Ann Cvetkovitch Depression: A public feeling

Abstract

Ann Cvetkovitch Depression: A public feeling. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012. 296 pp. ISBN 978–0–8223–5223–5, £64.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Gillian Harkins, University of Washington, USA

It might be an inheritance, but it was not a destiny.

(Ann Cvetkovitch, Depression: A public feeling)

Ann Cvetkovitch's Depression: A Public Feeling creates an archive of ‘how capitalism feels’ (p. 11, emphasis in original) in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century and the ‘political depression’ (p. 24) induced by today's endless war on ‘terror’, life, and hope. Drawing on feminist theory and practices of ‘consciousness-raising, personal narrative, and craft’ (p. 10), Depression moves beyond ‘cultural critique’ to explore the constellations that make visible what Cvetkovitch, borrowing from Lauren Berlant, calls the ‘impasses’ (p. 20) of late modernity. Those impasses are not necessarily revealed through the privileged aesthetics and politics of modernism/Marxism or postmodernism/poststructuralism, and Cvetkovitch joins the scholars of Public Feelings in taking the time to patiently assemble the missing pieces of daily life, its embarrassment of riches, its clichés and abandonments to the banal, and its routine potential to move us out of impasses we do not know we inhabit. Cvetkovitch imagines methodology as movement, as ‘an open-ended and speculative inquiry that fans out in multiple directions’ (p. 5). Thus even as she situates her work in relation to the ‘affective turn’ (p. 3), she departs from affect studies inspired by Gilles Deleuze to focus more specifically on vernacular languages of ‘feelings as both subject and method’ (p. 5). Her aim is to show the ‘linkage between depression and political failure’ (p. 7) in order to participate in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the ‘reparative’ work (p. 19) of re-imagining ‘a liberatory version of social and affective relations’ (p. 6). This moves her away from the stigmatised sentiment of ‘left melancholy’ and toward the emotional possibilities of ‘political depression’ (p. 24). It also allows her to situate feminism, alongside scholarship on colonial occupation, African diaspora, class exploitation and indigenous displacement, as central genealogies of affect and its study.

The book is structured as ‘a diptych’ (p. 17): the first half is titled ‘The Depression Journals (A Memoir)’, the second, ‘A Public Feelings Project (A Speculative Essay)’. Following an inaugural ‘Depression Manifesto’ included in the Introduction, the first half of the book offers memoir as a research method aimed at disclosing what is otherwise difficult to ‘know’ in academic terms about impasse and inertia. It is no coincidence that Cvetkovitch's memoir records her time from 1986 to 1991, the duration of a journey from academic job market through tenure with its familiar blend of intellectual space–time compression and emotional space–time expansion. Cvetkovitch situates the impasse of writing and feeling in the context of everyday embodiments, suggesting ultimately ‘transformative daily habit as an antidote to depression’ (p. 76) and transformative daily grammars that replace the medico-pathological term depression with keywords like despair, acedia, dread, and respite (p. 79). The second half of the book then tries to embody this transformative praxis in academic discursive writing. Here Cvetkovitch attempts to track and transform the disciplinary systems of knowledge and feeling across medical, social, and cultural terrains, with an emphasis on descriptions of tactile and legible surface rather than analytics of depth or structure. Across three chapters, Cvetkovitch creates an archive of feeling for ‘depression’ that moves away from medical models, even socio-medical models, and towards models of performing and creating that re-mobilise arrested affective and cognitive processes.

Chapter 1 focuses on how academic research ‘disciplines’ our ability to identify and understand the cause of depressive feelings. Cvetkovitch reviews existing medical histories of depression, which often focus on its diagnostic emergence in psychiatry and dismiss as historical anachronism categories such as Christian acedia (spiritual despair) or Renaissance melancholia. Noting melancholia's reclamation as a category for queer and critical race studies, Cvetkovitch turns instead to fourth century Christian John Cassian's treatment of acedia in De Institutus Coenobiorum to foreground embodied spiritual and creative practice as possible ‘cure’ for what ails the present. Chapter 2 moves ‘From Dispossession to Radical Self-Possession’ by centring histories of racism, displacement, and colonialism in spiritual and creative accounts of ‘cure’. After a discussion of multicultural mental health initiatives, Cvetkovitch quickly moves to ‘alternative cultural geographies’ (p. 25) that reveal the deeper imbrications of racism and the felt impasses of the present. Cvetkovitch reads Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother (2008), Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing (2006), Sharon O'Brien's The Family Silver (2004), and Jeffery Smith's When the Roots Reach for Water (1999) to argue that longer histories of racism, colonialism, and capitalism are what ails the present, even as historical divisions of humanity bequeath us uneven distributions of cognitive and affective recognition for its ‘cure’. The racial violence that destroys archival materials, denies alternative epistemologies, and devalues aspirational hopes manifests in what Jacqui Alexander calls ‘writer's block’ (p. 133): an impasse in the capacities to create meaning until the very categories and conditions of meaning are transformed.

Chapter 3 on ‘The Utopia of Ordinary Habit: Crafting, Creativity, and Spiritual Practice’ links Jacqui Alexander's call for radical self-possession to queer artistic practices of living and making as an everyday archive. This final chapter collects an archive from the visual, performance and craft works of Lisa Anne Auerbach, Gregg Bordowitz, Betsey Greer, Leslie Hall, Kiki and Herb, Allyson Mitchell, Magda Sayeg and Knitta Please, Sheila Pepe, and Faith Wilding alongside the affect studies work of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Heather Love, and Katie Stewart. Here the impulse of crafting, of knitting together and assembling pieces, animates an entire ‘microclimate of hope’ (p. 155) aligned with ‘an ordinary form of spiritual practice that I call the utopia of everyday habit’ (p. 159, emphasis in original). The epilogue completes this treatment by returning to writers and writing as participants in a mobilising process (rather than an obstacle, as it appeared in the academic disciplining of writing in the Memoir and Chapter 1). Completing the journey from ‘Depression Manifesto’ through ‘Depression Memoir’ to ‘Depression Archive’, the epilogue explores work by Lynda Barry, Kate Bornstein, David Foster Wallace, Audre Lorde, and Eileen Myles to reconnect writing with bodily habit.

Cvetkovitch's book helps explain how ‘depression’ has come to operate like a structural adjustment of the soul, pressing those in its impasse to bargain away openness to strangeness and possibility in exchange for the pharmaceutical promise of mere survival. While some are invited to a pharmacological phantasmagoria, others are lucky to find work on its assembly line, while still others are locked eternally in its experimental institutions (such as psychiatric wards and prisons). Cvetkovitch's book crafts one aesthetic and critical response to this structural adjustment. There may be limits to its method: I felt Chapter 2's effort to create an ‘Archive of Ordinary Racism’ through ‘a somewhat arbitrary and unsystematic collection’ that is ‘guided by hunches’ (p. 122) would benefit from more sustained engagement with broader dialogues on race, history and affect. Some archives are difficult to constitute by feeling one's own way through it. But Cvetkovitch remains mindful that she is not crafting a universal response, not tracking everybody's feelings, but rather feeling for her own way through an archive of impasse that threatens to turn inheritance into destiny. Her commitment to creating alternative responses to this impasse is laudable, and the risk exemplified by this book is moving. Her work invites us to risk creating others.