What Does Lauren Berlant Teach Us about X?

Abstract

This essay considers method and style in the work of Lauren Berlant, with particular attention to questions of evidence, scale, and exemplarity. Berlant has explored these issues through her analysis of the genre of the case study, with its competing demands of singularity and representativeness. The essay tracks her concern with “the becoming general of singular things” from her analysis of queer and cultural studies methodology to the obese body as a case. I argue that, rather than resolving the contradictions of the case-study form, Berlant exacerbates them in order to make visible the political impasse of the present.

Keywords:

• Lauren Berlant
• Case Study
• Method
• Feminism
• Obesity

Notes

1. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), vii.

2. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), vii.

3. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), vii.

4. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), vii.

5. Lauren Berlant, ed., On the Case special issue, Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 663–894; and Critical Inquiry 34, no. 1 (2007): 1–232.

6. See Lauren Berlant, “On the Case,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 663–72; and “Introduction: What Does It Matter Who One Is?” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 1 (2007): 1–4.

7. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 12.

8. Lauren Berlant, “Hard Feelings: Stephanie Brooks,” Criticism 49, no. 3 (2007): 416.

9. Berlant, “On the Case,” 669.

10. Lauren Berlant, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 7.

11. In this regard, see Berlant's engagement with the problem of noise and message in constituting the affective public sphere in Chapter 7 in Cruel Optimism, “On the Desire for the Political,” 223–63.

12. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 21.

13. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 15.

14. Anna McCarthy, “From the Ordinary to the Concrete: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scale,” in Questions of Method in Cultural Studies, ed. Mimi White and James Schwoch (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 31.

15. Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 754–80.

16. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 95–119. For the remainder of the essay, I refer to the version in Cruel Optimism, which differs in minor ways from the original.

17. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 6.

18. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 7.

19. I borrow these two phrases (as well as their juxtaposition) from the title of Chapter 5 in Cruel Optimism, “Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta,” 161–89.

20. Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

21. Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)., 68.

22. Lauren Berlant, “'68, or Something,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 129.

23. Lauren Berlant, “'68, or Something,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 129.

24. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Guest Column: What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA 110, no. 3 (1995): 343.

25. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Guest Column: What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA, 348.

26. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Guest Column: What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA, 349.

27. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Guest Column: What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA, 348.

28. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Guest Column: What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA, 348.

29. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Guest Column: What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA, 348.

30. Berlant, “On the Case,” 671.

31. For instance, see John Gerring, “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good for?” American Political Science Review 98, no. 2 (2004): 341–54. He contends that case studies never treat a unique, isolated instance, but that they always implicate their objects in larger contexts of comparison. Gerring argues that the “N=1 research design … is not logically feasible” (344). This idea of the utter singularity of a case is a key claim of anthropological and historical work (351) (and one might also go on to map this assertion onto literary studies); by contrast, it “haunts the imaginations of social scientists” (344) who would better understand case-study method as a comparative method that makes claims about causality based on a small-N sample, not a single case. Berlant cites Gerring in “On the Case,” 665 n9.

32. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 12.

33. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 11–12.

34. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 19.

35. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 20.

36. Berlant, “On the Case,” 669.

37. Berlant, “On the Case,”, 671.

38. Berlant, “On the Case,”, 669.

39. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 23.

40. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 95.

41. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 97.

42. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 98.

43. Berlant, “Introduction: What Does It Matter Who One Is?” 4.

44. Berlant, “On the Case,” 666.

45. Berlant, “On the Case,”, 671.

46. Berlant, “Slow Death,” 98.

47. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 11.

48. Berlant, “What Does It Matter Who One Is?” 2.

49. Berlant, “On the Case,” 666.

50. Berlant, “Slow Death,” 106.

51. Berlant, “Slow Death,”, 105.

52. Berlant, “Slow Death,”, 114.

53. My observations echo a post about “Slow Death” on the Australian blog Fatuousity, in which the author argues that Berlant conflates her critique of capitalist conditions of production and reproduction with familiar panic over “the horrific and life-threatening consequences of obesity.” The argument continues: “Such a connection is overly simplistic and does a disservice both to actual fat people and to the arguments against modern labour relations. I'm almost too bored with the argument to bother saying that actual fat people have a wide variety of eating and exercise behaviours, just like non-fat people. That we eat out or eat at home or skip the gym or walk to the shops just like non-fat people. I actually don't want to argue that eating and activity have no bearing on weight, but that to equate fatness simply with sedentary-ness and over-eating not only perpetuates fat stigma, but obscures the real stakes of her anti-capitalist argument. The conditions of workers and consumers under late capitalism, the slow death of the labouring population, is important not because it (maybe) causes fatness, but because of the conditions of workers and consumers under late capitalism … . There is no need to co-opt the ‘plight of the obese’ to make them matter, and doing so damages both sides of the argument.” Sizeoftheocean, “Sovereign Fictions,” Fatuosity (blog), February 15, 2011, http://www.fatuosity.net/2011/02/15/sovereign-fictions/ (accessed May 1, 2011).

54. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 25.

55. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 114.

56. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 102.

57. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 103.

58. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 113.

59. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feelings Project (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming), np.

60. Berlant, Compassion, 6.

61. Berlant, “'68, or Something,” 128.

62. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 18.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather Love

Heather Love is the R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007); the editor of a special issue of GLQ on the scholarship and legacy of Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex” 17, no. 1 [2011]); and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History (with Bill Albertini, Ben Lee, Mike Millner, Ken Parille, Alice Rutkowski, and Bryan Wagner, “Is There Life after Identity Politics?” 33, no. 4 [2000]). She is working on a book about the source materials for Erving Goffman's 1963 book, Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity (“The Stigma Archive”)