Editor's Column: Pessimistic Times

Suspicion of the status quo, discontent with the now discredited rhetoric of progress, and a lingering dissatisfaction with bland hope or optimism—with a belief in the post-ideological, post-political, post-critical, post-racial, and so on—have settled in. It seems that pessimism characterizes more and more today's political horizon. In these pessimistic times—with the proliferation of ecological catastrophes, endless wars, and immigration crises across the globe—what is a literary critic to do? Is pessimism the unfortunate, if not tragic, result of failing to produce a much needed transformation in the political landscape? Is pessimism humanity's new normal in the age of neoliberalism? Such questions invariably frame pessimism as a matter of loss (loss of will, imagination, and resistance), positing the pessimist in a state of passivity, reacting to intractable external forces rather than actively shaping the world.

But pessimism can also embody a more active disposition. It can, for example, take the form of a hermeneutics. A pessimistic interpretive mode entails an unconditional refusal to accept that "things will get better," to prolong such cruel pragmatism, and it judges with suspicion everything around us as complicit with or tainted by power. As Jasbir Puar puts it in the context of community activist Dan Savage's positive message to the LGBT community in the video "It Gets Better" (in response to a series of queer youth suicides):

[The] video is a mandate to fold into urban, neoliberal gay enclaves, a form of liberal handholding and upward-mobility that echoes the now discredited "pull yourself up from the bootstraps" immigrant motto. Savage embodies the spirit of a coming-of-age success story. He is able-bodied, monied, confident, well-travelled, suitably partnered and betrays no trace of abjection or shame. His message translates to: Come out, move to the city, travel to Paris, adopt a kid, pay your taxes, demand representation. But how useful is it to imagine troubled gay youth might master their injury and turn blame and guilt into transgression, triumph, and all-American success?¹

The structure of white privilege and ableism enables to Savage to create a vision of the future that some queer marginalized bodies might have a chance to enjoy. But these very structures are simultaneously disavowed. Queer subjects of color, for instance, confront a different reality. Savage's "uplifting" message is at best inconsequential (it doesn't really apply to you) and at worst devastating (it can get you killed if you think that the system is improving and making you less vulnerable). The power of privilege is precisely what Savage's intervention misses. Puar adopts a pessimistic stance vis-à-vis the liberalism of Savage and others. The generalized rhetoric of "It Gets Better" is part of the problem—by ignoring or bracketing racial and ableist assumptions from critical analysis, the slogan fails to fully address why some queer lives continue not to matter—rather than a solution to it.

If pessimism is a response to (the abuse of) power, we might recall here Michel Foucault's insistence that power doesn't mean "that everything is bad," but rather "that everything is dangerous."² And more importantly, what follows from this critical recognition is not despair or apathy, but a resolve to confront any configuration of power identified as dangerous—or cruel, ideologically dubious—by adopting what Foucault suggestively terms "a hyper- and pessimistic activism."³ Slavoj Žižek repeats this kind of "hyper- and pessimistic activism" when he underscores the lack of transcendence from within, when he insists that under the current social configuration thinking suffocates and things "naturally" get worse. The counter to the "slow death"⁴ of quotidian life is not reform but revolution. Futurity as such is not the problem: it is the current social reality and its proposed/authorized liberal solutions for improvement. Against the liberal model of incremental change, we must entertain the bold vision that there is no light at the end of the tunnel; on the contrary, if there is a light, what we are actually seeing is another train bearing down on us.⁵ In this respect, "the courage of hopelessness...