Berlant rescues the possibility of reading affect in the historical present from the flattening discourses of the archival narrative. She argues for a present that is constituted by affective response. A given text may affectively register the construction of the present through genres that mark the unfolding of a contemporary moment. Berlant primarily tracks the genre of the “impasse,” which she defines as an (affective) representation of “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects materials that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event” (Berlant 4). Berlant describes the impasse as the body’s attempt to elongate the present in order to make sense of “the relation of living on to ongoing crisis and loss” (5). This threatening crisis emerges in the genre of the “situation,” in which one may arrive at an impasse to make sense of the situation. A situation conveys a sense of foreboding, of a possibility that may or may not come to pass but is nonetheless threatening.
The creation of these genres structures the experience of reality and either builds or undermines a sense of the ordinary and the everyday. History therefore involves the finding of genre in order to make sense of crisis and to continue living in the face of it. Berlant is interested in how these genres are evidence of historical sharing, as a means of constructing a tolerable (and reacting to an intolerable) historical present.
By reading affect as an essential register of genres that create the present—rather than simply a feature—Berlant presents a mode of historicizing the present that responds to Jameson’s notion of history, on the one hand, and calls for the affective re-reading of the archive, on the other hand, in order to grasp “the circulation of the present as a historical and affective sense” (20). What Jameson observes as the waning of affect, Berlant observes as a waning of certain genres that we create to make sense of new situations that emerge in our particular historical present. Our affective capacity is still intact; it just finds expression in different genres.
Like Berlant, Watson complicates the perceived stability of the archive by interrogating the history-making processes of modernity. Watson’s “The Phantasmal Past” begins by arguing that modern scholarship, especially those disciplines that work on or with history, largely conceptualizes the past as a static monolith, a repository of stable figures and events that can be drawn upon and talked about in order to make assertions in the present. Watson aims to rescue the past from the future-obsessed gaze of modernity “through the body of medieval hermeneutic theory that concerns itself with imagination” (Watson 4). Watson argues that
the past matters, not only because it underlies the present, not only because its unsuspected sophistication challenges its dismissal by the present [modernity], but because it remains inseparably entangled with the present and will continue to be so however much this fact is forgotten or its relevance denied (5).The past, as Watson posits, is an absence and a presence, a paradox most saliently demonstrated by the partial records of a volatile archive. The past, an incomplete collection of images preserved in the archive, must be imaginatively reconstructed as phantasm, a vision that is both true and fraudulent, over and over again by scholars who engage with history in the present. Watson forwards recombinative imagination, an interpretive cognitive faculty used in medieval Christian theology and historical theories, as a strategy for reviving a vanishing past. Because the past’s meaning in the present exists in a state of constant fluctuation, scholars must be mindful not to neglect its dynamic nature and perennially return to its composite image to ensure veracity and posterity. For Watson, the recombinative imagination offers a crucial method for scholars to understand the manifold complexities and contradictions that haunt the archive, allowing them to regard the past not as a backdrop for the present, but a palimpsest of combined and recombined images that must be continually reexamined and recast in a process of historical (re)visioning.
How might we see Hartman’s project in light of Watson and Berlant? We might say that Hartman employs new strategies of affective reading to challenge the available narratives of the archive, narratives that only characterize the “degraded matter and dishonored life” of the subaltern in terms that can only “delight and titillate” (Hartman 7) or in terms of violence and objectification. We might regard her “recombinant narrative” of recovering an account of Venus as a genre strategy that elongates the present in order to navigate “the relation of living on to ongoing crisis and loss” enacted by slavery (20). Her project to ”illuminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact [...] and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices” (20) may benefit from Watson’s imaginatively reconstructed phantasms that lurk in the shadows of the archive. The clash of voices that Hartman conjures is really the spectral wails of Watson’s phantasmic past.
MEANWHILE, A DISPATCH FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT ABROAD...
Presenting affect
Although faraway in Virginia, I am collaborating with Timothy and Jon via response to their wonderful contributions to our post. I want to start with something we shared via text message: “Berlant provides a way to engage affect and materialism without reducing affect into a phenomenon of ideology.” On page 53, Berlant says:
“affect theory is another phase in the history of ideology theory,” moving “from what’s singular—the subject’s irreducible specificity—to the means by which the matter of the senses becomes general within a collectively lived situation” and by situation, meaning the animated, yet suspended present.
I think we can see here, by the shared comment and in Berlant’s own language that she situates affect as a form of knowing rather than simply a byproduct of ideology. It feels like an inversion of ideology where you’re interpolated into a form of shared knowledge, whereas affect is the individual experience of something and then how the individual experience gets constituted/collected within ordinary life. Somehow, it still maintains that individual specificity that say, Althusser’s interpolation doesn’t seem to suggest. However, even more so, we can see, very specifically, what Berlant is interested in via her methodology, which sets out very specifically to generalize, rather than be specific: “track the becoming general of specific things” (12). It is also in this section where I think she hints at affect theory is a phase of ideology theory (but isn’t subsumed under ideology theory) and this little nugget also really gets to the heart of how she differentiates between affect theory and affect: “an optimistic attachment is invested in one’s own or the world’s continuity, but might feel any number of ways” (12). Berlant is interested in the relational structure of the attachment, but still acknowledges that said attachment may arise out of any certain number of feelings.
Berlant argues that the past and future are flattened out into an extended, ongoing present, pointing out that “the present is what makes itself present to us before it becomes anything else” (4) and more importantly argues that this temporality, this present is not an object, but actually a “mediated affect.” So it’s not necessarily so much as reading the affect in the present, but that the present itself is a mediated affect that filters out a variety of situations and events that make up this extended present. I kind of see her definitions of situations, episodes, and events in this way: the situation is our paradoxical animated/suspended present where certain events may emerge to “govern” that situation (5). While episodes are the nearest thing to a past that we get in this construction and definition of a present: “something mainly forgotten, distorted, and half-remembered” (57).
It's interesting to think of how the "volatile" archive operates for both Watson and Hartman. As you mentioned, Watson's archive is a paradoxical absence and presence; it is incomplete and has to be thought of as phantasmal and recreated repeatedly by scholars. Hartman's archive is similar--it is also incomplete and demands an imagination for the absent parts. However, the slave archive differs from the medieval in that its sordid history keeps scholars at a fearful distance.
ReplyDeletePerhaps they are not brave enough to handle the "clash of voices" or "wails of phantasmic pasts."