Cruel Optimism

Notes

Contents

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Affect in the Present

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A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.

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the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.

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the affective struc- ture of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way.

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the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, pro- foundly confirming.

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At the center of the project, though, is that moral-intimate-economic thing called “the good life.”

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what happens to fantasies of the good life when the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impend- ing crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to “have a life” that adjustment seems like an accomplish- ment.

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paradigms for how best to live on, considering.

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conceiving of a contemporary moment from within that moment. One of this book’s central claims is that the present is perceived, first, affectively:

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the impasse is a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help

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“the distribution of the sensible”

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A situation is a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amid the usual activity of life.

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the distinction between forced adaptation, pleasurable variation, and threatening dissolution of life-confirming norms.13

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trauma theory conventionally focuses on exceptional shock and data loss in the memory and experience of catastrophe, implicitly suggesting that subjects ordinarily archive the intensities neatly and efficiently

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A traumatic event is simply an event that has the capacity to induce trauma. My claim is that most such happenings that force people to adapt to an unfolding change are better described by a notion of systemic crisis or “crisis ordinariness” and followed out with an eye to seeing how the affective impact takes form, becomes mediated.

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a logic of adjustment within the historical scene makes more sense than a claim that merges the intense with the exceptional and the extraordinary.

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Even those whom you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least.

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the attrition of a fantasy, a collectively invested form of life, the good life.

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Aesthetics is not only the place where we rehabituate our sensorium by taking in new ma- terial and becoming more refined in relation to it. But it provides metrics for understanding how we pace and space our encounters with things, how we manage the too closeness of the world and also the desire to have an impact on it that has some relation to its impact on us.

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the present is more or less a problem to be solved by hope’s temporal projection.

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optimism is not a map of pathology but a social relation involving attachments that organize the present.

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looking at the complexity of being bound to life.

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Ghassan Hage’s wonderful Against Paranoid Nationalism tracks the “availability, the circulation, and the exchange of hope” in Australian national culture, looking at unequal access to the affect as itself an emotional map of what it means to belong in the historical moment contemporary to its operation.20

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From one vantage point, then, Cruel Optimism is a kind of proprioceptive history, a way of thinking about represented norms of bodily adjustment as key to grasping the circulation of the present as a historical and affec- tive sense.

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One: Cruel Optimism

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I. Optimism and Its Objects

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All attachments are optimistic. When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises

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whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.

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the fear is that the loss of the promising object/scene itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything.

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the very vitalizing or animating potency of an object/scene of desire contrib- utes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place.

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recognition is the misrecognition you can bear, a transaction that affirms you without, again, necessarily feeling good or being accurate

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The conditions of ordinary life in the contempo- rary world even of relative wealth, as in the United States, are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject,

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II. The Promise of the Object

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in the American dream we see neighbors when we want to, when we’re puttering outside or per- haps in a restaurant, and in any case the pleasure they provide is in their relative distance,

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Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it—when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc.,—in short, when it is used by us. . . . In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, into the sense of having.

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Be open to the one who comes up to you. Be changed by an encounter. Become a poet of the episode, the elision, the ellipsis . . .

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The promise is everywhere, and the dis- solution of the form of being that existed before the event is not cause for mourning or rejoicing: it is just a fact.

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Moving from home to hum, to homme to um, an interruption: it sounds like punning, this Thoreauvian method of sounding out the space of a mo- ment to measure its contours, to ask what is being stopped, who gets to do it, and what it would mean to be in this moment and then beyond it. It is always a risk to let someone in, to insist on a pacing different from the pro- ductivist pacing, say, of capitalist normativity.

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pay attention to, have transference with, those moments of suspension in which the subject can no longer take his continuity in the material world and contemporary his- tory for granted, because he feels full of a something ineloquently promising,

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extend the moment to activity that would dissolve the legitimacy of the optimism embedded in the now displaced world, with its promising proprietary zones, scenes, scapes, and institutions. Otherwise this is not an event but an episode in an environment that can well absorb and even sanction a little spontaneous leisure.

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III. The Promise of Exchange Value

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surrealism of survival in the context of poverty so extreme that riches can only confirm insecurity.

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In this world the subject’s confrontation with singularity is the most hor- rifying thing of all.

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IV. The Promise of Being Taught

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It is striking that these moments of optimism, which mark a possibility that the habits of a history might not be reproduced, release an overwhelm- ingly negative force. One predicts such effects in traumatic scenes, but it is not usual to think about an optimistic event as having the same potential consequences.

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And yet: at a certain degree of abstraction both from trauma and optimism the sensual experience of self-dissolution, radically reshaped con- sciousness, new sensoria, and narrative rupture can look similar; the subject’s grasping toward stabilizing form, too, in the face of dissolution, looks like classic compensation,

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not embedded in the couple form, the love plot, the family, fame, work, wealth, or property. Those are the sites of cruel optimism, scenes of conventional desire that stand manifestly in the way of the subject’s thriving. Instead, the novel offers a two-step of saturation in mass fantasy and history as solutions to the problem of surviving the brutality of trauma and optimism

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one moment of relief from herself produces a permanent crack in the available genres of her survival.

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deterritorialize from the normal by digging a hole in sense like a dog or a mole.30

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how to pay attention to the built and affective infrastructure of the ordinary, and how to encounter what happens when infrastructural stress produces a dramatic tableau. In scenarios of cruel optimism we are forced to suspend ordinary notions of repair and flourishing to ask whether the survival scenarios we attach to those affects weren’t the problem in the first place. Knowing how to assess what’s unraveling there is one way to measure the impasse of living in the overwhelmingly present moment.

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Two: Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event

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I. The Way We Live Now: Affect, Mediation, Ideology

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affective realism, of how people’s desires become mediated through attachments to modes of life to which they rarely remember consenting,

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“intuition” as the process of dynamic sensual data-gathering through which affect takes shape in forms whose job it is to make reliable sense of life.

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intuition is the work of history translated through per- sonal memory.

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Intuition is where affect meets history,

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You forget when you learned to use your inside voice—it just seems like the default mode,

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refuses a return to the ordinary that had required them to dedicate their gifts to predictability.

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explaining crisis-shaped subjectivity amid the on- goingness of adjudication, adaptation, and improvisation.

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everyone lives the present intensely, from within a sense that their time, this time, is crisis time.

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“we” is both singular and general—the crisis makes the people impacted by AIDS kinds of people who are not identical, nonetheless, to any biopolitical norm.

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the passivity and the activity of feeling forced to take on living as a practice,

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II. Histories of the Present

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historical present that becomes apprehensible as an affective urgency to remake intu- itions for living through collecting presentist genres—conversation, patho- cartography, ritual—that might someday achieve a habitual rhythm.12

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has not claimed that subjects feel accurately or objectively historical—this is why the concept of ideology had to be invented

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argues that capitalism always blocks the development of a historical sense that can grasp the struc- tural determinations that constitute the present,

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III. The Affectsphere and the Event

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IV. The Falling Man and the Screaming Man: Anonymity and Trauma

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something half-remembered, half-forgotten, a thing caught in the throat of memory, incompletely metabolized.37

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In The Intuitionist, dread is the main crisis-affect of the African American sub- ject who wants to pass through white supremacist space.

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“This is the true re- sult of gathering integration: the replacement of sure violence with deferred sure violence”

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they believe that “healing” is humane and that we know what it would feel like. It would feel like someone and some world had become unstuck, less systematically violent, and less predictably disappointing and alienating.

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Three: Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency)

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I. Slow Death and the Sovereign

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deterioration as a defining condition

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masks in a dis- course of “control” the wide variety of processes and procedures involved historically in the administration of law and of bodies, even during peri- ods when sovereign rulers exerted their wills by fiat.3

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biopower’s attempt to manage what he calls “endemics,” which, unlike epi- demics, are “permanent factors . . . [that] sapped the population’s strength, shortened the working week,” and “cost money.”

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attachment to a fantasy that in the truly lived life emotions are always heightened and expressed in modes of effective agency

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think about agency and personhood not only in inflated terms but also as an activity exercised within spaces of ordinariness that does not always or even usually follow the literalizing logic of visible effectuality, bourgeois dramatics, and lifelong accumulation or self-fashioning.

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phrases like “self-medication,” which we use to imagine what some- one is doing when they are becoming dissipated, and not acting in a life- building way—the way that liberal subjects and happy people are supposed to.

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in the scene of slow death, a condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing life, agency can be an activity of maintenance, not making;

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II. Conceiving the Genre of the Case

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Four: Two Girls, Fat and Thin

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Five: Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post- Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta

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Six: After the Good Life, an Impasse: Time Out, Human Resources, and the Precarious Present

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Seven: On the Desire for the Political

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Note on the Cover Image: If Body: Riva and Zora in Middle Age

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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