For the official version of record, see here:

Gunaratnam, Y. (2023). Dragging the University. Media Theory, 7(2), 309–328. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/575

Dragging the University

YASMIN GUNARATNAM

King’s College, London, UK

Abstract

In this article, I discuss Lauren Berlant’s way of writing with/in the affective infrastructures of universities, embracing comedy and play, while engaging constraint. My case example is Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds (2019). In the company of Berlant’s incitements, I come back to the inconvenience of our latter-day crises of scholarly knowledge and writing, instigated by black and brown intellectuals and artificial intelligence, which in their different registers unsettle traditional kinds of intellectual governance and regulation, laying bare what is at stake in the combing-over of vulnerability.

Keywords

Affect, Artificial Intelligence, Queer Theory, Universities, Writing

The opening scene of Lauren Berlant’s 1994 essay ‘68, or Something’ (Berlant, 1994), is a co-authored memo, written with women colleagues at the University of Chicago to the Committee on Critical Practice. The anecdote is very Berlant: gossipy, sensational (“I loved every minute of writing this memo”, ibid.: 125), fantasy rich (“I remember imagining hearing their eyeballs creak as they rolled in sarcastic fatigue while reading”, ibid.: 125), full of surprises. Altogether queer. The memo begins, “For us the main disappointment of CCP has come in its failure to inhabit a space of concrete utopian imagining” (ibid.). The signatories call out the Committee’s failure to engage seriously, “the different meanings of progressiveness that operate the different domains in which we practise as intellectuals, political agents, teachers, and ordinary actors in the world” (ibid.: 124). Obviously, it landed badly. “This was the worst memo we have ever read. You are so ’68. We have gone through all this already, and watched its failures once, and we’re not going through it again” (ibid.: 125). The admonishment is a familiar rhetoric. Sara Ahmed (2012) calls it “overing” (we are so over racism/sexism/’68…; get over it!; see also Eng and Han, 2003: 364). As with temporal/genealogical types of storying, past political failures have been dealt with and cannot be repeated (Hemmings, 2011).

The anxieties and failures that ’68 stood in for at the time were heightened for Berlant by the increasing, if bumpy, institutional rise of feminism, queer politics and multiculturalism, tipping the memo into a feminised realm of a “minor” politics, under the guise of concerns about professionalism (see also Berlant, 1997). “I take the ill-fitting mantle of ’68 to stand here for something like the risk of political embarrassment, of embracing undercooked transitional thought about the possibilities and politics of futurity itself” (ibid.: 128). Warning against the desire to naturalise “safe spaces” as both attainable and good, Berlant was interested in the risk of pedagogical scenes susceptible to the inevitable demagnetising energies of new knowledges. If we take another three-decade loop from the ’68 essay to 2023, our circumstances are deflatingly resonant: right-wing fearmongering about free speech, culture wars, gender, Critical Race Theory. And most recently in the UK, Conservative government attacks on “fake”, low value academic subjects, with a targeting of courses failing to deliver the “good outcomes” of graduate level employment or postgraduate study within 15 months of an undergraduate degree. The degree programmes were unnamed, but we can guess, “many of them have the word “studies” in the title” (Davies, 2023). Courses failing to deliver will have their recruitment capped. In the chronometrics of this banking model of education, the value of education is a fixed temporal resource with a sell-by date. 

Reading ‘68’ now, within five heavy-going years of industrial action by the British University and College Union (UCU) – “a howling protest against the ongoing destruction of higher education” (Srinivasan, 2019) – that has seen more creatively snarky performance protests by university workers and students, what hits me is Berlant’s style of dragging the university. By dragging, I mean both in the Gen Z sense of embarrassing and what Elizabeth Freeman (2010) theorises as “temporal drag”; an anachronistic undertow, connecting the irritating and their histories across time in a queer hyper-sociality. “‘’68, or Something’ is a beautiful and crazy essay,” Ann Cvetkovich (2021) has observed, “that exemplifies the experimental daring of Lauren’s writing.” Rather than the subjects of Berlant’s engagements, which fall more obviously within media theory (cinema, art, fiction, images, TV), it is their queer/reparative writing in glitching machineries of making normal and following shifting coordinates of “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011) within universities that I want to discuss through two registers.

First, there is Berlant’s dragging of institutional scholarly life through a complexly involved, at times, comedic ac/counting, amid growing straight-faced metrics, audit cultures, systemic underinvestment and the suppression of wages and working conditions. “Sinthomo-epistemology may induce vomiting”, they once blogged, in an ornate analysis of the politics of secrets, throwing in, almost as an aside:

I thought some of this during a meeting at school a few weeks ago. Why bother going to the gym when I’m getting so much exercise rolling my eyes while keeping my face straight? Composure uses up glucose. Writing keeps me from flying off into the air from all that fluttering (2008a).

Comedy ignites when we meet “an unexpected edge in proximity to what felt innocuous” (Berlant and Ngai, 2017: 248). It can be a draining intimacy, “the fatigue from feeling vulnerable because pleasure’s bad objects are not always in one’s control” (ibid.: 248). Humourlessness, an affective neighbour is, “typically associated with a bracing contraction of relation…with a tone drained of whatever passes for warmth or openness” (Berlant, 2017: 308). Think of those Friday late-afternoon, passive-aggressive memos announcing job-cuts, the disproportional, mathematically far-fetched, docking of wages for industrial actions; the unburdened-by-irony newsletters pledging to decolonise alongside the aspiration to be “world-leading”. Comedy’s capacity to bear the tensions between pain and relief, recognition and estrangement is a marker of queer theory’s confrontations with political and sensual ambivalence as a mode of renegotiating the world’s violations. The comedic distinguishes Berlant’s autoethnographic writing from other radical genres of temporal drag, such as those restaging the historic racial violence on which universities are built (see Zembylas, Bozalek and Motala, 2020), as well as the fast-growing field of Critical University Studies. It should be obvious by now that Berlant loved irony. It was how they survived the university (Berlant, 1997: 144).

Dragging the university through streaming its affective registers and infrastructures, where any sense of a singular shape of experience trips over the pushiness of political economy and of others, connects this autoethnographic thread in Berlant’s interventions to their broader concerns. They were long enamoured with intimate publics, non-sovereignty, lateral forms of agency as more listless than fervoured (Berlant, 2007) and where being in relation is not so much denied, but does not feel like it at all. Rather than more psychologically or phenomenologically-inflected work, Berlant’s tracking and evoking of affect comes through the sandpit of the Marxist-influenced cultural studies of those such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall.

It is worth noting too that affect studies is “a rangy and writhing poly-jumble of a creature” (Seigworth and Pedwell, 2023: 4), making it especially difficult to locate Berlant’s affective enquiries and the fun they had with undisciplining. “I hear Affect Theory announces that life persists throughout moments. But why is that a thing to say?” (Berlant and Stewart, 2019: 118). If pushed though, I would say their writing feels like a propositional, in-process translation of affect worlds. It has this way of “cultivating vocabularies of attention that slow down the leap into critical judgment and urge greater generosity toward flailing and failing” (Weigman, 2023: 874). Oftentimes this generosity was practised through textual negative capability and fourth-walling, using asides, questions and coda to undercut any sense of a smug, already sewn-up analysis. Berlant never really finished a piece of writing. The coda invariably comes with a seemingly new or oblique swerve of thought:

I’m starting a new genre for riffing, for keeping suggestive connections alive. Interruption is my stylistic ethics: to self-interrupt, to force openings in my own habit of self-tracking and self-regard, to be idiomatically non-monogamous, as you would predict. Adultery, fantasy, philandering, swerve (I read an article today about adultery, where the commentators kept saying “she got her swerve, he got his”) (Berlant, 2008a).

So, when I describe Berlant as an affect translator, I don’t mean translation in the sense of efforts to mime affect in words, language and writing. I have in mind Spivak’s (1992: 178) rendering of translation as the most intimate act of reading, while all the time knowing, “Language is not everything. It is only a vital clue to where the self loses its boundaries”. Berlant – for whom words and language mattered as political praxis – writes around affect as clues to the wheres and many ways in which the self is forever losing its boundaries (See Mani, 2022 for a beautiful multi-media exploration of interdependence in longstanding Southern contemplative traditions such as Tantra). It is this in situ, annoying, unwilled openness to all sorts of others that wafts from the pages of their post-humous book, On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022). Overcloseness is also at stake in the rewriting of writing by global majority intellectuals and our latter-day computational hermeneutics of suspicion as an unfolding crisis in scholarly knowledge, centred on writing, which I will come back to later.

The second register I want to highlight is Berlant’s writing as écriture; an affective prompt engineering, loosening up or enlarging our attachments to objects. What Berlant took to be objects were not only material things. They are forms of life, wrought out of affectively and politically jagged relationships, “clusters of promise, projection, and speculation that hold up a world that we need to sustain” (2022: 27). What’s more, our tendency is to get mired in a desiring fidelity to objects that get in the way of our flourishing, in a “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011). Even when these relationships become harmful. Why? Because leaving risks loss. “It is unclear”, Ben Anderson and colleagues (2023: 144) helpfully point out, “whether the person/people that are in such relations know this or not: Berlant left that open”. If we are unknowing, Berlant’s cruelly optimistic scholastic scenes and objects still feel uncomfortably close. Most so in their blog ‘Supervalent Thought’, with its glimpses of the arduous process of writing (lots and lots of revising) and the sheer hard work it is to take time off (it never quite seems to happen).

As much as our stuckness in cruel optimisms feels like an affective fact, Berlant stays with its creative liquidity. Have a think about how cruel optimism manifests in universities at this time, within endemic cultures of overwork. A recent survey by UCU found that academic staff in UK universities work at least two unpaid days every week. Teaching Assistants/Graduate Teaching Assistants, many on short-term and fractional contracts, are working almost double the hours they are paid for (UCU, 2022: 26). Along with illness, bad backs, frozen shoulders, insomnia and the like, there can be political depression, indifference, anxiety, dissociation or acclimatisation. All of which, like teeth grinding, have this knack of becoming habits. And there is more. Although habituation could reasonably suggest a backgrounding of consciousness, Berlant is careful to distinguish not-thinking from thoughtlessness. “Being overwhelmed by knowledge and life produces all kinds of neutralizing affect management”, they suggested, “coasting, skimming, browsing, distraction, apathy, coolness, counter-absorption, assessments of scale, picking one’s fights, and so on’ (2008b: 6). In staging affective scenes as case-events, what can surface is “ways of resisting the reproduction of attachment to diminishing but world-sustaining things” (Berlant, 2022: 27). Here, the potential of queer writing, so evident in the ’68 essay, is the capacity “to construct unexpected scenes out of the materials it makes available” (Berlant, 1994: 133), as a means to unlearn what we thought we knew (Berlant and Edelman, 2014). Undoing, however, cannot become a routine, “Unlearning is not the replacement of a cartridge” (Berlant, 2021: 101). “We write to invite and to goad, to bring the weight of scenes home, not to model”, Berlant would later assert with Kathleen Stewart (2019: 131).

It is easy to get distracted and swept away by the fresh eloquence of Berlant’s writing. Like Marotta (2023: 123), I re-read, “sometimes just for the sentences”. And invariably because of the density of ideas and exquisite prose. So, let me move on and say more about how their reparative reading and writing practices hold together universities as sites of neoliberal regulation in which critical scholars are enmeshed, while showing some of the potential of convivial pleasure and play. Media theory, after all, comes from somewhere. This should make more sense with a case example of Berlant’s writing.

Measure for Measure

The Hundreds (2019), Berlant’s antiphonal ethnography with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart – ‘a co-compose pushing off a cut or a story…’ (ibid.:126)­­ – is my case for thinking with their textual disturbances of academic “consensus sensibility” (Berlant, 2007: 672). A case, as they theorised it, could be an instance of something, a synonym for an argument, or a disciplinary genre, organising singularities into exemplars and patterns. A case can also work as a professional genre, pointing to the form information takes so it can be evaluated and judged. With scholarly knowledge-making and published writing, value extends beyond its professional authorisation and uptake:

To decide to publish something is to confirm that it has made a case for its worthiness as knowledge. To decide not to is not evidence of anything. At the same time, the phrase “knowledge object” obscures how often debates about whether a topic or object is an object or is worthy of becoming an absorbing and potentially transformative case-event are really about whether one can bear to have transference with the low and the hot; professional life is generally so stable and so cool (Berlant, 2007: 671-2, original emphasis)

The Hundreds is low and hot. Its queer autoethnographic witnessing attunes to “ordinary affects” (Stewart, 2007) and the ordinary “as a space at once actively null, delightfully animated, stressful, intimate, alien, and uncanny” (Berlant, 2016: 399). Stewart describes this mode of storying affect as in the spirit of Eve Sedgwick’s (1997) weak theory: “Theory that comes unstuck from its own line of thought to follow the objects it encounters, or becomes undone by its attention to things that don’t just add up but take on a life of their own as problems for thought” (2008: 72).

It is relevant that The Hundreds grew out of writing workshops at the Austin Public Feelings group; one local hub in a national network of those wanting to figure out different ways of building alliances outside of the academy. And how to survive within it. The process of the groups, initiated in 2001, was to begin by tuning into a public mood – the impact of the US invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina – and then move with its trails across the disparate and interwoven scales at which events make themselves felt. The toll and limitations of this type of feeling and thinking in the neoliberal university were close to the surface and impetus for the groups. Here is Ann Cvetkovich describing one national meeting:

many of us admitted to feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by our professional obligations, and we considered what kinds of projects might emerge out of those conditions and how to produce scholarship not timed to the rhythms and genres of conferences, edited collections, and books. To make academic work and to create conjunctions between academia, activism, and art…” (2007: 459-60)

The use of number in The Hundreds, based on a free-writing activity, means that constraint is the scene, measure and heuristic of the collection, “in following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, objects, ideas, worlds) in hundred-word units or units of hundred multiples” (Berlant and Stewart, 2019: ix). What a clever way of showing how much of our lives are framed and saturated by numbers and metrics, yet not necessarily flattened or drained of colour. In the university, instrumental numerical systems are in surround sound: workload allocation models, citation indexes, publication records, student evaluation scores, university league tables, with numbers transposed into standards of validation and professional advancement. There is also the institutional cultivation of weird attachments to metrication as self-worth, product, taxonomy and those small, sweet habits of keeping each other going. An academic told me recently about “publication cakes” – every tenth publication in a department is celebrated with cake.

In queering these various metrics, The Hundreds beckons us into the creative possibilities of quantification and measured language. “Every edit set off a cascade of word falls, Rubik’s Cubes, tropes, infrastructures, genres, rhymes and off-rhymes, tonal flips and half-steps this way and that” (Berlant and Stewart, 2019: x). Alongside the pressures of new counting regimes incited by digital and computational developments and the determinisms of information theory (the quantifying of uncertainty and randomness within a system through measures of entropy and surprise), Berlant and Stewart desire, adventure and stay with the possibilities of measure as working on, with and under the ephemeral force of words; “A new sentence arrived just because it had seven words.” (ibid.: 44). Words, as Bruce Fink has reminded us in his reading of Lacan, are inconveniently intrusive and pushy:

sometimes so persistently that we are virtually forced to speak or write them before being able to move on to others. A certain image or metaphor may come to mind without our having sought it out or in any way attempted to construct it and thrust itself upon us so forcibly that we can but reproduce it and only then try to tease out its meaning (1995: 14).

Dissolved in the acidity of academic metrics is this unruly life of words, language and writing. So too, the affective and material conditions of thinking, reading, writing and teaching that appear throughout the Berlant and Stewart collection. To be clear, the collaging of white tenured life through tableaus of intimate-public storytelling and atmospheric riffs are far less generalisable to the lives of precarious and sidelined scholars on whose work universities depend (see Khan, 2022). Rather, by documenting the stuck places, recoiling, absurdity and sheer range of prosthetics needed by senior scholars to do their work (see ‘Red Bull Diaries’, Berlant and Stewart, 2019: 12-3), a flimsy, often awkward, white authorial authority catches something of the mood swings of the neoliberal present:

Red Bull Diaries

“This morning I awoke on my side in the dark and wrote with my thumbs for a few hours, breasts hanging clear of the open short. The ginger cat climbed onto my hip. Sometimes work is the most important thing, and sometimes it’s like walking into a beautiful room and grinning at the weather. What would it mean to have that thought? Rain, snow, wind, sun. (ibid.: 12)

Reading Notes, the Week of December 16, ’16

“17. We wish for evidence the way we wish to use life – to simplify and let us be good-natured sometimes (Whitehead 1999)”

Office Hours

“Another time a student was condescending, so I gave them their echo to play with. Another time we were watching a movie and students rebelled because I watched the credits in the dark till the end” (ibid.: 125)

Writing Lessons

“Twenty years ago I had an intro to cultural studies class right after a yoga class I was taking. I always fell asleep during the final relaxation, which disconnected me from my drivetrain, so I’d walk into my class and just stand there, looking around for thirty seconds. That’s a long time” (ibid.: 58).

Writing infrastructurally

The daze of disconnection from the “drivetrain”, from thought, body, space and time, is a (neurotypical) glitch in institutional infrastructures. Infrastructure is the lively patterning or connective tissue of social forms. It buoys our sociality. Infrastructure is “the lifeworld of structure”; “all the systems that link ongoing proximity to being in a world-sustaining relation” (Berlant, 2016: 393). Infrastructural failures or glitches as Berlant (2016) describes them, are more than shortcomings or mishaps. They show the play of historical, economic and cultural contingencies within those systems that undergird social life. As sensory and textual experiments, enamoured with the low-key registers of how the social is cobbled together and transported through affects, The Hundreds holds the tense intimacy between certain academic bodies and writing as infrastructure, misfiring and repair. At the same time, Berlant cautions, “resilience and repair don’t necessarily neutralize the problem that generated the need for them, but might reproduce them” (2006: 393-4).

To practise or to be conscious of writing as infrastructure within the university is to live up close to fierce and muffled contradictions. There is no getting away from writing as a commodity, integral to university supply-chains, used to performance check, survey, discipline. It is also part of a bubbling libidinal economy. Writing is a love-object and an object of rivalry. I fall in and out of love with writing all the time. Who hasn’t hated writing, been undone or broken by it; got caught-up in writing-envy, been restored and affirmed by it? (I am too embarrassed to say how many hours and how many drafts it has taken me to write this piece). And there is always mimetic desire at work somewhere. When we write, we play and splash around with/in the fantasmatic field. And then the terrible devastation and exhaustion when it all crashes and burns. “When writing fails the relation between word and world, it spins out like car wheels in mud, leaving you stranded and tired of trying” (Berlant and Stewart, 2019: 10).

Writing for Patricia Clough (2000: 290), in conversation with the work of Mark Seltzer (1993: 106), is a “primary mediation”, saturated with fantasy, displacements, projection. “The unconscious processes of autoethnography”, Clough asserts, “are not about the authority of knowledge but rather the very (im)possibility of knowledge” (ibid.: 288). Katherine McKittrick (2021) is more specific, locating an “impossibility of knowledge” in the rumpled creases of race, capitalism and modernity, including the organisation of the fantasy of possession (see also Andersen and Christen, 2019). In other words, we are never really the sole originator or owner of our ideas. Our memories too are unreliable and “dishonest” (ibid.: 15); a reality McKittrick pulls into the formatting of her writing and presentations. In public talks, her slides fade in and out on a continuous loop. The asynchrony between speech and image performs and amplifies loss. “I started doing this,” McKittrick explains, “because I was finding it difficult to track …how I know what I know, where I know from, who I know from, and what I cannot possibly know” (ibid.: 14).

Experimenting with form and “beautiful writing” (Nash, 2019: 110) – as “invit(ing) us to cultivate practices of care, tenderness, and love that make beauty possible” – is one way black and racially marked intellectuals are remaking what counts as scholarly knowing, reading and writing. They study and write at a snail’s pace, dwelling in archival absences, evaporations, reverie; in making-believe (Cho, 2021; Hartman, 2008; Philip, 2008). What counts as knowing is put under erasure from within the very innards of texts. If this is a negative writing, it is a type of prompt engineering also, wherein diasporic literacies “function to expand the text outside itself (the prompt opens a door)” (McKittrick, 2021: 6). Opacity and aesthetics in these circumstances are cues for teaching, shared living and imagining, as well as unsettling the Northern veneration of words and language as primarily carriers of intended meanings, rather than having sensual, spiritual and gestural life (Motamedi Fraser, 2015).

At the same time, the difficulty in keeping track of where our ideas and arguments come from, draws close to the seemingly banal “I took too many notes” student narrative Will Davies (2022) finds prevalent in university plagiarism meetings. Tears in these meetings are not uncommon. Nor is the heartfelt advocacy by the friends students sometimes choose to accompany them. There are few “slots of loveliness” in the “geometric problems” of the fast-growing industry of academic integrity (Bonney 2009: 26, quoted in Berlant, 2022: 75). Peer-to-peer shielding is one of them. No matter our efforts to dejeopardise, the atmosphere of plagiarism meetings is charged with shame. We become privy to circumstances and histories we have not earned the right to hear. We witness the naked greed of our institutions, admitting students with tenuous language skills. We feel the pressures of those juggling care, work and study. Along with the so-called culture wars and struggles over free speech, intellectual fakery using Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fast becoming a morally laden and number driven fault line. Talk of two types of universities is re-emerging: those where learning can be gamed and those where study matters. As Ruth Gilmore Wilson made clear over a decade ago, such cleavages are made through race and class:

There are the students who are overprivileged who don’t read because they don’t care, because the instrument they wish to seize by getting a degree has nothing to do with learning anything, and then there are the people who are actually interested in learning who are scrappy and curious but tired. They’re extremely tired (2011: 259-60).

The growing crises of plagiarism and machine writing are not the same epistemological or ethico-political predicaments that Gilmore Wilson, McKittrick and others are talking about. That they are so neighbourly is the inconvenience of how a hermeneutics of suspicion in knowledge economies is currently showing up, augmented by AI and specifically Large Language Models (LLM), designed to understand, interpret, generate and interact with human language by ingesting text and drawing inferences from large datasets.

The epistemological and technoaesthetic questions raised by AI writing are huge: what is the nature and “product” of reading and writing in an increasingly automated landscape? What might scholarly knowledge – and the metrics of workload for that matter – be when released from the immaterial and bodily labour of close reading, skimming, forgetting, conversation, listening, watching, questioning, being floored, winging-it and synthesising? In what ways will expertise shift around? How might a routinised, habitual use of AI systems reassemble what thinking and feeling are; the relationships between language and the non/unconscious? In this “textpocalypse”, “where machine-written language becomes the norm and human-written prose the exception” (Kirschenbaum, 2023), might affect be re-evaluated as the mortar of a scholarly habitus?[i] What sort of affect? Hayles (2023) poses some brilliant and exciting possibilities for AI’s decentering of human exceptionalism and the smudging of boundaries between machines, cognition and affect[ii]. Prompts, for example, are not only affectively laden for Hayles, they can tell us about machine sensitivity to power dynamics between the human prompter and the AI responder: AI has the capabilities to infer attitudes and affect from language. The latter, a capacity affected by neuro-diversity, opens up all sorts of possibilities for AI as a crip prosthetic and affordance. Coming back to how disciplinary hierarchies are presently stacked, can you almost imagine a future in which the low-carbon skills of ponderous reading and writing, nurtured by our economically failing, low-value disciplines, become so rare as to be prized and sought after? What an ironic temporal drag that would be. Closer to home, as I write under pressure from care responsibilities and relentless bean-counting, I can’t help wondering, what could have been worse – for you and me, but not the editors – than missing the extended-extended timeline for submitting this article? Getting it in on time?

Regenerate Response

With studious attention, a white man assembles an elaborate combover. His “blank expressionlessness come[s] off at first as comic because he does not appear to get the joke that his idealizing action is a useless fantasy” (Berlant, 2017: 306). The scene from American Hustle, is Berlant’s object for deciphering humourlessness in the slippy surfaces between ordinary nakedness and the dissimulation of political orders in the late 1970s (the American Dream). Humourlessness, caught up in fantasies of sovereignty, teeters on the edge of exposing the thousand small nonsenses of everyday fakery in the intimate public. The purpose? To combovervulnerability:

All the while the white man’s face is pure gravitas, utterly serious and focused. He is at one with his ambition, honed in on his action. Behind him the room’s ornate curtains and furniture look like faded conceptions of what royalty would enjoy in its ordinary life…The atmosphere, in other words, suggests a space where one tries on sovereignty for size (ibid.: 306)

Instantly familiar. The imagery is scalable to many academic and political settings. I am in May 2020 at the socially distanced press conference of Dominic Cummings, Chief Advisor to the Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson[iii]. Hosted in the Downing Street rose garden, the conference followed media investigations showing Cummings had broken the coronavirus lockdown, driving 260 miles to stay in a cottage on his parents’ estate. There were 46,687 deaths involving Covid-19 between 1 March and 31 May 2020 (Office for National Statistics, 2020). We were not allowed to be with loved ones, even when they were dying. Of the two-hundred health care workers who had died from Covid, 61% were from “ethnic minority” populations (Marsh and McIntyre, 2020).

In a string of excessively elaborate stories, Cummings did not come close to apologising. Or even blushing. It is the contrived humourless of the performance, within the broader clowning and chaos of Boris Johnson’s ministry, that fastens Cummings’s press conference monologue to the comic and farcical. Subsequently, Johnson would resign as an MP following an inquiry into “Partygate”; several gatherings flouting lockdown measures by Conversative ministers and staffs. We were told that Johnson was an innocent victim of his birthday party. He was “ambushed by cake” (Conor Burns, MP). Conservative ministers seemed to believe we were all having a drink together after work, with the fuss about politicians’ gatherings, “you would think there were pole dancers” (Michael Fabricant, MP).

During his lockdown forays, there were public sightings of Cummings and his wife and child in public spaces. For each alleged sighting, Cummings tapped into the telegenic plotline of Euro storying. Each denouement offering a satisfying tying up of a story’s beginning and middle. One tale was of a 60-mile roundtrip to a beauty spot, Barnard Castle. Cummings said the drive was to test if his eyesight was good enough to make the return journey to London. The eye-test coincided with his wife’s birthday. The day after the press conference, the company Brewdog issued a limited-edition beer, “Barnard Castle Eye Test IPA”, with profits funding its hand sanitisers, donated to the National Health Service and health care charities.

Leaning into paralanguage is a must when propping up delusions of sovereignty with humourlessness. In this, the Cummings press conference was verbose. A shiny-headed, white, middle-aged man sitting behind a table, a spray of pink-red roses over his left shoulder (“Behind him the room’s ornate curtains and furniture look like faded conceptions of what royalty would enjoy in its ordinary life”). White-shirt, rolled-up sleeves. The timeless jug and glass of water. An A4 sheaf of notes, read verbatim in monotone; regular purposeful eye-contact, a pared-down body language. The sense of absolute entitlement to our complete, undivided attention. Tightly circumscribed comportment is important in allowing the full bloom of visual and narrative melodrama. What matters when traditional infrastructures and national fantasies are withering is the capacity and skillset to archive imperilled authority into a conventional format. It is a know-how imbibed from riding the slipstreams of tacit cultural knowledge. And if you don’t have the nous, you can now more easily plagiarise. It is the latter we find deeply intolerable: the ability to perform styles, genres and high-level narratology, that without the accidents of privilege, are not our organic property.

Lauren Berlant invariably came up with ingenious ways to circle and mark for attention vulnerability in their own writing and institutional life. This feels like a good moment to do the same. What is behind academics’ panicky outrage at machine writing, particularly from those who seem to be skipping over the endurance test and degradations of scholarly apprenticeship? This feels less about integrity, the loss of modern Northern fantasies of writing as our richly textured individuality. Or even the Pascalian distinction between quick-witted cleverness and the deep, slow growing ethical and spiritual knowing that is wisdom. I suspect that underneath our contempt is a fearful, curled-up fragility. Fear of what cracking open the drag closet of mastery might expose. Afterall, “We are all combover subjects” (Berlant, 2017: 308).

References

Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Anderson, B., Awal, A., Cockayne, D., Greenhough, B., Linz, J., Mazumdar, A. et al. (2023) ‘Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms’, The Geographical Journal, 189: 143–160. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12493

Anderson, J. and Christen, K. (2019) ‘Decolonizing Attribution’, Journal of Radical Librarianship, 5: 113-52.

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Notes

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[i] As Clough and co-authors (2007) pointed out several years ago, far from rendering traditional measures of value obsolete, affectivity can do more than reflect value, acting as a generative agent of it.

[ii] Thank you to Carolyn Pedwell for gently suggesting this part of my analysis might benefit from reading N. Katherine Hayles.

[iii] For more context on the political circumstances of the Cummings’ press conference, its broader deviations from traditional executive structures and its comedic layers, see Patrick Dunleavy (2020). During the final stages of completing this article, the UK’s Covid 19 Public Inquiry had begun publishing its evidence. The farcical nature of government at this time feels rather underplayed in my analysis. For more details of the inquiry see https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/

Yasmin Gunaratnam is a sociologist interested in how different types of intimate politics are produced, lived with and remade and how these processes create new forms of local and global inclusion and dispossession. Yasmin is also a yoga teacher, exploring liberatory and embodied pedagogies. Her publications include Researching Race and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power (2003, Sage), Death and the Migrant (2013, Bloomsbury Academic) and the co-authored book Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies (2017, Manchester University Press).She tweets @YasminGun

Email: Yasmin.Gunaratnam@kcl.ac.uk

This article is part of a special section on ‘Lauren Berlant and Media Theory’, edited by Carolyn Pedwell and Simon Dawes, introduced by Carolyn Pedwell, and featuring articles by Ben Anderson, Ali Azhar & Megan Boler, Lisa Blackman, Sarah Cefai, Angharad Closs Stephens, Chole Turner & Rebecca Coleman, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Chris Ingraham, Henrike Kohpeiß, Susanna Paasonen & Vilja Jaaksi & Anu Koivunen & Kaarina Nikunen & Karoliina Talvitie-Lamberg & Annamari Vänskä, and Greg Seigworth & Rebecca Coleman.

A key detail about Lauren Berlant and pronouns: Laurent’s estate provided a brief statement on this, which we quote here: “Lauren’s pronoun practice was mixed – knowingly, we trust. Faced with queries as to ‘which’ pronoun Lauren used and ‘which’ should now be used, the position of Lauren’s estate (Ian Horswill, executor; Laurie Shannon, literary executor) is that Lauren’s pronoun(s) can best be described as ‘she/they’. ‘She/they’ captures the actual scope of Lauren’s pronoun archive, and it honors Lauren’s signature commitment to multivalence and complexity. It also leaves thinkers free to adopt either pronoun, or both of them, as seems most fitting in their own writing about her/them”.