She's having an episode: Patricia Williams and the writing of damaged life.

• Author: Berlant, Lauren
• Position: Fourth Annual Symposium: The Work of Patricia Williams

1. Anecdotal (1)

   I heard a story once about two friends who were trading tales about the ways that white, male supremacy extends itself formally and informally into sexual reproduction: through structure and stricture; statements and gestures; anecdotes and atmospheres; law and families, and not just white families. The conversation produced so much pain and awkwardness that the friends "grew embarrassed, somehow"; and so, spontaneously, as though it would save the day, they resorted to the language of political theory, of "laissezfaire economics and governmental interventionism," to get at the situation. But theorizing for life's sake didn't work out too well--that time. The abstractions made "a clear line, a railroad upon which all other ideas and events were tied down and sacrificed." (2)

   A little later I heard a similar story about a godmother and goddaughter who exchanged tales that might also have referred to legacies of sexualized racial violence--that is, might have, if the godmother had not insisted on euphemizing how that violence was embodied in her life and why their family, a family harmed by it, would still so identify with and indeed long for access to the white supremacist world. In this case too, the conversation moved away from "the truth" to allegory-spinning, from veracity to "voracity"--for displacement, not escape; but this time the interlocutors moved not toward a professional register. Abjuring the rhetoric of law and the idiom of history, the women spun out fictions of animals with appetites, talking about polar bears until their "plates were full of emptiness and [the goddaughter] became large in the space which described [the godmother's] emptiness and [the goddaughter] gave in to the emptiness of words." (3)

   Even now, years later, this second anecdote about the godmother and goddaughter seems more tender and positive than the first one between the collegial theorists, because the generosity and intimacy of the fairytale is still less harsh than the brutal technicality of a professional jargon whose searing criticality scores its users as well as its objects. Yet both responses to pervasive sexualized racial violence involve intimacy, exchange, optimism, criticality, aversion, disappointment, aggression, and distance--all of it. Each response-style expresses a desperation that seeks at once contact, displacement, transmission, and defense against the prodigious weight of violence and possibility. Each sacrifices the potential for mutually facing an overwhelming scene (the same one, yet varied) to the abstraction of a speech register that insists on the solidity of representation despite all the evidence that the speakers have failed to achieve even an adequate description of outrageous social relations. So this material, derived from the ordinary of subordination, not only extends the violence it restages, and not only exemplifies what so often goes wrong when we recount power's story with a reparative intention, but, even more disconcertingly, discovers the reproduction of structural violence in intimate conversation, the kind in which people conscript each other to desire a common idiom so as not to feel alone and defeated by life. Here, the preservation of fidelity, the drive to stay in sync with another, beats out the pursuit to extend justice. Each aim takes its own kind of courage.

   In an episodic aesthetic, we focus attention on converting a disturbance into a case, a singularity into an exemplum, or an incident into an event, in the hope that this remodeling will transform what there is to see, to engage, and, when it is relevant, what there is to fight in the world. (4) But, paradoxically, each episode demonstrates an insufficiency of the case as well, as it requires proximity to other scenes and cases for the force of its change to be assessed. This analytic attention to the process of generalization is the only way to change what an object is, how it is to be encountered, contextualized, figured, narrated, and shifted within its own resonating field. Patricia Williams' On Being the Object of Property is shaped by this transformational wish and will, both within sections organized by incident and in its overall style of nested, accretive exemplification. The essay's opening, for example, stages Williams' mother relating something about their shared slave past that she wants her daughter now to own with pride, seeking to convert the negativity of history to prophetic victory; (5) and the daughter, in retelling, converts her hurt and bafflement at her mother's judgment and desire into an anecdote with different exemplary force, this time encapsulating how it comes to be that the corrosive work of the world can turn into a constricting double-bind when delivered in the context of love.

   But such constraints grow not only from the intimate zones of inheritance, where staying tethered to familiar others maintains the most durable world we know. Williams' essay also absorbs many kinds of incidents among strangers, neighbors, and institutions--from the random assault of a gaze on the street to a major occasion in relation to law. So, for instance, Williams relates an episode of reality TV that focuses on a case of shamed public sexualization around AIDS. This episode might just be one more ding on the nerves to some people, but here it resonates with other scenes of suffering within the family and among friends, colleagues, and the body politic in a way that makes one ask general questions and questions about generality: about whose lives are made obscenities and whose are valued; which suffering is an effect of the law's sovereign power and which is an effect of habits, norms, open secrets, ideologies, patterns of "accident," and interest; which resistances are valued and which not; and, at the heart of it, what the point is of propping any general case on a singular story, given how diffuse, banal, particular, and seemingly discretionary so much systemic violence is, especially insofar as it is regularly transmitted through passive-aggressive instruments like zoning laws, pedagogy, tone of voice, sidewalk manners, fairy tales, or stare decisis. (6) Thus in this work, it is not only a dominating power that segments life into false antinomies, material and epistemic hierarchies, or holding patterns that become calcified into facts, laws, norms, and negating types of personhood. It is not only the privileged who make up stories that dilute or dreamify the hegemonic agreement, at once distorting and protecting them. The reproduction of power and the work of violence are collective, serving many interests, at once explicit, insinuated, and formal.

   On Being the Object of Property also shows how, moving through ordinary life, we often notice only belatedly that we have already begun to collect and organize the diverse scenes that disorganize our affects without knowing how we are holding them, or anything else, like ourselves, together. The gathering together of incidents that become events slowly, only as they resonate with other happenings, is the beginning of altering objects. Noting how institutionally-sedimented force affects the sensorium makes it possible to see objects in a different way--as sites or collections of effects--and therefore to change their meaning, structure, and impact. (7)

   Here, racialized sexual violence and sexualized racial violence are a kind of Mobius strip, a knot, and a weapon whose faux ontology the essay is trying to destroy. But Williams' way of tapping into the episode's capacity to make a situation into a transformative case, her ambition to convert negating encounters into "resources" and "provisions" for better living, collects the knots without connecting the dots into what appears to be a line. (8) In Williams' essay, and regularly in her work, the disturbance of the encounter with concepts, things, affects, emotions, judgments, norms, laws, classrooms, conferences, shops, and other people generates destabilizing episodes that suspend the effects of relentless negation so that we can look at them and reshape not only what concepts we can derive from them but how we, bodily, sensually, can occupy them: see the final Polar Bear anecdote, during which she dons the "cool fragments of white-fur invisibility" previously associated with white supremacy. (9)

   But her style of anecdote nested in segments nested in sections demonstrates many other things. It enters into evidence the fact that the same kinds of thing repeatedly happen and that life on the bottom is an extended case of repetitive stress disorder; it suggests that a genuine counter-justice can be sensed affectively, and in minor folds of relationality that have not achieved event status, the way we usually think it; it demonstrates that for social change worthy of its inconvenience to occur we must bring all of the ways we know something to a problem even if, and especially when, and since inevitably, all of those ways are incommensurate, overwhelming, and tedious.

   From the medical and legal spaces of reproduction to the ritual zones of the funeral, and all that's in the middle--in hospitals and courtrooms, on street corners and bedrooms, or anywhere the impossible and unbearable exist near the intimacies of attachment and the incoherent rigidities of institutions, where tender contact and tendered contract point to the hovering presence of life and death something happens in the encounter as she writes it that keeps things open, often painfully open and unresolved, still and always resonating, somehow, and therefore always potentially the beginning of a thought worth drawing out. This must be why, crossing the gutters between episodes, the essay is also a tribute to conversation, that unleashing thing we do which, happening everywhere and anywhere, has no memorial to it except for whatever...