Review of Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People

On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant (review) Kaitlyn Patia The Comparatist, Volume 47, October 2023, pp. 454-457 (Article) Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/com.2023.a911958 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/911958 single paragraph of the discussion. The chapter’s conclusion, that the “embracing of an unknown love/nature . . . would commit the self in a reattachment to an alterity as to allow us to reinvest ourselves in the realm of the Real” (133), is unsuccessful in encapsulating ways the erotic concerns of the eighties poems relate to the psychoanalytic and philosophical foundations of Merwin’s ecology. Feng quotes Marjorie Perloff ’s assessment of Merwin as a “fastidious poet, whose gift is perhaps less for revelation than for delicate resonance” and counters, “Revelation need not exclude resonance” (3). Like Merwin’s poetry, Feng’s critical prose is distinguished by a gift for delicate resonance; more fastidious editing might enhance its capacity for revelation. Some inconsistencies of tense are left uncorrected, and the word “surpass” is offered as a potential definition of beyond (55), a particularly dismaying lapse as it occurs in one of the book’s best readings (of “White Goat, White Ram”). Feng writes movingly and elegiacally of Merwin in his introduction, provides startling psychoanalytic insights into later poems, and remains admirably attuned to matters of form throughout. A danger for American Merwin scholars may be allowing a sense of proprietorship to interfere with fresh encounters with the texts. This is one reason international contributions like Feng’s should be especially welcome. Feng’s cosmopolitanism, ambition, and devotion to craft are of a piece with his subject and reflect the highest ideals of comparatism. Readers who look beyond surface eccentricities will be rewarded with a welcome reminder of the broad contours of Merwin’s artistic career; exciting new ways of understanding his poetry, including some especially forbidding late productions; and a welcome global perspective on a poet who made a point of belonging to the world yet remains distinctly American. Paul aarstaD  Indiana University Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. xi + 238 pages. Sex. Democracy. Life in common. In On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant attends to these and other of “life’s good hard things” (170). We want these things, or want to want them, or have some sense that we should want them. But they are difficult. Messy. Things go to pieces in unexpected ways (or in entirely predictable ones). Previous works by Berlant, such as Cruel Optimism (2011), explored how peoples’ relationships with the objects of their desire can work to frustrate the realization of that desire. With this newest book, Berlant proposes that we are drawn to inconvenient objects. They describe this as “an inconvenience drive—a drive to keep taking in and living with objects” that both vex and attract us (6). But, 454 the comParatist 47 : 2023 for Berlant, this is not a bad thing, at least not always or entirely. And, well, even if it was a bad thing, inconvenience is inevitable, “evidence that no one was ever sovereign,” so what might we (un)learn from attending to our mixed feelings about inconvenience (3)? One of the conceptual anchors of the book, aside from inconvenience, is ambivalence. Berlant encourages a shift in perspective with regard to ambivalence, working to loosen the concept “from its association with negativity to its genuine technical state of intensely clashing images and aims” (33). We are affectively murky creatures. “We want and we don’t want what we want,” but we’re not necessarily confused or mistaken. Desire is complex, expressed as “a mess of loose live wires that it’s hard to put a finger on” (36). Over the course of the book, Berlant teases out the ambivalence wrapped up in moments—alternatively, episodes or events—of inconvenience. They take the reader through a variety of case studies—or, object/ scenes—to trouble moments when inconvenience appears as a blockage or stoppage. “Blockage,” Berlant observes, “is deemed to be a bad thing; flow, a good thing” (170). But inconvenience, that which we do not control or anticipate, can also be an opening, a crack that reveals a new path, a new world. Over the course of three chapters, plus an introduction and a coda, Berlant reads an array of texts that include films, poetry, essays, books, art, photographs, and performances in order to feel out our collective desire for inconvenience. If we stay with the ambivalence at the heart of this drive, Berlant reveals that what we are holding might just be a way forward, tactics that show us new ways of relating and being with others. Ambivalence contains “an otherwise” (171). On the Inconvenience of Other People is a love letter to the playful experimentation at the heart of theory. In this book, as in their others, Berlant allows theory to take the form of a proposition that resonates across a diverse and challenging set of examples (19). Berlant describes this approach to writing and mode of organization as “chapter-experiments” (10), “assays” (11), or “case study exercises” (27). They note, “Pretty much everything I’ve written has been modular that way, built through sections that allow a problem-cluster to be both established and transformed through its contact with specific object/scenes or cases” (11). This mode of writing resists, or perhaps even protests, definitive summary. “Books are never finished,” Berlant observes. “One just stops writing them” (27). With this book, Berlant has given us a gift, but a gift that is also, somewhat inconveniently, a project. In wrestling with the threads, connections, and sites of contact within the book, we, Berlant’s readers and co-interlocutors, are called to work through the theory and to put the theory to work. The first chapter, “Sex in the Event of Happiness,” locates Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film Last Tango in Paris as its primary object/scene, though Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998) and Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson (2006) are also examined briefly in Review Essays 455 the chapter’s coda. Berlant’s aim in this chapter is to imagine revolutionary politics alongside sexual desire. They argue that, in pursuing a better world, theorists, activists, and other utopian dreamers “too often cleave sex from the commons and other imaginaries of living with social division” (42). The body is inseparable from “revolutionary desire,” and so our theories of futurity, of worldmaking, must work through what sex means for sociality—not just after the revolution, but in the hereand-now (74). To begin sorting out ambivalence around sexual desire, Berlant eschews a tidy case study in favor of plumbing the depths of the complicated and unsettling. The film Last Tango in Paris, after all, contains rape, violence. It also contains moments of intimacy and humor, even if the jokes “are not very funny” (34). Berlant sees the potential of jokes and takes them seriously, locating the comedic as a site of pedagogy. If we want to work through the ambivalence we feel toward being with others, Berlant suggests that “few genres of social reciprocity are as reliable as the joke form in at once delivering and denying intimacy” (38). This both/and of intimacy is discomfiting, yet Berlant offers a scaffolding for “building skills for recognizing, explaining, and finding temporary housing for [this] discomfort” (67). In “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,” chapter two of Berlant’s book, they seek to destabilize the seeming fixity of the commons concept, and not just the occasional matter-of-fact descriptive quality of its popular use, but also “the prestige that the . . . concept has attained in the United States and the theorycosmopolitan context” (77). Instead, Berlant reminds us that the commons are “propositional,” “worked out in real time” (77), and a “path through struggle” (80). This chapter contributes to the book’s central project, untangling our ambivalence toward being with other people, by developing the common “as an action concept that acknowledges a broken world and the desperate need for a transformational infrastructure” (85–86). Writing in 2020, Berlant engages with the ongoing global pandemic and heightened protests against police violence against Black Americans, noting how such moments function as a kind of “glitch” that allows us to see more clearly the collective affects, “patterns, habits, norms and scenes of assemblage and use” that shape infrastructures (95). Within this moment, there is “all kinds of loss and transitional suspension of our confidence about how things work.” And yet, these changes also contain the “creative energy for worldbuilding” (106). Berlant traverses Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” and Emerson’s “Nature,” two works that take place on Boston Common, as well as the photography of Thomas Hawk and Stephanie Brooks, the poetic work of Juliana Spahr, and Liza Johnson’s 2009 film In the Air, among other stops on their journey to build “a compendium of getting out” of the static space of institutions and breaking open new infrastructural possibilities (86). Berlant continues to pursue the sticky both/and of life among others in chapter three, “On Being in Life Without Wanting the World: No World Poetics, or, Ellipti456 the comParatist 47 : 2023 cal Life.” They explore the ambivalent state of dissociation through the structural violences of everyday life in texts such as A Single Man, both the novel by Christopher Isherwood (1963) and Tom Ford’s film (2009), as well as Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. “Dissociation,” Berlant argues, “is a predictable effect and nonexceptional experience of living with, in, and under biopower’s structural disciplines and historical aggressions” such as “racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobic and class disgust” (118). Dissociation, as Berlant engages with the concept, can occur when the grate of life is more than anyone should bear, and yet . . . Perhaps there are ways of gaining some distance among all that closeness of collective life in order to keep going. Berlant describes the dynamic tension between closeness and distance as “the study of proxemics” (143). A study of proxemics captures the affect of “being in the middle of a relation without feeling integrated into it” (143). Berlant presents the complexity dissociation offers as grounds for “a politicized affect theory” (134). “The dissociative,” they argue, is “a common condition that brings with it a clarifying resource for thinking about what to do with a life that is defined by what is out of joint in it” (126). Berlant notes resonances among this argument and those of other theorists of “the affective phenomenology of structurally damaged life” such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, and Patricia Williams (142). Berlant reveals the major and minor irritations of collective life as fecund ground for creative resistance. Berlant does not flinch from exploring the “dark places” of collective life. Their coda centers “a limit case of inconvenience to the reproduction of life”—“rape/ murder: an ordinary thing” (152). This comes at the end of a book that explores sexual violence, suicidal ideation, white supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia. And yet, the book also addresses humor, art, writing, and creativity. Berlant’s own wry humor and boundless creativity guide readers through this book. I approached On the Inconvenience of Other People with a potent cocktail of grief and anticipation—grief, after Berlant’s death in 2021, and anticipation of the incomparable experience of reading Berlant’s writing. “One has to make language do what it cannot yet do,” Berlant writes (99). Their persistent originality models this call. Individuals who are interested in affect, sex and desire, democracy and other approaches to collective life, and theories of publics/publicity and the commons will find a rich archive of material to work with in this book. Readers who are new to Berlant’s work can dive right in. Berlant has left us with the resources for living among life’s darkness, complexity, and inconveniences. A gift, a project, an invitation to “keep . . . showing up” (172). Kaitlyn Patia  Whitman College Review Essays 457