Theory Live

"And now he's here once again to capitalize on people's emotions."

Berlant, Lauren. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event.” American Literary History, 20:4 (Winter 2008): 845-60

I call this "live theory" because I'm responding even before I finish the essay. I think Berlant's writing lends itself to that -- much as with reading in Chinese, some translation and paraphrase is necessary along the way.

This essay begins by giving me the idea that Yang Jiang’s essays, both as collections and as fragmented vignettes living their own lives all over the internet, act analogously to The Intuitionist or Pattern Recognition in that, like historical novels, they attempt to capture the affective response to the historical crises. If you can capture exactly what it was that we felt, then you can bring together the two opposing views that history determines us (structure) and that we determine history (agency). I pictured this at first as a closed door and person approaching. The person reaches out, opens the door, and walks through. The door shuts. Which determined what just happened, the person or the door? Clearly it was a process of the person’s immediate response to the circumstance of the door. The door didn’t make the person go through it. Similarly the person did not choose to open the door rather than simply pass through without opening it. Structure and agency affect each other.

Of course, most of the time the circumstances are far more complicated than one person and one door. Berlant asks, “...how does the aesthetic rendition of emotionally complex sensual experience articulate with what what is already codified as “knowledge” of a contemporary historical moment? How is it possible for the affects to sense that people have lived a moment collectively and translocally in a way that is not just a record of ideology?” Imagine if the only way to tell the story of 9/11 was with CNN news clips. Now imagine how much we add by writing novels that tell the intimate experience of the disaster. What does making the novel add? As for the second question of Berlant, I think immediately to the South Park parody of Alan Jackson’s song about 9/11: sometimes it is just a record of ideology.

Berlant proposes the to answer the questions by analyzing how people respond to such historical novels with intuition -- in this, she seems to be doing the same work as the makers of the South Park episode, exposing how intuition overrides critical judgment -- but I’m sure in a nicer way. For one thing, the plot of a historical novel is experienced in two ways at once -- it happens in your mind as an immediate experience, with the same perspectives as the characters. But it is also known to have occurred in the past. “[D]espite the singularities of affect, the historical novel points to a unity of experience in an ongoing moment that historians can later call epochal, but that at the time was evidenced as a shared nervous system.” (847) Translation: Even though “feelings” can only be had by one person, and even then they can’t have exactly the same “feeling” twice, with the historical novel we can make it seem like a whole group of people was having “feelings” together. Again, when we tell the story of 9/11, we do something -- like say where we were at the time -- that implies we were feeling something similar (a break in the daily routine, say. A shock.)

We have to check out what genre our novel is, because genres each manipulate the feelings of the reader in a different way: the ghost story makes you scared, for example. In Berlantese, genres are “a loose affectual contract that predicts the form that an aesthetic transaction will take.” Marxists like Lukacs first mapped out the conventions of the historical novel, and even realized that these conventions were linked to feelings, but they did not work out how different conventions activate different feelings. They did not have a science of “affect,” which is another way of saying that they didn’t care much for each other’s feelings.

A historical novel takes as its theme the past, but the feelings the story makes us feel are feelings that have to do with the historical present of the author. “Affect works in the present.” (848) This helps me solve the problem of what is so important about old people’s writings. Old people begin to see all of their experiences as “emergently historic,” especially if they have lived through multiple crises.

More to come.