Review: Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology.

Feminist Theory http://fty.sagepub.com/

Object Lessons, Robyn Wiegman Sara Ahmed Feminist Theory 2012 13: 345 DOI: 10.1177/1464700112456800

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Book Reviews

Feminist Theory 13(3) 345–354 ! The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464700112456800 fty.sagepub.com

Feature review Robyn Wiegman Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. x + 399 pp. ISBN 978–0–8223–5160–3, £17.99 (pbk) Reviewed by: Sara Ahmed, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK Announcement

Feminist Theory and the LSE Gender Institute present a special lecture by Professor Robyn Wiegman, Wishful Thinking, on 3 December 2012 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, from 6:30-8:00pm. Object Lessons by Robyn Wiegman is a profoundly pedagogic book. By which I mean: it is a book that teaches us how we are taught. Our teachers can be our objects of study. If we are investing ✓ in learning we can also learn from our investments. Different chapters follow specific objects (women, gender, intersectionality, whiteness, sexuality, queer, the transnational) as the scene or site of a lesson, which is to say, as the scene or site of a struggle over the terms of engagement. This is a curious book: a book that responds to our own programmes and institutions with curiosity. There is an ethics to this curiosity: Wiegman shows us compellingly and gently how our own work is worth being curious about. As a reader you are invited to reflect with the text about your own habits of thought. What are we thinking when we are doing feminist theory? What shape do we give feminism by how we tend to approach feminism? Objects are not external to us, even if they have careers or biographies that can be described as institutional as well as social. Indeed the book could be understood as showing the interiority of the institutional, as well as the exteriority of the personal. This book considers the desires at stake when an academic field is motivated by a sense of social justice. Its interest is not to produce a theory of desire (it bypasses cleverly the psychoanalytic frames that might ask us to put this theory first (pp. 18– 19)), that is, a theory of the formation of the subject, but rather a theory of how objects come to matter or keep their hold. And if this book teaches us how we are taught by our own objects, then it is also a book about the affective hold these objects have even (or especially) when we feel we have given them up or moved beyond them. We might learn about our hopes from our disappointments. One of

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the strengths of this book is the attention to recovery as a form of narrative: how for instance we might employ certain critical moves in order to recover from the perceived limitation of a category of thought (how gender became assumed as a way of recovering from the limitations of the category of women, and so on). But in a way it is the hope we invest in recovery that becomes the limitation. Our task is not as feminist critics to recover from recovery (or to give up hoping): but to think from and with our very desire for something that motivates a desire to move beyond something. Object Lessons could be considered a companion volume to Clare Hemmings’ Why Stories Matter (2011). Both books offer careful and reflexive attention to the very modes or styles of feminist theorising. Object Lessons is also concerned with institutions: reflecting not only on styles of work but also on how these styles can be normalised in teaching practices (looking at, for instance, how queer studies becomes constituted as anti-normative through syllabi as well as in declarations or commitments). One of my favourite aspects of the book is how it gives you details of the author’s journeys (details that are often left out of published writing – and there is missing in the leaving): how various conferences, meetings or events provided the occasion for writing, so that you get a sense of the book as impressed upon by the fields it reflects upon. This attention to what we are creating as we work ‘under’ as well as ‘with’ various terms is thus a worldly attention: for if we gather around certain objects, we are creating spaces in which certain things can happen (and other things, not). This means that when Wiegman reflects on critical terms she does not just use academic writing as her archive: for example the chapter on whiteness draws on a reading of a film (Forrest Gump) as well as legal cases. If we are invested in objects, we are participating in worlds. Given the centrality of concepts of investment and attachment in the book, Wiegman might have taken her argument further if she had engaged with other recent feminist and queer work on affect and emotion (this body of work is relegated to a footnote (p. 21)). She refers to objects as optimistic attachments throughout: for instance she describes them as ‘collating’ optimism (p. 40). I wondered thus how Wiegman’s arguments might relate (or not) to Lauren Berlant’s model of cruel optimism.1 Are we sometimes worn down by our attachment to scripts that are not working? What kind of promises do we make (to ourselves and to each other) when we constitute a field of study or when we find ‘it’ promising? It would be interesting for instance to consider what it means for affect itself to become an object: how we invest hope in ‘affect itself’ as if affect is an object, one that can move us beyond the constraints of, say, language or discourse. Even if the book does not go there (and why should it: affect as an object of thought seems to be carried less by a sense of social justice, even if affective theorising can and does participate in justice), its strength is that it gives the reader some resources to go there: I can now speculate more readily what lessons we might learn when affect becomes an object of thought. And indeed given that there has been an ‘object turn’2 as well as an ‘affective turn’3 this book helps us to speculate what lessons might be learned from how objects become our object.

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Book Reviews

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Object Lessons invites us to consider how terms such as ‘identity’ have careers. Although the book focuses more on ‘identity knowledges’ rather than ‘identity politics’ it again gives us the resources to speculate on other terms in its terms. We could think for instance of how ‘identity politics’ is used to caricature certain styles of work (as simplistic, reductive, backward and so on): showing how we disinvest in certain styles of work as a way of being on the side of complexity and progression. In a way, this book taught me to think more cautiously about what it means to invest in our own progression. I thought it would have been worth interrogating further the phrase ‘identity knowledges’. It might seem self-evident for instance that Women’s Studies is an identity knowledge. But that is not for instance how I think of Women’s Studies (or ever thought of Women’s Studies for that matter). I think of ‘Women’ used in this way, next to the word ‘Studies’, not as identity but as rebuttal – a way of saying to the universal of the university that it is particular: university ¼ men. The very reduction of ‘women’ to identity could be read as a strategy for containing Women’s Studies to something particular (to lodge Women’s Studies as particular rather than as a dislodgement of the general). Late on in the book the category of ‘women’ is very usefully referred to as ‘the persistent irritation’ (p. 336). I think this perfectly captures the trouble with women; how women can be, to borrow from Judith Butler (1990), ‘gender trouble’ at its most troubling. A genealogy of Women’s Studies is indeed a genealogy of troubling terms. Perhaps by responding to the argument with an ear, that is by saying what I hear when I hear ‘Women’s Studies’, is to suggest that the lessons of this object will depend on our relation to that object: a relationship that can be personal and idiosyncratic, but also depends on timing and location (I think the discussions about Women’s Studies reflect the US academic scene, and there is no error in that reflection). The book prompted me to reflect on my own relation to Women’s Studies even if I did not always recognise the version of Women’s Studies being presented (and we do not need to recognise each other’s versions to know they bear some relation). I remember discussions we had in Women’s Studies in the late 1990s about changing our name to Gender Studies: the discussions were not premised on an idea of progression, but were about strategies for continuation. If we had been confident that Gender Studies would attract more students, we probably would have agreed then to call ourselves that but precisely not because we were invested in Gender Studies. I knew that the university wanted us to be Gender Studies: gender seemed more neutral, less obviously a rebuttal, more easily translated as an object in an academic sense. So partly the objects we organised ourselves around were predicated on judgements about the university as a world we inhabited (not necessarily on how we thought of ourselves). Strategy can be thoughtful and questioning: what would work to secure our place in the context of the precarity of our situation? Institutional precarity is what can generate a struggle over terms: you have to struggle to reproduce the conditions of possibility for your own existence. It is possibly this background sense of precarity that is at stake when we become invested in objects as part of a social justice project: the sense that we have to

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become persistent if the object is to persist; that if our objects are hopes, they are fragile and depend on us for their future. I was left uneasy by some aspects of the book (which is not necessarily a criticism: who would want to be left easy by a book?). Object Lessons continually evokes or refers to itself in such a way that the book is attributed with agency: ‘in the context of Object Lessons’s overall intentions’ (p. 306); ‘Object Lessons has sought to convince’ (p. 318); ‘from the vantage of Object Lessons’ (p. 326); ‘Object Lessons has spent no time’ (p. 326); ‘Object Lessons has been interested’ (p. 326). Even the opening sentence of the book refers to the book by title (‘If Object Lessons accomplishes what I want’ (p. 1)). One wonders with Marx: does something become an object (one might specify: a commodity object) through reification, that is, by cutting the object off from, say, the body of the writer/ labourer? Of course writing depends on these cut-off points. One section of the book is entitled, ‘Objects and Their Wishes’. By the end of the book, I began to think of wishful objects in relation to our own work: when we make our work wish for us, are we externalising our wishes? Are objects letting us wish, or even care for what we wish for, by making our wishes reappear as if coming from outside of ourselves? Is that one of the lessons: to listen to objects in order to witness the unfolding of wishes into worlds? I was left wondering. The referencing of the book within the book happens with greater frequency towards the end: and it is of course an academic convention when summating to present books as the author rather than as authorised (perhaps this is a sign of our readiness to identify ourselves with our work). However, as a reader it can end up feeling as if the book has become about itself: that the book is about the creation of an-itself. Perhaps this bookish sense is how the book performs the argument that Wiegman is making: objects come right back at us, just when we think we are letting them go. Notes 1. Lauren Berlant first published ‘Cruel Optimism’ as a journal article in 2006. It has since become the core chapter of a book of the same name (2011). 2. I am referring here to an area of scholarship known as object orientated philosophy (OOP) or object oriented ontology (OOO). 3. See Koivunen (2001) and Clough (2007).

References Berlant, Lauren (2006) ‘Cruel Optimism’. Differences, 17(3): 20–36. Berlant, Lauren (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Clough, Patricia with Jean Halley (eds) (2007) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hemmings, Clare (2011) Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Koivunen, Anu (2001) ‘Preface: The Affective Turn?’. In: Anu Koivunen and Susanna Paasonen (eds) Affective Encounters: Rethinking Embodiment in Feminist Media Studies. Conference Proceedings. Turku: University of Turku, pp. 7–9.

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