Nearly utopian, nearly normal: Post-fordist affect in la Promesse and Rosetta

Public Culture

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 273-301

  Berlant, Lauren ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547187020     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2006-036     Document Type: Review

References (65)

1. Rosetta Plan Launched to Boost Youth Employment, European Industrial Relations Observatory On-line, www.eiro.eirofound.cu.int./1999/11/feature/ be9911307f.html (accessed September 5, 2005). A bill called the "Rosetta Plan" was initiated in Belgium shortly after the film appeared, to try to develop more jobs for chronically underemployed youth within the first six months of leaving school. Reviews suggest that the film was seen as barely fictive in its dramatization of generally contingent economic conditions as well as those among youth, but Rosetta was read as strongly exemplary of a generation of the willing, able, and economically unacknowledged.
2. Leslie Camhi, "Soldiers' Stories: A New Kind of War Film: Work as a Matter of Life and Death," Village Voice, November 3-9, 1999, www.villagevoice.com/film/9944,camhi,9632,20.html.
3. The Utopian potentials of the impersonality of an apprentice relationship are followed through, complexly, in the Dardennes' next film, Le FiIs (2002).
4. This essay focuses on labor, kinship, and the children as the scene of the event in the Dardennes' films; but that La Promesse specifically articulates the global traffic in manual labor and sex traffic must not go unnoticed, as the kinds of ambivalence raised by the global market for subproletarian migrant labor do not usually apply to the outrage around sexual traffic, which seems more often to provoke moral clarity against indentured servitude, bodily exploitation, and actual or virtual slavery. See, e.g., the magazine Migration, produced by the Geneva-based nongovernmental organization International Organization for Migration. Migration covers many crises of survival, including defining migration as trauma, but its moments of greatest clarity are in the essays on the sexual trafficking of children and young women (including an announcement of a new organization by the entertainer Ricky Martin called People for Children, which arose from his experience of meeting former sex slaves in India). See www.iom.int (accessed March 16, 2006).
5. Dave Kehr, "Their Method Is to Push toward Moments of Truth," New York Times, January 5, 2003. Kehr interviews the Dardenne brothers in this article, suggesting that "though the Dardennes' films are scrupulously naturalistic, they all belong to the suspense genre, though it is a suspense of character, not of plot. It is not so much a question of what will happen next, as of how the characters arrive, or fail to arrive, at a decision to act." The "suspense of character" is played out, in their films, intergenerationally: the suspense is how the children will act, not the adults, who are bullied about by chaotic appetites.
6. Thomas L. Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 1.
7. Catherine Labio argues that the structural and subjective effects on contemporary Belgium of the changes wrought by the European Union and neoliberal economics are quite different than those felt in France or Germany. She attributes this shift to historical factors such as Belgium's long colonial history in Africa but relatively short national history as a federalized state. It is only in the last few decades that a project of building a national metaculture has commenced; at the same time, class breaches between the rich and poor are becoming more accentuated there as everywhere. See "Editor's Preface: The Federalization of Memory," Yale French Studies 102 (2002): 1-8;
8. and Alexander B. Murphy, "Landscapes for Whom? The Twentieth Century Remaking of Brussels," Yale French Studies 102 (2002): 190-206.
9. See "Uncertainties of the Informal Economy: A Belgian Perspective," European Industrial Relations Observatory On-line, www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/1998/08/feature/be9808240f.html (accessed September 5,2005).
10. See also, for a fantastic synthesis of the transnational problematic of economic precariousness and "precarity" among youth across Europe, Angela Mitropoulos, "Precari-us?" Mute, January 9, 2006, www.metamute.org/en/node/7057. It is also worth saying here that the Dardenne output of the 2000s, L'Enfant and Le FiIs, draws the same "economo-affective" picture as that of the 1990s.
11. Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman, "Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis," in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 155.
12. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 290-94.
13. See also Nick Dyer-Whitheford, "Empire, Immaterial Labor, the New Combinations, and the Global Worker," Rethinking Marxism 13, no. 3/4 (Winter 2001): 70-80.
14. On the capitalist destruction of life in the project of making value, see David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
15. Rosetta's rejection of her mother's faux gentility taps into a long tradition of talking about working-class "decency" or "respectability." The locus classicus of academic discussion of this phenomenon is Peter Bailey, "Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up? Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability," Journal of Social History 12 (1978): 336-53.
16. For recent analyses of and contribution to this literature, see Simon J. Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
17. Margie L. Kiter Edwards, " 'We're Decent People': Constructing and Managing Family Identity in Rural WorkingClass Communities," Journal of Marriage and the Family 66 (May 2004): 515-29;
18. Daniel Siegel, "The Failure of Condescension," Victorian Literature and Culture 33 (2005): 395-414;
19. and Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
20. Jody Heymann, Forgotten Families: Ending the Growing Crisis Confronting Children and Working Parents in the Global Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
21. This desire to pass on a desire for a better good life that looks like the present unhampered by individual failures or defeats, and unsupported by the economic, social, and political positions of a historical moment, is documented by all of the major class analyses of familial reproduction from Carol Stack's All Our Kin (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)
22. to David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Vintage, 2004).
23. See also nn. 34 and 39.
24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Other Things Are Never Equal: A Speech," Rethinking Marxism 12, no. 4 (2000): 37-45.
25. Bert Cardullo considers this final moment a redemptive one in which a Christian relation of mercy is articulated. See "Rosetta Stone: A Consideration of the Dardenne Brothers' Rosetta," Journal of Religion and Film 6, no. 1 (April 2002), www.unomaha.edu/jrf/rosetta.htm.
26. "Families we choose" is Kath Weston's term for improvised institutions of queer intimacy, in Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
27. Now in somewhat spreading usage to describe genres of aesthetic embarrassment such as the BBC's The Office or Blackadder, the genre phrase "situation tragedy" describes episodes of personality caught up in a form of despair not existential or heroic but shaped within the stresses of ordinary life under capitalism. (Not "everyday life" in the classic sense, where subjects are busy making do, but ordinary life, where projects of affect management provide registers for experiencing the structural contingencies of survival.) "Situation tragedy" emerged in the anti-Thatcherite critique of the "This Vicious Cabaret" insert in Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta (New York: DC Comics, 1982-1985). The genre links the effects of draconian economic and erotophobic politics on a stunned body politic that now lives in catastrophic time, an experience of a paralyzed but aware spectatorship of its own demise as a public; because nothing is ever worked through, and the public is stuck in repeated viewings of its own annihilation, it is situation tragedy and not, say, melodrama. Moore and Lloyd's not unfamiliar countercultural imaginary enmeshes cuttingly ironic Weimarstyle kitch-decadence with a love of pop culture, both of which are seen to house the exuberance, longing for intimate and social reciprocity, and anarchic joie de vivre that, they argue, can never be entirely defeated by creeping or accelerated fascism or constitutional crisis. The immediate context for the phrase is "At last the 1998 show! / The situation tragedy! / Grand opera slick with soap! / Cliff-hangers with no hope ! / The water-colour in the flooded gallery...." In the "grand opera slick with soap" that is the BBC's The Office, when David Brent is finally ejected from his phantasmatic place as the funniest good boss imaginable, he spends all of his time in cars, in waiting rooms, and on benches, trying to make something happen. When he haunts his old "haunt" compulsively, he becomes the figure of embarrassment, the person who cannot not be exposed in his thwarted desires and therefore the figure for everyone's potential ejection into the social death of no work and no love, the nearness of which it becomes harder and harder to protect oneself from knowing.
28. Using the periodizing language of supermodernity to mark the ascent of neoliberalism, Mark Auge argues that the emerging centrality of the "nonplace" (malls, terminals, hospitals) as a zone of episodic experience exemplary of the displacements that contemporary Europeans manage complicates everyday life theory's conception of the dynamic relation of ordinary space to the production of subjective life. He focuses especially on the need to consider the impact of life lived among social spaces that interrupt grounding logics of value and norms of intelligibility and self-identity. My claim is on the affective side of things, that supermodernity/neoliberalism produces the situation tragedy as a way of expressing the costs of what's ordinary now, the potential within any grounding space to become a nonplace for anyone whose inconvenience to the reproduction of value becomes suddenly, once again, apparent. Mark Auge, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).
29. Recent worker revolts in Paris and Dubai, for example, forced concessions by exposing and exploiting the economy's dependence on docile workers. But for many, strikes threaten the already too tight margin of survival for the marginal worker, and the more common response to exploitation, as documented in Shipler's The Working Poor and Heymann's Forgotten Families, is to grit it out just in case a life can be built in the process of it being worn out by poverty. See Hassan M. Fattah, "In Dubai, an Outcry from Asians for Workplace Rights," New York Times, March 26, 2006;
30. and Elaine Sciolino, Thomas Crampton, and Maria de la Baume, "Not '68, but French Youths Hear Similar Cry to Rise Up," New York Times, March 17, 2006;
31. and Craig S. Smith, "Four Ways to Fire a Frenchman," New York Times, March 26, 2006.
32. "This 'life world' is not only the field where individuals' existence unfolds in practice; it is where they exercise existence-that is, live their lives out and confront the very forms of their death." Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 15.
33. We might also address here the alternative temporalities to a counter-human rights conception of living on, as in Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2002), 14-15,
34. where the person's capacity to take up subjectivity requires a conception of the Good beyond that reality which is presented to him as the ground of experience; or Giorgio Agamben's flattened temporality of the Aristotelian lifeworld, where the prevarications and temporizations of the law/bios in the zone of indistinction that constitutes official understandings of belonging in the social is contrasted to zoe, the fact of living that connects live matter and that doesn't require historicizing to justify a world organized around sustaining its existence. This view extends to that put forth as a radicalized rights consciousness in Patricia Williams's visionary The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 165.
35. What's important here is to enumerate, in any case, what it means, historically and politically, to "exercise existence." Agamben returns to this in his advocacy of zoë over bios in all the work including and after Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
36. "Fantasy bribe" is Fredric Jameson's term for what capitalism, and commodity genres particularly, hold out as a kind of affective profit for its participants. See his "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (1979): 144.
37. For the history of this argument, see Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005).
38. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Berger (London: Blackwell, 1992), esp. 47-56.
39. Lauren Berlant, "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics," in Left Legalism/Left Critique, ed. Janet Halley and Wendy Brown (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 105-133;
40. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002);
41. and Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). Much of this work emerged from discussions of the Late Liberalism project of the University of Chicago. None of the above claims that affective recognition has never been part of the significant political, economic, and social empowerment of minoritized or negated communities-it always is. But more often, the intensities of affective performance are not matched in scale by transformations in the law, the distribution of wealth, the administrations of institutions, or the normative collective practices of communities.
42. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977), 9.
43. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 27.
44. Butler, Precarious Life, 46.
45. Butler, Precarious Life, 26-27.
46. Butler, Precarious Life, 37-41.
47. W. R. D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, intro. David E. Scharff and Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles (1952; London: Routledge, 1990), esp. 59-151.
48. Christopher Bollas, "The Transformational Object," in The Shadow of the Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 13-29.
49. On "technologies of patience," see Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 222.
50. Lillian B. Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family (New York: Basic Books, 1977),
51. and Stack, All Our Kin, provide the classic analyses of this phenomenon; the ensuing bibliography is extensive. For a great literature review, which focuses on parental pain rather than childhood experiences of class,
52. see Thomas J. Gorman, "Reconsidering Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class(es)," Sociological Review 15, no. 4 (2000): 693-717.
53. With variations on styles of survival, their findings about defensive affective binding as a condition for the reproduction of normative fantasy are supported entirely by ethnographies of working-class children and youth from each of the following decades. High points of different kinds include Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Accardo, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, and Susan Emanuel, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Societies (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999);
54. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983);
55. Jason Parle, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare (New York: Viking, 2004);
56. Heymann, Forgotten Families.
57. Rubin, Worlds of Pain, xxv.
58. Rubin, Worlds of Pain, 27.
59. Rubin, Worlds of Pain, 29.
60. Steedman performs a like congeries of ambivalence, silence, and secrecy entailed in her experience of the transactions of parental love in her working-class household in Landscape for a Good Woman.
61. Loïc J. D. Wacquant, "Inside 'The Zone': The Social Art of the Hustler in the American Ghetto," in Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World, 156.
62. For cognate readings of a cleavage in the relation of lived life on the bottom of class society and aspirational normativity with a particular focus on youth, see Paul Connolly and Julie Healy, "Symbolic Violence and the Neighborhood: The Educational Aspirations of 7-8 Year Old Working-Class Girls," British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 4(2004): 1-19;
63. Edwards, "'We're Decent People'"; Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
64. and Katherine A. MacTavish and Sonya Salamon, "Pathways of Youth Development in a Rural Trailer Park," Family Relations 55 (April 2006): 163-74.
65. This paragraph reworks material in Lauren Berlant, "Compassion (and Withholding)," in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004), 8.