becoming different by being with others

（把之前发布在Goodreads 上的书评搬到豆瓣上，希望能给贫乏的简中互联网增添一点关于Berlant的讨论）

Lauren Berlant’s works often strike me in an affective sense. They move me, unsettle me and disorganise me a bit, or a lot, in a way that not that many, if any, academic books can. To quote themselves ‘When I say a book breaks me this is what I mean: I am changed by it, startled and thrilled that something has become unbound in me. I become the loosened object, in proximity to an uncomfortable enigma but not a fate.’ (p.171)

So, I like this book not so much because or not only because it has analytical merits, which it certainly does, but also because it speaks to me in some visceral and enigmatic way, and this encounter happened when I need to be spoken to, at a moment when I increasingly realised that this ‘me‘ is but an unstable and ever-changing subject in the midst of all sorts of intense academic, personal and relational transformations. In other words, the book has become effectively become one of my objects of attachment. (But that attachment may itself be risky if not cruel, and is, if anything, equally prone to overdetermination)

But okay, as much as a lot of my love for Berlant or this book is not entirely rational, I did manage to write down some points of why I like it

The gist of this book, as much as I find it difficult to grasp, seems to be about inconvenience in a number of different senses: as an existential truth (that we have to depend on others rather than sustain a fantasy of sovereignty, no matter how difficult that is going to be), as the nature of any forms of relationality (that being with other is by definition non-sovereign, it is something that both drives us and impedes us in volatile and unexpected ways) and as a ground for justification for discrimination against ossified political differences (that some population are considered an inconvenience for the smooth operation of the society and therefore othered and excluded). I guess the latter one is not really new for me, as here inconvenience can simply be used interchangeably with concepts such as abject. But I was most stricken by the formal, namely an explicit focus on those aspects of 'being with others' that are incoherent, ambiguous, and nonsovereign, being that desire, love, democracy, or community, emphasising them to be the very necessity of human ontology rather than shying away from them.

Ambivalence as the inevitable affective response to the inconvenience of other people, and to overdeterminations that dictate singular affect. It also, in Berlant's view, bears the potential for forging forms of solidarity based on how people are similarly governed affectively.

Infrastructure as the binding of the social and the structural. Forms and scenes of life that exist in animated solidity and always exceed representation.

In terms of ethics, the book gestures towards unlearning, recognising that 'objects are looser than they appear'(p.25) while also developing new ways to loosen your objects, as a third way other than holding onto it tightly or getting rid of it completely.

Methodologically, Berlant grounds their thesis on lengthy analyses of obscure films and texts. To be entirely honest, this is usually my least favourite part of Berlant’s work, or indeed any queer theory that originates from more of a humanities/literature tradition.

Stylistically, this book is almost peak Berlantian: dense, long and rhythmic prose, crisp and unexpected combination of phrases and concepts, animated deployment of the strange verbs that somehow make sense and make scenes: lubricate, metabolise, etc. As an example of this, p. 27: 'When I say I love you, it means that I want to be near the feeling of ambivalence our relation induces and hope that what’s negative, aggressive, or just hard about it doesn’t defeat what’s great about it really - or in my fantasies of it, anyway.'

They deliberately reject using parentheses which, in their view, implies ‘a hierarchies among knowledge’ (p.29). Reading Berlant is therefore mostly frustrating, but at times illuminating - it is an intensive experience like no other.

I’m also not entirely sure how well the concept of inconvenience works in terms of bringing the three quite disparate chapters together into a cohesive whole, although Berlant would probably argue that that’s exactly the point: the promise of a coherent theoretical framework is itself a fantasy. (Indeed, they state that their writing had always been ‘modular in that way, built through sections that allow a problem-cluster to be both established and transformed through its contact with specific object/scenes or cases (p. 11)’) But still, considering that the three chapters were written over a period of ten years if not longer, this might have resulted in many concepts being either unrelated (the linkage between inconvenience and infrastructure is weak at best) or too related (what’s the difference between a cruel attachment and an inconvenient attachment? Is this old wine in new bottles? )

But again, just like what she said ‘she did what she could do at the time‘ (p.29).