Spectres of Pessimism by Mark Schmitt

Author:Mark Schmitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031253515
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Pessimist-Utopian Care?

As the discussion of afropessimism and Black utopia has shown, the tension between utopianism and pessimism continues to be a central factor of contemporary modes of prefiguration. Their relationship, however, is not the one of straightforward antagonism that the polemic pessimist criticism of utopian thought by thinkers like E. M. Cioran and John Gray might suggest. Rather, as the relationship of afropessimism and Black utopia suggests, pessimism is in a continuous dialogue with utopianism that amounts to a more complex dialectic relationship. If we accept Joshua Foa Dienstag’s assessment, echoed by Frank B. Wilderson’s afropessimism, that pessimism’s intervention in modern political thought suggests that we should expect nothing, then this is not an inevitable condemnation of passivity. Rather, pessimism’s rejection of progressivist narratives and obligatory/cruel optimism can open a new horizon of expectation. Not unlike Storey’s radical utopianism, such a kind of pessimism rejects hegemonic framings of what progress can mean. So how can one care for the future from a position of pessimism? The (afro)pessimist-utopian reading of Steve McQueen’s film “Education” shows that reclaiming one’s cultural history can begin with a pessimist diagnosis which is necessary to prefigure a different future that radically questions existing institutions.

What if our own attachment to institutions of care have become cruelly optimistic while we are standing in the ruins of the present? When faced with this kind of cruel optimism, an optimism that cruelly tells us to just passively indulge in the false “excitement at the prospect of ‘the change that’s gonna come’”,85 a pessimist mode of critique might be liberating.

As Shona Hunter, argues, false optimism in dysfunctional institutions can be substituted with what she calls “melancholic hope”:Hope is not a matter of optimism as such, but a matter of more agonistic relational practice which is only achievable within the context of difference, disagreement and uncertainty over the nature of reality. […] hope sits in the contested space between a knowable and achievable shared reality and a projection of something else that might be, where that something else cannot be known either in advance or retrospectively, it can only be playfully fantasised about and tested out through practice in the present.86

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