Originally published March 6, 2015
By Iván Castañeda
(Duke University Press, 2011)
“I am an eternal optimist,” we all say; or we counter, “I am a realist” (read: cynic). We live on the brink of a not-as-yet promise of the happy life, the good life, success. But as Lauren Berlant reminds us in Cruel Optimism, there is an etymological relationship between “substitute” and “succeed”. We live on borrowed time, and piggy-back on substitutes for the happiness that is to come. Cruel optimism is “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.” Subjects, all of us, are perpetually tied-down to good-life fantasies as we ride the treadmill of the present, which is produced as a living, everyday precarity of an optimism that feeds the beast of neoliberal deferred desires. To “have a life” we must play the game of the what has become a perverse “normal”: a constant hovering, suspended animation of “getting-by” through the concomitant disavowal of the reality of the nature of economic survivalism: “The ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the ‘technologies of patience’ that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions about the cruelty of the now”.
We could call this living within the real-life genre of “situation tragedy”, where a tirednedness of the present, a stuckness of the economic dream of happiness through the neoliberal menu of opportunity and hope and change cruelly disposes and imposes upon us a constant “hold on and wait; it will get better” phantasmagoria of hope and optimism. How do we get unstuck from this real Vicious Cabaret without imploding into ineffectual postmodern/posthuman cynicism or silly economic utopianism? Things have to change: “To be teachable is to be open for change,” writes Berlant. We have to design change within the autopoetic situation of the present. We must learn to play differently.
Berlant threads us through two films of Luc and Jean Dardenne, La Promesse (1996) and Rosetta(1999) where we see the “crisis ordinary” of survivalism where “children” need to learn to play by the rules of neoliberal emotional nomadism. Children, of course, Berlant reminds us, are the great symbol of optimism. But the cruel reality is that you will not feel loved until you get a job because without one you have no life. We need to teach people that “getting a life” is not impossible through other means.