More Flailing in Public

Abstract

More Flailing in Public Anna Poletti (bio) There has been an outpouring of tributes to Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, in response to their passing in June this year. Some tributes, like those published in The Nation or n+1 (Butler et al.; Bordowitz et al. ), focus on Berlant's intellectual legacy, often prioritizing the importance of Cruel Optimism as an analytic frame for understanding the contemporary moment. Others, such as those published on the blog of the journal Berlant coedited, Critical Inquiry (Ferguson and Brown), are closer to forms of digital life writing. The personal, often intimate and confessional, tone of many of these tributes seem entirely appropriate ways of memorializing a thinker, teacher, interlocutor, collaborator, and (for some) friend, who was a leading figure in developing a rigorous approach to studying a cluster of related phenomena: affect, publics, intimacy, sexuality, gender, genre, and form. Many of the tributes are a testament to what Berlant helped us think and say about the work of the intellectual ( "Affect is the New Trauma"; "Genre Flailing"), and how Berlant's way of engaging with their colleagues was often intellectually generative, as well as personally surprising or unsettling. In what follows, I offer my perspective on the worlding Berlant engaged in (Poletti and Rak 262; Berlant and Warner), and offer a sketch of some of the elements for worlding they left behind. For me, Berlant's publications and their way of speaking with colleagues enacted and theorized core tensions that preoccupy lifewriting studies: what it means to be a person in public—sometimes alone, sometimes in a collective, sometimes in search of collectivity. Always thinking from, and beyond, psychoanalytic insights into the disorganizing experience of desire (largely through object-relations), Berlant explicated the kinds of stories about the good life that permeated American culture, and explored what happened to people's belief in culture, politics, and themselves when they tried to live those narratives, or discovered those narratives were structurally unlivable ( The Female Complaint; Cruel Optimism ). Berlant's early work on trauma ("Trauma and Ineloquence" ) and their interviews (with Jay Prosser, and with Julie Rak and me) are the places where the relevance of their deep attention to the politics of "fantasies of the good life" are most clearly connected to lifewriting scholarship. Margaretta Jolly's special issue of Biography on "Life Writing and Intimate Publics," published ten years ago, shows us how productive Berlant's theory of the importance of being and feeling intimate in [End Page 2] public can be for studying life writing, particularly online. A thinker preoccupied with genre ( The Female Complaint ; "Genre Flailing"), Berlant was ambivalent about autobiography per se. They made that ambivalence available as a tool, rather than a judgment. When they invited Julie Rak and me to present at the University of Chicago, they responded to my speculative paper, an attempt to connect Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of the periperformative utterance to the importance of the performative in theorizing of life writing, by asking openly: Isn't all autobiography periperformative? Luckily, I had read enough Berlant by then to know that their use of all was not an attempt to collapse everything together in order to control or dismiss it, but an invitation to shift the object or my position in relation to it. In a footnote to a later publication, Berlant summarized the periperformative as "Sedgwick's term for the context-extending effects of performative actions" ("Genre Flailing" )—a statement that usefully condenses a core element of Sedgwick's concept, while also being an apt descriptor of Berlant's intellectual legacy. Through a slow unfolding of specific genres that give form to Americans' investment in the good life (such as the couple form and the nation), Berlant's scholarship (a performative action) radically extended the applicability of feminism and queer theory's interest in ideologies of proper desire. When we interviewed Berlant the day after our presentations, they spoke from their commitment to creating deep context through attention to "the scene," and with characteristic honesty about the goals they had set themselves as a writer and thinker with their blog, Supervalent Thought. For...