Affective Politics of Structural Adjustment: “Cruel Optimism” and Turhan Selçuk’s Cartoons in Turkey, 1983–1986

This article contributes to the social history of neoliberalism by analyzing the emotions, feelings, and sentiments through which Turkish people experienced the structural adjustment program of the 1980s. I argue that market reforms were experienced through a paradoxical entanglement of desire and disillusionment—an affective politics that Lauren Berlant defines as “cruel optimism.” This concept captures the ways in which neoliberalism generates a series of aspirations, longings, and yearnings that can never be fully achieved or satisfied but nevertheless pulls subjects toward an imagined future. I examine these collective feelings through a visual analysis of Kemalist intellectual Turhan Selçuk’s editorial cartoons that were published in the center-left newspaper Milliyet between 1983 and 1986. These editorial cartoons function in complex ways, providing relief through satire but also narrating the ways in which a sense of optimism encircled sentiments of anxiety, despair, and precarity. I identify three distinctive instances of cruel optimism in his work: first, the will to retain control over economic affairs despite the dominance of international organizations, second, the hope that trade liberalization shall bring prosperity amidst mounting class inequality, and third, the allure of consumption even when most of the population was unable to afford export commodities. Rather than demonstrating a clear temporal gap between the promise and demise of market reforms, the article reveals the coproduction of two oppositional affective registers and suggests that the fluctuation between willingness and reluctance is a constitutive element of neoliberal subjectivity.