Cruel Optimism

Berlant, Lauren

doi:10.1215/9780822394716

Cited by 3,326 publications

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“…Drawing on Richard Sennett's (1998) insightful (though gender-blind) account of the consequences of work in the new capitalism, we argue that exhortations to confidence, selfbelief and empowerment of the kind we have discussed, repudiate dependence as shameful. This apparently feminist technology of confidence, which incites women to constantly regulate and work on their bodies and selves in (the cruelly optimistic) 18 pursuit of happiness and success, promotes shame about dependence, failure and vulnerability --the lifeblood of neoliberalism.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Confidence Cult(ure)

Gill

Orgad

2015

Australian Feminist Studies

227

165

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In this paper we explore how confidence has become a technology of self that invites girls and women to work on themselves. The discussion demonstrates the extensiveness of what we call the 'cult(ure) of confidence' across different areas of social life, and examines the continuities in the way that exponents of the confidence cult(ure) name, diagnose and propose solutions to archetypal feminist questions about labour, value and the body. Our analysis focuses on two broad areas of social life in which the notion of confidence has taken hold powerfully in the last few years: popular discussions about gender and work, and consumer body culture. Examining the incitements to self-confidence in these realms, we show how an emergent technology of confidence, systematically re-signifies feminist accounts, by turning away from structural inequalities and collectivist critiques of male domination into heightened modes of self work and self-regulation, and by repudiating the injuries inflicted by the structures of inequality. We conclude by situating the 'confidence cult(ure) in relation to wider debates about feminism, postfeminism and neoliberalism.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Confidence Cult(ure)

Gill

Orgad

2015

Australian Feminist Studies

227

165

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“…I explore the limitations of this model of colonial tutelage as well as the model of agency it suggestswhere agency is located in slippages and (mis)translations. I intend to analyze the novels of Jose Rizal (El Filibusterismo) and Pramoedya Toer's (Footsteps from the Buru Quartet), paying particular attention to the scenes in the colonial classroom, to suggest that the colonial classroom is a site of negotiation of multiple optimisms that are variously inflected by local issues of class, ethnicity, and gender but often erased by both the cruel optimisms (Berlant 2011) of colonial and nationalist discourse.…”

Section: Discussion Of Proposed Chaptersmentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s More Fun in the Philippines: Positive Affects and the Post-Colonial Condition

Chavez¹

2017

KAJH

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Abstract. This research note outlines ideas and maps out the critical context of the author's current research project entitled "It's More Fun in the Philippines: Positive Affects and the Post-Colonial Condition." It also engages with recent literature from the expanding field of critical happiness studies. This project, envisioned to be a book-length study, explores the enabling as well as the obstructive capacities of so-called positive affects in imagining and realising an affirmative and sustainable cultural and socio-political practice within conditions of postcoloniality. In the process, it bridges several disciplines -in particular, Postcolonial Studies, Affect Theory, Critical/Cultural Theory and Gender Studies -and also aims to analyse a variegated body of philosophy, literature and cinema.

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“…Indeed, in asking 'whether there is any place for a subject to rest amid the chaos of intimate and economic upheaval' 98 , Berlant proposes that a concern with how the precarious present is a state that minorities (those who have historically needed to invest in 'the promise of upwards mobility') feel and live with, requires a 'valuing [of] political action as the action of not being worn out by politics' 99 . Her framing of political action is interesting here in terms of how I have discussed pessimism as a mood that involves both flattening and enlivening, and that works through and draws attention to a non-linear, affective temporality.…”

Section: Hopeful Pessimism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Austerity Futures: Debt, Temporality and (Hopeful) Pessimism as an Austerity Mood

Coleman¹

2016

New Formations

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This article examines the relationships between austerity, debt and mood through a focus on temporality and the future. Its starting point is a poll, conducted in Britain in 2011, which showed an increase of pessimism about the future and led to suggestions that 'a new pessimism' had become the 'national mood'. Exploring this survey and other related examples, I ask whether and how pessimism about the future might be considered a mood characteristic of austerity in the UK, consider some of the implications of the future being imagined not as better but as diminished and, drawing on Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, propose a notion of hopeful pessimism. I explore the politics of pessimism about the future, focusing especially on the affects and emotions that some women and young people might feel. In these senses, I aim to turn around the focus of this special issue to inquire not so much about the future of austerity as about the kinds of futures that are imagined in the new age of austerity, and the affective experiences of such imaginations. 2Austerity Futures: Debt, Temporality and (Hopeful) Pessimism as an Austerity MoodIn November 2011, the UK research company Ipsos MORI published the results of a telephone survey, commissioned by the British Sunday newspaper The Observer, on British adults' attitudes towards the economic and social climate. The survey asked a representative sample of 1006 respondents six questions, ranging from their satisfaction with life at the moment to their opinion on whether or not it is necessary to cut spending on public services to pay off the national debt. Two of the questions asked respondents to imagine what the future would be like for the next generation. The results of the survey led The Observer's political editor Toby Helm to argue that 'concern about the economic crisis [has] harden [ed] into long-term pessimism' 1 (Helm 2011a). He describes the results of the poll as indicating a new 'national mood', which he terms 'the new pessimism'.In this article, I draw on this survey and other related examples taken primarily from the UK during the relatively early period of austerity from [2009][2010][2011][2012][2013], to explore the relationships between austerity, debt and mood through a focus on temporality and the future. There are three reasons for this focus. First, it is intended to pull through the questions in the survey, where attitudes towards the economic and social climate are assessed in part through imaginations of the future. Second, it is to consider the relationship between debt and futurity;as Lisa Adkins 2 among others argues, debt is 'defined by time' and in particular by 'a time which has not yet arrived, namely in the future'. Third, I suggest that attending to mood, affect and feeling is one way in which it is possible to unpack the cultural politics of austerity and indebtedness. The article picks up on arguments in contemporary social and cultural theory that see the affectivity of time, and especially the future, as a 'defining quality ...

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Cruel Optimism

Cited by 3,326 publications

References 0 publications

The Confidence Cult(ure)

The Confidence Cult(ure)

It’s More Fun in the Philippines: Positive Affects and the Post-Colonial Condition

Austerity Futures: Debt, Temporality and (Hopeful) Pessimism as an Austerity Mood

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