For the official version of record, see here:

Azhar, A., & Boler, M. (2023). Cruel, Convenient, and Intimate Publics: Berlant’s Lessons for Loneliness and Digital Media Commons. Media Theory, 7(2), 353–372. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/573

Cruel, Convenient, and Intimate Publics: Berlant’s Lessons for Loneliness and Digital Media Commons

ALI AZHAR

MEGAN BOLER

University of Toronto, CANADA

Abstract

Lauren Berlant’s contributions chart innovative conceptual frameworks to help us understand how affect and emotion, desires and hopes traverse the public and private realms. However, rather surprisingly, Berlant’s work does not engage directly with explorations of digital culture and its effects, nor has it been used extensively in the analysis of digital culture. We begin by updating Berlant’s descriptions of how we think about the contemporary culture of ‘crises’ (2011), drawing on recent documentations to illustrate the interconnected phenomena of “epidemics of loneliness” and isolation in the face of uncertainties of the historical present. To address those gaps, we then explore how cruel optimism and intimate publics have been taken up in studies of digital and social media. We will conclude by addressing how these concepts, as well as Berlant’s most recent work on the inconvenience of others, can best be engaged to help navigate and theorize digital culture. Finally, we take up their 2022 work to explore the crises of polarization as a manifestation of loneliness, through the lens of inconvenience. In conclusion, we will suggest how Berlant’s concepts provide valuable insight for further studies of digital culture.

Keywords

Lauren Berlant, loneliness, inconvenience, intimate publics, cruel optimism

1. Introduction

Loneliness, uncertainty, polarization, and crisis: few will disagree that these intersecting conditions increasingly constitute the new ‘normal’. Indeed, loneliness has come into the headlines over the past year: an epidemic, decreed across the world. Most can readily list factors contributing to the loneliness crisis, such as the Covid pandemic, the increasing use of digital mediums that decrease face-to-face contact with one another; the erosion of civic and public spaces of gathering, connection, and political and social discussions. The decrease in such networks – already in decline – was of course exacerbated by the pandemic. And while on occasion questions of emotion might come into the news as a psychology fluff-piece, over the past months, headlines announce the epidemic of loneliness across national contexts including Japan, the US and the UK. In his January 2023 Atlantic article, ‘How We Learned to Be Lonely’, Arthur Brooks provides one of the early full-length pieces on the new studies: “emerging evidence suggests that we are in the midst of a long-term crisis of habitual loneliness”.  In April 2023, writing in the New Internationalist, Husna Ara notes that “[t]he world began to notice something was awry when ‘ministries of loneliness’ cropped up in Japan and the United Kingdom following the Covid-19 pandemic”. In May 2023, the US Surgeon General declared loneliness the “new public health epidemic”, and the topic has remained in headlines since. At the same time, Japan reported its updated official counts of the “loneliness crisis”: “nearly 1.5 million social loners” from a survey of people ages 10-69. Apparently, however, the phenomenon had already been well-recognized in Japan, where – since the 1990s – there is widespread use of the concept of “hikimomori”, or shut ins, a phenomenon in Japanese culture dating back to Japan’s 1990s economic recession.

What is the ‘crisis’ of the ordinary that animates our contemporary times which generates affects of loneliness and disillusionment? Although Lauren Berlant’s work doesn’t directly address loneliness, they argue that a ‘crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming” (2011: 10). In their most recent work, On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022), Berlant writes “from the multiple crises of the present in 2020”, that hastily generates multiples of the “we”. There is the COVID-19 pandemic that asked for a collectively experienced fantasy of democracy with phrases like “We are in this together!” Then, there is the “we” that “arises in contexts of structurally induced suffering-toward-death from anti-Black police torture and murder, food insecurity, medical bankruptcy, drug-price inflation, the widening militarization of state tools for control and domination, the racist carceral habit and so on” (114). For Berlant, this “we” is always a projection of a vision for a collectively inhabited experience which may well be a “heuristic coupled with a desire”. Rather than thinking of “we” as a noun, Berlant pushes us to think of “we” as a verb, where transitional infrastructures unravel, release and unbind affectively bound energies that reside in normative life-worlds.

How and when does the production of this “we” help us think about the predicament of loneliness? How and when do digital cultures provide a “commons” as a work-in-progress, a placeholder to work out our affective investments and “build affective structures that admit the work of desire and the work of ambivalence as the tactics of commoning” (116)? From within these tensions, paradoxical relations and contradictions of modern life, Berlant’s work provides a refracted lens to explore the diverse modalities of digital commons.

Although not directly addressing the particular phenomenon of loneliness, arguably the core of Berlant’s work is a question of the bridging of the individual and the social, personal and political, intimate and public. Loneliness might be understood as the negative of sociality, a lack of being in relation. If loneliness is understood as causing one to recede into enclosures, to be non-receptive to objects (which in Berlant’s terminology would mean things, people, fantasy or clusters of promises and attachments), then by contrast the drive for receptivity, openness, and inconvenience could be termed a desire for the political. Berlant describes desire as that which moves one out in the world seeking environments and situations of love, reciprocity, belonging. Desire moves the subject from “sensual autonomy to a relation with the world” (2012: 19; see also Berlant et al, 2022). Loneliness is countered, in part, by the desire for the political.

For Berlant, desire can be recognized as a political force, recontextualizing individualized (and therein often pathologized) experience in its broader socio-political context. In its “desublimated, freed, or rerouted” forms, desire has the power to upend “unjust conventional intimacies and entire societies” and to have socially transformative consequences” (47). Berlant’s analyses of the aesthetics of desire in films and literature reveal how it is shaped and produced within socio-cultural and political and economic contexts and how the aesthetics of desire engenders paradoxical relations. Desire is predicated as “a primary relay to individuated social identity of coupling, family, reproduction, and other sites of personal history”, while also being that which puts people in comedic situations beyond their control as it conjoins diverse lives. Thus desire is that which brings one out into the world, however it is also a measure of difference and distance. It recontours the distinction between the private and the public, and in reaching for scenes of fulfillment it encounters obstacles and conventions of “power and value” (13).

Yet, as we articulate further in the section that follows: if there is a reach out from the private to the public for desire and its fulfillment, there is a corresponding relation of how the public sphere profoundly structures the institutions and conventions of intimacy. For example, in their edited collection, Compassion (2014), Berlant articulates how conservative politics rendered the individual, local or private spheres as the site for compassion “to ameliorate the suffering that used to be addressed by the state” (3). Their work repositions compassion as “a social and aesthetic technology of belonging” rife with the contradictions of the responsibilities entailed in the witnessing and consumption of scenes of suffering (see also Pedwell, 2014). Members of society, Berlant argues, “witness suffering not just in concretely local spaces but in the elsewheres brought home and made intimate by sensationalist media” where one is asked to feel compassionately even while being entertained (2014: 5).

To explore these questions further, in section 2 we discuss how digital media scholars have used the formulation of an intimate public sphere as an “affect of feeling political together” (Berlant, 2011: 224) where the “inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness” (Berlant, 2008: 281). In section 3, we then discuss the desire for the political and ambient citizenship as the performance of belonging and solidarity, and how digital media scholars situate cruel optimism in terms of digital forms of intimacy and contemporary digital media crises of misinformation. Finally, building on the strains of optimism found in Berlant’s work on inconvenience, we conclude the essay with a discussion on how inconvenience, both structural and everyday, provides a means to challenge polarization and rethink the possibilities of being-in-relation, encountering blockages, being proximate in new ways to the scene of the crisis, and the possibility of infrastructures that rethink the forms and genres of digital encounters.

II Intimate publics

Of all of Berlant’s work, the concept of intimate publics has been utilized most extensively to explore digital cultures. In this section, we articulate Berlant’s formulation of the intimate public to provide a genealogy of how politics was relegated to the private sphere. We highlight how digital media scholars have used these conceptualisations to study novel forms of community online and the contradictions these utopic and optimistic forms of intimacy encounter.

The concept of an intimate public sphere permeates Berlant’s work, from their earliest book The Queen of America Goes to Washington City to their posthumous book On the Inconvenience of Other People. In The Female Complaint (2008), Berlant illustrates the intimate public sphere as a mediatised linkage of producers, viewers and readers (172), bound together by a cluster of promises, attachments and affective registers, through their analysis of early twentieth century archives of women’s culture in America. An intimate public functions as a site of networked mediation between the public and the private sphere. As she demonstrates in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, (1997) the Reagan era of the 1980s in the U.S. systematically privatized politics. Relegating politics to intimate spheres such as the family, this mode of privatization reinforced iconic model citizenship, the American Dream, and the nation as “utopian horizon[s] of political aspiration” (2). By collapsing the public into the intimate public spheres, conservative politics sought to turn the nation into a privatized state of feeling, sanitized from critical discussions of economic, race, gender, class, sexuality and other counterhegemonic concerns.

Within the ideology and institutions of the intimate public sphere, Berlant argues, genre functions as “an aesthetic structure of affective expectation” (2008: 4) that models how affect becomes “conventional”. For example, a love plot can take on a life of its own and provide avenues for reconciliation, proximity, and resolution. These aesthetic structures work with other genres such as therapeutic self-help, psychotherapy, or memorabilia which in turn helps us retain continuity and proximity to the fantasy of a good life, providing simplified moral clarities and “a genericising dialectic of women’s cultural narrative as a whole” (181).

Scholarship that utilizes Berlant’s framework to describe intimacy within digital spaces addresses distinctions between the public and the private spheres. For example, Shaka McGlotten (2013) adapts Berlant’s concept of intimate publics to describe virtual public spheres. They outline virtual intimacies as contacts made possible by digital and networked means, where intimacy is “a vast assemblage of ideologies, institutional sites, and diverse set of material and semiotic practices that exert normative pressures on large and small bodies, lives, and worlds” (1). The edited collection Mediated Intimacies (Andreassen, et al., 2017) draws centrally on Berlant’s scholarship to theorize the relationship of intimate publics with social media. This collection of articles describes how intimacy is mediated through the “active process of doing and becoming, in and through media technologies” (2). In their 2017 publication, Kristian Moller and Michael Petersen describe home as a site for intimate belonging that is “technologically enhanced as well as technologically disrupted” (Moller & Petersen, 2017: 212).

Rikke Andreassen (2017) describes the intimate public of a social media group that connects “donor families”, and the new kinds of intimacy and promise for belongings that emerge from these connections. She utilizes the term “intimate public” to designate the blurring of the public and private spheres on social media sites which can be perceived as public, while the experience of using it feels like a private network. Adrienne Evans and Sarah Riley (2017) engage intimate publics to examine post-feminist sensibility and normative desires of traditional gender roles depicted in the images and texts of a media platform called TubeCrush, where people post and share unsolicited photos of “guy candy”. Catherine McDermott (2018) utilizes Berlant’s description of an impasse, where “one keeps moving, but one moves paradoxically, in the same space (Berlant, 2011: 199)”, to analyze post-feminist social media self-help and DIY videos. In “Hashtag feminism” (2018), Gina Chen, Paromita Pain, and Briana Barner describe the intimate public created around hashtags as a form of political mobilization on social media emphasizing the fleeting nature of these collectivities, their potential to form alliances over geographies and to foster change as opposed to what they describe as ‘slacktivism’ or armchair activism. Such analyses showcase how Berlant’s work enables a critique of the often contradictory promises and impulses that bind digital media collectivities.

These examples describe the tensions central to Berlant’s analyses, specifically how novel and intimate forms of belonging emerge while also critiquing the contradictions that arise when the public sphere relegates politics to spheres of intimacy. These contradictions are central to the modes of loneliness that concern us, tensions that are also central to waning optimism surrounding digital media and its growing role in (dis)information, polarization and antagonism. As much as digital might be a balm for loneliness, so might it be a cause.

III. Cruel optimism and the unfulfilled promises of digital connection

Berlant’s concepts of ‘ambient citizenship’ and the ‘desire for the political’ provide valuable conceptual maps for understanding networked spaces. In their chapter in Cruel Optimism (2011), titled ‘The Desire for the Political’, Berlant discusses the interplay between the political intensities and performative aesthetic distortions of ambient citizenship by reading alongside activist art and films. They articulate how people multiply idioms to inhabit the desire for the political, and belonging, in proximity to normative and contemporary modes of politics. The chapter begins with George W. Bush’s desire to skirt the “noise” of the filter in reaching his audience without any filter in an immediacy that would allow a seamless affective circuit. However, as Timothy Barker (2021) observed in his article on Michel Serres, the white noise of the filter cannot be separated from the message. In this chapter, Berlant discusses how artists, citizens and digital inhabitants repurpose and unravel, for example, image and affect, associations, talk back to security cameras and upturn the predominant hegemony of the melodramatic mode. They offer means of reworking the colors of national symbolism, and flattening the tonalities of the present: a “deflationary aesthetic” that “stretches out the space between cause and effect, stimulus and response” (Berlant, 2011: 250).

Ambient citizenship, then, involves a commitment to the present activity of the senses, where the work of citizenship is a “dense sensual activity of performative belonging to the now in which potentiality is affirmed” (261). Like ambient sound, it measures the elastic proximity of people in a collective moment moving closer and away from each other, while being in a sense isolated castaways on an island engaged in getting on with things, in the flattened present, leaving dramatic expressivity for later (257). Berlant’s project of Cruel Optimism is a theorization of the historical present as it is first perceived, affectively, before it takes the orchestration of an event or finds its genre (4). The temporality that Berlant charts in this work is a tracking of the waning of optimism as it relates to the “good life” genres of “upward mobility, reliable intimacy, and political satisfaction that has graced liberal political/economic worlds since the end of the Second World War” (10). They look at depictions of the stretched-out present as figured in aesthetic worlds configured in archives of film, art and literature, and describe the “impasses in zones of intimacy”, structures lived in the ordinariness of daily lives, “that hold out the often cruel promise of reciprocity and belonging to the people who seek them – who need them – in scenes of labor, of love, and of the political” (21).

Digital media as a scene for political engagement entails a dissonance, a difference “between politics as a scene of antagonism and the political as that which magnetises a desire for intimacy, sociality, affective solidarity, and happiness” (252). It is an arena, where while political demonstrations remain exceptional, by clicking on a hyperlink, posting, liking, it continues the old model of “citizenship as an event of circulating opinion”, from the ongoing demand of one crisis to the next (261). The neoliberal present, Berlant argues, is a space of transition between historically animating and sustaining fantasies that seem to be unravelling, a shift that has its own intensities. It confers a historical consciousness on its subjects where “recent pasts and near futures blend into a stretched-out time that people move around in to collect evidence and a non-sovereign footing” (261). Berlant invokes a lateral politics which feels at the seams of the present, engages in loose solidarity and reorganizes the world from within the scene that has not quite taken on the firm footing of an event. The desire for the political animates a coming together again, a coming together which requires sentience and focus to develop for an affective consonance amidst agonism and debate (260). The optimistic mode reshapes the white noise that contours the sense of an affective immediacy, fracturing the sustaining attachments and fantasies, in a politics without preconceived clarity and ends. However, Berlant remains wary that an absorption in the present moment may merely reinforce the neoliberal orchestration of emotions, privileging a sense of belonging in relation to “the hard questions of distributing resources, risk and vulnerability in the polis”. How might ambient citizenship reshape the performance of belonging and solidarity, idioms of the political, and provide new motors for fantasies that rupture those that already don’t seem to be working?

‘Cruel optimism’ offers an apt framework for conceptualizing and understanding the ways in which the promises of mediated connection simultaneously become obstacles to our flourishing. “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project” (2). Cruelty is a factor “only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (2). Where once digital utopias were envisioned, now it is all too easy to witness the voracious and cancerous digital spaces of information and disinformation. It is increasingly felt that the promises of the digital world may be failing to resolve loneliness and uncertainty, and further may parasitically and exponentially increase manifestations and experiences of loneliness and uncertainty. The hyper-polarization engendered by social media reflects the pernicious twists of digital culture’s cruel optimism: in seeking connection and certainty online, we are as likely to encounter uncertainty and fear as we are love and hope. Nonetheless these mediated spaces simultaneously serve as sites of connection, positive activism and social movements, as freely accessible sources and spaces of communication. What can be learnt from depictions of temporalities of crises mediated and communicated as they are through our media worlds? How might we become attuned to the pernicious promises that hold intimate publics on social media in fray, as the forms of these encounters remain foreclosed in the current forms and circulation of affect that holds lifeworlds? To derive structural historical relations from “patterns of affective response” (16) through digital media might seem unlikely. Yet without question there are countless online spaces that hold and magnetize intimate publics around objects of desire or clusters of promises and attachments, despite accompanying cruelties.

There is surprisingly limited scholarship that takes up cruel optimism to address digital contexts in a robust way. While many essays and books addressing digital media cultures and politics mention the concept of cruel optimism in passing, few focus on how cruel optimism might help us to understand foundational aspects of our relationships with digital media. Of those that do engage the concept deeply, a significant number address male desire and sexualities in transnational contexts. Jamie Hakim (2018) studied the phenomenon of men posting their body-work online and the rise of the spornosexual: “a portmanteau of sports star and porn star” (Hakim, 2018: 233). Both Tingting Liu et al. (2022) and Thomas Whyke et al. (2023) describe the cruel optimism of digital romance amongst South China’s rural workers, and how these promises encountered obstacles, turned out to be problematic and failed to transcend social hierarchies and heteronormative controls. Shuaishuai Wang and Oscar Zhou (2022) analyzed the emergent gay visibility on social media platforms and their algorithms. Miao Li (2023) studies “peiwans” or companions in the gig economy of China’s e-sports industry, which promises employment and a way out of structural relations in late capitalist and global neoliberal practices. Taken together these articles provide insight into transnational relationships of cruel optimism made visible through thwarted desires in contexts of neoliberal precarity and austerity. They illustrate why, for Berlant (2011), cruel optimism “gives a name to a personal and collective kind of relation and sets its elaboration in a historical moment that is as transnational as the circulation of capital, state liberalism, and the heterofamilial, upwardly mobile good-life fantasy have become” (11).

One of the few essays to address the political contexts, as distinct from digital cultural contexts, is Jason Young’s (2021) essay which articulates disinformation as the weaponization of cruel optimism. Young argues that the affective registers of cruel optimism fit neatly with social media’s promises, and that digital culture plays a key role in producing the radical loss of belonging and community – and, we would add, subsequent loneliness – that characterizes contemporary modernity. He is especially concerned with how our “loss of affective belonging has driven us to social media and made us susceptible to misinformation” (2). As we “shift our focus from lived realities to emotional registers”, we “invest ourselves in anything that promises us resilience or community” (3). He details how misinformation “acts as a constantly proliferating source of new promises to which we can (cruelly and optimistically) attach ourselves. Even when information turns out to be false, we maintain faith in the larger cluster of promises and, counterintuitively, may become more dedicated to the fantasy precisely because we have endured the setback of being lied to on occasion” (3). The intermittent reward system of misinformation serves as a Pavlovian addiction. We are not merely “vulnerable to misinformation”, but we may readily “crave it as an easy and constant source of ‘compensation for their profound, collective, material, and phantasmic loss’ (Berlant, 2011: 222) of living the good life. It is better to receive a lie that confirms your desires, than a truth that reminds you of the crisis in which you live your life” (Young, 2021: 3). Returning us back to questions of affect, Young critiques the extent to which the “broader misinformation studies agenda remains largely controlled by epistemic questions of truth or facticity” (2), thereby overlooking the extensive role affect and emotion play in cultures of misinformation. Young’s essay urges us to attend to the complexity of our desires, and deepen our understanding of the affective tensions that operate cruel optimism.

The interconnection of intimate publics and cruel optimism describes the double-edged sword of digital spaces: desires for belonging and connection draw us toward digital intimate publics. Digital life is aptly described as a range of intimacies and continuums of connections and disconnections, through which some gain sustenance from others within intimate publics, others that link up like-minded communities near and far, and those which sustain through paranoid fantasies of conspiracies engendered by digital medium, often reinscribing polarized relations.

(In)Conclusion

In her renowned work Alone Together (2011), Sherry Turkle presented her analysis of fifteen years of ethnographic study of human interaction in networked spaces. Despite the optimism that infused her earlier work, by 2011 she concludes that the promises of digital connectivity have backfired: “Networked”, she argued, “we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone” (2011: 54). Communications felt “crammed into a medium that quickly communicates a state but is not well suited for opening a dialogue about complexity of feeling” (Turkle, 2011: 268).As public and civic spaces shrank with the growing reach of neoliberalism, hopes were pinned on social media as the public sphere saviour; political debate moved to the digital commons, initially sparked by desires to encounter difference and dialogue in meaningful ways. Despite a significant era of hopes regarding digital media and democracy, cruel optimism has come to aptly describe many such spaces today. In the context of dashed dreams of digital commons, arguably loneliness increasingly morphs into a larger political affect, finds its way into ‘convenient intimate publics’: filter bubbles and echo chambers, and the comforting familiarity of polarized community.

Berlant’s description of the quality of our everyday encounters describes this push-pull of everyday digital life: “most experiences in this register, though, are not relations in the robust sense of a drive toward a reciprocal intimacy. They involve the uptick from ordinary contact that is usually processed by conventions, which might have the heft of a microaggression or merely the force of a flicker. They can produce irritations but also kinds of longing – if they produce anything beyond the ding of encounter” (Berlant, 2022: 7).

And polarization reveals one modern modality of being alone together, a digital structuring of a political loneliness, as it were, distinct from the social forms that concern Turkle. An embedded affective dimension of communicative capitalism, such political loneliness serves state interests.

Cruel optimism in digital contexts is structured in part by communicative capitalism (Dean, 2005). Networked communications “heralded as central to democracy” promised a “richer variety in modes of living and practices of freedom” but instead “undermine political opportunity and efficacy” (2005: 55). This ‘white noise’ of social media fails to serve democratic interests, instead serving the economic interests of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019). As Wendy Chun aptly enjoins, “[t]he goal before us is to move the big data drama away from preemption and predictable yet rampant consumption toward political contestation and sustainable habitation” (2021: 171).

Berlant’s insistence on genre and aesthetics draws us to recognize a further element structuring the phenomenon of polarization and political loneliness. Central to polarization is the genre of melodrama, recognizable as the ressentiment of the digital age: attachment to victimhood, the sense of threat to partisan identity and the comforts of moral certitude posed by villainous outsiders (Boler et al., forthcoming). Inoculated by the truncated nature of social media and its frequent lack of nuance in the context of political debate, shaped by the circulatory logics of social mediatization, melodrama serves to normatively structure political affects and specifically political loneliness within networked spaces. Structuring interests of neoliberalism become visible, as seen for example with Cambridge Analytica and the targeted manipulation of users’ emotions to gain votes (Boler and Davis, 2020). Indeed, this dramatized polarization is increasingly a go-to trick produced through social media of political campaigns (Kleinfeld, 2023).

It is increasingly difficult to extract ourselves from this vicious circle: seeking a digital commons and connection via networks, yet feeling increasingly alone as these convenient yet polarized digital enclosures backfire. Intimately linked to the logics of social media platforms, melodrama animates our engagement through a modern grammar of moral certainty. Comforting certitude, alongside the convenient intimate publics of familiar others in one’s polarized ‘commons’, produced through a clear script, familiar and polarized stories engendering ready oppositions. Just as communicative capitalism gives us a grammar for speaking about political hopes thwarted and twisted in networked space, so does understanding that social media platforms’ logics rely centrally on melodrama permit us insight into networked genres. Melodrama effectively organizes political loneliness and the desire for political connection into oppositional scripts. Polarization is a quick fix, sating the need for familiar others, a sense of in-group community, but in the quick end-run around inconvenience it often bypasses the messy dissensus.

Yet Berlant also shows us as well the malleability of genre and the power of aesthetics as a force that can explode structures of feeling and challenge the force of networked melodrama. “Genres”, she writes, “provide an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold, whether that thing is in life or in art” (2011: 6). More than rules and internal logic, genre can also invite new structures of feeling and desire.

In this context, how might Berlant’s concept of inconvenience disrupt the familiar grooves and challenge the reductive force of digital political melodrama? Inconvenience, Berlant describes, is the “affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation” (2022: 1) built into our everyday encounters and endemic in our attachments to political objects and desires. Inconvenience, according to Berlant, can produce renewing, transitional infrastructures of living and acting in the commons. “My proposal in this book”, they write, “is that there is an inconvenience drive – a drive to keep taking in and living with objects” (6).

Berlant specifically addresses how inconvenience need not be experienced as melodrama:

To say that people are inconvenient, that they have to be dealt with, and that this affect is ordinary and profoundly life-shaping in how it generates styles of processing others and life, is not always to point to dramas that feel like melodrama. Inconvenience in this sense is more like attachment: a description of a relation so foundational to coexistence that it’s easy to think of it as the whatever of living together and not a constantly pulsing captivation of response. Attachment, one might say, is what draws you out into the world; inconvenience is the adjustment from taking things in (Berlant, 2022: 6).

Berlant’s strategy in privileging the pedagogical and receptive modes of being in relation involves “reading with other aesthetic events for alternate ways of being inconvenient and living with inconvenience” (11). For example, “in the popular resistance to austerity regimes and anti-Black and patriarchal capitalism” (115), familiar associations, continuity and analogies are decoupled to unbind affect that induces and sustains mutations. As Berlant puts it: “If there is an inconvenience drive, can consciousness of it become a resource for building solidarity and alliance across ambivalence rather than appearing mainly as the negative sandpaper of sociality?” (8). Similarly concerned with the question of a “new collective politics”, Wendy Chun asks: “How can we take advantage of and play with and within the rich collaborative manufacture of the self, and how can we reach others through the correlations that have been laid before us?” (Chun, 2021: 171).

To study inconvenience online would be to attend to the constant inundations of stimulation that require being processed. Here, people and events are encountered as abstractions – as kinds of things, which through repetition of abrasive contact can produce sensations ranging from numbed relations to the enactment of massive rage (Berlant, 2022: 6). Yet, the disturbance of attention and boundaries that acknowledgement requires may be foundational to a sense of being in relation.

Friction, blockage as opposed to flow is given a positive valence in Berlant’s oeuvre, which is a pedagogy of unlearning, feeling out objects and their fields or atmospheres, shifting them, being inconvenienced. In avoiding inconvenience, we invite even greater and grander disconnection. Convenient choices readily become new forms of disconnection.        

Blockage is deemed to be a bad thing; flow is a good thing. But this insistence on x and its others has done tremendous damage to our conception of ourselves and the social, presuming that we know flow and ease when we feel them, solidarity when we proclaim it, care when it’s an intention, and who the embodied brutal enemy is, even though it is completely ordinary to be surprised that our affect was all wrong and a bad representative of our wish. Was the wish a bad idea, once our judgement about it was revealed to be only an expression of loneliness and drive? Or can we think differently about the encounter with the inconvenience of other people: that we might desire not only them or any objects but also the inconvenience (Berlant, 2022: 160)?

Our misguided choice of convenient connection reveals the power of loneliness: quick judgments and presumptions of what counts as easy solidarity, followed by the revelation that our affective compass has misled us, guided us into siloes likely to reinscribe further isolation and loneliness. On point, Chun similarly concludes that “[t]o act, we need to acknowledge our plurality. Our characters and plotlines change constantly because they are determined by the actions of others. As characters, we are never singular, but singular-plural – I am YOU” (Berlant, 2022: 171). The convenient choice disconnects us from the optimism of a deeper resonance. Berlant helps us understand loneliness in terms of being proximate to the sustaining objects and attractions of the good life, yet detached from them.

If desire is that which draws us out to be in relation with the world, what would it look like to direct these not to the convenience of chambers of familiarity, but instead to be inconvenienced, and to thwart loneliness in a much more radical sense? Inconvenience is a study of receptivity to the unloosening of objects that are at times unbearable. Yet, it is this very work that is productive not only in staying close to something that breaks you, but also to reformulate the very scene, to make it into “a breathable space of figuration”, to reform the inconvenient object that is already “partially incorporated” and needs to be countenanced, and to alter its infrastructure (Berlant, 2022: 169). We suggest that polarization can be challenged even in our studies of digital media, engaging inconvenience to re-imagine the divergent drives to feel connected on what terms and for whom, and for what purpose.

The distance that exists between the digital as a scene of antagonism and that of intimacy, connectivity and proximity, asks us to rethink the form and genre of the promises and attachments that magnetise our desires. The value of Berlant’s work has yet to be fully mined for its relevance to digital spaces. Cruel optimism, intimate publics, inconvenience provide valuable conceptual tools for unpacking the complicated connectings and loneliness of our cybernetic lives, the digital spaces that have captured and entangled us, both in encounters with ourselves and with others. Berlant’s mappings help us to see what is working, what is not yet defeated in the digital commons even if the possibilities are ephemeral, transient. It asks us to think of inconvenience as an affect and drive that privileges the hard work of being-in-relation, encountering blockages, knots and impasses, with the hope that objects can be unloosened, reconfigured and reconstituted. Given the immense present and future challenges posed by the growth of artificial intelligence, conspiracies, and misinformation, these concepts will likely prove indispensable.

References

Andreassen, R. (2017) ‘New kinships, new family formations and negotiations of intimacy via social media sites’, Journal of Gender Studies 26(3): 361-371.

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Ali Azhar is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Pedagogy at OISE/University of Toronto. His research focus is on the politics of writing. He does this work through research on the poetics of Divine Love in the Islamic tradition.

Email: ali.azhar.h@gmail.com

Dr. Megan Boler is a Professor in the Social Justice Education Department at OISE/University of Toronto. Her work explores the interconnections of affect and social media.

Email: megan.boler@utoronto.ca

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”.