I do miss blogs.

Someone wrote to me this year to say, “maybe this blog should be a book.” I felt flattered. I don’t think so, though. It was writing for a different time. I wouldn’t want to have to revise it all for a new context.

Now I’m not in academia. I’ve said my goodbyes to my academic field. I don’t feel like quite the same person I used to be. I’m not concerned with the same things. I don’t need to criticize a culture I’m not part of.

So I think this is it for the old blog! Goodnight, world! I’m going to migrate all the content away from WordPress so I don’t have to think about WordPress any more. But all the content and URLs should stay the same.

I’m still around on the internet. I still write a lot. And you know where to find me!

Sometime in 2019, I noticed that my former teacher, Lauren Berlant, had changed their pronoun to they. They’re gone now, and the work of mourning is ongoing. Yet it seems to me that the most optimistic thing we can do is to keep learning from their work, their thought.

This might be awkward, since our relations to our teachers are so often enigmatic and awkward. Yet they can also sometimes be transformative and life-sustaining. Once, in a rare autobiographical moment, Berlant evoked the power of teachers to hold us together when we’re not really OK:

As though they knew what it was like to be me in my family, my teachers, and the world of school and work they sustained, made my life possible. I do not know whether I expected it, or demanded it, or even whether they knew what they were doing, or whether I deserved it.^[1]

I do not know whether they knew what they were doing: we can all say this of our teachers, even if they made our lives possible. I’m not sure exactly what Berlant meant by adopting they, late in life. I do know, though, that Berlant’s life was organized by a long-term disidentification with gender and femininity. As a genderqueer person, I felt a sudden kinship with their pronoun choice, an impersonal joy in finding myself together in the same gesture as my teacher. This joy does not imply any deep mutual understanding or transcendence of the structural distance that always separated us. But it might make space for thought. And what I want to suggest here is that Berlant’s embrace of they was not merely a personal identification. Rather, it is a clue to their larger theory of subjectivity in general.^[2] It sheds light on their theoretical project and its grounding in life and history.

(Caveat lector: What follows is a bit long and somewhat theoretical.)

A real flower child

By the time I met them, Lauren Berlant was an illustrious and contradictory figure in the academic world. They were on the far left at a fundamentally conservative institution, the University of Chicago. They possessed many kinds of capital and openly supported the graduate student labor union. They sympathized with anarchism while occupying a professorial chair named after George M. Pullman — Pullman being famous for owning a railroad company town where, in 1894, striking workers were shot by federal troops. No wonder, perhaps, that Berlant felt profoundly alienated by the university where they worked, while being in some ways deeply ensconced there. Ninety years after the Pullman strike, Berlant was hired — at age 26 or 27 — as an assistant professor. By age 35, Berlant was already writing about how disappointed they were with the possibilities for radical, progressive, or left action at the university. Their efforts at feminist utopianism in turn had attracted derision. “You’re being characterized all over as ’68, a real flower child,” Berlant reported hearing from a colleague in those days, the early 1990s.^[3]

Where did Lauren Berlant come from? Berlant’s own coming of age seems to have been traumatic and utopian, marked by multiple forms of abandonment and awkward intermediacy (particularly in social class terms), and by attempts both to escape from life and to reattach to it. “I was eleven in 1968,” they commented, “and a precocious—wild—eleven… And so I went to a commune when I was fifteen, I went to rallies, I hated Nixon appropriately, and I had socialist proletarian grandparents on one side of the family.”^[4] By the time Berlant graduated from college — the countercultural Oberlin in the late 1970s — they were already an experienced feminist teacher. But once they began graduate school, the utopian impulses may have proved a mixed blessing. Berlant has described their graduate education at Cornell University in the 1980s as a scene of trying to survive in a pretentious culture of “high theory.”

Everything was extremely poststructural at Cornell, and besides not having a Continental philosophical background—which I quickly had to cultivate—I was also a Marxist and a feminist. I didn’t think that these should be deemed vulgar compared to what was deemed high theory.^[5]

Some people find stability in defining themselves as feminists or Marxists, but for Berlant, while these identities offered space for thinking, they also seem to have conferred a risk of stigma and exclusion. Berlant recalled graduate school as a moment of being socially unrecognizable, “quite blundery and Martian-like from the perspective of my colleagues as well as myself,” and of “struggling terribly, partly because I felt stupid all the time, as usual, and partly because at that time there was very little feminism for graduate students in the English department.”^[6] A patriarchal institutional culture can readily produce both an organized absence of feminism and a sexist climate of representing illegible outsiders as “stupid” inferiors. Berlant’s rightful rejoinder to this was that there’s nothing vulgar or unintelligent about feminism.

Yet Berlant’s feminist critique, and their personal struggles against illegibility and marginalization, did not culminate in radical or melodramatic rejections of poststructuralist theory either. It all led into something more nonbinary; and yet the nonbinary for Berlant has never been a simple negation of binaries. Instead it is a way of opening space within, outside and alongside them, a way of holding incompatible things together without subsuming them into a definite theory, a single genre, or a stable affective style.^[7] Even after Berlant started using “they” pronouns, they also kept “she” pronouns. I think they saw the pronouns as optimistic invitations, not fixed identity markers. In Berlant’s thought, too, the nonbinary is a conceptual gesture, not an organized object. This gesture consists of a radical affirmation of multiplicity.^[8] Multiplicity pervades Berlant’s analysis of subjects and their subjectivities — an analysis which largely eschews conventional psychology in favor of exploring “the multiple tethers of the subject to the world.”^[9]

What, then, is Berlant’s account of how we are tethered to the world?

Subjectivity is multiple

Berlant did not prefer the general to the particular, and they did not set out to formulate a general theory of subjectivity. On the contrary, they participated in a version of queer theory where “theory… has meant unsettlement rather than systematization.”^[10] Nevertheless, when I sat down to read Berlant’s work last year, certain common observations about subjectivity did become clear to me. Let me suggest a provisional list of Berlant’s conceptual axioms, even if these are heuristics, not absolutes.

1. Subjectivity is multiple. It’s so easy to say this, and yet so hard to think it all the way through. The subject’s multiplicity means many things. It means that there is never just one kind of social subject; there are always many kinds of subjects. It means there is never one thing going on within us, always lots happening. “I would foreground non-coherence as a principle of being rather than a cumulative effect of serial finitude,” Berlant says, “I never thought that the subject ought to be seen as in one state.”^[11] It means we are always in multiple relationships (of kinship, sex, school, work, fantasy, etc), never just one primary relationship (it’s not all Oedipal triangles). Our many relationships each emerge, overdetermined, from many different histories. We also have many desires, and many desires about our desires, and many desires not to desire. We have many stories and theories about ourselves, and many relations to these stories. Subjectivity is soothing and it’s vertigo: it proliferates scales and modes of being, oscillating between the abstract and the concrete, the social and the affective, the big deals and the little nothings that are all wrapped together in a life.^[12]

2. Subjectivity is radically historical. Such a view has been a hallmark of critical theory since Marx, at least. Berlant particularly insists, following Foucault, that what is historical is not just identities and subject positions, but also all the terms and processes of our affective existences. Thus one of the great moments in Berlant’s work is the analysis of “trauma” as an emergent moment in the history of late capitalist public subjectivity, an analysis which in no way denies the reality of trauma and social violence, but which insists that the genres of traumatic expression have their own history.^[13]

3. Subjectivity is conventional. To be a subject, then, is to inhabit terms of subjectivity that come to us from outside, and we can call these terms conventions. But characteristically, Berlant insists that interpellation and conventionality are not only negative processes. Rather, they organize our optimism: “To love conventionality is not only to love something that constrains someone or some condition of possibility: it is another way of talking about negotiating belonging to a world.”^[14] Thus it is not necessarily bad to be conventional, and we cannot really avoid it anyway. Being a person implies inhabiting genres of living and being that capture our attachments, or that teach us what attachment means in the first place. Conventions are not only fetters; they are a space of fantasy and pedagogy.

4. Subjectivity is worldly and permeable. Berlant takes our inner lives very seriously; like a novelist or a therapist, they believe in the complexity of our psyches, of our moods and affects, defenses and boundaries. But they also take seriously our subjective locations within histories, scenes, relationships, and social formations. As they put it, subjectivity is always subject to “the overdetermining work of ideology, atmosphere, the unconscious, distraction, ambivalence, attention—in short, the many ways the subject takes up a position in any episode and in the world.”^[15] This is a materialism in several senses. It acknowledges the material impact of feelings and shared moods. It also chronicles the material impacts of systems of cultural production, economic precarity, vulnerability and violence.

5. Subjectivity is a survivor. The subject gets by. Even when we are hit and kissed and damaged and sickened and disappointed and scared and in love and horribly broken, we might still find new places to turn, or even find comfort in our own stuckness. And the very existence of predictability can be a pleasure; on Berlant’s view, a pleasure is simply “a repetition that makes a form, not necessarily something that feels good.”^[16] There is a ruthless practicality about the subject, trying to get by in the face of a bad world. This practicality is nevertheless not the essence of the subject either; it is just one more pattern one might notice about people.

6. Subjectivity is wishful. It is a den of fantasies. It is not always centered on our “lived experience” or our “ordinariness.” It is genuinely escapist, whatever content it might give to its escapes. Ironically, this also means that fantasy makes lived relationships more manageable: “Without fantasy… there would be no way to move through the uneven field of our ambivalent attachments to our sustaining objects.”^[17] Since desires are multiple, we frequently find that we want a thing and its opposite, or we want something that interferes with what we also want. This interference might not be a problem; Berlant repeatedly cites the Freudian dictum that “there is no negative in the unconscious.” Nevertheless, our wishfulness or fantasy life might threaten our own wish for coherence or our relations with others; just as we are often trying to catch up with others, so too are we stuck trying to catch up with our fantasies.

7. Subjectivity is rhythmic. Rhythm organizes what is overwhelming in our lives; it helps manage our fantasies and contradictions. Thus we can “be ourselves” at one moment and radically out of character the next, and the rhythm of these moments can prevent their interference from being destructive. Sometimes bad rhythms or the breakdown of rhythm do become a problem; but the impact of a rhythmic disturbance is something we can negotiate with, not something that is given all in advance. It is perhaps salient that one of Berlant’s chief instruments of childhood optimism was a rhythm instrument (the guitar).^[18] The notion of rhythm comes to orient Berlant’s theory of form, where we attune ourselves to rhythms and patterns that may or may not have any names, genres, or regulatory apparatuses yet. (A genre is an institutionalized rhythm.)

8. Subjectivity is affirmative. This certainly does not mean it is not full of negation, both in the aggressive will-to-destruction-and-incoherence sense^[19], and in the sense of being subject to oppression and suffering. Still, “any object of optimism promises to guarantee the endurance of something, the survival of something, the flourishing of something, and above all the protection of the desire that made this object or scene powerful enough to have magnetized an attachment to it.”^[20] Desire might be destabilizing or destructive in practice, but the form of it always has a sort of affirmative, optimistic force in the world.

9. Subjectivity is projective and object-oriented. This means that all our relationships constitute their objects. All subjectivity veers towards fetish subjectivity: “The fetish reproduces the general structure of desire, which is an activity that aims at repeating pleasure by finding substitutes for a lost or unstable object.”^[21] Nevertheless, “objects are always looser than they appear. Objectness is only a semblance, a seeming, a projection effect of interest in a thing we are trying to stabilize.”^[22] Thus all objects are also placeholders for other things. Every attachment is also a reference to an earlier attachment; every scene is derivative of other scenes; nothing in social life is entirely sui generis. These references can become quite abstract too, since many of our desires are for very abstract things. Sometimes what we like in an object is that it represents the very existence of possibility itself or even the possibility of transformation.

10. Subjectivity is impersonal. This means at least three things for Berlant. 1) We are never seen fully by others; they are always projecting so much onto us that, ultimately, they see what they arrange to see. Thus, whether I am being subjected to “violence” or “love” from others, it “isn’t about me.”^[23] 2) What’s personal about us, in an emotionally-authentic-and-vulnerable sense of the personal, is at most only one part of our lives. We also contain impersonal multitudes: we can be robots of convention, agents of discipline, radical interruptors of our own personal narratives, bewildered sleepwalkers, and so on. 3) Finally, our very notions of what is “personal” are themselves the result of genre conventions.^[24]

11. Subjectivity is incoherent. This follows from its being multiple and having multiple desires. It follows from its being deeply personal, and also deeply not. Subjectivity’s incoherence involves contradictions, tensions and antagonisms. But the impact of its incoherence is an empirical question. Our antagonisms might or might not be experienced as conflicts or dramas. They might just be experienced as alternative “positions” that we can take up one after the other in our fantasies. “The scenic form of fantasy enables the desiring subject to produce a series of interpretations that do not have to cohere as a narrative.”^[25] By removing the assumption of radical coherence or of radical incoherence in the subject, we can then be more curious about when coherence does or not happen, and when this does or does not pose problems.

12. Subjectivity is ambivalent.^[26] Ambivalence is an affective corollary of incoherence: ambivalence is how our incoherence is lived. On Berlant’s view, ambivalence is “an inevitable condition of intimate attachment.”^[27] As such, it is often unfairly stigmatized. Ambivalence means in part that our feelings are always plural and that we are always partly open to feeling incompatible feelings. We are open to affective flows that might push us away from the positions we thought we inhabited. The clichéd view about ambivalence is that it is a genre of inner drama, such as a grandiose struggle between two opposing poles, love and hate. But Berlant does not see ambivalence as having a fixed plot, or even any resolution other than provisional. Rather, ambivalence is something more nonbinary: it is the prerequisite of our existing in multiple ways in the world. Nor is it a purely passive state; it is a site of action, whether conscious or unconscious, and perhaps even “a pleasure in its own right.”^[28] At one point Berlant suggests evocatively that “ambivalence is a kind of temporalized bargaining.”^[29]

I might emphasize here that a nonbinary theory of the subject is not the same as a theory of nonbinary subjects. Berlant has not to my knowledge specifically analyzed nonbinary gender subjectivity. Rather, what is nonbinary about Berlant’s approach to subjectivity is its rigorous intellectual refusal of dualisms, schematisms, simplifications and closures. It is a radical affirmation that everything that is, is also something else — and thus that everything is enigmatic. Even “the nonbinary” is multiple, in the end. In Berlant’s work, the nonbinary might describe an unconscious desire (to refuse and refashion femininity, for instance); a conceptual commitment (to multiplicity); and a structure of feeling (we feel many things at once). Was this somewhat effervescent approach to thought not influenced by the social and intellectual life of the 1960s and 1970s, and their famously affirmative “philosophies of desire”? Perhaps, but Berlant’s thought always has a dialectical moment too, a moment of negation and critical ricochet. Sometimes I think one can read Berlant as trying to create a dialectics without binaries, a dialectical writing that stays true to immanence, historicity and femininity. Where conventional Marxist dialecticians have tended to privilege production, energy and motion, Berlant was equally interested in reproduction, exhaustion and stuckness.

Fort-da with the dialectic, or supervalent thought

Over the years Berlant came to identify less as a Marxist than, more broadly, as a “materialist.” They quit their campus Marxist Theory Workshop in 1985, switching their focus to feminist and queer studies, and later to affect studies. There was surely a gender politics in this: they tended to avoid masculinist critical theory culture, in its boys’ club version. Nevertheless, like the critical theory tradition, Berlant’s writing always aims to produce thought that is radically immanent to a brutal and inconsistent world. Berlant describes their project at one point as “the activity of being reflexive about a contemporary historicity as one lives it”^[30]; they also cite a “desire to angle knowledge toward and from the places where it is (and we are) impossible.”^[31] Such a project has no definite genre and no plot.

But this form of thought might still have its organizing images. Berlant at one point anchored their intellectual work around something called supervalent thought, which was also the title of their blog. They explained:

A supervalent thought is a thought whose meaning resides not only in its explicit phrasing, but in the atmosphere of intensity it releases that points beyond the phrase, to domains of the unsaid. It’s a pressure. A supervalent thought produces an atmosphere, disturbs modes of apprehension, consciousness, and experience. It wedges things while inducing leaking. It’s a resource and a threat.

It’s a concept from Freud’s Dora. Freud uses it to describe an expressed thought (I don’t love you) that covers up a concealed thought that is its opposite (I love you). But the spirit of the concept is that in the penumbra an ideation, a sensed concept, generates all kinds of contradictions that can be magnetized to induce an impact beyond what’s explicit or what’s normative.^[32]

A supervalent thought is too multiplicitous, too heavily charged, too overflowing and too resonant to pin itself down in any single dialectical drama. In a supervalent thought, the contradictions aren’t gone; they are everywhere. And there is no hope of finding a single driving logic in things or in thoughts. The large “penumbra” of a thought does not necessarily point us towards a Hegelian Absolute or any definite horizon. Rather, it stirs things up, “disturbing” us, shaking us out of our norms or perceptual habits, changing our space of possibilities without imposing a telos. The effervescence of supervalent writing might mirror the incoherence of the world in which we are writing. While much dialectical writing seems to aspire to sovereignty over its object, in supervalent thought we are always outmatched by the multiplicitous force of the unconscious. Supervalent thought might carry us away in spite of ourselves, inducing a sense of nonsovereignty in our thinking.

Still, supervalent thought needs anchors, stock images and points of departure. One of Berlant’s recurrent models for nonbinary subjectivity was the famous scene of fort-da recounted by Freud. Fort-da, as Freud reports, is a game invented by a bourgeois German child around the First World War. In the game, a small child copes with his mother’s periodic absences by banishing and then unbanishing his toys. Frequently throwing a toy away into the corner, he shouts “Fort” (German for gone). Occasionally, he also brings the toy back, shouting “da” (there). Freud speculates that this game helped the child find agency in a situation that he experienced as passivity (since he was powerless to prevent his mother’s absences), adding this may also have constituted a substitute for revenge on the beloved object (the mother).

In Cruel Optimism, Berlant approaches fort-da as a way of thinking about how we spend our lives oscillating between different subjective stances.

The child’s “loss” and “recovery” of the top is read generally as the bargaining any subject does to retain a notion that her or his intelligibility or continuity in the world is a function of her or his will. However, the capacity of the ego to respond to contingency via a principle of form should not imply that the subject “really” is contingent and only masterful in a compensatory way. Each position, repeated countless times, is its own pleasure, and the playing child is also increasing his capacity to be in the room with myriad potentialities.^[33]

In other words, fort-da is not only a pathetic Freudian symptom that compensates for the pain of having an absent mother. Rather, it illustrates Berlant’s basic views about the ways that subjectivity isn’t binary. What fort-da suggests, at its most basic, is that to be a subject is to be ambivalent about the object. (Anything, incidentally, can become an object to a subject — our “object” in psychoanalytic jargon could be a parent, a toy, an institution, a relationship, etc.) And we are not fixed in one specific subject position; rather, our subjectivity comes into being as a motion across multiple stances. We cling to our object and we throw it away; we are lost children and vengeful autocrats; we are intrinsically multiple creatures. The game of fort-da, on Berlant’s first reading, is a scene of training in multiplicity — a way in which we learn the pleasure of changing positions, and a way of increasing our tolerance for this stance-changing.

A few years later in Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant comes to question whether the game should be seen as “a form” at all, in any singular sense. They propose instead that it might be read as an experimental space where multiple things are happening at once.

Although the child’s play with a top that he loses and repossesses repeatedly is widely read as a scene of play as mastery over loss, why not read it as a scene defined by a play with multiple consequences and risks—for example, the risks of possessing, ambivalence, being in control, being out of control, being alienated or dissociated, and/or the pleasures of cycling through these? Why not read the child’s play as an experiment in potential form that does not seek out a form? Is it not possible that recontextualizing a problem shifts its conditions of extension even if one of its persistent conditions is its negativity?^[34]

On this second, more expansive reading, fort-da is a scene where we are inventing new practices to process our multiple affects and desires. The Berlantian thought that emerges from fort-da is that we are always responding to ambivalence with intensive bargaining, which becomes the ordinary praxis, in effect, that emerges from supervalent thought. In our everyday scenes of existence, whatever the object of our present desire might be, we are always trying to calibrate our relations to it, trying to make sure we have the right amount of it, but not too much. As Berlant insists, it is so easy to be either overwhelmed or abandoned by one’s object, and so hard to make sure that one’s subjective calibrations are not over-corrections that yet again miss the mark. In short, Fort-da is how people always are with objects and other people, and all thoughts are potentially supervalent.

If one reads across Berlant’s work, it is striking how much it is permeated by people’s ongoing need to bargain with the world.

Even though I wish to remain myself, I may want also to experience the discomposure of intimate relationality, yet want only the discomposure I can imagine, plus a little of the right kind extra, and how can I bear the risk of experiencing the anything that might be beyond? How can I bear not seeking it?^[35]

Or earlier:

Think of the frequent moments in the life of a relationship when you experience frustrated sovereignty, needing to feel free to be vague, wrong, opaque, distracted, withholding, or irresponsible at the same time as you need your intimate to remain open, unsuspicious, clear, and caring, as well as alive with the capacity to surprise you (but not too much!). Love demands an imbalancing act.^[36]

For Berlant, almost all subjectivity is this kind of Goldilocks subjectivity — suspended between too much and not enough of whatever our desire might seek. It is nevertheless dialectical in the sense that it is not trapped in a closed oscillation. It is reflexive and immanent thinking: it takes us someplace, it becomes historical, it gets us through life. Or indeed, it might make life itself into the object on which one’s ambivalence is enacted or avenged.

Berlant divulges (in a rare moment of linear autobiography) that they had done fort-da with their life, describing their experience in Oberlin College.

I was very ill while I was there with anorexia which stemmed from a lot of things, including poverty and rape, and I returned to the game of fort-da with my own existence. I was supporting myself—I put myself through college—and it was all very insecure.^[37]

Is it any wonder that later in life Berlant began to theorize precarity, having lived through it? And what then, what comes after precarity? What happens after you wear yourself out with ambivalence, with fort-da, with relentlessly tracking the environment for new cues, with a frenzy of intellection? Since Adorno at least, dialecticians have no longer known where we were going. For Berlant, the utopian often still lingers as a distant horizon, as something much more fragmentary than The Revolution, as an unreachable object of desire. Supervalent thought leads us in Berlant’s work to one of its blind spots: to exhaustion. One might then ask: who is the subject of exhaustion in an exhausted world? The subject of exhaustion is the subject of reproduction. A subject with a gender.

The nonbinary, the feminine

This brings up a seemingly straightforward question: who is the subject of a Berlantian theory of the subject? The question seems to have a clear general answer: women. Berlant’s work is predominantly about women’s culture and writing, and this feminist methodological choice has a powerful effect. With an eloquent and forceful silence, it displaces men from their historical position as the default subjects and objects of critical inquiry. Nevertheless, Berlant’s work does not idealize women, nor construe their femininity as a singular form. Instead, Berlant is deeply committed to the view that “women” is a historical field without a timeless unity. “Feminists must embrace a policy of female disidentification at the level of female essence,” Berlant wrote back in 1988. “What we share is a history of oppression by patriarchy in its various alliances with other hegemonic economic, state, racial, and religious practices; what we do not share is our relation to these systems of oppression.”^[38] Berlant then argued that when we refuse to organize feminism around a universal subject of women, it becomes possible to comprehend “the overdetermined and incoherent activity that passes for, or simulates, something like the essence of woman”^[39] (my emphasis).

In 2021, it may be easier to imagine feminism without a universal subject of women than it was in 1988. But I must say, in the face of a new essentialism that pervades many contemporary trans and nonbinary communities — one that sometimes manages to picture even nonbinary gender as an alternative essence of self — it is still powerful to argue that womanhood is already in itself a set of incoherent practices passing as an essence.^[40] “Passing” in trans vernacular is understood as the process of becoming recognizable as a coherent bearer of a binary gender category.^[41] The heterotopian process of passing expresses an entirely understandable longing to dodge symbolic violence, to slip under hegemony’s radar, and to be welcomed warmly by the world. But in its very framing (passing or not), it also tends to construct cishet hegemony itself as much more coherent than it ever is. Whence the continued radicality of Berlant’s early view: that cis women too are only passing as women.

What does this passing look like in practice? Berlant approaches gender in the first instance as a condition of ordinary subjectivity, and unsurprisingly, it turns out that people really like to play fort-da with gender. Berlant’s work is not remarkably sanguine about our collective capacities to transform gender norms, but it is quite optimistic about the clandestine ways that gender enables us to transform, escape and sustain ourselves. Thus Berlant suggests at one point that “gender categories are best seen as spaces of transformation, nodal points that are supposed to pro­duce general social intelligibility while encrusted with constantly chang­ing noncoherent meanings.”^[42] As Berlant’s subsequent work has explored the “overdetermined and incoherent activity” called femininity, it seems to me that the feminine has also led into something nonbinary.

On one level, the nonbinary in Berlant’s analysis of women is purely an emergent rhythm. It is immanent in the patterns of women’s subjectivity. The feminine for Berlant is a space of multiplicity and ambivalence, even if it is permeated by regulatory ideals, foundational fantasies, and aspirations to simplicity. It includes attachments and revulsions, exploitations and egalitarianisms, potential for excess and potential for insufficiency, a permanent flux and a constant repetition. To patriarchal eyes, femininity’s multiplicity has sometimes appeared to be a fatal incoherence, but we could just as well call it ordinary being in the world. In The Female Complaint (2008), Berlant derives a preliminary account of this incoherence from a brief reading of Lydia Davis.

“Generally, the women in [Davis’ book] Almost No Memory lament [their] cramped existence, turning into cedar trees that ‘group together in a corner of the graveyard and moan in the high wind’; fulfilling their femininity by being reactive to men and children; being emotionally central to intimates while querying the value of the bargains they’ve struck with these ongoing intimacies. Their main fascination is in watching themselves shuttle between emotional generosity and resentment at the demands for emotional service by children and lovers to whom they are attached” (17).

Women’s lives here are cramped because they are dominated by the unworkable contradictions of their seemingly endless emotional labor. This labor is not entirely without symbolic benefits, since it provides the “fulfillment” of being one’s gender role, the slow drips of recognition from the men and children whom one tends, and perhaps even the sheer pleasure (“the sensual spectacle,” 19) of seeing one’s care labor keep the world in motion. Nevertheless, these benefits are not enough to provide stability. The Others only take and never give, or not enough: “women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.”^[43] The multiple pressures are overwhelming. The emotional skills that make femininity so rewarding can also sensitize you to everything that is untenable about life in an oppressive system. But even the contradictions of femininity can be partly managed by convention.

The analysis continues: “She feels a failure not because she has not developed emotional competence but because she has overdeveloped it… she keeps from falling apart by shifting between hypervigilance and inattention. This enables her to remain close not to her lover but to the situation of love and the promise of exchange… Over and over in Davis’s work, a woman’s self-consciously writerly eloquence and keen insight lead to descriptions of what does not change despite the woman’s frantic aspirational activity toward making emotional simultaneity… Davis’s point is to show that somehow the accumulation of knowledge leads to an unraveling for the writer/speaker and yet this unraveling, which ought to produce madness, is actually ordinary feminine consciousness. It turns out that even unraveling has its genres” (18).

The unraveling of femininity can thus become a space where we become nonbinary. The capacity to exist in a nonbinary way — to be one thing and also another, to cope with multiplicity more or less gracefully, to process ceaseless demands from the Other while not collapsing, to feel generosity and resentment simultaneously, or conversely to feel affirmed by one’s seeming captivity to the Other — all this is arguably a standard feminine capacity. And femininity, like every gender, is a holding environment: a cultural form that can absorb all kinds of things, indeed a cultural form (more than any other) charged with absorbing all kinds of things. So becoming unraveled or nonbinary (not that these are the same) does not necessarily become an exit from a binary gender location. On the contrary, femininity can readily absorb the unraveling of its own subjects.

But what do people do when they become conscious of the ways that their normativity is a dumpster fire, their gender constituted by unraveling, their dignity tantamount to their capacity to endure structural degradation? Commonly, such subjects turn to other women, who might at least recognize the pain of systematic misrecognition and disrespect. Yet this turn to women’s public spheres might yet again cause you to get enlisted in a type; to experience ambivalence about the conventions of femininity; and to get caught in new forms of repetition. “The circularity of the feminine project will not escape you, therefore: it is a perfect form, a sphere infused with activities of ongoing circuits of attachment that can at the same time look like and feel like a zero” (20). Of course, feeling like a zero, in Berlantian terms, might start to become a familiar consolation. “The sense of treading water or drowning in the present can also mark the pleasure and even the comfort one might derive from the most painful repetition” (244).

Berlant is extremely generous, although necessarily ambivalent, towards women’s conventional practices of solidarity and conviviality. They frequently draw a contrast between feminism and conventional women’s culture, but rather than presuming that the former is a virtuous improvement over the latter, Berlant’s research points to feminism’s limits as an existential rubric. They eventually conclude that “feminism has been a much better resource for critique than for providing accounts of how to live amid affective uncertainty, ambivalence, and incoherence” (234) — a narrative project that I think seems urgent to Berlant, both personally and theoretically. The “female complaint” genres that so interested Berlant are one major way in which conventional women’s culture facilitates survival, by providing categories and narratives that help process the ambivalence of love, care work, and structural subordination. Yet there is no definitive escape from type there, just a refiguring of femininity that makes its ambivalence more bearable.

Misrecognition is an optimism

Berlant’s work is not a new theory of radical politics. On the contrary, it has to be read as a theory of how any radicalism would be radically incomplete without an account of feminity, of reproduction, and of life outside the political. And for those of us who live most of our lives in the capitalist world system, it answers a different question: about how to survive emotionally in the bad world where we spend most of our time. Berlant has occasionally suggested that the core message of U.S. popular culture is “You’re not alone.” One wonders if there is something of a core message in Berlant’s work too. If there were, it might seem at first to be “I’m OK.”^[44] No matter how bad it gets, on Berlant’s view, there is an optimism always implicit in our tendency to develop patterns, rhythms, and styles of being in the world. But this core message would also have to have a qualifier: “I’m OK (even though I’m not).” The ways that we are defined by our stories of negativity and negation do not just go away. “Trauma can never be let go of.” This is not a negation of negative dialectics; it is a nonbinary dialectic, meaning an effort to be transformed by ambivalence and to find optimism in our very bargaining. The imperative of Berlant’s materialist reflexivity is, then, to investigate the real places we come from and then to ask what dialectic of optimism and exhaustion they have left us caught up in.

To theorize emotional survival in late capitalism might almost be a utopian act in itself. But I think Berlant’s project holds some more specific lessons for those of us who want to ditch conventional gender and make something new. It implies that to the extent we are serious about remaking social life, this will be not just about creating new social forms such as labels, identities, or publics, but will also be about learning new ways to inhabit our psyches and attachments. Nonbinary gender often seems like a supervalent thought in search of a genre of conventional identity, one inclined to begin with a heroic narrative of largely individual self-assertion, self-transformation, and recognition struggle. Berlant would not try to prevent our creating new conventions. Surely, we need new conventions. But Berlant might also encourage us to reflect on the limits of that kind of identity project. Their work might provide pathways towards inventing new forms of nonbinary desire, love and bargaining. And it might suggest that any nonbinary gender project might need to take seriously the lessons of conventional femininity. Surely no nonbinary space will survive without habits of care and emotional sustenance, habits which should not disregard the lessons of women’s structural ambivalence about care work.

Yet I also find myself thinking: it seems vaguely like a betrayal of these texts to look to them for political guidance. They give us no road maps towards radicality, towards unambivalence, or even towards better ways of surviving. “I don’t usually make credo-style speeches,” Berlant declared in 2009, “nor pitch my practice at a level of generality that’s supposed to model a way of being for colleagues.”^[45] What anyone might learn from Berlant’s work is supposed to remain indeterminate; that is perhaps one reason why Berlant has never written a pedagogical introduction to their own thought. “One cannot predict how and when—with intellection as the guardian of the bruised and disappointed self—someone will move toward any number of possible identifications,” Berlant comments in their analysis of Two Girls.^[46] It is, in this sense, a genuinely anarchic project, one that refuses the patriarchal imperative to reproduce oneself in one’s students. It provides no clear direction; it only provides the mimetic force of its own example. At most, it might give us hints for making sense of the directions we are already going.

Here I find myself wondering again: Whose intellection guards whose bruise? And who is getting worn out guarding the bruises anyways? We come back in the end to the question of education, the question of teachers. This is one of Berlant’s lasting contributions to materialist feminism: that we must theorize teaching just as intensely as we ever theorized domestic labor or motherhood. Berlant was my teacher for most of a decade in graduate school, and I found their presence to be world-making for me, even though it was overdetermined, glimpsy, and full of misrecognition. One time, I said (after my quals or some other brutal ritual) that I was grateful that they treated me like a human being in a graduate institution (the University of Chicago) that mostly dehumanized us. They protested, saying something like “What about my intellectual engagement with your work, isn’t that what matters?”

I was momentarily surprised that they could felt like anyone could possibly have underestimated their formidable intellectual presence in the world. But for years afterwards I felt guilty — guilty for having equated their existential presence with their femininity, and for having leaned on their care labor to help me survive the toxic culture of the university, as if that were in any way their job. Now, ironically, it feels like my increasing distance from graduate school (and from the academy) makes it easier for me to read their work, or even to acknowledge their thought in a way that formerly was structurally foreclosed.

The nonbinary reading of Lauren Berlant’s work may itself be a scene of misrecognition. But Berlant would remind us that misrecognition is also an optimism. And maybe that’s what we can learn from Berlant’s struggles with a contradictory existence: not just how to use “they” pronouns, but how to find optimism in the struggle to get by in a bad, incoherent world.

Works cited

Berlant, Lauren. 2016. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times.” Environment and Planning D no. 34 (3):393-419.

—. 2012. Desire/Love. Brooklyn: Punctum Press.

—. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 2009. “Affect is the New Trauma.” Minnesota Review no. 71-72:131-136.

—. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 1997. “Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy.” In The politics of research, edited by E. Ann Kaplan and George Levine, 143-161. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

—. 1997. “Trauma and ineloquence.” Cultural Values no. 5 (1):41-58.

—. 1997. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 1994. “’68, or Something.” Critical Inquiry no. 21:124-155.

—. 1988. “The Female Complaint.” Social Text no. 19/20:237-259.

Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. 2014. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham: Duke University Press.

Berlant, Lauren, and Jay Prosser. 2011. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Biography no. 34 (1):180-187.

Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. 1995. “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” PMLA 110:343-349.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hobarek, Andrew. 2001. “Citizen Berlant: An Interview with Lauren Berlant.” Minnesota Review no. 52-54:127-140.

Seigworth, Gregory J. 2012. “Reading Lauren Berlant Writing.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies no. 9 (4):346-352.

Tyler, Imogen, and Elena Loizidou. 2000. “The Promise of Lauren Berlant: An Interview.” Cultural Values no. 4 (3):497-511.

[1] “Feminism and the Institutions of intimacy,” 159.

[2] Berlant’s most general formulations of this part of the project appear in blogs and interviews. For example, “I have a really different view of the subject, and this is what I’m trying to write into being. I think it begins and proceeds as a porous and disorganized thing that is constantly impelled (compelled and desiring) to take up positions of clarity in relation to objects, worlds, and situations, but the available clarifying genres of personhood underdescribe the range of practices, knowledges, impulses, and orientations that people have while they’re foregrounding being this or that kind of thing at a particular moment… It’s a new realism of the ordinary subject who is at once durable and diffused” (“Life Writing and Intimate Publics” 187).

Compare also: “a person is a loosely-knotted cluster of impulses, reflections, apprehensions and prehensions moving through ordinary time (imagine a net with head, hands and feet).” (https://supervalentthought.com/2010/12/19/combover-approach-2/)

[3] “’68, or Something” 125.

[4] https://thepointmag.com/politics/pleasure-won-conversation-lauren-berlant/

[5] “Citizen Berlant” 134.

[6] ”Citizen Berlant“ 134, ”Institutions of Intimacy” 145.

[7] Berlant does cite at one point Monique Wittig’s image of “the prisonhouse of binary relationality” — the expression is Berlant’s — that forces us to be “intelligible as a gendered subject” (Sex or the Unbearable, 14). The rejection of that intelligibility would arguably be betrayed by rendering it as a new nonbinary gender, but I digress.

[8] As Michael Hardt explains, multiplicity is a Deleuzian technical term for “a notion of difference that does not refer back to (and thus depend on) a primary identity, a difference that can never be corralled into an ultimate unity… this expanding, proliferating set of differences that stand on their own, autonomous” Hardt in Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (ix). Deleuze at times envisioned this in quite sweeping terms: “There is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity… multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essential transformation and constant symptom of unity” (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 23-24).

[9] Cruel Optimism 287n30.

[10] “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” 348.

[11] https://supervalentthought.com/2010/12/12/combover-approach-1/

[12] Berlant’s world is not just multiple, then; it is recursively heterogeneous. The heterogeneity of the world can pose its own problems of subjective organization. As Berlant comments, ”So many different kinds of structure organize the estrangements and attachments of the world that how we are to live among and transform their existence both materially and in fantasy is my central question” (Sex, or the Unbearable 116).

[13] “Trauma and Ineloquence.”

[14] Female Complaint 3.

[15] Cruel Optimism 287-288.

[16] Cruel Optimism 138.

[17] Desire/Love 69.

[18] I might also cite their persistent affection for Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis.

[19] Berlant and Edelman: ”Negativity for us refers to the psychic and social incoherences and divisions, conscious and unconscious alike, that trouble any totality or fixity of identity. It denotes, that is, the relentless force that unsettles the fantasy of sovereignty. But its effects, in our view, are not just negative, since negativity unleashes the energy that allows for the possibility of change” (Sex, or the Unbearable, vii-viii).

[20] Cruel Optimism 48.

[21] Desire/Love 36.

[22] “The Commons” 394.

[23] Cruel Optimism 125.

[24] Impersonality: “The state of the interruption of the personal, and the work of normativity to create conventions of the personal” (Cruel Optimism 159). I would note that Berlant is exceptionally skeptical of the compulsory melodramas of emotional authenticity that organize a certain version of a “personal life.”

[25] Desire/Love 77.

[26] “What if we derived our social theory from scenes of ambivalence, which is to say, the scenes of attachment that are intimate, defined by desire, and overwhelming? We understand why we are overwhelmed by extreme and exhausting threats and actualized violence, as they menace the endurance of the world and of confidence in ongoingness. What’s harder to process is why it is hard to bear the very things we want.” (“The Commons” 395).

[27] Female Complaint 2.

[28] Female Complaint 2.

[29] Tyler and Loizidou, “The Promise of Lauren Berlant,” 511.

[30] Cruel Optimism 5. Compare Jameson: “Briefly, the dialectic may be said to be thinking that is both situational (situation-specific) and reflexive (or conscious of its own thought processes)” (Valences 322).

[31] Cruel Optimism 124.

[32] “Supervalent Thought,” https://supervalentthought.com/2007/12/23/hello-world/

[33] Cruel Optimism 287n21.

[34] Berlant in Sex or the Unbearable 79.

[35] Cruel Optimism 146.

[36] Female Complaint 12-13.

[37] Hobarek and Berlant 133.

[38] “The Female Complaint” (1988) 253.

[39] “The Female Complaint” (1988), 254.

[40] It is interesting to note that Butler’s famous rhetorical question along these lines — “Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established?” — only appeared in Gender Trouble two years after this paper came out.

[41] Meanwhile, it is common to acknowledge in U.S. queer cultures that genders are “social constructs,” but this often means in practice that gender identity is considered susceptible to individual gestures of self-definition, through a sort of agentive striving to become what one always already was.

[42] Queen of America 86.

[43] This is the end of the first sentence of The Female Complaint.

[44] Berlant comments at one point that “to desire belonging to the normal world, the world as it appears, is at root a fantasy of a sense of continuity, a sense of being generally okay; it is a desire to be in proximity to okayness, without passing some test to prove it” (Female Complaint 9). It seems to me that without downplaying the violence of belonging, Berlant would urge us not to shame people for having this fantasy.

[45] “Affect is the New Trauma” 135.

[46] Cruel Optimism 145-6.

I left anthropology for economic and family reasons, but that isn’t what I want to write about. I just want to write about no longer being what I was. What does that mean?

I don’t practice anthropology any more. I don’t teach it. I don’t write it. I don’t read it. I sold my anthropology books for a dime.

What does it mean to unbecome what you were?

Unbecoming an anthropologist: You stop making a mental map of who’s who. You don’t know who got what jobs. You don’t know who just published what.

Unbecoming an anthropologist: You no longer know what theories are alive and which are dead.

Unbecoming an anthropologist: You stop trying to speak in a certain tone, the academic tone of voice. That tone starts to seem thorny and stilted, though it used to feel natural and empowering. It stops making you feel like you are part of something.

Unbecoming an anthropologist: Your existence no longer hinges on your knowledge, your thoughtfulness, your capacity to theorize. You will no longer make cultural analysis into a cornerstone of your professional being in the world.

Unbecoming an anthropologist: Above all, you cease to constantly REPEAT the little ritual incantations that held up your claims to “be” that thing. To “be an anthropologist” involves constantly DECLARING your identity as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I’m an anthropologist…”, “I’m in anthropology…”, “As an anthropologist…”

But when you stop repeating those speech acts, when you stop being around those speech acts, the identity itself goes up in smoke.

Was it ever more than a mirage?

Yes: it was a mirage that people fervently believed in. A mirage that was also a landscape some people can spend their lives in.

How do you change a landscape?

The self is subject to the forces of wind and water and it shifts through almost geological processes. To change your self, you just let natural processes of erosion, slippage, and fire take their course. Maybe you can channel them — just a little.

Laboriously, you had made yourself look a certain way. And then you stopped maintaining the look, and soon your face changed.

I’m not an anthropologist: I just worked there for a while.

In leaving a profession, one senses the deep (ideological) gulf between “the professions” and “working for a living.”

“I’m a doctor” vs “I work in a hospital”: they’re totally different things. One of them defines your being in the world: another merely describes your relationship to capital and wage labor. (This may turn out to be a distinction without a difference, but it still feels like a difference.)

To be clear, I had the social and economic capital to be able to change careers and fairly easily become “something” else. I didn’t unbecome an anthropologist in exchange for nothing. But that is another story.

I don’t think I will ever again try to anchor my whole identity in my relationship to work. At least, I’d rather avoid it.

It’s almost funny that I ever was “an anthropologist.” What a reified thing that was. Why do anthropologists have such a objectified, involuted discourse on their own identity?

But there’s a lot of pleasure and comfort in self-objectification. That’s what I’ve learned and had to give up.

“One of the best ways to get a self is to be a thing,” I wrote once when I was thinking about gender. It would be funny if it weren’t a bit painful.

Perhaps one of the best ways to change a self is to stop being a thing.

And then — and then?

I started this blog on academic culture back in November 2007. I think I might be done with it now.

I want here to explore feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s professional encounter with critical theory in Britain. I draw here on her published reflections on her education, set largely in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For Ahmed, theory’s reified masculinism was a point of departure in her process of coming to consciousness as a feminist. Ahmed, who resigned her professorial position at Goldsmiths to protest widespread sexual harassment, initially encountered “theory” as an undergraduate in the literature department at the University of Adelaide. When she moved to Cardiff University’s then-new Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory for her doctoral work, she learned a major lesson: that theory in the abstract was predominantly theory in the masculine.

What I glean from Ahmed’s writing is that her coming-to-consciousness-against-theory took place in four key moments.

1. In the first moment, in Adelaide in the late 1980s, Ahmed traversed the theory boy-style superiority complex. She quickly rejected the philosophy department only to discover the power of theoretical capital.[1] “I remember, when I was an undergraduate student, thinking that the people who took the ‘theory’ courses in my literature department were cleverer!” (2000:98). This perception of cleverness was, I think, a moment where Ahmed felt a structure of ideology flicker over her, a norm trying to establish itself. One way that critical theory has intimidated, and in this has also protected its patriarchal heritage, is by presenting itself as a task of the clever Other who was only potentially the self.

2. In a second moment, pursuing her doctorate in Cardiff, Ahmed faced pressures to reshape her own identity in keeping with French Theory’s fetishized patrilineages:

When I was doing my PhD, I was told I had to give my love to this or that male theorist, to follow him, not necessarily as an explicit command but through an apparently gentle but increasingly insistent questioning: Are you a Derridean; no, so are you a Lacanian; no, oh, okay, are you a Deleuzian; no, then what? If not, then what? Maybe my answer should have been: if not, then not! [2017:15, my emphasis]

In this impoverished theory space — “theory is used to refer to a rather narrow body of work,” she reports (2017:8) — the key social imperative revolved around the question: What are you? This demand for an identity in theory needs to be read alongside Ahmed’s eloquent description of racial hailing on the street in Britain:

I am walking down a street in Cardiff. And I am stopped by someone; he is walking the other way. How interested he seems. In what, am I what? ‘Hey, where are you from?’ […] I know what the question is asking of me. I resist giving the answer I am being asked to give. ‘Australia,’ I say. No, I mean originally. […] He knows I know what he is asking. I give in, wanting to move on. ‘My father is from Pakistan.’ That’s it. The conversation is over. I have given the right answer, the answer he was waiting for, even hoping for. [Ahmed 2017:116]

Sometimes identity demands are a progressive force, but here are they are a reactionary one, a moment of colonial and racial discipline. Such a sense of discipline was mirrored in the theory case: “Are you a Derridean?” and so on. Such questions are also an ideological hail, teaching you who you are by telling you to pause for authority. They are also a moment of essentializing taxonomy, where intellectual space is given a set of propertarian names and divided up after the fashion of a Great Enclosure. Manifestly, the three patrilineages in Cardiff — Derrideans, Lacanians, Deleuzians — were all French. Yet these three French men and their lineages were also almost not-national, taken out of historical context and reframed as abstract nodes in an intellectual space which cast itself as the only one that mattered. Interestingly, there was a certain affective surplus in this process of interpellation. Just why was Ahmed called not just to affiliate with French Theory, but also to give it her love?

I suspect that love became mandatory because theory-fetishism had become an obligatory mode of academic reproduction, and reproduction always demands a mandatory affective excess. To love theory is not a form of sexual romance but a form precisely of fetishism: a love of a reified thing, an object that also functions as an academic brand. That does not mean that fetishism is pathological. Indeed, it is enabling, but what it enables is an institutional system premised on misrecognizing “theory” as a thing. In emphasizing the forms of branding and reification that organize theory, Ahmed helps us see that ”theory itself” is premised on fantasy structures of hierarchical recognition, aspiration, elite-building and commodification.

3. For all their supposed radicality, these structures can also become remarkably antipolitical. That is apparent from the third moment of Ahmed’s encounter with theory, where theory’s masculinity emerged as a moment of harsh boundary maintenance on the part of her teachers.

I still remember submitting a critical reading of a theory text in which woman was a figure as one of my essays… I was concerned with how statements made by the teacher, like “this is not about women,” were used to bypass any questions about how the figure of woman is exercised within a male intellectual tradition. When the essay was returned to me, the grader had scrawled in very large letters, “This is not theory! This is politics! [2017:8]

To police the boundaries of theory, for this teacher, was an act of anger or at least of energetic venting. It was to scrawl, rather than discuss; to assert, rather than think. As with Theory Boy, the adulation of theory goes along with a wish to pin it down within heavily policed boundaries. And this wish for a fixed image of theory went along with a brutal rejection of questions about women and gender, a rejection sometimes policed, Ahmed adds, by women instructors. This introduced stark contradictions between theory and academic practice. “I met academics who wrote essays on feminist theory but who did not seem to act in feminist ways,” she recalled (2017:14).[2] This sounds like an impossible trap.

4. Yet in a fourth, feminist moment, Ahmed found a way out of the fundamentally melodramatic drama of theoretical inclusion. Rather than writing a critique of theory that would implicitly center it in her work, she ultimately chose instead, in Living a Feminist Life, to deflate, dedramatize, relativize, and partially normalize it.

Even though I am relatively comfortable in critical theory, I do not deposit my hope there, nor do I think this is a particularly difficult place to be: if anything, I think it is easier to do more abstract and general theoretical work… I think that the more difficult questions, the harder questions, are posed by those feminists concerned with explaining violence, inequality, injustice. The empirical work, the world that exists, is for me where the difficulties and thus the challenges reside. Critical theory is like any language; you can learn it, and when you learn it, you begin to move around in it. Of course it can be difficult, when you do not have the orientation tools to navigate your way around a new landscape. [2017:8-9]

Ahmed thus closed her narrative about critical theory by deconstructing precisely the sense of superiority, singularity, and openness that had organized its aura in her undergraduate days. Reframing empirical work as harder than theory, she reversed the original dogma that theory was where the cleverer people went. And insisting that critical theory is “like any language,” she reduced it from a master discourse to merely one discourse among others. Her conclusion became one of mandatory ambivalence, verging even on ironic appreciation. “I will come out with it,” she declared: “I enjoy and appreciate much of the work that is taught and read as critical theory” (2017:10). Her very enjoyment worked to deprive theory of the abject energy that a more extended critique of its masculinism might have conferred upon it.

But Ahmed’s act of dedramatization in turn calls attention to the two dramatizations that were at play here: theory’s self-dramatizations, which Ahmed sought to undo, and the dramatization of the subject who is critical of theory, on the other. Here, as love-of-theory became ambivalence-about-theory, Ahmed enacted a particular gesture of negativity. In declaring “If not, then not!” she negates the very grid of legibility that was supposed to organize her academic world.

Yet for Ahmed this moment of negation, period, was coupled to a dissociative, structural optimism. “I do not deposit my hope there” was coupled to “I enjoy and appreciate much of the work.” The critique of patriarchal discipline ends in ambivalence: I would suggest that this ambivalence is a already powerful feminist gesture. Curiously, a contradictory and even violent academic environment can become a good place for a subject to develop ambivalence. The very badness of an environment can finally become functional, liberating one to look elsewhere for one’s optimism.

Needless to say, this unexpected use of a bad structure does not justify its existing in the first place.

[1] Ahmed’s education began with an early rejection of the Adelaide philosophy department, a department which only taught “sadly… pretty much straight analytical philosophy,” and failed to address her intellectual interests “in how we know things, in questions of truth, in perspective and perception, in experience and subjectivity” (2017:28).

[2] She added that these academics “seemed routinely to give more support to male students than female students, or who worked by dividing female students into more and less loyal students” (2017:14). Elsewhere, she recalls that “One tutor got so cross with me in an argument about Derrida’s use of the figure of ‘woman,’ that she threw her cup of coffee down on a table and stormed out of the room. The coffee spilled all over me. I was startled, often, by the trouble I seemed to cause” (2015:181).

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
—. 2015. “Being in Trouble: In the Company of Judith Butler.” Lambda Nordica no. 2-3:179-192.
—. 2000. “Whose Counting?” Feminist Theory no. 1 (1):97-103.

If we boil things down, this course shows us an image of Europe that is fundamentally about conflict, crisis, nationalism, and the heavy weight of ugly histories. The Europe we’ve seen this semester is a Europe in crisis. Even at times in agony. It suffices to recall that Europe is a place where a Turkish family’s house can get burned down by neo-Nazis, as in Solingen, Germany in May 1993. It’s a place where refugees drown by the boatload offshore, or where refugee camps can catch on fire, as on the Greek island of Lesbos this September 19, sending more than 3,000 refugees fleeting. It’s a place where a French citizen can take a Kosher supermarket hostage on behalf of the Islamic State and then get killed by the riot police, as Amedy Coulibaly did almost two years ago, and then be construed by right-wing xenophobic politicians as hard evidence of an implacable clash of civilizations between “Islamic fundamentalism” and the (fantasized) West. It’s a place where pension payments to the elderly can get slashed to satisfy foreign lenders, and also a place where people can die while waiting months for socialized medicine to give them heart surgery. Austerity policies, like socialist ones, can kill. Europe is a place where whole worlds have been burned down and slaughtered only to be rebuilt and reborn, like my grandfather’s childhood apartment in Berlin, which, sometime after his family fled or died in fled Nazi Germany, was converted into a parking lot.

In sum, crisis and conflict are the essence here, not the accident; they’re the shape of the historical frame, not an exception or ornament. If you picture European history since 1945 as a sea, this one has rarely been still. As you recall, we started out class by thinking about nationalism and the nation. Again, if you learn one thing from this class, it is that the nation is by definition a conflict zone. The history of nations in Europe, even in a relatively limited historical scope as the period since 1945, demonstrates that crisis is not new.

Already in 1947 in Greece, or earlier in the 1930s in Spain, European countries were divided by civil war. And I’ve learned from reading your papers that many members of our class tend to idealize the nation as a unified thing. But again: nations are never unified things. Nations are ongoing conflicts. Struggles. When people pretend that the nation is unified, you have to take that with a grain of salt. It may be an aspiration. It may be a fantasy. It may be propaganda, as in Queen Frederica’s orphanages. In any case, it has never been true that any nation is altogether united, because it is just not actually possible for a mass of millions of people to share a single “soul.” There is only ever an unsteady balance between partial unity and disunity; disunity is a constant. In that sense, civil wars — like the ones in Greece and Spain — are not moments where nations break down. They are merely moments where the conflicts at the heart of a nation can no longer be hidden or postponed.

This gets us to the question of the European Union, whose destiny, of course, is impossible to foresee. It’s worth recalling that a large part of the European Union’s project was to prevent war. The 1992 Maastricht treaty that created the European Union, for instance, began by “recalling the historic importance of the ending of the division of the European continent and the need to create firm bases for the construction of the future Europe,” and stated that its aim was “to promote peace, security and progress in Europe and in the world.” By creating a new type of European citizenship and trying to foster “social integration,” the aim was to decrease malign nationalism. Yet malign (if not malignant) nationalism has instead prospered in the 25 years since Maastricht.

Part of the aim of our course, then, has been to arm you with some critical skills for thinking about nationalism and the nation. Again, Ernest Renan was largely right when he said what a nation was not. A nation is not simply a territory, a race, a language, or a religion. One has to qualify Renan’s view: of course many nations are strongly associated with all these things, which is why we can associate the nation of England with the English language, the Anglican church, and some stereotypes about racial whiteness. Danforth and Van Boeschoten’s quip is worth recalling here: “Nations, in other words, are large, politicized ethnic groups that exercise, or hope to exercise, state sovereignty over a specific territory” (2012:35). We can acknowledge that nations do have certain social, linguistic, “ethnic,” religious and territorial roots. But there is no such thing as the soul of a nation. All nations are divided to one degree or another; no nation is entirely ethnically, linguistically, or religiously pure.

So this raises a question: Why do people think nations are pure if they are actually impure? Why do they seem to be unified if they are actually disunified? Here we can go back to the Queen of England’s Christmas Speech, with its curious blend of kitschy family harmony, official Christendom, and displays of military force. Nations have narrators. People end up believing in the existence of nations because they are swayed by these narrators – they may even identify strongly with them. People imagine that they belong to unified nations because they are in the sway of these national stories.

The problem is, national narrators are seldom entirely trustworthy. Hopefully in class you’ve learned to ask yourself some critical questions about them: What kind of person gets represented in this image of the nation? And who’s getting left out? Whose interests does the national narrator serve? Whose interests do they betray? If they portray the nation as being unified in opposition to some foreign adversary, is the adversary really foreign? Or is it actually a part of the nation that is getting falsely pushed outside and then treated as foreign, as with the large group of Muslim citizens of the French Republic, or the Greek citizens ostracized for their Macedonian roots?

Indeed, national narrators often convey their images of unity through antagonism against foreigners. But let’s be clear: the conflicts and crises that afflict Europe today are substantially internal to Europe, not strictly imposed from abroad. We could make a list of different kinds of conflicts in Europe:

• Economic conflicts: debt, economic growth, expensive social programs
• Conflicts over ethnic otherness: xenophobia, social marginality, integration of immigrants, specific antagonisms towards North Africans, Turks, Muslims, sub-Saharan Africans, not to mention Gypsies, Jews, Eastern Europeans, and so on.
• Conflicts of identity (which are inseparable from conflicts over ethnic others: who is British in a multiracial Britain?)
• Crises of social reproduction (can one get a job? a college degree? who will do childcare? how will death be recognized, unrecognized, collectively processed?)
• Conflicts of order and disorder (how will unruly populations be policed, whether migrants or striking workers?)
• Conflicts of political respectability (what will be the role of neofascists in Europe?)
• Conflicts of heritage: what will be the role of the past, when the past is irredeemable? when the past is fascist? when the past is full of unmarked graves? Can bad pasts be forgotten or transcended? Or, as Look Who’s Back suggests, is the potential for fascism alive and well in Europe today? What is the role of monarchy in a democracy? Is it a sign of oppression or merely a new national brand?

In our class, we’ve also looked at different ways that conflicts and crises get handled. They can get forgotten, as the Greek civil war has been by many. They can erupt into street conflicts, like with the British coal miners in the 1980s. They can get channeled in somewhat irrational directions, like political abandonment and precarity got channeled into Brexit. They can elicit satire, as with Black Mirror and its commentary on the alienation of technological progress, or with the representation of Hitler returned to the streets of Berlin in a moment of increasing hostility towards immigrants. Crises can shift history away from the “progressive” future that the European Union was supposed to facilitate, becoming moments of historical reaction. We can start to ask ourselves: Is conflict ever a ruse for something else. What gets concealed by a crisis?

We’ve also learned concepts that are useful for thinking about how people cope with crisis and live through it. Liminality is one way of dealing with crisis: you can leave your home in a fishing village in Ghana to become liminal in Italy, in hopes of getting better economic prospects. Precarious employment can be a way of surviving in a compromised world, even if it is one where traditional postwar forms of labor stability seem to have declined. I would even speculate that the concept of precarious employment will not be entirely irrelevant to your own generation’s experience as you enter the work world.

But in any event, if the course has a more philosophical moral, it must just be this: that crisis has become ordinary, that social and national conflict is inevitable, and that life is less about finding absolutely solid ground but rather is about navigating crisis, surviving conflict, and accepting that differences and even antagonisms are not going anywhere. Some might mourn the reality of this sort of unstable world. But I would say the opposite: conflict shows us that we are not trapped in a frozen order, and that history is still possible – indeed, is still unfolding before our eyes.

My first thought about abolition is that it makes an immense difference just what we are trying to abolish. What, for instance, might it mean to “abolish left patriarchy” in academia? Etymologically, patriarchy is rule of the fathers, a regime of male power and patrilineal inheritance. One might thus see abolishing patriarchy as a destruction or cancellation of male power in general, or at least of propertarian gerontocracy and its self-assertions of grandiosity and naturalness.

But if we are ourselves products of a patriarchal academy (which is not only about cishet men; there are queer people who act like patriarchs), then the problem of abolishing patriarchy also becomes a problem of self-abolition. Who abolishes the abolitionists? Is there a form of political selfhood, an evanescent one, that is always en route to self-abolition? And why is it that, coming here to speak as a precarious academic, I feel a bit destabilized, a little obscurely sad, a little overwhelmed with the weight of — what is it? — of being a case of failed reproduction?

Is there any other kind?

Abolition as we have it in the conference invitation seems a bit threatened by the specter of its own excess. And yet it seems to me that abolition — as an effort to end slavery, incarceration, dispossession, capital accumulation, and the racial capitalist societies that produce them — this abolition is always incomplete, threatening to turn back on itself, only ever partial. As others have also evoked. “Proletarian revolu­tions criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thorough­ness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts.”

This brings us back to the problem of left patriarchy. Much of second wave feminism emerged historically out of a desire to cancel — to abolish — the massive sexism of the 1960s New Left. And in many quarters, these criticisms of sexism in “the movement” had a real impact. But the abolition of patriarchy in the New Left was, to say the least, never total. An abolition that went unfinished.

Even now in the aftermath of #MeToo, it is bitterly disappointing to see the patriarchy and toxic masculinism that still pervade significant swaths of the supposedly left-radical academic world. Personally, when I was a student, this was at its worst for me in various seminars on Marx, who I was just citing. These seminars always gestured towards general emancipation, but remained extraordinarily patriarchal in their pedagogy and their horizons of discourse. “Maybe Marx is just a guy thing,” one of my professors told me once when I complained. (As if Marxist feminism did not even exist…)

Meanwhile, among my feminist comrades, terms like “manarchism” and “brocialist” are now in fairly widespread circulation. These feminist terms of art pick out a specific contradiction: the contradiction that patriarchal power and masculine violence endure in academic spaces nominally dedicated to liberation and radical social critique. To name this contradiction — which we can call, with Tania Toffanin, left-wing patriarchy — is to deplore it and to want to abolish it. But perhaps we need to talk about how it works before we can cancel it. How does left-wing patriarchy endure, for example in a university department?

I have been writing about this lately, and what I found ethnographically, in one left-wing French philosophy department, was not auspicious. It was a historically male-dominated site. There were reports of cishet sexualization, objectification and harassment from certain male professors. There was also a more widespread mode of naturalized male power which we can usefully understand in terms of Rebecca Lentjes’ concept of sonic patriarchy. Lentjes invokes the notion of sonic patriarchy to draw attention to the way that academic patriarchy works through the senses. In neoliberal universities, Lentjes observes, patriarchy is not only a matter of the male gaze, but also of the domination of sound and of what is — and is not — hearable.

In the department I studied, I sometimes had the sense that I all I heard was patriarchy. Patriarchy in this site seemed to be durable because it worked simultaneously on several fronts. It was infrastructural, being grounded in demographic, citational, and institutional domination. It was normative, incorporating a set of masculine norms of conduct (even if these were polyvalent). These norms worked to exclude its Others (women and political conservatives). Far from being static, it was a conflictual system, and in its conflicts, patriarchy became something naturalized, visceral, and inescapable. At the same time, this visceral conflict mobilized many men’s existential desires for their established system to endure, even to flourish. I arrived ultimately at the disturbing thought that, at least in this particular university department in France, left patriarchy does not just automatically reproduce itself; rather, its continuation is actively desired.

The question of desire brings us back to the reflexive question of what it means to abolish left patriarchy, if that is not just an institution outside us but also is part of us. How do we distinguish the work of political transformation (as they call it in South Africa) from the socially determined compusion to rebel against our own patrilineages? How can we engage with a discipline, or imagined discipline (such as “Critical University Studies”), without invoking an intergenerational cycle of gendered melodrama?

Nothing is more indebted to a discipline than a struggle with a discipline. (Nothing is more indebted to “Critical University Studies” than a struggle with Critical University Studies.) And one might argue that nothing is more queer, more antipatriarchal, than to abolish the problem of inheritance. To abolish our own toxic investments, to dedramatize our cravings for recognition, and, then — and then?

I don’t know.

Does abolition bring us answers or only new questions?

You have to be a materialist about desire. It takes a whole set of institutions to produce the desires that sustain left patriarchy. What kind of institutions might produce the desire to cancel it out?

The kind of theory I was taught in college had a big aura. It was a chic kind of theory, a French kind of theory, one entwined with hipster and bohemian aesthetics, with “female effacement” (Johnson 2014:27), with things postmodern or poststructuralist, with American whiteness, and with a barely repressed spirit of commodification and elite competition. In the American university context, this theoretical competition was readily entangled with clumsy masculine ambition and ersatz intersubjectivity, as one can see from a late-1990s satirical song about dating at Swarthmore College.

The song, “Theory Boys,” began:

Comes on the scene in a sharp wool coat
Bright eyes, hair a little too long and big teeth
Wanna strip away the phrases he recites by rote
Wanna find out what’s underneath

Don’t want to talk about anything I think I know
It won’t take long to see I’m hopelessly outclassed
And when you finally get him home
Has he got what it takes to last you?

One of these days I’m gonna have to get away from theory boys
One of these days I’m gonna have to get away from theory boys
When they read Foucault for fun
That’s when you know it’s time to run! If they’re so much
Smarter than me, why do they act so dumb?

[Fein 1998]

Let us dwell on “Theory Boys” for a moment, since its lyrics convey a whole theoretical world. The theory boy’s theory was a prestige object, used not in the service of any collective politics, but as part of a masculine bildungsroman which was nothing if not cringeworthy. In the song’s scenario, the theory boy was a bad boyfriend because he not only thought he knew everything, he also sought to make you feel inferior in the face of his knowledge, distilled from obsessive readings of fetishized male philosophers — Foucault and, as another verse notes, Nietzsche. Today one would call him a mansplainer, and his ostensibly subversive cultural knowledge was not to be mistaken for actual thinking. On the contrary, it consisted essentially of rote formulas that may, nevertheless, have channeled genuine existential angst. “Man is mortal, life is pointless, God is dead and stuff,” was the summary of his views offered in the fourth verse by the composer, Elizabeth Fein, who went on to become a psychological anthropologist. The theory boy was a connoisseur of yesterday’s philosophical dissidents in France and Germany, and what he sensed as radical chic was really a palimpsest of yesterday’s academic imperialisms, now eclipsed by the United States’ ascendant academic industries. Meanwhile he protected his expertise by avoiding his interlocutor’s domains of knowledge; he privileged his own verbal prowess over sexual reciprocity with his partner; and he aspired to style by practicing Francophile bobo consumerism, notably, as the third verse notes, by binging on coffee and cigarettes.

Methodologically, the point is that theory was enmeshed in a system of angsty patriarchy and frustrated desire. It was not that the theory boy definitively preferred the literary androgyny of French theory to the embodied femininity of his partner, since being a theory boy was clearly his coy sexual strategy.[1] In the libidinal economy of the song, the theory boy automagically constitutes an object of desire for the woman protagonist. He seems enticing in spite or because of his repulsive and excessive qualities, which give her desire for him a certain masochistic quality. In this, her desire mirrors his: the desire for theory is itself a masochistic desire, because who but a masochist (in this view) would be dumb enough to read Foucault for fun (Kulick 2006)? Just as the girl never gets what she wants from the boy yet can’t quit him, so too, it would seem, does the boy never get real knowledge from Foucault, but can’t stop reading him. The three of them enter into a paraphilic love triangle, where a girl chases a boy who chases a book, which in turn androgynously embodies both the masculinity of philosophical authority and the aesthetic femininity of French culture. Yet all the while, by the song’s account, the theory boy remains oddly trapped in himself, and in his barely intelligible code: “At least he can speak his own language—no-one else knows how.”

We could say that the theory boy’s theory becomes a fetish object, in a libidinally charged though not directly sexual sense. The objects of fetishistic desire (paraphilia), whose inanimacy affords them a welcome stability and predictability, can play a powerful function in stabilizing libidinal economies (Berlant 2012).[2] Fetishes serve at once to comfort and alienate, interfering with easy fantasies of subjective sovereignty. For the fetishist is not self-sufficient, he needs the object; he is not in control, but neither is he obliged to swallow too much intersubjectivity, since his desire can be satisfied by a substitute; and ironically, his very lack of sovereignty can make new things possible.

Now the “theory boy” is obviously a specific social type, and an idealized one at that. He is not a stand-in for Anglophone critical theory at large; he is neither an Angela Davis nor a Herbert Marcuse, neither a Barbara Johnson nor a Sara Ahmed. But in the instabilities which afflict him as he tends his theory fetish, he represents a political dead end whose implications reach far beyond the narrow confines of American elite college culture. If the unfinished global legacies of twentieth century radicalism show anything, it is that dialectical fantasies of a happy merger between revolutionary subject and revolutionary theory have generally proven unrealizable.[3] “Theory” in its post-sixties sense has consequently often been in a bad relationship with politics — as my French interlocutors sometimes complained — and this fraughtness is inseparable from its potential to become an academic fetish object.[4]

Still, it is not my view, either in this case or in general, that theory (itself a highly historically mutable category) is a fetish by nature. It is merely analytically important that, at certain historical moments, it can become one. Meanwhile, no one would mistake Theory Boy for a utopian: he is too dogmatically affirmative about theory for that, and too hostile to other human beings. But his masculinist fetish of theory has the merit of showing a deep connection between patriarchal desire and the forms of objectification that continue to organize the theory universe. This has been only too apparent to women — and no doubt invisible to too many men.

Notes

[1] It is an ideological curiosity that French culture is strongly gendered female in American public culture (whether in terms of fashion and beauty products, of Paris as a love space/object, in terms of France’s military and economic inferiority to Britain and America since the 19th century, or in terms of its artistic and intellectual movements). It is intriguingly compatible with France’s general femininity-for-America that French Theory was often deeply masculine and male-dominated. For more on the ambiguous gendering of French national self-representations, see Cooper (2000), or on gender in French philosophy, Le Doeuff (2003).

[2] As Berlant puts it, “The fetish enables desire to be controlled, to be manageable, to be comprehended, signified, and also screened out by the material form. Moreover, the fetish has no uniqueness nor singularity, like the penis; it can always be possessed, reproduced, replaced, and collected. Thus it encompasses value and valuelessness, and construes desire through aggression and protectiveness” (2012:34).

[3] I think here of the unactualized fate of Firestone’s revolutionary Marxist feminism, or Biko’s subject of Black Consciousness, or even Lukacs’s theory of the revolutionary proletariat (which may not be the Ur-form of this fantasy but certainly traces an extreme version of its failure).

[4] Aijaz Ahmad comments even more pessimistically than me that “It is also arguable… that dominant strains within this ‘theory’, as it has unfolded after the movements of the 1960s were essentially over, have been mobilized to domesticate, in institutional ways, the very forms of political dissent which those movements had sought to foreground, to displace an activist culture with a textual culture, to combat the more uncompromising critiques of existing cultures of the literary profession with a new mystique of leftish professionalism, and to reformulate in a postmodernist direction questions which had previously been associated with a broadly Marxist politics” (1992:1)

References

• Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso.
• Berlant, Lauren. 2012. Desire/Love. Brooklyn: Punctum Press.
• Cooper, Nikki. 2000. (En)Gendering Indochina: Feminisation and female figurings in French colonial discourses. Women’s Studies International Forum 23(6):749-759.
• Le Doeuff, Michèle. 2003. The Sex of Knowing. New York: Routledge.
• Fein, Elizabeth. 2017 [1998]. “Theory Boys.” Swarthmore College Alumni Songbook, 2017 Edition. Pp. 7. Swarthmore, PA: Swarthmore Folk.
• Kulick, Don. 2006. Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology. Current Anthropology 47(6):933-952.
• Johnson, Barbara. 2014. A life with Mary Shelley. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

I was not surprised to find out that in the 1970s, sexism and rape culture were major problems among the male-dominated French far left. They remain issues on French campuses today.

But I was nevertheless dismayed by men’s grotesque responses to an early feminist meeting at Vincennes. Men were asked to leave a women-only meeting (accounts differ as to when this request was made). But the men balked at leaving the room, instead attacking the women, insulting their intellects, their politics, their credibility, their sexuality, and their legitimacy.

The male insults were recorded in a subsequent feminist tract, “Verbal abuse at Vincennes,” which was reproduced in Jean-Michel Djian’s Vincennes: Une aventure de la pensée critique.

The context, according to the tract: “On Wednesday June 4 1970 (and not 1870), thirty girls had announced their intention to meet among themselves to talk about their problems.”

I’ve translated many of the insults that emerged.

• There’s no woman problem
• I don’t see anyone I know, no little girl activists
• What group are you with?
• You speak in whose name? In the name of sex?
• The catharsis of lady intellectuals
• They don’t have what it takes to get psychoanalyzed
• You’re little girls with complexes and that’s all you are
• It’s petty bourgeois problems
• It’s no good to compare us to the bourgeois
• Big dicks, big dicks [des grosses bittes]
  
• You want to get taken seriously? It’s unreal
• Believe me, your movement won’t get taken seriously, given the attitude you had tonight (silence)
• We’ll leave once you give us a political reason. [Why?] We want to make sure you don’t screw up.
• A woman’s catharsis can only come from a man
• If we don’t support you, your movement is bound to fail
• Big dicks, big dicks
  
• I propose that you remove us by force
• They’re sex-starved, we’ll give them a good lay [C’est des mal baisées, on va bien les baiser]
  
• If you want your equality, let’s screw
• But who’s going to clean up after you?
• Big dicks, big dicks [des grosses bittes]
• Lesbians
• She’s naughty
• Just seeing you grouped together pisses me off
• I’m more scared of girls than of riot cops
• You’re a cunt (he gets a slap in the face)
• Big dicks, etc

I’m not sure I have the words to comment right now on what this says about the sexist culture of the French far left in the 1970s. It’s more than depressing, more than awful, more than politically outrageous. Also it’s beyond arrogant and beyond juvenile in its practices of sexist objectification.

The month after this, a feminist statement was published, called “Against male terrorism.” I haven’t been able to find the document, but according to Joëlle Guimier’s new analysis of “The difficult life of women at Vincennes,” the text declared that “In our liberation, men have nothing to lose but their alienation.” That seems like a surprisingly generous reading under the circumstances.

Edit: I originally wrote in this post that the meeting had been advertised as a women-only meeting. One French interlocutor reports that it was initially not unspecified, and only announced as women-only (“non-mixte”) as a result of men’s masculinist conduct during it. I have not been able to resolve the conflicting accounts of this point.

So here is a little excerpt from the preface that explores the relationship between French Theory and the recent controversy over the HAU journal in my field.

It seems retro to appeal to French Theory as a source for the utopian imagination. From the point of cultural anthropology, French Theory now seems outmoded, since the 1960s are long since “past,” and nothing now seems less novel than its Great Men, Foucault or Deleuze. What is the point of an ethnography of an outmoded moment of intellectual production? Ironically, though, the very rejection of French Theory lies at the heart of anthropology’s latest crisis of coloniality: a coloniality founded on new pedestals for old men (and, it must be said, some women). It is worth exploring this in some detail, to show how French Theory remains key to reflexive struggles within Anglophone anthropology.

In June 2018, six months after #MeToo, a more specific conflict erupted in anthropology, centering on the journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. The journal’s namesake category, hau, had been extracted by Marcel Mauss from a 1909 ethnography of Māori “forest lore” and repurposed in his 1923-24 “Essay on the Gift,” where it became an increasingly decontextualized concept of the “spirit of the gift.”[1] In 2011, HAU’s founders, Giovanni da Col and David Graeber, inaugurated their project by drawing on Mauss. His essay, they said, was “the quintessence of everything that is equivocal, everything that is inadequate, but also, everything that is nonetheless endlessly productive and enlightening in the project of translating alien concepts” (Da Col and Graeber 2011:vii). But it was the journal itself that ultimately became an equivocal, inadequate and productive symbol of the violence of theory.

The insider critiques of the journal chiefly took the form of #MeToo-style public testimony about an abusive workplace. Anonymous letters from the journal’s staff testified that da Col, who was Editor in Chief, had systematically mistreated them. They described financial mismanagement, wage theft, “daily vitriolic reprimands,” “overwork, exhaustion, and de-moralization,” and “inappropriate sexual comments,” and they argued that the journal’s open access mission had been betrayed by transferring its operations to the University of Chicago.[2] Graeber publicly disowned the project, writing an apology for the failed “realization” of what he still called the project’s “brilliant concept.”[3] The journal’s continued defenders, preoccupied by internal reorganizations, declared that the allegations amounted to a smear campaign by disgruntled egotists, confused outsiders and misguided radicals making “destabilizing efforts.”[4] (The phrase became infamous.) It seemed to me that the journal’s defenders never made a very persuasive public case for themselves, while the alleged labor abuses struck me as depressingly common features of precarious academic workplaces.

But the ensuing debates, which circulated on numerous blogs and on Twitter under the hashtag #HauTalk, rightly made HAU into a broader site for critiquing coloniality and elitism in contemporary anthropology.[5] Just as #MeToo had insisted that we not deny our coevalness with sexism, #HauTalk reiterated that colonial structures in anthropology were not a matter of the past, but were an ongoing crisis in the present, as Zoe Todd particularly emphasized (2018). It was commonly observed that HAU was a product of the elite Northern centers of the field: it was based largely on social networks from the University of Cambridge and the University of Chicago (my own alma mater). The Mahi Tahi collective wrote pointedly from New Zealand to ask, “How well have the journal’s recent practices, decisions and approaches lived up to the Māori concept of hau, a concept that the journal has continually stated is its central ethos?”[6] Adia Benton’s comments from 2017 were picked up again; she had been one of the first to say publicly what minoritized anthopologists had been saying privately, that HAU had fixated on “a rather old-fashioned model of canonizing the oldies,” and that these “select few ‘theorists’… skew[ed] white, old and male.”[7] Takami S. Delisle summed up the “core problem” as “white colonial elite masculinity.”[8] Was it a coincidence that the editorial board foregrounded representatives of “old school” anthropology, while the journal seemed to reject contemporary theories of identity, coloniality, race, gender, sexuality, and the intersections of all these?

Let us turn here to re-examine HAU’s founding statement, which turns out to center on a specific melodrama of masculine recognition. For Da Col and Graeber, the widespread influence of French Theory in cultural anthropology had left us a “discipline spiraling into parochial irrelevance” (Da Col and Graeber 2011:xii). Instead of borrowing ideas from Foucault or Deleuze, they argued, we should take refuge in the heartlands of our discipline, distilling concepts from ethnographic data instead of borrowing them from others. “It’s only by returning to the past, and drawing on our own hoariest traditions, that we can revive the radical promise of anthropology” (xxix). Doubling down on territoriality, the HAU founders also pictured the discipline in Leninist terms, declaring that “anthropology has been since its inception a battle-ground between imperialists and anti-imperialists, just as it remains today” (2011:xi). I have nothing against critiquing imperialism, but unlike Lenin, Graeber and Da Col did not link their radical rhetoric to any collective labor politics or political project. On the contrary, the rhetoric of anti-imperialism worked to downplay the journal’s own elite position in the academic field. In theory, Da Col and Graeber sought to diversify anthropology, promising to “promote intellectual diversity across different traditions… outside the North Atlantic and Anglo-Saxon academic juggernauts.” Yet these were the very juggernauts that had seeded their project with its initial academic capital — a contradiction which the authors proved incapable of working through.[9]

Thus if the radical promise of anthropology was ever “revived” at HAU, it was buried alive again the same day. The obvious detachment from contemporary Māori culture—however much it was valorized as a source of ethnographic concepts—was only matched by an equal and opposite disengagement with its French counterpart. As an ethnographer of French academic life, I was struck by how HAU’s founders unwittingly replicated the form of shallow, ahistorical engagement with France that they deplored in others. They treated “French Theory,” “European thinkers,” “Continental philosophy,” and the “Western philosophical tradition” as synonyms for each other, reproducing an essentialized, undifferentiated image of Europe. And instead of seriously analyzing theoretical production in the Cold War moment of decolonization and Western Marxism, they invoked a bizarre analogy with Classic Rock, dismissing “French theorists from the period of roughly 1968 to 1983” as “the intellectual equivalents of Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin” (Da Col and Graeber 2011:xii).

If “Classic Rock” was passé to HAU’s founders, the funny thing is that then they got nostalgic for theory from the era of Dixieland jazz, Tin Pan Alley showtunes and Frank Sinatra. In the first half of the 20th century, they declared plaintively, anthropology had produced “concepts that everyone, philosophers included, had to take seriously” (2011:x). They noted excitedly that Jean-Paul Sartre had written about the potlatch and that Sigmund Freud had written about totems. Yet their casual expression “everyone, philosophers included” was really a misnomer for a narrow Franco-German sphere of white, male, overwhelmingly bourgeois intellectuals. In 1949, which HAU cast as the end of anthropology’s glory days, 68% of French university students were children of the bourgeoisie or of civil servants, while less than 2% emerged from the industrial working class.[10] Meanwhile, in France, anthropology hardly even existed as a discipline.[11] The Big Men of French social theory — Durkheim, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu — were all initially credentialed to teach philosophy, via a French certifying exam called the agrégation. This philosophical legitimacy, not (contra HAU) some inherent draw of early anthropology, was key to why French philosophers took ethnology “seriously.”

Meanwhile, it is hard to idealize this intellectual epoch, since it was also a factory for vicious colonial and racist ideologies, as Aimé Césaire documented in his Discourse on Colonialism (2000 [1950]). The very French institutions that produced Mauss were themselves organs of structural racism, in a way that HAU never acknowledged. In 1952, Frantz Fanon described the agrégation as sufficiently racist that black men would simply not bother with it. “When an Antillean philosophy graduate says he won’t bother to take the agrégation, citing his color, I say that philosophy has never saved anyone.”[12] I find it disturbing that these seminal critiques of colonialism mark the ending of HAU’s preferred era of social theory.

In any case, when HAU went on to call contemporary anthropology an “intellectual suicide,” what they were lamenting was not a failure of political engagement with the communities where we do research, but a failure of renewed recognition from present-day academic elites. This is why I say that HAU was founded on a melodrama of masculine recognition. Its founding mood was embattled woundedness, and its founding relation was the fear of not finding legitimacy in the eyes of the Other — this obscure “everyone” that still seemed to focus on European philosophers. Da Col and Graeber went on to fantasize about creating a “different mode of engaging” with philosophy, but they did not imagine studying philosophers ethnographically (which, of course, is the project here). Instead, invoking a game of competitive one-upmanship, they liked to envision ethnographers showing that Deleuze and Guattari had been wrong about one concept or another (2011:xiv).

I have long appreciated Graeber’s contributions to anarchist anthropology and his activism. But he has never sufficiently processed his own investments in the elite section of the discipline, and I must disagree strongly with his conclusion that HAU was founded on a “brilliant concept” that was poorly realized. On the contrary, the project was always compromised by its basically affirmative stance towards anthropology itself, by its indifference to intersectional critiques of the field, and by its inability to move beyond the elitism and structural violence of its institutional origins. It was sometimes said during #HauTalk that HAU had renounced one locus of white masculinity, French Theory, only to enshrine another instead. Yet if we look at the social institutions of French Theory, it turns they are not only the institutions of pure white radicality that they seem to be. Like contemporary anthropology, they too are sites of struggle with coloniality and masculine domination. One reason for an ethnography of French Theory, then, is to learn from a set of French struggles that most of us are not even aware of.

Césaire, Aimé. 2000 [1950]. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Chimisso, Cristina. 2005. “Constructing narratives and reading texts: approaches to history and power struggles between philosophy and emergent disciplines in inter-war France.” History of the Human Sciences no. 18 (3):83-107.

—. 2000. “The mind and the faculties: the controversy over ‘primitive mentality’ and the struggle for disciplinary space at the inter-war Sorbonne.” History of the Human Sciences no. 13 (3):47-68.

da Col, Giovanni, and David Graeber. 2011. “The return of ethnographic theory.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory no. 1 (1):vi-xxxv.

Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil.

—. 2008. Black skin, white masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press.

Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W.D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton.

Sauvy, Alfred. 1960. “L’origine sociale et géographique des étudiants français.” Population no. 15 (5):869-871.

Todd, Zoe. The Decolonial Turn 2.0: the reckoning. Anthrodendum, 15 June 2018. https://anthrodendum.org/2018/06/15/the-decolonial-turn-2-0-the-reckoning/.

Notes

[1] See Mauss 1990:114n24-25.
[2] “Former and current HAU staff letter”, June 14, 2018, https://haustaffletter.wordpress.com/; ”An Open Letter from the Former HAU Staff 7”, June 13, 2018, https://footnotesblog.com/2018/06/13/guest-post-an-open-letter-from-the-former-hau-staff-7/
[3] “HAU Apology,” David Graeber, https://davidgraeber.industries/sundries/hau-apology.
[4] ”Letter from the new Board of Trustees,” HAU Journal website, June 11, 2018, https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/announcement/view/17
[5] An overview of these debates is at “HAU Mess,” https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSHK7oM8jxF9ppg_oVnX2VjWofn0VrH3Hf7GMqvlygYSDcuJ3-rSlGVQNEyKeHXLNVjabGBfJnL1Mnx/pub
[6] ”An Open Letter to the HAU Journal’s Board of Trustees,” June 18, 2018, https://www.asaanz.org/blog/2018/6/18/an-open-letter-to-the-hau-journals-board-of-trustees
[7] Tweets by Adia Benton, https://twitter.com/Ethnography911/status/908799037889024000, https://twitter.com/Ethnography911/status/908799682637389824
[8] Tweets by Takami S. Delisle, https://twitter.com/tsd1888/status/1009592747588714502
[9] To be clear, I also got my academic capital from this juggernaut, and I too oppose it in theory while benefitting from it in practice.
[10] See 1949 data in Sauvy 1960:869. I counted as “bourgeois or civil servants” the categories professions libérales, chefs d’entreprise, fonctionnaires, and propriétaires-rentiers.
[11] On French disciplinary recomposition in this period, see especially Chimisso (2000, 2005).
[12] “Lorsqu’un Antillais licencié en philosophie déclare ne pas présenter l’agrégation, alléguant sa couleur, je dis que la philo­sophie n’a jamais sauvé personne” (Fanon 1952:22). I have modified the English translation somewhat from Markman’s recent version (Fanon 2008:17).

Here’s how my paper summarized itself:

When social actors find themselves at an impasse, perceiving their futures as threatened, how can they respond? If their futures can get broken or interrupted, can they subsequently be reconnected or repaired? If yes, how? Here, I consider an ethnographic case of reconnected futurity drawn from French protest politics: the 2009–2010 Ronde Infinie des Obstinés, or “Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn.” Opposing Sarkozy-era neoliberal university reforms, the Ronde sought to instrumentalize its temporal and political impasse, shifting its relation to the future out from the register of subjectivity and into the register of ritual motion. By situating the Ronde within the fabric of Parisian political space, I show how it synthesized the politics of occupation with the politics of marching, hopelessness with stubborn endurance, the negation of state temporality with the prefiguration of an alternative future. I conclude by reflecting on the place of temporal repair in relation to recent forms of prefigurative radicalism.

I hadn’t actually read the paper for a couple of years, so it was strange to re-read it.

In hindsight, I think the paper really wanted to emphasize three points.

1. Futures are plural and in conflict with each other: my future might well be incompatible with yours.
2. Any given future can get broken down. But when a future gets broken, it can be fixed. (Or at least, you can try to fix it.)
3. Fixing a future does not require that you feel hopeful about it. Sometimes you can be in despair about a future and still be trying to fix it. (As in the case the article talks about: “stubbornness.”)

Anyways, having read the paper, the students (and Les) asked me a bunch of neat questions. But I didn’t have time to answer them all, so I thought I’d write a little in response.

1. Most researchers who write about protests have some sort of relationship to the things they’re writing about. What was your study’s impact on its participants? Or the protest’s own impact on its participants?

Like I was saying in class, I think my relationship to the protest was that of a sympathizer who participated. And people liked that — they were predisposed to like fellow participants, whatever their motives!

As far as the impact of the protest in general, I think it may have given people a chance to make friends, or just to talk, in a university environment where people don’t always get much of a chance for that. It’s nice just to have unstructured social time, which was what you got while you were walking in this circular march.

When I finally published the paper six years after the protest, I think my closer friends in the field were happy that someone had kept alive the memory of their action: had preserved a trace of it. Since otherwise it would largely now be forgotten. That’s one thing you can do as a researcher — give people a trace of their own history.

2. I’m a little skeptical about activism. How does everyone who’s involved know what they’re doing? Are they just there for bad reasons, like just wanting not to go to class?

Firstly, I do think a characteristic of any good social form is that you can participate successfully without completely understanding what you’re doing. That’s what puts the collectivity in social action!

In the case of a protest, I especially think that political significance and personal motivation are two radically different things. Sometimes, for any given social occasion, good intentions yield bad outcomes. And sometimes bad intentions yield good outcomes. Especially in a large protest situation, there is nothing — other than the possible force of shared experience itself — that regulates what everyone is thinking, feeling, or expecting. And yet the protest’s effects are generally going to be judged in aggregate, as a collective social fact. If a political leader resigns in the face of protest, for instance, that has to do with how much collective pressure the protest can muster, not with the specific motivations of any individual protesters.

So again, this decoupling is OK.

That being said, in the specific case I wrote about, the participants were largely professors (as well as some university staff and students). And I think they largely were motivated by political motivations. If they had been tired, they could have just stayed home, since classes were cancelled already during the strike. I think for the most part people were there to try to send a message to the French government, and secondarily, perhaps out of loyalty to the organizers who had encouraged them to come.

3. Graeber talks about prefiguration in radical politics. How does that apply here?

Research (some cited in the conclusion of the paper) shows that lot of “radical politics” doesn’t exactly look like prefiguration, as Graeber described it. In the standard Graeberian image of prefiguration, as I understand it, the means are the ends: you act as if you were already free, prefiguring the freedom you wish you had in the world. In your protest action itself you go outside state frameworks or market frameworks, occupying land or redistributing goods or whatever, and meanwhile the aim of your protest is perhaps also to abolish the form of capitalist exchange or ownership, or whatever.

The nice thing about prefiguration is that it gets away from this glum, instrumentalist image of protest where any means are justified in the pursuit of a higher cause. It tells you that you should not have to be miserable now as you pursue a better world that may never actually come into existence. It opposes political expediency as well as political boredom.

And in a sense, that image of prefiguration does fit the case I wrote about. French protesters were protesting market-oriented, competitive higher education, and then in their protest they also enacted egalitarian, horizontal social relations. (There’s a section of the paper that talks about this in more detail: “Stubbornness as compensatory form and prefigurative content.”)

Yet Graeber tends to give “prefiguration” a particular affective tone. He pictures it as joyful. But in the protest I studied, people were basically ambivalent. They were incapable of feeling too much joy or optimism, since they were after all in the process of being politically defeated. They described their feelings as “stubborn,” which is almost like a way of avoiding your feelings, rather than living them intensely.

I ended up thinking that stubbornness was less a way of living out a future in advance, but rather was a way of fixing a future that had been broken.

And my more general thought is that, of course some activists do seek to act “prefiguratively,” but that is only one possible approach among many possible political temporalities. Sometimes you are acting “reparatively,” which seems like a different temporal stance.

4. What was the process of your research? Do you speak French? How did people respond to being your being an American, a foreigner? And if a foreclosed future motivated the protest, what was that like?

I definitely speak French. And since I was studying mostly fellow academics, everyone understood pretty clearly already what it meant to do research. There are tons of foreign academics in Paris, so I was not a Martian; I was just a stranger. People were generally more or less comfortable with that. Of course, some are more interested in you than others. Sometimes you become useful (a useful idiot, perhaps)…

On the other topic, I think “stubborn” and “ambivalent” is what it feels like to encounter a foreclosed future!

5. What were the immediate difficulties of participating in the protest?

Well, I think it was physically a bit intense to have to walk outside for sustained periods of time. So the main challenges were probably inclement weather, fatigue, sore muscles, maybe thirst or hunger, and boredom. The challenges of everyday life, more or less.

6. How did people feel about your presence? Were they aware of your being a researcher?

As a point of protocol, the current American ethical standards say that you can observe “public behavior” (without interacting with anyone) without having to get consent, but that once you start to talk to someone, or do anything that could identify someone, or pose any risks to them, then you have a pretty standard informed consent process.

So basically, if I was just taking some notes on the general scene of the protest, which was in a public square in Paris, I wouldn’t have needed to discuss my project with anyone.

But as soon as I started talking to anyone, I obviously explained that I was a researcher, etc, etc. They made me write a script for “oral consent” in advance. In practice, it was a very relaxed process, since people were expecting to talk to strangers in a protest, or even to talk to journalists.

Meanwhile, after I had been coming for a while, word got around about who I was, so it was easier to introduce myself to new people because people were already familiar with my presence.

7. Can you talk more about activism and temporality? We usually think of activism as creating a better future, but that’s challenged by your case, where activists are facing this foreclosed future. And can you say more about Graeber’s opposition to ideology [in the sense of an explicit doctrine that organizes direct action]?

Well, on the doctrine front, I think it’s important that, in Paris, not all activist causes are very “doctrine-driven.” Some activist causes are more “issue-driven,” as in my case, the university politics case. And with issue-driven causes, it’s usually understood that the participants will show up with a range of political ideologies. While some participants might be attached to a particular ideology or doctrine, others might only have vaguer or more situational commitments. Thus, acceptance of ideological diversity tended to become a practical requirement.

My experience in the French university world was that it was very rare to hear activists — or more broadly, politically engaged people — talk about any specific doctrine or ideology. They tended instead to talk about their analyses of situations, about their coalitions or allies, about the “balance of power” (rapports de force), about shared values or points of tension, or even about specific personal relationships that had become politically salient.

The big question then becomes, how does this sort of down-to-earth politics actually fit together with some larger theory of the future? I don’t think there is any single answer to this question; different activists try to answer it differently, depending on circumstance.

8. Everyone else already asked what I was going to talk about! But can you talk more about democratic administration in French universities?

Hey, actually I wrote a different paper about this, and it just came out officially this month: “A Campus Fractured: Neoliberalization and the Clash of Academic Democracies in France.” It goes into lots of detail about how this works and how it breaks down in the face of neoliberal policy.

9. Arguably revolution became impossible after 68, in part in the face of social constructivist doctrines. Is revolutionism dead, in your view?

There’s a lot to say about this, and I tend to think it has less to do with constructivist theory than it does with 20th century geopolitics. There aren’t the same sorts of anticolonial revolutions now because we aren’t in the same colonial conjuncture that obtained in the mid-20th century. The old colonial empires are gone, or radically transformed into economic-cultural modes of domination that rely on more punctual military interventions. (France still intervenes militarily in West Africa, while the United States currently maintains about 500 overseas military outposts…) And the Eastern Bloc has collapsed, which removes the big strategic ally of would-be left revolutionaries, even though Russia and China continue to be involved in militarized conflicts around the borders of their spheres of power, as in Ukraine or the South China Sea.

So it’s a different geopolitical conjuncture now, and within that conjuncture, I suppose it’s true that “revolutionism” meaning the armed overthrow of governments has declined somewhat as a recognized strategy for political change. Nevertheless, it must be said that in our generation there are still plenty of armed conflicts and insurrections, some of which probably deserve to be called embryonic or potential revolutions. ISIS in Iraq comes to mind. There’s an armed truce in Gaza. Maoists fought a civil war in Nepal that ended last decade. There’s a Maoist/Naxalite armed insurrection in India that Arundhati Roy wrote about. In Libya, the Arab Spring culminated in a civil war and a splintered state. So the pursuit of politics “by other means” continues, if those means are arms, and I presume that this image is at the heart of the stock image of a revolution, à la the American Revolution.

What does seem to have dwindled since the mid-20th-century is a more utopian image of specifically left-wing revolution. At least, this loss of revolutionary hope is what happened in the French left, and surely in the American left too. (The Weather Underground are no longer even thinkable, it would seem.) There used to be a moment when Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria (and in the background, the Russian and Chinese revolutions) seemed to be key models of anti-imperial revolutionary action, giving us this romance of the revolution which Fanon theorized in The Wretched of the Earth (deeply based on Cuba). That model used to echo even in the “Global North”; it no longer does so.

A few more factors besides the geohistorical ones come to mind.

1) We’ve seen plenty of right-wing revolutions lately, which puts a dent in any expectation that armed revolution is an intrinsically “progressive” strategy. The Taliban are revolutionaries of a kind too, right?

2) This is hard to quantify, but I do suspect that it makes some difference that lots of 20th century revolutions ended badly, especially in the long term. At best, the results have been profoundly ambivalent. Utopia has not yet been realized on earth. (This isn’t saying that revolutions produced nothing of value — obviously it is easy to understand why an Algerian would wish to abolish French rule.)

3) Meanwhile, the coercive powers of states have probably amplified since the mid-20th century. Surveillance is much easier; weapons technology is more advanced; repressive police tactics have been further elaborated. Thus, armed overthrow of the state may now be logistically much less plausible than it used to be, especially in the more functional nation-states.

4) At the same time, we’ve seen a series of non-revolutionary strategies for pursuing utopian dreams. These include alternative social institutions; altermondialisation; solidarity economies/”fair trade”; free schools; back-to-the-land projects; new forms of kinship, love, gender and sexuality; ecopolitics and animal rights politics; communes and co-operatives; radical art, music and culture; some forms of direct action… Such projects testify to a new optimism that flourishes in the face of pessimism about seizing state power. Implicitly, they dwell on questions like: Do you have to seize the state to create a utopian society? What if you don’t want a state at all, as we currently picture it? Which gets back to the Graeberian means-ends question — can a nonviolent society be created by force, or a utopian world emerge from war?

What’s interesting is that even though these questions remain radically unanswered, the notion of revolution still has some lingering purchase. If only as metaphor.

Is there really such a thing as a biography?

After all, we are not really individuals. We are more like aspen colonies, all grown together but hiding the togetherness underground.

What is a biography but an alibi?

What is a biography but a ceremony?

Who gets to have a biography and who barely even gets counted in the statistics?

One thing at least is sure: that you can’t write about yourself without writing about others, since the comic fact is that we all have otherness inside ourselves and live inside other people too.

There’s something funny about biographies.

I especially liked its capacious theory of women’s freedom.

STATEMENT BY CHICAGO WOMEN’S LIBERATION

February 1969

During sit-ins and other protests at the University of Chicago over the firing of Professor Marlene Dixon, a radi­cal feminist, for her political ideas:

What does women’s freedom mean? It means freedom of self-determination, self-enrichment, the freedom to live one’s own life, set one’s own goals, the freedom to rejoice in one’s own accomplishments. It means the freedom to be one’s own person in an integrated life of work, love, play, motherhood: the freedoms, rights and privileges of first class citizenship, of equality in relationships of love and work: the right to choose to make decisions or not to: the right to full self-realization and to full participation in the life of the world. That is the freedom we seek in women’s liberation.

To achieve these rights we must struggle as all other oppressed groups must struggle: one only has the rights one fights for. We must come together, understand the common problems, despair, anger, the roots and processes of our oppression: and then together, win our rights to a creative and human life.

At the U of C we see the first large action, the first impor­tant struggle of women’s liberation. This university—all uni­versities—discriminate against women, impede their full intellectual development, deny them places on the faculty, exploit talented women and mistreat women students.

(From Sisterhood is Powerful, p. 531.)

The summary judgment about sexism in all universities is quite striking as well. Clearly, in some ways gender relations in universities have changed immensely since 1969. But at the same time: the themes of the critique still resonate today.

My first summer in France I had a sublet for eight weeks. It wasn’t a place that made a lasting impression on me, but I just came across a list of rules and guidelines that I sent to an American grad student who needed a place to stay for a week.

I wasn’t in town at the time, so I sent him a comically long list of instructions. I guess I was trying to put down everything I knew in writing. It turns out to be a good reminder of all the details of everyday life.

The first problem was getting my friend the key.

OK, so it turns out that Duff [our mutual friend] is in Paris for a couple weeks, visiting his parents, and I think I’m going to leave my key with him. It should be a little easier for you to pick it up that way, even if you show up at some odd hour or whatever.

Then I gave a long list of considerations.

Here’s a list of practical stuff to know about the apartment:

Getting here

• Roommates’ names: Christophe (cell: 06 xx xx xx xx), Siegfried (cell: 06 xx xx xx xx), Ann (from Luxembourg). Not sure of their schedules — Christophe at least is coming home sometime next Tues or Weds. I don’t know how their English is but they probably speak at least a little!
• Address: 1xx Blvd de Magenta. Nearest metro stop: Barbès-Rochechouart. (From the metro, go straight south on Blvd de Magenta and it’s on yr left in like 30m.)
• To enter the apartment: you enter a code to open the outside door (which is large and wooden — it is also the egress for a garage). The code: B5048. The lock will click open (this is standard procedure for Paris, i don’t know if you’re familiar). Once inside, you take a right into the stairwell, hit the light switch if it’s off, climb two flights of musky-smelling stairs to the second floor (in America it would be called the third floor, but in France the ground floor is called 0, as you probably also know). You’ll see two apartments. Ours is the one directly across from the elevator, and you’ll recognize it by the “rêve général” sticker on it.
• The latch on our front door takes a wee bit of getting used to. The key only goes in one way up (it will not enter the lock if it’s upside down). Then, counterintuitively, you must you be pushing the key in while you turn it. Sometimes you have to pull the door towards you with the handle, also. Don’t worry, this will all makes sense when you try it, I think.

It’s like I was trying to provide just enough information about French culture and urban geography to help someone navigate the environment.

Once inside the apartment

• In case you get here and there is no one to show you around… my room is the one at the far end of the hall, across from the kitchen and next to the bathroom! I’ll leave some bedding. Try not to be too loud on the floor late at night — apparently it creaks like mad in the apartment below ours.
• Kitchen is all yours — my allotted shelf in the fridge was second from the top and my cupboard was the top one in the left-hand cabinet, in case you wanted to store food. Stove and dishes are pretty straightforward, and people share the usual spices, oil, a few dry goods like flour, etc. Basically if it’s near the stove or sink it’s cool to use.
• There’s an ethernet cable for internet on the desk. Not sure about wifi.
• Small supermarket (‘monop’) is just outside the house, two doors down. Open late if you’re hungry. Bad selection but quick. Also if you want takeout, I happen to be partial to sandwich grec (ie, gyros), and you can find a million Turkish restaurants just north-west of the house on Rue de Clignancourt. Finally, if you go down near the gare du nord, a bunch of shops and restaurants are open at all hours, even sunday when most stuff is closed.
• To EXIT the apartment: if someone else has locked the door, you have to unlock it from the inside with the key. (This confused me the first day i lived here.) Then to latch the door, you have to open the latch with your key while you shut it. (It’s apparently really bad for the lock to shut the door without holding the latch open.) Obviously, you should also lock up if no one else is home!
• Washing machine by the sink. Drying racks in bathroom and living room. Detergent in my room if you need it!
• You should shut the bedroom window if you go out — it can rain and even if it doesn’t, the kitchen window is often open, which creates powerful cross-currents that will probably slam the doors in between.
• The shared agreement of the apartment is that if something runs out (toilet paper, whatever) you should take your turn replacing it. Don’t sweat this too much, you won’t be there long.
• It’s good to take out the trash though if you think of it… trash can’s in to the courtyard (through the double inner doors across from the outer door of the building).
• In case of some type of emergency… the water shutoff is in the kitchen by the sink; hot water heater above the sink; electricity cutoff in the back closet of Christophe’s bedroom, which is across from the living room.

You can see a whole domestic order starting to take place, with rules for sharing, rules for using appliances, rules for how to make noise, rules for how to shut the windows… None of these were like legal strictures. They were just shared understandings.

Incidentally, here’s what my subleased room looked like. Most of the stuff wasn’t mine.

This was the kitchen.

I ended my instructions with a little bit of tourist information.

The bedroom’s balcony is awesome for watching the street, with a good view of Sacré Coeur at night. I recommend the view from the top of Sacré Coeur if you haven’t been up there, in spite of the throngs of tourists. Other places I highly recommend in Paris: Parc de Belleville also has a stupendous view of town and no tourists; Parc de St-Cloud, near the end of metro 9 and 10 and technically outside the city limits, is beautiful and quiet and you can walk for hours in the woods. And basically everywhere without tourists is a much more interesting place to walk around on the street (19th and 20th arrondissements are good for that). Across the street from our house is the beginning of the Rue de Faubourg Poisonnière, which is a good little street to walk south on.

If you read all this, you get the idea that it wasn’t a bad place to live.

But when I remember living in this place, what I remember is mostly the extreme solitude of early fieldwork. I liked my roommates, especially Christophe, but they were never home. It was summer, so my research sites in French universities were closed down, and I didn’t have much to do. I remember staying up until the middle of the night and cooking greasy food by myself. I obviously liked going for walks, which evoked this whole tradition of exploring Paris by foot. But then, there are so many racial, class, and gender politics on the Paris streets. To explore Paris without being hassled by the police for your skin color is already a form of white privilege, I would have to say.

What do I mean, worldmaking?

What I mean is: gender holds up the world. (Is that even a metaphor?) It’s a catastrophic world for some; a liberatory world for others; it’s an ambivalent, precarious, awkward, inconvenient, effervescent world for so many of us. But in any case, inasmuch as the world is being held up at all, it’s held up by gender. NOT ONLY. But in substantial part.

One of the things that this means is that gender is not only a form of constraint, an outside “social norm,” or a harsh repressive apparatus. It is also a productive force (and a force of production); a zone of creativity and improvisation; an architecture for social dramas and a set of dramatic occasions; sometimes it’s a source of joy or, as they say these days, “euphoria.” Gender is what gives social things their color, one could say, or that shows us their depth by organizing the flow of light and of shadows. We’ve tried to bring some new things into the light. And we’ve observed that gender calls out to us (that’s what interpellation is) and it gives us a place to occupy (whether we choose to stay in it or not). We’ve investigated how gender organizes both the work of social reproduction and the social reproduction of work.

Gender as we know it here is not just worldmaking. It’s capitalist worldmaking.

Thus gender organizes the hidden work of social reproduction: childbearing, caretaking, cleaning, raising, educating, celebrating, holding people up. It’s interesting how in writing that sentence, one can say the word women without even uttering it. But of course, it is not only women, and the division of gendered labor is shifting in some important ways. You can end up with two very different images of the world if you study its historicity — that means the way that it becomes historical, the way that it is changing, the directions of its motion — and then if you study a freeze-frame of its structures — the way that everything seems to endure across space and time, the immutable principles of the system. The gender binary sometimes seems immutable, embedded in our infrastructure and even in our unconscious. Yet it seems to be shifting out from under us…

Meanwhile, gender also organizes the social reproduction of work. In a world where it sometimes seems that almost everything is commodified, gender is partly what is there to ensure that the system of commodity exchange and capital accumulation can continue, gender makes sure that we are ready for work, wakes us up on time, organizes our homes… To be able to get up and go to work is, again, to be an object: that’s what we are doing when we work for a wage, selling our labor power and ourselves as commodities.

Gender, then, makes us objects. But not all forms of objectification are equally dehumanizing. To be a mother or father or nonbinary parent is also to be a sort of object for one’s child. A “transformational object,” some psychoanalysts would call the maternal role: an object that serves to let somebody else transform herself into a subject. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be the kind of object that a caregiver is. I’m not saying it is always unalienated or unambivalent or unexploitative. But perhaps without moments of objectification, we would not be subjects either. And gender makes us subjects, organizes selves, is already there inside us. For better or worse, it preshapes our very forms of perception, the cognitive schemas that organize our gaze, our hearing, our sense of touch. And not just the raw sensory impressions themselves, but the conditions of possibility of their use. When are we allowed to look at each other, when are we asked to avert? What are we allowed to hear, or not hear? Who touches, who gets touched?

I’ve been touched by this class even though I’ve been overwhelmed by it. One of the most interesting moments for me in this class was when we talked about emotional labor and being a student. It turns out that even though this is an institution that is structurally affluent, virtually everyone here has done some form of service or care work, most of which is structurally devalorized and much of which is gendered.

People reported being asked to be “eager”, “available,” “polite,” “firm,” “infinitely available,” “neutral,” “eager to help,” “curious,” “not rude,” “vigilant,” “calming,” “nice,” “confident,” “looking fancy,” “efficient,” “authoritative or comforting” (for the EMTs).

I mean. That’s a lot of emotional work.

Meanwhile the kinds of norms that come from the school environment are fundamentally set up to encourage you to identify as the future managers of a neoliberal, precarious economy. Again, here’s what we said about being a student at this university, in 2019, in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States, in the Global North. (We are deeply situated. We are not universal.)

You must be attentive. Get good grades. Be silent. Take notes. Stay awake. Be eager. Care. Be on time. Do the work. Be competitive. Be proactive. Be curious. Participate. Be good at time management. Have “executive function.” Appear overworked. Be young. Like groupwork (which is widely loathed). Treat school as top priority. Everything is a means to an end. Don’t question authority. Accept that the person who grades you is right even if they’re not…

These norms might seem natural to you, or not. As an outsider, I think this list of requirements is utterly overwhelming and bewildering. It asks you to accept multiple forms of domination and discipline. But you are also supposed to stay enterprising, optimistic and productive, and to take on the burden of filling in for any failures in the institution. You’re supposed to be intensely entrepreneurial but docile, you perform agency and enthusiasm but obediently, and your instrumentalism is without bounds.

In an important way, the norms of being a student draw on the sorts of emotional labor that many of you have had to perform in other jobs. But they add to it the possibility of having some power, authority, status, and institutional agency. It also seems to offer you the possibility of leaving behind the sorts of service work that you have previously done so as to aspire to something “better” or at least different (in that omnipresent future that is infinitely deferred).

This whole scenario fills me with existential questions about what I am doing as a teacher. And about what you must be doing as students…

But again, the class is really not about giving you answers or even a settled theory of how gender and social reproduction work. It’s about sensitizing you to questions. Who are we such that we think about gender? (To think about gender is already gendered…) Whose desire animates a space, whose fantasy? (Whose desire animates this classroom? Mine? Yours? No one’s because we are all too exhausted and alienated?) Whose perspective is this? Who is at the center of this scene, who is marginal? Who is working and who is on the slack?

As I speak, I’m working, but I’m not sure from whose perspective I’m speaking. I’ve ended up feeling like the problem with teaching this class is that it is hard to really be present because we are always asked to be instrumental, always asked to be projecting into the future. (That’s true for teachers too: we are also supposed to be always instrumental.) Of course, there’s a reason why we aren’t always present: the present can be a bad place to be. My heart goes out to those of you who are stressed and overwhelmed and struggling with dilemmas, structural and otherwise. I’m sure I don’t know about most of them. I still respect the fact that people are going through things that aren’t going to come out in a classroom, at least this classroom, maybe any classroom.

Teaching, again, is a lot about emotional labor too. And scenes of failed reproduction. I’ve learned a lot about failure as a teacher here. I’ve gone home and felt crushed by having said something that was wrong or inadequate or just bad for our mood. I’ve talked too much and watched people get worn out by the noise of my own voice. I’ve never taught this class before, you know, and so I’ve also learned a lot about which readings work and which don’t, which sequences of ideas work and which ones are too abstract, which assignments produce good results and which ones… produce meh.

At the same time, this class has been the first time I’ve ever been comfortable presenting in a feminine way at work. For all its other problems, I’m grateful to the university environment for that. A class on gender seems like a fitting place for that.

It’s a strange day for me (as a worker) because this might be the last class I ever teach; I don’t have another academic job lined up, and I literally can’t afford to keep being a precarious academic because I have kids to feed and this economy is not working. I sort of love teaching even though I’m still working on not being bad at it. And this isn’t a class about me, but I’m a social symptom too (I encourage you to learn less from what I say than from my obvious contradictions). I think it always matters who the teacher is, and I think teachers owe you some kind of accountability or at least some self-analysis. I owe you that. It’s strange, because next week I’m leaving Cleveland — the work here is done — and literally I may never set foot here again. That’s what precarious academic work looks like right now: a long trail of absences. I wish I had been able to do a better job of teaching this material to you all. But I’m still grateful that I got the chance to try. Good luck with the end of the semester.

THANK YOU.

That’s it, class is over, I know you’re all busy, you’re all free to go now.

The seminar was taught by Jeff Williams, an English professor who I’ve been in touch with for fifteen years. We’re in pretty different fields, and a generation apart in age, but we’ve shared this odd interest in writing critically about academic culture. It’s a weird, great feeling to be around like-minded academics, and to get reminded that there’s solidarity in specialization. After you work on your tiny specialized research project for a long time, you can start to feel increasingly closed in on yourself. Then it’s nice to be reminded that solitude is just one moment in a thought process.

Anyway, in Jeff’s seminar, I tried to explain how I came to work in France. I explained that a lot of French “theory” had actually produced by this particular Philosophy Department (at Paris 8), and I explained that I’d come to write about it as an institution permeated by utopianism and ambivalence (not to mention disciplinary masculinism and a complex relation to the postcolonial world).

After I had gone on extemporaneously for a while, the room felt a little hushed, because it was eight at night. So I asked if we could go around and have each person ask a question. (I was afraid that not everyone would speak if we didn’t have something structured.) And people asked such great questions, it turned out, that I wanted to write them up here, to remember them, and honor them a little.

Here they are:

• How do you collect your data? Who did you talk to?
• Coming back to this country from France, what’s your opinion of the U.S. system?
• What did you teach in South Africa?
• How does anthropology relate to literary studies?
• What’s the connection between philosophy in France and theory in the USA?
• You do ethnography — what do you make of how ethnography fits into cultural studies?
• What’s your writing process for your book?
• We heard a lot about your ambivalence. Where’s your hope and positive investments?
• You’ve been in three very different higher education systems — France, USA, South Africa — what are French and South African universities like?
• What do you still idealize?
• How do you position yourself in academic space? Where do you fit in?
• Who is your audience? Do you intend to suggest a remedy to ambivalence?
• What surprised you in South Africa? In France?
• You criticize the places that you inhabit in academia. What happens when you’re negative about your own institutions? What are the implications of that for you?

(All these are paraphrased from my notes.)

Some of these are just really interesting comparative questions that I wouldn’t have thought of. Some bring up points that have a lot of existential stakes for me. And some just remind me that any time you try to talk outside of your field, you partly need to explain the basics of your field. (What is ethnography anyway?)

I couldn’t really answer all these questions (without writing another book probably), so I felt like I had been given a gift I couldn’t entirely reciprocate.

At the same time, there were more questions I had wanted to ask the class — questions about the feelings that go with theory and academic life, mostly. They were things like:

• What are things about academic life that surprise you? What seems logical or illogical about university institutions?
• What’s it like to be a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon? What do you make of “theory” in literary studies?
• Have you ever had a thought you couldn’t express? Or (conversely) have you encountered academic texts you couldn’t make sense of?
• What’s your experience of the relationship between academic texts and everyday life? When does academic writing speak to your life and when does it feel disconnected?

Next time I do something like this, I’ll have to leave more time for more discussion of this sort of theoretical consciousness…

* What is a career but a debatable interpretation of a series of biographical accidents?

What is a vignette? Vigne is vine (in French) and vignette is thus “little vine,” which is certainly an evocative image. But what does a little vine do for ethnographers?

The dictionary is useful here, helping us connect dots of history. Merriam-Webster distinguishes three modern senses of the term:

1. “A picture (such as an engraving or photograph) that shades off gradually into the surrounding paper; the pictorial part of a postage stamp design as distinguished from the frame and lettering.“
2. “a short descriptive literary sketch; a brief incident or scene.”
3. “a running ornament (as of vine leaves, tendrils, and grapes) put on or just before a title page or at the beginning or end of a chapter; also : a small decorative design or picture so placed.”

Of course what ethnographers have in mind is always sense (2), “a short descriptive literary sketch.” But my view is that the way we actually use and refer to vignettes ends up reproducing some real epistemological problems. And these problems emerge, it seems, from the very etymology of the term, or at least they resonate awfully harmoniously with its semantic history. Everything happens as if we were haunted by these other illustrative senses of this term: the “running ornament of vine leaves” that beautifies a text, the “pictorial part” of a stamp that is distinguished from its frame.

We are not positivists, right? We do not subscribe to an impermeable distinction between theory and data, do we? And we would like to overcome the historically gendered, historically colonial hierarchies that grounded this distinction, would we not? Yet the notion of a vignette tends to reproduce them.

In ethnographic practice, the vignette is a text within a text, a marked text that implicitly sets the ethnographic “data” (the non-positivist term is “experience”) apart from the ensuing “theory” or “analysis.” In vignettes — and too often only in vignettes — we feel allowed to be vivid. Allowed to be writers and storytellers, not merely analysts or theorists. Allowed to feel enmeshed in a scene, allowed to bring our readers along to vicariously experience places they have not been, allowed to allude to our human relations with our ethnographic subjects, allowed to present the world as unstructured and historical.

But it never gets to stay that way. Because the vignette is put to work within a larger text. Here are some examples of how ethnographers use the word vignette in their writing (taken randomly from PDFs on my computer):

• “Another brief vignette will help clarify this point.”
• “All three vignettes point to the fact that…”
• “The weighty tokens of durability noted in the opening vignette…”
• “The essay then provides three ethnographic vignettes from the author’s work in Indonesia…”

The vignette commonly has a double function. It “backs up” someone’s claims, providing “evidence” that is construed as having a sort of weight or force by virtue of its mere existence in the text. In this sense, vignettes provide “proof” or “warrant” — like admissible evidence in a court case. On the other hand, vignettes are full of meanings that are then mined or extracted in the text that follows. It is common to pause after a vignette and say something like, “So just what does this mean?” “What does this tell us?” And then to say something complex that is likely not very obvious to anyone but the author… Like a myth or sacred book, the vignette is prone to invoke a hermeneutic project, crying out for interpretation.

There is a normative discipline around how we use vignettes. Many anthropologists believe that vignettes must exist in a certain proportion: not too much, not too little. I’ve been told more than once, by editors or reviewers, that “this paper needs an opening vignette.” But too many vignettes — that’s a problem too. One time I saw someone give a talk at my graduate program at the University of Chicago, a notoriously theory-focused place. The speaker mainly wanted to tell some stories, but he started out instead by saying: “I wrote a page of theory to introduce my talk, because I thought people wouldn’t be able to accept just stories on their own terms.”

The discipline around vignettes is very weird, though. You can get in trouble for not having enough vignettes, but once you’re in the middle of one, you are in a little zone of freedom. It is easy to write vignettes, in my experience, because they are much less heavily policed than “theoretical” writing. People will attack you for the way you cite other scholars. They rarely dispute the way you describe your field experience.

* * *

In the end, the fact that people like talking about “vignettes” is a sign of their ambivalence, of their inner slippage or incoherence. I think the vignette operates on the logic of what Derrida used to call a “supplement”: it seems optional, at first, but actually is supposed to add some essential piece without which the original thing, claim, point, theory, idea, etc, would somehow fall flat. It never gets to be central — when you’re telling stories, they’re usually not about you, you just become the medium for some sequence of events — but its seeming marginality is sort of a ruse.

But it manages to trivialize the flux of empirical reality at the same time, insisting on the primary of theory by denigrating storytelling. It’s a flat genre of empiricism that lets life happen while keeping it in a cage. It makes phenomenology, experience, and history into decoration. The little vines that decorate the long streams of colorless, authoritative prose.

The “vignette” — this is really what bugs me about it so much — is a story that feels guilty about being a story. No vignette ever graduated from its embryonic state of narrative insufficiency. It is little by nature, born little, destined to remain little. But storytelling need not be marked as little. That every story is finite and non-total is a sign that history is unfinished, not grounds for epistemic guilt.

In its littleness, the vignette is a genre all too well suited for our era. We have short attention spans, we produce too much (and what we write is not well read if it is ever read), and our discipline itself is full of crisis. There is a crisis of gendered violence, as MeToo insists; there is a crisis of coloniality, as #HauTalk insists; there is a crisis of labor, as groups like PrecAnthro observe. And these crises also suggest that we might ask if the notion of vignette does not also have some unexplored gender connotations.

If “theory” is marked masculine (as Lutz famously argued in The Gender of Theory), and if our more “serious” or “academic” writing is the part where we want to be recognized as serious scholars with authority, then the vignette seems to enter that textual economy as the site where our feminine part can come out. The things that vignettes do are historically marked feminine: they decorate; they care about moods; they talk about relationships and process incidents; they provide pleasure and comfort to tired readers; and sooner or later (ugh), they get interrupted by male voices…

I begin to wonder if the notion of the vignette does not work in contemporary ethnography to denigrate the feminine.

I think we could do without it.

Of course our writing does need stories. It needs moods. It needs to process incidents. It needs to provide pleasure and transmit experience.

But it does not need to have a category that sets these functions apart from the rest of our texts and makes them into marked moments, set out against the unmarked, uncomfortable, authoritative, and potentially masculinist prose of theory and analysis.

But everything here is sadly unremarkable, aside from the gender and sexuality parameters. Workplace hierarchies and precarious gigs are ripe for abuse. Harassment is largely about enjoying power and transgressing other people’s boundaries. It exploits ambiguity and hides in plain sight.

These usual truths are all I have. I still think they’re worth hearing.

It’s an older story now, and I left out the names and places.

* * *

I had just graduated from college with an anthropology degree. I was bi and genderqueer, but not as out as I would get later. I was working as a temp receptionist for eleven dollars an hour at a big urban university.

Next to me at the front desk sat a charismatic gay man. I found him cute.

Let’s call him M.

We flirted a little at work. It was a boring place to work. I felt so very awkward in my totally ill-fitting, unfashionable efforts to dress business casual.

Once as we were leaving work at the end of the day, we kissed on the sidewalk.

M. was a bunch older than me and had a permanent job. He wasn’t my boss, but there was an asymmetry. But let’s be clear, the first time, the kiss was welcome. It was very quick. It had a certain energy, an anxiety. Our coworkers could have seen us. That would have been so weird.

We parted ways at the subway.

Maybe a little later there was another one kiss like that. I think there might have been about two okay kisses. I wasn’t taking notes.

But then after the kiss, or two, the office became a miserable space for me.

* * *

It’s hard to explain how miserable it was. Miserable in this nothing is what it seems way. There was the normal part of office life, and then the other part, the part hidden right in front of everyone.

The succinct version doesn’t do it justice. M. started to hit on me constantly at work. It was only barely clandestine. I really didn’t like it, I didn’t respond positively, and I didn’t know how to make him stop.

He sat right beside me at a long counter, facing the public. Whenever he thought he could get away with it, he would turn towards me and make these come-hither, sit-on-my-lap gestures. I’m sure he found it sexy and fun. I found it mortifying.

The truth is, I suspect he enjoyed my discomfort, or my powerlessness. I frowned back at him sometimes, or wrinkled my brow. These desperate, little gestures.

Two women worked right alongside us — literally three, five feet from us. But they never noticed anything. There are always moments when someone is looking the other way, when they’re down the hall. You would never think anything like this could happen in such a well-lit, sterile office environment.

This went on for a while.

I would go home at night and feel awful, like something was happening to me that I didn’t really understand; I just knew I felt trapped. I remember that I began to doubt myself a lot — like maybe it was my fault, or I’d asked for it, or I was misunderstanding something.

Sexual violence of this sort is mostly epistemic violence. Somehow your truth has become unhearable; you’re living something that is invisible; your version of the story is beyond subordinate, it might as well be nothing. All of these are pretty classic feelings for workplace harassment situations, I gather.

It was extra awkward to complain, because someone in my extended family had originally helped me get the job, by putting me in touch with her friend, the HR person for that branch of the university, who in turn sent me to the temp agency. I didn’t think much about complaining.

Meanwhile, some harassment scenarios might be unambiguous, but mine was awkward because there was a consensual part before it was non-consensual. That also made it harder to explain to anyone.

* * *

One day in the elevator, M. jumped me once the doors were shut. As he came up close and kissed me, I protested more directly than usual. “No, stop, M!” But it all happened quickly and he didn’t listen. The brief collision with an unwanted body. The elevator doors opened again soon.

Did he tell himself I was just being coy?

I don’t think he thought he was doing anything wrong. Not consciously.

But I also think he knew I didn’t like it, and that was part of the draw. They always say harassment is really about power — getting off mostly on power — but it only makes sense when you see it in person.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t say it was capital t Traumatizing — to get kissed when I really did not want to get kissed — but it left me very rattled. At best, it was a really depressing boundary violation.

* * *

After three weeks on reception duty, I got moved upstairs to a different temp worker task, filing enrollment records.

Though the new work was deathly boring, it was a relief to be away from M.

But somehow, he kept finding excuses to stop by the file room to make sexual overtures. He even showed up and did it once in front of my one friend in the office, a woman.

It was hugely validating to have someone else see how egregious and gross it was. I’d started telling her about it, but I don’t think she really believed me until she saw it herself.

* * *

Anyway, after six weeks there, I quit. I had a new job lined up first.

In the exit interview, I told the temp agency I’d been sexually harassed.

I remember how hard it was to say anything, even then, when nothing professional was at stake. I remember having to get up my nerve. This little moment of hesitation.

The manager was superficially sympathetic. Should we only send women temps to that site, to keep them away from M? he wanted to know. (Which is a heinous cop-out.) Could we contact the employer?

I did let them contact the employer. The university HR person invited me to come describe my experience — to meet her, I had to sneak past M. at the front door of the building. But when I said that the first kiss had been consensual, she seemed really skeptical. I left her office feeling shaken. Frankly, the complaint process made me doubt myself even more.

* * *

My friend told me that M. did get reprimanded after I complained, and he seemed very chastened. This news didn’t really make me feel a lot better.

A month later, M. reportedly still talked about me, saying I kind of miss him* but he hates me.

[*my accepted pronouns at the time.]

He just never really got it, I guess.

Maybe most harassers just never get it. He just thought it was about “hating him” for some random interpersonal reason.

But I still don’t even hate him. I just hate the situation. And the lingering feelings that go with it. The feelings that maybe I am the bad person in the story, the broken one, the unreliable one, the queer subject who wanted something and then not what came next, the one who suffered through becoming an object.

It wasn’t a very bad harassment case. I had an exit. I didn’t suffer professionally. To be honest I don’t think about it most of the time. It was just something that happened.

Something that nevertheless should not have happened.

* * *

Why didn’t you protest more directly? someone might ask. But harassment is about constituting you as an object. And this process can be woefully effective.

When you end up spending so much time putting yourself in question, dealing with the confusions in your own psyche, it can feel like there’s no space to put anyone else in question.

And if you don’t know what harassment is, it’s hard to understand at first that it’s happening to you.

I wish I had been taught something about harassment beforehand. I wish everyone was taught that.

But would any amount of training really have prepared me?

I’m still not sure.

I just know how much I admire the courage of those who protest more successfully than I did.

This was written in 2018, but with some edits in 2020 to slightly improve the analysis.

It’s been about twelve weeks since I left my faculty job in South Africa. I really liked teaching there, partly because the weight of the Apartheid past was still so very present in Stellenbosch that, in an unexpected way, it made it feel especially worthwhile to teach critical social science. But it was just too far from my partner and our kid, who had stayed here. Obviously, we had explored different options. Leaving Stellenbosch ended up being the right thing, and I’m not ambivalent about it, even though I miss the teaching.

Here’s what I wrote on Facebook as I was leaving:

I made so many mistakes in the classroom this year, but for obscure reasons, I also really fell in love with teaching in South Africa, so much that I’m in tears now, writing this. My colleagues told me to be ambitious and teach what I thought was challenging, which was the opposite of my postdoc, where my boss said the students were pretty mediocre and not to expect much. Here I got less afraid of the classroom, and more in touch with which boundaries I need and which ones I don’t. I got better at being myself, at accepting the mistakes and fixing them, at being reflexive in front of the students, and at managing bad affects (mine & other people’s). Some students didn’t like my act and some loved it, and sometimes their critiques of my classes were spot on, and sometimes they came from detached kids who rarely showed up. I think I got better at hearing the critiques and doing my best and just feeling… alive. I don’t necessarily know what people thought or what they took away, and that indeterminacy is important. Teaching is a modest project. But I want to believe that when I was more present, they were more present too. Sometimes I could see it in their faces, I thought; and to my considerable delight, a lot of supposedly “bad students” sneakily turned out to be pretty good ethnographers.

To leave a place is to figure out how to acknowledge your losses, to learn what you will miss.

That experience also taught me, contrary to what I’d imagined, that mixed feelings are not the same thing as ambivalence. Ambivalence in the strong sense, I think, only emerges when mixed feelings are also in conflict with each other, or express some contradiction. But you can feel happy and sad at the same time without having this sense of unresolution that ambivalence provides. Ambivalence is a way of deferring the solutions to struggles, of keeping contradictions open (sometimes, of course, it is an permanent deferral). But me, I’m at peace with my mixed feelings.

Still, on a professional front, it was very hard to leave a teaching job without having another one figured out first. I hope I can find a new university position in America, but we’ll see, since the academic job market in my field is still pretty meager. I still think my work is good. But I’m still writing about precarity, and experiencing it.

We often think of precarity as meaning short-term work contracts, but oddly, when I was at Stellenbosch, I had a permanent academic position, but it was still precarious because the geography was so incompatible with my life realities. The trip, one way, was 25 hours and three flights, minimum.

I liked my colleagues and I’m happy that I’m going to stay affiliated with my department in Stellenbosch for the next few years. I’ll go back and visit, maybe even teach a short course.

Meanwhile, I’m doing much more childcare, and trying to finish my book about French disappointed utopians. There are a lot of coffeeshops in this neighborhood, which constitutes a sort of college town for Case Western Reserve University. Maybe I’ll write more about this neighborhood, with its odd class markers and its unusual (for America) degree of racial diversity. The spaces around universities always bring out my ethnographic instincts.

One of the difficulties with using the term ‘modernity’ is the contested, shifting nature – indeed promiscuity – of its use in the literature. There are almost as many defiŽnitions of it – some social/institutional, others attitudinal/cognitive (Gaonkar 1999) – as there are scholars who write about it. Thus modernity’s deŽfining feature is, for Weber (1958), instrumental rationality; for Habermas (1983), the ideals of the Enlightenment – science, knowledge, reason, progress; for Marx (1977), the commodity form and all that commodities and markets entail; for Berman (1982), perpetual dynamism, ambiguity, ephemerality, unending rupture; for Giddens (1990), trust; for Taylor (1999), comfort; for Baudelaire (1981), presentness and the everyday. Then again, others prefer to emphasize different traits, each seen as a/the essential feature of the modern: secularism, critical humanism, pragmatic instrumentalism, revolutionary consciousness, self-realization, the emergence of the nation-state and of certain types of public sphere, the rise of mass media, a legal order based on contractualism and the right-bearing individual, a Fordist regime of production, globalization.

Moreover, there are other less celebratory takes on modernity – critics who see its dark side as intrinsic to the modern itself: the ‘iron cage’ of rationality and routine (Weber 1958); the alienation and exploitation of labor under capitalism (Marx 1977); the slave system which made possible industrializing Europe’s wealth accumulation (Gilroy 1993; Mintz 1985); imperial expansion (Lenin 1971; Mandel 1975; Wallerstein 1974); the fascist regimes of the interwar era (Bauman 1989; Horkheimer and Adorno 1972), and so on. [pp. 88-89]

Here, the masculinity of theory seems to entail the invisibility of gender, but I digress…

Sometimes I also catch myself starting to write paragraphs like this (though I would hope with a more socially diverse set of references). It feels fun to try to systematize lots of different ideas or theories. But the thing is, being encyclopedic rarely does much for your reader (unless you are writing a bibliographic essay). And in reality, being encyclopedic is often quite difficult because classification is difficult. (That’s why Marx appears twice, first in the “celebratory” paragraph, then in the “less celebratory takes” paragraph.) Of course, I find myself classifying things anyway. Being an academic is so much about organizing ideas and labeling them…

Anyway, it’s not every day I come across someone who tries to sum up such a massive field in such a short space, so here it is as an instance of that. (If you are in fact interested in longer reviews of modernity theory, by the way, I particularly recommend Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Definitional Excursions.”)

Being a bit anxious makes it easier to get up and get moving.

I’m staying in a basement flat, not even really a studio, since it has no kitchen, but only a bedroom, all white, which I’ve never decorated except with lamplight. By the bed there’s a door to a cave-like bathroom, which has no window, but does have a cranky exhaust fan barely able to remove the accumulation of moisture. Often when I go out, I leave the fan on.

Today I get up and find my glasses and, without even having coffee, sit down at my jumbled desk in the next room. The next room is technically not my apartment, but rather a furnished basement belonging to the larger house where my landlords live. (I do share their kitchen and some of the other living space.) In the basement, my desk is stashed in a corner, with a ridiculous ergonomic keyboard (the Kinesis Advantage), some piles of papers and notebooks, and a bit of music recording gear.

Anyway, I have to teach today at nine, but I want to send an Important Email beforehand, so I spend a while writing that. I puzzle over the wording. I probably also procrastinate a bit with Facebook and the news, but eleven hours later, that’s already become blurry in my memory.

An hour goes by, and then I have to I rush through getting ready, pausing for a minute to puzzle about an outfit that feels sufficiently Teacherly. I find a gray sweater with a wide collar, a checkered shirt, and my black Doc Martens, which have acquired an obscure but real emotional function in my teaching practice. They aren’t quite a talisman, but when I do the kind of teaching where you stand up in front of the room, they keep me more steady and feeling, very slightly, more invincible. Honestly, I have never felt very invincible in a classroom, but it’s still nice to fortify yourself a little against the world. As if you could be held together by the look.

Then a happy accident: I have exact change for the departmental coffee machine (which costs R10, about 80 cents), so I can go straight to work, pausing only to pack an apple and a granola bar. It’s after eight, and my bike tire needs air, so I risk driving — it is essentially a five minute drive without traffic, but sometimes traffic is quite slow in this small city. My lamentable current rental car, a Volkswagen Citi Golf, doesn’t like to start; often it stalls after ignition. If you give it more gas right after it starts, it seems to warm up after five or ten seconds. I haven’t driven stick for years, and I’ve gotten rusty about car coaxing techniques.

Soon the car is coaxed down the hill, past the fancy private schools, over the little river, past the Helderberg dormitory, past the town square. The pedestrians negotiate via hesitant glances over whether they will cross the street right in front of me. Once I make it to the Arts and Social Sciences building, I have about 25 minutes to put down my things, gulp my vending-machine coffee, print out my teaching materials, and chat with my colleague, R., who has generously agreed to co-teach with me today.

This month I’m teaching a short-form version of ethnographic methods, which meets for three hours, twice weekly, from 9am to noon. The class, for students in a 1-year graduate degree program called Honours, is technically called “qualitative methods,” but really I am trying to teach a class about what it means to interpret social situations. In the end, it’s not just “how we gather research materials,” it’s also what we make of them.

How does one interpret? How does one write an interpretation?

Well, here’s an interpretive question that I don’t know how to answer. At the door to the classroom, two minutes before nine, I find the students all clumped up in the hallway, waiting at the locked door to the classroom. Since my office is ten meters down the hall, I wonder why they didn’t come ask me earlier to help get the door open, instead of having to wait outside. But probably they sensed that opening a locked door was not their problem.

I get the door open, and people inside. It’s a room I haven’t taught in before: a “board room” with a massive oval table that keeps people facing each other, but far from each other. Everyone sits as far away from me as possible, but as the later arrivals show up, the gaps fill in.

We have a long and somewhat emotionally-intense-for-me class session on how to do interviews. It’s intense because I have never actually co-taught a class before, and it turns out that I have some minor but real disagreements with my coteacher, R., about interview technique, and about time management in the first part of class. He’s a lovely person and I instantly feel very guilty for my maladroit efforts to limit the time we spend on an opening discussion.

Here was the plan for the three hours of class (as I prepared it in advance):

1. Q&A about interview guide (15min)
2. Demo interviews in front of the class (45min)
   1. R. interviews Eli about a surprise topic, while students observe what happens interactionally
   2. Eli interviews R. about his “dream class”, while students write down dialogue as verbatim as possible
   3. Interview with a volunteer student, while students listen without taking notes, and take notes afterwards about what they can remember.
3. Break
4. Students practice interviewing each other in pairs
5. Students have time to notice themes and analyze their interviews (10min)
   
6. Group discussion of interviews and analysis

Amazingly, we mostly stick to the schedule. We only have about twenty minutes for the closing discussion, where I do a go-around to get everyone talking. By the time everyone has commented on their interviews with their classmates, class is just about over. We’ve largely tried to stress that interviewing demands real rapport, but it occurs to me at the last minute that, ethnographically, you can also learn a lot from awkward or interpersonally unpleasant moments. So I tell a story from my own fieldwork about that, but it’s a story about a somewhat dark moment, and I wish afterwards that I’d told something more light-hearted, to avoid ending class in a crestfallen mood.

It’s always hard to know what moods mean in the classroom and how they matter. But for me, when I’m teaching, often moods are all I have to go on when I’m there in the moment. So I do feel concerned that they are relatively positive.

It was also an intense class because when my colleague interviewed me in front of the students, he chose for his topic “Eli’s first impressions of Stellenbosch.” My first impressions of this place were quite overwhelming, having gone straight to a job interview from a 25 hour flight, and finding the city to be a beautiful, but quite racialized and unequal place. And while I could have decided to answer the questions a very guarded way, I decided to be fairly open, to not pay attention to the room of students watching us, and to look only into the eyes of my interviewer. At one point I remarked that there was a certain “masculinity of power” at the university, and then, like a good interviewer, R. asked what I meant by that. I found it hard to tackle a huge question like that without collapsing into a super academic register.

Afterwards, the students asked a very reasonable question: “Why did you still respond to questions that made you uncomfortable?”

There’s really no good answer to that. Sometimes we don’t extricate ourselves from awkwardness. Eventually, I say I think questions follow a logic like that of gift exchange, so that it’s just ritually hard to not respond to them, or even reciprocate.*

Anyway, after class eventually ends, time gets a lot more unstructured, and less hurried. I chat with my colleague quite a bit about how our class went. He liked it, he says, which I’m happy about, since he’s been teaching research methods for quite a while, and is a hard act to follow.

My memory gets vague about the rest of the day. I walk down the block and buy lunch at a grocery store; I do some classroom admin things; I chat a little bit online to my friend who teaches linguistic anthropology on a different continent; I feel overwhelmed by life but relieved to be done with class; I’m touched by the energy and seriousness of the class as a group; I leave my office door slightly open so that I can sense the flurries of motion in the department hallway.

As evening sets in, I sit down at my desk and write this, because I think it’s still valuable to have documents about everyday academic life. Now it’s quite late and everyone else has long since gone home. But since my family isn’t here in South Africa, I can indulge in working odd hours.

That is one version of a teaching day. Outside, it’s pitch black but the sky is clear and full of stars. I drive my little car home.

* Credit where it’s due: I think I got the analogy between questions and gift theory from a paper by Esther Goody, I suspect “Towards a Theory of Questions” from 1978, but I only ever had a photocopy and now I can’t find it to check!

I had lots of different feelings in graduate school, and lots of them weren’t bad. But for me, some of the hardest things were those ritual moments where your very Being is supposed to be under examination. In concrete terms, that meant the big rites of passage: the qualifying exams, the dissertation proposal hearing, and finally the dissertation defense. It’s easier to think about them now that they’re a bit distant in time.

Sometimes you have anxieties that you just can’t explain rationally. None of my advisors thought I needed to worry about my quals.

Yet here’s an entry in my journal from Sept. 29, 2008.

I was feeling practically gleeful about my exam, pleasantly numb, but suddenly
— I was at a Graduate Students United meeting—
   my roommate calls it a panic attack but I prefer to call it sick from anxiety
— I began feeling bad, locked myself in a little bathroom, locking both the locks on the door.

Horrible cramps in the abdomen, broke into a sweat, turned cold. I looked in a mirror later and I was convinced I’d turned white, the cheeks and forehead pale.

The scary part was less the physical symptoms than the total sense of not panic but weakness.

There’s the nice kind of vulnerability and then there’s the kind where you just feel terrible, a little desperate, helpless, I told my partner later.

So the bad moment was just sitting there in pain, my vision narrowing as if I were going to faint though I didn’t, and feeling afraid of how to get home, wondering if I could beg someone to bring me to their apartment and let me lie on a couch, prone. This awful feeling that something is wrong, and it had come from nowhere.

Then as I’m still in the bathroom starting to feel better, there’s a jingle of keys and a knock. When I come out I find the janitor, Joe, who works nights. I tell him I think I almost fainted. He says he goes in the basement bathroom and douses his head at times like that.

There used to be a cot down there, in the basement bathroom, but they took it away, I say. Too many people sleeping down there, he observes.

***

This all happened a long time ago and nothing bad came of it, really. But I’m posting it because public vulnerability in academia is very gendered, and I think it’s important for those of us who aren’t women to step up and think publicly about the hard moments that academic socialization wants us to endure.

I think because I’m generally unafraid during public performances, people don’t think I’m the kind of person who would feel anxiety elsewhere, in private.

Of course, not everybody has this much anxiety or experiences it the way I have. I don’t usually have moments like this; I actually forgot that this one even happened until I was re-reading my notebook the other day. That said, even though everyone is different, I do think that a lot of people experience massive and polymorphous anxieties in academic life. These experiences are themselves likely quite gendered, and, to insist on my point above, the way we talk about them is very gendered too. And who talks about them is very gendered.

I was amazed to read an article by some male geographers about “neoliberal anxiety” that had no mention whatsoever of anything personal or experiential. They weren’t even aware of the Cartesian and masculine quality of their discourse.

Indeed, there can be a lot of pressure to conceal these kinds of feelings and experiences, because they’re incompatible with the stoicism and invulnerability that is supposed to be part of professional comportment. As you learn when you teach, you can’t be sick, you can’t suffer, you can’t come undone, and you are supposed to be In Control. I mean, you can do these things, but there is pressure not to; they are almost maxims of professional comportment.

I know some people work against these norms, sometimes even building solidarities with their students by working against these norms. (I do that too, sometimes.)

And it’s funny how bad moments can produce unexpected solidarities. Like me and the janitor who told me about dousing his head.

I wonder what happened to him.

It doesn’t really matter to me what the survey is about. The survey has two fatal flaws:

1. It uses clickbait marketing tactics to try to reach me.
2. It purports to compensate me by offering me a chance to win a gift card.

Both of these strategies are insulting and, inasmuch as “professionalism” means anything whatsoever, unprofessional.

Literature review: Clickbait is just a bunch of clichés, normally used in titles, that seek to generate phony desires to become a reader of some online article. The standard emotional logic is about generating a feeling of missing out or an epistemic lack — “XYZ happened, you’ll never guess what happened next!”

Here, then, are some phrases used in the survey messages that I consider clickbait: “Don’t miss your chance to take part,” “We have not heard from you yet!”, “AAA needs your help!”, “Please watch your inbox”…

It’s as if they want me to believe that there was an actual personal relationship here and not just the nth request to provide data to an organization that gouges its members on fees and rents its journal portfolio to Wiley-Blackwell… Not to mention that instead of just sending me one email about this survey, they sent me three.

This takes us right into spam territory. Listen, if I’d wanted to participate, I would have. Show some respect for my time and attention.

The question of respect brings me to the atrocious gift card lottery that is supposed to incentivize/compensate for my participation.

Look, we’re (ostensibly) professional social scientists here. That makes us experts in how to compensate people fairly for participation in research. If a student of mine proposed to compensate their research participants by giving each of them a lottery ticket, I would explain that that was ridiculous. But giving out a chance to win a gift card — which is exactly the same thing as giving me a lottery ticket, from my perspective as the recipient — is somehow considered appropriate in many university and scholarly contexts.

Back when I was in grad school, for instance, this was how the student health services people tried to get me to click on their survey link:

As an expression of our appreciation for your time and input, all students who complete the survey will be entered into a random drawing with a chance to win one of the following prizes:
1st prize – (1) iPad mini, 64GB tablet with Retina display (mfsr $599)
2nd prize – (1) Kindle Paperwhite 6″ reader (mfsr $139)
3rd prize – (10) $25 gift certificates at the University Bookstore

My disciplinary association, by contrast, is considerably more frugal:

In appreciation for your time, you will have the opportunity to enter a drawing for a chance to win one of ten $25 Gift Cards.

Let’s suppose there are 10,000 members (source) — $250 total in gift cards divided by 10,000 comes out to $0.025 per member.

So basically we are getting a little message here about what our time and attention is worth: 2.5 cents is considered is a fair average rate for survey-completion services.

Now they also mention that the survey should take five minutes to complete. From this, we can calculate the hourly rate that the AAA considers fair compensation for survey participation.

$0.025/5min = $0.005/min
$0.005/min * 60 min/hr = $0.30/hr

So here you have it, everybody: for our professional time and energy in contributing to the statistical data banks of our disciplinary association, we are being compensated at thirty cents per hour. That’s just slightly more than 4% of the current U.S. federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr).

At this point, it would be less insulting just to ask the research participants to participate gratis.

But this brings me to my real thought about this. Governance by survey is not a satisfactory form of participatory democracy. And it’s not fair to force a group of increasingly precarious professionals to pay a large annual tax to a disciplinary association that fundamentally has no form of participatory governance.

The word for what they do is rent-seeking.

And it is precisely because my disciplinary association is a large, opaque and self-interested entity, seeking primarily to reproduce itself as an organization rather than to help its members, that it resorts to this sort of casino-consumerist substitute for participatory input. It’s bad social science and it’s bad democracy. The irony, however, is lost on the organizers.

Anyway, halfway through the volume, I find a compendium of sexist comments made to women graduate students at the University of Chicago. I thought it would be worth reproducing here, since I haven’t seen this text before and I think it’s good to have this sort of discourse out in circulation. While the general lines of this sort of sexist thought are pathetically familiar, the horror is always in the particulars.

THE HALLS OF ACADEME

The Women’s Caucus, Political Science Department, University of Chicago

Several of our professors have made these comments—some of them in jest— without realizing how damaging comments like these are to a woman’s image of herself as a scholar:

“I know you’re competent and your thesis advisor knows you’re competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you’re doing.”

“The admissions committee didn’t do their job. There’s not one good-looking girl in the entering class.”

“Have you thought about journalism? I know a lot of women journalists who do very well.”

“No pretty girls ever come to talk to me.”

“Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the only decent book I’ve ever read written by a woman.”

“Any girl who gets this far has got to be a kook.”

“They’ve been sending me too many women advisees. I’ve got to do something about that.”

“I hear I’m supposed to stop looking at you as a sex object.”

“We expect women who come here to be competent, good students but we don’t expect them to be brilliant or original.”

Student: “No, I wouldn’t stop teaching if I had children. I plan to work all my life.”
Professor: “But of course you’ll stop work when you have children. You’ll have to.”
Professor to student looking for a job: “You have no busi­ness looking for work with a child that age.”

Some people would say things are better now than they used to be. Well, are they?

A dozen women students showed up, no men. The class has 60 enrolled students, about 90% women overall. I was warned by my colleagues that only the truly committed students were likely to show up at the last lecture. The warning was sound.

I often come to the last day of a class with a written lecture, but this time it seemed to me that what I wanted to do was exemplify ethnographic analysis. So I started by telling two enigmatic stories from when I was an undergraduate student.

Here was the first:

Back in 2003, I was riding my bike through a desolate tiny town in the foothills of the Catskill mountains, looking for a place to stay the night. A group of kids was on the sidewalk, and they started talking to me as I rode past.
“Hey!”
“Hi!”
“What’s your name?”
“Eli!” I may have said; I’m not sure.
“Can I ride your bike?”
“Maybe later,” I said.
Then they asked a more surprising question:
“Are you gay?”
I just kept going.

The second story was even stranger.

I left work early on a hot summer day and went for a walk in a little river valley. After walking for a while, I sat down in a secluded spot, and covered my shoulders with a blanket to keep off the sunburn, because I was very pale.
Out of the woods, several kids appeared suddenly, shouting, trailed by a young dad who seemed to have little authority over them.
Frustrated by the lost solitude, I pulled the blanket up higher to cover my head and waited, hoping the kids would go away.
But instead they were intrigued.
“Who are you?” they asked. I didn’t answer.
“Maybe it’s an alien!” they shouted. “Maybe the aliens left it there!”
I laughed quietly at these remarks.
“Let’s throw a rock at it!” they shouted.
I said to myself: No one in their right mind would throw a rock at a total stranger under a blanket.
A rock hit me in the shoulder. Then I came out from under the blanket and stared angrily at the children. They stopped bothering me and eventually wandered off.

These stories seem to me mainly to testify to the weirdness and aggression that can emerge when people try to make sense of strangers, of the Other, of things they don’t understand. So we talked some about that in my class.

Afterwards, I asked my student to respond to a writing prompt: “What’s a question you wish someone would ask you?”

A lot of them seemed to interpret this as a Big Question, and pondered for a few minutes before writing anything. Afterwards, I read their responses out loud, letting people stay anonymous, which they preferred.

There was an odd feeling of shared vulnerability that I hadn’t really experienced before in a classroom. “If you’re an ethnographer and you can get people to share things like this with you, you’re doing something right,” I told them by way of a conclusion.

It turns out that Cape Girardeau was just in the news, in a Guardian report on rural racism in America. A lodging house in town was once included in the Green Book for Negro Travelers, a historically important guidebook telling black people where they could safely travel in the United States. But Cape Girardeau is nonetheless a highly racist place.

In the latest Guardian report, it becomes emblematic of the experience of driving while black:

For younger African Americans, racial profiling by police has become the new frontline in their experience of driving while black. Marshall Egson, whose family owns a large colonial-style house in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which was listed in the Green Book, likens the cumulative effect of being stopped over and over again by law enforcement to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“Every time I go out in my car I worry: am I going to make it home?” he says. “Over time it gives you PTSD. The way I see it, most every black man in America has PTSD.”

As the road miles of my tour of Missouri pile up, past and present seem to elide. When did the Green Book end and the present begin? Has there ever been a break?

I kick myself as I read this for not having had the political consciousness to have even looked into race in this town before writing about it. The stories are there to find.

For instance, in 2005 there was a rally against racism at the local hospital, which was reported on IndyMedia:

In July 2004, I lost my mother, my best friend to blatant discrimination and negligence from a very oppressed and racist hospital. After several attempts of trying to resolve this matter peacefully with the hospital, all efforts where ignored. So on March 26, 2005 my family along with the National Alliance of Black Panthers gathered in front of St. Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau, Mo to protest in a peaceful manner. We wanted to shed light on the past events of racism and unfair treatment of African Americans, as well as Minority Medicaid recipients.

According to Holli Wrice, who wrote the report, the city police rapidly tried to halt the demonstration:

During our peaceful protest, a police officer came to our demonstration and told us not to use the bullhorn, and stated this was against city ordinance. Sistah Shazza and myself demanded to see the ordinance rule. (Allow me to mention that The NABP as well as myself had contacted the Police Department prior to the demonstration, to see what measures we can take for such usage of the bullhorn, and obtain a permit and etc). The Officer told us if we continued to use the loud horn, he would lock all of us up.

The protesters were also subject to acts of overt racism, on Wrice’s account, beginning with a threat of vehicular homicide by the KKK:

Several hours into our peaceful protest, the Ku Klux Klan drove a truck as close as they could to us repeatedly coming very close to the curb in which we were standing. They yelled niggers; all the while they drove their pickup with a huge confederate flag waving from the rear of the truck. Some of my family went to a nearby restaurant and they were called niggers. Employees from the hospital showed their nametags and gave us the middle finger.

Wrice eventually concludes that “Racism still exists and is very thick and blatant where I reside, here it is 2005 and you still have white supremacists sporting Klan uniforms, Man, I need to tell them that is played out now, times are changed. America is still ass backwards, its up to us to keep the dream alive and going.”

A few years later in 2012, the KKK (defended by the ACLU) won a court case against the city to gain the right to leave flyers on people’s cars.

The racism that affects a town is of course almost certain to affect the local university. So it’s not surprising that the local college, Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO), is associated with similar dynamics. (I’m not, of course, claiming to be an expert on SEMO or to be giving an exhaustive analysis of it. What follows is just what I can find out with a bit of online research.)

A recent analysis of language use on Twitter named SEMO #1 in the nation for frequency of “derogatory” speech, based especially on frequent use of the word “bitch.” The survey was methodologically controversial — and denounced by the college itself — because it consisted purely in a statistical analysis of the spatial proximity of derogatory language to the campus, without considering context or verifying that students were the ones doing the tweeting. But while the data is obviously a very indirect measure of campus climate, if you ask me, it definitely says something about local prejudices.

Local reporters in any case readily corroborated the findings. One Twitter user commented that “SEMO is super racist”; another person showed that students from the campus were advertising a “slave auction outside the university center.” Meanwhile, about two years ago, one student started an online petition (with 81 signatories) to denounce his teacher’s “hate filled racist rant blaming people of European ancestry for the plight of those of African ancestry.” (What specifically was said?) A 2016 Black Lives Matter exhibit was defaced with a pro-police message. And in a Facebook group “Living at Southeast,” efforts to discuss racism were shut down by school administrators.

A few years earlier, in 2013, an online forum discussion about whether SEMU is racist generated this response from someone in Cape Girardeau named “Nazi pride”:

“Black women r disgusting and mostly bald lol even black men kno white women are way more beautiful that’s y there always trying to bag one the white race is the apex of beauty and knowledge we tought u how to read write your welcome btw without us ud be wearing loin cloths chucking spears at elephants.”

In a remark like this, the level of racism and white supremacy is so extreme, it’s hard to even notice the exceptional stupidity that goes with it.

Meanwhile, liberals wrote to the newspapers in the wake of Ferguson with thoughts like, “As a lifelong Missouri resident, I’m sad that our state has gotten a racist reputation… I know most of us aren’t racists and are sad that Missouri has been labeled as a racist state.” As if racism was just an image problem and not about contesting white supremacist discourse and practice on the ground.

This brings me to my mea culpa as a scholar of higher education. When I went to this town in 2011 — admittedly I was just passing through, but still — I didn’t ask the right questions or look in the right places. And I completely missed the racial and racist dynamics that hang over this town, and over its local university.

It’s an analytical mistake I don’t plan on making twice.

Edit: I see that some people from SEMO are perhaps reading this post! I’d welcome additional commentary, corrections to my impressions, or any other feedback.