dig

In dim light now, his eyes
   straining to survey
the territory: here is the country
   of Loss, its colony Grief;
the great continent Desire
   and its borderland Regret;

vast, unfathomable water
   an archipelago—the tiny islands
of Joy, untethered, set adrift.
   At the bottom of the map
his legend and cartouche,
   the measures of distance, key

to the symbols marking each
   known land. What’s missing
is the traveler’s warning
   at the margins: a dragon—
its serpentine signature—monstrous
   as a two-faced daughter.

My Father as Cartographer, Natasha Trethewey

Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d!

Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Song of the Open Road, 15, Walt Whitman

“fantasy parses ambivalence in such a way that the subject is not defeated by it.” (LB)

It is precisely this holding together of multiplicity and power—and of the different critical imperatives that follow from them—that leads to the productively ambivalent conundrum in much of Berlant’s work: the tension between ‘the productivity of never-mere-description beyond the fantasy of tying things down’ (Berlant, 2019b, p. 291) and the need for critical analyses of and alternatives to (extra)ordinary violence and precarity. Different people and projects will be differently drawn toward these imperatives; for us, it is appealing to remain with the questions that the conundrum of ambivalence open up rather than seeking their resolution, to stay a little longer in the realm of undecidability so as to not delimit a given affective relationship to an object, or not arrive at a settled point of (mis)recognition too early (Ruez & Cockayne, 2021). However, rather than inaction or indifference, maintaining such a position requires careful and uncertain work. This work is important precisely because of its (im)possibilities: we are never fully in control of our own psychic processes, the ‘we’ at work here is differentially and unevenly precarious, and the contingency of thinking and acting in common necessarily entails ambivalence. All of which are lessons that Berlant’s work can help us (un)learn. (Daniel Cockayne and Derek Ruez, Encountering Berlant part two.)