on intellectual loitering

“everything i write lately is from the position of depressive realism, in which the world’s hard scenes ride the wave of the optimism inscribed in ambivalence, but without taking on optimism’s conventional tones. i do not have the aim of moving beyond x but the aim of setting there awhile, dedramatizing the performance of critical and political judgment so as to slow down the encounter with the objects of knowledge that are really scenes we can barely get our eyes around. in other words, i do not want to move beyond a thing, as i am always still approaching it from within a scene of contact. as method, this perspective turns the object x into an impasse, a singular place that’s a cluster of noncoherent but proximate attachments that can only be approached awkwardly, described around, shifted… 

…to substantiate this cluster of phrases in a way i can live with takes work: archive gathering, phrasemaking, conversing, reading around, rephrasing, listening, nitpicking—spreading out into the lateral spaces often drowned out by the demands of argument and of interlocutors who want ‘ways out’ while i’m still looking for ‘ways in.’ moving among different registers of critical work is motivated by a hunger not for satisfaction but for help in articulating different materializations of a scene. it’s like hovering around the enigma of a new attachment, a crush, but with a more patient epistemopulsation. this is the reciprocal scholarly obligation of queer attentiveness to which i continue to feel indebted.”  

—lauren berlant, “starved,” in after sex