Affect Theory and The New Age of Anxiety

Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety | The New Yorker 2022-11-29, 9:18 AM
A Critic at Large March 25, 2019 Issue
Affect Theory
and the New
Age of Anxiety
How Lauren Berlant’s cultural criticism
predicted the Trumping of politics.
By Hua Hsu
March 18, 2019
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/25/affect-theory-and-the-new-age-of-anxiety Page 1 of 16
Lauren Berlant sees all politics as

sentimental, trailing a fantasy of the good
life. Photograph by Whitten Sabbatini for The
New Yorker
Listen to this story
0:00 / 19:04
To hear more, download the Audm app.
n October, 2011, the literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren

I Berlant published “Cruel Optimism,” a meditation on our
attachment to dreams that we know are destined to be dashed. Berlant
had taught in the English Department at the University of Chicago
since 1984. She had established herself as a skilled interpreter of !lm
and literature, starting out with a series of in"uential, interlinked
books that she called her “national sentimentality trilogy.” A sense of
national identity, these books argued, wasn’t so much a set of
conscious decisions that we make as it was a set of compulsions—
attachments and identi!cations—that we feel. In “Cruel Optimism,”
Berlant moved from theorizing about genres of !ction to theorizing
about “genres for life.” We like to imagine that our life follows some
kind of trajectory, like the plot of a novel, and that by recognizing its
arc we might, in turn, become its author. But often what we feel
instead is a sense of precariousness—a gut-level suspicion that hard
work, thrift, and following the rules won’t give us control over the
story, much less guarantee a happy ending. For all that, we keep on
hoping, and that persuades us to keep on living.
The persistence of the American Dream, Berlant suggests, amounts to

a cruel optimism, a condition “when something you desire is actually
an obstacle to your own "ourishing.” We are accustomed to longing
for things that we know are bad for us, like cigarettes or cake. Perhaps
your emotional state is calibrated around a sports team, like the New
York Knicks, and despite hopes that next season will be better you
vaguely understand that you’ll be let down anyway. But our Sisyphean
pursuit of the good life has higher stakes, and its amalgam of fantasy
and futility is something that we process as experience before we
rationalize it in thought. These feelings, Berlant says, are the “body’s
response to the world, something you’re always catching up to.”
“Cruel Optimism” was dense and academic, but it proved enormously

in"uential. Its timing was serendipitous. The book was published at a
moment when Barack Obama could still credibly draw upon “the
audacity of hope,” and, with a second term in sight, people wondered
if he would !nally unleash the progressive will that many believed
lingered deep inside him. Those who opposed him continued to work
themselves into a radical frenzy, as the Republican mainstream
reoriented itself around the Tea Party. Berlant tuned in to a wider
sense of disaffection—the feeling among average voters that neither of
these visions for change was really about them, or for them. According
to Berlant, these suspicions manifested themselves in mundane ways:
hoarding things or overeating might be attempts to overcome feelings
of personal powerlessness. And her affective framework was a means
of understanding larger manifestations of these suspicions, too: the
Occupy movement, which began in September, 2011, could be seen as
a response to the cruel optimism of capitalism, the pent-up outrage of
citizens realizing that they’d been chasing nothing more than a dream.
In the years that followed, Berlant’s interest in the immediacy of what

others call “felt experience” helped explain why people were feeling
increasingly unsteady. It was as though they were in relationships that
lacked reciprocity. Her work, like the school of thought that had
produced it, was attentive to the buffeting emotional weather of
everyday life: consider our Twitter-fed swings of anger and mirth, the
oversharing and moodiness ascribed to younger generations, the
paranoia stoked by proliferating conspiracy theories, even the
emergence of the eternally sad pop star. Shortly after the publication
of “Cruel Optimism,” Berlant began to sense a subtle, atmospheric
disturbance. In September of 2012, she offered a diagnosis on her
blog:
Many of you would say that Donald Trump was excluded

from the Republican convention, has no traction as a political
candidate, and is generally viewed as a clown whose spewing
occasionally hits in the vicinity of an opinion that a
reasonable person could defend. But I am here to tell you
that he actually won the Republican nomination and is
dominating the airwaves during this election season. He is
not doing this with “dark money” or Koch-like in"uence

peddling. He has done this the way the fabled butter"y does
it, as its wing-"apping sets off revolutions.
Berlant felt Trump’s spectral presence everywhere, his bluster

mimicked and channelled by the Party establishment. Though hardly
a man of nuance, he had tapped into the subtleties of affective politics.

She called it “the Trumping of Politics.”
iterary criticism used to be centered on meaning. The critic

L interrogated a poem or a passage, and applied her preferred
theory of how meanings were produced and where they could be
found. A New Critic might have scrutinized form and irony,
explicating the interplay between overt and actual meaning; a
deconstructionist might have been attuned to the way the metaphors
and propositions in a passage undermined each other; a historicist to
the way the meanings of a text might be situated within larger
political or social tensions. For each, the task was interpretation, and
the currency was meaning. In the past couple of decades, however, a
different approach has emerged, claiming the rubric “affect theory.”
Under its in"uence, critics attended to affective charge. They saw our
world as shaped not simply by narratives and arguments but also by
nonlinguistic effects—by mood, by atmosphere, by feelings.
The so-called affective turn was propelled, in no small part, by a series

of essays, starting in the mid-nineteen-nineties, by the late Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, who had become fascinated by the work of the
psychologist Silvan Tomkins. He had identi!ed nine primary “affects,”
some positive (interest, enjoyment), most negative (anger, fear, shame,
disgust, “dissmell”), one neutral (surprise). Tomkins—who had a
background in theatre—believed that people acted toward one
another according to social scripts. We could achieve peace or
happiness by understanding how the scripts worked and by avoiding
situations that triggered negative affects. But literary critics like

Sedgwick were less interested in !guring out how to make people
better than in understanding why we feel the way we do.
During the two-thousands, affect theory became one of the dominant

paradigms of literary studies, and a bridge to other !elds, notably
social psychology, anthropology, and political theory. Scholars like
Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, and Ann Cvetkovich began exploring the
emotional contours of life during increasingly precarious times. They
were circling around a kind of overstimulated numbness, considering
everything from what it meant to call something “interesting”—a
hedge against actual judgment—to the relationship between economic
anxiety and mental health. In “Ugly Feelings” (2005), Ngai published
a “bestiary of affects,” including animatedness, envy, irritation,
paranoia, and the combination of shock and boredom that she called
“stuplimity.” Other affect theorists noted that, amid a sense of
dawning futility, many people seem to derive their greatest pleasure
from making others feel bad; disaffection and disillusionment are
contagions we can spread ourselves.
Berlant roots her version of affect theory less in works of psychology

than in works of Marxist thought, especially those of Raymond
Williams, who, back in the nineteen-!fties, wrote of the “structure of
feeling.” He was trying to describe how we come to agree on social or
cultural conventions—the intuitive, pre-ideological sense a cohort has
that one version of the future is feasible while another is not. Berlant,
in turn, sought to chronicle “dramas of adjustment” that have
overtaken the postwar, boom-time conceptions of the good life, and
that might “force into being new recognitions of what a life is and
ought to be.”
The draw of the American Dream, in her view, has always been its
seductive invitation to fuse one’s “private fortune with that of the
nation.” When she began teaching at the University of Chicago, in the
mid-eighties, Ronald Reagan spoke con!dently of a “morning in
America,” and the American story of postwar prosperity still seemed
possible. General skepticism about meritocracy and opportunity, felt
most acutely by marginalized groups who couldn’t see themselves in
picket-fence campaign ads, had yet to go mainstream. Berlant saw the
contradictions within the public realm played out in sentimental
!ction. These works were often seen as unserious because of their
appeal to emotion and their focus on the domestic sphere, and yet
they could move people to act.
In sentimental !ction, we encounter righteous solutions to problems

that feel unresolvable in real life. Berlant held that American popular
culture had been built, layer by layer, from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to
“The Simpsons,” upon the assumption that identifying with “someone
else’s stress, pain, or humiliated identity” could change you. “Popular
culture relies on keeping sacrosanct this aspect of sentimentality—that
‘underneath’ we are all alike,” she observed.
Everyone has heartstrings. Over time, she wrote, we had grown

addicted to having them pulled, rather than focussing on what the
pulling could accomplish by way of political change. We’d replaced
tangible action with affective experience. “What does it mean for the
theory and practice of social transformation,” she asked in a 1999

essay, “when feeling good becomes evidence of justice’s triumph?”
Somewhere along the way, doing good had come to seem irrelevant—
or maybe just felt impossible.
n 2002, Berlant helped found the Feel Tank Chicago—her version

I of that ubiquitous vehicle of policymaking the think tank. The
collective consisted of academic colleagues, artists, and activists who
sought to take “the emotional temperature of the body politic.” It
functioned both as a support network and as a strategy workshop for
“political depressives.” Underneath the playful conceit was the very
serious possibility that politics was essentially theatre, and that it was
basically impossible to opt out of one’s part in it. As Berlant later
wrote, in “Cruel Optimism,” “The political depressive might be cool,
cynical, shut off, searingly rational or averse, and yet, having adopted a
mode that might be called detachment, may not really be detached at
all, but navigating an ongoing and sustaining relationship to the scene
and circuit of optimism and disappointment.”
We dream of swimming toward a beautiful horizon, but in truth,

Berlant evocatively observed, we are constantly “dogpaddling around a
space whose contours remain obscure.” What stories do we tell
ourselves in order to stay a"oat? In December, 2007, she started a blog
called Supervalent Thought, dedicated to slowing the world down,
zooming in on its mundanities. Some of its most bewitching posts
had a voyeuristic intimacy, cataloguing interactions on city streets or
in coffee shops, scrutinizing nonverbal cues, gestures, and "eeting
expressions—the traces of affect that litter our daily lives.
In one post, Berlant recounts an argument between a cashier and an

angry customer at a convenience store. The customer leaves in a huff
but forgets his credit card, and the “aggrieved” yet duty-bound cashier
rushes out after him, hoping to get his attention with an unusually
loud whistle—the kind “that you know requires your !ngers.” When
the cashier returned, Berlant complimented him on his technique.
“He told us a story about elementary school,” she wrote. “He said he
had had a math teacher who insulted and shamed him. One day she
was using him as an example, and he just put his !ngers in his mouth
and blew.” It was an experience that couldn’t be easily distilled into
lesson; it endured as a lingering affect. Berlant was interested in the
“atmosphere” of scenes like these, acted out by dispirited characters in
search of a plot.
“The Hundreds” (Duke), Berlant’s latest book, co-written with

Kathleen Stewart, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at
Austin, grows out of these short writing exercises. Each entry is an
experiment in “following out the impact of things” in a hundred
words, or a multiple of a hundred words.
The result is a strange and captivating book. It is an inventory of what

Berlant and Stewart call “ordinaries,” which arise from encounters
with the world that are “not events of knowing, units of anything, or
revelations of realness, or facts.” They are records of affect,
meditations, manifestos, and prose poems. There are entries on
smoothies and weird encounters at the liquor store, digressions on
sel!es, yoga, and capitalism, a reference to the TV show “Search Party”
and the real-estate app Zillow. The authors sift through the detritus
of the American Dream—the symptoms of cruel optimism. Men at
the local deli seem to suspect that life is “a set of roadblocks cooked
down to a rage.” One particularly haunting page recounts an argument
that the narrator had with a neighbor over a urinating dog. Another
woman walks by, trying to calm the author down and bring her “back
to the good.” “His words were spitballs; hers were gently bouncing
tennis balls. He was a rage machine; she was a sympathy machine, but
she seemed so tired, too, and I could only imagine why.”
In Berlant and Stewart’s hands, affect theory provides a way of

understanding the sensations and resignations of the present, the
normalized exhaustion that comes with life in the new economy. It is
a way of framing uniquely modern questions: Where did the seeming
surplus of emotionality that we see on the Internet come from, and
what might it become? What new political feelings were being
produced by the rudderless drift of life in the gig economy? What if
millennials were unintelligible to their parents simply because they

have resigned themselves to precariousness as life’s de!ning feature?
A lot of affect theory is abstruse to the point where you forget that it
aims to describe basic facets of everyday reality. Stewart’s books have
been a notable exception, interweaving diaristic observation and
everyday reportage with critical theory. The sentences in Berlant’s
previous books and articles tended to be very long, conveying the
sweeping complexity of her ideas. But she seems invigorated by the
neurotic limitations of this form, which produces a kind of frenzied
poetry. “The Hundreds” calls to mind the adventurous, hybrid style of
Fred Moten (the book includes a brief poem by him), Maggie Nelson,
or Claudia Rankine, all of whom bend available literary forms into
workable vessels for new ideas. Berlant leans into the wit and
vulnerability on the edges of her previous work. “There is nothing I
love more than watching someone use their freedom,” she writes. “I’ll
coast in awkward transit, family meals, and acrid sex to get next to a
freedom. I’ll "ing myself at ordinary monsters if in the crevasse of the
mistake I get next to a freedom. We bear each other hoping to breathe
in each other’s freedom.”
The most penetrating moments of “The Hundreds” occur when the

authors meditate on what it means to write about life in the !rst place.
Their efforts end up telling us something about what it means to
assess our lives without giving up on ourselves: “We make a pass at a
swell in realism, and look for the hook. We back up at the hint of
something. We butt in. We try to describe the smell; we trim the fat
to pinpoint what seems to be the matter here.” It’s like an asymptote,
moving toward but never arriving at the point of convergence. This is,
of course, the geometry of cruel optimism—the endless chase for a
destination you’ll never reach. It’s tiring work: “When writing fails the
relation of word and world, it spins out like car wheels in mud, leaving
you stranded and tired of trying.”
ll attachment is optimistic,” Berlant argued in “Cruel

“A Optimism,” because it forces us out of ourselves. From there,
we enter “into the world in order to bring closer the 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.”
The challenge is !nding con!gurations that don’t simply reproduce
the same old patterns of life.
There’s a stirring moment, at the end of “Cruel Optimism,” when

Berlant writes about the book’s cover image, a painting that depicts
the artist and disability activist Riva Lehrer lying beside her dog,
Zora. Lehrer seems to "oat behind Zora, her hand covering her face.
Zora is blind in one eye and wears a cone around her neck. They are,
by conventional standards, limited and vulnerable beings. But, to
Berlant, they are a “team.” They “seem at peace with each other’s
bodily being, and seem to have given each other what they came for:
companionship, reciprocity, care, protection.” In the absence of real
stability—the state of affairs that we must come to terms with—there
is still the possibility of true solidarity, the experience of “having
adventures and being in the impasse together, waiting for the other
shoe to drop, and also, allowing for some healing and resting, waiting
for it not to drop.”
In moments like these, Berlant’s work can feel strangely and kindly
optimistic. What’s moving about her reading of Lehrer’s painting is
this awareness of the boundaries between these bodies, as well as the
atmosphere they nevertheless share. Maybe relinquishing or
recalibrating our fantasies of the good life doesn’t lead to absolute
darkness. It can simply be a matter of coming to grips with different
possibilities of communion, !guring out who bene!ts from our
collective weariness. The political backdrop that inspired “Cruel
Optimism” seems quaint compared with the divisiveness of the
present. But attentiveness to affect encourages us to imagine ourselves
beyond the present: even if feelings of exhaustion, indifference, or
disillusionment may have been naturalized, that doesn’t mean they’re
natural.
“No one wants to be a bad or compromised kind of force in the world,

but the latter is just inevitable,” Berlant once wrote in a short essay on
her personal credos. “The question is how to develop ways to
accentuate those contradictions, to interrupt their banality and to
move them somewhere.” We can build worlds out of these small
ambitions. We continue to write, even if it occasionally feels as though
we were spinning our wheels, and we continue to live, even if it means
giving up the certainty that our story is going to end the way we want
it to. Writing on her blog a few years ago, Berlant issued what she
described as her collective’s secret motto: “We refuse to be worn out.” ♦
Published in the print edition of the
March 25, 2019, issue, with the

headline “That Feeling When.”
Hua Hsu is a staff

writer at The New
Yorker and the author,
most recently, of the
memoir “Stay True.”
This Week’s
Issue
Never miss a big New

Yorker story again. Sign up
for This Week’s Issue and
get an e-mail every week
with the stories you have
to read.
E-mail
address
Your e-mail address

Sign up
By signing up, you agree to our

User Agreement and Privacy
Policy & Cookie Statement.
Read More
Books Books a-reporter-at- annals-of-

large history
Says You Martin
Amis, Style Iphigenia in The Day
How to be a
Supremacist Forest L.B.J. Took
critic in an age Hills Charge
of opinion. Few writers are
as rapt and Anatomy of a Lyndon Johnson
By Nathan Heller
rigorous in their murder trial. and the events in
celebration of By Janet Malcolm Dallas.
prose. By Robert A. Caro
By Thomas
Mallon
Cookies Settings

Affect Theory and The New Age of Anxiety

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Affect Theory and The New Age of Anxiety

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety | The New Yorker 2022-11-29, 9:18 AM

A Critic at Large March 25, 2019 Issue

Lauren Berlant sees all politics as

Listen to this story

To hear more, download the Audm app.

n October, 2011, the literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren

The persistence of the American Dream, Berlant suggests, amounts to

“Cruel Optimism” was dense and academic, but it proved enormously

In the years that followed, Berlant’s interest in the immediacy of what

Many of you would say that Donald Trump was excluded

not doing this with “dark money” or Koch-like in"uence

Berlant felt Trump’s spectral presence everywhere, his bluster

a man of nuance, he had tapped into the subtleties of aﬀective politics.

iterary criticism used to be centered on meaning. The critic

The so-called aﬀective turn was propelled, in no small part, by a series

situations that triggered negative aﬀects. But literary critics like

During the two-thousands, aﬀect theory became one of the dominant

Berlant roots her version of aﬀect theory less in works of psychology

In sentimental !ction, we encounter righteous solutions to problems

Everyone has heartstrings. Over time, she wrote, we had grown

theory and practice of social transformation,” she asked in a 1999

n 2002, Berlant helped found the Feel Tank Chicago—her version

We dream of swimming toward a beautiful horizon, but in truth,

expressions—the traces of aﬀect that litter our daily lives.

In one post, Berlant recounts an argument between a cashier and an

“The Hundreds” (Duke), Berlant’s latest book, co-written with

The result is a strange and captivating book. It is an inventory of what

In Berlant and Stewart’s hands, aﬀect theory provides a way of

millennials were unintelligible to their parents simply because they

The most penetrating moments of “The Hundreds” occur when the

ll attachment is optimistic,” Berlant argued in “Cruel

There’s a stirring moment, at the end of “Cruel Optimism,” when

for it not to drop.”

“No one wants to be a bad or compromised kind of force in the world,

Published in the print edition of the

March 25, 2019, issue, with the

Hua Hsu is a staﬀ

Never miss a big New

Your e-mail address

By signing up, you agree to our

Books Books a-reporter-at- annals-of-

You might also like