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The Process Julie: How did you come to your blog writing process? What made you decide that you were going to prepare your posts in advance? Lauren: My process has developed over time into a thing that is relatively reliable , although I don’t post regularly. In 2004 I published a piece called Unfeeling Kerry where I describe why I didn’t really like blog writing at that time, which, among many academics, involved adapting theory to polemics, to the opinion form. I wasn’t really interested in shooting off quick responses to immediate stimuli. I wasn’t interested in being, as it were, an affect register keyed to prescriptive conclusions about what appeared for a moment to be significant events. So, instead, it seemed to me that if Supervalent Thought could be cast as a research blog, my task would be to try to figure out the contours of a problem in relation to a project. In a short piece you can only begin to approach a problem and see what shifts because of your mode of approach. I tended to articulate those problems in terms of phrases and keywords : for example, there is a series on “the encounter” and one on “the combover ” as a form of subjectivity and social experience. There is also a series on the problem of thinking about life at its edges—the suicide materials, the Do You Intend to Die? sequence. All of this slight movement has been very important to developing the final chapter of my next book, where the question is what it means not to want to attach to the world, which I take profoundly to be an experience of biopolitics. I decided that because it was a research blog it ought to be my project to be developing things. It was also an opportunity to think about the way I write, since I am a bad writer. My process is a lot like making pie crust. I try carefully and slowly to push a problem into a new contour by making a new 259 The Blog as Experimental Setting An Interview with Lauren Berlant k a n n a p o l e t t i and j u l i e r a k context for it—I feel like I’m very slow compared to other people. So I don’t know about a “decision” I made, but this turned out to be my process. So one thing about the process is that because it was a research blog, I felt like it was important for the entries to develop thought. The other thing is that, as I’m trying to learn how to write so I couldn’t just be, you know, just casting things off quickly. So there’s a lot of ongoing revision. I think that the writing in Cruel Optimism (2011) was transformed by writing the blog because I have a more available style now than I had in previous work. Julie: What was it about the form of blogging that made you think it was a good medium for this kind of writing? Lauren: Well, again, I wasn’t thinking of it as a good medium for where I was at the time. It’s a developmental medium; it’s an experimental medium for me. Communication: Writing to Humans Lauren: My interest in the blog was to try to think about writing as communication . . . rather than the way I think about it when I’m writing normally, which focuses on my fidelity to the idea and the question. When I’m writing out of fidelity to the idea and the question, my writing tends to involve longer sustained abstractions, and when I’m writing to humans . . . I’m much more likely to be closer to a storytelling modality. Anna: How did you know that people would be reading your blogs, was it a speculation on the form? Lauren: Yes: I think the medium and genre of the blog presumes such a rhetorical orientation for the writer, a hybridized public, personal voice: but I didn’t make any conscious empirical predictions about the destiny of the blog, or really have fantasies about it. Because one doesn’t know what will happen. I didn’t really care or consider outcomes. My blog actually gets quite a few hits. But I don’t know how much reading there is. But then there’s hardly any reading anywhere anyway . . . Julie: Is it important to you to...

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