Lauren Berlant on the Critical Lede, August 25, 2012. They introduced Cruel Optimism (2011).
“… forms of optimism, I’m very interested in, are the kind with which you attached your endurance in the world, with which you attached your continuity in the world
… what it means to have a life […] there’s so many people but one normative model of having a life […] it’s the job of politically engaged critical work to try to imagine other ways of having a life”
all of that is about the way that the labor of the reproduction of life in the historical present is sustain by the fantasy of the good life but is lived as an ongoingness
you make your political claim in the present
the present […] as a place where people are figuring out life
affect works in the present, it’s the bodies response to the world
attempts to change people’s political consciousness, not by changing their ideology, but by changing their affective relation to inhabiting the public
what ought to be in the collective imaginary for flourishing”
… optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.
via Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms
