samsnewsletter.doc is a collection of thoughts about feelings and feelings about thoughts. The newsletter is free, but I’d be honored if you shared it with a friend or two. Enjoy!
Being hopeful in today’s moment can almost feel awkward. At times, it can even feel like a betrayal of all the evidence in front of us. I remember getting so frustrated during the height of the pandemic in the US with anyone who would try and offer thin platitudes about the “silver lining” of the pandemic, as if having the opportunity to stay inside was worth thousands of people dying every day. This isn’t what they meant, of course, but the way the death count clashed with these notions of a positive perspective felt like they were trying to say that the grass is greener on the other side of a pile of bodies.
This weekend, Portland, Oregon experienced its highest recorded temperatures ever. This is the same place that was ravaged by excessive wildfires last year. This picture taken in Oregon last year during the wildfires captures well the dreaded anticipation of what seems to be an inevitable climate fallout within my lifetime.
In a talk I listened to last year, a literary theorist described the genre of cultural conversation as a perpetual “20XX is the worst year ever.” Social media is filled with dread wrapped in comedic phrases like “i hate it here,” “launch me into the moon,” and “i’m going to k-word myself.” With our eyes toward the future, it feels so often like the only appropriate response is to anticipate with dread and fear.
In last week’s post, I talked about the weight of relentless skepticism that many of us feel. I made a proposal for a poetics of belief as a balm for our hardened dispositions toward the world. I think the question of how we anticipate the future falls closely along the lines of how brutal skepticism can eat away at our humanity. Today, I want to make an argument for the subversive potentiality of hope.
I have a hard time with hope. I grew up quite religious, and my church’s teaching on hope was essentially that it was 1) always a good thing and 2) some type of magic force to make the pain of the moment go away. But I’m not so sure it’s productive to think of hope within a “good/bad” binary. Hope is not always good. Acting out of naive hope can be counterproductive. Just because I hope something is going to happen doesn’t mean it will, especially if that thing is out of my control. Instead of thinking of hope as good or bad, I think it’s good to put it in relation with fear. Both fear and hope are feelings of anticipation. They both use a similar method: through a memory of the past combined with an imagination of the future, they anticipate what’s to come. Fear and hope are what affect theorists call “affective structures” of anticipation. When you anticipate, you can either feel positive and hopeful or negative and fearful. These affective structures are not inherently good or bad, but are rather necessary at different times.
These affective structures, hope and fear, are not controllable in and of themselves. Instead, they arise based on a complex network of circumstances. For instance, if you think about the next time you’re going to hang out with your best friend, you’ll probably have some sort of positive anticipation of how it will go. This is because you have positive memories with this person. Of course, this might be complicated by what activity you’re doing with your friend. Maybe you have to go to a funeral, in which case your feelings of anticipation might change. The point is, there are a lot of different factors in why you might be hopeful or fearful about something in the future. One thing that is present in all of these anticipations is your imagination. The anticipation of the future is putting to use your imagination.
I love the way queer theorist José Estaban Muñoz talks about imagination and the future in his book Cruising Utopia. Muñoz says, “Queerness yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” Muñoz’s book enters a fraught conversation in queer theory about whether it’s helpful to dream of a better future or not. This conversation has also found itself in the academic circles of Afrofuturism and Afro-Pessimism. There are incredibly rich theories on both sides of these arguments, and I in no way can fully address them in this post. However, I think Muñoz’s notion of a queer utopia is profound in thinking through why hope has a place in conversations about the present. It is a truly beautiful idea that even if we don’t ever see the utopia we imagine, the simple work of imagining it at all can give us warmth. The reason hope has a place in the present is not because we aren’t doomed, but because doing the work of using our imagination can produce goodness in and of itself.
In the midst of last year’s uprisings after the death of George Floyd, I began to do more research on abolitionist politics. I read about the abolitionists during slavery and how the influence of abolition has continued to the current conversations on prisons and the police. I truly believe the world would be better without the police and without prisons as we know them. A world without the police is a type of utopia— an imagination of a different future. But as we’ve seen in the American political sphere, this kind of language has been taken up to stoke fears of how defunding the police will make communities less safe. Conversations about abolition with those who still believe in the centrality of the police and prisons are difficult because none of us have lived in a society without the police. This means we’re using our imaginations to dream of a different world without something (the police) that is incredibly ingrained in our society. But one of the beautiful things about abolition is how it advocates for the use of imagination to hope for a better world. This hope is a disposition toward addressing the serious issues facing us today. It is not blind or naive, but critically engaged with the present. This is the work of positively anticipating the future.
Of course, there have been so many words wasted on “hope” that are not critically engaged with the present. Muñoz talks about this kind of language as being based in an “abstract utopia” which is “untethered from any historical consciousness.” Instead, he advocates for a “concrete utopia” which is “relational to historically situated struggles.” Ultimately, these concrete utopias are the realm of “educated hope.” I think the unhelpful and dangerous hope we sometimes cling to is uneducated hope. These hopes are abstract and don’t do a thorough job of looking back on the past as a way of guiding the imagination of the future. This is incredibly important because building a different world is no easy task that you can just dream up. Systemic change is not just another Shark Tank pitch. Rather, it must be rooted in a real memory of the past which requires study and attention to where we’ve come from.
One person who has clearly done the work of generating educated hope is Angela Davis. If you don’t know her, Davis was a leader in the Civil Rights movement and continues to be a highly respected voice in the movements for liberation all around the world. She has advocated for the abolition of prisons and, more recently, police forces. Davis is certainly educated through the books she’s read, but she also brings the experience of a formerly-incarcerated person to her work in prison abolition. Davis spent over a year in jail for a felony she was later acquitted of. Her imagination of a better future is deeply engaged with the traumatic memories of her past. It is clear that her advocacy for ending the prison system is not done in spite of her time in prison, but is rather deeply engaged with that experience.
On Juneteenth, I was able to listen to Davis give a talk at the University of Chicago. At one point, the moderator asked her to give an status report of the struggle for Black liberation in America. I was surprised by Davis’ answer. To be honest, I expected a level of pessimism. After the largest uprisings in history last summer, our news feeds are still filled with videos of the police pointlessly killing innocent Black lives, and it can certainly feel like no real policy change is taking place in police forces around the country. However, Davis said that she was filled with hope. She said we had a longer way to go forward than where we had come from, but that she is filled with hope because of the movement of the past year and a half. As she elaborated on how this movement felt even stronger than what she experienced in the 70s and 80s, I realized that Davis’ “educated hope” spanned many more years than mine.
Maybe my imagination needs some time to develop. Maybe Davis and older generations of organizers have had more experience with the present in a way that allows them to imagine the future in a more robust way. Hope, an educated and engaged hope, has carried Davis through many years of struggle. She continues to use her imagination to dream of a better world for all of us. Like Muñoz says, maybe that world will never be realized. But even in the dreaming and the advocating for a better world, we can feel the warmth of a horizon imbued with potentiality.
The Weekly Syllabus
Yet another suggestion list:
This poem by Dianne Seuss from her Frank: Sonnets collection:
This article about Lauren Berlant. Berlant was a literary theorist who passed away Monday morning. She has been one of the most influential scholars for me and so many others. In many ways, the last two newsletters have been deeply inspired by her work on how capitalism makes us feel.
This quote on writing from Berlant.
Pose on Netflix. This show is stunning and I know I’m late to it but it is an incredible look into 80s Ball Culture in New York. It’s heartbreaking and inspiring.
Take a walk to nowhere. I’ve been trying to do this more often now that we’re settled in our Chicago neighborhood. Every time I do it I feel like a weight has been lifted off my chest. It could be 10 minutes or an hour, but getting outside and moving around is truly a gift.
See you next week!
-Sam
What a beautiful flow chart for pessimism and optimism and everything in between you’ve given to us. I love this!