Writing with Bruised Fruit

Throughout On the Inconvenience of Other People, in both its main text and its footnotes, Lauren Berlant repeats a certain phrase. It takes the formula "From x person I learned to think about y thing." At the end of the introduction, for example, they write: "From Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick I learned that it's not an idea until you circulate it, whatever stage it has reached. From Stanley Cavell I learned that showing up with the bruised fruit of one's perspective is what the argument requires to reshape the dynamic processes always on the move from and toward forms of life" (30). Beyond the standard citational systems of quotation and footnote, with page numbers and book titles, which allow the curious reader to read more and the suspicious reader to check if the writer is right, this practice calls these authors to Berlant's own text. It marks Berlant's writing as emerging from a large network of thought and brings in the other as an active participant in the dialogue. To read and write in any academic discipline is to enter into a conversation that has been going on for a long time, well before one entered the room, and that will continue after one leaves. With this writerly quirk, Berlant extends a hand, telling their reader what transpired in the conversation before the reader came through the door. It functions as an anecdote of Berlant's formation as a thinker. Rather than "see x on y," the verb learned in the role of a citation is both a generous methodology and an active act that asserts Berlant's own writing voice. They are cutting up the "bruised fruit of their perspective" and sharing a messy slice with the reader. On the Inconvenience of Other People has many methodological features like this, where a little quirk of language will reveal Berlant the theorist, showing us what they are trying to do while also doing it.In mentioning Sedgwick and Cavell in their introduction (as well as in gesturing at Ludwig Wittgenstein with the enigmatic concept "forms of life"), Berlant invokes the traditions of both queer affect theory and ordinary language philosophy (OLP). While both Sedgwick and Cavell draw on J. L. Austin's work on performativity, these two projects seem to be at odds: antinormative queerness and antilinguistic affect meeting the normative, language-centric OLP.1 But both strands of thought are deeply concerned with the normal; whether in more or less antagonistic ways, both take the normal seriously and listen to what it has to say by opposing the normative or repositioning a descriptive approach to the normal use of words as central for philosophical inquiry. That Berlant draws on these traditions at the beginning also shows their methodological expansiveness, which draws from queer and affect theory, OLP, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, among others. They describe the "space of permission opened by" Sedgwick and Cavell and note that methodologically the two "helped me see a way into writing that would be freeing" (29–30). For me, ultimately, it is their writing itself that is the key to untangling their work and their academic project. On the Inconvenience of Other People is not easy to read. This is not a transparent type of descriptive academic writing in which the author takes it for granted that you will understand the use of evidence, a school of theory, and academic convention; On the Inconvenience of Other People does not aspire to fade into the background and provide a smooth reading experience. Every step of the way Berlant is there, writing aloud about writing and demonstrating the truth for this text of what they learned from Fredric Jameson: "that context is immanent in a text" (15).Like Berlant's Cruel Optimism, On the Inconvenience of Other People is a high-concept work that moves outward from a central idea. As in Cruel Optimism, it shows their deep concern with the everyday and the ordinary, concepts that they do not disentangle in this book but that are suggested as subtly different from each other in Cruel Optimism. There Berlant explains that they move away from Michel de Certeau's and Henri Lefebvre's theories of the everyday, which they take as no longer descriptive of twenty-first-century life, and toward an "ordinary" that is disorganized by capitalism. The ordinary, for Berlant, also links to "crisis ordinariness," a term they prefer over trauma, as it eschews the exceptionalism and break that trauma implies.2 At the same time, as they note in the preface to On the Inconvenience of Other People, the "crisis convergence" of the moment of the final stages of the book's writing brought the coronavirus pandemic, anti-Black racism, anti-Asian racism, and antimigrant racism to the forefront of public consciousness in the United States (ix–x). Ordinary, for Berlant, is not quiet or easy.To this scene of ordinariness, Berlant brings the concept of "inconvenience" as a way of thinking through a whole host of things that arise from "the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation" (2). To be in the world is to be in relation with other people, and to be in relation with other people is to be inconvenienced and inconvenient as we adjust and shift to those people and their presences and effects. This is neither something that Berlant decries nor something they cheer for; it just is. Always a theorist of scales, Berlant locates inconvenience as "more than 'being affected' and something less than 'being entangled'" (2). It indexes a nonsovereignty. Like attachment, inconvenience is fundamental to being with others, but in a different direction, as Berlant suggests: "Attachment, one might say, is what draws you out into the world; inconvenience is the adjustment from taking things in" (6). This psychoanalytic idiom continues in their coining of the concept of the "inconvenience drive," which they define as "a drive to keep taking in and living with objects" (6). This is a drive in a present progressive tense, keeping us in the world and moving.The forward movement of the inconvenience drive indexes a futurity that Berlant invokes in their calling themself, after Michel Foucault, a "heterotopian." Unlike a "utopian," a "heterotopian" still believes in alternatives and better possibilities, but they nevertheless err on the side of multiplicity and partial potential: the crack through which you can see the light, rather than the chasm you fall into. For Berlant, heterotopia points to an expansive repertoire of techniques of theory and ultimately a nonreproductive futurity that emerges through the inconvenient, painful, or even close-to-unbearable work of thinking that signals "the copresence of an otherwise" (16). It doesn't all fit together neatly, but it doesn't need to. There are still scenes of mutual care, of love, of fun, and there is a recognition of violence and a different politics.Along with the preface and the introduction, On the Inconvenience of Other People has three main chapters, arranged around sex and jokes, democracy and infrastructure, and the desire for life and proxemics. These are followed by a coda on the unbearable. Taking readings from films, poems, and artworks, Berlant lingers in the theoretical at the beginning of each chapter, drawing it through each of their objects and extending their readings of scenes, passages, and moments for so long that they become almost fractally saturated with meaning. For this review, it is hard to pick out moments in the text in which Berlant states a thesis without also disarticulating their text into a list or quoting them at great length. They note that their own process is "modular," which is to say "built through sections that allow a problem-cluster to be both established and transformed through its contact with specific object/scenes or cases" (11). On the Inconvenience of Other People has many moving parts, and its moving parts move other parts: its chapters, Berlant states, "offer concepts as tools with which to loosen other concepts. To loosen an object is to make it available to transition" (12). This idea of "loosening" is carried through the book, with Berlant noting that to loosen an object is "to make it available for different kinds of attachment, use, form, concept, scene, world" (124). The object is not just a work of literature or film to read, nor is it just a person, nor is it just a theoretical concept, but rather, as they set out in Cruel Optimism and reiterate in On the Inconvenience of Other People, it is something around which affect and meaning is gathered: "clusters of promise, projection, and speculation," and "scenes of attachment" (27). Thinking with the object to loosen it opens up new possibilities for how it, its clusters, and its scenes could be otherwise. This theoretical move, in which the object is already overdetermined as a cluster or a scene or an "object/scene," allows Berlant to move between a series of virtuoso close readings and a heady theoretical idiom. The close reading for them is key as a work of demonstration, but the choice of what to read seems often incidental. They gesture at historical moments, like Paris in 1968, but they do not stay there. For the more historically minded or textually prudent reader, Berlant's expansiveness may come across as profligacy, but for Berlant themself, these objects are just case studies: things that Berlant found were good to think with and in which they located something gesturing toward the heterotopian.On the Inconvenience of Other People is declarative and aphoristic, full of pithy and pleasing sentences that claim truth through their force. As readers, we are listening as we read; we are being told what's what by Berlant. Style, for the work, is not something to be disarticulated from content: the book is in Duke University Press's Writing Matters! series of expansive conceptual writing, founded by Berlant along with Saidiya Hartman, Erica Rand, and Kathleen Stewart (who was also Berlant's cowriter of a 2019 collection of experimental prose poems, The Hundreds). The writing itself as an art, a practice, and a way of thinking through and with the world—"How it matters, how it interferes" (176), says Berlant in the acknowledgments—is foregrounded, and as mentioned above, the writer as the writing agent is ever-present. In the vein of many queer and feminist theorists, Berlant's own writer's voice is loud and foregrounded in this work; it is not hard to imagine them saying these things to you, even as someone who never met them in person. They note that they have tried to write in the "parenthetical voice" (29), in which authors often couch their more intimate thoughts, turning the parentheses inside out to let the voice loose in the main text and subsequently banning parentheses from their writing.Their voice is part of the joy of reading the book, whipping up the thick theory and creating something still rich but also airier, with room for the reader to move about and think. It has certain familiar quirks, like the frequent use of what's to evoke a scene of generality, immediacy, and ongoingness: "being with what's ongoing" (6), "a flattened voice near what's threatening" (99), "without reproducing what's diminishing" (126), "confidence about what's transpiring" (137). The instances of what's gesture at a texture of everyday life without getting too specific and allow the audience to read between the lines and fish out their own examples. The text also frequently hails the reader as "you," with more aphorisms: "contact with inconvenience disturbs the vision of yourself you carry around" (3); "It's that you can't be certain how you'll feel about or be able to live on in the disturbance you created" (76); "In this book you never know whether something works, if work means contain and repair. But you have to show up to try something memorial, nonreproductive, and forward moving" (171). Grammatically, it would work to replace you with one in these sentences, but the stuffiness of one works against generalizability. "One" is someone else, maybe Berlant themself, or maybe someone blank and featureless. But as it's "you can't be certain how you'll feel," then I imagine myself in the scene. When has this happened to me? How do I act in this situation? Is Berlant right about this? I am drawn into the scene of thinking by the prose, interpellated by the second person.Even as I am drawn in and given space to think by the voice, it also feels, at times, unrelenting. The pace of On the Inconvenience of Other People is quick, even if at points we are running in place to stay with Berlant's object. I feel excited reading Berlant's words, warmed by both their chattiness and their masterful deployment of a host of texts and scenes to make their points, but I also feel as if I am trying to keep up with someone always at least two steps ahead of me, pulling me by the hand—"you, you, you"—but also keeping me out of breath. As they say, "reading is inconvenient to the reader" (19). But inconvenience is not all bad and has its own pleasures: in their reading of Juliana Spahr's "This Connection of Everyone," they quote at length from a repeating sequence that builds upon itself, mimicking the in-and-out rhythm of breathing. I know I should read the whole thing, subvocalize and experience the poem as a song, but I am impatient and my eyes slide over to the end of the quote, back to Berlant's prose. The first sentence: "Did you skim?" Oops. Sorry, Lauren. Reading that, I feel abashed that I did, so obviously, and also pleased to have been seen and imagined by Berlant in this way. After such a read they offer a consolation that is also a proposition: "It is hard not to let the incantation fuzz out the demands of staying with what's changing in a rhythmic common" (101). Berlant gives us a model and a lesson in theory and formal analysis, yoking it to the experience of reading and their witty, arch voice.Aphorism for Berlant is not a gesture of mastery or finality. They are writing theory, but for Berlant, theory is not a grand unified project or a codex of what is true. Rather, it is a creative endeavor, an attempt to get somewhere and figure something out. They note that "work claiming to be theory must be read as propositional" (19), and so, at the same time as we are hailed as readers, pulled into the theoretical abstraction that is the scene of thinking, Berlant also offers us a puzzle. This is an invitation to theorize: What if this were true? What if this abstract conclusion could be drawn from this poem, this film, this piece of art? ("The exempla are beginnings, not hermetic seals" 27.) This spirit runs throughout the book. In the preface, they say, "Everything needs to be tested with humility and focus" (xi), as though offering a note on their general methodology, but this is also a note to the reader. Caveat, reviewer. In the introduction, in the space between two paragraphs, separated from the other text by lines above and below, they insert the following exercise: "So, brainstorm your own examples of structural and affective alienation" (26). After a long list of questions at the end of their first chapter, they note to the reader: "None of these questions is rhetorical; all of them are propositional" (73). We are being asked these questions by Berlant; theory here is also pedagogy, and the reader is being given homework. There is a delight in the gift of being taken this seriously as readers and asked to share in the intellectual work the book is doing.In my own writing, I have been thinking about futures for a long time, trying to locate my work on Okinawan and mainland Japanese literature written in the shadow of American empire on a map drawn by queer theorists of futurity, one that sketches out a terrain between utopian possibility and nonreproductive antifuturity. In trying to believe in the possibility of something better as a writer—isn't all writing a futural project?—I also want to avoid a tendency to fetishize resistance and protest as the be-all and end-all of every text, assuming that the texts I read have things to tell me that I already know before I open the book. Life and thought are ordinarily complicated, which is to say, there are always too many moving parts to be neatly understood or to lead to a simple solution. At the same time, there is urgency in practices of solidarity. We can't ignore what must be protested. Maintaining this tension is something I continue to struggle with. Turning to Berlant's work then, I take a lot from inconvenience in its indexing of the inevitable difficulty of being together, even as it is a necessary part of being in the world. I also take the heterotopian imaginations of elsewheres we can gather from the practice of loosening the object, and the nonreproductive futurity—the possibility of a future that doesn't replicate the crisis ordinary of the present—that is suggested by this loosening.Beyond the question of queer futurity, Berlant also engages queerly with the question of sex, which they try to bring back as central to queer inquiry, where it has been pushed out—as they see it—to make room for concerns about sexuality, identity, or love. Sex is something potentially dangerous and definitely inconvenient. In the first chapter of the book, for example, Berlant examines Last Tango in Paris (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) and foregrounds a problem of writing about a film steeped in sexual violence: how can a writer think about this while also maintaining a sense of sex positivity? Erotophobia in society and in theory arises from bad sex and the possibility of violence, but as a resolution, argues Berlant, it is not adequate, missing out on the potential for overdetermination that allows for a loosening of the object. Sex might be disturbing, but "the disturbance of sex is different from the trauma of sex" (38). Sex is disturbing because people are difficult, and even sex that is desired, they note, can be something we are ambivalent about, wanting and not wanting it at the same time. The "both/and" of this kind of ambivalence around sex may be a dramatic state but might also just be the ordinary messiness of being in relation to other people. This both/and of sex should not be taken as neither/nor, as Berlant states that they aim to find an approach that succeeds at "interrupting the impasse between the affirmative and the aggressive view of sex, one that does not minimize or negate the prospects of happiness or violence" (67). For the couple of Jeanne and Paul in Last Tango in Paris, sex is a way to experiment with radicality and an antibourgeois life in the historical moment of a post-1968 Paris, but the experiment fails. There is bad sex, there is rape, and there is death. For Berlant, the attempt and the failure have something to tell us about sex and the political: paying attention to scale again, sex is not just an analogy of the social for Berlant, as if good sex could simply point to a good society and a good society could point back to good sex. Rather, it is something more quotidian: "a training in how simply hard it is to be in the room with another person" (66). So they argue that we need to embrace the "inconvenience of staying in a rebroken social scene" (68) that is the result of being in a world in which political change and revolution is possible and ongoing, as well as understanding the awful normality of sexual violence. Last Tango in Paris is a failure of a creation of politics via and proximate to sex, but it "does not mean it was a bad idea to try" (77), says Berlant.The question of violence is a difficult one in On the Inconvenience of Other People. When at the beginning of the book Berlant invokes Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Achille Mbembe, and Jasbir Puar, or in their discussions of sexual violence and murder, the reader may already be wondering where inconvenience ends and violence begins, or if "inconvenience" isn't a grand understatement. Berlant does try to differentiate between the concepts: for them, this violence is not the same as inconvenience, which is, after all, a state of being with other people. But it is queasily proximate, and even though Berlant states that they have tried to "separate out" the two in their work (x), so that the being with does not equate to the terribly ordinary, the fact that they do not always succeed is instructive. As they say drily and darkly in the coda: "rape/murder: an ordinary thing" (152). This shit is all around us. And so it is important to think about what literature, film, or art could do within the crushing ordinariness of it all. For this, Berlant offers a reading of James Ellroy and Bhanu Kapil's works that discuss the violence of rape and death, and they make the point that the difficulty of their literary form affords the thinker time to go slowly and treat the horror of the violence seriously. The works' experimentation is purposeful "because the incidents involve rape/deaths for which available genres make too much sense" (154). In these works, they see a "realism for the nonsovereign" (169), which, rather than an inevitable script or a dour cynicism, allows space to breathe and think in a different mode in a difficult world. The acts of reading, watching, and writing offer something to us all. The world is full of pain. "And yet" (171).A poignant moment in the book comes when Berlant places On the Inconvenience of Other People in between Cruel Optimism and their next book, on humorlessness, which they will not write. As the note to the readers at the beginning of the text tells us, Lauren Berlant died in June 2021, when the manuscript was complete but the book was not yet in production; the final work of getting the book finished and into the world was undertaken by the series editors, Hartman, Rand, and Stewart. As a last book, On the Inconvenience of Other People is very pleasingly Berlantian: witty, difficult, and theoretical, with attention paid to the ordinary, fantasy, attachment, and sex through a close reading practice that feels like it turns the texts inside out. The line to the book from their previous publications is clear. You and I are left with the rich, pleasurable, inconvenient archive of thought and feeling that is Berlant's work. From Berlant I learned that writing is a way of getting at an ongoing scene, to test out what you think but also to offer other people a hand as they think through the ordinary. From Berlant I learned that showing up in my writing doesn't have to mean a superfluity of the first person, but that it can. From Berlant I learned that theory, like fantasy, is an everyday practice. So, brainstorm your own examples.