Supervalent Thoughts (On Desire)
Lauren Berlant
Berlant also maintained a relatively obscure online presence for their niche community of peers and students. Supervalent Thought (2007–2019) was a classic manifestation of the blog era. The standard accumulation of meandering thoughts, conceptual fits and starts, comments and their retorts, and subtextual exhaustion was a part of Berlant’s own process in between publications.
They were a longtime professor in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, having received an appointed professorship in 1984 until their death in 2021. While their academic papers are held at Brown University, Supervalent Thought has not been collected or documented in its entirety as of this writing. Below is a minor attempt to share Berlant’s authored texts: dated and contextualized, to be read, considered, and critiqued. Because one has to start somewhere, I did a word search for ‘desire’.]
December 25, 2007, 10:31 pm
Filed under: Affect Theory, Attachment, Belonging, Encounters, Love, Ordinariness, Theory of this Blog | Tags: Belonging, Encounters, Facebook, internet, intimacy, Love, temporality
Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long conversation about what the point of networking amongst “friends” is. The person was so skeptical because to her stranger and distance-shaped intimacies are diminished forms of real intimacy. To her, real intimacy is a relation that requires the fortitude and porousness of a serious, emotionally-laden, accretion of mutual experience. Her intimacies are spaces of permission not only for recognition but for the right to be seriously inconvenient, to demand, and to need. It presumes face to faceness, but even more profoundly, flesh to fleshness. But on Facebook one can always skim, or not log in.
My version of this distinction is different of course, and sees more overlap than difference among types of attachment. The stretched-out intimacies are important and really matter, but they are more shaped by the phantasmatic dimension of recognition and reciprocity–it is easier to hide inattention, disagreement, disparity, aversion. On the other hand it’s easier to focus on what’s great in that genre of intimacy and to let the other stuff not matter. There’s less likely collateral damage in mediated or stranger intimacies. While the more conventional kinds of intimacy foreground the immediate and the demanding, are more atmospheric and singular, enable others’ memories to have the ethical density of knowledge about one that is truer than what one carries around, and involve many more opportunities for losing one’s bearings. The latter takes off from a Cavellian thought about love–love as returning to the scene of coordinating lives, synchronizing being–but synchrony can be spread more capaciously and meaningfully amongst a variety of attachments. Still, I think all kinds of emotional dependency and sustenance can flourish amongst people who only meet each other at one or a few points on the grid of the field of their life.
Thinking about yesterday’s reciprocity entry, I said to her that one point of Facebook is to inhabit the social as a place of play, of having a light impact, of being ordinary, of being acknowledged, of echoing and noodling, where the bar for reciprocity is so low that anyone could perform it by clicking. It’s a place where clicking is a sign that someone has paid attention and where dropping a line can build toward making a life. You know someone has imagined you today, checked in. You’re not an isolate. Trying to accommodate my positive explanation, she said, I guess it’s like when churches organize prayer circles for impaired strangers, sending out love into the spirit world–it can’t hurt, but is it deep? Me: people value different evidence of having had an impact and of mattering to the world they’re imagining belonging to, and who can say what’s deep from outside of the transference? But I realized that I may be incoherent about this, and of course this problem, of figuring out how to talk about ways of being that are simultaneously openings and defenses, is central to this project. When people talk about modes of belonging they talk about desire but less so about defense.
I sense that Facebook is about calibrating the difficulty of knowing the importance of the ordinary event. People are trying there to eventualize the mood, the inclination, the thing that just happened—the episodic nature of existence. So and so is in a mood right now. So and so likes this kind of thing right now; and just went here and there. This is how they felt about it. It’s not in the idiom of the great encounter or the great passion, it’s the lightness and play of the poke. There’s always a potential but not a demand for more.
Here is how so and so has shown up to life. Can you show up too, for a sec?
How can the “episodic now” become an event? Little mediated worlds produced by kinetic reciprocity enable accretion to become [an] event without the drama of a disturbance. The disturbance is the exception. And that’s what makes stranger intimacy a relief from the other kind, which tips you over.
January 15, 2008, 5:54 pm
Filed under: Affect Theory, Attachment, Craziness, Detachment theory, optimism, Theory of this Blog, writing | Tags: affect, comedy, depression, laughter, optimism, surviving
My friend Katie wrote me that she was struck by the relation of optimism to humor in this blog. After yesterday I’d say to the humors, as I was steamy, then, with optimism drain–blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, acidic energy generated by my frustrated desire to have a whole thought amidst institutional avalanches of need, demand, passive aggression, aggression, and obligation. Some things just won’t just flake away through inattention.
But mainly, I was so bollixed up by all I wanted and failed to say in the last entry that I hadn’t even gotten to say what I’d been thinking about that very thing: that is, humor, laughter, the comic, and their relation to the psychoanalytic and political interests of this project’s aim to understand problems of detaching from normative, durable, reliable forms of life. Laughter is a form of dissolution that would seem to indicate an attachment to a situation that generates pleasure. But not always, maybe not even usually.
Here’s a start toward another research thread. Even a suggestion of the comic puts me in a good mood. Thanks, Katie! (Katie even thinks that maybe these should be called The Optimism Papers, although that wouldn’t predict, say, the chapter on torture. On the other hand, torturing is the state’s ridiculous optimism about controlling the real, isn’t it? And yet, there are questions of tone: the structure and affect of optimism aren’t identical, and being precise about those divergences matters.) [Ed. Note: Cruel Optimism would be published three years later]
All throughout writing The Female Complaint comedy haunted me, comedy as a subordinated subculture’s or overwhelmed individual’s lubricant for being in the room with and figuring out how to survive what’s presently overwhelming about the real. But I could only talk about the comic as an intensity, an extremity on the other side of melodramatic heightening, as in the Dorothy Parker chapter: “Listen, I can’t even get my dog to stay down. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government?” This couplet cracks me up. But even Parker claims that comedy isn’t a weapon, but a failing shield. It’s hard for me not to feel all mixed up around Parker’s humor, sensing the fear and defense that radiates in the atmosphere of her sharp observation. But sometimes comedy is just a cigar, or whatever: delight, unmixed relief to be stretching out without a sense of wearing out.
People dissolve into laughter and into tears, among other things, I’d been thinking: the dissolution of bodily composure was always part of this research (Losing It and Unraveling were other early handles for this project). Last Thursday I realized that Detachment Theory had to start with thinking about laughing. Maybe that would be the chapter on Lamb’s She’s Come Undone and Ellman’s Doctors and Nurses. But there’s so much in the archive for this book that could be about comedies of dissolution that are not merely Rabelaisian inversion.
In the Affect Publics reading group this week we read Bergson’s Laughter and Baudelaire’s “The Essence of Laughter.” Neither of these attended enough to ambivalent laughter, because I’m most interested in the knot that undoes someone’s sense of formal control in an enduring way, not just as an involuntary pulse. But Bergson’s interest in adjustment as the scene or situation of laughter seems a perfect referent for that part of this project. He writes that inelasticity and inflexibility on display produce laughter, as the subject being laughed at can’t adjust to his situation: he talks about the comic spectacle of “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” Bergson’s sense that the comic is produced by inelasticity where we would expect or even need to see adaptation works well with John Limon‘s great prediction: “the appeal of comedy may be traced to its imposition of geometrical perfectionism on compounded liminality.” Limon ends up talking about queer precision.
As I was reading I kept thinking about dissolving into tears/laughter, where the bodily fact one always faces in laughter involves watching someone live through this, exerting control and letting go, tipping over and getting back up. When getting back up happens, I mean.
Dissolving can take on so many forms of bodily action: for example, bending over in laughter. I knew a woman once who was so stiff that her laughter looked like a threat to her bodily integrity: we were all actually scared when she laughed, we wanted it to go away, because we were afraid that in the aftermath she would just be broken, a stick dissolved into splinters.
She was a teacher of ours. Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve had two depressive teachers like this, whose laughter wasn’t a relief but a release of something the person really could not contain but could not survive the release of. The other one would shake side to side like a possessed metronome. Both were high composure, high WASP, very controlling women: one suicide, one now debilitated, mentally alive when she is, but not pedagogically, professionally, or personally too functional. She can laugh at ducks, and occasionally at talks.
February 1, 2008, 9:06 pm
Filed under: Belonging, Craziness, Love, optimism, Politics, psychoanalysis, supervalent_thought, Theory of this Blog, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: defenses, depression, Love, paranoia, political_trauma, Politics, privilege, secrecy, shame, terrorism
Read a great and useful piece on secrecy: Shersow and Michaelson, Is Nothing Secret? Does “secret” in the title mean deliberately to dogwhistle “sacred,” and what does that suggest? Or does it point more to that other great pronouncement of ethical failure, “Have you no shame?”, a near-rhetorical question that accuses someone else of losing moral discipline or withdrawing from a commitment to normative ethical views and acts. Have you no x? You should have x. If this is a rhetorical question, you don’t even deserve to have heard it.
The shamelessness of political antinormativity: terrorism, now, has become defined as a commitment to hoard knowledge from the state of any political views and intentions. For pro-HUAC politicians the shame was secreting communist affiliations and for people like Joseph Welch (who famously accused McCarthy of shamelessness) it was McCarthy’s embodiment of the state’s equation of democratic freedom with citizen transparency. The fear of the citizen’s opacity rubbed up against the ideology of individual sovereignty. Absent somebody’s discipline by a sense of duty, somebody‘s shame was supposed to relax the contradictions, one way or another. I learned the word “dogwhistle” from Amanda Macdonald, by the way. In Australia, it refers to a connotation that’s inexplicit in an utterance but seeks to confirm solidarity with a specific kind of ideologically-defined ear/subject/being/population.
I also learned from the learned essay something I ought to have known, and shame on me. The etymology of privilege is “law of the private”–privus lege–by which we can understand here less the modern sense of privacy (the law legitimating possession of that which can be called personal) than the traditional sense (the law legitimating the sovereignty that derives from ownership). The law of the private, or privilege, points to the sovereign rights of any individual, but historically that individual was the Pope, who had ecclesiastical privilege. But knowing this history puts a new penumbra around accusations of privilege, for now they can be understood as accusations that someone or some institution has asserted a private law that self-benefits or benefits a class. It reminds that the property word title organizes a sense of an actual entitlement.
Secrecy, hoard, trust, title–this reminds me of Aristotle’s always startling revelation of how often the terms of ethical discourse derive from the economic. Maybe that’s why I’m as suspicious of ethical as of capital logics of value: I don’t trust most self-privileged guarantees of good intentionality or the normativity of most forms of reciprocity.
Meanwhile, to secret the loss of your commitment to normative ethics, to not tell the world that you have withdrawn from the normative agreement that x behavior will denote y moral state, practice, or commitment, is to assert a privacy that the state/your interlocutor can’t bear, these days. The body politic is petit objet a, and has to be beaten for it.
It’s one thing when people hoard transparency from each other: usually it is a betrayal of trust to violate the intimate’s promise to be transparent enough. These departures into opacity are inevitable, though, and anyway much secreting of alterity can actually come from motives of care, to protect the big picture of love from malign variations of mood. But that doesn’t mean that exposure will not be an event: it’s always an event to discover the alterity of the lover that was always and will always be there, and is there right now.
But the politics of who gets to secret the secrets–this is what Kim Scheppele wrote about a decade ago, and what Michaelson and Shersow are thinking about. In “The Epistemology of State Emotion” I argued that the state defends its own opacity from accusations of antinomianism by claiming that the terrorist practices of secreted secrecy force the state into mimetic overdrive. Here’s the view of The New York Times.
Michaelson and Shersow’s real aim is to explain secrecy in terms of Derridean-inflected genre theory, and to approach the Constitutional history that made the Patriot Act seem legal. Of course it should have been called the superfluous, supernumerary state secret act, since it legalized already legal suspensions of due process. Bush/Cheney were angry that they had to ask permission to do what they wanted, claiming that speed of execution in an era of rational paranoia is a priority over the boring business of supervision. But perhaps one ought to save the word “supernumerary” for its best phrase partner, “nipple.”
Here’s a bit of what Michaelson and Shersow have to say:
In any case, a secret evidently can—or must—be shared by more than one; and yet, to remain faithful in any sense to its own concept, it cannot be shared by every one. . . . In those cases that are called, in English, “open secrets,” and in French, “les secrets de Polichinelle,” only the sharing of the secret is secret, not the secret itself; and even such sharing remains always suspended just this side of a necessary limit which it may always encounter in, for example, the voice of a child proclaiming an emperor’s nakedness. Are these problems of number and limit (as such phrases and examples seem perhaps to indicate) the source of the faintly comic note that seems to play, as we shall see, around the whole idea of the secret, even in its most serious (and secretive) political form? We will also suggest that this question of the secret is a kind of ghostly double of the question of democracy itself, to which it remains inescapably linked by exigencies at once practical and theoretical. Democracy and the secret pose a sort of double problem whose two sides can be denoted in French by the single phrase plus un (cf. Derrida, Politics 101). How many can share a secret? The secret replies, so to speak: this many, but no more. And how many [End Page 125] can join in a democracy?
This passage calls up Jodi Dean/Zizek’s argument too: that democracy produces an evidentiary crisis. Who has the information that organizes life? The enmeshing of “openness” with democracy, equality and freedom requires suspicion on all sides, and a play between the sovereignty and injustice of kept secrets, open secrets, fetishes of transparency on all sides, and a suspicion that things are never equal, which they aren’t. Intellectuals can fetishize the circulation of knowledge, as though knowing all equals an even playing field. But rather than be cynical about it, let’s turn to Ranciere’s work, where democracy is a desire and a process of opening and claiming that refuses the norm/law of class privilege, and it’s not the same thing as openness or equality, which is a measure in a moment. Secrecy might be anti-democratic, a treasury or hoard of value, but transparency is a fantasy horizon that does not guarantee or constitute democracy. We know that and yet the impotence of the truth and the seduction of the wish remains, that a sense of openness equals openness of access to power, resources, and indeed privilege, with all the unimpeded mobility of impact its etymology suggests.
Below I’m starting a new genre for riffing, for keeping suggestive connections alive. Interruption is my stylistic ethics: to self-interrupt, to force openings in my own habit of self-tracking and self-regard, to be idiomatically non-monogamous, as you would predict. Adultery, fantasy, philandering, swerve (I read an article today about adultery, where the commentators kept saying “she got her swerve, he got his”).
Side effects: Secrecy may dissolve or engender solidarity, paranoia, and love. Its genre is the stage whisper. Secrecy may induce constant surprise at leakage. Be prepared, ask your doctor. It can perform coercive binding, as when, after information is “shared,” the speaker says, “You mustn’t say a word about this,” as though by listening you had already consented to pretend not to have heard or been changed by the event of the dirt. It may induce pervasive skepticism about the meaning of gifts and of love. It may make one long for stupefied and stupefying defenses against any assurance at all. See extimacy. See also political depression. Unimaginative and thrilling inversions can develop, too, as in: retaliatory acts of openness, disloyalty to that open secret which shields privilege from experiencing its own fragility, compulsive uncaring frankness, or gossip (the sublation of once-hoarded information to pseudo and then actual performative authorlessness). Hearing commentary on you that open with phrases like “people say” may lead to an adrenalin rush, the sensation of being tipped over, and generalized hate or love, depending. People who are cruelly made to discover that they have been out of the loop, discourse fellowship, or sentimental holding chamber of insiderness may go crazy on you: do not open up the treasury while driving a vehicle. Secrecy may cause more hoarding, more secrecy, more informational auto-poesis or lying. It may cause diarrheas of deniability, falsely innocent assertions of not having known, not having been on the inside, and not having had a will to the death of the other from whom x was kept and who could not therefore understand or shape the condition of their lives. Refusals to protect the secrecy of the open secret dissolve the assurance of others, and may create a will to saturate all sensual fields not in kind but with acts of reason or pseudo-openness that really amount to an ungiving turned-away back. Sinthomo-epistemology may induce vomiting. I thought some of this during a meeting at school a few weeks ago. Why bother going to the gym when I’m getting so much exercise rolling my eyes while keeping my face straight? Composure uses up glucose. Writing keeps me from flying off into the air from all that fluttering.
February 16, 2008, 5:00 pm
Filed under: Affect Theory, Attachment, Belonging, Love, optimism, Ordinariness, psychoanalysis | Tags: Attachment, conversation, Deleuze, Love, psychoanalysis, Sedgwick
I heard from two friends today who wanted to say something on the blog, but were too shy and too averse to the appearance of insiderness that the very presence of the blog as a public incitement is supposed to obviate but never really does, sigh.
One friend is like me, or was finding the likeness in me, in the way that s/he is shaken up constantly not by detachment or existential loneliness but by the optimism of attachment, the optimism that brings us back to the pleasure of self-dissolution in the zone of the intimate other’s potential to relieve one of oneself a bit. This is what we wrote about entre nous. Dehiscence: the thing we get when we talk. The other friend and I said, in reference to the earlier Sedgwick/Moon post, that we don’t want all being to be “wound dehiscence” or patterns of mourning, and we hope not and think not, because there’s always that potentiality of lightening in the suspended present that brings people back to making contact and then, having made it, wondering how to repeat that feeling, even to the point of politics (struggling for the world that sustains people rather than wears them out. All convergences happen in the stretched out, activity-activated, present).
The optimistic thing makes us actually desire being in the room with the good-enough misrecognitions. The optimistic thing keeps us in the house with inconstant love. The optimistic thing makes us talk to strangers. It makes us abstract and hopeful when attached to the anything-at-all that feels not like a metaphysical foundation, but an episode of relief. The thing that makes us optimistic about distension, which Deleuze and Guattari define as “when . . . two sensations draw apart, release themselves, but so as now to be brought together by the light, the air or the void that sinks between them or into them, like a wedge that is at once so dense and so light that it extends in every direction as the distance grows, and forms a bloc that no longer needs support” (“Percept, Affect, and Concept,” 168). This describes the sense that a good conversation produces, as it feels autonomous from the conversers, like a dream that gets made between them.
We will be following the theory of this optimism in attachment as an optimism not just for becoming solid, or building houses over graves, but for becoming liquid, becoming light, as we move through the Bowlby tradition, which tells the tender story of return over and over not only as traumatic symptom, but also something else, a refusal to be defeated, an orientation toward producing a world worthy of the trust you want to project in it. It is not always melodramas of loss crazily returned to as the center of being. It is not always a desire for possession or for being possessed. It is not always compensation for lack or wound, a desperate thinning out of personality that gets created in the near compulsive return to the optimistic fix. It is also the desire to be delighted, and you know what that leaping feels like. On the other hand, people can only bear so much openness: in cats, overstimulation produces displacement behavior; in the political season, all sorts of cynical noise.
As the object of others’ drive to be relieved, one also experiences other downsides of this patterning: from, say, the people who fix you somewhere in space and talk at you until they can diminish that intensity within them. That intensity, that deep loneliness, hasn’t defeated them yet: they’re dying for relief from it, they need you to stand still for a minute, minimally. Thus even their aggressive motive is tender, delicate: it’s an attempt to connect for an exchange of potential weight-bearing, and what’s terrifying or irritating is the need that makes them have to not care whether you want it when they need it.
In so much cultural studies psychoanalytic work on projective fantasy you would think that drives to attach produce weight (see Salecl’s On Anxiety; Dolar’s work in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects; Sedgwick on the Paranoid/Schizoid position in Touching Feeling). There, one’s anaclitic fantasy really does engulf the object, solidifies the object by keeping it at an extimate distance so that it can be fixed, pinned, displayed, tortured.
But propping doesn’t have to be heavy–as Sedgwick/Klein says, as Bersani writes, and as I’ve gestured toward in Intimacy and (any week now!) The Female Complaint. To approach an object from within the situation of an attachment does not necessarily involve projecting out solidity onto the intimate other so that, transitively and parasitically, one can take its whole being for oneself. One might also be looking for an interruption or diversion, a rerouting of just a little bit of too muchness or too closeness. Being diluted by the voice, the sight, the smell, the potentiality of the idea, or a whatever interlocutor can do the work to spark: one senses being held lightly in what’s there, leaning against or maybe just even brushing against it.
Even a brief encounter can wear out the walls of resignation welcomly. (Or not so welcomly: an unwonted optimism can feel like the painful recovery from not caring, like frostbite.) I don’t know whether the metaphorics of new skin (Ahmed, Probyn) is necessary for this: it has to do more with the warmth of proximity. I am gesturing toward a sad and a gloriously low bar for the optimism of attachment: glorious because it takes so little warmth to sustain someone, and sad because the kind of lightening or quickening relieving transaction is barely reliably there for so many who are then leaning over into the wind in some infinite tilt.
(Oh, and the parenthetical part of the title is a Lucinda Williams song.)
May 6, 2008, 4:19 pm
Filed under: affect, Belonging, emotion, Love, Ordinariness, Politics, writing | Tags: affect, emotion, Obama, Politics, yes_we_can
(Column 1 in a series; the Long version; experiment in political journalism; see “Credibility and Incredibility” below)
Sometime in fading recent memory, it seems that we were debating about “hope.” Has hope’s moment passed? How did the Yes We Can moment come to feel so long ago, a shadow second before all the bowling and cake and bitterness? Can you even remember the beginning of this sentence? If you’re thinking, as you read this, “Oh, “Yes We Can” was so February!” that’s because political time moves with the rising and falling intensities of scandal and speculation.
But it’s also because other people’s optimism is so often felt as a threat. Optimism? I’m serious. Get me out of here! We are taught to respect our own pain, and to respond compassionately to that of others. We have a word for taking pleasure in other people’s pain: schadenfreude. But there’s no word for the anxiety that arises from other people’s optimism.
Why is that? Did Hillary Clinton’s deflationary anti-aesthetics–as in Mario Cuomo’s “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose”–burst the hope bubble? Was her disrespect for the mereness of “just words” actually effective in its dismissal of desire for the political? Did the skies open up not with hope, but with shame? Was it an accident that the appearance of organized collective inspiration suddenly got widely equated with the threat of fascism and the shallowness of rock star celebrity?
For a few days, some students and colleagues and I had an intense email conversation about the will. i. am video, “Yes We Can.” If you haven’t seen it yet, go to You Tube: it’s been viewed in excess of seven million times. Many of us revealed that they started to watch it but had to turn it off after a minute. Why? Aesthetic aversion–and too much emotion. The pressure of not identifying with other people’s optimism. As quickly as our collective discussion started, it stopped. It was too interesting; it was too compelling. The whole thing, the whole bolus of contradictory emotion it released, was overwhelming. We were revealing to each other our political desires, plus the compromises we were half-willing to make with them.
This video of “Yes We Can!” takes a speech by Barack Obama, delivered on the occasion of not winning the New Hampshire primary. Will. i. am, of the Black Eyed Peas, writes that he produced it because the speech lingered, induced an earworm. An earworm is a musical phrase that dominates your mind, echoing there despite your best efforts. The earworm–presumably the phrase, “Yes We Can”–made him make some work, possibly just to shut his brain up. But he also took being haunted by a phrase to be a sign of a political desire that he had not yet either felt or expressed in his own words. Prior to that, he’d been disengaged from the election.
Phrase is a musical term as well as a grammatical one. The video drapes a musical version of Obama’s speech onto the speech as he gives it. Many beautifully-lit people sing along with the speech, individually and in harmony of sorts with Obama. Their repetition of his words is often slightly out of synch with him, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind. Sometimes they repeat his phrases on their own time, during his pauses, while the audience chants. Once in awhile the soundtrack goes quiet while he continues talking: for example when he says, “We have been told that we can not do this by a chorus of cynics . . .”
“Chorus” is a perfect, classic word for the culture of commentary that flourishes to one side in the theatrical drama. We overhear the political. It’s an oral culture, a gossip culture, something whose sense of things we pick up in asides, over meals, skimming the headlines as we walk by kiosks, or wait in the drugstore, or the airport. Just this minute the people sitting near me in a Borders cafe are debating the Democrats: I can’t quite follow, but I’m getting some gist. Cynics perform their dog-like barking as a chorus. But so do the rest of us, voice by voice. We also encounter that culture of commentary vulnerably, for fear that someone will buzzkill our optimism.
I can never detach myself from being moved by people’s desire for the political. Wherever they are on the political spectrum, when they manifest a desire for social and economic and juridical reciprocity and accountability I take it as a tender moment, and not always just a will to power, or a shallow greed. Sometimes it’s all of them: that’s an empirical question.
But midst the noise and nonsense of the political in this season is the cracking of a frostbite-like defense against wanting something–from the mainstream political sphere. This column is no brief for Obama. In more ways than I like he’s a centrist. But it is a brief for meditating on the phenomenon of what feels like oversimple, ridiculous political emotion. What does it mean to want “change”? When someone says that a term is “empty” it really means that it’s overfull. Words like these, in this season, stand-in for a desire for the political sphere to be accountable to the humans who populate it. It expresses a desire for a revitalized sense of social reciprocity. No significant social transformation can take place without the strength of that ridiculous desire.
It is always fragile-making to have a political desire, even more so to say it. You’ve been there, you know what I mean. Someone says, shifty-eyed: “Who are you supporting?” You say your view–maybe boldly, maybe hesitantly–but whatever the tone, your eyes shift around to assess whether you’re going to be admonished, flipped off, held in contempt, or held in the relieving embrace of a “me too!” This is especially true in a season of contradictory desires. Little in ordinary political speech is more threatening than the phrase that may reveal your fundamentally weak constitution as a political thinker and hoper.
People are politically incoherent. We want what we can’t get, what we can’t stop wanting; we don’t want to give up, give out. We don’t want to give in to our political depression; we want our anger to be reflected in someone else’s policy commitments. The people and terms presented to us are like most objects of desire, compromised from the start. The work of processing disappointment while staying in the room with the object of desire is as much the work of politics as of love. This will be the topic of my next column.