Cruel optimism is in this sense a
concept pointing toward a mode of lived immanence, one that grows from a
perception about the reasons people are not Bartleby, do not prefer to
interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the
system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held
in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean
defeat by it. (28)
I also think there is much to be critical of in the
elevation of Bartleby as a figure of political resistance, and yet I think that
the figure of Bartleby raises more questions than it answers about political
subjectivity. To begin with, then, the primary question raised by Bartleby
is the question of what it means to prefer. The story of Bartleby never
resolves the ambivalence about preference that some would read into it; rather,
it sets in motion the problem of preference as a political gesture.
In my
reading, this problem is also explored in Hannah Arendt’s theory of proairesis, which precedes or informs
the distinction between the social and political. I’ve described all of this
elsewhere, highlighting preference not as a form of activity, but as a problem
for activity. Rather than seeing how Arendt problematically divides these
“realms,” I was focusing on how preference not only exposes assumptions about
ideas of (political, revolutionary) activity, but poses the question about how
these models are formed in the first place. The question of preference does so
because, as Arendt spells out, it is an issue of proairesis, literally of pro-airesis, of a choice before choice. It
thus occurs at the intersection of one’s political activity and one’s social
status, at the intersection of one’s capacity to produce one’s identity or
attitude or to be produced (structurally, logically, institutionally) as an
identity. Tracing out the consequences of some of Arendt’s observations, I have
described how that faculty, that capacity, is worthy of being seen in its own
right, not merely as an extension of the idea that in spectating or observing
(or in judging) we are already taking action, as Jacques Ranciere formulates,
for example, in The Emancipated Spectator.
An important part of this conceptualization resides in
Arendt’s formulation of preference in “Reflections on Little Rock” as something
has the capacity to intervene in the social realm. This is an understanding of
preference as pre-political that I think is important to rethinking reified
notions of political action that are understood as revolutionary. But an aspect
that I did not initially explore is the fact that this presentation of
preference in “Reflections on Little Rock” emerges in the context of the issue
of school segregation and interracial marriage. And here, Arendt’s insistence
on identifying school segregation/integration and miscegenation as things
belonging to the social realm rather than the political is clearly in error.
In her book Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana UP 2014), Kathryn T. Gines argues
that Arendt’s distinction represents a severe limitation in Arendt’s thinking
about the Negro question (which also rests on her understanding of anti-Black
discrimination as a “Negro problem” rather than a “white problem”) and that
this has consequences for her ideas about representative thinking and judgment.
Gines argues that these shortcomings can be seen in light of her presentation
of the Jewish question and the ways that this question is extended, although
not explicitly connected to the Negro question.
Seen from this perspective, it’s hard to read Arendt’s
essay, along with her other discussions of the problem of race in America, as something
other than emissions of a form of white privilege that is little different from
white racists of the time, as Gines points to. To consider the concept of
preference from this perspective, however, allows for a consideration not so
much of how racism emerges through preference, as Arendt is arguing it should
(and should freely be allowed to),
all the while, of course, not being able to see the contradictions and
discriminations (those private, interested things) that she was applying to the
political (the realm that she believes should be disinterested, a reading that
Gines also thoroughly exposes the contradiction of in terms of her response to
James Baldwin, refuting “love” as a political emotion (extension of this in recent debunkings of dwyl (do what you love)).
Rather, the conjunction of preference (via Arendt’s explicit
and implicit formulations of preference as something that has the capacity to
intervene in the realm of the necessary) and race allows us to turn the way
that the “white problem” rewrites as “choice” things that are always mediated
by necessity, always mediated not only by the economic necessity or social, but
by the way that these political, institutional, and structural conditions get
coded or written as bodily necessity. In describing this process, I am
following Denise Ferreria da Silva’s formulation of the way that the racial
already marks a place for the rewriting of the body via cultural difference.
Although it’s difficult with Arendt, and one wants to be very clear about her problematic
assumptions and ideas, I do think that she, like Bartleby, provides not so much
a model in which these issues are resolved as the kind of nexus in which they
can be perceived.
What becomes interesting about this to me is the way that
“choice” remains very much at the center, conceptually and otherwise, of the
problem, contemporarily phrased, of the “post-racial” or of “racism with race”
and also in the critical elaborations of this paradigm. I’m thinking, as I loop
back around to where I began, of the way that this emerged in Miranda Joseph’s
lecture. Although gesturing to some of the ways that the financial crises
of 2008 and 2009 disproportionately affected people of color and also gesturing
critically to the discourse of fiscal “responsibility” that drives the terms of
debt under capitalism, Joseph’s terms for understanding the problem of debt
remain the problem of an “entrepreneurial” subject, a subject, who, as Arendt
figures the black parent in “Reflections,” is “involved in an affair of social
climbing” (194). Arendt’s whole point—that “free choice” be upheld—is
discredited by the fact that segregation is not the same as forcing parents “to
send their children to an integrated school against their will” (212). But her
point remains important, abstractly, because it is this same version of “free
choice” that remains powerfully imbedded in liberal desire.
Joseph highlighted this dynamic at the end of her talk when
she identified the way that the desire for quality education and safety fuels
middle-class decisions about home-ownership, namely by buying one’s distance
from racialized poverty. What I thought was interesting about this
conceptualization was that Joseph returned to Berlant’s problem of attachment
as a way of talking about this very complex dynamic, in which the desires of
white parents about the choice of associations can be seen not to produce race
(as Joseph described) but to deploy produce a subject for whom raciality is
something substantive, something essential.
My question, which has to do with how this complex dynamic
could be understood, was recognized as a question about what constitutes this
desire for distance from racialized poverty, and Joseph described (in terms
that would also befit the parvenu) how African Americans that were showcased on
Oprah’s “Debt Diet” were shown to also have the same desire, that is, the
desire to distance themselves from their race, from racialized poverty. What is
remarkable about this response is that the terms of “free choice” remain
embedded even as the ideology of personal responsibility is brought into
question. And it’s interesting that free choice emerges here, where race is
identified by recourse to a projective structure (here, the Berlantian
attachment to an object that inhibits one’s aims, that is produced as “other”
and thus as “bad” or “cruel”) that seems capacious enough to include the
“problem” of race as one of its possible “objects.” In this sense, Joseph’s
slogan, to “seize the means of temporal production,” is even more explicit in
its erasure of the inhering relationship between temporal production (the
production of the entrepreneurial subject, for whom “choice” is a real
possibility) and the production of others in space as racialized subjects.
picture: Francisca Sutil, Mute 14 (2009/10)
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