Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event

The essay to follow takes as its literary archive two novels that are, in some strong sense, about the US: Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1998) and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003). However, it claims no interest in contributing to "American Literary History," insofar as that project sees the US as the protagonist of its own story or even as the magnet that organizes stories about it, however chaotically. Rather, this essay takes on the linked problem of writing the history of the present and the literary history of the present. It sees this problem as a problem of affect, a problem of apprehending heightened moments in which certain locales become exemplary laboratories for sensing or intuiting contemporary life.

Sometimes such locales can be national—for example, the nation can be seen as one of the locales of globalization, a place where forces are managed, processes settle, and things happen. But even from that perspective the national is lived simultaneously in diffused and specific places as well as in bodies that are working out the terms of what it means to feel and to be historical at a particular moment. This essay's interest is in the historical sense, particularly of the present—any present, even a past one. How does a particular affective response come to be exemplary of a shared historical time, and in what terms?¹

On the face of it, affect theory has no place in the work of literary, or any, history. Gilles Deleuze writes, after all, that affects act in the nervous system not of persons, but of worlds.² Brian Massumi posits the nervous system as so autonomous that affective acts cannot be intended (35–36). Yet, as they and Teresa Brennan—writing from another tradition—argue, affective atmospheres are shared. For the purposes of this brief essay my claim will be that affect, the body's active presence to the intensities of the present, embeds the subject in an historical field, and that its scholarly pursuit can communicate the conditions of an historical moment's production as a visceral moment.

Another way to ask this is, why are so many novels so quickly written, these days, about the intimate experience of disasters such as 9/11, and how does the aesthetic rendition of emotionally complex sensual experience articulate with what is already codified as "knowledge" of a contemporary historical moment? How is it possible for the affects to sense that people have lived a moment collectively and translocally in a way that is not just a record of ideology? I will argue later that a particular model of trauma has become, for a certain contemporary literary audience, a main way to talk not about what Cathy Caruth calls "unclaimed experience," but about experiencing the present as an ongoing process and project of collective sensory detection. Especially when the terms of survival seem up for grabs, the aesthetic situation turns to the phenomena of affective disruption and the work of retraining the intuition.

What follows conceives of action and cognition as following out the goals of affect, but more centrally tracks the production of intuition as central to the historicizing sensorium. There is a history, from Henri Bergson on, of this kind of thought about intuition. Additionally, there is a strand within Marxist cultural theory, including everyday life theory, which focuses on the historical novel precisely for its address to the normative affective sensorium that registers history in transitional moments that are both in continuous time and stand out from within it. For this essay's purposes, The Intuitionist and Pattern Recognition, two novels of the historical present, will provide the main archive for tracking the building of an intuitive sense of the historical present in scenes of ongoing trauma or crisis ordinariness.³ In it, all generality—what nations do, how power works—is derived from stories constituted by catching up to a crisis already happening in worlds that are being shaped by a collectivity that is also caught up in making and apprehending the present moment. In talking about writing histories of the present it asks what a...