For the official version of record, see here:
Kalinka, I. (2023). Reading in Dark Times: Toward a Queer Politics of Repair. Media Theory, 7(1), 125–146. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/893
Reading in Dark Times: Toward a Queer Politics of Repair
IRINA KALINKA
Columbia University, USA
Abstract
The essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’ by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997; 2003) has been frequently cited as a foundational text of post-critique, especially in literary and queer theory. In this article, I will make the case for reparative reading as a consciously political project, inspired by Sedgwick’s deep commitment to making oppositional strategy, and bring this understanding in critical conversation with some examples of its uptake during the post-critical “reparative turn” in the Humanities. I further posit that Sedgwick was already engaging in such reparative projects even before she explicitly theorized this practice through a close-reading of her 1991 article ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.’ My overarching argument is that reparative reading, while at times misappropriated, can still provide the foundation for a larger project of queer repair – a prefigurative politics of the imagination.
Keywords
Reparative Reading, Queer Theory, Critique, Sedgwick, Prefigurative Politics
How to read in dark times?[1] The Humanities are under attack, right-wing populism is on the rise around the globe, capitalism seems without alternatives. There is no shortage of possible disasters to be paranoid about. In a world that is so obviously inhospitable and in which it has become commonplace to concede – even within the academy – that leftist critique has “run out of steam” (Latour, 2004), what remains of a critical reading practice that has placed so much faith in the radical and supposedly transformative project of exposing the hegemonic, the normative, the oppressive? How do we read the objects and forms of such a broken world without over and over affirming its hopeless premise, like a self-fulfilling prophecy? Yes, these are dark times, the critic seems to preach, let me count the ways.
As we read and write among the debris of our revolutionary aspirations, we as scholars have grown increasingly weary of the promise of exposure, of the belief “that knowing is the means for knowing what to do” (Wiegman, 2014: 7). The foundational essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’ by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997; 2003) – written during the dark days of the AIDS crisis and her own battle with breast cancer – is often cited as among the first and most prominent instances of this turn in the Humanities. Sedgwick questions the political potential of what she sees as the widespread and reflexive privileging of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ being the only acceptable methodology within cultural critique. Instead of solely engaging in such paranoid reading practices, she argues in favor of allowing more space for a multiplicity of other affective stances and the possibility for positive surprises – openings, however unlikely, for the (possibly traumatic) discovery of hope.
Since its publication two decades ago, the essay has been credited both as being one of the texts that inaugurated the larger field of post-critique and as serving as a major inspiration to later post-critical thinkers and projects, especially in literary and queer theory. My own aim is to trouble certain mobilizations of Sedgwick’s intervention in this context, especially those that deemphasize her deep commitment to “making oppositional strategy” (Sedgwick, 2003: 142). There is nothing allegedly neutral or deliberately modest about her reparative reading practice – I argue it is an ambitious and consciously political project. Reading this way is an exercise in radical reassembly, treating the text as a construction site or playground where one can discover new possibilities for sustenance vis-à-vis systems of oppression and engage in radical moments of reimagining both past and future. While coming from a place of “love,” instead of mastery of one’s object of study, it is still an instrumentalizing approach that prioritizes our need for serious transformation. It is a kind of “love that generates out of concentrated meditation on [a book’s] pieces a different and needed book; the transformative, frankly instrumental love of the artifacts of a culture” (Sedgwick, 1996: 278). The reparative critic takes these pieces – bits of debris – and rearranges them, aiming to construct something new and needed: an imaginative exercise that tries to bring alternative worlds and ways of being into the realm of the thinkable and thus possible. It is a reading practice that seeks to circumvent the obvious, instead turning our attention to the ever-present rifts within that which is taken for granted, tracing how a text is always already awash with all sorts of unruly potentials. It is a strategy for sustenance and survival in dark times.
What is at stake for me in this re-framing of Sedgwick’s thought is theorizing a queer politics of repair and, in the process, challenging some of the popular uptake of reparative reading by the larger post-critical literature. Sedgwick is doubly-vulnerable for such an appropriation. Having passed away at the young age of fifty-eight in 2009, a mere six years after the book chapter version of the paranoid and reparative reading essay appeared in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity,[2] she was robbed of the possibility to be in active conversation with later thinkers on the reparative turn and to provide a more extensive exploration of what reparative reading might look like in practice. Additionally, her original essay admittedly provides very few examples of what reparative reading might look like and does not go into depth about its potential. Building on Sedgwick, I am going to attempt to remedy this lack of examples and put forward an argument for the political edge of repair.
In what follows, I will first make the case for reparative reading as a consciously political project of sustenance, survival, and speculation through a reading of Sedgwick’s foundational essay. Then, I will explore some examples of how her project has been interpreted during the reparative and/or post-critical turn in the Humanities to contrast them with my own understanding. Reparative reading, I argue, is neither predictable metalanguage, nor modest description, nor yielding to the text. Rather, it is a prefigurative politics of the imagination that allows itself to be surprised. To make this case, I end by discussing what I see as examples of how such a politics of queer repair could be put into practice by making the case that Sedgwick was already engaging in reparative projects even before she explicitly theorized this practice through a close-reading of her 1991 article ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.’ Ultimately, what animates these readings of my own is a desire to highlight the continued importance of a prefigurative politics of the imagination in our contemporary moment of forever crisis and the constant refrain that ‘there is no alternative.’[3] I choose to read for alternative worlds, even as I often doubt they can come into being. I allow myself the hope that they might. This cautious hope fueled by imagination allows us to escape stifling notions of inevitability, if just for a moment, and is its own kind of resistance to the darkness of the present.
The political stakes of reparative reading
From the very first pages, which describe her conversations about the possible causes of the AIDS epidemic, Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid and reparative reading makes clear that it has pressing activist concerns and commitments. It is before a backdrop of death that she asserts: “whatever else we know, we know there isn’t time to bullshit” (2003: 149). There is a real sense of urgency to her intervention, not one borne out of a mere exasperation with the supposed frivolity or entitlement of critique within the academy. Rather, she wonders if an exclusively paranoid approach, obsessed with exposure, makes for good oppositional strategy in the face of structural violence, since having “an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppression does not […] enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences” (2003: 124). Given the context in which Sedgwick was writing (and in which we are largely still living today), she clearly believes such consequences are much needed. Yet the transformative potential of arriving on the scene with the same bad news time and time again is far from clear or certain, at least in the present intellectual moment.[4]
While Sedgwick wants to think through alternative ways of relating to her objects of study, prioritizing survival and hope instead of punitive readings, she does so – unsurprisingly for a committed queer theorist – with objectives that go beyond such post-critical aspirations as “neutral description” (Best & Marcus, 2009: 16) or “aesthetic pleasure” (Felski, 2015: 188), for example. She is, for instance, deeply invested in denaturalizing the heterosexist status quo through foregrounding queer possibilities discovered, collected, and staged through a reparative reading practice. That is why, from the start, Sedgwick emphasizes that “to practice other than paranoid forms of knowing does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression” (2003: 128). This reality is, for her, indisputable. And yet, it is still possible to “[l]ove […] a book, even a sinister book” (1996: 278). Despite the presence of “sinister” aspects, a text can still positively surprise us – possibly by how well it lends itself to a queer intervention, even against its own avowed aspirations. That is because texts, from a reparative perspective, are always already awash with multiple unruly energies and potentials. They constitute the bits and pieces out of which the reparative reader can reassemble a different, needed text. This can be a deeply political, even revolutionary act.
Sedgwick further acknowledges that there are benefits to paranoid reading and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Considering how deeply indebted she is to a genealogy of “paranoid” gender and queer criticism, as well as having previously done hypersymptomatic readings herself,[5] it is unsurprising that Sedgwick is not arguing that we, as scholars, need to permanently “move on” from the paranoid position. Rather, she is willing to acknowledge that “paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” (2003: 130, emphasis mine) and cautions that “it can also be reifying and, indeed, coercive to have only one, totalizing model of positive affect always in the same featured position” (2003: 146). Sedgwick’s intervention is thus not about the univocal embrace of taking pleasure in one’s object, but about allowing room in cultural criticism for other affective stances, like forgiveness, solidarity, or love, and for the possibility of positive surprises, at all. Further, she does not stage the reparative and paranoid stances as part of a dialectical struggle or a limiting either/or binary opposition but discusses them as being in a “flexible to-and-fro movement” (2003: 128). Instead of posing these two approaches as thesis and antithesis, engaged in a violent struggle in which one of them will win out over the other, or else as stable personality types, the critic can inhabit them both (to an extent). Such “changing and heterogeneous relational stances” are integral to Sedgwick’s conception of reparative critical practices (2003: 128). According to her, it is not possible to inhabit purely one or the other position in one’s critical practice.[6] Both imply constant displacement – they are intellectually promiscuous. That is why Sedgwick emphasizes the “powerful reparative practices that, I am convinced, infuse self-avowedly paranoid critical projects, as well as in the paranoid exigencies that are often necessary for nonparanoid knowing” (2003: 129). These approaches are not easily separable in order to stage a straightforward confrontation between them. For Sedgwick, paranoia and depression/repair are intimately intertwined.
Her question then becomes about priorities: Is a reading practice based on paranoid exposure the only, or the most promising, way of inspiring resistance, surviving oppression, and imagining differently? Might there be something else we can discover in our chosen – for a reason, surely not exclusively or primarily aversion – texts? This is far removed from a call for “surface reading,” for example, where scholars are called upon “less to evaluate than to describe,” the modest aim being to “indicate what the text says about itself” (Best & Marcus, 2009: 16, 11). Sedgwick openly declares of which allegiances her reading practice is guilty. As a queer theorist, she has clear political investments in non-normative ways of living and loving for instance. Reparative reading thus neither condones the normative system as it is/was, nor allows itself to be “naïve, pious, or complaisant” through its partial embrace of positive affect (Sedgwick, 2003: 126). Rather, as Ellis Hanson argues, reparative reading is a “creative act of love, albeit one that is grounded in disillusion rather than infatuation” (2012: 547). This creative act is grounded in the acknowledgement that the world is “damaged and dangerous” (2012: 547), yet still allows itself to hope for positive surprises as part of practising self-love for marginalized identities. Such a love is not complaisant, but actively political.
Sedgwick’s intervention is about circumventing what have become all-too obvious and predictable readings, inspired by what she perceives to be the “near-profession-wide agreement” in the Humanities on “protocols of unveiling” (2003: 143f). Making scenes of unveiling so integral to one’s academic methodology has its own pitfalls according to Sedgwick, since defining (by convention) a project exclusively as being “against” something else, like oppression in its multifarious disguises, creates a certain dependence on the very thing that is being opposed. First, normativity or ideology need to be found and thus established over and over again in one’s object of study, so that – in a predictable next move – they can be torn down and opposed yet again. If only paranoid reading could expose ever more instances of oppression and then dismantle their logic in turn, this strategy seems to suggest, we could finally overcome such restrictions once and for all.
As Sedgwick points out, “paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known” (2003: 138). This faith in exposure can lead to a stifling obsession with the target of critique:
few actual psychoanalysts would dream of being as rigorously insistent as are many oppositional theorists […] in asserting the inexorable, irreducible, uncircumnavigable, omnipresent centrality, at every psychic juncture, of the facts (however factitious) of ‘sexual difference’ and ‘the phallus’ (2003: 132).
The same story is being discovered time after time, in order to predictably arrive at the same stance against it. Through her insistence on the possibility of a reparative stance, Sedgwick instead wants to broaden our conception of what is considered permissible, valuable, and constructive in the critical Humanities. What if we would instead “Forget the Name of the Father” (or the phallus or sexual difference)?[7] This is not in order to deny the presence of such oppressive normativities in the object of study, nor to encounter the text merely as it is, but to assemble our own counter-story that (for the sake of argument) forgets the dominant logic of the text and focuses on the odd, wayward, or ambiguous in order to open up new lines of inquiry within the work.
Much more could be said about Sedgwick’s challenge to what she perceived to be (and might no longer be) a monopoly of paranoid theoretical practice in the Humanities. But let us follow her suggestion and prioritize an alternative path, the reparative turn. Sedgwick herself did not go into great detail as to what exactly a reparative reading practice would look like. She does, however, conclude her essay by outlining the potential of such a practice: “What we can best learn from such [reparative] practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (2003: 150f). Reparative reading here is not confined to the halls of the academy. It is a living practice. The ways in which marginalized people and communities relate to the objects of an inhospitable culture are obviously manifold and multidirectional. What emerges as sustaining or successfully resistant within these relationships cannot be fully known ahead of time, it is an exercise in day-to-day improvisation. We cannot know in advance what will come of our attempts at repair. Successful oppositional strategy can take many forms and even, sometimes (most times?), appear on the scene as a surprise. Nurture, vulnerability, play, pleasure, and even simply existing all have the potential to be part of, or be themselves, resistance. They are, for example, integral to the continued survival of non-normative ways of living, which are not only and always about fighting against the dominant and inhospitable status quo, but also about nourishing and making sustainable alternative selves and imaginaries.
That is why, following Marxist feminist Silvia Federici, it is important to conceive of resistance not just as sacrifice, but also to emphasize that “the struggle is a healing process” (2011: n.pg.). Sedgwick also raises this question of care for the self and for the community (see, for example: 2003: 136ff). She notes of the instrumentalizing nature of the reparative reading practice: “the desire of a reparative impulse […] is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (2003: 149, emphasis mine). A reparative reading practice carefully collects the multiple wayward energies and potentials permeating a text to engage in a strategy of radical reassembly, repurposing these bits and pieces for counterdiscourses of all kinds[8] – as Sedgwick herself had already done in 1991 by piecing together a case for the long forgotten sexual identity of “the Masturbator” in Sense and Sensibility, which I will be discussing more in-depth later on in this article. As such, reparative reading can offer sustenance and nourishment to various inchoate or barely sustainable selves, which see themselves reflected in or inspired by such alternative imaginaries. By prioritizing the subjective and affective needs of readers vis-à-vis an inhospitable world, for example opening up different economies of bodies and pleasures as suggested by Foucault (1990), reparative reading actively creates the book that is needed out of the one that was given – not out of “mere” pleasure, but to allow for particular kinds of formerly unthinkable pleasures that are not politically neutral or unconcerned.[9]
One of the most radical promises of a reparative reading practice, however, could be its potential for acts of reimagining as part of a prefigurative political practice. It allows the reader to play with the “what if” and conceive of the world of the text as being configured around radically different lines than expected, creating surprising openings, and making alternative ways of being thinkable. It also allows for hope:
Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because she has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did (Sedgwick, 2003: 146).
Reparative reading, understood in this way, is a kind of “politics of the imagination,” defined by Tara Forrest as: “not only a desire to denaturalise the current state of affairs, but to cleave open a space within history’s so-called march of progress toward the future within which the possibilities of both the past and the present can be imagined and explored anew” (2007: 17). By reimagining the possibilities of both past and present, by reorganizing its fragments, reparative reading approaches the text “as if” it could forget the dominant logics that govern its structure, as if it was building a new world in the shell of the old. The reparative reader tries to free themselves from the ‘Name of the Father’ (however futile such an attempt might be), so as to be consciously prefigurative and “not to reproduce the structures and practices of that which it struggled against, but rather to create the sort of social relations which are desired” (Raunig, 2007: 42). This act of creation is not one based on a clear-cut political agenda, but rather on experimenting with various utopian possibilities – the end of capitalism, postcolonial futures, or queer families for example – in the present. Sustenance or nourishment might not be all we can discover in the text, as repair can also be a project of improvisational remaking.
For Sedgwick, such alternative social relations do not need to be imagined into being out of thin air, since “heterosexist structure [is] always already awash with homosexual energies and potentials […] whose making-visible might then require only an adjustment of the interrogatory optic, the bringing to the family structure of the pressure of our different claims, our different needs” (1993: 71). If one circumvents the obvious question of the ‘Name of the Father’ in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest for instance,one can – like Sedgwick does in ‘Tales of the Avunculate’ (1993) – discover an abundance of queer uncles and aunts that do not fit neatly into normative kinship models. One direction to take reparative reading is to think and feel alongside one’s object of study to make such queer energies and potentials explicit to tell an alternative story outside the confines of the reproductive heterosexual family unit. This is an approach to the text that does not go into depth in order to unearth something hidden, but points out the queer potentials in plain sight, yet routinely overlooked. By applying a differentinterrogatory optic, based on specific (“guilty”?) claims, it makes those possibilities visible within the text.
Another instance of this prefigurative aspect in Sedgwick’s reparative approach could be her mention of the deliberate creation of “alternative historiographies” in practices of camp (2003: 150), which reconfigure the possibilities of past and future together. In contrast to a “paranoid reading practice [that] is closely tied to a notion of the inevitable” (2003: 147), such an approach would allow for surprises – good or bad – to surface through a renarration and reinterpretation of collective history. It is, for example, one “feature of queer possibility […] that our generational relations don’t always proceed in this lockstep [of Oedipal regularity and repetitiveness],”according to Sedgwick (2003: 147). This allows for alternative kinship models to emerge not just as already existent and overlooked in the past, but simultaneously as viable in the future. Through a practice of radical reassembly, the reader (not just of specific texts, but also of genealogies) can take the various wayward bits and pieces in her object of study and use them to cleave open a space of potential futurity – allowing for glimpses of a radically different world possibly yet to come.
The reparative turn
In contrast to this understanding of reparative reading, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,’ has been mentioned in various post-critical projects in theintervening two decades that deemphasize such political potentials. The literature of post-critique is certainly no monolith and neither is the reception of Sedgwick’s thought within this intellectual genealogy. Her essay can, however, be called a popular and foundational citational reference, especially in literary and queer theory. While a more thorough exploration of how reparative reading has been discussed within the field of post-critique is beyond the scope of this essay, this section rather serves to discuss a few examples of Sedgwick’s uptake in order to both highlight what crucial aspects of her intervention get lost in some of these later projects and to further emphasize what I see as the oppositional and political edge of repair.
In their essay ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction,’ Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, for example, cite Sedgwick as one thinker whose project – in line with their own – was supposedly about an “embrace of the surface as an affective and ethical stance. Such an embrace involves accepting texts, deferring to them instead of mastering or using them as objects” (2009: 10f). The problem is that nowhere does Sedgwick defer to the text. Rather, she works from the assumption that our reading practice brings forth particular affective responses, lines of inquiry, and unruly potentials in the text. Yes, the text was already awash with these energies, but it still needs the reparative reader to unite the bits and pieces to create a new, needed book out of the one given. The creative aspect of the reparative stance gets lost. Also, hers was not merely an “ethical” project, often assumed to be less contentious. As discussed previously, it includes clear political and oppositional aspirations. In contrast to surface readers, who decide ahead of time to situate their objects of study “in landscapes neither utopian nor dystopian” (Best & Marcus, 2009: 16), reparative readers allow themselves the possibility of being surprised by their object of study, not ruling out utopian or dystopian glimpses in advance. Reparative reading consciously plays with the economy of meaning in a text to imagine anew. Further, an embrace of intimacy, vulnerability, or affect in this process does not make reparative reading automatically a neutral and/or moral project: being hailed into political subjectivity is also an embodied and affective experience (Butler et al., 2016).
In her book The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski also credits Sedgwick as a major inspiration (2015: 195) and describes Sedgwick’s reparative approach as “a stance that looks at a work of art for solace and replenishment rather than viewing it as something to be interrogated and indicted” (2015: 112). Yet, these two views are not opposed. The desperate need for solace and replenishment is itself an indictment of a world that makes them be in such short supply, including the world of the text. Such an indictment is not inspired by the wish for the text to finally receive “its comeuppance” through the clever judgment of the critic (2015: 112), but as an act of self-love for marginalized selves and communities, an act of taking subversive pleasure in cultural objects that are not necessarily, at first glance, meant to provide it.
Felski also asks why it is “that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take umbrage” (2015: 5)? For Sedgwick, the answer is obvious: it is because we live in a world ruled by structural violence and “systemic oppressions” (2003: 124). Like the critics Felski aims to criticize, Sedgwick also “takes issue” with the larger world and tries to “subvert” its underlying logic, even if she does so through a reparative reading practice that circumvents predictable protocols of exposure and unveiling. That does not make Sedgwick any less committed to “radically defamiliarizing and denaturalizing, not only the past and the distant, but the present” through her alternative readings based on reparative motivations (2008: 44). What gets lost about Sedgwick’s intervention is her motivation: “the main reasons for questioning paranoid practices are other than the possibility that their suspicions can be delusional or simply wrong” (2003: 130). This is decidedly different from Felski’s criticism that “the practice of critique harbors an unmistakable kernel of antagonism, as we proceed to arm ourselves against imagined adversaries to whom we impute malicious or hostile intent” (2015: 112). When was there ever a need to imagine adversaries out of thin air? There is no shortage of real adversaries to be pointed out, their malicious and hostile intent clearly and proudly stated. Paranoid readers might be very right to be suspicious, “even a paranoid can have enemies” after all (Sedgwick, 2003: 127). But while there is good reason to be skeptical, Sedgwick is still wondering – considering the hypervisibility of violence at any given moment[10] – if exposure is the only, or the most promising, approach to make oppositional strategy or imagine differently. This question is what inspires Sedgwick’s intervention, one that is antagonistic against the status quo, not the wish to avoid “being drawn into [a] negative or oppositional attitude” (Felski, 2015: 192). Reading in dark times, such an attitude is warranted.
Felski does embrace what I see as a key feature of Sedgwick’s intervention, namely to value the “potential of literature and art to create new imaginaries rather than just denounce mystifying illusions. The language of attachment, passion, and inspiration is no longer taboo” (Felski, 2015: 192). New imaginaries, however, are themselves created in response to present conditions and hopes for the future. It is crucial to ask: Imaginaries by whom, for whom, against what? Experimental reimagining in a reparative mode is a political endeavor; it has collective stakes. This is no triumphant utopianism either, though, assuredly knowing in advance what its performative impact will be, and what kind of outcome it might inspire. While Sedgwick is advocating for a wider range of affective stances in relation to one’s object of study, allowing room for “attachment, passion, and inspiration,” her intervention is still deeply skeptical, since “in a world full of loss, pain, and oppression, both epistemologies [paranoid and reparative ways of knowing] are likely based on deep pessimism” (Sedgwick, 2003: 138). The reparative stance is rooted in the depressive position after all.
Closer to my own understanding of reparative reading, Robyn Wiegman acknowledges in her article, “The times we’re in: Queer feminist criticism and the reparative ‘turn,’” how the call for a wider range of affective stances towards one’s object of study can have political motivations. She writes:
In recent years, symptomatic reading has come under assault by literary critics who express a desire for intimacy with objects of study they neither master nor disdain. In the name of ‘reparative reading’, ‘weak theory’, or compassionate redescription, they seek new environments of sensation for the objects they study by displacing critical attachments once forged by correction, rejection, and anger with those crafted by affection, gratitude, solidarity, and love (2014: 7).
The aim here is to think and feel alongside, and in solidarity with, one’s object in order to open up new environments of sensation and healing. Wiegman goes on to argue that a new generation of queer theorists are emerging out of this shift, who are “emphasising the creative act” and putting “faith in their objects of study as affectively rich environments for cultivating a response to the conditions of the political present” (2014: 16, emphasis mine). To cultivate such a response is, again, not ‘innocent’ description or individualized feeling. It demands something of its object. It presupposes political commitments. Wiegman elaborates, however, that this constitutes a “dramatic revision of the political capacity of critical practice by casting such dependency [of the critic on their object of study] in ethical terms, as a response to the object’s experience and needs” (2014: 16). Here, again, the word “ethical” surfaces in a way that seems to deemphasize the political edge of a reparative practice. Further, while Sedgwick does not argue in favor of subordinating the object to the critic’s sovereignty, she still prioritizes the experiences and needs of the reader over those of the object.
Another approach that is also in conversation with the possible political potential of a reparative reading practice is Elisabeth Freeman’s article ‘Still After.’ She focuses on the fragments and part-objects that a reparative reader encounters or creates within the text. Instrumentalizing them through a practice of radical reassembly does not mean – and this is a crucial point – that one knows in advance what the finished product will exactly look like or have to offer. While born out of specific political investments, it is still an improvisational practice that allows room for all kinds of surprises. For Freeman, this is intimately linked to the queer experience of self-and world-fashioning:
It is more like what I think Sedgwick means by reparative criticism: that because we can’t know in advance – we can know only retrospectively, if even then – what is queer and what is not, we gather and combine eclectically and idiosyncratically, dragging a bunch of cultural debris around with us and stacking it in eclectic piles ‘not necessarily like any pre-existing whole’ (2007: 499).
By highlighting the multifaceted, disjointed, and individual ways that queer people have “succeeded in extracting sustenance” from their particular “eclectic piles” of “cultural debris,” Freeman reiterates reparative reading as a strategy of survival. Yet, she also hints at the prefigurative possibilities of the practice through mentioning the potential of remaking the text into something “not necessarily like any pre-existing whole.” The fragments that permeate the object of study are reorganized in playful ways, stacked in idiosyncratic piles, experimented with. We cannot know in advance, only retrospectively, if such an experiment succeeds in inspiring resistance, providing sustenance, imagining differently, or being successfully “at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (Sullivan, 2003: 43). But as reparatively-positioned readers, we allow ourselves to hope that it might.
Reparative reading in practice: Toward a queer politics of repair
What, then, would reparative reading look like in practice? I argue that Sedgwick’s own article, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,’ can be read as an illuminating example of such an approach. Though it was written in 1991, six years before the reparative and paranoid reading essay was first published as the introduction to the collection Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997),her essay on Austen already demonstrates similar commitments and methodology. Sedgwick points out here, for example, that “Austen criticism is notable mostly not just for its timidity and banality but for its unresting exaction of the spectacle of a Girl Being Taught a Lesson” (1991: 833). Much like the paranoid stance discussed earlier, such a pedagogical reading hides other possible approaches from view. Much scholarship on Austen, Sedgwick suggests (in a move that, granted, creates a somewhat strawman Austen critic), focuses either on how the female heroine, or Jane Austen herself – often cast as an obvious representative of unthinking political and gender conservatism – “have to” be taught a lesson. In a marked turn away from this business-as-usual, Sedgwick goes on to define her own intent as wanting
to interrupt this seemingly interminable scene of punitive/pedagogical reading, interminably structured as it is by the concept of repression, that I want to make available the sense of an alternative, passionate sexual ecology – one fully available to Austen for her exciting, productive, and deliberate use, in a way it no longer is to us (1991: 834).
Far from doing a predictable reading of Austen’s work as a pure example of a conservative world view in need of further exposure or criticism, Sedgwick instead extracts rather surprising, alternative potentials from Austen’s work. In other words, Sedgwick is already engaging in a reparative project here, years before she will explicitly theorize this practice. She reads Sense and Sensibility as a challenge to the “heterosexist homo/hetero calculus” by discovering traces of the since almost forgotten sexual identity of the “masturbator” (1991: 826)[11] in Marianne Dashwood, arguing that the character’s “autoeroticism is not defined in opposition to her alloerotic bonds, whether with men or with women. Rather, it signifies an excess of sexuality altogether” (1991: 829). Instead of attempting to expose Austen’s conservatism yet again, so as to correct and reject it, Sedgwick tries to think and feel along with Austen and in solidarity with her position. In this way, Sedgwick allows for the possibility of a deliberate exploration of homosocial and autoerotic desire by Austen. The goal of this reparative practice is not to suggest that this particular interpretation was Austen’s own purpose. Rather, it is to show that her writing is another instance of an assumed outward conservatism being awash with other motivations, intimacies, and pleasures.
Instead of yet again trying to teach “Jane Austen” – or “the past” – a lesson, Sedgwick puts the spotlight on the present. By resurrecting the long-forgotten pathological identity of the “masturbator,” she attempts to point past the single-minded focus on gender difference and partnered sexuality as valid markers of identity formation in the present day and towards the future possibility of redefining the meaning and symbolic economy of sexual identity altogether. For Sedgwick, to “have so powerful a form of sexuality run so fully athwart the precious and embattled sexual identities whose meaning and outlines we always insist on thinking we know, is only part of the revelatory power of the Muse of masturbation” (1991: 822). What exact shape this revelation will take is not completely clear in advance, but to resurrect the “Muse of masturbation” is to carefully collect fragments from the text in order to reassemble them in ways that reimagine what we had previously taken for granted about sexual identity formation, present and past. To build towards such a revelation of what else sexual identity might encompass, is to disrupt the magnetizing force of normative conceptions of self that orient everything around their seeming inevitability. Sedgwick argues that “in Austen’s time as in our own, the specification of any distinct ‘sexual identity’ magnetized and reoriented in new ways the heterogenous erotic and epistemological energies of everyone in its social vicinity” (1991: 824). To discover counter-energies, like taking autoeroticism seriously as a disruptive form of sexuality, weakens the magnet’s pull. Such a move can create openings for alternative selves and social relations, such as joyful and sexually-satisfied non-coupled adulthood, to become thinkable and sustainable.
In addition to extracting sustenance for various alternative identity formations from Sense and Sensibility, Sedgwick also challenges a solely use- or outcome-centered approach to reading and writing practice in the essay. For her, “masturbation can seem to offer – not least as an analogy to writing – a reservoir of potentially utopian metaphors and energies for independence, self-possession, and a rapture that may owe relatively little to political or interpersonal abjection” (1991: 821). Again, the Muse of masturbation is not being resurrected in the name of any clear-cut agenda, like the introduction of a new identity category for instance. Rather, it is the discovery of this “reservoir of potentially utopian metaphors and energies” within the text that constitutes its own prefigurative political possibility. It is not immediately apparent in what ways the contents of this reservoir might surprise us, but we are invited to reassemble its contents and imagine radical alternatives to the status quo: for instance, the queer utopian possibility that one could integrally identify with non-productivity, with “squandering” valuable time on pleasures that offer nothing productive or lasting, running counter to normative imaginaries of life as a thoroughly utilized means to achieve ever more personal optimization and acquisition, or else of reproduction as the be all and end all of personal development. This kind of identification has collective stakes, in that it runs counter to a whole lot of taken-for-granted assumptions about what constitutes a good and valuable life.
In this way, reimagining economies of bodies and pleasures is not exclusively a personal or individual matter, but can challenge a whole host of normative expectations about ‘proper’ self-development, kinship, and social relations that structure larger society. This was what Foucault had in mind when he argued that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex” (Foucault, 1996: 310; Quoted in Halberstam, 2005: 1). In other words, the argument here is not that the sexual practice of masturbation is going to set us free. Sedgwick’s approach is about challenging longstanding assumptions about identity formation and productivity, while also disrupting predictable readings of the canon of romantic love and couplehood. She is neither engaging in a reading exposing Austen’s heteronormativity, nor is she deferring to the text and what it says about itself. Instead, Sedgwick is playing with the possibility of a different economy of meaning in the text, as well as the possibility that the past could have been otherwise than tends to be assumed, to potentially allow for new imaginaries and value systems to emerge as viable in the present.
This performative capacity for making alternative social relations thinkable is, ultimately, where one could take the radical promise of a reparative reading practice beyond queer theory’s challenges to the normative power structures surrounding desire, sexuality, partnership, gender, and reproductive imperatives. In the collection Vulnerability in Resistance, Sarah Bracke writes about the importance of imagining otherwise for this political moment:
this brings me to the kind of agency an [neoliberal] ethos of resilience forecloses: it thwarts the developing of skills of imagining otherwise. Resilience […] implies a colonization of the imagination, given its profound investment in the motto at the heart of neoliberalism: ‘There is no alternative.’ A well-known refrain by now holds that it has become easier to imagine the end of the world – by ecological disaster, terrorist inferno, deadly contagious disease wiping out the human race, or a fatal combination of all of these – than the end of capitalism, including neoliberalism, as a political economy (2016: 63).
This skill of ‘imagining otherwise’ is closely linked to an understanding of reparative reading as a practice that includes radical forms of reassembly. Applying this kind of reimagining to a different realm, it might not yet be possible to imagine an alternative to neoliberal values or capitalism as a whole. We might know ‘only retrospectively, if even then’ what could be successful ways of reorganizing the political economy and social relations along radically different lines. Until then, however, we can engage in a kind of prefigurative politics of the imagination, not through a coercive embrace of positive affect, like making hope compulsory, but from a deeply pessimistic stance that nonetheless will allow itself to be surprised. By conceiving of our objects of study as construction sites, filled with wondrous rubble, we might discover ever more openings for projects of reimagining.
How to read in dark times? A queer politics of repair does not imitate already established protocols, but takes a transformative and creative approach to fragments, aiming to produce both new artifacts and new relationships out of the texts and forms of a broken world. Reparative readers unearth pieces out of the book they were given and rediscover them in a practice of radical reassembly. Trying to circumvent the obvious, this is an improvisational gesture that, like in play, has no certain outcomes or impacts. It might very well fail. And yet, the reparative reader chooses to keep engaging with all sorts of unruly (and at times surprisingly revolutionary) potentials in a text to possibly create something new and needed. They will allow themselves the risk of hope; of possibilities opened up by imagining otherwise. The reparative reader tries to forget the dominant logic that once held all these scraps together, and instead creates their own small world apart – potentially nourishing formerly unthinkable pleasures, alternatives, and surprises.
References
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Best, S. and Marcus, S. (2009) ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108(1):1–21. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1.
Bracke, S. (2016) ‘Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience’, in J. Butler, L. Sabsay, and Z. Gambetti, eds., Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press.
Butler, J., Gambetti, Z. and Sabsay, L. (eds.) (2016) Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Notes
[1] The title was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s book‘Men in Dark Times’(1983).
[2] The essay was first published in 1997 as the introduction to‘Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction’.
[3] Mark Fisher attributes this idea to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Fisher, 2019: 2).
[4] For Sedgwick, this might have been different in past decades: “To keep arriving on this hyperdemystified, paranoid scene with the ‘news’ of a hermeneutic of suspicion, at any rate, is a far different act than such exposures would have been in the 1960s” (2003: 143).
[5] Sedgwick directly admits this in her essay: “I certainly recognize that [paranoia] characterizes a fair amount of my own writing” (2003: 144).
[6] Indeed, as Heather Love argues, Sedgwick’s foundation essay “itself is not only reparative – it is paranoid” (2010: 238).
[7] As Sedgwick urges the reader in ‘Tales of the Avunculate: The Importance of Being Earnest’ (1993: 58).
[8] This is a decidedly different kind of intellectual labor than the one suggested by Bruno Latour, when he writes that the “critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles” (2004: 246). Instead of aiming to get closer to “facts,” as Latour suggests (2004: 231), Sedgwick’s use of assembling here is a creative, speculative, and instrumentalizing practice that instead prioritizes the subjective needs of the reader.
[9] This is what Sedgwick means, I would argue, when she asks in the essay: “What makes pleasure and amelioration so ‘mere’?” (2003: 144).
[10] As Sedgwick writes: “Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enmeshed in the penal system? In the United States and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret” (2003: 140).
[11] The full quote reads: “The identity of the masturbator was only one of the sexual identities subsumed, erased, or overridden in this triumph of the heterosexist homo/hetero calculus” (Sedgwick, 1991: 826).
Irina Kalinka is a scholar of political and critical theory with a focus on digital media. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, she is currently working on her first book project, ‘The Political Imaginary of User Democracy.’ She previously received her Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her recent publications include ‘The Politics of Appearance on Digital Platforms: Personalization and Censorship’ in Die Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft and ‘Community Despite Connection: Resisting the Digital Logics of Optimization and Failure’ in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture.
Email: Irina.Kalinka@columbia.edu
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