Abstract
To talk about affective tendencies is almost always to talk about intensities, and behind that linkage is a relation to melodrama, that modality of performance that attaches feeling states to their gestural inflation in bodily performance. In contrast, Raymond Williams’ model of the structure of feeling places the historical present and the affective present in a space of affective residue that constitutes what is shared among strangers beneath the surface of manifested life. “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin” reads with Scott Heim’s novel and Gregg Araki's film to think about how to think about the structural, historical, and affective overdeterminations of underperformed emotion, tracking the emergence of a cultural style that appears as reticent action, a spatialized suspension of relational clarity that signifies a subtracted response to the urgencies of the moment (the historical moment, the sexual moment, the intimate moment, the moment where survival time is being apprehended, absorbed, and encountered).
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Notes
Georg Lukács classically defines the historical novel in terms of “necessary anachronism,” and the Marxist tradition of thinking the historical novel extends from that. See Lukács (1983, 151–2) and passim. For a longer argument about anachronism and the political in the historical novel of the present, see Berlant (2011a), Cruel Optimism, especially “Intuitionists,” 51–93. See also Anderson (2011), and Rohy (2006). On anachronism as the condition of historicism itself, see Harootunian (Harootunian 2007, 2004). On anachronism as a stamp of structural crisis and the precondition for political transformation (the becoming-archaic of normative modes of labor and value in contemporary capitalist transition), see the special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly edited by Moishe Postone, Special Issue: Perspectives on the Global Crisis, 111(2) Spring (2012) and especially Hardt (2012) and Postone (2012a, b). In his essay in the issue, “Time and Dependency in Latin America Today,” Claudio Lomnitz (2012: 348) locates this problem of disrupted and overdetermined time-sense and time-structure—of “resolving the problem of the contemporary chronotope”—in this phrase, about contemporary Mexico: “We do not currently know when we are”. Chandler (1998) points out that there is a constantly chiasmatic relation between anachronism and anatopism in the historical novel too, a thought implied in Bakhtin’s (1981) attentiveness to the chronotope as well.
I use the concept “supertext” to describe intertextual relations of adaptation across media, starting in The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (1998), 28 et passim.
I refer here to the trauma-work of historical consciousness in Gordon’s (2008) Ghostly Matters and the pleasure-work of erotohistoriography in Freeman’s (2010) Time Binds, both of which anchor their great analyses to what is knowable in the event of disruption. I am not refuting this work at all, but attending to a different patterning within the historical present of forces that could be, but don’t have to be, coded as the past’s unfinished business.
On debates about how coherent and representative the time image is in relation to contemporary cinema as historiography, see Shaviro’s (2010) Post-Cinematic Affect.
On 1 August 2014, for example, the US President Barack Obama uttered the phrase, “we tortured some folks.” The conjuncture of the word torture with the folksy vernacular sent commentators from all political positions through the roof. But Obama’s cool articulation of seriousness with a casual mien and the professorial with the folksy has been a signature of his political style from the start: a management strategy meeting a generational norm that has ties to a class norm as well, what Peter Stearns would call the bourgeois respectability discourse of “American cool.” On Obama’s cool-casual intensities, see Berlant (2011b); on the overdetermined class history of the cool and the casual, see Stearns (1994).
I make the longer argument about the politics of sentimental inflation (with implications for US histories of gender, class, and race subordination that suffuse this essay as well) in “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics” (2002) and in The Female Complaint (2008), especially pp. 33–67.
Slavoj Žižek, “The Interpassive Subject,” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-interpassive-subject/. Last accessed 23 July 2014. See also Žižek (1997, 1998).
For an indispensable art historical account of this mode, see Joselit (2000). In cinema studies, the touchstone for thinking about distended style is Deleuze’s (1989) Cinema 2: the Time Image, but one might also turn to histories of neorealist style—as does Laura Mulvey’s (2006) wonderful 24 Frames a Second—or discourses of the drift, as in Charney (1998) and Ma (2010).
This set has many more members—these are just high points. Related but not identical collections can be found in Jaffe (2014) and Mulvey, op cit. In The Desiring-Image (2013), Nick Davis argues that contemporary queer cinema moves beyond the “action-image” in the postwar era, but less toward the movement-image than the desiring-image, which is to say his interest remains in dramatic stagings of a sexuality in excess to identity, unruly and intensified as effects of the forces of history, even though many of his key directors (Gus Van Sant, David Cronenberg) have contributed significantly to a contemporary cinema of dissipated causality and affect that is ambivalent toward nostalgic attachments to drama.
I cannot but barely begin an adequate summary of the geographers’ geopolitical analytic here, apart from to say that I am deeply sympathetic to their insistent traversal of the material and the structural. See Kaplan (2011); for access to the larger debate about the costs of seeing unevenness as flat and domination as movement, follow the summary and notes in Jones et al. (2007).
Thanks to Joshua Clover for this proposition.
On the internal tensions of superflatness, see, for example, Ivy (2010).
Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in “Friendship as a Way of Life,” trans. John Johnston, in Essential Works 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (1981; New York: The New Press, 1997), 136–40. Also in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e): 1996), 308–12.
Much critical work on prostitution makes this point about the strange transfers of control and vulnerability in the scene of sex work—see, for example, Bernstein 2007. But the most viscerally memorable rendition of the simultaneity but non-mutuality of this relation I know is in Michelle Tea (writer) and Lauren McCubbin (illustrator) (2004) Rent Girl.
I have been vastly instructed by Kane Race’s work on drugs in gay pleasure practice--on conviviality, risk, self-interruption, and encounter. See Pleasure Consuming Medicine (2009).
The phrase in Bollas refers to Sigmund Freud’s ([1915] 1957: 249) description of melancholic life in “Mourning and Melancholia”.
I am referring here to debates about reading as a paranoid/reparative project, on the one hand, or a paranoid/accretive project attending to the presencing of the detail and the surface on the other, debates that are partly about what inevitably we do when we read and partly about what we should do so we do not calcify norms or miss anything (as though there is a thing rather than a relation, as though we could ever determine the relation of the literal to the figurative, or the surface to its projected penumbra, always on the move). The inciters of these debates are Sedgwick (2003), Best and Marcus (2009), Love (2010) and Moretti (2013).
I learned to think this way, about form as pattern that can induce a sense of complex action in structure, from many disciplines—especially psychoanalysis, anthropology. My favorite recent teachers include Kathleen Stewart—A Space on the Side of the Road (1996) and Ordinary Affects (2007)—and Rooney (2000, 2010).
I derive this from Bollas’s (1987: 201, 249) use of “hovering attention”.
Thanks to Caren Kaplan for this illuminating read of the bird’s eye or vertical view within the film.
Thanks to Melissa Gregg for helping me think about this point about the too-available convenience of generational thought against which this paper argues from the beginning, and yet which it risks reproducing.
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Acknowledgments
My gratitude goes out to many audiences, especially at the University of Pennsylvania, Tufts, Northwestern and the University of California at Davis. Thanks, very much, to Joe Fischel, Jackie Stacey, Robbie Duschinsky, and Emma Wilson for their timely, insightful, and generous critical responses. Finally, gratitude to Chase Joynt, Gregg Araki, and Scott Heim for allowing me to capture images of the reticent action that holds up Mysterious Skin.
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Berlant, L. Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin . Int J Polit Cult Soc 28, 191–213 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-014-9190-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-014-9190-y