Berlant and Intimacy, Again

An example of the many interactions intimacy can have with institutions

Berlant, Lauren. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 281-288.

On the third reading of this small, dense essay, I am just beginning to realize how difficult it is to use any of what Professor Berlant is saying, because I have not only to translate her often disconnected terms and propositions, I have to sift through carefully staged generalities and ambiguities to create statements that might apply directly to what I am thinking about. I thought once before that at the very least, writing under the influence of theory was less difficult than translating Chinese scholarship. How wrong that was!


Therefore, to help prepare the theoretical portions of my dissertation, I will begin going through American theory very, very carefully, tasting my thoughts along the way. I have time.


Berlant opens with a vision of intimacy as an element of stories that call us to look inward at intimate relationships between people, but also calls us to look outward towards "institutions of intimacy" that we hope will help us lead the lives we wish to lead. I find mysteriously intriguing Berlant's comment that intimacy as an element of stories is suited to simple elegance:

"I didn't think it would turn out this way" is the secret epitaph of intimacy.To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity.

Certainly, I do not at the moment see the connection between this form that intimacy takes and its dual inward/outward nature. All I have is an inkling.


The next three paragraphs are very unclear, but involve the ideas of therapy and jurisdiction (which I suppose we can understand as the law as an institution). Berlant's point seems to be simply that the stories we tell about intimacy have an influence on such institutions ("intimacy builds worlds")


Next, Berlant states the scope of the essays in that number of Critical Inquiry: the essays investigate the complex relationship between intimate life on public life and vice versa. For example, a billboard may suggest strongly that abortion is wrong: the public sphere has a message about the intimate sphere. But the intimate sphere may have something to say back to that. And so on and so forth. There are huge philosophical battles here: we Americans tend to consider private life more real than private life. How does all this happen? asks Berlant. "How can we think about the ways attachments make people public, producing transpersonal identities and subjectivities, when those attachments come from within spaces as varied as those of domestic intimacy, state policy, and mass-mediated experiences of intensely disruptive crises?" (283)


In the USA, we perpetuate a divide between public and private that does not accurately describe many of our institutions, which in fact "can be read as institutions of intimacy." Habermas understood that if the public were to take up a role as critic, then "collective intimacy" must the ideal of the public in cafes, newspapers, and at home. "Persons were to be prepared for their critical social function in what Habermas calls the intimate spheres of domesticity, where they would learn (say, from novels and newspapers) to experience their internal lives theatrically, as though oriented toward an audience." (284) But it didn't work because people were driven to read and watch stories that are pleasurable, not merely instructive. It becomes hard to tell the difference between pleasure and critical function. Special interest groups begin to realize that many stories demean them, which calls into question whether we should ever have striven for a collective intimacy -- isn't it always a dream of omnipotence by some privileged class?


But intimacy is actually a very diverse, "wild thing:" we can find stories of people who walk dogs, or fetishists and their objects. Berlant reveals her interest in the marginalized people whose stories often go untold, and ask us to question, why are there so few plots? Single people, queer people, can become "unimaginable" even to themselves, thus wasting "world-building energy." Therefore there is a major need to "rethink" the narratives, presumably to increase to total diversity of narratives, of ways of being. "To rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living."


When we consider intimacy, we always see tacit "fantasies" in the stories that people fight to show us and make us believe. When a certain kind of intimacy becomes an issue, we see people argue for it eloquently. When a population loses its sovereignty, the stories they produce can be expected to be bitter. Many, many kinds of trauma affect contemporary societies everywhere, but these traumas are now mass-mediated events, including testimony from those who suffer that offers a "shocking" message about intimacy (I'm not sure what Berlant means here: is she saying that the Haiti earthquake survivor shocks with her appeal via intimacy, or is she saying that we learn of our true intimates when they are sheared away, and this is shocking?)


To recap, Berlant's vision is of a set of essays that will further conversations about "the modes of attachment that make persons public and collective and that make collective scenes intimate spaces." My project would seem to engage only the first of these two rough divisions to the project -- I present stories by a single author that show intimate attachments becoming public. For me, the form of the Chinese essay is an intimation, in that it communicates with readers using spare signs and gestures. The essay shows us the personal details, sometimes of attachments and sometimes not, but always to form a multiplex attachment with many readers -- this is the power of the symbol. I take it as well from Berlant that it is crucial to attempt to understand how such stories affect and are affected by institutions such as the law. Certainly there are reciprocal relationships between stories and institutions that deserve consideration, though this aspect of the work remains most mysterious to me. Some clues that Berlant leaves include: check out the hidden divide between stories that instruct and those only meant to entertain, check for the most marginalized populations and their strategies, and think about to what extent the entire society is experiencing trauma through mass-mediation.