Apologies for missing last week’s newsletter! Freelancing is my main source of income these days. Much to my dismay, projects tend to come in waves and spurts. I just started a project that requires a fast turnaround, so I wasn’t able to devote the time necessary to writing last week. I expect to be back to a normal schedule next week, so this week’s newsletter will be shorter, more ruminative. One of the consequences of the gig economy is, of course, the pervasive feeling of being disorganized. I’ve realized, over the last year or so of freelancing, that there can be no sense of organization—no sense of time as neat and orderly and, therefore, manageable—when your livelihood depends upon the ebbs, flows, and disruptions of the market, which always seems to be moving at the speed of too late and as soon as possible!
I’m working on a new project and, as I often do, taking down books from my shelves to think with those authors. I remembered Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism has a lot to say about melodrama, and I was flipping through that book when I came across the following passage (with an apology for quoting at length):
Living amidst war and environmental disaster, people are shown constantly being surprised at what does and does not seem to have a transformative impact. Living amid economic crisis, people are shown constantly being surprised at the amount, location, and enormity of moral and affective irregulation that comes from fading rules of accountability and recognition. What will govern the terms and relations of reliable reciprocity among governments, intimates, workers, owners, churches, citizens, political parties, or strangers? What forms of life will secure the sense of affective democracy that people have been educated to expect from their publics? Nobody knows. The news about the recent past and the pressures of the near future demand constant emergency cleanup and hyperspeculation about what it means to live in the ongoing present among piles of cases where things didn’t work out or seem to make sense, at least not yet. There are vigils; there is witnessing, testimony, and yelling. But there is not yet a consensual rubric that would shape these matters into an event. The affective structure of the situation is therefore anxious and the political emotions attached to it veer wildly from recognition of the enigma that is clearly there to explanations that make sense, the kind of satisfying sense that enables enduring.
While “constant emergency clean up” and pervasive anxiety is descriptive of just about any day since November 6, 2016, Berlant was actually writing in 2011, a vastly different (yet almost identical) moment to our own in 2021. While there are continuities with her earlier books, Cruel Optimism was really catalyzed by the Bush presidency and the growing disappointments of the Obama presidency. In 2011, we were just beginning to see that the economic crisis of 2008 was never going to go away, the humanitarian crisis of the Iraq War was a signal moment in the ongoing necrosis of the US Empire, and the political crisis of white supremacy was to be realized in the rise of far-right extremism. Berlant’s achievement in Cruel Optimism is her ability to ask what happens to our lifeworlds when these ongoing crises become more and more ordinary.
What is striking about this passage is the idea that liberalism reproduces itself through a cycle of surprise and explanation. Liberalism, as both a politics of the American center and as a kind of ethos of the American elite, endures precisely because it fails to diagnose the rot at the center of American politics. We’re all subject to surprise—no matter how much we know better—not because we’re stupid and gullible but because we live within a political and economic system (capitalism) that is so disorganized and disorganizing that it makes any sense of continuity and regularity impossible. And, at every new, surprising event, the whole system bears down on the stupidest, simplest explanation so as to avoid actually gazing into the eyes of the beast.
We’ve seen this a lot in the last few weeks since the events of January 6th, but especially in the hours after the Senate failed to convict Trump for his role in inciting white supremacist violence. Over and over again, people repeated: “I’m not surprised but I’m surprised they actually acquited him.” And, over and over again, people fell back on default explanations for why the Senate failed to convict him: the corruption of the GOP, the corruption of the Democrats, etc. Again, it’s not that these explanations are wrong and it’s not that we’re all too stupid to know better. It’s that, in many ways, for us to endure living within this lifeworld, we have to resort to satisfactory “explanations that make sense” and provide a sense of closure. Recognizing what is really at fault is to live within “anxiety”—but, that’s no way to live. As so many of us with clinical depression and anxiety know, you can’t live within anxiety—it’s unsustainable. So, we pass forward to the explanations that we know are unsatisfying but which “make sense” so as to live another day, waiting for the next crisis that will surprise us with its novelty but which we will ultimately recognize.