{"id":149844,"date":"2023-08-12T20:27:17","date_gmt":"2023-08-13T04:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=149844"},"modified":"2023-08-13T04:26:17","modified_gmt":"2023-08-13T12:26:17","slug":"cruel-optimism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=149844","title":{"rendered":"Cruel Optimism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gabriel Winant writes for N+1 in 2015<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\nAffect theory\u2019s center of gravity is found near this question of happiness. If there is one contemporary scholar who looms over the field, it is Lauren Berlant, an English professor at the University of Chicago. Her central concept is also the title of her 2011 book, Cruel Optimism. It is a distinctively contemporary feeling, Berlant argues, the sticky affective residue left by the slow decay of once-stable forms of the good life: \u201c\u2018Cruel optimism\u2019 names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.\u201d The result is a kind of purgatory. However harmful any individual attachment might be\u200a\u2014\u200ato a relationship, or an ambition, or a way of life\u200a\u2014\u200agiving up on it would shatter the personality that has been organized around it. \u201cWhatever the content of the attachment is,\u201d Berlant writes, \u201cthe continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject\u2019s sense of what it means to keep on living and to look forward to being in the world.\u201d Taking on an impossible debt load to buy a house or go to college, because you won\u2019t have a stable or normative or meaningful adult life if you don\u2019t\u200a\u2014\u200athis is cruel optimism. The graduate student\u2019s single-minded, misery-inducing pursuit of one of the few remaining tenure-track jobs\u200a\u2014\u200athis, too, is cruel optimism. (It\u2019s no coincidence that affect theory so precisely captures academic life; academia, just like the rest of the economy, is undergoing the process of the colonization of feeling.) Perhaps the grandest example of cruel optimism is found in our collective relationship to looming climate catastrophe. What we have done is surely terrible, but apparently we find it less terrible to keep on as before than to imagine other ways of living.<\/p>\n

At a more general level, what \u201ccruel optimism\u201d describes is the way life under neoliberalism feels stuck in a stalled-out temporality. Theoretical advances are typically products of moments of great social change. Yet affect theory in general\u200a\u2014\u200aand some of its sharpest political criticism in particular\u200a\u2014\u200aemerges from inertia. Cruel optimism flowers in the shade cast by the overhang of an unresolved past over an absent future. We are, Berlant argues, picking over the ruins of a good life that we cannot restore and will not leave behind. It is as if the whole society were living in Grey Gardens.<\/p>\n

Berlant\u2019s best-known specific case is her reading of mass obesity, which she describes as a form of \u201cslow death.\u201d The poor and the working class, she notes, know that they will not live as long as their social superiors. The bourgeois imperative of self-care, the efficient reproduction of one\u2019s own body, has become at this point a cruel joke. To eat unhealthily is not simply an act of direct resistance, for Berlant, but a form of \u201clateral agency.\u201d Food is one of life\u2019s few reliable pleasures, and its consumption offers a form of community and belonging. \u201cUnder a regime of crisis ordinariness, life feels truncated, more like desperate doggy-paddling than like a magnificent swim out to the horizon,\u201d she writes. \u201cEating adds up to something, many things: maybe the good life, but usually a sense of well-being that spreads out for a moment, not a projection toward a future.\u201d Berlant\u2019s prose, always a bit slanted, seems to enact the kind of lateral agency she describes: \u201cParadoxically, of course, at least during this phase of capital, there is less of a future when one eats without an orientation toward it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hua Tsu wrote for the New Yorker in 2019<\/a>: <\/p>\n

* In \u201cCruel Optimism,\u201d Berlant moved from theorizing about genres of fiction to theorizing about \u201cgenres for life.\u201d We like to imagine that our life follows some kind of trajectory, like the plot of a novel, and that by recognizing its arc we might, in turn, become its author. But often what we feel instead is a sense of precariousness\u2014a gut-level suspicion that hard work, thrift, and following the rules won\u2019t give us control over the story, much less guarantee a happy ending. For all that, we keep on hoping, and that persuades us to keep on living.<\/p>\n

The persistence of the American Dream, Berlant suggests, amounts to a cruel optimism, a condition \u201cwhen something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing.\u201d We are accustomed to longing for things that we know are bad for us, like cigarettes or cake. Perhaps your emotional state is calibrated around a sports team, like the New York Knicks, and despite hopes that next season will be better you vaguely understand that you\u2019ll be let down anyway. But our Sisyphean pursuit of the good life has higher stakes, and its amalgam of fantasy and futility is something that we process as experience before we rationalize it in thought. These feelings, Berlant says, are the \u201cbody\u2019s response to the world, something you\u2019re always catching up to.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Shortly after the publication of \u201cCruel Optimism,\u201d Berlant began to sense a subtle, atmospheric disturbance. In September of 2012, she offered a diagnosis on her blog:<\/p>\n

“Many of you would say that Donald Trump was excluded from the Republican convention, has no traction as a political candidate, and is generally viewed as a clown whose spewing occasionally hits in the vicinity of an opinion that a reasonable person could defend. But I am here to tell you that he actually won the Republican nomination and is dominating the airwaves during this election season. He is not doing this with \u201cdark money\u201d or Koch-like influence peddling. He has done this the way the fabled butterfly does it, as its wing-flapping sets off revolutions.”<\/p>\n

* …\u201caffect theory.\u201d Under its influence, critics attended to affective charge. They saw our world as shaped not simply by narratives and arguments but also by nonlinguistic effects\u2014by mood, by atmosphere, by feelings.<\/p>\n

…In sentimental fiction, we encounter righteous solutions to problems that feel unresolvable in real life. Berlant held that American popular culture had been built, layer by layer, from \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin\u201d to \u201cThe Simpsons,\u201d upon the assumption that identifying with \u201csomeone else\u2019s stress, pain, or humiliated identity\u201d could change you. \u201cPopular culture relies on keeping sacrosanct this aspect of sentimentality\u2014that \u2018underneath\u2019 we are all alike,\u201d she observed.<\/p>\n

* As Berlant later wrote, in \u201cCruel Optimism,\u201d \u201cThe political depressive might be cool, cynical, shut off, searingly rational or averse, and yet, having adopted a mode that might be called detachment, may not really be detached at all, but navigating an ongoing and sustaining relationship to the scene and circuit of optimism and disappointment.\u201d<\/p>\n

* We dream of swimming toward a beautiful horizon, but in truth, Berlant evocatively observed, we are constantly \u201cdogpaddling around a space whose contours remain obscure.\u201d What stories do we tell ourselves in order to stay afloat?<\/p>\n

* “All attachment is optimistic,\u201d Berlant argued in \u201cCruel Optimism,\u201d because it forces us out of ourselves. From there, we enter \u201cinto the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.\u201d The challenge is finding configurations that don\u2019t simply reproduce the same old patterns of life.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Erin Maglaque writes for the May 18, 2023 LROB<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* \u2018In academia,\u2019 Lauren Berlant wrote, \u2018reputation is gossip about who had the ideas.\u2019 <\/p>\n

* Berlant was less concerned with traditional objects of literary critique \u2013 plot, narrative, character \u2013 than with the mood and atmosphere that pervaded a text: the more ordinary the feelings, the more seriously Berlant took them.<\/p>\n

* Berlant reads Obama and Oprah as part of a shared national sentimentality: \u2018Oprah\u2019s sentimentality always abjures the political: always sees change as coming from within; always sees obstacles to change as internal wounds and not structural blockages.\u2019 In a similar way, Obama \u2018wanted to believe that through him we could dissolve affectively what\u2019s antagonistic structurally\u2019 \u2013 that is, the long history of American racism \u2013 \u2018and then bring politics to make structural what had been achieved [first] in … \u201ctrue feeling\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n

* In 2016, Berlant showed Obama\u2019s \u2018Yes We Can\u2019 advertisement to undergraduates who were too young to have followed the 2008 presidential campaign. They began to cry. Until that moment, Berlant writes, the students \u2018didn\u2019t know they had national sentimentality\u2019. I once took my English boyfriend to a minor league baseball game, and he welled up at \u2018The Star-Spangled Banner\u2019. That\u2019s the power of American affect for you.<\/p>\n

* Berlant\u2019s most influential book, Cruel Optimism (2011), describes the \u2018relation which exists when something you desire is an obstacle to your flourishing\u2019. Romantic love. Fast food. The Democratic Party. Prestige TV. Each offers comforts and securities. Each diminishes us in large or small ways, makes false promises, prevents us from striving for something better. Yet we continue to strive, often blaming ourselves when things go wrong. Cruel optimism explains why you continue to accept casual contracts, hoping for a more secure position. It explains why you continue to \u2018work\u2019 on your marriage or save for a down payment on a house. It explains why you just spent \u00a36 on a coffee. Cruel optimism might even explain why you decide to have children, or why you vote. Berlant\u2019s critical theory serves not only as an explanatory paradigm for neoliberalism, say, but for your own little life.<\/p>\n

Berlant\u2019s central example is the so-called obesity pandemic in the US, which they argue has been framed in American policy and popular culture as a crisis of will. If only the obese person would diet, or exercise, or cook certain kinds of food, or eat at home; if only they would exercise sovereignty over their desires, they could become an ideal American citizen. For Berlant, obesity offers a way to think about agency. Individual sovereignty, they argue, is itself cruelly optimistic: the fantasy that we are in control of ourselves is a legacy of the Enlightenment ideal of the political subject. Obese people, in Berlant\u2019s analysis, don\u2019t act according to this fantasy and are therefore vilified and pathologised in American culture. Fatness is physical proof of the individual\u2019s resistance to what, under neoliberal capitalism, is agency transformed into \u2018an activity of maintenance, not making\u2019. Obesity shows us an alternative view of agency, though it might not look like much. Sitting. Scrolling. Eating a nice meal. Having a nap.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gabriel Winant writes for N+1 in 2015: Affect theory\u2019s center of gravity is found near this question of happiness. If there is one contemporary scholar who looms over the field, it is Lauren Berlant, an English professor at the University … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t