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Ottimismo crudele
Che cosa vuol dire vivere nell’ombra di un sogno irrealizzabile? Crederci, contro ogni evidenza, finché non avrà prosciugato la nostra quotidianità? Languire sperando che le promesse del neoliberismo – mobilità sociale, sicurezza economica, giustizia sociale, stabilità affettiva – si possano realizzare, nel terrore che i tasselli del puzzle della nostra felicità si rivelino per quello che sono: le macerie di una realtà in cui la crisi è diventata una condizione ordinaria, e la reazione al trauma è sfumata in un adattamento in consapevole, un ottimismo acritico, infondato, ostinato, crudele. Lauren Berlant vuole farci aprire gli occhi, dimostrarci che a dettare i criteri della «buona vita» sono le stesse condizioni che li rendono inaccessibili. L’ottimismo crudele è l’altra faccia del realismo capitalista che neutralizza qualsiasi visione di una prospettiva migliore: la pulsione a restare aggrappati a desideri che costituiscono un ostacolo alla nostra felicità.
Seguendo una complessa rete di «scene» attraverso la lente della psicanalisi, della queer theory e della fantascienza, Berlant fa emergere le dinamiche del processo proteiforme che lega realtà e ideologia, individualità e desiderio. E, nel farlo, porta alla luce le possibilità atrofizzate da una realtà che ci schiaccia nella «morte lenta»: quella perversa rassicurazione che si prova a spegnersi a ritmo costante, senza imprevisti.
Squarciare il velo dell’ottimismo crudele però non vuol dire disconoscere il potere trasformativo della fantasia – dietro la paura della perdita possiamo scoprire nuove forme di reciprocità, di solidarietà e di altruismo grazie a cui immaginare un’altra vita. Una vita che valga la pena vivere.
Seguendo una complessa rete di «scene» attraverso la lente della psicanalisi, della queer theory e della fantascienza, Berlant fa emergere le dinamiche del processo proteiforme che lega realtà e ideologia, individualità e desiderio. E, nel farlo, porta alla luce le possibilità atrofizzate da una realtà che ci schiaccia nella «morte lenta»: quella perversa rassicurazione che si prova a spegnersi a ritmo costante, senza imprevisti.
Squarciare il velo dell’ottimismo crudele però non vuol dire disconoscere il potere trasformativo della fantasia – dietro la paura della perdita possiamo scoprire nuove forme di reciprocità, di solidarietà e di altruismo grazie a cui immaginare un’altra vita. Una vita che valga la pena vivere.
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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11583 people want to read
About the author
Lauren Berlant
29 books322 followersLauren Berlant was an English Professor at the University of Chicago, where they taught since 1984. Berlant received their Ph.D. from Cornell University. They wrote and taught on issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 137 reviews
June 28, 2021
I think one of the biggest challenges of reading this book, beyond the complex points and the difficult and beautiful prose, is that, if you read it right, you're going to be faced with your own cruel optimistic relations. You're going to be distracted by thoughts of your own troubling attachments, which both give you the strength to live and prevent you from really living. I was faced with an additional challenge: I developed a cruel optimistic relation with the book itself and with my process of reading theory in general, which the book generously gave me the tools to defuse. Here's my reading-process memoir:
I have a catalogue of synopses I've written that summarize many of the works by theorists, philosophers, and literary critics I've read. I realized, as I write these synopses and accumulate more and more "knowledge," that my need to fill up my catalogue overshot the actual content value of my synopses. Further, my attachment to my catalogue made me anxious about confronting the fact that my synopses might all be useless. So as I read, I desperately tried to summarize the chapters in a way that was better, more comprehensive, more effective, with my mind set on the "Berlant" entry of my catalogue. This turned into a vicious cycle, since, as I wrote, my anxiety grew as well and made the content of my synopses worse and worse.
So I scrapped it all, and tried to develop a new reading process. This new reading process attends to the content in front of me. It de-dramatizes the epic accomplishment of nailing my Berlant reading experience and capturing it for my catalogue. And this is, in a sense, what Berlant encourages us all to do, as readers, audiences, and political subjects. To recognize how the drama of what we are attached to sabotages us, and to evaluate and be honest about the value of that drama. This honesty isn't posed as an answer, but rather as therapeutic, lifecoach-esque advice to stop securing the condition of our mistakes' repetitions, and instead to open ourselves to the possibility of, even if accidentally, landing on a new, felicitous mode of flourishing.
Maybe, when I'm rummaging through the almost entirely useless contents of my "Derrida, Jacque" folder from four years ago, I'll find a somehow useful misunderstanding that I had about him. If not, oh well, it's just another file that's cluttering my computer: time to delete it. Switching my conception of the folder from "MY synopsis of Jacque Derrida! MY connections! MY understandings!" to simply content on my computer that is either useful or just clutter, is exactly what she encourages when she empathetically describes how "it is awkward and it is threatening to detach from what is already not working" (263). If I didn't understand the book, at least I learned, in the process of reading it, to be a more honest reader and scholar.
I have a catalogue of synopses I've written that summarize many of the works by theorists, philosophers, and literary critics I've read. I realized, as I write these synopses and accumulate more and more "knowledge," that my need to fill up my catalogue overshot the actual content value of my synopses. Further, my attachment to my catalogue made me anxious about confronting the fact that my synopses might all be useless. So as I read, I desperately tried to summarize the chapters in a way that was better, more comprehensive, more effective, with my mind set on the "Berlant" entry of my catalogue. This turned into a vicious cycle, since, as I wrote, my anxiety grew as well and made the content of my synopses worse and worse.
So I scrapped it all, and tried to develop a new reading process. This new reading process attends to the content in front of me. It de-dramatizes the epic accomplishment of nailing my Berlant reading experience and capturing it for my catalogue. And this is, in a sense, what Berlant encourages us all to do, as readers, audiences, and political subjects. To recognize how the drama of what we are attached to sabotages us, and to evaluate and be honest about the value of that drama. This honesty isn't posed as an answer, but rather as therapeutic, lifecoach-esque advice to stop securing the condition of our mistakes' repetitions, and instead to open ourselves to the possibility of, even if accidentally, landing on a new, felicitous mode of flourishing.
Maybe, when I'm rummaging through the almost entirely useless contents of my "Derrida, Jacque" folder from four years ago, I'll find a somehow useful misunderstanding that I had about him. If not, oh well, it's just another file that's cluttering my computer: time to delete it. Switching my conception of the folder from "MY synopsis of Jacque Derrida! MY connections! MY understandings!" to simply content on my computer that is either useful or just clutter, is exactly what she encourages when she empathetically describes how "it is awkward and it is threatening to detach from what is already not working" (263). If I didn't understand the book, at least I learned, in the process of reading it, to be a more honest reader and scholar.
February 7, 2012
as i've been reading this book over the past month, i've tried to share it with most everyone i am around--sentences, snippets, or general ideas. i would really only recommend it to folks who have a fetish for critical theory and are committed to dense, poetic, academic work...which is a bit of a shame since the ideas in it are pretty broadly resonant, useful, and important to a much larger community of folks than will read this book. berlant's discussions of the historical present and cruel optimism are hella insightful to the present moment, to thinking about this era of precarity and in particular interesting bookended by 9/11 and now, the occupy movement. berlant brings in the body often and the viscerality and sensuality of her work--in terms of metaphors, ideological focus, and poetic effect--feels important to the kind of writing and topics she is engaging in...that is, a really bodily and affective unpackings of books, films, and "radical art." i wish that the last chapter, on radical art which brings up anarchist/DIY ethics often, were extended and unpacked more. also, i found the chapter on obesity and, broadly, why people eat, to be interesting but kind of fundamentally fatphobic. coming from a really body-positive and fat-loving community, i didn't see her engaging with that kind of radical viewpoint, which i found disappointing. i also enjoyed the few moments of personal reflection in the book (they are few) and the brief sub-chapter on sex. i learned a lot about precarity (i tracked her use and definition of precarity through the book which was a delightful way of reading with purpose) and affect theory and neoliberalism and time and class. reading this from outside academia, i find that berlant's work offers a tough but resilient and poetic vocabulary of feelings and ordinariness that has transformative potential if you can tear it away from the pages it clings to.
in short, to folks who are already intending to read this book, i support you! share it with your friends! i think as readers of radical academic texts we have an important task of sifting and translating this kind of important work for a broader audience.
in short, to folks who are already intending to read this book, i support you! share it with your friends! i think as readers of radical academic texts we have an important task of sifting and translating this kind of important work for a broader audience.
June 29, 2021
Berlant died of cancer on 28 June 2021. I will miss this irrepressible, irreplaceable voice in our culture's chorus.
January 21, 2022
Here’s an embarrassing set of admissions:
Once, early on in graduate school, I attended a guest lecture. The speaker was Lee Edelman, who blurbed this book. The topic, as it happened, later became one of the chapters in “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.” I remember three things about the lecture: #1: that Lee Edelman was a not-unattractive man; #2: that very little of his lecture was clear (as in “erklaren”) to me, excepting perhaps, the “delicious double entendre” that a chiseled mini-Lee pointed out in the Q&A, a point which later became a not-inconsequential turn in Prof. Edelman’s argument in the printed version; and #3: that understanding such arguments (as in “verstehen”) is in many ways secondary to appreciating them in an aesthetic sense (i.e., “anerkennung”). It was, in fact, somewhere in the middle part of his lecture – right about where he was leading us down into the rabbit hole of Lacanian theory – that my ears sort of unfocused, as one’s eyes do when looking at one of those 3-D “hidden puzzles,” and the densely complex gorgeousness of his rhetoric was revealed to me. It was as if I were listening to a masterful oral performance of poetry in an ancient tradition, the vocabulary and grammar of which were completely mysterious, but the rhythms and cadences of which were achingly lovely no matter what the underlying meaning might be. It was so beautiful that we made a mix-tape, and all had cigarettes afterward. It was the mid-90s, after all, and such decadences as mix-tapes, and cigarettes, were a price worth paying for intellectual enrichment.
I thought about that lecture, and its printed version, along with a lot of other things, while I was slogging my way through this book. I thought about Arlie Hochshild’s astonishingly dead-end attempt to understand white working-class political values (“Strangers in Their Own Land”). I thought about J.D. Vance’s obviously meretricious, and remarkably vapid, attempt to do the same thing. I thought about the inherent fun-house mirror nature of theorizing about anything other than one’s own autobiography in a world that has abandoned, excepting some unironically revanchist circles in which I happen to run, the quest for the holy grail of empiricism. Instead of which we apparently have collectively somehow decided that it’s just simply too much fun to sit around telling stories about all the lovely shadows on the wall. Hell, I even thought about Gramsci – and what a godawful slog that was.
I thought, in other words, about the fact that any attempt to try to understand “the other” – especially when the behavior of the other is so patently, bizarrely, self-defeating that the only readily-available explanatory mechanisms tend to involve some version of infantilism, insanity, or addiction – is ultimately an exercise in projection, in the specifically psychotherapeutic sense.
Where was I? Oh, right. This book. This frustratingly dense, densely frustrating, almost-but-not-quite-a-caricature of deconstructionist literary criticism. What is one to make of a book that has sentences like the following:
“Gregg Bordowitz’s film Habit and Susan Sontag’s “The Way We Live Now” recount the multiple threats presented by AIDS to derive, in the derivé, a case for the centrality of intuitive rehabituation for the subject/world’s capacity to maintain itself amid an impossible, but no longer unlivable, situation. The section following locates intuition in the strand of Marxist aesthetic theory that focuses on the centrality of the affective sensorium to the sensing of the historical present. Then, the chapter asks what a historicism that takes seriously the form or aesthetics of the affective event might have to attend to, in relation to the institutions, events, and norms that are already deemed history’s proper evidence, especially when that history is the history of the present.”
What. The. Eff. Seriously, people. I have a gotdamt Ph.D. in the gotdamt social sciences, I even speak f**king French, and I can’t make head nor tail of what’s going on in that extract.
It was along about there that I got to thinking about what I was told was the central point of this collection of essays: namely, that there exists a thing – call it “cruel optimism” – which describes what happens when what we want, or think we want, interrupts or otherwise problematizes our ability to flourish. It very well may be that that was what this book was about. If so, that was not exactly clear from the individual substantive chapters that make up the book -- except maybe one part about 2/3 of the way through -- and especially not from the introductory chapter that provides the frame, in which in fact at one point Prof. Berlant freely admits the chapters admit of no unifying theme. It certainly was not clear from the final chapter, which consists of a rather short piece interpreting the cover image, a disturbing print involving a one-eyed dog in one of those no-scratch white plastic collars, behind which lies a woman on her right side, holding her face with her left hand, itself enshrouded in a white opera-length glove.
This is an inherently attractive theme, assuming that it is in fact the central point of the book, a claim that I have to take primarily on the strength of the blurb on the back cover (thank you, Prof. Edelman!), rather than, say, the clarity or lucidity of Prof. Berlant’s prose. She ultimately does assert (on page 227!) that her argument “throughout this book [is] that an optimistic attachment is cruel when the object/scene of desire is itself an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it.” This in a chapter about how politics is always, already, stupid, and people who engage in political activity are either elitist exploiters, or chumps. Also, that people who engage in performance art to point out this inherent stupidity are actually doing something kind of interesting, even if it is (ahem) an obstacle to fulfilling whatever wants the artists are bringing to their performances. That chapter was actually the most interesting of them all – but again, that says everything about me (see above) and nothing about Prof. Berlant’s argument.
But here’s the thing: I’ve now spent 1000 words –almost two pages, single-spaced – discussing how frustrating, and unenjoyable, this text was. If there is some specifically po-mo point to this -- that, for instance, reading Prof. Berlant’s book involved an exercise in the cruel optimism of hoping that she might somehow bring a little sunlight to scatter the shadows on the wall – well, that’s a mean trick to play on a poor sucker of a sociologist. As with Gramsci, I suggest reading the précis (see what I did there? Derive that, Prof. Berlant!) and skip the original.
Once, early on in graduate school, I attended a guest lecture. The speaker was Lee Edelman, who blurbed this book. The topic, as it happened, later became one of the chapters in “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.” I remember three things about the lecture: #1: that Lee Edelman was a not-unattractive man; #2: that very little of his lecture was clear (as in “erklaren”) to me, excepting perhaps, the “delicious double entendre” that a chiseled mini-Lee pointed out in the Q&A, a point which later became a not-inconsequential turn in Prof. Edelman’s argument in the printed version; and #3: that understanding such arguments (as in “verstehen”) is in many ways secondary to appreciating them in an aesthetic sense (i.e., “anerkennung”). It was, in fact, somewhere in the middle part of his lecture – right about where he was leading us down into the rabbit hole of Lacanian theory – that my ears sort of unfocused, as one’s eyes do when looking at one of those 3-D “hidden puzzles,” and the densely complex gorgeousness of his rhetoric was revealed to me. It was as if I were listening to a masterful oral performance of poetry in an ancient tradition, the vocabulary and grammar of which were completely mysterious, but the rhythms and cadences of which were achingly lovely no matter what the underlying meaning might be. It was so beautiful that we made a mix-tape, and all had cigarettes afterward. It was the mid-90s, after all, and such decadences as mix-tapes, and cigarettes, were a price worth paying for intellectual enrichment.
I thought about that lecture, and its printed version, along with a lot of other things, while I was slogging my way through this book. I thought about Arlie Hochshild’s astonishingly dead-end attempt to understand white working-class political values (“Strangers in Their Own Land”). I thought about J.D. Vance’s obviously meretricious, and remarkably vapid, attempt to do the same thing. I thought about the inherent fun-house mirror nature of theorizing about anything other than one’s own autobiography in a world that has abandoned, excepting some unironically revanchist circles in which I happen to run, the quest for the holy grail of empiricism. Instead of which we apparently have collectively somehow decided that it’s just simply too much fun to sit around telling stories about all the lovely shadows on the wall. Hell, I even thought about Gramsci – and what a godawful slog that was.
I thought, in other words, about the fact that any attempt to try to understand “the other” – especially when the behavior of the other is so patently, bizarrely, self-defeating that the only readily-available explanatory mechanisms tend to involve some version of infantilism, insanity, or addiction – is ultimately an exercise in projection, in the specifically psychotherapeutic sense.
Where was I? Oh, right. This book. This frustratingly dense, densely frustrating, almost-but-not-quite-a-caricature of deconstructionist literary criticism. What is one to make of a book that has sentences like the following:
“Gregg Bordowitz’s film Habit and Susan Sontag’s “The Way We Live Now” recount the multiple threats presented by AIDS to derive, in the derivé, a case for the centrality of intuitive rehabituation for the subject/world’s capacity to maintain itself amid an impossible, but no longer unlivable, situation. The section following locates intuition in the strand of Marxist aesthetic theory that focuses on the centrality of the affective sensorium to the sensing of the historical present. Then, the chapter asks what a historicism that takes seriously the form or aesthetics of the affective event might have to attend to, in relation to the institutions, events, and norms that are already deemed history’s proper evidence, especially when that history is the history of the present.”
What. The. Eff. Seriously, people. I have a gotdamt Ph.D. in the gotdamt social sciences, I even speak f**king French, and I can’t make head nor tail of what’s going on in that extract.
It was along about there that I got to thinking about what I was told was the central point of this collection of essays: namely, that there exists a thing – call it “cruel optimism” – which describes what happens when what we want, or think we want, interrupts or otherwise problematizes our ability to flourish. It very well may be that that was what this book was about. If so, that was not exactly clear from the individual substantive chapters that make up the book -- except maybe one part about 2/3 of the way through -- and especially not from the introductory chapter that provides the frame, in which in fact at one point Prof. Berlant freely admits the chapters admit of no unifying theme. It certainly was not clear from the final chapter, which consists of a rather short piece interpreting the cover image, a disturbing print involving a one-eyed dog in one of those no-scratch white plastic collars, behind which lies a woman on her right side, holding her face with her left hand, itself enshrouded in a white opera-length glove.
This is an inherently attractive theme, assuming that it is in fact the central point of the book, a claim that I have to take primarily on the strength of the blurb on the back cover (thank you, Prof. Edelman!), rather than, say, the clarity or lucidity of Prof. Berlant’s prose. She ultimately does assert (on page 227!) that her argument “throughout this book [is] that an optimistic attachment is cruel when the object/scene of desire is itself an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it.” This in a chapter about how politics is always, already, stupid, and people who engage in political activity are either elitist exploiters, or chumps. Also, that people who engage in performance art to point out this inherent stupidity are actually doing something kind of interesting, even if it is (ahem) an obstacle to fulfilling whatever wants the artists are bringing to their performances. That chapter was actually the most interesting of them all – but again, that says everything about me (see above) and nothing about Prof. Berlant’s argument.
But here’s the thing: I’ve now spent 1000 words –almost two pages, single-spaced – discussing how frustrating, and unenjoyable, this text was. If there is some specifically po-mo point to this -- that, for instance, reading Prof. Berlant’s book involved an exercise in the cruel optimism of hoping that she might somehow bring a little sunlight to scatter the shadows on the wall – well, that’s a mean trick to play on a poor sucker of a sociologist. As with Gramsci, I suggest reading the précis (see what I did there? Derive that, Prof. Berlant!) and skip the original.
January 30, 2017
faaaaaaaark *giant exhalation*
I finished it. It took a year. I wish I had not invested the time.
Ideas: some chapters, 5 stars. Some 3
Holy mother of god academia-speak rating: so many negatives light cannot escape their gravity
***
NTS: Buy this next payday
I finished it. It took a year. I wish I had not invested the time.
Ideas: some chapters, 5 stars. Some 3
Holy mother of god academia-speak rating: so many negatives light cannot escape their gravity
***
NTS: Buy this next payday
August 4, 2012
To say that Cruel Optimism left me feeling bruised and exhausted is not necessarily bad; indeed, I think that was partially Berlant's intent. Her style is visceral and unflinching, "manifest[ing]" in her readers a sense of the "unbinding of subjects from their economic and intimate optimism" that is characteristic of the "situation of contemporary life" (7, 9). Berlant traces this "attrition of a fantasy, a collectively invested form of life, the good life" through an diverse assortment of novels and films, masterfully weaving together her analysis of these art forms with an assessment of the present moment (11). What she isn't as good at is saving her readers from a visceral sense of the precarious present, but that is part of the point. The "DIY practices" and "lateral politics" that she analyzes in the final chapter seem, as she admits, "minor," but they offer a possible avenue for "changing the white noise of politics into something alive right now [that] can magnetize people to induce images of the good life amidst the exhausting pragmatics of the ordinary's 'new normal'" (261).
I recommend reading Cruel Optimism in small doses, both to be able to fully immerse yourself in Berlant's unique prose and to allow yourself a break from her exceptional skill at making you feel exactly what the characters in the films or books she is analyzing are feeling. There are no happy stories here. As an example, trauma, in Berlant's styling, is described as something that "can never be let go of: it holds you. It locates you at the knot that joins the personal and the impersonal, specifying you at the moment you have the least control over your own destiny and meaning. You become like a small animal that, when picked up, never stops moving its legs" (127). I still can't get this image out of my head. Nevertheless, this is a book that is worth sitting with and mulling over, even in its most painful moments.
I recommend reading Cruel Optimism in small doses, both to be able to fully immerse yourself in Berlant's unique prose and to allow yourself a break from her exceptional skill at making you feel exactly what the characters in the films or books she is analyzing are feeling. There are no happy stories here. As an example, trauma, in Berlant's styling, is described as something that "can never be let go of: it holds you. It locates you at the knot that joins the personal and the impersonal, specifying you at the moment you have the least control over your own destiny and meaning. You become like a small animal that, when picked up, never stops moving its legs" (127). I still can't get this image out of my head. Nevertheless, this is a book that is worth sitting with and mulling over, even in its most painful moments.
October 21, 2021
...in the scene of slow death—where mental and physical health might actually be conflicting aims, even internally conflicting—the activity of riding a different wave of spreading out or shifting in the everyday also reveals confusions about what it means to have a life. Is it to have health? To love, to have been loved? To have felt sovereign? To achieve a state or a sense of worked-toward enjoyment? Is "having a life" now the process to which one gets resigned, after dreaming of the good life, or not even dreaming? Is "life" as the scene of reliable pleasures located largely in those experiences of coasting, with all that's implied in that phrase, the shifting, diffuse, sensual space between pleasure and numbness?
I’ve spent most of the year savouring this book, reading it the way I would read a novel from start to finish. I bought it as a gift for myself after finishing a really difficult semester of uni when i was so sick of theory and also sick of reading the e-book on ProQuest and timing out every 15 minutes (i hate that platform sm).
Ironically the only thing that could bring me comfort was reading fragments of Berlant’s essays, which I could only digest in parts. It's so densely poetic and academically rigorous, with a certain impersonality about the current state that we are living in, which is addressed in the book, too: "Reading is one place where the impersonality of intimacy can be transacted without harm to anyone; writing and paper-giving are others. There is no romance of the impersonal, no love plot for it. But there can be optimism, a space across which to move." At the same time it is so deeply personal and moving and true, like a pang! to your heart.
I feel like this book offers such a rich vocabulary for us to understand feelings that are difficult, but necessary, to digest. Truthfully i didn’t even understand what I was reading at times (and there are definitely parts that I still struggle to understand because the concepts are so complex and still new and exciting to me). But part of the comfort I found in it was that I was struggling to write and struggling to understand the world but I really wanted to and Cruel Optimism kept bringing me back to that desire. And these concepts are not easy— it's a huge project, but its hugeness is so intellectually laborious that I feel thankful someone was able to carry the weight so that we could read it and learn from it. It traverses so many areas—film, food, literature, politics—but it is tied to a theory that is so strong and pervasive it is present everywhere. I think that's what I found most comforting when I was suffering from the agony of academia; that this was a moment where theory felt impossible and inescapable and entirely necessary. And that all of those things could exist in one body of text, and that I could feel changed by it somehow. & also I was like Omg life kinda sucks rn and the book is like, yes it does! i know!
Halfway through my reading of this book, Berlant passed away, and I genuinely felt so much loss and sadness for one of the greatest cultural theorists of our time. their work is so special and beloved. I kind of want to know what they think about everything, and I'm just sad we won't get to anymore. I'm thankful for a book I will always return to and lean against.
Read
December 12, 2020A bunch of close reads that examine our attachments to the fantasy of the Good Life promised to us by neoliberalism and why we don’t let go of that fantasy after realizing the promise will never be fulfilled.
August 24, 2017
Challenge is an odd concept because it is self-inflicted struggle, a non-lethal difficulty that is opt-in and can be called off at nearly any time. Running a marathon, landscaping your yard, redecorating your kitchen: these are modern challenges because there isn’t a penalty to fail. Cruel Optimism was not a struggle, because I did it to myself; it is absolutely the most challenging book I’ve picked up, though. Not only was it dense—“Cruel optimism is, then, like all phrases, a deictic — a phrase that points to a proximate location. As an analytic lever, it is an incitement to inhabit and to track the affective attachment to what we call “the good life,” which is for so many a bad life that wears out the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it”—it altered my thoughts on the previous post- or lateral-capitalist tomes I have already read. The essentially optimistic The Mushroom at the End of the World was my prior un-capitalist touchstone, describing how people can survive at the fringe of the capital marketplace. But Mushroom is still predicated upon a modern capital-based ethos, just one in ruin; it doesn’t reimagine living, it posits that there is a way to survive once things crumble. The book I read just before Cruel Optimism, Updating to Remain the Same, outlined the digital crisis-cycle that modern networks emphasize; Cruel positions the online cycle as a microcosm of our modern reality, a way to glimpse the future of physical reality though accelerated online interactions.
Basically, the book cohesively tied together many of the social/structural concepts I’ve been reading about in 2017. And what it left behind is not pretty:
That nothingness is the paradox within the pages; the author knows that the promise of “the good life” is empty, but acknowledges that the lie is positioned as a required motivator for society not to slide into a nihilistic abyss. “Positioned as a required motivator,” is key; constant expanding capitalist progress isn’t inherently necessary for a good future. That coda is the breakthrough moment of Cruel Optimism. Simply uncovering the false promise of “the good life” is a challenge in-and-of itself; that is as far as intellectualism tends to go:
Hopelessness is en vogue because there is no way to imagine a life outside of American capitalism. Rather than any sort of attempt at structural change, the heavy burden imposed upon simply existing in society results in resigned drudgery. The manufactured collapse of potentiality—money goes toward loans or housing or food or healthcare or education, so people without prior wealth are forced to work for the financial benefit of the moneyed aristocracy—enforces its own contronl over the capital systems already in place:
Challenges or struggles?
Basically, the book cohesively tied together many of the social/structural concepts I’ve been reading about in 2017. And what it left behind is not pretty:
I have argued throughout this book that the neoliberal present is a space of transition, not only between modes of production and modes of life, but between different animating, sustaining fantasies.It functionally strips away the dream of middle-class comfort and security—something I knew, on a large scale, was environmentally unsustainable already—and replaced it with....nothing.
That nothingness is the paradox within the pages; the author knows that the promise of “the good life” is empty, but acknowledges that the lie is positioned as a required motivator for society not to slide into a nihilistic abyss. “Positioned as a required motivator,” is key; constant expanding capitalist progress isn’t inherently necessary for a good future. That coda is the breakthrough moment of Cruel Optimism. Simply uncovering the false promise of “the good life” is a challenge in-and-of itself; that is as far as intellectualism tends to go:
Yet for a long time now, Sedgwick argues, skepticism has been deemed the only ethical position for the intellectual to take with respect to the subject’s ordinary attachments. Even Adorno, the great belittler of popular pleasures, can be aghast at the ease with which intellectuals shit on people who hold to a dream. Dreams are seen as easy optimism, while failures seem complex.Capitalism sucks, but what else can we do? Replacing the system is the hard part — excising the cruelty from a constant cycle of hope without reason necessitates removing the hope as well, which is daunting. But we are fooling ourselves by thinking there is any benefit to pretending things will simply get better. Meritocratic upward mobility is dead already; for example, student loans foreclose the dreams of those without parental patrons from amassing wealth even with high academic degrees. Yet the myth of upward class mobility through education still persists, because what else can we do for our children but tell them to continue to study and pray that they get better jobs than we had?
Hopelessness is en vogue because there is no way to imagine a life outside of American capitalism. Rather than any sort of attempt at structural change, the heavy burden imposed upon simply existing in society results in resigned drudgery. The manufactured collapse of potentiality—money goes toward loans or housing or food or healthcare or education, so people without prior wealth are forced to work for the financial benefit of the moneyed aristocracy—enforces its own contronl over the capital systems already in place:
In “Remembering the Historical Present,” Harootunian argues that capitalism always blocks the development of a historical sense that can grasp the structural determinations that constitute the present, engendering a distorted apprehension of pastness and devastating misrecognition of how contemporary forces work….subjects of capitalism will be doomed to think of themselves as merely inhabitants in a “thick” and nonporous present.Breaking free of the endless modern lie that is capitalist class mobility is difficult because the very idea protects itself; if you’re struggling, the claim par excellence is that you aren’t working hard enough. You, too, can become an owner of other people’s livelihoods, if you just work more. That cycle is self-sustaining: working harder—as proven by tech-fueled disruptors that are supposed to increase our leisure time, from washing machines to emails—leads to more demands on one’s time, not fewer. More capitalist entrenchment begets less mobility: see our current globe-spanning supply chains that require a handful of ultra-powerful conglomerates to maintain them. It certainly feels like there aren’t a lot of options for, say, food, outside of industrial agriculture. Certainly not on the lower end of the economic spectrum, and all of a sudden you are focusing on your car, apartment, cell phone payments and supporting all these necessities have forced you out of planning the revolution. The system maintains itself while precluding real thought of anything else. And its primacy in culture colors everything:
[Slow death, the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence] takes as its point of departure David Harvey’s polemical observation, in Spaces of Hope, that under capitalism sickness is defined as the inability to work.Health is commodified as future labor output and used as a weapon to brand the ill as a drain on our society. Leisure is game-ified as “productive” relaxation and character growth or decried as wasted potential. All of which costs money. Money, meanwhile, is treated as the greatest leveler. But even if you get it, you still won’t have it:
Exchange value is not identical to the price of things, but marks a determination of what else a thing can get exchanged for…[M]oney cannot make you feel like you belong if you are not already privileged to feel that way….“Exchange value” demonstrates the proximity of two kinds of cruel optimism: with little cultural or economic capital and bearing the history of racial disinheritance from the norms of white supremacist power, you work yourself to death, or coast to nonexistence; or, with the ballast of capital, you hoard against death, deferring life, until you die.Thus is the challenge of Cruel Optimism: do you slide into nihilistic self-destruction and end up adrift or racist or both? Do you focus on marches and rallies or marathons and redecorating, school districts and property tax or drone strikes and rare-earth minerals?
Challenges or struggles?
January 20, 2023
I think there were some interesting ideas here, buried in a tour de force of just the worst writing academics are capable of. Like I guess this is the book you might write if you thought Frederick Jameson perfectly coherent, but just maybe not saying enough about queer people? I realise that I am not really the target audience (a lay-friendly summary can be found in the course of this essay), which must be other academics from Berlant's field, but it is interesting to consider the economy - sorry, all abstract nouns should be pluralised, economies - that produce this type of writing. Is there some kind of benefit to this style which outweighs the cognitive burden of having to entangle sentences like these?
The central idea in Cruel Optimism is that in Our Tragic Late Capitalist Society the things which cause hope can themselves be bad, conspiring to dig the subject ever deeper into the hole they are in. An example Berlant lingers on is obesity: Michelle Obama's campaign against childhood obesity is a malevolent instantiation of health apartheid, using shaming as a weapon against the oversized underclass, which is disproportionately poor and nonwhite. Although trying to make people healthier may seem (to the untrained eye!) like a worthwhile goal, in fact the social and economic forces which lead to childhood obesity are built into the system (fast-food companies sponsoring children's athletics, "food deserts" unserved by sources of non-processed foods, not claims I disagree with at all), such that by pinning the blame on the individual one medicalises and removes the joy from the one source of pleasure they have in their unhappy lives under capitalism. And of course, in Berlant's world the locus of evil is the normative - white, suburban, bourgeois, Christian, middle-class, cis- or heterosexual - and of good, that which departs from it: the ill, disabled, queer, poor, non-white, sans-papiers, migrant, precariat, and generally non-conforming. So eating unhealthily can be a brave act of protest against society's expectations of conformist self-improvement. Let them eat cake!
I think this connects to the realm of "Affect Theory", an idea that humanities scholars have salvaged from the worst bits of Marx (see also: Freud, Sigmund). In broad terms this says that all emotions and "vibes" in the world are downstream of economics, so if you feel like you don't belong, or are into alternative music that doesn't get played on the radio, or wake up with a sore tummy - that's Capitalism, baby. (Under socialism, coffee shops will only play Talking Heads, and everyone will like it.)
Berlant explores some ideas from other scholars, such as "history is what hurts" (Jameson) or that "under Capitalism, being sick is defined as the inability to work". (Although the book doesn't mention it, I'd charitably guess that this is referring to headlines like Depression Costs U.S. Workplaces $23 Billion in Absenteeism . But I would question how significant those bits of clickbait are!) There are also detours into some very specific political events, or AOL headlines, which have aged less well. I feel a bit sorry for critical theorists working before Trump, who had to really work hard to dress up the anodyne conservative politicians of their times in terms of world-historical destructive malevolence and dishonesty, before being gifted someone who actually fit that mold pretty well.
As I have hopefully indicated in the course of this review, Berlant does have some interesting ideas, some of which have filtered through to the broader culture since this book came out (Berlant died in 2021). It is a pity that it is so paranoid, and so uninterested in the actual mechanisms of power, and written in prose seemingly designed to keep its contents a secret. But neither of these issues are specific to Berlant themself; it is their entire field which has drifted, and continues to drift, away from the public and deeper into its own echo chamber.
Gregg Bordowitz’s film Habit and Susan Sontag’s "The Way We Live Now" recount the multiple threats presented by AIDS to derive, in the derivé, a case for the centrality of intuitive rehabituation for the subject/world’s capacity to maintain itself amid an impossible, but no longer unlivable, situation. The section following locates intuition in the strand of Marxist aesthetic theory that focuses on the centrality of the affective sensorium to the sensing of the historical present. Then, the chapter asks what a historicism that takes seriously the form or aesthetics of the affective event might have to attend to, in relation to the institutions, events, and norms that are already deemed history’s proper evidence, especially when that history is the history of the present.My lay understanding is that this has something to do with Adorno's idea that you can only analyse a textual or cultural artifact in the term it itself employs, in order to uncover its internal contradictions, but I don't see how these terms emerge from the (quite normal) film, literature and cultural flotsam discussed in the book.
The central idea in Cruel Optimism is that in Our Tragic Late Capitalist Society the things which cause hope can themselves be bad, conspiring to dig the subject ever deeper into the hole they are in. An example Berlant lingers on is obesity: Michelle Obama's campaign against childhood obesity is a malevolent instantiation of health apartheid, using shaming as a weapon against the oversized underclass, which is disproportionately poor and nonwhite. Although trying to make people healthier may seem (to the untrained eye!) like a worthwhile goal, in fact the social and economic forces which lead to childhood obesity are built into the system (fast-food companies sponsoring children's athletics, "food deserts" unserved by sources of non-processed foods, not claims I disagree with at all), such that by pinning the blame on the individual one medicalises and removes the joy from the one source of pleasure they have in their unhappy lives under capitalism. And of course, in Berlant's world the locus of evil is the normative - white, suburban, bourgeois, Christian, middle-class, cis- or heterosexual - and of good, that which departs from it: the ill, disabled, queer, poor, non-white, sans-papiers, migrant, precariat, and generally non-conforming. So eating unhealthily can be a brave act of protest against society's expectations of conformist self-improvement. Let them eat cake!
I think this connects to the realm of "Affect Theory", an idea that humanities scholars have salvaged from the worst bits of Marx (see also: Freud, Sigmund). In broad terms this says that all emotions and "vibes" in the world are downstream of economics, so if you feel like you don't belong, or are into alternative music that doesn't get played on the radio, or wake up with a sore tummy - that's Capitalism, baby. (Under socialism, coffee shops will only play Talking Heads, and everyone will like it.)
Berlant explores some ideas from other scholars, such as "history is what hurts" (Jameson) or that "under Capitalism, being sick is defined as the inability to work". (Although the book doesn't mention it, I'd charitably guess that this is referring to headlines like Depression Costs U.S. Workplaces $23 Billion in Absenteeism . But I would question how significant those bits of clickbait are!) There are also detours into some very specific political events, or AOL headlines, which have aged less well. I feel a bit sorry for critical theorists working before Trump, who had to really work hard to dress up the anodyne conservative politicians of their times in terms of world-historical destructive malevolence and dishonesty, before being gifted someone who actually fit that mold pretty well.
As I have hopefully indicated in the course of this review, Berlant does have some interesting ideas, some of which have filtered through to the broader culture since this book came out (Berlant died in 2021). It is a pity that it is so paranoid, and so uninterested in the actual mechanisms of power, and written in prose seemingly designed to keep its contents a secret. But neither of these issues are specific to Berlant themself; it is their entire field which has drifted, and continues to drift, away from the public and deeper into its own echo chamber.
August 22, 2021
Cruel Optimism thrilled me. I'm not sure if this book was somehow exactly what I needed to read at this time, in this cultural moment, but I constantly find myself thinking about it. I stayed up until past midnight reading several times, and read several pages many times over. Quite a dense read but startlingly influential, especially with the current pandemic times that we are in. Holding our grip on what we are currently comfortable with and deeply rooted in is not only necessary for social reproduction, but also is a psychic necessity. Berlant asks, why and how do we do this? With multiple crises looming and ongoing, what we are so very attached to, the American Dream, class mobility- these notions result in our emotional and political stagnation.
Even if you aren't particularly interested in theory, the citations in Cruel Optimism are worth it alone. I can't begin to fathom Berlant's complete catalogue of historical and media references.
Even if you aren't particularly interested in theory, the citations in Cruel Optimism are worth it alone. I can't begin to fathom Berlant's complete catalogue of historical and media references.
December 11, 2025
oke eindelijk een recensie van dit boek. dat heeft een jaar geduurd omdat het me ook een jaar geduurd heeft om het uit te lezen. om maar met de deur in huis te vallen: ik zou dit boek niet aanraden. het is onleesbaar, frustrerend, ontmoedigend, omslachtig, overdreven academisch, etc etc. laat het liggen als je het in de winkel of in de ub ziet. en mocht het toch onverhoopt in je handen geraken, deponeer het dan het dichtstbijzijnde buurtbiebje. ik zou zeggen, begin er niet aan, maar toch heb ik een grote zwak voor dit boek ontwikkeld. de ideeën en terminologie die berlant introduceert hebben zich in mijn hoofd genesteld en komen er niet meer uit, ook al kan ik niet zeggen dat ik alles heb begrepen, verre van(!!).
de premisse van cruel optimism is eigenlijk heel simpel: in onze samenlevingen – berlant schrijft in principe over noord-amerika en west-europa, maar hun ideeën zijn breder toepasbaar – zijn we gehecht aan een heleboel dingen waar we met z’n allen hoop in vestigen, maar deze hoop, en onze gehechtheden (attachments) aan deze fantasieën weerhouden ons er eigenlijk van om het beste uit ons leven te halen ('to flourish'). we worden ondermijnd, ófwel direct, omdat de dingen waar we ons aan hechten ons direct schaden, bijvoorbeeld verslavingen, ófwel indirect, omdat ze ons tegenhouden om betere, gezondere dromen na te streven. het klassieke voorbeeld is dat van meritocratie, of z’n nog duivelsere broertje, ‘the american dream’. het idee dat iedereen door hard te werken een beter leven kan bereiken, ‘omhoog kunt klimmen’, is uiteraard bedrog. dat weten we. maar we willen dat niet erkennen, kunnen het niet erkennen, iedereen krijgt het met de paplepel ingegoten, je moet voldoendes halen op school, en natuurlijk krijg je de hele dag het hele jaar voorbeelden van selfmade-succesverhalen door de strot gedouwd (zoals die engnek jitse groen van thuisbezorgd. bah! zie ook: The Labor of Hope: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt)
berlant onderbouwt hun argument aan de hand van een zelf-aangelegd 'archief' van kunst, met name films, die iets blootgeven over de wereld waarin we leven. om een beetje chocola van dit boek te maken helpt het als je de films die de auteur behandelt van tevoren te kijken. bijzonder boeiend vond ik berlants bespreking van rosetta van de dardenne broers, een film over een meisje dat met haar moeder op een camping in de ardennen woont (ja ja), dat de armoede van haar tweekoppige gezinnetje zat is en gewoon 'een normaal leven' wil leiden maar tegen wordt gewerkt door de enorme werkeloosheid en armoede. (in de voetnoten bespreekt berlant ook les glaneurs et la glaneuse van agnes varda: deze film is verder niet heel relevant voor deze recensie en staat ook niet centraal in het boek, maar dit is wel mijn dringende kijktip aan u, goodreads-vriend)
volgens berlant leven we, net als rosetta, in een tijdsgewricht dat gekenmerkt wordt door crisis en door 'impasse'. wooncrisis, politieke vertrouwenscrisis, stikstofcrisis, economische crisis, fatbikecrisis, coronacrisis - alles is crisis (voor iemand zoals jij, voor hem voor haar voor mij). berlant noemt dit een 'crisis ordinary': een situatie van paniek die niet in een bepaald 'genre' past, geen makkelijke oplossingen kent en daarom maar eindeloos doorsuddert. daar komt nog bij dat veel stabiliserende instituties - 'traditional infrastructures for reproducing life' (blz 5) -aan neoliberale herstructurering verloren zijn gegaan. vaste aanstellingen zijn vervangen door flexcontracten, gezinnetjes die samen elke dag spruitjes eten hebben ruimte gemaakt voor samengestelde flexgezinnen, brede volkspartijen hebben terrein verloren aan politieke eendagsvliegen, RIP de kerk, etc etc. we bevinden ons steeds vaker in een precaire impasse: 'a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out into anxiety ... it marks a delay that demands activity' (blz 199). het gaat van niets naar nergens, maar het gaat wél, weliswaar zonder gepredetermineerd pad, of zoals berlant zegt, 'genre'. desondanks blijven we geloven in de mogelijkheid van een stabiele, vervullende baan, een stabiel huwelijk of iig relatie, een stabiele woonsituatie, etc. etc, kortom huisje boompje hypotheekje. het kan wél. ofzo. (spoiler: het kan niet.)
(als je geen beeld ziet: hier hoort een foto te staan van rob jetten die in de notre-dame in ubbergen zijn stem uitbrengt)
in hoofdstuk 7 pakt berlant ‘de politiek’ aan. verkiezingen, wat een schijnvertoning, man o man. rob jetten trekt naar ubbergen, gaat naar de havo-school, gaat naar het stemhokje, kruist z’n eigen bolletje vermiljoenrood, poseert voor de anp-fotografen en werpt dan ritueel het biljet in de otto. het doet me altijd denken aan hoe ze bidden bij, eveneens vermiljoenrode, shinto-schrijnen: je werpt een 5-yen-muntje (japans: go-en) in de put, klapt, klapt, bidt, klapt nog een keer, en hoopt op geluk (eveneens go-en). mensen het spijt me: van rob jetten wordt deze wereld niet beter. die 10 steden zijn een leugen en bovendien een verschrikkelijk dom plan. maar toch, hè. de weken in aanloop naar de verkiezingen kijken we allemaal naar het nieuws, volgen we de peilingen, alles om maar te voelen dat er een klein beetje hoop is op verandering, op verbetering. misschien ook maar beter ook, dat we hierin geloven (want anders krijgen wij ook january 6-taferelen). toch is ons geloof in wat er nog over is van liberale democratie een door en door wrede vorm van optimisme - uiteindelijk worden we toch genaaid.
waar cruel optimism in uitblinkt is dat het boek je confronteert met je eigen wreed-optimistische denkbeelden (in het engels klinkt het toch wat overtuigender hè). je krijgt de spiegel voorgehouden over de toekomstbeelden waar jij en de mensen om je heen zelf aan vastklampen. ik moet telkens denken aan iemand die ik voor mijn scriptieonderzoek heb mogen spreken. ze hopt al meer dan tien jaar van camping naar camping, van de ene naar de andere tijdelijke plek - noem het een impasse, een 'wooncrisis-ordinary' - en zou daar wel klaar mee willen zijn. dat gaat echter lastig, zegt ze: 'ik wacht tot ik iemand die een beetje leuk is tegen het lijf loop, zodat ik hier weg kan, verder met mijn leven.' ik vind haar woordkeuze zo typerend, ze hoeft niet iemand te 'leren kennen', een 'band op te bouwen', 'tegen het lijf lopen' volstaat. ze houdt heilig vast aan het idee dat je als alleenstaande niet van de camping af kunt om een eigen leven te leiden. nog bijzonderder: zonder het te weten herhaalt ze woord voor woord iets wat berlant ooit in een interview zei: 'people desire to throw themselves at someone so they can start a plot named life'¹.
is er een 'goed leven' zonder dit 'plot'? is het mogelijk om normen en voorbedachte fantasie daarover los te laten, en zo ja, wat moeten we dan? genoeg om over na te denken!!!
¹ https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/l...
de premisse van cruel optimism is eigenlijk heel simpel: in onze samenlevingen – berlant schrijft in principe over noord-amerika en west-europa, maar hun ideeën zijn breder toepasbaar – zijn we gehecht aan een heleboel dingen waar we met z’n allen hoop in vestigen, maar deze hoop, en onze gehechtheden (attachments) aan deze fantasieën weerhouden ons er eigenlijk van om het beste uit ons leven te halen ('to flourish'). we worden ondermijnd, ófwel direct, omdat de dingen waar we ons aan hechten ons direct schaden, bijvoorbeeld verslavingen, ófwel indirect, omdat ze ons tegenhouden om betere, gezondere dromen na te streven. het klassieke voorbeeld is dat van meritocratie, of z’n nog duivelsere broertje, ‘the american dream’. het idee dat iedereen door hard te werken een beter leven kan bereiken, ‘omhoog kunt klimmen’, is uiteraard bedrog. dat weten we. maar we willen dat niet erkennen, kunnen het niet erkennen, iedereen krijgt het met de paplepel ingegoten, je moet voldoendes halen op school, en natuurlijk krijg je de hele dag het hele jaar voorbeelden van selfmade-succesverhalen door de strot gedouwd (zoals die engnek jitse groen van thuisbezorgd. bah! zie ook: The Labor of Hope: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt)
berlant onderbouwt hun argument aan de hand van een zelf-aangelegd 'archief' van kunst, met name films, die iets blootgeven over de wereld waarin we leven. om een beetje chocola van dit boek te maken helpt het als je de films die de auteur behandelt van tevoren te kijken. bijzonder boeiend vond ik berlants bespreking van rosetta van de dardenne broers, een film over een meisje dat met haar moeder op een camping in de ardennen woont (ja ja), dat de armoede van haar tweekoppige gezinnetje zat is en gewoon 'een normaal leven' wil leiden maar tegen wordt gewerkt door de enorme werkeloosheid en armoede. (in de voetnoten bespreekt berlant ook les glaneurs et la glaneuse van agnes varda: deze film is verder niet heel relevant voor deze recensie en staat ook niet centraal in het boek, maar dit is wel mijn dringende kijktip aan u, goodreads-vriend)
volgens berlant leven we, net als rosetta, in een tijdsgewricht dat gekenmerkt wordt door crisis en door 'impasse'. wooncrisis, politieke vertrouwenscrisis, stikstofcrisis, economische crisis, fatbikecrisis, coronacrisis - alles is crisis (voor iemand zoals jij, voor hem voor haar voor mij). berlant noemt dit een 'crisis ordinary': een situatie van paniek die niet in een bepaald 'genre' past, geen makkelijke oplossingen kent en daarom maar eindeloos doorsuddert. daar komt nog bij dat veel stabiliserende instituties - 'traditional infrastructures for reproducing life' (blz 5) -aan neoliberale herstructurering verloren zijn gegaan. vaste aanstellingen zijn vervangen door flexcontracten, gezinnetjes die samen elke dag spruitjes eten hebben ruimte gemaakt voor samengestelde flexgezinnen, brede volkspartijen hebben terrein verloren aan politieke eendagsvliegen, RIP de kerk, etc etc. we bevinden ons steeds vaker in een precaire impasse: 'a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out into anxiety ... it marks a delay that demands activity' (blz 199). het gaat van niets naar nergens, maar het gaat wél, weliswaar zonder gepredetermineerd pad, of zoals berlant zegt, 'genre'. desondanks blijven we geloven in de mogelijkheid van een stabiele, vervullende baan, een stabiel huwelijk of iig relatie, een stabiele woonsituatie, etc. etc, kortom huisje boompje hypotheekje. het kan wél. ofzo. (spoiler: het kan niet.)
(als je geen beeld ziet: hier hoort een foto te staan van rob jetten die in de notre-dame in ubbergen zijn stem uitbrengt)
in hoofdstuk 7 pakt berlant ‘de politiek’ aan. verkiezingen, wat een schijnvertoning, man o man. rob jetten trekt naar ubbergen, gaat naar de havo-school, gaat naar het stemhokje, kruist z’n eigen bolletje vermiljoenrood, poseert voor de anp-fotografen en werpt dan ritueel het biljet in de otto. het doet me altijd denken aan hoe ze bidden bij, eveneens vermiljoenrode, shinto-schrijnen: je werpt een 5-yen-muntje (japans: go-en) in de put, klapt, klapt, bidt, klapt nog een keer, en hoopt op geluk (eveneens go-en). mensen het spijt me: van rob jetten wordt deze wereld niet beter. die 10 steden zijn een leugen en bovendien een verschrikkelijk dom plan. maar toch, hè. de weken in aanloop naar de verkiezingen kijken we allemaal naar het nieuws, volgen we de peilingen, alles om maar te voelen dat er een klein beetje hoop is op verandering, op verbetering. misschien ook maar beter ook, dat we hierin geloven (want anders krijgen wij ook january 6-taferelen). toch is ons geloof in wat er nog over is van liberale democratie een door en door wrede vorm van optimisme - uiteindelijk worden we toch genaaid.
waar cruel optimism in uitblinkt is dat het boek je confronteert met je eigen wreed-optimistische denkbeelden (in het engels klinkt het toch wat overtuigender hè). je krijgt de spiegel voorgehouden over de toekomstbeelden waar jij en de mensen om je heen zelf aan vastklampen. ik moet telkens denken aan iemand die ik voor mijn scriptieonderzoek heb mogen spreken. ze hopt al meer dan tien jaar van camping naar camping, van de ene naar de andere tijdelijke plek - noem het een impasse, een 'wooncrisis-ordinary' - en zou daar wel klaar mee willen zijn. dat gaat echter lastig, zegt ze: 'ik wacht tot ik iemand die een beetje leuk is tegen het lijf loop, zodat ik hier weg kan, verder met mijn leven.' ik vind haar woordkeuze zo typerend, ze hoeft niet iemand te 'leren kennen', een 'band op te bouwen', 'tegen het lijf lopen' volstaat. ze houdt heilig vast aan het idee dat je als alleenstaande niet van de camping af kunt om een eigen leven te leiden. nog bijzonderder: zonder het te weten herhaalt ze woord voor woord iets wat berlant ooit in een interview zei: 'people desire to throw themselves at someone so they can start a plot named life'¹.
is er een 'goed leven' zonder dit 'plot'? is het mogelijk om normen en voorbedachte fantasie daarover los te laten, en zo ja, wat moeten we dan? genoeg om over na te denken!!!
¹ https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/l...
November 15, 2021
Lauren Berlant characterizes the term “cruel optimism” in various ways, but the one that spoke most clearly to me is “a projection of sustaining but unworkable fantasy.”
The idea behind cruel optimism is a condition in which the happiness we’ve subscribed to as an ideal, when attained, isn’t happiness and yet we continue to subscribe to it. A circle of frustration that seals its own exits.
An early discussion by Berlant of the book Exchange Value struck me as very poignant in conveying this sense of happiness frustrated. Two kids who can only dream of wealth rob a presumably dead woman’s home and find a huge surprise — almost $1 million in cash, other investments, etc.— all hoarded away. They find a chance at the wealth they dream of.
But their dreams aren’t what they dreamed of. One spends his share but ends up with nothing of real value to show for it. And the other holds his wealth, like the hoarder herself, in an anxious clutch.
It’s not just that we chase the wrong things, like wealth, or that nothing, once attained, lives up to our wishes. The problem is the structure of “normal” life.
“Normal” life (the “predictable, maybe in Berlant’s terms) is a fluid interplay of events and meaning, where meaning happens in our affective lives and in more and less explicit interpretations of the events of our lives. When things are normal, there is a flow, no collapses or sudden, disorienting reconfigurations. We can count on the flow as the environment in which meaning can develop and thrive.
But what happens when “normal” itself becomes a flow of collapses and reconfigurations, when change and disruption is our constant environment, when the pace of life changes in such a way that the disturbances are disturbances of a very flow of disturbances?
Normal then becomes a constancy of crisis, where our affective lives and our ability to go on are in constant question and reconfigurations that themselves get interrupted by the need to reconfigure again before we’ve completed even a single reconfiguration.
“Normal” life assumes some stabilities — the pace of time and events, the consistency of meaning-making activities, some kind of containment of the community of meaning-making to a space of potential consensus. But now we find ourselves in a tight circle in which we are trying to develop in instability itself. But it cannot grow there — its conditions snatch away its possibility.
As Berlant says, “Even when you get what you want, you can’t have what you want.”
How did we get here? We embraced change and disruption, and we disvalued stability. The stability we in fact thought we had — maybe think the 1950s — was ill-grounded, in turning away from institutions and practices that we wanted hard enough to believe in that we ignored their failures.
All the stabilities that we count on have now played out their lives — economic, employment, career, marriage, maybe even education. None of these offer an environment in which to settle and develop something meaningful to a life. They change, shatter, transform, and we try to create meaning out of their instability itself.
And since the book was written, even the very stability of reality has played itself away in the proliferation of “realities” via social media and “news.”
If all of this sounds very abstract, it’s because it is. Berlant thinks in a world in which ideas and themes have agency and effect. History is exactly that play of ideas and themes, and we, as historical creatures, are constituted by it.
She builds the story by examining the arts — our meaning-making activities — novels, film, performance art, . . . They are our reflective lives, the places in which we would create meaning, and in which we do create meaning but in a broken flow.
The story also sounds very bleak, but I think it is bleak in the mainstream. It’s on the fringes that we can look ahead. Berlant does find, in her later discussions, a kind of turn against the normal. Even if we can’t defeat the normal, we can throw it back in its own face, a rejection of the normal and maybe a path forward into the not-normal.
The idea behind cruel optimism is a condition in which the happiness we’ve subscribed to as an ideal, when attained, isn’t happiness and yet we continue to subscribe to it. A circle of frustration that seals its own exits.
An early discussion by Berlant of the book Exchange Value struck me as very poignant in conveying this sense of happiness frustrated. Two kids who can only dream of wealth rob a presumably dead woman’s home and find a huge surprise — almost $1 million in cash, other investments, etc.— all hoarded away. They find a chance at the wealth they dream of.
But their dreams aren’t what they dreamed of. One spends his share but ends up with nothing of real value to show for it. And the other holds his wealth, like the hoarder herself, in an anxious clutch.
It’s not just that we chase the wrong things, like wealth, or that nothing, once attained, lives up to our wishes. The problem is the structure of “normal” life.
“Normal” life (the “predictable, maybe in Berlant’s terms) is a fluid interplay of events and meaning, where meaning happens in our affective lives and in more and less explicit interpretations of the events of our lives. When things are normal, there is a flow, no collapses or sudden, disorienting reconfigurations. We can count on the flow as the environment in which meaning can develop and thrive.
But what happens when “normal” itself becomes a flow of collapses and reconfigurations, when change and disruption is our constant environment, when the pace of life changes in such a way that the disturbances are disturbances of a very flow of disturbances?
Normal then becomes a constancy of crisis, where our affective lives and our ability to go on are in constant question and reconfigurations that themselves get interrupted by the need to reconfigure again before we’ve completed even a single reconfiguration.
“Normal” life assumes some stabilities — the pace of time and events, the consistency of meaning-making activities, some kind of containment of the community of meaning-making to a space of potential consensus. But now we find ourselves in a tight circle in which we are trying to develop in instability itself. But it cannot grow there — its conditions snatch away its possibility.
As Berlant says, “Even when you get what you want, you can’t have what you want.”
How did we get here? We embraced change and disruption, and we disvalued stability. The stability we in fact thought we had — maybe think the 1950s — was ill-grounded, in turning away from institutions and practices that we wanted hard enough to believe in that we ignored their failures.
All the stabilities that we count on have now played out their lives — economic, employment, career, marriage, maybe even education. None of these offer an environment in which to settle and develop something meaningful to a life. They change, shatter, transform, and we try to create meaning out of their instability itself.
And since the book was written, even the very stability of reality has played itself away in the proliferation of “realities” via social media and “news.”
If all of this sounds very abstract, it’s because it is. Berlant thinks in a world in which ideas and themes have agency and effect. History is exactly that play of ideas and themes, and we, as historical creatures, are constituted by it.
She builds the story by examining the arts — our meaning-making activities — novels, film, performance art, . . . They are our reflective lives, the places in which we would create meaning, and in which we do create meaning but in a broken flow.
The story also sounds very bleak, but I think it is bleak in the mainstream. It’s on the fringes that we can look ahead. Berlant does find, in her later discussions, a kind of turn against the normal. Even if we can’t defeat the normal, we can throw it back in its own face, a rejection of the normal and maybe a path forward into the not-normal.
July 24, 2012
Will soon review this for Common Knowledge. V. Excited! ... Ok, got the rough draft of the review done. Turns out CK will let me publish that (though not the edited CK version), so you get a preview.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism ( Duke University Press, 2011), 342pp.
Berlant's work synthesizes Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, the Frankfurt School, affect theory, and the Situationists: the mixture is a useful one. (My grandmother told me, in a letter that later helped release her from permanent coma, that she didn't want to live past her usefulness, so, you see, “useful” is one of the highest compliments I can give.) The question is always: useful for whom? In this case, those of us who keep fighting the washed-out, disaffected, peri-Stockholm syndrome we feel in our imagining-other to the globalized-neo-liberal-free-market-total-performance-in-isolation-post-modern-condition. Berlant perfectly describes the more and more intense “political depression” that has had its funk all over me for the last several years. It's not that my love died, but that it has burned to a kind of Derridan cinder from the bellows of constant affront, and stoking it back up seems an awful lot of work. In the 1/3 World (the term belongs to Arundhatii Roy), and in the 10% of it to which I belong, we have all the luxury we need to devote masses of time and energy to world building, to a future worth living, but many are distracted and soggy and unsteady. Under neo-liberal regimes, we live in Marcuse's alienation intensified, globalized, imperialized into a condition of “normal trauma.” Most admirable about Berlant's work is the kindness with which she writes it. Hard-toned sentences describing the numb-panic of the “affectisphere” or “affect world” always shift to clauses of compassion for all of us who are just living
though “an impossible, but no longer unlivable, situation” at one point described as “the attrition of the subject of captial articulat(ing) survival with slow death ... has to be reunderstood as a kind of destruction toward survival.” Working in conditions of radical precarity (political, economic) and sharing a field of “ambient
citizenship” in which subjects are “magnetized” to various condensations of desire, usually elements of a mythical “good life,” Berlant argues that we are living in a condition of cruel optimism. We are cathected to ideals and values that are not realizable under present conditions, optimistically continue to attempt to realize
them, and endure the “wearing out” of our subjectivity in pursuit of a promise that cannot be answered, or cannot be answered with the tools available, or the purpose of which is not to be answered, or even the answering of which hurts. Cruel optimism is the condition in which our optimism toward the promise damages us, and yet. Paragraphs often open with conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, other signaling phrases: so, but, but, at the end, likewise (174-5 is a snapshot). The effect mirrors the kind of stuttering, or repeated coming to one's senses for a moment that Berlant argues is one subjectivity of the “normal crisis” and the near permanent “impasses” through which we live. On page three of the introduction, I started making a list of novels and US television shows that answer to Berlant's diagnosis of our fractured and intimate public sphere. They are tragedies, comedies, satires, horrors: Tattoo Girl, The Hunger Games, The Wire, Dexter, Anthropology of an American Girl, Mad Men, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Californication, Girls. Happily, Berlant is not merely a diagnostician, but what I wrote in the margins of the final chapter matters outside the genre of the review. If Berlant's readings of our times are accurate, and this is not just me but what it feels like to live in the 1/3 World where the goodies accumulate, then the impossible alternatives we set to enlivening had better collude with the 2/3 World. (Finally: This book made me stop smoking.)
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism ( Duke University Press, 2011), 342pp.
Berlant's work synthesizes Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, the Frankfurt School, affect theory, and the Situationists: the mixture is a useful one. (My grandmother told me, in a letter that later helped release her from permanent coma, that she didn't want to live past her usefulness, so, you see, “useful” is one of the highest compliments I can give.) The question is always: useful for whom? In this case, those of us who keep fighting the washed-out, disaffected, peri-Stockholm syndrome we feel in our imagining-other to the globalized-neo-liberal-free-market-total-performance-in-isolation-post-modern-condition. Berlant perfectly describes the more and more intense “political depression” that has had its funk all over me for the last several years. It's not that my love died, but that it has burned to a kind of Derridan cinder from the bellows of constant affront, and stoking it back up seems an awful lot of work. In the 1/3 World (the term belongs to Arundhatii Roy), and in the 10% of it to which I belong, we have all the luxury we need to devote masses of time and energy to world building, to a future worth living, but many are distracted and soggy and unsteady. Under neo-liberal regimes, we live in Marcuse's alienation intensified, globalized, imperialized into a condition of “normal trauma.” Most admirable about Berlant's work is the kindness with which she writes it. Hard-toned sentences describing the numb-panic of the “affectisphere” or “affect world” always shift to clauses of compassion for all of us who are just living
though “an impossible, but no longer unlivable, situation” at one point described as “the attrition of the subject of captial articulat(ing) survival with slow death ... has to be reunderstood as a kind of destruction toward survival.” Working in conditions of radical precarity (political, economic) and sharing a field of “ambient
citizenship” in which subjects are “magnetized” to various condensations of desire, usually elements of a mythical “good life,” Berlant argues that we are living in a condition of cruel optimism. We are cathected to ideals and values that are not realizable under present conditions, optimistically continue to attempt to realize
them, and endure the “wearing out” of our subjectivity in pursuit of a promise that cannot be answered, or cannot be answered with the tools available, or the purpose of which is not to be answered, or even the answering of which hurts. Cruel optimism is the condition in which our optimism toward the promise damages us, and yet. Paragraphs often open with conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, other signaling phrases: so, but, but, at the end, likewise (174-5 is a snapshot). The effect mirrors the kind of stuttering, or repeated coming to one's senses for a moment that Berlant argues is one subjectivity of the “normal crisis” and the near permanent “impasses” through which we live. On page three of the introduction, I started making a list of novels and US television shows that answer to Berlant's diagnosis of our fractured and intimate public sphere. They are tragedies, comedies, satires, horrors: Tattoo Girl, The Hunger Games, The Wire, Dexter, Anthropology of an American Girl, Mad Men, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Californication, Girls. Happily, Berlant is not merely a diagnostician, but what I wrote in the margins of the final chapter matters outside the genre of the review. If Berlant's readings of our times are accurate, and this is not just me but what it feels like to live in the 1/3 World where the goodies accumulate, then the impossible alternatives we set to enlivening had better collude with the 2/3 World. (Finally: This book made me stop smoking.)
January 6, 2018
2.5 stars? I tried to give this a fair/objective reading and approach it on its own terms, but affect theory and critical theory are still new and frequently confusing to me.
I may return with a full review once I've had time to digest/discuss this book (which took me nearly a year to finish, usually taking long breaks between chapters).
The idea at the core of this work is interesting and valuable, and the novels, films, and art-works Berlant examines are excellent, but I am put off by her writing style, and for every moment of lucid analysis, there are many paragraphs of nebulous, half-formed assertions to wade through. I'm skeptical of her use of psychoanalysis, and too ignorant to speak to her use of queer theory, but mainly I was put off by her decidedly ambivalent/cynical conception of the means and ends of political action, and found the alternative she gestures towards to be markedly impoverished (although maybe these radically diminished expectations are the whole point?).
I may return with a full review once I've had time to digest/discuss this book (which took me nearly a year to finish, usually taking long breaks between chapters).
The idea at the core of this work is interesting and valuable, and the novels, films, and art-works Berlant examines are excellent, but I am put off by her writing style, and for every moment of lucid analysis, there are many paragraphs of nebulous, half-formed assertions to wade through. I'm skeptical of her use of psychoanalysis, and too ignorant to speak to her use of queer theory, but mainly I was put off by her decidedly ambivalent/cynical conception of the means and ends of political action, and found the alternative she gestures towards to be markedly impoverished (although maybe these radically diminished expectations are the whole point?).
Read
February 14, 2024Difficult difficult lemon difficult. Honoured to be Berlant’s academic granddaughter (they supervised my supervisor).
July 28, 2025
“… insanların çıkmazda bocalarken, yalpalarken, pazarlıklara girişirken, bir şeyleri denerken veya bu dünyada bağlandıkları vaatler yüzünden başka şekilde yıpranırken kapılabilecekleri bir ritim keşfediyoruz.”
Zalim İyimserlik, yedi bölüm altında
haberimiz olmasına karar verilen kadar haberimiz olan gerçeklerin incelenmesi. Krizlerin gölgesinde yaşamaya, normal olarak dayatılan yaşam biçimini yıkmaya,
iyimserliği devam ettiremediğimiz seviyede gerçeklerle karşılaştığımızda yediğimiz darbeye dair bir kitap.
Kitabı özetlemenin belirli bir yolunu, net bir anlatımını bulamadığımı farkediyorum. Doğru anladığımdan emin olma çabasıyla okudum çoğunlukla. Çünkü ülkemizin içinden kendimizi çıkaramadığımız kadar boğulduğumuz gerçeği var.
Ama diyelim çıkartma gücü bulduk bunu anlam yaratma yollarınından edebiyat, sinema, müzik, performans sanatı gibi hareketlerin yirmi ve yirmi birinci yüzyıllarda nasıl yapıldığına değiniliyor dört bölüm kad
“Geldiğimiz nokta bu: Tükenen bir tekrar ve bir çıkmaz. Tükenmiş bir şeyi kendinden başka bir şeye, herhangi bir seye dönüştürmek ne anlama gelir?”
“Tarih yaralar, ama sadece yaralamaz. Tahakküm eden ya da kanıksanmış olan her neyse onun baskıcı varlığına bir karşılık olarak iyimserlik de yaratır aynı zamanda. Politik duygular, değişim beklentilerine verilen tepkilerdir: Bu tepkilerle oluşan bağlılık iyimserdir, her ne kadar etkileri karanlık olsa bile. Eleştirel teoriyi iyimser bir janr olarak değil de karanlık yanlarıyla düşünmenin nedeni, sadece karakteristik olarak şüphe dolu olması değil, ama aynı zamanda "en düşünceli" düşüncenin bile değeri hakkında fazlaca yorucu kaygılar yaratmasıdır.* Ancak arzunun başka bir tanımk olan iyimserliği tekrar etme zorunluluğu, aynı zamanda bir kez daha hayal kırıklığı ve depresyondan, yani hiçbir şeyin değişmeyeceğine ve herkesin, özellikle de kendinin öğrenme kapasitesini kaybettiğine dair uzun erimli histen kurtulma ihtimalini riske sokması muhtemel bir durumdur.”
“… öfke ve zalimlik edimleri bakım biçimleriyle karışan işçinin tabi kılınmış duyusallığının, kapitalizmin geleceği şimdiki zamanın ezici üretkenliği içinde eritmesi ile normatif yakınlık vaadi arasındaki ilişkinin bir etkisi olduğunu savunuyorum, ki bu da bizim bir arkadaş edinmenin, biriyle randevuya çıkmanın ya da mücadelemizde bize yoldaşlık edebilecek birine özlem duymanın gerçekten de yaşamın tam da vuku bulduğu yer olduğunu tahayyül etmemizi sağlar.”
Zalim İyimserlik, yedi bölüm altında
haberimiz olmasına karar verilen kadar haberimiz olan gerçeklerin incelenmesi. Krizlerin gölgesinde yaşamaya, normal olarak dayatılan yaşam biçimini yıkmaya,
iyimserliği devam ettiremediğimiz seviyede gerçeklerle karşılaştığımızda yediğimiz darbeye dair bir kitap.
Kitabı özetlemenin belirli bir yolunu, net bir anlatımını bulamadığımı farkediyorum. Doğru anladığımdan emin olma çabasıyla okudum çoğunlukla. Çünkü ülkemizin içinden kendimizi çıkaramadığımız kadar boğulduğumuz gerçeği var.
Ama diyelim çıkartma gücü bulduk bunu anlam yaratma yollarınından edebiyat, sinema, müzik, performans sanatı gibi hareketlerin yirmi ve yirmi birinci yüzyıllarda nasıl yapıldığına değiniliyor dört bölüm kad
“Geldiğimiz nokta bu: Tükenen bir tekrar ve bir çıkmaz. Tükenmiş bir şeyi kendinden başka bir şeye, herhangi bir seye dönüştürmek ne anlama gelir?”
“Tarih yaralar, ama sadece yaralamaz. Tahakküm eden ya da kanıksanmış olan her neyse onun baskıcı varlığına bir karşılık olarak iyimserlik de yaratır aynı zamanda. Politik duygular, değişim beklentilerine verilen tepkilerdir: Bu tepkilerle oluşan bağlılık iyimserdir, her ne kadar etkileri karanlık olsa bile. Eleştirel teoriyi iyimser bir janr olarak değil de karanlık yanlarıyla düşünmenin nedeni, sadece karakteristik olarak şüphe dolu olması değil, ama aynı zamanda "en düşünceli" düşüncenin bile değeri hakkında fazlaca yorucu kaygılar yaratmasıdır.* Ancak arzunun başka bir tanımk olan iyimserliği tekrar etme zorunluluğu, aynı zamanda bir kez daha hayal kırıklığı ve depresyondan, yani hiçbir şeyin değişmeyeceğine ve herkesin, özellikle de kendinin öğrenme kapasitesini kaybettiğine dair uzun erimli histen kurtulma ihtimalini riske sokması muhtemel bir durumdur.”
“… öfke ve zalimlik edimleri bakım biçimleriyle karışan işçinin tabi kılınmış duyusallığının, kapitalizmin geleceği şimdiki zamanın ezici üretkenliği içinde eritmesi ile normatif yakınlık vaadi arasındaki ilişkinin bir etkisi olduğunu savunuyorum, ki bu da bizim bir arkadaş edinmenin, biriyle randevuya çıkmanın ya da mücadelemizde bize yoldaşlık edebilecek birine özlem duymanın gerçekten de yaşamın tam da vuku bulduğu yer olduğunu tahayyül etmemizi sağlar.”
September 2, 2021
Although not as bad as some other critical theorists' works, this was a struggle to get through. I'm just not a critical theory type of guy, I guess.
Of interest to me is first the concept of cruel optimism. This quote sums it up: "an optimistic attachment is cruel when the object/scene of desire is itself an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it: but its life-organizing status can trump interfering with the damage it provokes" (227). My concern: if we are so focused on the future that we neglect the present, is our present ALWAYS rife with negative optimism? Positivity must exist, at least in some cases. I need to think on this more.
Second of interest to me is chapter 6, which is a great discussion on precarity and what comes after the possibility of "the good life" is destroyed. In a neoliberal society, how can the laborer exist if the future they worked so hard to achieve is ruined? In the long run, this chapter will probably be the most useful for my research.
The third thing of interest to me is chapter 7, which discusses the issue with optimism when we pursue the political. I struggled a bit with this chapter - I think it needed a little more fleshing out, and I didn't think the archive worked for me - but the idea of pursuing a positive political future through art (i.e., art as social mobilization) yet ultimately failing because mere optimism is not enough to achieve your goal (or, though untouched by Berlant, the reverse) is fascinating to me and speaks to my long-standing interest in literature/visual culture as protest or means of social change.
In summary: this book has some useful/interesting ideas, but I suck at critical theory so I don't know if I identified any of them correctly, but three things stood out so that's cool I guess
Of interest to me is first the concept of cruel optimism. This quote sums it up: "an optimistic attachment is cruel when the object/scene of desire is itself an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it: but its life-organizing status can trump interfering with the damage it provokes" (227). My concern: if we are so focused on the future that we neglect the present, is our present ALWAYS rife with negative optimism? Positivity must exist, at least in some cases. I need to think on this more.
Second of interest to me is chapter 6, which is a great discussion on precarity and what comes after the possibility of "the good life" is destroyed. In a neoliberal society, how can the laborer exist if the future they worked so hard to achieve is ruined? In the long run, this chapter will probably be the most useful for my research.
The third thing of interest to me is chapter 7, which discusses the issue with optimism when we pursue the political. I struggled a bit with this chapter - I think it needed a little more fleshing out, and I didn't think the archive worked for me - but the idea of pursuing a positive political future through art (i.e., art as social mobilization) yet ultimately failing because mere optimism is not enough to achieve your goal (or, though untouched by Berlant, the reverse) is fascinating to me and speaks to my long-standing interest in literature/visual culture as protest or means of social change.
In summary: this book has some useful/interesting ideas, but I suck at critical theory so I don't know if I identified any of them correctly, but three things stood out so that's cool I guess
January 27, 2021
Reading Cruel Optimism was like reading an extended poem – peripheral, visceral, imagist, affective. And the results are profound, if a bit difficult to articulate. Berlant describes the sense of the present before it emerges as something in the present, before it may become an ‘event’. In this ephemeral present there is both the ‘optimism’ that draws one forward and the ‘cruelty’ of that optimism as it acts as a limit to its achievement.
Berant explores intuition, lateral agency, the exhausted repetition of melodrama, the gesture, and the utopia of normality and the good life as it is lived in precarity. Each of these is expressed as the enigmatic space of the ‘impasse’ that urges movement while paralyzing it in failure. What Berlant is exploring is contemporary society – that ‘sustaining but unworkable fantasy’. The book questions the attrition of the self as it explores relations between pragmatic and accretive activities.
“To belong to the normal world is to misrecognize only certain modes of intelligibility as expressing one’s true self. It brings out my queerness to think of living not only as self-extension but also as a process that interferes with the drama of the self” (p.125).
If read patiently, I think there is a lot going on in this book. In a phrase, it is saying: “All babies smile, but it might be gas” (p.158).
Berant explores intuition, lateral agency, the exhausted repetition of melodrama, the gesture, and the utopia of normality and the good life as it is lived in precarity. Each of these is expressed as the enigmatic space of the ‘impasse’ that urges movement while paralyzing it in failure. What Berlant is exploring is contemporary society – that ‘sustaining but unworkable fantasy’. The book questions the attrition of the self as it explores relations between pragmatic and accretive activities.
“To belong to the normal world is to misrecognize only certain modes of intelligibility as expressing one’s true self. It brings out my queerness to think of living not only as self-extension but also as a process that interferes with the drama of the self” (p.125).
If read patiently, I think there is a lot going on in this book. In a phrase, it is saying: “All babies smile, but it might be gas” (p.158).
June 18, 2020
Wanting things that aren't good for you. The introduction and first chapter are widely applicable and compelling. The rest of the book narrowed its focus: an aesthetic analysis of specific novels and films, the cultural meaning of fatness/obesity in the West, and some general political observations (which, being from 2011, now feel too mild and vague for the specific political moment we have reached in 2020). I did find these concepts very helpful nonetheless. I recorded some quotes.
July 24, 2017
my old professor used to say "u kno maddy norms and the pursuit of the normative are a lot more complex than just a singular and negative disciplinary norm" and i was like "hmm" but now i know he meant "read cruel optimism"
July 29, 2021
I knew there was a reason that I didn't get my doctorate. Very insightful but for us civilians, the introduction is probably the most important part.
March 31, 2024
I tried and I tried but oh god this wasn’t my sort of thing at all
July 12, 2016
Every day we're onto a new crisis brought about by mass shootings. We can't help but post about them, or enact our sense of grief and outrage, and drum up our political explanation for it. We lock horns with the other side, as they parrot back at us their own drummed up political explanation. It goes on like this for a while until we run out of memes, and we're about to concede some empathy with the other side and admit it's all more complicated and human than this, but before we can more shots ring out and we're onto the next one, spin the wheel and see who gets shot by whom to pick out the new narrative of victimhood, historical oppression, and false equivalence. It's not getting us anywhere, but it's taking up our entire horizon of concern and the circumstances and being shuffled too quickly for us to find our footing. The spectacle of violence and our visceral disgust with racism, black and white, trumps the time we would need to develop less self-righteous opinions. We can't help but check-in and react, terrified of being branded as apathetic or apolitical. But this isn't politics. It is the cruel optimism for a politics that we hope can advance, but it's not about interests and coalitions but ratings and spectacle. That's what I learnt from this book.
Cruel Optimism is also the company in California that will come spray paint your lawn green during water restrictions to keep your middle class yard looking good even when the well is drying up. It won't be Nero fiddling in our case, it will be someone in a visor watering their lawn with the last potable drops in the water table.
Cruel Optimism is also the company in California that will come spray paint your lawn green during water restrictions to keep your middle class yard looking good even when the well is drying up. It won't be Nero fiddling in our case, it will be someone in a visor watering their lawn with the last potable drops in the water table.
July 12, 2021
What great literature, and I suppose really any form of art, should do is in some unique way communicate the affect of the time. Berlant's work on the concept of 'cruel optimism,' or a desire for something that presents significant barriers and suffering to the fulfillment of that desire, analyzes a host of twenty and twenty-first century art that gets at the alienation at the core of our affective experience of the world. The book includes in-depth examinations of literature, cinema, music, installation art, and even protest movements that either enunciate cruel optimism in a novel way or offer a path out of it. I read this book as an undergraduate and think it is an excellant gateway into object-relations and critical theory for those who won't be bothered into reading all of Freud. This was the work that convinced me the psychoanalytic tradition had something useful to say.
June 26, 2019
As the New Yorker article that prompted me to pick this sucker up stipulated, "'Cruel Optimism' [is] dense and academic." Having been out of the academy for some time now, I read for pleasure. Was this book a pleasure to read? Absolutely not. Had it not been a PDF, I would have thrown it across the room upon completion. Yet, like a masochistic marathon runner, I kept pace. The thesis, for sure, is relevant and all too real and I'm wiser for having absorbed whatever I absorbed, but the footnotes alone could be its own novel and anything that requires that much explanation has lost me already.
February 4, 2013
With enthusiasm I approached and read the introduction of this book, and it pretty much died there with one of the most densely written, obscurely referenced, and convolutedly disasterous experiences.
April 15, 2018
As always with Berlant, read the first and last chapter for the revelations, and wade into the middle sections depending on how invested you are in seeing her test out these ideas. Her writing is notoriously dense but her concepts are always revelatory, if you can find your way to them.
February 23, 2025
Picked this up in undergrad and never had the juice to get past Chapter One, so this was like healing my inner child in a way. Berlant isn’t what I would call an easy writer—kind of the ultimate (complimentary) case of the critical theorist who trades in dense thickets of prose that only momentarily sharpen into aphorism—but, with patience & the wisdom of 27 years, the meaning is apprehensible and the beauty appreciable. Its central question is still one that I think about a lot: wherein lies the seed of the radical in our unfortunately ineluctable attachments to the systems that exhaust and immiserate us, and how can it best be nourished into something useful?
September 16, 2025
oops she’s right
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