2018 | Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1 (2)

CAPACIOUS
Genre Flailing

Lauren Berlant
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

I'm an editor of a journal that publishes literary criticism. What's always mov-
ing and interesting to me is that most of the work we receive isn't at all bad or
failed, as most of it opens up a world of fresh associations around what seemed a
dormant or misframed object or problem.1 But often what distinguishes a suc-
cessful work from a less successful one—and I'm not at all excepting myself from
this—is a confusion on the writer's part about whether the writer is trying to
open up the object or close the object, extend a question or put it to rest. It's as
though it's impossible to distinguish a defense against knowledge from its pro-
duction, and here's the thing—you can never know. The aim is almost certainly
always mixed—to control the object enough to say a thing about it and to change
it enough that it comes to organize surprising kinds of exemplary association.
Most of the time people hide their confusion about stabilizing and moving their
object in the shadows of definite statements that the critical work then goes on
to contradict, convolute, or dilute.

Then, sometimes, we have to face in public a crisis of the object distinct from
our own ambivalence toward its transformation, when circumstances alter it be-
fore our eyes—whether it's the value of literary criticism, pedagogy and identity
triggers, public education, or the failure of the political world to be worthy of

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capaciousjournal.com | DOI: https://doi.org/10.22387/CAP2018.16
157 Lauren Berlant

our attachment to it. Under those circumstances, when one's defenses are made
manifestly insecure by an uncontrollable disturbance in the object's stability, we
do what I'm calling "genre flailing."2

Genre flailing is a mode of crisis management that arises after an object, or object
world, becomes disturbed in a way that intrudes on one's confidence about how
to move in it. We genre flail so that we don't fall through the cracks of height-
ened affective noise into despair, suicide, or psychosis. We improvise like crazy,
where "like crazy" is a little too non-metaphorical. We see it in the first gasps
of shock or disbelief, and the last gasps of exhausted analogy. But it's not always
a wildly inventive action. When crisis is ordinary, flailing—throwing language
and gesture and policy and interpretations at a thing to make it slow or make it
stop—can be fabulously unimaginative, a litany of lists of things to do, to pay
attention to, to say, to stop saying, or to discipline and sanction. Often in the
pinch of a crisis we return to normal science or common sense—whatever offers
relief in established clarity.

Countless encounters since the Trump election hiccup into the genre flail in the
riff on what's happening? Anything anyone writes in the ongoing periperform-
ative eddy of his world-shaking thud, whether it's hard, mournful, or pastoral
in the sense of "preach!" is a genre flail. 3 . Protest is a genre flail; riot, sometimes
too, and so is whatever we do off the cuff or in a last minute insert when we're
giving a conference talk and cannot not comment on the present moment, in
which the speaker presumes that we're all disoriented or in crisis and wanting to
fix the world.

But what does this representation of the genre flail have to do with critical hu-
morlessness? In the book about it I'm working on, the experience of humorlessness
involves the encounter with a fundamental intractability in oneself or in others. 4 .
In affective terms, it's typically associated with a bracing contraction of relation.
It is often associated with a tone drained of whatever passes for warmth or open-
ness. This is why humorlessness is associated both with political correctness and
the thing it responds to, the unbending anti-PC privilege that casts inequality
as the appropriate order of things, and the freedom to enjoy it as a core tenet of
freedom. Humorlessness wedges an encounter in order to control it, creating a
buttress of immobility and impasse. People on the top of social hierarchies use
humorless performativity to produce the fear that protects power; people on the

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Genre Flailing 158

bottom perform it to refuse to extend and legitimate the top's self-pleasure. But
assessing humorlessness in a given encounter is much trickier than its ordinary
American association with one-sided woodenness, flat affect, or severity would
predict. Structured by their commitment to protecting a relation or object/scene
from transformation, people can express their humorlessness in many ways: as af-
fectlessness, passive aggression, seriousness, bitter mirth, a fixed grin, or any kind
of warm gesture, a touch or a smile. What constitutes humorlessness is someone's
insistence that their version of a situation should rule the relational dynamic; but
no particular way of sounding confirms its social presence.

In literary criticism the work of humor-

Untitled, Anna Loy, 2016

lessness is evident whenever, for example,
we hear the accusation that "x critic is
'self-indulgent,'" a phrase that negatively
judges work that feels out its object in
the analytical space, often by way of a
personal voice, rather than by making di-
rect arguments or truth statements about
the state of things. At the same time, it is
often a feature of such exploratory work
to be humorless, insofar as that work po-
lemicizes against common sense, norma-
tivity, or consensually expressed emotions
like empathy and intention, rationality
and disinterestedness. To give some oth-
er examples, let's take antithetical oper-
ations in the current arguments for and
against critique. 5 On one side, one could
call much of the reparative reading movement that has arisen after Eve Sedgwick's
prompt humorless anti-humorlessness work, by which I don't mean it's not witty
or funny, but that it's careful, sensitive, sincere, and searching, committed to
stopping a condemnatory tone it doesn't like and inducing a reparative tone it
does. On the other side, take the brilliant writing of Jack Halberstam and Tavia
Nyong'o, for example, at the Social Text and Bully Bloggers blogs, where some of
the best (most powerful and delicate and courageous) aesthetic criticism of our
moment is on offer. 6 This work tends to be funny and explicitly playful, fore-
grounding intensities of acerbic play and pleasure that conjoin the judgmental, the
extreme and the ordinary. See also the manifesto set called "30@30: The Future
of Literary Thinking," just published at the journal Textual Practice.7 All of this
work on all sides demonstrates a powerful belief in what analysis can do to capture
and transform the usual associations with their commonly held problem, which
159 Lauren Berlant

is the problem of social/aesthetic form in relation to the mass vulnerability lived

by persons, populations, and nations. All of this work can seem anti-humorless
because it's arguing against the unimaginative stuckness of privileged others,
polemic against polemic. All of this work seems to value alternativity in a world
that's defunding it. By performing criticism as "literary thinking," such works
see the task and desire of criticism in this light to extend the world-bending work
of art as such.

Untitled, Anna Loy, 2016

Nonetheless, as Juliet Mitchell has written in her wonderful essay, "Theory as

an Object," such projections of the other's humorlessness are defenses, the kinds
of projective identification that put one's own aggressions and irrationality and
out-of-scaleness onto other objects, while viewing one's own commitments as
non-distorted, flexible, receptive, and thoughtful. 8 In the Winnicottian tradition,
to play with an object is to test it, and to test it is to destroy it, because one has

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Genre Flailing 160

changed its qualities. Mitchell thinks it would be better to say that one disturbs
the object, rather than destroys it. Therefore, as makers of transformative con-
cepts, she argues, "though the [object] may be, to all extents and purposes, the
same before and after my attempted destruction of it, when it survives it will be
in a different place" (2005, 32). As, Roland Barthes would also have said, to work
with, on, and around an object is to rough it up: to change what it can do.

But at the same time, I would argue, whenever one is destroying some things
in the object one is also trying to protect something else in it that matters, that
deserves a better world for its circulation, or that constitutes a crucial anchor. And
this is the non-place, the space of both holding and disturbing, from which the
humorlessness of the critic—or anyone, really—comes.9. This is how critique can
seem humorless while post-critique does not, but I would argue that the literalism
about tone one finds in much post-critique argument disavows the operation of
the will and desire that in psychoanalysis is called, non-judgmentally, aggres-
sion. This literalism of tone is often a mask of reparativity that can hide its own
humorlessness in sincerity or play.

The inutility of any distinction between a sincere seriousness and play was at the
center of literary theory from its current beginning, coming out of the debate
in Derrida's "Signature Event Context" (1972) about whether it's even possible to
distinguish serious from playful speech.10 Derrida argues against any claim that it
is possible to distinguish writing that's self-integrated as to meaning, intention,
and tone from reflexive or ironic writing, like the joke. This salvo set off decades
of punning and play in critical work and induced many barbs at sincerity and
other forms of false unity and liberal good intentions.

My claim is that taking one's tone of critical openness as actual intellectual open-
ness is a mistake. We can never be certain about the distinction between the
serious and the humorless. We cannot presume that there is a thing called repara-
tive affect that trumps self-evidently mechanical or paranoid or anti-relational
thought and ideology. We cannot presume our defenses aren't also aggressions,
and just because we think we are open to being educable doesn't mean that we
are. Another way to say this is at the current debates about tone and critique think
they know whose literary criticism is humorless, and therefore unethical or un-
kind. But in this clash, one sees a battle in which all sides elevate their seriousness
against the other's humorlessness.

For criticism not to be delusional, engendering debate as a clash of humorless

titans, we need produce more than just a little performative self-skepticism. Rath-
er than attacking the so-called humorless rigidity of others to mask our own
161 Lauren Berlant

aggression, we can ask ourselves, where is the humorlessness in my work, what

am I protecting from exposure to change? Rather than assuming that a unity of
intentionally empathic, careful, or playful tone is evidence of anything, unmixed
in its reparativity, we need to see the work of style and tone both as hard-shell
charismatic defenses and affective openings that make the way for concepts to
emerge. The question is at what cost, to what end?

Conclusion: Another way to see this is, people still want to read with things.
"Reading with" is an ethics of collaborative critical engagement I introduce at
the end of Sex, or the Unbearable.11 I learned it from reading with Eve Sedgwick's
"White Glasses": you see with the perspective of an object, while also moving
through the world in your difference from it.12 The Textual Practice thinkers take a
related, but different angle on critical attachment and attention. They demonstrate
a hunger to write sentences that will enable us to continue reading together so
that we can feel at once and en masse how unbearable it is to be nothing before
the text, and yet to want to make something different by reading with it, wheth-
er in texts or the world. What we share, in their view, is reading as aspirational
co-being, not necessarily belonging. David Marriott and Simon Jarvis think of
such practice as central to the aesthetic and to the collapse, in our time, of the
distinction between art and craft, criticism and its objects.13 The exteriority of
the aesthetic and critical object resists them, matters to them, changes them as
members of an "us," collectively, and recognizes the need to reinvent how criti-
cism appears, performs, and engages. They are not seeking proof of the value in
this transition in the self-evidence of tone, though.

The violence of the world makes us flail about for things to read with, people to
talk to, and material for inducing transformations, that can make it possible not
to aspire to, feel at war, or to be right; but to be disturbed together, thrashing
with, and creating value through a shift in the object. The value of recognizing
the aggression in desire is that people who desire to be good won't inadvertently
secure it through a disavowed humorlessness. Our critical ambivalence toward
opening our objects to a transformation whose effects are not foreclosed might
make us better at holding the objects that are also changing.

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Genre Flailing 162

Endnotes
1. By "object" I mean the anchoring interest that's organizing the research and the writing: it could
be a question, a literary work, a genre, an event. I often use "object/scene" or "object/concept" in my
written work to amplify this dimension.

2. A different version of the following paragraph can be found in the post, "Big Man." Berlant, Lauren.
(2017). Big Man. [blog]. Social Text. Available at: https://socialtextjournal.org/?s=big+man [accessed
19, January, 2017].

3. "Periperformative" is of course Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's term for the context-extending effects
of performative actions. Kosovsky Sedgwick, Eve. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Per-
formativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 67-91.

4. This paragraph steals from "Humorlessness (3 monologues and a hairpiece)." Berlant, Lauren.
(2017). Humorlessness (Three Monologues and a Hairpiece). Critical Inquiry 43 (2), 305-340.

5. For the strong argument against critique, see Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski eds. (2017). Critique
and Postcritique. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

6. The Social Text blog is available at https://socialtextjournal.org/ and the Bully Bloggers blog is
available at https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/

7. Boxall, Peter et al. (2016). 30@30: The Future of Literary Thinking. Textual Practice. 30 (7) 1149-118.

8. Mitchell, Juliet. (2005). Theory as an Object. October. 113, 29-38.

9. "Non-place" is Marc Augé's term for the transitional spaces that loosen up ordinary identity. Augé,
Marc. (1992). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John
Howe. London and New York: Verso.

10. Derrida, Jacques. (1988). Signature Event Context (1972). In Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel
Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston IL: Northwestern UP, 1-24.

11. Berlant, Lauren and Edelman, Lee. (2014). Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham NC: Duke University
Press. See also, Interview with Lauren Berlant as told to Andy Campbell. Berlant, Lauren. (2014).
Interview with Lauren Berlant as told to Andy Campbell. [online]. Artforum. Available at: https://www.
artforum.com/interviews/lauren-berlant-discusses-reading-with-and-her-recent-work-45109. [ac-
cessed 20 March, 2018].

12. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. (1993). White Glasses. In Tendencies. Durham NC: Duke University
Press, 252-266.

13. Marriott, David. Make Nothing Happen; Jarvis, Simon. Non-retweetables. Boxall, Peter et al.
(2016). 30@30: The Future of Literary Thinking. Textual Practice. 30 (7) 1149-118.