#berlant

[proustiansleep]

"In times of radical transition—as people lose confidence in how to be together, uncertain about how to read each other and incompetent even to their own desire, wanting everything hard to be “post-” already, with few skills for bearing transition— their default modes of managing the inconvenience of other people, including themselves, suddenly intensify in awkwardness and generate frictions at all kinds of scales." —Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People

[nunhauntology]

Lauren Berlant quoting Joseph Litvak

[gradling]

Earlier this year, one of my friends attended Lauren Berlant’s Zoom memorial service (Berlant taught a required introductory Gender and Women’s Studies class [the only undergrad class they taught], so as a GWS major my friend was one of their students). During the service, people shared things that Berlant had said over the years, and my friend wrote some of them down and shared them with me. Over the past couple months, working through the pandemic, some of those quotes keep returning to my mind, so maybe others will appreciate them too:

“To adapt Jean-Luc Nancy’s version of love: I may desire to break my own heart to become open to your capacity to repair it to a state better than it was when I met you.”

“What would it mean to think that thought?”

“Don’t let your shame get in the way.”

“Many see the university mostly as violence and damage, whereas I really do think I and my work have worked the contradictions and opened things up in their slow expansion and circulation.

"I think teaching and writing are hard but not weapons. Any professional life is on a precipice of opening and closing.”

And the one that has resonated with me most deeply:

“You’re a scholar because you don’t want the answer, you want to ask a better question.”

[elizabethanism]

Lee Edelman on the narrative implied by optimism. I’m thinking whether the ‘refusal to live it while one could’ here is necessarily always a corollary to ‘bestowing a value on life by way of the future anterior’? Does optimism always presuppose an implicitly *completed* action?

Like, I get (and appreciate) how Edelman and Berlant are unpicking the structure of optimism here in favour of negativity, but I wonder if optimism necessarily has to be relegated to a process that is always-already completed

So here’s Berlant later in the book defining their divergence from Edelman. I think this is closer to my position, in that it prizes ‘the ongoing now’ as a temporal field of potentiality without the need to foreclose on the idea of a future

[athousandgateaux]

But trans satire, I think, has the potential to become a real, substantive methodology—not rejecting narration as such (which is impossible), but trying to learn how to write without optimism, or maybe how to be optimistic without being hopeful. Then again, I do suspect that writing without optimism is also impossible, insofar as I am persuaded by Lauren Berlant (2011: 1–2) that ‘all attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.’ Perhaps what I mean, then, is writing without political optimism, that is, writing without the subsumption of all optimistic attachment under the sign of the political. Call this a bitter optimism, maybe. Bitterness feels right to me as one of the primary critical affects of trans satire as we’re imagining it here—not cynicism, which is away of titrating bitterness until you can’t taste it anymore, but real bitterness, the bitter disappointment of finding out the world is too small for all our desires, and especially the political ones. I know I’m bitter. I get the sense you are, too.

Andrea Long Chu in “After Trans Studies,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 6.1, pg. 106

[allslost]

To protect her last iota of optimism, she goes crazy.

Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant, 48

[narduccidesoto]

Sometimes you just need to let loose... --- -- - #jazz #livemusic #saxophone #sax #improvisation #improv #chops #shredz #shred #tenor #selmer #ottolink #aea #r84 #ribbonmic #mxr #delay #berlant #tla100a #ProAc #narducci #DeSotoSoundFactory (at DeSoto)

[proustiansleep]

"One thing I’ve learned from reading work on the Anthropocene and its variations is that it is a comforting fantasy to think that the world is ending. The fantasy of an end gives you finitude and formal satisfaction, whereas the fact of the matter is that we are living in the ending and don’t know where we are in that ending."

—Lauren Berlant, in interview