 Attachments and then in order to flourish in order to stay alive you actually have to have them And so you can't really be against optimism. You can't be against attachment because you so she's talking here about her book on Optimism but it has a fascinating fascinating title. It's it's about the You know the downsides or the price paid for optimism It's called cruel optimism And and she just makes some great points here and just a few words you can't live without attachments if you don't learn to attach to people you'll attach to Substances like drugs or alcohol or food or to processes such as gambling addiction sex addiction porn addiction All right, you can't live without attachment But as soon as you form attachments particularly with people they can blow up your sense of having a coherent narrative for your life You living requires you actually to be attached to something so then what's what's interesting? There's what's the relation between the form of an attachment and the affects that get magnetized to that attachment and and and the history and Situation of those of that magnetization of affect is the political and is the social okay? So so I'm interested in you know how people how feelings bind us not only to the people we know But the people we don't know and how the even bounded even being bound to people We don't know including and not just people we don't know but but things we don't know and ideas We don't know and smells. We don't know the essay says you could be bound to anything the smells Ideas humans. It doesn't really matter that form of binding is itself The condition of your flourishing therefore It's not only content, but it's form and then the question is how do you how do you make a better world for the attachment to life? that you have right so The thing I'm really interested in are the affects of belonging the relation between attachment to the world and the and and the feeling of Belonging to the world and what is the relationship between the feeling it does belonging always feel like belonging or does it sometimes feel like prison and Does the sun let times feel suffocating and does it sometimes feel impossible and does does belonging feel like foreclosure when it's also the Condition of your actual flourishing in the world those kinds of questions are Really central and the thing that I want to get to I'm gonna be writing a the book after the book after next It's gonna be about the affects of belonging particularly the affects of the commons I mean do we even know what at what are the effects of a collective belonging would be and How do people even think the commons is now being kind of touted as the way to think about democracy? Without hierarchy or you know the the collection of singularities, but you could say it as form But what okay, this is Lauren Belant professor of affect meaning public emotions. She is speaking here back in 2011 What's the what's the affect of it and how would you know it when you felt it if you felt it and so So I'm interested therefore When Anne was reading nobody ever willingly abandons a libidinal position, which is one of my favorite phrases for some reason I mean think of everything that's that's in that phrase nobody willingly Abandons a libidinal position right the power of the libidinal of the lustful of Sex all right just tends to Overwhelm every other consideration Because it's true. I mean and but also because it's beautiful I always make a mistake when I say it which is nobody ever willingly abandons a political position Because the political and the little are all tied up with each other because people Understand that some yeah the political and the libidinal all right the political and the lustful are tied up with each other in that They give meaning and coherence and a narrative to our life It's how we understand ourselves and whether we're winning or losing at life level that their attachment to the political is their attachment to being in the commons to being attached to being in a collective world and What's the relation between being attached to the political and being attached to politics politics the place where you're always Disappointed and the political the place where you're always excited and so it's kind of so her book is cruel optimism that we That we need things to believe in But and we need these things that we believe in they shape our narrative our sense of self They give us meaning a purpose in life yet. They will always disappoint us Like what toffee was saying about the good bad object of technology on the one hand It's the thing that becomes it wears out and it becomes broken And on the other hand the idea of it is actually something that lights your brain up You know and one of the things you could always think about is how Optimism and trauma do the same kind of thing it lights up a part of your brain that makes you non sovereign And so the thing that really interests me is the ways that people desire and right So when you're attached to something to someone to a process or substance, right you lose your sovereignty Right when we bring people into our life when I have guests on the show I have to surrender a great deal of my sovereignty when I bring people into my life and I interact with people You know, I am giving up a substantial amount of sovereignty I mean life is impossible without this and yet it requires Vulnerability and it requires that these these people or processes or substances that we're bringing into our life can absolutely blow up any sense of Coherence or meaningful narrative that we have fantasized. We've got going on in our life And don't desire to become non sovereign people desire and don't desire to become attached in a way That makes them lose control and that those forms of losing control are the forms of belonging to the social Because I want to actually be involved with people I don't know in order to build a world that I can't see yet. That's the political. That's my attachment to the political, right? So I mean just I'm saying right like you know me, but it really that's it is my time It's your attachment to the political too is my point, you know That's what the political holds out. It holds out the possibility of a good non sovereignty And yet the discourse that we have about what you get when you have democracy is more sovereignty and yet Belonging is all about the possibility of having a world that you could so you may get A great deal of meaning in your life from your political attachments And so then you frequently Will experience the agony of defeat you may get a great deal of meaning In life from your attachment to the dallas cowboys and the dallas cowboys haven't even been in an nfc championship game for 28 years All right, there's a great deal of pain with being a fan and what is nationalism But a form of you know, non-rational fandom you're you're a fan of a particular people right so the more intense your fandom the more intense your your cruel attachments here the the fantasized optimism that Sustains our life right the more you get outside of the rational strategic autonomous buffered distant self as envisioned by the enlightenment as envisioned as the You know the highest form of being by Martins by the liberal left intelligentsia right so fandom is a callback to more traditional ways of being more traditional ways of Experiencing the world with your body where you have immediate primal responses to you know blood and soil to family to your Hero system for example that marriage is a heterosexual institution or a military should be a heterosexual institution or that Jesus died for your sins whatever your hero system the more traditional Your way of experiencing life the boy you come from just these primal responses As opposed to the attenuated the disciplined the distant the reflexive the buffered the strategic autonomous Rational sense of self that is promoted as the highest sense of self by the liberal left intelligentsia Trust with your non sovereignty with your dependence on other people and with the way that you have to Be in the world with them to build a life So it was interesting to me That today's speakers were all about this and and by the way Uh, I have a blog entry kind of Percolating they take me a really long time called I prefer to you know, which is like my answer to Bartleby You know the I prefer not like all the all the philosophers in the world are really into preferring not to and I'm like I'm into preferring You know and I think queer theories into preferring, you know like like would there be a world that would be That would deserve our preferring of it. That's what you want and when you try to do politics It's to make a world you could actually desire since you already have a desire for a world And so it's also very interesting then to think what do we do for a living? You know, what do critics do? What what's the point of what of Producing new forms for extending our optimism because then being in it's right. So think about being a fan of this show Right, you have all sorts of expectations for the show that probably more often than not I dash There's all sorts of content that I have produced more often in the past that is Impelling that is visceral that is immediately grabs you and transports you Contains considerable elements of spectacle And so you may welcome to this show, you know, hoping for it to regain the glories of the past and yet be continually disappointed intellectuals being optimistic an idea impacted us and then we became different and then we had ideas that we hoped would impact people And then they would become different. What what is it that we're what is it that we're doing? When we when we write or when we talk or when we teach a class or when we're trying to actually Get everyone in sync for the possibility of a transformation Which is Stanley convo's definition of love is is is the attempt to stay in sync with another So i'm not saying I love you, but but I i'm trying to stay in sync with you But that's you know, but you know people people get excited about that when it's just Right. So a great theory of human relations is that it revolves around bids You know other people are making a bid for our attention and usually if someone bids for our attention twice and We either actively decline it or ignore it people rarely bid a third and fourth or a fifth time So people are in sync people who have their positive relations with other people They're in sync with other people's bids and they're responding There's two people but i'm excited about it when it's the possibility of a world being in sync And then the possibility that the form of being in sync could open up a space where we could say it and take it back Where we could be genuinely experimental and are trying to imagine what a new good life is So what everybody was saying today, which is really true about Cruel optimism is that one of the things it's about is about the relationship between survival and flourishing And that incredibly moving Line in the song from company that ann cited to help us survive being alone Is that to help us survive being alive to help us survive being alive and um So the best way to help you survive being alive is to have good relations with your friends and family And community right to have the best possible relations with everyone in your life and One of the things I always say in my work A female complaint says it really explicitly in the showboat chapter and its chapter on musicals Is that what happens all the time in the political is that The difference between zero and one between not surviving and surviving starts to foreclose all of our imagination for living Because survival is not a given for almost anybody and so But it's really important to hold the space open beyond survival the space of flourishing And that's what hose is also trying to think about it's like the it's like, you know, in fact One of the things we do when we're trying to create a critical space is a space where it would be possible to survive And better and where survival would be the minima and then we and then the debate over what politics should do Is the debate over the minima what should the minima be That would constitute life so that we could imagine what flourishing would be and that flourishing is what the good life is And what so you don't notice trads or conservatives or right wing or reactionary people talking much about human flourishing right so On the left there's much more of an ethos of follow your bliss And on the right there's much more of an ethos of do your duty So for people on the right meaning is something that exists outside of yourself Most likely in the form of your community your your tribe or your nation and to the extent that you live up to this external Framework for meaning that's the extent to which you will have meaning and that you will Flourish even though people on the right don't really talk much about human flourishing But people on the left meaning is something that we create in our own brains Okay, generally speaking. This is a more You know liberal Individualist perspective that we can create meaning in our own minds You know aside from what the community and the tribe and the nation believes constitutes meaning This is the buffered identity buffered meaning that you are protected from the outside world that you can just create meaning on your own The right wing perspective is that we lead porous identities That's what's going on outside of us has a profound effect on us It has a more profound effect than anything Generally speaking that our rational minds can conceive. So on the right we see meaning as something that exists outside of ourselves That we conform to on the left. We pursue our bliss construct meaning, you know inside our own buffered reflexive Autonomous strategic rational identity one of the things we're so so cruel optimism is is is coming out at a moment Where there is no escapology possible, you know in a certain sense because what there is is the aspiration for a present that we could live in You know, it's not we can't presume the present and this talk was delivered in 2011 And hope for a future react. We can't even presume the present. So we're hoping for a present that we could that we could live in and we could flourish in and and And what's hard is that So many of the infrastructures of continuity that have generated the good life since the 1940s And the United States and in social democracies all over the world have collapsed Right. So a right-wing perspective on this would blame it on civil rights legislation which has made Our attachment to the tradition traditional constitution attenuated which has diminished Our right to private property has diminished our right to freedom of association So has hacked away at the traditional ties that sustain people and enable human flourishing right having more freedom of Association more freedom with your private property so that you can create the kind of life you want with the people that you want to be close to But those like lauren belant who's on the left they blame the lack of human flourishing on inadequate social welfare spending So that it's it's it's it's incredibly hard to imagine and we no longer have an anchor for What we project out is the good life So this is an opportunity for us as critics and thinkers and artists Is to think well, what do we want the good life to be collectively? Is it possible? What are what what is it? Is it just not not surviving? You know, is it just the possibility of survival that would be the good life? Or can we imagine something that we would be willing to have that we would be willing to fight for And importantly that we would be willing to lose for Because the reorganization of life as cruel optimism says the reorganization of life requires you to lose your object And to be in the space beyond your object where you can actually encounter other humans and build a world with them Um, and it means not knowing not no longer having the archaic fantasy of the good life That you grew up with or that organized the world for you But actually kind of think well that good life didn't really work well too well There are too many people and it turned out that like only six people could get it And everybody else what they were what they were floating on was the fantasy It was a phantasmatic cushion and now the phantasmatic cushion has lost its air or choose your metaphor And so and nonetheless we need the possibility of an imaginary for what to build toward That we have to be willing to lose for we have to be willing to disagree with each other And we have to be willing to experiment and be wrong And there has to be a space where we can actually be open to the possibility of our non sovereignty and relation even to our fantasies So I think so that so you know what all of these yeah, that's a profound point all right to Bring people into your life Right and to have positive interactions with that requires the surrender of a substantial amount of your own individual sovereignty being part of a community Requires surrendering a significant part of your sovereignty And yet the good life for most people requires these very sacrifices these are necessary losses Papers were about is that that's about that's the question of what it means to be undone by your fantasy and then also Those moments at which you have to interact right think think about The successful sexual act all right requires that you surrender control and that you be essentially undone by The experience of orgasm Rerupt the fantasy that sustained you in order for you to be able to imagine a better justice. So janis janis started out with justice and I I'm always um Moved by a gamban saying in his work on witnessing where he says The performance of justice is really there to provide you the satisfaction that a decision happened It's not actually a delivery of justice. It's not actually a delivery of the pleasure of the possibility of flourishing together It's it's that at least something happened. It's like the minimal event Okay, so she's coming from a left-wing socialist perspective, but there's still A lot of good stuff here of something happening So It's not even justice that we can imagine right now because but I don't even know what the terms of collective life can be That the world can sustain and that we would fight Okay, so she's talking about collective life and I think most right wingers would want a more corporate and more collective life they just would want people to have more freedom to be after choose the community and collectivity and corporate Community that they belong to right people Need people are the happiest people in the world right people who have other people in their life successfully getting along with other people Are generally speaking happier and more productive right generally speaking a group strategy Works out superior to an individualist strategy for the world to sustain So what's really interesting is that all of the papers and in some way we're trying to think about What it means to have a kind of you know Effective or aesthetic interruption so that you could walk around and figure out what What could be preserved and taken out of that place To be the building brown the effective building ground for the new life and the the new good life that we could then actually fight for and What's so i'll just close by saying Yo, yeah, oh, let's see. I have to see I just saw my cat here So speaking of the good life He's calling me. That's right. It's right. Oh, I talked for too long. Okay, so I'll just You know, he's like he's sitting there looking me going feed me But you're not here. So now I'm going to really beat you up when you come home um, so I think so so one of the things we could think about is the uh, is the the how To effectively deal with what's unbearable, which is the loss of our object world and not to just Be overwhelmed by the loss of that object world but to see that loss as the opportunity for building new So I know men who don't want to date and don't want to relate because of the pain of The breakup of an emotional relationship was greater than they can handle They don't want to go through it again better objects for optimism And what the aesthetic was in all of these papers that the aesthetic technological was in all of these papers Was the kind of interruption that allowed people to feel a kind of absorption and the possibility that the artwork made to feel otherwise and to represent otherwise and I think It's relation to criticism and political theories and to create forms for magnetizing new Optimistic effects that we could trust. So that's my response to you So this is the late professor of affect fancy academic term for feeling lauren belant And you'll be thrilled to know that there is a new yorker essay about her It's called affect theory and the new age of anxiety how lauren belant's cultural criticism Predicted the trumping of politics. This was published March 18th 2019 in october 2011 the literary scholar and cultural theorist lauren belant published cruel optimism A meditation on our attachment to dreams that we know are destined to be dashed Burlant had taught in the english department at the university of chicago since 1984 She had established herself as a skilled interpreter of film and literature Starting out with a series of influential interlinked books that she called her national sentimental trilogy A sense of national identity these books argued wasn't so much a set of conscious decisions that we make as if it was a set of compulsions attachments and identifications that we feel In cruel optimism berlant moved from theorizing that genres of fear. Yeah, that that's so important Our most important allegiances are not rationally thought through They are experienced primarily meaning Loyalty to family to extend a family to community to tribe to nation All right nationalism is not Something that's primarily rationally thought out with a disengage reflexive buffered identity Using strategic autonomous approaches to life right our sense of communal identity right our most primal loyalties Are not the product of reason Fiction to theorizing about genres for life We like to imagine that our life follows some kind of trajectory Like the plot of a novel and that by recognizing its arc we might in turn become its author That is so good. We like to believe that our lives follow a trajectory And by recognizing the arc of our lives we can somehow become the author of our lives. So this is More of an enlightenment rationalist strategic autonomous liberal perspective that we can be the author of our lives I think the more right wing you are the more at ease you are with the vulnerability of life the The weakness of reason And we will have you know less optimism about the individual's ability to author his life But often what we feel instead is a sense of precariousness A gut level suspicion that hard work Thrift and following the rules won't give us control over the story much Okay, so We we don't get to control our lives We can have some agency over our lives in different parts of our lives But we don't get to control the whole thing because our lives are Interlinked with other people. That's why I don't love the individualist approach to life or to understanding How the world works. I prefer the tribal national understanding that we are not primarily individuals with You know god-given inalienable rights. We are primarily members of a nation or members of a tribe And whatever rights that we can develop are contingent depending upon circumstances and are going to be historically Changeable right depending on the situation. You're going to have access to more or fewer rights Let's guarantee a happy ending For all that we keep on hope. So I think people on the right have a less optimistic view of human nature and so have a more resigned understanding of the tragic nature of life while people on the left with their belief in a strategic autonomous buffered rational identity The individuals have these inalienable rights or should have right People on the left tend to have a much more optimistic view of human nature And tend to be less well equipped to deal with tragedy So many people on the left have given up on politics because it's just become too painful for them When communism has been tried it's not worked out well So many people on the left have transferred their allegiances to campaigning for human rights It's a way to retain the primordial impulses behind left-wing politics But transfer them to a realm outside of politics and You know make up this idea of human rights and then fight for human rights hoping and that persuades us to keep on living The persistence of the american dream berlant suggests Amounts to a cruel optimism a conditioning and something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing We are accustomed to longing for things that we know are bad for us So one thing I notice in all pretty much all dramatic movies plays tv shows novels Is that What creates the tragedy Is that the individual protagonists don't have any higher transcendent purpose beyond the satisfaction of their own desires So I came to this insight after years in 12 step programs. So One part of the ethos behind the 12 step program is that there should be A transcendent purpose to your life beyond satisfying your own desires that frequently pursuing your own desires will You know lead you to self-destruction and so We are offered instead the transcendent purpose of being a service to other people it Transcending your own desires can come from an allegiance to a political or religious or cultural ideology or pursuit But people tend frequently to get into a great deal of trouble pursuing their natural desires their You know optimistic delusions if they don't have anything above their desires Which is something that religion offers like cigarettes or cake Perhaps your emotional state is calibrated around a sports team like the new york nicks And despite hopes that next season will be better. You vaguely understand that you'll be let down anyway So anyone whose primary purpose in life or a substantial part of their purpose in life or a substantial part of their meaning in life or a substantial Part of their identity in life comes from allegiance to a sporting team is in a great deal of trouble I mean, that's a really bad basis for living And so I Inevitably find that the more extreme someone's devotion to a sporting allegiance Right the more trouble the person is the more of a loser They are who wants to shed this unwanted self and dissolve themselves in this supposedly superior championship team But our sycophene pursuit of the good life has higher stakes And it's amalgam of fantasy and futility is something that we process as experience before we rationalize it in thought These feelings berlant says are the body's response to the world Right, so that is a a trad perspective. So the left-wing liberal Modern perspective on life is that we can strategically autonomously Through our buffered identities reason our way to being the captains of our ship The traditional perspective on life understands that reason is weak that We are a part of a nation or a tribe rather than individuals That we we don't have nearly as much power over our souls as we imagine That our reason takes place within the body that we have all sorts of pre cognitive impulses and directions and impetuses Before we can even start to reason that shape how we react such as The effect of our genes and the effect of our early imprinting and The effect of incentives around us of which we might not be conscious So what she's alluding to here Is a much more foundational part of the right-wing perspective on life, even though she is a socialist something you're always catching up to Cruel optimism was dense and academic, but it proved enormously influential Its timing was serendipitous Look, do you still paint your face in Aussie cricket team colors on game day? I've never painted my face And I don't believe I've ever worn a sporting paraphernalia like a shirt The book was published at a moment when Barack Obama could still credibly draw upon the audacity of hope And with a second term in sight people wondered if he would finally unleash the progressive will that many believed lingered deep inside him Those who opposed him continued to work themselves into a radical frenzy as the republican mainstream reoriented itself around the tea party Burlant tuned into a wider sense of disaffection The feeling among average voters that neither of these visions for change was really about them or for them According to burlant these suspicions manifested themselves in mundane ways Horting things or overeating might be attempts to overcome feelings of personal powerlessness And her effective framework was a Yeah, so so many of our tactics in life they start out as adaptive such as overreading. All right I know when I eat too much The blood rushes to my stomach which reduces my anxiety levels. Also, I get to distract myself with a lot of pleasure So what starts out however is adaptive quickly becomes a maladaptive strategy for life means of understanding larger manifestations of these suspicions to The occupy movement which began in september 2011 So many of us are sustained by cruel optimisms and delusions But some of these optimisms and delusions are adaptive and others of them a maladaptive Could be seen as a response to the cruel optimism of capitalism The pent up outrage of citizens realizing that they'd been chasing nothing more than a dream In the years that followed burlant's interest in the immediacy of what others call felt experience Helped explain why people were feeling increasingly unsteady. It was as though they were in relationships that lacked reciprocity Her work like the school of thought that had produced it So I would suspect the primary reason people feel unsteady is not capitalism. It's not Neoliberalism It is that we have reduced the ability to have freedom of association and we have reduced rights to private property and so people have more individualist less communal identities today and if we could restore pre civil rights america And reduce litigiousness that we would be after encourage More bonding with others which would give people a more solid sense of themselves, right Trying to have a sense of yourself that is individualist is a much weaker Way to create a life than a sense of oneself as a member of a tribe Or of a nation or of a community something larger than yourself So she seems to be venerating here She's kind of an interesting combination between the socialist and Recognizing the primordial power of all sorts of urges that go on inside of us prior to making cognitive rational choices Was attentive to the buffeting emotional weather of everyday life Consider our twitter-fed swings of anger and mirth The oversharing and moodiness ascribed to younger generations The paranoia So the oversharing of younger generations, right? These are primarily people who lack normal human connections, right? If you're tight with your family tight with your friends tight with your community You're much less likely to self-destruct on a live stream or on social media in general Right the the most valuable resource you can have is a sense of self-respect and some Fact-based You know liking of yourself and this is much more likely to develop when you have You know a whole series of positive relationships in your life as opposed to an individualist existence Just trying to construct meaning through the power of your own thoughts Stoked by proliferating conspiracy theories even the emergence of the eternally sad pop star Shortly after the publication of cruel optimism berlant began to send So I noticed that allegiance to a pop star much stronger among people outside of traditional religion than people inside of traditional religion People inside of traditional allegiances and traditional identity have much less need for parasocial relationships in general Including to pop stars and a subtle atmospheric disturbance In september of 2012 she offered a diagnosis on her blog Many of you would say that donald trump was excluded from the republican convention Has no traction as a political candidate and is generally viewed as a clown Who's spewing occasionally hits in the vicinity of an opinion that a reasonable person could defend But I'm here to tell you that he actually won the republican nomination And is dominating the airwaves during this election season He is not doing this with dark money or coke like influence peddling He has done this the way the fabled butterfly does it As its wing flapping sets off revolutions Berlant felt trump's spectral presence everywhere is bluster mimicked and channeled by the party establishment Okay, great comment in the chat that swifties Maybe more loyal than most christians these days. Well, to the extent that's true. Why is it true? It's because loyalty to taylor swift and attending her concerts Is providing more of a sense of community and identity and meaning and purpose and life and connecting them More to people that they want to be connected to Than being a christian Right, taylor swift is out competing christianity to the extent that what you said is true Though hardly a man of nuance, he had tapped into the subtleties of effective politics She called it the trumping of politics Literary criticism used to be centered on meaning The critic interrogated a poem or a passage and applied her preferred theory of how meanings were produced And where they could be found A new critic might have scrutinized form and irony Explicating the interplay between overt and actual meaning A deconstructionist might have been attuned to the way the metaphors and propositions in a passage undermined each other A historicist to the way the meanings of a text might be situated within larger political or social tensions For each the task was interpretation and the currency was meaning In the past couple of decades, however, a different approach has emerged claiming the rubric affect theory Okay, I don't think I'd heard about affect theory prior to my explorations recently, but uh, I'm intrigued Under its influence critics attended to effective charge They saw our world as shaped not simply by narratives and arguments, but as a result of a change in the narrative They saw our world as shaped not simply by narratives and arguments But also by non-linguistic effects by mood by atmosphere by feelings The so-called effective turn was propelled in no small part by a series of essays starting in the mid-1990s So I think this touches on a perennial theme of this show over the past few months the power of the non-linguistic right the power of Primal emotions and and all sorts of things that move us prior to our having an ability to Start thinking in words 90s by the late eve kosofki sedgwick Who'd become fascinated by the work of the psychologist sylvan tomkins? He had identified nine primary effects some positive interest enjoyment most negative Anger fear shame disgust Dissmell one neutral surprise Tomkins who had a background in theater believed that people acted toward one another according to social scripts We could achieve peace or happiness by understanding how the scripts worked and by avoiding situation I think that's true We do largely relate to one another according to social scripts and your ability to understand the appropriate script for your situation is Frequently the difference between losing or winning in that interaction patients that triggered negative effects But literary critics like sedgwick were less interested in figuring out how to make people better than in understanding why we feel the way we do During the 2000s affect theory became one of the dominant paradigms of literary studies and a bridge to other fields Notably social psychology anthropology and political theory scholars like sarah ahmet sian nigh And an svetkovich began exploring the emotional contours of life during increasingly precarious times They were circling around a kind of overstimulated numbness Considering everything from what it meant to call something interesting A hedge against actual judgment to the relationship between economic anxiety and mental So where we overstimulated where do we seek to Get you know more stimulation than is good for us A large part of that is lack of normal human connection All right The more rooted you are in your family extended family community friends Your profession your hobbies your interests your educational community Right the less need you have to go outside of those vital primal human connections for stimulation health In ugly feelings 2005 nigh published a bestiary of effects Including animatedness envy irritation paranoia and the combination of shock and boredom that she called stuplimity Other affect theorists noted that amid a sense of dawning futility Many people seem to derive their greatest pleasure from making others feel bad Disaffection and disillusionment are contagions we can spread ourselves Burlant roots her version of affect theory So why would many people get more pleasure from making other people feel bad because They want to induce other people what's going on with them. All right, we're always broadcasting All right, we're always sending out signals to others if we're basically happy We're getting to what other people would be happy if we're basically miserable We're going to want other people to be miserable So that's why you can make a good case for The moral obligation to try to Reduce your miserable level and try to increase your happiness level less in works of psychology than in works of marxist thought Especially those of raymond williams who back in the 1950s wrote of the structure of feeling He was trying to describe how we come to agree on social or cultural conventions The intuitive pre-ideological sense a cohort has that one version of the future is feasible while another is not Burlant in turn sought to chronicle dramas of adjustment that have overtaken the post-war boom time Conceptions of the good life and that might force into okay dramas of adjustment all right having dramatically more immigration Uh overturning the old constitution for a new civil rights constitution, right limiting the Rights of private property limiting rights to freedom of association in the name of this new litigious Intrusive big government civil rights industrial complex right that's going to cause a lot of dramas of Integration to being new recognitions of what a life is and ought to be The draw of the americans Okay, what a life is and what it ought to be That is something from a traditional perspective exists outside of us and we adjust to it rather than the modern liberal left Consensus that we can create that with the power of our reason Through our own you know individual buffered reflexive distant Identity 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 80s Ronald Reagan spoke confidently of a morning in america in the american story of post-war prosperity still seemed possible general skepticism about meritocracy and opportunity felt most acutely by marginalized groups Who couldn't see themselves and picket fence campaign. So what type of person would uh Would be whale american meritocracy like what type of group right? Well, that's not cutting it right if you're cutting it You have no you have no problem with being judged on merit But if the merits of what your community is producing are quite minimal While the social havoc that your community is producing are quite maximal You're going to have a dramatic psychological need to blame your problems on something outside your community 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 In sentimental fiction we encounter righteous solutions to problems that feel unresolvable in real life berlant held that popular culture had been built layer by layer from uncle tom's cabin to the simpsons upon the assumption that identifying with someone else's stress pain or humiliated identity could change you Popular culture relies on keeping sacrosanct this asprecto sentimentality that underneath we are all alike Okay, that is A dominant strand of american popular culture and it's also a delusion underneath. We're not all alike Different groups experience the world differently That is the most basic of observations Yet, it's one that the liberal left dominant elitist mainstream academic world rejects as Their primitive medieval and reprehensible she observed Everyone has heartstrings Over time she wrote we've grown addicted to having them pulled rather than focusing on what the pulling could accomplish by way of political change We'd replace tangible action with effective experience What does it mean for the theory and practice of social transformation? She asked in a 1999 essay when feeling good becomes evidence of justice's triumph Somewhere along the way doing good had come to seem irrelevant You're going to most often feel good when you connect it to other people But that's the best way most consistent way To feel good is to have the best possible relations that you can have with your family your extended family your friends Your community and strangers that you interact with and people at work And so there are ways of living there are adaptive strategies that enable you to have the best possible relations with everyone that you interact with And that is what's going to make you feel good. How do you feel good? You get on the same page With other people then you create a shared reality, right? Even if that's just you meet regularly in the elevator and you exchange a few words about sports or about the weather or about Something that's going on that's relatively innocuous, but if you can create a brief shared reality All right with someone And get on the same page with them and get into some kind of synchronicity with them You are going to leave those interactions with more emotional energy than you brought into the interaction So you will get charged up. They will get charged up out of that emotional charge You will develop a bond out of that bond will come an ethic, right if you can go around continually replacing and Restoring and elevating your levels of emotional energy I'm drawing on the works here of Randall Collins, right? Because you're getting on the same page with people and created a shared reality, right? Even marching together doing anything together, right? That brings about a sense of synchronicity that you're working in a rhythm together And that you're working towards a common goal You're going to consistently feel happier and more energized if you lack energy and you lack happiness It's because you are not establishing a shared reality with other people that you're interacting with You are not developing a rhythm in your interactions with them And you're not getting on the same page and you don't have a sense of connection towards a common goal Or maybe just felt impossible In 2002, Berlant helped found the field tank Chicago per version of that ubiquitous vehicle of policymaking the think tank The collective consisted of academic colleagues artists and activists who sought to take the emotional temperature of the body politic Right, it's the Robert Putnam bowling alone study Robert Putnam found the more diverse the community Right the less likely people were to volunteer The more diverse the community less likely you will feel safe and at ease and happy In the public space the less likely you will participate in the public space The more likely you are to retreat from the public space and watch a lot of television Which does not make for a happy productive life It functioned both as a support network and as a strategy workshop for political depressives Underneath the playful conceit was the very serious possibility that politics was essentially theater And that it was basically impossible to opt out of one's part in it As berlant later wrote in cruel optimism The political depressive might be cool cynical shut off Searingly rational or averse And yet having adopted a mode that might be called detachment may not really be detached at all But navigating an ongoing and sustaining relationship to the scene and circuit of optimism and disappointment We dream of swimming toward a beautiful horizon But in truth berlant evocatively observed we are constantly dog paddling around a space whose contours remain obscure What stories do we tell ourselves in order to stay afloat? In december 2007 she started a blog called Supervalent thought dedicated to slowing the work. Okay, we have no alternative but to Create stories to stay afloat. That is why I repeated someone else's observation that a hero story Is a biological necessity Right, we have no alternative but to create narratives to give meaning and purpose and structure To to our lives, right? There is no alternative to having a hero system World down zooming in on its mundanities Some of its most bewitching posts had a voyeuristic intimacy Cataloging interactions on city streets or in coffee shops scrutinizing nonverbal cues gestures and fleeting expressions The traces of affect that litter our daily lives In one post berlant recounts an argument between a cashier and an angry customer at a convenience store The customer leaves in a huff but forgets his credit card and the aggrieved yet duty-bound cashier Rushes out after him hoping to get his attention with an unusually loud whistle the kind that you know requires your fingers When the cashier returned berlant complimented him on his technique He told us a story about elementary school. She wrote he said he had had a math teacher who insulted and shamed him One day she was using him as an example and he just put his fingers in his mouth and blew It was an experience that couldn't be easily distilled into lesson. It endured as a lingering effect berlant was interested in the atmosphere scenes like these acted out by dispirited characters in search of a plot The hundreds duke berlant's latest book co-written with catlin stewart an anthropologist at the university of texas at austin Grows out of these short writing exercises Each entry is an experiment in following out the impact of things in a hundred words or a multiple of a hundred words The result is a strange and captivating book. It is an inventory of what berlant and stewart called Ordinaries which arise from encounters with the world that are not events of knowing units of anything or revelations of realness or facts Yeah, sharing a cottage together can do you know wonders for your happiness level Uh, this this analysis this whole field of scholarship is an example to me Of how there's so much to be learned from academics and from people who have completely different political orientations, right? You don't have to be a socialist to appreciate The frequent profundity of the late lauren berlant. They are records of affect medications manifestos and prose poems There are entries on smoothies and weird encounters at the liquor store digressions on selfies yoga and capitalism a reference to the tv show search party and the real estate app zillow The authors sift through the detritus of the american dream The symptoms of cruel optimism Men at the local deli seem to suspect that life is a set of roadblocks cooked down to a rage One particularly haunting page recounts an argument that the narrator had with a neighbor over a urinating dog Another woman walks by trying to calm the author down and bring her back to the good His words were spitballs hers were gently bouncing tennis balls. He was a rage machine She was a sympathy machine, but she seemed so tired too and I could only imagine why In berlanton stewart's hands affect theory provides a way of understanding the sensations and resignations of the present The normalized exhaustion that comes with life in the new economy It is a way of framing uniquely modern questions Where did the seeming surplus of emotionality that we see on the internet come from? And what might it become? What new political feelings were being produced by the rudderless drift of life in the gig economy? What if millennials were unintelligible to their parents simply because they've resigned themselves to precariousness as life's defining feature Okay, that precariousness all right doesn't primarily come from capitalism Primarily comes from a lack of normal human connections ties and attachments and loyalties From acknowledging oneself as a member of a tribe of a community of an extended family of a nation Rather than looking at oneself as an individual with inalienable rights A lot of affect theory is abstruse to the point where you forget that it aims to describe basic facets of everyday reality stewart's books have been a notable exception Interweaving diaristic observation and everyday reportage with critical theory The sentences in berlant's previous books and articles tended to be very long conveying the sweeping complexity of her ideas But she seems invigorated by the neurotic limitations of this form which produces a kind of frenzied poetry The hundreds calls to mind the adventurous hybrid style of fred motton The book includes a brief poem by him maggy nelson or claudia ranken All of whom bend available literary forms into workable vessels for new ideas berlant leans into the wit and vulnerability on the edges of her previous work There is nothing i love more than watching someone use their freedom. She writes I'll coast in awkward transit family meals and accurate sex to get next to a freedom My god fox news is advertising. They've got harnes bonds spikofsky coming up next. I mean, this is the multiply debunked discredited So-called expert continually trotted out by right-wing news media absolutely pathetic I'll fling myself at ordinary monsters if in the crevasse of the mistake I get next to a freedom We bear each other hoping to breathe in each other's freedom The most penetrating moments of the hundreds occur when the authors meditate on what it means to write about life in the first place Their efforts end up telling us something about what it means to assess our lives without giving up on ourselves We make a pass at a swell in realism and look for the hook We back up at the hint of something we butt in Right. So trying to assess your life, right? This is a very liberal preoccupation. Follow your own bliss You can create meaning on your own from your own strategic, you know reflexive distant buffered rational perspective Right the right-wing approach to finding meaning in life is to understand that it comes outside of you Comes from your tribe your community your nation right it comes from being a part of something bigger than yourself and Adjusting yourself to this outside structure Rather than expecting the world or seeking the world to adjust to you Just more of a liberal left perspective. We try to describe the smell. We trim the fat to pinpoint what seems to be the matter here It's like an asymptote moving toward but never arriving at the point of convergence This is of course the geometry of cruel optimism the endless chase for a destination. You'll never reach It's tiring work When writing fails the relay So Bernard says why isn't there more of a move to ban people over the age of 70 for running for political office? My objection to that is you're saying that people You can't be trusted to decide where to bestow their their votes So I would prefer to just allow people to make choices Rather than to try to implement rules about who people can vote for or not Station of word and world it spins out like car wheels in mud leaving you stranded and tired of trying All attachment is optimistic berlant argued in cruel optimism because it forces us out of ourselves From there we enter into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own But sense in the wake of a person a way of life an object project concept or scene The challenge is finding configurations that don't simply reproduce the same old patterns of life There's a stirring moment at the end of cruel optimism When berlant writes about the book's cover image a painting that depicts the artist and disability activist Okay, that's uh the new yorker essay. I was just so Intrigued by learning about lauren belant and her body of work. You'll be glad to know I went on a research binge And uh, here are some of the things I found there was a big article about her in n plus one magazine socialist magazine Talks about affect the theory's center of gravity Lies with lauren belant militia professor at the university of chicago her central concept is the title of a 2011 book cruel optimism It's a distinctively contemporary feeling Well, if that's true, maybe there's something wrong with our contemporary world, which is not primarily structural, maybe is well Maybe it's not primarily about economics Maybe it's primarily about the decline of traditional rights such as to private property and freedom of association and the Imposition of an enormous and intrusive and litigious civil rights industrial complex So according to lauren belant Cruel optimism is the sticky effective feeling left by the slow decay of one's stable forms of the good life Yes, I would agree with that because we Have less of a sense of community than we used to we have less social trust and less social cohesion Thanks in large part to inordinate amounts of immigration combined with the civil rights industrial complex so cruel optimism Is a relationship of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility Because realization is discovered either to be impossible sheer fantasy or too possible and toxic Or you're more likely to be vulnerable to cruel optimisms if you're believing that you can create meaning and purpose from inside your own head rather than attaching yourself to A structure of meaning that exists primarily outside of you in a tribe or a nation or a community So however harmful an individual attachment might be to a relationship to an ambition to a way of life Giving up on it was shatter the personality that has been organized around it. So do we want to organize ourselves? Where there is nothing higher To ourselves than the satisfaction of our desires or do you want to organize our lives around? transcendent pursuits that go above and beyond and more important than our own visceral desires So according to belant whatever the form of attachment is The continuity of the form it provides something of the continuity of the subject sense of what it means to keep on living And to look forward to being in the world. Yeah To me happiness my favorite definition of happiness is the one I think I came up with Happiness is looking forward to the day or looking forward to tomorrow Taking on an impossible debt load to buy a house or to go to college Because you don't believe you'll have a stable or normal life without it. This is cruel optimism The graduate students single-minded misery inducing pursuit of one of the few remaining tenure track jobs. This is cruel optimism. So one of the approaches to life that leads people to 12 step programs like debtors anonymous is I'm going to graduate school at affect theory captures academic life academia Is undergoing the process of the colonization of feeling Huh, I don't know what that means Grandest example of cruel optimism is found in our collective relationship to a looming climate catastrophe Okay, cruel optimism describes a way of life under neoliberalism Right. I don't see that And then we had the new yorker. Oh, okay, erin mclough. All right. I played video of her earlier She writes in the london review of books an academia reputation is gossip about who had the ideas So I earlier read her observations on obama and opera part of a shared national sentimentality The most influential book cruel optimism describes the relationship would exist when something you desire is an obstacle to your flourishing Such as romantic love fast food The democratic party prestige tv each offers its comforts and securities That each diminishes in us large or small ways making false promises and prevents us from striving for something better Yet we continue to strive blame ourselves when things go wrong We accept casual contracts instead of hoping and seeking a more secure position Explains where we spend ten dollars on a cup of coffee. All right. So you say wow 40 this lauren beland She just sounds amazing surely Surely there's there's more More where that came from But what else This lauren beland Have to offer us And you're in luck I think I've got more no not in luck let me Catch my breath here and find what I want to play riva lair lying beside her dog zora lair seems to float behind zora her hand covering her face Zora is blind in one eye and wears a cone around her neck They are by conventional standards limited and vulnerable beings, but to berlant they are a team They seem at peace with each other's bodily being and seem to have given each other what they came for companionship reciprocity care protection In the absence of real stability the state of affairs. I mean, that's what we have going on here We are at ease with each other's bodies and we extend to each other all those great things That the new yorker article was just talking about All right, this is from the university of chicago where chasing the good life is hoarding us back in the morning What motivates you to go to a job you may not love? Save up to buy a house. Uh, maybe because you have obligations that should transcend your own petty desires Or a luxury car Maybe because you have obligations that transcend your own petty desires For most americans is a desire to attain the quote-unquote good life From the moments you live Not the things you own But what if that promise that you can have the good life if you'd just work hard enough is a lie Starting in the 1970s the image of the good life as an economic good life Started losing its traction lauren berlant is a professor of english at the university of chicago She spent her career theorizing and writing about finding meaning in american life And whom our society decides gets to be included as citizens I mean there's this whole question of being deserving which i find so terrifying With so much a part of the politicization of the good life berlant says that our society An individual sense of place in the world have been shattered in the last few decades But she wants to find a way to reshape things, you know Insofar as like i work with art and work with theory My interest is in trying to produce Better ways of thinking about what a good life would be That didn't depend on achievement and success and these kind of very Kind of beef jerky like models of what how people live from the university of chicago. This is big right? That's what religion traditional community used to give people Why not restore more incentives for building community with Iran Israel nationalists and zionists and they like ran guns for the israelis So there was a way she's talking about her in america Who gets included in society and who gets excluded? How do we find meaning in this experience? These are questions that berlant has been asking her entire life My grandparents on my father's side were communists from russia and my grandparents on my mother's side were boris wild nationalist and zionists And they like ran guns for the israelis So there was a lot of citizenship talk in the family and I was 11 and 68 So I came into kind of adulty consciousness political consciousness Like during a period when people were really fighting about it And so there was just a lot of that kind of conversation And I think it really matters if you're coming up during a time of movement culture The first books berlant wrote were called her national sentimentality trilogy They grappled with questions like what are the relationships and responsibilities that we have to each other And how are those bonds formed? Thinking about belonging and attachment to life and the attachment to living on how one lives on has been incredibly important to me You know, some people think they're attached to each other because of the way the law Makes a web of constancy among them. So we're all citizens. What does that mean? So many people get a substantial part of their mini life from being a fan And nationalism is an extension of fandom So there's a new book out by a liberal left professor Paul Campos It's called a fan's life the agony victory in the thrill of defeat It's about his experience on a university of michigan football Reddit board And it gets a review in the may 18 2023 london review of books Says that adam smith's famous metaphor of an invisible hand guiding markets was one of the enlightenment's many appeals to a fictional outsider It's supposed to be a barometer of value. So The enlightenment places a great emphasis on The pursuit of neutrality and objectivity You've got a discipline of economics that Has historically assumed that markets are instruments of justice that the price system Is oblivious to the cultural identity or political status of its participants And so this is part of the enlightenment project to make life increasingly irrational Now the anxiety buzzing around in the background of this book a fan's life is that fandom has Increasingly entered the public square has now infected american culture and politics at large So we've seen liberalism give way to neoliberalism. So neoliberalism is cutthroat politics cutthroat economics More more free market economics than even classical liberalism So now our elites are no longer Our middle class our bourgeoisie are no longer given the task of sustaining ideals of fairness and balance But instead have become more like fans. They are instead given the task of whipping up enthusiasm So online there is this there is sufficient space for every opinion And for every claim to be published and articulated and live stream So what need now is there for anyone to look down on these claims from a position of disinterest such as The objectivity that the mainstream news media supposedly Has so fandom has increasingly become the norm The internet is less a marketplace of ideas as conservatives and libertarians would have it To become much more a marketplace of passions This has significant knock on effects for the rest of the media Especially the liberal media that wants to distinguish themselves in terms of their Commitment to neutrality to critical distance to facts right these enlightenment virtues virtues right these enlightenment values That go against a public sphere awash with fandom So nationalism is a form of fandom it rebels against the constraints of the liberal construct of liberal reason of liberal Allegiance to neutrality and objectivity because nationalism expresses an unapologetic bias for one side against the other So outrageous conservative media outlets such as fox news and brightbot have nourished the sense that nobody is free from bias and prejudice It's only the liberal elite who ever pretended to be so in the first place Internet isn't just a space where fans debate with one another. It's also where tribes Build up a distorted and hateful picture of their enemies. So sports allegiances Are a sublimated form of politics and politics are a sublimated form of fandom of the more traditional kind And so the the mentality that distrusts all claims to neutrality and objectivity ends up seeing corruption everywhere which is Pretty stimulating point right back to lauren beland A few years ago a student and i and i taught a class called queer arts after stonewall today marks 50 years since the start of I set the stone wall in in new york I think i'll skip that Quality corporate greed and the influence of big business in politics spreading to hundreds of cities across america people Who are starting to think again about well? What does it mean to be a public when i was doing my early work? The question of what a public was was so important and then there was a long period like the last decade But everyone's like there are no there's no such thing as a general public which is related to there's no such thing It's a purple america and i think obama basically emptied the bottle on the model of Um citizenship is a kind of medic category that makes all of us have something in common with each other Well, he said there's no red america or blue america. There's purple america even as we speak There are those who are preparing to divide us the spin masters the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes Well, I say to them tonight. There is not a liberal america and a conservative america There is the united states of america And now everyone's like where's purple america now I my first three books were about national sentimentality e.g. Purple america You know the idea that there was some common space that people thought was more or less a fact Of a common space and even if you had different effective relations here like you might hate it or you might like it You saw that you were attached to it where everybody had because everybody is holding the same songs or the same images or the same fantasies They have something in common with each other. I think that's been pretty shattered So we're living without national sentimentality for the first time since the 19th century Maybe the late 18th century right now. We're not right now. And tell me what you mean more about that We're living without national sentimentality. We're living we're living without a normative sense that to be american means to have something in common With other people who are members of the set and we don't have that anymore. I think it's been completely wrecked And that's one of the great Yeah, so you can think in large parts of rights industrial complex and in order levels of immigration Regularly of people who is not well equipped to thrive in our modern economy. So benny johnson post on twitter august 11 Rich man north of rich in richmond is the most listened to track in the world in the past 24 hours This american working man's protest song has millions and millions of plays sung by an off the grid farmer in the countryside with his dogs And nathan coughness responds Main point of conservatives new favorite song is that rich man have devalued and taxed the dollar But in america, most taxes are paid by the rich and even now poor are rich by global standards Off the grid Virginia farmer who can spend more than the annual household income in most countries on recording equipment for his music hobby Right 40 years ago an american hillbilly would have been lucky to own his own harmonica that cost less than a one week supply This guy's Beardwax populace on both the left and the right can't articulate what works them So they invent economic grievances and blames And blame these rich men north of richmond for forcing them to sit out here waste my life away And i think i agree with that coughness critique Um effect by which i don't mean one of the good effects of the current administration Democrats produce mobs republicans produce jobs Increasingly we americans occupy alternate universes, but you also had people that were Very fine people on both sides And there's a rejoinder here question either super rich don't pay taxes because they're high IQ and have good accountants and lawyers Or they pay the most taxes, which is it that's very easy. It is the super rich and the rich who paid the most taxes Now they may not pay as many taxes as you would like but taxes are overwhelmingly paid by the rich No, that is asking the question again of you might be here you might you might be in the same space as me But it doesn't mean we both belong to this space when mexico sends his people. Okay, so los angeles have nothing in common Right half of los angeles. I don't think can even speak english So when you kind of even share a common language with someone that you're in the same physical geographic space Doesn't mean that you have Much of a bond, right? That's no basis to build meaningful relationships when you can't speak the same language They're not sending their best They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists and some I assume are good people and the ministry of cruelty or whoever makes his decisions um Had decided to float the idea of giving up birthright citizenship, you know to me The ministry of cruelty. Okay cruelty to whom is kindness to others? right by employing some standards about who gets to become an american citizen by I would say that Allowing citizenship to people who are in the country illegally Right is cruel both of the majority to the existing citizenry and cruel to those who abide by the rules of the law And try to immigrate to america legally so I would not say denying birthright citizenship is just some Gratuitous cruelty to me it is kind to those who deserve kindness and it is tough to those who deserve Toughness that's just a kind of astonishing Moment in dialing back what constitutes belonging that you have to earn belonging now that it's not something that you show up for And it has yeah, that's a right-wing approach. You earn belonging. It's not just something that you show up for Right that you should earn your way that if your group Overall is consistently producing havoc is consistently absorbing more tax dollars than it contributes It's understandable why why people outside your group would not be positively Attuned to your group, right? Yeah individuals and groups should have the mindset of earning their way in life And not just expect everything to be given to them because they have certain inalienable rights or they can construct Or legally or rationally or politically compelling arguments Has to be fought for because you can see the incredible vulnerability If you if the way that you operate your life is against my best interest Why should I have positive feelings about you if the way that your group? Behaves is against my best interests. Why should I be positively? attuned to you This is insane what she's suggesting that groups and individuals just because they're in the same demographic or Nation-state regime That therefore we should just love one another and pull together, right? If you're consistently against my best interests Why would I? Support you. Why would I love you? If your group consistently acts against my best interests at every form of life wants to construct an environment It is best suited to its own thriving And so every form of life naturally has a negative reaction to those other forms of life that destroy its optimal environment This is library Right if you go to the library to try to study and to learn You will naturally have a very negative reaction against protesters and activists who disrupt your ability to study and to learn The ability of people who don't have it as a protection and I think it's a really big question now What are our names for the thing that we hold in common one of the forces driving the brake? Uh, what do we have in common? All right the best Predictor of people getting along is genetic similarity followed by cultural religious political Solidarity right the more you have in common the more likely you are to get along with other people That's it. Bye. Bye