Category: theory

Lauren Berlant on the Critical Lede, August 25, 2012. They introduced Cruel Optimism (2011).

“… forms of optimism, I’m very interested in, are the kind with which you attached your endurance in the world, with which you attached your continuity in the world

… what it means to have a life […] there’s so many people but one normative model of having a life […] it’s the job of politically engaged critical work to try to imagine other ways of having a life”

all of that is about the way that the labor of the reproduction of life in the historical present is sustain by the fantasy of the good life but is lived as an ongoingness

 you make your political claim in the present

 the present […] as a place where people are figuring out life

affect works in the present, it’s the bodies response to the world

attempts to change people’s political consciousness, not by changing their ideology, but by changing their affective relation to inhabiting the public

what ought to be in the collective imaginary for flourishing”

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… optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.

via Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms

Marjorie Levinson – Lyric: the Idea of This Invention, 2015. And as a chapter in Thinking Through Poetry: Field Notes on the Romantic Lyric (Oxford University Press, 2018). 330 pp. (Hdbk., $82; ISBN 9780198810315). A review.

About her project, Professor Levinson writes:

“Borrowing frameworks from one discipline for use in another” is how Jonathan Culler describes one of theory’s traditional agendas and it gives a good general account of my procedures in this essay. Although the frameworks I borrow come from several disciplines (e.g., neurophysiology, post-classical physics, evolutionary biology, 19th-c morphology, developmental systems theory), they share a common paradigm (self-organization) and a common process (recursion). That paradigm and that process are the connect with lyric form, one of my core topics. The other topic is method, and there too I take a leaf from the sciences, arguing for an epistemic pluralism and, more radically, an ontic pluralism as well, such that we can allow not just different kinds of explanations for different levels of study, but different kinds of objects emerging at different scales and through different techniques of inquiry and display. The validity of my contribution is therefore tied to its level of analysis, which I characterize, via Culler once again, as “theory of the middle range, or what used to be called poetics” (as distinct from “high theory” on the one hand, and “literary criticism” on the other). By adapting some modeling moves from scientific discourses that target this middle range, I hope to circumvent the tired historicist/formalist standoff, and more important, to generate language for describing deep structure effects in the absence of deep structure causes and origins.

Event announcement at Stanford.

Marjorie Levinson reviews The Calamity Form, 2020.