The study of everyday life lost one of its boldest and most formative voices this summer with the passing of Lauren Berlant, a prolific literary critic and theorist whose work on female experience, sentimentality, and public discourse made her one of the most prominent academic intellectuals of the last two decades.
Berlant disowned “everyday life” as a label for her later work—mainly because the early- and mid-twentieth century scholars associated with that term were grappling with historical conditions that no longer applied in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Nonetheless, her insights in Cruel Optimism and her methodological experiments, with writing partner Kathleen Stewart, in The Hundreds (2020) bring a unique set of lenses to the mindsets, moods, and dynamics by which general social conditions are re-produced and felt in everyday life.
One of Berlant’s most important claims is that ordinary psychic, emotional, and interpersonal dynamics take the form of genres and genre conventions. She argues that our hopes, understandings, and interactions follow specific storytelling forms and are thus conventional in this sense. They are shared across people and situations, and thus function as genres. “Genres present an affective expectation of watching something unfold, whether that thing is in life or in art,” she wrote in Cruel Optimism, her most celebrated book. Further, she suggested that we are living through an unstable transition in which old story forms are breaking down and contending with new ones.
Take, for instance, such ubiquitous story lines as generational upward mobility or self-actualization. Berlant argues that economic precarity has turned such narratives into forms of “cruel optimism”—a condition in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” With these genres breaking down, Berlant writes, we find ourselves in a situation where the “relation of persons and worlds is sensed to be changing but the rules for habitation and the genres of storytelling about it are unstable, in chaos.”
Berlant sought to track people’s “different styles of managing simultaneous, incoherent narratives of what’s going on or what seems possible and blocked in personal/collective life” (4).
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These ideas seem prescient in pandemic times, which have rather plainly put us in a position where standard narratives have lost their ability to help us make sense of the relations among present, past, and future. While Berlant was tracking a breakdown in the promises of capitalist individualism over the past few decades, the pandemic intensified feelings of anxious uncertainty about the future, spreading them even to relatively prosperous people.
Berlant has been much on our minds as we’ve been reading what the Everyday Life in Middletown volunteers have written during the pandemic. Our primary tool for studying everyday life is the day diary, which is also a genre with conventions—conventions that obliquely reproduce the working-out or breakdown of the “genres of event” Berlant writes of.
The day-diary is a subgenre of the diary—one of the oldest genres in western writing. Its conventions include its connection to the day (both “diary” and “journal” are derived from Latinate words for “day”); its presumption of honesty; its impetus to record events, however personal or banal; and its tendency to promote reflection and self-awareness.
Dating back centuries, people in western societies have used diaries to construct life narratives—to write their lives as plots in which they have agency, in which past actions and decisions are seen as having produced the present and today’s activities steer a course for the future. In The Hundreds, Berlant and Stewart archly observe the degree to which the very fact of having survived to the present can seem to justify one’s past: we use the phrase “Well, I turned out alright,” as though it “vindicates the violence or justifies the scar tissue called personality if one appears interesting and complex.”
This sense of agency and causality, linking past, present, and future, is central to well-being, according to British sociologist Vanessa May, who describes a powerful “cultural script” in which people view their daily activities as growing from their pasts and contributing to a desired future. This script, May writes, gets “amputated” when someone drops out of a career track because of illness or disability and, to an extent, when people grow old and retire.
When that narrative link between past, present, and future is broken, it becomes difficult to locate ourselves and our daily lives within a satisfying story arc. We shouldn’t be surprised if we find ourselves more palpably in the place Berlant conceptualized, where new genres are forming, or where we’re juggling multiple, incompatible stories in order to make sense of events.
This is what we’ve found in diaries and directives our volunteers have written during the pandemic. Over the next two weeks, we’ll look at how some of this writing struggles to find its genre, grappling with the pressures the pandemic has placed on the stories we like to tell about ourselves.
Discreet events occur along a continuum of mental health, which is always a component of stimulus and response. Teaching students who learn differently often relies on a pragmatic framework : beginning, middle, end and what comes next- which is unpredictable at best and often terrifying, in a pandemic, be it Covid or violence.