Category: psychoanalysis

Do you dream of the weather?

Blog, climate change, psychoanalysis

The weather, as writers on climate change from Amitav Ghosh to Jenny Offill (and many others) have been noting, hardly ever figures at the centre of the plot. Even stories that have a large climactic disaster determining the world they build (The Road, or Margaret Atwood’s Maddadam series, or Octavia Butler’s Parables), the event is usually, in a somewhat punny phrase, precipitating; it happens before, or because, it does not change, it does not change with us, and it cannot be changed.

It is weird to think that a concept so clearly defined by the tendency to change – namely, climate change – is at the same time an acknowledgment of the absolutely planetary scope of human agency (after all, it is human-induced climate change that should most concern us) and of its limits (after all, it is clear that we are locked into at least 1.5C degree warming now, with all the unpredictability that brings). To think about the weather, then, is to dwell on – and at – the very boundary of the human condition: both what we can achieve – destroy, mostly – and what we cannot (repair, mostly). It is also, as Brian Wynne brilliantly analyzed, to revisit the boundaries between observation (or phenomenology), measurement (or attempt at quantification/standardization), and indeterminacy, and thus pose the question that forms the crux of one of the strands of my work: what is the relationship between knowing about and doing something about the future? Or, to put it slightly differently, is the future something we know about or something we do?

To dream of the weather, then, adds another degree of radical indeterminacy: to the extent to which dreams are not volitional (and even for fans of lucid dreaming, that is still a large extent), the incursion of weather into dreams further refracts the horizon of agency. While in dreams we think we can choose what we do (or don’t do), but we are both in charge and not in charge; we are (again, with exceptions) not aware of the dream as we are producing it, but we are producing it; there is no-one else there, right?

It struck me some time ago that, to the best of my knowledge, not many people dream about the weather. Or, in the vein of the backdrop that Ghosh writes about, even if they do, they dream of the weather as something that just happens. True to form, I had a dream that featured a blizzard that very night; but it also featured a snow plough, or road sweeper/gritter, I am not sure which.

Last night, however, I had a dream of a storm cloud passing all over North America, and then getting to the UK. In my dream, the southwest tip of the UK – Cornwall, a bit of Dorset, Somerset – was the only part that was spared. This was strange, as I was sure that what precipitated the dream was reading the forecast about storm Nelson, which predicted high impact in the southwest, but almost none in the northeast, where I live. Yet, when I woke up, rain was lashing against my windows; a thick, low cloud hung over most of the coast.

Strange weather?

In dreams begin responsibilities

Blog, Media, Politics, psychoanalysis, Uncategorized

Dreams are dangerous places. The control and awareness we tend to ascribe to what is usually referred to as ‘dreams’ in the waking state (ambitions; aspirations) is the exact opposite of the absence of control we tend to assume of dreams in the unconscious (sleeping) state, but neither is, strictly speaking, true; we do not choose our ambitions or orientations with full awareness, much like it is ridiculous to fully outsource authoriality when we sleep.

Psychoanalysis, of course, knows this. But, much like other disciplines and traditions that take dreams seriously, it is all-too-often equated with treating dreams as epistemology; that is, using dream logic to deduce something about the person who dreams, as if exiting from the forces generating the unconscious (in Freud’s formulation, following Ariadne’s thread) is ever truly possible. Sociology, needless to say, hardly does a better job, instead placing dreams at the uncomfortable (all boundaries, for sociology, are uncomfortable) boundary between collective and individual, as if the collective (unconscious) somehow permeates the individual, but always imperfectly (everything, in sociology, is imperfect, except its own imperfections).

Bion describes pathology as the inability to dream and inability to wake up; but is this not another (even if relaxed) call for discreteness, ushering in Freud’s Reality principle through the back door? This seems relevant given the relevance of the ability to dream (and dream differently) for any progressive movement or politics. What if elements of reality become so impoverished that there is nothing to dream about? This is one of the things I remember most clearly from reading Cormac McCarthy’s’s The Road – good, happy, and peaceful dreams usually mean you are dying. Reality, in other words, has become so unbearable that there is nothing but retreat into personal, individualized fantasy as a bulwark against this (this is also, though in a more complicated tone, a motif in one of my favourite films, Wenders’ Until the End of the World).

There are several possible ways out of this. One is to see dreams as shared; that is, to conceptualize dreaming as a collective, rather than solitary activity, and dreams as a possession of more than a single individual. Yet, I fear this too-easily slips into platitudes; as much as dreams (and beliefs, and feelings, and thoughts) can be similar and communicated, it is unlikely they can literally be co-created: individual mental states remain (and, in some cases, are indistinguishable from) individual.

(I’m aware that the Australian Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime may challenge this, but I’m reserving that for a different argument).

Instead of imagining some originary dream-state in which we are connected through other minds as if via a umbilical cord, I’m increasingly thinking it makes sense to conceptualize dreams as places; that is, instances of timespace with laws, sequences, and sets of actions and relations. In this sense, we can be in others’ dream(s), as much as they can be in our(s); but within this place, we are probably still responsible to ourselves. Or are we?

How free are you to act in someone else’s dream?

Faraway, So Close

Blog, history, psychoanalysis, Reviews, social theory

My best friend and I used to finish every party at my place sitting by windows that were flung wide open, feet propped up on the ledge, smoking, listening to music, and waiting for the dawn to break. Staying behind to help with the dishes was, back in the day, the ultimate token of friendship: my family did not own a dishwasher (it broke down sometime in the early 1980s and it would not be until mid-2000s that political and financial stability were sufficient to buy a new one); there was always a lot of cleaning up to do after a party. These early-morning moments became our after, where we could watch the day rise, safe in the knowledge both mild ignominies and larger embarrassments of the night before were put to sleep, together with the dishes.

One of the songs we used to listen to in such moments was U2’s ‘Stay (Faraway, So Close!’). I’m not sure whether this was before U2 Sold Out or Became Uncool, or because we were just too cut off from that iteration of the ‘culture wars’, in the country still called Yugoslavia deep in the throes of an actual war, to notice or care. Or maybe we were just a little too enamoured of Wim Wenders’ ‘Das Himmel Uber Berlin’ (‘Wings of Desire’ is its English title, sadly probably one of the worst translations ever) or its eponymous sequel, for which the song was recorded.

The period between these two films was also the period during which the events that would mark our childhoods unravelled. “Wings of Desire” was shot in 1987, in a Berlin whose dividing line will soon turn to rubble. “Faraway, So Close” premiered in 1993. Longer-brewing political conflict in what was then known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia surfaced in 1988/9, and transformed into a full-scale war in 1991.

In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence. The first anti-Milosevic protests happen in Belgrade. Almost everyone I know is at this protest.

Yugoslav army forces enter Slovenia. Two Serb secessionist entities form in Croatia and in Bosnia. All sides are armed.

In 1992, the siege of Sarajevo begins.

It will take another three years until the Dayton Peace Agreement, and another ten until the war is effectively over. I was eight when I confidently declared to my father that I think Slovenia will secede from Yugoslavia, and twenty when the war ended. I spent most of my childhood and teens alternating between peace & anti-regime protests, and navigating the networks of violence, misogyny, and hate that conflicts like these tend to kick up. In my late twenties and early thirties, part of my career will be dedicated to dealing specifically with post-conflict environments; and so, in the broader sense, was my book.

At any rate, as we sat by the window ledge sometime between the second half of the 1990s and the first half of 2000s, the lyrics of the song precipitated the whole wide world, which was in stark contrast with the fact that sanctions, visa regimes, and plummeting economy made it exceedingly difficult to travel. Those who did mostly did it in one direction.  

Faraway, so close

Up with the static and the radio

With satellite television

You can go anywhere

Miami, New Orleans

London, Belfast and Berlin

Sometimes, we would swap ‘Belfast’ for ‘Belgrade’, just for the fun of it, but also to make clear that we considered our city, Belgrade, to be part of the world. The promise of connection, of ‘satellite television’ (watching MTV through one of the local channels). The promise that there is a world out there, and that just because we could not see it did not mean it has disappeared.

In the intervening years, I would go to London, Belfast, and Berlin (I’ve still not been to Miami or New Orleans). I would live in London – briefly – and also, more permanently, in Oxford, Budapest, Bristol, Copenhagen, Auckland, Cambridge, Durham, and Newcastle. My friend, though she will travel a bit, will remain in Belgrade.

***

It is 3 May 2023 in Belgrade, 8AM Central European Time (CET). CET is one hour ahead of British Summer Time (BST), which is the time zone in the northeast of England, where I normally live. It is also six hours ahead of EDT (Eastern Daylight Time), which is where I am, in upstate New York. I am here on my research leave – that’s sabbatical in British English – from Durham University, at Bard College. It is 2AM, and I am sound asleep.

At this time, in the entrance of an elementary (primary+lower secondary) school in Belgrade, a 13-year-old opens fire from a semi-automatic rifle, hitting and killing a security guard, injuring two students, before moving down the corridor on the right to the classroom on the left, where he opens fire again, injuring a teacher and killing another eight students. The classroom is my classroom – ‘homeroom’ between 1992 and 1996. The school is the elementary school both me and my best friend attended from 1988 to 1996.

It is 7AM EDT in Red Hook; 1 PM CET. I wake up, going through the usual routine of stretching-coffee-breakfast. I go for a run. I do not check social media, because I need to focus on the talk I am giving that afternoon. The talk is part of my fellowship at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard. It is on spaces and places of thought and violence.

It is 12PM EDT, and 6PM CET. I’m having lunch with Anthony, who’s a friend and also the editor of The Philosopher, the journal whose board I’m on, and another member of the editorial board.

It is 4PM EDT, and 10PM CET. I’m giving the talk. It’s entitled ‘How to think together’, and it’s a product of anything from two months to twenty years of thinking about how to coexist with others, including across political difference. [you can watch the recording here].  

It is 10PM in Red Hook. I have just come back from the post-talk dinner, buzzing from pleasant conversation and the wine. I log on to social media – I see nothing on Twitter, and then, for some reason, I log on to Facebook, which I rarely use (mostly for friends and family in Serbia).

It is 4AM on 4 May in Belgrade. Flowers have been amassed; the candles lit; the vigils held. My friends have hugged and held each other. All of them (quick check on Facebook) are safe, also their children who go to the same school. All of them are safe: none of them are OK.

And, for that matter, neither am I.

***

What is the purpose, the value of mourning at a distance? As the week unfolds, I turn this question over and over again in my head, my ethical, normative, political and affective registers crashing and collapsing against each other.

“I have no right to mourn, I wasn’t even there” to “I wish I could have been there, and I wish I could have taken at least one of those bullets”.

“These kinds of things happen in the USA all the time, why am I suddenly so impacted by this?”

From “Fantasies of self-sacrificing heroism are a wish for immortality/covert fear of death, cut it out” to “There is nothing I can do nor any use I can be of from here, feeling this way is self-indulgent”.

From “I want to go home” to “Home is the north of England, what difference would being there make?”

What right do I have to mourn from a distance?

What does distance do to a feeling?

***

Distance, proximity, detachment and engagement have been among the key themes of my thinking, writing, and, inevitably, life (this blog, for instance, was born out of exploring these themes in both theory and practice). Away is both a mode of escape or distance, and of sustaining desire: being seen but not held (too tight), acknowledged but never (fully) known, alone but never isolated. Or at least that was the ideal. As years went on, it became less and less a moral, ethical or aesthetic choice, and more a simple fact of life. Academic mobility combined with endless curiosity meant I accepted – and, to be honest, welcomed – the constant movement. I regretted that relationships broke apart because of this; I reluctantly accepted that my dislike of heteropatriarchal, monogamous, nuclear family patterns as fundamental social units meant I was likely to struggle to form new ones, especially as more and more friends were having children. A fact of life then became an adaptation strategy: to accept the impermanence of all things; to always have one foot out of the door. Ready to detach and withdraw, there for people should they need me, but not to burden them with my presence, or needs. Or feelings.

Congruent with my other beliefs, being away quietly stopped being a location, and became an answer. 

This mode of inhabiting the world resembles what Peter Sloterdijk in The Art of Philosophy frames as being “dead on holiday”, the practice of studied detachment that first came to define the social role of professional thinkers. This position entails the denial not only of bodily functions and of mortality, but also of time itself; to take up semi-permanent residence in the realm of pure forms means exiting human time as it known. The theme of exiting human space/time is, of course, common to all ‘otherworldly’ practices and belief systems – from Greek philosophy to Christianity to mysticism and whatever happened in between (or: outside, as after all, we do not have to conform to human time). This, of course, is also what both Wenders’ films are about; distance, and desire, and time.

Hannah Arendt, who engaged with this dichotomy and its implications before Sloterdijk, notes that this position – as conducive to thinking as it is – also means we remain isolated from others:

Outstanding among the existential modes of truth-telling are the solitude of the philosopher, the isolation of the scientist and the artist, the impartiality of the historian and the judge (…) These modes of being alone differ in many respects, but they have in common that as long as any one of them lasts, no political commitment, no adherence to a cause, is possible. (…) From this perspective, we remain unaware of the actual content of political life – of the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public.

(Arendt, ‘On Politics’, 2005: 62).

Arendt argues that this is what makes the realm of thought – ‘pure speculation’ – separated from politics. Theorizing rests on the ability to distance oneself not only from the immediacy of reality (something Boltanski explores in On Critique), but also on the ability to suspend judgment; that is, to retain a sufficient degree of distance/detachment from the object (of contemplation) so as to be able to comprehend them in their entirety.

The PhD I wrote in 2019 explored this complex operation insofar as it is involved in the production of critical social theory, in particular the critique of neoliberalism as concept [a concise version, in article form, is here; I drew on Boltanski, Chiapello, Arendt, and Sloterdijk but also went beyond them]. I called it ‘gnossification’ for the tendency to turn complex, ambiguous, and affectively-loaded phenomena into objects of knowledge. This isn’t simply to ‘rationalize’ or ‘explain away’ one’s feelings: we can be blindest about our own feelings when we confront them, as it were, head-on. The point is that gnossification also performs the affective work of creating and maintaining that distance, for the mere fact that it locates our field of vision in our own interiority. It literally produces (affective, perceptive, cognitive) space. And because space is relational (or, as Einstein would have put it, relative), it both requires other objects and cannot but treat them as such.

(If you’d like to hear more about this, I’m always happy to expand 😊).

But doing theory or philosophy is not the only way one can take up semi-permanent residence in the realm of the dead. We can do it through relationship choices (or avoidance of choices). In On Not Knowing, Emily Ogden encapsulates this beautifully and succinctly:  

It is not only in death itself that we encounter the temptation to prescind from life. What it means for death to claim us is that the sterile round of our routines claims us. We no longer see the point or the possibility of a pleasant surprise…Death claims us in the passion some of us have for disposing of our lives, equally in the taking of excessive risks and the settling of marriages. And those two things are not even incompatible: it is possible to ‘sow one’s wild oats’ in the name of settling down. Put me, I beg you, in a rut.

Ogden draws extensively on the work of psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle. In In Praise of Risk, Dufourmantelle characterizes this kind of strategy as concerned with avoiding the inevitable ambiguity of existence:

the risk of ‘not yet dying’, this gamble that we will always lose in the end, but only after traversing life with more or less plenitude, joy, and most of all, intensity.

Or, of course, pain.

***

To mourn from a distance: to recognize that no amount of distance – linguistic, conceptual, geographical, emotional – can protect us from the pain of others.

To love at a distance: to know that feeling has no natural connection to proximity, and that this is not the answer but the beginning of a question or, more likely, the question: how to care for others – and to let them care for us – even if we have chosen not to be physically close to them.

To feel at a distance: to understand that it is possible to want to feel the pain, joy, and fear of others, not as a spectator, seer, or helper/healer, but because this is what love – and friendship – is.

***

Friendship, Derrida writes, is a contract with time. In friendship, we make a pact of lasting beyond death. We know our friends will remember us even after we die. And, reciprocally, we accept not only the cognitive but also the emotional task of keeping their memory alive: in simpler terms, we accept we will both remember and miss them.

To love is to accept that there are objects whose presence is felt regardless whether we have chosen them as objects of contemplation. It is to receive the reminder that things can’t be ‘switched off’, even for those of us with significant training, capacity, and experience in doing so. To love means to, essentially, live with others even if we choose not to live together. For someone whose probably most successful and effectively longest relationship was predominantly long-distance, but who was also taught to associate this tendency with narcissism and avoidance of intimacy, this is a difficult lesson.

Back in the early oughts, on a website called everything2 (think like anarchist – no, chaotic – Wikipedia, but with stories, poetry and fiction interspersed with information), there was a post written from the perspective of someone who is spending the winter in one of the research stations in the Antarctica (yes, this was a job I’d considered, and were it not for the unfortunate fact of Serbian passport, would have still very much liked to do). I can’t reproduce much of the post – I didn’t save it, and repeat attempts over the years have failed to resurface it – but I remember the line on which it ends: “I still see you, and I love you very, very much”. The point being that distance, at the end of the day (or the end of the world?), makes very little difference at all.

Being dead on holiday officially over, I begin to pack to go back to the UK, and thus also to leave – even if temporarily – the US, which now holds most of these realizations for me. Not screaming ‘Behold, I am Lazarus’, because this is not a miracle, not even a tiny one. It is more of a coincidence, a set of circumstances, though thanks will be given where thanks are due, because I owe this to so, so many people. You know who you are, and I love you.

Tár, or the (im)possibility of female genius

Blog, Politics, psychoanalysis, Reviews, social theory, theory teaching, Uncategorized

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius;”, wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex; “and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.”

Of course, the fact that the book, and its author, are much better known for the other quote on processual/relational ontology – “one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman” – is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the first. A statement about geniuses cannot be a statement about women. A woman writing about geniuses must, in fact, be writing about women. And because women cannot be geniuses, she cannot be writing about geniuses. Nor can she be one herself.

I saw Tár, Todd Field’s lauded drama about the (fictional) first woman conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, earlier this year (most of this blog post was written before the Oscars and reviews). There were many reasons why I was poised to love it: the plot/premise, the scenario, the music (obviously), the visuals (and let’s be honest, Kate Blanchett could probably play a Christmas tree and be brilliant). All the same, it ended up riling me for its unabashed exploitation of most stereotypes in the women x ambition box. Of course the lead character (Lydia Tár, played by Blanchett) is cold, narcissistic, and calculating; of course she is a lesbian; of course she is ruthless towards long-term collaborators and exploitative of junior assistants; of course she is dismissive of identity politics; and of course she is, also, a sexual predator. What we perceive in this equation is that a woman who desires – and attains – power will inevitably end up reproducing exactly the behaviours that define men in those roles, down to the very stereotype of Weinstein-like ogre. What is it that makes directors not be able to imagine a woman with a modicum of talent, determination, or (shhh) ambition as anything other than a monster – or alternatively, as a man, and thus by definition a ‘monster’?

To be fair, this movement only repeats what institutions tend to do with women geniuses: they typecast them; make sure that their contributions are strictly domained; and penalize those who depart from the boundaries of prescribed stereotypical ‘feminine’ behaviour (fickle, insecure, borderline ‘hysterical’; or soft, motherly, caring; or ‘girlbossing’ in a way that combines the volume of the first with the protective urges of the second). Often, like in Tár, by literally dragging them off the stage.

The sad thing is that it does not have to be this way. The opening scene of Tár is a stark contrast with the closing one in this regard. In the opening scene, a (staged) interview with Adam Gopnik, Lydia Tár takes the stage in a way that resists, refuses, and downplays gendered stereotypes. Her demeanor is neither masculine nor feminine; her authority is not negotiated, forced to prove itself, endlessly demonstrated. She handles the interview with an equanimity that does not try to impress, convince, cajole, or amuse; but also not charm, outwit, or patronize. In fact, she does not try at all. She approaches the interviewer from a position of intellectual equality, a position that, in my experience, relatively few men can comfortably handle. But of course, this has to turn out to be a pretense. There is no way to exist as a woman in the competitive world of classical music – or, for that matter, anywhere else – without paying heed to the gendered stereotypes.

A particularly poignant (and, I thought, very successful) depiction of this is in the audition scene, in which Olga – the cellist whose career Tár will help and who will eventually become the object of her predation – plays behind a screen. Screening off performers during auditions (‘blind auditions’) was, by the way, initially introduced to challenge gender bias in hiring musicians to major orchestras – to resounding (sorry) success, making it 50% more likely women would be hired. But Tár recognizes the cellist by her shoes (quite stereotypically feminine shoes, by the way). The implication is that even ‘blind’ auditions are not really blind. You can be either a ‘woman’ (like Olga, young, bold, straight, and feminine); or a ‘man’ (like Lydia, masculine, lesbian, and without scruples). There is no outside, and there is no without.

As entertaining as it is to engage in cultural criticism of stereotypical gendered depiction in cinemas, one question from Tár remains. Is there a way to perform authority and expertise in a gender-neutral way? If so, what would it be?

People often tell me I perform authority in a distinctly non-(stereotypically)-feminine way; this both is and is not a surprise. It is a surprise because I am still occasionally shocked by the degree to which intellectual environments in the UK, and in particular those that are traditionally academic, are structurally, relationally, and casually misogynist, even in contexts supposedly explicitly designed to counter it. It is not a surprise, on the other hand, as I was raised by women who did not desire to please and men who were more than comfortable with women’s intellects, but also, I think, because the education system I grew up in had no problems accepting and integrating these intellects. I attribute this to the competitive streak of Communist education – after all, the Soviets sent the first woman into space. But being (at the point of conception, not reception, sadly) bereft of gendered constraints when it comes to intellect does not solve the other part of the equation. If power is also, always, violence, is there a way to perform power that does not ultimately involve hurting others?

This, I think, is the challenge that any woman – or, for that matter, anyone in a position of power who does not automatically benefit from male privilege – must consider. As Dr Autumn Asher BlackDeer brilliantly summarized it recently, decolonization (or any other kind of diversification) is not about replacing one set of oppressors with another, so having more diverse oppressors. Yet, all too frequently, this kind of work – willingly or not – becomes appropriated and used in exactly these ways.

Working in institutions of knowledge production, and especially working both on and within multiple intersecting structures of oppression – gender, ethnicity/race, ability, nationality, class, you name it – makes these challenges, for me, present on a daily basis in both theoretical and practical work., One of the things I try to teach my students is that, in situations of injustice, it is all too appealing to react to perceived slight or offence by turning it inside out, by perpetuating violence in turn. If we are wronged, it becomes easy to attribute blame and mete out punishment. But real intellectual fortitude lies in resisting this impulse. Not in some meek turning-the-other-cheek kind of way, but in realizing that handing down violence will only, ever, perpetuate the cycle of violence. It is breaking – or, failing that, breaking out of – this cycle we must work towards.

As we do, however, we are faced with another kind of problem. This is something Lauren Berlant explicitly addressed in one of their best texts ever, Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy: most people in and around institutions of knowledge production find authority appealing. This, of course, does not mean that all intellectual authority lends itself automatically to objectification (on either of the sides), but it does and will happen. Some of this, I think, is very comprehensively addressed in Amia Srinivasan‘s The Right to Sex; some of it is usefully dispensed with by Berlant, who argues against seeing pedagogical relations as indexical for transference (or the other way around?). But, as important as these insights are, questions of knowledge – and thus questions of authority – are not limited to questions of pedagogy. Rather, they are related to the very relational nature of knowledge production itself.

For any woman who is an intellectual, then, the challenge rests in walking the very thin line between seduction and reduction – that is, the degree to which intellectual work (an argument, a book, a work of art) has to seduce, but in turn risks being reduced to an act of seduction (the more successful it is, the more likely this will happen). Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory, which I’m reading at the moment (shout out to Phlox Books in London where I bought it), is a case in point. Despentes argues against reducing women’s voices to ‘experience’, or to women as epistemic object (well, OK, the latter formulation is mine). Yet, in the reception of the book, it is often Despentes herself – her clothes, her mannerisms, her history, her sexuality – that takes centre stage.

Come to think of it, this version of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ applies to all women’s performances: how many times have I heard people say they find, for instance, Judith Butler’s or Lauren Berlant’s arguments or language “too complex” or “too difficult”, but on occasions when they do make an effort to engage with them reduce them to being “about gender” or “about sexuality” (hardly warrants mentioning that the same people are likely to diligently plod through Heidegger, Sartre or Foucault without batting an eyelid and, speaking of sexuality, without reducing Foucault’s work on power to it). The implication, of course, is that writers or thinkers who are not men have the obligation to persuade, to enchant readers/consumers into thinking their argument is worth giving time to.

This is something I’ve often observed in how people relate to the arguments of women and nonbinary intellectuals: “They did not manage to convince me” or “Well, let’s see if she can get away with it”. The problem is not just the casualized use of pronouns (note how men thinkers retain their proper names: Sartre, Foucault, but women slip into being a “she”). It’s the expectation that it is their (her) job to convince you, to lure you. Because, of course, your time is more valuable than hers, and of course, there are all these other men you would/should be reading instead, so why bother? It is not the slightest bit surprising that this kind of intellectual habit lends itself too easily to epistemic positioning that leads to epistemic erasure, but also that it becomes all too easily perpetuated by everyone, including those who claim to care about such things.

One of the things I hope I managed to convey in the Ethics of Ambiguity reading group I ran at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023 is to not read intellectuals who are not white men in this way. To not sit back with your arms folded and let “her” convince you. Simone Weil, another genius – and a woman – wrote that attention is the primary quality of love we can give to each other. The quality of intellectual attention we give to pieces we read has to be the same to count as anything but a narrow, self-aggrandizing gesture. In other words, a commitment to equality means nothing without a commitment to equality of intellectual attention, and a constant practice and reflection required to sustain and improve it.

Enjoyed this? Try https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00113921211057609

and https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/philosophy-herself

You can’t ever go back home again

Blog, history, Politics, psychoanalysis, social theory, Sociological fiction

At the start of December, I took the boat from Newcastle to Amsterdam. I was in Amsterdam for a conference, but it is also true I used to spend a lot of time in Amsterdam – Holland in general – both for private reasons and for work, between 2010 and 2016. Then, after a while, I took a train to Berlin. Then another, sleeper train, to Budapest. Then, a bus to Belgrade.

To wake up in Eastern Europe is to wake up in a context in which history has always already happened. To state this, of course, is a cliché; thinking, and writing, about Eastern Europe is always already infused with clichés. Those of us who come from this part of the world – what Maria Tumarkin marks so aptly as “Eastern European elsewheres” – know. In England, we exist only as shadow projections of a self, not even important enough to be former victims/subjects of the Empire. We are born into the world where we are the Other, so we learn to think, talk, and write of ourselves as the Other. Simone de Beauvoir wrote about this; Frantz Fanon wrote about this too.

To wake up in Berlin is to already wake up in Eastern Europe. This is where it used to begin. To wake up in Berlin is to know that we are always already living in the aftermath of a separation. In Eastern Europe, you know the world was never whole.

I was eight when the Berlin Wall fell. I remember watching it on TV. Not long after, I remember watching a very long session of the Yugoslav League of Communists (perhaps this is where my obsession with watching Parliament TV comes from?). It seemed to go on forever. My grandfather seemed agitated. My dad – whom I only saw rarely – said “Don’t worry, Slovenia will never secede from Yugoslavia”. “Oh, I think it will”, I said*.

When you ask “Are you going home for Christmas?”, you mean Belgrade. To you, Belgrade is a place of clubs and pubs, of cheap beer and abundant grilled meat**. To me, Belgrade is a long dreadful winter, smells of car fumes and something polluting (coal?) used for fuel. Belgrade is waves of refugees and endless war I felt powerless to stop, despite joining the first anti-regime protest in 1992 (at the age of 11), organizing my class to join one in 1996 (which almost got me kicked out of school, not for the last time), and inhaling oceans of tear gas when the regime actually fell, in 2000.

Belgrade is briefly hoping things would get better, then seeing your Prime Minister assassinated in 2003; seeing looting in the streets of Belgrade after Kosovo declared independence in 2008, and while already watching the latter on Youtube, from England, deciding that maybe there was nowhere to return to. Nowadays, Belgrade is a haven of crony capitalism equally indebted to Russian money, Gulf real estate, and Chinese fossil fuel exploitation that makes its air one of the most polluted in the world. So no, Belgrade never felt like home.

Budapest did, though.

It may seem weird that the place I felt most at home is a place where I barely spent three years. My CV will testify that I lived in Budapest between 2010 and 2013, first as a visiting fellow, then as an adjunct professor at the Central European University (CEU). I don’t have a drop of Hungarian blood (not that I know of, at least, thought with the Balkans you can never tell). My command of language was, at best, perfunctory; CEU is an American university and its official language is English. Among my friends – most of whom were East-Central European – we spoke English; some of us have other languages in common, but we still do. And while this group of friends did include some people who would be described as ‘locals’ – that is, Budapest-born and raised – we were, all of us, outsiders, brought together by something that was more than chance and a shared understanding of what it meant to be part of the city***.

Of course, the CV will say that what brought us together was the fact that we were all affiliated with CEU. But CEU is no longer in Budapest; since 2020, it has relocated to Vienna, forced out by the Hungarian regime’s increasingly relentless pursuit against anything that smacks of ‘progressivism’ (are you listening, fellow UK academics?). Almost all of my friends had left before that, just like I did. In 2012, increasingly skeptical about my chances to acquire a permanent position in Western academia with a PhD that said ‘University of Belgrade’ (imagine, it’s not about merit), I applied to do a second PhD at Cambridge. I was on the verge of accepting the offer, when I also landed that most coveted of academic premia, a Marie Curie postdoc position attached to an offer of a permanent – tenured – position, in Denmark****.

Other friends also left. For jobs. For partners’ jobs. For parenthood. For politics. In academia, this is what you did. You swallowed and moved on. Your CV was your life, not its reflection.

So no, there is no longer a home I can return to.

And yet, once there, it comes back. First as a few casually squeezed out words to the Hungarian conductors on the night train from Berlin, then, as a vocabulary of 200+ items that, though rarely used, enabled me to navigate the city, its subways, markets, and occasionally even public services (the high point of my Hungarian fluency was being able to follow – and even part-translate – the Semmelweis Museum curator’s talk! :)). Massolit, the bookshop which also exists in Krakow, which I’ve visited on a goodbye-to-Eastern-Europe trip from Budapest via Prague and Krakow to Ukraine (in 2013, right before the annexation). Gerlóczy utca, where is the French restaurant in which I once left a massive tip for a pianist who played so beautifully that I was happy to be squeezed at the smallest table, right next to the coat stand. Most, which means ‘bridge’ in Serbian (and Bosnian, and Croatian) and ‘now’ in Hungarian. In Belgrade, I now sometimes rely on Google maps to get around; in Budapest, the map of the city is buried so deep in my mental compass that I end up wherever I am supposed to be going.

This is what makes the city your own. Flow, like the Danube, massive as it meanders between the city’s two halves, which do not exactly make a whole. Like that book by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is a Hungarian name, btw. Like my academic writing, which, uncoupled from the strictures of British university term, flows.

Budapest has changed, but the old and the new overlay in ways that make it impossible not to remember. Like the ‘twin’ cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma in the fictional universe of China Miéville’s The City and the City (the universe was, of course, modelled on Berlin, but Besźel is Budapest out and out, save for the sea), the memory and its present overlap in distinct patterns that we are trained not to see. Being in one precludes being in the other. But there are rumours of a third city, Orciny, one that predates both. Believing in Orciny is considered a crime, though. There cannot be a place where the past and the future are equally within touching distance. Right?

CEU, granted, is no longer there as an institution; though the building (and the library) remains, most of its services, students, and staff are now in Vienna. I don’t even dare go into the campus; the last time I was there, in 2017, I gave a keynote about how universities mediate disagreement. The green coffee shop with the perennially grim-faced person behind the counter, the one where we went to get good coffee before Espresso Embassy opened, is no longer there. But Espresso Embassy still stands; bigger. Now, of course, there are places to get good coffee everywhere: Budapest is literally overrun by them. The best I pick up is from the Australian coffee shop, which predates my move. Their shop front celebrates their 10th anniversary. Soon, it will be 10 years since I left Budapest.

Home: the word used to fill me with dread. “When are you going home?”, they would ask in Denmark, perhaps to signify the expectation I would be going to Belgrade for the winter break, perhaps to reflect the idea that all immigrants are, fundamentally, guests. “I live here”, I used to respond. “This is my home”. On bad days, I’d add some of the combo of information I used to point out just how far from assumed identities I was: I don’t celebrate Christmas (I’m atheist, for census purposes); if I did, it would be on a different date (Orthodox Christian holidays in Serbia observe the Julian calendar, which is 10 days behind the Gregorian); thanks, I’ll be going to India (I did, in fact, go to India including over the Christmas holidays the first year I lived in Denmark, though not exactly in order to spite everyone). But above and beyond all this, there was a simpler, flatter line: home is not where you return, it’s the place you never left.

In Always Coming Home, another SF novel about finding the places we (n)ever left, Ursula LeGuin retraces a past from the point of view of a speculative future. This future is one in which the world – in fact, multiple worlds – have failed. Like Eastern Europe, it is a sequence of apocalypses whose relationship can only be discovered through a combination of anthropology and archaeology, but one that knows space and its materiality exist only as we have already left it behind; we cannot dig forwards, as it were.

Am I doing the same, now? Am I coming home to find out why I have left? Or did I return from the future to find out I have, in fact, never left?

Towards the end of The City and the City, the main character, Tyador Borlú, gets apprehended by the secret police monitoring – and punishing – instances of trespass (Breach) between two cities, the two worlds. But then he is taken out by one of the Breach – Ashil – and led through the city in a way that allows him to finally see them not as distinct, but as parts of a whole.

Everything I had been unseeing now jostled into sudden close-up. Sound and smell came in: the calls of Besźel; the ringing of its clocktowers; the clattering and old metal percussion of the trams; the chimney smell; the old smells; they came in a tide with the spice and Illitan yells of Ul Qoma, the clatter of a militsya copter, the gunning of German cars. The colours of Ul Qoma light and plastic window displays no longer effaced the ochres and stone of its neighbour, my home.

‘Where are you?’ Ashil said. He spoke so only I could hear. ‘I . . .’

‘Are you in Besźel or Ul Qoma?’

‘. . . Neither. I’m in Breach.’ ‘You’re with me here.’

We moved through a crosshatched morning crowd. ‘In Breach. No one knows if they’re seeing you or unseeing you. Don’t creep. You’re not in neither: you’re in both.’

He tapped my chest. ‘Breathe.’

(Loc. 3944)

Breathe.

*Maybe this is where the tendency not to be overtly impressed by the authority of men comes from (or authority in general, given my father was a professor of sociology and I was, at that point, nine years old, and also right).

** Which I also do not benefit from, as I do not eat meat.

*** Some years later, I will understand that this is why the opening lines of the Alexandria Quartet always resonated so much.

**** How I ended up doing a second PhD at Cambridge after all and relocating to England permanently is a different story, one that I part-told here.

On reparative reading and critique in/of anthropology: postdisciplinary perspectives on discipline-hopping

Blog, Conference presentations, Philosophy of social science, psychoanalysis, social theory

*This is a more-or-less unedited text of the plenary (keynote) address to the international conference ‘Anthropology of the future/The Future of Anthropology‘, hosted by the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in Viminacium, 8-9 September 2022. If citing, please refer to as Bacevic, J. [Title]. Keynote address, [Conference].

Hi all. It’s odd to be addressing you at a conference entitled ‘Anthropology of the Future/The Future of Anthropology’, as I feel like an outsider for several reasons. Most notably, I am not an anthropologist. This is despite the fact that I have a PhD in anthropology, from the University of Belgrade, awarded in 2008. What I mean is that I do not identify as an anthropologist, I do not work in a department or institute of anthropology, nor do I publish in anthropology journals. In fact, I went so far in the opposite direction that I got another PhD, in sociology, from the University of Cambridge. I work at a department of sociology, at Durham University, which is a university in the north-east of England, which looks remarkably like Oxford and Cambridge. So I am an outsider in two senses: I am not an anthropologist, and I no longer live, reside, or work in Serbia. However, between 2004 and 2007 I taught at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology of the University of Belgrade, and also briefly worked at the Institute that is organizing this very conference, as part of the research stipend awarded by the Serbian Ministry of Science to young, promising, scientific talent. Between 2005 and 2007, and then again briefly in 2008-9, I was the Programme Leader for Antropology in Petnica Science Centre. I don’t think it would be too exaggerated to say, I was, once, anthropology’s future; and anthropology was mine. So what happened since?

By undertaking a retelling of a disciplinary transition – what would in common parlance be dubbed ‘career change’ or ‘reorientation’ – my intention is not to engage in autoethnography, but to offer a reparative reading. I borrow the concept of reparative reading from the late theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay entitled “On paranoid reading and reparative reading, or: You’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you”, first published in 1997 and then, with edits, in 2003; I will say more about its content and key concepts shortly.

For the time being, however, I would like to note that the disinclination from autoethnography was one of the major reasons why I left anthropology; it was matched by the desire to do theory, by which I mean the possibility of deriving mid-range generalizations about human behaviour that could aspire not to be merely local, by which I mean not apply only to the cases studied. This, as we know, is not particularly popular in anthropology. This particular brand of ethnographic realism was explicitly targeted for critique during anthropology’s postmodern turn. On the other hand, Theory in anthropology itself had relatively little to commend it, all too easily and too often developing into a totalizing master-narrative of the early evolutionism or, for that matter, its late 20th– and early 21st-century correlates, including what is usually referred to as cognitive psychology, a ‘refresh’ of evolutionary theory I had the opportunity to encounter during my fellowship at the University of Oxford (2007-8). So there were, certainly, a few reasons to be suspicious of theory in anthropology.

For someone theoretically inclined, thus, one option became to flee into another discipline. Doing a PhD in philosophy in the UK is a path only open to people who have undergraduate degrees in philosophy (and I, despite a significant proportion of my undergrad coursework going into philosophy, had not), which is why a lot of the most interesting work in philosophy in the UK happens – or at least used to happen – in other departments, including literature and language studies, the Classics, gender studies, or social sciences like sociology and geography. I chose to work with those theorists who had found their institutional homes in sociology; I found a mentor at the University of Cambridge, and the rest is history (by which I mean I went on to a postdoctoral research fellowship at Cambridge and then on to a permanent position at Durham).  

Or that, at any rate, is one story. Another story would tell you that I got my PhD in 2008, the year when the economic crisis hit, and job markets collapsed alongside several other markets. On a slightly precarious footing, freshly back from Oxford, I decided to start doing policy research and advising in an area I had been researching before: education policies, in particular as part of processes of negotiation of multiple political identities and reconciliation in post-conflict societies. Something that had hitherto been a passion, politics, soon became a bona fide object of scholarly interest, so I spent the subsequent few years developing a dual career, eventually a rather high-profile one, as, on the one hand, policy advisor in the area of postconflict higher education, and, on the other, visiting (adjunct) lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest, after doing a brief research fellowship in its institute of advanced study. But because I was not educated as a political scientist – I did not, in other words, have a degree in political science; anthropology was closer to ‘humanities’ and my research was too ‘qualitative’ (this is despite the fact I taught myself basic statistics as well as relatively advanced data analysis) – I could not aspire to a permanent job there. So I started looking for routes out, eventually securing a postdoc position (a rather prestigious Marie Curie, and a tenure-track one) in Denmark.

I did not like Denmark very much, and my boss in this job – otherwise one of the foremost critics of the rise of audit culture in higher education – turned out to be a bully, so I spent most of my time in my two fieldwork destinations, University of Bristol, UK, and University of Auckland, New Zealand. I left after two years, taking up an offer of a funded PhD at Cambridge I had previously turned down. Another story would tell you that I was disappointed with the level of corruption and nepotism in Serbian academia so have decided to leave. Another, with disturbing frequency attached to women scholars, would tell you that being involved in an international relationship I naturally sought to move somewhere I could settle down with my partner, even if that meant abandoning the tenured position I had at Singidunum University in Serbia (this reading is, by the way, so prominent and so unquestioned that after I announced I had got the Marie Curie postdoc and would be moving to Denmark several people commented “Oh, that makes sense, isn’t your partner from somewhere out there” – despite the fact my partner was Dutch).

Yet another story, of course, would join the precarity narrative with the migration/exile and decoloniality narrative, stipulating that as someone who was aspiring to do theory I (naturally) had to move to the (former) colonial centre, given that theory is, as we know, produced in the ‘centre’ whereas countries of the (semi)periphery are only ever tasked with providing ‘examples’, ‘case-‘, or, at best, regional or area studies. And so on and so on, as one of the few people who have managed to trade their regional academic capital for a global (read: Global North/-driven and -defined) one, Slavoj Žižek, would say.

The point here is not to engage in a demonstration of multifocality by showing all these stories could be, and in a certain register, are true. It is also not to point out that any personal life-story or institutional trajectory can be viewed from multiple (possibly mutually irreconcilable) registers, and that we pick a narrative depending on occasion, location, and collocutor. Sociologists have produced a thorough analysis of how CVs, ‘career paths’ or  trajectories in the academia are narratively constructed so as to establish a relatively seamless sequence that adheres to, but also, obviously, by the virtue of doing that, reproduces ideas and concepts of ‘success’ (and failure; see also ‘CV of failures‘). Rather, it is to observe something interesting: all these stories, no matter how multifocal or multivocal, also posit master narratives of social forces – forces like neoliberalism, or precarity, for instance; and a master narrative of human motivation – why people do the things they do, and what they desire – things like permanent jobs and high incomes, for instance. They read a direction, and a directionality, into human lives; even if – or, perhaps, especially when – they narrate instances of ‘interruption’, ‘failure’, or inconsistency.

This kind of reading is what Eve Kosofsky Segdwick dubs paranoid reading. Associated with what Paul Ricoeur termed ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, and building on the affect theories of Melanie Klein and Silvan Tomkins, paranoid reading is a tendency that has arguably become synonymous with critique, or critical theory in general: to assume that there is always a ‘behind’, an explanatory/motivational hinterland that, if only unmasked, can not only provide a compelling explanation for the past, but also an efficient strategy for orienting towards the future. Paranoid reading, for instance, characterizes a lot of the critique in and of anthropology, not least of the Writing Culture school, including in the ways the discipline deals with the legacy of its colonial past.

To me, it seems like anthropology in Serbia today is primarily oriented towards a paranoid reading, both in relation to its present (and future) and in relation to its past. This reading of the atmosphere is something it shares with a lot of social sciences and humanities internationally, one of increasing instability/hostility, of the feeling of being ‘under attack’ not only by governments’ neoliberal policies but also by increasingly conservative and reactionary social forces that see any discipline with an openly progressive, egalitarian and inclusive political agenda as leftie woke Satanism, or something. This paranoia, however, is not limited only to those agents or social forces clearly inimical or oppositional to its own project; it extends, sometimes, to proximate and cognate disciplines and forms of life, including sociology, and to different fractions or theoretical schools within anthropology, even those that should be programmatically opposed to paranoid styles of inquiry, such as the phenomenological or ontological turn – as witnessed, for instance, by the relatively recent debate between the late David Graeber and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on ontological alterity.

Of course, in the twenty-five years that have passed from the first edition of Sedgwick’s essay, many species of theory that explicitly diverge from paranoid style of critique have evolved, not least the ‘postcritical’ turn. But, curiously, when it comes to understanding the conditions of our own existence – that is, the conditions of our own knowledge production – we revert into paranoid readings of not only the social, cultural, and political context, but also of people’s motivations and trajectories. As I argued elsewhere, this analytical gesture reinscribes its own authority by theoretically disavowing it. To paraphrase the title of Sedgwick’s essay, we’re so anti-theoretical that we’re failing to theorize our own inability to stop aspiring to the position of power we believe our discipline, or our predecessors, once occupied, the same power we believe is responsible for our present travails. In other words, we are failing to theorize ambiguity.

My point here is not to chastise anthropology in particular or critical theory in more general terms for failing to live up to political implications of its own ontological commitments (or the other way round?); I have explained at length elsewhere – notably in “Knowing neoliberalism” – why I think this is an impossibility (to summarize, it has to do with the inability to undo the conditions of our own knowledge – to, barely metaphorically, cut our own epistemological branch). Rather, my question is what we could learn if we tried to think of the history and thus future of anthropology, and our position in it, from a reparative, rather than paranoid, position.

This in itself, is a fraught process; not least because anthropology (including in Serbia) has not been exempt from revelations concerning sexual harassment, and it would not be surprising if many more are yet to come. In the context of re-encounter with past trauma and violence, not least the violence of sexual harassment, it is nothing if not natural to re-examine every bit of the past, but also to endlessly, tirelessly scrutinize the present: was I there? Did I do something? Could I have done something? What if what I did made things worse? From this perspective, it is fully justified to ask what could it, possibly, mean to turn towards a reparative reading – can it even, ever, be justified?

Sedgwick – perhaps not surprisingly – has relatively little to say about what reparative reading entails. From my point of view, reparative reading is the kind of reading that is oriented towards reconstructing the past in a way that does not seek to avoid, erase or deny past traumas, but engages with the narrative so as to afford a care of the self and connection – or reconnection – with the past selves, including those that made mistakes or have a lot to answer for. It is, in essence, a profoundly different orientation towards the past as well as the future, one that refuses to reproduce cultures – even if cultures of critique – and to claim that future, in some ways, will be exactly like the past.

Sedgwick aligns this reorientation with queer temporalities, characterized by a relationship to time that refuses to see it in (usually heteronormatively-coded) generationally reproductive terms: my father’s father did this, who in turn passed it to my father, who passed it to me, just like I will pass it to my children. Or, to frame this in more precisely academic terms: my supervisor(s) did this, so I will do it [in order to become successful/recognized like my academic predecessors], and I will teach my students/successors to do it. Understanding that it can be otherwise, and that we can practise other, including non-generational (non-generative?) and non-reproductive politics of knowledge/academic filiation/intellectual friendship is, I think, one important step in making the discussion about the future, including of scientific discipline, anything other than a vague gesturing towards its ever-receding glorious past.

Of course, as a straight and, in most contexts, cis-passing woman, I am a bit reluctant to claim the label of queerness, especially when speaking in Serbia, an intensely and increasingly institutionally homophobic and compulsorily heterosexual society. However, I hope my queer friends, partners, and colleagues will forgive me for borrowing queerness as a term to signify refusal to embody or conform to diagnostic narratives (neoliberalism, precarity, [post]socialism); refusal or disinvestment from normatively and regulatively prescribed vocabularies of motivation and objects of desire – a permanent (tenured) academic position; a stable and growing income; a permanent relationship culminating in children and a house with a garden (I have a house, but I live alone and it does not have a garden). And, of course, the ultimate betrayal for anyone who has come from “here” and ‘made it’ “over there”: the refusal to perform the role of an academic migrant in a way that would allow to once and for all settle the question of whether everything is better ‘over there’ or ‘here’, and thus vindicate the omnipresent reflexive chauvinism (‘corrupt West’) or, alternatively, autochauvinism (‘corrupt Serbia’).

What I hope to have achieved instead, through this refusal, is to offer a postdisciplinary or at least undisciplined narrative and an example of how to extract sustenance from cultures inimical to your lifeplans or intellectual projects. To quote from Sedgwick:

“The vocabulary for articulating any reader’s reparative motive toward a text or a culture has long been so sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary that it’s no wonder few critics are willing to describe their acquaintance with such motives. The prohibitive problem, however, has been in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself. No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.“

All of the cultures I’ve inhabited have been this to some extent – Serbia for its patriarchy, male-dominated public sphere, or excessive gregarious socialisation, something that sits very uncomfortably with my introversion; England for its horrid anti-immigrant attitude only marginally (and not always profitably) mediated by my ostensible ’Whiteness’; Denmark for its oppressive conformism; Hungary, where I was admittedly happiest among the plethora of other English-speaking cosmopolitan academics, which could not provide the institutional home I required (eventually, as is well-known, not even to CEU). But, in a different way, they have also been incredibly sustaining; I love my friends, many of whom are academic friends (former colleagues) in Serbia; I love the Danish egalitarianism and absolute refusal of excess; and I love England in many ways, in no particular order, the most exciting intellectual journey, some great friendships (many of those, I do feel the need to add, with other immigrants), and the most beautiful landscapes, especially in the North-East, where I live now (I also particularly loved New Zealand, but hope to expand on that on a different occasion).

To theorize from a reparative position is to understand that all of these things could be true at the same time. That there is, in other words, no pleasure without pain, that the things that sustain us will, in most cases, also harm us. It is to understand that there is no complete career trajectory, just like there is no position , epistemic or otherwise, from which we could safely and for once answer the question what the future will be like. It is to refuse to pre-emptively know the future, not least so that we could be surprised.

Sally’s boys, Daddy’s girls

Blog, psychoanalysis, Reviews, social theory, Sociological fiction

I’ve finished reading Sally Rooney’s most recent novel, Beautiful World, Where are you? It turned out to be much better than I expected – as an early adopter of Conversations with Friends (‘read it – and loved it – before  it was cool’), but have subsequently found Normal People quite flat – by which I mean I spent most of the first half struggling, but found the very last bits actually quite good. In an intervening visit to The Bound, I also picked up one of Rooney’s short stories, Mr Salary, and read it on the metro back from Whitley Bay.

I became intrigued by the ‘good boy’ characters of both – Simon in Beautiful World, Nathan in Mr Salary. For context (and hopefully without too many spoilers), Simon is the childhood friend-cum-paramour of Eileen, who is the best friend of Alice (BW’s narrator, and Rooney’s likely alter-ego); Nathan, the titular character of Mr Salary, is clearly a character study for Simon, and in a similar – avuncular – relationship to the story’s narrator. Both Simon and Nathan are older than their (potential) girlfriends in sufficient amounts to make the relationship illegal or at least slightly predatory when they first meet, but also to hold it as a realistic and thus increasingly tantalizing promise once they have grown up a bit. But neither men are predatory creeps; in fact, exactly the opposite. They are kind, understanding, unfailingly supportive, and forever willing to come back to their volatile, indecisive, self-doubting, and often plainly unreliable women.

Who are these fantastic men? Here is an almost perfect reversal of the traditional romance portrayal of gender roles – instead of unreliable, egotistic, unsure-about-their-own-feelings-and-how-to-demonstrate-them guys, we are getting more-or-less the same, but with girls, with the men providing a reliable safe haven from which they can weather their emotional, professional, and sexual storms. This, of course, is not to deny that women can be as indecisive and as fickle as the stereotypical ‘Bad Boys’ of toxic romance; it’s to wonder what this kind of role reversal – even in fantasy, or the para-fantasy para-ethnography that is contemporary literature – does.

On the one hand, men like Simon and Nathan may seem like godsend to anyone who has ever gone through the cycle of emotional exhaustion connected to relationships with people who are, purely, assholes. (I’ve been exceptionally lucky in this regard, insofar as my encounters with the latter kind were blissfully few; but sufficient to be able to confirm that this kind does, indeed, exist in the wild). I mean, who would not want a man who is reliable, supportive of your professional ambitions, patient, organized, good in bed, and does laundry (yours included)? Someone who could withstand your emotional rollercoasters *and* buy you a ticket home when you needed it – and be there waiting for you? Almost like a personal assistant, just with the emotions involved.

And here, precisely, is the rub. For what these men provide is not a model of a partnership; it’s a model of a parent. The way they relate to the women characters – and, obviously, the narrative device of age difference amplifies this – is less that of a partner and  more of a benevolent older brother or, in a (n only slight) paraphrase of Winnicott, a good-enough father.

In Daddy Issues, Katherine Angel argues that feminism never engaged fully with the figure of the father – other than as the absent, distant or mildly (or not so mildly) violent and abusive figure. But somewhere outside the axis between Sylvia Plath’s Daddy and Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto is the need to define exactly what the role of the father is once it is removed from its dual shell of object of hate/object of love. Is there, in fact, a role at all?

I have been thinking about this a lot, not only in relation to the intellectual (and political) problem of relationality in theory/knowledge production practices  – what Sara Ahmed so poignantly summarized as ‘can one not be in relation to white men?’ – but also personally. Having grown up effectively without a father (who was also unknown to me in my early childhood), what, exactly, was the Freudian triangle going to be in my case? (no this does not mean I believe the Electra complex applies literally; if you’re looking to mansplain psychoanalytic theory, I’d strongly urge you to reconsider, given I’ve read Freud at the age of 13 and have read post-Freudians since; I’d also urge you to read the following paragraph and consider how it relates to the legacies of Anna Freud/Melanie Klein divide, something Adam Philips writes about).

In the domain of theory, claims of originality (or originarity, as in coining or discovering something) is nearly always attributed to men, women’s contributions almost unfailingly framed in terms of ‘application or elaboration of *his* ideas’ or ‘[minor] contribution to the study’ (I’ve written about this in the cases of Sartre/de Beauvoir and Robert Merton/Harriet Zuckerman’s the ‘Matthew Effect’, but other examples abound). As Marilyn Frye points out in “Politics of reality”, the force of genealogy does not necessarily diminish even for those whose criticism of patriarchy extends to refusing anything to do with men altogether; Frye remarks having observed many a lesbian separatist still asking to be recognized – intellectually and academically – by the white men ‘forefathers’ who sit on academic panels. The shadow of the father is a long one. For those of us who have chosen to be romantically involved with men, and have chosen to work in patriarchal mysoginistic institutions that the universities surely are, not relating to men at all is not exactly an option.

It is from this perspective that I think we’d benefit from a discussion on how men can be reliable partners without turning into good-enough daddies, because – as welcome and as necessary as this role sometimes is, especially for women whose own fathers were not – it is ultimately not a relationship between two adults. I remember reading an early feminist critique of the Bridget Jones industry that really hit the nail on the head: it was not so much Jones’ dedication to all things ‘60s and ‘70s feminism abhorred – obsession with weight loss and pursuit of ill-advised men (i.e. Daniel Cleaver); it was even more that when ‘Mr Right’ (Mark Darcy, the barely disguised equivalent of Austen’s Mr Darcy) arrives, he still falls for Bridget – despite the utter absence of anything from elementary competence at her job to the capacity to feed herself in any form that departs from binge eating to recommend her to a seemingly top-notch human rights attorney. Which really begs the question: what is Mr Darcy seeing in Bridget?

Don’t get me wrong: I am sure that there are men who are attracted to the chaotic, manic-pixie-who-keeps-losing-her-credit-card kind of girl. Regardless of what manifestation or point on the irresponsibility spectrum they occupy, these women certainly play a role for such men – allowing them to feel useful, powerful, respected, even perhaps feeding a bit their saviour complex. But ultimately, playing this role leaves these men entirely outside of the relationship; if the only way they relate to their partners is by reacting (to their moods, their needs, their lives), this ultimately absolves them of equal responsibility for the relationship. Sadly, there is a way to avoid equal division of the ‘mental load’ even while doing the dishes.

And I am sure this does something for the women in question too; after all, there is nothing wrong in knowing that there *is* going to be someone to pick you up if you go out and there are no taxis to get you back home, who will always provide a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on, seemingly completely irrespectively of their own needs (Simon is supposed to have a relatively high-profile political job, yet, interestingly, never feels tired when Ellaine calls or offers to come over). But what at first seems like a fantasy come true – a reliable man who is not afraid to show his love and admiration – can quickly turn into a somewhat toxic set of interdependencies: why, for instance, learn to drive if someone is always there to pick you up and drop you off? (honestly: even among the supposedly-super-egalitarian straight partnerships I know, the number of men drivers vastly outstrips that of women). The point is not to always insist on being a jack-of-all-trades (nor on being the designated driver), as much as to realize that most kinds of freedom (for instance, the freedom to drink when out) embed a whole set of dependencies (for instance, dependence on urban networks of taxis/Ubers or kind self-effacing mensaviours there to pick you up – in Cars’ slightly creepy formulation, drive you home).

Of course, as Simone de Beauvoir recognized, there is no freedom without dependency. We cannot, simply, will ourselves free without willing the same for others; but, at the same time, we cannot will them to be free, as this turns them into objects. In Ethics of Ambiguity – one of the finest books of existentialist philosophy – de Beauvoir turns this into the main conundrum (thus: source of ambiguity) for how to act ethically. Acknowledging our fundamental reliance on others does not mean we need to remain locked into the same set of interdependencies (e.g., we could build safe and reliable public transport and then we would not have to rely on people to drive us home?), but it also does not mean we need to kick out of them by denying or reversing their force – not least because it, ultimately, does not work.

The idea that gender equality, especially in heterosexual partnerships, benefits from the reversal of the trope of the uncommitted, eternally unreliable bachelor in the way that tips the balance in an entirely opposite direction (other than for very short periods of time, of course) strikes me as one of the manifestations of the long tail of post- or anti-feminist backlash – admittedly, a mild and certainly less harmful one than, for instance, the idea that feminism means ‘women are better than men’ or that feminists seek to eliminate men from politics, work, or anything else (both, worryingly, have filtered into public discourse). It also strikes me that the long-suffering Sacrificial Men who have politely taken shit from their objects of affection can all-too-easily be converted into Men’s Rights Activists or incels if and when their long suffering fails to yield results – for instance, when their Manic Pixie leaves with someone with a spine (not a Bad Boy, just a man with boundaries) – or when they realize that the person they have been playing Good Daddy to has finally grown up and left home.

Women and space

Blog, psychoanalysis, social theory, Sociological fiction

Mum in space

Recently, I saw two portrayals of women* in space, Proxima – starring Eva Green as the female member of the crew training for the first mission to Mars; and Away, starring Hilary Swank as the commander of the crew on the first mission to Mars (disclaimer: I have only seen the first two episodes of Away, so I’m not sure what happens in the rest of the series). Both would have been on my to-watch list even under normal circumstances; I grew up on science fiction, and, as any woman who, in Rebecca West’s unsurpassed formulation, expresses opinions that distinguish her from a doormat, have spent a fair bit of time thinking about gender, achievement, and leadership. This time, an event coloured my perception of both: my mum’s death in October.

My mother was 80; she died of complications related to metastatic cancer, which had started as breast cancer but had at this point spread to her liver. She had dealt with cancer intermittently since 2009; had had a double mastectomy and repeated chemotherapy/radiation at relatively regular intervals since – in 2011, 2015, 2018 and, finally, 2020 – the last one stopping shortly after it started, as it became evident that it could not reverse the course of Mum’s illness and was, effectively, making it worse.

As anyone living with this kind of illness knows, it’s always a long game of predicting and testing, waiting when the next one will come up; it’s possible that the cancer that eventually killed my mum was missed because of flaky screening in November, or because of delays at the height of the pandemic. What matters is that, by the time they discovered it during a regular screening in June, it was already too late.

What matters is that, because living with this sort of illness entails living in segments of time between two appointments, two screenings, two test results, we had kind of expected this. We had time to prepare. My mother had time to prepare. I had time to prepare. What also matters is that I was able to travel, to leave the country in time to see my mother still alive, despite the fact that at that time the Home Office had been sitting on my Tier 2 visa application since the start of July, and on the request for expedition due to compassionate circumstances for three weeks. This matters, because many other women are not so lucky as to have the determination to call the Home Office visa processing centre three times, the cultural capital to contact their MP when it seemed like time was running out, nor, for that matter, an MP (also a woman) who took on the case. It matters, because I was able to be there for the last two weeks of my mother’s life. I was there when she died.

But this essay isn’t about me, or my mum. It’s about women, and the stars.

Women and the stars

Every story about the stars is, in essence, a story of departure from Earth, and thus a story of separation, and thus a story of leaving, and what’s left behind. This doesn’t mean that these themes need to be parsed via the tired dichotomy of the ‘masculine-proactive-transcendent’ principle pitted against the ‘feminine-grounded-immanent’, but they often are, and both Proxima and Away play out this tension.

For those who had not seen either or both, Proxima and Away are about women who are travelling into space. Proxima’s Sarah (Eva Green) is the French member of the international crew of astronauts spending a year at the International Space Station in preparation for the first mission to Mars.  

The central tension develops along two vectors: the characters’ relation to their male partners (Sarah’s – ex – Thomas, Emma’s Matt); and their relationship to their daughters – Sarah’s Stella, and Emma’s Alexis (‘Lex’). While the relationship to their partners is not irrelevant, it is obvious that the mother-daughter relationship is central to the plot. Neither is it accidental that both (and only) children are girls: in this sense, the characters’ relationship to their daughters is not only the relationship to the next generation of women, it is also the relationship to their ‘little’ selves. In this sense, the daughters’ desire for their mother’s to return – or to stay, to never leave for the stars – is also a reflection of their own desire to give up, to stay in the comfort of the ground, the Earth, the safe (if suffocating) embrace of family relations and gender roles, in which ‘She’ is primarily, after all, a Mother.

It is interesting that both characters, in Proxima and in Away, find similar ‘solutions’ – or workarounds – for this central tension. In Proxima, Sarah leaves her daughter, but betrays her own commitment by violating pre-flight quarantine regulations, sneaking out the night before departure to take her daughter to see the rocket from up close. In Away, Emma decides to return from pre-flight Lunar base after her husband has a heart attack, only to be persuaded to stay, both by the (slowly recovering) husband and, more importantly, by the daughter, who – at the last minute – realizes the importance of the mission and says she wants her mum to stay, rather than return to Earth. The guilt both women feel over ‘abandoning’ their daughters (and thus their own traditional roles) is thus compensated or resolved by inspiring the next generation of women to ‘look at the stars’: to aim higher, and to prioritize transcendence at the cost of immanence, even when the price is pain.     

We might scoff at the simple(ish) juxtaposition of Earth and the stars, but the essence of that tension is still there, no matter how we choose to frame it. It is the basic tension explored in Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist philosophy – the tension between being-for-themselves and being-in-relation to. It’s the unforgiving push and pull that leads so many women to take on disproportionate amounts of emotional, care, and organizational labour. It’s a tension you can’t resolve, no matter how queer, trans, or childless. Even outside of ‘traditional’ gender roles, women are still judged first and foremost on their ability to conceive and retain relationships; research on women leaders, for instance, shows they are required to consistently demonstrate a ‘collective’ spirit of the sort not expected of their male counterparts.

A particularly brutal version of this tension presented itself in the months before my mother died. I was stuck in England, not being able to leave before my Tier 2 visa was approved, and her condition was getting worse. Home Office was already behind their 8-week timeframe due to the pandemic; the official guidance – confirmed by the University – was that, if I chose to leave the country before the decision had been made, not only would I automatically forfeit my application, I would also be banned for a year from re-entering the country, and for a further year from re-applying for the same sort of permit. In essence, this meant I was choosing between my job – which I love – and my mother, which I loved too.

Luckily, I never had to make this choice; after a lot of intervention, my visa came through, and I was able to travel. I am not sure what kind of decision I would have made.

Mum and daughter in space

I saw Proxima in August, shortly after moving from Cambridge to Durham to start my job at the University. It was only the second time I was able to cry after having learned of my mum’s most recent, and final, diagnosis. I saw Away after returning from the funeral in early October, having acquired a Netflix account in a vague attempt at ‘self-care’ that didn’t involve reading analytic philosophy.

My mum saw neither, and I am not sure if she would have recognized herself in them. Hers was a generation of transcendence, buttressed by post-war recovery and socialism’s early successes in eradicating gender inequality. She introduced me to science fiction, but it was primarily Arthur Clarke, Isaac Assimov, and Stanislav Lem, my mum having no problems recognizing herself in the characters of Dave Bowman, Hari Seldon, or Rohan from ‘The Invincible’. Of course, as I was growing up, neither did I: it was only after I had already reached a relatively advanced career stage – and, it warrants mentioning, in particular after I began full-time living in the UK – that I started realizing how resolute the steel grip of patriarchy is in trying to make sure we never reach for the stars.

My mother famously said that she never considered herself a feminist, but had led a feminist life. By this, she meant that she had an exceptional career including a range of leadership positions, first in research, then in political advising, and finally in diplomacy; and that she had a child – me – as a single mother, without a partner involved. What she didn’t stop to think about was that, throughout this process, she had the support not only of two loving parents (both of my grandparents had already retired when I was born), but also of socialist housing, childcare, and education policies.I would point this fact out to her on the rare occasions when she would bring up her one remaining regret, which was that I choose not to have children. Though certainly aided by the fact I never felt the desire to, this decision was buttressed by my belief (and observation) that, no matter how dedicated, egalitarian, etc. etc. a partner can be, it is always mothers who end up carrying a greater burden of childcare, organization, and planning. I hope that she, in the end, understood this decision.

In one of the loveliest messages** I got after my mum died, a friend wrote that he believed my mum was now a star watching over me. As much as I would like to think that, if anything, the experience of a death has resolutely convinced me there is no ‘thereafter’, no space, place, or plane where we go after we die.

But I’m still watching the stars.  

This image is, sadly, a pun that’s untraslateable into English; sorry

* For avoidance of doubt, trans women are women

**Throughout the period, I’ve received absolutely stellar messages of love and support. Among these, it warrants saying, quite a few came from men, but those that came from women were exceptional in striking the balance between giving me space to think my own thoughts and sit with my own grief, while also making sure I knew I could rely on their support if I wanted to. This kind of balance, I think, comes partly out of having to always negotiate being-for-oneself and being-for-others, but there is a massive lesson in solidarity right in there.