When you read the scholarship of a generation, you get to know the characteristic concerns that sat uppermost in the years of that generation’s coming of age. Another way of saying that is the wry but familiar remark that each scholar’s dissertation is really their autobiography. PhD students in the humanities express—often in a scarily unambiguous form—their psychic needs, the emotional baggage that they lugged into the academy with them.
But you can get much the same kind of insight by looking to the books that young academics lean on as theoretical inspirations: the books that aren’t really pertinent to the subject of their dissertation or first book, but that show up in their works cited any way.
The work of Lauren Berlant, who died late last month, serves this function for many who entered graduate school just before, during, or after the financial crisis of 2007-2008 (a cohort of which I am a member). Their book Cruel Optimism has resonated with the experience of working toward a goal that seemed to be, day by day, receding: a tenure-track job, a life teaching and researching. The book’s definition of “cruel optimism” fits precisely the snare we all seemed to have found ourselves in: “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” When Berlant referred to “the world they had to reconfigure in the face of tattering formal and informal norms of social and institutional reciprocity,” we saw ourselves in that “they.” Cruelly optimistic, we were frequently faced with the realistic possibility that the only thing pushing us annually into the hunger games known as the job market was a form of the sunk cost fallacy, the state of not knowing when to quit.
I am not going to be able to do any kind of justice to either the life or the thought of Berlant, but I hardly need to, as there is much brilliant writing both by them (Berlant used they/them pronouns) and about them; Hua Hsu, one of my favorite writers for the New Yorker, provides a sterling primer here. Instead, what I want to write is a consideration of what the popularity/meaningfulness of the concept of “cruel optimism” indicates about what it’s like to try to live a “life of the mind” in this historical moment.[1]
The title of this post comes from Judith Butler’s 2012 Adorno Prize lecture. Butler drew the title from a line in Adorno’s Minima Moralia—“wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”[2] Cruel Optimism is very much concerned with the “good life” and what keeps us from discerning it. This purpose for writing—the desire to help readers find the life they want to live and both see and remove the obstacles that prevent them from reaching it (obstacles that in many cases are self-created)—is the essence of self-help, although that genre is quite often deprecated as either narcissistic or avaricious, given that so many self-help books focus on material gain. Yet almost all religions have their own literatures of ethical self-reconstruction—for Jews, these works are referred to as Musar—and I don’t think it is inapposite to think of Cruel Optimism and Butler’s lecture as works in this vein.
It is not a coincidence that Butler and Berlant are among the most influential writers in the genre/field of queer theory; to them we could add Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose luminous essay on the difference between paranoid and reparative reading has served as a sort of roadmap for many scholars trying to locate a path out of the kind of cynicism that either too much Foucault or too much Twitter can engender. I think there is a way to read queer theory itself as self-help for the humanities, but I don’t really have the space or time to make that argument with the kind of care it would require. Gabriel Winant, in an essay for n+1 utterly radiant with insights, argues that the direction that queer theory took in studying and trying to operationalize affect is also potentially a kind of self-help for activists of the left.[3]
In short, though, what I think queer theory gives to the humanities—and possibly to anyone else who encounters it—is a radical sense of the possibilities of self-making, but of self-making within the hideous constraints of a world deeply antagonistic to one’s very being. There is undeniably a certain amount of appropriation or intrusion here for someone like me, who is not a sexual minority, in finding solace or guidance in queer theory, but there is also a sense, I think, that like feminism, the promise of queer theory is (meant to be) universal. Queer theory takes up Rainer Maria Rilke’s modernist injunction “You must change your life” [Du mußt dein Leben ändern] and seeks to provide the tools for doing so, furnishing and fulfilling what Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living.”
Yet I don’t want to wave away the “trespass” concern, that queer theory speaks to a specific set of needs and experiences that are not everyone’s needs and experiences, even if they resonate widely. One of the core reasons why queer theory seems to offer so much to people looking for resources for self-(re)construction is that trauma theory has been such a central site of theorizing for the field. There should be some kind of acknowledgment that, especially in the wake of AIDS, the reasons why queer theory thought so much about trauma were historically and even individually specific. But queer theory’s orientation toward trauma has also changed over time, partly because of developments internal to the field and partly, I think, because of more macro- changes in life conditions for many sexual minorities and for people in general. Berlant’s intervention in trauma theory, given in the introduction to Cruel Optimism, speaks especially well, I think, to why the book feels so incisive as a description of the conditions of being in the present.
Berlant questions the tendency “for describing the historical present as the scene of an exception that has just shattered some ongoing, uneventful ordinary life that was supposed just to keep going on and with respect to which people felt solid and confident.” This understanding of trauma assumes that crises announce themselves unambiguously, that the extraordinary and the intense are experienced in real time as a total break with ordinary life. In reality, such moments are extremely rare, and thus “trauma” is too widely applied. Berlant counters,
My claim is that most such happenings that force people to adapt to an unfolding change are better described by a notion of systemic crisis or “crisis ordinariness” and followed out with an eye to seeing how the affective impact takes form, becomes mediated. Crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming… The extraordinary always turns out to be an amplification of something in the works, a labile boundary at best, not a slammed-door departure. In the impasse induced by crisis, being treads water; mainly it does not drown. Even those whom you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least.
What Berlant offers the reader, then, is not a guide for getting past a single moment of autobiographical discontinuity, a way to piece life back together after a unique instant of rupture, but of how to continuously attempt to repair (and if possible strengthen) a makeshift “good life,” under conditions that never cease being adverse, with materials that never begin to be ideal.
[1] There’s a new novel by that title—The Life of the Mind, by Christine Smallwood—that I have yet to read, but very much mean to.
[2] I wonder about this translation: the original is “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”—wouldn’t the more literal pair of antonyms be true and false, rather than wrong and right? In other words, “There is no true life [to be found] in a false one”?
[3] I made the dumb mistake of not reading Gabe’s essay until I was almost done with this post. If you read it (as you should, if you have not), you’ll see that we hit many of the same beats—including a contrast of Berlant’s ideas with the older ideal of authenticity, an issue that I’ll take up in a later post. I hope this confluence is a sign that I’m on to something here, a corroboration of what at first felt to me fairly speculative.