Living Truth: a Reading in Social and Sociological Hermeneutics

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Living Truth: A reading in social and sociological hermeneutics

Ashley Barnwell

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Social Sciences Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences 2014

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet Surname or Family name: Barnwell

First name: Ashley Other name/s:

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: SOCA9000

School: Social Sciences Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences

Title: Uving Truth: A reading in social and sociological hermeneutics

Abstract:

In social theory, as in everyday life, we are faced with the question of how to account for the seemingly unaccountable complexity of lives that are not all of one piece with methods that are similarly dissonant. Drawing attention to such a representational challenge, this thesis explores the ethical, sociological, and political dimensions of both social and academic truth· telling and verification practices. Focusing on questions of method. and the recent turn from critique to affect theory specifically, this study parses out underlying questions about how we determine what will and will not qualify as a complex field, a proper genre, or an affective impulse; as well as how these decisions work to shape and produce particular realities.

To foreground the living contestation that animates questions of truth, the thesis opens with a case study about veteran imposture, the Stolen Valour Act. and public debates about who has the right to claim particular life stories. Autobiography hoaxes are routinely read as a breach of the line between fact and fiction, however, as this chapter illustrates, they also draw out underlying social conflicts about authorship and propriety and alert us to the dynamism of seemingly rigid genre laws. Building on this investigation into social authorship, chapter two tracks the ongoing disciplinary irresolution in the sociology of literature, and discovers that scholarly projects seeking to address the ideological rift between felt and factual truths are similarly unsure about what constitutes authentic represen tation.

Dilating upon this intriguing parallel, the final three chapters offer a sustained analysis of the affective turn's theoretical and methodological directives, which propose that in order to tease out the nuances of experience we must discard methods of close reading, judgement, and truth· seeking, to take up new. affect-oriented, experimental practices. Together, these chapters examine whether such a shift can alleviate critical exclusion, or if it co ntinues to circumscribe which methods can hold intellectual and practical value. Through a series of close readings, this thesis reframes recent methodological manifestos not as appeals for newness, or hope for solutions. but as a continuation of debates about discipline, methodology, ethics, and th e nature of veracity.

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Abstract

In social theory, as in everyday life, we are faced with the question of how to account for the seemingly unaccountable complexity of lives that are not all of one piece with methods that are similarly dissonant. Drawing attention to such a representational challenge, this thesis explores the ethical, sociological, and political dimensions of both social and academic truth- telling and verification practices. Focusing on questions of method, and the recent turn from critique to affect theory specifically, this study parses out underlying questions about how we determine what will and will not qualify as a complex field, a proper genre, or an affective impulse; as well as how these decisions work to shape and produce particular realities.

To foreground the living contestation that animates questions of truth, the thesis opens with a case study about veteran imposture, the Stolen Valour Act, and public debates about who has the right to claim particular life stories. Autobiography hoaxes are routinely read as a breach of the line between fact and fiction, however, as this chapter illustrates, they also draw out underlying social conflicts about authorship and propriety and alert us to the dynamism of seemingly rigid genre laws. Building on this investigation into social authorship, chapter two tracks the ongoing disciplinary irresolution in the sociology of literature, and discovers that scholarly projects seeking to address the ideological rift between felt and factual truths are similarly unsure about what constitutes authentic representation.

Dilating upon this intriguing parallel, the final three chapters offer a sustained analysis of the affective turn’s theoretical and methodological directives, which propose that in order to tease out the nuances of experience we must discard methods of close reading, judgement, and truth-seeking, to take up new, affect-oriented, experimental practices. Together, these chapters examine whether such a shift can alleviate critical exclusion, or if it continues to circumscribe which methods can hold intellectual and practical value. Through a series of close readings, this thesis reframes recent methodological manifestos not as appeals for newness, or hope for solutions, but as a continuation of debates about discipline, methodology, ethics, and the nature of veracity.

Acknowledgments

During the process of writing this thesis I have been supported and encouraged by mentors, colleagues, and friends. Most importantly, I thank my supervisor, Vicki Kirby, for her faith in my argument. It is difficult to convey the extent of my gratitude to her – she has taught me to think and to write. But, more than this, she has inspired me to be curious about the world, to be loyal to my questions, and to make intellectual work a vocation. The unwavering acuity, richness, and honesty of her supervision has been invaluable.

I am also grateful to my co-supervisor Helen Pringle, Melanie White, Ursula Rao, Andrew Metcalfe, Dominic Fitzsimmons, Jamie Roberts, and Peta Hinton for their time, reading suggestions, and professional mentorship over the past few years.

My colleagues and friends in the Post-graduate Research Lab have supported me in ways both big and small. In reading and writing groups my fellow students have offered me valuable insight and feedback. But I was equally nourished by squandered office hours spent swapping recipes, secrets, and favourite albums. Patricia Morgan, Michelle Jamieson, and Florence Chiew have been peer mentors to me – sharing their wisdom and working methods. I am also grateful for the friendship and daily presence of Will Johncock, Rosemary Grey, Maia Gunn Watkinson, Emilie Auton, Yvette Selim, Rebecca Pearse, Anisha Guatam, Jac Dalziell, Rhonda Sui, Ele Jansen, Zoe Baker, Ozzie Etminan, and Scott McBride. Special thanks to Lorraine Burdett for her humour and proofreading skills.

During the final stage of this project I was supported by a summer scholarship at the National Library of Australia, generously funded by John and Heather Seymour. On the edge of Lake Burley Griffin I found the solitude and space needed to draw together the final threads of my thesis. I am very grateful to the NLA for this opportunity.

Finally, my greatest debt is to my family for their excitement about and pride in my efforts; my dear friend Moira McKenzie for her warmth and interest; and to Joseph Cummins for his daily care, his intellectual provocations, his stoic advice, his honesty, and his love.

Contents

Abstract i

Acknowledgments ii

Introduction 1

I. Telling the Truth: The Complicity of Social Authorship 10

II. Reading Life’s Literature: A Question of Method 36

III. Evidence in Flux: Verifying Affect 76

IV. The Crisis of “Non-Representation” 124

V. Ordinary Paranoia: An Everyday Hermeneutics of Suspicion 162

Conclusion 191

References 204

Warnings about relativism to the contrary, truth is still what most of us strive for. Partial and insecure surely, and something slightly different from ‘the facts,’ but truth nonetheless: the capacity to say ‘This is so’.

Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, (2008, 20).

Despite my intense desire to know the truth, however partial or incomplete, I am forced to recognise that the process of finding the story continues to change the story. As I advance into the territory of recovery, I can’t trust even myself. That may be the hardest lesson of all.

Nancy K. Miller, The Things They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, (2011, 26).

Introduction

As the first thing the reader reads, yet the last thing the writer writes, an introduction often masks a period of coalescing and uncertainty with the clarity of hindsight. But the truth of a project’s evolution is often less organised and precise. An intellectual exploration, though perhaps considered, methodical, and already informed with a unique signature, may not always be aware of its own impetus or goal. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her book about the social life of stories, The Faraway Nearby (2013), “We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us” (4). Questions about where authorial intention originates and how it works are central to this thesis, and thus by way of introduction it seems appropriate to give a brief account of how the motivations and direction of this particular project developed.

When I began writing this thesis it was to be about memoir and autobiography hoaxes. I was fascinated by public arguments about what makes a story true, and what is socially accepted as evidence in different contexts. My questions were about the everyday methods we use to decide what is valuable or genuine in both personal and public life. For example, if someone transgresses the rules of genre, perhaps using non-fiction to present a fiction, why does it attract moral outrage in some cases, yet at other times public applause? Why are facts important to people in some instances but not in others? Furthermore, how does society deal with its conflicts about what verifies or authenticates a truth? These questions informed the first stages of my research.

However, when I started to think about my own methods – forms of sociological reading – the focus of this thesis took an unexpected turn. Faced with the matter of how to identify or position my questions in reference to existing traditions and conversations, the very ‘genre panic’ I was examining in public life became central to my own project. Rather than clarifying the question of how people determine what is true, I found that debates about scholarly methods, even at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary work, were also governed by questions about what should and should not qualify as an authentic account. Must a story, first and foremost, have emotional resonance or a verifiable foundation? Do people care about the political assumptions that underpin particular forms of rhetoric, or are they more interested in the pragmatic affects of public discourse? In addition, what do we do with the

inconsistencies and contradictions that arise and threaten to unhinge the representational practices we often rely upon to make life, with all its irresolvable complexities, workable? All of these questions were further complicated, rather than resolved, by the method proposals I read.

Confronted by this parallel between academic and public life, I discovered that my deliberations about which genre to use were not simply my own, but the very stuff of the social and sociological imagination. Hermeneutic processes of interpreting and creating meaning are vital, yet unsettled, in both scholarly and common life. In our everyday dealings we struggle with how best to represent ourselves in a way that is true to our sense of self, but also intelligible to others. We downplay or omit things in certain contexts but emphasise these same attributes in other forums. Similarly, when we explain our work to people, the focus of what we do, the example we choose to give, is slightly different depending on who is asking, and where, and when. There is not one clearly prescribed, fail-safe way to give account. Our words and actions are shaped and edited in a volatile social arena where the very determinants that guide us - rules and conventions about what is proper and preferred - are also in flux. Yet, in a fascinating complication, we pursue an accurate and reliable way of finding and telling the truth nonetheless. Even as we participate in the changing demands of social life, we desire, and often need, a foundational explanation that sets things out with clear identities and relational patterns, like chemicals in a periodic table with known properties and reactions.

Delving into this puzzle, my thesis, which began as a sociological study about public truth-telling, therefore extends into arguments within the social sciences and humanities about how to engage with ordinary life. Importantly however, while it intervenes in existing discussions about how to most authentically represent social being, this study steers away from choosing which method is finally and exclusively the most veracious. Rather, it meditates upon how and why we make such decisions, and what these appraisals tell us about how we value and use truth, facts, and evidence. This thesis explores why we invest certain ways of explaining something with more authority, valour, or reverence than others, and if our commitment to certain modes of representation limits the scope of what can be recognised or revealed. It is interested in how our subscription to certain genres, to set identities with recognisable characteristics, creates important forms of social cohesion but

also terms of exclusivity. Or, put simply, how do our questions shape our answers, and vice versa?

One of the challenges this study takes up is to both acknowledge and confront our desire for narrative coherence, or for identities, be they of a person, a class, or a species, to be fixed and recognisable. Why do we scrutinise and obsess over genealogies and causes, or motivations and hidden agendas? Why do we need to make sense of things and to define what is sensible? As narrative theorist Maria Tamboukou explains, in academic analysis we have long desired the “components of coherence” – “linearity, completeness, and thematic or moral closure” (2011, 4).1 Though, such intellectual tidiness also challenges genuinely curious and inclusive thought. When researchers become “obsessed with identifying these components […] they inevitably suppress or ignore ‘narrative phenomena’ that do not present the attributes of coherence” (4). Wedded to a prescribed form, the critic risks circumscribing intellectual possibilities on many levels: “analytically (what we can find), cognitively (what we can know), epistemologically (how do we know what we think we know), but also ethically and politically (who gets excluded, and to what effect, from such an approach)” (4). When we commit to a certain set of assumptions about how something is, what its essential elements must be, it is as though we cannot see alternatives or variations. Questions or anomalies that threaten to unsettle the coherence of an answer are either edited out, or unconsciously masked. Of course, such editorial and scope-narrowing processes are important and necessary – perhaps even unavoidable. But given the gravity of their effects, they call for a certain level of reflection. Following Tamboukou, my study draws out the risk and ethical tensions involved in determining the rules, identities, and capacities of genres. What becomes of the anomalies and contradictions that disturb order? What produces and sustains the divisions that lend identities their form?

Genre is often spoken of in terms of literary texts, however, it can also be understood as a sociological phenomenon. The term itself derives from the French word for gender, and thus at its very origins speaks to social acts of division and classification that carry great political and ethical consequence. Even in studies of literature, its social nature is often

1 For a rich and eclectic investigation into the stakes of coherence in narrative sense-making, see also Hyvärinen, Hydén, Saarenheimo, and Tamboukou (2010). The present study draws inspiration from this collection, specifically Mark Freeman’s call to “recognise the narrativity that is part and parcel of experience” (171). 3

mentioned.2 John Frow, for instance, describes genre as “a shared convention with a social force” (Frow, 2006, 102). Referring directly to authenticating practices, Fredric Jameson also notes that genres are “social contracts between a writer and a specific public whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artefact” (1981, 106). In life, the public act of marking out what belongs, or as Jameson says, what is “proper” to a certain grade or order, literally governs whether someone or something can “fit in”. This contract or convention is directly involved in setting out the terms of social inclusion and exclusion. As Phillip Vannini and J. Patrick Williams explain in Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society (2009), authenticity, one of our most desired forms of cultural capital, operates in these terms, as “a set of qualities that people in a particular time and place have come to agree represent an ideal or exemplar” (2009, 3). But what happens to those that do not possess this set of qualities? Can someone or something be authentic if their particular make-up does not “fit in”? And if not, what kind of mechanisms and practices does this exclusion generate? In concert with existing work on the categorising and qualifying processes of public life, this thesis examines how people negotiate social and formal codes that define the very structures by which they can live, as well as what happens to that which is held outside of these domains or provokes their boundaries.

Because the current study is about how we classify and use methods, I have thought a lot about method across the course of this thesis and realise both the difficulty and responsibility of being clear about one’s own methodology. My considerations here are guided by Avery F. Gordon’s meditation on sociological inquiry in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2008). “How,” she asks, “can our critical language display a reflexive concern not only with the objects of our investigation but also with the ones who investigate? What methods and forms of writing can foreground the conditions under which the facts and the real story are produced?” (24). Gordon does not claim to finally resolve these questions, but neither does she ignore their ethical importance or the need to address them. Indeed, the choice of method Gordon makes is very important in

2 Although it is outside the scope of this thesis to embark on an extended review of the field of genre studies, it is worth noting that there are strong precedents for the social nature of genre even in fields that are considered either formalist or literary. These include Mikhail Bakhtin, often noted as the forefather of genre studies, who was interested in how genres, both literary and “extra-literary”, evolve in dialogue with the authors and audiences (1986). The field of rhetorical genre studies also extends the concept of literary genres to emphasise the socio-cultural functions of genre. In this work, genre is conceived as any space where shared literacies and conventions can be read and practiced (see Devitt, 2004, Miller, 1984). Furthermore, forms of genre are understood to change and be changed by their social contexts in an ecological fashion (Bawarshi and Reif, 2010 and Bawarshi, 2001). 4 terms of my study of scholarly practice. As I will explain, several social scientists have recently argued that in order to tease out the nuances of experience, to engage with common truths and beliefs, we must discard the truth-seeking motivations of psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and new historicist readings, to take up new, affect-oriented, experimental practices. But for Gordon, it is these existing methods, psychoanalysis in particular (42), that can register what falls out of sight when we try to solve the problems of representation by replacing one method with another - when we attempt to edit out our errors.

In Gordon’s account, the tensions that unsettle a narrative’s coherence can never be finally left behind. The unresolved “ghostly matter” that is excluded from a genre, or a history, or a family – its slips and secrets and inconsistencies – continues to structure and haunt new forms. “In order to write about [these] invisibilities and hauntings,” Gordon argues, “requires attention to what is not seen, but is nonetheless powerfully real; requires attention to what appears dead, but is nonetheless powerfully alive; requires attention to what appears to be in the past, but is nonetheless powerfully present […]” (42). Similarly intrigued by what directs, but also disturbs, our preferences and focus, this study draws influence from close reading practices that probe into what supports an argument. Following Gordon, my approach tries to recognise the value of existing traditions and questions, but also to resist assuming that one method can finally remedy the apparent failures of another. As with Gordon’s sociology, this thesis is interested in the representational and ethical challenges that are inherent to all methods, or efforts to account for social life.

In terms of method, Barbara Johnson serves as another inspiring mentor with her “attention to what is not seen, but is nonetheless powerfully real”, and her efforts to understand how difference works. Johnson’s deconstructive, close reading practice does not just discard troubled arguments as failed or wrong. Rather, it examines how polemical opinions can be animated and extended by their own misjudgements and contradictions. Johnson argues that when we look closely at things that seem to be at war, we see that their conflict often stems from deep-seated, shared, and internal struggles rather than radical, external differences. “The differences between entities,” she explains, “are shown to be based on a repression of differences within entities. But the way in which a text differs from itself is never simple: it has a certain rigorous contradictory logic whose effects can, up until a point, be read” (1981, x-xi). Using this mode of analysis, genres are not simply compared; their very difference and make-up is questioned. The way we read is opened up for scrutiny when 5 we realise, for example, that the realism of a particular testimony rests on its use of fictive devices – the very thing it is supposedly defined against. A false testimony, in other words, for all its error, may not be dispatched by simple dismissal. It can teach us about how we judge veracity and why we facilitate certain truths. Why do we invest in the truth of the story? How did we fill in gaps in evidence and logic? What, in sum, is at stake when we decide which information is vital, simply a mistake, or an anomaly? These are the questions this thesis pursues.

Chapter one, Telling the Truth: The Complicity of Social Authorship, takes the question of testimony as its focus to explore how life-narratives are selectively and socially verified. Whenever an imposture or an identity hoax is reported in the popular media, social anxiety and conjecture arise around who has the right to claim particular life-stories. Focusing on one instance of this social phenomenon, the chapter examines what is at stake in the Stolen Valour Act, a law passed by the United States government in 2005 to prosecute people fraudulently claiming to be decorated war veterans. As I will explain, these controversial veteran hoaxes attracted a diverse and fascinating range of responses based on different ideas about what kinds of truths and stories have currency. Some veterans fought to defend their valour, naming and shaming impostors, while other veterans gestured to the unusual appeal of these ‘storytellers’ in a culture where giving testimony is fraught. Drawing out different positions, my analysis of this case raises ethical questions about how we determine the rules and proprieties of genres in everyday life. For instance, should genuine veterans have an exclusive right to give testimony about war experience? What happens to those people who feel that their life narratives are not of social value as a consequence of our selective affirmations? Indeed, what causes someone to covet and claim a valorous, veteran identity in the first place? Autobiography hoaxes are routinely read as a breach of the line between fact and fiction, however, as this chapter illustrates, they also draw out underlying social conflicts about authorship and alert us to the dynamism of seemingly rigid genre laws.

Chapter two, Reading Life’s Literature: A Question of Method, locates a similar problematic in sociology; about what genres of research have truth-value and which scholars have a valid claim to use them. It examines the sociology of literature’s ongoing and troubled efforts to forge a legitimate field and method amidst the ‘two cultures’ legacy. This cultural rift is thought to separate the arts from the sciences, divide intellectual interests into natural facts or cultural values, and frame disciplinary practices as either subjective and stylised or 6 objective and documentary. With a unique position on the cusp of literary studies and social science, the identity of the sociology of literature is seemingly torn between two disciplines with a long-running rivalry. The very truths it is interested in, and the methods its uses to seek and depict them, defy the rules and conventions of academic tradition. Recurring special journal issues devoted to this topic argue that the sociology of literature’s inability to exclusively conform to either one of these cultures renders its project illegitimate, if not illegible. As a result, one of the field’s primary endeavours, though seemingly always troubled, has been to find a methodological solution, or to decide where it belongs.

This chapter focuses specifically on the most recent efforts to define and revive the sociology of literature, efforts which turn from the Marxist legacy of the field to devise new ‘pragmatic’ and ‘descriptive’ methods. It carefully follows the logic of these accounts to try and understand how the divisions between academic genres and their associated values are negotiated, and sometimes redrawn. Parsing out the complexities of how we determine the rules of academic and social genres of inquiry, this chapter reads current interventions in the sociology of literature as a further meditation upon the ‘two cultures’ debate and its attendant conflict about the differing value of representational modes. Inspired by Wolf Lepenies’ history of the rift between sociology and literature (1988), the chapter reframes the current critical moment, not as a choice between social science traditions or experimental genres, but as another call to consider how we determine the very identities of such methods: their social purchase, ethical effects, driving force, and predictability.

Building on this work, the final three chapters offer a sustained case study of the “affective turn”, an intellectual movement that directly addresses the question of what the matter of life truly is and therefore how we should best access and describe it. My analysis of this popular, and rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary field focuses on how it navigates and informs discourses about the value of methods. As I will explain, the affective turn grapples with several of its own genre divisions in its pursuit of an inclusive and generous practice. Its proponents argue that if social scientists break from abstract, academic scrutiny they could engage the flux of lived experience in a way that is both ethical and authentic. Analysing key theoretical, methodological, and practical exemplars within the affective turn, these three chapters examine whether such a shift can alleviate critical exclusion, or if it continues to circumscribe which methods can hold intellectual and practical value. As an extended case study of several stages in the development of an argument, these three chapters also offer 7

insight into how ideas and directives can take hold, and even thrive, despite deep internal conflicts, unseen commitments, and acts of self-negation. In this current effort to forge methods that can access the real stuff of life, old questions about the nature of evidence, the propriety of disciplines, and the social value of intellectual work are revived.

After introducing the genealogy and current status of the affective turn, chapter three, Verifying Affect: Evidence in Flux, analyses the directives of three of its most influential advocates, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997), Bruno Latour (2004), and Brian Massumi (1995). Paying particular attention to the formulation of these foundational arguments, their stated concerns and motivations, my analysis considers how these theorists’ own methods of verification, weaving together felt and factual truths, might challenge the assumption that critical and affect-oriented forms of inquiry are at odds. In addition, this chapter outlines the logic upon which decisions about method are made in these and ensuing directives, including scientific and political premises.

Chapter four, The Crisis of ‘Non-representation’, introduces method proposals, such as Nigel Thrift’s “non-representational theory” (2007), John Law’s “deliberate imprecision” (2004), and fictocriticism (Muecke 2002 and 2010, Stewart 2007, Brewster 1996, Gibbs 2005, Taussig 2010). Influenced by the arguments discussed in the previous chapter, these critics variously argue that experimental and creative genres of representation, such as fiction and performance, are more affective and can thus access and represent the visceral truth of experience better than more scientific and critical methods. Analysing the proposals of Thrift, Law, and fictocriticism, the chapter explores why certain genres are deemed to be more creative than others, and therefore, more in touch with the lived realities of social life. It asks if these proposed methods truly offer a more ethical way to practice social inquiry. Examining the cogency of these arguments’ cited motives, namely, to make methods more inclusive and politically relevant, the chapter then puts these thinkers into dialogue with the “ghostly matter” which is omitted from, but still informs, their work. Re-enlisting unacknowledged contexts for these method proposals, such as existing disciplinary questions about the ethics of representation and paranoid themes in popular culture and the arts, this chapter draws out what is at stake in evaluating genres on the basis of accepted notions about their inherent capacities to affect.

The final chapter, Ordinary Paranoia: An Everyday Hermeneutics of Suspicion, further explores the tension between the affective turn’s argument that critique is out of touch with social forms of inquiry because it has become paranoid, and the ubiquity of suspicious reading practices in everyday life. This paradox provokes questions about how we decide what ideas or experiences are socially relevant, and upon what terms. Following on from the theoretical and method directives discussed in the previous two chapters, this chapter focuses upon Kathleen Stewart’s ethnography, Ordinary Affects (2007), which is posited as a material realisation of the affective turn’s aims. Explicitly framed as a turn against paranoid reading, Stewart’s evocative ethnography, in a bizarre irony, describes a hyper-vigilant public. Examining both the explicit and implicit commitments of Stewart’s ethnography, my close reading offers insight into the internal and recurrent tensions that underlie the affective turn’s arguments about the varying values of social and scholarly hermeneutics. Drawing the quotidian and academic milieus of my thesis together, this final chapter examines how the structure and merit of genres is formed in real-time by the very people they represent.

Across the course of these five chapters I argue that the pursuit of truth – the question of its form and the conditions of its verification – is both more complex and dynamic than a strict division between critical interpretation and creative intuition will allow. I explore how hermeneutic processes are, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, not simply positive or negative (1970). Verifying practices that appear to uphold the rules of genre - whether it is the drive behind an academic argument, the evidence that a memory rests upon, or a person’s justification for their political preferences - are often revising and bending these conventions in fascinating ways. This study then, overall, offers a different perspective on the question of authentic representation in sociology. It asks not how we can break from the blinders of scholarly methods to see the raw realities of social life, but rather, aims to rethink the composition of authorship, veracity, and genres of interpretation in a way that contests the propriety of these spheres. At the crux of this thesis is a foundational, sociological, and ethical question about how we decide what is valuable and true, as well as an exploration of the peculiar means by which these choices are often defended.

I Telling the Truth: The Complicity of Social Authorship

“The moment one begins to investigate the truth of the simplest facts which one has accepted as true it is as though one has stepped off a firm narrow path into a bog or a quicksand – every step one takes one steps deeper into the bog of uncertainty” Leonard Woolf, Autobiography, (in Guralnick, 1994, xii).

Peter Guralnick cites this reflection from Leonard Woolf in the preface to his biography Last Train to Memphis: the Rise of Elvis Presley. In framing the biography, Guralnick grapples with the difficulty of making “sense of the mass of random detail that makes up a life” in order to tell the story of that life (1995, xii). Guralnick posits Woolf’s state of uncertainty as “an unavoidable given and inevitable starting point” for biographical inquiry (xiii). When the biographer begins to investigate the truth of a life, it becomes apparent just how precarious the truth of a life is. Guralnick interviewed hundreds of firsthand participants in his research, each with their own version of events, sometimes contradictory and irreconcilable with each other. Peculiarly, it is this cacophony of stories that Guralnick must draw from in his desire to “tell a true story” (xiii). What Guralnick learns from this counterintuitive truth-seeking methodology is that stories are made up of stories, and his own story - his own editorial curation of the life of Elvis Presley - is inevitably just another voice in the amorphous mix.

There is no untainted account with which to measure the veracity of all other accounts. Guralnick discovers that Presley’s life is not contained within an individual human body that once walked the streets of Memphis, but dispersed in the stories of the people who shared the life of which he was part. Neither, Guralnick concedes, can his subject’s life be contained within the pages of the biography, which he suggests will only open “the subject to new aftershocks” (xiii). “[L]ike any of our lives and characters” he suggests, the story “is not all of one piece, it does not lend itself to one interpretation exclusively, nor do all its parts reflect anything that resembles an undifferentiated whole” (xiii). Nevertheless, Guralnick qualifies that to say this “is not to throw one’s hands up at the impossibility at the task”, but “to embrace the variousness and uniqueness of a life” (xiii). Guralnick affirms that there is no other way to tell a true story than with the words of other, sometimes questionable, stories.

He suggests that there is no other way to look into another time and place than through the vision of others’, perhaps quixotic, eyes. Guralnick cites British historian Richard Holmes on the fact that “the possibility of error is constant in all biography” (Holmes in Guralnick, 1995, xiii).

It is possibly this insight into the problematic process of verifying the truth of a life that compels Guralnick to adopt the unconventional literary style in which the biography is written. Freed from the possibility that he could unearth the true story of Elvis Presley, Guralnick moves away from a historical or academic writing model, instead choosing to “keep the story within ‘real’ time, to allow the characters to freely breathe their own air, to avoid imposing the judgment of another age, or even the alarums that hindsight inevitably lends” (xii). Guralnick argues that this writing style allows him to “remain true” to the “characters” (xii). In effect, what Guralnick does is concede that there is no way that we can tell an untainted story, even as he uses techniques that work to convince us that this is precisely what we are reading, or perhaps more pointedly, witnessing. Interestingly, despite this confusion, The Last Train to Memphis remains the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. The biography that spends some time foreshadowing the impossibility of knowing the one true story is the place we turn to for just that narrative. Indeed, in the paperback edition’s testimonials, Bob Dylan advocates the biography as “unrivalled”. He states that Elvis “steps from these pages, you can feel him breathe, this book cancels out all others” (Guralnick, front matter). Dylan is a figure famously incredulous toward biographers, and yet even with this attitude and a warning from Guralnick to the same effect, he still feels Elvis breathe from these pages. Guralnick brings Elvis to life and this aliveness, its immediate presence, serves as all the facticity readers require.

In this case, readers are lenient with the rules of genre and how a life may be represented and verified. The blurring of fact and fiction is warranted because the biography achieves its audience’s desire to be viscerally close to its subject and present in its myth- affirming world. But this is not always so. The methods by which society authenticates life- narratives, like lives themselves, are “not all of one piece” and do not “lend [themselves] to one interpretation exclusively” (xiii). Genres, and the authorial responsibilities people ascribe them, are at turns mercurial and rigid in public culture, shaping the way stories can be read and told. Authorship, in this sense, is a social process where it is no longer clear why or with whom a narrative specifically and straightforwardly originates. Where this authorial practice 11

becomes most provocative however, is in the social desire to determine such a source nonetheless. The question that emerges from this unsteady, yet determined social process is one of accountability, in terms of both intention and intelligibility: from where is the authority to tell a particular story derived and how is its veracity constituted? How are paths forged, followed, and held together in Woolf’s “quicksand”?

The stakes of this question are perhaps best considered with the case of autobiography hoaxes. When the author of a memoir or autobiography is found to have fabricated details of their life, and in some cases their entire identity, discussions about the boundaries between non-fiction and the novel often dominate media commentaries. However, underlying this genre-panic are ethical questions about why a person would claim or testify to an identity that is not their own. Identity hoaxes unsettle the political assumptions that underpin the division between fact and fiction, but they also question who has the right to tell which stories and why. Acts of imposture, both written and lived, reveal the investment that we have in being told “the true story”, furthermore, our preference for particular narratives exposes the role the public plays in influencing which genres and which stories are attributed authenticity.

Maria Takolander and David McCooey gesture toward these broader sociological considerations in “Fakes, Literary Identity and Public Culture” (2004). Takolander and McCooey focus on a series of Australian literary hoaxes that occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s. Importantly the majority of these cases featured an author from the then hegemonic Anglo-Australian culture, posing as someone from an ethnic minority.3 The fact that several of these texts won major literary prizes further exacerbated the tensions surrounding authorship and identity politics. Such hoaxes hit the fragile nerve-centre of Australian postcolonial identity and consequently the public anxiety that arose around these cases extended

3 Prominent examples include Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper (1994), a self-declared autobiographical novel which claimed to draw upon the author’s Ukrainian family history, but was actually a work of fiction written by Helen Darville, the daughter of English migrants, arguably as a means to verify her anti-Semitic leanings (Manne, 1996). Another example is Wanda Koolmatrie’s My Own Sweet Time (1994), an Indigenous Australian woman’s autobiography, actually written by the taxi-driver Leon Carmen, who claimed that, as a white man, his work was ignored. The fact that several of these texts won major literary prizes exacerbated the tensions surrounding authorship and identity politics. Darville won two of the most prestigious Australian literary prizes, the Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript and the Miles Franklin Award, and Carmen’s memoir won the Nita May Dobbie Award for first novel by a female author. There is a wealth of literature on the topic of Australian literary hoaxes and how they have affected or been affected by Australian cultural politics. Maggie Nolan and Carrie Dawson’s Who's Who?: Mapping Hoaxes and Imposture in Australian Literary History (2004), offers a comprehensive introduction to these recent cases, particularly the Demidenko hoax, but also the long and intriguing history of identity hoaxes in Australia. For a dedicated study of Carman’s imposture, see Bayley (2004). 12

beyond the ethics of writing autobiography to include the question of authenticity more generally. The hoaxes became a catalyst for the authors, and subsequently members of the Australian public, to voice fears about what they alleged to be the slippery slope between affirmative action and reverse discrimination, both in the publishing world and the political sphere. Thus while the integrity of literary genres was certainly at stake in these authors’ transgressions, what emerged from their hoaxes was something more violent than just the severance of “the autobiographical pact” between a memoirist and their trusting readership (Lejeune, 1989).

Affirming the sociological implications of literary hoaxes, Takolander and McCooey concluded that while “Literary fakes are perceived precisely as undermining literary institutions… [they] also reveal how authorial identities operate in the public sphere as commodified authenticity and as markers of an ethical aesthetic, in association with which reader identities are constructed and displayed” (57-58). Indeed, “Literary fakes,” they argue, “are only understandable in relation to identity and public culture” (58). For Takolander and McCooey literature is a constitutive actor in social life, and the hoax in particular reveals how literary narratives, as cultural politics, are socially authored. In this conception, literature is not a mere representation of life; representation itself is a living, sculpting act. Decidedly sociological in its purchase, Takolander and McCooey’s definition of life-writing provides a precedent for approaching the question of how life and narrative operate co-constitutively to produce the terms by which social life can be represented, and thus produced.

Another precedent for reading the hoax as evidence of the inextricability of reality and representation is theorised by Paul John Eakin. Eakin’s analysis of literary hoaxes, and his intervention into narratology more generally, aims to collapse the distinction between written and lived autobiographies. Indeed for Eakin, imposture brings into question the boundaries of the autobiographical genre, reframing it “not as a literary genre but instead as an integral part of a lifelong process of identity formation” (2001, 114). In Breaking the Rules: The Consequences of Self Narration (2001), Eakin states that literary hoaxes gesture towards narrative identity and ask: “what are the prerequisites in our culture for being a person, for having and telling a life story?” (114). Eakin’s narrative identity thesis suggests that we live autobiographically, creating a discourse of identity that is “delivered bit by bit in the stories we tell about ourselves day in and day out” (Eakin, 2008, 4). Eakin suggests that we do not “tend to give much thought to [the] process of self-narration precisely because, 13

after years of practice, we do it so well” (4). However, “when this identity story practice is disrupted,” Eakin explains, “we can be jolted into awareness of the central role it plays in organising our social world” (4). Identity hoaxes are such a disruption. They reveal the active, though often unacknowledged, process of social narration: the creative process of determining which life stories will be deemed intelligible, appropriate, or socially-sanctioned in particular situations.

It is the nature of this complicity, the role that a collective yet conflicted authorship plays in an imposture and in determining why some stories or genres of truth-telling are more authentic than others, that is this chapter’s focus. In order to investigate this phenomenon, this chapter will analyse the discourse surrounding veteran imposture and the Stolen Valour Act, a law passed by the United States government in 2005 to prosecute people fraudulently claiming to be decorated war veterans. This case follows Eakin’s definition of autobiography as processes of writing the self in everyday life, and it illustrates the broader sociological purchase of narrative inquiry, specifically the complex distribution of agency and authorship involved in imposture. Building on Eakin’s argument that literary hoaxes ask “what are the prerequisites in our culture for being a person, for having and telling a life story?” (2001, 114), I argue that they also compel us to consider how such prerequisites are determined and what is at stake in both their maintenance and transgression. In order to contextualise this case study, the chapter is divided into two parts. Preceding an analysis of veteran imposture, the first section outlines the climate created by previous identity hoaxes, and draws out the political positions that are commonly expressed in these public debates.

Identity hoaxes and the public evaluation of truth-telling genres Existing research on literary hoaxes opens the field for a sociological intervention into the formation of narrative truth. In “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir” (2007), Nancy K. Miller points to how audiences participate in the authorship of autobiographies: “Like speech acts, memoirs perform effectively, felicitously, as J. L. Austin’s phrase goes, only on condition of common cultural consent, but writers often misjudge how much exposure is appropriate” (Miller, 541). It is this misjudgement that often unveils the hoax, but it is important to consider how “common cultural consent” supports the imposture up until that point of transgression. Bending the truth, it appears, is not forbidden, but the grounds upon which it is permitted are constantly in flux. Indeed, arguably the ultimate transgression of a biographical hoax is the exposure of social collusion in this elastic 14

genre. Elegantly articulating this crisis of authorship, Kateryna Olijnyk Longley explains that one of the major Australian literary hoaxes (Helen Darville/Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper) “was for the press and the public unforgivable, not because of the fraud itself but because it exposed, by means of this double twist, Australian mainstream culture’s complicity in [the author’s] act by way of its fascination with the exotic” (1997, 38). The hoax provokes questions about social, as well as individual, accountability.

Indeed the media reaction to the exposure of hoaxes often centres on what the event says about the audience, as much as the author, summoning a fear of relativism, or a concern that people no longer value veracity. In an article about the controversy surrounding James Frey’s best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces (2006), Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times’ head literary critic, expressed this moral panic. After being endorsed by Oprah Winfrey as a “brave, survivor narrative”, Frey’s memoir was infamously revealed to have fabricated most of the ‘hard knocks’ in Frey’s life, including the felonies he claimed to have committed, and the time in prison he alleged he had served for them.4 It was further suggested that Doubleday Publishers had received Frey’s manuscript as a novel, but decided it would have more appeal as a memoir.5 However, Kakutani suggests that the issue highlighted by Frey’s fabrication is not “just a case about truth-in-labelling or the misrepresentation of one author […] It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth […] the waning importance people these days attach to objectivity and veracity” (Kakutani, 2006). Kakutani argued that the public clemency towards the blurring of truth illustrated, to use Paul John Eakin’s summation, “culture’s pernicious

4 For a detailed catalogue of the inconsistencies in Frey’s memoir see The Smoking Gun exposé which originally revealed the hoax, aptly titled “A Million Little Lies” (2006), accessed online 04/05/2012: http://www.thesmok inggun.com/documents/celebrity/million-little-lies 5 While this assertion was commonly reported, the extent to which Doubleday knew of Frey’s fabrications is contested. Though, trawling through Frey’s editor Nan Talese’s damage-control rhetoric, journalists and scholars have noted curious inconsistencies. For instance, while Talese claimed to have become aware of Frey’s liberties only after The Smoking Gun critique, she must have been aware from at least 2003 when she was approached by, and gave comment to, a journalist who was suspicious of several passages in Frey’s memoir. These included an opening passage that has Frey boarding an aeroplane bloody and beaten, an unlikely scenario in any case, but particularly conspicuous post-9/11. Talese cited the subjective and unverifiable nature of memoir. This exchange came prior to the publisher releasing a press statement which declared the memoir to be “brutally honest”. In addition to this, under pressure from Winfrey to divulge the legal and fact-checking process at Doubleday, Talese remarked that it was an embarrassing oversight not to have included a disclaimer from the outset. This implies that such a declamation was possible. For a well-researched Slate piece on this topic see Noah (2006), and for a more scholarly assessment see Gilmore, (2010, 665-671). Excerpts from the transcript of Winfrey and Talese’s interview are available online, accessed 04/05/2012: http://www.nyti mes.com/ref/books/excerpts-oprah.html. This particular facet of the Frey case is fascinating because it demonstrates the fuzziness around what kind of truth is expected from the memoir genre, but also how rigid this expectation can suddenly become when its fault-lines are tested. The market-driven publisher serves as a telling thermometer of readers’ desires in this case. 15

drift towards cultural relativism, a bending of the truth that creates a climate in which the existence of the holocaust can be questioned” (Eakin, 2008, 19).

In a bizarre twist, Kakutani cited the academic popularity of deconstruction as the context for Frey’s deception and the “pernicious drift” demonstrated by its reception. “While books like these were further blurring the line between fact and fiction,” she argues “academics were questioning the very nature of reality” (2006). Kakutani suggests that “by focusing on the ‘indeterminacy’ of texts and the crucial role of the critic in imputing meaning, deconstructionists were purveying a fashionably nihilistic view of the world, suggesting that all meaning is relative, all truth illusive” (2006). In a polemic move, Kakutani then directly links deconstruction to holocaust denial: The dangers of such relativistic theories are profound. As Deborah Lipstadt, the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, has argued, the suggestion that no event or fact has a fixed meaning leads to the premise that ‘any truth can be retold’. And when people assert that there is no ultimate historical reality, an environment is created in which the testimony of a witness to the holocaust […] can actually be questioned. (Kakutani, 2006)6 Kakutani is palpably anxious about the dislocation of the author’s authority and the propriety of what genres may be used to narrate what events. Her concern is not without foundation, but it affirms rather than dispels deconstruction’s argument about the productivity of interpretation. If historical truth were straightforwardly fixed, the societal shift Kakutani suspects would pose no risk. Kakutani’s position is based on a real fear that historical truth is not fixed, even if recorded or remembered, and thus vulnerable to social revision.

Kakutani is alarmed by the amendments to the confessional genre that its readership is authorising. Her rendering of deconstruction glosses over the fact that, ironically, what is at stake for this scholarly movement is not unlike what is at stake for Kakutani. In The Law of Genre (1980), Jacques Derrida does not argue for lawless relativism. Where he states that “the law is mad,” he is careful to qualify that “madness is not the predicate of law” (81).

6 Marking genre as the issue specifically, Kakutani argues that such writers (we can assume she means Frey, but perhaps also continental post-structuralists) “strive to be imaginative, inventive or creative, instead of accurate and knowledgeable” (2006). Kakutani’s argument that some narratives must be represented only with historical documentary out of reverence for the event itself has its precedents with Theodore Adorno, who famously proclaimed “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno, 1967, 19). For Adorno, political cataclysm complicates aesthetics, making it callous to take liberty with people’s suffering; making some stories and the way they are told socially sacred.

Similarly confusing this causal relationship, stating that one cannot be conceived without the other, Derrida argues, “There is no madness without the law; madness cannot be conceived before its relation to law” (81). Thus, adjudications are made, but not as static structures of order imposed upon a natural chaos. For Derrida, the very debate Kakutani partakes in would be evidence of the madness, or indeterminacy, inherent in the rule of genre itself, which is not set but must be defended in a forum of uncertainty. When Derrida states: “One cannot conceive truth without the madness of the law” (80), this does not mean that truth and laws are never conceived, but rather that the process by which they are identified is itself peculiarly uncertain. Decisions, though debatable, must be made, and often acted upon without final assurance that they are ultimately correct. The risk that Kakutani perceives is in how ill-considered and illogical interpretations can nonetheless contest and determine social truths. The laws of genre are not in themselves predetermined and inherently reliable.

The source of Kakutani’s anxiety is therefore not the fallacy of representation’s power to produce realities, but the palpable and unsettling truth of this process. The reader adjudicates whether the story is true, based on various metrics of evidence and tradition, but also utility and desire.7 In this sense, Kakutani agrees with the authorial power of interpretation as a means to attack, but also to protect, certain facts. Kakutani’s position is to defend the sanctity of historical truth, marking the Holocaust as both a narrative to be protected by limiting its interpretation and an implicit warning of what can happen when a society accepts rhetorical retellings of history. For Kakutani, the fictionalisation of the testimony genre and a widely condoned freedom of interpretation is an assault on truth, but it is precisely this question of what makes something true that hoaxes bring into question.

Frey’s defence of his memoir introduces us to another position in these debates, one that stands in opposition to Kakutani’s. In response to the media’s accusations of fraud, Frey claimed that people derive different kinds of truths from life-stories; that the authenticity and power of the story need not be verifiable or based strictly on factual accounts. Frey defended the liberties he’d taken with the claim that his story still had an “emotional truth” (CNN Transcript, 2006), or lent an affective authenticity to an exemplary event. In a public defence of Frey’s book, Winfrey also affirmed the value of this kind of truth, claiming:

7 For a discussion of some of these metrics of authenticity, see Smith and Watson (2013). 17

The underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s novel still resonates with me… whether or not the car’s wheels rolled up on the sidewalk or whether he hit the police officer or didn’t hit the police officer is irrelevant to me. What is relevant is that he was a drug addict who spent years in turmoil … [he] stepped out of that history to be the man that he is today, and to take that message to save other people and allow them to save themselves. That’s what’s important about this book and his story. (Winfrey in CNN Transcript, 2006) Frey argued that the liberties he took with the actual events were for the sake of communicating the “essential truth” of a life of drug and alcohol addiction. Because the emotional impact is the primary goal, Frey’s elaborations are apparently justified. In the above excerpt, Winfrey affirms this, placing the truth-value on the efficacy of the memoir rather than its veracity. However, in an act that emphasises the contingency of such evaluations, Winfrey later withdrew her support for Frey in response to public pressure, and broadcast an apology for her “mistake” (Dahmen, 2006, 124). In a New York Times editorial, Winfrey was praised for this action: “Ms. Winfrey gave the audience … what it was hoping for: a demand to hear the truth” (cited in Dahmen, 2006, 124). Winfrey’s equivocation about what should constitute “the truth” demonstrates the power of what Miller terms “common cultural consensus” (2007, 541). Winfrey was allowed to change her position, indeed she was praised for this, only because she eventually made what was popularly verified to be the “right” choice. Her attribution of emotional truth to a non-fiction genre, to a genre that most readers assume to be factual, was quickly downplayed.

Emotional truth is a provocative, and curiously under-researched, concept which warrants a short divergence for the sake of definition. Frey’s assertion about emotional truth is not pioneering. Notions of affectivity and truth-telling practices have created controversy across a wide spread of periods and genres. In “False Documents” (1977), E. L. Doctorow attempts to locate this form of truth historically, suggesting that “it is possible there was a time in which the designative and evocative functions of language were one and the same” (217). Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” (1968), Doctorow notes that fiction was once looked to for life counsel: “If the story was good the counsel was valuable and therefore the story was true” (218-19).8 In this assertion, the story is attributed a truth based on its affectiveness, on its ability to “move” its audience. The notion of truth caused debates

8 For a nuanced analysis of the history of these fluctuations in the nature of authorship, see Burke (1992).

in the field of journalism in the 1970s and 1980s, when Joseph Mitchell, an acclaimed journalist at The New Yorker, insisted that he wanted his “stories to be truthful, rather than factual” (Mitchell, 1992, 373). Despite attracting criticism, similar statements recur across a diverse range of fields. Vietnam Veteran writer Tim O’Brien has also defended the use of a shared, emotional literacy as a form of verification in autobiographical fiction. Explaining his blurring of fact and fiction, O’Brien argued that “a story’s truth shouldn’t be measured by happening but by an entirely different standard, a standard of emotion, feeling – ‘does it ring true?’ as opposed to ‘is it true?’” (O’Brien and Naparsteck, 1991, 10). Representing the invocation of emotional truth in yet another genre, Geoff Dyer similarly explains his popular history of jazz music, But Beautiful (1996), as “imaginative criticism” (Dyer, 1996, vii, original emphasis). He argues that to be faithful to a subject’s form, “may mean being less than faithful to the truth” (viii). In a scholarly instance, anthropologist Michael Taussig argued that “fiction allowed [him] to be more truthful” (Strauss, 2005, unpaginated) in writing his ethnography, The Magic of the State (1997). These claims that one can be more truthful by being less factual are provocative, not only because they ask us to rethink notions of veracity, but because they challenge the usual alliance of emotional truth with fiction and verifiable truth with non-fiction.

Further evidence of the association of emotional truth with fiction is illustrated in Robert S. Boynton’s interview with narrative journalist Richard Preston. The discussion centred on the narrative style of New Journalism, which, as stated, caused public anxiety over the mixing of verifiable and emotional truth genres, specifically the use of fictive devices such as “interior character development” in reporting (Wolfe, 1975, cf. Markel, 1972 and Otzick, 1973). When asked whether the literary forms of New Journalism could capture truth, Preston defined what he termed “emotional and cultural truth” (2005, 321). Preston explains that emotional and cultural truth is “the truth that one encounters in [Henry] Fielding’s preface to Tom Jones, in which he argues that even though Tom Jones never really existed, his story is ‘true’ because it tells the human truth. It is the true depiction of the human condition and human emotions” (321). This is the truth that is assigned to fiction, in which characters are not considered real but their stories thought to capture a profound collective truth. For Preston, the fictional tropes of New Journalism make it capable of this kind of truth, but not the verifiable truth of traditional journalism.

Preston’s definition describes an emotional truth as a fable, as something that only signifies life. However this definition is not necessarily nuanced enough to capture the fluidity of how truth is negotiated, as the use of emotional verification in non-fiction suggests. Emotional truth is no less prescriptive about which narratives are authentic. As human beings we draw across tenuous and counterintuitive sources to collate a socially acceptable biography, constantly confounding received notions of which words and representations have real weight. As such, people may read stories verified by emotional truths as proscriptive. Several cases could be investigated further to highlight this fact. In journalist Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996), Christopher McCandless, a young, runaway hiker, dies from poisoning and starvation in close range of several stocked rangers’ cabins because his map of Alaska derives from Jack London stories rather than the parks’ authority (173). Another case could be Johann Wolfgang van Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther [1774] (2006), which inspired young men to commit suicide, or Orson Welles’ infamous radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1938), which caused public hysteria with its seemingly real depiction of alien invasion.9 In short, people may not always recognise the nuances of genre, but are affected in productive ways nevertheless. Frey’s readers, for instance, were offended because they felt changed by his memoir, its testimony to addiction had informed their lives, but then they were forced to question how this could happen if the story was not true. Hoaxes disrupt the safety of genre and push us to scrutinise what we routinely read as reality.

In questioning the alliance of truth-value with genre, however, it is important not to overlook how powerful such divisions are, even when porous. In “False Documents”, E. L. Doctorow, perhaps motioning to the realising power of all genres, proclaims that there “is no longer any such things as fiction or non-fiction; there’s only narrative” (Doctorow, 1977). However, while it is fair to say that the sovereignty of these categories is enduringly under question, as the reaction to the Frey controversy illustrates, people do perceive fiction and non-fiction as distinct genres, which make different demands upon readers’ engagement. It is the genre, not simply the story, which indicates the level of emotional investment and empathy a reader will devote to it. A life story is socially evaluated, but so is its method of

9 Goethe’s novel inspired the term “the Werther effect”, which is used colloquially and in medical vocabulary to characterise suicide contagion or copycats. According to Schmidtke and Hafner: “J. W. von Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had, in its author's own words, “‘a great, even an immense impact’: men of society used to dress like Werther, and many seem to have felt, acted and died like him. For this reason Goethe's novel was banned in many European states, e.g. Denmark, Saxony and Milan” (Schmidtke and Hafner, 1988, 665).

delivery. False documents or identity hoaxes do not collapse the distinctions between fact and fiction, between emotional and verifiable truths, or between experience and evidence. Indeed, in many cases they actually reify them, and yet they illuminate, nevertheless, what is at stake in these distinctions.

Returning to the issues raised by the Frey case, Kakutani describes a society that places little value in veracity, or a readership entranced by emotional truth. However, public culture clearly has a stake in facticity. Doubleday’s deliberate release of Frey’s novel as a memoir would have been based on the perception that people want to read real stories about real people’s lives. In fact, Frey’s readers filed a federal class-action lawsuit claiming that, due to such a genre betrayal, reading the book had been a waste of time for which they should be reimbursed financially (Dahmen, 2010, 116). The public’s reaction to what was seen as a breach of faith indicates that people do read books differently depending on their genre, or at least would if given the correct signifiers. Kakutani, however, reads the growing interest in memoir as a further trivialisation of testimony. She argues that the increasing popularity of the “memoir of crisis” or “survivor” is particularly distasteful, explaining that having once belonged to those who “had lived through wars or famines or the holocaust”, the genre is now being usurped by those without an authentic claim to it, such as memoirists “coping with weight problems or bad credit” (2006). What Kakutani suggests here is that some people have more right to use a certain narrative to represent their lives than others. Confessional memoirists must have something worthy to confess. But who decides what is worthy?

In “American Neoconfessional: Memoir, Self-help, and Redemption on Oprah’s Couch” (2010), Leigh Gilmore also argues that the Frey case highlighted a hierarchy within the confessional memoir genre based upon social preferences for particular confessions. However, for Gilmore, the value judgements and prohibitions Kakutani applies to the confessional memoir genre were instrumental to Frey’s use of deception. Arguably, he and Doubleday bent the rules of genre to qualify for a memoir-worthy confession, using the very criteria of sufficient drama, violence, and trauma that Kakutani posits here. Gilmore argues that: Embedded within the neoconfessional form is an inegalitarian if dynamic relation of judgment that limits redemption to specific storylines, and thereby powerfully norms the voices that currently crowd the public sphere despite the appearance of diversity and multiplicity, and that offers publishers and writers an incentive to 21

provide optimistic accounts of overcoming. Thus the audience toward which the neoconfessional is directed retains the authority to judge the value of that truth and its producer. Free to compel certain kinds of storylines, to lionize and defame writers who succeed or fail in varying degrees to produce normative life stories, and to curtail discussion about the more volatile elements of confessional speech, audiences consume life story with an emerging set of conventions about veracity, authenticity, and autobiographical narrative. (Gilmore, 2010, 660) Gilmore’s summation here is very important, because it asks us to reconsider the distribution of authorial agency in hoax cases. According to this view, Frey should not be held solely accountable for his deception. In disqualifying certain narratives as unworthy of public confession, Kakutani also plays a role in the authorship of the confessional genre, of its

“emerging set of conventions”, and thus the narratives that it may articulate.

Kakutani argues that we should take exception to this blatant disregard for the conventions of genre and the transgression of the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. But what problems arise when such exceptions are made, when people cannot articulate their own experience because it does not conform to a socially, or legally, affirmed narrative genre? The Stolen Valour Act, which the remainder of this chapter will focus upon, is an example of just this kind of exception. As I will explain, this law further illustrates exceptionalism while at the same time demonstrating why the selective affirmation of only certain narratives can counter-intuitively result in people favouring a socially-sanctioned life story over their actual life story. Identity hoaxes confirm how most people seek to be verified by a socially-recognised narrative and that, if an authentic claim to such a narrative is denied them, they may simply write themselves into this narrative regardless, whether by patently or insidiously “breaking the rules” (Eakin, 2001). This has profound implications for how we understand the relationship between facticity and social truth-telling. It implies that the truth we demand is not always the truth as we would characterise it, but a socially-authenticated story that may in fact be quite far from the facts. The demand for a particular truth in consequence may author a lie. Thus impostures force us to question what constitutes an authentic life story and what role we play in this constitution.

Stolen valour: veteran imposture and the exclusivity of narrative In 2005, the United States government passed the Stolen Valour Act, which made it illegal and punishable to “falsely represent [oneself], verbally or in writing, to have been awarded 22

any decoration or medal authorised by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States” (U.S.A. v. Rick Glen Strandlof, 2010, 2). The Act was used to charge Rick Glen Strandlof, a man who under the name Rick Duncan, claimed to have been a Marine Corp Captain, to have done three tours of Iraq, and to have been awarded the Silver Star for bravery and the Purple Heart for wounds in combat. He made this claim to various veterans’ groups with which he was involved, to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and other media outlets. He even appeared as a veteran in a campaign advertisement for an American politician. Duncan also claimed to have been working at the Pentagon when it was attacked on September 11 2001, indeed he gave quite an emotive testimonial of his experience of this day to the ABC in a news report they shot in Colorado leading up to the 2008 presidential election.

In the criminal case, which was heard in the District Court of Colorado, Judge Robert E. Blackburn proved to have quite a different idea of what constitutes a “pernicious drift” to that of Kakutani. The Stolen Valour Act is precisely the kind of exceptionalism that Kakutani advocates. It affirms in law that only some people have the right to tell some stories, particularly those who have suffered and sacrificed - those with “survivor narratives” - and that this exceptional authorship should be protected. However, the only exception Judge Blackburn was willing to make in the case of Rick Strandlof was toward exceptionalism itself. He dismissed the case on the grounds that the very Act was unconstitutional and violated Strandlof’s right to freedom of speech. In his verdict, Blackburn explained that the “government posits the Act serves a compelling interest of protecting the symbolic significance of war medals” (2010, 9). As a precedent for his decision, Blackburn cited the case of Texas v. Johnson, in which political activist Gregory Lee Johnson was charged with having desecrated the American flag.10 The charge was also dismissed in regard to the First Amendment: “To conclude that the government may permit designated symbols to be used to communicate only a limited set of messages would be to enter into territory having no discernable or defensible boundaries” (Texas v. Johnson in U.S.A. v. Strandlof, 2010, 10).11 This is an interesting position because, in direct contrast to the moral panic in Kakutani’s response, it posits that it is exceptionalism which will lead us to an ethically dubious and indefensible space. It is exceptionalism that represents “a pernicious drift”. What Blackburn

10 For an interesting study about American activists’ relation to the American flag as a varying symbol of patriotism, see Andrews (1997). 11 The existing literature on the Stolen Valour Act is situated in legal studies and focuses on the Act’s implications for freedom of speech (Barnum, 2001, and Wood, 2001). 23

suggests here is that we get further from the truth when we limit the parameters of truth- telling, or when we sanction only one storyline at the cost of all others.

Arguably, this is the kind of exception that encourages an affirmation-seeking individual like Strandlof to engage in imposture. Indeed, Judge Blackburn argued that the actions of those claiming to be decorated veterans only prove the strength that the valourous narrative, supposedly under threat, actually possesses, complicating where the agential motivation for such a crime emerges (2010, 12). That war valour is a narrative worth lying for is evidence of the social investment we have in it. In an account of his actions in a CNN interview that seems to affirm this reading, Strandlof explained that he had been “caught up in the moment” (Foreign Correspondent, ABC, 21/09/2010), suggesting that he was compelled by a socially contingent force present within a certain time and place. Strandlof’s actions also lack further malice. The government was not able to bring upon him fraud charges as he was found to have gained no personal profit from his imposture. In fact Strandlof was primarily involved in philanthropic and activist roles for veteran groups. It was valour that Strandlof had stolen, the valour of an authentic and authorised personhood and the social affirmation and belonging this identity would afford him.12

Strandlof’s case is not isolated. In The Story Is True (2007), Bruce Jackson highlights the public, and specifically his own, complicity in affirming the social currency and popularity of the valorous war hero narrative. Jackson, the James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo, New York, is also an award winning documentary film-maker and it is in this capacity that he met Jim Bennett. Jackson recounts his discovery that Bennett, a man whom he had been collaborating with on a documentary about Vietnam veterans, was not a decorated, former Special Forces veteran, but a consummate conman (205-221). The Story Is True is Jackson’s cautionary tale, in which he recognises his own role in authoring Bennett’s veteran identity. Indeed, the title of Jackson’s chapter is “The Storyteller I Looked for Every Time I Looked for Storytellers”. The fact that Bennett qualified for all of the received notions of a veteran was enough to convince Jackson of his

12 In response to unverified claims of survivor identities, Marita Sturken, a leading theorist of cultural memory, dilates on exactly what constitutes the social value of survivor status. “Throughout the twentieth century,” she explains, “survivors of trauma have been powerful cultural figures. The survivor as a figure of wisdom and moral authority emerged in the wake of World War II and now stands as a signifier of a moral standard, someone who must be listened to” (1998, 116). In this cultural context, Sturken raises a salient question for Strandlof’s case: “In what ways has declaring oneself a survivor become synonymous with having the right to speak?” (116). This question draws out the leverage that particular life genres possess and further highlights why valour is worthy of pursuit. 24 authenticity. We read with received narratives, and are often influenced by context. For instance, if one looks back at the footage of Rick Strandlof in his interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the same confirmation is evident. The strained words, widened eyes, and frenetic twitches that now suggest a pathological disturbance, if not performance, were once equally plausible as signs of post-traumatic stress and the casualties of war.

The Story Is True is a retrospective narration of how Jackson’s faith in Bennett blinds him to the lapses in the story. Upon this revelation of Bennett’s imposture, Jackson’s memories of exchanges with him assume different points of emphasis. The key events in Jackson and Bennett’s relationship became the ones in which Jackson saw, in hindsight, that he should have realised that Jim Bennett was an impostor. Upon reflection, there were many telling events, including the time that the general hadn’t remembered him at first, the military night-scopes that Bennett claimed to possess but that never materialised, the medals mysteriously lost “in one of those moves” and the records that, according to Bennett, were inaccessible, classified, in the hands of the CIA and unable to be checked. At these moments, Jackson authored Bennett’s identity-story even as Bennett failed to do so, filling in the gaps of now-glaring inconsistencies with his own causal explanations.

Jackson’s chronicle reveals the complex nature of authorial accountability. It recalls a suggestion made by Doug Sterner, a military historian who helped draft the 2005 Stolen Valour Act. In response to the proliferation of imposter veterans, Sterner suggests that “we have a tendency to want those heroes, so then when we meet them we tend to quickly embrace them and not be dubious” (Foreign Correspondent, ABC, 21/09/2010). Jackson was looking to make a documentary film about Vietnam Veterans. The shape and structure of the narrative of Jim Bennett was already well known to Jackson before he even encountered Bennett, in the same way that the story of Chris McCandless had already been anticipated by Jon Krakauer when he wrote Into the Wild. Upon hearing McCandless’ tale, Krakauer is reminded of his own earnest attempts as a young hiker to tame the wild. His identification with McCandless explicitly punctuates his account at various points, and perhaps also implicitly colours his characterisation. In these cases, it is not clear where or with whom a story begins and ends.

Jackson, like Kakutani in her response to James Frey’s memoir, expresses his anger at being deceived, or perhaps more specifically, his anger at the realisation of his complicity in this deception. He tries to make sense of authorial roles, rethinking the agency of the documentary-making process: “Jim was director, all right. He was also producer and one of the principle actors. I was another actor and also part of the audience” (Jackson, 227). What distressed Jackson was the way in which we not only write narratives but are also written into them in our lives and in the lives of others; how we may be living a narrative that is authentically inauthentic, without our conscious authorisation, but with our implicit authorisation nonetheless.

Jackson experiences the crisis of authorship that Longley felt in response to the Helen Darville/Demidenko identity hoax in Australia. Longley argued that, for the public, the hoax was “unforgivable, not because of the fraud itself but because it exposed ... Australian mainstream culture’s complicity in her act” (1997, 38). The hoax was unforgivable precisely because it complicated who was to be forgiven. Jackson was also confronted with the authenticating power of his own projection. However, one of the most remarkable points to emerge from the full context of the stolen valour cases is a counter-position to that of Jackson and Kakutani; a position that further problemitises the social effort to determine what qualifies as an authentic account. For Jackson, the power of Bennett’s story was undone by the revelation of his imposture. However, for one of his fellow veterans, Bennett’s stories had an emotional truth: they articulated the truth of one soldier’s experience in a way that he, himself, was incapable. Like Oprah Winfrey’s initial response to Frey’s fabricated autobiography, the fellow veteran’s reaction to Bennett’s imposture questions the hierarchy of value between emotional and verifiable genres of truth-telling in a way that does not conform to the conventions of genre.

As Jackson reports, a veteran that interacted with Bennett and Jackson turned out to have deduced early on that Bennett was lying. Running into this particular veteran sometime after he had severed ties with Bennett, Jackson asked him if he had known Bennett “was a phony”. “Sure” the veteran replied. He had been a Green Beret stationed at some of the places in the periods Bennett had claimed to be, and therefore he knew that Bennett had not been there. Jackson queried, “Why didn’t you ever blow the whistle on him?” To which the veteran replied that Bennett wasn’t doing any harm: “And he told such great stories. I loved

hearing him tell those goddamn stories. I mean, I was there, and I couldn’t tell stories like that guy” (Jackson, 2007, 221).

Now, there is no reason why the testimony of this veteran could not also be read as a revision of the event, told retrospectively in a desire to be seen as discerning. Nevertheless, although Jackson does not acknowledge it, his claim suggests that the need for the story to be told surpasses the idea that only those who can authentically tell it can speak. The veteran, the very person whose valour is supposedly under threat here, argues that Jim Bennett’s storytelling was in fact an accurate representation of his own experiences. In this case, we must consider that Rick Strandlof, who tells a fraudulent veteran narrative, can actually help a veteran who cannot give voice to his own experience. In 1990, the famous Vietnam Veteran writer, Tim O’Brien, expressed the difficulty of giving war testimony, when he argued, “In most cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling” (1990, 68). In regard to Vietnam Veterans, Marita Sturken has also described this discursive silence, a cultural narrative in its own right, as the “incommunicability of the [war] experience” (1991, 129).

Within this context of cultural silence, it is not clear that all veterans perceived Strandlof’s appropriation of these stories to be detrimental. Veterans that worked with Standlof told the LA Times that it was precisely because Strandlof was so outspoken and openly emotional about his war experience that people became suspicious. He did not act like a veteran. But they also stated that it was for this reason that he was so effective in advocating for young veterans. Fellow activist, Joe Barrera, explains that “when Duncan spoke [...] he was different than other young vets, who were typically stoic. Tears would roll down his face. People in the audience would start to cry” (Correll, 2009).

In both the case of Rick Strandlof and Jim Bennett, “real” veterans underlined the political efficacy of their imposture. The reaction of these veterans suggests that the need for the story to be told challenges Kakutani’s proscription about who has the right to give testimony to an experience. In this instance, the truth-value is based on efficacy. Strandloff and Bennett’s stories were perceived to have pragmatic truth-value, although they had not truly experienced war. Their testimony was of particular value because those who can authentically claim the story based on military experience cannot tell it, due to post-traumatic stress or a culture of silence. Some of Frey’s readers also experienced the story’s cathartic 27

power or emotional truth and declared that his memoir was a true representation because such incidents do happen to people, if not specifically to Frey. In this context, an imposture is perceived to do service to the truth by creating an authentic representation of experience. Although the author cannot verify the testimony with their own lives, it is verified by the experience of others, indeed their articulation of the event has the power to verify the experience even for some of those who have lived it. Articulation itself creates a comprehensible coherence, renders readable, and thus verifies, a life.

In “The Storyteller” (1968) Walter Benjamin gives a scholarly precedent for the fellow veterans’ conception of authorship. Through a discussion of the moral novels of Nikolai Leskov, Benjamin laments the storytelling of shared experience, which he deems to be a lost art. He suggests that it was “granted to [the storyteller] to reach back to a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience but no little of the experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to his own)” (Benjamin, 1968, 108).13 By this definition, Rick Strandlof was legitimate in constructing his life-story from the war blogs of people serving in Iraq, or collating a photo-shopped album of his “four tours” with their images (Foreign Correspondent, ABC, 21/09/2010). Benjamin suggests that the storyteller is not necessarily to be held accountable, indeed, it is his amanuensis-nature that makes the storyteller socially useful: the stories he tells belong to everyone. However, Benjamin’s concept of the social storyteller does not “solve” the case of the stolen valour veterans, precisely because stories do not belong to everyone equally. While some veterans may be grateful for an articulation of their experience, these veterans are a minority. Other veterans are gravely offended by veteran imposture, and support not only the Stolen Valour Act, but also the public naming and shaming of false claims.14 They have

13 The mystery surrounding Benjamin’s own life-story, perhaps most specifically his death, is relevant to this chapter. When fleeing the Nazis at the French/Spanish Border, Spanish police informed Benjamin’s party that they would be deported back to France. Apparently in fear of this prospect Benjamin committed suicide by overdosing on morphine. In tragic irony, his party was granted safe passage to Lisbon in the following days. Speculation has risen around Benjamin’s death, including rumours of his murder (Jeffries, 2001) or the missing suitcase that contained an unknown manuscript. On a pilgrimage to Benjamin’s grave, anthropologist Michael Taussig notes that Benjamin’s death left behind a misleading trail. Dying in a place where he was unknown, the Jewish man was buried in a Catholic cemetery, his cause of death pronounced “cerebral apoplexy”, his headstone (and all other papers involved in his death) reading “Doctor Benjamin Walter” (Taussig, 2006, 5). These discrepancies illustrate the way in which truths are bent for social purposes, for instance, suicides catholicised, or how mistakes are made which result in misinformation becoming the story. It also suggests the way that such evidence can exist but be overruled by another, empirically verifiable, story. Imagine an archaeologist, a thousand years from now, trying to put together the identity of Doctor Benjamin Walter, whom evidence suggests was a Catholic medic. 14 There are several websites devoted to the “outing” of those posing as veterans, or claiming to have medals they were not awarded. The most established of these sites is www.stolenvalor.com, accessed online: 28

literally fought for the right to their valorous narrative, and thus their exclusive claim is not arbitrary. The definition of relativism incorrectly assumes that because authorship is dispersed it is equally distributed. However, if the Stolen Valour act demonstrates anything about the nature of authorship it is the complex operation of exclusivity. Benjamin’s position is fraught when considered in this context, however by juxtaposing it with the position of Kakutani or Jackson we are alerted to the posturing that is upset by the imposture of hoaxes. Indeed, rather than promoting a clear schema for when certain genres of truth-telling are appropriate, hoaxes demonstrate that such standards are always contested, and thus always in flux.

If we consider the possible altruism of veteran imposture, the division between verifiable and emotional genres of truth-telling - a division that laws like the Stolen Valour Act aim to protect - is challenged. Kakutani expresses the fear around relativism that emerges when hoaxes such as Frey’s or Strandlof’s are revealed. But rather than establishing relativism, what these discussions prove is that there is never really an arena in which stories are not being socially evaluated. Identity hoaxes do not just present the deluded desires of one lone individual; they reveal a complex social complicity in deciding which stories we as a society want to hear and who we will allow to tell them.

Eakin argues that hoaxes ask “what are the prerequisites in our culture for being a person, for having and telling a life story?” (2001, 114). However hoaxes also compel us to consider how such prerequisites are determined and what is at stake in both their maintenance and transgression. The Stolen Valour act aims to protect veterans, to secure the integrity of their identities, however, the various responses to veteran imposture discussed in this chapter call for a reassessment of the efficacy of mandating exclusive authorship. Ruling against the Stolen Valour Act, Judge Blackburn argued that a slippery slope was more likely to emerge if the law was upheld than if it was dismissed. His argument is that it is more dangerous to allow an exclusive power to decree what constitutes the truth, than to let the integrity of truth be contested in the public sphere. German novelist and legal scholar Bernhard Schlink describes the consequences of the exclusivity position in a context that corresponds directly

04/05/2012. The site is comprehensive and has a vigilante tone. Run by veteran groups, it actively campaigns for people to “report a fake,” and is proactive in creating its own educational material. It promotes and sells both B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley’s self-published book, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation was Robbed of its Heroes and its History (1998), as well as its own forthcoming online television series. Other web pages are more blatant in their naming and shaming approach, and often profile one particular offender. For a typical example see: http://www.beware-jeffrey-howard-lerner.info/, accessed online: 04/05/2012. 29

with Kakutani’s fear of a “pernicious drift” towards Holocaust-denial, an example she presumably offers to express the broader implications of the debate. Schlink explains that “one unintended effect” of the imposed norm of the laws protecting the narrative of the Holocaust was that “those who set out to deny the Holocaust don’t do it bluntly any more. Rather, they minimise what happened in a very skilled and subtle manner” (Schlink, 2009, 122).15 As Schlink notes, exclusions aimed at disabling can become unintentionally enabling.

In Guilt about the Past, Schlink discusses the ethics of writing fiction about the Holocaust, an event about which it is clear people feel particularly anxious in regard to representation. He is concerned specifically with the question of how we determine who holds the rights to narrate an event and what is at stake in challenging this ownership. Schlink asks: “Are there rules for fiction dealing with the past? Is it anything goes?” (Schlink, 2009, 117). The Holocaust is an instance where an exclusive authorship, or narrative, is maintained. It is not “anything goes” precisely because people have varying stakes in how stories are told and we attribute a hierarchy of ownership to that story accordingly. As Schlink states: There are people who were not heard or not seen and who want their truth acknowledged, traumatised people who want their trauma respected, people deprived of a dignified life who want their dignity restored. Their expectations come to the fore whenever someone writes about the past they experienced. (2009, 118) In other words, to create a stylised account of a historical event is to rattle the very co- ordinates that anchor people’s lives. This narrative is their life. It is their history and their very identities that are threatened with re-vision, and in some cases, denial.

Such an idea evokes poet Ted Hughes’ famous response to the public dissection of his marriage to Sylvia Plath. In a letter to the Independent, he stated “I hope that each of us owns

15 As the author of The Reader (1995), a novel accused by critics of humanising a concentration camp prison guard (see, for instance, Franklin, 2011), Schlink offers firsthand experience of the social ramifications of narrating events with socially unsanctioned narratives. In his novel, Schlink attempts to understand the story of how a person comes to commit such crimes, and to comprehend their priorities. His depiction of the banality of such developments is deeply unsettling to the traditional narratives of the Holocaust, which often represent such choices as malicious and premeditated. Instead, Schlink’s prison guard, Hannah, takes the job, which does not require her to read, to hide the shame of her illiteracy. Schlink’s effort to rethink essential notions of good and evil plays into a wealth of academic research, from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) to Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments, recorded in Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974). 30

the facts of his or her own life” (Independent, 1989, 19). Hughes’ concern is exactly what is at stake in the difference between living and telling. Must one “own the facts” or have actually lived the events of a story to tell it? In response to the expectations of living Holocaust survivors, Schlink asks: “Can these wants be dismissed or must they be honoured?” (2009, 118). In other words, should people be granted exclusive authorial rights on the basis of their lived, experiential claim to a narrative, or should anyone be able to represent this experience? Is veracity a prerequisite for autobiography, or can it have an unverifiable, but emotional truth?

For Schlink, the answer to this question is not only about genre preference, it is about maintaining social coherence. Schlink argues that what “lies behind the idea that some events may not be fictionalised or may only be fictionalised while remaining true to the facts is not about the genre, not about documentation versus fiction […] It is about authenticity in a fuller sense” (2009, 119). However, as this discussion of identity hoaxes and social authorship has demonstrated, genre preference and social coherence are formulated in the same process. The terms by which a life story comes to be verified involve a social process of authentication, which is about genre, and is about documentation versus fiction, but not as self-evident, static structures. What qualifies as authentic in “a fuller sense” is liable to social rules, but also to the fickleness of these rules, and sometimes to their transgression. An autobiography hoax, be it literary like Frey’s or lived like Bennett’s or Strandlof’s, disrupts the structures of genre, but in doing so, disrupts the very articulation of people’s lives. What is true, in terms of being socially verified or authentic, is not confined to one genre of truth - historical, empirical, or emotional - its narrative may draw from all of these and many other forms of verification in paradoxical, yet workable ways. In this sense, debates about fact and fiction point to underlying social conflicts about authorship and propriety. The trouble is not simply how a story is told, but by whom and when and for what purpose. One author may bend a rule to public acclaim, another to public crucifixion; depending on what is at stake.

Looking to a brief exchange between Schlink and one of his readers, we see the use of genre is inextricably tied to the sociological underpinnings of both personal and social identifications, and thus their stability. In a question and answer forum on the BBC’s World Book Club, Schlink responded to audience questions from around the world about his novel The Reader. As fiction about the Holocaust, and a meditation on second-generation German guilt specifically, the novel is tied into the social and ethical quandaries that Kakutani sees in 31

the broader frame of the Frey autobiography scandal. It uses fiction to provoke questions about the narratives that are routinely told about this traumatic, culture-defining event. Thus the response to Schlink’’s use of genre is not about the ethics of fiction as a mere representation, but rather about the ethics of fiction as a force of political and social constitution. To question the authenticity of a representation is not only to question style or taste, but also to question the authenticity of the personal and social entities this representation has forged, and continues to support and reproduce.

The operation of genre as a socially-authored, social-defining structure is evident in the reader’s question. Additionally, Schlink’s answer makes clear what is at stake in the contested, creative discourse in which he, the reader, and the text itself, participate. Read out by the discussion’s host, the audience member’s question to Schlink, addressing the characterisation of his illiterate, prison-guard Hannah, was as follows: Your book The Reader begs many questions, and one of them […] is the question of Auschwitz. I am a Hungarian born survivor of that bestial camp. The guards, particularly the female guards, were, without exception, excessively brutal. It is well documented that none of the guards were forced to join and all were free to resign from their duties without being court-marshalled. So, are we really to feel sorry for poor Hannah that this duty was the only place for her? Mr Schlink you are a well-respected scholar, why dabble in fantasy, especially with Auschwitz? For me, it’s a desecration of truth; and dangerous. Are you asking us to feel sorry for Hannah? (BBC, 2011)16 The reader speaks with the authority of having lived the reality Schlink can only tell. She reads the novel as a direct commentary on Auschwitz that deviates from her own first-hand account of the event, and presumably the form with which it must be told. But not only is the novel an inauthentic portrayal, the reader argues that it desecrates the truth, that it is an act of irreverence toward something held sacred. Furthermore, she argues that his account is dangerous, that it gives rise to Kakutani’s “pernicious drift” toward relativism, which, in that case and this, results in the retelling of the Holocaust story in an unsanctioned genre. Such a revision in turn poses a threat to the stability of the event as it is memorialised in our collective memory. This question is about genre, about “dabbl[ing] in fantasy”, but it highlights the “authenticity in a fuller sense” that underpins debates about the ethics of

16 These excerpts are from my own transcription of the radio broadcast, accessed online 05/06/2013: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00cp7t1 32

representation. In no uncertain terms, the reader reminds Schlink that when he plays with the rules of genre, it is not just a literary game; he plays with her life and history at large.

In response, Schlink speaks directly to the reality she represents. Where other writers might invoke the artist’s right to interpretation, to freedom of speech and from censorship, Schlink skips the abstraction of art from life and acknowledges the social productivity of literature. He speaks of his fiction as an effort to affect the discourse surrounding not only his accountability as an author writing about the Holocaust, but the accountability of Hannah, and the Nazi prison-guards she represents. In answer to whether we must feel sorry for Hannah, Schlink states: I don’t, and she [the reader] doesn’t have to feel sorry for Hannah. What I think is of crucial importance [is] that we don’t make this world simpler than it is, in the respect that those who committed monstrous crimes were just monsters. If they were monsters, they are so far away from us. They are not a threatening experience for us. But the experience that my generation made again and again was that someone who we knew, liked, admired, even loved, who was kind and generous and helpful, as we later found out had been involved in something awful [or] had committed something awful. And this is the tension that we can find in people. (BBC, 2011) For Schlink, The Reader is a direct intervention into historical truth, and the narrative complacency that can obscure the nuances and paradoxes of what happened. Schlink infers that the collectivity and repetition of historical truth operates as a structure not unlike fiction in its ability to be stabilising and cathartic but also dangerously manipulative in its effort to make genres simpler than they really are; in attributing motivations that are either entirely good or evil. To necessarily locate evil as the failing of one person’s morality is to overlook the social complicity of authorship, and here, guilt, however confronting. By telling the story from the perspective of the young man who loved Hannah, but then learns years later in a courtroom that she has committed horrific crimes, Schlink challenges readers to rethink the nature of agency, authority, and identity. Trying to reconcile the Hannah that was his first love with the Hannah on trial, readers are faced with the biographical conundrum that confronted Guralnick: the fact that lives are “not all of one piece” (1994, xiii). In this exchange between Schlink, the writer, and his reader, the Holocaust survivor, we see the importance of both protecting and provoking social truths; of persevering with, as Derrida describes, the madness of the law, descending into Woolf’s quicksand, and trying to articulate 33 what is at stake in testimony, even if, in fact precisely because, the truth, and its genre, are contested.

Social debates about authorship and authenticity, as exemplified in this exchange and other examples throughout this chapter, challenge us to reconsider how we routinely read lives and stories as conforming to pre-existing forms with clearly-delineated purposes and responsibilities. When the rules of genre are broken we realise the complexity with which they are upheld. Forced to be reflexive, people are faced with the challenge of the biographer: “The moment one begins to investigate the truth of the simplest facts which one has accepted as true it is as though one has stepped off a firm narrow path into a bog or a quicksand” (Woolf in Guralnick, 1994, xii). By teasing out the various positions, paradoxes, and conflicts within public conjecture about the ethics of representation we are faced with the dynamic intricacy of seemingly prosaic, and intrinsic, laws. How people read or verify testimony, for instance, is and is not governed by the rules of genre. Literature may be read as an emotionally true fable, but it might also be read as an instructive guide about how best to live, or as a historical and factual account of real-life events. Consciously or unconsciously fiction may also be read as a heterogeneous mix of all of these things. The question of literature – as life-writing – is enlivened and uncertain here.

At the site of this social nerve-centre, reality and representation prove inextricable; language, as a productive, yet unpredictable, contributor, is used to both create and challenge different forms of truth-telling and the lives these forms anchor. An account of events as they happened is hard to verify, because it exists in stories, in limited perspectives, perhaps made- up, misremembered, politically inconvenient, contradictory, or too difficult to tell. Social truth is verified by consensus, but as this chapter demonstrates, consensus is erratic. The question of whether a true story can be verified with empirical facts or an evocation of shared experience remains open. It is enduringly complicated by the way stories are verified drawing across these forms of truth even as they appear to comply with conventions of genre and readership. There are so many conflicting positions, some read fiction as fact, some write it as history, others knowingly appreciate genre-blurring for its efficacy, others still defend the propriety of genres as the only way we have to decipher what is real or not. All of these positions entangle in society’s efforts to determine forms of ethical literacy; to determine how to tell, use, and recognise an authentic iteration of truth, one stable enough with which to identify and authenticate one’s life. In a parliament of stories, a social readership is faced 34 with the question of how to account, in a liveable, intelligible fashion, for the seemingly unaccountable complexity of lives that are not “all of one piece”, with methods that are equally dissonant. By drawing attention to this ongoing public forum, this chapter opens up social practices of verification as a subject of both social importance and sociological intrigue. It calls attention to the complex, contradictory, and counter-intuitive methods by which people socially verify their lives and, consequently, the lives of others.

Reading Life’s Literature:

A Question of Method

Just as the politics of authenticity challenges social decisions about what is and is not true, it influences the identity of academic methods; both within and between disciplinary circles. In the academy, the division of affective and factual truths is traditionally expressed in what C.P. Snow termed the “two cultures” [1959] (1998), widely understood as the partition between scientific and humanist disciplines, or “the confrontation of cold rationality and the culture of feeling” (Lepenies, 1988, 1). 17 This rift was revived, and slightly refigured, during the 1990s “science wars”, when the physicist, Alan Sokal, staged a hoax. He submitted a pseudo-scientific paper (1996) to the cultural studies journal, Social Text, to prove that the humanities would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions” (Sokal, 1996a). Like the hoaxes discussed in the previous chapter, Sokal expressed and exacerbated a pre-existing moral panic, in this case, about why we regard certain genres, such as scientific stories, as essentially authentic. Just as Michiko Kakutani’s insisted that the survivor memoir genre should only be used by survivors of sufficiently traumatic events, Sokal set up boundaries of representational propriety around the field of quantum physics. Critical theory, in Sokal’s eyes, plaits science with quackery and poetry in disregard for the rigor of facts. Rather than seeing all genres as, in different ways, truth-making, Sokal claimed that cultural theorists, using pithy writing styles, obfuscate the facts of science in a way that scientists, writing lab reports, do not. In this understanding of representation, certain genres are taken to be truth- producing, unadorned testaments to the hard facts of reality, while other genres are seen as ornate, politically-invested stylisations of the truth.

On the other side of the debate, postmodern cultural theorists chided scientists for their unreflexive positivism, insisting that the empirical verification of facts, always mediated through a very human set of prejudices, must be a relative and subjective social construction. This critique drew attention to the often unquestioned authority of science but sometimes

17 In 1959 Charles Percy Snow delivered a lecture titled “The Two Cultures” at Cambridge University. As a chemist and a novelist, Snow was well positioned to notice the cultural gulf between his fellow scientists and literary intellectuals, neither of whom, he argued, was well versed in the fields of the other. Snow saw this as the fault of the Victorian British education system and argued that it would leave the educated ill equipped to face challenges requiring a synthesis of knowledge [1959] (1998). 36

reduced science, particularly its effectiveness and diversity, in the very same way that Sokal refused to engage with the complex, plural, and contested fields within the social sciences and humanities. As Daniel Cordle explains in Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science and The Two Cultures Debate (1999), the science wars showcased the stubborn resilience of the two cultures rift, and further polarised the disciplines. In an intellectual war over which disciplinary genre offers a more truthful insight, the underlying question of how and why genres are relied upon to transparently produce or grant access to particular truths remained mostly unexamined on both sides. If the science wars unveiled something, it was surely just how unsure we remain about the nature of fact and interpretation or the relation of truth and genre. However, akin to the division of verifiable and emotional truths that arose in response to James Frey’s fabricated memoir, the discourse surrounding this scandal reductively split scholars, based on what disciplinary genres they use, into those who verify knowledge with “facts” and those who verify knowledge with “values”. Academic work, in this long-running polemic, is routinely thought to exclusively address either objective or subjective realities, facts or fictions, natural or cultural phenomena. 18

“The two cultures”, as an enduringly productive, ideological convention, also informs the identities of, and relationship between, the social sciences and humanities. Though driven by common questions, social scientists are presumed to analyse real people and literary scholars to analyse representational characters. Of course, history is rife with instances of intellectual inquiry that do not conform to this division of labour. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic works, for instance, blur this distinction constantly, drawing from canonical and obscure fiction, scientific studies, patients’ testimonies, and dreams to inform his theories. Similarly, Walter Benjamin’s Marxist work on the industrialisation of Paris enlists the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, almost as reportage, to capture the nuances of the sensual, everyday response to changing social configurations (1939). However, despite this counter- history, an academic division of emotional versus verifiable truths noticeably continues to inform disciplinary identities, conservative and radical alike.

The aesthetics of this division, constructing social science as impartial and literature as intuitive, are routinely reiterated even by unexpected voices. A writer such as E. L.

18 Cordle’s account of the links between the original two cultures debate and the science wars offers a balanced and insightful analysis of these disciplinary rifts and their implications for knowledge. For further commentary on the details of the science wars and their aftermath see Parsons (2003) and Ashman and Barringer (2000). 37

Doctorow, for instance, not positioned in the academy and famous for his genre-bending historical fictions, ascribes facts to social inquiry and emotion to literary inquiry.19 In False Documents (1977), Doctorow challenges the privileging of scientific over fictional truth. He argues that the division between emotional and verifiable truths is a recent and flawed construction. However, it is the hierarchy, not the division of value, which Doctorow challenges. His description of genres plainly utilises the language Snow deemed misrepresentative in his pioneering critique of disciplinary insularity. “Sociologists and social psychologists” Doctorow explains, “not only make communion with facts but in addition display the scientific method of dealing with them. The tale told by the social scientists, the counsel given, is nonspecific, collated, and subject to verification” (1977, 231, emphasis added). Literary scholars, conversely, deal with “fiction,” a “not entirely rational means of discourse,” and deliver different counsel than that of social science (231, emphasis added). The “complex understandings” of literature are “indirect, intuitive, and non-verbal”: they “arise from the words of the story, and by a ritual transaction […] instructive emotion is generated in the reader [...]” (231, emphasis added). Couched in these terms, Doctorow registers sociology as an objective science dealing with life and literary studies as an emotive engagement with fiction. Thus it seems that, even in False Documents, a treatise written to demystify the mythology of genre by an author renowned for twisting form, the legacy of the ‘two cultures’ is surprisingly robust.

Similarly, in academic circles, this traditional division persists even in more radical and experimental spheres, those purportedly unbridled by convention and structure. Following the previous chapter’s investigation into the social authorship of identity hoaxes, this chapter extends the project of rethinking what is at stake in accepting the division between emotional versus verifiable truths in a scholarly setting. As discussed in the previous chapter, the question of whether a testimony’s veracity rests on its correlation with shared feelings or verifiable facts underpins public tensions about the ethics of life-writing. Reading into the methodological and historical context for debates about truth-telling, it becomes clear that similar tensions govern academic efforts to address these very social practices. The next logical step from the preceding chapter then, namely, to draw on a range of historical and contemporary scholarship to account for the social vagaries of evaluating and verifying life- narratives, is complicated by the fact that such intellectual frameworks are fraught

19 For a detailed engagement with Doctorow’s blurring of fiction and history see Henry (1997) and Strout (1980). 38

expressions of this very same process. At a meta-level, the social sciences and humanities wage their own debates about what constitutes an authentic account and which disciplines have the right to use particular narratives. Recent attempts to bridge sociology and literary studies, in particular, like readers and critics of autobiography, are engaged in deciding if reality is better represented by factually accurate or emotionally resonant narratives. Practices of truth-telling and verification then, as both a sociological subject and method of focus, are unsteadied by a common conflict about what constitutes authentic representation.

Taking recent interventions in the sociology of literature as a case study, this chapter finds tensions about authorial ethics and exclusions, such as those that inform social debates around veteran testimonies, within the field of social inquiry itself. Autobiography’s muddling of evidence and evocation draws out implicit assumptions about the identity of genres and how we read them. Similarly, the sociology of literature, in its attempt to straddle sociology and literary studies, teases out the ideological differences of these disciplines and challenges us to consider what is at stake in their maintenance. Beginning as a primarily Marxist discourse, the sociology of literature questions how people come to value particular ideologies and how these social facts are culturally reproduced. Its subject of analysis is the social nature of fact, specifically, the ideological, structural, and didactic power of literature. But at the same time – and perhaps this is the most fascinating characteristic of the field – the sociology of literature’s efforts to engage with this subject are challenged by formative ideas about the nature of their own literature, namely, scholarly methods. Their academic project is reflexively autobiographical. Methodologies, like genres, leverage certain facts and not others. Thus, they too, as the literatures of sociology, are open to the sociology of literature’s questions about value and reproduction.

As this chapter will explain, sociologists of literature widely agree that their endeavours have been persistently thwarted by the divisive structure of the ‘two cultures’. Furthermore, recent interventions in the field demonstrate that its structural influence continues to organise even the most interdisciplinary and avant-garde projects. This makes the sociology of literature an interesting case study with which to unpack the pursuit of authenticity, not only as a phenomenon deserving of sociological attention, but as a phenomenon within sociology itself – in the formation of its disciplines, critical turns, and political identities. This analysis lends reflexivity to scholarly debates about the propriety, genre, and ownership of narratives. It foregrounds how studies that address this discourse are 39

similarly structured by, and often wedded to, a fact/affect split. Such an attachment, if unacknowledged, problematises the means to rethink how this same dichotomy affects, and is challenged by, social processes of verification, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, do not conform to simple categories. This chapter, therefore, focuses on the sociology of literature as a field with which to complicate the current segregation of emotional and verifiable truths. Furthermore, it questions the underlying assumption that social and sociological questions are of different orders.

Thus, to be more precise, the shift here is not from the social to the scholarly or from the lived to the methodological. Rather, this chapter hopes to emphasise that social concerns are contiguous with scholarly concerns about what makes a study ethical and veracious. This analysis therefore is not strictly a meta-analysis, but foregrounds the kinship of social spheres that we often read as distinct. Like metafiction (a trope which allows a character in Muriel Spark’s metafictive novella The Comforters (1957) to be plagued by the sounds of Spark’s typewriter and ghostly voice insisting she is fictional) the intrusive introduction of the ‘meta’ here – the sociological lens – troubles the barrier that brackets one world from another. Approaching several dividing lines, this chapter opens an inquiry into how the sociology of literature is troubled not only by Snow’s ‘two cultures’, that is, the division between the sciences and the arts, but also by the assumed division of scholarly and everyday forms of reading, or the idea that social scientists cannot access the real stuff of life. Tracking historical and contemporary interpretations of the ‘two cultures’ problematic, it examines how the disjunctures between emotional and verifiable truth are negotiated in current critical debates about genre and representational ethics. Finally, taking these interpretations into account, the chapter considers how we might dilate a discussion about the ethics of social method to include the sociality of method itself.

The sociology of literature The sociology of literature is traditionally thought of as the Marxist analysis of literature, and anchored in texts such as György Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel [1920, trans. 1962] (1978) and Lucien Goldmann’s Towards a Sociology of the Novel [1964] (1975). The legacy of these Marxist theorists burgeoned in the late twentieth century when the humanities, in a post- formalist shift, began to explicitly politicise literature and scrutinise its cultural productivity. For instance, two of the major centres for research on the sociology of literature arose with

British cultural studies around figures like Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart, who were sociologists working in literature departments between the late 1970s and early 1980s. At this time, specific research centres dedicated to the social analysis of literature were also established, including Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Essex Sociology of Literature Project, both of which merged political and aesthetic concerns.20 Influenced by their sociologist colleagues in this new interdisciplinary environment, left- leaning cultural critics, such as Pierre Macherey (1978 and 1995), Terry Eagleton (1978, see also his entire body of work), and Fredric Jameson (1971 and 1981), used sociological frames of reference to analyse literature. The sociology of literature, then, is different from other branches of sociology because it has often been institutionally located in the humanities, or interdisciplinary spheres such as cultural studies or critical theory, rather than in social science itself. The precise genealogy of this field as a challenge to the asocial aesthetics of New Criticism’s call to forget the intentions and affects of literary works - influenced by growing attention to the role of art in fascist and communist regimes - is fascinating but outside of the scope of this discussion.21 It must suffice to state that this work was important in rethinking the bounds of literature as an object for formalist analysis because it approached works of literature, and processes of cultural production more generally, as social and political actors in their own right. This sociology of literature, however, does not take centre- stage in this chapter. Rather, the focus falls selectively on a specific and current critical moment in the field that heralds a turn away from a Marxist legacy and thus the sociology of literature as it is known.

20 An online archive of the latter collects works associated with the project between 1976 and right up until 2001: http://www.essex.ac.uk/lifts/soclit/introduction.htm. See English (2010) for a comprehensive catalogue of work broadly grouped as the sociology of literature, mostly in the tradition of literary Marxism, from the 1970s onward. See also Simon Frith (1998) for an account of the rise of sociologists, including himself, in English departments. Janet Wolff additionally offers an informative reflection of her role in bringing the British influence of sociology in literary studies to the United States in the 1970s (1999). Other early theorisations of the sociology of literature include Coser (1963) and Davison, Meyersohn, and Shils (1978). 21 New Criticism defined its method against the socialising of a text, or the causal linking of literature to social motivations or effects. Its pioneers, Monroe Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt, authors of “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy” (1949), declared that the value of literature could not be determined by considering the author’s intentions or the affect on the reader. They encouraged critics to consider poetry in a vacuum: the antithesis of the sociology of literature. In this conception, literature has no social origin or destination; it does not derive from, participate in, or produce social life. This widespread orthodoxy (see Booth (1988) on its institutional influence) was challenged by the arguments of key scholars who drew literary production (and therefore literary criticism) into dialogue with political events and experiences. Walter Benjamin’s reassessment of art as socially structuring propaganda in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1968a) and Edward Said’s use of comparative literature as a space to challenge the Orientalism of the western literary canon (1978) are just two examples of this shifting perspective on art. 41

The sociology of literature now confronts a crossroad. Describing the geography of this present in its very title, James F. English’s “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After ‘The Sociology of Literature’” (2010) – the introduction to New Literary History’s “New Sociologies of Literature” issue – departs from the sociological history of the method and the legacy of Marxist ideology critique that governs past projects. In an effort to create a new sociology of literature English turns to the alternative methods being posed in opposition to critique across the social sciences and humanities, such as: flat, surface, and descriptive reading, a focus on affect and ontology, and the adoption of genres of representation associated with the creative and performing arts.

Attention to English’s argument is vital to understanding this shift and what it brings to a conversation about the ethics of genre. But before turning to a close analysis of English’s directive, it is useful to explore its genealogy. For while English’s turn is provocative, importantly, such attempts at revision have been one of the sociology of literature’s most prominent endeavours. English’s intervention steps into a field that, under different historical conditions, has consistently written of being troubled by the two cultures’ division and methodological uncertainty. This history locates the sociology of literature at the crux of questions about what is wagered in the division of different kinds of truth-telling and describes the struggle to forge life between divided intellectual labours. Introducing a special issue on the “sociology of literature” more than twenty years prior to English, for instance, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Philippe Desan, and Wendy Griswold described the field as a stalemate. They proclaimed that the “most basic boundary line divides literary studies and social science” and that this “fundamental opposition between the two determines work in the sociology of literature more than might be supposed for such avowedly interdisciplinary work” (1988, 421, see also 1989).

Focusing in on special editions dedicated to devising a resilient method for the sociology of literature, a consistent pattern of disciplinary struggle emerges. Drawn together, these manifestos read like the chronicle of a curse inherited across generations. For example, in a 1967 special issue of International Social Science Journal, ‘Sociology of Literary Creativity,” Goldmann, a pioneer of the field, titled his contribution “The Sociology of Literature: status and problems of method” (493). In 1972 these problems persisted, as Diana Laurenson and Alan Swingewood claimed in their primer The Sociology of Literature: “the sociological study of literature has not developed, either in terms of its theory or in its 42

methods of analysis, but has remained in some kind of limbo, suspended between literature as literature and sociology as social science” (vii). On one side, they explained, there are “those who believe that social science is simply the study of facts,” and on the other, “those for whom literature is a unique subjective experience which defies scientific analysis” (vii).

Writing about the field in 1970, sociologist Roger Pincott similarly motioned to the ingrained legacy of the two cultures division, arguing that long-standing assumptions about the autonomy of art from political culpability or analysis trivialise the sociology of literature’s aims. He explains: There is something about the so-called sociology of literature which often produces that wry and knowing smile or that scornful snort which is tantamount to a charge of dilettantism […] and this, coupled with the reciprocal fear that a massive violation of aesthetic sensibilities will automatically ensue from attempts to locate the social determinants of great literature, often inhibits people from practising it or from taking seriously those who do. One further view […] also inhibits this sort of study: that of the total spontaneity of the creative act—the view that somehow great art is not accessible to reasoned factual analysis because it only exists as an inexpressible moment recreated in the participant’s experience. (1970, 177) Pincott suggests that there is a strange, over-determined level of scorn directed at attempts to breech the barrier between fact and fiction, or those facets of social life deemed either socially productive or simply reflective. More contemporary contributions, such as Ferguson, Desan, and Griswold’s work in the 1980s, claim that it remains impossible, in this prohibitive intellectual environment, to collate the sociological study of literature into a coherent identity. “The sociology of literature,” they declare, “in the first of many paradoxes, elicits negations before assertions. It is not an established field or academic discipline. The concept as such lacks both intellectual and institutional clarity” (1988, 421, see also Griswold, 1993).

Collectively, these attempts to revive, and often defend, the sociology of literature describe a censorship that, arising from the two cultures’ division of labour, prohibits the progression of sociological analyses of cultural production or objects. In this long-running disciplinary biography the sociology of literature cannot be gathered to form a lucid body of work. The rift between social science and literary studies, between evidence and experience, or between emotional and verifiable truths, according to these inventories, is stubbornly 43 perpetuated by cultural, institutional structures that divide the humanities from the (social) sciences. Consequently, the sociology of literature remains in “some kind of limbo” (Laurenson and Swingewood, 1972, iiv).

It is into this history that English’s “Everywhere and Nowhere” (2010) intervenes and once again presents the scattered terrain of a discipline at once ever-present and evasive. Continuing with this long-running narrative, “[t]he ‘sociology of literature,’” he states, “has always named a polyglot and rather incoherent set of enterprises. It is scattered across so many separate domains and subdomains of scholarly research, each with its own distinct agendas of theory and method, that it scarcely even rates the designation of a ‘field’” (v). Like the disciplinary audits that precede his, English proposes a direction that he hopes will leverage a space to meld the insights of sociology and literary studies and form a method that defies their division. However, to realise this aim, English takes a slightly different approach. He turns from the sociological legacy of ideology critique to invest in novelty, namely, the alternative methods being posed as part of a broader academic turn against critical analysis.

Closely reading English’s argument draws out another aspect of the ongoing disciplinary irresolution within the sociology of literature. As Ferguson explains, the progress of this interdisciplinary project is determined by cultural divisions more than is often supposed, and, as the following analysis highlights, this remains true of English’s most recent proposal. But it is also important to emphasise that the sociologist of literature’s inability to settle the difference between facts and fictions does not prove that the division is immovable. English’s efforts to pinpoint the dividing line of sociology and literature, to accurately tease out exactly where each discipline stands on the nature and value of fact, and how these positions differ from one another, is troubled. The extrication of an untroubled interdisciplinary academic sphere from one tainted by the two cultures, proves as complicated as disentangling the two cultures themselves. The line, though productive, is difficult to finally determine. English foregrounds an ideological divide that articulates scholarly narratives and the way they are valued, but it is one which, upon close inspection, is not as straight-forward as it seems. The current turn to new methods reckons with the challenges and considerations inherent to the ongoing question of method that characterises the sociology of literature, specifically the unsteady act of demoting and promoting experiential and evidentiary modes of truth-telling. Though it promises to deliver us to a new destination,

44 this proposal returns us to the thorny question of the methodological pursuit itself and lands us within the social struggle to authentically represent life.

Locating sociology in the sociology of literature In “Everywhere and Nowhere,” English takes up the question of why his field of study has been derailed and stigmatised in the mainstream academy. He pays homage to discipline- defying acts in the sociology of literature, but also grapples with broader economies of disciplinary value. Mapping the corporate university, English explains that the professional stereotyping with which Snow charged ‘men of science’ and ‘men of letters’ still thrives in the academy.

In this bleak landscape, English explains, literary studies’ conception of sociology maligns the sociologist’s project as akin to, if not in cahoots with, the economic quantification, restructuring, and retrenchment of intellectual work in the humanities. English cautions that “literary scholars seem less able than ever to map themselves on the higher- educational landscape without reference to that presumed fault line […]” between social science and the humanities (2010, xiii, xiv- xv). This familiar disciplinary contest continues to structure and challenge English’s efforts to establish a more inclusive, pragmatic field. In staking out a position for his argument, for instance, English is faced with the need to limit his scope. In this first necessary choice, the two cultures already weigh upon English’s attempt to rethink them, as he limits his focus to “the fate of sociology in the recent history of literary studies […] for purposes of clarity and simplicity” (v). This choice displays the institutional pressure to make an argument intelligible within a certain specialist field. The act of clarifying and simplifying here comes at the expense of a robust portrait of sociology. Instead we see sociology, and its contribution to the sociology of literature specifically, only through the lens of literary studies. An article cannot be written without some degree of omission and generalisation, but in this particular instance, such disciplinary narrowing is exactly the pressure that English hopes to address, and yet cannot quite escape. For even as English tries to challenge the dogged division between sociology and literature, his argument, at a different turn, funnels into this same structure. The logic of both the challenges to and recuperations of disciplinary value within English’s argument is complex and its formulation deserves close attention.

At first, English works to maintain a balanced position to counter literary studies’ pejorative view of social science. He explains the ‘party line’ as a bystander, describing how sociology’s role in the humanities oscillates between a relic and an antagonist: New or old, the sociology of literature seems to possess little traction in literary studies. Nobody appears to regret the passing of an ‘old’ sociology of literature, invoked these days (where it is invoked at all) as a stale and outmoded approach, like reader-response or archetypal criticism, barely worth a chapter in the latest theory anthology. But nor would many literary scholars embrace the prospect—as they perceive it—of a new sociological turn, of a more ‘sociological’ future for literary studies. If the old sociology of literature seems all too old, a superseded relic of an earlier moment in the discipline, a new sociology of literature can seem all too contemporary, in step with ominous trends that are driving humanistic inquiry toward some small, sad corner of the increasingly social-science- dominated academy to endure an ‘interdisciplinary’ afterlife of collaborative media research. (2010, v) English is aware that this characterisation of social science as a quantitative epidemic is both inaccurate and unfounded. However, he is sympathetic to the brutal economic conditions that he argues have led humanities’ scholars to create a faulty, but identity-shoring, causal link between social scientists and the number-crunching statisticians of their increasingly corporatised universities (vii). English offers a more detailed explanation of this reasoning: The institutions in which we are lodged […] have become ever more committed to numerical data, imposing on us ever more stringent quantificational regimes of value and assessment—regimes which have tended predictably to shift resources away from the humanities and toward the very disciplines that have created them […] As the largest discipline in the humanities, and the center of its interdisciplinary formations, literary studies has shouldered much of the burden of critique and resistance to this encroachment, defending qualitative models and strategies against the naïve or cynical quantitative paradigm that has become the doxa of higher-educational management. Under these institutional circumstances, antagonism toward counting has begun to feel like an urgent struggle for survival. (vii-viii) This assessment of literary studies’ political position describes a discipline unaware not only of the actual work done in sociology - much of it liberal, theoretical, and qualitative - but importantly, also literary studies’ own indebtedness to social science for the political and 46

social theories it has relied upon to shoulder “the burden of critique and resistance” (vii- viii).22

It is therefore a welcome relief when English, maintaining his position on the border of both disciplines, qualifies this caricature of sociology later in the article. He acknowledges firstly that “[c]ritical sociology has contributed far more than literary studies to the tool kit for critique of current social hierarchies and neoliberal ideologies,” and secondly, that “the sociology of education has produced more powerful and comprehensive challenges to the corporate university” (xiii, xvi). English locates a tension point here between representation and reality; between a narrative that is verifiable and one that is embraced because it explains something uncertain, provides a clear enemy, or holds a group together. The process by which social facts gain momentum and become socially verified, despite a lack of evidence or logic, occurs even in the very social sphere that is charged with the duty of discerning them. Correlation, however loose, is taken as causation. It is this robust, contemporary expression of the two cultures - or as English explains, a “view of sociology, and of the social sciences in general, as allied with the hegemony of numbers, and as a discipline decisively favored, over and against the humanities, by the despised new managers of higher education” (xiii) - that English initially struggles against in his efforts to address the disjuncture between literary studies’ representation of social science and what he sees to be the reality.

Given that this is the method English uses, namely, to point out a social fact that he then proves to be unfounded despite its social purchase, one could say that his argument is a traditional ideology critique. Furthermore, we might assume that it is explicitly Marxist in nature. English pinpoints economic conditions - specifically inequality and the rationalisation of the individual as a unit of labour - as the cause of literary studies’ inaccurate but robust representations of social scientists as corporate statisticians and the sociology of literature as a managerial effort to make the humanities nothing more than a subset of social science. Indeed, if it were not for the next shift in English’s argument, we could read his discussion thus far as a call to reconsider the current turn against ideology critique in his field. For this

22 In addition to obvious reference points such as Marx and Foucault, it is worth noting that even more recently two of the most moving attempts by scholars to address the fate of intellectual life in economic rationalist institutions, in both practical and impassioned terms, have been written by social scientists: Maria Tamboukou’s (2012) “Truth telling in Foucault and Arendt: Parrhesia, The Pariah and Academics in Dark Times”, and Raewyn Connell’s published letter to the Vice-Chancellor of Sydney University (2013), available online, accessed 04/07/2013: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/raewynn-connells-letter-to-michael- spence/story-e6frgcjx-1226607091032 47 turn, as English explains here, rests on ideological assumptions and therefore for this same movement to claim that ideology critique is no longer relevant or necessary is a profoundly paradoxical act. Such a paradox highlights the need to protect the space of critique within our own methods, which are themselves embedded in and geared by all kinds of fluid and contested social discourses. Indeed, English’s argument, up to this point, might serve overall as a check on how important our power to check each other as scholars remains.

It is surprising then, given this preceding argument, that English endorses a sharp turn from “critique” as the way forward for the sociology of literature. This provocation is doubled when the definition of critique emerges as that which is most sociological in the sociology of literature – the so-called “skeptical criticism” that Paisley Livingston has termed “the sociological turn in literary theory” (1988, 5). The Marxist theory and political economy frameworks drawn from sociology to study literature are isolated as the cause of the sociology of literature’s perpetual derailment. As a result of this conclusion, the analysis of how ideologies, identity politics, cultural production, and systemic power operate in and through literature, or what role literature plays in social structuration, is set aside for new forms of analysis which are considered more pragmatic, affective, and descriptive.

This shift seems untimely not only because of English’s own impressive use of critique and his interjections about the value of sociology. At an earlier point in the article, as part of his historical overview, English also explicitly and compellingly argues that it is under the banner of critique that the sociology of literature has been successfully operating, and indeed gaining a significant foothold across the social sciences and humanities, despite the ongoing perception that the field has been stymied. The development of Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, queer, and new historicist frameworks for analysing literature dragged novels, poems, and other texts out of New Criticism’s asocial aesthetics to investigate their social productivity; their intentions and affects. Literary criticism in this case continued, as the eminent German, historical sociologist Wolf Lepenies notes of earlier styles, as “a concealed sociology” (1988, 174).

In English’s argument critique emerges as first the saviour and then enemy of the sociology of literature. Initially the project thrives: “There was rather less need to specify a distinct school or approach called the ‘sociology of literature’,” English explains, “because so

48 many literary scholars were now, in this very basic sense of the term, sociologists of literature” (2010, viii). He summates: Wherever [critical theorists] might be located on the map of named and recognized subfields—postcolonial studies, queer theory, new historicism—their shared disciplinary mission was to coordinate the literary with the social: to provide an account of literary texts and practices by reference to the social forces of their production, the social meanings of their formal particulars, and the social effects of their circulation and reception. (viii) Here English states that, in critiquing cultural production, literary scholars and social scientists created a sociology of literature more encompassing even than that of literary Marxism. The critical sociology of literature approached the literary text for the social meaning of its formal elements, not just the economic or social conditions of its production. The division between text and context was not honoured. Literature was recognised as a sociological actor in its own right, but crucially, one with its own semiotic and aesthetic particularities.

However, when English comes to conclude his summary of all the projects that have operated as sociologies of literature during times when it was assumed the field had disappeared, the determinants of his argument curiously shift. There is a leap from the success of critique as one of these “stealthily advancing” unions of social and literary matter to not only the presumed diagnosis of critique’s exhaustion, but the positioning of it as the obstacle which has held sociology and literary studies apart. This shift occurs in the space of just three sentences: [W]hatever its reputational and nomenclatural fates may have been since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the sociology of literature has not actually receded. Instead, it has become partner to a great many significant and innovative projects that are no less sociological for bearing other labels than “the sociology of literature.” It has stealthily advanced on many fronts and seems now, as much of the work in this issue suggests, to be arriving at a point of especially rich potential as both sociology and literary studies turn toward new, more rigorously ‘descriptive’ or ‘pragmatic’ approaches, rejecting the long-dominant paradigm of critique that has governed and limited the previous history of their encounters. (xii)

Here, English’s argument ceases being a celebration of the branches of the sociology of literature that have continued to thrive in the face of prohibitive conditions, such as reader- response research, economic studies of the publishing industry, political analyses of how literary canons are chosen, and many forms of social critique. In the space of these few sentences, English shifts to celebrating new methods, which are, without ethical question, leveraged against the methods that have, up until this moment by English’s own account, defended the sociology of literature (in the face of, if we recall Pincott, “scornful snort[s] … tantamount to a charge of dilettantism” [1970, 177]). Where he sets out to question the rift between sociology and literary studies, English begins to re-anchor the division, setting up critique as the evidence-obsessed antagonist to ‘description’ in this case.

In the following quotation, English, again, even more explicitly, displays the puzzling formulation with which his shift is leveraged. He suggests that the sociology of literature was only ever a pseudonym for ideology critique, adopted by those who feared the ridicule of the, then in-vogue, literary formalists. Furthermore, English explains that when sociologists of literature had carved out a legitimate space to practice interdisciplinary social research on cultural material, they no longer had to officially mark themselves as sociologists to prove they were not bringing unwelcome social and political questions into their New Critical literary departments, instead they ‘triumphantly’ proclaimed themselves critical theorists. If the liberation of the sociology of literature was the goal of English’s call, this chain of events would be retold favourably. But this is not the case. The quotation is as follows: If the ‘sociology of literature’ had often functioned during the period of New Critical orthodoxy […] —as a euphemism for the Marxist approach—then perhaps it was the triumph of that approach, the triumph of critical theory and the paradigm of ‘critique,’ which permitted the term itself to wither away. ‘Triumph’ is of course somewhat overstating the matter […] But broad acceptance of the (Marxist) paradigm of critique within literary studies had by 1990 enabled the ‘symptomatic’ or ‘suspicious’ mode of close reading largely to supplant that of the New Criticism while elevating History and Power to the position of new disciplinary watchwords and consigning much of the formalist inheritance to a reject bin labelled ‘aesthetic ideology’. (2010, vii) English’s verbs here suit “literary studies’” belief that sociological concerns are the concerns of the neoliberal bureaucracy: critique “supplants,” “elevates,” and “consigns” ideas to the “reject bin” (vii). Where English has previously used the pronoun “literary studies” to distance the unfortunate views of the status quo from his own, here that separation dissolves 50 in his effort to ascribe to critique a calculating approach. Furthermore, in the formulation of this narrative, we begin to get the sense that English is less interested in liberating the sociology of literature as initially stated, for as he explains that happened at the birth of ‘critical theory’, and rather more interested in reviving the kind of formalism that this sociology of literature “supplanted”. A very different project begins to arise here, one that works to rebuild a disciplinary split rather than challenge it. Literature is marked as a field not to be counted or critiqued.

What is lost in this detour toward uncritical methodologies is focused attention on the problem that propels English’s project to begin with, namely, what is at stake in the intellectual rift between sociology and literature? English’s narrowing scope limits the potential to rethink what makes something true or factual across disciplinary lines, lines that presumably divide the hard facts of scientific evidence from the literary evocation of experience in both social and scholarly spheres. If we begin with the analytic premise that the texture of a particular iteration must be critical or creative, detecting or describing, then we preclude the recognition of forms of truth-telling that draw their authority from a tangle of these perspectives. The process by which a particular narrative is granted, or obtains social veracity, is held off-limits as an area of study in the call for new methods. The political implications of returning to formalist modes of interpretation and forfeiting a position of critique are equally troubling, particularly given the economic and political conditions that English cites. The political power of narrative and the skills required to address it are as relevant now as ever. Nonetheless, English’s proposal for the sociology of literature reflects a broader turn against critique; one that is gaining considerable traction across the social sciences and humanities.

A broader turn against critique In recent years, several theorists have variously proposed that to be generous scholars we must discard methods of close reading, judgement, and an investment in unearthing hidden truths, to take up new, affect-oriented, experimental practices. It is difficult to collect these theorists into a common group, for they are often in implicit and open conflict. Speaking from diverse positions across the social sciences and literary studies, they also have different allegiances and aims. Yet a common thread can be followed through these method treatises. Arising within a shared timeframe, the proposals are united by an insistence that we have been failed by past methods, specifically critical reading practices, and must forge more 51

creative ways to tease out the nuances between facts and values, professional and personal investments, or material and ethical concerns.

The proposals share the structure of conversion. They proffer methodological remedies to critique, which is thought to be too brutal in its diagnoses of false consciousness. Instead they turn to the potential of new methods which, though often opaquely defined, promise not to naysay or demystify everyday attachments. Though, importantly, such generosity does not extend to the practices of naysaying within these directives, even though negativity is marked as the ultimate error. Questioning the ease with which a judicious, differentiating form of inquiry can be shaken, their acuity is still leveraged with reference to the blind spots of others. In “Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism” (2010), for instance, Timothy Bewes proposes his own notion of “reading with the grain” as an antidote to Walter Benjamin’s suspicious “reading against the grain”. Bewes underlines “the need to out grow our supposedly Benjaminian habits of reading against the grain—the phrase that functioned as a byword for theoretically informed criticism in the second half of the twentieth century” (4). He contends that “in its place would appear a reading that suspends judgment, that commits itself, rather, to the most generous reading possible” (4).23

Ironically, in this effort to be generous, many precedents, methods, projects, questions, and interpretive possibilities, are needlessly dismissed. Enemies are made where allies might be found. Bruno Latour, for example, a social scientist who has consistently struggled with the question of how facts are premised, has made two recent attempts to depart from critical methods, on the proviso that they cannot register the value of facts. Firstly, in “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” (2004), he opposes the iconoclastic methods of critique to a more generous treatment of matters of concern as socially productive, rather than simply constructed. Translating this shift into a

23 Several other arguments against critique repeat this structure of conversion. In affect theory, for instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick champions “reparative reading” over “paranoid reading” (1997), which Lauren Berlant has termed her “antidote to the hermeneutics of suspicion”, a “mode of reading” that seeks to “deshame fantasmatic attachment” (Berlant, 2011, 122-3). Brian Massumi argues for a turn away from critique’s judgement to affect’s potential (1995, see also Zournazi, 2003). Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (2009), offers “surface reading” as an answer to Louis Althusser’s “symptomatic”, deep reading [1970] (1979). Other methodological manifestos including Nigel Thrift’s “non-representational theory” (2007), Michael Warner’s “uncritical reading” (2004), Rachael Ablow’s “affective reading” (2010), John Law’s “mess as method” (2004), and “fictocriticism,” (Taussig 2010, Stewart 2007, Brewster, 1996, Muecke 2010 and 2002) also call for alternatives to critique that are essentially positive. All of these method proposals share a similar structure, seeking to make up for the ethical and explanatory failings of critical methods with novel forms of inquiry.

52 method, in “The Compositionist Manifesto” (2010), Latour proscribes “compositionism” as an alternative to what he sees, again without explicit evidence, to be deconstruction’s “destructive” methods.

Though they are diverse, implicit in many of these departures is the assumption that critical analysis, including sociology, has not and cannot facilitate an engagement with how social values come to verify facts, how facts come to verify social values, and the complication and entanglement of these processes. However, it is important to foreground that the efforts of a social scientist, such as Latour, to engage with the question of why certain things gain truth-value or currency, are premised upon a rich history of sociological inquiry rather than an intellectual wasteland. From Marx’s commodity fetishism [1875] (1974) and Émile Durkheim’s social facts [1895 and 1897] (1982 and 1970), to Pierre Bourdieu’s symbolic power (1984) and Robert K. Merton’s self-fulfilling prophesies (1948), sociology has dealt with questions of how social structures and subjectivities can be actualised by projections and desires. In 1928, the sociologists W. I. Thomas and D. S. Thomas also formulated their famous “Thomas theorem” – “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” – in an effort to understand the precarious productivity of belief (571- 572). The sociological pursuit of facticity, in these traditions, does not simply expose the falseness of false consciousness, but rather considers its productivity and potential.

Similarly, deconstruction is not purely destructive, but aims to wrest possibilities of meaning from open texts. Though often contrary, Jacques Derrida does not simply declare that reading Rousseau is a waste of time, nor does Paul deMan dismiss the entire project of romanticism. These are not negative pursuits. Their readings deal closely and reparatively, though not uncritically, with past works. Riling against deconstruction, Latour asks for “critical proximity” rather than “critical difference” (2005, 8), but this is what such close readings already offer by, as Vicki Kirby describes, “making [themselves] at home in the very logic of [their] opponent’s argument and showing how the direction of that argument can comprehend a very different set of implications” (Kirby, 2012, 86). Indeed, the careful attention to the primary text in much post-structuralist work is more generous, and proximate, than many of the current arguments against critique, which, in several cases, are entirely devoid of specific examples of, let alone citations from, the critical genres they eviscerate. Even in an ungenerous reading of critique, surely, in keeping with Latour’s project to open up which actors contribute to and animate life, such historical precedents – even their suspicion, 53 judgement, and criticality – must remain part of the puzzle? What might we learn from previous struggles to navigate the inextricability of facts and values? Do all attachments, we might ask these ancestors, call for reparation? To be generous, must scholars be uncritical, or is being decisive, or even incisive, also a form of care?

However, rather than unpack past attempts to tease out the nature of social facts – and the problems inherent to all efforts to discern what is proper or true – several arguments against critique frame structural and post-structural approaches to experiential truth alike, as intrinsically flawed and beyond redemption. Latour, for instance, argues that critique has made a career out of denouncing the efficacy of people’s values. He asserts that critique’s limited “fact” (positivist) and “fairy” (post-structuralist) narratives always give the critic the upper hand in unveiling the illusory fetishes of the “naïve believer” (2005, 238) and have “had the immense drawback of creating a massive gap between what was felt and what was real” (2010, 4). Though it clashes with his continued participation in this method, Latour diagnoses faith in de-mystification as bad scholarship and calls for “a suspension of the critical impulse” in order to “repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together” (2010, 4). In “After Suspicion” (2009), Rita Felski similarly argues that “suspicion,” the term she uses to characterise critique, “sustains and reproduces itself in a reflexive distrust of common knowledge and an emphasis on the chasm that separates scholarly and lay interpretation” (29). It is, she suggests, a method from which we must “turn” if we are to “build better bridges between theory and common sense, between academic criticism and ordinary reading” (31). While arguments such as these hope to open up a plural, inclusive, and ethical practice, they do not engage with the implicit recuperation of disciplinary exclusion – including their demotion of a great many critical and sociological concerns, both past and present – or essentialist notions about the exclusive efficacy of certain genres.

In this line of argument, criticism is cast as tired and unresponsive to the unpredictable fluidity of daily life, rather than studies which are expressions of this life. Critique, tarred as perfunctorily suspicious, is assumed to preclude generosity, or the ability to engage a subject with genuine concern, inquisitiveness, and a willingness to be surprised. Theorists, such as Bewes, Sedgwick, Felski, and Latour, argue that a departure from deconstructive or revisionist methods, and what they read to be their purely negative affects - suspicion, judgement, and paranoia - will result in a generous engagement with “common sense” or “matters of concern”. But it is at this point, less emphasised in English’s argument,

54 that the stakes of the turn against critique become explicitly social, as well as disciplinary. For the turn assumes that critical analysis is unsalvageable, but also that common sense or ordinary reading, the kind of thinking reserved for non-academics, is wholly different from critical reading or interpretation. The reduction of sociology’s project is an important oversight to underline within the turn against critique. But in some of these arguments, sociology is not just positioned against literary studies as a vulnerable, humanist discipline; it is positioned, more broadly, against vulnerable humans. The turn against critique frames itself as an ethical, inclusive act of salvation, but it is also an act of intellectual censorship and prohibition, against certain styles of scholarship, and as the next section will illustrate, against the complexity and dynamism of everyday thought.

So far, this chapter has illustrated how English’s argument bases its return to formalism on an ungenerous characterisation of critical sociology’s project. In addition, other arguments against critique base this reading on equally reductive assumptions about everyday experiences of politics. With such rationalisations, these projects, which hope to increase the scope for complexity, actually risk, to use Bernhard Schlink’s terms, “make[ing] this world simpler than it is” (BBC, 2011). Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s proposal for surface reading, another “recent [call] for alternatives to critical hermeneutics” (Love, 2010, 387), provides an example of this. In “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (2009), their editorial opening to the Representations special edition “The Way We Read Now,” Best and Marcus argue against “symptomatic reading,” their synonym for critique. Though this term has a specific origin in sociology with Louis Althusser’s study of Marx [1970] (1979), Best and Marcus use it to describe a widespread method that they argue was “popularised by the “linguistic turn of the 1970s” and “the acceptance of psychoanalysis and Marxism as metalanguages” in the humanities. They contend that such approaches are based on the belief that “what a text means lies in what it does not say” (2009, 1). Best and Marcus argue that this method is not relevant to contemporary political realities, but rather has come to seem “nostalgic, even utopian” (1-2). Justifying this waning relevance, they contend that: Those of us who cut our intellectual teeth on deconstruction, ideology critique, and the hermeneutics of suspicion have often found those demystifying protocols superfluous in an era when images of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were immediately circulated on the internet; the real-time coverage of Hurricane Katrina showed in ways that required little explication the state’s abandonment of

its African American citizens; and many people instantly recognized as lies political statements such as ‘mission accomplished.’ (2) Best and Marcus argue that because political injustice is now transparent and “on the surface” we should perform surface readings. They state that one of their aims is to demonstrate that “to see more clearly does not require that we plumb hidden depths” (18).

It is not difficult to notice that the anecdotal evidence Best and Marcus offer for a dismissal of sociological methods as socially irrelevant is rickety. Simply because a subset of the general public distrust the government seems unjust cause to abandon scrutiny. The fact that then U.S President George Bush was re-elected to serve another term in office after he flew the banner stating “mission accomplished”, a slogan that Best and Marcus explain “many people instantly recognized as lies,” suggests it may not be time to dismiss rigorous detective practices just yet. In the most basic respect, the political events Marcus and Best argue require “surface reading”, the release of photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib, were not transparent until they were made so. Evidence of such corruption makes it into the media, enabling a “surface reading”, only after it has been deliberately brought to the surface by a “symptomatic” reading of some kind, in this case an official military inquiry leading to the Taguba Report (2004) and the investigative journalism of Seymour M Hersh for The New Yorker (2004).24 Similarly, evidence at a surface level, such as a photograph or video footage, is never self-evident or transparent, but rather open to interpretation and contestation. The use of civilian George Holliday’s camcorder footage of the police beating Rodney King in 1991 as a tool for both the defense and prosecution is one case in point. In a debate over what this footage “proved”, the tape was used firstly as evidence to indict the police involved, and then again, upon appeal, to acquit them. The lawyers of both sides used this “surface document” to weave a narrative. The images, inextricable from framing interpretations, drew from a depth of existent racial and historical narratives. How we see and read, as demonstrated in this famous case, is more complex than the justification for the surface reading method allows.25

Unable to contain this line of reasoning, Marcus and Best’s argument inevitably refutes itself, if only at the margins. Where their methodological and political investments

24 Taguba Report available online, accessed 04/07/2013: http://www.npr.org/iraq/2004/prison_abuse_report.pdf 25See Judith Butler’s account of the interpretation of this videotape, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia” (1993), for a detailed assessment of how the social context, in this case, existing, racist correlations of blackness with danger, lent narrative validity to the defence’s rereading of the recording. 56

meet, their attempt to wrest social from sociological concerns falters. Marcus and Best make the bold diagnosis that the political events of our times are happening on the surface, clear for all to see, but find it necessary to punctuate this with a footnote, quietly granting that “there remain things that government powers go to extraordinary lengths to keep hidden, to keep as state secrets, ‘extraordinary rendition’ being one of them” (19). They concede that “[a] hermeneutics of suspicion in which understanding requires a subtle reading of the situation thus remains readily pertinent to the work of critique” (19). This happens only in the endnotes, so as not to disrupt the legitimacy and coherence of a call for a more relevant method in the body of the text. However underplayed, this admission demonstrates that even an argument against critique is clearly not yet able to relinquish its suspicion. Marcus and Best cannot maintain that ideology critique is irrelevant when they do not live in a post- ideological world. In such peripheral detours, the reader gets a sense that the new reading methods proposed, while enabling scholars to experiment with new methods, may not be based on the most rigorous analysis of the social body they promise to more ethically and accurately represent.

To render critique extraneous, arguments against the hermeneutics of suspicion must simplify the social context of their intervention and caricature their predecessors’ efforts. Traditional sociological concerns about the veracity of social facts and foundations must be mutated into what Latour has termed “iconoclasm” – the senseless destruction of people’s idols (Latour, 2001, 21, see also 2004).26 Social reality and the flexibility of interpretation it animates are reduced to a point that these arguments become limiting even to their authors. The polemic, in its denial of “matters of fact” in favour of “matters of concern,” threatens its own ability to practice scholarship in good faith. Reductive in effect, it pares away the complex motivations and concerns that drive critique, or the desire to find an authentic, ethical path: ambitions that continue to underpin their own interpositions.

This slip into self-negation and its counter-productive effects is evident in Rita Felski’s argument against critique, which centres specifically on her concern about the authentic representation of quotidian acts of reading. In a collection of publications, Felski, the co-editor of English’s special issue on “new sociologies of literature”, has established

26 Discussing the destruction of religious idols, Latour states: “And of course, idol smashing is in no way limited to religious minds. Which critic does not believe that her ultimate duty, her most burning commitment, is to destroy the totem poles, expose ideologies, disabuse the idolaters?” (2001, 21). Latour’s own iconoclastic stance on critique will be discussed in the next chapter. 57

herself as one of the foremost critics of the hermeneutics of suspicion in literary studies (2008, 2009, 2011, 2011a). 27 Like Marcus and Best, she declares that political, revisionist forms of reading, (used by feminist, post-colonial, and queer critics, among others, to question exactly what identities cultural production affirms) are no longer relevant to social and political life. Again like Marcus and Best, Felski bases this redundancy on an assumed consensus: “a dawning sense among literary and cultural critics that a shape of thought has grown old” (2008, 1). In a similarly collective pronoun, she argues that de-mystification is outdated in a world where apparently all is self-evident: We know only too well the well-oiled machine of ideology critique, the x-ray gaze of symptomatic-reading, the smoothly rehearsed moves that add up to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Ideas that seemed revelatory thirty years ago – the decentered subject! The social construction of reality! – have dwindled into shopworn slogans […] what virtue remains in unmasking when we know full well what lies beneath the mask? (1) Just as English contends that critique keeps sociology and literary studies apart, Felski claims that critique divides the scholar from social reality. She argues that scholars who practice critique are not truly concerned with revealing the nature of reality, but with the ease and satisfaction drawn from using the well-rehearsed method of revelation itself.

For Felski, critique stymies an authentic engagement with how people experience literature. This argument is most clearly set out in The Uses of Literature (2008), where Felski describes “ideology critique” as a form of analysis in which the work of literature is

27 Felski draws on Paul Ricoeur’s term “the hermeneutics of suspicion” (1970) to describe the critical method, however, where Ricoeur uses this term specifically to denote three key scholars interested in false consciousness - Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche - Felski uses this term to describe a vast catalogue of the intellectual movements of the 20th century: “The hermeneutics of suspicion, in other words, is a term applicable to a diverse range of critical frameworks” (Felski, 2011, 216). Under this banner Felski includes: structuralist and poststructuralist modes of thought [...] the impact of an identity politics of race, gender, and sexuality[ ...] the influence of Marxism via the models of symptomatic reading developed by Macherey (1975), Jameson (1981), [...] the taken-for- granted nature of Freudian schemata [...] psychoanalytical feminism, New Historicism, and postcolonial criticism ... [when] anthropologists unmask the covert imperialist convictions of their predecessors, when sociologists read the texts of Weber, Marx, or Durkheim against the grain, when legal scholars challenge the purported neutrality of the law to lay bare its hidden agendas [...] [voices] associated with deconstruction or with recent Levinas-inspired work on the ethics of reading [...] contemporary styles of intellectual politics that, following the reception of Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and others, have largely relinquished affirmative or utopian projects of world-building in favor of the rhetoric of subversion, estrangement, and critique. (216-218) In a summation which attributes a hasty coherence and pessimism to this diverse collection of disciplinary perspectives, Felski states that while these “approaches, are characterised by obvious differences in focus and method, […] they all subscribe to a style of interpretation driven by a spirit of disenchantment” (217). 58 always “relegated to the status of a symptom of social structures or political causes” (6). She sees this primarily sociological reading of literature as a tiresome method that depletes literary studies of the ability to genuinely register how people are affected by reading stories. Her contention is that ordinary people do not read the way critics do and that critics only read in this way to meet disciplinary expectation or because they think it qualifies them as “knowing”. “That one person immerses herself in the joys of Jane Eyre, while another views it as a symptomatic expression of Victorian imperialism,” Felski contends, “often has less to do with the political beliefs of those involved than their position in different scenes of reading” (12). Scholars of literature, she argues, have fallen out of touch with themselves and the public. They must rediscover authentic acts of reading and the ability to engage with them.

To revive literary analysis, Felski proposes a “neo-phenomenology” that can better account for the lived experience of how everyday people, but also critics when they are off- duty, respond to and use literature. Her self-proclaimed manifesto traces four common motives for reading, “modes of textual engagement” that she argues cannot be recognised by critique. These are recognition, reading for self-understanding; enchantment, reading as immersion or to forget oneself; knowledge, reading for information the text knows about life; and shock, reading to unsettle or challenge oneself. Importantly, however, Felski’s work is not about everyday motives for reading, as was, for instance, Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984). It is an argument about which method produces the most authentic account of quotidian experience. Literary studies, Felski maintains, if unencumbered by the “disenchantment” (a term that evokes sociology, via Max Weber) of the hermeneutics of suspicion, will authentically access the enchantment of everyday reading.

Felski’s project is initially set up as a moral binary. Critique versus “neo- phenomenology” reads as a version of the two cultures, the division of scientific scrutiny and lived experience. Negativity or a wariness of narrative’s role in establishing particular values is barricaded to one side and Felski’s “positive aesthetics,” the means to connect with life’s true texture, to the other. But, as it unravels, the project is less clear-cut. Felski uses critique to revise methods, indeed to challenge what she perceives to be a numbing ideology that limits the potential of literary analysis. As a result, the archetypes she creates, such as enchantment/disenchantment or scholarly/social, ultimately begin to threaten her ethical 59 position, denouncing the critical tools she continues to use and the positivity, that is, productivity, of her own negative inquiry.

Felski risks bad faith by applying the “knowing” model she argues against, to critique. Her prohibition upon critique is so resolute that she refrains from opening up an actual example of the method for close analysis; not even a straw-man. She characterises critique with her own summative impression, rather than quoting or attending to specific examples. When lined up, the words Felski uses to depict critique in her introduction, as an apparently cogent identity, form quite an ungenerous portrait. For Felski, critique is “a quintessentially paranoid style” which “calls for constant vigilance, reading against the grain, assuming the worst-case scenario, and then rediscovering its own gloomy prognosis in every text” (2008, 3). It is “a stance of permanent skepticism and sharply honed suspicion”; an “automatism of our own resistance” (3). Though critique “prides itself on its exquisite self-consciousness […] the very adoption of such a stance is pre-conscious rather than freely-made, choreographed rather than chosen, determined in advance by the pressure of institutional demands, intellectual prestige, and the status-seeking of professional advancement” (4). It “subordinate[s]” literature and “haul[s]” it in to “confirm what the critic already knows” (7). It is a “style of criticism […] propelled by a deep-seated discomfort with everyday language and thought, a conviction that commonsense beliefs exist only to be unmasked and found wanting” (13). It is a form of theory that “requires us to go behind the backs of ordinary persons in order to expose their beliefs as deluded or delinquent” (13). With this battering of descriptors, Felski constructs a repellent and duplicitous antagonist.

Felski’s licence to treat critique disparagingly is premised on this unsubstantiated characterisation of all such work as brutally dismissive of everyday thought. In the introduction, from which these descriptions come, she does not offer one quotation from a specific critique, and certainly not one which “go[es] behind the backs of ordinary persons in order to expose their beliefs as deluded or delinquent” (13). Indeed, in addition to the lack of cited reference to justify critique’s evils, Felski’s own use of critique also suggests there is more to the method. Felski preserves criticism not just to debunk for debunking’s sake but to leverage reparations for a social practice she cares about. Crucially, her intention is not simply to defraud every deconstructive or psychoanalytic theorist. Like English, Felski is deeply concerned that the humanities are in economic and existential jeopardy, unable to keep up with institutional demands for application and innovation. She cautions that while 60

critical theorists satisfy themselves with close reading: “Our students, meanwhile, are migrating in droves toward vocationally oriented degrees … the natural and social sciences pull in ever heftier sums of grant money and increasingly call the shots … in the media and public life, what counts for knowledge is equated with a piling up of data and graphs” (2). Her aim, in expressing this concern about what kinds of facts are valued, is to open up possibilities for transformation. We might consider that ideology critics of the past, back to Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion”, endeavoured to do the same, their negativity fuelled by concern and hope.

Indeed a brief digression into Ricoeur’s original formulation of this much-cited and maligned genre of interpretation reveals that the term itself was invoked as part of a project to complicate, if not dismantle, the opposition of negative and positive hermeneutics. The term appears in a larger study of Freud and interpretation, which values psychoanalysis as a form where nature and culture, in a broader definition of text, are inextricably entangled (1970, 4). After tracing the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of faith as a received opposition, Ricoeur ultimately points to the “profound unity of the demystifying and remystifying of discourse” (1970, 54). “[T]o destroy idols, to listen to symbols,” he asks, “are these not one and the same enterprise?” (54). Although Ricoeur’s term, “the hermeneutics of suspicion”, is used throughout the wider turn against critique as the apt descriptor of one side of a polemic, namely, to leverage a return to positivity, in its original context Ricoeur deploys it in defiance of such oppositional ways of thinking.

Hermeneutics, for Ricoeur, is “animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect and willingness to listen” (1970, 27). This is a notion that Felski quotes, but in the context of riling against critique. “In the long run,” she argues, “we should all heed Ricoeur’s advice to combine a willingness to suspect with an eagerness to listen; there is no reason why our readings cannot blend analysis and attachment, criticism and love. In recent years, however, the pendulum has lurched entirely too far in one direction […]” (2008, 22). In the short run, it appears that Felski’s tactic is to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. But, surely the answer to an obsession with facts cannot simply be the reliance on intuitions? If this were the case, the debate would then regress back into a hierarchy of arid rationality or felt experience, albeit reversed. It is this very either/or mentality that Ricoeur aims to unravel

in his original analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion.28 Indeed, the rest of the quotation, directly following the line that Felski quotes, reads: “In our time we have not finished doing away with idols and we have barely begun to listen to symbols. It may be that this situation, in its apparent distress is instructive: it may be that extreme iconoclasm belongs to the restoration of meaning” (Ricoeur, 1970, 27). This line of argument, thirty years ahead of the game, challenges Latour’s conflation of critique with a purely destructive iconoclasm. In Ricoeur’s terms, hermeneutics is a dually positive/negative action - a living method, both unpredictable and dynamic.

Considering that for Ricoeur it is important not to read negativity as unproductive, the turn against critiques’ invocation of his argument is something of a distortion. Ricoeur defines the hermeneutics of suspicion as a form of positivity in its own right, rather than a blatantly destructive act.29 “All three [masters of suspicion]” he insists, “far from being detractors of consciousness, aim at extending it” (1970, 34). From this admission we can surmise that Marx critiqued capital, Nietzsche morality, and Freud individual agency, not because they wanted to prove how foolish people are and how all-knowing they were in contrast, but because they were deeply committed to these questions; to rethinking them and transforming how they might be lived. These scholars did not stop at the revelation of a fact’s ideological basis. Their end was not exposure, as Latour and Felski suggest. This inquiry was the means to explore how facticity worked and how knowledge of its operation might be used to empower people to rearrange social structures. The theories of these three “masters of suspicion,” as Ricoeur named them, might have cast humans as wretched and self-enslaved on the one hand, but their commitment to their projects on the other hand suggests that they held out hope that humans might recognise how ideological elements of economics, history, or sexuality operate and how they might use this knowledge to transformative ends. After all, Nietzsche’s famous essay was titled, in resemblance to Felski’s own utilitarian title, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” [1874] (1997, emphasis added).

28 See Mark Freeman on the fact that this effort to rethink either/or thinking was one of Ricoeur’s overall projects (1993, 18). 29 The hermeneutics of suspicion has conversely been critiqued for its positivity. In On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion (1999) Gabriel Josipovici focuses on “post-modern” versions of the method to argue this case. For Josipovici, the issue is not that the method is too negative, but that it is not negative enough. Unlike Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth century, existential Danish polymath, whom Josipovici explains always remains lodged in the reality of despair, critics like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault lapsed into positivity when they celebrated the method of re-reading as a final achievement and subsequently relaxed into testing out its creative potential. Josipovici argues that this romantic recovery of lightness distorted suspicion into positivity rather than pursuing a nuanced gestalt of negativity as an ongoing dialectic of suspicion and trust. By putting all their trust in suspicion, that is, these scholars forgot the need to be suspicious of suspicion. 62

Following Ricoeur, Felski’s argument would be stronger if it did not misrepresent critique in reductive terms, but instead posited it as a mode of reading that has always and continues to be embedded in everyday concerns about how to live. For in fact, as Uses of Literature progresses, Felski seems to find much utility in the type of critics she labels “suspicious,” “disenchanted,” and “pessimistic”: she draws on the work of new historicist Stephen Greenblatt to theorise enchantment, and on deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller to evoke the critics’ coming of age, giddy with absorption in the experience of reading. Felski also cites D. A. Miller, the very critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick uses to exemplify the paranoid stance in her pioneering conflation of critique and suspicion (1997), to foretell the re- enchantment of the critics’ personal engagement with aesthetics.30 At the start of her manifesto, Felski clears the table of critique with one fell swoop, yet renowned “de- mystifiers” find their way back into her study as those already at work on the phenomenology of reading. These critics have not lost “sight of why [they] were drawn to such texts in the first place,” as Felski claims on her opening page (2008, 1). Rather, Miller and Miller tell the story behind their work: the fraught love of literature that drew them to the vocation of literary criticism.

For D. A. Miller, this love (of Jane Austen) is inextricably bound up with his political and sexual coming of age.31 These influences converge in the act of reading and collectively draw him to participate in the formation of one branch of ideology critique: queer literary criticism.32 This example works against Felski’s account of critique as a project of disenchantment, aiming only to debunk the coercive illusion of literature and show up the reading public as hypnotised lemmings. Miller is enchanted by the consuming nature of Austen’s style, but he also recognises that Austen “concealed her spinsterhood,” with style, “to deflect attention away from a depth model of the self” (Miller in Felski, 2008, 64). She

30 The next chapter will detail Sedgwick’s influential argument and its formulation. 31 This work appears in Miller’s Jane Austen, and the Secret of Style (2003). I use Felski’s citations here to demonstrate that the basis for my reading is already present in her selections from his text, even if she does not draw the same conclusion. 32 Miller’s most famous texts, Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (1981) and The Novel and the Police (1988), both critique the ideological workings of the novel form: its creation of emancipatory narratives that do not reflect, and are thus unhelpful for, the social projects to which the novel assumes it is contributing. In recent articles, Miller defends the practice of close reading, or “too close reading,” with a candid passion that troubles Felski’s assertion that practices of mining the text disregard and disrespect the novel’s ability to aid self-understanding and knowledge (2010, 2003). For Miller, the practice of ideology critique, his commitment to compulsive scrutiny and learning the text’s “open secrets”, has been a lifelong love for, and affair with, for instance, the novels of Jane Austen and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. 63

created worlds in which she could never exist and in this sense her novels perpetuate an ideological exclusivity that Miller feels when he reads. Miller’s recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock, to use Felski’s models, were engaged with a love of Austen’s “glittering” aesthetics, but they were also derived from a realisation that, present in this experience of reading, was the self-negating affirmation of brutal norms and acts of concealment. With Felski’s introduction of this story, the reader is left to question why she must dismiss critique as anathema to a phenomenology of everyday reading when it is clear that for Miller the critical pursuit of Austen’s concealment in the marriage plot was not an act of sheer destruction or malice, but a very personal revelation sparked by the recognition, enchantment, and shock experienced in this formative act of reading.

For Austen and Miller the phenomenology of writing and reading was inextricably bound up with the lived experience of social ideologies. Felski argues that “[t]he making and unmaking of identity […] while a theme much loved by contemporary critics, is not a rubric well equipped to capture the sheer thickness of subjectivity or the mutability of aesthetic response” (11). But to exclude identity politics from the act of reading literature is to dismiss many of the forms of subjective and mutable recognition people might have with a text. Similarly, to devalue any notion of confronting ideology, sensing deception, or battling with the assumptions of a novelist, is to limit the phenomenology of reading unnecessarily. Reading is phenomenological but it is also sociological. Experience, regimes of perception and sense, are bound up with social practices of verification. Felski’s attempt to separate everyday acts of reading from sociological interpretation not only reduces sociology, it underestimates the complexity of common interpretive acts.33

The framework of a polemic between sociology and literary studies does not offer Felski the nuance of experience her project requires. Neither does her commitment to the idea of an abstracted ivory tower lording it above everyday life. To truly level out the rupture Felski sees between common sense and scholarly analysis would be to consider critique as a quotidian act of concern; an act in which Felski remains mired as she responds to the economic conditions of the humanities and the university at large. Felski creates one image of critique with her villainous descriptions, but she also infers a different image: she uses

33 This is not to mention the literary author who may intend more for their readers than enchantment or immersion. What is Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001), for instance, if not a hermeneutics of suspicion: a mediation on the dubiously seductive nature of literary and living narrative; or the implication of the question of method in the question of truth? Chapter three addresses this motif in literature. 64

ideology critique in dialogue with the past as a simultaneous act of creation and destruction. When Felski introduces Miller she gestures to the social and personal impetus of sociological questions – breaking down the division between scholarly and social motivations. Like English, Felski side-steps her own embargo and leads us back to an unsettled notion of critique, an unsure sociology of literature, and an ongoing question of method, albeit by antithetical means.

Opening the question of method This chapter reframes recent methodological manifestos not as a slate for newness, or hope for solutions, but as the continuation of a debate about discipline, methodology, ethics, and the nature of veracity. The current negotiations with disciplinary propriety offer a rich ground to rethink what is at stake in the intellectual and institutional opposition of the social sciences and humanities’ attempts to document social life – a division, as the sociology of literature affirms, that can never be final. English’s initial query, namely why questions that fall between the disciplines of sociology and literature are so difficult to ask and have heard, cannot be answered by proving one side’s methods of interpretation to be superior to the others’. The question is about method itself: Why does this oppositional structure recur and what is at stake in it? What is at stake specifically for questions about the nature of veracity or how we can address the common hermeneutic and hermetic drives of sociology, literature, and literary studies; each a reflexive act which strives for authentic representation whilst also struggling with the question of what an authentic representation is?

Thus, it is in the acknowledged pursuit of a better method, that is, a mode of inquiry that can better account for a truth thought to be accessible only with the right approach, that English’s initially courageous study goes astray. Likewise, where Felski turns against the hermeneutics of suspicion she loses sight of its relevance to her own project, which is not about the everyday reading practices of students or people in airports, but about her own commons: the experience, scope, and responsibilities of academic reading. She is enmeshed in the sociological reflex of critique because it is the method that anchors her in the autobiographical question of method itself. Inherent to the question of what the truth is is the question of how we can know and find it. The ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ then, is not simply a suspicious hermeneutics, or an act of inquiry that is by nature wholly distrustful, but properly a science of interpreting interpretation. It is the question of truth and of method.

Thus, the sociology of literature must, even by the course of negation, be a hermeneutics of suspicion: a vigilant participant in the blurring of evidence and interpretation.

While the preference for particular scholarly narratives is articulated by disciplinary structures, it is crucial to highlight that these structures themselves are narratives that are authored and maintained. Therefore, when we analyse how scholars contend with structuration, it is vital to consider how they participate in it, that is, how interventions into social inquiry define the terms of a problem in the very act of leveraging solutions. The texture and fate of the two cultures is determined in the way it is negotiated. Attention to this level of the methodological quests that form the subject of this thesis is vital if we are to consider how to account for the living operation of a social truth or how to address the predictable yet counterintuitive ways people verify their lives. If we can begin to include the pursuit of method as part of this process of accountability, rather than just the best means to access it, we could consider how social forms of narration, which include critical theory as much as any other iteration, might already confound the long-standing division of the literary and the social and its correlative hierarchies of truth-value.

By recognising the sociality of academic method, and the ongoing provocations of its pursuit, this chapter opens up a context for the following chapters’ subsequent analysis of a specific branch of the methodological turn against critique, dealing most directly with the division of emotional and verifiable truths: the affective turn. As the sociological analyses of academic methods addressed in this chapter suggest, the two cultures is not simply a static, imposed structure but one which is constantly revised and reaffirmed on the basis of changing, and often unacknowledged, investments by the very scholars it affects. For instance, where formalism was once decried across the humanities as a method that silenced what was socially at stake in literature, it is now being hailed as the way to become more attuned to how people authentically experience literature and life itself. 34 The narrative of the two cultures, as a structuring force that divides the social sciences from the humanities, when studied closely can be seen to operate in both the perpetuation and defiance of its own logic.

34 Mariam Fraser also notices the congruence/conflict between older and recent debates about sociological methods versus “craftsmanship” in her informative article “Experiencing Sociology” (2009). However, interestingly, in the debates she traces about the conflict between sociology and cultural studies (67), post- structuralist critique’s creativity is posited as the adversary of sociology’s scientism. In the turn discussed in this chapter, the line between adversaries is drawn differently: post-structural schools are grouped with the suspicion of Marxist sociology, and positioned against the creativity of aesthetics. The variation of these two accounts, only a few years apart, further highlights the fickleness of boundaries assumed to divide evidentiary and experiential concerns. 66

The following chapters take the methodological directives of the affective turn, a particular subset of the present turn against critique, as an example with which to rethink the divisions which are routinely drawn, though in fascinatingly paradoxical ways, between verifiable facts and lived interpretations, as both a disciplinary and social dichotomy. This project draws inspiration from Wolf Lepenies’ study of the two cultures, Between Science and Literature: The Rise of Sociology (1988), which through its inquiry into academics’ nineteenth century negotiations with this disciplinary structure, provides a precedent for thinking about method, not simply as a way to read society, but as society’s challenge to read itself. Lepenies’ project is not unlike that of Bernhard Schlink, who, as discussed in the previous chapter, uses both fiction and non-fiction to unpack the complication of social accountability and guilt in the aftermath of the Second World War. Schlink states that he is dedicated to the “crucial importance” of not making “this world simpler than it is” (BBC, 2011). Where Schlink emphasises “the tension that we can find in people” (2011), in their contradictions and lapses in propriety, Lepenies similarly emphasises the tension we can find in disciplines and methods. Before turning to a reading of the affective turn, it is useful, at the close of this chapter, to offer a brief account of how the two cultures division has indeed always been both reiterated and challenged by those scholars it affects. Method, read this way, has long been an expression of the nebulous social it seeks to document.

The juxtaposition of the present intervention into the space between sociology and literature and its history also draws attention to the continuity of these current arguments with the very oppositional rifts they claim to depart from, namely, a robust tradition of opposing sociological and literary concerns. This thesis aims to loosen the bondage of these disciplinary identities from their traditionally polemic stances and illuminate their entangled involvement in the question of how truth is socially constituted. Given that social science is afforded limited scope within the turn against critique, this final section also works to foreground a nuanced identity for the discipline of sociology that will hopefully reverberate across forthcoming chapters. Giving a sense of sociology’s rich historical investment in, and contribution to, the question of how facts and fictions enmesh to verify social life, underlines what is at stake in several new method manifestos’ keen dismissal of sociological engagements with social truth.

An impure history Defending sociology against accusations of “vulgar scientism” in a way that speaks to the current turn, Robert Nisbet explains that, in addition to canonical sociologists’ commitment to the intricate literacy of social life, their methods were also a melange of scientific and poetic modes. “Can anyone believe that Tӧnnies’ typology of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Weber’s vision of rationalization, Simmel’s image of metropolis, and Durkheim’s perspective of anomie came from logico-empirical analysis as it is understood today? Merely to ask the question,” Nisbet states, “is to know the answer” (1966, 19). Nisbet argues that a scholar who claims that sociology stands squarely in a tradition of arid rationality misses the fact that “[e]ach [of these sociologists] was, with deep intuition, with profound imaginative grasp, reacting to the world around him, even as does the artist, and, also like the artist, objectifying internal and only partly conscious, states of mind” (19). Sociology, in this history, is not firmly settled in the house of science, but has long been a provocateur of the two cultures’ propriety. Following Nisbet, any scholar who asserts that sociology is literature’s plain antagonist has yet to engage properly with the complexities that inform the discipline of sociology.

The negation of this history is one of the primary oversights of English and the wider turn against critique’s agenda. English’s attempt to bridge the social sciences and humanities does not draw from this rich history, but guards against it. In his and similar intellectual projects, the choice to persist with an idiosyncratic history from which one could salvage an engagement with the narrativity of life, including literature’s sociality, is forsaken. The opportunity to rethink or revive old methods or possibilities, or to reorient old sociological thinkers, is not embraced. Sociology is dismissed as a counting discipline in effect, even if not in reality.35 Though, as Lepenies traces, where sociologists of literature assume a stalemate, there is a long and fascinating history of Trojan horses and treason, and in less sinister terms, a genuine, if sometimes competitive, interest in shared questions.

Traversing the geographical terrain of France, Germany, and Britain, Lepenies’ Between Literature and Science offers a comprehensive and eccentric retelling of sociology’s

35 As an important exception to this trend, Heather Love uses the work of Erving Goffman to inform her descriptive reading methods. Though her work does not challenge the broader argument that ushers in such methods, it does envision a sociology of literature that values sociologists (2010, see also 2010a, 2013). 68

bildungsroman amidst the ‘two cultures’. 36 Literature and sociology have, “from the middle of the nineteenth century onward,” according to Lepenies, “contested with one another the claim to offer the key orientation for modern civilization and to constitute the guide to living appropriate to industrial society” (1988, 1). Along their fault lines several related conceptual oppositions are drawn, including reason and emotion, fact and fiction, evidence and experience, and reality and representation. But where this conflict has endured it is also continually undermined. Though sociologists and literary critics and authors may assume a coherent polarity, it has never been successfully shored up.

Lepenies suggests that the formative rift between sociology and literature came not from innate difference but from an uncomfortable overlap (13). “In this competition over the claim to be the rule of life appropriate to industrial society,” Lepenies cautions, “sociology cannot, however, simply be equated with rationality and literature with feeling” (13). It is Lepenies’ dedication to proving this point, rather than adopting a qualitative/quantitative binary, that makes his intervention useful for rethinking the disciplinary field English describes. The history Lepenies recounts destabilises sociology as the strict heir of science, positioning the discipline as the confounding progeny of the seemingly incompatible houses of science and literature. Sociology, far from just “a counting discipline,” embodies the fact that the laws of separation by which knowledge is reproduced – chiefly the separation of reason and emotion or fable and fact – are elastic.

The value of Lepenies’ study lies foremost in his account of how sociologists lived their intellectual question, often in ways that challenged the opposition of fact and feeling in real-time. Lepenies uses this finding to muddle the division between the humanities and social sciences in two ways. Firstly, he challenges the received history by pointing to several genealogical forbears that spoil the supposed propriety of positivism versus poetry – novelists declaring themselves sociologists and sociologists heavily indebted to novelists. He

36 Histories with a similar spirit, namely, those seeking to chart how the fate of social theory is bound up with the political investments of the moment, include Geoffrey Hawthorn’s Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory (1976) which goes into more detail on the philosophical roots of the discipline; Robert A Nisbit’s The Sociological Tradition (1966); Johan Heilbron’s The Rise of Social Theory (1995); and Bruce Mazlish’s A New Science: The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology (1989), which also focuses on the emergence of sociology as a third culture between the humanities and the hard sciences. Though its focus is distinctly narrower, Ilse N. Bulhof’s The Language of Science: A Study of the Relationship Between Literature and Science in the Perspective of a Hermeneutical Ontology, fleshes out a close reading of Charles Darwin’s very poetic, hermeneutic science The Origin of Species to challenge the history of the two cultures on the grounds of method. 69

cites many forbears that mix science and literature as knowledge, for instance Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s influence, as both natural scientist and poet, upon most scholars in the emerging modern European academy.37 As another example, the naturalist and cosmologist Comte de Buffon, whose 36 volume of natural history was “read by every intellectual in Paris,” influenced the novelist Honoré de Balzac, who in turn influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Marcel Proust, (who was also indebted to French philosopher Henri Bergson) (1988, 3).38 In England, sociology also has literature in its genetic mix: Comte’s correspondent John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian sociology was influenced by his dedicated study of romantic poetry (98-9). In Germany, the novels of Thomas Mann stylised the ideas of his correspondent Max Weber for the literary public (Lepenies, 297- 312, see also Goldman, 1991 and 1992).

Just as sociology drew from literature, novelists also claimed the mantle of sociology. According to Lepenies: “When [Emile] Zola spoke of the ‘sociologie practique’ that characterised his novels he implied that in the last resort it was he who practised true sociology” (7). In later years, in England, the novelists’ claim to produce social inquiry continued. In 1906, for instance, H.G. Wells gave a lecture to the Sociological Society at the London School of Economics titled “The So-called Science of Sociology” dismissing the discipline’s scientific status and pioneers, such as Auguste Comte (Lepenies, 1988, 150, Wells, 1914, 141-151). Elsewhere, Wells claimed that “the modern novel …is the only medium through which we can discuss the great majority of the problems which are being raised in such bristling multitude by our contemporary social development” (Wells, 1914, 121). Wells contended that literature had always done the work of sociology and that the introduction of a dedicated pseudo-science could not usurp the social novelist’s practice. Lepenies also includes Charles Dickens as a social novelist and critic of social theory, explaining that Hard Times (1854) is a satire of “the dehumanising effects of the utilitarianism of a James Mill,” the founder, along with Jeremy Bentham, of utilitarianism (1988, 13, see also Fielding, 1956).39 Lepenies uses these tangled lineages, the interweaving

37 For a contemporary study on the legacy of Goethe, specifically in critical theory, see Ronell (1993). 38 An analysis of Bergson’s influence on Proust’s literature of memory is offered by Bisson (1945). 39 Dickens continues to be invoked as a social theorist, for instance, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use a passage from Dickens to illustrate his theory of immanence in “Immanence: A Life” (1996). This use of literature to point to a place where an idea already operates is common in social theory. Freud draws on mythology and literature in much of his work, particularly in “The Uncanny” [1919] (2003). Similarly, Erving Goffman uses the work of Herman Melville in Asylums (1961). 70

of methods and interests and the chafing tension of overlap, to unsettle the received history of 40 literature and sociology as stand-alone disciplines.

Lepenies second method of complicating the divide between the arts and social sciences is to analyse how the biographies and careers of the scholars that wage these arguments often contradict their own polemical allegiances. As with English and Felski, method proposals of the nineteenth century were also based on situational and autobiographical readings of the then current political climate. In Lepenies’ “secret history of the modern social sciences” (1988, 14) – love, depressions, rivalries, class factions, political ideologies, generational conflicts, resentment, jealousy, or the struggle to make or maintain a career – concomitantly leverage and undermine arguments that oppose reason and judiciousness to creativity and emotion. Lepenies offers us the history of the division between sociology and literature that Ferguson, Desan, and Griswold would later describe as “an antagonism, as durable as it is simplistic” (1988, 49). But he also gives us another history, a meta-history that contributes a sense of the complexity and contestation that reproduces this rift, but also challenges its sustainability. In Lepenies’ disciplinary chronicle, how truth and knowledge operate, how they are lived by the very theoreticians involved in the debate, points to something beyond the propriety of discipline. The social scientist’s attempt to separate evidence from experience, to enact positivism without personal perspective, or to detach from desire, always trips over itself. The literary critic’s inverse efforts meet a similar fate.

Lepenies’ history locates a challenge to the division of emotion and reason at sociology’s very formation. Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology [1848] (1865), for instance, forsook his initially strict division of parable and positivism, when appealing to the heart of the Catholic, female novelist Clotilde de Vaux. Throughout their letters to one another, Lepenies traces a transformation of Comte’s positivist science – originally anti- theological – into a positivist religion that “united thoughts, feeling and action – with the goal of perfecting the outer and inner existence of man” (1988, 29). The influence of de Vaux upon Comte was a Parisian love story (sadly for Comte, unrequited) that Lepenies explains

40 In this context it is interesting to note Kurt Spellmeyer’s history of the humanities, which explains that English literature only recently rose to prominence as the key humanities discipline. Before this the main subjects were Rhetoric and Classics, which both drew from non-fiction and fiction texts as their objects of study. Authors, such as Rousseau, were studied in a way that did not divorce form from function. The idea that one would write or read literature with intention and for affect, that is, as social acts, was assumed (2003, 3). 71 marked “a bizarre episode in the history of the social sciences” that “later led Comte’s successors to divide into two separate strands” (35). The sociologist, in this founding tale, recalibrates his science, driven in part by love and desire: his life work is a web of personal and professional stakes. From Comte’s biography it is clear that the evidence the sociological method itself is based upon is not all measurement and rationality; it is also made up of experiences, desires, and contingencies. At its emergence, sociology already pointed to the fact that emotional and verifiable truths could not be successfully segregated in theory because they are not separate in the life that theory seeks to conceive of, and by which it is conceived.

In this account, how knowledge is lived is also a form of writing. When Lepenies opens up the scholarly notion of text to include life-writing he disrupts the division of morality, emotion, and folk knowledge from rationality, reason, and analytic logic that is thought to underpin scholarship. The sociologists live the very theoretical complication they pose to the academy. Their actions, principles, history, and everyday quirks are the stuff of science. For Comte, positivism was a compulsion. His desire to systematise and quantify social life ranged from his writing methods to his hygiene routines. Later in life, according to Lepenies, “each treatise of Comte’s would […] comprise seven chapters. Each chapter would be in three parts, each part in seven sections, and each section would consist of a leading paragraph of seven sentences and three further paragraphs each of five sentences” (20). Comte also “scrupulously weigh[ed] out his daily food on a pair of scales down to a margin of five grammes” (23). As Lepenies argues, Comte’s “urge to systematization was a reflection of the way in which he moulded his own life” (22). To create his method, Comte summoned not only the taxonomies of science but also the discipline of poetic form and monastic practice. His science was constituted by creativity and ritual as much as quantification. Rationalisation, like asceticism, was for Comte part of the struggle to manage and master life.

This contested, socialised, and biographical understanding of method lends a different perspective to how we read the motives behind certain critical shifts. Michel Foucault mused upon the blurring of life and work in his discussion of the French poet Raymond Roussel in a way that informs Lepenies’ reading of Comte and the biographical production of writing in general. Foucault explained that a true understanding of literary work considers life an act of writing that includes, but is not limited to, the writing of books: 72

I believe that it is better to try to understand that someone who is a writer is not simply doing his work in his books, in what he publishes, but that his major work is, in the end, himself in the process of writing his books. The private life of an individual, his sexual preference, and his work are interrelated not because his work translates his sexual life, but because the work contains, includes the whole life as well as the text. (Foucault, 1987, 184) By socialising the founding tracts of sociology, Lepenies reframes the question of disciplinary identity as the question of identity proper. While he focuses on the difficulties of a discipline trying to account for human nature, he gestures toward the possibility that what complicates the project is the fact that anyone who takes on this task is actually faced with the broader, and often subliminal, difficulty of trying, as Foucault suggests, to account for and sustain themselves. In doing this, Lepenies cleverly muddles the separateness of reason and passion, or the disparate logics that are assumed to mark sociology as literature’s other. “The conflict between cold reason and the culture of feeling, typical of the competition between the social sciences and literature,” Lepenies states, “is not confined to the realm of scientific and literary publications: it also sets its stamp on the lives, private and public, of the writers and scholars we are to consider” (1988, 14).

Like Comte’s positivism, a discipline is transformed as it is lived and used. A method does not fall away from its object of study like a carbon copy. To think of method in this way problemitises the departure English, Felski, and their peers promote. If the method itself is of social life it becomes difficult to simply dismiss a method as if it were a final, inanimate, and asocial apparatus, outgrown by reality. The solution then, is not as simple as finding the right method to represent the mess of life, for the method of representation itself is of this mess it seeks to document.

Method, like any other truth in the present, is a strange concoction of a moment in time unaware of what it will become and re-become in hindsight; in this sense even when a truth is arrived at it is not final. The narrative written to document the present encompasses a collection of biographies, histories, social investments, hopes and prejudices, all of which will change, influenced in part by the very document that collates them into a coherent identity with a possible path. As Mark Freeman notes in his work on narrative and hindsight: “‘Memory,’ in this context, becomes a curious amalgam of fact and fiction, experiences and texts, documentary footage, dramatizations, movies, plays, television shows, fantasies, and 73 more” (2010, 101). Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s notion of deferred action, the idea that memory is not static but changed in remembering, Freeman adds that “the human past [is] itself […] a kind of text, progressively rewritten in the light of ongoing experience” (88- 89). Literature is vital to sociality but it is also in many cases the very texture of what social life is; how it coalesces and is reproduced. Method is not a static reading-tool, but a living and changing source of verification. Following Freeman and Freud, evidence is social and experiential and so is the method by which we access it. The reason that it is difficult to account for the complexity of social decisions is not because we do not yet have the right method, but because method itself is this process of complex decision-making.

The identity of social truth and its telling, of which sociological method is just one example, is akin to what sociologist Avery F. Gordon defines as the identity of a person, or “complex personhood”. The person is actual, they are anchored, and workably coherent, but they also “remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognise themselves and others” (2008, 4). For Gordon, “complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society’s problems are entangled, and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching towards” (4). What is documented as evidence then, even in the case of statistics or census results, are facts that are reported from a reservoir of reason and emotion, of actuality and aspiration, pre-existing narratives and stabs in the dark. The fact itself is a jumble of these things; the process by which it is collected and reported is another layer again. Fact works as a solid force of verification but it is also in flux. What is socially accepted as factual at one point in history is discarded, or derided, at another. The history of intelligence, nutrition, the canonisation of saints, and countless other bodies of knowledge, are constantly being rearranged and reconstituted as facts and the ways we measure them change. A truth is verified by facts and fantasies, which in turn consist of evidence and experience, conviction and observation, memory and consensus. The question of literature on this scale, namely, the composition of the social truths that determine social norms and arrangements, has always been the interest of sociological study. In many cases sociology has not repressed the fictive, but rather consistently meditated on its social operation.

Concluding with this impure history of discipline, this chapter foregrounds both the history offered by the turn against critique and a genealogy that is less neat and thus lends 74 itself less easily to a revolution in method. There is a common history that speaks of the social sciences and humanities as disciplinary enemies but, as Livingston notes, “dichotomies drawn in such schemes are far too tidy to be trusted” (1988, 1). While the current turn against critique presents the adoption of new methods as a natural next step, questions remain about how the authenticity of representational modes is being adjudicated.

III Evidence in Flux: Verifying Affect

Emotional and verifiable truths are not strictly separate in social life. The reason that people choose to narrate their lives in certain genres is not transparent, but rather, contingent and diverse, influenced by social conventions about narrative structure which are themselves contested. Authorship is a social process. However, the assumed division of labour between the social sciences and the humanities, the idea that one deals with real life and the other only with the representations of this life, makes the recognition of this process challenging. As detailed in the previous chapter, there have been several recent proposals across the social sciences and humanities attempting to address this disjuncture. Though, far from alleviating political contestation around what forms of truth-telling will be accepted, these academic proposals are equally fraught with questions about whether a truth should be verifiable or emotionally resonant, whether a story is best told through genres of non-fiction or fiction, and who has the right to decide how the boundaries between these forms will be drawn.

The affective turn is one such proposal. Like “surface reading,” this movement also positions itself as an answer to the “recent calls for alternatives to critical hermeneutics”, and the perceived need to “suspend routine ... habits of paranoia and suspicion” (Love, 2010, 387). Positioning affect theory as the antidote to critical analysis, pitting ontology against epistemology, and lived experience against bookish knowledge, the affective turn’s argument settles squarely within both old and new debates about truth and genre. However, as this chapter will illustrate, rather than challenging the terms by which this debate has been waged, the hierarchy drawn between critical and “new” methods maintains a division between emotional or verifiable truths, or facts and values. In the turn from critique to affect theory, facts are still divided into those that are felt and those that are foundational. The reproduction of this structure troubles the affective turn’s aim to engage with the complexities of how people account for and verify their lives; often in ways that do not conform to such a neat binary. Several key proponents of the affective turn propose that scholars should turn away from the empiricism of critique, its reliance upon facts, to embrace the unverifiable dynamism of experience. This reading of social science facts or scholarly empiricism as

somehow not experientially derived, however, limits our ability to conceive of evidence and experience, or data and its interpretation, as entangled phenomena.

To consider how we might keep the question of evidence open while also acknowledging the challenges of method’s social context, this chapter traces three proposals frequently cited as influential for the turn against critique toward affect theory and alternative methods. These are, Bruno Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” (2004), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction is About You: Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” (1997), and Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995). Aside from being highly influential, the arguments of Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi are of interest to this thesis because, for each of them, the turn is not only an imperative for scholarship generally, but also for shifts in their own intellectual and political interests. On the surface, these arguments affirm a polemic around the question of genre: critique is static and predictable, whereas “composition”, to use Latour’s term, can express the fluidity of life. However, if we look more closely at their living formulation, in the tradition of Wolf Lepenies (1988), these proposals are themselves evidence of the dynamic terms by which veracity is negotiated.

Thus, drawing out the formulation of the turn against critique, the following investigation demonstrates how three of its key proponents’ own critical turning points are verified by a dynamic evidentiary process that enlists personal convictions and political investments as much as the findings of affect science. Though they rationalise the forms of evidence certain genres can use and the truths they can produce, within these arguments themselves genres of evidence are actually quite porous. The opposition between felt and verified knowledge, or experience and facts, is averred but not sustained. Mercurial in nature, the affective turn’s methods of verification unsettle their own premise that critique and affect are essentially opposed. Opening up these paradoxes, this chapter therefore locates unresolved questions – about how and why genre structures and their truth-values are produced – at the roots of the affective turn’s methodological corrective.

There is a burgeoning mass of work on affect across the humanities and social sciences, as well as a few accompanying critiques. While this thesis takes a different approach to existing work on affect by focusing on its underemphasised methodological implications, the present chapter is structured to provide insight into the present field of affect 77

studies. For this reason, before turning to Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi’s proposals, a brief introduction to the affective turn and its current critics is provided.

The affective turn While studies of the emotions have been central to key classical and modern works of scholarly inquiry, including Plato (385-380 BCE), Aristotle (1354, 1447), Descartes [1649] (1984), Hobbes [1651] (1994), Darwin (1872), and Nietzsche [1872] (2003), the “affective turn” referred to here has quite a specific genealogy. Charting the recent interest in affect, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth locate early inquiries with Sigmund Freud and Baruch Spinoza. However, they suggest that “undoubtedly the watershed moment for the most recent resurgence of interest and intrigue regarding affect and theories of affect came in 1995 when two essays – one by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold’) and one by Brian Massumi (‘The Autonomy of Affect’) – were published” (2010, 5). Gregg and Seigworth suggest that these two essays underpin the two major strands of contemporary affect theory.41 Sedgwick and Frank emphasise a psychobiological approach, drawing from the work of Silvan Tomkins, while Massumi, drawing from neurobiology and philosophy, anchors his “immanent affect” in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Spinoza. 42 In these definitions, affect is something that operates independently of or through the human, rather than as a property of human personality or relation. Though Tomkins’ and Deleuze’s theories of affect have disciplinary and conceptual differences, they both establish the premise that affective response is precognitive: put simply, stimuli trigger affect before it enters human consciousness. For Deleuze, “Affects are man’s nonhuman becomings” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000, 470). For Tomkins, “feeling and thinking are two independent mechanisms [...] affective judgments may precede cognitive judgments in time, being often the very first and most important judgments” (Tomkins, 2008, 656).43

41 As this thesis is concerned primarily with how these ideas are being used to anchor specific shifts in social science writing practices, it is deliberately limited in its capacity to explore all of these developments here. See Gregg and Seigworth’s Affect Theory Reader (2010) for a comprehensive overview. See also Gregg’s earlier work Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (2006). For other primers with comprehensive bibliographies of work on affect, see Blackman and Venn (2010) and Lloyd and La Caze (2011). For a thorough review of literature within the field of feminist studies dealing with affect see Gorton (2007). 42 Spinoza’s dictum “to affect and be affected” [1677] (2001) is used in the affective turn (Massumi, 1995) as a description of how the world is co-constituted though affect. However, Spinoza’s conception does not account for why the recent proposals exclude language and human agency or intention from this process. 43 Social scientists writing on affect draw across, and often confuse, these two strands. One important point of contention is whether affect and emotion are interchangeable. Sedgwick, following Tomkins, discusses affect in terms of specific emotions such as shame (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995). The main point for Sedgwick is that affect is triggered externally rather than internally from trauma in the psychoanalytic sense. Massumi, however, draws a strict division between affect and emotion, based on the notion that emotions are cognitive structures of 78

Affect theory, influenced by Deleuze, Spinoza, Tomkins, Sedgwick, and Massumi, but also Fredric Jameson’s “waning of affect” (1984) and Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling” (1976), has become increasingly popular since the mid-1990s, sweeping the social sciences and humanities. Its influence can be seen across a diverse range of disciplines, including politics (Ahmed, 2004, Protevi 2009, Brennan, 2003, Connolly, 2002); media studies (Massumi, 2002, Paterson, 2007, Grusin, 2010); gender studies (Blackman, 2012, Berlant, 2000, Liljeström and Paasonen, 2010); queer theory (Cvetkovich, 2003, Love, 2007, Munt, 2008); philosophy (Redding, 1999); geography (Anderson, 2006 and 2009, Carter and McCormack, 2010, Thrift, 2009); art and performance (Altieri, 2003, Best, 2011, Bennett, 2005, Goodman, 2010); social psychology (Wetherill, 2012); sociology (Clough, 2007); film studies (Abel, 2007, Shaviro, 2010); anthropology (Stewart, 2007, Lingis, 2000); and literary studies (Ngai, 2005, Thrailkill, 2007, Riley, 2005). With varying motivations and aims, much of this work champions affect theory for its focus on socially contagious forces that have productive politic effects but often defy human interpretation and are neither logical nor locatable. With this intellectual shift away from causality and cognition, in many cases, comes a stated departure from critical and social scientific methods.

language that distort affect after the event (Massumi, 1995). Massumi’s differentiation of affect and emotion assumes that affect is immune to linguistic representation, and thus cannot be translated into descriptors such as sadness or anxiety. Eric Shouse explains that for Massumi: “affect is not a personal feeling. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal” (Shouse, 2005, unpaginated). An example of the confusion about whether affect and emotion are synonymous or opposed, can be seen in Nigel Thrift’s attempt to genealogise the affective turn in “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect” (2004). Thrift begins the article by referring to specific emotions as affects. “Particular affects such as anger, fear, happiness and joy are continually on the boil, rising here, subsiding there” (Thrift, 2004, 57). However, further into the article Thrift states that he does not think words like anger and joy, along with a host of other emotions, “work well as simple translations of the term ‘affect’. “In particular”, Thrift explains, he “wants to get away from the idea that some kind of root emotion (like shame) can act as a key political cipher” (59). Shame is a political choice to use as synecdoche for discrete emotions because it references Sedgwick and Frank’s seminal article “Shame in The Cybernetic Fold” (1995). Here, Thrift presents the choice to oppose affect and emotion as a choice between Sedgwick and Massumi’s strands of affect theory. An implication of Thrift’s choice to take up Massumi’s opposition of the terms is the dismissal of a significant amount of work on discrete emotions. On the cultural and political workings of shame alone, from disciplines as diverse as sociology, film studies, literary studies, psychology, socio-biology, history, and gender studies, see Pattison (2000), Dalziell (1999), Probyn (2001), Morris (1971), Piers and Singer (1953), Heller (1955), Lynd (1958), Leys (2007), Nussbaum (2004), Chamarette and Higgins (2010), Tangney and Fischer (1995), Najafi, Serlin and Berlant (2008), and Ngai (2005). Put simply, the field of affect theory is a heterogeneous collection of theoretical groups with differing political intentions that often contradict or exclude the work of each other, both knowingly and unknowingly. Additionally, the separation of affect and emotion in particular arguments recuperates the original opposition of emotion and reason. Affect is primordial, felt, and inexplicable, whereas emotion takes on the role of the rationalising, cognised, and inevitably inaccurate interpretation of raw life, in this case. As a final note, it is worth stating that this thesis does not subscribe to the division of affect and emotion, based on these terms. 79

Given the scope, diversity, and contemporaneity of work on affect, it is worth making a side-note on limitations. Like all intellectual groups or movements, the scholars currently working on affect are heterogeneous, yet often subscribe to common assumptions. Addressing this commonality without obscuring the nuances and genealogies of specific arguments presents a challenge. On this count, charges of conflation and selectivity have been levelled against existing critiques of the affective turn.44 As a narrowing of scope, it is therefore important to state outright that this chapter will deal only with the select works of a few scholars, chosen because of their almost ubiquitous reference and canonised status within work on affect and method. The collective term “the affective turn” is thus used in this thesis to denote those scholars discussed directly, who share a common investment in using the concept of affect to revolutionise social science methodology, rather than all work which touches upon affect or emotion. This study is less concerned with the legitimacy of the psychobiological or philosophical history of the theories of affect per se, in terms of comparing the current claims to their summoned forbears, although this endeavour remains an important question. Rather, it focuses on how and why critical interventions from the mid- 1990s onward use affect to launch an argument about what kinds of truth-telling matter. Instead of disproving the foundations of affect theory, this chapter is interested in how the movement sustains itself despite the fact that it is based on various paradoxes. This type of analysis elucidates how the movement effectively challenges its own assumptions about what constitutes veracity.

Existing critiques of the affective turn focus on contemporary affect theorists’ distortions of their intellectual precursors, most often Massumi’s interpretation of affect science. But in addition to these issues of rigour, and attention to what affect theory is premised upon, it is also important to consider what the revelation of affect leverages, perhaps even regardless of its foundational strength, in this case, a methodological turn

44 For example, in their response to Ruth Leys’ “The Affective Turn: A Critique” (2011), Elizabeth Wilson and Adam Frank criticise Leys for her conflation of Silvan Tomkins’ psychobiology with that of other psychobiologists, including Tomkins’ student Paul Ekman. Wilson and Frank state that “the specificities of Tomkins’ work have been badly served in Leys’ essay” (2012, 1). Leys does conflate these scholars as “like- minded theorists”, and does not go into the details of Tomkins’ studies, however this is perhaps understandable given that the subject of Leys’ critique is not Tomkins, or Sedgwick, whose intellectual genealogy often warrants an exposition of Tomkins’ work, but rather Massumi. Similarly, Wilson and Frank devote their counter-critique to a discussion of Tomkins rather than addressing the actual subject of Leys’ critique, which is the scientific validity and ethical implications of Massumi’s interpretation of affect science. To read the body of literature that is affect theory is to become aware of the way conflation is used to aid arguments in some places, perhaps to present a coherent and solid impetus, and then avidly decried at another turn, for the way it obscures specificity. The paradox of conflation flags the importance of critical discernment, but also the struggle we have in making it, due to the confusion of facts and values, of verity and what works as verification. 80

against critique. Indeed, reading through the existing critiques, the threat to social sciences’ methodological value emerges as an under-acknowledged impetus. While these critiques can be read as challenges to the empirical validity of affect theory, they are also protective responses to the ethical and representational implications of its impact. It is not the opening of affect studies that invites criticism from other scholars, but the closing of sociological and critical methods and concerns; the negative undertow to what has proven a productive current. The debate here, as in the previous two chapters, is about the ethics of genre and the question of who has the right to tell which stories and why. In addition to providing insight into the foundations of affect theory, an analysis of these existing critiques draws out the methodological stakes – including the fraught effort to determine a fact’s constitution – of both the affective turn and its reception.

A justifiable defence: existing critiques of the affective turn The general objection of the existing critiques of the affective turn, including Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard’s “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect” (2010), Ruth Leys’ “The Affective Turn: A Critique” (2011), and Claire Hemmings’ “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn” (2006), is that rigorous and responsible scholarship, the thorough and correct citation of arguments from other disciplines and their contexts, has been sacrificed by affect theorists in their fervour to underline the radicalism of their political shift.45 Papoulias and Callard communicate this in their summation that “[t]he (neuro)biology that is summoned in the turn to affect is ... a helpmeet for a distinctly political project” (36). In other words, these critiques argue that the affective turn’s reference to affect science is used to position the turn as a natural and necessary progression, rather than a political manoeuvre: the scientific basis is used and distorted to add validity to a predetermined investment in championing some forms of social science over others.

Papoulias and Callard’s critique focuses on several proponents of the affective turn from diverse, but dialoguing, disciplines. They analyse how scholars such as political philosophers Brian Massumi, Mark Hanson, and William Connolly, as well as cultural geographers Nigel Thrift and Derek McCormack, draw selectively from the research of two

45 Other critiques examine how interest in affect is changing their disciplines, such as Clive Barnett’s ‘Political Affects in Public Space: Normative Blind-spots in Non-representational Ontologies’, (2008), which, focusing specifically on cultural geography and the arguments of Nigel Thrift, follows a similar critical trajectory to the critiques discussed.

neuroscientists, Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, and one developmental psychologist, Daniel Stern (33). Not only is this scientific research distorted in recontextualisation, they suggest it works against the affective theorists’ anti-foundationalist intentions. Unpacking how the affective theorists’ use of neuroscience sits awkwardly with their opposition to the revelatory methods of critique, Papoulias and Callard add that, “[e]ven as affect theory shows how a biology of afoundational foundations can be imagined, the language through which the findings of neuroscience are invoked by cultural theorists is, paradoxically, often the language of evidence and verification” (37). This paradox, of uncritically adopting science’s revelations of evidence on the one hand and denouncing critique’s revelation of evidence on the other, draws out an implicit value system about which disciplines qualify as sciences and which methods are capable of producing truth. Where social science’s critical descriptions presumably fail to document affect, apparently science’s reports can offer authentic insight into affect’s essential nature. Massumi’s understanding of evidence, in particular, is mercurial. At times documented, revelatory knowledge works as a verifying premise, and at others, it remains a futile attempt to represent the unrepresentable.

For Papoulias and Callard, this selectively uncritical reading of experimental scientific evidence revives a host of problematic assumptions about disciplinary value that surfaced during the science wars, including the notion that cultural critique is parasitic upon science rather than a knowledge-producing science in and of itself. As cultural theorists, Papoulis and Callard are troubled by the haste with which the turn to affect dismisses the concerns of the social sciences based on the findings of “real” science. They argue that Massumi frames his work as post-“science wars”, when in fact his argument, which opposes affect and language, actually reaffirms the binary and hierarchy of nature/culture: “Massumi’s description of the humanities needing the sciences ‘for their own conceptual health’ is an indication of how little, rather than how well, cultural theory has resolved one of the central features of the science wars, namely the concern with the legitimation of the kind of knowledge that cultural theory produces” (2010, 39). They surmise that to presume “cultural theory no longer needs to express its hostility to the sciences but instead needs to receive a shot in the arm from them does not indicate that its insecurity concerning its claims to knowledge has been resolved” (39). The full quotation from Massumi affirms Papoulias and Callard’s reading: “[The] fact of the matter is that the humanities need the sciences – entirely aside from questions of institutional power but rather for their own conceptual health – a lot more than the sciences need the humanities’ (2002, 21). In Papoulias and Callard’s 82

critique we see an understandable concern about the implications this revolutionary tone has for the legitimacy of social science, particularly for those social scientists who value the interests or methods to be revolutionised.

The affective turn is actively involved in making judgements about which narratives are worthy of attention. Papoulias and Callard detect a moralising tone in “the ease with which the very distinction between ‘good’ and ‘not-so-good’ theory comes to be made” (48). It is this perceived threat to their own explanatory narratives, suddenly being ushered out of vogue, which compels Papoulias and Callard to ask: “What would such an emphasis on attention [to neuroscience as a disciplinary foundation] do, then, to the practices of humanities scholars and culturally oriented social scientists?” (38). In this context, we can see that the debate is unquestionably about whose stories or careers will be granted legitimacy as much as it is about pointing to the misreading of evidence.

This trepidation is also evident in Hemmings’ critique. The subject of Hemmings’ article, however, differs slightly from that of Papoulias and Callard, and of Leys. She is not concerned with the politics of appropriating scientific research but rather with the role the concept of autonomy plays in these arguments. In line with the other critiques, she is similarly troubled by the implications of Massumi’s characterisation of the body as autonomous and separate from the mind, specifically his claim that affect is “asocial”, that it occurs before, and in isolation from, social meaning (2006, 563). As a social scientist, a feminist studies scholar specifically, Hemmings does not agree with the idea that the body is “asocial” and finds it quite difficult to understand how cultural critics, such as Massumi and Sedgwick, can support the nature/culture division inherent in affect theory’s premise that cultural interpretation straightforwardly and systematically follows natural instinct. Hemmings argues that the implications of this claim, particularly for questions of agency and intention, are overlooked in the blindness of the polemic. She argues that Massumi and Sedgwick are “presented with something of a problem”: As prominent cultural theorists, they cannot fail to be aware of the myriad ways that affect manifests precisely not as difference, but as a central mechanism of social reproduction in the most glaring ways. The delights of consumerism, feelings of belonging attending fundamentalism or fascism, to suggest just several contexts, are affective responses that strengthen rather than challenge a dominant social order. Sedgwick and Massumi do both acknowledge this characteristic of 83

affect in their work, but do not pursue it, interested instead as they both are in that ‘other affect’, the good affect that undoes the bad. (550-551) For Hemmings, these oversights, and their moralising context, are dismissive of her interest in how affect can be something other than politically liberating.

The affective turn’s limited generosity is also drawn out in these critiques. Hemmings’ key question is how affect theorists would have other social scientists respond to the revelation that their current methods, indeed their entire overarching desire to elucidate the mystery of social life, are completely inadequate? Hemmings explains that: “While many will concur with Massumi’s scepticism of quantitative research in its inability to attend to the particular, we are left with a riddle-like description of affect as something scientists can detect the loss of (in the anomaly), social scientists and cultural critics cannot interpret, but philosophers can imagine” (563). She asks: “How then can we engage affect in light of the critical projects we are engaged in, or are we to abandon the social sciences entirely?” (563). In answer to her own rhetorical question, Hemmings states that these proposals make no provision for cultural critics. “In fact,” she argues, “both Massumi and Sedgwick are advocating a new academic attitude rather than a new method, an attitude or faith in something other than the social and cultural, a faith in the wonders that might emerge if we were not so attached to pragmatic negativity” (563). Hemmings is astute in her reading that Sedgwick and Massumi are invested in a revolutionary fervour despite their call to embrace error and ease correction.46 However, to separate these scholars’ theoretical aims from their methodological assumptions, as this last quotation from Hemmings does, skates over the paradox of their concomitant dismissal of and attachment to pragmatic negativity.

The critiques of Papoulias and Callard, Leys, and Hemmings, provide a well-argued insight into the problematic nature of the current turn to affect, principally, the questionable scientific foundation by which it is justified. They establish that influential formulations of affect allow little scope for social scientists interested in investigating or documenting social meaning in any way. However, what these critiques do not discuss is the fact that while Massumi and Sedgwick may not be formulating a precise method for the social sciences and humanities, they are not simply “advocating a new academic attitude rather than a new

46 Hemmings also flags the writers’ division and hierarchy of epistemology and ontology, in which affective being serves as the antidote to an obsession with truth and knowledge. The point to underline here, and it is one that drives this thesis though in different terms, is that the obsession with truth, the state of paranoia, is a lived experience - an ontology - of deducing knowledge, of determining what is true and how we know this. 84

method”. The turn to affect is unequivocally tied to a change in methodology. The science that Papoulis and Callard, Leys, and Hemming’s critiques argue is misread is done so to provide evidence for a turn against critique: to render critical interpretation obsolete and establish the need for new methods. An example of the affective turn’s reception as a specifically methodological turn is evident in Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn’s introduction to Body & Society’s special issue on affect (2010), the very issue in which Papoulias and Callard’s critique features. For Blackman and Venn, the revelation of affect theory is read directly as a call to create new methods. The editors state that their “important focus” for the issue is to “spark interest and ongoing engagement in questions of method and experimentation in light of the common ontologies emerging across the humanities, and the natural, social and human sciences” (7). Citing Nigel Thrift’s (2007) and Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) arguments for a turn from “representational” to “non-representational” forms of analysis, Blackman and Venn explain that: “These examples importantly direct our attention back to method and to a consideration of what different methodologies and apparatuses of creative experimentation afford in terms of the production of particular kinds of ‘effects’ and ‘affects’” (13). As editors collating an overview of affect theory’s impact, Blackman and Venn mark the affective turn as a primarily methodological one, and a call to “creative experimentation” specifically.

The affective turn establishes a moral hierarchy privileging some genres of analysis over others, not only for the evidence it will take into consideration as academic precedents, but for the forms it proposes that the social sciences should adopt. Clearly, it is this very adjudication, the cavalier nature by which traditions and possibilities are dismissed, that fuels the existing critiques of affect. Papoulias and Callard, Leys, and Hemmings are concerned about the dismissal of their intellectual interests. Rather than diminishing suspicion, or opening the scope for generosity, the affective theorists’ sharp turnabout ironically inspires this guarded affect, as other scholars feel that the legitimacy of their work is being unjustifiably devalued. It is upon the question of methodology, an important question clearly at the heart of the affective turn, though given little attention in existing critiques, that this chapter will now focus.

The affective turn: a methodological turn Close attention to key directives in the affective turn - Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” (2004), Sedgwick’s “You’re So 85

Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You: Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” (1997), and Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995) - reveals the enigmatic process by which particular notions of affect are verified. The most provocative entry-point into this inquiry centres on the fascinatingly tautological recuperation of paranoia as a dominant theme, and a position of defense, in arguments against the hermeneutics of suspicion. It is within this contradiction that the division of felt and factual knowledge as separate forms of verification can be seen to unravel.

Creating a fundamental tension, suspicion operates as both the enemy and motor of the affective turn. Using various synonyms, proponents of the affective turn characterise critical methods as paranoid, arguing that they are obsessed with revealing a hidden underbelly of malicious intent. Because critique is assumed to have a predetermined, negative conclusion and an obsession with the revelation of evidence, affect theorists argue that it is unreceptive to the shifting and imperceptible nature of affect. Latour and Sedgwick use paranoia to characterise critique’s rhetorical negativity, its focus on what is absent, and conflate this with moral pessimism. Rather than unpacking how negativity can be productive – as, for instance, negative theology is a productive practice for St. Augustine – Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi charge that to be negative is simply to be jaded. Ironically, they dismiss paranoia through narratives that are hyper-paranoid, peppered with defensive metaphors of militarised, biological, or cultural warfare. Such testimonies rightly arouse our suspicion, not only because they continue to use the very method they dismiss, but because they are verified by an entanglement of evidence that the intrinsic opposition of affect and critique should not allow.

Though Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi, in some instances, install a binary between evidential facts and experiential values, their arguments nevertheless use experience as evidence and highlight the complex process by which we verify facts. Unpacking this paradox is particularly important because, though they malign the hermeneutics of suspicion, their work similarly struggles to put together an explanatory story by relating and conflating different, and often disparate, forms of proof. Though these arguments identify methods as fixed and essentially different – in both means and ends – they can also be seen to enact these same methods’ contingent and lived complexities, thereby challenging the resolution of their own stance and re-enlisting questions about the sociality of method.

Critical conversions Defining critique is not just a historical exercise but an autobiographical imperative for the theorists discussed; the socio-historical setting for their arguments is their own experience of a paranoid zeitgeist. Periods of political vulnerability for intellectuals, including the Cold War, the 1990s culture wars, and more recent public debates about 9/11 and climate change serve as the terms of reference in Sedgwick, Latour, and Massumi’s proposals.47 Sedgwick’s intellectual position develops amidst the anxiety of the AIDS crisis. Latour’s constructivist resolve is shaken by the political unrest over climate change and counter-terrorism. Massumi is arrested by the dangerously charismatic power of then U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s political rhetoric. It is in the context of their own ideological shifts that these theorists tell us to imagine that critique, a defence which was once essential to (their very own) political survival, has now become a mere defence mechanism, a perfunctory reflex. “Are we [scholars] not,” Latour asks, “like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them?” (2004, 225). For Sedgwick the political climate has changed; vigilance is no longer necessary or useful. For Latour and Massumi, the problem is the predictability of this defence; the fact that it is now being appropriated by conservative groups.

The affective turn’s “critique”, does not follow the genealogy that Judith Butler, for instance, traces, via Michel Foucault’s “What is Critique?” [1978] (2002), back to Immanuel Kant, who advocated critique as a method for intellectual scrutiny, freedom, and rigour (Butler, 2002). However, their perception of critique is not unrelated to the specifically political context Butler outlines. Butler explains that, “[a]lthough critique clearly attains its modern formulation with philosophy, it also makes claims that exceed the particular disciplinary domain of the philosophical” (2002, 775). “In Kant, for instance,” Butler notes, “critique operates not only outside of philosophy and in the university more generally but also as a way of calling into question the legitimating grounds of various public and governmental agencies” (2002, 775). Here Butler contextualises critique as a form of pragmatic, political intervention. In the arguments discussed in this chapter, we are introduced to this critique as an already-failed enterprise. For Sedgwick and Latour, critique is a specific and static set of revisionist methods established during their academic coming- of-age, including deconstruction and new historicism. They testify to their own living

47 For two broader and detailed studies of how the Cold War, and the culture wars that followed, have affected intellectuals see Kramer (1999) and Hunter (1991). 87

realisation of these methods’ failure to “call into question” social injustice, or rather, their failure to achieve anything beyond such a call.

What serves as verification in these three theories is at once social and personal. The turn is narrated via the scholars’ testimonies of political events. Basing their call for a disciplinary shift upon autobiographical turning points, these three proposals can be read as what Gerald Peters calls “conversion narratives” (Peters, 1993). To give context for this narrative archetype, Peters casts back to A.D. Nock’s classic study of Christian conversion, which stated that religious conversions involve “a reorientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning from [...] an earlier form of piety, a turning which involves a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right” (Nock, 1933, 7). As Nock suggests, this “reorientation” often forms a moral polemic, a sharp turn from “wrong” to “right”. We witness this conversion in Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi’s manifestos, as they denounce their former faith in critique and turn to new affect- oriented methodologies. Their conversion is then set as a precedent for other scholars. It provides a set reference-point and validation of what is, paradoxically, a questionable interpretation that itself denies the ability to fix a causal origin or rely on pre-existing schemas. Through a series of similar contradictions, their narratives of conversion bolster and challenge the differentiation between, and varied generativity of, different genres of truth- telling.

The “matter of fact” is a “matter of concern”: Bruno Latour A provocative inconsistency arises between the affective turn’s general desire to be inclusive and their intolerance of any and all arguments that rest on suspicion. In Latour’s argument this paradox makes for a confusing train of logic, one that, it becomes clear, cannot quite settle upon the source and boundaries of suspicious reasoning. At its first turn, for instance, critique is paranoid and imposes its negative schema upon social life. Latour argues that critical theory perfunctorily responds to everyday ideologies, facts, and values with extreme paranoia and iconoclasm, and is thus no longer socially useful. The method, in his summation, is exhausted, or worse, has been co-opted into an ominous “right wing”. Following this, Latour argues, critique cannot serve reality, the real stuff of social life, because it has become obsessed with the revelation of falsehood. In the wake of deconstruction, he explains, critics are geared to proving that myriad conspiracies of power underlie the prosaic relations of everyday life. According to Latour, positivists and post- 88

structuralists no longer trust or value facts in-themselves. Insisting that critical theory is infected with paranoia and bypasses the common candour of living, Latour advises scholars to elide critique.

However, in a curious turn, Latour also maintains that critical theory became paranoid because it was polluted by social methods of theorising, such as conspiracy theory. Lost from Latour’s grip, a dumbed-down distortion of critique, used to question the validity of all scientific research and serve moral and political purposes, feeds back from the civic to spoil critical theory with its paranoid logic, its pathological distrust of facts. The public then, in Latour’s plot, is first the victim of paranoid critique, and then its genesis. Thus, in arguing against critique, Latour insists we need to save facts from and for the very same “everyday believers”. By this account, critique is both out of and too in-touch with the everyday attachments that fuel the culture wars, especially the selective verification of facts according to certain values.

With this contagion of knowledge occurring in the post 9/11 political landscape Latour describes, and within the logic of his very argument, Latour’s seemingly uncomplicated shift in method, from critique to realism, is troubled. If both scholarly and social forms of discourse are riddled with paranoia, for example, can we so easily distinguish between the infection and the antidote? By Latour’s own assessment, right wing pundits ventriloquise left wing critics and ivy league-educated intellectuals echo the rhetoric of common conspiracy theorists. In this greenhouse environment, Latour struggles with the task of determining propriety, such as where calls for revelation and exposure truly originate. This confusion generates an important series of overarching questions. For instance, does the dispersed agency of this social scene, the de-centred form of agency Latour encourages, truly warrant the dismissal of a suspicious, critical reading? Or, does the symbiotic flare-up of suspicion in social and scholarly forums suggest a more entangled notion of reality and methods of representation? Is Latour’s own argument, for example, so different from the arguments he suggests are no longer productive? What verifies Latour’s own selection of which facts have value?

We can follow the tangled logic of determining the source and threat of paranoia in Latour’s influential essay about the current state of critical inquiry, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” (2004). To begin, Latour laments 89

that the conspiracy theories of suspicious citizens have infected academic discourse. This is the turning point of Latour’s narrative. His moment of conversion comes when he discerns a blur between left wing and right wing rhetoric. He exemplifies this with what he suggests are the “regrettable remarks” of Jean Baudrillard on 9/11. Baudrillard’s analysis seeks to give credence to the power of the symbolic; Latour however, is averse to this position. He asks: “What has become of critique when a French general, no, a marshal of critique, namely, Jean Baudrillard, claims in a published book that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak, undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself […]?” (Latour, 2004, 228). Needless to say, Latour is not interested in the point Baudrillard is trying to make, but only in its alarming resonance with a French villager who, in the same time period, scoffed at Latour’s belief that terrorists, rather than the CIA, were responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre towers (228).

However, Baudrillard’s argument is relevant to a discourse that questions whether a fictional representation can have more gravity than a verifiable one. Baudrillard is interested in the “spirit of terrorism”, the power that the symbolic played in the 9/11 attacks. In the section that Latour paraphrases here, Baudrillard does not argue that the towers collapsed under their own weight, but that, in a sense, they committed suicide. In this section he refers to the fact that Hollywood produced several filmic imaginings of the destruction of American icons leading up to this event, and that such representations show that this reality was already conceivable (see also Žižek, 2002). Baudrillard is not flippant about the events of 9/11 in the way Latour infers. To the contrary, he suggests that they mark a fourth world war. He suggests that the Towers’ suicide is an example of what he argues is a historical patternment of the inevitable collapse of extreme dominating power. He maintains that the First World War ended colonialism, the second fascism, the third communism, and the fourth globalisation (Baudrillard, 2003, 11-12). Indeed, Baudrillard’s assertion that such events were happening even before they became perceptible to us, is in line with the very argument the affective turn aims to make.48

Latour, however, sees only bad omens in Baudrillard’s argument. He is alarmed by what he hears as echoes of conspiracy theory. “What’s the real difference”, he asks, “between conspiracists and a popularised, that is teachable version of social critique inspired by a too

48 For earlier work on the symbolic and the political, focusing on the Gulf War, see Baudrillard (1995).

quick reading of, let’s say, a sociologist as eminent as Pierre Bourdieu?” (Latour, 2004, 228- 9, note the dichotomy of populism and eminence). Nonetheless, he finds “something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the first movement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling of causal explanations coming out of the deep dark below” (229). It is clear from this statement that Latour sees this work, including Baudrillard’s metaphorical play, as a “troubling”, lesser form of academic inquiry.

The concern here is not with the rupture between social and sociological forms of inquiry but with their alarming similarity. Latour frames this decline into conspiracy theory, the social forums’ improper adoption of “critical thinking”, as the enemy of scholarship. He characterises this antagonism with a recurring warfare metaphor: [C]onspiracy theories are an absurd deformation of our own arguments, but, like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons nonetheless. In spite of all the deformations, it is easy to recognize, still burnt in the steel, our trademark: Made in Criticalland. (2004, 230) With this contamination metaphor Latour represents critique as spoiled. It has turned against the scholars who made it and taken over the entire critical enterprise. Critical reading, as it occurs in the public forum, is seen to be cheapened or commercialised, a deformed syndication, “[m]ade in critical land”, of what Latour deemed to be proper critical theory in its elite, distillate form.

It is important to pause and note that Latour’s argument at this point sounds like an argument against anti-intellectualism, akin to Louis Menand’s “Dangers Within and Without” (2005). Latour frames Baudrillard’s foray into television as a compromise of scholarly rigour and Menand too is concerned by the tendency of academics to adopt the rhetoric of the public sphere in an attempt to be public intellectuals. Menand challenges this trend: The last premise academic humanists should be accepting is that the value of their views is measured by the correspondence of those views to common sense and the common culture. Being an intellectual and thinking theoretically are going outside the parameters of a common culture and common sense – whether it’s string theory or deconstruction. What Derrida believed about how language works is not what the average newspaper reporter believes about how language works. Why is that a scandal? What are philosophers for? For that matter, what are universities for? It cannot be that universities exist to flatter the world’s self- 91

image. That work of flattery is being carried on by powers a million times greater

than ours all the time. (16) Like Latour, Menand is suspicious of the shared motifs in right wing politics and academic discourse. However, whereas Menand concludes that: “We are living in a country in which liberals would rather move to the right than offend the superstitions of the uneducated”, and “that this is an invitation we should decline without regrets” (17), Latour’s argument takes a less cogent turn.

Despite his anxiety about conspiracy-contaminated critique, Latour cites the need to engage more generously with the beliefs, fetishes or common sense of everyday people as the motivation for a proposed shift in methodology. Latour, asserts that critique’s limited “fact” and “fairy” narratives always give the critic the upper hand in unveiling the illusory fetishes of the “naïve believer” (Latour, 2005, 238) and have “had the immense drawback of creating a massive gap between what was felt and what was real” (2010, 4). Latour diagnoses the repetitive faith in de-mystification as bad scholarship and argues for “a suspension of the critical impulse” in order to “repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together” (2010, 4). Thus, while it initially appears that Latour dislikes the infection across academic and quotidian discourses of belief, he calls for the scholar to respect the values of everyday believers, to repair the ruins that are left in the wake of their own iconoclasm.

Latour’s characterisation of both intellectuals and the “naive believers” they are apparently at odds with, however, is needlessly reductive. He argues that “90 percent of the contemporary critical scene” can be summarised as using only two narratives to discuss social life and that the rigidity of these limited forms renders them inept in capturing the complexity of the social. In both cases, Latour suggests, the critic is always right. Latour rejects both positivism and post-structuralism as disingenuous and dismissive, claiming that they both frame the everyday citizen, or “naïve believer,” as a fool. The first narrative is “antifetishism,” or post-structuralism. Latour calls this the “fairy position”. He explains that in this perspective the “role of the critic is … to show that what the naive believers are doing with objects is simply a projection of their wishes onto a material entity that does nothing at all by itself” (238). Latour states that “the courageous critic, who alone remains aware and attentive, who never sleeps, turns those false objects into fetishes that are supposed to be nothing but mere empty white screens on which is projected the power of society, domination, whatever” (238). Latour diagnoses the second narrative, positivism or “the fact 92 position”, as equally dismissive. He suggests that “this time it is the poor bloke, again taken aback, whose behaviour is now ‘explained’ by the powerful effects of indisputable matters of fact: ‘You, ordinary fetishists, believe you are free but, in reality, you are acted on by forces you are not conscious of. Look at them, look, you blind idiot’” (242). His “fact” and “fairy” methods, which encompass most of the sociological work of the past few decades, are cast aside, without specific, cited evidence, indeed without anything other than Latour’s assured testimony. Similar to Felski, whose pejorative definition of critique was discussed in the previous chapter, Latour’s definition of critique is akin to the characterisation of a villain.

It is only toward the end of his argument, when Latour rises among the ruins to shepherd scholars to a new method, that his sardonic tone becomes serious. Framing his moral conversion, he asks: “Is it not time for some progress? To the fact position, to the fairy position, why not add a third position, a fair position?” (243). In a call for new methods, he adds: “Is it really asking too much from our collective intellectual life to devise, at least once a century, some new critical tools?” (243). From “matters of fact”, he proposes a shift to “matters of concern,” where the question would not be whether a fact was true, but of what it was capable. This correction seems to assume that sociological research is not already gauging the productivity of social facts and that its studies into the nature of facticity operate solely to sleuth out illusions, rather than to rethink how society might actualise alternative structures. As the last chapter explored, this is not a fair depiction of the sociological project. Nonetheless, to capture “matters of concern” Latour argues that critique must be replaced with “composition”: a genre he assumes is not geared toward revelation or veracity. Latour offers composition as the corrective of the corrective. “My question is thus”, he states: “can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care […]?” (232). The turn from critique here is methodological and in aid of taking common thought and motives seriously. But, in this conversion, everyday motives become strangely benign. Positing a polemic, Latour casts both academic and quotidian forms of inquiry in a reductive and misleading moral hierarchy.

Reading Menand’s argument alongside Latour’s demonstrates that paranoia is not the only trope arguablely borrowed from more conservative, right wing arguments. The affective turn’s proposal that scholars speak in the terms of, and give primacy to, the beliefs of everyday people, rather than complicating these attachments, is, in Menand’s eyes, akin to 93

the vacuousness of political populism, if not quietism. While Latour intends irony with his characterisation of the didactic intellectual and the “naive believer,” the archetypes begin to take on an earnest quality. After a renowned career illustrating the social construction of scientific facts (Latour and Woolgar, 1979), Latour begins to empathise with the “naive believer” when he hears echoes of his own argument in right wing rhetoric that accuses him of naive belief in the apparently socially-constructed, scientific facts of climate change. Outraged, Latour argues that his argument has been distorted, and facticity imprudently cast aside. As a response he argues that we must refrain from demystifying the commitments of “naive believers” and embrace their attachments as positive productions. Though, not once does Latour consider that climate scepticism, as Menand alludes, is politically supported by these very same not so “naive believers”. The right wing is not an evil omnipotent force but a quotient of civil society, admittedly hailing from calculating boardrooms but also, and in no small part, from the “naive” populace. What forms of social attachment are deemed worthy of “care” is clearly contingent upon Latour’s political perspective, his discernment and judgement about what facts have value, and his implicit insistence that it is still the (iconoclastic) scholar who decides.

Thus while Latour speaks against Baudrillard to begin his argument, the semiotic approach of his fellow “French general” comes closer to the generosity Latour aspires to with his representation of everyday beliefs. Baudrillard presents reality as a symbolic narrative and underlines the realising power of symbols – his account of how the concrete is experienced on a day-to-day level, as a morally and existentially-contested fact, is more complex. The Twin Towers are targeted for their symbolic potential in an act that is actually and symbolically destructive. The terrorism on 9/11 constitutes an act of war, as Baudrillard explains, not just because it destroys buildings and lives, but because it ruptured the cohesive narrative that holds a national, social, political, and economic system together. For Baudrillard, the symbolic power of the World Trade Centre buildings, as icons of North American prosperity, marked them as potential victims in a symbolic war that began long before it was actualised on 9/11. Baudrillard is acutely aware, in this conceptualisation, of the productive and sometimes brutal power of symbolic attachments. The attack upon lower Manhattan was mobilised by the everyday faith in and animation of the act of terror’s symbolic and affective potential; its value as a “wounding punctum” in a narrative of political aggression (Barthes, 1981). In sum, what people believe and why they believe it may deserve

94 something more than reparation if we are to genuinely understand how conviction enacts political reality.

Latour creates a division between intellectual and public discourse which is not necessarily present. He seems not to recognise the first part of his argument, namely, that scholarship has been infected by conspiracy theory’s poor-reasoning and disregard for facticity, conflicts with the second part of his argument, where he claims that academic work needs to come into accordance with how “naïve believers” account for what matters to them. The premise Latour asks for is already apparent, but obviously in a form he does not wish to acknowledge, a form that clearly still requires scepticism as much as generosity. What is a matter of fact and how facts are produced or maintained, is the matter of concern for both scholars and “naïve believers”. These matters are not separate. The fact that people may not accept certain facts, or even disregard them in favour of a differently-evidenced theory, thus questioning what a fact is, does not mean that to those same people facticity is not important. The complexity of our engagement with the question of truth is that in some instances facts may be of the utmost salience to us and at other times have no real purchase at all. Latour’s career is a perfect example of this variability. He is content to question scientific facts until that fact happens to be one he believes in, such as climate change or the real threat of terror. The “danger,” according to Latour, comes not from “an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact […] but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases!” (227). To counter critique, Latour calls for “a realist attitude” (245). But the underlying impetus of critique remains valid with continuing questions, as Latour’s very argument proves, about who has the right to adjudicate which matters of fact are “good” and which realities are “real”.

Epiphanies of evidence: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Latour’s effort to pluralise the way scholars distribute agency – in this case specifically how they read everyday investments in fact – twists back on itself by segregating forms of inquiry and comment, and thus underestimating both the public’s taste for ideology critique as well as positivism’s and post-structuralism’s matters of concern. Similarly, Latour does not account for why the contestation over which facts have value – for instance, climate science – would be abated by a change in social science method, for surely his claim that the methods others value have “run out of steam” perpetuates a certain contestable iconoclasm? The foundation Sedgwick uses to verify her turn from critique is equally provocative. Sedgwick 95

begins her career as a queer theorist, finely attuned to the productive persuasion of cultural narratives and dedicated to uncovering the heteronormative implications of their reproduction. Her field-defining studies, such as Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990), popularised a revelatory methodology in queer theory that sought to draw out the sexualities hidden in canonical, and often heteronormative, works of literature. But after a series of very unique personal events and developments, Sedgwick decides that such work is no longer germane. However, as with Latour, when we look closely at Sedgwick’s testimony about this conversion, the evidence used to verify a turn from paranoid reading to reparative reading actually draws out both the inextricability and ambiguity of these modes.

Sedgwick outlines her turn against critique in an essay that first appeared as the introduction to Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997). In the boldly titled, “You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction is About You: Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” (1997), Sedgwick argues that the essays collected in Novel Gazing present a new precedent for how to read texts. Marking their promise as a departure from the hermeneutics of suspicion, Sedgwick explains that “aside from the deroutinizing methodologies of these essays, what seems most hauntingly to characterise them is how distant many of them are from a certain stance of suspicion or paranoia that is common in the disciplinary work whose ambience surrounds them” (3).

Sedgwick’s intervention favours an earthier engagement with quotidian forms of attention. Initially, her project leavens out its field, asserting values with which this thesis is entirely sympathetic. Sedgwick’s understanding of literary analysis is sociological, as she qualifies, it is “well to attend intimately to literary texts, not because their transformative energies either transcend or disguise the coarser stuff of ordinary being, but because those energies are the stuff of ordinary being” (1). By addressing method, Sedgwick is trying to think through a way to register the lived, everyday texture of her own practice, and specifically the modes by which it is driven and verified. “Suppose one takes seriously a notion” she considers, “that everyday theory qualitatively affects everyday knowledge and experience; and suppose that one doesn’t want to draw much ontological distinction between academic theory and everyday theory; and suppose that one has a lot of concern for the quality of other people’s and one's own practices of knowing and experiencing” (20). “In these cases” she adds, “it would make sense - if one had the choice - not to cultivate the 96

necessity of a systematic, self-accelerating split between what one is doing and the reasons for which one does it” (20). Her project then, aims to be self-reflexive. It also extends its generosity to other scholars, not just ordinary citizens. When Sedgwick praises the work of the essays collected in Novel Gazing, for instance, it is because: “Though passionate, they are also not particularly polemical, and they don't greatly feature the disciplining of previous errors of theory or interpretation.” (1)

Furthermore, Sedgwick values the essays of Novel Gazing for diverging from conventional schemas of “proper” methods, to ask, genuinely, how people read. In this context, they are “remarkable resources for a fresh, deroutinized sense of accountability to the real” (2). By which, Sedgwick adds, she “mean[s] the […] very marked turns these essays take away from existing accounts of how ‘one’ should read, and back toward a grappling with the recalcitrant, fecund question of how one does” (2). In this context, the question of method is initially opened up for scrutiny, not just to decide which is the proper method (for she appears to encourage a plurality), but how such proprieties are adjudicated or relate to acts of reading. In several of its opening considerations and aims, the conception of literature as “the stuff of ordinary being”, the desire to consider “academic theory” as “everyday theory”, or to engage with past interventions rather than dismissing them as erroneous – Sedgwick’s proposal is exceptionally promising. It offers a less caustic and divisive approach to contemporary methodological ethics, one we might use specifically to regauge, or repair, the possibilities of brute critique.

However, despite this sensitive outline of the problems and promise of critical intervention, when we look closely at the continuation of Sedgwick’s argument, particularly how she sets up reparative reading as a correction to paranoid reading, it is clear that her own method remains “polemical” and “corrective of previous errors of theory and interpretation” (1). Sedgwick offers, as Hemmings posits, “the good affect that undoes the bad” (2006, 551), or a new schema for how we “should” read. For Sedgwick, paranoid reading, or “the frequent privileging of paranoid methodologies in [...] feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, deconstruction, Marxist criticism, or the New Historicism,” is out-of-date, a lingering mind- frame from the bygone, Cold War era (7). In a line of reasoning that appears to preserve the methods of New Historicism at the same time as it declares the task of tracing ideological causes and formations redundant, Sedgwick posits Cold War paranoia as the genesis of paranoid reading, which she explains is now an engrained schema being routinely applied to 97

a world it no longer suits. Noting a “a popular maxim of the late 1960s, Sedgwick reasons, “it seems quite plausible to me that some version of this axiom [‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you’] is so indelibly inscribed in the brains of us baby boomers that it offers us the continuing illusion of possessing a special insight into the epistemologies of enmity (7). Sedgwick explains that events like the Watergate scandal bolstered paranoid critique because it proved conspiracy theory correct. “In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systematic oppression,” Sedgwick deduces, “to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant” (Sedgwick, 1997, 5). For Sedgwick, this is a problem because paranoid reading, in addition to being untimely, is beset by essential limitations that render it incapable of achieving (and seemingly earning) her intended generosity. Noting a “property of paranoia itself”, Sedgwick argues that it is “contagious”. She also “explains” that it is anticipatory, and intrinsically pessimistic: “The first imperative of paranoia is ‘There must be no bad surprises,’ […] because there must be no bad surprises, and because to learn of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known” (9). Paranoid reading, in Sedgwick’s definition, is pre-emptive and retaliatory: “Paranoia proposes both ‘Anything you can do [to me] I can do worse,’ and ‘Anything you can do [to me] I can do first’ - to myself” (9). The method is limited, according to Sedgwick, in its perception and response, like a monotonous and predictable reflex involuntarily responding to all stimuli with the same knee-jerk reaction.

After pages of such characterisations, akin to Felski’s description of critique in the previous chapter or Latour’s above, paranoid reading begins to take on the villainous form of Shakespeare’s Iago, inexplicably deluded and deceitful. Isolating the critical method as the bad seed of contemporary theory, Sedgwick contends: it is “only paranoid knowledge that has so thorough a practice of disavowing its affective motive and force, and masquerading as the very stuff of truth” (15). Sedgwick also presents paranoid reading as a deterrent to other more positive forms of inquiry. Critical forms of reading are consistently described, in her text, like a suffocating straightjacket that, always pre-determined, renders alternatives impossible: […] the mushrooming, self-confirming strength of a monopolistic strategy of anticipating negative affect can have […] the effect of entirely blocking the potentially operative goal of seeking positive affect. (14)

[…] to a startling extent, the articulations of New Historicist scholarship rely on the prestige of a single, overarching narrative: exposing and problematizing hidden violences in the genealogy of the modern liberal subject. (16)

The dogged, defensive narrative stiffness of a paranoid temporality, after all, in which yesterday can't be allowed to have differed from today and tomorrow must be even more so, takes its shape from a generational narrative that's characterized by a distinctly Oedipal regularity and repetitiveness: it happened to my father's father, it happened to my father, it is happening to me, it will happen to my son, and it will happen to my son's son. (23)

Like Latour, Sedgwick offers her own conspiracist tone when she represents “paranoid reading” as a malignant growth threatening to subsume scholarly practice.

Fuelled by suspicions about suspicion, Sedgwick argues that “subversive and demystifying parody, suspicious archaeologies of the present, the detection of hidden patterns of violence and their exposure … these … protocols of unveiling have become the common currency of cultural and historical studies” (21). Alluding to a slippery slope, she contends that: If there is an obvious danger in the triumphalism of a paranoid hermeneutic, it is that the broad consensual sweep of such methodological assumptions, the current near-profession-wide agreement about what constitutes narrative or explanation or adequate historicization, may, if it persists unquestioned, unintentionally impoverish the gene pool of literary-critical perspectives and skills. The trouble with a narrow gene pool, of course, is its diminished ability to respond to environmental (for instance, political) change. (21) Akin to Latour’s military crisis metaphor, Sedgwick’s biological crisis creates an alarming atmosphere, forewarning imminent disaster and political paralysis.

In this climate, it is fair to say not only that paranoid reading, a term representative of diverse methods, seems exempt from Sedgwick’s reparation, but also that Sedgwick herself, anticipating and forewarning, remains implicated in this method, even on her own terms. Paranoid reading poses a threat of which to be wary. As Sedgwick scholar Heather Love has argued, “despite the methodological gains and affective appeal of the turn away from critique” she does not “think it’s possible to read Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid and

99 reparative reading as only a call for reparative reading” (Love, 2010, 238). Love asserts that “[t]here is no doubt [Sedgwick] extends this call. But that is not all she does […] the essay itself is not only reparative – it is paranoid” (238). We are then met with the paradox that Sedgwick chooses a paranoid method to argue for reparation; to make a positive intervention, despite her claim that this very method is incapable of such a productive feat. Rather than a clean split with a failed method in favour of a new one then, Sedgwick’s argument presents a complex case of contradiction, self-refuting the negative reduction of critique’s identity and action.

Again, the lack of citation to exemplify critique proves telling, as if to include critique itself might bring “a bad surprise”, or complicate the coherence of reform. The example Sedgwick selectively cites as an example of the paranoid method in queer theory is D.A. Miller’s The Novel and The Police. But even with this example, one she has carefully chosen, Sedgwick struggles to exemplify her point. When she describes the specific nature of Miller’s writing, she must concede that it does not conform to the particular polemic she has outlined. When describing its grim “strong theory”, its affective inflexibility (the opposite of the preferred, “weak theory”), she explains: [T]he very breadth of reach that makes the theory strong also offers the space - of which this book takes every advantage - for a wealth of tonal nuance, attitude, worldly observation, performative paradox, aggression, tenderness, wit, inventive reading, obiter dicta, and writerly panache. These rewards are so local and frequent that one might want to say that a plethora of only loosely related weak theories has been invited to shelter in the hypertrophied embrace of the book’s overarching strong theory. In many ways, such an arrangement is all to the good - suggestive, pleasurable, and highly productive; an insistence that everything means one thing somehow permits a sharpened sense of all the ways there are of meaning it. (14) Allowing, then, that the book is affectively flexible, that it lends and inspires all manner of emotional engagements with its texts and readers, Sedgwick must explain how the text is read as paranoid despite this.

To circumscribe Miller’s text as a limited model, Sedgwick argues that his work, despite its obvious multimodality and nuance, is read only for its “grim” narrative of Victorian literature’s role in reproducing conservative, heteronormative sexual identities: 100

But one need not read an infinite number of students’ and other critics’ derivative rephrasings of the book’s grimly strong theory to see, as well, some limitations of this unarticulated relation between strong and weak theories. As strong theory, and as a locus of reflexive mimeticism, paranoia is nothing if not teachable. The powerfully ranging and reductive force of strong theory can make tautological thinking hard to identify, even as it makes it compelling and near-inevitable; the result is that both writers and readers can damagingly misrecognize whether and where real conceptual work is getting done, and precisely what that work might be. (15) If we recall Felski’s dismissal of Miller’s foundational experience of reading Jane Austen in the last chapter, we can see that Miller, a favourite choice as poster-boy of ideology critique, is robbed here, yet again, of the contradictions within his work that might complicate Sedgwick’s negative polemic. Because Sedgwick assumes, indeed requires, that Miller is only read grimly, because she “anticipates” an always already “bad surprise”, the question of Miller’s defiance of binary methods is shutdown. In the alleged likelihood that all who read his book, students and critics both, will grossly reduce its message – a claim that sits awkwardly with Sedgwick’s suggestion that “popular cynicism, while undoubtedly widespread, is only one among the heterogeneous, competing theories that constitute the mental ecology of most people” (17) – we are meant to take Miller’s text as proof that paranoid reading is bankrupt and that Sedgwick’s reparative reading provides a more generous and ethical method. But as Sedgwick’s text infers, Miller’s critique is not wholly paranoid and Sedgwick’s is not wholly reparative. There is a tension within these methods that challenges their stark oppositional descriptions.

Insight into the contingency of the critical method – as a living struggle of fact and value – is highlighted by the way in which Sedgwick verifies her critique. When setting up the division between paranoid and reparative reading, Sedgwick specifically motions toward their differing relations to truth-value. Marking her project’s interest in unverifiable truths, she claims the essays of Novel Gazing are valuable because they reveal, “that an ethic or aesthetic of truthtelling need not depend on any reified notion of truth” (1). Paranoid reading, in contrast, is geared toward unveiling, or reifying, hidden truths. But in the development of Sedgwick’s critical position, clear distinctions between factual and felt truths are difficult to locate. Her critique, for instance, is verified with a series of personal epiphanies. It is geared toward the revelation of foundational facts, but they are subjective and contestable. However, 101

this does not mean that for Sedgwick these facts, the motor of her critique, are not reified. Indeed, this subjective data is used as a generalizable fact upon which to premise a definitive, academy-wide shift in method. As in Miller’s critique, what occurs in Sedgwick’s argument does not lend evidence to the strict and essential division of affect and critique. The means by which her argument is leveraged confounds such terms. Critique, in Sedgwick’s hands, is not removed from the precarious values of life, but contests and participates in their very reproduction.

In the first example of her argument’s formulation, Sedgwick explains that her review of the utility of paranoid methodologies was provoked by an exchange she had with her friend, the activist and scholar, Cindy Patton, about the origin of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Sedgwick, struck by the ubiquitous speculation about whether “the virus had been deliberately engineered, or spread; whether HIV represented a plot or experiment by the U.S. government which had gotten out of control, or perhaps was behaving exactly as it was meant to,” approached Patton to ask her what she made of “these sinister rumours” (Sedgwick, 1997, 5). Sedgwick was startled by her friend’s response, which, unlike her own keen interest in getting to the bottom of all the speculation, was markedly indifferent to the disease’s origin. Patton argued that she saw little pragmatic worth in the possible revelation of such knowledge: [E]ven suppose we are sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants ... supposing we were ever so sure of all those things – what would we know then that we don’t already know? (Patton in Sedgwick, 5) Sedgwick explains that this statement was a turning point for her: it helped her unpack “the intellectual baggage that many of us carry around under a label like ‘the hermeneutic of suspicion’” (3). Sedgwick decided that her academic practice need not be based on the question of “is a particular piece of knowledge true”, but “[w]hat does knowledge do?” (5).

Sedgwick’s point of departure from this revelation is interesting, because she decides to move away from a methodology of exposure, and in doing so, does not question whether her friend’s premise itself is necessarily true, or socially representative. She emphasises a turn to pragmatism, but seems to assume that the pursuit of truth was not already 102

pragmatically motivated. There is a fairly sizable and important difference between whether a disease is a naturally-mutated phenomenon or whether it was a deliberate act of systemic genocide. It is questionable whether this information would have little utility or effect. The revelation of the Holocaust death camps, surely of comparable horror to the suggestion of this more recent fascist genocide if it were true, certainly could not be said to have had no important constitutive political, historical, or social effects. It may not be of interest to Patton, but to suggest that the revelation of this would be of little utility in general, and to take this statement as the reason to move away from an academic practice of uncovering factual oversights and inconsistencies, seems unjustified.

Nevertheless, Sedgwick makes a similarly testimonial argument in “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes” (2007), again presenting a very personal and intuited account of why suspicion is no longer an appropriate orientation toward political reality. To support her argument against paranoid reading, Sedgwick returns to her experience of the 1980s AIDS epidemic. She offers this personal trajectory, again a casual and linear reading of events, to justify a dramatic shift in critical perspectives. It is worth closely following how this argument unfolds in order to understand the personal and contingent logic that verifies Sedgwick’s turn against paranoid methods.

To begin, Sedgwick argues that, particularly in her field of queer theory, the guiding theoretical force of paranoia was justified in “the 1980s and early 1990s” by the fear and discrimination of the AIDS epidemic, by “the not knowing what kind of response to AIDS might crystallize from the state or public sphere” (638). Sedgwick captures the palpable sense of impending terror the queer community felt at that historical moment: This was the time when, despite the hecatombs of dead, the word AIDS didn’t cross the lips of the U.S. president for the first six years of the epidemic, while prominent legislators and complacent pundits busied themselves with fake- judicious, fake-practical, prurient schemes for testing, classifying, rounding up, tattooing, quarantining, and otherwise demeaning and killing men and women with AIDS. (2007, 638-9) Sedgwick explains that “the punishing stress, of such dread, and the need for mobilizing powerful resources of resistance in the face of it, did imprint a paranoid structuration onto the theory and activism of that period, and no wonder” (639). From this temporal perspective, Sedgwick shifts slightly to reassess the calamity in hindsight, a stance from which the 103 actuality of the impending threat is softened into a fantasy, albeit a noble and “inescapable” one: Now we live in a world in which most of these things haven’t happened, at least in relation to AIDS. But they were staples of public discourse at the time, and there was no visible brake on their implementation from any sanctioned, nonhomophobic argument in the public sphere. The congruence of such fantasies—fantasies that never understood themselves to be such—with Foucauldian understandings of how panoptic power gets embodied through the disciplines of bureaucracy, law, psychiatry, science, and public health, was inescapable to those who awaited or fought to prevent their implementation. (639) In these passages, Sedgwick illustrates that queer theory was justifiably defensive in its battle to draw out the murderousness in protectionist, homophobic rhetoric that was, (and arguably still is), reproduced in certain social structures and institutions. Sociological critique, as a means to wrestle with these structures, was welcomed in the humanities as a consequence.

However, in “the mid-1990s,” the time that marks a resurgence of affect theory, Sedgwick explains that “developments both public and private came together, for [her], to produce some changed relations to paranoid thinking and writing” (639). “A nodal point,” she states, was the revelation that AIDS could be medically treated and the life of its sufferers prolonged (639). As a result, Sedgwick explains that: “Along with many, many others, [she] was trying over that summer to assimilate an unaccustomed palette of feelings among which relief, hope, and expansiveness and surprise set the tone” (639). At the same time, Sedgwick learns she has advanced breast cancer. Reckoning with her illness, she suspects that her “lifelong depressiveness,” has made her “perhaps oversensitive to the psychic expense exhorted by the paranoid defences” (640). With regard to her own health, Sedgwick states “I knew for sure that the paranoid/schizoid was no place I could afford to dwell as I dealt with the exigencies of my disease” (640). Summating the basis of these two personal shifts - an improvement in the prospects for people suffering from AIDS and her decision, in the face of terminal illness, to depart from what she feels to be a draining practice – Sedgwick states that: “At any rate, for reasons both private and public, I found myself at this point increasingly discontented with the predominance of the self-perpetuating kinds of thought that I increasingly seemed to be recognizing under the rubric of paranoia” (640). It is for these very personal reasons, based on a need to conserve her energy and her sense of relief as AIDS became less stigmatised and less threatening, that Sedgwick instigates a turn away 104

from paranoid reading and critique. In contrast, Sedgwick explains that she has shifted to fields she finds more relevant to her own experience, including Buddhist writings and the affect theory of Tomkins and Klein.

However, Sedgwick’s very personal, and conditional, revelation develops into a directive for scholarship and society as a whole. She states that “a lot of more recent queer theory has retained the paranoid structure of the earlier AIDS years, but done so increasingly outside of a context where it had reflected a certain, palpable purchase on daily reality” (640). Based on her own intellectual, personal, and emotional trajectory, Sedgwick’s shift is understandable, however it is important to consider what is implicit in her reflection that “[n]ow we live in a world in which most of these things haven’t happened, at least in relation to AIDS” (639, emphasis added). Sedgwick does not pursue this qualification, however it is important to seriously consider that the anxieties she argues are no longer evident in the queer community do remain relevant to other social groups facing other social crises. Such a consideration questions whether Sedgwick is right to extend the timeliness of her personal conversion to the broader populace.

There may be truth to Sedgwick’s observation that the queer community is no longer stigmatised and threatened to the extent that it was in the 1980s, at least in the West. Certainly there was a fever-pitch of moral panic at this time, when the Australian government, for instance, screened a horrifying, nation-wide AIDS prevention ad-campaign featuring a scythe-wielding grim reaper and forewarning – with a voice-over citing projective statistics and footage of dead bodies piling up in the mist – of an impending death count to rival the Holocaust. This level of public paranoia around AIDS has abated. However, as a reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a new set of citizens have become the target of moral panic, indeed we could re-use the very terms Sedgwick uses in reference to the 1980s to describe the kind of logic that supported extraordinary rendition policies during the Iraq war. In this case, “prominent legislators and complacent pundits busied themselves with fake- judicious, fake-practical, prurient schemes for [...] classifying, rounding up, quarantining, and otherwise demeaning” (638-9) people they deem to have no civil rights, not on the basis of potential infection, but on the basis of their religion, nationality, and familial or political affiliations. Giving xenophobia a new focus in the lead up to the 2013 Australian federal election, for instance, a parliamentary candidate of the incoming government, Fiona Scott, publicly blamed traffic congestion and delays in hospital medical centres on asylum seekers

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in support of one of her party’s leading election slogans: “stop the boats” (Four Corners, ABC, 02/09/2013). In this context, though Sedgwick may claim that the critical desire to examine causal connections and uncover injustice is no longer valuable to her, she cannot justifiably claim that it has no political purchase in general.49 Again, an argument trying to persuade us that evidence is no longer contentious, that it no longer harbours hidden biases, and that ideologies are not being reproduced, summons a contrary conclusion.

As Latour and Sedgwick’s arguments demonstrate, what verifies a critical turn does not have to be logically coherent and carefully verified: knowledge is actualised by facts, rhetoric, assumptions, intuitions, projections, and other contingent forms of evidence. Despite the problematic nature of both Latour and Sedgwick’s points of departure, each a reactive and subjective reading of political reality, their experiences leverage a dramatic and influential departure in methodology – purportedly from suspicion and facts to reparation and concern. However, the detail of these arguments prove that both scholarly and social methods demand more nuance than such polemical limitations allow, and yet the question of why a hermeneutics of suspicion has become prominent in both academic and social forms of inquiry is abandoned in favour of a new slate. Critique, in its incurable paranoia, is represented as irreparable and unworthy of concern. It is clear that Latour and Sedgwick still rely upon the efficacy of critical discernment to make these pronouncements, and that social forums remain fraught with combative and rhetorical accounts, and yet they maintain that it is time to abandon investigative methods.

Such arguments against critique install a resolute, moral opposition of pessimistic and optimistic methods, even though to do so works against their efforts to rethink divisive structures of knowing. In his “Compositionist Manifesto” (2010), for instance, Latour offers compositionism as the moral diametric of critique. Composition emerges not as a clear method but as a general orientation against critique, though Latour states that he likes the term because “it has clear roots in art, painting, music, theater, dance, and thus is associated with choreography and scenography” (474). His argument is that in order to be ethical we must be caring, and in order to do this we must use methods of creation instead of what he

49 It is worth noting that the European Unions’ reports on the U.S. government’s extraordinary rendition policies, revealing secret government acts including the inter-country transport and unlawful detention of citizens, were released and highly publicised in 2006 and 2007, the year leading up to the publication of Sedgwick’s article. 106

sees to be critique’s innate destructiveness (473). Latour reiterates his earlier position, arguing that critique has expired: To be sure, critique did a wonderful job of debunking prejudices, enlightening nations, prodding minds, but, as I have argued elsewhere, it ‘ran out of steam’ because it was predicated on the discovery of a true world of realities lying behind a veil of appearances. (Latour, 2010, 475) Making a polemical distinction between critique and composition, he argues that “what performs a critique cannot also compose” (475). In reference to one of Ricoeur’s masters of suspicion, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, Or, How to Philosophise with a Hammer [1888] (1986), Latour explains that, “[w]ith a hammer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together” (475). However, the broader social context of Latour’s project, his desire to move beyond Cold War paranoia, begins precisely with a hammer, as the destruction of the Berlin Wall ushered in the end of the Cold War and was, for some, the first step both in assembling peace and stitching Europe back together. Nonetheless, Latour deems it “necessary to move from iconoclasm to […] the suspension of the critical impulse [...]” (475).

However, while there is evidence to locate paranoia, although not exclusively, within the Cold War era, little more than a personal fatigue with criticism is offered to justify why our current age demands a radically different, and allegedly more hopeful and credulous, approach.50 Indeed, when we look at other work on paranoia, it is not clear that suspicion is a redundant or unwarranted reaction, precisely because the means by which knowledge is actualised are unpredictable and insecure. As Marita Sturken explains, “we have moved from various phases of late modern optimism into cold-wars fears, from 1960s disillusion to a late twentieth-century culture in which conspiracy theory forms a primary narrative” (1997, 64).

50 Sedgwick is not the first literary theorist to limits critique’s relevance to the Cold War period. Tobin Siebers’ Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (1993) similarly states that “Modern criticism has made a virtue of cold war paranoia” (34). Though it is also important to note that while Siebers promotes a comparable shift, he paradoxically acknowledges that although the “era began officially with [Winston] Churchhill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in March 1946, and until recently ... was believed to have ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 ... The cold war is in part a history of false endings” (Siebers, 1993, 29). Thus, when he describes the “cold war effect” as a self-perpetuating mode of defence, (“We have seen the cold war come and go so many times ... It is a state that requires scepticism, and this scepticism in turn preserves the state” [29-30]), we can assume that it may still be necessary. While Sedgwick argues that cold war paranoia is stale, Sieber’s admission that its trigger endures indefinitely adds an interesting context for the persistence of paranoia in the arguments discussed here.

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Discussing the prevalence of paranoid themes in twenty-first century literature, Emily Apter argues that paranoia is a response as relevant now as it was in the Cold War period. “Now, as then,” she argues, “paranoia assumes the guise of a delusional democracy buoyed by cascading national cataclysms: the Bay of Pigs, The Kennedy and King assassinations, Kent State, the FBI hunt for Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army and Weather Underground radicals, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, and 9/11” (Apter, 2006, 368). Taking up the most recent of these events, Apter explains that, “[p]aranoia has returned with a vengeance as the ordre du jour in the aftermath of 9/11” (369). Contrary to Sedgwick’s argument that paranoia is a remnant of the political past, Apter argues that in the aftermath of this event, the American citizen has been “exhorted by Washington to connect the dots, to posit connections between weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the world trade centre attacks” (369). Apter adds to this that: In this scheme, what we are told is connected is rivalled only by what we are asked to believe is not connected: there is apparently no link between oil and the Iraq invasion, no coincidence between electioneering politics and war, no cause- effect relationship between the media-hyped epistemology of insecurity and the abrogation of civil liberties. (369) To Apter’s account we could add more recent cases such as the exposé of torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, or the ongoing Wikileaks scandals. Is paranoid reading truly inappropriate when the public learns in 2013, via the whistle-blowing, former CIA and NSA computer technician Edward Snowdon, that the United States of America’s National Security Agency, operating a mass surveillance network, can access and monitor the social- networking accounts, emails, word documents, video-chats, file transfers, and browsing history of both U.S. and non-U.S. citizens at any time without court-approval? In the political climate that Apter describes here, where a complex state of paranoia is almost a prerequisite of citizenship, it is clear why the zeitgeist is, in this time, as paranoid as ever and why a hermeneutics of suspicion remains pertinent.

Latour and Sedgwick maintain that paranoia is not necessary and that the social scientist must inoculate herself against it. However, inherent in this argument is a certain disconnection from the fact that social science is itself of the very social it seeks to document. Such a consideration sees more than an alarming error in the correlation between Latour’s French villager and his colleague, Baudrillard. In his discussion of the paranoid style, George E. Marcus concurs that a paranoid perspective has become inextricable from inquiry, 108

however he does not see this as a problem: “The legacies and structuring residues of [the Cold War] era make the persistence, and even increasing intensity, of its signature paranoid style now more than plausible, but indeed, an expectable response to certain social facts” (Marcus, 1999, 2). What Marcus suggests here is that in an era when the person is faced by the very real threat of the conspiracy and corruption of power, the paranoid style is an inevitable response. 51 Marcus does not see the paranoid style as necessarily limiting. He wishes to “come to terms with the paranoid style, not as distanced from the ‘really’ rational [...] but within reason, as a ‘reasonable’ component of rational and commonsensical thought and experience in certain contexts” (Marcus, 1999, 2). Marcus and Sedgwick see the Cold War legacy of paranoia in markedly different ways: Marcus sees the legacy in the fact that people could no longer trust their governments, whereas Sedgwick sees the legacy as the tyrannical suspicion of McCarthy himself. But of course both positions were inherent and instrumental to the same political reality.

It is the fact that people, like Sedgwick and Marcus, experience and interpret facts and their consequences in very different ways that is at stake in this discussion. It is difficult to draw a rigid line between, and singularly adjudicate the validity of, matters of fact and matters of concern. The experiential moment that Sedgwick uses as evidence for her turn away from critique, her revelation that the true cause of AIDS is not necessarily a productive piece of knowledge, may not necessarily be sound evidence to someone else. As both Sedgwick’s and Latour’s testimonies illustrate, suspicion is vital in an arena where what constitutes a fact is both contingent and contested, or when influential theorists can, without reserve, say that what is important to others, and indeed, what was once important for them, is simply and finally valueless. Pessimism is not inherent to critique itself, but rather to the affective turn’s quite narrow definition of it. It is a presumption that affect theorists tend to

51 Corroborating Marcus’ statement, we are confronted daily with stories of this enduring political reality. One current example that comes to mind is the recent discussion of the corruption surrounding the drilling of gas fracking on residential land and its consequential pollution of drinking water supplies. The recent political documentary Gasland (2010), depicts the everyday plight of people who, increasingly unable to live on their own land due to this chemical pollution, have been labelled paranoid, with the corporations responsible denying the validity of their claims. The documentary captures the real conditions under which a paranoid position becomes perfectly reasonable. Information is consistently denied to the filmmakers, and phone-calls, interviews, and emails are evaded. The revelation of such cases has been consistent in recent years, with texts such as Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action (1996) also detailing a cover-up of the connection between industrial water contamination and public health problems. Where people have to deal daily with a lack of transparency, it is little wonder that they are suspicious. The assumption that social scientists should somehow be immune to such shifts (or affective forces for that matter), or indeed, position themselves outside them, deserves to be treated with some suspicion also. 109

defend, but in the act of being defensive in the name of ethics, it is also a presumption they undercut.

The suggestion that we abandon the malignance of suspicion for “benign” experimentation is problematic precisely because the negativity of critique, the desire to hear what is silenced, and to consider its productive force, is not inherently pessimistic or lacking in creativity: surely such suspicion can also be pedagogical, protective, enabling, and caring? Latour argues that to progress in scholarship we must become “caring”, but caring is not inherently benign. To care about something might mean to fight for it, to be both defensive and judicious. The affective turn consistently represents the affect of paranoia and the method of critique in a pejorative and limited fashion, but without any concession that genres change and can be animated by different affects and to different effects.

There is a profound appeal to censorship within these arguments. Their censorious attitude to critique in the name of social ethics does not account for how vital critical faculties are to the everyday citizen as a means to participate in democracy, the law, and the market, forums that require us to navigate, and often challenge, rhetoric and our involvement in its structuring force on a day-to-day basis. The field-defining arguments of Latour and Sedgwick summon several very important questions about the continuing power of ideology and thus ideology critique. However, these questions are prematurely shut down, and even stigmatised. Not content to simply adopt new methods, the decision of other scholars to persist with critique, and seemingly the integrity of intellectual rigour more generally, is mocked. For example, Sedgwick claims: Whatever account it may give of its own motivation, paranoia is characterized by placing, in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se – knowledge in the form of exposure. Maybe that’s why paranoid knowing is so inescapably narrative. Like the deinstitutionalized person on the street who, betrayed and plotted against by everyone else in the city, still urges on you the finger-worn dossier bristling with his precious correspondence, paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known. That a fully initiated listener could still remain indifferent or inimical, or might have no help to offer, are hardly treated as possibilities. (1997, 17)

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Earlier scorned for her guile, the pathetic critic is now ridiculed for his guilelessness. The anti-intellectualism here is explicit; the very notion that critics would think their research productive and socially valuable, or that other people might be receptive to their accounts, becomes comedic. In consideration of such summary dismissals, claims to have discovered how to be more generous than previous critics test credibility. With such boundaries in place, the kind of project this thesis envisions, for instance, one that opens questions about the nature of evidence and tracks social debates about the evaluation of different genres and modes of truth-telling, would be curbed. However, though this may be the argument the affective turn overtly presents, it is not the only, or indeed the most persuasive, contribution they offer. Intricate projects of narrative sense-making and locating authorial and causal accountability continue to drive the turn against critique, despite the fact they are effectively self-negated.

The turn from critique to affect may guard against questions of truth and representation and deride scholars who remain faithful to critical methods, but this cannot wholly obscure the fact that their arguments remain invested in these very questions and ideals. Latour and Sedgwick point to ideologies, they critique their scholarly precedents, they represent society on both macro and micro levels, and they argue for superior methods that they claim will “finally, this time, get the story truly known” (Sedgwick, 1997, 17). The affective turn is an exercise in exactly what it claims to depart from. It is a self-assured diagnostic about what narratives should qualify as truthful, factual, valuable, or authentic, and it claims exclusive insight into the realities of social attachment. Its arguments do not work in favour of its aims, namely to be inclusive or reparative. Therefore, to engage with the turn against critique and its implications, we must next consider what is at stake in this act of self- negation. Is the “negative” more than it appears?

Brian Massumi’s theorisation of affect, for instance, aims to create a radical form of scholarship. But what kind of political intervention can be made within the terms he offers? Massumi’s argument censors social conjecture and discourse in an even more extreme formation than do Sedgwick and Latour. Where they oppose affect, or at least generosity, to critique, Massumi opposes affect to linguistic representation as a whole. Massumi’s project agitates political discourse, specifically activism against neoliberalism. But followed to its conclusion, his division of experience and language also presents troubling implications for the very efficacy of discourse and activism. In the politics of affect would questions of human 111

agency, intention, structure, and judgement be of little consequence? Would semiotic, democratic, and critical dissent be possible? How does activism work if politics is refigured in this way? Bending back on itself, Massumi’s scientifically-verified, written manifesto against causal and representational forms of critique suggests that a non-judgemental, non- representational form of scholarly intervention proves difficult both to theorise and achieve. Importantly, language, narrative, and interpretation remain the terms with which he expresses his desire to know affect and its social effects.

The tangled facts of affect: Brian Massumi Massumi’s most-cited and influential work, “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995), characterises affect as an uncategorisable force beyond human intention or representation. It argues against the efficacy of structural or sociological critique and posits affect as a new tool for political resistance. However, reading Massumi’s earlier formulation of affect, in The Politics of Everyday Fear (1993), the cogency of this more recent political solution becomes unsettled. Examined closely, Massumi’s work on affect actually begins as a distinctly suspicious examination of fear as an oppressive, social structure motoring our economic system. In this early text, Massumi struggles with questions such as how a force of affect is reproduced, what social atmosphere it creates, and how it can be transformed. Yet these questions, as well as the very ability to ask them, are circumvented, though importantly not resolved, by his later insistence that affect is autonomous from human interpretation and intervention. Tracing the logic of Massumi’s turn from a social to an asocial definition of affect provides insight into the process by which certain questions, questions that seem crucial to the democratic, political agency Massumi values, fall out of his influential affect theory. Indeed, with close attention, the reader can often see how the analytical methods Massumi appears to rule out actually remain productive within, and vital to organising, his argument. The puzzle of intention that troubles Massumi’s earlier work on social affect continues to haunt his later ‘asocial’ affect theory and its reception, and it is this tension that works to challenge his later reduction of methods and genres into static, essentialist categories. Importantly, reading “against the grain” of Massumi’s stated intentions, or perhaps more accurately, acknowledging their somewhat muddled directions, opens the tensions that inhere within questions of authorial responsibility.

In his original formulation of affect, Massumi shifts from a structural to an autonomous affect. Across these two conceptions the intellectual’s ability to respond to and 112

intervene in social processes differs dramatically. In The Politics of Everyday Fear, Massumi offers a dystopic view of social reality; “the saturation of American social space by mechanisms of fear production” (viii). Indeed, for Massumi, fear has become indistinguishable from the human subject, with all attempts at resistance absorbed into acts of complicity. Massumi prefaces his introduction with a series of questions that construct fear as both politically disabling and inescapable. They also express Massumi’s struggle to locate a means of resistance to such a self-perpetuating socio-economic system: Have fear-producing mechanisms become so pervasive and invasive that we can no longer separate our selves from our fear? If they have, is fear still fundamentally an emotion, a personal experience, or is it part of what constitutes the collective ground of possible experience? Is it primarily a subjective content or part of the very process of subject formation? ... If we cannot separate our selves from our fear, and if fear is a power mechanism for the perpetuation of domination, is our unavoidable participation in the capitalist culture of fear a complicity with our own and others' oppression? [...] Most of all, how, now, does one resist? (1993, ix) Thus, Massumi begins his research on affect - here an all-pervasive fear - with a distinctly sociological sense of how it sustains and is sustained by social, economic and political structures that are very difficult to reform. In his description above, the subject’s agency is suffocatingly complicit in the perpetuation of the very fear that plagues her, but there is still a question of the subject using their agency to resist.

In the quotation that follows, we sense this sociological understanding of agency slip away. Uncannily pre-empting the forthcoming conversions of Latour and Sedgwick, who are dissatisfied with the discourses surrounding climate change and AIDS respectively, Massumi focuses on two political crises that, for him, demonstrate an amorphous enemy, but crucially now, also the futility of defence: The Communist as the quintessential enemy has been superseded by the double figure of AIDS and global warming. These faceless, unseen and unseeable enemies, operate on an inhuman scale. The enemy is not simply indefinite (masked, or at a hidden location). In the infinity of its here-and-to-come, it is elsewhere, by nature. It is humanly ungraspable. ... The theory that HIV is the direct “cause” of AIDS is increasingly under attack. More recent speculations suggest multiple factors and emphasize variability of symptoms. AIDS, like 113

global warming, is a syndrome: a complex of effects coming from no single, isolatable place, without a linear history, and exhibiting no invariant characteristics. (1993, 11) 52 The scope of causality becomes overwhelming here, but though it is complex, culpability remains a vital political question, as those who attack the theory of HIV as the origin of AIDS would attest. For Massumi, however, this complexity defies the ability to locate responsibility. In a hyper-paranoid final line, he states: “The pertinent enemy question is not Who?, Where?, When?, or even What? The enemy is a Whatnot?--an unspecifiable may- come-to-pass, in an other dimension. In a word, the enemy is the virtual” (11). In later work on affect, Masumi turns even more dramatically from questions of causality, accountability, and political responsibility, yet curiously still in the name of political intervention. The fraught question of how scholars can enact political resistance is circumvented by theorising that affect, the political agent to which we must direct our attention, is itself resistant to the very means of an intellectual intervention: evaluation, cognition, and language.

By the time Massumi comes to write “The Autonomy of Affect”, a leap has been made and affect and emotion are represented as mutually exclusive entities. Where a collective social fear was seen to be motoring not only itself, but the capitalist economy, affect, now undefined and non-human, is salvaged as an, albeit unharnessable, form of resistance. The questions that Massumi raises in The Politics of Everyday Fear, indeed the very reality he describes, are not simply put aside but utterly devalued. The project of mounting a traditional, scholarly, political intervention is abandoned. In order to create a form of resistance, Massumi not only changes the terms of response, he changes the terms of the problem. The fraught question of our authorial complicity in the production of fear is “solved” with the debatable suggestion that we do not consciously “author,” and thus cannot be accountable, for affect. The negative context of saturation and suffocation is exchanged for the happier prospect of potential and momentum. This is done by separating affect out from its received history as a taxonomy of emotional affects, and making it something Massumi theorises as an unrepresentable force demanding new methods.

52 This characterisation also foreshadows the conceptions of Jane Bennett’s New Materialism (2010) or Latour’s Actor Network Theory (2005), both of which position themselves as remedies for critique. Massumi and Bennett’s radical distribution of agency, the conclusion that it is impossible (or anthropomorphic) to attribute blame to a human actor, resembles the legal workings of the contemporary corporation, whose actions as legally human, and yet clearly non-human, cannot be brought back to one responsible entity. This legal manoeuvre is used to deflect responsibility in the case of wrongdoing, in aid of retaining financial profit. Considering this parallel, the idea that agency cannot easily be attributed to human actants alone, or indeed, any one cause, may not be as resistant to capitalism as Massumi and other post-human arguments assumes. 114

To establish affect as a field immune to language, Massumi characterises emotion as affect that has been “pinned down” and defined in words, rendered static by structure and thus redundant in explaining a rapidly changing world.53 Massumi explains that: “What they lose, precisely, is the expression event – in favour of structure” (87). He suggests that: Much could be gained by integrating the dimension of intensity [a word he suggests is interchangeable for affect] into cultural theory. The stakes are the new. For structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules. (87) Massumi sees language itself as devoid of affective force; as a debilitating anchor, inherently opposed to affect. Similarly, affect is seen to operate in a way that is oblivious to structure, which Massumi assumes, in clear disregard for post-structuralist insight, to be entirely rigid and static. And yet Massumi preserves structure, employing a structural binary to register affect as inherently different (dynamic and natural) and separate from language (static and cultural).

Massumi then uses these seemingly structural and intrinsic qualities of affect to render critique obsolete: “[affect] is not ownable or recognizable, and is thus resistant to critique” (88). Explaining this point further in an interview, Massumi argues that “‘[c]ritical’ practices aimed at increasing potentials for freedom or for movement are inadequate, because in order to critique something in any definitive way you have to pin it down” (Massumi in Zournazi, 2002, 220). Marking critique as unethical, he further contends that this “pinning down” “is an almost sadistic enterprise that separates something out, attributes set characteristics to it, then applies a final judgement to it – objectifies it in a moralising kind of way […] I think [critique] loses contact with other more moving dimensions of experience” (220). Massumi offers affect theory, though its exact application remains opaque, as a solution to critique: “[critique] doesn’t allow for other kinds of practices that might not have so much to do with mastery and judgement as with affective connection and abductive participation” (220). For Massumi, the term judgement stands in for Latour and Sedgwick’s paranoia to denote a perfunctory and ineffectual authorial stance:

53 Alongside the argument that emotions, as linguistically anchored affects, cannot capture change it is perhaps interesting to consider that the etymology of the word “emotion” suggests something different: the French émotion, means “to stir up” or “agitate,” and similarly from the Latin emovere, means “to move out”. 115

A critical perspective that tries to come to a definitive judgement on something is always in some way a failure, because it is happening at a remove from the process it’s judging. Something could have happened in the intervening time, or something barely perceptible might have been happening away from the centre of the critical focus. These developments may become important later. The process of pinning down and separating out is also a weakness in judgement, because it doesn’t allow for these seeds of change, connections in the making that might not be obvious at the moment. In a sense judgemental reason is an extremely weak form of thought, precisely because it is so sure of itself […] (220-1) It is true that narratives may be contrived into a generic coherence that works against a reality not so easily sutured together, and that, in persisting with this desire for coherence, we may miss the way that life often defies it. However, can this same accusation be held against Massumi’s own diagnosis of language’s petrifying power? On Massumi’s own terms, can language, its actual ontology and workability, so easily be “pinned down”? Massumi’s argument against structure, measurability, and explanatory categories, is paradoxically made using traditional binary structures of definition, which, as we can see, are anything but a place “where nothing ever happens” (1995, 87). Massumi’s argument is rich with such paradoxes, all of which challenge his opposition of affect and language and foreground the persuasive nature of rhetoric as a mercurially verified mix of generic and evidentiary codes.

The vacillating nature of empirical verification is drawn out most interestingly in Massumi’s invocation of scientific evidence to verify his theorisation of an afoundational affect. Here his formulation of a seemingly static opposition of affect and representation cannot finally “pin down” the nature of either of these entities. To examine this process of verification, it is useful to reconsider Massumi’s use of affect science as a foundation that, contingent upon and tailored to his argument, further disrupts the division of fact and interpretation as forms of evidence. Massumi’s contention that affect is immune to representation, (seemingly with the exception of his description of it as resolutely asocial), are based upon two scientific experiments that he outlines in “The Autonomy of Affect”. The first of these, “The Snowman Experiment”, was a German study conducted in the 1980s about the emotional effects of the media. In this experiment, children, hooked up to galvanic equipment reading their bodily reaction, had to watch three versions of the same short film about a man and his snowman. The first had a factual soundtrack. The second had a soundtrack with key emotional directives. The third was silent. Massumi reads the fact that 116

the children had the longest memory of the emotional version as evidence that the emotional resonates with us more than the factual. He also interprets the children’s rating of the silent version as the most “pleasant” as evidence that we respond best to what is not codified by language at all. Several questions emerge about the validity of using this experiment to justify an elision of critique. For instance, its empirical weight and relevance; it is only one study and what children find pleasant does not necessarily translate to what is politically imperative for society as a whole. Further, how we watch and interpret film is a specifically cultural, learned cinematic language. Films that carry the signifiers of factual genres, such as documentaries, are not necessarily any more factual or less emotionally manipulative than narrative or experimental fiction films. In addition, the scientific measurement and report of this experiment, by Massumi’s own rules of affect, could only be a distorted representation of the real response. Nonetheless, this scientific foundation is used quite traditionally to verify Massumi’s argument, lending empirical validity and causal reasoning to his revolution in method.

However, challenging the notion that fact and measurement are stagnant, science itself, as a body of evidence, is open to revision and reinterpretation. Indeed, it can be seen that Massumi relies upon science’s authority and interpretability to verify affect’s autonomy from human intention. This can be seen in Massumi’s use of another experiment, known as “The Missing Half Second”. In this experiment, participants were asked to randomly flex a finger and then report when they were first aware of their intention to do so by noting the position of a marker on a clock that measured fractions of a second. Massumi’s use of this experiment has drawn particular scrutiny. Hemmings, along with Papoulis and Callard, challenged Massumi on his selective and decontextualized use of this data.

Similarly, Ruth Leys focused her critique “The Turn to Affect: A Critique” (2012) on Massumi’s use of affect science. In her reading of Massumi’s article Leys gives a useful explanation of the experiment: Libet found that the actual finger flexes occurred 0.2 seconds after the experimental subject clocked his or her decision but that the EEG machine employed to monitor brain activity registered significant activity 0.3 seconds before the subject registered his awareness of his decision. In other words, there seemed to be a half-second delay between the start of the body-brain event and its completion in the form of the movement of the finger. (Leys, 2011, 453) 117

The outcome of the experiment suggested that the mind acknowledges phenomena half a second later than the body, which would have significant repercussions for how we think about intentionality and determinism. Without questioning these implications, Massumi takes this finding as evidence that it is the body which processes affect and impels us, and when the conscious mind catches up, bringing with it sociological sense-making, affect’s effects are already in motion. In reference to the supposed basis established by both experiments, Massumi summates “the skin is faster than the word” (Massumi, 1995, 85). Leys explains that “this well-known experiment [the missing half-second] has come to play a strategic role in [Massumi’s] and other like minded theorists’ arguments about affect” (2011, 452). However, she adds that this experiment was discredited as early as 1985, something which Massumi fails to mention (455, see also Hogan, 2003).

Indeed, Libet’s science has been a source of conjecture and interpretation from both scientists and philosophers for at least the past thirty years. Libet himself was well aware of the political implications of his work and authored works on the question of volition in conversation with philosophers and legal scholars (Libet, Freeman, and Sutherland, 1999). Science is an ongoing critical conversation, and as more recent work by neuroscientists at the Harvard Centre for Brain Science concludes, “[u]nderstanding how self-initiated behaviour is encoded by neuronal circuits in the human brain remains elusive” (Fried, Mukamel, and Kreiman, 2011, 548). By not addressing the political conjecture surrounding this science, Massumi gives a fair hearing to neither the hard nor the human sciences. Additionally, his apparently interdisciplinary project does not give a genuine sense of how the humanities and neurosciences were already in close collaboration on this topic. The nature of evidence is stripped of all complexity, and used as an apparently indisputable and explanatory foundation for an anti-foundational argument.

Again, it is worth noting that affect science itself does not fuel the critical reception of affect theory: it is social scientists, such as Leys, who have instead taken issue with how it is used to verify a particular reading of political reality and methodological change. The question of political accountability is particularly important to Leys, who publishes on the role of shame in the ongoing trauma of the Holocaust, and particularly survivor guilt (2000, 2007). She is troubled by the ease with which Massumi dispenses with questions of intentionality, and like Papoulis and Callard, and Hemmings, the ease with which his division of affect and emotion consequently dismisses the value of work on recognised affects, 118

representation, or causality. It is Massumi’s interpretation of affect science that garners criticism, because the complexity of locating agency and accountability is left out of his formulation, overlooking political, legal, and social matters of concern. Critiquing the foundational assumptions of Massumi’s reading of the Snowman experiment, for instance, Leys argues that: Massumi imposes on Sturm’s experimental findings an interpretation motivated by a set of assumptions about the asignifying nature of affect. These assumptions drive his analysis of Sturm’s data in order to produce a distinction between, on the one hand, the conscious signifying (“emotional” and intellectual) processes held to be captive to the fixity of received meanings and categories, and on the other hand, the nonconscious affective processes of intensity held to be autonomous from signification. (Leys, 2011, 450) Leys suggests that the pre-existing framework Massumi applies leads him to miss, or misread, aspects of the experiment that would complicate his argument. For example, Massumi argues that the factual version of the story dampens the intensity. But Leys points out that Massumi’s assumption here betrays the fact that he “thinks the lowered skin resistance in the viewers of the factual film version was a measure of the dampening of intensity”, whereas, Leys explains, “since lowered skin resistance is a sign of increased skin conductance associated with higher arousal, it is unclear from the data what if anything was dampened in this version” (2011, 449). What Leys suggests here is that the findings of the scientific experiment were not nearly as clear-cut as Massumi proposes; rather the nature of interpretation in this study is complex and inconclusive. Affect science is the subject of Massumi and Ley’s arguments, but what is truly at stake for them both is what changes to social inquiry this science could actualise. Empirical evidence is not static, but can be twisted, in both adherence and defiance of its genre, to verify a rhetorically persuasive argument affected with political fervour and hope for methodological change. Thus, even if the scientific basis of affect theory is questionable, this does not necessarily mean that its popularity or application will be hampered.

Massumi uses a variety of empirical facts and investments to enact his own vision of political intervention, or rather, reprieve. Affect science, like testimony, paves a way out of the disabling position Massumi articulates in The Politics of Fear. The “Autonomy of Affect” is his turning point, “a deliberate turning from ... an earlier form of piety, a turning which involves a consciousness ... that the old was wrong and the new is right” (Nock, 1933, 7). If 119

Massumi was at a loss as to how resistance could be enacted, the “revelation” of affect provides new hope, for his project, and for other scholars. He bases the need for a turn to affect on the need to combat right-wing political ideology. He argues that, “[i]n North America at least, the far right is far more attuned to the imagistic potential of the post modern body than the established left, and has exploited that advantage for the last decade and a half” (1995, 105-6). He suggests that “[p]hilosophies of affect, potential, and actualization may aid in finding counter-tactics” (106). In yet another combat metaphor, the hope that the scholar can defend the political truth is maintained. The fear Massumi describes in his previous text, the fear that we are each complicit in the production of a fearful zeitgeist, is replaced with the more manageable fear that social analysts simply have the wrong weapons.

Productive blind spots Though it still grapples to account for causality and the truth of how social dynamics are determined, the affective turn has an obvious blind spot regarding its own hermeneutics of suspicion. But again, in Sedgwick’s terms, errors remain productive. Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi dismiss suspicion and judiciousness, but their narratives are hyper-paranoid. Both Latour and Massumi, by their own accounts, are besieged; what they hold dear both politically and professionally is threatened. Paranoid reading, in this context, is not a rigid and bygone method. Neither is critique immune to affect. As these calls for an affective turn demonstrate, the impetus of criticism is concern, often personal and passionate. Critique’s drive, as illustrated here, is social, embodied, emotional; impelled by hit nerves and the rattle of everyday encounters with people and colleagues. Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi defer to personal epiphanies about the redundancy of paranoia for their proposed change in method. And yet their use of conversion narratives – mixed in with history, science, and intuition – structures and verifies their arguments in a way that challenges the opposition of what is felt and what is factual. These three influential affect theorists assume a strict division between ideology and affect, but the mixed methodology that animates their own arguments works against this easy discrimination. It demonstrates that what we take to be the verifying factor of a certain narrative is not necessarily either facts or values but often something much less distinct.

What this generic diffusion suggests is not that veracity is of little value, but that one can never be sure what will be counted as evidence: in some cases what is clearly questionable serves as concrete proof. In the critical proposals discussed, experience, no less 120

than any other kind of empirical evidence, verifies and justifies a dramatic departure in methodology. The fact that Sedgwick’s moment of conversion is problematic does not mean that her testimony has not compelled an entire field of research on affect, on Silvan Tomkins’ research, and on reparative methods. The point is that it has had an enormous impact precisely because Sedgwick’s critical intervention into literature, culture, and politics is both incisive and impassioned. Sedgwick’s writing is cynical, satirical, and audacious. It mixes, in the written critical genre, felt and detected truths to verify a vital point of relational and intellectual contact. Paranoia animates Sedgwick’s reparation and matters of fact provoke Latour’s matter of concern. Additionally, the fear that we cannot resist social complicity pushes Massumi to put his faith in the incorruptible power of affect. While the field-defining theorists discussed do not ultimately achieve the inclusive, ethical solution to the difficulty of representing social life that they propose, they do add to the intricacy of this issue by demonstrating that even those critics claiming to extricate themselves from the pursuit of truth and authenticity remain inextricably invested in this very practice. These theorists are not willing to exchange the revelatory for the ineffable; to follow through with the pragmatic implications of their moral arguments about truth-seeking methods. They too are vying to position their account as the most authentic. They too have a stake in making a judgement about which narratives do and do not have value.

With attention to these proposals, this chapter amplifies questions about the constitution of veracity, the nature of evidence, and the efficacy of suspicion that are at risk of being censored. Drawing from philosophy and psychobiology, Massumi and Sedgwick’s proposals argue that scholars should suspend their judgement, namely the use of critical genres, on the provision that interpretation lags behind a visceral affective response. However, this discussion has drawn out a richer sense of the evidence used to verify this particular claim, which includes affect science but also personal convictions, influential experiences, and political motivations. Rather than simply demonstrating that these scholars rely on the positivist, epistemological trope of evidentiary reference they discourage, a close analysis of their means of verification questions whether their continued reliance on this reflex, as well as a tangle of others, actually undermines the basis upon which we discriminate and separate different genres of social inquiry. This chapter’s intervention, therefore, investigates what is at stake in this turn’s characterisation and evaluation of genres, based on their interpretation of these methods’ social relevance, truth-value, and ethics.

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Close analysis of these three key directives for a turn against critique toward affect theory, and their paradoxical formation, challenges us not to drift with the current of the critical moment, but rather to consider what is implicit in its momentum. As Avery Gordon, the sociologist of literature, explains of critical turns, new avenues open but there is also always the question of “what paths have been disavowed, left behind, covered over and remain unseen” (2008, 41). This chapter marks the implications of such omissions. For instance, identifying genres as bald caricatures, with intrinsic and polemic moral values - such as Latour’s “critique” versus “composition - makes it difficult to engage generously with how people, like the very scholars discussed, might use genre to wrangle an authentic or verified account of themselves or the world. The scholarly reversal of the fact/affect hierarchy similarly overlooks the question of how genres, methods, and disciplines, are constituted and what role they play in determining the truth-value of one account over another. Also, and importantly for the affective turn’s argument, this static conception of genres’ structure does not acknowledge how genre itself is a contingent and changeable life form. Paranoia, or a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, is assumed to have no affective potential or only a destructive one. Thus this chapter’s aim – to complicate the fact/affect division with close attention to how the affective turn is verified – is important not only for my own argument, but also for the arguments that inform the affective turn, which propose to capture life in its complexity. Returning to the words of Bernhard Schlink from chapter one, it “is of crucial importance that we don’t make this world simpler than it is” (BBC, 2011) by casting the identity and intentions of people, or in this case, methods, as simply malignant or benign.

Persisting with a hermeneutics of suspicion, despite their declarations to the contrary, the proponents of the affective turn make judgements and call upon others to join them in their adjudications. Such a process is integral to all forms of ethical advocacy. Perhaps the most important thing to recognise about our participation as social scientists in social change is that no genre is unaffective or unaffected. Every utterance, of every genre, is socially informed and productive. Affect, for this reason, defined as an asocial, apolitical, or essentially positive form of influence, that is, crucially, impervious to human intervention, seems neither to equate with or to serve the affective turn’s hope to change the way humans imagine, read, represent, and wield, agency. As the historian and social activist Howard Zinn once stated on the subject of social change and ethical accountability: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train” (Zinn, 1995). Just because it may be difficult to make a statement in a constantly shifting world, does not mean that the most ethical choice is simply not to make 122

one, or indeed, to suggest that such an effort is scientifically proven to be impossible. Tobin Siebers, who is himself in favour of a turn away from critique, nonetheless articulates the risk, and courage, of representation. He argues that politics “demands that we risk taking a position, that we stand somewhere, that we decide, and that we accept as part of the political process the possibility that our positions, stances, and decisions may go horribly wrong, nowhere, or miraculously right” (1993, viii). The affective turn’s attempt to step out of their critical history, to denounce authorial intention, judgement, definition, or doubt, is unsuccessful precisely because they enlist all of these devices to stake their own position, and justifiably so.

The affect theorists discussed here genuinely aim to stimulate an ethical and political re-evaluation of the scholar’s role in social debate. It is in this context that their call to elide efforts to interpret and try to represent the complexities and causes of political and public discourse seems misguided. These arguments themselves indicate that the nature of evidence and interpretation remain entangled and unsure, and the scholar, in the face of such a hermeneutic challenge, still seeks to wrest sense, purpose, and an ever-clearer insight into how life is authored. In the proposals discussed in this chapter the polemic between affect- driven, lived experience and the ratio of positivist evidence is constantly unsettled. Though Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi motion toward the utopia of new genres, they reenlist the critical method to mobilise their political interventions. This highlights the ongoing utility of critical genres and faculties and encourages us to rethink the idea that the hermeneutics of suspicion is no longer salient. The sense that we must be engaged and vigilant, or that meaning can be wrestled from the ineffable, remains the unacknowledged motivation of the affective turn. With this in mind, perhaps there is a different lesson to be learnt about the possibilities of critique from these arguments. Addressing the persistence of distrust and guardedness within the turn to affect, perhaps could we open up critique as a broader social phenomenon that is neither easily located nor excised? The question, in these terms, would not be not how to surpass the hermeneutics of suspicion, but rather why it remains such a pervasive form of social interpretation, and more pointedly, why a curiously self-negating revision of this method is gaining so much traction across the social sciences and humanities.

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IV The Crisis of “Non-Representation”

Despite the complex and provocative nature of their formulation, Bruno Latour (2004), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997), and Brian Massumi’s (1995) arguments against critique and advocacy for reparative and affect-oriented alternatives have inspired a collection of manifestos about method. These include geographer Nigel Thrift’s “non-representational theory” (2007), sociologist John Law’s “deliberate imprecision” (2004), and the anthropology/literary studies collaboration, “fictocriticism” (Muecke 2002 and 2010, Stewart 2007, Brewster 1996, Gibbs 2005, Taussig 2010). Following the theorisations that inspire them, these three proposals work with the notion that genres are essentially enabling or disabling. They justify a division between “critical” and “creative” forms with the argument discussed in the previous chapter, namely, that the affective tenor of social change eludes the social scientist’s “anticipatory” or “iconoclastic” attempts to “pin it down” with scholarly genres of representation. Their project then, is to find methods that can engage with the dynamic nature of affect. But given that critique, social science writing, and in some cases, linguistic structures in general, are already locked down as ineffective, the question these methodologists work with, and its possible answers, are already quite circumscribed.

In these method directives, genres that might be associated with emotional truth, such as creative writing or performance, are exclusively pursued and promoted as appropriate avenues for social research. Re-iterating the “two cultures” divide, this shift from scientific to artistic methods is framed as an ethical imperative: firstly, as a responsibility to knowledge – to keep our methods relevant; and secondly, as a social responsibility – to access what really matters to people. However, taking these same responsibilities into account, it seems important to carefully consider this proposed shift, and to specifically question how its proponents determine what is affective about certain genres and not others. Several important questions arise, for instance, might the distribution of suspicion or truth-value among different forms of representation be more complex than the critical/creative dichotomy can accommodate? Are the genres we read as “creative” really more expressive or less definitive and didactic than critique? And do fictive forms truly provide safe harbour from the political quandaries of the culture wars or the suspicious taint of the Cold War era? In sum, are the determinants of this turn in method – both the disciplinary history from which it claims to

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depart and the raw, everyday desires it claims to access - as fixed and differentiated as assumed?

To explore these questions, this chapter will analyse the respective proposals of Thrift, Law, and fictocriticism, focusing specifically on why certain genres are deemed to be more creative than others, and therefore, in another intriguing verdict, more in touch with social life. Examining the cogency of these arguments’ cited motives, namely, to make methods more ethical, inclusive, and socially relevant, the second part of the chapter will put these thinkers in dialogue with existing disciplinary questions about the ethics of representation, and paranoid themes in popular culture. Together, these sections offer a detailed picture of what is at stake in stratifying genres on the basis of received notions about their individual capacity to affect. With a fuller disciplinary and social context for these method proposals, it becomes clear that a “crisis of representation” – unresolved questions about what determines and verifies truths – is still very much alive within the affective turn, and society at large.54

Method proposals As an introduction to the methodological experiments that are emerging in relation to affect theory, this section unpacks three proposals: Thrift’s “non-representational theory”, Law’s “mess as method”, and fictocriticism. Speaking from and to diverse social science disciplines, including cultural geography, sociology, and anthropology, these proposals draw on the affective turn’s terms of reference and foundational claims, such as the stasis of critical forms, affect’s immunity to representation, and the need to revolutionise academic methods. The premise is that the social sciences are bogged down in the sceptical reading methods of critique and thus ill-equipped to face social and economic changes, whether the everyday responses to cataclysmic events like 9/11 or the economic rationalisation of the academy. In the vein of Latour’s “Compositionist Manifesto”, these social scientists offer creative expression as an antidote to critique. To remedy social science’s supposedly lagged response to affective events, Thrift, Law and fictocritics variously argue that their disciplines must adopt an artistic practice that eschews definitive claims, celebrates imprecision, reserves judgement, and actively aims to experiment.

54 The origins of this term, “the crisis of representation”, will be explained in the second section of this chapter which deals explicitly with the ethnography debates of the 1980s, an important precedent for discussions about genre and ethics in the social sciences and humanities. 125

By accepting the notion that creative composition is inherently enabling, the architects of these alternative methods do not ask the question of genre – its essential identity – but simply a question about which genre. They do not open up the matter of how and why different styles are presumed to have divergent affective capacitates, or how aesthetic forms variously constitute social facts. In order to sustain an oppositional division between creativity and criticism, the affective turn’s characterisation of critical reading as essentially disabling is coupled with a representation of creativity as inherently enabling. In this context, genres associated with the creative and performing arts are exempted from the political influence of Cold War suspicion and quotidian conspiracy that has infected the social sciences. Instead, genres selected as exclusively creative are represented as unencumbered, open channels for the mysterious forces of affect.

Thrift, in his “non-representational theory”, and Law, with his turn away from “knowing”, understand their interventions into social science methodology as novel departures from the desire to reveal the truth. However, as proposals purporting to know the right way to represent social life, their claim to have left a desire for epistemological mastery behind is unconvincing. The quite rigid characterisations of genres these manifestos develop, and also ascribe to past methods and present publics, do not allow for cross-over or counter- intuition. Though framed as perceptive and flexible engagements with everyday life, the affective turn’s rigid opposition of methods risks overlooking the nuances of how people might use and relate to various representations, what resonances they draw from them, and what they presume the affective capacities of genres to be. This critical moment’s focus on an asocial affect also distracts from the social history and context of its own methodological intervention: influences that nonetheless inform this turn’s arguments and implications in interesting ways.

Proposal one: non-representational theory Nigel Thrift’s Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (2007) proposes a social science method that addresses affect’s presumed autonomy and its implications for representation. Thrift’s ubiquitously cited manifesto has several aims, each echoing tenets of affect theory. In particular, Thrift makes reference to escalating social change (“to capture the ‘onflow’ […] of everyday life” (2007, 5)), post-humanism (“to be resolutely anti- biographical and pre-individual,” and to trade “in modes of perception which are not subject- 126 based” (7)), pragmatism (“to concentrate on practices” (8)), experimentalism (to be “experimental” (12)), affective resonance (“to get in touch with the full range of registers of thought by stressing affect and sensation” (12)), and the need to emphasise artistry (“to re- gather the ethic of craftsmanship” (15, emphasis in original)). The primary methodological proposal of Thrift’s text is that social scientists should turn to the creative arts, or “practice”, for superior methods of social inquiry. He characterises creative forms as energising, enabling, and dynamic. “In particular,” Thrift explains, he “want[s] to pull the energy of the performing arts into the social sciences in order to make it easier to ‘crawl out to the edge of the cliff of the conceptual’ […]. To see what will happen. To let the event sing you” (Thrift, 2007, 12).

This act of promoting the creative arts is accompanied by a demotion of current social science practices. Anticipating a counter-argument to non-representational theory, Thrift asserts that “[t]o some this will appear a retrograde step: hasn’t the history of the social sciences been about the kind of rigour that the performing arts supposedly lack?” (12). His answers to this rightly anticipated question about the specificity of disciplinary checks and balances, illustrate a dismissive view of traditional social science practice. Thrift does not question the terms by which we come to value particular methods over others, but rather makes such evaluations. His logic is either/or. It offers the performing arts as the solution to the problem of social sciences. With his simultaneous act of advocacy and admonition, he argues that “the performing arts can have as much rigour as any other experimental set up, once it is understood that the laboratory, and all the models that have resulted from it, provide much too narrow a metaphor to be able to capture the richness of the worlds” (Thrift, 12). In this account, social scientists are simply slow to realise the inferiority of their methods. He suggests that “the performing arts may help us to inject a note of wonder back into a social science which, too often, assumes that it must explain everything” (12). With these assessments, Thrift contributes to the general characterisation of critical writing that we have seen in the arguments of the affective turn so far, namely, that it is stale and impolitic.

For Thrift the turn is a necessary and ethical act. He argues that, “[w]e are continually being made into new creatures by all kinds of forces, but it is surely the case that as the world is forced to face up to the damage done, so we can no longer move along the same cul-de- sacs of practical-cum-conceptual possibilities” (Thrift, 2007, vii). Thrift offers “non- representational theory” as a response to this call for change and argues that it can better 127 attune itself to the speed of social and political dynamics. To position traditional scholarly genres as unsuitable for this task, Thrift evokes the language of Brian Massumi, describing the presence of asocial forces which are impervious to representation. He states that “it is imperative to understand the virtual as multiple registers of sensation operating beyond the reach of the reading techniques on which the social sciences are founded” (12). In the light of the revelation of how affective “forces” work, Thrift suggests we can no longer characterise social life with traditional representational forms. Instead, “[o]ther possibilities need to be alighted on for thinking about the world. That requires boosting inventive attitude so as to produce more contrary motion” (vii). Thrift argues that his non-representational theory provides these other possibilities because it is not representational and thus not hindered by the stubborn solipsism he attributes to critical essays and data sets.

However, there is nothing “uncritical” about Thrift’s political positioning. He carefully positions his theory as avant-garde and portrays himself as a political advocate determined to pay attention to issues that are in danger of being silenced by the mainstream: In days when the Iraq War, Afghanistan, 9/11, 7/7 [the London bombings] and other such events often seem to have claimed total occupation of the Western academic psyche, and many academics have reacted accordingly with mammoth statements about warfare, imperialism, capitalism, global warming and numerous other waypoints on the road to perdition, it is difficult to remember that other kinds of political impulse might have something to say, something smaller and larger, something which is in danger of being drowned out. (vii) In the manner of omission seen in Felski’s Uses of Literature in chapter two of this thesis, the names of these “many academics” and the specifics of their “mammoth statements” are not provided, remaining an ominous threat that literally endangers. It is worth highlighting that the nameless, all-encompassing adversary that Thrift posits in this quotation and the critical impulse to reveal underlying truths both qualify Thrift’s argument for Sedgwick’s “paranoid reading”. However, his effort to defend particular academic projects and expose topics that he feels are overlooked in current discussions goes unacknowledged. Rather, Thrift’s passage mobilises a revolutionary rhetoric and characterises the affective turn as a grassroots movement. In opposition to mainstream social inquiry, Thrift argues that instead his “book keeps faith with the small but growing number of determined ‘experimentalists’ who think that too often we have been asking the wrong questions in the wrong way” (vii). He characterises these experimentalists as: “Those who … want to generate more space to be 128 unprecedented, to love what aids fantasy, and so to gradually break down imaginative resistance” (vii). With this resistance narrative, Thrift creates a clear, moral opposition between the affective turn and the rest of “the Western academic psyche” (vii). It is an opposition that is cultivated with little evidence other than Thrift’s assertions and a continuation of Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi’s warfare motifs to sustain it.

In Thrift’s presentation of creative practices as a superior vocation to existing forms of scholarship, we see the dismissiveness that provokes the protective tone of existing critiques of the affective turn (Hemmings, 2006, Callard and Papoulis, 2010, and Leys, 2011). To champion creativity and practice, Thrift unnecessarily trivialises criticality and erudition. For him, the work of other social scientists is simply, indeed doubly, “wrong” (vii). He argues that a “more valuable endeavour” would be “to try to construct practices of vocation” (3). In turning to “practice,” Thrift explains that he “want[s] to try and add a distinct co-operative-cum-experimental sensibility in to the mix of the world that will help us ‘engage the strangeness of the late modern world more receptively’” (Thrift, 2007, 4). He suggests that “[t]he net outcome would be that the texture of the feel and outcome of the everyday could be reworked as traditional forms of expression were slowly but surely breathed differently” (4). Although academics may see their existing careers, as researchers and teachers, to be vocational, Thrift implores that we must look outside the social sciences for evidence of this model. The next question then, if we are to consider Thrift’s methodological shift, is what the practice of “non-representational theory” actually entails? What marks its radical break with current practices?

The answer to this question seems as opaque as its premise. Social scientists are asked to give up their existing disciplinary practices for “co-operative-cum-experimental” methods, without contextualised detail about the proposed alternatives and why they qualify as superior. If Thrift were simply opening up new forms of research, this might not be of concern; not all research has to conform to the strictures of critical theory. What makes the diffuseness of this proposal troublesome, however, is that it is offered as a correction to the naivety of other methods. Thrift’s ideal template for a “practice of vocation” is dance. He argues: “dance is important: it engages the whole of the senses in bending time and space in new kinaesthetic shapes […] challenges the privileging of meaning, gives weight to intuition as thinking-in-movement” (Thrift, 2007, 14). He adds that although “my stomping ground for these kinds of thoughts has often been dance, [...] it could just as well be building or music, 129 two other baseline human activities” (14). There are obvious provocations here, such as what qualifies these particular practices as “baseline” or more foundational than others, such as writing? Or again, why intuition is preferable to or different from discerning meaning? The process by which Thrift drafts this preferable taxonomy of forms and their values is not explained. Nor is what Thrift understands to fall under the genre of dance thoroughly outlined. For surely classical ballet, a highly traditional, structured, routinized and exclusive practice would more closely mirror the essay form than Thrift’s description of dance, which seems to apply strictly to free-form improvisation?

The vagueness of how Thrift determines his hierarchy of genre, moreover, flags one of the affective turn’s more challenging aspects. It specifically highlights their call to adopt purposefully imprecise writing to realise a speculative approach to scholarship without closure or any sense of final revelation. Thus, while it is clear that Thrift glosses over several salient details, he arguably does so with the licence of a prior disclaimer. For a reader to accuse Thrift, or Law whom I will soon discuss, of not being critical or definitive enough would apparently be to miss the point of their intervention. However, while Thrift advocates dance as a more affectively resonant genre, he remains within the essay genre for this particular argument. Given this, an insistence that his work cannot be read or evaluated by the tenets of the critical genre is surely disingenuous.

Thrift may explicitly argue for a shift to creative genres, to leave critical genres behind altogether, but what he actually challenges is the critical genre and its received tenets. Thrift argues that: [Non-Representational Theory] is a tentative book because it is not entirely clear what a politics of what happens might look like – indeed, given that so much of what I want to outline is avowedly experimental, perhaps too much in the way of clarity should not necessarily be counted as a good thing (although straightaway I can hear the criticisms from those who believe that theory should slide home like a bolt. (2) Thrift claims that much of what he wants to “outline” is “avowedly experimental,” but the genre of explanation he uses is traditionally critical. Despite his apparent magnanimity, Thrift’s unequivocal dismissal of existing social science methods does, indeed, slide home like a bolt. Thrift states that his argument is about adopting genres where judgement is not present, however, what he argues for, as we see in the previous quotation, is to make 130 judgements and criticisms without any of the work that is expected to underpin them. To practise critique is to take the risk of singling out one or two of the “many academics” and carefully detail why their “mammoth statements” do not hold. This involves a commitment to learn about the disciplinary context in which their original argument was made, as well as the precedents for one’s own arguments. Thrift does not do these things, nor does he outline the details of the methods with which he does agree. Thrift tries to be more creative and tentative with his academic writing, and his actions highlight what he takes the markers of creative work to be. The implication, (and surely it is one that adds the insult of artists to the injury of social scientists), is that creativity is less meticulous and less focused than critical work; that creative practitioners express without fore-thought or intention; that they do not draw from a history and tradition; in short, that all art is a rough sketch. In Thrift’s argument, genres are ascribed essential identities that reduce their complex volatility, kinship, and composition.

Proposal two: deliberate imprecision This stated avoidance of clarity – a method based on the assumption that to remain relevant everything must remain tentative because life is constantly evolving – is more explicitly outlined in John Law’s After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (2004). A text which Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, editors of The Affect Theory Reader (2010), cite as “a more than worthy and messy methodological text for what [they] have in mind” for a method following affect theory (Gregg and Seigworth, 25). According to Law, a key proponent of Latour’s actor network theory, After Method is about “what happens when social science tries to describe things that are complex, diffuse and messy” (Law, 2, see also Law and Hassard, 1999). “The answer”, he argues, “is that it tends to make a mess of it […] because simple clear descriptions don’t work if what they are describing is not itself very coherent” (2). Law advocates a shift away from clarity, claiming that: “The very attempt to be clear simply increases the mess” (2). The irony of the already messy method of lucid social analysis seems lost on Law, because rather than working with this productive desire for clarity, or the way practices of observation and representation complicate the sociality they simultaneously participate in and seek to document, he argues that this desire is an external, stymying force to be overcome.

In answer to the question of how we are to represent something that defies representation, John Law suggests that we should take up the techniques of “deliberate imprecision” (2004, 3). Outlining the scope of his endeavour, Law makes a strange 131 delineation between which social issues he believes are coherent and which are not. It is a division that further illustrates the haphazard assumptions about what is worthy of “creative” attention. Interestingly, he suggests that there are some things that can be made clear and definite, and these include: “income distributions, global CO² emissions, the boundaries of nation states” (2). Such delineation seems problematic, as one can easily think of numerous prominent examples where these things are at the very centre of ongoing contestation, such as the enduring Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the ongoing Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Carbon Emissions Trading Tax, and The Kyoto Protocol. Nevertheless, Law judges that “these are the kinds of provisionally stable realities that social and natural science deal with more or less efficiently” (2).

In contrast to these supposedly straightforward “realities”, Law argues that there are things in the world with a different texture which these “methods of academic inquiry don’t really catch” (2). Law makes a list of these differently textured things. They include: “Pains and pleasures, hopes and horrors, intuitions and apprehensions, losses and redemptions, angels and demons, things that slip and slide, or appear and disappear, change shape or don’t have much form at all, unpredictabilities…” (2). Law suggests that if these things are contained within “our ethnographies, histories and statistics”, it is because they have been “distorted into clarity” (2). In other words, Law argues that the social sciences have so far been inept at representing an entire swathe of social occurrences because their methods are distortive.

Law seemingly has faith that there is a method that does not distort social phenomena. He muses on how it is that social scientists could possibly engage with “things that slip and slide” without distorting them into clarity: If much of the world is vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all, then where does this leave social science? How might we catch some of the realities we are currently missing? Can we know them well? Should we know them? Is ‘knowing’ the metaphor we need? And if it isn’t, then how might we relate to them? (2) Law’s logic displays the affective turn’s shift from epistemology as a “knowing” which is disembodied and obdurate. The desire to know is associated with paranoia, control, and negative critique, whereas the preferred methods are associated with reparation, sensation, 132 and ingenuity. Law, like Thrift, proposes that, to be relevant, scholars need “new ways”, “methods unusual to or unknown in social science” (2). Positioning ontology as the answer to a failed concern with knowing, Law encourages a move to embodied and lived perspectives. Though it is telling that Law cannot differentiate from knowing entirely, only from the undefined, yet supposedly disembodied forms of knowing he asserts have previously preoccupied social science: Perhaps we need to know them through the hungers, tastes, discomforts, or pains of our bodies. These would be forms of knowing as embodiment. Perhaps we will need to know them through ‘private’ emotions that open us up to worlds of sensibilities, passions, intuitions, fears and betrayals. These would be forms of knowing as emotionality or apprehension. (2-3) In this passage, another assumption about previous methods is evident, that is, that they were impersonal, impassive, and disembodied. Again, we must ask if this is a fair representation, for as Wolf Lepenies explains, as discussed in the second chapter of this thesis, Auguste Comte, when creating sociology in its most positivist form, was influenced by his affection for the catholic novelist Clotilde de Vaux, as well as his own aesthetic tendencies of hygiene (1988, 29). His sociological method was visceral, responsive, and inextricable from his emotional life. Similarly, Rita Felski’s account of D. A. Miller’s professional path to queer theory captures his experience of reading Jane Austen’s marriage plot in a way that was inextricably private and public, informed by and forming social norms in lived acts, such as reading and writing fiction, that are solitary and yet profoundly social.

It is also unclear how Law’s embodied knowledge differs from ethnography, and particularly the deliberately reflexive ethnographic forms that were spurned in the confrontation of formalism and identity politics that shaped critical theory and have been popular since the 1980s. Nonetheless, Law positions his alternative modes of attention as “experimental” and opposes them to a particularly rigid image of social science writing. Law argues that perhaps “we will need to rethink our ideas about clarity and rigour, and find ways of knowing the indistinct and the slippery without having to grasp or hold them tight” (3). “Here knowing,” Law suggests, “would become possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision” (3). Using this technique, Law argues that social scientists should be purposefully vague, thus allowing for possibilities rather than stating a definitive point that, he suggests, will inevitably be subject to change.

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As with Thrift’s critical manifesto, there is nothing imprecise about Law’s dismissal of traditional social science forms here: they simply cannot convey what really matters. In a paradoxical claim that is both a didactic and definitive account of the world, Law contends that “[t]he world in general defies any attempt at overall orderly accounting” (6). Yet, it is the desire to find a more accurate and precise method of accounting, albeit one which codes itself as “disorder”, that lies at the heart of Law’s argument. The “non-representational” is not, in practice, non-representational. Instead, it seeks only a different genre of representation. Ironically, while the method of deliberate imprecision is designed to help social scientists see the “diffuse”, the “slippery”, the “indistinct” (Law, 2004, 2), what we are offered by both Thrift and Law is a starkly black and white picture of affective and positive creativity on one side and defective and negative criticism on the other. The lack of clarity becomes exactly that, a loss of detail, of specificity, and of all the intricacy and intersection that makes the social world, including humans’ myriad attempts to represent it, a “mess”. Both Thrift and Law’s notions of methods that can better convey complexity actually represent methods to be less complex than they already are.

Proposal three: fictocriticism Even in fictocriticism, a method that hopes to radically unite critical and creative genres, the identities of these forms of representation, and their abilities to affect, are taken to be essential and exclusive. As its title suggests, fictocriticism, attempts to blur the difference between the writerly styles of fiction and criticism and the roles of author and critic. It is another experimental methodology created by social scientists influenced by the affective turn, and has been taken up by key figures in the affective turn, such as Kathleen Stewart (2007). Fictocriticism is posited as both a challenge to disciplinary boundaries and a form of political activism. Though it differs in its less dogmatic negation of post-structuralism, fictocriticism, in its various forms, as with the work of Thrift and Law, repositions the scholar as ideally a creative practitioner. This shift in authorship is hailed as an ethical act that offers the social scientist a newly relevant and responsive practice. As Timothy Brennan, who is not convinced of such emancipatory outcomes, explains, “the theorist as artist sees him or herself as being more political because s/he is involved in practice […] a term that appears to place fictocritics in a more committed, hands-on role [...] (Brennan, 2010, 278). Consonant with Thrift’s argument for practice, fictocriticism is endorsed as a vocation that is more accessible and transformative than academic prose, and thus more effective in enacting social activism.

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To give a sense of the fictocritical form, Stephen Muecke’s “The Fall: Fictocritical Writing,” (2002), opens with the following passage: You have invited me to lunch because you want to pick my brains. So we meet at Central, then walk down the road to the Malaya. This is our first meeting and I immediately find you attractive. Over curry, which you find too spicy, you are curious about my name. I say it is of German origin, and means ‘little fly’. Because you speak French I can point out that it is a cognate of mouche: ‘My name is Monsieur Mouche.’ And you laugh. (108) As an anthropologist working within a creative writing department, Muecke is at the forefront of this disciplinary intervention. The direct address and self-reference in this passage, and its continuation throughout the academic article, position Muecke’s work outside the scholarly essay genre. However, the piece’s ten academic citations and allusion to Deleuze on Spinoza reposition it within a practice of scholarly reference. Citation, however, is integrated into a personal recollection rather than an analytical, philosophical discussion: You refer me to a website: Deleuze on Spinoza, his 1978 lecture: ‘Sadness will be any passion whatsoever which involves a diminution of my power of acting, and joy will be any passion involving an increase in my power of acting’. Carry that idea over into writing, you say, and we will always find a way to unblock creative flows. Your succession of masks outstrips my unmasking, so that by the next day I have understood nothing and you have become a fantasy, so overpoweringly present that all I want to do is love you, to bring something else into existence: more trouble, no doubt. (109) With Muecke’s confessional tone, the journal article genre is confused, but perhaps in a way that signals a writerly preference as much as a critical intervention. The intervention is, however, framed as the latter.

In his promotion of fictocriticism, Muecke sets up the seemingly obligatory foundation of sociological critique as a dull method. He discredits not only critique’s broader social reach, but its value within the teaching university. In an argument for fictocriticism as an academic program, Muecke states that in contrast to “traditional sociological texts”, his text “is organised around flows and coagulations of thoughts and feelings, following in some respects the recent work of Bruno Latour” (Muecke, 2010, 1). Setting up the familiar division between creative and critical genres, Muecke differentiates between “works of reference” and 135

“fictional texts”, arguing that “literary texts” create and address different publics than “traditional sociological ones” (Muecke, 2010, 1). Finally, underscoring what he sees to be fictocriticism’s pedagogical value, he states that “the domain of literature, the pages of novels and poems, are the places where we can both learn and feel at the same time” (2010, 6). Critique, in this comparison, is not “a place where we can learn and feel at the same time”: the affective influence of critical writing’s authority, tenacity, and sometimes revelatory re- interpretations is not valued. Though it positions itself as directly subverting and questioning what constitutes a genre, fictocriticism seemingly presents a received faith in fiction’s power to invigorate a tired and impassive criticism.

Fictocriticism aims to interrogate what is at stake in the division of scholarly and imaginative forms of writing, but is waylaid by a too quick resolution. By accepting the notion that creative composition is affectively resonant in an inherently enabling way, fictocritics put aside the question of genre more broadly to promote only certain genres. As evident in Anne Brewster’s “Fictocriticism: Undisciplined Writing” (1996), the parameters of the methodology are initially set out in generous and engaging terms. Unlike other advocates of affect-oriented methods, Brewster acknowledges her indebtedness to post-structuralism and the facilitating interdisciplinarity of cultural studies. Brewster frames the proposed genre as a challenge to the valuations implicit in a division between fiction and criticism, stating: If there is a generic division or opposition which fictocriticism seeks to mediate, it is the demarcation inscribed in academic production of the genres of high art (fiction, poetry, drama) and the essayistic modes which purport to study them (commentary, criticism, analysis, theory). The opposition between these two genres is figured in the way we characterise criticism, for example, as neutral and disinterested and literature as expressive of a personalised subjectivity. Another figuring of this opposition is the notion that criticism trades in ideas; literature in states of emotion and feeling. (29) According to Brewster, “[i]t is the apartheid of the different reading conventions attaching to the genres of high art on the one hand and the essay on the other (and, concomitantly, the apartheid of the offices of the 'writer' and the 'critic'), that fictocriticism, an intermediate or mediating genre, seeks to challenge and displace” (29). In theorising the aims of fictocriticism, Brewster draws out several important assumptions by which the division between creative and critical genres are figured, including the implicit division of subjectivity and objectivity, and reason and emotion. 136

Speaking more specifically about how the method is practiced, Brewster argues that “[f]ictocriticism enables an interrogation of poststructuralist ideas in forms other than the conventional essay, and from enunciative positions other than the so-called neutral, disinterested voice of academic scholarship” (30). However, while Brewster qualifies this characterisation of dry academic prose as “so-called”, in practice, as Muecke’s writing illustrates, the genre of fictocriticism does privilege the first half of its portmanteau. Fictocritical writing remains free from definitive criticality. As Brewster’s description of fictocriticism as “an intermediate or mediating genre” begins to suggest, the method, while outlined as a challenge to generic hierarchies, is practiced either as a hybrid or reversed hierarchy of what are considered two distinct genres. Fictocritics relocate to fiction, rather than challenging the values Brewster states are inherent to its demarcation from criticism.

Rather than investigating why critique is assumed to have, “run out of steam” as Latour suggests, fictocriticism promotes a preferable alternative. Social scientists associated with this method carry forward the affective turn’s essentialist representation of criticism as deadening and art as enlivening as justification for their writing experiments, setting up an ethical opposition between themselves and the rest of the academy. Proponents of fictocriticism frame the blurring of genres as a distinctly dissident act rather than simply an expansion of the social scientists’ writerly repertoire. Like the writings of English and Felski discussed in chapter two, fictocriticism marks its project as a radical challenge to the economic rationalisation of academic disciplines. Anna Gibbs, another proponent of the genre, captures this when she states that “[fictocriticism] is writing as research, stubbornly insisting on the necessity of a certain process in these days when writing is treated by those who determine what counts as research to be a transparent medium” (Gibbs, 2). In these terms, Gibbs poses fictocriticism as a challenge to the fiscal ruthlessness of the contemporary research institution, or “those who determine what counts”. But ironically, the affective turn also positions itself against those schools of inquiry already adamant that writing is not transparent, as well as the critical methods that allow scholars to delve into the hidden labour and processes that constitute texts.

Michael Taussig’s “The Corn-Wolf: Writing Apotropaic Texts” (2010) similarly advocates fictocritical writing as a defence against institutional constraints. In Taussig’s argument, the political camps, and their correlative genres, are starkly drawn. As an 137

antagonist to “Corn-Wolfing”, Taussig posits “agribusiness writing”.55 He asks, “what chance is there for my anthropological project given the prevailing agribusiness approach to language and writing that wipes out the Corn-Wolf?” (2010, 29). Taussig contends that agribusiness writing is enforced in the university and alternatives censured. The prevailing approach, however, seems not to be the mass financial cut-backs we might expect Taussig to be addressing, but rather a preference for analysis over experimental forms of writing: “you can write about James Joyce, but not like James Joyce” (2010, 29). To “counter the purported realism of agribusiness writing” (2010, 32), Taussig - echoing Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi’s warfare motifs - encourages the use of “apotropaic” writing, or “writing as countermagic”. He proposes a list of “wolfing moves” that such counter-writing could employ, arguing that “the ultimate wolfing move” is “the endorsement of the real as really made up” or the “blurring of fiction and nonfiction …” (2010, 33). In this argument, Taussig posits fictocriticism as an act of resistance to the academy’s alleged attempts to censure creative research out-puts. What results from his and other proposals for alternatives to critique is another possible act of censure.

Fictocritics argue that their genre-blurring writing experiments pose a threat to the marketisation of the academy; however, the political outcomes of de-emphasising critical commentary in favour of “practice” may not always aid dissent. Addressing the implications of fictocriticism’s promotion of a creative turn, Brennan points out that: Overlooked here is the consonance of this approach with the plans of university administrators (Bard College is a well-known example) who wish to redefine the humanities by defunding inconvenient or “useless” work of critical social theory in favour of the creative arts—a pattern equally evident in major fellowships in the humanities as well where the vast majority of grants go to artists (the Guggenheim, for instance). (Brennan, 297) As Brennan notes, to relinquish judgement for play may enable, rather than prevent, the de- politicisation of the humanities. This is one of the issues at stake in the framing of

55 Taussig’s work is often more traditionally anthropological in structure than other works within the field of fictocriticism, for instance his terms here derive from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s commentary on Sir James Frazer’s famous text The Golden Bough [1890] (1979). In his commentary on Frazer, Wittgenstein noted: “If what is hidden in the last sheaf is called the Corn-Wolf, but also the last sheaf itself and also the man who binds it, we recognize in this a familiar movement of language with which we are perfectly familiar” (Wittgenstein in Taussig, 2010, 27). This comment responds to a section from The Golden Bough pertaining to corn gods. Taussig uses the term ‘Corn Wolf’ as a euphemism for play and magic in language, but importantly the source is a very traditional social science text. Diverging from the shift against ideology critique, much of his work is also Marxist and draws significantly from the writings of Walter Benjamin, see for instance Taussig (2006). 138

fictocriticism as an imperative for knowledge and ethics in general, rather than simply a challenge to social science’s conservatism. Fictocritics overlook the possible implications of their argument because they invest in the essential, positive efficacy of creative genres and the political obsolescence and negativity of critique.56

In the absence of a thorough interrogation of how genres are constituted, fictocriticism becomes accountable, as we saw in Thrift’s work, for challenging only the critical genre and specifically its emphasis on verification, reference, and lucidity. In fictocritical writing, genre experimentation is limited to using the assumed playground of, the short story form for instance, to loosely work through philosophical ideas, arguably in a way that adds little to the existing labour of literature.57 There is no attempt to extend this disciplinary irreverence the other way. Fictocritics do not, for example, hold fiction to the requirements of criticism. They do not challenge the literary form’s didacticism, nor its representations of everyday experience. The social novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for instance, are not tested for their criminological veracity. Fictocritics do not “play” with the novels of Phillip Roth to test his representation of female interiority. In fictocriticism, the critic’s writerliness is explored, but the novelist’s social analysis is left unquestioned.

To re-summarise, the above proposals champion the use of the creative and performing arts as an alternative to the inertia of traditional social science forms. With non-

56 This oversight summons a point that political economist, Wanda Vrasti, raises about the affective turn more generally in her work on “caring capitalism”, namely, the parallels between their celebration of creativity and autonomy and the current neoliberal celebration of creative entrepreneurism, which is, in reality, a celebration of the mass casualization of the workforce. The dismissal of critique in favour of craftsmanship is resonant with what Vrasti sees as the “moral legitimating structures” that capitalism relies upon to “make critique look ridiculous or exasperating” (Vrasti, 2011, 1). Vrasti sees the “valorization of affective and aesthetic competencies to compensate for the cutback in social services and safety provisions” as one of the current manoeuvres of neoliberal rhetoric, a shift that again parallels the turn from structuralist and demystifying methods to affect theory and artistry (3). Embracing affect as the main social force, operating irrespective of structure, we are left with a scholarship that disables the function of critique to the point that it inadvertently recuperates the rhetoric and action of the very political regime it claims to provoke. Vrasti argues that affect is not a natural antagonist to neoliberalism, but one of the key forces of its reproduction (see also Illouz, 2007, Berlant, 2011, and Gordon, 2008). Currently, the trivialisation of critique and celebration of creative entrepreneurialism is another. By dismissing critical reflexivity, in favour of unbridled expression, we limit our ability to notice such resonances and to question the ideology of genres and their pragmatic affects. 57 Many literary texts already deal with the same questions that fascinate critical theory, such as indeterminate subjectivities and social structures. From one of the very first novels, Cervantes’ Don Quixote [1615] (2000), to the free indirect discourse of modernist Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway [1925] (2009) to Todd Hayne’s postmodern, fragmented biopic of Bob Dylan, I’m Not There (2007) the question of the subjects’ coherence, identity, and agency has driven authors. Additionally, two of the best-selling literary authors of contemporary times, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffery Eugenides, have characters (Chip and his students in The Corrections [2001] and the three protagonists in The Marriage Plot [2011]) that freely, and sometimes rigorously, discuss post-structural ideas and authors in university settings, drawing comparisons between these accounts of the world and the various crises of their lives. 139

representational theory, Thrift calls for a vocational practice, a craftsmanship, that he suggests is practical, participative, and hands-on in expressing a non-subject based experience. Law advocates a deliberately imprecise style of writing that allows for change and shifts in definition and experience, and fictocriticism promotes experimentation and self- expression. In all three proposals, an opposition between criticism and creativity is established. In framing their argument as “non-representational” and social science history as oblivious to the nuances of genre, the affective turn divorces itself from existing disciplinary arguments about the ethics of representing lived experience that inform, and could add dimension to their project. For instance, the affective turn’s methodologists do not include the 1980s ethnography debates - ignited by questions about authorship and representational ethics - as a precedent for their work. Giving a very different account of the social sciences’ relationship to form, these arguments had a profoundly influential effect on anthropology, but also the humanities, and even began to blur the boundaries between these disciplines. As the next section will explain, social scientists in this field were similarly interested in writerly possibilities for scholars and questioned the varying responsibilities of different types of authorship and representations. The affective turn either omits this intervention or openly disclaims its usefulness, by lumping it with critique as a bygone discourse. Nevertheless, it continues to resonate.

The argument for “non-representation” nevertheless reenlists questions about representation into the affective turn’s argument by asking how genres, with their varying emotive influences and ideologies, can express social reality in different ways. In fact if we disrupt the stated genealogy of the affective turn’s methodological proposals, which most often channel back through Deleuze (in a fashion so cursory as to be criticised repeatedly within these arguments themselves),58 and anchor their inquiry in the social science discourse where these particular social scientists actually came of age, the representational implications of their argument and methods come to the fore. In this light, social science history

58 In Non-Representational Theory, Thrift criticises the blind faith of his peers’ Deleuzianism. Thrift warns against what he describes as the “spirit guide approach to social science”, which he suggests is exemplified by the increasing popularity of a Deleuzian “makeover” of people’s work, “that sometimes seems to resemble a religious conversion” (18). He states that he does not “think that it is the function of a social scientist to simply apply the work of philosophers” (Thrift, 2007, 18). In her work on affect and fictocriticism, Anna Gibbs is similarly critical of the often-tokenistic invocation of Deleuzian terminology. Gibbs argues that other possible precedents for fictocriticism are “too often ignored in favour of simple citation of (as opposed to actual use of), for example, Deleuze” (3). She adds: “Here I speak as a passionate reader of Deleuze, but one dismayed by his dismal impact especially on postgraduate work in Australia, as thought seems increasingly to be replaced by jargonistic replication” (9). 140 complicates rather than deadlocks questions about social representation, methodological ethics, and conventions of verification.

“Blurred Genres”: unacknowledged forbears Interest in genres and their affects have not, up until now, been dormant in the academy. The affective turn is only the most recent iteration of a methodological question alive across centuries, cultures, and fields. As Clifford Geertz explains in Blurred Genres: The Reconfiguration of Social Thought (1980), the act of playing with and testing generic rules has a long and diverse history. Writing well before the current turn, Geertz pinpointed the blurring of genres as a mounting trend, but importantly, not one that was restricted to certain styles, or to importing the ideas of one field into the form of another. In his typically opinionated manner, Geertz flagged experiments in diverse styles from diverse authors, including: [P]hilosophical inquiries looking like literary criticism (think of Stanley Cavell on Beckett or Thoreau, Sartre on Flaubert), scientific discussions looking like belles lettres morceaux (Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley), baroque fantasies presented as deadpan empirical observations (Borges, Barthelme), histories that consist of equations and tables or law court testimony (Fogel and Engerman, Le Roi Ladurie), documentaries that read like true confessions (Mailer), parables posing as ethnographies (Castenada), theoretical treatises set out as travelogues (Lévi- Strauss), ideological arguments cast as historiographical inquiries (Edward Said), epistemological studies constructed like political tracts (Paul Feyerabend), methodological polemics got up as personal memoirs (James Watson). (Geertz, 1980, 19) By presenting genre experimentation as something ongoing rather than novel, Geertz lends a different historical context to the affective turn. Considered in relation to the precedents Geertz lists, the affective turn’s methodological experiments are not as revolutionary as they suggest. What does set their work apart however, is its base claim that critical genres are static whereas creative genres are enabling. Compared to the forbears Geertz notes, this most recent presumption takes on a new conservatism, for previous experiments, works that predate the affective turn by more than a century, already acknowledge, indeed play with, the flexibility of genre authority not only of “creative” genres, but the mercurial notion of disciplinary writing styles more generally. Far from seeing scholarly forms as dry and inert, literary provocateurs of the nineteenth century realised and took advantage of the 141

authoritative affects of the equation, the table, and the tract. Furthermore, Geertz suggests that social scientists have always utilised this “intellectual poaching licence”, explicitly aiming to do what every other genre already does implicitly: “trying to discover order in collective life” (Geertz, 20). Thus, while social scientists such as Latour, Thrift, and Law, and specifically anthropologists, such as Muecke and Taussig, reorient their work within alternative disciplinary genealogies, a rich and challenging history for their intervention into the ethics of blurred genres is already present, and arguably most obvious, in their home discipline.

While the manifestos discussed in this chapter claim to have moved away from representationalism and its discontents, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer’s original definition of “the crisis of representation”59 could easily double for a definition of the affective turn’s raison d'être. In Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (1986), they explain that: [The crisis of representation] is the intellectual stimulus for the contemporary vitality of experimental writing in anthropology. The crisis arises from uncertainty about adequate means of describing social reality. In the United States, it is an expression of the failure of post-World War II paradigms, or the unifying ideas of a remarkable number of fields, to account for conditions within American society, if not within Western societies globally, which seem to be in a state of profound transition. (8-9)

59 The ethnography debates of the 1980s were influenced by the linguistic turn of the 1960s and 70s – which recognised language as an agential structure. Texts such as Roland Barthes’ “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (1977) caused a resurgence of interest in the pioneer figures of structural linguistics such as Roman Jakobson (1956), who was in turn influenced by Charles Sanders Pierce (1994) and Ferdinand de Saussure ([1916] 1977). Jakobson’s work informed the research of both Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss. The work that responded to the theory of structural linguistics at this time is broadly labelled post-structuralism, and includes the work of continental thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva. Jacques Derrida revisited the works of major linguistic figures such as de Saussure (1976) and Levi-Strauss (1978). His lecture on Levi-Strauss, first performed at John Hopkins University in 1966, is commonly cited as the beginning of post-structuralism. In Michel Foucault’s archaeological studies of madness ([1965] 2006) and sexuality (1976-1984), he too aimed to challenge the assumed rigidity of structural oppositions by charting the malleability and construction of categories, such as madness and sanity, across time. Structuralist, psychoanalytic studies of language were also influential in this period, such as Jacques Lacan’s “The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis” (1968). The works of Deleuze (1972) and Kristeva (1980, 1984) focused most prominently on interrogating the structural assumptions of psychoanalysis. Other deconstructionist scholars working in literary studies also responded to structuralism at this time, including Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975), and Saussure (1976). Rosalind Coward and John Ellis’ Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (1977) and Elaine Marks’ New French Feminisms: An Anthology (1981) were influential texts that furthered interest in these continental theories in the English- speaking academy. 142

Though the affective turn aims to negate the continuation of this crisis by adopting “non- representational” genres, it is clear that their question is inherited and ongoing.

Highlighting the inescapability of anthropology’s ethical dilemma, Marcus frames the 1980s ethnography debates as the departure point for all subsequent experiments. In Paranoia within Reason, ten years on from Writing Culture, Marcus explains that academic writing practices are affected by “the deep influence on them of the 1980s critiques of long standing languages, rhetorics, and practices of scholarship about culture and society” (1999, ix). He suggests that “the self-awareness of the inadequacy of past means of representation has led to a vast outpouring of experimentation with modes of writing, theorising, scholarly practice, and a questioning of the purposes of scholarship itself” (x). Marcus makes an important assertion when he suggests that such experimentations or new forms, created “to grasp the present unfolding”, cannot stand alone despite their intentions. They are embroiled in a greater narrative and struggle with the questions of its genealogy and determinism. As Marcus contends, “the new languages or vocabularies will remain for the foreseeable future embedded in and inextricable from the messy, contestatory discussions that predominate in the wake of the widely acknowledged crisis of representation” (x).60

There are striking parallels between the arguments made then and now, but also interesting oversights about the relevance of this earlier work and its applicability to current dilemmas. The “crisis of representation”, as George E. Marcus terms it, plays an undeniable, albeit under-acknowledged, role in grounding the current turn. These debates presented such enduring problems for the practice of ethnographic representation that Geertz acerbically described ethnography in their wake as “a task at which no one ever does more than not utterly fail” (Geertz, 1980, 143). Bruce M. Knauft captures the fatigue over the enduring crisis of representation when he surmises that “[t]he debates of the 1980s and early 1990s – concerning experimental ethnography and reflexivity, science and pseudo-science, objectivity versus evocation and the subject-position of the author – have lost their energy and their sense of either accomplishment or struggle” (Knauft, 2006, 407). In light of Geertz’s and Knauft’s descriptions, it seems likely that the omission of this legacy in more contemporary discussion is symptomatic of the legacy itself, specifically the irresolvable difficulties it poses for notions of evidence and genre. The disturbance that these inherited questions would

60 It is also worth noting that Marcus gives this context in his own collection of social science writing on paranoia, implicitly linking questions of authorship, the anxiety of its influence, with this affect. 143 cause, if properly historicised, may explain why so little is made of the importance of this legacy to the work of current theorists. For instance, a consideration of this social science forbear would problemitise the novelty of Thrift and Law’s position. Juxtaposing the affective turn with their social science history also highlights well-established reasons to be wary of casting certain genres as more caring and protective (Latour, 2004, 232) or truthful (Taussig in Strauss, 2005, unpaginated) than others, and why dismissing suspicion as unproductive and unethical might seem imprudent in retrospect. The ethical turmoil involved in trying to authentically represent the truth of a particular person or community is not abated by a neat schism between emotion and evidence, reality and representation, or ideology and practice, precisely because it is the instability of how these categories are defined that lies at the heart of the crisis of representation.

Anthropological texts from the 1980s such as Writing Culture: the Poetics of Ethnography (1980), edited by Marcus and James Clifford, inform current experimentations in the social sciences,61 but their association of experimental writing with critique makes their explicit inclusion problematic. Pinpointing the direct kinship of experimentation and intervention, Marcus and Fischer describe the ethnography debates as “an experimental moment in the human sciences” and the moment in which anthropology self-consciously became “cultural critique” (1986). It is a moment about which key figures in the affective turn are most certainly aware. Although, Kathleen Stewart, an anthropologist and key proponent of fictocriticism, does not cite the legacy in her recent work on affect, she does mention it in an earlier context. In her first ethnography, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (1996), Stewart acknowledges Writing Culture for the disciplinary conversations it enabled. Stewart suggests that these correctives included: [A] renewed search for context and history, the recognition of transnational cultural production and precise cultural practices, and theories of culture that highlight internal contestation and intercultural hybridity, cultural invention and imagined community, and an ironic self-consciousness embedded even in the processes of ‘following traditions’. (Stewart, 1996, 25) Stewart also cites “feminist critiques”, “subaltern, postcolonial, and minority studies”, “discourse-centred approaches”, “performance theory” and “dialogic, reflexive, and

61 For an interesting and detailed history of the reception of Writing Culture see Zenker and Kamoll (2010, 4-8). 144 deconstructive approaches” as all contributing new ways of approaching ethnographic representation. However, despite this acknowledged legacy, even in Stewart’s early work there is a clear resistance to locating her ethnography within this disciplinary history.

Following this reference to the postmodern intervention into ethnographic storytelling, Stewart argues that in the “wake of myriad critiques”, the “temptation to seek the perfect ethnographic text, to fix the problem of cultural politics in a presumed textual solution” remains (26). Here, in what could be read ironically as a description of her own project, Stewart dismisses these previous methods for the same reason that Sedgwick and Frank dismiss them, namely, for their focus on finding the right methodology. Looking for alternative forbears, Stewart harks back to James Agee’s eccentric and frenetic text Let us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) as a precedent for how to write about social life. Agee’s text reflects on the living standards of the sharecroppers in the U.S. South during the depression. Its style is autobiographical and experimental, at times using the techniques of free association or Agee’s own poetic verse. Stewart argues that the “new ethnography” would mean “using cultural critique to open up something like Agee’s passionately ambiguous space to fashion emergent insights that culture is dialogic, hybrid, contested, situated, and imagined into techniques of imagining and re-presenting the complex interpretive moves that constitute a cultural real” (26). It is interesting to consider Stewart’s allegiance here. What is it that makes her choose Agee’s text, which is a pioneering and experimental work, but within the field of investigative journalism, over the political interventions of her own discipline and era?

Stewart’s selection of a non-anthropological precedent might be explained by the affiliation of anthropology’s “experimental moment” with the casting of anthropology as an “orientalising” and dubious discourse that patronised its subjects. Marcus explains that “two highly visible challenges to the validity of past ethnographic methods and knowledge emerged” at this time: “Edward Said’s classifying most anthropology as a form of ‘orientalism’, and Derek Freeman’s calling into question the accuracy of Margaret Mead’s fieldwork and famous interpretations of Samoans” (Marcus, 1986, xxi). As an epitaph to the key post-colonial text Orientalism, Edward Said quoted Karl Marx: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (Marx in Said, 1978, 1). This is emblemic of a paternalistic desire to write, the desire upon which anthropological writing was arguably founded. By the time of the “experimental moment”, such altruism had soured. Marcus and 145

Fischer go as far as to say that the suspicion of anthropology’s project was the institutional death knell of the discipline. The governments of the “exotic” places refused permits and the home universities denied funding (1986, xi). Said and Freeman (1983) raised questions about the role of the author, whose omniscient position and ability to creatively manipulate material, they argued, played a significant role in the maintenance of political and racial inequality. Needless to say, such a discourse presents significant obstacles, particularly around questions of authorship and authority.

Situated in social science history, the argument that it is more ethical to have an immanent, unlocatable author, and to create representations of social life without reference to facts, meaning, or identity politics, clearly becomes problematic. In this context, it is difficult to see how an author can be immanent when they are, necessarily, politically positioned. The fact that fieldwork may result in a poem or a fragment, or that it discusses affect instead of identity, does not change the essential reality that the social scientist is positioned as the person, indeed “the one,” to interpret and represent another person’s life to the wider public through academic publications. More recent ethnographers’ attempts to do this in a form that eschews verifiability remains problematic. Indeed, it is difficult to see how anthropology can ever hope to escape, or render invisible, this power imbalance. The term “crisis of representation” is, for this reason, misleading. As Lauren Berlant argues in a different context, “the genre of crisis can distort something structural and ongoing within ordinariness into something that seems shocking and exceptional” (2011, 7). “Crisis” suggests a fraught moment, an exceptional period, the final impetus before a resolution, but in fact what anthropology is left with is “the question of representation”, the moniker of an unendingly fraught political reality that is inadequately addressed by conflating this problem into a question about genre choice.

Stewart’s selection of Agee as an “alternative” is akin to Thrift and Law’s hopeful reading of “creative genres”. It seeks reprieve from this ongoing problem, but in doing so looks to other genres through rose-coloured glasses. For instance, Stewart does not mention it, but Agee’s text has, like ethnography, been criticised on the grounds of representational ethics. Agee was hired, along with photographer and co-author Walker Evans, by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Government’s New Deal Program’s Farm Security Administration Scheme to document the experience of sharecroppers in the Great Depression in a way that would support the government’s reports and policy proposals. Art historians have been 146

particularly critical of the way that these artistic, documentary depictions were complicit with this institutional and political bias (Price and Wells, 2000, 94-97). Importantly, forms of creative journalism such as Agee’s are equally implicated in the “crisis of representation”. Discussing the politically manipulative power of photography, Price and Wells also affirm that images are as edited and manipulative as written accounts; they are not merely creative conduits of affect, but plots which invite particular causal connections and express subjective biases. This area is well-covered ground, in the fields of both photography and anthropology.62

The common problems of these methods of social documentation were recognised in the crisis of representation. Marcus and Fischer explicitly questioned the ethics of anthropology following New Journalism’s adoption of fictive tropes for the purpose of capturing an emotional resonance. For them, the question of representational ethics was present to both writing practices, not simply an academic anthropology. They consider the panicked public reaction to various journalistic transgressions, such as the use of composite characters, as an omen for what anthropologists using the same tropes could expect. Marcus and Fischer conclude that: The point for ethnography is that the motivation to develop more effective ways of describing and analysing cross-cultural experience makes the use of more explicit fictional narrative devices tempting, and with this temptation, the status of ethnography as science or factual description, analogous to journalistic reporting, comes into question. (76) In short, what we can deduce from this context is that Agee’s “experiment” does not open up “an ambiguous space to fashion emergent insights” as Stewart hopes (Stewart, 26). Instead, it demonstrates that the crisis of representation applies to civic and creative genres, as much as scholarly depictions. It is perhaps because of this enduring representational crisis that social scientists, such as Stewart, are drawn to the theorisations of Thrift and Law: the latter make no mention of these standing questions about ethics and genre when they advocate creative forms and dispersed authorship as more ethical methodologies. However, for contemporary social scientists to evade this history is to ignore, and effectively discredit, one of the most incisive interventions of their own field; an intervention which insisted on considering the pragmatic and lived effects of scholarship, writing, and representation.

62 For a critical reading of the autonomy of photography and the observer/observed dialectic see Sontag (1977) (Sontag also adjudicates the ethics of FSA photography in this key text), Barthes (1980), and Berger (1972). 147

Even within the experimental milieu of the 1960s-1980s, there were ethical questions about what would be accepted as ethnography. Marcus and Fischer argue that while there was an impetus for new ethnographic forms, disciplinary processes of adjudication and verifiability were still vital: “not just anything goes” (1986, 40). They exemplify this qualification by analysing the reception of Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968). This work detailed Castaneda’s experience of apprenticeship with a shaman, and was pitched at the popular market of the counterculture. Foreshadowing Stewart’s shift to Agee, its style was more akin to New Journalism than a traditional ethnographic narrative. For instance, it ignored the referential contextualisation and discussion of related perspectives in the field. Marcus and Fischer argue that “most anthropologists firmly rejected this experiment as ethnography because it violated the obligation to provide readers with ways of monitoring and evaluating the sources of information presented” (1986, 40). In his work on blurred genres, Geertz describes the monograph as “parables posing as ethnographies” (Geertz, 1980, 165). Simply because Castaneda’s text became more accessible to the public did not make it a more ethical piece of inquiry. From this example it is clear that in the 1980s social scientists did not restrict the crisis of representation to one genre. Importantly, this reassessment of how genres and truths are constituted was motivated by ethical considerations about the social and political implications of representation, specifically the ethnographic form. To now divide genres into either creative or critical categories, supposedly in answer to the same question of ethics, seems a particularly confused move, for presumably the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion inherent to identity politics have not been miraculously resolved in the past thirty years.

While the ethnography debates of the 1980s were not unproblematic,63 they demonstrate a more considered engagement with the question of genre than the current disciplinary turn. Clifford was enthusiastic about the possibilities that a shift to creative forms could offer, however, there was still some hesitance to do away with pressing issues of accountability. The political context demanded such considerations. Said, after all, did not simply aim his criticisms at ethnography, as though different literary genres might escape the problem. According to Said: “This Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor

63 See Jennifer Lorna Hockey and Andrew Dawson’s After Writing Culture: Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology (1997), and Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon’s Women: Writing Culture (1995) for two follow-up texts that address various shortcomings of the volume, including the lack of female voices. 148

Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx” (1978, 3). In other words, genres of both fiction and non-fiction were seen as equally capable of perpetuating colonial stereotypes.

Writing later in the decade, Marilyn Strathern, renowned for her feminist intervention into the discipline of anthropology, further highlights the point that shifting genre does not elide the crisis of representation. She states that “whether a writer chooses (say) a ‘scientific’ style or a ‘literary’ one signals the kind of fiction it is; there cannot be a choice to eschew fiction altogether” (1987, 257). As Strathern suggests here, any genre is an act of authorial interpretation; all genres are fictions, in that they are all selectively manipulated and created. She explains that we “typically think of anthropologists as creating devices by which to understand what other people think or believe. Simultaneously, of course, they are engaged in constructing devices by which to affect what their audience thinks and believes” (1987, 256). This practice does not change because the ethnographer writes poetry. Poetry is also a manipulative figural device. For this reason there is a certain regression in the affective turn’s advocacy of shifting to creative genres as a way to escape the problems inherent in presenting evidence. It overlooks an insight that was already established by the previous ethnography debates, namely, that all genres are implicated in the political and ethical actions of the times in which they are authored, and the times in which they are read.

The affective turn’s presumptions that engagements with affect are unadulterated and pure expressions of a primordial asocial truth, free of judgement and agenda - that they are somehow ethically superior - does little to encourage an engagement with the mess of truth- telling practices and the partiality with which genres are determined or recast. The claim that judgement is opposed to, or at least very different from the emotional, is also a hazardous presumption. The process of judgement is always and inevitably entangled with affect and their interaction is not circumscribed by genre. In Saving Persuasion: A Defence of Rhetoric and Judgment (2006), Brian Garsten argues that the special character of judgement “emerges from and draws upon a whole complex of emotions, dispositions, and tacit knowledge, a persuasive speaker often engages judgment by appealing to passions and images as well as reasons” (Garsten, 2006, 9). Following from this, the emotions and reason, or affect and cognition, are not so easily disengaged, and thus neither are the genres they are assumed to govern. It is not exactly clear how a judgement will resonate with someone. Nor is it clear from where a judgement arises. Indeed, some of the most influential pieces of didactic propaganda appeal to and arise from affective logic; Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film of 149 the Nuremberg Rallies, Triumph of the Will (1935), comes to mind. The fact that a piece of work is creative and emotionally resonant is not always a guarantee that it is more “caring”. There is always an element of judgement in our choice of whom to care for, but also what the notion of care actually assumes. To claim that Riefenstahl’s “creative” work, a film that was both evocative and experimental, was “asocial” and did not mine and manipulate existing narrative threads would be cavalier to say the least. It is the refusal to contemplate such historical precedents and their immediate complication of the critical/creative division, in favour of a forward-looking, avant-garde fervour, that proves one of the most problematic aspects of the celebratory turn to “creativity”.

Importantly, when viewed against a backdrop of prior political turmoil and questions of conscience in anthropology, the social scientists of the affective turn recuperate the assumption that creative genres are politically neutral. The current intervention opposes judgement to justice, critique to composition, and affect to emotion. It is only through the omission of both the ethical questions raised by the crisis of representation, and, as the next section will detail, a thorough engagement with these genres themselves, that Thrift or Law can possibly conceive of a creative genre as non-judgemental. By asserting the argument that affect is “somehow” outside language and not implicated in these earlier questions, social scientists such as Latour, Massumi, Thrift, Law, and Stewart, can disavow this history and deny its relevance. By channelling their intervention back through a philosophical, or in Stewart’s case, a journalistic history, carefully skirting the fraught historical record of their own discipline, these practitioners negate the most unsettling questions an engagement with their own field would raise. They claim to escape the “crisis of representation” by shifting to “non-representation”, however, as this discussion has illustrated, the logic of this transition is unsound. The question of how to tell the truth, and specifically which genre provides the most ethical and faithful testimony to social life, is still at the heart of the affective turn. Indeed, despite claims of its waning relevance, the question of how life is verified continues to drive society’s effort to understand itself more generally.

Paranoid reading as popular reading The method manifestos from Thrift, Law, and the fictocritics assume that imaginative genres will offer the opportunity to break with the solipsistic paranoia of critique. However, even if we took creativity to be limited to novelists and poets, if we did not question the essential identity of these genres, it remains that creative writing is not a politically neutral holding- 150

space. Indeed, a cursory look into the central themes of literature and popular culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, suggests that post-structural questions and hermeneutic methods are actually expressions of a broader social zeitgeist. A strong body of research indicates that literature is also pervaded with the paranoid style, both in theme and structure. Moreover, several critics argue that paranoia has become the pinnacle theme of post-modern literature, demonstrated in the works of key figures in the twentieth and twenty- first century literary canon, such as Phillip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, Kathy Acker, George Orwell, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Herbert Marcuse, and William S. Burroughs (Hume, 2000, Dimovitz, 2008, Rosenfeld, 2004, Freedman, 2005, Bersani, 1989, Navarro, 2003, Trask, 2010, Bywater, 1990, Fisher, 1992, Knight, 1999, Melley, 1999, Trotter, 2001, Rizza, 2008). In Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Post-war America (2000), Timothy Melley explains that writers as different as these have “depicted individuals nervous about the ways large organisations might be controlling their lives, influencing their actions, or even constructing their desires” (1999, xii). In this light, we must reconsider the affective turn’s position that paranoid thinking is a Cold War malaise that only affects a torpid ivory tower. The congruence of paranoid themes across scholarly and social forms of narration suggests a different story.

Locating the paranoid style in post-Cold War creative genres, Aaron S. Rosenfeld, in “The ‘Scanty Plot’: Orwell, Pynchon, and the Poetics of Paranoia” (2004), argues that in the literature of the post-Cold War period, paranoia expanded to become a “broad-based cultural pathology” (Rosenfeld, 2004, 340). Where Sedgwick limits paranoid pathology to critique, Rosenfeld argues that “plot” generally is “a working through and out of a hermeneutic code” (359). That is, the creation of a plot is always dependent upon a paranoid reading method and the drawing of pre-emptive causal links. Rosenfeld’s argument that novels, like critique, are pathologically paranoid, problematises the affective turn’s claim that creative genres are a remedy for suspicion. Fiction, following this, is not free of the paranoid style or representational anxiety. Novelists are directly engaged in asking questions about the representational and truth-telling limits or responsibilities of their practice and its genres. Devices such as unreliable narration (Boyle, 1969, Currie, 2011) and metaficiton (Waugh, 1984, Ommundsen, 1993) pose questions about verisimilitude, authorial presence, and the line between fact and fiction. Novelists, in short, are engaged in questioning, rather than simply endorsing, the workings and effects of their representational method.

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Contrary to the idea that creative genres are less intentionally motivated and didactic, literary authors also use novels to make moral judgements about current political and intellectual debates. Discussing postmodern paranoid literature, Kathryn Hume argues that literature demands that we act more definitively than post-structural theory mandates: Postmodern theory may decentre the self to the point that no core remains that would permit agency, yet these writers stubbornly commit themselves to the position that meaningful action must be taken. Mailer with his seven souls and Burroughs with his many alter egos literalise the notion that we may have become a congeries of selves, but they agree that some spark of awareness must make decisions and act. (439) Here Hume suggests that these authors use their novels to make an argument about social affairs, not only to assert their own definitive viewpoint, but to suggest that, even in a postmodern world supposedly in flux and disarray, broader socially-defining points can and must be made. This purpose runs counter, for instance, to Thrift’s idea that “non- representational” or creative genres will allow social scientists “to be resolutely anti- biographical and pre-individual, to trade in modes of perception which are not subject-based” (2007, 7). For Hume, literature operates as a definitive and didactic form of social commentary and critique.

Leo Bersani explores an example of the novelist’s social commentary in “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature” (1989).64 Writing about Thomas Pynchon’s conception of paranoia in Gravity’s Rainbow, Bersani explains that for Pynchon what constitutes paranoia is the pinnacle question for our age. This is a statement that problematises not only the affective turn’s dismissal of paranoia as a fait accompli, but their suggestion that fiction is the ultimate tool for a revolution against paranoia. Pynchon’s characterisation of literature also presents a provocative challenge to the affective turn’s proposal that creative genres are free from judgement and ideology. Bersani explains that, for Pynchon: [L]iterature, far from saving us from the controlling designs served by information systems, is itself an information system that threatens its readers’ freedom by the very elusiveness of the demands which it makes on them [...]

64 For an interesting collection of writers’ testimonies to the political motivations of their fiction and the fiction of others, including Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie, see Phil Mariana’s Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing (1991). The collection is drawn from a symposium for authors of fiction about the “crisis of representation”. For an investigation into fiction as ideology, a study that incidentally affirms the ongoing relevance of Marxist and other traditional frameworks for navigating the relation of sociology and literature, see Lennard J. Davis’ Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (1987). 152

Literature is never merely an agent of resistance against networks of power- serving knowledge; rather it is one of that network’s most seductive manifestations. It can never stand outside the oppressive manipulations of social reality and negate those manipulations by a willed alienation from history. (1989, 116) For Pynchon, a practitioner revered for his creative renderings of social life, literature and creative genres are not a refuge from political and historical struggle, they are agential forces internal to them. Literature is not an antidote to paranoia; it is itself concurrently productive and symptomatic of the paranoid. Art forms have been used for propaganda, for instance agitprop by the Soviet Union, precisely because they can work within semiotic and narrative conventions to solidify or coerce particular social sentiments (Clark, 1997, Orwell, 2009).

Nor are suspicious themes limited to the literary canon. In popular culture more broadly, the desire for demystification is clear, not only in theme but in method. The public interest in reading plots via a hermeneutics of suspicion suggests that faith in detection is not confined to social scientists. The protagonists of the most popular genres of books, films, and television programs - crime, legal dramas, even romantic comedies - engage in a sort of archaeology, following traces, uncovering secret injustices, pinpointing a flaw in someone’s psychology, or finding “the one”. Through their endeavours we vicariously sleuth and detect, attempting to collate a verifiable chain of events or evidence a conclusion. Studies about the rise of paranoid, conspiracy culture in the 1990s (concurrent with affect theory) affirm this, citing the mass popularity of television programs such as The X-Files (1993 - 2002), with its pertinent tag-line: “The truth is out there” (O’Donnell, 2000, Melley, 2000, Parish and Parker, 2001, Kelley-Romano, 2008, Burns, 2000). Paranoid reading is popular reading.

More recent television programs have focused on hidden truths in various ways. Primetime programs such as Mad Men (2007 - present), Big Love (2006 - 2011), Breaking Bad (2008 - 2013), or Homeland (2011 - present), focus on protagonists who lead double lives and conceal secret identities. The charming Ad Man, Don Draper, hides a past as the stolen valour veteran Dick Whitman. The upstanding local businessman, Bill Henrickson, runs for office in Salt Lake City, Utah hiding the fact he is a suburban polygamist. High school science teacher, Walter White, hides firstly the fact he is dying of cancer, and then his success as New Mexico’s leading Crystal Meth manufacturer, from his family. War hero, Nicolas Brody, an American marine held hostage in Iraq, secretly kneels down and prays 153

toward Mecca in his garage, and is suspected by the CIA to have become a terrorist. In all of these stories we, the audience, are given a privileged window into the truth. We share in the protagonists’ anxiety and empathise with their paranoia, as they struggle to maintain a coherent facade, or deconstruct one. Secrets are revealed to us in yet more popular television programs such as In Treatment (2008) and The Sopranos (1998 - 2007), where we are privy to the intimate encounter between psychiatrist and patient. In True Blood (2008), Buffy (1997 - 2003) and its spin-off Angel (1999 - 2004), The Vampire Diaries (2009), and two of the highest-selling book series of the twenty-first century, The Twilight Saga (2003 - 2008) and Harry Potter (1997 - 2007), we are introduced to a world where the supernatural other walks among us, disguised as banal and human. These creative renderings of social life represent a desire to look behind the veil to a truth which is revealed to us through dramatic irony - a view into someone’s haunted dreams, their supernatural metamorphosis, or their clinical confessions - or at least to try to catch a glimpse of this activity.

These narratives give us the pleasure of indulging our suspicion, a fascination with what may be going on under the prosaic surface, and an interest in the suppressed secrets or secret existence of others in our midst. But the ubiquity of dramatic irony in these shows also alludes to a desire to see the intricate workings of what it takes to construct or maintain a socially believable story or identity. We wish to see the truth, but also its progression toward, or dissonance with, social tell-ability. The prevalence of this narrative demonstrates that we, as a society, are interested not only in authenticity, but in its constitution. We are interested in watching representations and allegories about how life is lived (ontology and pragmatism), but importantly and specifically, experiences which question knowledge, truth and representation (epistemology and veracity). Evidence that the public are still engrossed in the interplay of truth and representation, contrary to the affective turns’ claims, is ubiquitous.

Forensic crime shows represent another recent trend in the truth-seeking genre, dominating prime-time television during the past decade. They celebrate our ability to make the invisible visible with science and technology. Interestingly, in a more recent development in this genre, (and it is one that uncannily mirrors the affective turn from positivist to intuitive methods) the truth-seeking detective has become one who not only discerns a forensic truth but penetrates the world of the unknown: the forensic detective has given way to the psychic detective. Television programs such as Medium (2005 - 2011), Supernatural (2005 - present), The Mentalist (2008 - present), A Gifted Man (2011 - present), and The Ghost Whisperer 154

(2005 - 2010) all feature detectives who solve crimes by psychically engaging with “the other side”, most often the deceased victims of crime. In the family drama Six Feet Under (2001 - 2005) a family of funeral directors similarly converse with the spirits of their cadaverous clients. These narratives extend hermeneutics to intuiting the ineffable and human life to include post-human agency.

Ann McGuire and David Buchbinder position this shift in the detective genre as a reasonable reaction to the current political climate, arguing that the rise of the psychic detective is symptomatic of post 9/11 trauma (2010, 293). McGuire and Buchbinder place these television programs within the Gothic genre, or what Fredric Jameson calls “its political-paranoid forms” (Jameson, 1992, 290). Alluding to the American psyche, Jameson argues that sheltered socio-economic privilege acts as “a protective wall through which you cannot see, and behind which therefore all kinds of envious forces may be imagined in the process of assembling, plotting, preparing to give assault” (Jameson, 1992, 293). 9/11 brought the gothic narrative to life: behind the spectacle of economic comfort, though uncannily within the borders of the nation, people were indeed plotting and preparing assault. Drawing from Jameson’s metaphor, McGuire and Buchbinder argue that the interest in psychic detective narratives reflects a post 9/11 desire to gratify paranoid attention and to confront this perforated “protective wall”.

McGuire and Buchbinder explain that the transition from detective to psychic detective was compelled by a decline of trust in traditional, ocular-based methods of forensic detection: The events of 9/11 produced a complete paradox: the unseeable other had breached the boundaries of the nation state and left it metonymically in ruins. Yet the other remained invisible, even if agents could be seen and arrested. At the same time, however, the technologies of surveillance and visibility on which the nation had relied for its security and safety now became the mechanisms by which the citizens of the nation witnessed their betrayal, their exposure to danger and to fantasies of danger. In such a context, the traditional, the familiar forensic strategy – that is, a way of knowing the world and events – becomes manifestly inadequate. A new way of seeing, and therefore also of knowing, the world and events is required. (2010, 302)

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Following this suspicion of the spectral, it correlates that we are drawn to stories where we are made cognisant of what is unseen, private, or secretive. The nature of what is empirical, or of what seems stable and factual, was troubled by the events that led up to and followed the War on Terror. Faith in our ability to determine a causal chain of events, to predict or anticipate, was understandably shaken by the shock of the almost unbelievable, televised event of planes hitting the twin towers on 9/11.

Thus while Thrift and Law argue that the rapid impetus of life gets lost in narration, particularly suspicious narratives, in this case hyper-awareness is the response-in-motion to social change. The idea of detection as a means to navigate political insecurity finds a precedent in Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the everyday experience of Parisian modernisation. “In times of terror,” Benjamin states, “when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in a situation where he has to play detective” (Benjamin, 1983, 40). For Benjamin, detection is not averse to change, but an integral agent in both its momentum and acceptance. He suggests that the citizen “develops forms of reaction that are in keeping with the pace of a big city [...] This is an indication of how the detective story, regardless of its sober calculations, also participates in fashioning the phantasmagoria of Parisian life” (41). McGuire and Buchbinder’s argument can be read as an extension of Benjamin’s: the specific form of detection that arises now is impelled by a specific form of terror. To know now we must penetrate the unseen, undetectable, and unexplained agencies behind political events.

Given the desire to penetrate the unknown in popular culture, one could easily see the affective turn, with its focus on understanding affect - a notion which Brian Massumi and Nigel Thrift define as an incomprehensible force (Massumi, 1995, Thrift, 2007) - as a direct expression of this wider turn to intuitive discernment. Psychic crime programs challenge the idea of a truth that can be forensically revealed. In these shows the truth is located in the unknown, on the other side of perception and can only be obtained by those with an extra- sensory gift, with an ability to “cross-over”. Importantly though, the method is still a relentless pursuit of truth, pushing further into the unknown in the search for answers. In Massumi’s influential argument, the conception of reality is similar, affective, animating forces are beyond our perception, eluding our cognition and representations (Massumi, 1995). In sum, there is a focus on the unknown, on what is beyond the “protective wall”, which in the affective turn’s case is the wall of human cognition. 156

Paranoid reading is widespread in popular reading, but the parallel goes further. Likened to the extension of forensic detection to psychic detection, the affective turn becomes an extension of, rather than antidote to, critique. It too pushes into hyper-paranoid territory, believing that we are being driven by forces we cannot even see. It too seeks to transform inquiry based on a distrust of past methods which was prompted by current political uncertainties. Similar to the psychic detective, Massumi does not retreat from the possibility of understanding why we act. Rather, he argues that the locus of agency operates elsewhere and requires new methods of communication. Similarly shifting from the forensic and the spectral, affect theory calls for a kinetic mode of feeling as knowing. Hyper-paranoid, it anchors agency entirely outside our determination or control. The idea of an autonomous affect warns that the methods we trust to be emancipatory - the democratic rights to petition, information, or speech - are ineffective because what motivates and animates life defies human agency, particularly language, criticism, or causal reasoning. Read this way, the affective turn actively participates in and encourages, rather than contradicts, a paranoid zeitgeist.

The fact that the scholars discussed do not acknowledge the continuing popularity of themes of secrecy, detection, and imposture in public culture sits awkwardly alongside their claim to engage more generously with the beliefs, fetishes, or common sense, of everyday people. Latour and Sedgwick characterise critique as paranoid, or, in what is clearly and ironically a conspiracy metaphor, as an insidious malaise threatening scholars’ ability to engage with social life. Sedgwick specifically calls critique “paranoid reading” and uses metaphors of biological warfare to describe its pervasiveness (1995, 21). Latour, too, likens critique to the reasoning of conspiracy theorists and employs military metaphors in his argument (2005, 230 - 231). In “After Suspicion” (2009), Felski argues that: “Suspicion sustains and reproduces itself in a reflexive distrust of common knowledge and an emphasis on the chasm that separates scholarly and lay interpretation” (2009, 29). She argues that it is a method from which we must “turn” if we are to “build better bridges between theory and common sense, between academic criticism and ordinary reading” (31). In these arguments the hermeneutics of suspicion is cast as a negative mode of engagement, a tired and repetitive endeavour that has no relevance to the unpredictable fluidity of daily life. However, if we do look towards the desires and beliefs of everyday people, to the stories of “the popular” as the turn against critique wishes to do, then we see a dogged commitment to unveiling truths, to 157 the idea that there is always more than meets the eye, and an assumption that truth can be found with relentless perseverance. Indeed, the fact that the turn against critique maintains this very desire to reveal what slips beneath our perception questions whether paranoid narratives are behind the times, or if they are, in fact, evidence of scholarship’s involvement in the social current. Perhaps suspicion is not evidence of a gap between critique and common sense, as Felski argues, but rather, evidence of their continuity. The repetition of paranoid themes across various genres of scholarship, and high and low-brow popular culture, highlights a web of collective anxiety about how our lives are animated and authored.

To consider the affective turn as congruent with social critique, summons a series of important and interconnected questions. For instance, if the affective turn’s thesis is simply another instantiation of a desire to give voice to the silences present in social life, or to collate a complete image, can we truly believe that a desire to demystify is no longer relevant? By characterising paranoia and a commitment to truth-seeking as synonymous with critique, contrary to the direction of their own efforts, the affective turn must ignore fascinating questions, such as, why is paranoia so pervasive? What motivates it? Why does it seem never to satisfy itself? Why, consistently, do we as a public sit and watch ourselves vicariously sleuthing secrets and cathartically confirming the fact that everyone is harbouring a hidden truth? Why are the most heralded and the most popular novels of our time peopled by paranoiacs who always turn out to be not so paranoid after all? Or as a correlative question, aimed specifically at social science practice, why is it that we are constantly searching for new ways to capture a more authentic representation of social life? Why do we always have a sense that the truth of sociality eludes our efforts to describe it? These questions are vital to a social, and sociological, hermeneutics of suspicion.

The popular culture examples discussed here demonstrate that the wariness the affective turn hopes to escape by shifting to the genres of the creative and performing arts is in fact already there. This is because we are not looking at two distinct generic registers – critical and creative – but at one, to draw on Law’s term, “mess”. Paranoid reading does not preclude the popular. Its epistemological questions do not preclude the lived ontology of social life, for sociality is not divided by these terms. Popular paranoid culture is interested in how truth is lived. No genre or author is immune to the influence of a political, social, and historical milieu. All forms of storytelling are equally entangled in the matrix of social authorship. Literature and sociology, for example, are mutually involved in the processes of 158 social inquiry and social definition. Similarly, paranoia is not the exclusive attribute of critical genres; it is holistically integral to an engagement with sociality, or rather to sociality’s engagement with itself. In addition to socio-political triggers like the Cold War and 9/11, the very act of creation or momentum inspires wariness as life constantly becomes fixed and unfixed. Identity, informed by the agency and experience not only of the self, but multifarious social agents and events, is at once anchored and fluctuating. It is this state, the need to respond and yet remain responsive in the knowledge that while you affect you are also being affected, that informs a quotidian suspicion; a suspicion that expresses itself in various social media, including critique, literature, and on the silver screen.

Considering the fuller context of the methodological proposals made by the affective turn it is evident that much of what is dismissed, such as suspicion, is actually crucial, even intensified, in grounding the very rationale of their intervention. We are right to be suspicious of the imposed coherence of the affective turn’s arguments and curious about the questions that continue to lurk behind their editorial dismissals. The division that Thrift, Law, and fictocritics draw between creative and critical genres does not hold up because their characterisations of both sides of this polemic are unnecessarily and misleadingly reductive. They rob these diverse genres of their complexity, their history, their ambidexterity, and their interconnections. Creative genres, such as novels or poetry, do not provide a hopeful counterweight to the hopeless writing of the social sciences. Any attempt to tell a story is always already fraught with the question of its fidelity. As the juxtaposition of various genres in this chapter illustrates, novelists, dramaturges, and screenwriters, grapple alongside social scientists with questions of representational credulity, ethics, and authorship. In an attempt to build an interdisciplinary bridge between the methods of the social sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts, the methodological proposals discussed in this chapter actually impose schisms and segregations where there are shared questions and narrative motifs.

Indeed, the traction that these method proposals, in their critical forms, add to questions of truth and genre, the conflicts they provoke and the ghosts they summon, are evidence of the critical method’s power to enact transformation, its inability to be finally “pinned down”. Despite the caricatured, uni-dimensionality ascribed to terms such as judgement or suspicion, and to genres as entirely separate forms of expression such as critique or fiction, the affective potentiality of these words, their very life, chafes against the claim that language, and critical language in particular, is deadweight. The fact that the 159 affective turn’s definitions of genres cannot be easily knitted into their living context affirms their unnecessary brittleness. However, interestingly, the fact that their arguments can nevertheless, still facilitate the questions they do not ask – that in effect what is brittle can still be supple - affirms the volatility of words and their meanings; their mercurial ability to self-refute.

The affective turn is a twofold motion: it is a turn away from the suspicion of critique to the productive naivety of creative genres. As this and the preceding chapter argue, both actions are problematic and fall short of addressing their stated intention, which is to create a more generous academic practice, one which gives credence to the pragmatic power of beliefs, desires, and the seemingly ineffable forces of affect. What the argument ends up doing is denouncing the dogmatism of the critical method without engaging with the fact that this “dogmatism” is based on faith, a faith in the pursuit of truth or justice or the efficacy of counter-narration. Ironically, it is a faith that might serve as the perfect exemplar for how to apply the methods of the affective turn. As a “matter of concern”, the affect scholar might refrain, as Latour proposes, from calling critique out on its possible errors and assumptions, in short from disproving its facticity, in order to understand how it is formed by, and in turn forms, political reality. They might read it reparatively, as Sedgwick suggests, rather than through a paranoid diagnostic frame, which means drawing out how it is productive despite its arguable error. Following Massumi, they could pay attention to the affective flows that make critical writing compelling or stifling in various instances. However, the potential for such affective analysis is disabled by the very arguments that claim to define this potentiality. Instead, the social scientist’s faith in the critical method’s ability to unearth a truth is ridiculed, considered unworthy of even cursory analysis, dismissed as wholly unsalvageable. In fact, throughout all of these manifestorial proclamations we never see a true example of what the generosity the affective turn theorises might actually look like.

Rather than widening the scope for what constitutes a truth, whether it is facticity or faith that verifies it, or how its pragmatic effects can whip around to form its very foundation, truth is muscled out of the discussion. By imposing an opposition between “matters of fact” and “matters of concern”, the affective turn disqualify the question of fact itself as a matter of concern. The affective turn remain entangled within the critical genre precisely because this movement remains invested in the hope of revelation, even in the tautological case that this revelation be the impossibility of revelation. 160

Despite the argument that such hermeneutic desires are no longer salient, the desire to locate the pinnacle of truth-telling practices, the genre which will create the most authentic, unadulterated expression or representation of social life, is still the motivating force of the methods discussed in this chapter. Methodologists such as Thrift and Law struggle with representation, and their adoption of “non-representational theory”, albeit by way of various forms of representation, does not resolve this. The pursuit of coherence, the primary trope of the paranoid method, remains paramount in the method proposals of the affective turn. Reparative generosity remains a hope for this movement rather than a reality. To be “reparative” the affective turn would have to become less paranoid about suspicion, to open up paranoia as a “matter of concern”, which it clearly is. Indeed, if we were to untie the tourniquet that holds suspicion aloft from the surging body of affect like a diseased extremity, perhaps we could begin to consider that the discretion that is inherent to critical reading, but also to curiosity and creativity, is the very affective force that drives this turn and the broader sociality of which it is an expression.

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V Ordinary Paranoia: An Everyday Hermeneutics of Suspicion

In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and The Sociological Imagination (2008), Avery F. Gordon describes the disciplinary slippages between sociology and literature as the false-footings that inevitably occur when one tries to evade a taboo. Her account refers to the synergy of fact and fiction, but also works to describe the exclusion and return of paranoia, as method and motive, in the affective turn’s method proposals: Like a taboo that is always being approached in the act of avoidance, when sociology insists on finding only the facts, it has no other choice but to pursue the fictive, the mistake it seeks to eliminate. A marginal discourse, the story of how the real story has emerged, consistently shadows and threatens to subvert the very authority that establishes disciplinary order. (Gordon, 2008, 26) Similarly, the affective turn seems to unintentionally relapse into paranoid metaphors and ideology critique, even as it argues against the utility of these very methods. Everywhere the affect theorists discussed so far try to sever the life of suspicion, like a Lernaean Hydra, two heads arise in its place. The method proposals of Thrift and Law, as discussed in the previous chapter, mask their kinship with certain historical and social narratives, but, summoned nonetheless, these influences “threaten to subvert” the novelty and autonomy of affect theory. The projects they develop have much in common with prior interventions into representational ethics, as well as ongoing social desires to penetrate, and charter, the unknown. Even in foundational arguments against critique, as shown in chapter three, the very themes of conspiracy and threat which these authors wish to surpass, remain vital to their own circumscribed logic. Latour, for instance, suspects that critics’ constructivist weapons have been turned against them by right wing pundits, and Sedgwick guards against the malignant virality of “paranoid reading”. In calls for alternatives to critique, paranoia is “always being approached in the act of avoidance”. Thus the affective turn’s own directives, still leveraged by critical methods and riddled with conspiracist motifs, have the strange effect of disclosing the ongoing and seemingly inescapable potential of suspicious attention.

The need to acknowledge a recuperation of paranoid themes climaxes in one of the “most widely circulated books on affect,” Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007) 162

(Wilson and Frank, 2012, 873).65 Following Stewart’s introduction, and the way it is often cited, this experimental ethnography reads as a straightforward continuation of the affective turn’s project. Stewart positions her text as a creative experiment that develops a methodology for studying and addressing affect. In 115 autobiographical fragments, the longest stretching across 5 pages, the shortest just 4 lines, Stewart narrates scenes from her everyday life where people she knows, meets, or sees, respond to as-yet-undefinable, affecting forces. The fragments are prefaced by a short, critical introduction that positions Ordinary Affects as a correction to critical, structural, and representational forms of social science, and, in realisation of the affective turn’s methodological directive, as an intuited and creative rendering of everyday life. In the very first sentences, Stewart aligns her study with the aims and terminology that, as seen throughout the past two chapters, codify the affective turn’s intervention. “Ordinary Affects is an experiment, not a judgment” she argues, “[c]ommitted not to demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world, but rather to speculation, curiosity and the concrete [...]” (1).

Her authorial method is modelled after “non-representational theory” and posits experimental writing as a more embodied and embedded form of social inquiry. “I write not as a trusted guide carefully laying out the links between theoretical categories and the real world,” Stewart argues, “but as a point of impact, curiosity, and encounter” (Stewart, 2007, 5). Performing a separation from her role as author, Stewart refers to herself in the third person as ‘she,’ in order to “mark the difference between this writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence” (5). Using this style of writing Stewart presumes to relinquish her authorial agency and become a porous conduit of affective force: “‘She’ is not so much a subject position or an agent in hot pursuit of something definitive as a point of contact; instead, she gazes, imagines, senses, takes on, performs […]” (5). Constructing a different field of reference, the ethical demands of ethnography are thereby recast in terms of the affective turn’s preoccupations, rather than the disciplinary history of anthropology and the ongoing quandary of separating subject and object or observer and observed. Segregating critique and affect, Ordinary Affects subscribes to, and sets out to realise, the affective turn’s essentialising division of critical and creative genres, particularly the liberating nature of experimental forms. Importantly however, while Stewart repeats

65 In their special Body & Society issue on the affective turn, Blackman and Venn also cite Stewart as one of the primary advocates of “non-representation,” and “creative experimentation” (2010, 13). For more general engagements with Stewart’s text, see the introduction to Highmore’s Ordinary Life (2011), and a special review and response section in the journal Social and Cultural Geography, Vol. 11, No. 8, 2010, 921-931. 163

several of the turn’s exclusions, Ordinary Affects does more than simply make diagnoses about the perils of making diagnoses. Stewart applies the affective turn’s advocated methods in an attempt to investigate how affect, this seemingly ineffable force, actually operates in a pragmatic, everyday context. Because it does more than foreshadow a post-critical genre and refer obliquely to “ordinary people”, Stewart’s text is perhaps the most generous of the affective turn’s correctives. It commits to several of the turn’s exclusions, including its reductive conception of structure and its segregation of critical and common inquiry, but also reveals the possibility and value of thinking them otherwise.

For the purposes of this thesis, Ordinary Affects is also one of affect theory’s more remarkable texts because it exemplifies, and begins to unfold, the inevitable yet unacknowledged internal conflict within the affective turn, namely, its turn away from and toward paranoia. Stewart’s introduction reinforces the claim that a hermeneutics of suspicion has no everyday purchase, however, in stark contrast to this assertion, her ethnographic fragments present an unmistakeably hypervigilant public. Stewart’s fragments are populated by the eccentric characters and volatile settings we might expect to find in the postmodern paranoia novels of Thomas Pynchon, or the offbeat Americana of David Lynch’s television miniseries Twin Peaks. In North American trailer parks and strip malls, citizens are highly- strung and reactive. Ordinary Affects’ “ordinary” anticipates extraordinary events. “Its atmosphere is,” as Ben Highmore notes, “simultaneously small-town gothic, blue-collar naturalism, and main-stream surrealism” (2011, 8). With strikingly symmetrical irony, Stewart’s critical framework, which presumes paranoid reading is a tired, ivory-tower method, is inadvertently challenged by her own commitment to documenting the ubiquity and gravitas of suspicious reading in everyday life.

Given Ordinary Affects provocative structure, which offers both internal dissonance and paradoxical insight, a close reading of Stewart’s text serves as a valuable finale to this thesis’ case study of the affective turn’s pursuit of a true method. Having traced the theorisations of affect and their methodological preferences, with Ordinary Affects we seem to arrive at their ideal destination: a creative channelling of lived, social affect. After shedding the static impositions of structure and critique, Stewart, we might assume, is set to reveal an unsuspicious and uncritical public. However, this chapter argues that what we find in Ordinary Affects – contrary to its stated aims and the arguments of its cited influences – is a sociological and social commitment to anticipatory reading and causal sense-making as 164 complex, mutating methods. In the ordinary life Stewart chooses to document, people are anxious about where agency lies, about who is authoring their lives, about what comes next. But, crucially, their suspicion is not an obstacle to living, or creativity, or adaptation. It is productive of and responsive to these very practices. Stewart’s ethnography, which works against its stated motives, affirms the banality of paranoia as a justified attentiveness in most people’s lives; as a form of reading which is not essentially positive or negative. In Ordinary Affects hypervigilance is not a parasitic redundancy but a palpable, even necessary, reality: “watching and waiting has become a sensory habit” (2007, 35). Stewart’s ethnography is posited as a fulfilment of the affective turn’s methodological intervention. However, its paradoxes also challenge the redundancy of the hermeneutics of suspicion – as a common, interpretive method – in a world where authorial agency is radically distributed, and yet, individual culpability remains an immediate concern.

This chapter traces Stewart’s alignment with the turn against “paranoid reading” and then her allusion to the ongoing social purchase of hypervigilance. Drawing out this tension, it locates suspicion - as a living, dynamic form of attention - at the heart of Stewart’s ethnography. Recognising the vitality of suspicion, we can begin to unravel why wariness is such an untiring form of attention in scholarship and the broader social rhythms of life. Breaking from the affective turn’s essentialist reading of the hermeneutics of suspicion as an inert and uncreative method, this chapter finally considers how “paranoid reading” might already be a feasible way to deal with the shifting ambiguities of our mercurial social structures and the authorial complicities they involve.

A misplaced allegiance? In the introduction to Ordinary Affects, and in a series of related articles, Stewart commits to the arguments of the affective turn, drawing inspiration from its key theorists, its opposition to critical and structural methods, its justification of affect’s autonomy, and its claims to ethical progress.66 This section details Stewart’s investments in these theoretical and formal preferences, and begins to tease out what is at stake, or what risks being censored, in such an approach. It highlights Stewart’s commitment to the findings of affect theory, specifically her dedication to the idea that affect cannot be represented or understood using existing methods,

66 By related I mean that these articles contain excerpts from or similar arguments to Ordinary Affects (2007). 165 specifically those that seek to define, connect, and reveal, and charts the studied rhetorical techniques she uses to qualify affect as autonomous and indefinable.

The special signature of Stewart’s intervention is set out firstly through its literary affiliations. In “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World” (2008), for instance, Stewart cites Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s arguments against paranoid reading as an impetus for her work (72, see also 2011 and 2007, 6-7). In “Atmospheric Attunements” (2011) Stewart also names Nigel Thrift and Bruno Latour as inspiration for her “writing and thinking experiment” (Stewart, 2011, 445). “Following these tendencies to rethink theory and writing,” she explains, “my point here is not to expose anything but to pencil in the outline of what Thrift (2007) calls a geography of what happens: a speculative topography of everyday sensibilities […]” (2011, 445). Noting precedents for Ordinary Affects, Stewart also lauds fictocriticism’s blurring of fact and fiction, which, again marked as more sensorial than critical prose, “leaves the reader with an embodied sense of the world” (2007, 6).

Following these influences, specifically their dismissal of methods driven by revelation and judgement, Stewart alternatively proposes, “a pause, or to try to write theory through stories, or try, through descriptive detours, to pull academic attunements into tricky alignment with the […] commonplace labor of becoming sentient to a world’s work, bodies, rhythms, and ways of being [...] (2011, 445). Here, Stewart demonstrates her investment in the affective turn’s assumption that life’s ontological details are best served by expressive, intuitive, indirect, and undefined forms of documentation. In this claim, Stewart again follows Thrift, who maintains that “the performing arts may help us to inject a note of wonder back into a social science which, too often, assumes that it must explain everything” (Thrift, 2007, 12). However, this celebration of artistic practice, as the previous chapter outlined, assumes that genres such as poetry, dance, and experimental prose are not structured by conventions, imbued with political didacticism, and implicated in an ongoing “crisis of representation”. Perhaps this is because such a stratified and hierarchical notion of genres, with essential moral identities and affects, cannot be accommodated in the affective turn’s formulation of an immanent and changing world.

Nevertheless, running with the contested notion that affect precedes and escapes representation, and is thereby evidence for a revolution in social science methodology, Stewart represents ordinary affects as unresponsive to structural and analytic methods. 166

Affects “are not the kind of analytic object that can be laid out on a single, static plane of analysis,” she argues, “they don’t lend themselves to a perfect, three-tiered parallelism between analytic subject, concept, world” (3-4). Demoting representational and critical methods, Stewart explains that her “book tries to slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique long enough to find ways of approaching the complex and uncertain objects that fascinate because they literally hit us or exert a pull on us” (4). According to Stewart, such “[m]odels of thinking […] slide over the live surface of difference at work in the ordinary to bottom line arguments about ‘bigger’ structures and underlying causes” and “obscure the ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and non-coherent singularities” (4). Stewart argues that these traditional social science methods not only miss, but actually “obscure” reality.

As these descriptions of affect’s identity indicate, affect does not defy representation. Rather, Stewart crafts a speculative description of affect as if it could, or should be, autonomous. The distinctly oppositional sentence structure Stewart uses to describe affect’s resistance to existing methods determines this sense of character. As Stewart critically positions her ethnography, she makes clear that her work is not fixed, representational, semiotic, evaluative, or interested in “‘meaning’”, but open to potential, movement, the suspension of judgement, and affective resonance. “The question [affects] beg” she contends, “is not what they might mean in an order of representations, […] but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance” (3, emphasis added). “They work not through “meanings” per se but in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas and social worldings of all kinds”(3, emphasis added). “Ordinary affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, and more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meanings” (3, emphasis added). Stewart may not be clear about what affect is, but she is certainly clear about what it is not. In each of these descriptions of ordinary affects, Stewart uses the very critical techniques she rejects to better situate and represent the innovation of her own practice. She leverages the interest and novelty of affect with the revelation that existing methods are inadequate. Critique, though “pinned down” as lifeless here, continues to drive and privilege Stewart’s project.

The style of authorship Stewart adopts is thought to be uncritical and non-invasive; rather she describes her role as similar to that of an amanuensis, simply transcribing truths as 167 they emerge. In her introduction, Stewart explains: “My effort is not to finally ‘know’ [ordinary affects] – to collect them into a good enough story of what’s going on – but to fashion some form of address that is adequate to their form” (4). It is presented as an essential fact that affect requires new methods of representation. Affective forces are “[l]iterally moving things” that she insists “have to be mapped through different, co-existing forms of composition, habituation and event” (4, emphasis added). Ironically, affect’s ability to move is circumscribed by this structuralist limitation which demands that it remain mutually exclusive from processes of judgement, precision, and classification.

Stewart represents affect as a specific and coherent force with its own essential properties and limitations. It cannot, for instance, be representational, recognisable, suspicious, or structurally productive. Thus, her method, in accordance with the turn against critique’s methodological directives, constructs affect as an ineffable uncertainty and then, accordingly, refuses to pursue clarity or definition in explaining what is entailed. Several of the stylistic devices Stewart uses are worth detailing here to give a sense of the labour that goes into maintaining affect’s autonomy, namely, its inability to be straightforwardly legible or known.

In what one can imagine is the intended aesthetic of John Law’s “deliberate imprecision” (2004), Stewart confronts the reader with a deluge of adjectives, rather than definitive nouns to represent affect as an unrepresentable force. This method can be seen in both the introduction to Ordinary Affects and Stewart’s article, “Atmospheric Attunements” (2010), which broadly list, rather than analyse in detail or with examples, how ordinary affects manifest: They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency... (2007, 2)

Ordinary affects, then, are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routs, and disjunctures. They are a kind of contact zone where the overdeterminations of circulations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place (3)

To attend to ordinary affects is to trace how the potency of forces lies in their immanence to things that are both flighty and hardwired, shifty and unsteady but

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palpable too. At once abstract and concrete, ordinary affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicious, and unpredictable than symbolic meanings (3)

I try to open a proliferative list of questions about how forces come to reside in experiences, conditions, things, dreams, landscapes, imaginaries, and lived sensory moments (2010, abstract)

Here, things matter not because of how they are represented but because they have qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements (1)

What happens if we approach worlds not as the dead or reeling effects of distant systems but as lived affects with tempos, sensory knowledges, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields ... worlds of all kinds which form up around conditions, practices manias, pacings, scenes of absorption, styles of living, forms of attachment (or detachment), identities, and imaginaries, or some publically circulating strategy for self-transformation (2).

Described this way, affect matches the affective turn’s definition of it as impossible to “pin down”. The desire to locate ordinary affects, to get a tangible grasp of what they do and why, is denied by the quantity and platitude of these descriptions. This description of affect is presented as a pre-existing empirical foundation; however, as the repetition of these literary devices demonstrates, it is indeed part of a studied exercise in rhetorical tautology.

Further orchestrating this deliberate imprecision, Stewart repetitively employs one vague noun to denote the mysterious forces of affect. In just ten pages of “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World,” for example, Stewart persistently refers to “something”: ... is always something about getting yourself into something ... (2008, 72)

... a mode of production through which something that feels like something throws itself together ... (72)

An opening onto something (72)

... a something waiting to happen ...(72)

There are countless moments when something throws itself together” (73)

Something throws itself together ... (74)

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... things throw themselves together into something that feels like something ... (76)

... a metonymic explosion into something that’s thrown itself together”(76)

... being in something that feels like something ... (77)

Everyone knew that something was happening, that they were in something (79)

...to make something of the mess they were in, a little something offered politely, slightly solemnly, like a gift (80)

… their constant production of the sense of being in something... (81).

As suggested by her hesitation to represent, one can again assume that Stewart refrains from classifying, or trying to discern what “something” is, or even why it remains unrecognisable, on purpose. Ordinary Affects then, makes a formal effort to represent affect as definitively indefinite.

Stewart claims that affect is an important political actor and that its influence is potent and widespread, however, using the devices above, she remains silent on how we can respond to or engage with these forces. Indeed, she presents this as the only choice possible on the basis that affect only lends itself to this type of analysis. The structural, representational, or ethically-culpable determinants of social affects are deliberately veiled. This refusal, as outlined in previous chapters, limits the tools and questions that social scientists can use to address everyday experience. But it also trivialises the very subject of Stewart’s book, in which people grapple, and often fail with unsettling consequences, to adequately make sense of or locate who or what is responsible for major changes in their lives. In the dire cases Stewart presents, domestic violence, neo-fascism, or even her own stepson’s drug addiction, stylistic vagary and deliberately withheld analysis seem an inappropriate response. Many characters in Ordinary Affects, stranded in economic crisis, would not possess the same privilege of indifference or analytic deferral. For the everyday people in Stewart’s ethnography, confusion is often suffocating and sometimes injurious. For Stewart it is an artistic experiment and the means to make a disciplinary point. In effect, Stewart’s attempt at a more generous approach to addressing everyday precariousness, the anxiety of not knowing what actions mean or from where they arise, is to inadvertently celebrate what is often a bewildering misery. To embrace the quotidian as a virtuously naïve approach to life’s complexities is also to interpret it in one-dimensional terms.

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Stewart’s, as well as the broader affective turn’s aim to engage more carefully with the lived experience of theoretical concepts – to unite social and sociological method – is jeopardised by affect theorists’ need to toe a new, and arguably more stringent, set of party- lines. Setting up a dichotomy between definition and imprecision, Stewart deliberately fashions her address to represent a highly subjective and contentious view of the social form, then frames it as the most natural reflection, free from judgement or rhetorical coercion. But this act is no less didactic, stylistically manipulative, or structurally restrictive than the critical genre she claims to succeed. Stewart’s experiment, her call to novelty, not only presumes, but constructs, a failed predecessor. Conforming to the affective turn, Stewart judges critical, structural, and representational methods to be no longer useful for capturing the flux of everyday life, and offers her “experiment” as a correction. It is difficult, in this context, to read Ordinary Affects as “an experiment, not a judgment” (2007, 1).

A tension operates in Stewart’s argument at this level, in that the need to preface her “experiment” with a traditionally critical introduction, to provide it with critical leverage, purpose, and innovation, surely undermines her dismissal of critique. The ethnography claims to move past questions of representation to take in the real stuff of life, but clearly remains active in arguments about methodological ethics. However, as already stated, it is actually a broader irony that makes Ordinary Affects such an interesting piece of work, particularly for rethinking why a paranoia paradox holds in the affective turn. The experience of reading Stewart’s ethnography becomes uncanny when, braced for an unparanoid reading of life after the introduction and the theoretical genealogy it cites, one turns to Stewart’s fragments only to find they are riddled with everyday experiences of suspicion. Indeed, the ontology of affect, the experience of being porous to contagious but unreadable forces, seems to inspire, in Stewart’s own description, an everyday hermeneutics of the deepest suspicion.

Ordinary paranoia The world Stewart creates in her fragments compels us to ask whether paranoid methodologies are obscuring the true voice of the social, or if, as suggested in the previous chapter, the paranoia of critical methodologies is a manifestation of a broader, social atmosphere? To readers, an irony is clearly evident. Stewart aligns her position with Sedgwick’s characterisation of paranoid reading as an outdated methodology (1997), however, what we see consistently and persuasively in the ethnographic fragments of 171

Ordinary Affects is that paranoia is a vital, orienting method in the social milieu Stewart represents. Reading experiences of suspicion in this context also lends a different texture to structure, readability, and wariness than the affective turn, and Stewart’s introduction, locks in place. Drawn directly from Stewart’s post-9/11 North American context, a setting of immediate political, ideological, and economic unrest, these characters – call-centre employees, neo- fascists, and retirees alike – sense momentums that “threaten” to gather or disperse, unhinging their lives in banal and dramatic ways. In the environment Stewart studies, described with suitable imprecision as a “United States caught in a present that began some time ago” (1), it is not the imposition and rigidity of structure that causes a sense of unease among publics, but the volatility – the life – of such determinants.

In Ordinary Affects we are introduced to an unmistakably hypervigilant socius. Stewart includes social anxieties about day-care centres and ritual abuse (64), the moral panic of teenage massacres (74), impending Christian apocalypses (108), mysterious illnesses (43), border anxiety (123-124), 9/11 (121, 124), and public surveillance (82). Trailer park eccentrics and citizens fight, or fail to fight, the chemical companies whose covered-up contamination of the water supply is responsible for their ailments (28, 84, 33, 91). Disgruntled young men, in forgotten, post-industrial cities turn to neo-Nazism, wanting someone to blame (56). People are addicted to poker-machines (72, 95), wonder drugs (75), and wander around in shopping centres aimlessly looking to fulfil a mysterious desire (61). And in the middle of this ethnographic picture is Kathleen Stewart, “she”, as she refers to herself, who is never sure how anyone will react and always surprised by how they do. Stewart not only depicts a world off-kilter but is, herself, precariously placed.

Despite initial positioning against structural concerns, Stewart’s ethnography is consonant with a current resurgence of sociological interest in how demographics emerge or change in response to economic crises. Guy Standing, an economist and public intellectual, signals an emerging class called the “precariat”, a heterogeneous demographic united by their perpetual state of economic insecurity (Standing, 2011).67 It is a global class, Standing argues, that feels: “Everything is fleeting” (2011a). However, for Standing this is a feeling

67 In addition to Standing’s public commentary, there are also supporting academic studies of “precaritization”, an economic position influenced by the fiscal crisis and the casualization of the workforce among other factors, including Neilson, B., & Rossiter, N. (2008), Ross, A. (2009), Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2009), and de Peuter (2011).

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that can be anchored in actual processes, such as the casualisation of the workforce. The demographic Standing argues for, the “precariat”, resonates with the “emergent” class that Stewart describes in Ordinary Affects. The ethnography is awash with citizens who are wary of widespread financial instability, who are living in a permanent state of simmering unease. In a fragment called “short circuit”, for example, Stewart articulates the affective toll of industrial dispute and uncertainty, an anxiety that defines the “precariat”: [H]er brother makes foreman at GE after twenty some years on the line […] There’s a strike over healthcare cuts and job security. He and the other foreman have to cross the picket line. It’s horrible. He’s been a union steward. He’s given union speeches. Now things are getting ugly. Something powerful and painful flashes through him. (14-5) Though Stewart marks affect as “something” here, the flash is readable as the lived struggle of structure. The foreman has a sense of solidarity with his fellow workers, but is threatened by the obligation of his new role and the living it provides him. His affective experience is a profoundly sociological one. It is the feeling of being implicated and systemic, complicit in what grips you. As Judith Butler states in her recent work on global ethics: “Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency” (2012, 148). In this pithy description, Butler presents precarity, or a sense of precariousness, as a condition that emphasises our citizenship in a broader social economy, or ecology. Responding to public events, such as the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Greek Debt Crisis, Butler elsewhere presents this experience as the response to contemporary fiscal-crisis (2011, 2011b, see also 2009), and it is this economically unstable world Stewart documents in Ordinary Affects. Edging her vision closer to sociological commentaries about the impact of economic instability than she acknowledges, Stewart’s fragments offer a description that cannot, despite her introduction’s critical stance, sustain a division between structure and affect.

Stewart’s fragments, while assumed to take an uncritical form, forge an intervention that is no less critical, and arguably more incisive, than her introduction concedes. Their incursion, however, speaks to discourses other than the affective turn’s claim to improve scholarship. Contrary to its stated aims, the stories in Ordinary Affects build a compelling case for the quotidian value of critical thinking skills. In fact, delving into Stewart’s previous oeuvre reveals quite a stated fascination with the cultural importance of paranoia in contemporary U.S. culture (1999a, 1999b, 2000, and 2003). In Paranoia Within Reason, 173

Stewart’s essay, “Conspiracy Theory Worlds” (1999a), for instance, places her research within a body of work that recognises conspiracy culture as more than just Cold War McCarthyism. In these essays, suspicious feelings are located at the heart of very current political problems. Douglas R. Holmes’ “Tactical Thuggery: National Socialism in the East End of London” (1999), for instance, gives an insight into how the British National Party has used rhetoric conflating the decline of the welfare state with incoming migration, a deliberate manoeuvre to breed nationalist (and racial) paranoia. Ten years beyond the publication of this article, and exacerbated by the instability surrounding the global financial crisis, this same sentiment can be seen in the reasons given for the 2011 riots on the streets of London.68 Stewart’s inclusion in this volume positions her within a discourse which, contrary to the assertions of the affective turn, sees paranoia, and specifically the productive, everyday force of paranoid reading methods, as a topic worthy of ongoing analysis. Here, paranoia is outlined as an everyday structure of thought, a schema for how knowledge is collated and then acted upon in common scenarios. The prevalence of pattern-reading, in this context, while still exemplified with over-determined plots of conspiracy, begins to signal a more general act of interpreting, specifically the inference of causality.

In contradiction to its didactic preface (a preface which, as Kate Eichhorn has perceptively noted, “seems strangely misaligned” with Stewart’s “overall project”) the fragments of Ordinary Affects give the experience of anticipation some serious thought (Eichhorn, 2009). Though Ordinary Affects cannot be wholly divorced from the didacticism of its introduction, it is vital to challenge the limitations this directive places on how the fragments can be read. To begin this work, Stewart’s ethnography might be studied not only as a continuation of the affective turn, but also of her research history as a paranoia scholar. The tensions within Stewart’s arguments work productively to question what paranoia - this seemingly unshakeable modality - actually is.

68 The current leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, commentated the London riots via the social networking site Twitter, attempting to infer a causal connection between multiculturalism and the riots. A sample of his posts can be read on the Twitter platform: http://chirpstory.com/li/2171. Public polls reported in The Guardian suggest that Nationalist groups may have been successful in linking the riots to racial issues in the public’s perception of the event, accessed online 04/07/212: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/05/british- public-prejudiced-minorities-riots. As this case suggests, paranoid structures of interpretation are relevant to ongoing social changes in politics and communications, and to understanding how they operate. 174

The fragments Though intended as a departure from paranoid narratives, the scattered fragment form Stewart adopts, fashioned as “an address adequate to [ordinary affects’] form” (2007, 4), also encourages a meditation upon causal and relational forms of deduction. Stewart argues that “from the perspective of ordinary affects, thought is patchy and material. It does not find magical closure or even seek it” (2007, 5) and openly opposes a totalised system (1). Following this, Stewart draws on Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1977) as a model for how we might read her academic fragments.69 Barthes explains that his fragments or “unanalysed quotations” are used as a “dramatic method” which “renounces examples and rests on the single action of primary language (no metalanguage) [...] in order to stage an utterance, not an analysis” (Barthes, 1977, 3). In his denunciation of traditional linear narrative order, Barthes states that “to discourage the temptation of meaning it was necessary to choose an absolutely insignificant order” (8). However, in making such a distinction this order becomes absolutely significant. Like the unremitting repetition of the word “something”, it is as deliberate as any traditional, linear narrative in its manipulation of meaning or construction of coherence. Utterance is interpretive. Thus, while Stewart adopts the fragment to prove that causality is not a natural form of reasoning, the form works within, and depends upon, this very relational mechanism.

Following these formulations, the fragments presumably aim to work against a sense of closure and a traditional linear narrative. But on a methodological level, Stewart relies on the connective inferences of pattern recognition to weave Ordinary Affect’s moments into a zeitgeist. The fragment form is a known script with a history stretching back to antiquity, a history that frames how it is read as a clue to the whole. The form derives from the pottery shard or the torn papyrus, the irresolvable, incomplete archaeological form. In The Fragment: An Incomplete History (2009), a collection of essays on the fragment by archaeologists, artists, scientists and philosophers, philosopher Glenn W. Most suggests that: “Precisely by being incomplete, [the fragment] stimulates our imagination to try and complete it, and we

69 The fragment form has a strong history as an academic genre. Examples include Jacques Derrida’s The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987), Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, [1951] (2005) and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations [1558] (1998). According to Jacqueline Lichtenstein: “The fragment can be linked to the literary tradition, that of the formes brèves (short literary forms) favoured by French moralists of the seventeenth century” (2009, 125). Including: “La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, La Bruyère’s Caractères, Pascal’s Pensées, and - the earliest of these – Montaigne’s Essais” (Lichtenstein in Tronzo, 2009, 125). Drawing from literary precedents as Stewart does, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) also warrants mention. Lichtenstein asks us to note that “all these titles are plural nouns” (2009, 125). Ordinary Affects would fit this tradition. 175

end up admiring the creativity that would otherwise have languished within us” (Most in Tronzo, 2009, 12). Thus, the fragment encourages the reader, in an act of creativity, to join the pieces and make their own causal narrative connections. A collection of splinters works as an asyndeton, encouraging the reader to engage in what Sedgwick calls a “paranoid reading” method, anticipating and assuming that what constitutes the whole can be read in a part or even an omission.70 The fragment form operates within a frame of causality. We read patterns, make deductions about their relation and the arrangement of agency within them, and try to predict how they will unfold.

Paranoia drives knowledge; it is the knitting together of seemingly disparate events and utterances in real-time into a pattern that can be read and responded to. It serves the desire for meaning that Stewart, following Barthes, pushes into the background, but nonetheless pursues and provokes. Just as the affective turn posits the suspicious atmosphere of the Cold War as the origin and cause of critique’s identity, the very creation of knowledge is the creation of plots. And as E. M. Forster famously noted in Aspects of the Novel (1954), a plot runs on causality (60). It is not as though causality or meaning are imposed prison-house structures, that, when miraculously removed, will reveal a public undesirous of meaning and justification. Processes of relation and deduction are integral to thinking and creating and living. It is precisely these ever-evolving patterns of causality that drive and test the people of Ordinary Affects.

The scenes Stewart recounts in her ethnography affirm the ordinariness, the commonplace nature of the hermeneutics of suspicion as a methodology for relational living. They create a picture of American life where people are permanently attuned to the threat of mysterious “somethings” threatening to “throw themselves together”. The individual suffers an anxiety of influence, grappling with the social authorship, or the radically distributed agency, of life. Capturing the tone of the book, as well as creating a linear point of origin, Stewart begins her first fragment, “Dog Days”, with the ominous line “It’s been years now since we’ve been watching” (10). “Something surges into view like a snapped live wire”, it is both “real” and “delusional” (9). “The dogs take to sleeping in nervous fits and starts” and

70 Interestingly, this is also the tactic that Holmes suggests the British National Party implement with their rhetoric (1999). They put two separate facts together that do not necessarily correlate but will be causally related nonetheless, for instance, in the same year that the government increased immigration quotas the London Police started carrying guns. The reason this tactic is so effective is because the BNP are not accountable for making the connection themselves, but can rely on the fact that when reading, people may make causal connections, even where they are not strictly stated. In this context the fragment form assumes and reproduces paranoia. 176

“cower under legs for no good reason” (9). They “whimper at the sound of branches brushing up against the bathroom window in the still of the night” (9). The dogs are attuned to some mysterious threat, but then just as easily snap out of it and resume their tail-wagging play. In this fragment we are introduced to the kind of world Brian Massumi describes in “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995), where forces surge beneath our human perceptions, affecting our everyday lives. Though as we can see, this is not a world devoid of scrutiny, as the turn away from critique claims. In fact, the autonomy of affect creates perfect conditions for suspicion. The subject remains ever-alert to an unseen presence – their agency is always already thwarted in the face of a power that they allegedly cannot name or even perceive.

Thus, after layers of theorisations and proposals that insist everyday life is no longer animated by a desire to determine the true cause of events, and that affect is impervious to such attention, in Ordinary Affects we finally arrive at an illustration of this much-invoked socius only to discover that the indeterminacy of affect fuels paranoid reading. Stewart introduces us to a milieu where people cannot define exactly what forces are at work but nonetheless always have an inkling that “things are happening” (21). The vigilant attention that is introduced in the first line of “Dog Days” is repeated again and again throughout the book. In the very next fragment “Attention is distracted, pulled away from itself. But the constant pulling also makes it wakeful, ‘at attention’” (10). This guarded motif is one of the most prevalent in the book: And the habit of watching for something to happen will grow (12)

There’s a politics to ways of watching and waiting for something to happen (16)

It’s the paying attention that matters – a kind of attention immersed in the forms of the ordinary but noticing things too (27)

Watching and waiting has become a sensory habit ... Hypervigilance has taken root (35)

[Rogue intensities] incite... the most ordinary forms of watchfulness (45)

It’s like flexing one’s watching and waiting muscles, keeping them limber [...] Not exactly ‘passive’, it’s hypervigilant (50)

Forms of attention and attachment keep [the self] moving: the hyper-vigilance ... the vaguely felt promise that something is happening, the constant half-searching for an escape route (58).

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As the repetition of this motif demonstrates, vigilance is intrinsic to Stewart’s representation of everyday life. This “Watchfulness” (45), linking the anticipation of others and Stewart’s own ethnographic “gaze,” works against Ordinary Affect’s introduction to draw the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the hermeneutics vital to simply living, into alignment.

Moreover, Stewart appears to draw a parallel between hyper-paranoia and the affective turn’s proposed methods in a fragment where she recalls a former neighbour who filmed his daily life. One night, he gives Stewart and several other anthropologists a video of himself breathing heavily as he walks through the woods. Stewart reflects on the mode of attention in the film, where causality is not past, but rather, anticipated in the present: Things are (potentially) happening and he is in the habit of paying strict attention. But he is not necessarily in the habit of getting to the bottom of things or of making a decision or a judgment about what to do. He is making a record of his own ordinary attention to things and it’s this – the record of his attention – that he shares indiscriminately with the anthropologists gathered next door [...]. (36) In reference to this man’s methodology, Stewart explains that: “He’s an extremist, pushing things for some reason, but the close, recorded attention to what happens and to the intense materiality of things make some kind of sense to a lot of people [...]” (36). Stewart reads this man’s film as a shift toward attention without “judgement” or discrimination, a shift in which the author is merely a watchful channel. At this point, Stewart’s argument begins to truly turn back upon itself. It becomes difficult, when she so explicitly considers the potential utility and sense of hyper-vigilance, to reconcile her project with its critical framework, namely her subscription to the arguments of Sedgwick and Latour. Latour derides critique because he suggests that it is beginning to resemble conspiracy theory. Sedgwick claims that paranoid reading is actually redundant in contemporary times. However, in Stewart’s text, the anthropologist, like the man with the video camera, remains permanently attuned to their surroundings, even in the most innocuous circumstances. Stewart does not break from paranoid logic; she effectively locates herself in a circle of constant watchfulness. Often engrossed in hyper-paranoid milieus, she watches, indeed joins with, those who are watching and waiting for “something” to happen. The logic of the affective turn’s oppositions, particularly the mutual exclusivity of paranoia and affect, is tested here. In this context, the idea that affect, as a radically dispersed and unrecognisable non-human agency, is governing our actions and events, does not quell or suspend suspicious attention. It does not dampen the desire to pre-empt and anticipate. Rather, hypervigilance, as a form of responsive attention, is 178

actually exacerbated by the notion that agencies beyond our control can arise from anywhere at any time.

Contrary to many of her cited precedents then, several of Stewart’s fragments directly embrace the paranoid extremist and describe vigilance as an ordinary, even preferable, form of social awareness. Further evidence of this can be seen in a fragment titled, “Conspiracy Theory”, which refers to the suspicious subject: Investigative reports, talk shows, TV series, movies, novels, and textbooks present a diffuse, sometimes panicked, sense of struggle against unknown forces – a deep worry that normality isn’t normal anymore, that somebody has done something to the way things used to be, that we have lost something, that we have been changed. (2007, 88) Stewart presents this stereotypical image of the paranoid – “extremists” that “emerge on the paranoid edge,” “the profile loner/loser,” “the hypervigilant over-the-edge look in his eye” – but argues that, “there’s more to it than this” (89). She suggests that: “There are the small, inventive interpretive practices, the indeterminate trajectories of where things might go, the panics, the dream of popping up into the limelight with some kind of final truth or something, the moment of the ‘Ah ha! That’s what this is all about!’” (89). In these terms, Stewart frames conspiracy as just another way people are attempting to make sense of their lives and social context. She describes this as “an ordinary that is always already mixed up in all of this [...]” (89). Needless to say, this characterisation sits awkwardly with the dismissal of paranoia as a caricatured and perfunctory critical practice. Stewart is the lauded exemplification of the affective turn’s method proposals, and yet their pejorative description of paranoia unravels in her ethnography. But it is precisely this paradox that marks Ordinary Affects as a motivating point from which to recognise method’s complicity in an everyday desire to adequately represent what motivates and matters to people, and to regauge suspicion’s salience to this practice.

The social rhythm of suspicion So far, this chapter has drawn out a more nuanced definition of paranoid reading through a close reading of the tensions within Ordinary Affects. It has argued that anticipatory senses, in some form, animate almost every one of Stewart’s fragments, spanning class, race, gender, and geography. “Like a taboo that is always being approached in the act of avoidance,” when Stewart “insists on finding only” affect, she has “no other choice but to pursue” suspicion 179

(Gordon, 2008, 26). The motif is so compelling that Stewart’s subscription to Sedgwick’s or Latour’s characterisation of paranoia makes no sense at all. It is as if Stewart’s scenes of life are protesting against the narrow didacticism of her preface and unsettling her chosen intellectual pedigree. In Ordinary Affects, paranoia emerges as a perfectly ordinary affect. The prevalence of a suspicious reading method is entirely appropriate to its ethnographic setting. Though Stewart invests in the mutual exclusivity of suspicion and affect, creating a blind spot where insights into both sociality and sociological methods might be found, Ordinary Affects can be read at cross purposes to her stated aim.

Through her identification with the affective turn’s polemic and its various spokespeople, Stewart qualifies her ability to explore the complex negotiation of agency documented within Ordinary Affects. It is vital not to overlook how the particular tonality of affect, as an apparently indefinable “something”, is carefully constructed by Stewart throughout the text. Stewart continues to play the part of the social scientist that speaks for the social, even as she represents affect as an indefinable force that defies language. Ordinary Affects, despite its endorsement of Thrift’s theory, is not an example of “non-representation”. Indeed, its theme fits neatly with received notions of paranoia, like the delusions of people fretting over alien experimentation or fluoride in the water-supply. Leo Bersani suggests that stereotypical iterations of paranoia are “used as if it were merely synonymous with something like unfounded suspicions about a hostile environment” (1989, 99). Stewart comes close to offering us this tropological paranoia, with all the requisite ingredients, yet by affirming the ordinariness of this affect at other turns, the characters which populate Ordinary Affects point to “something” that is a little more ambiguous.

Stewart participates in the turn against critique, framing social sciences’ critical methodologies as “unhelpful”. However, in spite of its posturing, one could read Ordinary Affects as an account of how, even within the caricatured “paranoid” world Stewart often creates, people are not exactly positioned at the frontlines. Paranoia is not a malaise, or threatening attack that must be fought off, or from which people need to be saved. Instead, paranoia gives a tenable, even desired rhythm to people’s lives. It has a counter-intuitive, even positive momentum that creates coherent identities and communities. In Ordinary Affects, a shared suspicion, the sense that something is always slightly off-beat, unites people, as often as it divides them.

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In the fragment “Being in Public,” for instance, sociality is ultimately anchored in a shared suspicion. Stewart writes that, in public: “There are hard lines of connection and disconnection and lighter, momentary affinities and differences” (42). To exemplify this, she lists ways that people simultaneously differentiate themselves from and align themselves with social groups: Little worlds proliferate around everything and anything at all: mall culture, car culture, subway culture, TV culture, shopping culture, all teams and clubs and organisations [...] addictions of all kinds [...] diseases of all kinds, crimes, grief of all kinds, mistakes, wacky ideas. (42) Then in the fragment’s closing line, to gather together her lists, Stewart offers a final drawstring: “But everyone knows there’s something not quite right” (42). This fragment can be read as working against the idea that suspicion is fractious. It posits a suspicious inkling as the common thread that unites “everyone” – be they in the “country club” or the “sex group” (42). Similarly, in “The ‘We’ of Mainstream Banality” people are united in their mutual belief in government conspiracies, importantly in a light-hearted way, adorning their cars with bumper stickers, like the playfully homonymic “Bush bin Lyin’” (28). In both these fragments, people create identities and communities through shared suspicion. In creating a “Them,” they also create an “Us”.

In this case, paranoia is not simply a delusional social malaise, or “an unfounded suspicion about a hostile environment” (Bersani, 1989, 98); it is an effective mechanism with which to navigate sociality and the dialectic of self and other. Indeed, paranoia emerges to be, as Marita Sturken describes in her work on contemporary culture, “a social practice” “rather than a pathology” and “an integral aspect of the ways in which citizens mediate their relationship to political power” (1997, 77). The ubiquitous sense of suspicion is a constant reminder that the foundational narratives of our lives are precariously positioned due to constant shifts in the agential arrangement of social authorship. Ordinary Affects, read this way, compels us to consider not how “unhelpful” the scholarly desire to know and name is, but how alike it is to our everyday desire to be part of “something” recognisable or to give an authentic account of ourselves to others.

The reason that Stewart never recognises, or at least never acknowledges, the paradox in her work - the simultaneous condemnation of suspicion as an irrelevant discourse and affirmation of hypervigilance as a pervasive and important form of social attention - is clearly 181

because she assumes the paranoia of academic reading is separate from the hypervigilance of the everyday people she writes about. Her assumption, and it is a key assumption that also underlies her colleagues’ arguments against critique, is that when everyday people are compelled by something they perceive to be operating beneath the surface they gesture to affect, whereas if a scholar has the same experience, if they read a text and are unsettled and instructed by something lurking within it, “something” that is not self-evident but somehow present, then, to draw on Latour’s diagnosis, they are a savage iconoclast (2004).

The clear separation of life and writing is evident in the description Stewart gives of her intentions in “Cultural Poesis: The Generativity of Emergent Things” (2005). Stewart explains: “The writing here is one that tries to mimic felt impacts and half-known effects as if the writing were itself a form of life” (1016). For Stewart the idea that her writing lives is something we can only imagine metaphorically, as if it were itself a form of life. She assumes that she must manipulate her writing in order to make it “mimic” life, an endeavour at which it can only “try” and presumably fail, because, as the affective turn maintains, life escapes representation. Moreover, it is only by separating the critic from their own sociality, that Stewart, following the directives of the affective turn, can position critique as alien, imposed, and other than an expression of the social zeitgeist. However, as the preceding analysis of Ordinary Affects demonstrates, this separation cannot be sustained.

Stewart is magnetised, as the endurance of her work on paranoid culture attests, to the vigilant, interpretive attention that is also her own. Writing is of life. As the physicist Niels Bohr noted: “We are part of this nature that we seek to understand” (in Barad, 2007, 26). Though this connection languishes in Ordinary Affects, the unity of professionals and publics pursuing hidden agencies can be seen nonetheless. Latour, Sedgwick, and Stewart argue that paranoid frames are out of touch with social imperatives, but it is the stylistic correlations between their own arguments, their own “conspiracist” motifs, that point to the ubiquity and obvious relevance of practices of scepticism, wariness, and de-mystification in everyday life. Latour’s and Sedgwick’s characterisations of critique as a virulent and insidious malaise lines up perfectly with Stewart’s suspicious citizens, who see veiled threats emerging everywhere, from the supermarket to their neighbour’s lawns. For Latour, critique has fallen into the hands of “conspiracy theorists” like “weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party”; it “disarmed once matters of fact”, eat[ing them] up [with] the same debunking impetus”, resulting in a “sort of darkness” “fall[ing] on campuses” (2004, 232). For Sedgwick 182

critique threatens “if it persists unquestioned, [to] unintentionally impoverish the gene pool of literary-critical perspectives and skills” (1997, 21). These malignant characterisations are so like the fears of the characters in Ordinary Affects that, when reading these proposals, readers cannot help but see the parallels between the concerns of scholarship and the concerns of everyday citizens.

Thus, Ordinary Affects leaves us questioning just why these sleuthing methods seem to be so entrenched, so omnipresent, not just in academic methodologies but in popular culture, in our everyday dealings with people, and in our very economic system; a market that feeds on confidence but also rumour and fear. Why is suspicion’s hold so powerful that even those who claim to violently break from it are still entranced? Reading Stewart’s work leaves us asking why the turn against critique ignores these questions, particularly when they frame their inquiry as a more generous engagement with people’s actual concerns or beliefs. The affective turn’s warfare metaphors and the political imperatives of their arguments are themselves driven by the suspicion that their own “matters of concern” are under threat. In the struggle over authorial agency that lies at the heart of paranoia, Spinoza’s process of being concomitantly affected and affective is clearly illustrated. This state of scrutiny centres on the very anxiety between what is self and what is other, between what is a compulsion or a choice, or who is authoring and how. Paranoia is a process dedicated to speculation, to cartography, to taking itself and others apart to see how they work. Such suspicion is an unrelenting, vital process that never seems to reach the closure it desires, but continues to desire it nonetheless. It expects change, and braces for the resonating effect a tremor might initiate in the social fabric. Thus, rather than being a method to dismiss, suspicion seems to be precisely the place to look if we are to understand the nature of social organisation and how it is responsive to itself. By fore-fronting the practices of reading patterns and inferring authorial agencies, we can begin to consider structure, not as something static to be attenuated by altruism and creativity, but rather as a fluid process of structuration where people must navigate life even as its co-ordinates shift.

“Creative Paranoia”: a social method Reading Stewart’s Ordinary Affects alongside Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) clarifies Stewart’s experiment, its insights into how the experience of everyday suspicion is textured, and most interestingly, why it is vital to questions of genre as social structures.

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Berlant’s text has similar themes, but differs from Stewart’s in style.71 Though it also deals with social experiences of contingent presents and projective fantasies about the future, Berlant tries to name these states of being, and locate them with existing attempts to chart how people live in particular affective landscapes, such as Marxist and queer theory or the sociology of everyday life. Berlant carves out a slightly different critical space to Stewart, but it is one where Stewart’s work can be read, with critical reparation, in light of different kinships. In this context, what Stewart has to say about paranoia, as a social atmosphere, becomes a constructive dialogue with, rather than an unwavering subscription to, the broader affective turn and some of the forebears she lists in her introduction.

Importantly, Berlant picks up on the same tenor of hypervigilance that Stewart documents. However, where the ubiquity of this motif is deliberately unexplained by Stewart, Berlant marks it as a key theme of modern citizenship. Describing her own text, Berlant clarifies that: Each chapter focuses on dynamic relations of hypervigilance, unreliable agency, and dissipated subjectivity under contemporary capitalism; but what ‘capitalism’ means varies a lot, as each case makes its own singular claim for staging the general forces that dominate the production of the historical sensorium that’s busy making sense of and staying attached to whatever there is to work with, for life. (9) This explanation could serve aptly for the fragments of Ordinary Affects. In Berlant’s text, as in Stewart’s, being vigilant is how people feasibly deal with the turbulence of political, economic, and social climates. In both Berlant and Stewart’s texts, individuals try to be alert to how their attention is constantly being diverted toward spectres of prosperity; whether it is in the orchestrated detours of shopping malls or the wish-fulfilling images of advertising. Hypervigilance escalates as people “get wise” to the emptiness or endless deferral of such promises. Exploring citizen’s everyday response to contested agencies, these texts make a markedly different argument to the affective turn with which they are associated. Here, the pragmatic approach to social change that the affective turn is so eager to create is already apparent in everyday citizens’ shrewd incredulity, their guarded attempt not to be duped and to stay afloat amid social unease.

71 They are arguably companion texts. Berlant dedicates Cruel Optimism to “Katie Stewart” and Stewart credits Berlant as the primary inspiration for Ordinary Affects. These critics have also co-published and co-chaired conference panels. 184

To be vigilant, in Cruel Optimism, is not to be delusional. Instead, one needs to read the present with a tentative wariness if they are to keep up with society’s structural indeterminacy. The shifting nature of social currents, and the conflicting perspectives that interpret and reinterpret these shifts in real-time, demand that people be “anticipatory,” one of the key markers of “paranoid reading” (Sedgwick, 1997, 9). “If the present is not at first an object but a mediated affect,” Berlant explains, “it is also a thing that is sensed and under constant revision, a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now whose very parameters (when did ‘the present’ begin?) are also always there for debate” (2011, 4). In the reality Berlant describes, people live tentatively. But they must also make decisions and take actions even though they cannot always control the consequences, or even the original terms by which these decisions are made. The conventions of life’s genres, its structural determinants, are socially authored in the very acts of living and interpreting. The hermeneutics of suspicion, in this context, is not habitual in an inert sense, but utterly vital and transformative.

In Ordinary Affects, people, usually those already on the edge, find ways to survive in this precarious state, sleeping with one eye open, so to speak. They dwell in a space that Berlant terms, “the impasse,” which brings dimension to Stewart’s “something”. Berlant’s definition of the term links this space to a necessary, everyday vigilance: [T]he impasse is 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 material 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. (2011, 4) The impasse is the period where “something” is still taking shape, coming into vision, and is not yet clearly defined. It is a state that signals disruption and causes anxiety, but importantly has its own structural comfort, like the proverbial calm before the storm. For some, living with the threat of doom is preferable to living with certain doom. Berlant argues that, “for many now, living in an impasse would be an aspiration, as the traditional infrastructures for reproducing life – at work, in intimacy, politically, are crumbling at a threatening pace. The holding pattern implied in ‘impasse’ suggests a temporary housing” (5). This state of being 185

perpetually heedful offers trepidation but also hope. Paranoid reading, then, is an everyday reading practice, armed and ready, applying its full critical attention, prepared for the worst but also hoping for reprieve. A de-mystifying mind-set, in this case, is vital to improvisation, or the creativity that survival demands.

In his study of Thomas Pynchon’s novels, Creative Paranoia: In Gravity’s Rainbow (1978), Mark Seigel notes that, for Pynchon too, paranoia is an innovating space of potential, but one which is complex rather than simply disabling or enabling. Seigel explains that, in his representations of paranoia, “Pynchon finally promises neither annihilation nor transcendence; he is sure only that life as we know it is changing. With creative paranoia Pynchon balances his fears for the future with his hopes” (1978, 120). Seigel adds that, to think about social dynamism pragmatically, Pynchon is not only interested in potentials, but also probabilities: “[Gravity’s Rainbow] is a book of possibilities which seeks to divine the future through an examination of probabilities” (7). Slightly altering the Deleuzian definition that is prominent in the affective turn, Pynchon’s use of the term “potential” describes more than boundless and liberating possibility. For potential is not only about the potential for academic work to be inspiring, and interesting, and creative. It is about a period of indeterminacy in which people must make decisions in the dark. Social flux is not always freeing; it can create calamity. In a space of potential, people pragmatically need to infer probabilities and make adjudications to prepare for particular potentials. Novelty is informed by and responsive to history. In this practical context, the context Stewart equivocally directs us toward, reading patterns and anticipating likelihoods is vital to living social dynamism. Interpretation is intrinsic to creation, not its lagged, inert aftermath.

As Stewart’s fragments infer, this method of social participation, of being wary and using one’s discretion based on probabilities and existing narratives, need not dampen the potential for surprises to emerge. Probabilities do not always eventuate and known scripts can be edited by new experiences. For instance, a fragment called “Relief” describes an experiential sense of how the paranoid frame can melt into another kind of affective response: Unwanted intensities simmer up at the least provocation. And then a tiny act of human kindness, or a moment of shared sardonic humor in public, can set things right again as if any sign of human contact releases an unwanted tension. …

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She and Ariana are out walking in the neighborhood. White woman, brown baby. Some teenagers pass them, scowling. Brown boys dressed tough, showing attitude. But as they pass she hears one of the boys say to the others in a sweet boy’s voice “did you see that cute baby?”

She’s driving onto campus early one morning. The pickup in front of her stops in the middle of the road to let an older, heavy-set woman cross the street. The woman scampers across, too fast. Then she looks back, first at the man and then all around, with a big smile, vaguely waving. Too grateful. (50)

In these scenes, the probabilities we carry – the sensible wariness of a woman alone with a child faced with a gang of tough-looking young men, or of a pedestrian faced with traffic – are happily surrendered for other affects such as renewed hope or gratefulness or surprise. Discretion is not, in this context, simply the choice between being jaded or naïve.

In “Relief,” Stewart gives us a pragmatic and dynamic definition of paranoia that is more inclusive and workable than the definition she subscribes to with reference to Sedgwick and Latour. Where their definitions see paranoia as a barrier to the contingency of everyday life, particularly the productivity of belief or attachments, Stewart opens paranoia up as the space in which people are already navigating how truth is lived and distorted and constantly rewritten according to dynamic social currents. Stewart represents a public that makes ‘something’, whether it is a support group, or a conspiracy theory, or change of scene, out of both their fear and their hope - affects that we learn are both necessary to living in a society where agency is dispersed and social perimeters are contested. Stewart’s ethnography gives a different texture to the debate – a scope in which paranoid reading is more than a perfunctory reflex.

The sociology of literature here is not only about what kind of literature a sociologist writes, although this is an important part of the consideration, but about how the social authors itself. As “Relief” - the fragment in which Stewart encounters a surprise rewriting of her day-to day life – suggests, the answer to this question is open and ongoing. It is not as though we can simply decide upon one genre being the best genre with which to articulate social life. If the nature of life is that it is constantly surging and coursing and snapping into one form and then another, social scientists must be open to the credibility of all genres, and at the same time, sceptical about what these genres promise to deliver. In other words, a

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genre is an ever-negotiable contract. In light of this, the sociology of literature might concern itself with how social life creates and polices its genre, rather than advocating for the genre they presume, as a static and transparent frame, is ultimately the best for writing about sociality. In the very least these endorsements might reflexively consider that their advocacy is an expression of a broader social process of contestation.

In this context, Stewart’s work is better served by Berlant’s wary reading of reparative solutions than Sedgwick’s original formulation. Berlant honours Sedgwick’s vast contribution to her field and gives what is perhaps the most eloquent reading of what Sedgwick hoped to achieve with her argument “against the hermeneutics of suspicion” (123). However, Berlant adds that, while she admires Sedgwick’s dedication, she “also resist[s] idealising, even implicitly, any program of better thought or reading” (124). “How would we know,” she asks, “when the “repair” we intend is not another form of narcissism or smothering will? Just because we sense it to be so?” Berlant suggests that such a proscriptive ideology, albeit self-consciously dissenting, leads back to the very projection of values it hopes to avoid: Those of us who think for a living are too well-positioned to characterise certain virtuous acts of thought as dramatically powerful and right, whether effective or futile; we are set up to overestimate the proper clarity and destiny of an idea’s effect and appropriate affects […] I’m suggesting that the overvaluation of reparative thought is both an occupational hazard and part of a larger overvaluation of a certain mode of virtuously intentional, self-reflective personhood. (124) In Berlant’s estimation scholars cannot afford to stop scrutinizing their own evaluations or invest in a program of altruism that continues to position the critic as the ultimate truth- bearer, or now, as some kind of privileged conduit. Scholars are more likely to be among the citizens of Ordinary Affects: grappling curiously and hopefully for answers and often stumbling, rather than successfully and finally realising how sociality can be made fully legible. Or they might be like the self-negating people Berlant describes in Cruel Optimism, choosing a seductively uncomplicated route that actually postpones their desired outcome (as affect theory, for instance, sabotages its own plural and uncensorious aims by denigrating and excluding various methods, concerns, and questions). If the ethnographer is of the ethnographic, then it is no wonder that resonances of paranoia reverberate across sociality in a particular epoch, sounding in forms of everyday thought from the prosaic to the 188

philosophical. In her reading of Sedgwick, Berlant tacitly repositions Stewart within the salt- of-the-earth sociality of her own ethnography, rather than with the awkwardly overvaluating claims to methodological superiority that both preface and anchor Ordinary Affects.

The way structure is theorised by the affective turn, as a fixed and fading notion, is not representative of how people negotiate their lives, or to use Spinoza’s affect schema, how they manage structuring and being structured on a day-to-day level. In the fragments of Ordinary Affects paranoia is not inert. It is the labour and ingenuity, the “creative paranoia,” or concomitant fear and hope that people draw upon to carve out a space for themselves – an intelligible and tellable life – amid a bustling, contested public. A de-mystifying and anticipatory “paranoid reading” is no longer merely a tired and static genre, but the means by which people already try to keep up with tweaks and tremors in the social atmosphere, or how their lives are unsettled or redirected by political decisions, economic fluctuations, and public events.

Citizens stay attuned to structural shifts in real-time, ready to respond or revise their life-story accordingly. This revision then reifies a particular structure. If we conceive of this structural negotiation on the level of genre, we can consider how the question of representation is lived in a dynamic process. Paranoia is not simply a genre in this sense. It is the real-time response to and stimulation of genre shifts, reading for the markers of fiction or non-fiction in a live, differentiating act. In this practice of social authorship, like the poets of Harold Bloom’s famous study (1973), one feels an “anxiety of influence,” or the sense that one’s life is also being authored by diverse authorial agents, pushed and pulled in various ways. Berlant eloquently describes this responsive act as, “the improvisation of genre amid pervasive uncertainty” (6). In this process the form an event or its repercussion will take is contingent. This living, changeable process of differentiation calls for people to respond, to stake their claim, and to be ready to revise it if things do not go their way. Structuration, then, is a creative process generating its own forms of confusion and mess, but it also provides a workable scaffolding for how to live or communicate.

Improvisation, here, is not an expression of uninhibited play, but an interpretive response that grapples with the threat or the pressing need to realise a liveable reality. People improvise with social structure, and, as Stewart documents in Ordinary Affects, this actualising process is largely achieved by telling stories, or representing identities, or people 189

writing social scripts about themselves and others by different means. Rather than an asocial, ineffable indeterminacy, affect emerges here as a saturating, socially-generated atmosphere that pulls people into certain shapes, sometimes in ways of which they are not immediately aware. Akin, perhaps, to Émile Durkheim’s “collective effervescence”, a surge that is created and sustained by the very social it takes hold of and transforms [1912] (2011). Affect, in this light, is not separable from causal structures or human agency or efforts to be intelligible, for it is inherent to these things.

The fragments of Ordinary Affects, as read in this chapter, defy some of the critical limitations Stewart initially imposes upon them. “To affect and be affected”, in the scenarios they tell, is a complex process of social reading and writing that resists the division of emotion and reason or affect and interpretation. Rather than providing an antidote to suspicion, Ordinary Affects provides evidence to question the very need for one. Its meditation on the vigilance intrinsic to an ontology of affect troubles Massumi’s linear account of a rote cognition that always arrives after affect, and negatively shuts down the potential for novelty or event. Unsettled, this sequence no longer supports the autonomy, or asocial nature, of affect. Affect’s agency is generated out of the social current, but, in its structuration, it can also redirect and stymie the direction of public life. Read as structuring, affect no longer flourishes in the essential morality of one genre while eluding the feeble grasp of another; fields of emotion and reason, or scenes of raw life and literary representation, become difficult to differentiate. Story or narrative is no longer an external distortion, or a mere representation, but life itself, coalescing and refiguring its many expressions in the present. The sociality of method is therefore as legible in the moment when a critic senses a paradox in the treatise they are reading as it is in the moment when a new passenger boards a train carriage and the atmosphere becomes volatile. Immersed in attention, the reader of life is aware, but not solely in control of, the distributed agency of social authorship. As they scan for potentials and probabilities, people are already complicit in the dynamic of the event they interpret. The attention in these occurrences, the paranoid reading, anticipation, and inference that occurs is a creatively critical, social method. Always already contested, it is an everyday hermeneutics of suspicion; a productive act of reading that is never entirely confident of its own lens.

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Conclusion

In different ways, this thesis has puzzled over the question of genre in the context of truth- telling. Debates about the competing verity of fact and fiction, whether in regard to memoir or social research, routinely ask us to decide which genre produces the most authentic and useful truth. My thesis has endeavoured to ask a different question, namely, how determining the rules and exclusive value of various genres might determine the kinds of truths that can be told.

During the development of this project, I was drawn to the affective turn as a case study because it so richly captures the paradox of desiring a raw, untrammelled truth, while also being inherently implicated in mandating what this truth can include, as well as what form it should take. The tautologies and paradoxes I have uncovered in the affective turn’s arguments, therefore, need not undermine a living notion of genre. Rather, such tensions might challenge us to revisit the logic of inclusion, differentiation, and recognition that underpins the affective turn’s work more generally. This kind of analysis carefully parses out underlying questions about where and why we draw the lines that circumscribe what will and will not qualify for a complex field, a proper genre, or an affective impulse; as well as how these lines work to shape and produce particular realities.

In my effort to rethink what it is that actually identifies a genre, and intellectual work in general, Bernhard Schlink’s insistence that it is crucially important not to “make this world simpler than it is” (BBC, 2011) has served as an intellectual compass. Schlink’s caution, as outlined in chapter one, encourages us not to erase the tensions and unease that we may discover because to do so seems less difficult or threatening than facing the proximity of our implication in the very things we define ourselves against. As an ethics, his project challenges us to become aware of the divisions and exclusions we are complicit in; to recognise not only life’s complexity, its detours and deferrals, but our inextricable involvement in the very flesh and dictation of social rules. Truth, in this consideration, is not simply given; it is alive to an ongoing and inevitably vexed process of social reckoning, and recognition.

At the crux of Schlink’s work is a provocation to scrutinize how much of the truth is verified because it affirms what we want or need in order to feel stable and coherent, or to

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manage social life. Are there certain questions we will not ask because they risk the integrity of ourselves, our work, or social cohesion at large? Opening his inquiry in a high-stakes political context, namely, the German nation’s conventions for remembering the Holocaust, Schlink tries to rethink the division of good and evil through the lead character in his novel The Reader (1997), Hannah Schmitz. As readers learn, Hannah, an Auschwitz prison guard, committed her crimes not because she was deeply and vengefully anti-Semitic, but because she was wrapped up in concealing the shame of her illiteracy and performed her professional role with thoughtless obedience. As previously explained, Schlink’s suggestion in this has met with scorn, specifically with the charge that he has “humanised” Hannah. However, Schlink sees a more troubling risk in the act of censoring all investigation into the very notion of how a category such as evil is defined.

Schlink’s framework challenges readers to think beyond the orderliness of binary segregations, to take in how things might be more anomalous, inconsistent, or compathetic; or how what seems disparate may indeed be relational. The extreme polarisation of good and evil, as with the division between creation and critique, is facile, and ultimately misleading. As Schlink explains, when we maintain that people who committed crimes were “just monsters”, inhuman and immoral, then we hold them too “far away from us” and from tensions that are vital to the truth (BBC, 2011). Hannah was maternal and mean, curious and ignorant, unpretentious and utterly self-absorbed. As Schlink comments, “this is the tension we can find in people” (2011). Avery F. Gordon describes this inherent paradox as “complex personhood”, arguing that “even those who live in the most dire circumstances possess a complex and oftentimes contradictory humanity and subjectivity that is never adequately glimpsed by viewing them as victims or, on the other hand, as superhuman agents” (2008, 4). The contradictions and tensions that Schlink and Gordon highlight, the often inconvenient details of a life, are essential to the story, though they often confound the categories we use to understand and identify people.

What is ultimately risked in polemical thinking then, for Schlink, is a true insight into the lived texture of how processes of action and accountability work across boundary lines, or in the case of The Reader, how Fascism specifically operated logistically and logically as a social structure. This is not to say that Nazis are blameless, or to endorse a relativist argument, but to think very carefully about how people negotiate individual and social responsibility. The question here is not whether a person is inherently good or evil, but how 192

certain acts of exclusion became normal, or even instrumental, in people’s everyday lives. What particularities, or banal choices and oversights of daily life, sustained the system, just as the system, with its coercive social duress, organised the particular? How did the daily actions of many Germans assume a truth, or come to seem real, or justified? This is a harder, more unsettling question, but arguably, the most important one. To genuinely ask it requires a framework that is not wedded to, or uncritical of, explanatory structures, but rather one that recognises the role of these structures in producing particular discursive conventions. In this sense, Schlink’s work is a radical argument against fascistic logic, as it refuses to exclude or excise on the basis of received schemas that mark one thing from another. In sum, his ethical intervention provides a useful precedent for highlighting, analysing, and extending the stakes implicit in affirming or challenging the social rules and representational methods within which events or ideas can be legitimately discussed.

Following Schlink, this thesis has endeavoured to analyse how genres and the rules of their propriety come to be determined on a social and methodological level, and to highlight the ethical, social, and authorial affects such selections produce and are produced by. I have attempted to reveal the proximity of things that are outwardly opposed by foregrounding how all parties involved vitally shape, albeit with varying levels of agency, the structures and social truths that inform and govern their positions and/or selves. My effort has been to both recognise and reconsider the divisions that structure polemical debates about fact and fiction, or facts and values, in both public and academic forums.

In chapter one, I mapped out how life genres are socially contested and authored, to provide a very real sense of how debates over propriety and truth can alter and direct people’s identities and social standing. Autobiography hoaxes alert us to the fact that when we read for truth it is not always diligently or with reference to proofs; we often fill in gaps, overlook inconsistencies, or disqualify certain truths to cohere with social criteria or genre conventions. As we interpret, we are verifying and editing. Like Schlink, Peter Guralnick, the biographer of Elvis Presley, argues that although the biographer must give his subject a coherent identity, the truth of the person, as with Hannah, may well be something more confounding. It becomes impossible, he explains, when one really examines the truth of a life, to say that someone was straightforwardly either one kind of person or another. Similarly, the method or biography, the social act of organising a life, struggles to be true to its irresolvable diversity, and coherent enough to be socially intelligible. “[L]ike any of our 193

lives and characters” Guralnick suggests, the story “is not all of one piece, it does not lend itself to one interpretation exclusively, nor do all its parts reflect anything that resembles an undifferentiated whole” (1995, xiii). The tension that Schlink implores us to see in people, Guralnick also calls us to see in our efforts to make sense of people; in our methods.

The stolen valour case study that opens this thesis foregrounds the complex everyday processes by which life genres, and the rules that pertain to them, are determined. This social example also works to unsettle the idea that the public are either naïve or uncritical; in this case it is often in the very processes of evaluating, judging, or rationalising that we produce and create possibilities and limits to identity, or even experience. In a similar vein to Schlink and Guralnick, Judge Blackburn, who ruled against the stolen valour act in Rick Duncan’s favour, gestured toward the underlying ethical question of method’s part in determining what kinds of lives will be granted social recognition. Where he could have ruled against the individual deceit of one impostor, Blackburn instead highlighted such a judgement’s possible role in supporting the exclusive valour of only certain life genres, of offering people, on the basis of contingent political values and with exception to the law’s supposed universality, only certain terms by which to be validated. Underpinning Blackburn’s verdict was the question of where in the social body, if not solely with expressions like Duncan’s identity fraud, does agency and responsibility truly reside.

Returning to the very foundations of America’s constitutional and philosophical ethos, Blackburn encouraged people to consider what becomes of freedom of speech if it is exercised, selectively and centrally, to say which forms of speech can and cannot be free. Veteran groups evoked a slightly different query, asking if speech can ever be truly free when it is always socially tied to certain proprieties, or when its unqualified use consequently threatens the very integrity of particular identities. Valour, in this sense, is not only stolen by Duncan, but from veterans, who wonder if the public will now see them wearing medals at military celebrations and suspect that they are impostors. The exclusive attribution and refiguring of social capital, here valour, therefore legitimately affects the lives of both the genuine veterans and people such as Duncan, just as it calls into question the social processes by which authenticity is qualified. Importantly, the case draws attention to how we decide which life-stories, or forms of trauma and survival, have cultural weight, as well as what affect this selectivity has on those lives that both do and do not qualify.

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Collecting these contested voices, chapter one also posed a methodological question which overarches this thesis, namely, how can we address a case such as Stolen Valour without reducing its complexity, that is, respecting the gravitas of narrative propriety, while also recognising the porosity, and questioning the implications, of its boundaries? How can we examine the sway of particular identities without uncritically accepting or dismissing them? To ask such a question it seems we must identify and query the impulse and pressure to - be it out of convention, reverence, or fear - reduce the terms of our ethical engagement to a neat split. We cannot simply be free from structure, but we can strive to become more conscious and critical of how it works, the role we play in its formation, and the kinds of identities this produces and restricts. Thus, rather than claim that the means or traditions by which we differentiate fact from fiction can simply be left behind, such a consideration would also address how and why binary logic is valued and reaffirmed. Barbara Johnson, the American deconstructionist, speaks very eloquently on this theoretical challenge in The Critical Difference (1980): If, however, binary oppositions in this book thus play the critical fall guy, it is not because one must try at all costs to go beyond them. The very impulse to “go beyond” is an impulse structured by a binary opposition between oneself and what one attempts to leave behind. Far from eliminating binary oppositions from the critical vocabulary, one can only show that that binary difference does not function as one thinks it does and that certain subversions are logically prior to it and necessary to its very construction. (xi) Of course, categories of fact and fiction exist; for Johnson, this is not the question. The focus of inquiry is how and why these genres exist, and, as Guralnick points out, how they are never quite as coherent and sovereign as we might expect. The forms of fact and fiction are politically and structurally productive, but they are not essential and fixed genres; if we look closely their boundaries merge, shift, and reify in peculiar ways.

This is why the politics of truth-telling for Schlink, or what “lies behind the idea that some events may not be fictionalised or may only be fictionalised while remaining true to the facts [...] is not about the genre [and] not about documentation versus fiction”, but “about authenticity in a fuller sense” (2009, 119). It is not, in other words, about categorisation as a positivist project, but about the social stakes that are invested and played out in the process of differentiating and policing particular forms. Although often underemphasised, questions about how we mandate what does and does not properly belong to a particular category, 195

along with the act of selecting which categories have value, are at the crux of debates about representational ethics. The politics of form do not begin with the genre of the story, with the decision of using either one genre or another, for questions also apply to the terms by which the values and identities of such genres have already been socially determined, locked down, and circumscribed. It is this underlying social conflict that my thesis has attempted to leverage; to understand what this “authenticity in a fuller sense” is and how it works. Following Schlink, I have argued that such an inquiry needs to be pitched at the meta-level of genre determination, or method, because the ethical problems that affect theorists seek to remedy with methods, such as didactic authorship and the reduction of life to broad and familiar categories, are inherent to, and thus reproduced by, the very act of assuming that certain methods, and not others, are straightforwardly remedial.

Extending the social questions of chapter one into the sociological questions of chapter two, my thesis has argued that current scholarly efforts to capture the complex flux of social life tend to gloss over broader issues about the contingent logic with which genres, not just the people and events they represent, are shaped. A method does have certain affects and effects, but these are not straightforwardly static or innate, rather their structure and logic is affected by social desires and momentums, or disciplinary pressures and intellectual trends. The truths we can know, in this sense, are dictated by the questions to which we are willing to listen and ask. The intents and investments that produce tensions within social truths are therefore evident in the very methods social scientists develop to understand or ease them. We might insist we want to recognise ‘complexity’, the kinds of details and relations that make categorisation difficult, but are we also selective about what we are willing to complicate? If we begin with the premise that affect and ideology are mutually exclusive, for instance, are we really asking how and why people are impelled to act?

My contention is that we need the capacity to be both critical and respectful of genre if we are to see the ways in which its dynamic, social structures are used, both knowingly and unknowingly, to verify stories or to challenge them. Paul Riceour argued for this position in his original, and often misinterpreted, discussion of the hermeneutics of suspicion. He did not ask whether we should adopt a positive or negative form of analysis, but rather insisted upon the co-constitutive nature of faith and doubt. Ricoeur ultimately points to the “profound unity of the demystifying and remystifying of discourse” (1970, 54). Hermeneutics, he argues, is “animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect and willingness to listen” (27). In 196 this closeness – the rethinking of binary opposition that also drives Schlink and Johnson – negativity is seen to be inherent to creativity. In Ricoeur’s terms, arguments that appear oppositional are often invested in the very same pursuit that they eschew.

Taking up Ricoeur’s critical approach to either/or choices about genre and intention, the last three chapters’ case studies of the affective turn’s arguments about evidence, ethics, and method, have therefore challenged the notion that critique must be a polemical negation of its other, or a clean cut. Heeding Schlink’s caution not to hold the identities we see to be different from our own argument “too far away”, I have used the method of close reading to work with the tensions within the affective turn. While I perceive several of affect theory’s oversights and exclusions to be ethically problematic, I have nonetheless worked to remain close to them, “to make myself at home in their logic”, and to show that they contain their own disputes, and push towards their own reparations (Kirby, 2012, 86). Rather than offering a separate correction, my aim has been to extend these arguments by drawing out the ways they already threaten to extend and overturn themselves. These arguments contain what they insist they are not. They repeat what they claim to correct. They give away more than they intend. It is not, therefore, that these arguments have no grasp of sociological complexity, but rather that they risk not recognising how complex they actually are. I have argued that absolute exclusion and opposition are reductive methods, sometimes unethical and often ineffective. Therefore, as detailed in chapter two, rather than arguing for a Marxist or Realist sociology of literature, this thesis confronts the field with its role in affirming the very methodological divisions by which it has been enduringly troubled and structured. Such an approach insists that our academic precedents and peers are not models to be cited and discarded, but ongoing sites of sociological and literary significance.

Chapter two also sets out a historical context for this disciplinary struggle, and just as Wolf Lepenies notes that Auguste Comte’s efforts to make positivism a science began to resemble precisely that which Comte initially hoped to avoid, a theology, so too the affective turn often turns in what, by their own count, appears to be the wrong direction (1988, 29). The movement puts its faith in the structure of genre, assuming that the identity of fiction, for instance, is given – something upon which we all agree. However, at the same time, such methodological directives stretch these genres in such a way that they will accommodate, or exclude, whatever serves the argument about affect’s autonomy and critique’s redundancy, or the desired outcome for a change in social science methods. In practice, the affective turn 197 effectively proves that structure is both workably stable and malleable. Similarly, the life of evidence and verification is more provocative and unsettled than the affective turn’s arguments readily admit, and authorial intention, initially cast as an obstinate form of control, turns out to be strangely fickle and reflexive. In such twists and recuperations, polemical arguments show the risks of holding our enemies, as Schlink says, “too far away from us,” but also the impossibility of this gesture and our inevitable implication in promoting what we prohibit.

It is this inevitable methodological implication, marked by the return of excluded notions and leverages, that the final three chapters have tracked in an extended case study of certain arguments from the affective turn. When read closely, attempts to finally disavow, or depart from, a particular position, problematic, or method clearly falter in many of the arguments examined across the course of this thesis. Barricades between critique and formalism, surface and depth, affect and structure, ethics and judgement, feelings and facts, and the scholar and the social, are set up, but as I have illustrated, they remain porous. As explored in chapter three, Bruno Latour cannot avoid using the very critique that he damns elsewhere. The impetus of Latour’s own method and the desires of conspiracists – to reveal whose real is the real “real” - are stickier and closer to each other than he is able to recognise. In her effort to be reparative, to not fear “the terror of error”, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defends against paranoid reading as the ultimate error (Litvak in Sedgwick, 1997, 13). Brian Massumi, equally implicated in what he claims to leave behind, argues against structure, in favour of Baruch Spinoza’s monist and more generous approach, only to radically oppose affect and language as mutually exclusive categories. In chapter four, Nigel Thrift, John Law, and several fictocritics distance themselves from the disciplinary history they claim to remedy. In this distancing, they risk missing the multifaceted ways in which these same fields inform, address, and often complicate their own questions: ultimately, however, they cannot escape the hermeneutics of suspicion. With the recuperation of paranoid themes, guarded positions, and a desire to advance even further into the unknown, the affective turn participates in a broader zeitgeist of detection, mystery, and scepticism. Arguments for an autonomous affect, and methods to exclusively engage it, are therefore implicated in the very crisis of representation and the suspicious social atmosphere they outwardly reject.

In chapter five, which focuses on Kathleen Stewart’s ethnography Ordinary Affects, the force and symmetry of this contradiction is almost uncanny. Just as literary theorist Sean 198

Burke explains that “the Death of the Author fascinates [him] as a gloriously baroque meditation on authorship” (1995, x), Stewart’s argument against ‘paranoid reading’ reads as a “gloriously baroque meditation” on the social vitality of suspicion. The people Stewart writes about recognise, and/or struggle to recognise, that they are simultaneously responsible for and vulnerable to the volatile exigencies that shape their own lives. In this text, the social, as a critical and creative body, shuffles and refigures, pushing and pulling in various directions. Critique functions in such a way, as a self-contesting social organism in chapter one, and though the arguments discussed in the middle three chapters work to separate critical inquiry from social concerns, in the fifth chapter this separation proves untenable. In the fragments of Ordinary Affects, we again see the socius, suspiciously complicit in its self-structuration.

In sum, the arguments I have examined are rich with a paradox and tension that opens them up to further analysis. Such analysis is often against the grain of the affective turn’s structural divisions and intellectual direction, but it is certainly not averse to its overarching effort to create an unguarded field of inquiry. In one sense, what scholars such as Sedgwick and Latour are outwardly arguing for is the ability to ask social questions unrestricted by received schemas that make thinking less queer or accommodating than it often needs to be. A commitment to various exclusions inadvertently restricts this generosity, but it is nonetheless their aim. The scope for affect as a force and concept, as well as the ways we might theorise or address it, are therefore dilated, rather than shut down, by my critique. If we open affect’s identity up to include negativity as well as positivity, or the incisive as well as the intuitive – indeed if we enlist the field of affect theory to rethink how these very received structures actually work, that is, how they affect and are affected – we can extend the scope and freedom of the affective turn’s intended project. Affect theory, if unwedded to various exclusions, would no longer be unnecessarily divided into incompatible, dogmatic factions, but rather open to forging allegiances with old and new questions across disciplines and fields. In this genuinely inclusive frame, affect could be nebulous and indeterminate, but it could also be historical, or linguistic, or profoundly didactic; coercing the civic into certain shapes. Social scientists could find aspects to both celebrate and critique in an affect that might be dually conducive and circumspect, or that might impel one person or group but not another.

What I have highlighted is the need to take a more radical approach to inclusion if we are to truly open the intellectual avenues to which the affective turn gestures. To be open to 199 potential, in a way that does not take the form and identity of people or methods for granted - that can, for instance, accommodate the kind of shift that repositions Latour’s uneducated conspiracist neighbour as the knowing critic and Latour as the naive believer - surely we must not begin with a whole host of elisions and fixed reference points that lock the common person into a position of naivety or brute wisdom, and cast the intellectual as a disconnected iconoclast. Latour’s own social experience, where words and social positions become strangely twisted and recast, calls for something far less polemical, rigid, and segregated than this. Accordingly, my thesis has tried to leverage some of the questions that are over-looked or excluded from the affective turn’s directives in order to consider how they might be re- enlisted to extend its scope. Might the barest of statistical data have the same affective influence as a poem, for instance, or might intention be something more complicated than a cognitive process that arrives, too late, at a precise and calculated moment? Instead of choosing to include either one genre or another, or the rational mind or the sensual body (as if these entities were truly separate), can we rethink the terms by which such divisions are structured? Might there be a way to reframe the notion of genre or the locus of intention so that we do not have to circumscribe our inquiry in such a way; can we include and confront the seemingly inescapable, or socially mandated, desire to make cuts, or delimit our focus, in particular ways?

When we look closely at the arguments of English, Felski, Latour, Sedgwick, and Massumi the problems of scholarship are ascribed to certain enemies, such as social science, ideology critique, social trauma from the witch hunts of the Cold War or the AIDS epidemic, the “right wing” and, alternately, the dumbing down and obscurity of critical theory. But at the same time the recurrent motif of paranoia draws our attention to questions of reflexivity and defence, and the difficulty of locating and delineating from where threats originate or gain their strength. Aerating some of the logic with which these theorists attribute blame, it is clear that certain correlations and conflations are made. Social science, for example, is conflated with social theory and social critique. This aggregate of fields is then conflated with the economic rationalist ethos of university accountants, a move which consequently seems to hold social science, and the methods it informs, accountable for budget and value cuts in the humanities. This logic is not particularly fair, nor is it helpful in isolating, and really unravelling what processes are actually responsible for, or contribute to, the current realities of the academy. As I have highlighted, the polarisation of the social sciences and humanities often inadvertently contributes to the alienation of one school from another and devalues the 200

efforts of approaches which, while outwardly different, may be working toward opening similar questions or flagging shared ethical or theoretical complacencies. If we choose creative genres over critique, accepting that critique is never productive or inventive, then we unnecessarily limit the tools open to intellectual work, as well as the right to query and revise how the boundaries between these measures are drawn or exploited. What is truly at stake then, in rethinking notions of genre production, authorship, propriety, and intention, is a way to address our own and others’ complicities in narrowing the terms of our objectives to the point where we potentially thwart our ability to access revelatory alliances and illuminations. Again we meet with Schlink’s caution that if we hold things “too far away” from ourselves we risk not recognising how they work or connect, how an ethics can be complicated, or how we could intervene.

It is with such challenges in mind that the question of social responsibility, at the heart of this thesis, merges with the question of method. For it is clear that the rules of genre are rules of life: when we examine them, we are not simply applying external frames; we are creating the very conventions, both the possibilities and limitations, by which we might think about, speak about, and live life. We are deeply involved in the truths we produce. Indeed, we are produced by them. The stories we tell lend integrity to our sense of self, and thus there is always a conflict of interest in story-telling; always a ‘crisis of representation’. And yet, as this thesis has shown, in perhaps the most fascinating tension of all, no matter how far away we position the truth, or how impossible we claim it is to access, we are still devoting our lives to the pursuit of it, in various ways. As Gordon explains, “[w]arnings about relativism to the contrary, truth is still what most of us strive for. Partial and insecure surely, and something slightly different from ‘the facts,’ but truth nonetheless: the capacity to say ‘This is so’ (Gordon, 2008, 2). The question of method then is not just about how we can capture the texture of social complexity, but how we can account for our participation in the intricate authorship of social life, especially in determining which field or questions can be complicated. The ethics of truth-telling, in this light, requires us to consider how we live truth, not just how best to represent it. How can we make sense of social knots when our investigations further tangle and unravel their threads? How can we attend to, and become responsible for, our involvement in the complex social systems, the very regimes of recognition and differentiation, that we seek to understand and transform?

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To break from either/or thinking without presuming this is a final or radical break is one challenge, and to recognise one’s own involvement is another. The question for social science then is not just how to recognise the complex nature of life, as if it were simply there waiting to be revealed, but how our own inquiry affects and is affected by conventions of recognition. How can one take a critical position, or claim an identity, when we, and the terms by which we define ourselves, are always in flux? Vital to this inquiry is the question of why and how we invest in moral and social divisions and how we reaffirm them, knowingly or not. Such a position will also require acknowledging the inevitable blind spots of our own, nonetheless crucial, differentiations. For Schlink, it is clear that the facts of the past are inseparable from the values inherent to how we recount them today, just as identity is bound to its representation. Thus, in remembering history, we are ultimately faced with the challenge of understanding the ongoing social authorship in which we remain present: to read a story that, in our very act of comprehending and responding, we are also continuing, in various ways, to refigure and reaffirm.

Drawing out this implication in The Things They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past (2011), Nancy K. Miller recounts the experience of tracing her family tree and finding things that radically altered the stories she knew about her family, and thus how she is positioned by these same stories. This investment in how the story will unfold - Miller’s very involvement in its implications - leads her to discover that a form of self-reflexivity, though always problemitised, is vital to her process of re-membering history. It is not just the story that holds tensions, but Miller’s own method of reading it. “Despite my intense desire to know the truth, however partial or incomplete,” Miller explains, “I am forced to recognise that the process of finding the story continues to change the story. As I advance into the territory of recovery, I can’t trust even myself. That may be the hardest lesson of all” (26). Tracing her genealogy, Miller practices a hermeneutics of suspicion: asking the question of truth and of method. To be present to the contingency of this method, to be wary not only of the knowledge we interpret but also of our act of interpretation, is, as Miller argues, perhaps “the hardest lesson of all”. Such a lesson calls for us to acknowledge our own relation to truth, our complicity in both its openness and vulnerability, and its incredible power to both exclude and produce, often at the same time. Such a lesson makes us wary of how the truths we tell are authored, and why they are desired. Rather than resolving which genre produces the most truthful account, we are left with questions about where a story’s authorship originates and by

202 whom or what it is impelled. What do we require of truths? And can we always recognise our role in negotiating their verification?

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