When Optimism Becomes Cruel: Pt. I

– December 16, 5:30 pm (wanted to start, but distracted myself, delayed)

  7:36 pm to 8:10 pm

Optimism becomes cruel when it syncs up with biopolitical gaslighting about terminal illness. The straight shot—the kill shot—must be explicitly requested, and usually when you’re already out of time. Optimism becomes cruel when it weaponizes and capitalizes on hope. But I’m getting ahead of myself, I’m skipping to the end when I should be establishing a working frame. Here it is: 

Lauren Berlant coined the term “cruel optimism” in her 2011 monograph of the same title. As with everything Berlant, it’s infinitely complex, and I’m going to oversimplify considerably for the purposes of this introductory blog post. In the introduction, Berlant frames “cruel optimism” as the answer to the question “of how people maintain their binding to modes of life that threaten their well-being” (16). Cruel optimism is a form of attachment that binds us to the very things that allow us to cling to our illusions rather than confront unassimilable truths.  

She clarifies a few sentences later that she has two purposes in mapping the structures of cruel optimism and the conditions that enable it: first, “to clarify how being incoherent in relation to desire does not impede the subject’s capacity to live on, but might actually, at the same time, protect it” (16). This one is key: incoherence– things not making sense, things falling apart, out of coherence, out of their proper, rightful order— is not a problem to be solved. Actually, it is a form of protection, especially when the things we desire are often entrained within warped frames. Example: Patients desire survival and doctors are trained to prolong/manage/regulate life, so even when faced with a terminal illness, doctors will only give the rate of survival, not the limiting factors of that statistic let alone the other side of the coin. They narrate you into the 10% survival figure, without mentioning that in this context, “survival” means living in an absolute hellscape for one additional 2 years, maximum. They don’t prepare you for the 90% scenario where you will die within 6 months. They don’t tell you when you don’t stand a chance. They say: “You’re the lucky one. Keep fighting: here’s how.” 

So now it’s becoming more clear where optimism becomes cruel, I hope. Returning to Berlant, she notes that another aim of theorizing “cruel optimism” is  “to track… impediments to personal and social change from some attachments that become foundations for optimism even when they are damaging” (16). The plot thickens. How does a foundational attachment that may orient and shape the personality structure, and initially served an overwhelmingly constructive function, become harmful? How can the very things that shape us and make us “good”, or “good enough,” become the same things that expose us to harm? These are the complexities of relations of cruel optimism. 

I’ll be exploring this in much more detail in the coming days and weeks, including in some reconstructed dialogues where I’ll model the kind of cruel optimism that happened in my “medical research” sessions with ChatGPT– always a great case study and scapegoat. But of course it’s much more symptomatic of the general consensus/common-sense/hegemonic discourses on which it is trained than anything else, so it can help us analyze the frames of cruel optimism as it becomes structural gaslighting. That may have to wait until tomorrow. Hoping to write one more piece tonight; or at least until my Hanukkah candles go out. I have my menorah in my writing space—not quite celebration so much as ceremonial, vigil, ritual. 

More soon. 

--Dianna