Cruel Optimism

A difficult read, but extremely interestingThought provoking

If you can understand that you exist in your own mind, and are constucted piecemeal in the mind's of others, this book will have you understanding the nature of randomness as it flourishes within each of us.Ms. Berlant is a fine author, and will fly under your radar with a guidance control that will leave you wondering if you have any defense against such an onslaught of unbiased logic.A wonderful read.John Twomey

One of the best books I have ever read ... original subtle and witty !It navigates between various traditions - and sometimes thats unsaid , for example there is the scent of Cavell all over the chapters, but that's disguised, or I think so.For anyone interested in attachments, precarity, new understandings of capitalism, multiplicity and normativity, this is a must

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.”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. A circle of frustration that seals its own exits.An early discussion by Berlant of the book Exchange Value struck me as very poignant in conveying this sense of happiness frustrated. 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. They find a chance at the wealth they dream of.But their dreams aren’t what they dreamed of. One spends his share but ends up with nothing of real value to show for it. And the other holds his wealth, like the hoarder herself, in an anxious clutch.It’s not just that we chase the wrong things, like wealth, or that nothing, once attained, lives up to our wishes. The problem is the structure of “normal” life.“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. When things are normal, there is a flow, no collapses or sudden, disorienting reconfigurations. We can count on the flow as the environment in which meaning can develop and thrive.But 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?Normal then becomes a constancy of crisis, where our affective lives and our ability to go on are in constant question and reconfigurations that themselves get interrupted by the need to reconfigure again before we’ve completed even a single reconfiguration.“Normal” life assumes some stabilities — the pace of time and events, the consistency of meaning-making activities, some kind of containment of the community of meaning-making to a space of potential consensus. But now we find ourselves in a tight circle in which we are trying to develop in instability itself. But it cannot grow there — its conditions snatch away its possibility.As Berlant says, “Even when you get what you want, you can’t have what you want.”How did we get here? We embraced change and disruption, and we disvalued stability. The stability we in fact thought we had — maybe think the 1950s — was ill-grounded, in turning away from institutions and practices that we wanted hard enough to believe in that we ignored their failures.All the stabilities that we count on have now played out their lives — economic, employment, career, marriage, maybe even education. None of these offer an environment in which to settle and develop something meaningful to a life. They change, shatter, transform, and we try to create meaning out of their instability itself.`And since the book was written, even the very stability of reality has played itself away in the proliferation of “realities” via social media and “news.”If all of this sounds very abstract, it’s because it is. Berlant thinks in a world in which ideas and themes have agency and effect. History is exactly that play of ideas and themes, and we, as historical creatures, are constituted by it.She builds the story by examining the arts — our meaning-making activities — novels, film, performance art, . . . They are our reflective lives, the places in which we would create meaning, and in which we do create meaning but in a broken flow.The story also sounds very bleak, but I think it is bleak in the mainstream. It’s on the fringes that we can look ahead. Berlant does find, in her later discussions, a kind of turn against the normal. Even if we can’t defeat the normal, we can throw it back in its own face, a rejection of the normal and maybe a path forward into the not-normal.

In her theoretically nuanced readings of literature, film, art, resistance, and everyday life, Berlant offers a lyrical and original recalibration of the vocabularies affect theorists might employ to reflect on the intersections between socioeconomic difference, fantasy, and desire as well as the biopolitical valences of these intersections.

I know that in matters of style there is a great, great deal of subjectivity. I also know that many smart people are moved by her esoteric, jargon-laden writing. But I found the author's prose so dense that I cdn't read much beyond the first ten pages. So, I may be unfair.. But I don't think I am all wrong.

Subtle, insightful and creative. Berlant's work opens up a variety of avenues for reconsidering assumptions of and attachments to what we consider to be a "good life."

Book was cheap, arrived on time and in good condition. But the content, while having some great parts, was more fluff than anything. This ethnography could have been 150+ pages shorter. To me this book is by and for academics who write for the sake of academia.

I’m actually reading this for the 3rd time haha. I personally didn’t need any primer to understand or follow it. I think will absolutely be a workout for your mind, however.

This is an enormously influential book, which formulates an innovative and creative exploration of the transformative effects and affective potentials precipitated by ordinary crises. The introduction sets out Berlant's arguments for moving away from the psychocentric discourses of trauma and cognitive overload that have dominated much of the academic writing on crisis, since Freud and his acolytes. It offers a different way of thinking about affective events in our everyday lives. The introduction is followed by a series of examples to illustrate some of Berlant's key ideas. For those who complain about the 'difficulties' in reading the book, I say: take your time and allow plenty of space to absorb Berlant's writing. "Cruel Optimism" is challenging reading in every sense of the word and challenges, as Berlant argues, can be difficult, uncomfortable and moving. But they will always be transformative. This book is one of the most important feminist interventions of the last ten years.

Worthwhile and stimulating read.

Not written for the airstream reader.