We can count on the flow as the environment in which meaning can develop and thrive.īut 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? When things are normal, there is a flow, no collapses or sudden, disorienting reconfigurations. “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. The problem is the structure of “normal” life. It’s not just that we chase the wrong things, like wealth, or that nothing, once attained, lives up to our wishes.
And the other holds his wealth, like the hoarder herself, in an anxious clutch. One spends his share but ends up with nothing of real value to show for it. They find a chance at the wealth they dream of.īut their dreams aren’t what they dreamed of. 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. A circle of frustration that seals its own exits.Īn early discussion by Berlant of the book Exchange Value struck me as very poignant in conveying this sense of happiness frustrated. 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. 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.” Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory - with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary - is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life - with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy - despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives "add up to something".Īrguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.Ī relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.
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