This issue of Polygraph is concerned with the turn to crisis-whether understood as "the long down... more This issue of Polygraph is concerned with the turn to crisis-whether understood as "the long downturn," "secular stagnation," or a "terminal crisis" of accumulation-in recent Marxist literary scholarship, a periodization which seems to be displacing once-hegemonic ones of "postmodernism," "neoliberalism," "financialization," or "cognitive capitalism." The issue sets this turn to crisis in relationship to the category of narrative, often taken to be the central concern of Marxist literary criticism since at least Jameson's The Political Unconscious. Our interest in doing so originally stems from Joshua's argument-made in articles like "Autumn of the System" and "Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics"-that narrative should no longer hold this pride of place for criticism in a moment of financialization, protracted deindustrialization, and crisis. 1 However, in posing this conceptual pairing we also mean to raise the question of the stakes of periodization or emplotment and to highlight a turn, in much of this recent scholarship, towards what often seem to be non-narrative objects or frameworks of analysis. To start us off, we wonder if you could speak to how crisis theory-or the periodization of crisis-became important to your thinking. And then, on that basis, how has this theoretical or periodizing framework informed the more specifically aesthetic concerns of your scholarship? Joshua Clover (JC): I can already say that the difficulty of such sophisticated and complex questions is that they're going to lead to rambling answers. I don't think there's any concise answer to that question; I can probably only take up one or two aspects of it. I can say that the trajectory you describe of moving from a more immediately aesthetic or cultural relation to Marxist thought to a more directly political-economic one certainly describes my own engagement. My early engagements with Marxist literary study were exactly as you describe, and then, in very conventional ways, with 2008, I got interested in understanding crisis. I had a very basic
, where she has been a professor since 2017. Attending closely to the language that we use to spe... more , where she has been a professor since 2017. Attending closely to the language that we use to speak about our aesthetic experiences, her work looks at aesthetic forms and judgments that develop in response to a world where, as she puts it, "contradictions are true." In this conversation, which was conducted over Zoom, we discuss what it means to inhabit these contradictions as well as the scandalous suggestion that all art made under capitalism may, in fact, be a gimmick. You're in Germany right now. What are you up to there?
TEXTE ZUR KUNST ISSUE NO. 121 / MARCH 2021 "COMEDY", 2021
Lauren Berlant, the scholar and cultural theorist, died two days ago. On this sad occasion, we wo... more Lauren Berlant, the scholar and cultural theorist, died two days ago. On this sad occasion, we would like to publish a conversation we had here with Berlant, Sianne Ngai, and Alenka Zupančič for our March issue on the topic "Comedy." While working on that issue, we considered what it means to take up comedy right now, amid a global pandemic and following a year of urgent, far-reaching social movements and political events. Constructive disagreements abound, the conversation explores comedy's relationship to trauma, to representation, and to capitalism, and the productivity of political satire and in-jokes is questioned. Despite whatever relief it might bring us, comedy may actually be the genre least effective in helping us forget our troubles-though, as this discussion shows, it is anything but unproductive. TEXTE ZUR KUNST: What does it mean to talk about comedy in 2020, a year that witnessed immense loss and turmoil? LAUREN BERLANT: For one thing, I think we may not all have the same view about the relationship between comedy and trauma, seen either as form or as a synonym for history. In my work, and I think in Alenka's too, we're always saying that comedy and trauma have a formal resonance. It's a lot about proceeding in brokenness, and the relation among different kinds of brokenness. I probably talk about the comedic more than comedy in my work-that is, the elements of the comedic rather than a kind of genre form. And among the particular comedic modes of the present is the centrality of self-inflating forms of distortion in the appearance of power and resistance to power as a tactic of the radical Right and a tactic of fascism and fascist aesthetics. Caricature is supposed to reveal moral smallness, but the Right justifies itself with literalized bigness. Another thing the embrace of cruelty and satire as realist political registers has achieved is the stripping away of national sentimentality, long an anchor of liberalism. The convergence of right-wing comedy and mass suffering in the wealthier states makes 2020 less a scene held in common than a bubbling cauldron.
What are we as subjects of capitalist lifeworlds implicitly saying when we call something a gimmi... more What are we as subjects of capitalist lifeworlds implicitly saying when we call something a gimmick, regardless of the inevitably varying objects to which the evaluation is applied and varying identities of those applying it? What is being registered about a shared world, perhaps without the speaker entirely knowing she or he is registering it, in this ambivalent, if mostly negative aesthetic judgment? That is, in the fascinatingly complex but also ordinary speech act-a demand for universal agreement based on feelings rather than concepts-spontaneously elicited by a perception of form? We can start by putting the question differently: why are gimmicks almost comically irritating? Even the word seems to grate on Ivor Brown, who nonetheless devotes an entire essay to lovingly exploring his distaste for it in Words in Our Time (1958). "Comedians have their gimmicks, either as catch-phrase, theme-song, or bit of 'business,' which they exploit in. .. their appearances." 1 Gimmicks seem to provoke contempt simply in part because they are job related: bits of business for performing aesthetic operations that we somehow become distracted into regarding as aesthetic objects in their own right. Here the much vaunted concept of aesthetic autonomy turns into an undesirable feature for once, when asserted not by Versions of this article were presented at several institutions, and I would like to thank audiences at the University of Copenhagen,
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.
This issue of Polygraph is concerned with the turn to crisis-whether understood as "the long down... more This issue of Polygraph is concerned with the turn to crisis-whether understood as "the long downturn," "secular stagnation," or a "terminal crisis" of accumulation-in recent Marxist literary scholarship, a periodization which seems to be displacing once-hegemonic ones of "postmodernism," "neoliberalism," "financialization," or "cognitive capitalism." The issue sets this turn to crisis in relationship to the category of narrative, often taken to be the central concern of Marxist literary criticism since at least Jameson's The Political Unconscious. Our interest in doing so originally stems from Joshua's argument-made in articles like "Autumn of the System" and "Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics"-that narrative should no longer hold this pride of place for criticism in a moment of financialization, protracted deindustrialization, and crisis. 1 However, in posing this conceptual pairing we also mean to raise the question of the stakes of periodization or emplotment and to highlight a turn, in much of this recent scholarship, towards what often seem to be non-narrative objects or frameworks of analysis. To start us off, we wonder if you could speak to how crisis theory-or the periodization of crisis-became important to your thinking. And then, on that basis, how has this theoretical or periodizing framework informed the more specifically aesthetic concerns of your scholarship? Joshua Clover (JC): I can already say that the difficulty of such sophisticated and complex questions is that they're going to lead to rambling answers. I don't think there's any concise answer to that question; I can probably only take up one or two aspects of it. I can say that the trajectory you describe of moving from a more immediately aesthetic or cultural relation to Marxist thought to a more directly political-economic one certainly describes my own engagement. My early engagements with Marxist literary study were exactly as you describe, and then, in very conventional ways, with 2008, I got interested in understanding crisis. I had a very basic
, where she has been a professor since 2017. Attending closely to the language that we use to spe... more , where she has been a professor since 2017. Attending closely to the language that we use to speak about our aesthetic experiences, her work looks at aesthetic forms and judgments that develop in response to a world where, as she puts it, "contradictions are true." In this conversation, which was conducted over Zoom, we discuss what it means to inhabit these contradictions as well as the scandalous suggestion that all art made under capitalism may, in fact, be a gimmick. You're in Germany right now. What are you up to there?
TEXTE ZUR KUNST ISSUE NO. 121 / MARCH 2021 "COMEDY", 2021
Lauren Berlant, the scholar and cultural theorist, died two days ago. On this sad occasion, we wo... more Lauren Berlant, the scholar and cultural theorist, died two days ago. On this sad occasion, we would like to publish a conversation we had here with Berlant, Sianne Ngai, and Alenka Zupančič for our March issue on the topic "Comedy." While working on that issue, we considered what it means to take up comedy right now, amid a global pandemic and following a year of urgent, far-reaching social movements and political events. Constructive disagreements abound, the conversation explores comedy's relationship to trauma, to representation, and to capitalism, and the productivity of political satire and in-jokes is questioned. Despite whatever relief it might bring us, comedy may actually be the genre least effective in helping us forget our troubles-though, as this discussion shows, it is anything but unproductive. TEXTE ZUR KUNST: What does it mean to talk about comedy in 2020, a year that witnessed immense loss and turmoil? LAUREN BERLANT: For one thing, I think we may not all have the same view about the relationship between comedy and trauma, seen either as form or as a synonym for history. In my work, and I think in Alenka's too, we're always saying that comedy and trauma have a formal resonance. It's a lot about proceeding in brokenness, and the relation among different kinds of brokenness. I probably talk about the comedic more than comedy in my work-that is, the elements of the comedic rather than a kind of genre form. And among the particular comedic modes of the present is the centrality of self-inflating forms of distortion in the appearance of power and resistance to power as a tactic of the radical Right and a tactic of fascism and fascist aesthetics. Caricature is supposed to reveal moral smallness, but the Right justifies itself with literalized bigness. Another thing the embrace of cruelty and satire as realist political registers has achieved is the stripping away of national sentimentality, long an anchor of liberalism. The convergence of right-wing comedy and mass suffering in the wealthier states makes 2020 less a scene held in common than a bubbling cauldron.
What are we as subjects of capitalist lifeworlds implicitly saying when we call something a gimmi... more What are we as subjects of capitalist lifeworlds implicitly saying when we call something a gimmick, regardless of the inevitably varying objects to which the evaluation is applied and varying identities of those applying it? What is being registered about a shared world, perhaps without the speaker entirely knowing she or he is registering it, in this ambivalent, if mostly negative aesthetic judgment? That is, in the fascinatingly complex but also ordinary speech act-a demand for universal agreement based on feelings rather than concepts-spontaneously elicited by a perception of form? We can start by putting the question differently: why are gimmicks almost comically irritating? Even the word seems to grate on Ivor Brown, who nonetheless devotes an entire essay to lovingly exploring his distaste for it in Words in Our Time (1958). "Comedians have their gimmicks, either as catch-phrase, theme-song, or bit of 'business,' which they exploit in. .. their appearances." 1 Gimmicks seem to provoke contempt simply in part because they are job related: bits of business for performing aesthetic operations that we somehow become distracted into regarding as aesthetic objects in their own right. Here the much vaunted concept of aesthetic autonomy turns into an undesirable feature for once, when asserted not by Versions of this article were presented at several institutions, and I would like to thank audiences at the University of Copenhagen,
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.
Uploads
Papers by Sianne Ngai