For the official version of record, see here:
Anderson, B. (2023). Media Promises: On Attachment and Detachment with Berlant. Media Theory, 7(2), 209–224. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/580
Media Promises: On Attachment and Detachment with Berlant
BEN ANDERSON
Durham University, UK
Abstract
In this essay, I argue that Lauren Berlant’s work poses the question of how and to what we are attached by and through our media and popular culture. Beginning from a scene of listening, and juxtaposing it throughout the piece with the popular culture of romantic love, the piece encounters Berlant as a thinker of the movement of attaching-detaching. Attachment is a special type of relation, through which an ‘object’ becomes promissory. The first part of the essay summarises Berlant’s theorising of ‘attachment’ and argues that media and popular cultures circulate and distribute ‘promises’ that serve as resources to organise and intensify attachments. It then shifts to the importance of detaching and detachment in Berlant’s writings, arguing that detachment is the ever-present condition and accompaniment for attachment. As media circulate and distribute promises that are enacted through popular cultures, they simultaneously detach and (re)produce detachments. In conclusion, I advocate for a media theory that centres the dynamics of attaching-detaching and performs Berlant’s ethical-political imperative and methodological call to not shame people’s attachments.
Keywords
Lauren Berlant, Attachment, Detachment, Promises, Affect, Love
I aim for the scene I’m describing to open up a question for you. If the questions become more vital and interesting in the reading, then I’ve done my job. If readers then encounter these questions in the world, they might have a different way to think and act in relation to them (Berlant 2012a: no pagination).
Section One: A scene
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I fell in love with a song – ‘I have a love’ by For Those I Love[1]. For Those I Love is the pseudonym of David Balfe, an Irish artist and songwriter. The song is a eulogy to his best friend, Paul Curran, who died by suicide.
Hearing the song for the first time was a jolt. Catching me off guard, it brought back memories of my always missed friend Karen’s exuberant life before her death too young from cancer. It forced me into confrontation with the then cancer of someone I love. But there was something about the song that resonated beyond that; the grief in the words, the glimpses of the pleasures of an ordinary life of friendship lived together, the fierce affirmation by a man for his love of a friend. An affirmation that I wished had felt even remotely possible to express as a teenage boy growing up in the midlands, in 1980s Britain.
I played the self-titled album, ‘For Those I Love’, as my two kids and I were trying to find new work-life routines during COVID lockdowns, playing the album the song is part of on the speaker in the dining room we spent so much time working, sitting, arguing, ignoring each other. Sometimes, we’d change the lyrics, making a song of such pathos silly. My then eight-year-old singing it in protest and fun: ‘I have schoolwork, and it’ll never get done’. It rarely did. Everyone’s frustration would become giggles, before my daughter would exit the room in embarrassment at whatever it was that was happening between the three of us.
I’m listening to the song now as I think about Berlant’s writings on attachment and detachment, held between tears and a smile, recalling all that and more, other deaths of friends too soon. It’s become one of those songs I keep close, listening to it loud on a walk back from a night out with friends in town, during a quiet moment when writing becomes too flat. Sometimes I just love the euphoric high, recalling now long-lost nights out in Manchester in the mid-1990s.
There is a quote from The Female Complaint that I return to when I teach a second-year lecture on the geographies of love in the crisis present. During the lecture, we listen to popular songs that dramatize either how love destabilizes or the continued investment in love’s promises despite or perhaps because of the pain of disappointment: ‘Someone Like You’, Adele[2]; ‘All of Me’, John Legend[3]; ‘Hold Up’, Beyoncé[4]. The songs exist in and circulate through mass media. Something about them resonates for many. We then discuss Lauren’s words:
One of the main jobs of the minoritized arts that circulate through mass culture is to tell identifying consumers that “you are not alone (in your struggles, desires, pleasures)”: this is something we know but never tire of hearing confirmed, because aloneness is one of the affective experiences of being collectively, structurally unprivileged (Berlant, 2008a: ix).
I’m not sure the media we discuss in the lecture, or For Those I Love, count as ‘minoritized arts’, the term is too open to know, or at least juxtaposing minoritized and mass complicates both categories. But they are all part of the popular culture of love that can act as a bulwark and handrail in today’s crisis present, whilst at the same time enacting the ideology of romantic love, and reminding us that capitalism is, amongst lots of things, a machine for the translation of affect into value. ‘You are not alone’ has already struck me as a profound insight. As ever with Berlant’s claims, there’s a lot more to it than it seems. What does it mean to ‘tell’ consumers they are not alone? How do subjects respond to being told? Who do they hear telling them? Why only ‘identifying consumers’, and identifying with what (an identity, a tone, a gesture, a structure of feeling?). And what does it mean to “know” but “never tire of hearing confirmed”?
But I think why I return to the quote is because I’ve always taken the affirmation to be a proposition about the questions we should ask of media. And by ‘media’ I simply mean systems that (re/pre)mediate experience through the circulation of singular combinations of words, sounds, and images (after Mitchell, 2017). Not what does something represent, nor the more pragmatic question of what something does. But what do medias attach us to, how, and with what consequences for building and being in a life with and without others? And I think I hear in ‘you are not alone’ a note of optimism, one sometimes deferred, one that sometimes ends, but nevertheless a note that affirms that: ‘you can be attached to a world that offers you something’. In the reflections that follow I stay with Berlant’s theorisation of the dynamics and forms of attachment and detachment, asking what implications it might hold for media theory and understandings of popular culture. I begin, in short, from being attached by a euphoric and devastating song of love and mourning played on a Google home mini through Spotify.
Section Two: Attaching
All attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer that satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene (Berlant, 2011a: 1/2, emphasis added).
Berlant thinks from the promise of popular culture.Media is their[5] material and the means for the circulation and distribution of promises; novels, films, TV shows, musicals. Her account of politicians such as Obama (Berlant, 2011b) or Trump (Berlant, 2016b) treats them as mediated popular cultural figures. And their concepts, most obviously ‘intimate publics’ (Berlant, 2008a), are often offered to understand how media provide resources for inhabiting and flourishing through what she calls “world-sustaining relations” (Berlant, 2016a: 393).
Berlant’s orientation to the overdetermination and ambivalence of any and all phenomena emerges through and is inseparable from this career long encounter with the artefacts of popular culture and different forms of media. An encounter that is mediated through the heady mix of inheritances and influences Berlant’s thought carries, and I can only barely do justice to here; psychoanalysis to think the inconvenience of others and the multivariance of relations, heterodox Marxist accounts of affective and other forms of mediation, feminist and queer theories on the lure and pain of norms, amongst much else. Through this work, people’s encounters with mediated popular culture become scenes for dwelling with the complexity and multiplicity of the attachments that just about sustain some people. With media making available a set of resources[6] for organising living, but resources that are so often compromised, reproduce normativities, or are just tragic or bad.
Popular culture is, to put it in different terms, promissory. It holds out the prospect of what, in the quote above, Berlant (2011a) calls that “satisfying something”. What that ‘satisfying something’ that media promises is varies. In the mass culture of love that I explore with my students as we awkwardly listen to Adele and Beyoncé, it might simply be repeated signs of “utopian intimacy” (Berlant, 2012b: 99). Berlant goes on to reflect on the cluster of promises that gather around the mediated culture of romantic love. Mediated culture is a mix of desires and longings. Romantic love is no different.
This desire for love to reach beyond the known world of law and language enables us to consider the idea that romantic love might sometimes serve as a placeholder for a less eloquent or institutionally proper longing (Berlant 2012b: 95).
“Allows us to consider the idea” implies a generative questioning, a curiosity that follows from treating even something as ideologically weighted as ‘romantic love’ as a complex, multivariant formation; not least because of people’s attachment to it. For good reason so often a site of ideological and other critiques, love as probably the most mass of mass cultures becomes something more, something different through Berlant’s reading. They go on to diagnose the ambivalence and overdetermination of mediated ‘romantic love’ through a heady mix of ‘queer optimism’ (Berlant, 2008b) and ‘depressive realism’ (Berlant & McCabe, 2011):
A love plot would, then, represent a desire for a life of unconflictedness, where the aggression inherent in intimacy is not lived as violence and submission to the discipline of institutional propriety or as the disavowals of true love, but as something less congealed into an identity or a promise, perhaps a mix of curiosity, attachment, and passion. But as long as the normative narrative and institutionalised forms of sexual life organise identity for people, these longings mainly get lived as a desire for love to obliterate the wildness of the unconscious, confirm the futurity of a known self, and dissolve the enigmas that marks one’s lovers (Berlant, 2012b: 95).
The ‘But’ in the second sentence is vital. We hear in Berlant’s words how much weight is carried by the popular culture of love, as other promises become harder to hold onto amid compromised conditions of realisation. Love ends up being freighted with a lot – including the continuity of the self, and coping with the inconvenience of others. Perhaps these promises stand in for other “less institutionally proper longings”, a sort of utopian undercurrent coursing through popular culture. “But”, those longings are lived in a way that reproduces romantic love’s aspirational normativity.
Berlant is brilliant at diagnosing the multiplicity and complexity of mediated culture, through this ‘and, but, and’ mode of diagnosis. In the case of romantic love, popular culture enacts and circulates compromised promises that provide resources for living just a little better. ‘I Have a Love’ is of and outside this swirl of promises, refracting the promise of utopian intimacy found in romantic love through the pleasures of friendship and the pain of tender grief. The songs I listen to with my students in the lecture are this culture. Even in the most mainstream and corporate of mass cultural products we sense that they offer identifying subjects something to attach to; even if only the confirmation that they are not alone. Perhaps people attach to another person through these songs, to the conventional institutions of intimacy through which heteronormativity is performed, to the pleasures of mutuality and the singularity of an other, or something else entirely.
Attachment names, then, a special form of relation bound up with processes of differentiation between ‘objects’ (Anderson, 2022; 2023). Although often used interchangeably with other terms as a synonym for relation per se, attachment has a greater sense of durability and importance. Felski (2020) draws this double sense out in her excellent work on art as attachment, where she uses a set of terms that all indicate that attachments are enduring, particularly “ties” (15) and “bonds” (27). She also stresses that attachments differentiate between the ‘objects’ that surround us. Caught up in a relation of attachment, ‘objects’ come to stand apart from others and matter to a life, whether by providing meaning, purpose, or something else.
Berlant’s account of attachment supplements this emphasis on attachment as distinctive kinds of relations that differentiate in important ways. For them, attachments are movements, trajectories, that reconstitute the ‘object’, whatever it may be, as a promise. An ‘object’ might be a place, another person, an idea; anything really, including a song entitled ‘I Have a Love’ or music by global “stars”. This makes attachments optimistic, even when those attachments might be cruel. They “bring closer” that “satisfying something” offered by the objects that they differentiate from others. ‘Brings closer’ implies a distance remains, though. Attachments are a continual movement that continually (re)constitutes the promise of the object. Perhaps, for example, the culture of romantic love holds out not only the promise of utopian intimacy, but also simply the consolation that no one is alone through love’s disappointments, even as that disappointment painfully individualises.
Attachments are not, then, unproblematically positive or negative. Berlant suspends judgment, asking instead how attaching to this or that promise, to this or that ‘satisfying something’, enables a life to be lived. Even when an attachment appears to be ‘cruel’, is harming or damaging the subject who attaches or others, there is always something more going on:
Even when it turns out to involve a cruel relation, it would be wrong to see optimism’s negativity as a symptom of an error, a perversion, damage, or a dark truth: optimism is, instead, a scene of negotiated sustenance that makes life bearable as it presents itself ambivalently, unevenly, incoherently (Berlant, 2011a: 14, emphasis added).
This is not to deny that attachments bind subjects to forms that harm themselves and/or others, attachments can be cruel to oneself or others, but it is to ask the question of how attachments offer “scene[s] of negotiated sustenance”. The intimate publics of women’s mass culture is one such scene that makes life more bearable, for example (Berlant, 2008a). An intimate public has a “certain circularity” in that it expresses a living history and shapes the conventions of belonging that are expressed through that history, whilst also mediating attachments: “it promises also to provide a better experience of social belonging – partly through participation in the relevant commodity culture, and partly because of its revelations about how people can live” (ibid.: viii).
What, then, are the promises that animate the media ‘objects’ we are attached to and attached by? How do attachments to a song, a genre, a WhatsApp notification, going to the cinema, a popular song about love’s disappointments, offer ‘sustenance’, or hold out the prospect of flourishing? I love ‘I Have a Love’. But what is the ‘promissory object’ that I enact as I stay attached to the song through repeated banal acts of playing within the affective and other imperatives of daily living? Here are some promises, even as I feel keenly that some ‘objects’ and the desires and longings they magnetise cannot easily or perhaps ever be known by the attached subject. As Berlant stresses, attachments are often enigmatic, incoherent or contradictory, rarely transparent to the subject held by them. Perhaps it is the prospect of a tender form of masculinity out of reach to me when I was a young man, but I hope closer with friends now; perhaps it is the promise of holding onto the memories of a friend even as those memories fade just a little as every day passes; perhaps it is utopian forms of intimacy with others that I feel in the song, whether dancing in a club or sitting together with someone; perhaps it is simply that the present becomes more, momentarily.
Section Three: Detaching
Not all of our encounters with media and popular culture are inseparable from the special type of enduring relations that I give the name ‘attachment’ to. Nevertheless, my encounter with Berlant leaves me with a sense of media as systems that create economic and other value, in part, through the circulation of occasions for complex, overdetermined, attachments, as well as ‘scenes of attachment’ in which attachments might be heightened and promises intensified (Anderson, 2022). Media circulate and distribute the swirl of promises that are dramatized through popular culture – utopian intimacy, unconflicted belonging, a future, an enlivened present etc. Elsewhere, I have elaborated the concept of ‘form of attachment’ to address the question of how attachments are (dis)organised (Anderson, 2022). Forms of attachment are clusters of promises that have become normative, and available to be attached to. One form of attachment might be, for example, ‘romantic love’. Another might be the too slowly shifting norms of male friendship in the UK. Forms of attachment are not wholly reducible to the reproduction of the cruelties and harms of the normative, as per Berlant’s approach, even the most normative ‘object’ is overdetermined. But the concept does attune us to the density, the reach and intensity, of some promises. Think, for example, of how the promise of romantic love, and the promises entangled with romantic love, are circulated through multiple, partially connected media.
Berlant is also, though, a theorist of the difficulty of detachment. Cruel Optimism (Berlant, 2011a) is a book of scenes where the ordinary and shattering activity of detaching is intensely difficult for subjects held in attachments where the promissory object feels ever further out of reach. For Berlant, detaching from the grip of a ‘promissory’ object is hard, sometimes close to impossible, because of how the attachment has served to ‘sustain’. Many of their scenes from popular culture are ones where subjects hold on longer than they should, because they can’t not hold on given the meagre affective and imaginative resources otherwise available to them, and the pressures of living that their existing attachments help them navigate.
Cruel optimism, now Berlant’s (2011a) most well-travelled concept, reminds us of the intimacy of detachment and attachment, how attaching is detaching. The attachment given the name ‘cruel optimism’ is cruel because it holds subjects in a bind, where both exit and maintenance is harmful:
… optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming (Berlant, 2011a: 2, emphasis added).
As a concept, cruel optimism is typically read to name a problem of stalled detachment, a holding on too long as the relation itself becomes sustaining and harmful, and as threat and promise blur and are rendered indistinct. Perhaps romantic love is a kind of collective relation of cruel optimism, given the intimacy between romantic love and gendered violence and erasure of non-normative intimacies, even though romantic love holds out other prospects for sustenance or flourishing. But, a relation of cruel optimism is also already a relation of multiple detachments. First, and most obviously, detachment from the “expansive transformation” (a deliberately open term) that the subject strives from. Whilst the possibility persists, the subject is detached from a realisation they continue to strive for. But, cruel optimism also involves a hidden, unfelt, detachment from all the other promissory objects that exist and might sustain. Being in a relation of cruel optimism curtails possibility for finding other ‘handrails’ for navigating a precarious present.
Every attachment happens alongside willed and unwilled, habitual and intentional, known and unknown or never will be known, detachments. Staying in relation to a promissory object, being in a relation of attachment to a ‘satisfying something’, means that other promissory objects are not and may never be attached to. This is the flipside of the idea that media distribute and circulate promises. In doing so, they also continue the ongoing detachments that are the shadow and ever absent-present accompaniment of all attachments.
I relearn the lesson that attaching is detaching, that media attaches and detaches, with my students every year I teach the lecture on the geographies of love. We talk about what each of the songs might detach us from; alternatives to the affect imbued ideology of romantic love, non-normative intimacies, the prospect that love might be lost to us and that is ok, the sense that love might not serve as a cure-all for the world’s ills and other relations, such as anger, might infuse demands for justice, and more. As this list attests, some detachments might be welcomed and sustain us. Other detachments remind us of the intimacy between forms of attachment and norms and normativities. Detachments are no less the realm of the enigmatic and contradictory than attachments are. They ward off threats and foreclose promises. What might ‘For Those I Love’ detach me from as I remain attached to it? How might our media, and the affect-imbued words, images and sounds that are popular culture, serve as collective apparatuses of detachment?
Perhaps the lesson that detachments are ambivalent and contradictory is still an important one given that ‘detachment’ as a style is often assumed to be negative. Indeed, the question of detachment has been at the very heart of critiques of mass, corporate media from the Frankfurt school onwards. Corporate media are sometimes judged a collective capital-driven apparatus of detachment that functions to separate subjects from their own potentiality and conditions of existence. Or, conversely, mainstream media is understood as a compensatory mechanism, serving as one of the main ways in which subjects have learnt to detach, even temporarily, from enervating conditions of existence. Relaxation, for example, being the name for a state of detachment from the too much of Fordist work that enabled leisure to serve a compensatory function. ‘Fun’ as the name for a way of inhabiting a lively present so that a sense of possibility is intensely felt, and constraining conditions of work and life are temporarily no longer affectively present.
Both of these stories about the media as an apparatus of detachment are doubtless part of any account that pays attention to how media and popular culture detach, although they will vary by different kinds of media along the contested, sometimes indeterminate, lines of mass and minoritarian, corporate and alternative. But I think Berlant helps us orientate to a more expansive range of ordinary and extraordinary detachments that media and popular culture are intimate with. In many ordinary ways we detach from media as they settle into our everyday life, in a way a little different to intentional individual and activist efforts to detach from media felt and judged as harmful; e.g., around ‘digital detox’ or ‘digital diet’ movements (Hartmann, 2022). We can think of mundane practices such as not checking email, skipping a video, leaving a message unopened. New cultural practices and experiential forms have emerged, such as scrolling through short-form new media, where the ongoing accumulation of small detachments, the quick skip past, generate new affective states. Coleman (2018), for example, shows how different ‘connected’ and ‘expanded’ presents are produced through digital media use, that serve to carve out the present as a distinctive, heightened temporality. And media create value through promising the ease of detachment – the detachment from decision enabled by automatically starting the next episode on streaming services, for example.
In the previous paragraph, I have rendered detaching and detachment equivalent to a host of other practices and relations: disconnection, separation, distance etc. And that is doubtless there in Berlant’s use of the term as well. But the term also has an additional sense in Cruel Optimism, which loops back into the specific account of attachment that I learn from Berlant (see also Cockayne & Ruez, 2023). As well as a synonym for separating or removing, ‘detaching’ is also the movement whereby the once promissory object loses the sense that it offers a ‘satisfying something’ that an individual or collective subject strives for. An ‘object’, say a song or a film or a genre or anything else, changes to become just one of the many other things we share worlds with. It loses its special status as holding out a promise of meaning, purpose or value, or something that detaches it from other things.
Understood in these terms, thinking with Berlant pushes us to better understand how media and popular culture are bound up with ongoing processes and practices through which objects lose their promissory status. First, the media as that which forecloses detachments. Identifying subjects might be held, again, in a relation of cruel optimism as a song reattaches us to the promise of romantic love, for example. Or the reverse might be the case, with media dampening or ending the ‘sense of possibility’ (Berlant, 2011a: 2) that gathers around specific ‘objects’. But also, and second, media as a scene of intensified detaching. As I mentioned, attachments are confirmed in what elsewhere I’ve termed ‘scenes of attachment’ (Anderson, 2022) – occasions where the promissory object becomes intensely present. So, perhaps, media might be thought of as organising scenes of detachment where the loss of a promise is intensely felt, even if only momentarily. Perhaps listening to ‘I Have a Love’ is a minor, everyday scene of detachment from some norms of masculinity inherited growing up in the repressive atmospheres of 1980s Britain, including ones that foreclose some forms of intimacy and expressions of feeling?
Concluding Comments: On not shaming people’s objects
For me, it’s never about shaming people’s objects, it’s always about creating better and better objects. It’s always about creating better worlds, making it possible for us to think in more and different kinds of ways about how we relationally can move through life (Berlant & Seitz, 2013: no pagination).
This special issue of Media Theory is testimony to the inexhaustible plenitude of Berlant’s work, the cacophony of questions they left us with. My proposition in this short piece is that Berlant might offer a different way of holding onto and amplifying how media pattern the feel of everyday life, as well as what popular culture is and offers. Their work centres the dynamics of attaching-detaching in a way that poses the simple problem of how and why we are held by what comes to matter to us. Their work opens up the question of how, in a world of relations and encounters between all manner of bits and pieces, some ‘objects’ endure and become significant. Why this song or this genre or this movie rather than another? They also remind us that our attachments are enigmatic, incoherent, and sometimes dangerous, to proximate or distant others and/or ourselves. Harms and sustenance and damages and dreams are all mixed together. Our detachments are the same. For, as Berlant’s type of diagnostic critique constantly performs, everything, anything, is overdetermined and ambivalent. Listening to the album by For Those I Love is, for a moment, the point I give more data to Meta, feel a lost friend’s presence and ward off the fading of time, am inserted into digital capitalism, hope that other masculinities may be possible for my son, forget some things. For Those I Love becoming what it is for me through a dense thicket of attachments and detachments, some of which I can name, many of which I’m not sure I can, all of which merge and blur with one another.
Berlant never ‘shames people’s objects’, even if on reading their work it feels like sometimes the pull to judge as absurd, ridiculous, or just banal is close. I’ve taken the phrase as a methodological and ethical-political imperative to suspend the judgment of taste and become curious about attaching-detaching. Not shaming people’s objects is not the same as affirming, let alone celebrating them. It is instead to begin from questions that follow from the problem of how to make a life with fragile resources bound up with normative forms of attachment: how do different media circulate and distribute particular promises; how do some ‘objects’ become significant and matter to people; and how does the feeling of being attached-detached, of attaching-detaching, through media make a difference to people’s everyday life.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Carolyn Pedwell and Simon Dawes for their invitation and helpful comments on a previous draft of this essay.
References
Anderson, B. (2022) ‘Forms and Scenes of Attachment: A Cultural Geography of Promises’, Dialogues in Human Geography (online early) https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221129205
Anderson, B. (2023) ‘Unsettling Relationality: Attachment after the ‘Relational Turn’’, Dialogues in Human Geography (online early) https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231195672
Berlant, L. (2008a) The Female Complaint. Durham: Duke University Press.
Berlant, L. (2008b) ‘The broken circuity: An Interview with Lauren Berlant’. Cabinet https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/31/najafi_serlin_berlant.php
Berlant, L. (2012a) ‘Lauren Berlant on her book Cruel Optimism’. Available at: https://rorotoko.com/interview/20120605_berlant_lauren_on_cruel_optimism/
Berlant, L. (2012b) Desire/Love. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books.
Berlant, L. (2011a) Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Berlant, L. (2011b) ‘Opulism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 110(1): 235-242.
Berlant, L. (2016a) ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(3): 393–419.
Berlant, L (2016b) ‘Trump, or Political Emotions’, The New Inquiry. Available at: https://thenewinquiry.com/trump-or-political-emotions/
Berlant, L. & McCabe, E. (2011) ‘Depressive Realism: An Interview with Lauren Berlant’. Available at: http://hypocritereader.com/5/depressive-realism
Berlant, L. & Seitz, D.K. (2013) ‘On citizenship and optimism: Lauren Berlant, interviewed by David Seitz’, Society and Space. Available from: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/on-citizenship-and-optimism
Cockayne, D. & Ruez, D. (2023) ‘Inconvenience, ambivalence, and abolition: A politics of attachment and detachment in geography’, Dialogues in Human Geography (online early) https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231151415
Coleman, B. (2008) ‘Theorizing the present: Digital media, pre-emergence and infra-structures of feeling’, Cultural Studies 32(4): 600-622.
Felski, R. (2020) Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hartmann, M. (2022) ‘“Install freedom now!” Choosing not to communicate with digital media at work and home’, Javnost – The Public: Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture 29(1): 17-32
Mitchell, T. (2017) ‘Counting media: Some rules of thumb’, Media Theory, 1(1): 12-16.
Seigworth, G. & Pedwell, C. (2023) ‘Introduction: A Shimmer of inventories’, in Pedwell, C. & Seigworth, G. (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures. London: Duke University Press, pp. 1-62.
Notes
[1] For Those I Love, ‘I Have a Love’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTz3QZNORg4
[2] Adele, ‘Someone Like You’: https://youtu.be/hLQl3WQQoQ0
[3] John Legend, ‘All of me’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=450p7goxZqg
[4] Beyoncé, ‘Hold up’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeonBmeFR8o
[5] Given the ambiguity that surrounded Berlant’s public and private pronoun use, in this essay I affirm Berlant’s commitment to ambivalence and complexity by oscillating between she/they (see note on pronoun use in Seigworth & Pedwell, 2023).
[6] I use the deliberately open term ‘resources’ to describe the range of things that media make available for people to draw upon as they inhabit and (co)create forms of life. What these ‘resources’ might be vary across different forms of media, and across different forms of life: an artist around which the identity and pleasures of fandom can be created with others as a balm against loneliness; a lyric that resonates for a moment and stays; a TV show that offers a state of almost but not quite boredom in the midst of a life that feels too much, etc.
Ben Anderson is a Professor at Durham University. His work focuses on theorising affective life and understanding the relation between affect and politics. His monograph – Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (2016, Routledge) – sets out a theory of the different ways in which affective life is mediated. Recently, his work has focused on the experience and politics of boredom since the 1970s.
Email: ben.anderson@durham.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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