Lauren Berlant, ‘The Female

Complaint’
Anna Poletti, ‘Coaxing an intimate public: Life
narrative in digital storytelling’, Continuum:
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 25:01, 73-
83; 2011
• Lauren Berlant defines an intimate public ‘as a
space of mediation through which the particular
is refracted through the general. It is a space of
recognition and reflection.’
• In an intimate public, an emotional connection of
some sort is established.
• It consists of consumers of particular cultural
texts who de facto share a worldview and an
emotional knowledge that come from their more
or less shared historical experience. (Women and
romance for e.g.)
• The narratives that make up this intimate public
express the history that is common to the
consumers and in turn entail conventions of
belonging.
• Those narratives also provide the emotional
matrix that allows people to make sense of who
they are in the world and facilitates social
connections between groups of people through
participation in a common commodity culture
• It provides scripts for those people within that
public to understand how to make sense of their
lives.
• It is made up of non-dominant groups, generally
women, and enables a fluid affective
identification among strangers that opens into
the sense of belonging to a community that is
shaped by the promise of assuaging, securing,
policing and exploring what it means to live as an
anonymous being
• It entails a common fund of experience and
enables a critical engagement with the real
world and provides the resources to juggle
with life as an ‘x’.
• First-person narrative common in an intimate
public
• An intimate public operates when a market opens
up to a bloc of consumers, claiming to circulate
texts and things that express those people’s
particular core interests and desires. When this
kind of “culture of circulation” takes hold,
participants in the intimate public feel as though
it expresses what is common among them, a
subjective likeness that seems to emanate from
their history and their ongoing attachments and
actions.
• The intimate public’s relation to politics and the
political realm is complex and uneven.
• Members of an intimate public are constantly
caught up in a power dynamics in a desire to
forge a sense of belonging and to fullfil their
longing to live their lives in a part. way.
• Women share a set of experiences that leads to
the need for intimate, confidential and
supportive conversations and this interaction is
made possible through consumption of particular
cultural texts
• Those cultural products may not have been
written by women nor do they need to be
about women whose lives necessarily echo
those who consume them.
• Women have chosen to consume ‘women’s
culture’ because they have an inclination for
versions of personal life, of the intimate that
may in one way or another derive from real
life experiences
• Much of women’s culture is cast as fantasy
and is often grandiloquent and necessitates a
suspension of disbelief
• Women’s emotional lives, what is intensely
personal are accounted for in the cultural
texts, and provide the experience that are
shared amongst a community for whom those
experiences are meaningful.
• The cleavage between the worlds imagined in
the products tagged as women’s culture and
those in which ‘real’ women live may be quite
significant but they allow women to aspire to
the intimacy of belonging that appears
accessible to all women.
• It de-isolates, it creates a ‘collective story
about the personal’.
• Experience one’s story as being part of the
‘social’ even if the connections established
may be flimsy, irregular and ambivalent.
• Commonality of women’s experiences.
• Commodified genres of intimacy such as
Oprah-type chat show or chick-lit become the
platform for girl-talk and develops into an
intimate public.
• They provide common frames to understand
what it means to live as women.
• Sentimentality and complaint are two ends of
spectrum of emotional states that intimate
publics generate.
• Feminism jostles in between.
• Berlant calls this intimate public-
’juxtapolitical’ because it lives next to the
political realm and from time to time,
trespasses onto the domain of the political
• But mostly providing an emotional dimension
to and a certain perspective onto the political.
• Berlant is mostly concerned about the
ambivalent relations intimate public have with
politics.
• The emotional investment within an intimate
public refract the emotional connections that
enable the imagination of a nation
• It enables alternative networks of survival and
sympathy.
• From the 1830s, an intimate ps of femininity
constituted the first mass-mediated public of
disenfrenchised people in the USA
• Moved away from the realm of political
without challenging the unequal power
hierarchies whithin which women were
located.
• Sentimental public-assoc. With non-dominant
public-women’s suffering, emotional expertise
and practical agency.
• Even the debate around women’s vote was
dominated by women’s emotional selves
which would dominate their choices
• Politics was displaced to the realm of feelings
to explain injustice or when social change is
obfuscated.
• The offer of the simplicity of the feeling of
rich continuity with a vaguely defined set of
like others is often the central affective
magnet of an intimate public.
• IP are organized by fantasies of transcending,
dissolving, or refunctioning the obstacles that
shape their historical conditions
• Cultural products that constitute an intimate
public generate aesthetic and spiritual scenes
that generate relief from the political.
• In this discursive field, the emotional labor of
women places them at the center of the story
of what counts as life, regardless of what lives
women actually live.
• The conjuncture of family and romance so
structures the emergence of modern sexuality,
with its conflation of sexual and emotional
truths, and in that nexus, femininity marks the
scene of the reproduction of life as a project.
• The turn to sentimental rhetoric at moments of
social anxiety constitutes a generic wish for an
unconflicted world, one wherein structural
inequities, not emotions and intimacies, are
epiphenomenal.
• In this imaginary world the sentimental subject is
connected to others who share the same sense
that the world is out of joint, without necessarily
having the same view of the reasons or solutions.
• The context of the reproduction of life focuses on
scenes of ordinary survival, finding satisfaction in
minor pleasures and major fantasies.
• The fact that a narrative of a subaltern’s survival
can be read as a romance that heralds justice for
the collective seems to provide evidence that the
system isn’t all that rigid and that we are all
human, facing the same obstacles with the same
desires.
• It is a view of the universality of the emotional
experience of struggle and survival that does
not ask if anyone in the congregation objects,
a sacrosanct aspect of sentimentality—is that
“underneath” we are all alike.
• Women identify with each other as women
despite the myriad economic, social, and
political forces that create differences and
antagonisms among them
• Digital storytelling is one example of IP. It
contributes to the prevalence of intimacy and
affect in the construction of contemporary
citizenship (Berlant, 1997; 1998; 2008)
• It explores the relationships between personal
experiences of structural social and political
inequalities, given its narrative emphasis on
closure, affect and universality.
• Digital storytelling- a particular mode of
autobiographical storytelling, focused on affective
connection with the audience.
• ‘Digital storytelling’- the production of life
narrative through intensive workshops.
• This practice produces digital stories: audio-visual
vignettes of approximately two to five minutes in
length which present a first-person voiceover in
conjunction with visual material sourced from the
personal archive of its author.
• The majority of scholarly work undertaken on digital
storytelling has been concerned with its capacity to
bring the voices of ordinary and marginalized groups
into the public sphere (Couldry 2008).
• The work of John Hartley has also extensively
considered the role of digital storytelling as a tool for
fostering digital literacy both as an end in itself (Hartley
et al. 2008) and as a means of contributing to the move
away from the dominance of professional media and
its attendant expert paradigm brought about by recent
technological and cultural shifts (Hartley 2009).
• Digital storytelling is a means of occasioning
life narrative through which a range of
institutions participate in the construction of
an intimate public.
• As Nick Couldry has observed, the importance
of reinvigorating practices of storytelling
about our experiences as a means of
addressing ‘the disarticulation between
individual narratives and social or political
narratives’ is fundamental to digital
storytelling as a movement aimed at effecting
change in social and political spheres through
the inclusion of marginalized voices (2008,
388).
• Smith and Watson (1996) are concerned
explicitly with the rise of life narrative in
constructions of American identity but much
of their characterization of the uses of life
story holds for other media-rich democratic
societies such as Australia, the United
Kingdom and Western Europe.
• They analyse the role life narratives have in in
the construction of national identity as an
imagined community.
• They cite the discourse regarding the
‘promise’ of a free life in a meritocracy which
dominates American national identity, but is
underscored by the struggle for inclusion and
recognition of genocide by the original
inhabitants of the land (4–6).
• Their work, along with that of scholars such as
Paul John Eakin (1999), make a significant claim
for recognition of the role of life story in
everyday life at the level of the social, the
political and the individual’s identity.
• The need for digital stories to have emotional
content is also framed in terms of the ability
to hold the audience’s attention.
• The fundamental emotional paradigms – of
death and our sense of loss, of love and
loneliness, of confidence and vulnerability, of
acceptance and rejection are presented as the
features that enhance a story’s ability to
engage its audience and thus be intelligible.
• As one of a number of contemporary theorists
currently working on the proliferation of publics
and the variety of ways in which they are
constituted, Lauren Berlant opens up new ways of
thinking about the intersection of the personal and
the political in contemporary culture and media
(1997, 2008).

•
• In The Female Complaint she makes a claim
for the potential for (a kind of) formalist
criticism to contribute to ‘an analysis of the
mechanisms that enable the reproduction of
normativity not as a political program, but as
a structure of feeling, and as an affect’ (2008,
266).
• At the heart of Berlant’s analysis of women’s
culture, and the theorization of intimate
publics, is the tracking of the movement
between the personal, the affective, the social
and the political through the consumption of a
range of texts (including films, novels,
television shows, advertising, and citizenship
training manuals), the modes of identification
they foster.
• And the kinds of aspirations they make
possible.
• Berlant looks at the role played by sentimental
narratives in an intimate public, and the
capacity that these narratives have for both
sustaining and limiting demands for the
recognition of experiences and ways of being
different from those traditionally given ‘voice’
in the public sphere.
• Berlant observes that the expression, or merely the
identification, of the personal gets mistaken for doing
the work of the political, suggesting a critique of
second wave feminism’s slogan, ‘the personal is
political’.
• For digital storytelling, the question of whether the
outward projection of individualized experiences of
revelation generates a ‘passive . . . civic-minded ideal
of compassion’ in its audience is a critical one for the
movement’s capacity to contribute to the
diversification of voices in the (elite) public sphere
where structural political change occurs.
• John Hartley raises this issue when he suggests
that digital storytelling needs to be able to be
used for more than the communication of
personal experience to reach its potential to bring
about the ‘emancipation of large numbers of
otherwise excluded (or neglected) people into
the “freedom of the internet”’ in a way that
meaningfully challenges how knowledge is
constituted, understood and disseminated
through the media (2009, 139–40).
• Digital storytelling, as a programme for the
production of life narrative, brings its
participants into publicness via the genre of
digital story.
• One reason why digital storytelling can be
understood as an example of an intimate public is
that it does achieve the important effect of
‘legitimat[ing] qualities, ways of being, and entire
lives that have otherwise been deemed puny or
discarded.
• It creates situations where those qualities can
appear as luminous’ (Berlant 2008, 3) ; and this is
evidenced by the testimonials available on a
range of websites showcasing digital storytelling
projects and watching the stories themselves.
• In media-rich countries digital storytelling is creating communities
of mediated storytelling (Lundby 2008).

• However, for Berlant, ‘What makes a public sphere intimate is an

expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share
a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from
a broadly common historical experience’ (2008, viii).

• The digital storytelling movement is clear in its desire to make a

contribution to the public sphere, and what marks that contribution
as an attempt to create an intimate public is its insistence on the
preexistence of ‘story’ and the universality of themes such as ‘life,
loss, belonging, hope for the future, friendship and love’ (Burgess
2006, 212).
• These themes, posited as self-evident but
actually the product of the movement’s own
discourse, are presented as the common
historical experience shared by the
participants.
• With an explicit focus on bringing the voices of
ordinary and marginalized people into the
public sphere, digital storytelling has been
taken up by a range of public institutions
seeking to respond to the changing political
and social environment and its attendant
suspicion about authoritative, elite sources of
knowledge (Matthews 2007; Thumim 2009).
• It creates an experience of inclusion and
community building which ‘flourishes as a
porous, affective scene of identification among
strangers that promises a certain kind of
experience of belonging’ (Berlant 2008, viii).
• This promise occurs at the level of defining the
site of life storytelling as authentic, powerful and
dealing with universal themes that unite the
community.
• Texts have formal elements designed to foster
identification and reverie.
• This affective response to the process of
making and watching digital stories ‘provides a
complex of consolation, confirmation,
discipline, and discussion about how to live’
(Berlant 2008, viii).
• Berlant’s analysis of the mediation of intimacy
through institutions (including the media) and
the reciprocal relationships such mediation
creates between the personal and the
collective provides a productive way to frame
the complexity of coaxing life narrative into
the public sphere through a pedagogical
practice such as digital storytelling.
•
• Analysing digital storytelling as an attempt to
create an intimate public sphere allows us to
remain attentive to the issues of power
attendant in institutional environments
(Thumim 2009), but also to the structures of
feeling that the texts and practices of digital
storytelling create.