[Editors Note: Lauren Berlant was a preeminant cultural theorist and leading voice of affect theory. Known for the landmark publication Cruel Optimism, Berlant recontextualized the fantastical, modernist notion of upward mobility—i.e. the American Dream—as something that works to destroy us; that our deepest rooted desires often only work against us. Topics like attachment, citizenship, intimacy, comedy, dead-pan aesthetics, and urgency, were conjured into an analytical practice of what it means to be both an ordinary individual who is part of a collective, contemporary society.
Berlant also maintained a relatively obscure online presence for their niche community of peers and students. Supervalent Thought (2007–2019) was a classic manifestation of the blog era. The standard accumulation of meandering texts, conceptual fits and starts, comments and their retorts, and everyday exhaustion was part of Berlant’s own process in between publications.
They were a longtime professor in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, having received an appointed professorship in 1984 until their death in 2021. While their academic papers are held at Brown University, Supervalent Thought has not been collected or documented in its entirety as of this writing. Below is a minor attempt to share Berlant’s authored texts: dated and contextualized, to be read, considered, and critiqued. Because one has to start somewhere, I selected the ‘sovereignty’ and ‘non-sovereignty’ topics. Slight grammar and syntax errors have been edited for clarity.] SITTING ON AN AIRPLANE, A MULE
September 18, 2010, 6:30 pm Filed under:
class, Craziness, Encounters, Love, Mood, non-sovereignty, optimism, Ordinariness, psychoanalysis, supervalent_thought, Theory of this Blog, trauma, writing
1. I am reading other people’s work during a long travel corseting. Much of it is interesting and plausible: I try, it tries. I feel dull toward it, pickled.
Most of the writing we do is actually a performance of stuckness. It is a record of where we got stuck on a question for long enough to do some research and write out the whole knot until the original passion and curiosity that made us want to try to say something about something got so detailed, buried, encrypted, and diluted that the energetic and risk-taking impulse became sealed and delivered in the form of a defense against thinking any more about it. Along the way, something might have happened to the scene the question stood for: or not.
2. I never fall out of love, but run out of gas. That’s what I mean by thinking as a transformation within stuckness. All the noise of research and explanation gets created to materialize the thickness of an interest; the noise circles around its object and barely, usually, congeals the force to move it anywhere, although sometimes it does. The thought is never finished—in Deleuzean terms, the problem-event that governs the situation is in potential–but what I’m talking about in the finishing is something else, the movement within stuckness between making an opening and defending against so much of that which spikes out from the openings one makes until the thing has to be relinquished and moved into the world.
3. Thank god I didn’t bring candy onto the plane. The minute I step onto English soil I want licorice and it never ends. I am so very self-disciplined that it never ever ends. This time I walked into my hotel to see a huge bowl of Jelly Bellies, each individuallycased in a wrapperwith the logo on it. I knew a woman during the 1990s who supported herself for two years writing the official biography of the Jelly Belly. It was not then called a corporate or a commodity history, but a biography, but I don’t believe there was a chapter about the brilliance of individual wrapping for inducing an appreciation of the singularity of the bean, or its serial variations. She told me that Ronald Reagan was the key figure in the Jelly Belly’s global prominence as ordinary pleasure and corporate gift: the neoliberal elite’s first global snack. I flooded intensely with production tableaux when I saw the obscene bowl, and avalanched under various factory scenarios of bean wrapping (by robots? by people?), seeing unfold in front of me the soon-sickening slapstick of Lucy and Ethel on the chocolate line and then the destruction of the world that went into making come true the dream of the excessive logo. The wrapping unwraps the world and the unwrapping brings everything down to this bean, then that, and you can’t see a thing. I realized then that I knew not where cellophane came from. It turns out to be rayon’s relative, and not, as I first thought, iceberg lettuce’s neighbor. Did you know that “lettuce” comes from the same root as lactose, not cellulose? And that it contains an opiate-like substance? Many people experience this lettuce-like sensation as boredom, the opposite of the bean’s little spike.
4. #3. was meant to be a demonstration of #s 1 and 2, if that’s not obvious.
5. Meanwhile my head flashes on my own paragraphs to move around—reorganizes, synthesizes components, pulls thought like worms out through pores whose existence had been unknown, toward routes whose shape is yet obscure, and I don’t care so long as the work makes prehension of the contours of the impossible both more possible and richer.and therefore available for more significant eruption. One must refuse the intractable’s demand to experience pre-defeat. This isn’t therapy because the point is to make an experiment out of thought, to loosen up the tight knot of what’s been satisfying, even if it means risking being not understood and irritating and, all too often, feminized. (If a girl experiments it’s a failure to do something; if a boy does it’s called courage and vision—all too often). I can’t really tell the story of the non-encounters that produced this observation, but they had nothing to do with me personally. I just saw them not happen, over and over, during the conference I just attended, when suddenly I broke into fantasies of leaving the profession forever. This probably has something to do with my mood, but that mood probably had to do something with the candy.
6. Keston Sutherland gave a great paper about how what gets translated as congealed, solid labor in Marx really refers to gelatin made from the not-discarded body parts of animals, in some under-elaborated analogy to the worker’s body-in-parts that circulates through Capital and is visible in its destruction of life in I Love Lucy’s comic bit. He also cries in supermarkets, it turns out. What is it that gets scraped out from the insides of bones and called a delicacy? Why would anyone think to eat the inside of a bone, except out of sheer poverty? It’s so wide I can’t get around it. My old husband told me how to survive the cold. Stop resisting and the drama becomes a memory and suddenly you’re somewhere else. But how often does that gate open? It doesn’t just open by will.
4a. Work is where I show up with everything I’ve got. A month ago I dreamed about the start of school, and in the dream students passed out to everyone who passed by their kiosk marijuana bouquets that had gone slightly yellow and to seed. The affect was lovely even though I noted that the power of the gesture was diminished by the fading of the plant, and just today while reading in prison a pop up thought said, oh it’s about the good enough reciprocity between students and teachers, the aesthetic object that’s placeholding within the transaction that would allow consciousness to be alive and remediated and loosened up as we are all asked to do if we are learning. If we can bear to let in this fact: that all of our objects are stand -ins. This is the scholarly imperative. It’s all a stand in. There’s nothing behind it. The thing, the object, is a cluster of forces whose reliable appearance makes the world proximate and attachable to, and the attempt to think those relations as an it is a way of changing a lot through changing our proximity to the thing the lot makes, the way its density anchors us and makes us want to move it somewhere. And our own gestures, whose sweep we find in the world and sometimes (if we remediate for a living) turn into concepts (steady, now), they’re what make it possible for other people to learn and things to seem different, because the object can become stronger and different only on the condition that you see in it movement– suspended, alive, and in a space absorbing the thought that included all you know. We just passed the Appalachian mountains. We just passed on lox and grapes. The lady wants me to turn off my phone. Sprint valley. 3594. New city. 5500. Local time st origin 5. No more nuts. At density the plane is shaking. 3601. Suddenly signs of the interstates flash on the screen, as though the plane has made a category error. The road is not a runway. I hope.
6. This was the summer of putting closure on Cruel Optimism and the cinema of precarity, the digging, scraping cracking and caulking cinema of getting by, Then many new cushions were purchased, and by accident they were all red. Adam Phillips said at this conference that satisfaction is always an image first that preexperiences the later event, but that satisfaction is so threatening as a prospect we would rather destroy the object/prospect than deal with the the complexities of potentially infinite being-with it. I thought that giving too much to the image as object was off, that satisfaction is sensed before it is sensed in a thing, and thus the thing’s distortion of the sense’s infinite spreading without limit has to be disappointed when it lands on the stand-in that is never after all the star or God (as in tragedy—isn’t what Othello learns that he’s a placeholder, not the star or God?), because, I guess, it might be unbearable for some to see the sometimes fact that the sea looks like oil paint covered by lint, from a certain distance, where we close our eyes to hold it and finish it without, I’m afraid, it being the entire story.
I experimented with taking a day off. It was likely to be a failure, because it had to be an experiment, as I have no habits of leaving the desk, only habits of clawing a path back to it, which is odd because I never leave it, except when I am forced to by my job or my career, which are also what force me back, or there’s a movie to watch, but even then, if it’s at home, the “desk” comes with me like a friend, resting on the arm of the couch so I can turn to it anxiously when I hit a moment of not understanding. Even at the gym, I work on the elliptical. I am on a plane now. Leonardo DiCaprio’s coffee is shaking slow-mo and the people are acting as though they’re dissociating but his face is too wide, square, fat, or flat for me to cathect, which is a mimetic response.
I had begun to address my life with a flat voice. It was bad: usually I can get by with my drive to remain tethered to the potentially good event while meanwhile the infrastructure stumbles along. The causes of this sudden synthesis toward a dark plateau were, anyway, so overdetermined as to induce an affective semicolon. The correct analysis of a symptom does not reveal, produce, point to, or give confidence about the shape of its cure, which is why so much work in the humanities limps along in the phrases that follow out the description of a problem.
Two new big classes and a paper deadline and a vast job search and the students spilling out all late into December because we ask them to be intellectuals but give them no time to do it, inculcating in the upcoming professional class a fatigue autoerotics along with a shamed and confused awareness that these labor conditions allow only tumbling down a hill and then revising it later to look like a plan, when it was only doing what you could do at the time (my epitaph) in an act of blind hope. A cab driver today told me about all of the men he knows who beat women. I can’t remember why, it was like a dream. We talked of how hard it is to unlearn habits of intimate violence–not just to others but to oneself–since assuming a gender requires violence and shame and competence anxieties that never leave, and people can exhaust (fade or inflate) after a while of showing up for the audition. I promise that next year will be different: I won’t try to finish a book. I will be rolling around in a beginning that has already started. Meanwhile I felt I could crack into permanent consistency, although I don’t know what that would mean, if I didn’t take a day off.
Cold turkey was the only way, and yet I failed, because I decided to watch Greenberg. Goldmine! It turned out to be a film about a man trying to do nothing, which I found hilarious. When I type that I find something hilarious I think of Oskar in Jonathan Safran Foer’s astonishing Incredibly Close and Extremely Loud—how could he have written such a tender book—because Oskar is always cracking up, and when he does it it is so tender because it reveals his aloneness in the world, and his sense that he might fall over permanently if somebody doesn’t manifest a delight in observing the world right now. The book is about the history of his shame at having had a moment of hesitation. Greenberg is technically a comedy in that sense.
The stone-voiced and bitter Greenberg has relinquished compulsory ambition. This means in the film that he’s incapable of an attachment to anything that breathes, pets or persons. So he has to figure out what it means to live without building a life; so of course he’s a carpenter who has a feel for domestic infrastructure without having a feeling for it: first he’s in the doghouse, then he builds a doghouse, then he takes a dog to a house. So of course the film’s homeopathic alter to the career melodrama that blocks his access to the good life (he coulda been a contender) is heteropathic, a l o v e p l o t. The DIY generation that doesn’t mind being kind of mediocre at what it does teaches him to ratchet things down. An imagination wrote this that is so tiny a fruit fly would feel like an empty nester.
But I really liked it. I like Matthew Broderick films too, where he’s so abject I just marvel at the brave defenselessness of the acting. I like the Stallone of First Blood who forgot to put skin over his skeleton. I like dark acting that would have been slapstick if the filmmakers were dishonest. Greenberg is the meeting point between two affective/aesthetic idioms, mumblecore recessiveness and the indie-style of irony-admitting-it-was-melodrama-all-along. Stiller meets Greta Gerwig (and many other mumblecore stalwarts, who co-produced the thing too). But the portentous Noah Baumbach directed it, and as I was called portentous once, because I said I hated the way someone thought, I will think of him as my brother. Hate doesn’t equal love. It is a protest against airlessness.
There’s a dog with an autoimmune illness in the film, in case we needed more allegory. Blue Valentine also opens with a dog who comes to a bad end. They ask: if loving a dog is too much responsibility where are we headed? Has the imaginary for sociality come down to that measure? Everyone seeks an intimacy of proximity, or indirection, but (as Blue Valentine demonstrates) love demands more than wanting the dog to flourish; it requires knowing when to open the cage and when to keep it closed. Or else it’s just one blurt after another: “You seem really fine doing nothing,” says Gerwig’s character. “I want to be doing nothing. I’m doing nothing deliberately,” says Stiller. “I don’t know if I could do nothing and be that cool with everything,” Greta responds. Then she invites him to fuck. I believe in the math of that conversation that fucking=doing cool nothing. Score! But neither of them mean what they say, not that they know what they mean.
“I should be with a divorced 38 year old who has teenage kids and low expectations about life,” he says. He writes enraged letters to institutions that disappoint him and he personalizes their failures. He’s a total bore. What does it mean to aspire to love someone who aspires to sheathe his sensorium in stale drama repetitions while handing off the non-sovereignty of attentive responsibility to the unfortunates who happen to be around? Ok, he learns to call the taxi to help him show up more or less on time. But it’s just another way of encountering the end of the good life fantasy in the guise of an emotional austerity that dresses itself up as profound realism, and in the absence of an analysis of what kinds of loss should replace the usual ones, we get the risk of couple love as the habit we must treasure as fidelity to life itself. (Indeed the aspiration is for couple-love to be as tender as pet care.) So life goes on, and cruel optimism is allowed another chapter, and the question of how to really have a life continues its slouch. There’s also the dog in Wendy and Lucy. When I type “just another way” I mean this is where we are, tilting on the end of genre, among other things that indicate the pathetic state of relationality, among other things.
This post would be Combover 5 but it would also be Flatness 2 and Ambition 3. Things are taking shape! At least they are just, here.
I’m converting a cafeteria to a café—Valois just got wi-fi and I wanted to be in a capacious space, light with big tables and no soundtrack. It’s empty, almost, mid-afternoon. A few old people are sitting around schmoozing as they will, and we look after each other’s tables when we need bathroom breaks or a refill. After a few hours a father and son come and sit two tables up. The father, young, instructs his son relentlessly: on how to use a laptop, how to play a game, how to sit, how to be quiet, and how to eat without smacking his mouth. I am working with my head down trying to drown out the noise. Then at one point I hear him say to his son, why do you want to give up on your dream, why do you want to give up on your dream of being a football player? Kid: I want to draw cartoons. Father: you also want to be in the NFL, why do you want to give up on your dream? Kid: I want to draw cartoons, I have lots of stories to tell. Father: tell me, why do you want to give up on your dream?
A piece of paper falls off the table. It has boxes drawn on it and word balloons. The figures they’re attached to look better than stick, but there’s a not lot of detail. His father says, Don’t you see, when you’re 35 and you’ve been in the Super Bowl, you’ll have the skills of a 35 year old man, not a 9 year old boy, and when you’re 35 and a cartoonist, you’ll have the skills of a 9 year old boy?
They call it a skill set, the father says.
The father’s friend joins them at the table and they begin to write a statement for a grant. They’re tossing sentences back and forth, throwing the dough high. The language of the grant sounds like the lesson the parent learned once and is trying to impart to his son, to fulfill the demand of the world to produce optimism attached to plans. The kid puts his head on the table. He’s long faced and wiry, with no fat I can see. The father’s friend looks over and says, get up! You have to focus to get anywhere in the world, here, let me give you something real to do. Write down the first thing you think. The boy says something soft, I can’t hear it. The friend says to the father, you’re raising someone who can’t think? And to the son: You have to think on your feet in this world. The boy looks around wildly, and you could call it a smile if his mouth weren’t so wide open and mobile, like those Claymation mouths I remember scooting around from childhood. He’s not looking for escape, or dreaming revolution. He is scanning the space without focus. I put my fingers loudly in my ears to make them shut the fuck up. They look at me hard, and pityingly, I thought, thinking, what a buzzkill old woman asshole, which, in reality, I was trying to be.
You have to know that in Hyde Park this is a common café occurrence, a man or woman on the make taking up the aural public space and giving everyone within earshot a shot of philosophy and self-publicity. As the recession’s expanded, this man or woman could be any adult, in any city café, thrown onto entrepreneurialism and holding onto a dream through an insistent twisting of talk. I come from a family of café dreamers, as my grandmother used to joke, with big plans. All you need for the precarious present is a Bluetooth headset, a laptop, and a pitch. In the office the café has become, the capitalist dream finds succor, attracting the creativity of people desperate to demonstrate that they already have the life for which they are scrambling. They’re selling real estate, or have a pyramid scheme, or a program for youth. They make music videos and shoot weddings on the side. They can’t lose, they have an idea for a cross-platform citywide computer game that kids could first play online, later converging face to face. They’ve made it into a board game too, here take a look, take a copy, here is my card. All of these Eleanor Rigbys are keeping the business card industry in business. They have a fantasy to enhance the fantasies of others by showing up with a monetizing plan. Everyone wins, and they’re the hero, distributing scenarios everywhere like a fairy looking for wishers.
But the kid, what’s the kid going to do? I thought about giving him the card in my wallet for 10% off at the local comics store. I thought of saying, as I have done in the past–when I’m working in a café and talked to by a bored, wandering kid who’s often waiting for a working parent, or an adult who’s on the phone–do you want some pens and paper to draw (I always have lots of pens)? But my meter ran out, and there I was, left to give the kid a grin and a low five when he walked by to get some free ice water from the trays stacked in the back.
******
Cheers to my Facebook friends for the discussion that followed the first post from this event. Normally I spend many months on a post, but this time I wanted to capture the collective mood of its prior circulation. People wrote great phrases about “parental pronoun confusion syndrome”: Kid: Why do you want to give up on my dream?; Kid: Dad, Why did you give up your dream to play in the NFL?; Kid: Dad, I am not your dream. Father: Son, you are my dream.; Kid: “If only I had a father like that. Maybe I would have come to something”; “Send the kid secret hand signs that say: “Escape!”
Then I realized that throughout I must have been haunted by the phrase that provides this post’s title (“Father, can’t you see I’m dreaming?”/Why do you want to give up on your dream?”) Much has been said about the dream of the burning child that Freud relates, and Lacan’s revision of its meaning. They converge in the rhythm of the phrase, the transmission of desire in the form of a loving/punishing superego, the association of maturity (and masculinity) with a pedagogical realism that has borne, but can’t bear, its own lesson, in the spectacle of the father facing down the picture of his own paternal/parental non-sovereignty and the need for him nonetheless to repeat it in the son, so that the son must die again in the dream so that the dream can keep off the present. Needless to say, additionally, anyone who has ever attended, overheard, or paid attention to her own office hours would also face this scene with an uncanny shiver.
I noticed, over the last few months, as my mother was dying, that I had taken pictures that seemed very specific. Now I am looking at the archive, as one appraises a drying hand after a manicure.
My mother died of femininity. I told her that I would say this about her. She had said, “Will you write a book about me?” and I asked if she wanted me to. She said “Yes. I want you to say that I left the world a better place because I had you!” I said I thought that this was a bad idea: people would think it an excuse to write about me. She said, “Can you think of another topic?” I offered this phrase about femininity, and explained why. My brother-in-law thought that it would be better to say that my mother died from vanity rather than from femininity. I can see why he would prefer that story; it’s interesting to see how a label shifts the implication.
In her late teens she took up smoking, because it was sold as a weight-reduction aid. When she died she had aggressive stage 4 lung cancer. In her teens she started wearing high heels, to enhance the back arch and ass-to-calves posture whose strut transforms the whole body to a sexual tableau, shifting between teetering and stillness. Later, she had an abortion and on the way out tripped down the stairs in those heels, hurting her back permanently. Decades later, selling dresses at Bloomingdale’s, she was forced to carry, by her estimate, 500 lbs. of clothes each day. Shop girls, you know, are forced to dress like their customers. They have to do this to show that they understand the appropriate universe of taste, even while working like mules in that same universe, carrying to their ladies stacks of hanging things and having to reorganize what their ladies left behind on the dressing room floor. She liked this job, because she liked being known as having good taste.
These tasks threw her back out anew, and the result of this was an overconsumption of painkillers that ultimately blew out her kidneys. She had to go onto dialysis: she died three days after turning off her dialysis. In the meantime, more comically, she had two fingers partly amputated because her nails got infected by a “French wrap” gone wrong, and she was too ashamed to tell anyone about it, numbing the pain of infection with Anbesol, which she had also used for many years to avoid going to the dentist. This is not the half of it: ok, maybe it’s half.
Her name was Joanne. She asked me whether knowing this story might change any woman’s relation to her health: I said I didn’t think so, although you never know. First, no one thinks they’ll be defined by disaster until they are. They can sense it on the horizon, but the gamble is a gamble, and speculation comforts. Second, things are so bad, so minimally imaginative for sexual relations, that people tend to do the thing they heard about doing just to keep things going, and if it means poisoning themselves and wearing out their bodies, or being over- or under- stimulated, even, they’ll do it. I do it. I make better decisions but not different kinds of decision.
Once scavenged, we take habits on as beloved objects, as partners in the project of getting by, as ways of gaming the situation of making a life. I learned to think about this from Michael Eigen: you wake up, you see the world, it’s your eyes that are seeing that thing, you breathe, you sense your next breath. Those are your feet, your skin, your hands. You begin to read beyond the body. A singular world is there, it’s your partner, fixing in images the sense of continuity you carry around. Which is why loss is actually loss whatever else it is—even if it’s also a relief, a victory, an occasion for sentimental self-encountering, or a thud, almost nothing, as it is also the loss of a revitalization of sense that was bound to the image, which was itself just a stand-in for relation as such.
This is why deriving modes of attention and conceptualizing skills matters to me, you know. Once you see all objects as placeholders for the encounter with the world, as organizing the process of moving through the situation of the ordinary life, they become enigmas alongside the ways they gain specificity through use, over time. You can rely on them and have curiosity about them, and not only be scared of the way you don’t understand them. The fact that a thing is an enigmatic relation means not that the thing is replaceable, because it isn’t: but that it changes when it’s close to other things. Take a glimpse of this modernist phone I shot, for example:
Read more of Berlant's Supervalent Thoughts (On Desire)
