Affective intelligence

Page 4 American Book Review Affective intelligence Margaret Ronda Over the past fifteen years, Lauren Berlant has become one of American cultural theory’s most indispensable figures, drawing on a variety of discourses—post-Habermasian public sphere theory, queer and gender studies, poststructuralist and new historicist analyses of subjectivity and power, legal studies, and Marxist critical theory—to investigate the role of collective feeling in American politics and culture. In her justly celebrated first two books, The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991) and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997), Berlant tracks the displacement of politics into the domain of feeling and the coterminous publicizing of private affect. Centrally concerned with the affective formation of “intimate publics” through which modes of political allegiance and belonging are negotiated, Berlant’s work explores how such publics function “juxtapolitically,” in proximity to but importantly distinct from the national political sphere. Differentiating an intimate public both from a Habermasian liberal public sphere and the counterpublic model of non-dominant subjectivity theorized by Michael Warner and Nancy Fraser, Berlant emphasizes iconic, aspirational, commodified, and privatizing forms of collective identification, often most visible in massmarket materials like films and advertisements. Berlant’s new study, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, refines her analysis of intimate publics by focusing on one particular public: “women’s culture.” Readers familiar with her work will note a distinct shift, in The Female Complaint, away from a national-juridical topos that considers the intimacy of citizenship. Her continuing interest in belonging and normative fantasy in the US social field is geared, here, toward a gendered subculture created and maintained through the market. The Female Complaint examines “women’s culture” as “commodified genres of intimacy” that promise to connect women across differences. This “women’s culture,” Berlant argues, “is distinguished by a view that the people marked by femininity already have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate, revelatory, and a relief even when it is mediated by commodities, even when it is written by strangers who might not be women, and even when its particular stories are about women who seem, on the face of it, vastly different from each other and from any particular reader.” Consumers of women’s culture are presumed to share a worldview that is neither national nor political, but personal and emotional. This collective identification is, in turn, both shaped and reinforced by the “middlebrow” texts that constitute this cultural formation. If this sounds like yet another study of a marginalized subculture that emerges in antagonistic relation to dominant norms, Berlant’s groundbreaking approach defies such expectations. Women’s culture The Female ComplainT: The UnFinished BUsiness oF senTimenTaliTy in ameriCan CUlTUre Lauren Berlant Duke University Press http://www.dukeupress.edu 353 pages; cloth, $84.95; paper, $23.95 Ronda continued on next page Chandler continued from previous page Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). At stake in the dispute are the political consequences of approaches to feeling (both that of ourselves and others) that are not naturally just there but instead emerge historically, already intermingled with and productive of fields of social power divided by gender, race, and class. Cari M. Carpenter’s Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality , and American Indians, reviewed for ABR by Elizabeth Wilkinson, extends and complicates this conversation by analyzing how nineteenth-century views of American Indians shaped and constricted the kinds of emotional rhetoric available to them. It is here also that one can, albeit precariously, situate queer theory’s manifold contributions to affective studies, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), or Lauren Berlant’s most recent book, The Female Complaint, reviewed for ABR this issue by Margaret Ronda. By analyzing the configurations of sexual desire historically and by approaching the emotional styles of gay culture through the rubric of performance, such studies denaturalize the affections, or rather put them back into their historical contexts. The third camp I mark out is probably the most recent to emerge popularly within contemporary theory, but it is also the group with the oldest genealogy . These thinkers can be configured around their shared fascination with Baruch Spinoza’s...