Lauren Berlant Research Articles

Precarity and Public Housing

Precarity and Public Housing Emily J. Hogg (bio) and Bryan Yazell (bio) INTRODUCTION: PRECARITY, TEMPORALITY, AND PUBLIC HOUSING In 2022, five years after the fire that killed seventy-two people, Grenfell Tower still stands in West London, scaffolded, covered with plastic, and surrounded by hoarding. The hoarding, intended to be a temporary protective measure while a decision was taken on whether to demolish the Tower, has become the site of collective commemoration: the impermanent structure displays messages, photos, and artworks, including a community-created mosaic, which commemorate those who died and confront the systemic injustice that caused the fire to become so destructive.1 Renovation of the building, which was owned by the local government, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and was predominately home to social housing tenants, did not meet legal standards.2 The materials used fed rather than hampered the fire, and residents state that a series of warnings they made about fire safety before the disaster were ignored.3 A recent report by the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission states that given this history, some of the residents, survivors, and bereaved wish the Tower to remain standing in case "what happened will be forgotten. . . . if Grenfell Tower no longer marks the west London skyline, the general public will think that the tragedy has closure and it's time to move on—and there will be less pressure to deliver justice."4 Others want the Tower demolished for reasons that also have to do with justice and its timeframes. They worry about "how growing up literally in the shadow of the Tower impacts on their children. It's not possible to know how long justice might take, and there are no guarantees that it will ever come."5 Writing years before the Grenfell fire, Owen Hatherley described a particular sense of temporal disjunction associated with social housing, seeing "the council blocks that still stand all over Britain's cities" as the remains "in present-day Britain of the brief rush of Bevanite Socialism that followed the war."6 They are [End Page 13] remnants that recall the utopian ambitions of the postwar welfare state, even as they have degradingly become seen as what Lynsey Hanley calls "holding cages for the poor and disenfranchised," frequently threatened with demolition, privatized, stigmatized in cultural narratives and, as the Grenfell disaster so starkly shows, often poorly maintained by their municipal owners.7 When the dreams of social mobility and reliable security associated with postwar social democracy have become increasingly difficult to believe in, and no new way of imagining future flourishing has emerged, there is, according to Lauren Berlant, a situation of "impasse." The impasse is: a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things. . . . The holding pattern implied in "impasse" suggests a temporary housing.8 This dossier takes this final sentence, and its connection between housing and the temporal feel of the present, literally. Focusing on European social housing developments, as sites connected both aesthetically and historically with the welfare state and its egalitarian aspirations, it asks how what Hanley terms the "holding cage" and Berlant the "holding pattern" are related and considers the ways artistic mediations of the social housing development register the precarious temporalities of the present. Although the particularities of housing estates differ in individual national contexts, there are strong continuities—both symbolically and, in terms of design and construction, literally—between developments in different European states.9 Turning to the precarious time implicit in housing places in dialogue several critical approaches that while often expressing adjacent concerns, are rarely discussed together: precariousness as a shared socio-ontological condition, uneven temporalities, and the lived experience within social housing. Guy Standing touches on the confluence of these concepts in his expansive definition of the "precariat," which names the denizens most affected by neoliberalism's dismantling of the welfare state. For Standing, any potential solidarity within the precariat runs against the fragmented temporality that internally divides this "class-in-the-making."10...

Citizen Myles

The following paper proposes a reading of American poet Eileen Myles’ 2007 poetry collection Sorry, Tree in the interrelated contexts of Lauren Berlant’s understanding of intimacy and her concept of intimate citizenship, Lee Edelman’s understanding of sexuality and negativity, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s sense of the contemporary as always untimely. An openly lesbian and queer author, Myles gestures towards the sawed and the disempowered, olering an intimate, yet unmistakably political negotiation of a minoritarian lesbian position as both denant and transformative of the (hetero)normative status quo through acts of observation, engagement, and participation that do not necessarily have to be conspicuous or successful to elect reconceptualization of the social; rather, Myles suggests that individual agency in the public world also resides in failure as illuminative of the fact that one’s desire for presence is continuously actualized through entanglement with negativity.

Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King1

The article makes the case for David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King as a literary intervention into the American ethos of productivity, which offers a critique of this ethos by exploiting the trope of acedia, or boredom. Wallace’s novel employs acedia as the mode of its subjectivity and its main theme, thus creating a unique, recursive aesthetics, which is resistant to “productive” interpretations. Following Wallace’s own vocabulary, I call this aesthetics “the aesthetics of the feedback glare.” As a result of its recursive dynamics, the novel creates a series of micro-events. They can be classified as what Lauren Berlant calls “self-interruptions”: the events that guard the heterotopic territory of the subject’s (as well as the author’s) agency against interpellative calls of the book industry for self-exploitation and productivity.

Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms

AbstractPart 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of ‘cruel optimism’. Cruel optimism names a double‐bind in which attachment to an ‘object’ holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of ambivalence to Berlant's thought, as well as their orientation to overdetermination and incoherence. Geographers and others have found in the concept a way of understanding the intersection between affective and political economies in the crisis‐present following the 2008 financial crisis. Together with Berlant's linked concepts such as ‘crisis ordinariness’ and ‘impasse’, cruel optimism has offered a way of understanding why detachment can be so difficult and how damaging conditions endure. Contributors begin from these starting points, amplifying the concept's promise: a new way of researching and writing about the reproduction of ordinary damage and harm. By writing from diverse encounters with Berlant's work, they move the concept in multiple directions, juxtaposing it with other optimisms across a variety of empirical scenes and locations. The result is a repository of what cruel optimism, and Berlant's mode of thinking‐feeling more broadly, offer geographers and others.

Encountering Berlant part one: Concepts otherwise

AbstractIn Part 1 of ‘Encountering Berlant’, we encounter the promise and provocation of Lauren Berlant's work. In 1000‐word contributions, geographers and others stay with what Berlant's thought offers contemporary human geography. They amplify an encounter with their work, demonstrating how a concept, idea, or style disrupts something, opens up a new possibility, or simply invites thinking otherwise. The encounters range across the incredible body of work Berlant left us with, from the ‘national sentimentality’ trilogy through to recent work on negativity. Varying in form and tone, the encounters exemplify and enact the inexhaustible plenitude of Berlant's thought: fantasy, the case, love, impasse, feel tanks, slow death, ellipses, gesture, attrition, intimate public, ambivalence, style. Part 2 of ‘Encountering Berlant’ focuses on Berlant's most influential concept: ‘cruel optimism’. Across these heterogeneous encounters, Berlant's enduring concern with the tensions and possibilities of relationality and how to enact better forms of common life shine through. These enduring concerns and Berlant's commitment to the incoherence and overdetermination of phenomena are summarised in the Introduction, which also explores how Berlant's work has been engaged with in geography. The result is a repository of what an encounter with Berlant's thought makes possible.

Noir Affect in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

"Taking its cue from Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker’s rethinking of noir affect as a descriptor of detective fiction, this paper contributes to the discussion of South African writer Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City as a narrative that both harnesses and fluidifies the generic conventions of the crime thriller. Pondering Beukes’s claim that her story may become the site for the transmutation or transmission of ethically adjusted emotion, the paper resorts to Lauren Berlant’s thoughts on detective fiction as a genre condensing the “cruel optimism” of the ordinary, rather than the evental, present to explore the clues of affectional attunement in Lauren Beukes’s postapartheid novel."

Temporariness made interminable: Pacific Islander farmworkers in Australia and the enduring crises of global agricultural production

AbstractDrawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork with Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) workers in south‐east Australia, I reflect in this paper on the experience of interminable temporariness and on its implications for the structural conditions underpinning contemporary horticultural labour in Australia. Although in many ways reflective of the specificities of a unique historical moment, the interminable temporariness experienced through the COVID‐19 pandemic also speaks to broader, enduring conditions produced within contemporary Australian agriculture. Here, the restructuring of the agri‐industry produces for many what Lauren Berlant describes as the “impasse” or “crisis ordinariness” of life under neoliberalism. At the same time, logics of development—including racialized imaginaries and border regimes—articulate with agricultural guest worker schemes in ways that seek to fix whole populations and regions in relations of suspended hope. In this context, I argue, the pandemic exposed and intensified structural vulnerabilities and unequal distributions of risk, which are encoded in the political economy of farm work in Australia, while also cleaving open new, if tentative, possibilities for agency and solidarity.

Meet our baby: celebrities’ children and childhood between comfort, refuge, and futurity

ABSTRACT This paper aims to investigate representations of celebrities’ children and childhood in the context of the US during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores how discourses around the famous offspring serve social and cultural functions within the celebrity context and beyond. The increased exposure of children in celebrities’ homes has created kinship ties through a strengthening of parasocial relationships through the performance and illusion of intimacy. Furthermore, this paper aims at understanding the larger implications of discourses around celebrities’ children in the US context. By employing Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of retrotopia, it will be argued that representations of celebrities’ children can be seen as idealised versions of the present which harken back to an imagined, romanticised past. This will be read in light of a current moment that is marked by precarious living conditions and national crises, the COVID-19 pandemic only being the most current one. Moreover, Lauren Berlant’s idea of national sentimentality will be used to show that these representations can also be seen as visions of futurity. It will be demonstrated how narratively and visually embedded illusions of intimacy create a glorified image of childhood and construct childhood and family as a place of comfort, refuge, and thereby futurity.

#Relationshipgoals: fantasies of the good life in young people’s digitally-networked peer cultures

ABSTRACT Drawing on the creative group and individual interviews with young people aged 11–18 years old in England and Wales in 2018, this paper assembles data that addresses the changing nature of intimacies in young people’s digitally-networked lives. Informed by Lauren Berlant’s work (2008, viii), it maps how platforms such as Instagram and YouTube circulate certain ‘fantasies of the good life’ that orient young people towards heteronormative future imaginaries. It argues that publicising intimate relationships on social media works to both reify and unsettle fantasies of monogamy, marriage and domesticity by highlighting their inherent precarity. It also illustrates how smart technologies such as the virtual personal assistants Alexa and Siri reconfigure the good life fantasy. Moving beyond simplistic moral panics that seek to discipline young people’s digital intimacies, this paper aims to engage with the nuances of young people’s digital sexual cultures. Overall, this paper argues that attending to this complexity can enable practitioners to better attune to and support young people to navigate contemporary digital relationships and sexuality issues.

Ordinary Writing: Theorizing the Affective Structures of the Present in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds

The present work explores how affect is conceptualized throughout The Hundreds (2019), a collaborative project between Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart composed of one hundred poems of one hundred words each (or multiples of one hundred). Throughout these poems, the authors affectively reflect on and theorize about everyday life through experimental ethnographic and writing practices, self-imposing a word restraint to their writing with the objective of exploring the creative and theoretical possibilities behind alternative ways of writing affect theory. Focusing on the unique fusion of poetry, ethnography and theory present in their work, this text explores the formal qualities of the poems and how the distinctions between criticism and fiction are blurred through a series of creative and experimental tactics that point towards radical ethical pedagogies and resist neoliberal values in academia. Some of these tactics specifically subvert academic conventions regarding citation, authorship and enunciation, and point towards innovative ways of inhabiting the place of the scholar and understanding academy itself. One of the central questions this investigation seeks to answer is how form is used by Berlant and Stewart in The Hundreds to theorize affect, with a special focus on how their efforts amount to what could speculatively be called «ordinary writing», a method to creatively describe and conceptualize the ordinary.

Ambivalent states: Paradoxes of subjection in the Jordanian south

This paper explores the passionate attachments that underpin subjection to political authority. It does so through an examination of the ways residents of the Jordanian city of Ma‘an are formed by, respond to and live with stateness. Rather than unpacking the prosaic practices through which the state comes to appear as an external structure, it probes the forms of agency and affective connection that emerge from life amidst these practices, exploring some of their effects and conditions of possibility. Far from calling for the Jordanian state’s downfall or demise, Ma‘anis call for the state’s redemption, in a circuitous cycle that only intensifies their conviction in an object of desire that so dependably thwarts their aspirations. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant, this paper argues that while the assurances and consolations the state offers can be entered into in any number of ways, subjectivities in its midst may very well be marked by a constitutive ambivalence that is difficult to escape.

Review: Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, by Andy Horowitz

Review: <i>Katrina: A History, 1915–2015</i>, by Andy Horowitz

Forms and scenes of attachment: A cultural geography of promises

Attachment is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary cultural geography. Cultural geography is full of relations that look like attachments. But attachment as a concept is mostly absent, used interchangeably with association, connection or simply relation per se. In this article, I respond to dissatisfaction with the flattening effects of the relational turn by arguing for a cultural geography orientated to attachments. Engaging with the work of Lauren Berlant and other feminist and queer theory in dialogue with actor-network theory, I conceptualise attachments as enduring trajectories that ‘bring closer’ something which comes to feel necessary to a way of life. This means that ‘objects’ of attachment – whether a person or a place, a song or a nation or anything else – come to be encountered as promises. To understand the (de/re)composition of attachments, this paper offers two concepts. Forms of attachment are arrangements that make available promises to be attached to. They channel the optimism of attachment. The presence of the promissory object intensifies in scenes of attachment – everyday space-times of limited duration which give an affective push to forms of attachment. The result of orientating inquiry to forms and scenes of attachment is a cultural geography of promises.

Digital agriculture killjoy: Happy objects and cruel quests for the good life

AbstractThis article brings together phenomena not often connected in the rural studies cannon to show an underlying relationality connecting digital agriculture, conceptions of the good life and pursuits of happiness. Drawing from the scholarship of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, Agriculture 4.0 technologies are described as ‘cruel’ happiness pointers. These platforms are shown to direct actors towards happiness while potentially accelerating the very conditions that produced the problems they are promising to solve. Highlighting conceptions of the good life that are fluid, contested and multiple, which have connections to sayings and doings associated with these platforms, the analysis makes visible norms and values animating the so‐called digital revolution. At the same time, the article interrogates what these changing affective politics means for the future of farming and farm‐based identities, at least in Western countries. The data analysed, from individuals who had adopted smart farming applications in the US, were collected from focus groups and personal interviews, the latter conducted pre (2019) and post coronavirus (COVID‐19) outbreak (2020 and 2021).

Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite

Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite

Of Architecture and Hope

Abstract Of Architecture and Hope: The Citadel Theatre of Edmonton and the Cruel Optimism of a Bygone Petroleum Age explores how one of the largest theaters built in North America in the twentieth century represents a form of petroleum-driven “cruel optimism,” a concept introduced by Lauren Berlant. Drawing upon a wide range of primary sources from the City of Edmonton Archives, the Provincial Archives of Alberta, the University of Alberta Archives, and the private archives of the family of theater cofounder Joe Shoctor, Banafsheh Mohammadi provides a detailed analysis of the design and materials of the Citadel Theatre as a means of examining how they exemplify a distinctive twentieth-century form of petroleum-based aesthetics.

Singing in Dark Times: Report from Berlin

Singing in Dark Times: Report from Berlin

Searching for Lauren Berlant: Reflections on writing, temporality and loss

This article reflects on the difficulties of writing with/alongside creative practice during periods of lockdown endured as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows my search for Lauren Berlant’s writing on the pandemic and my desire to make sense of the claustrophobic intensity of that time through their writing on attachment, precarity and ‘cruel optimism’. In reflecting on the failure to write, this article journeys through temporal rhythms, critiques of neo-liberalism, temporalities of care and unending lists to argue for the importance of hidden work in writing and/as ordinary life.

In the name of love: Female impasses within capitalist logic in Lou Ye’s The Shadow Play

As one of the leading six generation directors, Lou Ye often captures the changing social and political atmospheres in China by portraying melodramatic relationships with jolted camerawork, convoluted time frames, and emotionally charged narratives. The intimate, damaging, and symbiotic ties among individuals in the private, domestic space in Lou’s works are often symptomatic of the trenchant social inequality and the inherent violence in capitalist values. This paper studies Lou’s 2018 crime drama, Feng zhong you duo yu zuo de yun (The Shadow Play) and analyzes the way the film unpacks the upward narrative of capitalism as inherently gendered and discriminative. As the diegesis unfolds in a disjointed temporal order and heterotopic spaces in which high-rise skyscrapers and demolished residential buildings coexist, the film documents the way China’s thirty years of reform and opening up perpetuate heteronormative gender performance and subjugation of women. Illuminated by Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism” that characterizes modern individuals’ futile yet tenacious struggles and negotiation in their everyday experience with capitalist mores under the false hope of prosperity and success, the paper investigates the way the female characters’ conformity to norms and improvised coping mechanisms lead to their downfall and insinuate a yearning for an alternative form of human bonding to that prescribed by masculinist hegemony.

Lauren Berlant’s legacy in contemporary political theory

Lauren Berlant’s legacy in contemporary political theory