Abstract
Robyn Wiegman traces her attachment to ‘paranoid reading’ practices through her early domestic environment that ‘lacked sufficient ways to anchor anyone in an explicable world’ (Wiegman, this volume: 7). Following this account of what we might call Wiegman’s childhood bipolar habitus, I locate my equivalent attachment to such reading practices in a familial history whose modes of disavowal seem with feminist hindsight to be best described as a ‘structure of feeling’ – those ‘social experiences in solution’ that Raymond Williams famously named as forms of culture not immediately available, yet whose ‘particular deep starting points and conclusions … [nevertheless] give the sense of a generation or of a period’ (1977: 133–134, 131, emphasis in original). If the original concept of ‘structures of feeling’ predominantly described social phenomena, I extend its remit here into the realm of familial dynamics, which, since second-wave feminism, have been theorised as always more than merely personal. When I was growing up in the suburbs of south London in the 1960s and early 1970s, this structure of feeling governed the respectable middle-class British family in which the bad things that happened were not just ‘not spoken about’, they were lived through repetitions of denial that made paranoid readings a necessity. My own investment in mastering the critical practices of exposure was not, as for Wiegman, 1 occasioned by the idea of reading as ‘a rich affective resource for navigating the at times awful, at times exhilarating, paces of everyday life’ (Wiegman, this volume: 7), but rather, by the promise of understanding the textures of hidden transactions and devious narratives, and of providing sufficient oxygen to navigate the claustrophobia of living with deceptions in plain sight. To read between the lines and to see beyond appearances was to contradict the attribution of anxiety to individualised failure, and to undo the personalisations of those practices of disavowal: in other words, to hold out the hope of undoing the structures of feelings to which I struggled never to become fully accustomed.
With the now taken-for-granted language of feminism, the costs that governed the contradictions of sexual respectability for the baby boomer generation were unjustly high. Whenever I rehearse my own version of the ‘paths-not-taken’ game, my story of escape continues to offer sufficient relief to suggest that I am still haunted by many of the alternative narratives that might have structured my life in quite different directions. My route out of a claustrophobic suburbia was a combination of higher education and political activism. Critical theory, then Women’s Studies and Birmingham Cultural Studies, brought the relief of what Lauren Berlant calls ‘modes of impersonality’, as paranoid reading practices shift dynamics away from individualised causation and blame towards symptomatic accounts of more fully social explanations – such as structures of feeling (Berlant, 2011, in Wiegman, this volume: 22, n. 14). Increasingly interested in styles of ‘writing otherwise’ (Stacey and Wolff, 2013), I sometimes imagine I might one day write an experimental memoir to trace connections between these personal, theoretical and more psychoanalytic registers of narration; it might be called something like Disavowal’s Outings: Stories from Seventies Suburbia. It is to the intermingling of registers and the (often indirect) influences that can only be partially traced in the theory that I am especially drawn, since even the briefest of opening confessional moments, like Emily Martin’s description of her own diagnosis in Bipolar Expeditions (2009), or indeed Wiegman’s uncharacteristically personal disclosures here, have significant and lingering affects that inform how we read the rest of the work.
Beginning with her own bipolar expeditions, Wiegman’s eloquent account (sometimes one cannot but retrace her sentences just to repeat the pleasure of her inventive conceptual prose) 2 returns us to the origins of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s much debated distinction between ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ readings (Sedgwick, 2003). Wiegman’s article traces a route through her own investments in modes of paranoid reading (rejected by Sedgwick for its diagnostic judgements, its critical sovereignty and delusions of grandeur that find political agency in textual mastery). Accepting this diagnosis, Wiegman welcomes the continuing ‘reparative’ intentions of so many current ‘queer feminist’ writers (Ann Cvetkovich, 2012; Elizabeth Freeman, 2007, 2010; and Heather Love, 2007, in particular). Placing current perceptions of feminism and critique at the heart of her answer, she asks, ‘What precisely motivates the widespread embrace of reparative reading for queer feminist readers today?’ (Wiegman, this volume: 12). For Wiegman, these writers conjure ‘queer temporalities’ through affective registers for reparative ends: reparative in so far as ‘small worlds of sustenance’ are built from an intimacy with previously painful objects; reparative in the sense of replacing the anxiety of paranoia with the hopeful ‘plenitude’ we might confer on such an object (Sedgwick, 2003: 149 in Wiegman, this volume: 11); and reparative in embracing the surprises brought by the unknowability of the future (and indeed of the past and present) that might provide the ‘resources for queer survival’ (Wiegman, this volume: 11, 14).
But, contra much current received theoretical wisdom, for Wiegman, these reparative readings establish sufficient critical space without abandoning interpretation as a queer feminist practice. Her argument hinges on the claim that the critical purchase of interpretation is renewed as these writers reinvent their textual relationalities to their objects and authors of choice through affective encounters with proximity, love, intimacy, sustenance, nurturance, failure and weakness. In all these (reparative) reinscriptions and reframings, she argues, interpretation continues to function as the legitimating force for critical work. Finding the common thread between paranoid and reparative readings to be an affiliation to interpretation itself, Wiegman argues that these queer feminist writings deliver a defence of interpretation as the practice of our time. Moreover, she concludes that it is the affective registers of temporality (be they presence, backwardness or belatedness) that hold these critical approaches together, as they enact the moods of their preferred time frame in their styles of writing. Wiegman’s reading of these reparative approaches brings us into proximity with how to live with uncomfortable public feelings in just such a way as to revalue close reading as a preferred critical practice: for example, her readings of Cvetkovich’s redescriptions of objects and practices that invoke the ordinariness of experiences of depression, and the hope of its cure in the art of everyday living (Wiegman, this volume: 13), and of Freeman’s interest in ‘the tail end of things’, in ‘whatever has been declared useless’, in ‘the afterlife’ of ‘failed revolutions’ (Freeman, 2010, in Wiegman, this volume: 15). Wiegman thus refuses the well-rehearsed polarity between the paranoid and the reparative position, avoiding the current trends towards rejecting theoretical approaches from semiotics to psychoanalysis, from dialogics to deconstructionism.
There are many critics, however, who would be reluctant to have their work included within Wiegman’s interpretative unification. Advocates of such a rejection variously suggest replacing the paranoid ‘symptomatic reading’ with redescription, observation, material immersion or even quantification. Some have argued quite explicitly against models of representation and interpretation to push for new paradigms of affective encounters with art, literature and film (see, for example, Thrift, 2007; Alaimo et al., 2008). 3 In making this move, ‘culture’ tends to be designated ‘the new bad object of feminist theory’ as ‘interpretation’ becomes the most redundant of methods. 4 Rejoicing in the end of the cultural turn, critics from very different intellectual locations have announced a shift in their focus away from text, form, representation, subjectivity and code, placing such concepts in a (false) dichotomy with materiality, affect, presence, event and encounter. Those who have followed Sedgwick’s interest in the biological affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, 5 inflected through Melanie Klein’s theories of ‘positions’ (Weed, 2012: 96) have welcomed reparative reading as a new paradigm that replaces what they see as the limits of ‘symptomatic’ interpretation.
As Elizabeth Weed discusses in some detail, the introduction of these new paradigms into literary studies, narrates a version of ‘theory’s’ history that becomes the site of contestation. One of her key examples is the bid to eschew interpretation in favour of what the special issue of Representations in 2009 formulated as ‘surface reading’ (Weed, 2012: 96). In making the case for opening up new critical practices, Weed argues, the editors of this special issue position the ‘unveiling known as “symptomatic reading” as uniting a number of different critical projects of recent decades’ (Weed, 2012: 97). Such moves not only forget earlier calls to push beyond the limits of ‘ideological unmasking’ (such as Fredric Jameson’s in 1981), they also falsely attribute to the practice of symptomatic reading a desire to render transparent the totality of the meaning system. Wrongly glossing such projects as primarily concerned with surfacing the ‘latent meaning behind the manifest one’ (Best and Marcus, 2009: 3, referring to Jameson, 1981: 60, quoted in Weed, 2012: 97) and with finding most interesting what the text represses, ‘which can then be used to rewrite the text in terms of a master code’ (Best and Marcus, 2009: 3, quoted in Weed, 2012: 97), the call for papers for this special issue, argues Weed, forgets the basic conceptual premise of Freud’s dream-work which is not metonymic but enigmatic: for Freud, ‘the dream-work involves complex operations, including condensation, displacement and considerations of representability, as well as secondary revisions’ (Weed, 2012: 100). For Weed, the imaginary relations between the elements of the structure that constitute its surface effects continue to offer conceptual purchase not because we, as critics, can reveal their textual truths, but because the paradoxes, ruptures and contradictions, the ‘strain’ (as she calls it, Weed, 2012: 101) between the lacunae of the different elements of a text, generate symptomatic readings that precisely demonstrate the illusory nature of a sense of omniscient totality in the interpretation.
There is much for someone trained in feminist Cultural Studies to say about how those bidding for a paradigmatic shift in critical reading practices narrate the history of supposedly affectless symptomatic readings, not least to comment on the frequent erasure from this story of Cultural Studies (most especially so much work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham that combined ethnographic and textual approaches, affective embodiment and psychic investment). But this is the subject for another article. My concern here instead is how the notion of ‘the reparative’ is mobilised, not in relation to interpretation (as for Wiegman), but in relation to ambivalence, specifically, the wishing away of ambivalence. In the rest of this article, I want to trace how the mobilisation of the concept of ‘reparation’ as a reading practice installs a non-ambivalent subject, removed from its psychoanalytic grounding and thereby losing some vital insights about how our conflicted relations to objects might continue to inform our attachments to culture. In pursuit of this issue, we might ask: what exactly is the nature of the desired repair in this work? What damage does it indicate and how do we imagine that reading as a practice can effect a repair, bearing in mind that traces of damage linger within the repair itself. Various images come to mind: the darn, the patch, the scar, the graft, the join.
Framing her argument as an expression of the desire to stop blaming her mother for the repetitions that drove her optimistic belief in the promise of a future normality, Wiegman’s intervention sits firmly in both the reparative and the paranoid camps: reparative in the sense of her wish to heal the wounds of the past through an acceptance of her ‘whole’ mother (rather than only the good or bad objects she had represented) and in Wiegman’s willingness to share the affective terrain with the queer feminist work of which she writes; but paranoid in so far as Wiegman’s diagnostic reading of the investment of this work in Sedgwick’s reparative embrace offers us as readers the familiar pleasures of symptomatic interpretation at its very best. 6 The shared affective registers of this queer feminist work for Wiegman lie in their bid for a different temporal configuration in the name of reparation – be it Cvetkovich’s dwelling in the present, or Love’s (2010) backward yearnings.
Sharing this desire in many ways, but simultaneously wanting to symptomise it, Wiegman places this yearning for reparation in its own temporal specificity: the current moment of doubt about whether both feminism and critique can be forgiven for not delivering on the impossible promises we hoped they might (even if they never could have). Wiegman’s intervention here thus both recognises the desires behind the reparative surge but reflects on ‘the ongoing necessity of interpretation’ despite suspending ‘paranoid criticism’s [tendency] to overwrite the critic’s agency in pursuit of progressive transformation’ (Wiegman, 2012: 22). Just as Object Lessons (2012) traced the ‘field imaginary of identity knowledges’ that would inevitably fail to deliver what our over-investments in them made them promise to secure, so here Wiegman insists upon the generative effects of all modes of critical practice, whether paranoid or reparative, that necessarily stretch beyond the intentions of the critic, or, as she puts it in her Coda, ‘the fantasy attachments that collate around intentionality’ (Wiegman, 2012: 18). In bringing into focus those ‘fantasy attachments’ to both intellectual and political knowledge-making practices, Wiegman’s work shows us what the working through of ambivalence might look like conceptually. Reading between, behind and beyond, as well as in intimate proximity with, the object(s) in question, Wiegman demonstrates the psychoanalytic debt through which her interpretations (and of course Sedgwick’s) continued to be formed.
In order to ground my argument about the loss of ambivalence enacted by the desire for the reparative more fully, I need to pause on the conceptual language of objects in Kleinian psychoanalysis, whence the terms ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ are drawn. 7 I want to suggest that we might push further the implications of attaching these two terms to the practice of reading, and, in particular, to ‘a textual encounter predicated on love’ (Wiegman, this volume: 10). In other words, I want to examine what kind of slippage happens when such psychoanalytic terms are transformed into cultural critical ones and to reflect on the ways in which our own desires shape these reconfigurations. Reading Wiegman’s careful navigation of this queer feminist terrain helped me answer this question, partly because of her refusal to abandon interpretation in the name of reparation, arguing instead that the reparative move might be read, psychoanalytically, as compensatory for the increasingly damaged authority of critique, and partly because this in turn made me wonder about the desire for reparation, which sent me back to reread Klein and others on this term. Based on this return, I suggest that the reparation that has been embraced in opposition to paranoid reading is one which departs from Klein’s theory of the necessarily conflicted relation to objects. As we shall see, reparation for her cannot be understood as a process born solely of love, or as promising a straightforwardly restorative desire for reconciliation or restoration.
In object relations theory (unlike Freudian instinct theory) the classical drives and stages of Oedipal development become the ‘working through of a “position” which remains an always available state – not something one passes through’ (Mitchell, 1986b: 116). For Klein, the infant processes an ongoing ambivalence towards the mother and in the first instance, towards her breast: the infant loves the good object that feeds and satisfies it but it hates the bad object that inevitably frustrates its needs. This splitting of the mother/breast into good and bad objects produces the fear and suspicion of the breast (paranoid-schizoid position), which is then superseded by the discovery that the breast it hates and the breast it loves are the same breast (depressive position). As Juliet Mitchell sums up: ‘the baby who has hitherto been destructive of or attached to “part-objects”, such as the mother’s breast, is now able to take in the whole mother’. For Klein, Mitchell argues, ‘How the baby manages this position – whether or not it can identify with an internalized good mother to the extent that it can repair the damage done by its destructive urges to the “bad” mother, or whether it must flee the implications of the position – constitutes the nodal experience for the infant on which its subsequent normality or psychosis depends’ (Mitchell, 1986b: 115). Thus, the depressive position – what Mitchell calls the hallmark of Kleinian theory – signals an acceptance of good and bad objects within the mother in her entirety. In this shift from a ‘partial object relation’ to the ‘relation to the complete object’ (and the mother is only an object to the baby at this stage, argues Klein) is a development of the ‘highest importance’ in which ‘new anxiety contents make their appearance and a change takes place in the mechanisms of defence’ (Klein, 1935, in Mitchell, 1986b: 118). Reparation, then, does not offer a place of straightforward love and safety, for as Klein explains, ‘not until the object is lived as a whole can its loss be felt as a whole’ (Klein, 1935, in Mitchell, 1986b: 118). As Jeremy Tambling makes clear, Klein ‘joins this desire for reparation to mourning’, and he argues, we should note that ‘the significance of being able to mourn is attended by its impossibility’ (2012: 76). Thus, while reparation invites a phantasy of repairing the imagined damage done to the mother and restoring her integrity, it is necessarily accompanied by the conflicted ambivalence of such restoration.
In her essay ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’, Klein insists on the ‘constant interaction of love and hate’ and the development of the ‘feelings of love and reparation … in connection with aggressive impulses and in spite of them’ (Klein, 1937: 57, emphasis in original). Key to understanding the place of guilt in these object relations is the centrality of ‘phantasy’ to Klein’s arguments (the ‘ph’ indicative of their unconscious placement). For the infant, Klein argues, really believes that its hateful thoughts and destructive impulses (triggered by the absence of the breast/food when it is desired) directed towards the mother/her breast have actually damaged or even destroyed her/it; and yet, the infant simultaneously believes (through its phantasies of omnipotence) that it has the power to repair and protect this love object that it imagines it has harmed.
Klein’s model of reparation is thus always and necessarily one based upon a conflicted object relation and never one in which love operates free of hate: ‘love and hate are struggling together in the baby’s mind; and this struggle to a certain extent persists throughout life’; as she goes on to detail, ‘if the baby has, in his aggressive phantasies, injured his mother by biting and tearing her up, he may soon build up phantasies that he is putting the bits together again and repairing her’. But this does not ‘do away with his fears of having destroyed the object … the one whom he loves and needs the most and on whom he is entirely dependent’; for Klein, ‘these basic conflicts profoundly influence the course and the force of the emotional lives of grown-up individuals’ (1937: 60–62). Reparation in psychoanalytic terms is thus a defence mechanism, a ‘process of reducing guilt by an action designed to make good the harm imagined to have been done to an ambivalently invested object’ (Rycroft, 1995: 156, emphasis mine). Proceeding from the basic psychoanalytic claim that there are ‘simultaneously contradictory wishes in the unconscious mind’ (1937: 74), Klein elaborates that ‘the way a child adapts himself to these problems in his mind forms the capacity for love and cultural development’. Although he (sic) can be assisted by those around him, Klein argues that these ‘deep problems cannot be abolished or solved for him’ (1937: 75). Moreover, she claims that in the process of reparation, the ego ‘finds itself forced to a fuller recognition of psychic reality … this exposes it to fierce conflicts’ (Klein, 1935, in Mitchell, 1986b: 120). What we see in paying closer attention to Klein’s text is that the nature of the repair brings with it fresh anxieties that then need to be managed.
As Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis sum up, ‘reparation is linked to the depressive position … and it is in response to anxiety and guilt intrinsic to this position that the child attempts to maintain or restore the wholeness of the mother’s body’. The motivation for reparation, they point out, is to counter the bad introjected objects believed to exist within the ego: ‘By thus restoring the wholeness to the loved object and negating all evil that has been done to it, the child is said to be assured of a thoroughly good and stable object whose introjection will strengthen his ego. Phantasies of reparation therefore play a role in ego-development’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988: 389). In all these accounts, reparation is a defence and the relations of the subject to its objects are ambivalent ones, forged through processes of projection and introjection that continue into adult life. Thus, time in Klein is not teleological or progressive: the past is affectively right here in the present. One might say all psychoanalytic concepts of time challenge the notion that childhood belongs to something neatly called the past; but where for Freud, ‘repression is a defence that creates a past and a symptom is a return of that past’, Klein is, as Mitchell puts it, ‘appropriately more interested in the defences which have no such dimension of time past and with atemporal inhibitions of the ego, not with symptoms’ (Mitchell, 1986a: 28). Or, as Mitchell sums up: ‘Freud’s historical imagination examines the present (the adult illness) and from it reconstructs a hypothetical past determinant. For Klein the past and the present are one’ (1986a: 27). This notion of temporal registers is central to debates about reparation (as Wiegman rightly notes more generally).
If reparative reading is mobilised to stake out new territories that might banish ambivalence (both theory's and the subject's) to the past, then it can only do so by forgetting Klein’s central psychoanalytic arguments about how reparation works. Contra the now widespread assumption that a reparative reading is one through which proximity to the loved object might nurture both critic and reader, a close reading of Klein suggests that whilst reparation restores to the mother the good objects that the punishing and sadistic infant phantasised he could deprive her of (or destroy in her), it nevertheless simultaneously generates anxiety and guilt that cannot be ‘fixed’ by this process. As Laplanche and Pontalis put it: ‘To the extent that their operations are defective, mechanisms of reparation may come to resemble sometimes manic defences (feelings of omnipotence), and sometimes obsessional ones (compulsive repetition of reparatory acts)’ (1988: 389, emphasis mine). The reparative promise (Kleinian style) of Wiegman’s recognition of her mother’s repeated need to long for normality through a disavowal of her own bipolar repetitions, in order to be able to imagine a future, brings with it the risk of its own guilty and anxious defences. Wiegman would be the first to recognise this, firmly grounded as she is within a psychoanalytic worldview. And, in her account of the affective terrain of queer feminist criticism which has turned towards reparation at this moment (when stories about feminism seem to place it in the historical past 8 and when the authority of critique is being undermined by the instrumentalism of the current epistemological trends in higher education), Wiegman herself signals the ambivalence of invested attachments and the pressure they have put on the objects we claim to love: feminism and critique. Moreover, Sedgwick’s own account of the Kleinian paranoid and depressive positions acknowledges that, in this latter position, the infant or adult ‘only sometimes and often only briefly’ succeeds in inhabiting a position which she describes as an ‘anxiety-mitigating achievement’ (2003: 128). For Sedgwick, the two positions are unstable and mutually inscribing; and, ‘powerful reparative practices’ importantly also ‘infuse self-avowedly paranoid critical projects’ (2003: 129). The murderous hatred that belongs to the object relations of subject formation is not forgotten or repressed, nor is reparation claimed as anything other than an imaginary space where the love object can be reassembled as a phantasy restoration of an (always already lost) originary wholeness.
But rereading this piece again for this article, one sentence in Sedgwick’s article leapt out at me: ‘Among Klein’s names for the reparative process is love’ (2003: 128). Extracting and privileging love’s place in the reparative position has somehow been read as an invitation to amplify love, leaving behind the less appealing dynamics of these object relations. It is this move that so many reparative readings echo, taking up Sedgwick’s focus on the ‘nourishment and comfort’ that it is possible if one uses one’s own resources to reassemble or ‘repair … murderous part-objects into something like a whole’ (2003: 128). So, even though, like Sedgwick, Wiegman acknowledges Kleinian ambivalence in her essay, when she writes ‘I have come to wonder what it means to confer love on an object as a tactical strategy in rescuing one’s self from condemnation’ (Wiegman, this volume: 12), she nevertheless risks perpetuating an echo that leaves behind the crucial ambivalence at the heart of Klein’s theory. In the move from psychic object relations to reparative reading, if reparation is conceived of exclusively as love (rather than the love ‘among’ other aspects, as in Sedgwick’s phrase cited above), then a psychic phantasy is granted a paradoxical (and misleading) theoretical space. What is enacted here, in the name of new critical departures, is yet another splitting of good and bad objects, of love and hate of which Klein wrote so extensively.
If reparation is a defence, then sustaining interpretation acknowledges how the productive effects of our conceptual imaginaries always remain slightly beyond our reach. As Peter Widdowson (2006) argued, all readings (even redescriptions or observations) are rewritings and thus interpretations; as such, perhaps both paranoid and reparative readings are in part defences against the impossible demands of the structure of feeling of the historical present; 9 and the desire for transparency and immediacy that so often announces the end of interpretation lingers as just that: a desire.
The concept of reparative reading brings with it important aspects to which I have been attached in my own work: proximity to the object of study rather than distance from it; an interest in describing the affects that follow from such proximity; a mode of writing that is less detached and more immersive, and sometimes personal, in the encounter with the object. 10 The risk of challenging the terms of the move towards reparative reading by returning to the original Kleinian sources, as I have done here, is of course that one’s arguments will be discounted as yet more paranoid correctives in the service of the mastery and control of the critic; or that such a return restricts the inventive licence of the critic to transform psychoanalytic theory, as it travels and mutates into cultural criticism. Both these objections to my argument could be rehearsed in fairly predictable ways. What is more interesting to explore instead, I think, is how reparation might provide a conceptual model for reading that is grounded in ambivalence. I have attempted to tie the idea of reparation back more tightly into its Kleinian origins not just for scholarly reasons, but also to argue that this psychoanalytic concept of the ambivalence within all object relations is precisely what makes this theory so interesting as a point of departure for critical reading practices. There are reasons that we might explore for finding this ambivalence especially appropriate for a queer feminist criticism at this current moment (and I can think of many); but those must be for another time.