. . . . . . . Supervalent Thought

This is Lauren Berlant’s research blog, tracking academic and random engagements with two scenes and concepts: ordinary life and attachment/detachment. I want to know why people stay attached to lives that don’t work. This is a political and a personal question. Psychoanalysis meets affect theory and Marxist critical theory. The projected book’s title was originally Detachment Theory, but the object/scene has multiplied and the focus will be serial: its aim is still to describe non-sovereign subjectivity in a variety of states–of anxiety, limerence, passive aggression, flat affect, rape, torture, the comedic, and affective labor–because, as it turns out that detachment is not antithetical to attachment but one of its styles, it would be better to focus on perspectives on the disorganization and reorganization of subjects and worlds rather than to presume the possibility of reversals and negations.

Usually “detachment” points to liberal theories of consciousness, and is related to the exercise of reason and the potential for disinterest. (See Amanda Anderson’s great work.) Disinterest, a state of affect that can never be achieved, is not what I’m thinking about here. Cruel Optimism (Duke, 2011) looks at the process of detaching from objects (lives, worlds, scenes) as a problem in itself that’s both usual (in the activity of appetitive self-medication or self-interruption, for example) and catastrophic (when one is forced to become disorganized or lose one’s shape, forced to lose one’s access to oneself  because of a structural transformation in one’s relation to the object world–death, divorce, ideological breach, war, imprisonment).  The following books will look at a variety of stunned, unresponsive, recessive, underperformative modes of bodily comportment to tell a story about contemporary post-melodramatic subjectivity.  One book is called On the Inconvenience of Other People; another, Humorlessness. The running title of the big book at the series end is Matter of Flatness.

Another aspect of the blog’s animating project is to learn how to write: to experiment with narrating the ordinary via the usually lost moments of gesture, glance, and tonal intensity; to track aleatory experience; to figure out how encounters open up consciousness and concepts without having themselves to be dramatically memorable events; to understand better what an event is, and can be. This is a question of storytelling, remediating the stuff of paying attention, and of interfering with (without negating) the hierarchy of normative philosophical abstraction over other registers of knowing. I want to think about how, in these encounters, people endure what’s overwhelming–being in the room with what’s structurally unjust, affectively impossible–and how they find registers (genre, media) for floating the affective event that impacts their sense of attachment to the world and its terms of reciprocity. Like all affective scenes, injustice is both a structural fact and a sense of something unfair, imbalanced, not right. I think that these wants are related.  Classicly a “supervalent thought” is deemed an idea covering over psychic encounter with a wish that is its negation: but more properly, I think, it’s a thought alive with an overdetermined set of barely articulated investments, a thought (a happening that finds a genre) that organizes these processes without neutralizing the resonating pressures they bring to bear.

Citations of this blog are invited according to the guidelines offered by Creative Commons.

If you’d like to see some of my published work in article form, click the “Anxiety, Urgency” link under “Blogroll,” go to the “Pedagogies of Feeling” page, and click “essays.”  Also, I understand that the type on this page is very small.  If you want it to be bigger, and you have a PC, press CTRL and the plus key and it magnifies.  Press the minus key, it contracts.

Great blog!
No reciprocity needed; I don’t have a blog up yet!
😉

Comment by Seyfried January 30, 2008 @ 4:09 am

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Very interesting ideas! Can’t wait to read more!

Comment by flimsygirl August 13, 2008 @ 12:38 pm

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[…] Berlant notes on Precarity Posted in Uncategorized by Rachel on September 20th, 2008 A belated attempt to store my notes from Lauren Berlant’s Melbourne visit. First, the public lecture she gave as a contribution to recent conversations on Precarity. Next, notes from the informal Masterclass given to grad students on a unique project conjoining psychoanalysis with post-Marxist affective labour politics to find possibilities for theorising detachment. […]

Pingback by Berlant notes on Precarity « MENTALIZATION-POSITIVE September 19, 2008 @ 2:44 pm

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Severely off-topic, but I was wondering if you’d be interested in a project I’m aiming at a number of the blog authors in the continental philosophy blogosphere. Specifically, I’m interested in developing a mailing list that would act as a “back channel” for discussion across a range of minds, the virtue of which is on-going, long-form discussion that bridges the gap between blog comments sections and email. If this interests you, let me know at what[dot]is[dot]ground[at]gmail[dot]com.

Comment by Benoît April 19, 2010 @ 9:35 pm

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i found you via fred moten. he interoduced me to your text on ‘lateral agency’ and ‘slow death’. cant thank him enough for that.have not read such a thoughtful and beautifully crafted text in a long time……..mo

Comment by monika halkort November 14, 2010 @ 12:00 pm

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thank you.

Comment by margaret December 16, 2011 @ 1:00 am

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I was happy to attend your talk in Manchester, 10 June 13. I will now be checking in on this blog from time to time. Very interested in your forthcoming book with Lee Edelman!

Comment by textualsilence June 11, 2013 @ 3:58 pm

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[…] https://supervalentthought.com/about/ This is Lauren Berlant’s research blog, tracking academic and random engagements with two scenes and concepts: ordinary life and attachment/detachment. I want to know why people stay attached to lives that don’t work. This is a political and a personal question. Psychoanalysis meets affect theory and Marxist critical theory. […]

Pingback by Berlant’s blog on ‘cruel optimism’ | Imperial Patterns Contemporary Rhythms December 21, 2013 @ 4:39 pm

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I read the New Yorker piece, and came here. I was wondering if you’d be interested in sharing a video essay on slowing down time…a 365 word essay on time recorded one word a day for 365 days. (3 minutes in a year) The message is think less, feel more.

Comment by Judd Pillot March 31, 2019 @ 10:16 am

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Sharing as in seeing?

Comment by supervalentthought September 23, 2019 @ 1:46 pm

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