Mastodawn

"It is awkward and it is threatening to detach from what is already not working."

Lauren Berlant wrote in "Cruel Optimism" (page 263)

Book presentation: 'A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.”'

#criticalTheory #philosophy #psychology #sociology #neoliberalism #queer #attachment #optimism #believe #faith #hope #Berlant #LaurenBerlant

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Estelle Platini Nov 22, 2024

"Capital’s answer [to the 1970s crisis] was the neoliberal revolution, directed against the democratic nation-state […]. The search was now on for improved motivational techniques, aimed at making the progress of capitalist accumulation more independent of politically mediated social and economic concessions. A central role in capital’s fight against the apathy of its retainers and the stagnation of capital accumulation caused by it was played by increased competitive pressures on the workers of the ‘affluent societies’ of the West, domestically by ‘deregulation’ and across national borders by ‘globalisation’, forcing them to work harder and submit themselves more obediently to unpredictably fluctuating market conditions, by developing the new kind of ‘governmentality’ that has been so strikingly portrayed by Michel Foucault."

Wolfgang Streeck’s in “Taking back Control? States and State Systems after Globalism”

#criticalTheory #neoliberalism #attachment #optimism #beliefs #inflation #capitalism #bioPolitics

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Estelle Platini Sep 14

In an interview, Lauren Berlant emphasizes and maintains that cruel optimism is not the object itself, but rather the relationship:
"A relation of cruel optimism is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing. So you can't say that there are objects that have the quality of cruelty or not cruelty, it's how you have the relationship to them. Like it might be that being in a couple is not a relation of cruel optimism for you, because being in a couple actually makes you feel like you have a grounding in the world, whereas for other people, being in a couple might be, on the one hand, a relief from loneliness, and on the other hand, the overpresence of one person who has to bear the burden of satisfying all your needs. So it's not the object that's the problem, but how we learn to be in relation."

https://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interview-with-lauren-berlant/

#psychology #sociology #attachment #optimism #beliefs #faith #hope #Berlant #LaurenBerlant

Interview with Lauren Berlant | Society and space

Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, has generated a path-breaking body of scholarship that has opened up and reinvigorated interdisciplinary conversations about citizenship, sex, law and neoliberalism for over two decades. David Seitz, a Toronto-based writer and Ph.D. candidate in human geography and women’s and gender studies at…

Society and space