Deprived of meaningful advancement, the white male citizen felt ‘a desperate desire to return to an order of things deemed normal … a general everyday intimacy that was sometimes called “the American way of life”’. In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Berlant argues that in the Reagan era sentimentality collapsed the public and the private to such a degree that ‘a nation made for adult citizens replaced by one imagined for foetuses and children.’ Berlant called this ‘infantile citizenship’. I laughed at him, but Berlant was generous enough to watch the students cry over Obama and conclude that ‘the world is just not a very safe space for anybody’s tenderness, when the tenderness means they would like the world to be different and they don’t want to experience much more loss on the way.’ That’s the power of American affect for you. I once took my English boyfriend to a minor league baseball game, and he welled up at ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Until that moment, Berlant writes, the students ‘didn’t know they had national sentimentality’. In 2016, Berlant showed Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ advertisement to undergraduates who were too young to have followed the 2008 presidential campaign. Berlant reads Obama and Oprah as part of a shared national sentimentality: ‘Oprah’s sentimentality always abjures the political: always sees change as coming from within always sees obstacles to change as internal wounds and not structural blockages.’ In a similar way, Obama ‘wanted to believe that through him we could dissolve affectively what’s antagonistic structurally’ – that is, the long history of American racism – ‘and then bring politics to make structural what had been achieved in … “true feeling”.’ For Berlant, Oprah and Obama are ‘classic sentimentalists’ who view individual feeling as the crucible for political change without considering sentimentality, we cannot fully account for their popular appeal, or for their limitations.
They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation … Their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible.īerlant’s first three books – The Anatomy of National Fantasy, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City and The Female Complaint (sometimes called the ‘national sentimentality trilogy’) – consider the shared feelings and identifications that bubble under the surface of American culture and are critical to understanding its political life. They give circuits and flows the forms of a life. Public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they are also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of.
Affect theory is hard to define I like the approaching-a-definition suggested by the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, one of Berlant’s long-time collaborators. In their work on American literature and film, Berlant was less concerned with traditional objects of literary critique – plot, narrative, character – than with the mood and atmosphere that pervaded a text: the more ordinary the feelings, the more seriously Berlant took them.
Cruel optimism meaning professional#
Berlant taught English at Chicago from 1984 until their death in 2021 (Berlant used the non-binary pronoun in professional life). ‘I n academia,’ Lauren Berlant wrote, ‘reputation is gossip about who had the ideas.’ Berlant had all the good ones: about sentimentality in American culture about the place of sex and intimacy in public life about what it feels like to live in a fraying world.
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