Sad Effects

Perhaps it isn’t fair to read Ann Cvetkovich’s vulnerable, selfconscious, and at times euphorically clunky text, Depression: A Public Feeling (2012), alongside the melancholic lyricism of Carol Mavor’s Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of “Camera Lucida,” “La Jetée,” “Sans soleil,” and “Hiroshima mon amour” (2012). Both books are richly illustrated with four-color photos and were published by Duke University Press in the same year; both interpose memoir and the personal voice with an academic critique of sad affects. Their aims seem quite different, however. The former reaches outward toward a politically engaged collective criticism-yet-to-be, while the latter dwells inward; it investigates the effects of forgetting as a deeply personal psychological and aesthetic experience, one that resonates bodily even when what is forgotten are those injuries that are not your own: the erasure without residue that accompanies the obliteration of memory and personhood as an effect Alzheimer’s disease or the razing of a whole-society-at-once through atomic catastrophe or racism.

Cvetkovich’s Depression eschews the beauty (and preciousness) that often infuses writing about sad affects and instead struggles to do justice to the ongoing despairs and microtriumphs of daily life: grocery shopping, flossing one’s teeth, getting out of bed, and the “surviving and hanging on and hoping and working for change” that may seem elusive (123).¹ Part journal, part criticism and cultural studies analysis, part rant, part thank you note to her Feel Tank / Public Feelings collaborators, Cvetkovich’s book posits a rejection of both medical/therapeutic models of depression and romanticized and recuperative heraldings of melancholia. It instead strives to imagine a politics of feeling that is at once celebratory, interactive, imperfect, unfinished, yet ethical and attuned to the politics of race, gender, and sexualities. Depression is performative and “process-based” (76), seeking to expose the “rough edges” and even “bad writing” that “allows fresh thinking to emerge” (77), while resisting the current tendency to simplify depression into a disease to be gotten over, as something “manageable” and “medical” (15) or, conversely, “melodramatic and sensational” (79). In short, Cvetkovich seeks to frame depression solidly within a cultural political sphere that is associated with the persistent “histories of violence” that manifest themselves in the drudgery the quotidian slights and ordinary struggles that are part and parcel of the landscape of American capitalism and colonialism and its legacies of racism, sexism, displacement, and homophobia.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, “The Depression Journals,” is a series of autobiographical fragments that describe the author’s own struggles with depression, mourning, mania, and anxiety, particularly during the process of writing of her dissertation, getting a tenure-track job, and publishing her first book during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The second part, “A Public Feelings Project,” includes three more traditional academic essays: one on early Christian spirituality as providing an alternative genealogy to contemporary scientific discourse on despair; a second on “ordinary” American racisms and colonialism and chronic, low-level depressions; and the last on art, craft, habit, and spirituality as the material means through which women—and queer women in particular—produce a “microclimate of hope” (her quite wonderful coinage) amid the challenges of living (155).

Conceptually, Depression extends Cvetkovich’s critique in An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture, which argues for a view of trauma that is not event-centered, but interwoven into the fabric of the trivial everyday. Her net is both broader and more intimate in this book. Depression, for Cvetkovich, is a “form of being stuck, both literal and metaphorical that requires new ways of living, or more concretely, moving” (26). The “moving” to which she refers follows an insistently “queer” trajectory, charting, as David Halperin has described it, a “horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot be delineated in advance” (62). Cvetkovich’s queer “moving” does not set itself in opposition to, say, Heideggerian dwelling or directly critique Marxian circulation, but it nonetheless insists on the relation between affective states (“feeling” moved) and literal, repetitive bodily activities of moving. She turns to the “micro...