Online lecture and conversation with Lauren Berlant
This event was part of the official program of the queer arts, culture & theory festival Skopje Pride Weekend 2020.
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watch more content from previous years:
SPW '16 | SOLIDARITY: • Skopje Pride Weekend 2016
SPW '17 | TRANS-FORMATIONS: • Skopje Pride Weekend 2...
SPW '18 | QUEERING THE POLITICAL: • Skopje Pride Weekend 2018
SPW '19 | GLITTERING WOUNDS: • Skopje Pride Weekend 2...
CRUEL OPTIMISM
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.” Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory-with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary-is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.
Lauren Berlant teaches English at the University of Chicago. Her recent books on sexuality include Cruel Optimism (2011), addressing precarious publics, fantasies of the good life and the aesthetics of affective adjustment in the crisis-ridden contexts of the contemporary US and Europe; Desire/Love (2012), an introduction to concepts of attachment, and, with Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (2014), a dialogue/argument about the self-disturbance and repair projected onto sex. She has written theoretically and in more public modes on the affects associated with citizenship, gender, racism, class antagonism, sexuality, trauma and comedy, for example. Her latest work, on the generative intensities of ordinary encounter and world-making, and written with the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, is called The Hundreds (2019).