Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms

Abstract

Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flour ishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of ambivalence to Berlant's thought, as well as their orientation to overdetermination and incoherence. Geographers and others have found in the concept a way of understanding the intersection between affective and political economies in the crisis-present following the 2008 financial crisis. Together with Berlant's linked concepts such as 'crisis ordinariness' and 'impasse', cruel optimism has offered a way of understanding why detachment can be so difficult and how damaging conditions endure. Contributors begin from these starting points, amplifying the concept's promise: a new way of researching and writing about the reproduction of ordinary damage and harm.

Inconvenience, ambivalence, and abolition: A politics of attachment and detachment in geography

“…Detachment also allows us to think more clearly about a politics of a geography of attachment, through its connection to concepts like ambivalence. As we note elsewhere (Ruez and Cockayne, 2021;Anderson et al, 2022), ambivalence is central to the scene of attachment-detachment, foregrounding the complexity of affective and material relation, its stopping points, its overdetermination, and its nonlinearity. Ambivalence as a concept clarifies attachment-detachment by complicating it: these terms are not binaristic, voluntaristic, or unidirectional.…”

The racial economy of Instagram

“…Dosekun also argues that examples of non‐Western post‐feminism (for example, Beyonce) work in service to white supremacy too, by reaffirming the idea that we are post‐feminism, post‐racial, and success and happiness can be achieved by anyone. This is emblematic of Lauren Berlant's ‘cruel optimism’, by which the promise of post‐feminist happiness requires biopolitical adherence to often harmful ways of being (Anderson et al, 2023; Dosekun, 2020). I refer to this harm by adopting Sabrina Strings’ terminology: ‘disciplined whiteness’ (Strings, 2019).…”

Encountering Berlant part one: Concepts otherwise

“…The contributions are wide‐ranging, covering encounters with some of their earliest published work – The anatomy of national fantasy (Berlant, 1991) – through to the posthumously published The inconvenience of other people (Berlant, 2022). Part 2 focuses on their most influential concept – ‘cruel optimism’, finding in it new ways to think about the perennial problem of how harm and damage are reproduced (Anderson et al, 2023). Neither Part is one, their lines of flight are many.…”

“…It was only with the publication of Cruel optimism (2011a) that Berlant's work crossed a threshold to become a key resource in geography for understanding the affective present. As contributors to Part 2 testify (Anderson et al, 2023), the book's emphasis on stuckness, the difficulties of detachment, and affective incoherence seemed to fit with a present scarred by precarity and caught in intractable impasses in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The conceptual infrastructure Berlant offered -crisis ordinariness, glitch, slow death, impasse, aspirational normativity, precarity, as well as cruel optimism -offered a vocabulary for depleting, difficult worlds.…”