![]() The Marxist in me looks at Berlant’s idea of cruel optimism as an opportunity for auto-examination. The “prison house of the here and now” I reference was a metaphor for the ways in which we live in a present that does not let us think otherwise through its insidious and outright self-referentiality. The introduction to Cruel Optimism demarcates that book’s difference from my project by saying that in Cruising Utopia I ultimately refer to the present as a prison. Such brazen longing can definitely feel like an avoidance of the present and it might also be symptomatic of a kind of cruel optimism in that, as Bloch explains, utopia is always disappointed. But the animating force of my queer utopia is a turn to what Ernst Bloch would call the not-yet-conscious or the-no-yet-here. Both approaches are moving towards a sociality that is against the odds, and participating in such an undertaking is more than “nearly utopian.” In many ways Berlant’s account of the social is saturated with the same active principle of hope that allows me to propose a figuration of the future as a mode of conceptual escapology. Cruel Optimism is a tale of being with an object in the present and allowing oneself to be changed by that object but understanding that such a transformation is not necessarily letting oneself be mastered by it, since enduring is nothing like a minimalist practice. Futurity for me is a figuration that allows people to think beyond the fraying “good life” narratives we hold onto. While our approaches are different, our trajectory, that of proposing a sustaining sense of the commons that may exist in the future and the present, ultimately do connect. Reflecting on Cruel Optimism, I can picture her hunkering down in the foxhole of the here and now, jotting down accounts of the eroding edifices and enclosures we occupy, while I am quick to scan for an exit sign in the form of a figurative futurity. Berlant has a great capacity to attend to the brutality that we endure in the present. In Cruel Optimism, I encounter a compelling account of the strange “exuberant attachments” that keep ticking in us despite the licking (or abuse) that life at this historical juncture offers. I see a vivid account of the ways we hold on in the face of a precariousness that wears life out so that the texture of everything becomes almost too slippery to hold or too threadbare to grasp. We read and hear each other to productive ends. In the same vein, both of us are interested in what is negotiated by different collectives and individuals who are able to perform or enact certain performances of queer temporality that unmoor us from those things that are so suffocating and damaging in life, the logics and forces that one experiences as compelled durational performances. Berlant and I are tethered insofar as we share an interest in describing one overarching phenomenon, which is basically outlining the affective work we do to endure and sustain ourselves during cruel times where we feel the erosion of once sustaining good-life genres. While Berlant and I share many interests and political attachments, I do not want to ameliorate the real differences between our positions. 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. Critical investments in thinking about the performative work utopia does can take different forms. But both of us do participate in traditions of theory that are engaged with the topic. ![]() 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. 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. Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism risks thinking the utopian in ways that are both bold and revelatory. ![]()
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