Unfeeling Kerry

8:2 ' 2005 Lauren Berlant

1.
Only a sense oI proIessional responsibility (I said I would do it)
and political urgency (to aid a collective reIusal oI reactionary
historical Ioreclosure) compels me to keep my obligation to write
this piece. the prospect oI which stimulates. mainly. political
depression in the Iorm oI Iailed anesthesia. I cannot not Ieel
enough about all oI this -- the election. the loss. the whole
stupeIying election season oI Iraming options and desires in the
U.S. political sphere.
1
The ego is supposed to protect you Irom
emotional overstimulation: but. as we know all too viscerally. this
is no longer the era oI the ego but rather oI the ego's exhaustion.
2
To be exhausted is not to be empty or archaic but to be dragging-
on tattered and barely holding shape. and thereIore living a
diIIerent. more unprotected kind oI existence than that implied by
"sovereignty."
3
2.
As the title predicts. this is an essay about being unIeeling. a
condition which. in many senses. was a topic throughout the
election season. ranging Irom issues oI candidate aIIect. the
humanity and inhumanity oI policy. voter apathy. and the like. But
it is also an examination oI the more general logic by which. in a
season oI high passions. we produce a calculus oI public aIIect
and emotion. usually without knowing it. and in a way that
suggests massive analytic disrepair in our conceptualization oI
political attachments. In this brieI piece I give some examples oI
public sphere attention to the insensate political emotions. Ilesh
out motives Ior developing a richer lexicon oI political anesthetics.
and close gesturing toward Iuturity with a Ioggy utopianism.
3.
You will note that I do not sound all bloggy and ranty about this
electoral event. tones that one Iinds in the emergent style oI web
writing that is iournalistic. at once seriously intellectual and
stridently casual. I oIten cavil at this new critical Irankness -- it is
too knowing. it has a hard time honoring analytically the obscurity
and strangeness oI an event: every event is already of course
clearlv way x. and there is no time or space Ior enigmas oI Iorm
or case. and even the supplement has become unsurprising.
Which is to say that I do sympathize with its desire Ior
transparency and Ior the sense oI belonging maniIested in the
need to know right awav what people and their communities
think about x: this emergent tonality also speaks to anxieties about
wanting a public Ior intellectuality as opposed to punditry. Which
is to say that reading the present as a recent past that might still be
an opening Ior something. I Ieel a little hesitant and ineloquent.
without in turn wanting to be a polemicist about it. Like Thoreau
in his moment. I honestly do not know how to sound now apart
Irom writing a mode into existence. So. this is a deliberate piece
Ieeling its way around a suspended space. an impasse.
4.
These days. the usual genre oI analysis aIter the political event is
the post-mortem. The post-mortem. which mixes epitaph.
eulogy. and autopsy. is in many ways an appropriate mode Ior
measuring the end oI an event. involving as it does counter-Iactual
Iantasies. proiections oI blame. and musings about imaginable
consequences. In terms oI this particular event. the election itselI
was plenty amortized in commentary (amortize: to liqueIy. Irom
Vulgar Latin DGPRUWiUH. to deaden). Commentary haunts the
event: the post-mortem is the revenge genre oI the commentary
class.
5.
Roland Barthes argues that a picture oI someone who's dead--
taken while they were alive -- Iorces the spectator into the future
anterieur. the will-have-been oI the period beIore mourning
when the unIolding oI something alive was yet to occur; Drucilla
Cornell talks about this tense as the condition oI imagining better
iustice.
4
But the post-mortem mainly looks back and blames. It
tries to derive lessons. It reeks oI a cramped and moralizing
pedagogy.
6.
Nothing has died. though. so the post-mortem itselI has to be
resisted as political commentary's pleasure genre. But what else is
there: the apres coup? In Freud's account a traumatic event is
brought into being as a blockage only in light oI something
subsequent. as though the import oI an event is in the interIerence
it runs on what precedes it. as though all activity were only
apphrehensible as retroactivity. In other words. the present is the
recent past; the Iuture is the will-have-been. II an episode that
remains animated by our attention to it becomes-event. then
criticism generates the possibility oI the possibility oI an opening in
what might become experience. Louis Marin makes a similar
point about "the schematizing activity oI the social and political
imagination which has not yet Iound its concept"
5
; Agamben holds
the place open Ior a Ioundationless community oI whatever.
signaling a space Ior radical political optimism. pace the poor
exhausted Gramscian will
6
: a mode oI being-with in proximity to a
Iantasy whose Ioundations are in something collective and yet
remain to be built.
7.
As Ior what happened last Iall. keeping the event open to
alternative descriptions and thereIore Iutures involves tracking the
circuits oI ongoing. iI ambivalent. attachment to the possibility oI
Ieeling political optimism. For me. beIore the election the
optimistic part oI this ambivalence had little to do with John
Kerry. It was attached to the Iantasy oI interIering with the
reproduction and expansion oI the Republican instance oI the
neoliberal mandate. I planned on being exuberant about that. Ior a
minute. In the electoral interregnum. optimism that had been Ielt as
an adrenalin rush toward a speciIic horizon oI activity mainly
quiets down. spreads out to other pulsations. When the event
itselI was played out on 3 November what ceased was a little
thing. really. One might have Iorgotten to breathe; one didn't
know what to look at. Actually the symptom was suspended.
almost subsensually. in being stunned but knowing but still
stunned: disbelieI.
8.
DisbelieI can be a political emotion. but not in the usual sense.
since it is not oriented toward opinion. It is. rather. the scene oI
stopping and looking around while Iull oI unacted-on sensation
related to reIusing a consensual real: an emotional space-time Ior
adiustment. adiudication. Ordinarily. uncommitted emotions like
this. which veer away Irom commitments to an obiect choice in an
available political world. are deemed apolitical. even blockages to
the political: and to the degree that the negative political aIIects
accompany non-participation in voting or political opinion culture.
one can see why this convention oI reading detachment in
dispassionateness persists. But what dispassion stands in Ior here
are the whole cluster oI deIensive emotions that maniIest a
subiect's relation to the political in modalities oI coolness and
distance easily misrecognized as apathy but running the whole
gamut in registers oI political depression. And we know what the
tell-tale signs oI that are: dramatic and undramatic versions oI
hopelessness. helplessness. dread. anxiety. stress. worry. lack oI
interest. and so on. Seen this way. the register oI political aIIect
I'm describing expresses mixed Ieelings. contradiction.
ambivalence. and above all. incoherence. Not emotions oI
revolution. but convolution.
9.
Political subiects. political discourses. and opinion itselI are
Iundamentally incoherent and bound up in the non-rational.
Intellectuals have a hard time bearing that Iact. because they are
trained to persuade by making better arguments.
7
The leIt in
particular has long pumped itselI up on the superiority oI its
arguments. But in the war oI attrition against the neoliberal
cultural. imperial. and economic proiect. better arguments can
only go so Iar. The right didn't grow its hegemonic bloc by making
better arguments -- Iar Irom it. We might even say. along with
Jonathan Schell. that they faked better arguments.
8
But this is
where Irom my place in the impasse the real and the Iake are not
excellent analytic tools Ior getting at the reproduction oI the
authority that contemporary reactionary ideology oIIers.
10.
The Republican right paired an economic and imperial proiect
with what Jameson calls a "Iantasy bribe"
9
: in this case the bribe
was Iantasy itselI. the opportunity to keep Iantasizing about the
normative good liIe. authorized by the right-wing promise to
maintain a vague scene and sense oI normalcy (sharpened at one
end by homophobia and. at the other. by the Iear oI economic
and terrorist disaster). As usual. the intimate domains (sexuality
and Iamily) represented what must not change while everything
else is revealed in its inIinite vulnerability. I am aware that the right
comprises many diIIerent vectors oI passionate interest: I am
speaking here not oI ideologues but their others. the maiority oI
people Ior whom political activity is mainly casual. a sometime
thing.
11.
Not dealing with the non-rational at the heart oI the political
blocks us Irom speaking to the importance oI people's Iantasies oI
the good liIe. however inconsistent and ungrounded in the
probable they might be; and makes it harder to note that the
particular Iantasies they phrase may not express the motives that
bring them to an attachment. The lure oI normalcy in particular. I
would argue. is the way an attachment to it produces a general
sense oI unconIlictednesss in the social world. despite the
structural Iractures that shape the ordinary as a deeply anxious
and Iragile phenomenal and mental space. But a mode oI
belonging in general that one can eIIect through a general mental
and physical commitment produces the normatively social as a
vague space oI unspeciIic pleasure that stands in as a home Ior
living on...Ior lots oI people.
12.
My speculation is that. among other things. people voted to stay
in proximity to a Iantasy oI the good liIe whose actual or potential
appearance in their own lives was not really a Iactor in their
decision. I am not arguing. though. that irrational Iorces made
people choose Bush while the rational would have had him
eiected Irom oIIice. To vote to stay in proximity to a Iantasy and
Iantasizing is to do Iormally what people do all the time in making
their obiect-choices.
10
This is why Tom Frank's language oI
voting Ior or against one's interest is iust so oII--as though one
could think Iully about interest actuarially. Fantasy is interest-
based. a motive to reproduce a scene that organizes one's sense
oI what it means to have a liIe. It involves placeholder attachments
(that's what obiect choice alwavs amounts to) that enable people
to be close to a rhythm oI Ieeling with which they identiIy.
11
13.
What's worth slowing down and attending to here is how political
Iantasy can be read as a Iorm oI selI-medication. lightening or at
least interrupting the instrumentalities oI the everyday. A candidate
is not merely a commodity. but even commodities are vehicles Ior
imagining the lightening oI liIe. To talk about political aIIects and
their relation to normatively identiIiable emotions is to negotiate
the blurry quality oI people's conscious liIeworld Iantasies. a blur
or slurring that ought to make it less surprising that many voters'
opinions do not seem to motivate their votes. Now the question
becomes: why choose the Right's style oI belonging-in-general to
a pretty abstract emotional nation. and not some other? I will be
presuming that "values" is not the answer to this. as only a small
percentage oI Bush voters said it was: but that something less
precise made his continuity in oIIice seem palatable to multiple
millions oI people.
14.
To advance on this ground I turn to November 3 2005 when.
scouring the web like a pig Ior truIIles. seeking a post-election
explanation oI how to be in a body politic now. I tripped over
Davey D.. writing on the website Rock and Rap Confidential.
Irom the part oI the Hip Hop community that had mobilized Ior
the election.
I would be lying iI I said last night's election results
were not a big disappointment. It's not so much that
I thought John Kerry would be the answer. but a
Kerry win and a Bush deIeat would've helped the
momentum and Iurther ignited the excitement and
passions held by many within the Hip Hop
community who went to the polls. . .. When we look
back at this election the Iundamental question we
have to grapple with is. was it enough to simply hate
Bush iI you weren't Ieeling Kerry?
12
15.
Let's start with a simple meditation on what Davey D. might have
meant. He posits a question that resonates throughout the pre-
election and post-election analyses. a question about Kerry being
wooden. stiII. without the common touch. out oI touch. This
charge works in contrast to the "excitement and passions" that
come Irom being engaged in social change activity as a relatively
more anonymous player. Davey D.'s common assessment oI
Kerry absorbed many diIIerent and incoherent suspicions about
him. especially that the candidate was what the right said he was.
a waIIler. a weakling when it came to the hard work oI political
courage. II someone is ambivalent about himselI. how can you
"Ieel" him in the best sense? It's as though what Kerry radiated
were his deIenses. which were then Ielt as deIenses against him.
which led to people not trusting him.
16.
Or perhaps Davey D. was reIerring not to the sense that Kerry
was weak but that he was covered with shame about something.
This was the Iilmmaker Erroll Morris's view. Morris made many
commercials Ior Kerry's campaign. Ieaturing Republicans who
were switching Irom Bush to the Democrats. These ads were
extremely clear-toned and emotional at the same time: emotions
oI betrayal and loss and anxiety about the now insecure Iuture that
would be brought about by a second Bush term runs throughout
them. Kerry is barely there in the ads: he's clearly a placeholder
Iigure Ior the whatever United States a non-Bush administration
would be. But the inarticulateness around that Iuture he embodied
didn't matter: it was an alternative Iuture and could be imagined
with relieI.
13
RelieI can be a political emotion. even when it's
empty as a program.
17.
Morris thought that Kerry should be a shoo-in given this
emotional climate.
14
But. he argues. Kerry's shame was over his
opposition to Vietnam: he wanted to run as a hero in the war but
not as a hero because oI what he did later. He rigidiIied his split
into a series oI disavowing phrases about Iighting Ior his country.
People could Ieel that he was being shoddy with his own history.
which neutralized the value oI his having been right. When one
sees the Iilms oI the young Kerry testiIying in Iront oI Congress.
one sees him in the Iuture anterieur. as someone who will have
been courageous in his liIe. But that person is dead. Morris argues
that Kerry was ashamed at the second. post-military part oI his
bravery. His ambivalence about a key part oI his courage
revealed him as not at home in himselI. ThereIore people were not
at home with him: they couldn't imitate his relaxedness in himselI.
because whether or not he had it. he didn't emanate it.
18.
This structure oI political mimesis. in which a public is encouraged
to identiIy with and to imitate a candidate's perIormance oI selI-
comIort. would be bizarre iI it were also not always central to the
grain oI emotional authenticity (true-to-oneselIness) that is
supposed to be at the heart oI modern Iakeness. In both oI these
instances the citizen wanted to have the candidate iustiIy their
aIIective intensity. with some intensity oI his own: the citizen was
looking Ior aIIective continuity. Now this is a usual part oI political
Iantasy mobilized by parties as they symbolize candidates. But it is
more than that too: already the New York Times is advocating Ior
Hillary Clinton's run by publishing people's Iantasies oI what they
would say to her to make her someone whom they could
misrecognize as being. at heart. emotionally. like them. even iI
their politics aren't identical.
15
At the heart oI this article is a sense
that Clinton is "evolving" her positions. and thereIore open to
inIluence. In the Iace oI a possibility like this. people's desires to
give their wisdom. to become unanonymous. to make a direct
impact. seem to Ilood out. In lieu oI the unmediated contact the
bottom line Ior any successIul political Iigure is that she be strong
enough to be at ease with her positions. that she enact a
political vernacular that weirdly. in perIorming a selI-relation.
reveals how she would recognize a citizen. In the contemporary
political world the vernacular is rooted in emotional authenticity.
Iealty to oneselI. proiected generally. Kerry did not radiate this;
neither will Clinton. iI she acknowledges evolving her Iundamental
political being. (Bush never acknowledges evolving his positions.
because he maintains a sense oI consistency according to the
ends. not the process. oI politics.)
19.
It would be easy to disrespect the visceral conIidence oI voters
who say things like "I didn't Ieel Kerry." Feelings aren't supposed
to matter: it is iudgment about power that's supposed to matter. In
"Making AIIect SaIe Ior Democracy." Patchen Markell notes that
even Habermas has had to rethink his aversion to a democratic
practice organized around political Ieeling by positing the
importance oI ambivalence to political identiIications
16
: but
ambivalence doesn't translate in the political world. which is one
oI the Iew spaces we have where idealism is solicited. not merely
tolerated.
20.
Indeed the whole construction oI the political sphere as a space
Ior cultivating emotions to which we aspire is rooted in liberal
American traditions. Another reason it pays to attend to the
irrationality oI political attachment is the contiuity oI the current
reactionary Iormation with the tradition oI U.S. liberalism. Those
with a tendency toward the right wing sensorium are the heirs oI
the sentimental politico-religious tradition embodied in Harriet
Beecher Stowe's exhortation that good people must "Ieel right"
about the world they try to bring into being. Stowe's
compassionate normativity vocalized the available reIormist
language Ior a reIraming oI the terms oI Iundamental social
enIranchisement: slaves Ieel pain. they have souls. so they should
be Iree the ways whites are.
21.
But the elevation oI Ieeling over other motives Ior transIormative
social practice has created new orthodoxies oI selI-regard in the
political sphere. where right Ieeling is now not an aspirational
vehicle to bring law into line with ethics. but rather iustiIies the
law's antinomianism with respect to itselI. Why don't more people
reiect that contradiction. since it's everywhere visible? Here's my
guess. Compassion is a proiect oI cultivated connectedness
masked as a natural outIlowing emotion. Like other Iorms oI
assurance. in the religious sense. it has always been Iake (a hope
lived as a truth) and always Iorced the hand oI the shamed and
the uncertain. What the right does now is not all that diIIerent than
what the leIt has done. where moral styles deployed politically are
concerned. But this time there are Iew obstacles to Iorce
compromises in the right's power and so its assurance can
become pure arrogance.
22.
Additionally. Bush's style is not in the hot genres oI leIt-
Democratic melodrama. He may be a compassionate
conservative. but his compassion is cool. Kevin Phillips locates
this style in the "Ialse populism" oI the CEO class that came to
power in the Reagan era.
17
Folksy. vulgar. canny but not
geniuses. this class could see itselI as an insurgency against old
money. chilly elitism. and also the liberal equation oI liIe with
suIIering that demands amelioration by the "haves" and the "have
mores." Bush's tendency to paint his goals as crises also works to
position his administration as a scrappy quick response team that
sees a problem. does what's necessary. then explains procedures
later. iI at all.
18
Who has time Ior Ieelings in the Iace oI a crisis?
And Ior whom does the assured Christian need to demonstrate
his Ieeling? (Talk about privatization!)
23.
E.L. Doctorow's impassioned "splenetic"
19
against Bush. "The
UnIeeling President." hits it right on the head.
20
In this widely
circulated piece. Doctorow scathes against Bush Ior hiding his
inhumanity under a shield oI pleasant vernacularity. This is a man
who cannot mourn the dead. writes Doctorow: "He hasn't the
mind Ior it. . . . you study him. look into his eyes. and know he
dissembles an emotion which he does not Ieel in the depths oI his
being because he has no capacity Ior it." You can tell that this
venal. greedy. loser is Iaking caring. He is not compassionate. he
is a iokester; he wears power lightly because (cynically) he is a
greedy bastard and (possibly also) a Ianatic who Ieels his deepest
obligations to the God and iustice at a sacred scale. Doctorow
contrasts him to Eisenhower. who could Ieel in advance the pain
oI the soldiers he has sent to die; Doctorow is enraged that Bush.
this light and insubstantial man. who is not deep with Ieeling.
cannot even mourn with or aIter he has produced so much global
and national suIIering.
24.
It is hard to disagree with this essay. Its claim that presidents Iorm
the "national soul" that will now be deIormed marks his genre as
the ieremiad (a pre-post mortem). What he can't see. what's too
painIul Ior him to see. I think. is why Bush's shallow emanations
would be an obiect oI desire. Why would a man who is actively
disinvested in Ieeling the pain oI others seem like a good idea Ior
a leader? Let me summarize: in this election the obiect choice was
not a candidate. or parties. or policies. Many people expressed
ambivalence about what was available Ior the choosing. The
obiect choice was a desire to promote the tendency oI x to
represent a Ieeling produced by a Iantasy oI a better good liIe.
This President does not address the political as a realm oI
inequality and suIIering. He phrases it as a space good people live
in who have a generally virtuous orientation toward a liIe that
"Ieels right" both in terms oI normalcy and democracy.
21
It is an
extremely hazy place that he clariIies only under political duress.
In the history oI sentimental politics. people who identiIy with
Ieeling right see politics as a degraded space they must pass
through to transcend it. to return politics to ethics. This liberal
tradition couched social change in radical aspirations beyond the
instrumentality oI capital and the potential comIorts oI a strictly
property-based Iantasy oI the good liIe. Bush enacts the same
structure oI disgust at the political. But suIIering is not the motor
oI his politics. Security is: the security oI a global capitalist
democracy abroad. the security oI a privatized world at home.
What the leIt sees as depth -- compassion with suIIering -- is not
on that agenda. On that agenda what's deep -- e.g. potentially
revolutionary -- is a commitment to Ieeling right about Ieeling
good. and whatever violence happens in its name. so be it.
```````````
25.
What will it have meant to think about the conIiguration oI a new
vernacular style as a prime neoliberal achievement? My argument
is that the leIt does not have to become more moral. less liberal.
less secular. Ior this is not a matter oI content. exactly. The new
ordinariness emits a casualness about power and a suspension oI
iudgment: shamelessness. Bush is always being asked about his
legacy and he replies. constantly. that he will leave it Ior history to
decide. He lives in the Iuture anterior. the will-have-been: this arc
oI proiection is central to political attachment in moments even oI
the most banal. Iormal change. It emanates the tone oI morbid
excitement motivating Deborah Kerr at the end oI Tea and
Svmpathv: "When you speak oI this in Iuture years...and you
will...be kind." Otherwise. Kerr imagines. she will merely be seen
as a stage someone had to go through: an event whose meaning
will have to do with her only insoIar as she was a stage that was
surpassed. Kerr-y was like his namesake. a little abiect about his
Iate in the iudgment oI history or the public: he was still Iighting the
power he was seeking while standing Ior nothing outside oI that
mode oI power's archaic conventions. He was seeming to express
unease with his own power. What the progressive style needs to
assimilate to the public body is an equal shamelessness about
making the U.S. world accountable to more progressive practices
oI iustice and equality; an ease in the Iace oI the hysterical and
smug conventionality oI the middle and right wing media and
publicity machine. A politics without embarrassment. It needs a
new vernacular style. derived Irom pride in the political culture oI
socialist and progressive iustice out oI which the new
phenomenology will emerge. Aspirational as opposed to nostalgic
solidarity. built on a version oI interdependence that is not
associated with weakness but a collective ethical experience and
a Ioggy vision oI a world beyond secret and explicit violence and
hyperexploitation. Such developments ought to provide the leIt
with the emotional base Ior the risks to come. Better that than one
more season oI the politics oI the merely less bad. about which
no-body ought to Ieel good.
Thanks to Tom Dumm. Jodi Dean and Adam Weg Ior their glad-
handing and spanking.
NOTES
1
By "stupeIying" I reIer to the antithesis within the term -- the
languorous or benumbed sense and the not-quite sublime sense oI
awe. One might note that the conIlictual sensations embedded
here are less benumbed than those in. Ior example. Susan Buck-
Morss's discussion oI the anaesthetic consequences oI sensual
overstimulation in modernist mass society. See Dreamworld and
Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West
(Cambridge: MIT 2000). pp. 257-270. Her account converges
with Simmel's sense oI the benumbed and the blas in "The
metropolitan mind and modern liIe." In my account we have
passed into another aesthetic era: as the ego loses even the
phantasm oI sovereign ground through the vanquishing oI upward
mobility. social security. and other phantasms oI liIe-building
toward the deIerred enioyment oI capitalist ideology. the mass
subiect seems to be Iighting back to unbenumb the senses. This
essay puts Iorth some reactionary aspects oI the new
vernacularity but will not suIIice Iully to make that argument.
2
Following Lacan. Teresa Brennan. in Historv After Lacan
(London: Routledge. 1993). identiIies calls capitalist modernity
"the ego's era."
3
The current rage Ior sovereignty as a category describing the
state. the citizen. and the subiect has opened up a mess oI
analogical thinking about Iantasies oI autonomous Iorce that. while
well-describing new imperial developments that create cracks in
the nation-state-law partnership. do not well-describe at all the
conditions oI the reproduction oI liIe Ior most people. most
places. but especially under regimes oI capitalist speed-up. I reIer
to Giorgio Agamben. State of Exception. trans. Kevin Attell
(Chicago 2005) and Achille Mbembe. "Necropolitics" (Public
Culture 15 1 Winter 2003) as my primary examples oI the ways
Iantastic representations oI state-associated biopower activity
(sovereignty under orchestrated regimes oI emergency) cannot
grasp the disiunctures experienced by ordinary people within
everyday liIe. Elsewhere I argue that the exhaustion oI practical
sovereignty is a central experience oI the reproduction oI liIe
under contemporary regimes oI capitalist speed-up; the subiect oI
practical sovereignty selI-medicates to survive the moment that.
exhausted. her egoic agency can no longer move through.
Meanwhile. as the sovereign subiect loses the material base to
which it is phenomenologically accustomed. the neoliberal state
invites identiIication with its own perIormance oI imperial
autonomy as though through identiIication there's a transIer oI
privilege. See "Slow Death: Sovereignty. Labor. Obesity"
(Iorthcoming).
4
Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida. Reflections on
Photographv. trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang. 1982) pp. 92-97; Drucilla Cornell. "Dismembered Selves
and Wandering Wombs." in Wendy Brown and Janet E. Halley.
Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham NC: Duke University
Press. 2002). p. 346.
5
Quoted in Phillip E. Wegner. Imaginarv Communities.
Utopia. the Nation. and Spatial Histories of Modernitv
(Berkeley: U CaliIornia Press. 2002). p. 45.
6
Giorgio Agamben posits the "whatever" community as that
brought into being by placeholder commitments that gain
substance through repetition. not reIerentiality and history. See
The Coming Communitv (Minneapolis: University oI Minnesota
Press. 1993).
7
For the longer genealogy oI these generalizations about political
emotion in the contemporary U.S.. my "The Epistemology oI
State Emotion" in Dissent in Dangerous Times. ed. Austin Sarat
State Emotion" in Dissent in Dangerous Times. ed. Austin Sarat
(Ann Arbor: University oI Michigan Press. 2005). 46-78. For a
currently inIluential argument that progressives would win iI they
phrased their positions via more rhetorically eIIective arguments.
see George LakoII. DontThink of an Elephant. Know Your
Jalues and Frame the Debate -- The Essential Guide for
Progressives (Chelsea Green. 2004) and Thomas Frank..
What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the
Heart oI America" (New York: Metropolitan Books. 2004).
8
Jonathan Schell. "Creating Uncivil Society." (6 April 2005)
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid2306
9
Fredric Jameson. "ReiIication and Utopia in Mass Culture"
Social Text 1 (Winter 1975): 7.
10
See Jacques Lacan. "The Function oI the Written in
Psychoanalysis" in. On Feminine Sexualitv. The Limits of Love
and Knowledge. 1972-1973. Encore. the Seminar oI Jacques
Lacan Book XX. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink.
(New York: Norton. 1998). pp. 26-37; Renata Salecl.
Perversions of Love and Hate (New York: Verso. 2000);
Klaus Theweleit. Obiect-Choice. (All You Need is love. . .).
trans. Malcolm R. Green (Verso 1994); Slavoi Zizek. The
Sublime Obiect of Ideologv (New York: Verso. 1989).
11
This is Freud's argument about the subiect's negotiation oI the
drives in Bevond the Pleasure Principle; in a very diIIerent
register Stuart Hall suggests unenumerated and internally
contradictory obiect choice as something like what the motivated
the petty bourgeoisie to support Margaret Thatcher; in yet a
diIIerent register this is what Carolyn Steedman argues made her
working class mother a conservative -- she identiIied with other
peoples belonging or perIormance oI selI-sovereignty. See
Sigmund Freud. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" in Standard
Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. 18. trans.
and Ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth). 7-64; Stuart Hall. in
"Blue Election. Election Blues." in The Hard Road to Renewal.
Carolyn Steedman. Landscape for a Good Woman (Rutgers
1987).
12
Davey D.. "The Election AItermath: Hip Hop Where Do We
Go From Here?". Rock & Rap Confidential; November 2.
2004; www.rockrap.com
13
Morris's ads are available at
13
Morris's ads are available at
http://www.errolmorris.com/html/election/og/election04main.html
14
Errol Morris. "Where is the Rest oI Him?" New York Times.
18 January 2005.
15
Michael Slackman. "Fantasy Politics: II I had Hillary Clinton's
Ear. . .." New York Times 5 December 2004.
16
Patchen Markell. "Making AIIect SaIe Ior Democracy? On
Constitutional Patriotism." Political Theorv 2000. 28: 38-63.
17
Kevin Phillips. Wealth and Democracv. The Political
Historv of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books.
2002). 408-09.
18
Jim VandeHei. "Bush Paints his Goals as Crises." Washington
Post 8 January 2005. p. A01.
19
The genre "splenetic" was used by Tony Kushner in "An
Unmannerly Pre-Election Day Splenetic" available on
www.southerncrissreview.org. As Iar as I know he is the Iirst to
convert this medieval personality type into a genre. which comes
not Irom the intestines (viscera) but the spleen. while perIorming
much the same bile.
20
E. L. Doctorow. "The UnIeeling President." The East
Hampton Star 9 September 2004.
21
For a diIIerent take on this see Daniel Gilbert. "Four More
Years oI Happiness." The New York Times 20 January 2005.
Lauren Berlant is ProIessor oI English at the University oI
Chicago. The thought animating this essay comes Irom her
book proiect. Cruel Optimism. Political Depression and
Social Belonging in the United States. She is editor oI
Intimacv (Chicago 2000) and most recently Compassion.
The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge. 2004).
She is also co-editor oI Critical Inquirv. She can be
reached at l-berlant(uchicago.edu.
Copyright 2005. Lauren Berlant and The Johns Hopkins University
Press