chicago workshop 015 - The Political Theory Workshop

George Shulman, The Gallatin School, New York University
Post-mortem effects: genres of crisis and the crisis of genre in
American political culture
I am working on a project that explores the relationship of
genre, democratic critique, and American politics. It begins
with the claim that contemporary political life and academic
theory are both characterized by an impasse, and the key to this
impasse can be called a “crisis of genre.” By characterizing
impasse in terms of genre, I ask: does revitalizing democratic
politics require we theorists to abandon or re-work inherited
genres of democratic critique? My method is to explore how
clusters of contemporaneous theorists and literary artists work
with and against inherited genre conventions to address what
each depicts as crisis in political and national life. I
contrast Tocqueville and Melville in the 19th century; Herbert
Marcuse and Sheldon Wolin with Norman Mailer in the 1960s;
Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands and Richard Iton’s Black Fantastic
with Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and Toni Morrison’s Paradise in
the post-civil rights period. By reflecting on the critical
salience and political value of literary experimentation I would
encourage theorists in the left academy to rework rather than
abandon “genres of crisis,” as Berlant calls them, and to
imagine instead that impasse is neither a historical end nor an
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“end of ideology,” but a “moment” that can be remade –by
politics and art- a condition of democratic possibility or even
revitalization. My talk today will unpack my claims about our
moment and impasse, about genre, and about literary art.
Setting the Stage: historical conjuncture
I begin with the idea that in this conjuncture, American
politics is haunted by what remains unspeakable in its
colloquial idioms.
A first unsaid is the imperial dimension of national power,
normalized as “world leadership,” permanent war in the name of
freedom, and global corporate power. A black president confirms
this unsaid, as he insists on the innocence of the American
state, the exemplarity of soldiers as model citizens, and the
necessity or righteousness of our violence, while denying the
historic racial basis and anti-democratic meaning of the
national security state.
A second unsaid is coded in the word “jobs.” It bespeaks
the pervasive and unexamined assumption that equates economic
growth and upward mobility with freedom, and this assumption has
tied freedom to American empire as a way of life. But imperial
politics, which once made the world safe for free trade and so
for American prosperity, now means de-industrialization and outsourcing. Neo-liberal structural adjustment since the 1970s, and
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the 08 crash, have generated a sense of national decline and
personal precarity -and thus sentiments of loss, anxiety, and
resentment- among the enfranchised. As a result, the axiom
linking jobs and freedom now entails understandable despair that
the American dream machine is irreversibly broken, that freedom,
livelihood, and futurity are no longer available. Political
elites and media repeat that economic growth, the “middle
class,” and American futurity can be renewed, but such claims
are widely deemed incredible. To false hopes offered by
formulaic reassurances, pervasive and understandable despair
responds symptomatically, in the populist rage and popular
cynicism that demagogues exploit by their own parodic promises
of renewal.
But elite reassurance and populist promises reveal a third
unsaid: the ten million urban and rural citizens permanently
withdrawn from labor markets, the 20 million working poor for
whom employment means poverty, the 7 million people subject to
carceral supervision (1 in 31 residents, 60% people of color),
and the 15 million residents without legal status -none are
addressed by either political party or any narrative of renewal.
In sum, prevailing political speech occludes unspoken and
unspeakable realities: first, global bases, covert killing,
“friendly” regimes, and corporate power abroad entail an
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oligarchy, military Keynesianism, and state surveillance “at
home;” second, our “domestic” economy cannot provide livelihood
or credible futures for MOST people; third, nearby increasingly
precarious “middle” (or working) class people are upward of 70
million people in segregated, fugitive worlds, rural or poor
whites, urban people of color, and illegal immigrants in hidden,
underground, and informal economies.
By depicting a systemic condition of distress around
livelihood and futurity, I echo Machiavelli’s view that
political theory names desolation to make it an opportunity, a
condition of collective action. But I foreground the issue of
narrative form: by what genres can political theorists and
actors represent our circumstances and imagine not so much a
specific possibility as the very possibility for new
possibilities? By imitating his landscape painter, who puts
heights and valleys into relation, I also mean to say that
democratic theory and politics must find ways to carry powerful
feelings among the enfranchised into productive political
relationship with the experiences and claims of other
inhabitants they may not count as real. Can those with much or
something to lose, including their sense of entitlement, those
undergoing real loss, and those with less or little in many
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dimensions, be brought into political conversation around issues
of loss and dignity, livelihood and membership?
My account of what is unsaid between two worlds raises a
cluster of related questions: which genres of political rhetoric
might help people acknowledge in politically salient ways what
they already know, but in some regards disavow and in other
regards resign themselves to as fated? By what rhetorical or
deliberative practices and in what kinds of public spaces could
the truth in the doxa of differently positioned subjects be
drawn out, articulated, forged into political judgments? Can
such capacities for judgment and action develop through
electoral mobilization and legislative reform in national
politics, or only “horizontally,” by ongoing work building
social movements? In sum, how can the worlds of the counted and
uncounted, as well as these dimensions and scales of politics,
be connected? But I want to inflect these questions in
rhetorical and literary ways.
From Conjuncture to Genre
Scholarship has shown that American politics is recurrently
organized in genres of romance, depicting frontier expansion,
endless growth, limitless possibility, self-invention, and
national unity, often by depicting redemptive struggle of the
people against the interests, the market against the state, or
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the nation against evil empires. Such romances feature pastoral
conceptions of harmony, and melodramatic, gothic, or even
paranoid figurations of threat. Elites and their critics often
rely on the genre of jeremiad, and tropes of decline or danger,
to depict crisis and authorize the progressive reform, culture
war, or imperial action they claim is needed for national
rebirth. IN this regard, I ask: by what inherited genres do
political elites, media, populists and demagogues represent our
current conjuncture, explain its causes, narrate its meaning,
justify a response? We theorists can understand our moment, and
respond resonantly, only by taking up such issues of genre,
narrative and rhetoric.
By “genre” I mean the vernacular idioms, conventional
narrative forms, and repeated tropes that constitute imagined
national community as well as projects seeking to rework it or
undo it. By focusing on genre I would foreground the rhetorical
dimension in politics, and in theories about it, by showing that
how people speak, the forms they use, inextricably shape who can
speak, what can (and cannot) be said -and heard- as well as what
we expect from each other and our speech-acts. “Genre” is thus a
hinge between the inherited grip, creative reworking, and
visceral reception of speech acts in the political world, and,
the ways academics theorize them. In both domains, genre
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conventions are never simply fixed, but face historical stress
that jeopardize their authority or engender reanimation.
My claim is that the inherited genres -call them romantic,
melodramatic, jeremiadic, and progressive- by which American
elites and social movements have rendered “crisis” and narrated
its overcoming, are now in crisis. To return to where I began,
in our electoral politics, the extent and implications of
empire, stagnation, and segregation are signaled indirectly, in
formulaic jeremiads promising renewal and futurity, either by
dismantling the old New Deal, or by funding a new one. But as a
gap widens between political rhetoric and lived experience,
people cannot make what they know politically pertinent. So my
question is: do inherited genres of politics trap us in what
Marx once called the resurrection of the dead, what contemporary
theorists often cast as melancholy, or can they be revitalized
in generative ways?
That question both arises from and addresses theorists
across the discipline, as Sheldon Wolin, David Scott, Eve
Sedgwick, Wendy Brown, Lauren Berlant, Jonathan Lear -among many
examples- depict the obsolescence of inherited genres of radical
(revolutionary, anti-colonial or democratic) theory and
practice. They lament the severity and injustice of the unsaid
realities that are now symptomized in American politics, but
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they also question the very trope of “crisis,” as well as
narratives that stipulate a “crisis” as a way to emplot a
narrative of overcoming or resolution.
The debate I would crystallize is discernible if we
contrast Wolin’s “Political Theory as Vocation,” in which “epic”
theory depicts a systemic crisis and overcomes it by a
revolutionary change of paradigm, with his “Invocation” essay,
which laments that the epic genre of crisis and systemic change
is no longer credible. It is not credible because the trope of
crisis now seems debased by proliferation of catastrophes and
wrongs, and because modern power seems immune to systemic
transformation. In a lamentation at once historically specific
and timelessly allegorical, Wolin emplots his version of the
iron law of oligarchy to offer a tragic vision of democracy as a
necessarily episodic moment of commonality. In parallel ways, I
think, David Scott claims that revolutionary anti-colonial
struggle had taken the form of a “romance” to depict a clear
break between domination and emancipation, and between colonizer
and colonized, but in a “post-colonial” moment dominated by the
“ruins of past futures,” he argues, critical theory must mourn
its losses and think in a “tragic” rather than romantic genre.1
Likewise, Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism depicts people
trying to thrive as their dreams of the good life become self-
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defeating. Frustrated paralysis is normalized, as if we can live
at all only by sustaining the very attachments and ideals that
now fail and diminish us. To grasp this situation, she argues,
we must give up “genres of crisis” -melodrama and romance
especially, she says, but also tragedy- in which a dramatic
realization generates radical or systemic change. We need
instead a “genre of impasse” to orient political action and
democratic critique in the muddled present Berlant calls “the
crisis ordinary.” She thus echoes Eve Sedgwick’s call for
theorists to shift from “paranoid” theory that polarizes friend
and enemy, to “reparative” modes of interpretation and affect.2
Such accounts of exhaustion or impasse compare fruitfully
with Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. He celebrates a Native
American chief who depicted the irreversible death of a way of
life based on hunting, but who could offer “radical hope,” a
capacity to imagine collective life on a new basis, because he
truly mourned the old world as lost irrevocably. Lear’s chief
thus echoes how Alexis de Tocqueville addressed French
aristocrats, and how James Baldwin addressed southern whites:
your form of life is doomed, but you can emerge from this
crisis, to create new ways to thrive, if you accept grievous
loss as a condition of possibility. Forgoing forms of jeremiadic
renewal, melodramatic polarization, or romantic resolution,
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Lear’s chief still re-works (rather than abandons) the trope of
crisis, to open an imaginative space for thinking beyond
impasse. For sure, there are profound problems with Lear’s
retelling, which casts Sitting Bull resistance as melancholic
pathology, and itself as something more than mere acquiescence
to white genocide and domination. But for my purposes here what
matters is that Lear sees the destruction of a way of life and
of its legitimating narratives, but he attributes impasse to a
failure of imagination, and he asks what would enable people to
imagine (and create) a life beyond impasse, on a new basis.
3
By relating and contrasting these figures I mean to suggest
two things. First, as the rhetorical forms of liberal
nationalism, and of its radical rivals, seem exhausted or
suspect, political actors and academic theorists are facing
parallel challenges. Second, creative theorizing -about theory
and democratic politics- is assessing the literary and narrative
forms, the repeated tropes, and vernacular idioms that have
constituted imagined national community as well as projects to
reconstitute, undo, or rework it. My purpose is not to reify
genres, but to relate inherited genres of crisis to a moment of
political impasse, and to debates among theorists as we rethink
our terms of inquiry, accounts of suffering, visions of social
change, and expectations of life more broadly. Is the obvious
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political impasse of this moment a condition to inhabit, or a
crisis to diagnose and overcome? In a moment that juxtaposes
intensifying inequality and ecological disaster to discursive
stasis, should citizens and theorists mourn inherited genres for
imagining crisis and (radical) change, as Wolin, Scott and
Berlant argue? Or does democratic renewal instead require
reworking the literary forms long constitutive of political
critique and insurgency? What are the conditions of possibility
for imagining and engendering new forms of political community
and collective action?
4
From theory to literature
I pursue these questions about politics, theory, and genre
by comparing literary and theoretical texts at specific moments.
My premise is that American literature is related to an imperial
republic in a way analogous to the relationship between the
institution of tragic drama and the Athenian polis in its
imperial moment. Sophocles used mythical figures and the altercity of Thebes as what James Baldwin called a disagreeable
mirror, whereas American literary art invents epic protagonists
(Hester, Ahab, Sutpen, Gatsby, Oedippa, Slothrop, Sethe, the
Swede, Coleman Silk) and fictional worlds elsewhere -on a ship
or raft, in imagined plantations, haunted houses, communes,
suburbs, or other intentional communities- to figure forth the
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desperate longings, violent fantasy, tender intimacy, uncanny
weirdness -and vital possibilities!!- hidden in plain sight.
Protagonists aspiring to self-determination or glory are undone
by the return of the repressed in Athenian drama, while in
American literary artists conjure what is invisible and
unspeakable in a commercial republic whose enfranchised citizens
aspire to sovereignty and redemption.
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How does such literary art compare to our typical forms of
theorizing? Return to the fact that dominant political rhetoric
embeds the idiom of rights in extravagant stories of an
idealized nation and demonized threats. In the dominant
tradition of liberal political thought, one variant (say Rawls)
would resolve melodramatic conflict by weighing claims about
rights and procedures, while another variant(say Hofstadter)
invokes realism to bring paranoid political romance down to the
pluralist earth of prosaic group conflicts. In contrast,
American literary artists repeatedly use genres of fabulation to
dramatize the power of American rhetoric, to make credible the
fantastical specters, visceral tropes, charged symbols, phobic
affects, melodramatic plotting, and violent costs of a
derangement that, contra Hofstadter, is central in American
life. If the liberal theory canon thus uses an idiom of reason,
rights, and interest, literary art presents charged, stylized
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conflicts -racial, sexual, familial, psychological, melodramatic
and supernatural- on wilderness frontiers and in intimate
spaces. If the liberal canon weighs cost and benefit, literary
art embeds prudence in the madness of genocide, slavery, and
hubristic self-making. If one would adjudicate conflicting
rights, the other bears witness to traumatic loss, mania, and
moral crisis. As one presupposes progress, the other narrates
repetition or tragic self-defeat.
The literary art thus dramatizes the disavowed psychocultural content, but also the symbolic forms that govern
American politics: it retells the background narratives and
reworks the genres by which citizens and subalterns engage in
self-reflection, speech, and action. By ghost story, allegory,
romance, fable, slave narrative, memoir, boys adventure, or
wildly experimental poetic and novelistic form, literary art
repeatedly renders in tragic (or tragi-comic) terms the romances
of freedom that bind nationalism, violence, and disavowal to
ordinary individualism, but that also animate struggle against
this regime. Accordingly, fiction-making is often the subject of
this art: by confronting readers with the artifice of stories
and unreliability of narrators, it exposes the inescapability
and generativity, as well as the danger and fateful implications
of fiction. Protagonists like Hester, Ahab, Sutpen, or Gatsby
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are consumed by the organizing fantasies they enact, but since
fiction-making is inescapable, the alternative must be to remake
the fictions we live by, to rework not abjure imaginative magic.
Indeed, people-shaping and world-building depend on fictionmaking, and democratic possibility depends on our capacity to
conjure “figures of the newly thinkable.” As the paradox of
politics declares that people cannot be, before they legislate
or act, what they (hope to) become by way of it, so works of
fiction show how political life -for good and ill- imitates art.
My project thus explores two parallel relationships, one
between an imperial republic and democratic criticism, and one
between political theory and literature. The hinge between them
is the idea that we reflect and act through genre conventions
that can represent but also manifest a crisis. My wager is that
literature repeatedly stages these issues in ways especially
pertinent to our moment.
While trying to digest the crisis of European civilization
after World War One, DH Lawrence argued that in Moby-Dick
Melville sank the ship signifying not only the American nation,
but western civilization and the “idealistic half-consciousness”
of “the white soul.” Because life continued after that death, he
asked, how should we depict it? It is a “postmortem effect,” he
declared, an un-dead form of life and language that persists
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despite what people know; as if to say a life that has not faced
or accepted its death -not only the death of the good life it
hoped for, but its failure as a form of life- so that people go
through the motions (of living and speaking) because any other
possibility seems unavailable. They cannot either acknowledge
what they know, but partly because they lack the language to
express, inter-subjectively share, and make real what they know.
They cannot yet fully acknowledge what they know, partly because
they remain invested in a symbolic order despite its failing,
and partly because they have not yet crafted what Cornelius
Castoriadis called “figures of the newly thinkable.”
For us, “empire as a way of (middle class) life” is ending,
and so also practices of livelihood, horizons of futurity,
models of social democracy, and narratives of progress. Perhaps
our literary art, which dramatizes self-defeating attachments
while still conjuring democratic possibility, can help us
imagine how impasse might be made a passage.
From Literature to Theory
Many critics of American literature argue that it depicts
what Myra Jehlen calls “failed flight,” and thus imprisons
readers in a society it cannot imagine changed. (Thus does
Ishmael return to land with “lowered expectations” of felicity
located in hearth and home, not politics.) My counter-claim is
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that great American literary fictions, far from demeaning or
escaping the ordinary, display layers of reality -and of
possibility- hidden in plain sight, if only we would look. This
is the central idea by which I would conclude this talk, by way
of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: Pynchon gives the name
“Trystero” to the realities, history, and people (Morrison says
“disremembered and unaccounted for”) hidden in plain sight,
which Oedippa Mass can discover, but only if she goes “below the
surface” or “through the pasteboard masks” that had defined her
reality. Correspondingly, Pynchon depicts an “alternate” form of
communication -colloquial, deeply felt and playful, and
protected from invasive authority- that exists in tandem and
tension with official, public, normative language. Oedippa
discovers that even the enfranchised use it:
...here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately
choosing not to communicate by U.S. mail. It was not an act
of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a
calculated withdrawal from the life of the Republic, from
its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of
hate, indifference to the power fo their vote...simple
ignorance, this withdrawal was their own... Since they
could not have withdrawn into a vacuum...there had to exist
the separate, silent, unsuspecting world.
As the novel closes, Oedippa has made a commitment to contact
this “world,” the realities and people once split off from
consciousness but always near at hand, whose (multifarious)
character and (morally ambiguous) meaning she can learn only by
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acting, by taking up the art of association.
Trystero is not an interest group that mediates between
state and individual, as 1950s theorists construed Tocqueville,
but an assemblage of associations, indifferent to the formal
state, a form of parallel play if not a parallel polis. Is
Oedippa “paranoid,” projecting disparate elements into
meaningful relation, is Trystero a reality independent of her
naming, or is it a “part with no part” that consolidates only by
its naming? For her -and for those she now sees aligned- acts of
naming do shift the virtual (or merely demographic) into a
political actuality visible to the otherwise unsuspecting.
“Counter-culture” then or “occupy” now, seem both more and less
than a stable entity merely signified by a name, both virtual
and actual, symbolic and material, as association is both verb
and noun, an “art” in an interval betwixt not-yet, this-is,
might-be.
In the novel, “politics” thus signifies association enacted
-forged, signaled, sustained- in the shadows created by any
enfranchised world, more than acts of articulation (and so of
demands or antagonism) crossing a threshold of visibility to
stage what Ranciere calls dis-agreement. But as Oedippa’s
discovery both signals and triggers the issue of political
identification -with whom do I stand and on what basis?- she
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enters and so dramatizes the intervals -between virtual and
actual as well between part and whole- in which the divisions,
identity, choices and fate of “the Republic” are staged. In the
novel’s last sentence, Oedippa is to enter the public room where
Lot 49 -“the estate that is America”- is to be auctioned, or
“cried.” That trope joins plea and claim, grief and grievance,
as if rendering how injury and debt must be credited to judge
the worth or value of a legacy, to assess the “price of the
ticket” a legacy confers, or passes on to, the heirs it has
disavowed as well as recognized.
If Oedippa commits to engage and indeed remake -not take as
given or avoid- an inheritance at once personal and political,
and if we are interpellated by identifying with her, does this
mean avoiding or denying daily, ordinary life? On the contrary;
she has begun to discover its contours and inequalities, a rich
complexity she had devalued and ignored. She does not escape the
mundane into a fantasized or supernatural beyond, but she does
discern how the sacred may enter or animate the profane. As
Peter Brooks argued in 1972, modern novelists can reach beyond
the apparent world to contact realities disowned by
rationalization or ideologies of disenchantment. “In a world
where there is no clear system of sacred myth, no unity of
belief, no accepted metaphysical chain leading from the
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phenomenal to the spiritual,” the “melodramatic imagination”
seeks to “renew contact with the sacred,” which seems “occult,”
that is, hidden. “Melodramatic utterance” remains “modern” by
not closing the gap between signifier and signified, but
inherits prophecy to signal that invisible powers lie “behind
reality, hidden by it, yet indicated within it,” and that
acknowledging the sacred would intensify and enlarge “man’s
quotidian existence.” In 1972 Brooks named Mailer exemplary of
we now call political theology, but Pynchon (like DeLillo and
Morrison) also conjures a “numinous site of meaning” as well as
“large moral forces,” to show that “large choices of ways of
being must be made” in daily life.
In registering what is unspeakable and invisible -call it
Trystero, “the moral occult,” or “black noise”- literary art
disturbs the hegemonic “partition of the sensible” in Ranciere’s
sense, by rendering who but also what (impulses, practices,
powers, realms) has not heretofore been counted as real (let
alone worthy.) Ranciere thus depicts a close bond between the
aesthetic and the political, as two modalities by which to enact
“disagreement” with the regime that counts what is real and
stipulates its proper place in a visible order of things. In
such “moments of madness” the aesthetic and the political seem
related in acts of rupture, interruption, and re-invention. In
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this sense Lot 49 can bring readers, like Oedippa, to a
threshold of meaning-making, a door of commitment and so of
discovery, risk, and change -also of world-making- with others.
6
Arendt in fact calls such action a miracle, because it
initiates something new or brings something unexpected into the
world. But Arendt, like Ranciere, is so anxious to credit the
political as a break in the routine and inertial, with what
Ranciere calls “the police,” that they cannot credit how
embedded ongoing practices are hidden in and enable moments of
creativity. If the ruptural and inaugural qualities of action in
concert both require -and validate- belief in, call it magic or
fantasy or fiction-making, so also the political and aesthetic
task must include returning the poetic to the worldly, to find
the magical in the ordinary, as if to engender a productive
tension, like a wave to the ocean or a leap to its ground.
Faced with stunning forms of disavowal -of inequality,
empire, or climate change- it is tempting to tell people to
“face reality.” The dangers in fantasy and fiction are manifest
in so many ways that anxiety about delusion, illusion, and “the
paranoid style,” about self-deception and disavowal is certainly
justified. But fictionality remains the most disturbing -at once
generative and destructive, aesthetic and political- aspect of
reality, especially in its ostensibly ordinary, prosaic
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dimensions. On the one hand, then, literary artists show us how
we apprehend the real only through fiction in its broadly
visionary, say mytho-poetic senses; we disturb a hegemonic
“partition of the sensible” not by facts as such but by countervisions that make some aspects of reality newly visible or that
reconfigure the meaning or significance of what we already count
as real. That is why defenders of the real, by refusing fiction
or fantasy, end up serving what Ranciere calls the police. And
on the other hand, if the paradox of politics is that we project
(in varying ways) what does not exist yet as a referent -those
Ranciere calls “a part with no part,” or “the people,” a
Trystero, or a future- then we need to credit fantasy, as it
were before a referent.
There is no radical politics without “imagined community”
and visions of possibility, which means that radical politics
depends on a magical capacity to at once deny “reality” and
produce new realities. At issue is not the real as such
distorted by the fictive or fantastical as such, but our
political judgments about better and worse magic, about the
worlds and subjects that different fictions (of the real)
occlude or make visible, make impossible or available. At issue
is not whether we live by what I would call an organizing
fantasy, but which, and how. If we assume that organizing
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fantasies and forms of magic are always powerfully at work in
and around us, the political and aesthetic task becomes to judge
their impact and rework their generativity. I have argued that
American literary art reworks and reinvigorates (and mixes)
inherited genres –our organizing fantasies and the expectations
they entail- to dramatize the vicissitudes of these powers of
fiction, to set us in the scenes they both disclose and obscure.
Like Pynchon placing Oedippa at the threshold of the auction,
the literary art leaves us with the possibility (and work) -at
once symbolic and material, at once ordinary and utopian- of
making desolation a condition of action rather than despair.
*
*
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1. For Scott, tragedy captures the tangled identifications and
contaminated agency that characterize our time. In his recent
Omens of Adversity the alternative to political romance is not
tragedy but allegory, to depict an ongoing or recurring tension
(a Machiavellian cycle) between institutionalization and
episodes of insurgency that seems resonant in all times and
places. His allegory thus parallels Wolin’s account of fugitive
democracy. But it seems crucial to face his account of
“exhaustion” in two directions: first, in relation to Daniel
Bell’s The End of Ideology, a 1959 account of exhausted
radicalism that was totally undone by the unexpected explosion
of the sixties; and second, in relation to “Afro-pessimism,” the
arguments that posit the intractability of white supremacy as a
regime.
2. Berlant is close to Scott, but what she calls “genres of
crisis” include “tragedy,” which she deems too vested in
figurations of crisis and dramatic realization to apprehend
experiences of “impasse” that characterize our social world. But
what does a “genre of impasse” look like, and what kind of
politics does it foster? Would such a genre resonate with Afropessimism?
3. Lear’s chief Plenty Coup refused Sitting Bull’s path of
violent resistance to white domination -a position Lear
associates with melancholic denial of loss- and risked
accusations of collaboration with white conquest, but on this
basis, Lear claims, he projected the possibility of a way
forward, of a radical change that nonetheless preserved a
continuity with the past. I leave aside a host of problems with
his account to emphasize that many Americans now feel like those
Indians, and to ask the theoretical and political question: what
does it require and mean to create a way of life on a new basis?
4. Mark Reinhardt has reminded me that impasse denotes more than
a discursive issue, for it seems literally impossible –
structurally foreclosed- for theorists and citizens to imagine
what might emerge beyond neo-liberalism and permanent war.
Theorists are sure they do not desire a neo-liberal world, but
they do not know what they desire affirmatively except in the
vaguest of terms. We lack a compelling vision of an alternative
but the limit to imagination is structural, not willful,
anchored in a regime that has decisively defeated or discredited
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alternatives. That is the point or truth in the arguments of
Scott, Berlant, and Lear, though Lear insists that an
alternative cannot be known in advance, but only developed IF –
and as- people mourn the old and develop a “radical hope” in
their capacity to create the new.
5. Athenian drama was institutionalized as part of the imperial
city-state, whereas American literature has remained marginal,
but as forms of “tragedy” and “comedy” once engaged an imperial
polis, so American literature has engaged an imperial republic
through non-realist forms, modes, and genre elements. I suggest
the analogy as a thought-device not a literal truth, because the
differences really matter.
6
. According to Ranciere, “the distribution and redistribution of places and
identities, this apportioning and reapportioning of spaces and times, of the
visible and the invisible, of noise and speech, constitutes what I call the
distribution of the sensible...[which defines the common of a community.]
Politics consists in...introducing into it new subjects and objects, to
render visible what had not been, and to make heard as speakers those who had
been perceived as mere noisy animals. This work involved in creating
dissensus informs an aesthetics of politics....This means that art and
politics do not consist in two permanent separate realities whereby the issue
is to know whether or not they ought to be set in relation. They are two
forms of the distribution of the sensible...There are not always occurrences
of politics, though there always exist forms of power. Similarly, there are
not always occurrences of art, though there are always forms of poetry,
sculpture, music, theater, dance.” So literary (or any) art is only
“political” -and action even in public forms or formally political
institutions is only “political”- to the extent that it disturbs and
reconfigures the partition of the sensible. For Ranciere, contra McCann, such
disturbane rejects formal politics as “the police” but politics is entirely
this-worldly engagement. But Ranciere does not and cannot theorize the worldbuilding that M&S, read generously, claim is missing from current accounts of
“radical” politics.
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