For the official version of record, see here:
Seigworth, G. J., & Coleman, R. (2023). ‘There is No Direct Evidence of Anything’: Mediation in Lauren Berlant and Raymond Williams. Media Theory, 7(2), 171–190. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/582
‘There is No Direct Evidence of Anything’: Mediation in Lauren Berlant and Raymond Williams
GREGORY J. SEIGWORTH
Millersville University, USA
REBECCA COLEMAN
University of Bristol, UK
Abstract
In this essay, we track back and forth between Lauren Berlant’s and Raymond Williams’ work to assemble a purposefully compact genealogy of mediation that also pays attention to how mediation intersects with and often redraws many taken-for-granted understandings of affect, ideology, aesthetics and materialism. We explore how, for Berlant and Williams, mediation requires a suspension or dislodging of direct cause and effect relations in favour of an intuitive (and conjectural) analytics of the ongoing overdeterminations that circulate through and about any particular affective/historical conjuncture. Reckoning with mediation has a profound impact too on our practices of writing and theorising – as critical-creative impulses, drawn from the intertwining rhythms of experience/experiment, emerge from the changing yet precise situations of the ordinary day-to-day. We argue that such a conceptualisation of mediation offers a productive means for attuning to and transforming the capacities of intellectual work, media/digital culture, and everyday life from within the midst of a continua of transformation.
Keywords
mediation, affect, ideology, aesthetics, materialism
Mediation. Remediation. Immediation. Premediation. Transmedia. And more. Much has already been written, including in this very journal (see the special issue ‘Mediating Presents’, 2020), in the conceptual swirl transpiring in the vicinity of mediation across its various forms. With apologies to our contemporaries – Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000); Richard Grusin (2004; 2015); Scott Lash and Celia Lury (2005); Lisa Blackman (2012; 2014; 2019); Rey Chow (2012); Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (2012); Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark (2013); John Durham Peters (2015); Erin Manning, Anna Munster and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen (2019a; b); Brian Massumi (2019); Andrew Murphie (2019); Lone Bertlesen (2019); Caroline Bassett, Sarah Kember and Kate O’Riordan (2020); Anna Kornbluh (2021; 2024) and many others – who have devoted considerable attention (critical, speculative, and otherwise) to the concept of mediation in and through its innumerable iterations, entanglements, immersions, misdirections, and trajectories, we are going to trace out a highly compact genealogy of mediation here.
Quite purposefully, this essay trains its focus upon mediation as it comes to be an ever more foundational coordinate in the work of Lauren Berlant. In particular, we will closely attend to how Berlant imaginatively takes up and reinflects Raymond Williams’ exploration of mediation in his formulations of culture. In unfolding the ways that Berlant’s writing and theorising extends and illuminates Williams (and how Williams, in the same refracted light, gives us an enhanced understanding of Berlant’s critical practice and project/s), we do not mean to restrict – by way of our tidy genealogy – the multiple points of reference and spheres of influence that otherwise populate their writings, interviews, and talks with such delightful overabundance. Williams and Berlant were both voracious multi-disciplinary readers, complexly nuanced writers-thinkers, and deeply engaged public figures/speakers, historically and affectively attuned to theories, experiences, aesthetics, political struggle, bodily-comportments, and intuitions, alive with uncovering how sensibilities were always in-the-making and, then, how these sensibilities and sensations could give contour and visceral texture to emergent potentials and/or the most recalcitrant of impasses. Our approach to mediation – strung between Berlant and Williams – is intended to capture some of the resonances, overlaps, divergences, historical situatedness, and shared embrace of experimentation and heuristics that passes between them, and yet always beyond them too: onto those forms and unforms of mediation that are so fully aswim about us right now.
Without a doubt, the most direct path for squaring up to the significance of mediation requires us to come to terms with how Berlant and Williams reckoned with the ‘affect/ideology’ relation.[i] After all, if you double-check, the word ‘mediation’ appears quite fortuitously between the words ‘affect’ and ‘ideology’ in the first subheading of Berlant’s ‘Intuitionists’ chapter in Cruel Optimism (2011): ‘The Way We Live Now: Affect, Mediation, Ideology.’ Here Berlant matter-of-factly – albeit counterintuitively – claims that ‘affect theory is another phase in the history of ideology theory’ (53). Say what? In most commonly held narratives of affect theory very few have chosen to frame it as a next phase of ideology theory, instead usually seeing affect as operating through some version or another of what Lawrence Grossberg calls ‘mattering maps’ – which do not jibe well with ideology’s ‘maps of meaning’[ii] (2010: 316). But if traced back to what Berlant finds most compelling in Williams’ (1977) concept of structure of feeling and, then, all that arrives reconfigured in its wake (mediation, ideology, aesthetics, etc.), a perspective on theories of affect and media emerges that can be incredibly generative for analyses of our contemporary moment.
Indeed, turning to the necessity of feeling (for) infrastructure and of forging a sustainable imaginary in the ongoingness of mediation’s ‘meanwhile’, Berlant attunes, in her/their final book The Inconvenience of Other People (2022), to what must be loosened, not only in order to better navigate among the forcefields of cruel optimism but also to seek out (and/or invent) what might become a resource (as new genres) for transition or transformation amongst the forces and elements of the ‘residual’ and the ‘dominant’. In this sense, because of the specific pressures and limits of our contemporary conjuncture, Berlant cannot adopt Williams’ own historically situated preference for tracing along the cusp of livingness for what is edging into view and, hence, his politically-inflected tendency to feel a way forward through ‘the emergent’. Rather, Berlant focuses in their Inconvenience book on what has become sedimented (as much as sentimented), even as it remains otherwise dynamic. Although differently hemmed by the constraints and potential of their times, both Berlant and Williams, each in their own way, worked to finesse the intimate, material, and social relation of affect to ideology, to forge an ongoing and supple conciliation of aesthetics and materialism.
But in order to get this genealogical backstory properly underway, we will first look at Williams’ steadfast refusal to ever allow the aesthetic to be cleaved from the material, especially as this came to influence his privileging of mediation over reflection in theories of ideology. Grasping this will give fuller shape to how structures of feeling work to describe the imbrication of the aesthetic and the material through lived presence, or what we now study through theories of affect.
Aesthetics and other situations
The most difficult writing in his book Marxism and Literature (1977), Williams confides to the interviewers in his career-spanning collection of interviews Politics and Letters(1981: 341), was not the ‘Structures of Feeling’ chapter but, rather, the chapter entitled ‘Aesthetic and Other Situations’. In many ways, the chapter’s conclusion presented another of Williams’ continuing attempts to reverse course on what he saw as the growing spiritualization or de-materialization of the superstructure in relation to the economic base of society across much of the Marxist-inspired analyses of his time (in this case, the late 1970s). Instead, he wished to reconnect studies of writing and reading practices with experimental science, to see how ‘life rhythms’ and what he called ‘the deep material bond between language and the body’ must become a necessary part of any aesthetic account (1981: 340). Where some observed a clear split, Williams saw an ever-shifting continuum. Any discussion of aesthetics that cast it as a somehow magically abstract dimension or as a function somehow separate from material existence was thoroughly rejected by Williams. Williams stood firmly against the then Lacanian-Althusserian currents of structuralist determination, by asserting that an accounting of experience (as process and presence/as a living concept) could not become just another dreary one-way tale of how culture constituted concrete individuals as subjects through imaginary relationships to the real conditions of existence. Emphatically, Williams sought critical insights on the aesthetic as mediated through the physical, the material, the bodily.
Thus, at the end of his chapter ‘Aesthetics and Other Situations’, Williams argues that writing has aesthetic effects that are ‘quite physical: specific alterations of physical rhythms, physical organizations: experiences of quickening and slowing, of expansions and of intensification’ (1977: 156). If theorists and critics continued to too readily divvy-up the social field by opening a growing rift between the practical-material nature of its base and the presumably detached, quasi-autonomous aesthetic and ideological realm of its superstructure, the material-physical aspects of the aesthetic itself were only going to be further elided. As such, these perspectives, Williams said, could “not admit what is also evident: the dulling, the lulling, the chiming, the overbearing, which were also, in real terms, ‘aesthetic experiences’: aesthetic effects but also aesthetic intentions” (1977: 156). That is, aesthetics was not simply something that was to be divulged through effects (experience-past) or reflections of the economic base of society but also must be grasped as multi-directional and multi-dimensional (experience-present, experience-to-come) and as unendingly diffuse.
With his New Left interviewers questioning Williams about his version of aesthetics and, then, the relations between the natural sciences and Marxism, he admits to a further and perhaps rather unexpected ambition in this regard. In a remarkable passage, he says:
I tried to set up actual experiments of what happened to physical rhythms in certain reading contexts, but such was the atmosphere of specialization that the work was never done. I believe, however, that we have got to move toward active collaboration with the many scientists who are especially interested in the relations between language use and human physical organization. I have great respect for Lacan, but the totally uncritical way in which certain of his concepts of phases of language development have been lifted into a theoretical pediment of literary semiotics is absurd… There has been such justified suspicion on the left of the dominance of behaviorism in the experimental social sciences that there has been an over-accommodation to the claims of psychoanalysis and its various derived schools… What is needed is not a blending of concepts of literature with concepts from Lacan, but an introduction of literary practice to the quite different practice of experimental observation. That would be a materialist recovery (1981: 341).
What is significant here is both that Williams identifies the affective modulation induced by an aesthetic encounter and that the cultural theory he proposes is an experiment with how to engage with and give an account of plural and changing bodily rhythms. And there are a couple of adjacent political tasks that Williams also sets forth for aesthetics and aesthetic criticism in his Marxism and Literature (and work that comes after) that are worth re-visiting, especially now, within the too-often-free-floating presumptions about the digital space-times of our present conjuncture.
One is that Williams did not believe in adopting a universalizing mode of critique; values, intentions, responses, and the nature of the physical itself varied in ‘precise situations’ even if occurring within the same time-frame, and, needless to say, are highly susceptible to change and mutation across shorter and longer spans of history. He states this issue quite pointedly in his essay ‘The Problems of Materialism’. Here Williams proclaims that ‘the special character of materialism … is its rigorous openness to physical evidence. … [A] materialist enterprise defines and redefines its procedures, its findings, and its concepts, and in the course of this moves beyond one after another “materialism”’ (1980: 122). Thus, Williams warns us that there is never the convenience of “seeming to know in advance and, as a test of our political fidelity, the changing materialist content of materialism” (1980: 122). For Williams, any undertaking of socio-cultural analysis requires a thorough framing and configuring (often reconfiguring) of its formation of elements and forces, their relations to each other, and the emergent but also historically contoured totality through which these elements and forces continue to move (and/or have come to settle into some manner of routine, rhythm, residue, recurrence).
Never confined to any notion of an abstract aura radiating exclusively from the art world, Williams understands aesthetics’ bearing to be inextricably enmeshed in culture as a whole way of life: aesthetics as an integrally vibrant aspect – even if/when lulling, dulling, etc. – of the mediating inter-textures and values (ethico-aesthetics) of ordinary livingness. And as such, specificity always-always-always matters and, indeed, any contextually attuned ‘articulation of presence’ (1977: 135) must recognize how the very physical matter/material of aesthetics registers in our critical accountings: from “the possibility of discovering certain invariant combinations of elements” to “at times an intense and irreplaceable experience in which these fundamental elements of human process are directly stimulated, reinforced, or extended; at times, at a different extreme, an evasion of other immediate connections, an evacuation of the immediate situation, or a privileged indifference to the human process as a whole” (1977: 156). Williams was insistent that aesthetics (like materialism, one after another) bled up and through everything (as a whole) and every single thing (in particularity). He urged that we must pursue the aesthetic and the material in each and every scene (including, quite crucially, the scene of writing itself).
This ever-changing materialist content is marked by a subtle but significant critical-conceptual shift in the inflection that Williams would give to the aesthetic dimensions/implications of ‘structure of feeling’ across his later works. What began in The Long Revolution as a way of denoting the ‘immediately experiential and the generationally specific aspects of the artistic process’ (Milner, 2002: 94) has, by the time of Marxism and Literature and thereafter, come to no longer uncover the dominant or residual living-presences of a particular cultural period (that is, structure of feeling as an accomplished historical formation). Instead, Williams places an increasing stress upon what he calls the ‘emergent’ and ‘pre-emergent’ aspects of the cultural formation ‘hover[ing] at the edge of semantic availability’ (1977: 132); these are edges/pressures/tensions/constraints/tones that point beyond any mere subjective quality of experience and toward a complexly imbricated, necessarily more-than-human view of cultural and social change throughout one’s time.
Always located within and interested in a broader socio-political-material context, emergent and pre-emergent structures of feeling (understood as more in ‘solution’ than as ‘precipitate’) are, Williams would maintain, intimately enmeshed with the stakes of a coming-socialism, a socialism to which fidelity would likewise require a materialist understanding of the aesthetic. For instance, see his book The Year 2000 (1983) where Williams advocates for a ‘variable socialism – the making of many socialisms’ (1983: 198). Williams argued for both an infinitely multiplying, agile socialism and aesthetics: as unfixable as the physicality of experience, as historically mutable as any materialism. Williams would never lose sight of culture as a single indissoluble source of living or, by his own shorthand, culture as a whole way of life – ordinary, everyday, material and processual, attentive to the lived durations of history but never simply viewing these as inevitabilities extending into a pre-determined future but, rather, a future (or a set of futures) where ‘making common’ through the rhythms of experience and experimentation serve as the open-ended task of a socialist politics allied with the aesthetic (and other situations).
Mediation
If there is a site where Raymond Williams’ thought has been kept most alive and in something other than the suspended animation of cultural studies’ amber, it has been in contemporary studies of affect; it is here that his work has been most frequently, effectively, and creatively deployed (not just resuscitated butre-inflected and re-imagined). Williams’s insights have been utilized by many in affect theory: Melissa Gregg (2006), Sianne Ngai (2007), Heather Love (2007), Kathleen Stewart (2007), Jonathan Flatley (2008), Ben Anderson (2016), Ben Highmore (2016), José Muñoz (2020), Derek McCormack (2023) … to namecheck only a few. But more than anyone else, Berlant, in particular with Cruel Optimism and then On the Inconvenience of Other People, has brought Williams’ insights into present-day conversation. While Berlant explicitly takes up and extends his structures of feeling, we want to highlight how Williams’ orientation to aesthetics and materialism is similarly fundamental to Berlant’s own writing/critical-reading approach. Further, we examine how Williams’ attention to ‘mediation’ – hinted at above – offers perhaps the most compelling way to grasp how affect, for Berlant, is another phase in ideology critique.
In an interview that serves as the coda to the 2020 collection, Mapping the Affective Turn in Education, Berlant tells the editors:
The thing about affect is that there is no direct evidence of it: but there is no direct evidence of anything, as all processes require refraction in solidity-approximating forms. This forces us to think about mediation. As I argue in my forthcoming book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, ‘Mediation is not a stable thing but a way of seeing the unstable relations among dynamically related things’. It is in this sense that all formulations of mediations are heuristics. Things that hit one with force often put people in mind of the literal though, setting off a search for the source that ‘reduced’ them to encountering themselves or the world specifically. But of course, the hit itself is a mediation, a thing that communicates proximity, atmosphere, mood, and intensity. That is to say, impacts communicate affect, both the affect in the world one walks through and the affect one brings to and generates in situations (Berlant in Dernikos et al, 2020: 248).
Mediation for Berlant here becomes a means through which to conceive the force and potential effects of affect. That is, in seeking to understand the significance of affect and its implications in the living world, it is necessary to track relationality not through cause and effect but rather through mediation. Williams, in his chapter ‘From Reflection to Mediation’ in Marxism and Literature, says similarly that ‘all relations between different kinds of being and consciousness are inevitably mediated, and this process is not a separable agency – a “medium” – but intrinsic to the properties of the related kinds’ (1977: 98). If the underlying architecture of Williams’ theory-writings is fundamentally organized by the relation of precipitate and solution (and it is), then mediation marks the shifting state of elements (situations, objects, practices, impacts) that are perpetually resolving and dissolving at once: both/and (McCormack, 2023). It is all solidity-approximating forms and unstable processes.
For Williams, one of the problems was that too many well-meaning theorists inserted mediation into their critical conceptualizations as if it was to serve as a separator ‘between’ this particular something and another something else, or as a mediator between already separated elements. Further, ‘mediation’ was (wrongly) utilised to differentiate between a primary site of action or determination (see: ‘base’) and, then, relegate ‘a world of sensations’ or ‘practical consciousness’ to a more passively receptive and aesthetically-inclined, and, thus, ‘essentially secondary’ superstructure (Williams, 1977: 70). Hence, Williams argues, the
necessary result is the projection (alienation) of a whole body of activities which have to be isolated as the ‘realm of art and ideas’, as ‘aesthetics’, as ‘ideology’, or, less flatteringly, as ‘the superstructure’. None of these can then be grasped as they are: as real practices, elements of a whole material social process: not a realm or a world or a superstructure, but many and variable productive practices, with specific conditions and intentions. To fail to see this is not only to lose contact with the actuality of these practices … [but also risks] assuming in advance that only some of them are material (1977: 94).
Mediation, however, operates otherwise: as the continua of transformation in forms, shapes, patternings, assemblings (all manner of relations among forms) across our uneven and inequitably lived existences – moving ‘by and through’, ‘among’, etc. Mediation means never searching for the ultimate resting place of a particular effect or for the originary site of a cause but always carefully sifting through and among affective processes already aswim in the activity of an overdetermined coming-into-and-falling out of relation/formation/precipitate. Put simply, mediation is ‘the whole’ of a medium (i.e., an immersive, saturative solution) in motion: not a ‘separable agency’ but in and among the affective formations of elements in varying states of resolution and dissolution. For Williams, mediation is primarily concerned not with content but with form (shapes, habituations, patterns, rhythms, conventions, etc.) in particular and precise situations, and further concerned to admit ‘the aesthetic’ as an irreducible and impactful force of ongoing valuation, among other forces, in the composition or constitution of ‘the full social material process itself’ (1977: 155).
Lauren Berlant co-signs onto virtually all of this.
Prior to her/their explication of mediation in The Inconvenience of Other People, as we have noted, the word ‘mediation’ appears between the words ‘affect’ and ‘ideology’ in a chapter subtitle in Cruel Optimism. Quite literally, affect becomes the next phase in ideology theory by way of mediation: ‘the present is not at first an object but a mediated affect’ (2011: 4). And a few pages into her introduction to the book, Berlant writes that her thinking “emerges from a long engagement with Raymond Williams’ incitement to think about the present as a process of emergence. In the present from which I am writing about the present, conventions of reciprocity that ground how to live and imagine life are becoming undone in ways that force the gestures of ordinary improvisation within daily life into a greater explicitness affectively and aesthetically” (2011: 7). In a moment that then hints at the methodological ways that mediation will manoeuvre through her own analyses, Berlant argues that “[c]inema and other recording forms” are both archiving and tracking “what happens in the time that we inhabit before new forms”, just before this emergent sensibility (what Berlant will call our ‘crisis ordinariness’) gets refracted as proximately solidifying shapes and patterns (2011: 7). Aesthetic form, for Berlant, always stages a test-run of affect’s mediation as ideology. In fact, pointing ahead to Cruel Optimism from the conclusion of The Female Complaint, Berlant argues for the study of how “the kinetics of aesthetic form … [can] open up an analysis of the mechanisms that enable the reproduction of normativity not as a political program, but as a structure of feeling, and as an affect” (2008: 266).
Like Williams, Berlant much prefers to understand the livingness of ideology through the collectivity of structures of feeling and motions of affect-mediation rather than more staticky and one-to-one correspondence of ‘reflection’, in part because this de-prioritizes any hastily assumed cause-and-effect relation between base and superstructure while drawing no firm line between the material and the aesthetic. Mediation requires us to consider ideological/affective-phase shifts in the dense concatenation of their zigzagging determinations and potentials, along with all of their lullings and dullings and chimings. As Berlant emphasises, “[f]amously, Raymond Williams’ phrase ‘structure of feeling’ points to the affective residue of a collective experience that mediates being historical with conditions of potentiality” (2008: 266). This saturated sense of temporality and tempo – shifting laterally and, thus, available as much to the residual as the emergent, sifting then between certain genres, forms, norms that come into and fall out of dominance – is key to both Williams and Berlant, and to how they grasp political possibilities. If Williams understood ‘structures of feeling’ as best attuned to the emergent in its conceptualization (and he did), then ‘mediation’ is turned almost 180 degrees in the other direction: toward the recursive looping/refraining, and not only the feeding forward, of the residual and the dominant as infinitely fractured and fractious line(s) of continuity – as necessary components in the (writerly/theoretical) conveyance of some sliver of the totality-in-and-out-of-formation.
With mediation, Berlant wants to advance ideology critique through affect theory while rejecting any kind of privileging of the interiorization (of thought) or mirrored reflection/representation (of a separable outside world). Neither inside nor out, mediation does not follow the dictates of structure and agency and, thus, the traumas that can follow in their misalignment or disruption. Rather, mediation moves “toward explaining crisis-shaped subjectivity amid the ongoingness of adjudication, adaption, and improvisation” (Berlant, 2011: 54). This is why Berlant turns to gestures and genres, to forms and attachments as affective processes of subjectivation: slippery, magnetizing, impersonal, indeterminate, ambivalent. Mediation is the zone where, she says, “memory and the past emerge … in visceral presence distributed across scenes of epistemological and bodily activity” (2011: 52). Mediation is how overdetermination is lived by and through both specific bodies and a collective body, not just through conscious or reasoned activity (but, yes, those too).
Ordinary, ongoing, overdetermined
Berlant values what affect can bring to ideological theory because it prolongs the processual immersion in states of overdetermination without ever fully landing with a thud at some final effect(s), structurally-anointed cause, or outsized event-trauma. In the midst of the processual, the episodic, the lower case, often uncaptioned events of living – this is where Berlant operates. Her three resonant keywords – as refrained over and again throughout Cruel Optimism and On the Inconvenience of Other People – are ‘ordinary’, ‘ongoing’, and ‘overdetermined’. Berlant needs mediation alongside affect (and between affect and ideology) to stay with the inconvenience of feeling through how histories weigh on the present, shape futurity: the innumerable gravities and momentary buoyancies of our crisis ordinariness.
With The Inconvenience of Other People, there is, though, a notable swerve from the stuck-ness and impasses of the everyday (and of theory) as encountered in the previous Cruel Optimism. More palpably foregrounding mediation in this latest work, Berlant experiments with how a new explanatory genre – what she calls ‘our inconvenience drive’ – can be made generative, in exploring how to invent or to “attend to terms for transition” that “forge an imaginary for managing the meanwhile”, for “writing the long middle without drowning in it” (2022: 24).[iii] In the Inconvenience book, Berlant wishes to stick with the impasse or encounter and engage what could be set loose from within the space-times of its closely clustered relationality – to find ways “to be graceful and generous when things get awkward” (2022: 27). Instead of chasing after what lies along the ‘cusp of semantic availability’ (as Williams described ‘the emergent’ and pre-emergent in his chapter ‘Structures of Feeling’ [1977]), it is more a matter of finding/inventing the terms and genres for a ‘transitional infrastructure’. Berlant says that her method now is “to slow the object’s movements, to describe its internal dynamics, to shift how we recognize and consider its parts and galvanize their transformation” (2022: 13). Hence, Berlant’s notable turn to infrastructure and mediation is about a shift in focus that teases out ‘more of a relation of histories and not ontologies of cause and effect’ (2022: 11).
Berlant leans much more upon the conceptual/material affordances of mediation in this latest work then, because it also serves as the transitional infrastructure for shuttling traffic between affect theory and ideology theory. For Berlant, something essential has shifted not just ‘in theory’ but in the textures of lived experience by and through which both affect and ideology immerse, emerge, interweave, phase in and out of one another. She writes that now “the question of politics becomes identical with the reinvention of infrastructures for managing the unevenness, ambivalence, violence, and ordinary contingency of contemporary existence” (2022: 25). The contours of Berlant’s own writing are grooved by how the flow of the ordinary finds its way into form(s) and then how form/s of livingness are, at best, loosely bounded coagulations and aleatory suspensions almost always on their way to something else, perhaps something more (or something less). These forms of life are not just out there waiting for us to find them. Neither, conversely, should we merely expect such forms to simply rise up in front of us, announcing their presence – wearing their names (even and especially where/when we are not looking). Quite often ‘form’ – at least its patterning, its outline, its substantilization – has to be made and such making is done under conditions where the subject’s sovereignty is anything but assured. This putting into medium (even and especially the medium of writing itself) is, thus, also an extrusion through the act of mediation, through the inconvenience of other people (Kornbluh, 2021).
For Berlant, finding form for feeling-thought in its lived specificity is conceptually propositional, a conjectural heuristic. Fashioning the conceptual-affectual hook makes real what might have been – perhaps only a moment or so ago – a set of vague impressions, a swirl of atmospheres, a tangle of vectors. Form is why Berlant relies upon the case-study, the object, the scene as the exemplars that become the launchpads for her theory-manoeuvres. She says “This is what it means to describe the ambivalence of a writing that needs to both fix its object enough that it can be seen and disturb it enough that it can reorganize its objects” (2022: 17). At one level, Berlant finds (some) affect theory sometimes inclining too immediately toward the emergent, toward sudden lines of flight, to what might be rendered liberatory or overly optimistic (even if cruelly so) … and not enough situated within or tarrying very long with the material conditions of possibility that have long been taking shape on the ground: in the recent present and its longer past.
Mostly, by locating affect theory in the lineage of ideology critique, Berlant is trying to conjure what happens when we are ‘feeling in and feeling out of the present’ or, in the title of another of her earlier essays, ‘thinking of feeling historical’ (2008b). It is this Marxian sense of living in history not of our own making, and, through the living of that history and the gradual training of our sensorium – feeling the mismatch or distance pulsing through the very fibres of our being and the ideas that rule our time – that Berlant is attempting to bring even more impactfully into consideration by articulating affect theory with ideology theory. She writes:
It is easy to forget that cultural Marxism itself provided us with an account of the matter of affect as key to reading the historical present. . . . It is not claimed that subjects feel accurately or objectively historical – this is why the concept of ideology had to be invented – but this tradition has offered multiple ways to engage the affective aspects of class antagonism, labor practices, and communally generated class feeling that emerges from inhabiting a zone of lived structure (2011: 64).
Berlant knows that – if she wants to provide vivid purchase to what is ‘emergent’ or promissory in the present – then she needs to bring into account that which has been sedimented as residue, substantialized as dominant, situated as an individually-&-collectively lived social fact. This enables an attunement to the crowd of ambivalences and otherwise tendencies that are continually feeding into a particular history’s formation, clawing it back into particular routines, pushing and pulling sometimes into new frontiers.
Overcloseness and experiment
As we saw above, Raymond Williams dreamed of setting up experimental observations (rather than, say, turning to Lacan’s theories about the child’s entry into ‘the symbolic’) to see, as one example, how the rhythms that organized human physicality were refracted through different reading contexts and language use. Such observations, he believed, could greatly aid in a one-after-another materialist recovery for cultural theory while simultaneously pulling aesthetic questions (and perhaps a few answers) into their collective wake: hence why Berlant will call special attention to how “Williams wrote and interpreted all literary works in terms of the articulation of historical and bodily events” (2011: 65). And it is not just Williams’ literary analyses but also his work directed toward the emergence of broadcast television in the mid-20th century (Williams, 1975): here one finds Williams concerned with how media is fundamentally material/materialist – situated within and constitutive of a social situation. He argues that the “inescapable materiality of works of art is then the irreplaceable materialisation of kinds of experience, including experience of the production of objects, which, from our deepest sociality, go beyond not only the production of commodities but also our ordinary experience of objects” (1977: 162). In this way, Williams is interested in media and mediums not in their isolated forms but as social practice: “it is because [art, social relations, and material production] are dissolved that they are not ‘media’” (1977: 163). But in their dissolution into practice, these media do constitute and characterise a historically specific structure of feeling.
This process of materialisation and dissolution in the mediation of the ordinary is closely mirrored in Berlant’s work. When she maintains that her efforts in Cruel Optimism are primarily directed toward creating a ‘materialist context for affect theory’ and that her approach can be understood as a means of writing a ‘proprioceptive history, a way of thinking about represented norms of bodily adjustment as key to grasping the circulation of the present as a historical and affective sense’ (2011: 20), Berlant, like Williams, is addressing the very ways that mediation moves through – and variously magnetizes (and/or repels) – particular assemblies of bodies, histories, theories, practices, etc. Becoming attuned to generative heuristic methods that grasp the always ‘in-process’ of our contemporary human/more-than-human sensorium: ultimately this affective-aesthetic interlacing of experience and experiment (in a kind of quasi-rhythmic to-and-fro) is at the heart of the various cross-connections that transpire between Berlant and Williams.
Williams wraps his aesthetic case in Marxism and Literature by turning to ‘creative practice’ in his last chapter, addressing the struggle that comes with loosening existing forms and bringing something new, yet unknown, into the world (through theorizing, writing, creative arts/acts in general). Such moments can be long and difficult in arriving (and sustaining), but we get there, Williams says, “not [by] casting off an ideology, or learning phrases about it, but confronting a hegemony in the fibres of the self and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing relationships” (1977: 212). Confronting our own present-day hegemony in the fibres of the self, Berlant argues, in The Inconvenience of Other People, that we live in a time when the ‘ongoing pressure’ of the world, its ‘overcloseness’, has become the initiating condition of sociality (2022: 26). So, in an inversion of earlier Marxist conceptualizations, we need to find ways to induce, not evade, slivers/blocks of alienation and nonsovereignty from “within the space of relation” as a way of “rerouting the body’s intimate labor” away from “the value extraction of others” (2022: 26). “Creating affective distance in order to make being in relation bearable, good, possible, or just happen”, Berlant advocates, “is the expression of ambivalent attachment to living on despite, with, against, and in a dynamic relation to whatever’s things, both the in-your-face things and the in-the-world-things” (2022: 26). This creation of ‘affective distance’ is not a defence or withdrawal; it is not a position that can be taken up from the outside or that re/inserts a separation between mind and body, flesh and world, idea and practice. Rather, it is the subtle shifts or more obvious thrashing around that we do to sense-make and make-sense.
Sounding again more than a little like Williams (surprise!), Berlant asks, on the last page of the Inconvenience book, that we keep “refusing easy models of affective and historical knowledge and intersubjectivity” and, instead, “create spaces for thought experiments to follow their own logics into the universe, where rational extension and wild causality are impossible to distinguish” (2022: 172). Such a project – where affect is joined to ideology through mediation – functions, we think, as an invitation to media theorists to consider and articulate the conditions – aesthetic and material – of contemporary (digital) cultures in all of their ongoing ordinariness, and to track the ways that overdetermination insists, persists, and might yet crack open and into those places where solidity-approximating forms and genres (that act to steady-enough the otherwise unstable relations among dynamic things) can serve to generate what direct evidence will never show.
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Notes
[i] In framing our discussion of mediation via the affect/ideology relation, we have been inspired by a workshop organised by Ben Anderson and Anna Secor in Newcastle, UK, July 2022, where we both, separately, presented work on mediation as conceived by Williams and Berlant.
[ii] See also Brian Massumi’s footnote #26 in his ‘Autonomy of Affect’ chapter in Parables for the Virtual (2021: 296) where ideology is understood as “capture and closure on the plane of signification … Ideology is construed here in both the commonsense meaning as a structure of belief, and in the cultural-theoretical sense of an interpellative subject positioning”.
[iii] Many thanks to Chad Shomura for late hour additional input on Berlant’s inconvenience argument, its focus on the waning of particular genres (not affect), and other helpful insights.
Gregory J. Seigworth is Professor of Digital Communication and Cultural Studies at Millersville University, USA. He is co-editor of The Affect Theory Reader (with Melissa Gregg) and The Affect Theory Reader 2 (with Carolyn Pedwell): both at Duke University Press (2010; 2023). Greg is managing editor-in-chief at Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, an open access journal dedicated primarily to publishing work by graduate students and early career researchers.
Email: Gregory.Seigworth@millersville.edu
Rebecca Coleman is Professor in the Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI) and School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, UK. She is currently Researcher in Residence at Knowle West Media Centre (2023-24), working on the co-creation of digital futures with community tech.
Email: rebecca.coleman@bristol.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”.
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