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Thinking about feeling historical
Lauren Berlant*
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:Accepted 7 August 2008
Keywords:History of the presentAIDSIraqEventAffect
a b s t r a c t
This essay looks at the waning of melodramatic event genres in
contemporary attempts to thinkhistorical experience. It telegraphs
this engagement in four passages that pursue how to write the
historyof the present under conditions of crisis within the
ordinary: in the first instance, AIDS/IRAQ are thegoads, in the
second, a more generalized but not apolitical atmosphere where the
contemporary isencountered not as trauma but flatness.
! 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
These are not ordinary times.1
If this essay were a polemic, it would argue that our
currentview of the communication of affect and emotion is too
oftensimply mimetic and literalizing, seeing their transmission
asperformative rather than as an opening to all sorts of
consequences,including none at all. It would aim to counter the
unfortunatetendency in much contemporary affect theory to elide the
differ-ence between the structure of an affect and the experience
weassociate with a typical emotional event.
If one determines that an event or a relation is
traumaticdthatis, endowed with the capacity to produce traumaddoes
it followthat it communicates trauma to anyone who encounters it?
If onedetermines that an event or a relation is shameful, must it
produceshame in the subjects it impacts? Is the absence of this
trans-mission a sign of some distorting or unethical defense? Is
thepresence of this transmission evidence that a subject or a
societyknows itself profoundly? Of course not. To impute a
mirroringrelation between affective activity and emotional states
under-describes the incoherence of subjectsdtheir capacity to
holdirreconcilable attachments and investments, the complexity
ofmotives for disavowal and defensedand the work of the normativein
apprehending, sensing, tracking, and being with, the event.
So, where trauma and shame are concerned, many states can
beengendered when the elastic snaps back on the subject who no
longer finds traction in the ways of being that had
providedcontinuity and optimism for her (thats the structure).
Maybe thesubject stops, just to let things sink in. Or to query:
What justhappened? Maybe the event disorganizes her, which means
thatshe may feel strongly or messy or distractedly about it. The
struc-ture of an affect has no inevitable relation to the penumbra
ofemotions that may cluster in the wake of its activity, nor should
it.To adapt Jean-Luc Nancys version of love: I may desire to break
myown heart to become open to your capacity to repair it to a
statebetter than what it was when I met you. But as I experience
thatrelation, I may sense it as love, desperation, bitterness,
ambiva-lence, a drive to competence, anxiety, spaciness, and/or
simply asa pressure in my body that I need to discharge.2
What follows is another way of tracking affective
intensitiespolitically without presuming their status as dramatic
or, indeed, asevents. It imagines the affectivity of the social in
registers alongsidemelodrama: it rethinks the sensing of history,
and of the historic.
It is 1988. Essex Hemphill faces Marlon Riggs camera andrecites:
Now we think/as we fuck.3 It is 2005. George Bush facesthe camera
that records his news conference and blurts: I thinkabout Iraq
every day.4 In these phrases, both men link thinking tobeing in the
now, the ongoing present. A situation has forced
* Corresponding author.E-mail address:
[email protected]
1 Frank Rich, Its the Economic Stupidity, Stupid. New York Times
20 July 2008.
Athttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/opinion/20rich.html?hp
(accessed 31 July2008).
2 Jean-Luc Nancy, Shattered Love, In The Inoperative Community.
University ofMinnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 82109.
3 The poem he reads is a slightly altered version of XIII, the
eighth book ofEssex Hemphill, Conditions. BeBop Books, Washington,
DC, 1986, n.p. The film isTongues Untied (dir. Marlon Riggs, 1988).
Hemphill died of complications from AIDSin 1995.
4 George W. Bush said, I think about Iraq every day, on 20 June
2005. Thetranscript is available at:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050620-19.html.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Emotion, Space and Society
journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/emospa
1755-4586/$ see front matter ! 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights
reserved.doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2008.08.006
Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 49
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Author's personal copy
them to think. A situation has changed the ordinary into
somethingthey can no longer presume. The police conventionally say:
Wehave a situation here. A situation is a state of things in
whichsomething that will perhaps matter is unfolding amidst the
usualactivity of life.
But, for these men, it is more than that. This disturbed time
isa historical present and not just everydayness because the
atmo-sphere suggests a shift of historic proportions in the terms
andprocesses of the conditions of continuity of life.5 Norms and
intu-itions suddenly feel off: a sensed perturbation of
world-shapingdimensions impels recasting the projected impact of
small andlarge gestures, noticings, impulses, moments. The
reinvention oflife from disturbance reemerges in cadences, rhythms,
the smallestpredictables.6 To change ones intuition about it all is
to challengethe habituated processing of affective responses to
what oneencounters in the world.7 In this kind of situation a
process willeventually appear monumentally as formdas episode,
event, orepoch. How that happens, though, will be determined
processually,by what people do to reshape themselves and it while
living in thestretched out now that is at once intimate and
estranged.8
You may find my coupling of these two thinking men a
bitperverse, and it is, to put it mildly: one has been visited by
deathsimminence from within a community that includes himself,
whilethe other speaks from a situation he created where the deaths
hefaces are the deaths of others whom he does not know.
HemphillsHIV-shaped community has to reinvent the ordinariness of
itsappetitive and intimate practices; Bush is scrabbling to
recalculatethe war by salvaging the emotional validity of a
defrocked strategy.But in this present, both face the loss of the
freedom to be uncon-scious about the internal limits to their
sovereignty.
Being forced to think these things (fucking, Iraq) as part of
anunfolding historic moment exemplifies the affective experience
not
of a break or a traumatic present, but of crisis lived within
ordi-nariness.9 Amidst the rise and fall of quotidian intensities a
situa-tion arises that provokes the need to think and adjust, to
slowthings down and to gather things up, to find things out and
towonder and ponder. Whats going on? As Kathleen Stewart
wouldphrase it, why do things feel on the vergedof something
(dissolv-ing, snapping, wearing out, overwhelming, underwhelming,
or justunpredictably different)?10
To think is not especially joyful or rational here, therefore.
Theideation to which the men refer is unwanted, after all: I
(must)think about Iraq, we (must) think as we fuck. Or else. Or
else, what?Both speakers presume that their audience knows the
fatal stakes.They assume that they are amplifying something about
thecollective condition: Black men loving black men is a
revolu-tionary act; They hate us for our freedoms. Even the
politicalregister here, under the pressure of a destabilized
historicalpresent, reorganizes the relation of affect and feeling
to knowledgeabout living. They are assuming that it matters to all
of us, thepublic addressed by the phrase, to have fidelity to the
event of beingforced into thought about it. To think emerges not
just as cognitiveresponse in general or the responsibility of
special people but asa general opening for cultivating
attentiveness and an ethics ofmindfulness for a public intimate
because theyre experiencingtogether a shift in the atmosphere.
The event expressed by the two speakers is, then, not the
eventof thinking as such. In this kind of case, to think is
primarily formal,an interruption. Thinking interrupts the flow of
consciousness witha new demand for scanning and focus, not for any
particular kind ofcognitive processing. We are directed to see not
an event but anemergent historical environment that can now be
sensed atmo-spherically, collectively.11 To be forced into thought
this way is tobegin to formulate the event of feeling historical in
the present.12
This may suggest that the default or unforced state would be
notthinking: but not thinking is not the opposite of thinking. It
is truethat under the pressure of an intensified, elongated
presentmoment where affective, experiential and empirical
knowledgenorms seem in disarray there develop states of
sociopathicdisavowal and ordinary compartmentalization. See the
sub-primebanking or climate change crises, for example. See
systemicracialized, gendered, sexual and regional class
inequalities whoseevidence in ordinary subjectivity shifts between
foreground and
5 This essay distills claims from my forthcoming Cruel Optimism,
whose focus ison redacting the historical present through
proprioceptive shifts, or the rehabitu-ation of the lived sensorium
(see footnote 7 as well). Teresa Brennans work aids inthis project
by thinking of the activity of affect, always in the present, as
producingdiscernment of atmospheres, the scenes one walks into and
responds to, feels out,and judges. See Introduction, The
Transmission of Affect. Cornell University Press,Ithaca, NY, 2004,
pp. 123.
6 This is more or less Sigmund Freuds argument in The economic
problem ofmasochism, in: James Strachey (Trans. and Ed.), The
Standard Edition of theComplete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, 19 (19231925). Hogarth Press,London, 1961, p. 160.
7 Henri Bergsons Matter and Memory deems intuition the work of
memory thatshapes the present. In the model Im putting forth
intuition is the subjects habit-uated affective activity, the
sensorium trained to apperceive the historical in thepresent by a
whole range of encounters and knowledges, not just memory.
Thememory/knowledge distinction could use a lot of work where
affects and emotionsare the scene of tracking the subjects feeling
out of the historical. See HenriBergson, Matter and Memory,
translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. Zone Books,New York, 1991,
especially pp. 66, 182183.
8 Some elaboration of this sentences terms might be useful. The
stretched outnow merges an intensified present with senses of the
recent past and near future:the temporal compartmentalizations of
an ordinariness that can be broadly takenfor granted are themselves
suspended when the historic(al) sense is forced toapprehend itself.
Crisis ordinariness is my preferred way of talking about traumasof
the social that are lived through collectively and that transform
the sensorium toa heightened perceptiveness about the unfolding of
the historical, and sometimeshistoric, moment (and sometimes
publics organized around those senses, whenexperienced
collectively). See Lauren Berlant, 2007. Slow Death
(sovereignty,obesity, lateral agency). Critical Inquiry Summer,
754780. Tom Dumms concept ofthe ordinary is sympathetic to mine,
insofar as it is a domain that absorbs a varietyof processes and
happenings, but he draws a more stark distinction between
theordinary and the event than I do here, as I am seeing the
process of eventilization asthat which shapes part of the
consciousness of whats durable (predictable, reliable,tractable)
about life in the ordinary. See throughout Tom Dumm, A Politics of
theOrdinary. New York University Press, New York, 1999, especially
pp. 1031.
9 These meditations on eventilization and the historical sense
respond to andengage without occupying in orthodox fashion either
the Deleuzian model of event(in The Logic of Sense and The Fold),
which (briefly) stretches the past into thefuture in the process of
becoming, eliding the present; or Alain Badious model,throughout
his work, in which the event forces a shift in the ethical
subjectssituation, or practice of inhabiting an ongoing present.
Compare, for example,Deleuze, 1969. The Logic of Sense. Columbia
University Press, New York, pp. 4041to Badiou, 2001. The Ethic of
truths, in: P. Hallward (Trans. 1998), Ethics: An Essayon the
Understanding of Evil. Verso, London, 2001, pp. 4057. In my
version,a situation occurs that becomes event as it becomes form,
in the ongoing presentout of which are refracted near pasts and
near futures. These distinctions feelmerely technical sometimes,
but sometimes they matter, as the question of survi-vingdnot taking
for granteddthe present intensifies.
10 On everyday attentiveness as a scene of living, see Kathleen
Stewart, 2007.Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
On something as a place-holder term for the historical present
tending toward crisis, see Lauren Berlant,1994. 68 or something.
Critical Inquiry 21 (1), 124155.
11 Michael Taussig, 1991. The Nervous System. Routledge, London
and New York,1991.
12 When a rise in the sense of a shared collective atmosphere
results from anoccurrence, feeling historical may rhyme with
feeling historic. But what werewitnessing here is what happens when
a situation opens out problems in how tolive that reveal a loss of
trust in the historical future, threats to the sense ofongoingness
in the durational present, and increased opacity within ordinary
life.Life itself does not provide a ground for trust or solidarity
but the sense of a sharedaffective management crisis does confirm
belonging to a disturbed field, ratherthan a normative world.
L. Berlant / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 49 5
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background. Being overwhelmed by knowledge and life producesall
kinds of neutralizing affect managementdcoasting,
skimming,browsing, distraction, apathy, coolness,
counter-absorption,assessments of scale, picking ones fights, and
so on.
Indeed, most of social life happens in such modes of lower
casedrama, as we follow out pulsations of habituated patterning
thatmake possible getting through the day (the relationships, the
job,the life) while the brain chatters on, assessing things in
focused andunfocused ways. People are, of course, always thinking,
in the senseof making sense of things, when they apprehend what
fluctuateswithout challenging very much the procedures of living.
But theyare not thinking in the precise sense implied by our
exemplarymen, Hemphill and Bush.
Hemphill and Bush are not just thinking, but stopping to
think.When these speakers intuit the present moment in proximity
toa word like think, they denote not a stream of perceptions,
flaneur-like collections, or the activity of a mental intestine of
sorts, but anidiomatic shift. Under duress from changes in the
conditions of life,their thinking jams the machinery that makes the
ordinary appearas a flow that we shape mildly, often
absentmindedly, which is notthe same thing as thoughtlessly. In
situations like the ones onwhich they dilate, to think is precisely
to begin to develop anarchitecture for apprehending the perturbed
world with all of thekinds of knowing to which one has access, from
the neuro-affectiveto the rationally processed. Amidst this process
of recalibratingintuitions about the intensified present, emotion
and affect are notmore telling than cognitive processing: in
reassessing the condi-tions of ongoingness, the thinkers involve
all possible knowledge,however incommensurate the idiom or
source.
To be more concrete, in the conjuncture of these two
statementsto think is to point to a forced interruption of the
dreamy activity ofsex-in-progress and the post-intentionality of a
war once set inmotion. It is to confront the physics of
eventilization, Foucaultsterm for the becoming-overfixed of
historical process.13 Suchinterruption slows and makes more
reflexive the activity of thenervous system that perpetuates itself
endlessly in reciprocalactivity with the world; most importantly,
though, it counters theintuitive sense that the world proceeds
independently of thehuman activity that makes it.
But when I think about Iraq, when we think as we fuck, when
westop and think, those things seen historically do not stop. They
keepgoing. Stopping to think puts on minor breaks, making
alternativeagency and affectivity imaginable but not yet achieved
within theshared world of the present that is in intensified
suspension. To ourcase study men, to think is a thing of necessity,
ethics, and slightoptimism: in the near future thats just a step
ahead of the rightnow, stopping to think about fucking and war
might shift the shapeof something definitive that seems pretty
imminent.
Hemphill:
Bush:I think about Iraq every day every single day because
Iunderstand we have troops in harms way, and I understandhow
dangerous it is there. And the reason its dangerous isbecause
theres these cold-blooded killers that will kill Ameri-cans or kill
innocent Iraqis in order to try to drive us out of Iraq.. I think
about this every day, every single day, and willcontinue thinking
about it, because I understand weve got kidsin harms way. And I
worry about their families; and I obviously,any time theres a
death, I grieve. But I want those families toknow, one, were not
going to leave them not going to allowtheir mission to go in vain;
and, two, we will complete themission and the world will be better
off for it.
Thinking under the pressure to respond publicly to death
notdesperately but with an attachment to life also sums up what
thesemen have in common. Here, to think is to figure out how to
live ina heterotopic now thats affectively sensed, amassed in a
scene thatthey are already living as a new ordinariness that
requires a newrealism. We sense the intensity of the pressure to
improvise a newintuition about how to live in the historical
present, to move affectand the political away from their
conventional relationdfor similarand different reasons.
The situation induces a focus on kisses and kinship: We returnto
. Private Lives; and I worry about their families. It reminds
usthat the affective turn emerges within the long neoliberal
momentof the attrition of the social, expressed in Margaret
Thatchers claimthat There is no societydjust individuals, families,
and neigh-bors.14 Attempting to break the circuit of accountability
betweenpersons and political worlds, phrases like hers elide the
differencebetween public and society in the hope of privatizing
every-thing, including the experience of collective emotion. But
forHemphill and Bush, our case study men, circling back to an
affectiveatmosphere provides a starting point, not a place of rest.
They haveno place else to go and, a bit lost, theyre responding a
high dramaof orchestrated emotionality by trying to nudge a new
phase into
Now we thinkas we fuckthis nutmight kill us.There might bea
pin-sized holein the condom.A lethal leak.
We stop kissingtall dark strangers,sucking mustaches,putting
lipstongueseverywhere.We return to pictures.Telephones.Toys.Recent
Lovers.Private Lives.
Now we thinkas we fuckthis nut might kill.This kiss could turnto
stone.
13 For Foucault on eventilization and the historical present,
see Paul Rabinow(Ed.), 1984. What is Enlightenment? The Foucault
Reader. Pantheon Books, NewYork, pp. 3250 and throughout Michael
Foucoult, 1969/1989. The Archaeology ofKnowledge. Routledge, London
and New York.
14 I think weve been through a period where too many people have
been givento understand that if they have a problem, its the
governments job to cope with it.I have a problem, Ill get a grant.
Im homeless, the government must house me.Theyre casting their
problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing
associety. There are individual men and women, and there are
families. And nogovernment can do anything except through people,
and people must look tothemselves first. Its our duty to look after
ourselves and then, also to look after ourneighbour. People have
got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obli-gations.
Theres no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met
anobligation. Prime minister Margaret Thatcher, talking to Womens
Own magazine,October 31, 1987;
http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htm.
L. Berlant / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 496
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being, phrase by phrase. By thinking, they open other registers
intowhich they step gingerly, pensively, haltingly, wandering
around toget a handle on what to do in the question-marked now.
We witness, here, then, not the waning of affect, but thewaning
of genre.15 Life can no longer be lived even phantasmati-cally as
melodrama, as Aristotelian tragedy spread to ordinarypeople, as a
predictable arc that is shaped by acts, facts, or fates.Their take
on the present oscillates among affects and emotions: ittransmits
as worry. At root, to worry is to strangle, to choke, tobite:16 for
our case study men, worrydthe repetition of anxiousunwanted
ideation about the state of a thingdis a sense thatresponds to a
situation thats unfolding, that needs to be movedtoward refuting
death as the only scene where lifes meanings addup. Gathering up
affectively and emotionally-saturated knowledgeprocessed in so many
different ways, demonstrating fidelity to theopenness of the event
that is not yet stone, there is otherwiseonly so much grief. This
grief for the lost ordinary is the defaultfeeling that theyre
refusing, of being historical in the present.17
This essay has described the performance of thinking
andintuitive recalibrating as signs of troubled knowing and living
ina historical present whose occupants sense it as distended. I
nowcontrast this scenario of ordinary lifes interruption by a
worriedthought with the strategies of two recent poems that model
somequite different practices of feeling out the unfinished
situation ofthe present. What follows also tracks how they notice a
contem-poraneity disorganized by the kind of crisis in the ordinary
thatforces one to invent (for oneself, for the collective) an
ignorantpedagogy18 that holds off grief, that doesnt distinguish
betweencognitive and other kinds of knowing, and that produces a
way ofgrasping and inhabiting a collectively significant
unthoughtknown that has been in some way apprehended.19 But the
affect ofthe crisis they encounter begins not with drama but its
absence.
Charles Simics Encyclopedia of Horror and Bill Hocoks APrimer
use traditional genres for making literacy possible.20 Theyworry
aloud about how to find ones way analytically and affec-tively
amidst the noise of the political and the non-place of the
social in a present moment in which survival presents itself asa
problem.21 Both poems perform the problem of developinga practice
of rootedness in processual awareness that can giveshape amidst the
unpeaceful, uninhabitable, and unknowable stateof crisis in which
living on is also taking place.22 Giving shape is notthe same as
solving the problem of crisis, or having the rightemotions about
it. Indeed, both poems confront a tonedan atmo-sphere, feeling,
sensedof flatness in the world, as though affectsand emotion
themselves are exhausted from adjusting to all theintensities. This
response is a structure with barely any energy forornamentation.
But the encounter with flatness in the world doesnot produce
identical flatness in the poems. The ethical and polit-ical
question is how to live managing overwhelming materials withan
overtaxed awareness; the aesthetic question is how to find
formwithout distracting from the gravity of the real.
In Encyclopedia of Horror, the state of awareness is one
ofsleepless hypervigilance:
Theres a lot to say biographically about Simics observations,the
relation of this piece to his long career of capaciously
darkhistoricism and modernist conventions of apocalypse or
wastedlife. But for our purposes the epistemo-affective work of
this poem,with its narration of the insomniacs compulsion to
encounter toomany pages of unbearable, unmanageable evidence of
historic andhistorical horror that is lived in the ordinary,
resides in the flurry ofrhyming in its last stanza: the eruption of
oo sounds (too, to,through) and the piercing cliche of guards
playing cards.
Rhymes provide some kind of comfort, but the method here
isfrottage: consonance rubs up against the flatly and frankly
phrasedassertion of the uselessness of knowing what the
couplingsemphasize. Prior to the last stanza, the poem lists random
horrorsthat might be around any cornerdfrom acts of bad parenting
andannihilative bombing (its for your own good) to the spectacle
ofa fatefully mad homelessness that is concealed in both of
thoseother examples too. The encyclopedia makes no assessment of
theexemplarity of or connection among its little portraits, but
ratherprovides a gathering up of instances, episodes, and scenes
thatmake an atmosphere that constitutes the present right up to
themoment of readingdthe slapped child was added only this
Nobody reads it but the insomniacs.How strange to find a
child,Slapped by his mother only this morning,And the mad homeless
womanWho squatted to urinate in the street.
Perhaps theyve missed something!That smoke-shrouded city after a
bombing raid,The corpses like cigarette buttsIn a dinner plate
overflowing with ashes.But no, everyone is here.
O were you to come, invisible tribunal,Thered be too many pages
to thumb through.Too many stories to listen to,Like the one about
guards playing cardsAfter they were done beating their
prisoner.
15 Fredric Jameson, 1991, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism(Duke University Press, Burham, NC, pp. 1011.
16 Worry: OE. wyrdan OFris. wergia to kill, MLG. worgen, MDu.
worghen (Du.worgen, wurgen), to strangle, throttle, OHG. wurgan,
wurkjan (MHG. wurgen,wurgen, G. wurgen), to strangle, worry, kill
by violence:dOTeut. *wurgjan, relatedto *werg-, a strong vb. stem
found in MHG. irwergen to throttle:dIndo-Eur.*wergh-. The a- and
b-forms (wirry and werry) are normal ME. developments ofOE. wyrdan:
cf. the forms of MERRY a. The g-forms apparently represent a late
WS.*wurdan, with later graphic substitution of wo- for wu-; see the
note to WORM n.The original u-sound of this form is indicated by
the late spellings with woo-.] OED.
17 I use the language of grief because George W. Bush uses it,
and not to refer toJudith Butlers Precarious Life, with its
argument for a metric of justice in the idiomof appropriate grief.
Nonetheless: my argument here (and in Cruel Optimism), isthat we
can over-respect the work of emotional justice, equating idealized
formswith the complexities of grounding and ungrounding that are
set loose when wefind ourselves in the middle of an emotional event
that shakes the sureties. Whenthe world is tipped over, habits,
meanings, and resonances of emotional self-possession go with
everything else. The structure of grief (reorganizing
subjectivityin response to the loss of something important) would
not be the same as theemotion of grief (which is just one option in
the range of ways to inhabit thatstructure, since people live loss
differently, and are differently shattered andinflated by its
effects on them). For her account of the clarities of political
emotion,see Judith Butler, 2006. Precarious Life: The Power of
Mourning and Violence.Verso, London and Judith Butler and Gayatri
Spivak, 2007. Who Sings theNation-State?: Language, Politics and
Belonging. Seagull Books, Calcutta.
18 Jacques Ranciere, 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five
Lessons in IntellectualEmancipation. Stanford Univerity Press, Palo
Alto, CA.
19 Christopher Bollas, 1987. The Shadow of the Object.
Psychoanalysis of theUnthought Known. Columbia Univerity Press, New
York.
20 Charles Simic, 2008. Encyclopedia of Horror. Harpers Magazine
316 (1895),April, 21; Bob Hicok, 2008. A Primer. The New Yorker 19
May, 4849.
21 Mark Auge, 1995. In: John Howe (Trans.), Non-Places:
Introduction to anAnthropology of Supermodernity. Verso,
London.
22 I say state of crisis rather than state of exception because
I dont think it isa state of exception, but quite the opposite, a
state of intensification within historythat points to a project of
forced adjustment. On the unexceptionality of exception,see Nasser
Hussain, 2007. Beyond norm and exception: Guantanamo.
CriticalInquiry 33 (Summer), 734753.
L. Berlant / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 49 7
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morning and everyone is here, both readers and subjects ofthe
book.
The insomniacs are historians of the present without a project
orprofession. Perhaps they are pressured into sleeplessness by
free-floating anxiety, or perhaps there is a reason. Reading the
Ency-clopedia, though, wont provide clues for the causes of
theircondition. The process of encyclopedia reading is closer to
countingsheep or pure seriality, as each episode is its own emblem
andsingularity, not a link in a chain. Things are bound togetherdit
isa book, after alldbut they are not internally bound. Each
punctumis an item in a collection whose principle of inclusion is
at once sovisceral and general that it is simultaneously piercing
and num-bingdthe tone is, literally, matter of fact. Perhaps one
ought to saythat the bombing and decimation of a population is the
poemsmain event, but the metaphor of cigarette butts and ashes in a
dishsmudges its devastated referent, stretching out the
catastrophicmoment into a space in the ordinary that might not be
of horror.Who knows whether, in smoking, the smokers were
exercisingmore of their death drive or their life drive, their
drive to pleasure?
The explicit point of articulation is that from a certain
distance,bombs and cigarettes produce ashes, the trace of lives and
ways oflife passed by: Dresden, Kosovo, London, Iraq, the
appetites,conviviality. Whats left for the living? Not even grief.
The Ency-clopedia of Horror is not an archive providing
prophylactic wisdom,enabling knowing subjects to prevent the
repetition of traumatichistory. Nor can the damage to the ordinary
apparently be undoneby a tribunal of readers who can provide
emotional justice ina magnificent performance of sentimental
recompense.
The poem enacts most powerfully the undoing of the fantasy
ofliberal emotional due process when it runs into guards
playingcards. This classic image of casualized discipline relates
the guardsto the purveyors of the bombs, in that the states
disciplinary forceaims to protect life and ways of life by
destroying whats potentiallyinconvenient to it. It doesnt matter
who is beat up or who does thebeating up. No person or happening
can represent the pervasivenessof violence. The despair of not
mattering that is expressed in the finalstanzas expression of
surrender to the whatever of skimming oneinstance of horror and the
one after that is inverted in the play of thestanzas surrender to
rhyme. Guards playing cards is funny andaversive, ironic and not
reparative. Guards playing cards invertsthe tendency of think/fuck,
think/Iraq: in the newer case, the jolt ofextra verbal pleasure
interrupts nothing nor contributes to theproduction of a new
potentiality. Think/fuck, think/Iraq, on the otherhand, wants to
pace out a new sensorium. Encyclopedia of Horrorstretches the
imprinted scenes of clotted reading into a thinmembrane. It
witnesses the wearing out of the old emotional andintellectual
supplements, including the comfort in the fantasy oflearning as a
necessity for personal and collective flourishing.
For the poems flatness speaks to the end of a habit of
knowledge,not a habitation in it: the insomniac reader is not only
sleepless but,as a scholar or collector of fact, homeless. The
narrators toneremains unanimated while thinking about going with
the flow,browsing and learning: there is no trace of hope that
knowingsomething will stop something else. But the poems discussion
ofhorror is not horrifying or sensationalist. It is collecting
instances,seeing what there is. It is talking about ordinary life.
Ordinary life iswhat it isdflat, post-vital, exhausted but not
dead, a card game inan ongoing present where we are trying to
assess whether theepisodic return to episodes of horror amounts to
the contemporarysituation of survival.
Hicoks A Primer also tells the story of the present organizedby
flatness: the atmosphere and tone of his US Midwest is so graythat
you want to kill the sky when you look around for andreceive no
relief from the landscape of corn corn corn. But,overwhelmed by
finding itself amidst the multiple middles of somany emerging,
ongoing histories, this poem sees resignation to
flatness as a backup plan. Plan A: to reroute the present
situation,where we move along without getting along, into a
condition ofongoing collective liveness fueled by riding the wave
of collectivelyrecycled affective knowledge. This new
pathocartography usesemotional mapping to tap into the exuberance,
the non-mereness,which radiates from the activity of surviving. It
rides the release ofenergy in sociality that comes from finding
someone and telling herwhat happened. It may be a low bar, but its
humming.
A Primer is both a lesson book and what makes paint morelikely
to adhere to a wall. The whole poem primes us for the finalcoupletd
Let us all be from somewhere./Let us tell each othereverything we
can. This is a couplet because of how the line begins(Let us) and
not how it ends, and so too it is a poem about whereto begin, now,
making connections. We learn to begin being in thelife through
which we are already moving by absorbing newphrases into our stock
observations: When I go back to Michigan Idrive through Ohio./There
is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life/goes.Life goes when events
change things. This reconception of
I remember Michigan fondly as the place I goto be in Michigan.
The right hand of Americawaving from maps or the leftpressing into
clay a mold to take homefrom kindergarten to Mother. I lived in
Michiganforty-three years. The state birdis a chained factory gate.
The state floweris Lake Superior, which sounds egotisticalthough it
is merely cold and deep as truth.A Midwesterner can use the word
truth,can sincerely use the word sincere.In truth the Midwest is
not mid or west.When I go back to Michigan I drive through
Ohio.There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so lifegoes corn corn corn
mosque, I wave at Islam,which were not getting along withon account
of the Towers as I pass.Then Ohio goes corn corn cornbillboard,
goodbye, Islam. You never forgethow to be from Michigan when youre
from Michigan.Its like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.The
Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live nowin Virginia, which has no
backup planbut is named the same as my mother,I live in my mother
again, which is creepybut so is what the skin under my chin is
doing,suddenly theres a pouch like marsupialsare needed. The state
joy is spring.Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseballis
how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,when February hasnt
ended. Februaryis thirteen months long in Michigan.We are a people
who by Februarywant to kill the sky for being so grayand angry at
us. What did we do?is the state motto. Theres a day in Maywhen were
all tumblers, gymnasticsis everywhere, and daffodils are askedby
young men to be their wives. When a man elopeswith a daffodil, you
know where hes from.In this way I have given you a primer.Let us
all be from somewhere.Let us tell each other everything we can.
L. Berlant / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 498
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Author's personal copy
a seriality that cannot be taken for granted but is crucial to
catchingup to the historical present has been forced on us on
account of theTowers. On account of the Towers the corn is newly
punctuatedand the landscape intimacy of we with Islam is just
technical,a statement about proximity. The landscape absorbs what
he hasnot yet. There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque is accordingly
allgrammatically unsubordinated, for the American English
speaker.
It is not a harmonious time, as were not getting along. Butwhile
not getting along, we are still moving along. Now the oldlandscape
is new as we pass through it, Then Ohio goes corn
corncorn/billboard, goodbye, Islam. It is impossible to read the
tone ofthis list. Goodbye Islam? Goodbye Ohio? The politics of the
pluralwe is not left unsaid, and for the better. But it is changing
as andbecause we speak: we have the US produced by the Towers,
thewe produced by association with Islam; the we produced bypooling
and spooling what we have seen and what we know; thewe of the speed
of movement; the we of trying to catch up withlife as it is
happening. By the end the poem reveals its desire for thewe to be
other things than the effect of an event, enjambmentturning each
phrase from the referent to a fishing line.
We used to know how to live as well as we knew the landscape.Yet
on reconsideration, what did we know? Some version of thatwe was
from Michigan. We carry deep bodily knowledge of howto fish, too.
The weather made us so regularly crazy, though, thatwhen it
released us from just getting by, we became all kinds
ofdisregulated, ruled by whim and whimsy. But that crazy
man-daffodil love spurred by the sudden sun is continuously
supple-mented and transformed in the new post-traumatic landscape
thatforces us constantly to re-find and re-tell the story of where
we arefrom. Meeting the present is like meeting a new lover:
telling thestory of how you got to be this way in the present
momentsuddenly changes its usual cadences because of the occasion
of thetelling. Where you are from is suddenly a different
somewhereelse, underdescribed or even hidden by the idiom of nation
or state:the states name becomes a ridiculous sound that reminds
you ofwhere you were ridiculous and unsound. It is a handle on
some-thing historical barely yet experienced. It used to matter,
where youcame from, because you felt akin to the other people who
livedthere, since they knew what you knewdthe landscape that
thehighway skims and random facts associated with patriotism.
Butnow the enmeshing of global power and ordinary life has
turnedthe scenic route into a situation.
However, unlike Simic, Hicok refuses to see the gathering of
theold and new knowledges as regression, attrition, or a flat
recitationof ongoing losses. The view seems to be that the social
never madesense, that the cycles of the seasons were always
affectively laden
by crazy magical thinking and elated interruption of the
exhaustionproduced by the atmosphere of the present we live in that
is thesum of history and the weather. The right hand did not know
whatthe left hand was doing, which was both uncanny and ok. He
seesa potential solidarity wrought from narrating the confusions
andstacking the irreconcilables. The solidarity of talking and
listeningrequires only affective consonance with the mere contract
to showup and participate in the couplet or coupling that ends and
begins.Let us.
Is Let us an order in the imperative or something softer, likea
plea? Is it the desperate good manners of Let us go then, you andI?
Let us now tell something: we dont have to think about it, wedont
have to feel anything, we dont have to express our deepestself and
wait for a recognizing response. This nascent solidarity
issolipsistic first, and not performative. Telling is a state of
bodilypractice whose performance opens intuition to surprising
rehabi-tuations, though, by making where you are from into
somethingyou can rely on only if you tell about it to someone who
hears it andproduces your thereness as a warmth of presence in the
historicalpresent. Solidarity happens prior to intimacy or the
contents ofyour auditors subjectivity. This is not about
recognition, letting inthe other, etc. But in fantasy there will be
transactions of telling andhearing, in the genre of sound,
streaming.
A Primer teaches a history of the present that is in the idiom
ofnormative bodily and factual life recast as a mode of tourism
andcuriosity that acknowledges how out of our native element we
allnow are. The state joy is spring, aspiring to sprung rhyme.
Thepresent is all mixed-up and intense; its emotional map is
lightlymanic and surreal; it does the best it can to narrate what
it doesntcomprehend while sensing so much thats coursing through
it. Butthis is the new realism that absorbs grief not into wars of
emotionor the imaginary end of sexual self-abandon or flat
seriality but intolove and fishing and daffodils and the register
of an affectiveoptimism about the sharing of whatever. Its
post-event.
A Primer is a dreamy poem, performing affectively a world asa
magnetic space ruled by a reliable absentminded rhythm. It is
asthough the fact of circulation can produce a present that
interruptsthe atomizing flatness of mass not mattering by gently
folding thepolitical words into the other ones without the
intensities ofsentimental transmission that have for so long
provided refuge forscoundrels and their wounded.
Acknowledgement
Thanks for reading to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Katie Stewart, andAdam
Weg.
L. Berlant / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 49 9
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