Professional Documents
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Feeling Brown Feeling Down
Feeling Brown Feeling Down
Position
Author(s): JosEstebanMuoz
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Signs, Vol. 31, No. 3, New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture (Spring 2006), pp. 675688
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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J o s e E s t e b a n M u n o z
one of the dominant affective positions addressed within the cultural field of contemporary global capitalism.
However, such a blanket statement requires fine-tuning. While art
and media that depict the affective contours of depression have certainly
become more prevalent, it is nonetheless important to be attentive to
the ways in which the current historical moment is able to mimetically
render various depictions of the problem of depression that plagues the
contemporary citizen subject with a crypto-universalist script. Certainly
depression is gendered. Female depression and male depression resonate
quite differently. While female depression is more squarely framed as a
problem, the depression that plagues men is often described as a fullon condition, registering beyond the sphere of the individual, linked to
a sort of angst and longing that are often described as endemic to postmodernism. However, that statement also requires some amending insofar as such a distinction reproduces a default white subject. The topic
of depression has not often been discussed in relation to the question
of racial formations in critical theory. This essay dwells on a particular
depiction of depression that most certainly speaks to the general moment
but resists the pull of crypto-universalism. The art project at the center
of this essay considers how depression itself is formed and organized
around various historical and material contingencies that include race,
gender, and sex.
The work of Nao Bustamante does not conform to our associations of
art practices that emerged at the moment of identity politics, nor does it
represent an avoidance of the various antagonisms within the social that
define our recognition and belonging as racialized, gendered, and sexed
subjects. Bustamantes work tells us a story about the problems of belonging in alterity. I contend that her oeuvre meditates on our particularities, both shared and divergent, particularities that are central to the
epression has become
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006, vol. 31, no. 3]
2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2006/3103-0006$10.00
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choreography of self and other that organizes our reality.1 This, as I will
contend, is negotiated through a particular affective circuit. The version
of depression I consider in this essay is marked by a depression that is not
one. I am provisionally naming this affective site a feeling of brownness
that transmits and is structured through a depressive stance, a kind of
feeling down, thus my rhyming title, Feeling Brown, Feeling Down.
Bustamantes video installation Neopolitan (2003) includes an elevenminute-long loop tape. The tape shows the artist breaking out into seemingly spontaneous sobbing as she watches the end of a movie. As she
cries, the viewer witnesses the somatic signs of depressive sadness: her eyes
well up, her nose runs. The video is shown on a monitor that sits on an
old-fashioned table, which sits on a sculpture block. The monitor is covered by a multicolored cozy that was crocheted by the artist. On top of
the cozy sits a crocheted basket filled with crocheted flowers. Above the
basket rests an artificial crow; the artificial bird wears a matching crocheted
hat. A power plug, connected to the wall, is also snugly covered in a
crocheted caddy. The movie being watched by the artist is Tomas Gutierrez Aleas Fresa y chocolate, a film set in the 1970s in Cuba and focused
on a difficult and fragile friendship between a proper revolutionary subject
and a gay bohemian. As the artist watches the film, it is lightly projected
on her face, giving the sense that the glow of the screen she is watching
is bouncing off her face. After the film is over, the artist rewinds it again
and again, continuing to cry (see fig. 1).
In this essay I will suggest that this installation can be read as an
illustration of the depressive position and its connection to minoritarian
aesthetic and political practice. Toward this end I will draw from certain
aspects of Kleinian object-relations theory. Thus, I will address a very
particular mode of depression, not depression in its more general or clinical
sense. Describing the depressive position in relation to what I am calling
brown feeling chronicles a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and
deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who dont
feel quite right within the protocols of normative affect and comportment.
While the work of Melanie Klein (1986) and her circle is not tailored to
attend to the vicissitudes of racialization and ethnic particularity, I nonetheless find some of her formulations suggestive and helpful when trying
to discuss what Im calling brown feelings.
The larger project of this essay engages different psychological and
phenomenological discourses in an effort to theorize affective particularity
1
This word usage is calibrated to address a minoritarian subject. For more on this
particular narrative of subjectivity, see Mun
oz 1999.
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Neopolitan. Nao Bustamante. The Lab, San Francisco (2003). Color version available as an online enhancement.
Figure 1
and belonging. Jonathan Flatley (2004) has recently described his own
interest in affective particularity in relation to the social as affective mapping. Affective mapping is Flatleys amplification and amendment of Fredric Jamesons (1981) theory of cognitive mapping. To some degree such
a description would hold sway with this analysis. My endeavor, more
descriptively, is intended to enable a project that imagines a position or
narrative of being and becoming that can resist the pull of identitarian
models of relationality. Affect is not meant to be a simple placeholder for
identity in my work. Indeed, it is supposed to be something altogether
different; it is, instead, supposed to be descriptive of the receptors we use
to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak
and are heard or, more importantly, felt. This leaves us to amend Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivaks famous question, Can the subaltern speak? (1988,
1999) to ask How does the subaltern feel? How might subalterns feel
each other? Toward this end, modified theories of object relations can
potentially translate into productive ways in which to consider relationality
within a larger social sphere.
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This idea of performativity as a doing is indebted to a line of thought in the postdisciplinary field of performance studies that engages the work of the philosopher of everyday
speech, J. L. Austin, and his book How to Do Things with Words (1962). See Parker and
Sedgwick 1995 for a useful introduction to some of Austins postdisciplinary relevance.
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which different circuits of belonging connect, which is to say that recognition flickers between minoritarian subjects. Brownness is not white,
and it is not black either, yet it does not simply sit midway between them.
Brownness, like all forms of racialized attentiveness in North America, is
enabled by practices of self-knowing formatted by the nations imaginary
through the powerful spikes in the North American consciousness identified with the public life of blackness. At the same time, brownness is a
mode of attentiveness to the self for others that is cognizant of the way
in which it is not and can never be whiteness. Whiteness in my analysis
is also very specific: I read it as a cultural logic that prescribes and regulates
national feelings and comportment. White is thus an affective gauge that
helps us understand some modes of emotional countenance and comportment as good or bad. It should go without saying that some modes
of whitenessfor example, working-class whitenessare stigmatized
within the majoritarian public sphere. Modes of white womanhood or
white ethnicities do not correspond with the affective ruler that measures
and naturalizes white feelings as the norm.
Depression is not brown, but there are modalities of depression that
seem quite brown. Psychoanalytic critic Antonio Viego (2003) has looked
at how American ego psychology attempts to perform a certain kind of
therapeutic work on Latino/a subjects. The telos of that project is to
achieve a gradually realized whole and well-adjusted minority self. The
majority of ego-psychological work explored by Viego attempts to translate notions of traditional Latino maladieslos nervios and attaquesinto
ethnically named translations of disorders analyzed as depression and anxiety disorder in English and North American institutional formats. Viegos
critique dismantles this wish for an ego that is not shattered in Latino
psychology. For Viego, such a desire would be an escape from the social.
Thus, any social theory that posits happiness as its goal is a flawed theory.
Viegos use of psychoanalytic protocols functions as a displaceable attentiveness that imagines a mode of brown politics not invested in the narrative of a whole and well-adjusted subject.
My notion of feeling down is meant to be a translation of the idea of
a depressive position. Thus, down is a way to link position with feeling.
The use of the concept of positions, rather than the more developmental
discourses on stages, is one of Kleins (1986) amendments to Freud.
Scholars interested in Klein or object-relations psychology view positions,
as opposed to stages, as less turgid trajectories of emotional development.
In this instance Kleins contribution resonates alongside one of Antonio
Gramscis most substantial contributions to social theory, namely, his
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way in which, as subjects, we resist a disrepair within the social that would
lead to a breakdown in ones ability to see and know the other. That
would certainly be a mode of clinical depression.
In queer studies Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) has recently turned to
the divide between paranoia and reparation. Sedgwick has argued that
paranoia has become a standardized posture taken in queer critique and
that it thus has become routine rather than critical thinking. The paranoid
move is always about a certain hermeneutic unveiling of an external threat.
Such a move becomes routine, or numb repetition, and renders the paranoid subject unable to participate in what Spillers would call the intramural protocol of a displaceable self-attentiveness. Spillers (2003) wishes
to turn away from a critique of the man and turn to a theory of the
way in which relational skills are organized around the one. The one,
for Spillers, is interior to the life world of the black community, the lives
we have among one another within racial formations. This is not to say
that there are not multiple threats presented by an outsider, by the man,
but Spillers want us to understand the ways in which our own sense of
relationality and practices of belonging within communities of color are
threatened from within. Spillers in this instance is once again insisting on
repealing a certain paranoid sense of being in the world where menace is
exterior to our world of intraracial or ethnic experience and instead wants
to linger or dwell in the realm of this enabling fantasy of a whole object.
Sedgwick invites her readers and the field of queer critique to consider
reparation. In this same intervention Sedgwick wishes to consider how
certain strong theories of the social, theories that can be codified as prescriptive and totalizing, might not be as advantageous at this particular
moment as weak theories that do not position themselves in the same
masterful, totalizing fashion. I would align a Gramscian war of positions
with this weak theory. I understand the theory-making impulse that propels my description of feeling brown as resisting the strong-theory model.
The stitching I am doing between critical race theories, queer critique,
and psychological object-relations theory is a provisional and heuristic
approach that wishes to stave off the totalizing aspect of all those modes
of critique.
I want to suggest that the ethics of the one that Spillers rehearses
is a mode of intramural depressive positionality that gives us the ability
to know and experience the other who shares a particular affective or
emotional valence with us. The reparation staged in Spillerss theoretical
work is informed by a desire to return to another place that she describes
as old-fashioned. Old-fashioned is associated with the nonsecular belonging that in turn is associated with the history of the black church
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References
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