Daniel Tutt

4 notes on class, fate and cruel optimism

I.

I turn on the TV and see a wealthy YouTuber interviewing a Millennial in her early 30s without kids on how to choose the best tiny home to buy with a $35,000 maximum budget. The host of the show is also the real estate agent and he is smirking the entire time. Both of them are too happy. They both have some enigmatic enjoyment at the encounter. We aren’t told whether this will be a cash purchase or a loan. What matters to the viewer is the immediate of the optimism of both parties.

Optimism becomes cruel under conditions of what Lacan called a pressurized surplus enjoying. This is a form of enjoyment that is anxious and hot, an enjoyment looking desperately, and uneasily, for relief. Under conditions of cruel optimism the subject is only given another surplus to resolve its state of agitated enjoyment. The only relief for this excessive enjoyment is…more enjoyment.

It is sometimes a mystery to me why Lacan says the discourse of the capitalist does not require castration, but in the case of cruel optimism it becomes apparent: the superego demand to enjoy only offers…more enjoyment. Maybe the queer theorists are right: we must turn to those affects that are not permissible under such conditions of cruel optimism.

A subject who enjoys but is not provided a solution for remediating their unease, the subject takes it upon themselves to disrupt the situation. But acephalous protest is not a praxis.

To leave a subject with nothing but unresolvable enjoyment and a cruel optimism is to leave the subject with an equally agitated sense of their own singularity, or uniqueness. Clement Rosset says in The Real and its Double that subjective uniqueness has a fragility because “the uniqueness of the thing which constitutes its essence never has any participation in being.” What then is being found in, to the extent it is found at all? It is found in negativity, in the nothing.

Rousseau: “I never meditate, I never dream better than when I forget myself.”

Lacan: “The individual is most him or herself in the wondrous emptiness of being, rather than the personal Ego, the Other or the totality.”

Harold Bloom: “The American is most him or herself when they are completely alone.”

Capitalist social life only accelerates a sense of agitated negativity, and we are left to make it work, to discover or to invent another source of negativity, alone.

II.

We see this in Nomadland, a movie about the new lumpenproletariat. Not to get too generational here because I find generations largely to have no class substance as a form of analysis, but the predominant Boomer understanding of Nomadland is that this is a film about “gritty self-realization,” or even “the joy of the open road.” The great American bards of self-discovery, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac and Horatio Alger would find this hard to swallow. Nomadland is a film about fate under conditions of cruel optimism, where no guarantee is available.

Rosset again: “it is the fate of everything that exists to deny, by its very existence, any form of different reality.” The fate of the woman protagonist in Nomadland is cruel optimism: but hey, the Boomer says, “at least she chose to exist problematically.” And there is definitely a dignity in her apparent free choice to not remain in the comfort of her boyfriend’s home. It is the illusion of choice that underpins liberal equality.

Nomadland certainly depicts one thing very accurately: falling into a pauperized retirement often happens as one’s family is totally oblivious and in denial about it happening. I’ve seen this. You may have seen this. The liberal tradition has blinded most of us to it. The function of discourse is to exchange one pressurized and agitated enjoyment with another stand-in product, what Lacan called the master signifier, the S1. But this product of enjoyment isn’t up to the task, the stand-in does not relieve the deeper splitness or disjointedness of the subject.

Why is this condition not seen? Perhaps one reason is that the ideology of liberalist notions of social reality themselves to not depend on a worldview. Roland Barthes is right when he says what distinguishes the bourgeoisie is that they disavow themselves as a class. Once the ruling class disavows their status as a ruling class, we’ve all entered into the downward spiral that has brought us to the proletarianization of the aesthetic.

III.

The “1619 project” is becoming a praxis, a worldview of university centers, nonprofits, and professional groups. Since one of the authors was denied tenure, this project is now seen as if the author is a critic of the US establishment and powerholders. She may have been wrongfully denied tenure — I am sure that she was. Yet the situation now is that the 1619 project is becoming an un-criticizable educational orientation, the fact she was denied indicates something about its subversive, and by extension, therefore necessary, utility. No discussion can be had of the implicit anti-solidarity basis of the report, its outright hostility to class struggle.

In that sense it’s a class device unto itself, a cudgel to further a certain agitated sensibility within the liberal managerial class that sees itself as radical. That the author has delivered keynote addresses to Shell Oil and major corporations for years now is not seen as a contradiction nor is it seen as a problem endemic to the very model of the report and its desired ends. What interests of power is it serving? We are beyond that now; there are only two sides, so pick one.

Socialists need to offer a better alternative to this orientation towards racial justice, admittedly. But it is very hard to do so without riling up the sentiments in a way which leads to nothing but misunderstanding. Socialists need to make the case clear why this praxis is harmful and does not produce the effects it purports to effect, that there is a better way to talk about racial justice and history. Perhaps I say this with too much reason, but it is worth saying nonetheless.

IV.

I’ve been obsessed with the idea that the aesthetic is proletarianized. Logan Paul appears on my timeline…is this Post Malone? No, he doesn’t have tats everywhere but there is the same sense that maybe this guy is from a trailer park. I Google him and notice the most Googled data on him, the most important thing about Logan Paul is how much money he makes per year.

If Logan Paul is from a trailer park, would it matter? When I hear that this is racial capitalism, I believe it’s true. We are in a sort of racialized capitalism but let’s take the logic further: today we have the racialization of class. Logan Paul and Post Malone are the racialization of whiteness; they look rough around the edges but don’t let that fool you, they are rough around the edges. This roughness signifies nothing.

Post Malone and Logan Paul efface the class struggle. As proletarians of the aesthetic everyone is tokenized with no class relation. But we insist that class solidarity is medicine, it is the outside.

A body riddled with tattoos is an aesthetic example of the very nonsense of the body in contemporary capitalism. It’s an aesthetic example of the very nonsense of our situation and its loneliness. What one affirms with the overdone tattoos is the one, the singular uniqueness, all alone.

There was a time in my life when I was younger and class seemed to speak in the popular culture but I was not attuned enough to hear it. Listen to early Kurt Cobain interviews in the supposed early part of the End of History, he spoke of himself as working class. Perhaps what the racialization of capitalism means is that everyone is a token, a stand-in that does not satisfy the absent class relation.