Many of our essayists fix on the senses as a revitalizing domain with which to chart theories and concepts of history, aesthetics, and experience. The words power and ideology don't make it into these paradigms much, and questions shaped around social inequalities are either presumed or subsumed in these phrasings. Class inequality and labor-related subjectivities, for example, are now increasingly embedded in capitalism and globalization; and, I think, but I'm not sure, critical race, feminist, and queer studies concerns are covered, covered over, or articulated in more general conceptualizations of embodiment, a term that designates the closeness to the body of social, experiential, and aesthetic affect. Because these sublimated categories of historical subordination were not formed as aesthetic events, and because they trouble the distance from the body that traditionally secures the prestige of critical thought, it is not surprising that a certain disenchantment would fall upon Critical Inquiry's writers and readers, motivating returns to the elegance of a greater distance, whether couched as the new aestheticism, a better empiricism, or rigorous theory. 
    Were it not for Mary Poovey's and Teresa de Lauretis's finely tuned statements, this shift would seem (among our essayists, anyway) to have happened without comment. De Lauretis argues that the ambitions of the new social movements were "sustained by a hope that today appears enmeshed in neoliberalism" (p. 000). Surely the uneven global history of liberalism's incommensurateness with itself in theory and in practice requires a more dynamic perspective. I take that to be the promise of de Lauretis's great phrase "the time for theory is always now" (p. 000). "Now," though, is not merely the definitional province of the World Bank, the IMF, nor, really, the U.S. capitalist/Christian state and all its others. Critics and pundits alike generate apprehensions of the present discursively. The present is something given back to us by those who reflect on it; not available to experience as such, the sense and the sense experience of the present are effects of critical practice.
    De Lauretis herself accurately notes, "thinking...originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events" (p. 000). So, if one does ride the wave that turns political fatigue to conceptual aversion, isn't that shift, along with the widespread backlash against theory, also "enmeshed in neoliberalism"? Perhaps conceptual fatigue is inevitable—on the model of metal fatigue, which denotes the exhaustion metal experiences on having to bear the burden of too much weight. But I am also reminded of David Wellbery's observation that theoretical projects (he's referring to poststructuralism) tend to be deemed exhausted precisely when they're poised to do their perhaps now unglamorous work.¹
    There is much more to be said on this topic, of theory and embodied histories of the present. Who is embodied, and how, and what is served by the sensual turn? Can we think about the relation of critical optimism to our vertiginous awareness of escalating violence in ways that continue to challenge our professional contexts? Or is it the case, as the New York Times opined recently, that this is a time of resistance without a critical social counterimaginary?² One could dilate infinitely on these questions. My presumption throughout will be that the critical realm of the senses encompasses what the senses do empirically; what feelings are made out to mean; and which forces, meanings, and practices are magnetized by concepts of affect and emotion. As in In the Realm of the Senses itself, the construction of new visceral practices in the context of massive social upheaval, perceived as both violence and aesthetic pleasure, is the scene from which I write.
    I propose for further discussion a few other approaches to these questions, noting at the outset that the matter of professional critical theorists' proper objects, projects, and attitudes—most deftly expressed in the pieces by Robert von Hallberg and Harry Harootunian—foregrounds a crucial concern. It must be the case that increasing pundit- and legislator-centered disrespect for the humanities has had some influence on our shifting attention to objects/scenes like emotions that can be misrecognized as universals or, less grandly, as things perceivable through common sense. One could make the same argument about the current literary critical embrace of ethics, which, whatever else it opens up, just sounds so comforting, so fundable, so theoretically palatable, and so politics-lite. Some of my best friends are ethicists (well, just one), don't get me wrong; it's not the field itself that concerns me but the impulse to recement individuality-with-consciousness at the center of critical thought.
    For the most part, my estimable colleagues have written affirmative essays about critical work and its futures. Whether or not they propose proper objects and better horizons for critical thought, their view is that critics and criticism will continue to sound as we currently do—smart, abstract, and slightly overabsorbed. Only my dear departed colleague, Harootunian, writes in a crackling tone of voice, arguing for working beyond the national, regional, and methodological norms of disciplinary expertise, refusing the backlash against theoretical work, and taking the risk of engaging with the history of the present. At the same time, he pushes aside the usually cool distance of the thinker with a series of jarring rhetorical moves, as though the intellectual performance of composure were a threat to occupying an analytical edge that might very well cut in any direction, back at the author himself or at the audience of readers.³ The sharp edge of intellectual passion opens up what you can't control; I love thought that welcomes the risk of formlessness, the unpredictable consequences of ideas. That's what critical theory does when it is done well. Truisms are cut into, things come undone, and what Gayatri Spivak calls "provisional generalizations" that make new contexts for knowledge threaten the transparency of expertise along with the phenomena under analytic scrutiny.⁴ Those who turn away from a scene of thought performed in unusual modes of critical intensity, theoretical acumen, or referential familiarity miss an opportunity for surprise learning. On the other hand, as Harootunian argues, such resistance is well rewarded professionally. As someone wrote in a memo once, we want to be at the cutting edge, but not go too far.
    But, not to be carried away entirely by metaprofessional polemic, I extract two issues from the pile I've amassed that address the production of emotion as critical inquiry's object/scene. One: to talk about the senses is to involve oneself in a discussion of the optimism of attachment, the sociability of persons across things, spaces, and practices. It represents a turn to the human without resurrecting, necessarily, a metaphysical subject, for sensual experience and emotions are usually thought about, these days, in contexts of enunciation and experience—the nation, the law, the family, religion, mass culture, or aesthetic ambition, for example.⁵ Emotionology usually intends a discussion about processes of belonging and reflexivity, of selves oriented toward worlds that are organized by forms that provide material and subjective senses of continuity.⁶
    Paradoxically, then, much of the best work on the senses means to deuniversalize them, rooting them somewhere in a space of time. Miriam Hansen's work in this area is exemplary.⁷ But what remains is the implicit optimism of critical thought that presumes the clarity of the senses and their phenomenological and historical place in world building. Herbert Marcuse called this phenomenon "affirmative culture," a phrase rarely applied to the kind of critical work in this journal's pages but nonetheless, I am arguing, all too relevant to its practices.⁸
    It seems hard to talk about the sociality of emotion without presuming the clarity and coherence both of it and the world in which it is intelligible. It is hard for thought to abandon its desire to intensify the thingness of its thing and thus its value. After all, as Hansen argues, the training of the senses is the bourgeois project of aesthetics, bourgeois not standing here for privileged in the "bad" sense but as a marker for the pleasures of capitalist modes of distinction. Bourgeois suggests that the aesthetic of modernity always involves a market, even if the name of the value it gives its objects of exchange is merit.
    At the same time, aesthetic experience gifts the good life with a different pacing than the working life, donating to the worker the privilege of slowness, of time to have a thought/experience whose productivity is subjective, connecting the sensorium to something that feels noninstrumental, absorbing, and self-affirming. Slowing down is a legendary tactic of antibourgeois and antinormative activity generally, but it turns out to be the privilege of the consuming subject as well. The double person of whom Marcuse speaks, who receives slow time as free time secured by hard work, is not countering any norms.⁹ Aesthetic and critical works that seek to promote overcoming what are called the immediate gratifications of mass society are, mainly, in perfect consonance with its modes of privilege even as they remain a marker of a different, or better, pace for living. Even when the content of aesthetic experience is disturbing in a utopian, avant-garde, or just difficult, counternormative way, one cannot say about it that its critical distance interferes with the reproduction of violence in whatever form.¹⁰ Poovey, Hansen, Frances Ferguson, and de Lauretis demonstrate this beautifully.
    I propose that we turn optimism itself into a topic probably best phrased as collective attachment. Optimism is a way of describing a certain futurism that implies continuity with the present, but as it does not always feel good, attachment seems a better way to describe the pleasures of repetition without presuming their affective reverb.¹¹ This is Marcuse's point: How is it that the "bad life" appears to so many as the good life yet unrealized? What relation is there between this mode of optimistic negativity or deferral and the pleasurable distances of aesthetic self-cultivation? At the same time that emotions bring us toward others (even internal others, say the psychologists) in a way that merges self-continuity with the continuities of repetition and futurity, there is a whole field of negativity that is not the opposite of cultivated emotion. We need to give more thought to the modes of subjectivity that are disorganized, or noncoherent, or negative, or lagging in a more profound way than even Freudian nachträglichkeit or deferred action would suggest.
    My second point follows from the first one, then, which argues that critical theory and criticism's investment in cultivating consciousness as a good in itself is, among other things, related to the anxieties of keeping critical culture affirmative. At the same time, whether the experience of available aesthetic phenomena provides beautiful, sublime, or palliative relief from the business of creating value for others, along with this relief is a whole field of negative emotion. Negative emotion is a formal category, related to bad moods and depressions the way attachment related to optimism above.
    For the last few years a project titled Feminism Unfinished has developed a national program of local cells, dedicated to a variety of topics; one of these is Public Feelings.¹² The Chicago group calls itself a feel tank rather than a think tank, only partly as a joke. Comprised of artists and academics, the feel tank is organized around the thought that public spheres are affect worlds at least as much as they are effects of rationality and rationalization. This is a collaborative project, and collaboration is one of our topics. We study theoretical, historical, and aesthetic materials engaged with the affects and emotions. Right now, we are amassing for future research the negative political emotions because most U.S. citizens and occupants have abandoned participating in the political sphere and because many who do, say, merely vote, do it without optimism for the kind of transformative agency that might/ought to have been a possibility. Some of these emotions: detachment, numbness, vagueness, confusion, bravado, exhaustion, apathy, discontent, coolness, hopelessness, and ambivalence.
    Our instinct is that these political emotions are often experienced as disconnection, consciousness at a distance. In the tradition of the negative dialectic, but also in other ways, what does it mean to think about the aversive emotions of negativity as kinds of attachment? We have hosted, for example, an International Day of the Politically Depressed. What does it mean to think of negativity not as an effect of bad power but as a way of being critical without consciousness, as we currently understand its cultivated form? How is it possible to think about cultivated subjectivity in the aesthetic sense without implying uplift, progress, or errancy? Situated in our own contradictions, we are also restless, angry, mournful, and strangely optimistic activists of the U.S. political sphere. I close with the slogan that will be on our first cache of T-shirts and stickers: Depressed?...It Might Be Political.

1.  See David E. Wellbery, foreword to Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif., 1990), pp. vii–xxxiii.
    2.  See John Leland, "A Movement, Yes, but No Counterculture," New York Times, 23 Mar. 2003, sect. 9, p. 1.
    3.  See Adam Phillips, "On Composure," On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp. 42–46. Phillips argues deftly that intellectuals' habits of composure are (overdetermined) modes of control.
    4.  See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, 1988), pp. 197–221.
    5.  The bibliography is enormous. For recent entries see, for example, Peter Goodrich, Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (Berkeley, 1995) and "Epistolary Justice: The Love Letter as Law," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 9 (Summer 1997): 245–96; Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago, 1999); Representing the Passions: Histories, Bodies, Visions, ed. Richard Meyer (Los Angeles, 2003); William M. Reddy, "Emotional Liberty: Politics and History in the Anthropology of Emotions," Cultural Anthropology 14 (May 1999): 256–88 and The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York, 2001); Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, 1999); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C., 2002); Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002); Gillian Bendelow and Simon J. Williams, Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues (New York, 1998); Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York, 1999); and Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana, Ill., 2002).
    6. The classic work on emotionology is Peter N. and Carol Z. Stearns, "Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards," American Historical Review 90 (Oct. 1985): 813–36. See also, most recently, An Emotional History of the United States, ed. Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York, 1998).
    7. See Miriam Bratu Hansen, "The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism," Modernism / Modernity 6 (Apr. 1999): 59–77.
    8. See Herbert Marcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture," Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1968), pp. 88–133.
    9. See Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1966), pp. 21–54.
    10. I refer here to the emerging importance of the study of trauma and human rights in the academy and of what we might call terror films in the U.S. popular public sphere, which are remaking traditional mainstream genres from horror to melodrama. What matters, in both of these domains, is the incomprehensibility of escalating violence everywhere. But the incitements to paranoia and conscience do not dissolve the affirmative impulses of consumer survivalism.
    11. For a fuller critique, situated in queer theory, of the normativity of optimism, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (forthcoming).
    12. Feel Tank Chicago has a complex bureaucratic history. It is a cell in a larger system first generated by the collaborative effort of Janet Jakobsen of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy of the Department