Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Affect Is the New Trauma
by Lauren Berlant | ns 71-72
Here's a tale about a time an accident led to an incident that is still shaping up as an event. Once I was at a conference. The conference was on feelings—on how the dynamics of their circulation shape the normative and potential workings of institutions, aesthetics, politics, historical imaginaries, and ordinary practices of sociality.1 People had a lot of feelings at the conference, too: boredom, nostalgia, engagement, admiration, anxiety, criticality (friendly), criticality (hostile), criticality (confused)—the usual. But it was a good thing; people came to listen hard, to think aloud, and to be curious. They stuck around, they acted like colleagues.
Another feeling they were having, though, was fear, but not the usual kind—of doing bad work or being useless. This fear was that other people, not at the conference, would think that we were being trendy by focusing on affect and emotion. What haunted the instigator of this anxious thread was the phrase "the affective turn." The instigator of this thread feared being seen as ambitiously having had the bad taste of being attracted to a glittering object and worse, a knock-off of a cutting edge. The fear was that we would all seem to have a shallow aspirational relation to knowledge, to be imitators and followers of the original pioneers who did all the real thinking.
My colleague's angst brought back to me a previous encounter with a bitchy colleague's dart-bearing phrase: "affect is the new trauma." This meant that one scholarly trend was replacing another. As I work on both things I felt at once like a paper doll in a string of identical cutouts. But only for a moment. Apparently, I'd worn my ego armor that day. The logic of the critical pecking order is that, if we seem to be in one, we are both borrowing its authorizing glory and, at the same time, appearing diminished relative to the glory we have borrowed to inflate ourselves. In academia, reputation is gossip about who had the ideas, but this time, fearing to embody wannabe intellectual belatedness, my colleague wanted us to assert our originality and priority.
This circuit of anxiety about professional value irritated me, made me sad, and undid my composure a bit. I responded in a tone that mixed consolation and flippancy. I said something like, "Look, we're professionals here. Other people's desire to diminish your motives for pursuing your work, which relies on knowing nothing about you and paying no attention to what you're actually saying, can't seriously affect how you proceed intellectually or pedagogically, can it? No doubt you've been working on feelings since you were a fetus, but must we justify our work by making self-inflating arguments about longevity, ownership, and origins? The important thing is where we push the thought and what we make with it, isn't it?"
I had always thought the point was that we do our work collaboratively, in discussion and across publics; that we are always in the process of playing catch-up with what we've read, heard, and discovered ourselves saying; and that the context of professionalism—for those of us who have jobs where we are licensed to gather it all up to test and take the ideas beyond what's predictable—provides important breathing space. We get to slow down around the objects/questions, gathering things up recursively and tracking their impact; meanwhile we find ways to hold at bay whatever kinds of anxiety or envy arise from taking the risk of having ideas in front of each other. Making work is always anxiogenic. And the conference, merging activists, artists, and critics in their hope that thinking affect and emotion epistemologically might open up new potentialities and scenes of convergence, demanded a lot of patient cross talk, for which there is never enough time. But the scene was shaped by anxious desires to relate things and to create a discourse world through their circulation that could have effects elsewhere, and on ourselves. To do that at any time we need to hone the skills to diminish our anxiety enough to show up, talk, and listen, and to counter other people's reductive and shaming derision of our intellectual appetites.
The conference then turned on me, in a way. The next four hours included a barrage of mainly passive-aggressive snarky side-comments about the wrong-headedness of identifying with professionalism. People with tenure, on the way to it, or otherwise highly trained claimed that they had an amateur relation to knowledge, a non-authoritarian relation to expertise, or (because not everyone made the same argument) by virtue of their subaltern/biopolitical location, did not enjoy the entitlements of the profession, always pushing it radically from occulted folds within it. For a long while I remained quiet, because something good was happening, a discussion of the affective dimensions of having jobs and/or making worlds for the work that we hope will matter. That most of this talk was in the genre of the aside said a lot about how disrupted by ambivalence engaged thinkers can become in reflecting on the very circuits of value-creation that bring us to each other and to the variety of things we call "our work."
But toward the end of the second day, I thought it was worth responding. I disputed any claim by the tenured people that they are not entitled by their professional position; said that for highly-trained people to call themselves amateurs was a wishful defense against facing the complexities of ambition and the desire for distinction and the role of discipline and normative skill-building in teaching. I disputed the presumption that progressive political commitments just naturally valorize vocational practices as more authentic, anti-bureaucratic, elitist, etc.; and claimed that the ways we benefit from the value distinctions between mental and manual labor constitute privileges we cannot neutralize by the other complexities of our historical trajectories. The academy is not the only location many of us occupy, and we all straddle a variety of zones of relative vulnerability and security. But this does not mean that we are not advantaged by the more flexible relation to productivity that academic life allows its workers.
It made me anxious to say this, as so much mystifying obfuscation and incoherence shape the ordinary disposition of promotion and informal career policing in academic life that it boggles my mind on a weekly basis; and because for those of us not securely embedded in academic life, the aspiration to be able to make worlds through work requires complex negotiations of loyalty, solidarity, distinction, and aspirational insiderness. But the fact is that we all are permitted slower productivity than most other workers—we are allowed to experiment and fail, to be wrong and revise, to get distracted, to not know what we're doing while we're doing it, to stop in the middle, to follow out instincts and hunches, not just building on established foundations. We are allowed to demand patience for the obscure, the experimental, the political, and the pedantic. Not all of us at all times. Not without cost. Like all other labor, critical cultural production in and outside of the academy is becoming increasingly proletarianized and unstable, as well as exposed to new initiatives for "quality control." And who knows what standards are being brought to evaluate our work and our thought? At the same time, typically a wide range of practices is absorbed in the category "good work."
In any case, I said, "Here's what I meant by professional. I did not mean normative according to the formal and imaginary meritocracy of any discipline, university, or particular intellectual cohort. By professional I mean pedagogical. It's our job to show up and think, to show up and think with others, to collaborate using what we know and what we don't know to push concepts beyond where they were when we entered the room. I mean all of us, whoever's in the room, nudging each other towards more and less clarity about the problems that engage us, and thereby changing the contours of the problems too. Doing this, focusing on building skills for thought, discussion, debate, expressivity, critique, and becoming different, regardless of how we feel at the moment, regardless of the noise of ambition that creates our own and our colleagues' nervous conditions, is the practice of professional obligation to which I was alluding. To be 'a professional' had never been an aspiration of mine—quite the contrary. But I'd begun to think of it because I had so many students perform the presumption that to work together was a private, intimate relation separate from its institutional mediation; and as I saw so many of us presume that if we were managing and producing distinction we must be doing it in the right, anti-authoritarian, anti-bureaucratic, barely compromised way. The narcissism of good intentions leads to serious self-misrecognition. As for amateurism, we are always working beyond our expertise and our training, but this is our job."
Things got more difficult later. A panel on pedagogy, affect, and emotion turned into a long and serious debate about whether professorial anti-authoritarian avant-gardism contributed to or blocked the empowerment or disempowerment of students. The debate was open, honest, cracking, and sharp: lots of incompatible desires and foci for political analysis of institutional politics in and outside of classrooms were on the table. The word "useful" was uttered in acid tones, although not by everyone. But no students would talk. Many private email exchanges happened later, but it seemed as though so much desire of the teacher was in the room, so much intensity of need not to be reproducing the deadening, corporate norms of credentialization, utility, excellence, and sublimated creativity of the neoliberal university and the class distinctions and discriminations it foments, that it crowded many topics and certain interlocutors out.
No one wants to be a bad or compromised kind of force in the world, but the latter is just inevitable. The question is how to develop ways to accentuate those contradictions, to interrupt their banality and to move them somewhere. Yet the stories that we so often tell ourselves about professionalism—it's what unimaginative people aspire to, a pedantic rank-based bureaucratic formalism propped against genuine conceptual richness—bar serious talk about the ethics of collegiality and pedagogy under conditions of aspiration in a way that can undermine how we embody the very scenes of desire in which we've invested our fantasies of flourishing at work, in collective worlds, with each other and our students, for those of us who teach. The oft unspoken enormity of this desire is why it is so easy to be deflated, for example, when colleagues condescend to us for want of intellectual discrimination.
I think often about this moment. I don't usually make credo-style speeches, nor pitch my practice at a level of generality that's supposed to model a way of being for colleagues. I am well aware that I drag my own personality and history to the classroom, the conference, the committee, the editorial meeting, the working group, the panel, the roundtable, the solo talk and the encounters around them, and while I try to generate practices that enable me to be reliable, focused, fun, and improvisatory, it's an ongoing project, as you can imagine. But developing an explicit pedagogical/collegial ethics (e.g. professionalism) to which I can aspire has helped me and my students fight the academic's tendency to personalize everything, including responsibility.
I know why the lure (the mirage, the alibi) of the amateur works for anti-authoritarian intellectuals and for people who try to maintain a foothold in modes of knowledge (activist, scholarly) that feel made up, processual, and more lateral than upwardly mobile. Amateurism is also a way of de-dramatizing the risk of having ideas in public, a position that critiques self-authorizing claims of credentialed expertise and the tedium of reproducing disciplinary norms. It allows the creative type to mix things up.
But the claim also disavows many things. It suppresses the amount of training that can go into the ways that one interferes with normativity. It cloaks the relation of power and privilege to the less institutionally, socially, and economically secure people with whom progressives have solidarity—including students. Even my own desire not to be disabled by the tensions between politically-engaged pedagogy and credentializing norms both manifests a liberal attachment to teaching as ideally a scene of unimpeded thought by universal subjects and solidarity with the contemporary work of autonomous universities where people join to gather up their singular knowledge and ignorance to create new social and conceptual imaginaries and practices.2 I try not to become disabled by the clash of fantasies. But living amidst the uneven rhythms and non-identity of institutional, broadly social, and always affective norms, fantasies, and economies demands a professionalism—or just ethics—that enables us to recognize what's impersonal, what's systemic, and what's mediated, about both our anxieties and the openings we are trying to create.
Let us look at the historical present, manifestly organized by the rhetoric of crisis. We need to reinvent what it means to do engaged, solidaristic work for the current crisis, the spreading precarities, and the insecuritization of all labor contexts. What world are we teaching people for, reaching toward, trying to describe or make?3 What is the relation between the fantasy of knowledge as a good in itself and pedagogy as a project of collective skill-building, a mobile utility that can have concrete effects elsewhere? Do the norms of engaged pedagogy change in the face of the economy with fewer and fewer safeguards, let alone guarantees? What's the relation among models of inequality, uncertainty, and survival? What infrastructure is required for pedagogical optimism? How does a pedagogy of the historical present provide ways for neither taking its appearance for granted nor as a mirage? The ethical and the professional meet in the nervous system in raw-making and destabilizing ways. These are the questions that should make those of us in the dreaming professions—analysts of power and alternative grids—appropriately fearful, anxious, and queasy.
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I offer this self-referential anecdote for the credo issue of the minnesota review to honor its fantastic interviews. They have always focused on the force of the personal in professional practice, tracking the singular ways that thought is both personal and impersonal, motivated and also an opening to unpredicted consequences not only in scholarship and teaching but in being in the world. I tell my students that they always have to be pedagogical in the classroom, and inevitably some reply that pedagogical means "condescending." What I mean is the opposite: lifting. The process of being in the world pedagogically (as someone who wants thought to have a transformative impact) is impersonal in the best way, as things happen collectively that can never be made by one virtuoso, even in an explosion of sovereign invention.
Notes
1. Anxiety, Urgency, Outrage, Hope: A Conference on Political Feeling, held at the University of Chicago, October 19-20, 2007.
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2. For information about autonomous universities, see the blog Constituent Imagination. View a map of autonomous universities here.
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3. This paragraph emerges from a long conversation with Eli Thorkelson, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago who works on the overdetermined atmospheres of contemporary university life in the US and France, and who blogs on this topic at Decasia.
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