An Anarchist Power Amidst Pessimism: The Overcoming of Optimism in José Saramago's Blindness and Seeing

Introduction: can pessimists change the world?

Thanks in great part to Lauren Berlant's book Cruel Optimism, optimism has come in for a lot of criticism and bad press of late. "Cruel" optimism in particular is seen as a force that holds political subjects to the vagaries of liberal capitalism, using a false form of hope to keep people yoked to the system that oppresses them. It is "cruel" because there never was any hope of the kinds of redemption that liberal capitalism promises (the promise of fulfillment, of happiness, of safety and riches). Optimism in this view is the affective dimension of liberal ideology.

Thus, Berlant writes of the "cruel optimism and its mode of slow death," specifically speaking of the way that capitalism promises so much to the liberal subject and delivers so little, particularly in terms of commodification and exchange of goods in the market. Berlant writes (41–42).

Under capitalism, money is power and if one has only surplus amounts of it, sovereignty is infinite and yet a weight that cannot be borne. Exchange value was supposed to leaven the subject through the handoff of value to another, who would return something in kind. The space of exchange would make breathing space and breathing space is what the capitalist subject, in all of her ambition, is trying to attain—the good life. … But what usually gets returned in the exchange of desire embedded in things is merely disappointingly, a brief episode, often with a thing as memento of the memory and not the actualization of desire.

(42)

Here, we see that optimism is not just cruel, it is also capitalist and statist. It is part of a web of intelligibility that determines and orders our political, economic and social lives.

If this is the case, if optimism is so entangled with oppressive political and economic forms, what then of pessimism? Is pessimism any more "realistic" or preferable to optimism? Does the pessimist see something that the optimist does not? And if so, what is it that they see? In this paper I will argue that pessimism is not in and of itself the proper response to optimism but that it is a critical part of a larger set of responses that enables some kind of radical break with existing norms and power structures. Pessimism alone is not enough because by itself it can readily be the mirror image of optimism, limiting options and viewpoints in the name of a defiance and resistance that doesn't expand past what it is resisting. The kind of response that I am interested in discussing is therefore neither a simple negation of cruel optimism, nor an entirely different phenomenon, but something that comes out of the affective dimensions of state and capitalist forms of ideology in a way that recognizes both the presence and determination of that ideology even as it offers a way to inhabit that space differently (more accurately, it shows how we have already been inhabiting that space differently in ways that are not always apparent to ourselves so long as we remain under the spell of optimism).

To make these arguments, I will focus on two novels by the Portuguese author José Saramago, Blindness and Seeing. In these novels, which form a sequel, Saramago explores two catastrophic events which have vast consequences for the characters in the novels (there is some continuity of characters between the two).

The first catastrophe is chronicled in Blindness, a plague of what Saramago calls "white blindness" wherein people are struck, one after another, with a form of blindness where all that they can see is white. Everyone but one woman, known only as the doctor's wife (Saramago almost never gives us any names at all), is afflicted and society completely collapses.

The second catastrophe, described in Seeing, is completely different. In that novel, set in the same city as Blindness—the capital of the country (which he suggests might be Portugal)—but now four years later, 83% of the population turn in blank ballots in a national election...