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Critical Inquiry, Armative Culture

Lauren Berlant

Many of our essayists fix on the senses as a revitalizing domain with which
to chart theories and concepts of history, aesthetics, and experience. The
words power and ideology dont make it into these paradigms much, and
questions shaped around social inequalities are either presumed or subsumed in these phrasings. Class inequality and labor-related subjectivities,
for example, are now increasingly embedded in capitalism and globalization;
and, I think, but Im not sure, critical race, feminist, and queer studies concerns are covered, covered over, or articulated in more general conceptualizations of embodiment, a term that designates the closeness to the body
of social, experiential, and aesthetic aect. Because these sublimated categories of historical subordination were not formed as aesthetic events, and
because they trouble the distance from the body that traditionally secures
the prestige of critical thought, it is not surprising that a certain disenchantment would fall upon Critical Inquirys writers and readers, motivating returns to the elegance of a greater distance, whether couched as the new
aestheticism, a better empiricism, or rigorous theory.
Were it not for Mary Pooveys and Teresa de Lauretiss finely tuned statements, this shift would seem (among our essayists, anyway) to have happened without comment. De Lauretis argues that the ambitions of the new
social movements were sustained by a hope that today appears enmeshed
in neoliberalism (p. 366). Surely the uneven global history of liberalisms
incommensurateness with itself in theory and in practice requires a more
dynamic perspective. I take that to be the promise of de Lauretiss great
phrase the time for theory is always now (p. 365). Now, though, is not
merely the definitional province of the World Bank, the IMF, nor, really, the
U.S. capitalist/Christian state and all its others. Critics and pundits alike
Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004)
! 2004 by The University of Chicago. 00931896/04/30020003$10.00. All rights reserved.

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generate apprehensions of the present discursively. The present is something given back to us by those who reflect on it; not available to experience
as such, the sense and the sense experience of the present are eects of critical practice.
De Lauretis herself accurately notes, thinking . . . originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent
events (p. 365). So, if one does ride the wave that turns political fatigue to
conceptual aversion, isnt that shift, along with the widespread backlash
against theory, also enmeshed in neoliberalism? Perhaps conceptual fatigue is inevitableon the model of metal fatigue, which denotes the exhaustion metal experiences on having to bear the burden of too much
weight. But I am also reminded of David Wellberys observation that theoretical projects (hes referring to poststructuralism) tend to be deemed exhausted precisely when theyre poised to do their perhaps now unglamorous
work.1
There is much more to be said on this topic, of theory and embodied
histories of the present. Who is embodied, and how, and what is served by
the sensual turn? Can we think about the relation of critical optimism to
our vertiginous awareness of escalating violence in ways that continue to
challenge our professional contexts? Or is it the case, as the New York Times
opined recently, that this is a time of resistance without a critical social
counterimaginary?2 One could dilate infinitely on these questions. My presumption throughout will be that the critical realm of the senses encompasses what the senses do empirically; what feelings are made out to mean;
and which forces, meanings, and practices are magnetized by concepts of
aect and emotion. As in In the Realm of the Senses itself, the construction
of new visceral practices in the context of massive social upheaval, perceived
as both violence and aesthetic pleasure, is the scene from which I write.
I propose for further discussion a few other approaches to these questions, noting at the outset that the matter of professional critical theorists
proper objects, projects, and attitudesmost deftly expressed in the pieces
by Robert von Hallberg and Harry Harootunianforegrounds a crucial
1. See David E. Wellbery, foreword to Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans.
Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif., 1990), pp. viixxxiii.
2. See John Leland, A Movement, Yes, but No Counterculture, New York Times, 23 Mar. 2003,
sect. 9, p. 1.

L a u re n B e r l a n t teaches English at the University of Chicago. She is the

author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life
(1991) and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and
Citizenship (1997), the editor of Intimacy (2000), and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry.

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Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004

concern. It must be the case that increasing pundit- and legislator-centered

disrespect for the humanities has had some influence on our shifting attention to objects/scenes like emotions that can be misrecognized as universals or, less grandly, as things perceivable through common sense. One
could make the same argument about the current literary critical embrace
of ethics, which, whatever else it opens up, just sounds so comforting, so
fundable, so theoretically palatable, and so politics-lite. Some of my best
friends are ethicists (well, just one), dont get me wrong; its not the field
itself that concerns me but the impulse to recement individuality-withconsciousness at the center of critical thought.
For the most part, my estimable colleagues have written armative essays about critical work and its futures. Whether or not they propose proper
objects and better horizons for critical thought, their view is that critics and
criticism will continue to sound as we currently dosmart, abstract, and
slightly overabsorbed. Only my dear departed colleague, Harootunian,
writes in a crackling tone of voice, arguing for working beyond the national,
regional, and methodological norms of disciplinary expertise, refusing the
backlash against theoretical work, and taking the risk of engaging with the
history of the present. At the same time, he pushes aside the usually cool
distance of the thinker with a series of jarring rhetorical moves, as though
the intellectual performance of composure were a threat to occupying an
analytical edge that might very well cut in any direction, back at the author
himself or at the audience of readers.3 The sharp edge of intellectual passion
opens up what you cant control; I love thought that welcomes the risk of
formlessness, the unpredictable consequences of ideas. Thats what critical
theory does when it is done well. Truisms are cut into, things come undone,
and what Gayatri Spivak calls provisional generalizations that make new
contexts for knowledge threaten the transparency of expertise along with
the phenomena under analytic scrutiny.4 Those who turn away from a scene
of thought performed in unusual modes of critical intensity, theoreticalacumen, or referential familiarity miss an opportunity for surprise learning.
On the other hand, as Harootunian argues, such resistance is well rewarded
professionally. As someone wrote in a memo once, we want to be at the
cutting edge, but not go too far.
But, not to be carried away entirely by metaprofessional polemic, I extract two issues from the pile Ive amassed that address the production of
3. See Adam Phillips, On Composure, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic
Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp. 4246. Phillips argues deftly that
intellectuals habits of composure are (overdetermined) modes of control.
4. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography, In
Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, 1988), pp. 197221.

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emotion as critical inquirys object/scene. One: to talk about the senses is

to involve oneself in a discussion of the optimism of attachment, the sociability of persons across things, spaces, and practices. It represents a turn to
the human without resurrecting, necessarily, a metaphysical subject, for
sensual experience and emotions are usually thought about, these days, in
contexts of enunciation and experiencethe nation, the law, the family,
religion, mass culture, or aesthetic ambition, for example.5 Emotionology
usually intends a discussion about processes of belonging and reflexivity, of
selves oriented toward worlds that are organized by forms that provide material and subjective senses of continuity.6
Paradoxically, then, much of the best work on the senses means to deuniversalize them, rooting them somewhere in a space of time. Miriam
Hansens work in this area is exemplary.7 But what remains is the implicit
optimism of critical thought that presumes the clarity of the senses and their
phenomenological and historical place in world building. Herbert Marcuse
called this phenomenon armative culture, a phrase rarely applied to the
kind of critical work in this journals pages but nonetheless, I am arguing,
all too relevant to its practices.8
It seems hard to talk about the sociality of emotion without presuming
the clarity and coherence both of it and the world in which it is intelligible.
It is hard for thought to abandon its desire to intensify the thingness of its
thing and thus its value. After all, as Hansen argues, the training of the senses
is the bourgeois project of aesthetics, bourgeois not standing here for privileged in the bad sense but as a marker for the pleasures of capitalist modes
5. The bibliography is enormous. For recent entries see, for example, Peter Goodrich, Oedipus
Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (Berkeley, 1995) and Epistolary Justice: The Love Letter as Law,
Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 9 (Summer 1997): 24596; Julie Ellison, Catos Tears and the
Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago, 1999); Representing the Passions: Histories, Bodies,
Visions, ed. Richard Meyer (Los Angeles, 2003); William M. Reddy, Emotional Liberty: Politics
and History in the Anthropology of Emotions, Cultural Anthropology 14 (May 1999): 25688 and
The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York, 2001); Jacques
Rancie`re, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, 1999); Brian
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Aect, Sensation (Durham, N.C., 2002); Michael
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002); Gillian Bendelow and Simon J. Williams,
Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues (New York, 1998); Antonio R.
Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New
York, 1999); and Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana, Ill., 2002).
6. The classic work on emotionology is Peter N. and Carol Z. Stearns, Emotionology:
Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards, American Historical Review 90
(Oct. 1985): 81336. See also, most recently, An Emotional History of the United States, ed. Peter N.
Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York, 1998).
7. See Miriam Bratu Hansen, The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as
Vernacular Modernism, Modernism / Modernity 6 (Apr. 1999): 5977.
8. See Herbert Marcuse, The Armative Character of Culture, Negations: Essays in Critical
Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1968), pp. 88133.

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Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004

of distinction. Bourgeois suggests that the aesthetic of modernity always involves a market, even if the name of the value it gives its objects of exchange
is merit.
At the same time, aesthetic experience gifts the good life with a dierent
pacing than the working life, donating to the worker the privilege of slowness, of time to have a thought/experience whose productivity is subjective,
connecting the sensorium to something that feels noninstrumental, absorbing, and self-arming. Slowing down is a legendary tactic of antibourgeois and antinormative activity generally, but it turns out to be the
privilege of the consuming subject as well. The double person of whom
Marcuse speaks, who receives slow time as free time secured by hard work,
is not countering any norms.9 Aesthetic and critical works that seek to promote overcoming what are called the immediate gratifications of mass society are, mainly, in perfect consonance with its modes of privilege even as
they remain a marker of a dierent, or better, pace for living. Even when
the content of aesthetic experience is disturbing in a utopian, avant-garde,
or just dicult, counternormative way, one cannot say about it that its critical distance interferes with the reproduction of violence in whatever form.10
Poovey, Hansen, Frances Ferguson, and de Lauretis demonstrate this beautifully.
I propose that we turn optimism itself into a topic probably best phrased
as collective attachment. Optimism is a way of describing a certain futurism
that implies continuity with the present, but, as it does not always feel good,
attachment seems a better way to describe the pleasures of repetition without presuming their aective reverb.11 This is Marcuses point: How is it
that the bad life appears to so many as the good life yet unrealized? What
relation is there between this mode of optimistic negativity or deferral and
the pleasurable distances of aesthetic self-cultivation? At the same time that
emotions bring us toward others (even internal others, say the psychologists) in a way that merges self-continuity with the continuities of repetition
and futurity, there is a whole field of negativity that is not the opposite of
cultivated emotion. We need to give more thought to the modes of subjectivity that are disorganized, or noncoherent, or negative, or lagging in a
9. See Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1966),
pp. 2154.
10. I refer here to the emerging importance of the study of trauma and human rights in the
academy and of what we might call terror films in the U.S. popular public sphere, which are
remaking traditional mainstream genres from horror to melodrama. What matters, in both of
these domains, is the incomprehensibility of escalating violence everywhere. But the incitements
to paranoia and conscience do not dissolve the armative impulses of consumer survivalism.
11. For a fuller critique, situated in queer theory, of the normativity of optimism, see Lee
Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (forthcoming).

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more profound way than even Freudian Nachtraglichkeit or deferred action

would suggest.
My second point follows from the first one, then, which argues that critical theory and criticisms investment in cultivating consciousness as a good
in itself is, among other things, related to the anxieties of keeping critical
culture armative. At the same time, whether the experience of available
aesthetic phenomena provides beautiful, sublime, or palliative relief from
the business of creating value for others, along with this relief is a whole
field of negative emotion. Negative emotion is a formal category, related to
bad moods and depressions the way attachment related to optimism above.
For the last few years a project titled Feminism Unfinished has developed
a national program of local cells, dedicated to a variety of topics; one of
these is Public Feelings.12 The Chicago group calls itself a feel tank rather
than a think tank, only partly as a joke. Comprised of artists and academics,
the feel tank is organized around the thought that public spheres are aect
worlds at least as much as they are eects of rationality and rationalization.
This is a collaborative project, and collaboration is one of our topics. We
study theoretical, historical, and aesthetic materials engaged with the aects
and emotions. Right now, we are amassing for future research the negative
political emotions because most U.S. citizens and occupants have abandoned participating in the political sphere and because many who do, say,
merely vote, do it without optimism for the kind of transformative agency
that might/ought to have been a possibility. Some of these emotions: detachment, numbness, vagueness, confusion, bravado, exhaustion, apathy,
discontent, coolness, hopelessness, and ambivalence.
Our instinct is that these political emotions are often experienced as disconnection, consciousness at a distance. In the tradition of the negative dialectic, but also in other ways, what does it mean to think about the aversive
emotions of negativity as kinds of attachment? We have hosted, for example,
an International Day of the Politically Depressed. What does it mean to
think of negativity not as an eect of bad power but as a way of being critical
12. Feel Tank Chicago has a complex bureaucratic history. It is a cell in a larger system first
generated by the collaborative eort of Janet Jakobsen of the Barnard Center for Research on
Women, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy of the Department of Womens Studies at the University of
Arizona, and me, when I directed the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago. If
our initial impulse was to work together to honor the unfinished scholarly, aesthetic, and activist
business of the 1982 Conference on Sexuality at Barnard evidenced in the anthology Pleasure and
Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol S. Vance (Boston, 1984), we moved quickly to
reimagining the form of feminist futures with feminist and queer scholars and activists from all
over, who have met collectively and in individual cells during the years since to pursue particular
interests. Transnational Feminism, Sex and Freedom, Organizing Gendered and Racialized
Communities through the Axis of Class, and Public Feelings are the most active cells.

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Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004

without consciousness, as we currently understand its cultivated form?How

is it possible to think about cultivated subjectivity in the aesthetic sense
without implying uplift, progress, or errancy? Situated in our own contradictions, we are also restless, angry, mournful, and strangely optimistic activists of the U.S. political sphere. I close with the slogan that will be on our
first cache of T-shirts and stickers: Depressed? . . . It Might Be Political.

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