Unfinished

Ah I am messy and I need a decent place to store good links.
I will post this here so that later on, when I eventually watch Showboat and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, I will think of Berlant. But I betcha I'll end up searching high and low for this baby:
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0878/investigations/sentimental_ed.shtml


I finially FINISHED The Female Complaint. Reading it was slow work, but for the past several weeks I enjoyed having it with my breakfast. I've always dismissed the romance genre as dumb and unworthy of serious critique, and yet, when the demands of the day are almost too much to bear, I like to unwind with movies like He's Just Not That Into You. I guess I always thought it would be anti-feminist to be publicly intimate with this intimate public. In a way, chick flicks, especially those that make allusions to or are adaptions of movies that were originally released before the "liberation" of women, make the feminist in me feel dirty, kind of like a porn-watching preacher. And yet, even porn-watching preachers can save souls.


Often, these citations [of sentimental classics] are not so deep: they are gestures toward the tradition of sentimental adaption that explain this time around why the great transformative and fulfilling love, the revolution without the trauma, must remain imaginable whether or not it is possible, discernible only in its smoldering remains.

But what remains is a resource, an unfinished event. Adaptations of sentimental realism are always about splitting and bargaining to stay in the scene of the fantasy of the better good life, as atrophied and confused as the manifest content of that fantasy can be. Possessing the object of desire matters les in these texts than does the re-experience of poteniality - the "tomorrow" in today where one works with what one has in order to survive. The delicate historicity of sentimental work provides pointers to the materials available for transformative opportunity. These scenarios are also archives of tactics for being undefeated, and indeed it is an attachment to this archive that also magnetizes the intimate public. To become not-someting is to unlearn a way of being, to see affective and emotional recalibration not only as possible but as desirable. in other words, in the view of the intimate public, there is no politics without the sentimental aperture/overture because that promise of emotional continuity can sustain people in the social amid the flux of change.

- Lauren Berlant

the moon and the scars

I particularly like these two passages from The Female Complaint:

1) This is why love's attack on memory is not usually considered a bad thing. Love is supposed to transcend or at least to neutralize the contradictions of history. When people enter into love's contract with the promise of recognition and reciprocity, they hope memory will be reshaped by it, minimizing out the evidence of failure, violence, ambivalence, and social hierarchy that would otherwise make love a most anxious desire for an end to anxiety. A fantasy norm unevenly bolstered by the institutions that are said to be its main supports, then, modern love requires the lover to produce an epistemology that works against the defenses of knowledge. In this convention, when love fails, the trauma of memory becomes a scar the failed lover carries around for life, declaring it as deserving of care, nostalgia, and mourning. But what is the failed lover ultimately mourning, if not the amnesia love's optimism creates?


2) As their smoke intermingles ... she says, "Oh Jerry. Don't let's ask for the moon! We have the stars!"

What does Charlotte mean by this phrase? Don't ask for a totalized object in love when we have so many bright and scattered opportunities? Or don't desire what you can't possess, and, ergo, desire what you can? Or, embrace your queerness, Jerry, don't be distracted by the big satellite when you can preserve the multiple practices and possibilities your desire has already created? Something about the difference between shining and twinkling? In the movie, the music swells when she makes this bargain, and the camera moves up to the starry sky, leaving the two lovers to their privacy.

cruel optimism

Time is unkind.


I just stumbled upon an old letter.
Funny how time fails to dull the sharpness of certain words. Just as I was beginning to consider a beginning without the author of such cruel words, I was taken in again, consumed by precisely that which makes his words so cruel: hope.

...you had your reasons for not responding and I value that so I drew the line and you became a friend. That doesn't mean that line cant ever be erased...

We were both victims of a wicked trick of time, yet I seem to be the only one who has yet to recover.

Aw boo, what could tempt me into opening old wounds? Nothing but the banal, conceited words of someone else. Words that are not his, words that have no meaning, words that have nothing at all to do with me. Perhaps this makes me banal and conceited. Regardless, I long to be caught in a whir of words that have everything to do with me - real words that do not merely make faint illusions to hope and promise.


*I realize that other than the title, this has nothing to do with Berlant. Well, Berlant, not everything has to be about you...

:P

the female complaint

Everyone knows what the female complaint is: women live for love, and love is a gift that keeps on taking.

- Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

It does matter that I decided to stop giving.
It does matter that I will never live for him.
The bastard keeps taking.
And I keep complaining.

According to Berlant, the personal is general. If she is right, then you must understand.

(not predictable enough)

Parenthetically powerful:

(To readers who do think that women in the United States are subordinated no longer, here is another view. In modern liberal democratic societies, most inequality is partial, contradictory, and contested: it is often more informal [in behavior] than formal [law or policy]. Yet these complex conditions are not so complicated that their negative impacts are unpredictable. Disrespect for women is not unpredictable enough. It is more often affectively sensed or experienced in episodes than objective and dramatically fixable. Popular culture is terrible at dealing with mixed bags and mixed feelings when the register is ideological and the topic is intimate, and women remain the default managers of the intimate. Even if social negativity and antagonism are intricate and uneven and not merely top-down, the social field is still shaped powerfully by them.)

- Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint

(Berlant is not saying that formal subordination no longer exists. Surely some women are formally subordinated more than others.)