Beyond Berlant's Impasse: Cruel Optimism, Material Constraint, and Counter-Infrastructures
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This preprint critically reassesses Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism by examining the relationship between affective attachment and material constraint under neoliberal capitalism. While Berlant's account offers a powerful diagnosis of attachments to compromised promises of flourishing, this paper argues that the framework remains strategically underdetermined when confronted with the question of structural transformation. Drawing on Marxist accounts of alienated labour, theories of social reproduction, and scholarship on institutional alternatives, the paper shifts attention from affective endurance toward the material conditions that make particular attachments difficult to abandon. Examples from platform labour and educational credentialism demonstrate how economic insecurity, social legitimacy, and dependence on existing institutions reproduce forms of cruel optimism. The paper develops the concept of counter-infrastructures to describe collective material arrangements capable of reducing this dependence and expanding the practical possibility of detachment from harmful promises. Rather than rejecting affect theory, the argument proposes a material extension of Berlant's diagnosis by connecting affective life to institutional power, economic security, and the construction of viable alternatives.
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Attribution 4.0 International