and Space, the interviewer, David Seitz, says to Lauren Berlant that he finds her thinking about objects “resonates with things that Robyn Wiegman and the later writings of Eve Sedgwick are up to. They don’t displace any of the political stakes but they also ask other questions about what else is going on, and remain fundamentally curious” (n.p.). I cannot speak for Wiegman, but I do imagine that Berlant’s answer ventriloquizes her: “I’m all for training my students in curiosity” (ibid.). Berlant also wonders whether the “project of queer pedagogy is not just the project of distributing more fabulousness, or historical knowledge, but also of having curiosity about the object?” In not taking the object for granted, Wiegman distributes a whole lot of fabulousness, historical knowledge, and curiosity about her objects. In doing so, she erects a habitation for critical thought and a welcoming pavilion for both persons and things. Wiegman’s is an unfinished world that I would not mind living and flourishing in.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Robyn Wiegman for her friendship, support, and for the constant stream of pdfs keeping me up to date with what is going on in queer studies on her side of the pond.

Michael O’Rourke teaches continental philosophy at Independent Colleges, Dublin. He works mostly at the intersections between queer theory and continental philoso-phy, and, among other things, is currently working on books concerning Eve Kosofsky


Sedgwick, Jacques Derrida, black metal theory, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and the ethics of reading. Some of his many publications are available at http://independentcolleges.academia.edu/MichaelORourke. He can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1. My personal copy of Object Lessons contains a kind inscription from Wiegman thanking me for my “serious engagement” with the book.

2. For another example of diffractive reading which engages with a recent queer theoretical text, see my “Time’s Tangles” on Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (forthcoming in Social Text: Periscope).

3. See my “On the Eve of a Queer-Straight Future: Notes Toward an Antinormative Heteroerotic” (2005).

4. I am unable to discuss, due to space restrictions, two earlier essays which were also formative for me, but encountered later that same year: Wiegman’s “Introduction: Mapping the Lesbian Postmodern” (1994) and “What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion” (1999).

5. See Wiegman’s “Feminism, Institutionalism, and the Idiom of Failure” (1999) and “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures” (2000).

6. Although I must confess that my first encounter with reading Wiegman was one tinged with pain just as much as fascination. I read the Signs essay by my father’s hospital bed as he lay dying. I could not, as it turned out, give the presentation at a conference on men as mal(e)contents in feminist theory, which was so heavily influenced by this essay. It is, of course, possible to tangle up my painful reading experience with Wiegman’s own of losing her friend Thomas Yingling to AIDS in 1992 and the 1997 publication of his AIDS and the National Body, which she edited.

7. See Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (2011); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011); and Annamarie Jagose, Orgasmology (2013). It is no coincidence that all these books, like Object Lessons, have been published by Duke University Press and designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan.

8. If I recall correctly from our discussions, Wiegman did not choose the cover image. It should be noted that Buchanan, the designer of the book’s dust jacket, is an award-winning designer. See the Duke University Press’s website, http://dukeupress .typepad.com/dukeupresslog/2013/02/congratulations-to-our-celebrated-designers.html.

9. Wiegman distinguishes between queer theory and queer studies in a way that I do not, but I leave this minor disagreement to one side here. I will say, however, that it would not work in the same way as the differentiation between disability studies and crip theory. This is one of the identity fields that Wiegman does not treat in her book.

10. For an earlier version see “Eve, At a Distance” (2012).11. Ian Bogost would call this carpentry; see his Alien Phenomenology (2012). It strikes

me that the images on the cover of Object Lessons are like children’s jigsaw pieces, which one might try (and perhaps fail) to put together.

12. See the posthumously published essays by Sedgwick in The Weather in Proust (2011).


13. See Sara Ahmed’s (2012) review of Object Lessons in Feminist Theory. For a much more nuanced take on the book, see Nick Mitchell’s review in Signs (2013).

14. This is a recurrent rhetorical feature of the review, as Ahmed dances uncom-fortably around her object. This all sounds rather curious coming from Ahmed, who wrote a book on tables and other objects (including pebbles), which has been extremely influential for object-oriented ontology. See her Queer Phenomenology (2007).

15. See, in particular, my “Girls Welcome!!!” (2011), “The Afterlives of Queer Theory” (2011), and “X, Welcome!!!” (2011). My book Queering Speculative Real-ism is forthcoming from Punctum Books. It is no coincidence, I like to think, that Bogost, one of the founders of object-oriented ontology, has just launched a new book series called Object Lessons. Curiously, Ahmed is on the editorial board (see http://objectsobjectsobjects.com/).

16. For an essay on inhabitation, feminism, and object-oriented ontology, see my “Princess of Networks” (2012).

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2007. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

———. 2012. “Review of Object Lessons.” Feminist Theory 13 (3): 345–48.Barad, Karen. 2010. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheri-

tance: Dis/Continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today 3 (2): 240–68.

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. “ ‘Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires,

Yearns and Remembers’: An Interview with Karen Barad.” In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, 48–70. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.

Elam, Diane, and Robyn Wiegman, eds. 1995. Feminism Beside Itself. New York: Routledge.

Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Jagose, Annamarie. 2013. Orgasmology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Johnson, Barbara. 2008. Persons and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Joy, Eileen A. 2013. “Weird Reading.” Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism 4

(June): 28–34.Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to

Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–48.Mitchell, Nick. 2013. “Review of Object Lessons.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture

and Society 38 (3): 739–47.O’Rourke, Michael. 2005. “On the Eve of a Queer-Straight Future: Notes Toward an

Antinormative Heteroerotic.” Feminism & Psychology 15 (1): 111–16.———. 2011. “The Afterlives of Queer Theory.” Continent. 1 (2): 102–16.———. 2011. “Girls Welcome!!!: Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology and

Queer Theory.” Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism 2 (May): 275–312.


———. 2011. “X, Welcome!!! Michael O’Rourke in Conversation with Stanimir Panayotov.” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 8 (2): 97–135.

———. 2012. “Princess of Networks: Lisa Baraitser’s Object-Oriented Maternities.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 13 (2): 94–100.

———. Forthcoming. Queering Speculative Realism. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books.———. Forthcoming. “Time’s Tangles.” Social Text: Periscope.Pease, Donald E., and Robyn Wiegman, eds. 2002. The Futures of American Studies.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2011. The Weather in Proust, edited by Jonathan Goldberg.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Seitz, David. 2013. “Interview with Lauren Berlant,” March 22. Society and Space—

Environment and Planning D. http://societyandspace.com/2013/03/22/interview- with-lauren-berlant/.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2008. “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World.” Journal of Folklore Research 45 (1): 71–82.

Warner, Michael. 2012. “Queer and Then? The End of Queer Theory?” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 1. http://chronicle.com/article/QueerThen-/130161/.

Wiegman, Robyn. 1994. “Introduction: Mapping the Lesbian Postmodern.” In The Les-bian Postmodern, edited by Laura L. Doan, 1–20. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1995. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

———. 1999. “Feminism, Institutionalism, and the Idiom of Failure.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11 (3): 107–36.

———. 1999. “What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion.” Critical Inquiry 25 (2): 362–79.

———. 2000. “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures.” New Literary History 31 (4): 805–25.———. 2001. “Object Lessons: Men, Masculinity, and the Sign Women.” Signs: Journal

of Women in Culture and Society 26 (2): 355–89.———, ed. 2002. Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional

Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.———. 2012. “Eve, At a Distance.” Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal

in the Humanities and Social Sciences 2. http://www.humanities.uci.edu/collective/hctr/trans-scripts/2012/2012_02_11.pdf.

———. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Yingling, Thomas. 1997. AIDS and the National Body, edited by Robyn Wiegman.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.———. Forthcoming. “Eve’s Triangles: Queer Studies Beside Itself.” In Reading Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick: Gender, Sexuality, Embodiement, edited by Michael O’Rourke.

Wishful Thinking

Robyn Wiegman





http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.wiegman.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v025/25.3.wiegman.html



Wishful Thinking

Robyn Wiegman

Q: How do you know when an analysis is done? A: When you have a different story to tell.

Q: How do you know when the story is different?

According to most definitions, an object lesson is a pedagogical tool for learn-ing how to grasp the complex meaning of a principle, moral, or ideal. It works by using real-world examples to make what is abstract both tangible and clear. Without the object, there would be no lesson, which might suggest that the object is what is most dear. But the measure of pedagogical success is typically oriented in the opposite direction, as the object’s value is contingent on its abil-ity to satisfy the pedagogue’s needs. Thus enmeshed in illuminating ideas that live beyond it, the object plays its part as if no interpretative complexity could possibly attend it. What is at stake in this instrumentalization? Or more to the point, exactly what kind of lesson does this object lesson teach?

As readers of this dossier know from the generous and compelling com-mentaries that comprise it, Object Lessons (2012) is a lengthy meditation on the work that objects of study perform in academic fields that take identity as a key figure for defining and enacting their commitment to social justice. The lessons it aims to track emerge largely from the psychoanalytic framework it adopts, which draws attention to the affective and aspirational complexities of the object relations that shape the scholar’s disciplinary world. Its primary interest lies not in what scholars take their objects of study to mean, but in what we want them to do. This distinction is underscored throughout the book by a critical idiom that translates the apparatus of scholarly discipline—method, argument, theory, and analysis—into psychoanalytic terms in order to consider the desire, anxiety, attachment, fantasy, disavowal, transference, and pleasure

Robyn Wiegman · 203

alive in the critical habits of scholarly work. By shifting the framework from the epistemological to the affective and ideational, Object Lessons deliberates, in its own words, on “the political desire that attends both our relationship to our objects of study . . . and our relationship to that relationship as well” (8). In doing so, it invites conversations, as the commentary by Nick Mitchell so nicely puts it, “on what our work demands of us, on what our work demands in spite of us, on what our work promises to us, [and] on how promising constitutes our work” (188).

Given the endlessly contentious reputation of psychoanalysis, it is perhaps no surprise that Object Lessons has been read as a polemic. But its aim was never to take, let alone to defend, a position. Following Avery Gordon (1997), it wanted to cultivate pleasure in the detour, which meant relinquishing belief in the destination as the ultimate measure of an argument’s worth. By focus-ing instead on what gets muted, ignored, or simply lost along the way, Object Lessons sought to craft an interpretative environment capable of nurturing the “magnetism between ourselves and our objects of study,” as Zahid R. Chaudhary writes in his introduction to this dossier. Shannan Hayes’s commentary rede-scribes this environment in temporal terms as a commitment to “slow thinking,” which orients Object Lessons away from resolution and toward a pedagogical engagement with “postponement” (176). My name for the book’s interpretative strategy is inhabitation, which I offer as a counter to the heightened suspicions of critique in order to dwell in the intimate ecology of what I think of as the affective atmosphere, to use Teresa Brennan’s (2004, 1) language, of identity’s politically invested academic domains. Chaudhary reads this dwelling not as “an avoidance of desire’s movements, but a performance of the captivation that rivets it” (132). In his estimation, this performance is the political project of the book: “in order to do justice to its own objects—institutional and disciplinary formations, the movements of political desire—[Object Lessons] cannot and indeed must not offer directions” (131; emphasis in original).

In organizing this dossier under the title “Inhabitations,” Feminist Forma-tions answers my hope to find readers who will not only “insinuat[e] themselves into the relationships that Object Lessons describes, analyzes, and performs,” but also grapple with “the resonances as much as the contradictions that arise between what I say and what they want” (2012, 25). For many commentators, this entails, as Object Lessons predicts, a turn toward their own objects of study to define, refute, or remake what they take as its most useful—or disconcert-ing—implications. Some readers—chiefly, Miranda Joseph, Michael O’Rourke, Janet R. Jakobsen, and Hayes—use their commentaries to inhabit Object Les-sons’ stated intentions, delineating its moods and ambitions by situating its labor in a longer history of scholarly and institutional work, both mine and their own. Others—Elizabeth Freeman and Antonio Viego—parse the book’s psychoanalytic investments, forging implicit disagreements about the task of “reconstruct[ing] political desire,” as Freeman optimistically casts Object Lessons’


theoretical purchase (171). Still other readers—Robert Reid-Pharr, Anjali Arondekar, and Mitchell—challenge Object Lessons to be less spellbound by the double binds that enthrall it. “Is there an outside to this plangent object lesson of recursivity and return . . .,” Arondekar writes, “or are we doomed to lessons of repetition without rupture?” (144). For Mitchell, an orientation toward the future is forged by pushing back against critique’s capture of “our collective capacities” (188). “But what would it look like,” he writes at the end of his commentary, “to put critique into the service of using the collectivity that emerges through our fields, practices, and classrooms toward different ends?” (188). And in Reid-Pharr’s estimation, the counter-lesson that readers of Object Lessons need is to know that engaging “our intimacy with the machine” is one active motor for pursuing and achieving “fundamental progressive change” (153). My response proceeds in the rhetorical tenor of amplification by returning to three kinds of relations that are animated by my respondents’ discussions: complicity, critique, and repetition. Each provides an opportunity to reflect on how the inhabitations of Object Lessons continue to do critical work on me.

My own quick survey of the book’s itinerary goes like this: Object Lessons begins with a chapter on women’s studies called “Doing Justice with Objects,” which considers how the turn to gender in the aftermath of women’s now famous categorical failure operates as a progress narrative for the field, inviting us to imagine what terms, analytics, and critical capacities will be needed when gender is outmatched by the political aspirations invested in it. The second chapter returns to the still-vexed encounter between feminism and queer theory to reframe debates about theory and practice in terms of the discordant tem-poralities that attend identity’s academic institutionalization; neither a lament nor a celebration, this chapter considers how social-movement projects and their academic itineraries diverge. Other chapters focus on critical investments in emergent object and analytic frameworks and the promises they make for rendering critical practice adequate to the political desires that inspire it. In queer studies, I examine how the commitment to anti-normativity that fuels the field’s political self-definition is itself a normalizing force for disciplinary reproduction. In ethnic studies, my object is the deconstruction of whiteness and the paradoxical investment in consciousness that accompanies anti-racism’s own enabling fictions. In American studies, I track the way that the discourse of internationalization has become the latest critical lever aimed at counter-ing the imperial power and globalizing force that the object of study wields, identifying the ways in which the move to be analytically outside “America” is tacitly inside its geopolitical imaginary. And in the penultimate chapter, which I think is the most challenging to the dispensation and political imaginaries of all identity-oriented fields, I consider how the juridical origins of intersectional-ity have been ignored or eclipsed as the concept has been transformed from a minoritizing discourse about black women’s position in anti-discrimination law to a universalizing claim about methodological and analytic inclusion.


By reading across identity fields of study—or what I call collectively iden-tity knowledges—the book’s six chapters pay attention to the political desire and critical habits that attend the study of race, gender, sexuality, and nation today. It does so not to give an account, as Mitchell would have it, of “these formations as a whole” (181; emphasis added), but to meditate on the singular belief they share regardless of the differences that importantly distinguish them from one another: that critical practice is a world-building political agency. In this emphasis, Object Lessons diverges from the two most well-known analyses of academic institutionalization now institutionalized in identity-knowledge domains, both of which focus on how the radical potentials of fields devoted to the study of race, gender, and sexuality have been undone. The first emphasizes institutionally orchestrated sabotage, co-optation, and the sheer negating force of administrative indifference; the second highlights complicity with large historical reconfigurations of the geopolitical landscape, rethinking the US university’s organization of the social body in relation, most recently, to the twin compacts of neoliberalism and multiculturalism. My work’s divergence from these readings is not a matter of disagreement. Like many before me, I have spent enormous time trying to make the universities that employed me answer the political commitments that identity knowledges have nurtured in both their local institutional insurgence and in the broader sphere in which they function to ease the contradictions, even as they hone them, in complex national, transnational, and international circuits of power. And like many of my interlocutors here, I have been exhausted by the routine ease with which our political desires have been converted into “the object,” in Viego’s words, “of an institution’s need” (156). Rather than signaling a timidity toward perform-ing my rage, identity knowledges is a phrase I use to register rebellion against the way that university cultures—no less than the larger US national public sphere—habitually use the work of the fields that matter most to me to “prove” that the mere gesture of representational inclusion is somehow adequate to ongoing demands for substantive change.

Identity knowledges emphasize, then, a political insistence on the intel-lectual content of our institutional labors, undermining the always haunting public suspicion that our fields have nothing to offer other than special inter-est and opinion. If I do not linger over the fact that the entire organization of the humanities, as Reid-Pharr rightly notes, is built on European identity, it is because the political ambition of Object Lessons has always been set against aiming my discussion at the constituency that we might call “them.” In my decade-long tenure in program administration, I learned to take seriously what it meant when people used the safety of their own ideological inoculation to consistently, belligerently, or even genially refuse to hear. Over time and with no small contribution from the insights of psychoanalysis, I learned to suspect that the very labor I expended to transform the university, through curricu-lar revision as much as critique, was a tacit affirmation of it nonetheless, one


that reinvigorated its value by positing it as the locus for fulfilling all kinds of political needs. Viego gives this situation a pedagogical name—“curing”—and nicely specifies how the psychoanalytic commitments of Object Lessons move the other way, toward understanding the madness that ensues when you keep turning for recognition and sustenance toward the very dependencies that threaten even as they reward you. In dictionary parlance, we might call this an object lesson for understanding “cruel optimism,” Lauren Berlant’s (2012, 1) term for describing “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” But the point in Object Lessons is not to decide which objects or scenes of desire can help us decipher, as Annamarie Jagose (2010, 533) puts it, “the cruel as opposed to presumably the kind or, at least, the benign” order of optimism. I am far more interested in tracking—no, in inhabiting—the confu-sion that Viego discerns at the heart of social-justice projects in which the object of desire is routinely mistaken for the object of need precisely because such a confusion has been my own.

The chapters that comprise Object Lessons were written in the context of these recognitions and tacitly register Joseph’s useful distinction between the institutional marginality of certain fields of study and the nonmarginal institutional stature of many of the scholars in them, including most of the participants in this dossier.1 For this reason, as well as a host of others, Object Lessons does not debate whether, or when, doing politics in the university is complicit or not. Indeed, I take that now routine discussion as a way to inocu-late scholars from having to contemplate, in Joseph’s words, “the constraints of our own making, those we project/construct as necessary to the fulfillment of our desires” (136). Object Lessons thus asks us to take seriously two of the most important theoretical assertions of the last half-century: that we are part of and not outside what we necessarily oppose; and that our agency is not the precondition for becoming a subject, but one of the most stunning consequences of subject-production. Freeman emphasizes the difficulty that ensues in trying to attend, in the same breath, to both of these, marking what we might think of as the temporal double bind of politically invested work when she writes of the “necessary impossibility of understanding historical praxis from within its own present” (171). Psychoanalytically speaking, we could simply say that the order of the present is not something we can know.

Still, if Object Lessons begins, and ends, by refusing what it considers a false, if alluring, choice between radicality and complicity, it is not to allow us to accept complicity and blithely move on, as Jakobsen so importantly notes, but to interrupt altogether what that framework installs, which is a reification of the complexity of politics in the name of being political. I have been more interested in exploring the disciplinary mechanisms that identity knowledges establish to fulfill the political desire that motivates and sustains them, which entails considering how those of us in identity knowledges understand our par-ticipation in the pedagogical incitement to mastery in the twin senses in which


Wahneema Lubiano (2008) has taught me to think of it—as both the mastery of a field, which includes its critical vocabularies, debates, arguments, impasses, and contexts, and the mastery of the political subjectivity that is projected onto, sought, and cultivated within the field. In other words, I have wanted to consider critical practice in ways that would not converge the demand at stake in the wish for our objects to be commensurate with the political desire that attends them with the wish for social justice itself.

It is in this context, where the disciplinary force of these fields must sustain the political aspiration for social justice that they repeatedly (if differently) name, that Object Lessons contemplates the power, pleasure, and limits of critique. By critique, I mean a genre of reading, writing, and interpretation that has largely been hegemonic in the critical humanities since the late 1980s when the cold war apparatus of knowledge, epitomized by the exceptionalist instincts of the New Critics, was demoted, and the political installed as the resonant justification and form of value for the culture-oriented disciplines. Here, where critical practice sustained its authority by addressing obfuscations of power, critique found an especially delectable if tacitly negative comportment as a mode of interpreta-tion dedicated to detecting and exposing the inner logics, obscured meanings, and normative workings of the social world. To be sure, this characterization of critique as willed negativity was countered then, as it is even more rigorously countered today, by a constructivist insistence that critique is neither a mode of judgment nor a form of criticism, but rather a practice aimed at analyzing the very conditions of legibility in which the social world “appears” at all.

Like other scholars of my generation, critique became familiar to me first as a practice of ideological criticism, determining my objects of study and the critical approaches that would enable me to interpret them. Its political aspi-rations were indeed epiphanic, but we did not need to travel to Marx’s grave to summon inspiration, as you could hardly travel anywhere in the emergent fields that comprised identity knowledges without experiencing its power. More importantly, in offering instruction into the operations of mystification, reifica-tion, and interpellation, the critical intuitions it cultivated seemed remarkably attuned to the discourses of dissent alive in the public sphere. In this sense, ideology critique gave me a name for what activist practices had already taught me, engaging me in a battle of interpretation over the meaning of a world that threatened to harm me. While it is perhaps too simple to say that all my objects of study were thus “bad” ones, it is surely true to say that it never occurred to me that my critical practices were anything but “good.” I was learning how to wrench political value from objects that disappointed me, which engaged me in pursuing objects of study that repeatedly failed, from dominant cultural fictions to various theories that reconvened the logics against which they were posed. When my competency grew and I could use critique to extract from the world around me the seeming superiority of my own vision, I got tenure. And so did most of the people I now know.


The point here, of course, is not that the world we encountered or the objects of study we assembled were “better” than what our critical practice typi-cally made of them. We did not make something worse in order to have faith in our ability to critique it. There was no crying wolf. On the contrary, when ideology critique first came under critique it was because those of us drawn to it had actually underestimated the forces that sutured people to the common sense of dominant belief. For me, it was this underestimation that opened the can of worms called psychoanalysis, whose insistence on the unconscious, and with it the idea that subjectivity is as much a psychic as a social relation, quite power-fully undermined the belief at the heart of ideology critique’s political compass: that through the revelation of the real conditions of existence, imaginary iden-tifications could be converted into counter-hegemonic, if not revolutionary ones, revising the consciousness of subordinated collectivities in accordance with their own historical interests. When Object Lessons takes up the conundrum of consciousness, and with it the ideal of an agent that can always know the difference between his real interests and the mirages that trap him in complic-ity, it is not to claim psychoanalysis as a more exacting analytic framework, as it too follows Marx in trying to make good on humanism’s imperative to forge a science out of belief. My interest in its ideal of consciousness arises from the way that critique’s mode of suspicion covers over the very attachment to specu-lation that mobilizes it. Hence, any insistence on the agency of interpretation as a world-transforming force must be considered a form of compensation for humanism’s inability to fully subordinate what cannot be known.

In recent years, of course, the status of critique has begun to be debated, as critics influenced by a range of critical discourses have configured a new lan-guage for reading practices that challenge, often by seeking to “move beyond,” the affective atmospheres and textual relationships cultivated under the prov-ince of suspicion. These efforts are present in the commentaries offered here by Freeman, Arondekar, O’Rourke, and Hayes and reflect with varying degrees of congruence an interest in critical practices based on weak theory, surface reading, compassionate redescription, and reparation.2 While the dispensations of these emergent practices are often incongruent with one another, what they share is a collective investment in developing modes of inquiry “after critique,” which is the title of a special forthcoming issue of English Language Notes.3 So rapid has the consolidation of these endeavors been that a student in my gradu-ate seminar declared last spring: “Critique is dead,” to which I pointed out that such a statement could hardly be the anthem for anything heralded as weak, let alone reparative! But it is certainly a measure of the difficulty of grasping the conditions of the present in which one writes that the consolidation of profes-sional opinion into emergent camps can seem a done-deal before anyone can fully account for what might be at stake in her expression of critical exhaustion. When Arondekar titles her commentary “The Object as Usual,” she reflects the reparative reader’s sense that too much effort has gone into understanding


the critic’s relation to the object in “agonistic terms,” and not nearly enough in pursuing an object’s own “modes of reproduction” (145). While her discussion shares with Object Lessons the axiom that an object of study is never reducible to the pedagogue’s need, my work hesitates before the proposition that we can confidently know the difference between approaching the object on its versus our own terms.

To be sure, in the history of identity’s knowledge formations, there is no shortage of just such self-knowing objects whose historical and hermeneutic resistances are taken to outpace the colonizing methods of modern disciplines by the critic’s ability to transfer sovereignty to them. If Object Lessons pays attention to this, the inaugurating condition of identity’s academic sojourn, by looking more closely at field formations in which the object loses such magnetic power, it in no way discounts the hope that fuels them. In fact, the book would have nothing to say if scholars were no longer interested in the promise of an object relation that could triumph over repetition by offering “rupture” as the “counter lesson” (Arondekar 144). For this reason, Object Lessons does not take up a dis-cussion of critique in order to secure authority for an alternative mode of critical practice to succeed it. On the contrary, given that critique has functioned as the model of interpretation for linking politics, subjectivity, and culture—or what we once called the politics of culture—I have been drawn toward it as part of a larger consideration of the political imaginary of the alternative, which I take as a characteristic of the disciplinary formation of identity knowledges in all of their contemporary manifestations. If readers of Object Lessons—O’Rourke is exemplary in his response here—now align it with those projects that enthusi-astically critique critique in order to find a way beyond it, the truth of the matter may be less pleasing—as deliberating on an attachment is one way of trying not to lose it. This psychoanalytic reversal was brought home to me most recently in my notes for this dossier. Where Freeman so movingly asks “can we love something that might not fulfill our every wish for it?” (173; emphasis added), I wrote: “can we lose something that might not fulfill our every wish for it?” The answer, of course, is yes—and no. Double bind indeed.

In critical venues in which the analytic charge is to account for the pres-ent political conjuncture, the ongoing value of critique is being debated in the context of neoliberalism, which serves as the framework for tracking the combat between capitalism and the modern nation-state form it helped create and is now aggressively negating. Some projects—I am thinking especially of certain genealogies of queer of color critique—seek to revise the Marxist-Althusserian inheritances in which they partially speak by establishing racialization as the missing ligament that joins histories of colonialism to capitalism and the nation-state. Less a critique of critique than a reconfiguration of its analytic and historical terrain, this work follows Lisa Lowe (1996) by reframing culture as the site of ongoing contradiction, thereby shifting an understanding of resistance from a subject who must come to know the conditions of his subjection (as in


proletarian revolution) to cultural formations that are taken to interrogate the normative ideologies of national culture by way of their historical emergence and epistemic location. As Roderick A. Ferguson (2004) writes in what is now considered a foundational text for queer of color critique: “Nonheteronorma-tive racial formations represent the historic accumulation of contradictions around race, gender, sexuality, and class. . . . To address these formations as an accumulation means . . . see[ing] the[ir] gendered and eroticized elements . . . as offering ruptural—i.e., critical—possibilities” (17). In these terms, queer of color analysis approaches racial formations not just as “minority cultural forms,” but as valuable “sites of critique” (26, 17). If it largely defers attention to the way its authority is secured by designating its object’s political agency as its own, it nonetheless de-universalizes critique by insisting that scholars must specify the social contradictions and epistemic locations that make it analytically available to them in the first place.

Other projects seek to register, from within the belly of US imperialism, the consequences of neoliberal rationality on the sphere of public reception in which the political subjectivity heralded by critique has been imagined as not only a potential collectivity, but as one that can actually be heard. In these terms, Eva Cherniavsky (2009) draws attention to the inadequacy, in the context of contemporary “neocitizenship,” of defining the condition of the US political present as a hegemony—which is to say, as a mode of governmentality and citizen construction that operates through the twin levers of consent and coer-cion (1). As she sees it, the ascendency of neoliberal governance has resolutely contracted the historical form and function of “bourgeois nationalism,” which prioritized the citizen as a formal addressee of the state and gave urgency to certain ideological practices of state narration that underwrote national belong-ing itself (15). Today, the “citizen” has been “divested of the modifier bourgeois” and replaced by “flexible” (2; emphasis in original). Such a divestment displaces at best and actively negates at worst the conditions in which critique has held political purchase because in the context of a state given over to securitization, the market evaporates the national sphere through which consent has been not simply solicited, but negotiated. This, she argues, was the pedagogical terrain in which critique politically maneuvered.

How do we proceed, Cherniavsky asks, when “the relation of subjects to the institutions of neoliberal governance” are not at all the same as the relation of citizens to “the legal and civic institutions of the bourgeois nation-state” (15)? As I read it, her argument is a haunting reminder of just how fast the forms of social life we critique can become necessary, and in ways that we never conceived, including the very framework within which critique as a political pedagogy might be said to have operated historically. Think here of the most ideologically complicit and hence routinely disparaged notions that accompa-nied the national sphere of hegemonic negotiation—the public good, democratic governance, even the people. All are discourses that cover over exclusion, excuse


abuses of power, and indemnify inequality, but the leverage they have provided as arenas for ideological contestation contextualize the sense of loss—some have called it a political depression—that characterizes the present, as even the imaginary possibility of addressing a national sphere of political contestation has been coded as nostalgic. Let me emphasize my language here—imaginary possibility—because the point is not whether Cherniavsky diagnoses the condi-tions of the political present correctly or over-inflates the pedagogical promise for contestation offered by hegemony as a specific liberal governmental form. I am most interested in the divergence that her analysis implicitly highlights between the political imaginary in which critique has operated historically, and the way that current discussions about its limits largely configure them as emblematic of critique’s inherent incapacities.

In this context, there are significant problems, as Mitchell begins to point to, in talking about critique as a genre of interpretation whose critical habits and formulae of narration become so thickly familiar that the critical histories and political distinctions at stake in debates about its capacities and incapaci-ties disappear. But it was precisely its generic conventions as a performance of writing and argumentation that most concerned me as the work of Object Lessons unfolded. Why marshal all of my attention toward critique simply to point out that as a strategy of achieving social justice, its tactics could only fail? My interest was in the political desire that animated identity knowledges, which was not something I wanted to render inadequate, misguided, occluding, complicit, or false. I was interested in the wish, and not the project of assessing, let alone condemning, it; and I was interested in how critical practice renewed itself when the wish failed. If in the process I pointed toward the disavowals that were necessary to sustain political belief or the way that our political disap-pointments had to find a home in a narrative of fault, the point was not to stop wishing, or disavowing, or transferring our desire from one analytic or object to the next—as if we could. Conscious intentions, I was sure—I am sure—are absolutely engulfed in the narcissism of self-representation: if they allow us to talk about the things we know we want, they privilege a voice that aligns political commitment with moral agency and the Left political credential of not just doing, but being good. But political desire, like any desire, is far more complex and risky than that.

Q: How, then, do you know when an analysis is done?A: When you have a different story to tell.Q: How do you know when the story is different?

For the object that is Object Lessons, this is not a question—it is a wish.

Robyn Wiegman is professor of literature and women’s studies at Duke University, where she directed the Women’s Studies Program from 2001–2007. In addition to Object Lessons, she has published American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and


Gender (1995) and a series of edited collections, including Women’s Studies on Its Own (2002). She is currently working on Racial Sensations, which uses theories of affect to analyze the toxic ecologies of race and sexuality in U.S. culture. She can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1. Of the participants in this dossier, Joseph, Jakobsen, Viego, and Wiegman have been program administrators. Chaudhary is currently director of graduate studies in his department; Reid-Pharr is a distinguished professor; Freeman is coeditor of the most important journal in queer studies in North America, GLQ; and Arondekar’s mono-graph received the prestigious Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for the best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies from the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association in 2010. Of the more junior scholars writing here, Mitchell recently left a prestigious UC postdoctoral fellowship for an assistant professor position, while Hayes is a fully funded doctoral candidate at Duke. Only O’Rourke is outside the employment and cultural capital circuit of the contemporary university.

2. On weak theory, see Kathleen Stewart (2008); on surface reading, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus (2009); on what I call “compassionate redescription,” see Lauren Berlant (2012) and Stewart (2011); and on reparation reading, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997), Heather Love (2010), and my forthcoming “The Times We’re In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative Turn.” An influential critic of critique is Rita Felski (2012). For a rebuttal to this entire body of work, see Ellen Rooney (2010) and Elizabeth Weed (2012).

3. For more about my relation to contemporary critiques of critique, see my col-laboration with Tim Dean, “What Critique Wants: A Critical Exchange” (forthcoming).

References

“Inhabitations” DossierArondekar, Anjali. 2013. “The Object as Usual.” Feminist Formations 25 (3): 143–148.Chaudhary, Zahid R. 2013. “Introduction.” Feminist Formations 25 (3): 149–153.Freeman, Elizabeth. 2013. “Lessons from Object Lessons.” Feminist Formations 25 (3):

170–174.Hayes, Shannan Lee. 2013. “Justice Regained: The Objects and Lessons of Object

Lessons.” Feminist Formations 25 (3): 175–179.Jakobsen, Janet R. 2013. “The Church, the State, or a Corporation: An Object Lesson.”

Feminist Formations 25 (3): 160–169.Joseph, Miranda. 2013. “Risking Justice: Women’s Studies beyond Measure.” Feminist

Formations 25 (3): 135–142.Mitchell, Nick. 2013. “The Object of Object Lessons: Thoughts and Questions.” Feminist

Formations 25 (3): 180–189.O’Rourke, Michael. 2013. “Objects, Objects, Objects (and Some Objections).” Feminist

Formations 25 (3): 190–201.


Reid-Pharr, Robert. 2013. “Tarrying with the ‘Private Parts.’” Feminist Formations 25 (3): 149–153.

Viego, Antonio. 2013. “The Madness of Curing.” Feminist Formations 25 (3): 154–159.

Other SourcesBerlant, Lauren. 2012. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. 2009. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.”

Representations 108 (1): 1–21.Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Cherniavsky, Eva. 2009. “Neocitizenship and Critique.” Social Text 27 (2): 1–23.Dean, Tim, and Robyn Wiegman. 2014. “What Critique Wants: A Critical Exchange.”

English Language Notes 51.2 (Fall/Winter 2014): forthcoming.Felski, Rita. 2012. “Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” M/C Journal 15 (1).

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Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Jagose, Annamarie. 2010. “Counterfeit Pleasures: Fake Orgasm and Queer Agency.”

Textual Practice 24 (3): 517–39.Love, Heather. 2010. “Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reader and Reparative

Reading.” Criticism 52 (2): 235–41.Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press.Lubiano, Wahneema. 2008. “By Any Other Name: Black Studies, Multiculturalism, and

Airport Bookshops.” E3W Review of Books 8 (Spring 2008). http://www.dwrl.utexas .edu/orgs/e3w/volume-8-spring-2008/building-and-renovating-the-house-of-race/jeremy-dean-interviews-wahneema-lubiano-in-by-any-other-name-black-studies- multiculturalism-and-airport-bookshops.

Rooney, Ellen. 2010. “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21 (3): 112–39.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1997. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1–37. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2008. “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World.” Journal of Folklore Research 45 (1): 71–82.

———. 2011. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (3): 445–53.

Weed, Elizabeth. 2012. “Intervention: ‘The Way We Read Now.’” History of the Present 2 (1): 95–106.

Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.———. 2014. “The Times We’re In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative Turn.

Feminist Theory 51 (4): forthcoming.

Documents

Feminist Formations Dossier on Object Lessons