Is the concept or slogan of “precarity” strong enough (or weak enough) to organize contingent or flexible workers into a global political subject? “That remains to be seen,” says Berlant. This is the case even as Berlant, crucially, remains skeptical about whether the rise of an economic and political fragility that increasingly cuts across social and geographical boundaries in itself constitutes “proof” of the emergence of a new “globalized or mass-homogenous class” (196). It is mainly because of the book’s noticeably intensified focus on contexts in which normality is aspirational rather than hegemonic and also because of its explicit engagement with precarity - a slogan whose universalizing ethos Cruel Optimism ends up sharing. This is in part because of its refraction through the lens of genres quite different from those featured in Berlant’s national sentimentality trilogy. Thus, while this is hardly Berlant’s first examination of the affective and political complexity of people’s attachments to convention (as mediated by and reflected in popular culture), in Cruel Optimism the problem assumes a new and especially urgent inflection. My point in tracing this aspect of Cruel Optimism back to the moment in “Sex in Public” is to hold it up as an example of how queer theory, still regarded by many as a minoritizing-only discourse whose “proper object” must be limited to sex and issues related to sexual object choice, can directly contribute to debates about the universalizing concept of “precarity” and whether it can actually fulfill its mission to “furnish a common cause for subjects arrayed across different industries, jurisdictions and digital divides” (as Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter put it). For this is a book explicitly concerned with what happens when normative fantasy itself - the promise of the good life tethered not only to the family but also to the state and to the liberal public sphere - begins slowly but quite visibly to erode in tandem with the destruction of the social institutions that once seemed to make it achievable, while nonetheless remaining an object from which people across social divisions cannot detach easily or without pain. Yet, intensified by a further decade and a half of neoliberal assaults on “modernity’s secure institutions of intimacy and reciprocity” (222), the problem sketched out in “Sex and Public” - the political ambiguity of people’s attachment to normative fantasy, or the price they “must pay for social membership and a relation to the future” - returns to become the central problem of Cruel Optimism. Cruel Optimism is an analysis of the contemporary informed by queer theory but whose relation to its discourse is also more aslant: while all seven chapters address the rise of an economic and political precarity that cuts across categories of social difference, only one addresses sexual practices or sexual counterpublics. “Sex in Public” is a queer theory classic: fourteen years old and still contemporary. People feel the price they must pay for social membership and a relation to the future is identification with the heterosexual life narrative that they are individually responsible for the rages, instabilities, ambivalences, and failures they experience in their intimate lives, while the fractures of the contemporary United States shame and sabotage them everywhere” (557). Yet as they go on firmly to argue, “This desire cannot be satisfied in the current conditions of privacy. An investment in norms of intimacy/reciprocity or in the idea of the normal, Berlant and Warner acknowledge, can be “an expression of a utopian desire for unconflicted personhood” or for social belonging, not just a succumbing to an oppressive ideology. Nor is it to decide that sentimental identifications with family and children are waste or garbage, or make people into waste or garbage” (557). Nor is to advocate the ‘existence without limit’ sees as produced by bad Foucauldians. Berlant and Warner respond, “We think our friend Biddy might be referring to us, although in this segment she cites no one in particular.” They proceed to clarify their stance in resisting the alignment of sex with privacy: “To be against the processes of normalization is not be afraid of ordinariness.
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