Cruel Optimism
by Lauren Berlant
First reviewed August 2017
As soon as another book mentions Berlant, the image on the cover of this book comes blasting into my brain. The text itself is rattling around in there somewhere, too. After lightly re-editing this in 2023, it feels like late 2017 was a particularly depressing reading list for me—and very recursive, as I cite myself often.
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 was perhaps 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: <blockquote>
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.
a touchstone image
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?