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Cruel Optimism | Lauren Berlant - Kyobo Book Centre
Cruel Optimism | Why is it that, even though we know capitalism does not enrich our lives, we cannot break free of it? Why can't we get out of relationships that hurt us
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When some object that we desire becomes, on the contrary, an obstacle to a better life, that is precisely where the relation of cruel optimism lies.
Introduction: Affect at the Present Moment
When some object that we desire becomes, on the contrary, an obstacle to a better life, that is precisely where the relation of cruel optimism lies. The object might be food, or it might be something like love. It might be a fantasy of a good life, or a political project. It can rest on something simpler still — like a new habit that promises to lead us toward a better way of being.
This kind of optimistic relation is not inherently cruel. An optimistic relation becomes cruel when the object of attachment actively works against the very goal that drew us into the attachment in the first place.
Every attachment is optimistic — that is, if we describe optimism as the force that pulls us out of ourselves and into the world in order to get closer to some object, person, way of life, project, idea, or scene that produces an effect, an object that satisfies us but that we cannot conjure on our own. But optimism does not always feel optimistic. Because optimism is ambitious, it can at any moment trigger anything from numbness to all sorts of feelings — from fear, anxiety, hunger, or curiosity, to a neutral alertness scanning the aisles of the supermarket, to excitement at the prospect of imminent change. Or it could be excitement at a change that will not come.
One of the everyday pleasures optimism gives us is that it generates conventionality. Conventionality is the place where desire takes form as the predictable comfort embedded in the various genres of the good life produced by people or by the world. But that optimism reveals its goal does not make it foolish or simplistic — an attachment that takes risks in moments of suffering often exhibits intelligence that exceeds rational calculation.
Therefore, regardless of the specific texture of the experience of optimism, the affective structure of an optimistic attachment includes a persistent inclination to return to a particular fantasmatic scene. The fantasy is one that lets us expect that, this time, drawing closer to this object will help adjust the self or the world to be just right.
Yet when a person or a people is willing to undertake a struggle in order to bring about a sweeping change, and the very object/scene that ignited the idea that change was possible itself makes such change impossible, then optimism becomes cruel. And when the pleasure itself of remaining within a relation becomes continuous regardless of the relation's content — so that we find ourselves or the world bound to a situation that is at once severely threatening and deeply reassuring — optimism becomes doubly cruel.
Berlant's tendency to render concepts like conventionality as a kind of "place" or "scene" reflects her distinctive way of thinking — namely, that such concepts are themselves domains of practice and meaning in which embodied life unfolds.
This book examines a range of relations of cruel optimism, from objects and scenes of upward mobility and romantic love to the desire for the political itself. But at the heart of this project lies something moral-intimate-economic that we call "the good life." Why do people cling to the conventional fantasy of the good life — for example, the couple, the family, the political system, the institution, the market, and ongoing relations of reciprocity at work — when there is overwhelming evidence that such things are unstable, fragile, and exact a tremendous cost?
A fantasy is a means by which people "keep stockpiled an idealized theory and blueprint of how they and their world might finally come to mean something." What happens when those fantasies begin to wear thin? Will it lead to depression, fragmentation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism? Or to a bottomless mess?
Readers of my trilogy on national sentimentality — The Anatomy of National Fantasy, The Female Complaint, and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City — will recognize that these questions have been central to what I have been examining over the last two centuries of American aesthetics, eroticism, and politics. Those books look at the affective components of citizenship and the public sphere, with a particular focus on how intimate publics operate in close proximity to normative modes of love and law. Cruel Optimism extends the concerns of that work transnationally and temporally, connecting them to the moment of our own time. The archive of this project encompasses present-day Europe and America, examining precarious bodily subjectivity and fantasy from the perspectives of citizenship, race, labor, class (dis)location, sexuality, and health. These cases are interrelated within the context of the past thirty years' withdrawal of the postwar promise of social democracy in the post-WWII United States and Europe.
Cruel Optimism does not cover the whole stretch from the late twentieth century into the twenty-first. In the postwar period, everyone believed in the democratic possibility that anyone could live a good life; but the economic opportunities, social norms, and juridical rights that fueled that immense postwar optimism are now being extended unevenly. This book is not, however, an exhaustive exposé of the state's evasion of intervention in this situation. Instead, it deals with mass media, literature, television, film, and video produced from 1990 to the present, and seeks to illuminate the belated historical sensorium that has emerged as the phantasmatic pull of optimism for structural change loses its power to draw the world along. Many fantasies are wearing thin — especially the fantasies of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, lasting intimacy. Among the convictions that are crumbling is the conviction in meritocracy. That is, the sense that liberal-capitalist society consistently provides the individual with the chance to form relationships of equitable reciprocity — so that life can amass into something meaningful and become a project of building protection for one's pleasures — is also breaking down.
Phantasm (fantasm) is a term used in the traditions of psychoanalysis and philosophy, meaning a particular fantasy (an unreal image) that is generated by the mind and psychic activity and that, in turn, becomes the material of psychic activity. Although it is hard to find a passage that lays down a single theoretical definition, surveying the broad ways in which Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, Žižek and others use the term, it appears to denote a scene produced by fantasy — and especially a mental image patterned in a particular way. In this book the term has been translated flexibly, depending on context, as either "phantasm" or "fantasy."
This book examines what happens to the fantasy of the good life when the everyday begins to feel like a landfill, piled with the impending, overwhelming crises that have crashed into the construction of life and into our expectations. By their very scale, these crises so threaten what "having a life" has meant up to now that even adapting to them comes to seem like a kind of achievement. The book also tracks the emergence of precarious public spheres and of intimate publics. An intimate public consists of subjects who, while sharing scenarios of economic and intimate contingency, exchange paradigms for how to manage to live as best one can. Each chapter of this book is a story about the disappearance of an object or scenario of optimism that once held open a space for the fantasy of the good life, and follows the drama of how we have adjusted ourselves to a situation in which what once seemed to be foundational relations have turned into so-called "cruel" optimism.
But how can we say that an aesthetically mediated affective response exemplifies a historical sense [shared among many people]? What follows below sketches how this book undertakes a general conceptual shift by posing such a question.
Cruel Optimism is most concerned with a historical sense that has to do with understanding the moment of our time from inside the moment itself. One of this book's important claims is that our perception of the present is, first of all, made affectively. The present is something that presents itself to us before becoming something else, like a coordinated collective event or any era we can recall in retrospect (Chapter 2, "Intuitionists," describes this way of thinking about the "affective present" within Marxist critical theory). If the present is, in the first place, not an object but a mediated affect, then it is also something that is sensed and continually revised; it is also a genre of time. The conventions of this genre arise from filtering — both privately and publicly — the various situations and events that occur within an extended "now."
The conditions that delimit the "now" ("When did the present begin?") are always contestable.
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From distributed causation to interruptive agency
In this analysis, agency and causality are thought of as environmental mechanisms strung across the personal-institutional axis. And up to this point I have shown how the dramatic outcome of overweight as an endemic condition is overdetermined by various environments. Yet — in the context of acceleration in the field of production and privatization, resource depletion, and compartmentalization in the public sphere — it is not enough to claim that habitus instilled in the workplace and the school is "responsible" for obesity. Just as it is not enough to claim that an epidemic of sick will is choking the productivity and the lifespan of the U.S. workforce. At the other end of this disintegrating circuit lies the agency of subjects who have been medicalized. We can sermonize at these subjects, force them to feel shame, lecture them to diet, to make their families diet, to eat at home, to exercise. People do not lend their ears to such admonitions for many reasons. Epidemiologists tell us that a deeper reason lies at the socioeconomic level. A less visible reason is that these admonitions also preach about dieting in another way that imposes shame and even half-criminalizes the listener. This is the case even when the institutional expert is the normative mom, the President's wife. Because expertise has so often been used in a shame-inducing way, it confirms the social negativity already imposed on subordinated populations, so that even helpful advice rightly comes to be regarded with suspicion. But to understand today's spread of unhealthy weight, we need to look at more than the historically and politically explicable image of decisions resisting conformity.
To take this phenomenon fully into account, we need to separate the image of obesity — viewed as a biopolitical event — from eating as a phenomenological act, and also from food as a space of nourishment and expression. Because of the difficulty of resolving the obesity problem, scholars have at times thought of eating as a stress-induced behavior, a desire for self-medication, a pleasure, or a cultural norm; but for that very reason, scholars have not thought clearly about the possibility that the act of eating may be a behavior that violates every definition of sovereign identity. My focus here is on viewing the act of eating as a kind of self-medication through self-interruption. Mariana Valverde argues that self-medication is not merely a weakness of those suffering a disease of the will. It is often a fitting response to a stress-inducing environment such as the family. It is also part of a way of being within a community, or part of being within a space of belonging organized as a promise of comfort. The pleasure of eating may be personal (if you are someone who regularly goes to a particular place), or anonymous (if you are someone who is just somewhere). To rest comfortably in such a place will be a temporary, episodic affair, but whatever it is, it is a way of pleasurably and usually undramatically extending one's being-in-the-world. From this perspective, the pleasure of [food] consumption characterizes the duration of the consumption (of food). This is yet another definition of "slow food." Slow food is a concept and a movement that, even as capitalist activity destroys the environment, on the other hand makes living possible, and finds within the everyday's inefficient practices a way for those living in such an environment to live well, simply to live, and to resist the speed that creates the contexts that wear out our lives. Food is one of the few spaces in which people can enjoy a pleasure that they can control and rely on. Unlike alcohol or other substances, food is something that being needs — it is part of self-care and the reproduction of life. But how do we materialize the urgency of those needs and pleasures together with the structural conditions of being that work against the well-being of workers and consumers? The form of diffuse pleasure I have been describing here is folded into the act of doing the work needed to keep the body moving smoothly within the foreshortened circuits of capitalized time — within a context where the work of building life consists not merely of the acceleration of work but also of barely getting through the day, the week, the month. The time of the near future, organized around paying various bills and looking after the children, coexists with the sense of well-being that a single meal can bring. And one might imagine that a parent's knowledge of unhealth would lead them to put a different diet into practice for themselves and their children, but according to ethnographic studies of working-class families, the economic threats to a family's continuity, and to the parents' sense of well-being, tend to isolate the family unit, and within such a household, food is one of the few stress relievers available, and one of the few sites that displays a clear continuity between parent and child. Moreover, in scenes of economic want, children share the
stress that the parents bear, and even with some generational difference, they look for solace in the same ways that their parents do. So the complicated work of maintaining a dependent identification can be simplified through the sociality of eating, and in this way provide a routine, repeated scene of happiness — though not of health.
This is the material context in which so many people find themselves. While we face the scene of survival made up of contingency, working life exhausts practical sovereignty and the will to act. Even in the very time of building life, the pressure of the reproduction of life can wear a person out. Eating may be regarded as a kind of stabilizer that balances the body against attrition; but, like other small pleasures, eating may also be regarded as a counter-dissipative act in that it can produce the experience of self-interruption, the experience of floating sideways. From this perspective, since it doesn't necessarily and usually doesn't focus on self-denial or self-extension, it is not — in the tactical sense or in the sense of effectiveness — equivalent to a resistant agency. Within the labor of life-reproduction today, eating, at its best, is an act that releases the subject into a state of self-suspension.
This experience of "floating sideways" refers to Berlant's notion of "lateral agency," which is distinguished from the goal-oriented, linear, single-track movement of an agent that is generally normalized. That is, you can think of it as an account of agency described as a kind of sideways movement — one that resembles self-interrupting acts such as side-stepping, going off course, or slipping down a side path that have nothing to do with will or goal-orientation. In connection with the concepts of lateral agency and "counter-dissipation" that Berlant proposes, consider the relatively recent neologism "tang-jin-jaem" (탕진잼) that has emerged among the younger generation of our society — meaning the act of indulging in something that gives momentary satisfaction, regardless of any macro-goal or long-term plan, while spending money or time freely.
This is not to say that we should replace the concept of conscious will with a concept of involuntary or unconscious action. In the model I am elaborating here, life is not only a kind of project; it is also a place of in-between rest in which, as episodes occur, one is gently let go of one's individuality from time to time. The burden of reproducing one's individuality is one of the parts of practical sovereignty's painfulness — the boring duty of living as someone who can be relied upon. Most of what we do is, in any case, not work that fits some purpose to the letter, but rather a series of brief vacations from the will itself, experiencing agency in another way. Will is so often exhausted by the pressure to keep pace with a labor day that includes preparation time and recovery time. These pleasures can be seen as interrupting the liberal-capitalist subject who is asked to have consciousness, intentionality, and effective will. Of course, interruption and self-extension are not opposites — that is precisely the point I am trying to make. But another point is that, in the scene of slow death — where the health of the mind and of the body can in fact be conflicting goals, and may even be internally conflicting goals — riding another wave of diffusion or fluctuation within the everyday reveals confusion about the meaning of the fact of having a life. Does it mean being healthy? Does it mean loving, or having been loved? Does it mean having felt like a sovereign being? Does it mean reaching the targeted state or feeling of jouissance? Is "having a life" now the process by which we resign ourselves and accept what is left after dreaming of the good life — or after never dreaming at all? Is "life" as a scene of reliable pleasure something we can find within experiences that drift along largely on inertia? Including everything implied by drifting on inertia: the back-and-forth, distracted, sensual space between pleasure and numbness?
My focus here is on how the wear-down endured by the subject of capital explains survival as slow death. The relations of various political depressions — alienation, indifference, separation, distraction, and so on, including numbness — can be interpreted as forms of affect that wrestle with the environment of slow death. This is especially the case for subordinated populations.
It is the same way that the [counter-]violence of battered women has had to be reconceived as destructiveness for survival. But what I am presenting here is also slightly different. In this scene, an action toward the reproduction of life is not the same as making life or self better, nor is it a mimetic response of living in compliance with the structural conditions for collective failure to live well, nor is it merely a brief vacation from being a responsible being. Such acts, too, are oriented toward producing a less-bad experience. They are a brief catching of breath, a deferral, but not a recovery. Not all such kinds of action are unconscious — eating involves many kinds of self-understanding, especially in a culture that produces shame and self-consciousness around the moral mirror that pleasure choices so often pose — but, for example, such acts are often not, consciously or unconsciously, oriented toward long-term planning.
The structural status of overwhelmed life intensifies this short-circuiting of consciousness and fantasy.
Under the regime of crisis-ordinariness, life feels as if it has been cut at its base, less like a stately swim toward the horizon and more like a desperate dog-paddling. Eating ends up meaning something — many things. It might mean the good life, but usually it is a feeling of well-being that spreads for a moment, not a projection toward the future. Of course, paradoxically, at least at this juncture of capital, when one eats without an orientation toward the future, the future itself becomes smaller.
Conclusion: Cruel and Everyday Nourishment
Slow death is not primarily a stylish gloss on the lives of quiet desperation that Henry Thoreau saw as characteristic of those who live in capitalist society. That said, the phrase "soul-shrinking" has been used so often to describe the wearing-away that bourgeois sociality brings about that we may have something to say about how, in order to live close to the mirage of sovereignty, people sacrifice a great deal. Likewise, the slow death I have discussed is also different from Baudrillard's melodramatic use of "slow death" — in the sense that the capitalist subject is doubly executed by the sacrificial violence of labor and by the ever-increasing temptation of the over-stimulating consumer culture. Nor is the phrase "slow death" an existential way of speaking about life as such — about living as a process toward death. Even so, listing such not-quite examples suggests something important about the space of slow death that shapes our particular biopolitical conjuncture. The main point is that people live in this space. They simply don't live very well.
As the backdrop against which the everyday unfolds amid the complex processes of globalization, law, and national regulation, this attrition of life — or this speed of death — is, for the typical worker, clearly an old story playing out in a new era. Likewise, the world keeps pulsing with acts of resistance to exploitation in various anarchist, cooperative, anti-capitalist, and radical anti-labor experiments. People are devoting more and more of the time they lack — owing to the urgency of life-reproduction — in order to refuse the maintenance of this profit-extracting vampire act, an act that exhausts the body even as it saturates the foundations of the most innocuous and impulsive everyday pleasures. But for most people, the latency within an overwhelming present, rather than being symbolized as an image of an invigorating, sustainable life, or guaranteed by the lavish promise of bodily longevity and social security, is expressed in episodic respites such as sex, zoning out, or food that is not for thought — within the regime of exhausted practical sovereignty and a wayward subjectivity, sometimes erupting in counter-absorption.
The phrase "food that is not for thought" twists the idiomatic expression "food for thought," which means "something to think about: material for thinking," and is used here to express a way of seeing the act of eating as an escape from the life of thinking.
