![]() ![]() Although Berlant does not explicitly foreground rhetorical theory to understand the relationship between “affective scenarios” and contingent styles of response to an everyday “disorganized by capitalism” (8), she operates with an implicit rhetorical sensibility and addresses a number of themes relevant to the readers of this journal.Īs one of its central aims, Cruel Optimism turns to theories of “the event” as a way of making sense of the production of the “historical present” (4). This is particularly the case given a disciplinary history engaging aesthetic forms emerging from particular contexts. Although the problem of rhetorical judgment has focused primarily on modes of reasoning within more exceptional contexts rather than the affective, ordinary, and everyday, Cruel Optimism perhaps demonstrates why rhetorical critics in particular are well-positioned to intervene in a burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in affective politics. Public address scholars have long been concerned with the attendant modes of political engagement that work to negotiate the relationship between risk, probability, and knowledge in contingent situations. ![]() ![]() Over the course of an introduction and seven chapters, Berlant engages a broad archive of “mass media, literature, television, film, and video” and boldly contributes to contemporary studies of affect by tracing the “emergence of a precarious public sphere, an intimate public of subjects who circulate scenarios of economic and intimate contingency and trade paradigms for how best to live on, considering” (3). In effect, the realization of the good life feels further and further out of reach, necessitating ways of making do moment to moment. In this case, Cruel Optimism imagines a complex nexus of fantasy, cultural production, and differential relations of precarity that have emerged in response to continued fantasies of “the good life” even as we witness the gradual undoing of reciprocal social structures in the wake of processes of neoliberal restructuring. By situating a study of aesthetic forms and generic conventions within the context of post-Cold War Europe and United States, Berlant continues her inquiry into the ways in which affective relations mediate citizenship and national public cultures. Cruel Optimism turns its attention to scenes of everyday life and traces affective modes of adjustment and attenuation as a way of coping with the radical contingency of neoliberal crisis in hopes of creating new modes of habit or relation to the world. Yet, as Lauren Berlant argues in her recent work, attachments to optimistic fantasies can often become, well, cruel. Moments of uncertainty can make us feel as though situations that evoke dreadful anxiety can be quelled by embracing optimism. ![]()
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