LIFE WRITING AND INTIMATE PUBLICS:

A CONVERSATION WITH LAUREN BERLANT

LAUREN BERLANT WITH JAY PROSSER

This text is recreated from the summary panel held at the International Auto/
Biography Association Conference, University of Sussex, June 2010.

Jay Prosser (JP): The first page of Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint: The
Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture sounds a klaxon
for biography and autobiography critics today. “The autobiographical is not the
personal,” Berlant tells us. “This non-intuitive phrase is a major presupposition of
The Female Complaint. In the contemporary consumer public, and in the longue
durée that I’m tracking, all sorts of narratives are read as autobiographies of collec-
tive experience. The personal is the general. Publics presume intimacy” (vii).
The aperçu opening that book helps us start to gloss the term so productively
titling the take on life writing in this special issue: intimate publics (see also Ber-
lant, “Introduction”). What we might take from her notion of intimate publics
are both the strangers formed into communities by affective ties; and the assump-
tions of shared emotions and worldviews that precede, create, and then often ren-
der anxious and ambivalent such publics. For me particularly as a reader, writer,
and critic of autobiography and biography, the force of this concept is to grasp
intimate and public not in some relation of antithesis (which common sense or
intuition would have), but as absolutely intricated. For autobiography critics and
indeed biographers and autobiographers, Berlant might get us to see the troubles
and temptations that come with the use of the focus on the individual life, what
she calls the work of “exemplification” of some lives to the exclusion of lives, affects,
and often deaths that won’t fit the normative story.
Further, Berlant’s notion of intimate publics gets us to see that our cultural
sensationalism has worked through normalizing formal and genre modes for a
long time. She redefines “genre [as] an aesthetic structure of affective expectation”
(Female 4 ). Her work on the genealogy of sentimental, sensational genres offers

Biography 34.1 (Winter 2011) © Biographical Research Center

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 Berlant and Prosser, Intimate Publics: A Conversation 181

us a chance to think about how the lives we encounter that feel most authentic,
where we feel most invoked ethically, are also those where we are in a spectatorial
position, the suffering staged, and the contexts theatrical.
Berlant’s project, then, invites life writing critics to rethink and reframe inti-
macy in life writing. As she puts it in her introduction to her collection on intimacy,
“To rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we
might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living” (286).
Without sensationalism, without melodrama, it should be said that nothing could
be more important for reading lives, writing them, or indeed living them.
Intimate publics: where are we now, Lauren? How do you hear your term in-
voked, developed—or put aside—in the field of life writing now?
Lauren Berlant (LB): Thanks so much, Jay. I want to begin by resisting a bit
your assessment that I call genre always normalizing; this will lead to some
thinking about biography and autobiography. Conventionalizing and norma-
tivizing are not the same thing. Sometimes they are: as in the passage from
Now, Voyager I describe where Charlotte Vale reads romances and aspires to
feel the things that the romances offer in order to feel worthy of normative
belonging. In that instance, “genre” models the becoming-conventional of
someone’s affect.
But only sometimes is the taking up of generic form the taking up of a
normative norm (a norm to which valorization is attached). Sometimes con-
ventionality is a defense against norms too, a way to induce proximity with-
out assimilation (this used to be called “inauthenticity”); and sometimes it’s
a way of creating another, counterconventional, space. Think of Foucault’s
“heterotopias,” the folds within the normative world where one can encoun-
ter the positivity of being otherwise. “Queer,” for example, opens a potential-
ly genuine alternative conventionality; so do all the focused Internet worlds
in which people are hammering out how to live as anomalous to a projected-
out norm.
The conference offered a rich archive and multiple genres for tracking
the conversion of the gestural forms that emerge from situations of ordinary
life into intimate publics whose scene of collectively witnessed survival can
provide a grounding for new social relations. At the same time I was worried
about the presumed self-evident value of bionarrative. I kept asking people to
interrogate how the story of having a “life” itself coasts on a normative notion
of human biocontinuity: what does it mean to have a life, is it always to add
up to something? Would it be possible to talk about a biography of gesture, of
interruption, of reciprocal coexistences (and not just amongst intimates who
know each other)? Shouldn’t life writing be a primary laboratory for theoriz-
ing “the event?”

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 182 Biography 34.1 (Winter 2011)

To my ear, the genre of the “life” is a most destructive conventionalized

form of normativity: when norms feel like laws, they constitute a social peda-
gogy of the rules for belonging and intelligibility whose narrowness threat-
ens people’s capacity to invent ways to attach to the world. Queer, socialist/
anti-capitalist, and feminist work has all been about multiplying the ways
we know that people have lived and can live, so that it would be possible to
take up any number of positions during and in life in order to have “a life.”
Another way to think about intimate publics is that they are laboratories for
imagining and cobbling together alternative construals about how life has
appeared and how legitimately it could be better shaped not merely in small
modifications of normativity.

JP: Your new book is called Cruel Optimism. What’s cruel about optimism,
maybe particularly now, and maybe particularly in relation to contemporary life-
writing and lives?
LB: The objects normatively on offer for “the good life,” like sexual intelligi-
bility via the couple and the family, or national culture, or upward mobility,
are often themselves blockages to living well, but they also represent living
as such, and so without them many people feel or are said to be not “hav-
ing a life.” A cruel optimistic relation exists when the objects of optimism
are blockages to the achievement of the desire for which they stand in. They
come to represent not only things and promises about life by which one wants
to be structured but the possibility of attachment to the world itself, so that
their potential loss is a double loss: of a particular attachment, and of the fan-
tasy of attachment as such. In the face of this overwhelming double logic,
people often stay tethered to bad lives, to lives and objects that do not work,
that exhaust and defeat them.
The world economy now is revealing that there is little structure on which
to hang the “good life” fantasy of upward mobility and intimate continuity
that was sold as a domesticating package to postwar urban national/global
subjects. My claim is that the insistence on normative fantasy objects in the
absence of a world for them isn’t just psychotic or personal but a general situ-
ation now, fomenting a “drama of adaptation” in which people have to be
seen seeing that they no longer have an account of how to live.
Nostalgia is one response to this within regimes of structural precarious-
ness, but it can be seen as a frightening conservatism or an insistence on
modes of social care that are inconvenient to capital. When is holding on to
normative life modes a world-regenerative refusal to adapt to neoliberal de-
mands for affective flexibility, mobility, reactiveness, and abjection or auster-
ity, and when is it a world-destructive refusal to admit non-normative human

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 Berlant and Prosser, Intimate Publics: A Conversation 183

beings to the resources of collective social life? In the contemporary moment

of economic crisis, the object/scene of life-organizing fantasy has been re-
vealed not as a ground for living but a mirage or unstable, and the social un-
rest that has ensued has been a debate about which object/scenes were cruel
promises, after all, and how the sites of convergence for the social ought to be
reimagined or reclaimed. The terms of antagonism are now up for grabs, and
what is at stake is the object called “the good life” in its political and socially
normative modes.

JP: I think of “intimate publics” as a particularly symptomatic, although not exclu-

sively, US phenomenon. To what extent is it translatable? This question dovetails,
perhaps, with another, about whether the use of the individual life in the public
sphere doesn’t inevitably vary greatly across cultures, nations, and continents.
LB: My field of research has been the United States, but the real project for
me has not been to generalize about US culture. It has been to think about
the simultaneously flourishing logics of belonging that have, since the nine-
teenth century, been largely organized by the nation form insofar as the state,
the law, and related institutions of social reproduction are prime generators of
affective continuities amongst strangers both directly (in modes of social con-
trol) and imaginatively (in terms of their saturation of collective imaginaries
of the social). Cruel Optimism is transnational, about the global circulation
of forms through which people are finding idioms to express social crisis (in-
cluding crises in what national belonging means amidst so many economic
and culturally mediated pressures). The claim is that in conditions of struc-
tural transition we are stuck in an imaginary impasse, living on while not
knowing what to do, and developing accounts and practices of how to live.
What I provide are ways to encounter and produce an account of the multiple
affective registers of collective life that keep people loosely knotted together
(attached to themselves and to the social) while the ground is shifting. The
geohistorical field of that research, focusing on the translocal impact of neo-
liberal threats to the “good life” fantasy, is historically rich and complicated
and not just one domain’s thing—so not very American in any sense that
matters to me.
Having said that, though, the appearance of the intimate public as a man-
ifestation of the affective components of political, economic, and social life
does vary—not only across national culture but in community identification,
locations of precariousness amidst structural crisis, practices of pleasure shar-
ing and world building, and the state of mainstream politics. That’s the em-
pirical question for scholarship. The way a concept like intimate publics can
illuminate multiple geopolitical situations is that “structure” always manifests

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 184 Biography 34.1 (Winter 2011)

itself locally and intimately and where there is mass circulation among strang-
ers who find recognition together (even ambivalently or in rage at being so
“kettled”) within scenes of collective self-representation.
Your question was partly spurred by Nadje Al-Ali’s keynote presenta-
tion, “Writing Iraqi Women’s Lives: Trauma, Memory, and Identity,” at
the International Auto/Biography Association conference, which argued for
the political urgency of knowing about the reality and history of women’s
and children’s lives in Iraq in the face of ignorance and (often well-meaning)
prejudice both outside and in the context of local and global political strug-
gles for democracy in Iraq. Al-Ali argued (in an aside) against the concept of
intimate publics on a few grounds: that the Habermasian principle of uni-
versal citizenship continues to ground contemporary political struggle for
legitimation and recognition in places like Iraq where there has been a cata-
strophic breakdown in government, law, and other traditional institutions of
the public sphere; and that concepts like “intimate public,” emerging from
the US seat of power, should not be presumed to have universal application
or legitimacy. I responded that I couldn’t agree more with the latter point:
the clarifying power of any concept is empirical, and the problem of whose
frameworks get read and taken in and whose not is a fundamental problem
of academic work and struggle, not just geopolitically but in terms of many
normative hierarchies of distinction.
But the critique was, for me, incoherent too, in an interesting and per-
tinent way, and not only because of its own fidelity to Habermas and Fou-
cault. The relation between universal-liberal and intimate publics has a politi-
cal history that is not at all antithetical, as I argue in The Female Complaint.
Intimate publics usually flourish to one side of politics, referring to histori-
cal subordinations without mobilizing a fundamental activism with respect
to them (think of illness publics, for example, which tend to spend most of
their time moving between sharing expertise and survival stories, and less
time mobilizing against structural discrimination). In times of crisis, though,
such as the present, their relation can become newly fraught and dynamic.
Political publics in struggle often take on the logics of intimate ones, deploy-
ing sentimental models of affective recognition to establish political grounds
for imagining survival according to their own interest. Indeed, they often try
to co-opt or affiliate with existing intimate publics, for good or ill, as when
they claim that their own politics is really about realizing a world for affective
community, and not about power as such. At the same time, in times of cri-
sis, intimate publics often redirect their attention to transforming the terms
of the political, converting their collective insider knowledge about injustice
to political labor-power in struggle against the dominant terms.

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 Berlant and Prosser, Intimate Publics: A Conversation 185

Let me demonstrate this political use of an intimate public by offering

my own reading of the slide show that Nadje Al-Ali presented, a series of
photographs of women and children from an Iraqi war zone. The aim of her
pedagogy was to represent, to image forth powerfully, the everyday situation
of family life and children’s lives under conditions of war and grueling politi-
cal contestation. The intimate public convention was actually used by her to
establish solidarity for a political ground. This scholar’s committed populism
required maintaining the norm of the universal as a horizon of political strug-
gle, but to communicate this she participated in the form of collective inti-
macy that has, since the mid-nineteenth century, provided popular grounds
for and idioms of political argument, often through representations of suf-
fering. Publics are imaginary worlds into which people enter without a high
bar of self-consistency but with enormous needs to hammer out bearable and
just principles of convergence; but of course what’s being hammered out in
particular scenes will vary, and assessing their specific potentiality is the core
question of struggle and of scholarship related to imagining infrastructures
and norms of belonging, sociality, and justice.
JP: Can you talk more about the role of the body in intimate publics? Sensational-
ism and melodrama seem to work through visceral responses of feeling—you speak
of a “sentimental contract” between author and reader. In contemporary trauma
narrative and memoirs, bodies are often our heroes, visually traumatized by scars
and so on, but survivors. This is especially the case for queer people and women.
Then there’s reality TV. Are some media more intimately affective than others?
Are photography and autobiography more intimate and affective in their ap-
peal—perhaps a pertinent question in the light of your reading of Al-Ali’s work?
LB: I’m going to address these as versions of the same question, because in
them “the body” stands as the site of immediacy, impact, and self-identifica-
tion. I understand that, but also this body is a thing produced by mediations.
Even events of trauma are mediated to the subject, find forms of expression in
the subject, and indeed shape immediacy insofar as “the immediate” is a space
we encounter. So much goes on in our responsive bodies and local worlds that
is not taken up in our accounts of ourselves; our accounts take shape in genres
delivered to us as the proper way of thinking about affect and emotion. So
yes, photography and reality TV, but also trauma, are genres for representing
immediacy amidst disorganized affective/bodily experience. I do think it’s
interesting to see the migration of melodrama to reality TV. Melodrama is
bourgeois tragedy. Reality TV is the melodrama of mass precariousness un-
der neoliberalism, the drama of the entrepreneurial subject. Different shows
vary, of course, but all of them investigate what counts as evidence that living

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 186 Biography 34.1 (Winter 2011)

is really taking place, and what the subjective and intersubjective costs are.
They are laboratories for assessing the relation of ambition to empathy, of or-
dinary boredom to the intensified event. The desire for brutality to generate
events that show how ordinary gestures matter. The desire for sex to interrupt
ennui, the ennui of living for a living. The desire for spectacles of dramatic
risk to display a success that might negate the persistent numbness and ex-
haustion of meaningless labor.
The sad part is that if we see ourselves as the inflated subjects of suffer-
ing who are only really living in relation to the transformative event or ges-
ture, and if our genres of the transformative event are the only media through
which we think that other people will be interested in us, we construct our
lives and our encounters with destructive disregard for the ordinary forms of
care, inattention, passivity, and aggression that don’t organize the world at
the heroic scale.

JP: For some three years now you’ve been writing a blog, “Supervalent Thought.”
Do you think of this as a form of life writing, even a more intimate form?
LB: Yes, it is a form of life writing. But it’s also a research blog. Writing a blog
for me is a discipline of worlding and a discipline of writing. I more or less
entered blogging in a mood, a feral mood of desperate searching for a genre
of analysis and communication in which I could believe, a genre that did not
exist yet for me as a communicative apparatus I could inhabit and share. I am
also trying to learn how to write—that is, to figure out better how to manage
making sense while stretching my reader’s attention out across a series of lines,
paragraphs, and entries.
My aim is to make mobile a question on which we are stuck by bringing to
the table all of the kinds of (scholarly and personal) knowledge I have, and find
a way to remediate them, despite the pressures of incommensurate evidence
and idiom. I want to produce a writing that enables us to walk around a prob-
lem and in so doing to change its contours. I am not interested in—I don’t
think I really understand—my autobiography separately from my conceptu-
alization of problems of disorganized, impaired, blocked, stuck, non-coherent
being. (I have given autobiographical interviews, though! But separated from
other knowledge, I find those narratives less interesting [Hobarek]).
My thought about this kind of writing takes inspiration from, say, Michel-
Rolph Trouillot’s argument about writing the history of events that didn’t
happen, or Achille Mbembe’s work on post-apartheid South Africa and the
emerging architectures of blockage that repress history in the material environ-
ment. What’s the autobiography of a screen memory, of a numb subjectivity,
of recessive or disorganized being? The problem with most autobiography and

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 Berlant and Prosser, Intimate Publics: A Conversation 187

biography to me is their conventional dramatization of action and intention

and obstacles to them.
But I have a really different view of the subject, and this is what I’m trying
to write into being. I think it begins and proceeds as a porous and disorganized
thing that is constantly impelled (compelled and desiring) to take up positions
of clarity in relation to objects, worlds, and situations, but the available clari-
fying genres of personhood underdescribe the range of practices, knowledges,
impulses, and orientations that people have while they’re foregrounding being
this or that kind of thing at a particular moment. In emotion/affect theory,
people tend to be encountered having only one dominant emotion/affect at a
time. But I think people’s clarifying actions are always in relation to complex
affective atmospheres that are equally active but not solely internal or external.
It’s a new realism of the ordinary subject who is at once durable and diffused.
My next project is on composure and the tipped-over affective states for which
it makes a space: the deadpan, the dissociated, the flat, the casual. . . .

WORKS CITED

Al-Ali, Nadje. “Writing Iraqi Women’s Lives: Trauma, Memory, and Identity.” Life Writing
and Intimate Publics. International Auto/Biography Association Conference 2010. U of
Sussex, 1 July 2010. Keynote.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.
———. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Cul-
ture. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.
———. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 281–88. Print.
———.
“Introduction: The Intimate Public Sphere.” The Queen of America Goes to Washington
City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1–24. Print.
———. Supervalent Thought. WordPress, n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986):
22–27. Print.
Hobarek, Andrew. “Citizen Berlant: An Interview with Lauren Berlant.” Minnesota Review
52–54 (2001). 127–40. Print.
Mbembe, Achille. “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” Public Culture 16.3 (2004): 373–405. Print.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston:
Beacon, 1995. Print.

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 Contributors 251

Nima Naghibi is an Associate Professor of English at Ryerson University in

Toronto. She is the author of Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism
and Iran (U of Minnesota P, 2007). Her articles have appeared in Radical His-
tory Review, English Studies in Canada, and Interventions: International Jour-
nal of Postcolonial Studies. Her current research focuses on diasporic Iranian
women’s life narratives

Kate O’Riordan is Senior Lecturer in Media, Film, and Music at the Uni-
versity of Sussex. Her research is in cultural studies of emerging technoscience
that examines the intersection of biology and digital media. Her most recent
book is The Genome Incorporated (Ashgate, 2010).

Anna Poletti is a Lecturer in English at Monash University. With Gillian

Whitlock she co-edited a special issue of Biography on autographics (31.1,
Winter 2008). She is the author of Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in
Australian Zine Culture (Melbourne UP, 2008).

Jay Prosser is Reader in Humanities at the University of Leeds. He is the

author of Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (Columbia UP,
1998) and Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss (U of Minnesota P,
2004). Most recently, he has coedited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis
(Reaktion, 2011).

Susan M. Stabile is Director of American Studies and Associate Professor of

English at Texas A&M University.

Darija Walker is a recent graduate of Saint Mary’s College of California with

a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. At Saint Mary’s she studied with Prof. Lenart-
Cheng, and the present article is the product of their joint research. As a for-
mer Victim Advocate for the Rape Crisis Center, she understands the impor-
tance of sharing life stories for the purposes of communication and solidarity.
Darija Walker is currently preparing for law school.

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