Juan Monroy — Module on Berlant

For each of the following quotes from the assigned essay, interpret and summarize the quote in your own words—in about two to three sentences in length.

Be sure to watch the following television program and movie to better understand Berlant’s argument.

The Simpsons, “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” September 26, 1991.
- Available on CUNY OneDrive (22 min.)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, USA, 1939).
- Available on CUNY OneDrive (130 min.)

Lauren Berlant, “The Theory of Infantile Citizenship,” Public Culture 5 (1993): 395–410.

“The definitional field of citizenship—denoting either simple membership in a political identity category or a reflexive operation of agency or criticism—is precisely what is under contestation, as the norms of signifying in what we might call ‘mass nationality’ change the face of power in America (e.g., in the public discussion over town halls versus other modes of national ‘expert’ culture)” (398).
“When cinematic, literary, and televisual texts fictively represent ‘Washington’ as ‘America,’ they thus both theorize the conditions of political subjectivity in the United States and reflect on the popular media’s ways of constructing political knowledge in a dialectic of infantile citizenship and cynical reason” (399).
In two minutes of television time, and two hours of accelerated chronological time, then, the system cleaned itself out, and the cesspool itself becomes born again, returns “home” to the discourse of national growth. Nothing complicated about this.…The competent citizen knows this and learns how conveniently and flexibly to read between the lines, thus preserving both domains of utopian national identification and cynical practical citizenship” (406).
What is left is a “consciousness of the nation with no imagination of agency—apart from perhaps voting, here coded as a form of consumption… National knowledge has itself become a modality of national amnesia, and an incitement to forgetting that leaves simply the patriotic trace, for real and metaphorically infantilized citizens, that confirms that the nation exist and that we are in it” (407).