Showing papers by "Lauren Berlant published in 2004"

Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture

Abstract: Many of our essayists fix on the senses as a revitalizingdomainwithwhich to chart theories and concepts of history, aesthetics, and experience. The words power and ideology don’t make it into these paradigms much, and questions shaped around social inequalities are either presumed or subsumed in these phrasings. Class inequality and labor-related subjectivities, for example, are now increasingly embedded in capitalismandglobalization; and, I think, but I’m not sure, critical race, feminist, and queer studies concerns are covered, covered over, or articulated in more general conceptualizations of embodiment, a term that designates the closeness to the body of social, experiential, and aesthetic affect. Because these sublimated categories of historical subordination were not formed as aesthetic events, and because they trouble the distance from the body that traditionally secures the prestige of critical thought, it is not surprising that a certaindisenchantment would fall upon Critical Inquiry’s writers and readers, motivating returns to the elegance of a greater distance, whether couched as the new aestheticism, a better empiricism, or rigorous theory. Were it not forMary Poovey’s and Teresa de Lauretis’s finely tuned statements, this shift would seem (among our essayists, anyway) to have happened without comment. De Lauretis argues that the ambitions of the new social movements were “sustained by a hope that today appears enmeshed in neoliberalism” (p. 366). Surely the uneven global history of liberalism’s incommensurateness with itself in theory and in practice requires a more dynamic perspective. I take that to be the promise of de Lauretis’s great phrase “the time for theory is always now” (p. 365). “Now,” though, is not merely the definitional province of theWorld Bank, the IMF, nor, really, the U.S. capitalist/Christian state and all its others. Critics and pundits alike