“When your cords were tense”: Giving up on, the Giving Ground

This essay lingers in the texture of Judith Butler’s writing for the sake of illuminating interlocutory particularity as a scenographic function rather than reliable internal reserve. Here, spatial agitation is experienced, whether or not consciousness can receive it, as intrapsychic metabolism gone awry, recalling Butler’s attention in their earlier work to the relational scrupulousness of Emily Dickinson and Henry James. Read alongside the buckling formalisms of descriptive exigency, perceptual groping, and the affective complexity of sincerity (in Lauren Berlant’s late writing, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and the HBO series White Lotus, respectively), this Emersonian account of Giving an Account of Oneself reflects, for the sake of thinking more closely about and within both the fiction of personal expression and the impersonal medium in which it is embedded, on the intimacy hydraulics with which our efforts at candor are pervaded and managerially counterposed.