Teaching "Sex in Public" (1998) a few months ago while in the middle of reading Cruel Optimism, I was struck anew by the moment when Berlant and Warner confront Biddy Martin's critique of an aversion to the ordinary in the queer theory of the early nineties. Martin writes: "In some queer work, the very fact of attachment has been cast as only punitive and constraining because already socially constructed. Radical anti-normativity throws a lot of babies out with a lot of bathwater. An enormous fear of ordinariness or normalcy results in superficial accounts of the complex imbrication of sexuality with other aspects of social and psychic life, and in far too little attention to the dilemmas of the average people we also are" ("Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary" [1994]). >>
Cruel Optimism
Lauren Berlant’s most recent book, Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011), undertakes the ambitious and necessary project of thinking the political present. Cruel Optimism attends closely to what goes undernoticed about living in relation to waning or worn-out models of legibility, sovereignty and sustainability. Working through the rhythms of crisis ordinariness, patiently tracking the emergence of new genres, styles and modes of response to the diffused conditions of precariousness that constitute contemporary life, revising critical models of agency to incorporate the floundering and gestural ways people attempt to make sense of their worlds, Cruel Optimism extends Berlant’s longstanding critical concern with the development of intimate publics into the present, exploring “what happens to fantasies of the good life when the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life’ that adjustment seems like accomplishment.”
This dossier assembles responses to the book by scholars Kandice Chuh, Lisa Duggan, Micki McGee, José Muñoz, Sianne Ngai, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and Rebecca Wanzo. In a dialogue with dossier editor Dana Luciano, Berlant engages these responses in turn and reflects on her own recent and forthcoming projects.
In 1969 Pittsburgh Courier cartoonist Sam Milai published a political cartoon, "September Morn," a riff on the Paul Chabas painting that depicts a young woman bathing nude. The erotic painting positions the viewer as voyeur who looks on her without her consent, the beauty of the image implicating the viewer taking pleasure in the woman as object. In contrast, Milai's figure is well aware that she is the object of a gaze. Her vulnerability is signified by her fully visible breasts as well as by her disturbed and direct look at the viewer. The vulnerable female figure is the embodiment of Civil Rights for African Americans, and she is surrounded by what Milai understands as undermining the possibility of black freedom and futures. The phrases "Nixon Administration," "White Backlash," and for the moderate Milai, even "Black Power" surround her body and threaten the status of African American citizenship. Given that Milai works for a black newspaper, I'm always struck by the question of who the audience interpellated by the image is. While Chabas conventionally hails a male gaze, Milai's figure is the black body politic and the cartoonist may be holding up a mirror. Look, he seems to be saying, at the precarious position of our community. The Civil Rights Act did not eliminate our vulnerability.>>
Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism has the uncanny quality of illuminating for readers what we believe we already knew. Her renderings of the affective quality of everyday life at the center of a declining US American empire, offered to us via her scalpel like readings of a range of contemporary texts, are sharp enough to hurt. My responses as I was reading this book often took the form of "ouch." I was cut most deeply by her account of working class ambivalence, laid out in her reading of Lillian Rubin's Worlds of Pain--a classic I first read in graduate school during the 1980s, that seemed uncomfortably to channel aspects of my relationship to my own working class parents, and that had an enormous impact on me at that time. >>
Thinking with Lauren Berlant, I want to use this occasion to reflect on the meaning and meaningfulness of mentoring, conceived as a form of pedagogy and as a way of conceptualizing being in the academic world. My frame of reference is graduate education in English, the area in which I have most deeply been embedded for the last decade or so, and I am especially interested in mentoring in relation to the subjects and practitioners of minority discourse.>>
Cruel optimism is the provocative concept Lauren Berlant has given to a phenomenon endemic to the present political and affective moment: the holding up of hope as a means of stifling dissent, forestalling change, and ultimately rendering any array of longed-for outcomes, whatever they may be, unattainable. The paradox Berlant has named is that what we seek eludes us precisely because the mechanisms by which we seek our objectives (whether personal happiness or political change) are irredeemably flawed in that they preclude the very outcomes that are desired.>>
Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism risks thinking the utopian in ways that are both bold and revelatory. My reflections on Berlant's already influential book open with me taking the liberty of positioning Berlant's work alongside my own writing on utopia. It should be clear to readers of both our work that Berlant does not write under the sign of the utopian in the same way I do. But both of us do participate in traditions of theory that are engaged with the topic. Critical investments in thinking about the performative work utopia does can take different forms. On one immediate level, Cruel Optimism is about maintaining traction in our presentness, while my writing about the concrete utopian project of imaging queer futurity is an attempt to think and act beyond the pragmatic thinking that hinders minoritarian politics in the present.>>
As someone who has been writing about food and eating for a long time, I am most intrigued with Cruel Optimism's engagement with eating in the third chapter, "Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency." My sense is that food exists as something of an exceptional material in this piece, an object of both wonder and ambivalence, whose importance is perhaps indicated in the fact that the word first appears as an object of desire immediately following the superb opening sentence of the book: "A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food..." I'm cutting in here, of course: other objects of desire include, as the text continues a few pages later, love, class mobility, intimacy, the "good life,"and even politics itself. My questions about food and eating have to do with how the "Slow Death" chapter does and does not bridge the gap between "something you desire," "the desire for the political," and the important - the crucial - observation put forward in Cruel Optimism that "affective atmospheres are shared, not solitary.">>
Lauren's thought is fat: rich and extensive, spreading with pleasure. And I'm headed to murder, fat, and luxury as I seek to fete her. First, however, something in Lauren's tone is moving.>>
Dana Luciano: I'd like to start by pressing further on your comment (Cruel Optimism 21) about the need to invent new genres for theorizing, genres that can more effectively register, assess and imagine forms of response to the "new ordinary" that Cruel Optimism is dedicated to elaborating.>>
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