Citizen Berlant: An Interview with Lauren Berlant

Andrew Hoberek Citizen Berlant: An Interview with Lauren Berlant Andrew Hoberek: Let's start with a counterintuitive question. Everybodyautomatically disses the star system. Do you haveanything good to say about it? Lauren Berlant: I don't know whether I think the star system exists right now. What is a star, anyway? People whose theoretical work resonates across disciplines and historical divisions within the disciplines ; people popular with graduate students; people who, tautologically , get the kind of reputation that makes their appearance in print or at conferences an event. This language comes from a particular historical moment in the early 80s, no? I'm not certain whether that kind of metatheory has the same status now. AH: Perhaps this is a product of disciplinary fragmentation: subdisciplines now throw up stars for themselves and not for the profession as a whole, as they did in the 70s and 80s. What would you say to this? LB: That's interesting. You might say that European high theory and the traditional literary-critical production of high cultural value attracted people to "stars." Now, in addition to that—because I don't think that's entirely archaic—you have people who are politically engaged in their work or engaged in the creation of a different kind of critical value. This is related to the rise of feminist, antiracist, GLBTQ, and postcolonial etc. work that emerges from what you're calling "sub-disciplines" but which I might call "transdisciplines." Some might say that this work also aspires to star value and that group X is no longer "marginalized" once it demands transdisciplinary attention. Others, like myself, see that kind of statement as ressentiment, as a symptom of what happens in the face ofchange in the normative parameters of critical value. AH: Do you think that the critique of the star system in some ways postdates the actual existence of the star system that's being critiqued ? So the critique that we have now addresses something that no longer has the institutional power that it once did? LB: That's certainly part of it. People tend to be stuck reading the profession in terms of where it was when they entered or left graduate school. If the star system is what dominated their relation to 128 the minnesota review theory and to doing disciplinary work in graduate school, it's going to factor into the way they continue to read the profession. For many people who are around now, looking at themselves over the last twenty years, it would be hard not to think about their career in terms of how it circulated as a "position" within the star system. But to return to the question of whether the star system is a good thing, do you think anybody ever thought of it in this way? Isn't it just a cynical, resentful phrase that has to do with people's fear of what is seen as undue influence over graduate students, or an undue, unfair boundary drawn between what's cool and what isn't cool? AH: There's a footnote in a recent Bruce Robbins essay where he says that we might think about the way in which the star system was a good thing for female academics or academics of color, for whom it provided a circuit of institutionalization and cultural capital outside of the old boys' network. He's making the typical Bruce Robbins argument: mediating institutions have always existed and while this one may have its problems, it also had a positive effect by helping people who didn'tbelong to the traditional demographic to break into the upper circles of academic power. To move to a different point, in the introduction to your book The Queen ofAmerica, you stress the ways in which your work differs from that of the high theorists who trained you. In particular, you don't feel that you have to rely on European high theory to authorize how you talk about "low" cultural material. Could you talk about that a bit? LB: It's never occurred to me to distinguish between high and low objects, because the questions that I was asking required a different organization of...