Cruel Optimism

Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, which made its way around academic circles several years ago, has been brought to public light in a New Yorker feature by Hua Hsu, who looks at Berlant’s work in the current field of affect theory. The 2011 work is “a meditation on our attachment to dreams that we know are destined to be dashed.” In her work, Berlant sketches the American Dream as a cruel optimism par excellence. She says, cruel optimism is the condition “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing.”  

The draw of the American Dream, in her view, has always been its seductive invitation to fuse one’s “private fortune with that of the nation.” When she began teaching at the University of Chicago, in the mid-eighties, Ronald Reagan spoke confidently of a “morning in America,” and the American story of postwar prosperity still seemed possible. General skepticism about meritocracy and opportunity, felt most acutely by marginalized groups who couldn’t see themselves in picket-fence campaign ads, had yet to go mainstream. Berlant saw the contradictions within the public realm played out in sentimental fiction. These works were often seen as unserious because of their appeal to emotion and their focus on the domestic sphere, and yet they could move people to act.