On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant (review)

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• On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant
• Ana Schwartz (bio)

On the Inconvenience of Other People
lauren berlant
Duke University Press, 2022
252 pp.

Where does history end and personality begin? This isn't exactly Lauren Berlant's question in On the Inconvenience of Other People. But for those of us reading from the field of early American studies, it's a question we may find occasion to return to, if we've asked it to ourselves quietly before. That we tend not to ask it explicitly in our work is, like our own individual personalities' tussles with history, not exactly our fault. Methodologically, our field indirectly still seems to be wrestling with its own historical foundation in hagiographic intellectual history, its prior ambition to vindicate the mind and its personal expressions against historical forces, to keep drawing, as Emerson expressively put it, new circles. The mood of this historiography is earnest. Everyone it narrates is sincere. There are few [End Page 204] protagonists here who aren't white. Since then, the field has reinvested in something like historical materialism, has begun seeking more comprehensively to recover the material conditions and their ideological consequences that together shaped the history we've inherited. We've widened our scope. "Everyone" now includes those not so richly documented in the sources earlier critics had used to write their accounts of the past. And because those underrepresented in the archive faced concomitant material predations and dispossessions, we often find it powerful to generalize about the mood and material expression of resistance that these individuals shared.

The challenge here, though—and it's one we're beginning to take on better in the twenty-first century—is to begin to understand historical individuals experientially, to appreciate better the contours of their lived histories within those unchosen conditions. The answers may not always be pleasant. The parties we have spent our lives understanding may turn out to be less individually heroic than we have wanted to believe them to be. And where, to extend my lease on Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best's most searing critique of our desires in historicist recovery projects, would be the heroism for us in that? This is a rhetorical question, mostly, but it's also a screen for an earnest inquiry. The place where history ends and personality begins might also be the weird surprise-filled place where we see the leap beyond historical circumscription that, for some famous figures of the past, bound the otherwise unglamorous individual with partially circumstantial heroism. And there of course were many who didn't make that leap. There we might see better how hard such a leap was, and why some failed in making it. We might learn other things, too, that we don't expect. I learned to think about this question from Ajay Batra, who learned it, I think, from reading Cedric Robinson. But we can all learn to think about it from reading Berlant, who is a thrilling guide in pursuing this question, and this is so not least because of their commitment to the possibility that the most potent place to look for what we might, archly, call a frontier between personality and history is in the unheroic, itchy, sometimes devastating, but often just profoundly ambivalent episodes of quotidian life.

Berlant's chapters are few: three plus an intro and a coda. They are also hard to read. They're tough in at least two regards. First, their sentences are extremely rich. This isn't exactly a surprise, but they're harder to read in this book than they were in Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011). The sentences [End Page 205] often require testing, rereading backward, or cross-referencing pronouns over here with nouns over there. This is true for the short sentences as well as the long ones. Not all critics can write like this, and surely literary and cultural studies would decelerate profoundly if we all tried. Berlant explains the reason for this prose style in their introduction, and here is my best synthetic paraphrase: Real life is full of seemingly ineffable nuance, nowhere more so than in the strangeness of other persons...