Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich (review)

Depression is structured to demonstrate the fusion of the personal—and social—aspects of depression. Its first section consists of Cvetkovich’s “depression journals” while the second section is a “speculative essay” on depression as a “public feeling.” While diptych in form, her goal throughout is to examine depression and its forces in order to “depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action rather than its antithesis” (2). As solitary as depression may make an individual feel, understanding depression as symptom of politics might allow for a better understanding of how individuals negotiate the political, “even if that movement sometimes seems backward or like a form of retreat” (21).

Cvetkovich’s “depression journals” begin in graduate school, with the realization, retrospectively, that she was so busy participating in academic culture that she could not participate in a protest; even worse, that as she mulled over her inability to participate, she stumbled and injured her ankle. She realized that she “couldn’t feel physical pain because I was so busy feeling other kinds of pain … an amorphous sense of dread” (30). But this dread persists after she passes her defense and gets her first job, leaving her “fixated on the immediate present, unable to think of other things … or how to imagine it ending” (35). Yet as the years pass, Cvetkovich finds ways of making depression less intense: a religious commitment, therapy, and occasionally, taking antidepressants. Yoga and swimming provide physical movement: the overcoming of an intellectual block helps her move forward with her first book. Importantly, each of these blocks are not alleviated alone, but with the help of others.

The “speculative essay” that forms the second half of Depression is meant to be an “alternative form” of tracing depression as a concept, in order to resist its medicalization, and to suggest alternative strategies that can get one “unstuck.” For example, its second chapter mixes scholarship on the African diaspora with the work of American writers who understand depression through their struggles with migration and class mobility. Both have in common the depression that comes with aspiration, the shared vantage point of “labor where the hidden social relations and activities that keep middle-class households functioning or make them an aspirational horizon for the upwardly mobile are more visible. They highlight the dynamics of assimilation, exposing the ambivalent status of the quest for middle-class respectability that is so frequently the cause of depression or sadness for white people as well as people of color” (122).

The last chapter of Depression focuses on what Cvetkovich calls the “utopia of everyday habit,” the personal, “creative” endeavors (hers is crafting) that allow for ways of negotiating depression. Both academics and activists are likely to be suspicious of Cvetkovich’s turn towards “creativity,” especially her consideration of idiosyncratic “spiritual” practices. Her response to such suspicion is to, in fact, “suspend the tendency to dismiss spirituality, even in its ‘new age’ manifestations, in order to reckon with the resources it has to offer” (199). In other words, what we do with the practices we call “spirituality” reflects a certain kind of politics: even when cordoned from public view, such cordoning reflects a political orientation. And this may tell us much of how Cvetkovich defines depression, as being “stuck” in a world in which one’s emotions are manipulated to make us feel that we cannot become “unstuck.” Any way we move, then—even those moves considered by others to be unviable—may move one away from depression. Such movement may be more similar to academic practice than we may initially consider: “Like spiritual practice, creative practice—and scholarship as creative practice—involves not knowing … rather than having an answer” (202). Depression shows that what we may not know about depression can lead us to greater insights about depression itself.