Object Lessons (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies) by Robyn Wiegman

Object Lessons (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies) Reviews

• 
  Kathleen

  Extremely self-indulgent. There's no way an assistant professor could get this book published. This book was published because Wiegman wrote it, not because it contributes something all that necessary. Also, the histories are pretty selective and partial, which kind of undermines many of her claims. Overall, I really wasn't into this book.
• 
  Eavan Wong

  In a nutshell, theorists are taking themselves too seriously because they are politically anxious.
  
  “Interrupting the progress narrative is not the same thing as undoing it.” (69) As such, Wiegman’s endeavor in Object Lessons is neither to offer a “critique” as it is paradigmatically practiced nor to denounce the legitimacy and efficacy of critique once and for all. Instead, it is to deliberate on the ideological discourse and affective atmosphere of “identity knowledges” that establish the “truth” of legitimacy and efficacy of disciplinary knowledge production from an insider’s epistemic position. Knowledge production is a process of affective investment too often reduced to its argumentative form. Wiegman’s project is to ask, how and why the feminist scholar gets attached to her identity object as a site of political struggle in an affectively hegemonic manner? Or, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s word, how does the contemporary production of “identity knowledges” amount to a sort of “paranoid reading”, which seeks endlessly to anticipate power, to be “critical enough”, to set itself against any surprise, to reduce its affective registers to negative ones like pain, melancholia, or violence, and to continuously reassure itself of its political efficacy by the mere theoretical detection and exposure of power? Here, the equivalence between feminist knowledge production and “doing justice”, which confers privileged authority to such paranoid mode of knowledge production filled with the knowing subject’s forever overflowing political desire, is put into question through symptomatic reading.
  
  One thing that I found unsatisfactory of, or expect to learn more in such reading, are the interrogation of “ideology” in Wiegman’s approach. Her two chapters are descriptive rather than explanatory, leaving the question of the configuration of affect unaddressed. That is, what motivates and produces the paranoid, the compulsive progress narrative, the idealist promises of social effectiveness? Here, many of the symptoms of disciplinary “identity knowledges” reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s critique of modern intellectuals, commodity fetishism, and the concept of progress from the left. From what I noticed, the resemblances between the affective structures Benjamin and Wiegman observe are as follow:
  1) Socio-political positions: Benjamin utilizes the image of flaneur to illuminate the position of the modern intellectual: he may have social prominence, but not dominance. Wiegman’s paranoid academics, likewise, possess social and intellectual capital but not political dominance (instead, they face a rather politically hostile world outside academia).
  2) The political economy of intellectual production: For Benjamin’s flaneur-as-writer, his protests against the social order are never more than gestures to sell his work because (not surprisingly under capitalism) he needs money. For the advocates for institutionalizing new identities or categories, they strategically negotiate resources and culture within the neoliberal university (78).
  3) The function of author-as-producer: The flaneur in capitalist society is a fiction writer, who does not depict the true conditions (esp. inequality) of urbanity but diverted readers from the tedium of reality. The critic that Wiegman observes produce unrealistic promises premised on the fantasy of critical subjectivity (24) in sharp contrast with the “surprising, unnerving, and conflicted” subject in real world (13).
  More broadly speaking, the attachment to the knowledge-commodity and the compulsive progress narrative in Wiegman’s description are also symptoms of capitalist modernity centered in Benjamin’s work. This raises the question: to what extent is such affective hegemonic of critique a result of the marketization of universities, in which knowledge is something to be sold, to be tailored to market demand (here, for political efficacy), and to preserve capitalist ideology, including its affective forms?
• 
  Yoel

  This is a must-read book.
• 
  Mandy

  3.5 stars - This book is clearly written and vigorously argued, making it quite the whirlwind to read and process. I'm glad to have read it, but auto-critique isn't my favorite form of scholarly work, so the parts that I found to be interesting too quickly slipped from my brain.
• 
  Tori

  Will have to revisit this