Stupid Pleasures

We all know that happiness is a form of stupidity. Once The Declaration of Independence promises the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right, it’s difficult not to think of happiness as a form of indoctrination. Shiny happy people are, first and foremost, unthinking rubes who watch reality TV, shop at outlets, vacation at Disneyworld (or, worse, Las Vegas), and generally enjoy vapid forms of cultural entertainment. Happily engaging in these activities simply proves the lack of capacity for critical reflection. Perhaps this is why academics who have dedicated their lives to criticism have such a difficult time presenting themselves as generally optimistic. Consider how often academics in the humanities convey genuinely good news as a complaint. News about receiving tenure (which rewards scholarly accomplishment with a job for life) is followed by something like, “Now I’m stuck here forever.” News about receiving a major fellowship (finally the time to do the work one really wants to do) is followed by, “Now I’m obliged to finish this book.” It’s as if we have to cast good news within a broader, pessimistic view of the world lest we appear to be happy and, therefore, stupid. Once optimism is unmasked as naïveté, it seems to produce a backlash in which, among the smart set at least, in order to prove oneself as sophisticated and subversive, one has to be generally unhappy and perhaps a little depressed.
 
It’s this dynamic that Michael Snediker seeks to displace for queer studies. How, Snediker asks, can queer theory conceive of optimism as a useful and interesting site for critical investigation? How can one develop a queer understanding of optimism that doesn’t simply reinforce its opposite, pessimism? One way into these questions might be to explore the centrality of camp in queer culture, but Snediker doesn’t go that route. More ambitiously, his study uses optimism as a conceptual wedge to overturn queer theory as we currently know it. Snediker begins Queer Optimism with the astute observation that optimism is a centrally unthought term among the writing of the most well-known queer theorists of the past twenty or so years. Since its invention in the late 1980s and early 1990s, queer theory (and here, Snediker means theoretical work by Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Eve Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman) has inadvertently produced a situation in which queer sexuality is equated with melancholia, self-shattering, shame, or the death drive-all negative, destructive, and, for Snediker, essential pessimistic concepts that foreclose analytic engagement with positive affect. Engaging with optimism reverses that situation by putting the question of queer identity back on the table. The generative movement in early queer studies was the critique of identity as the site of psychological and political normalization. Important as that critique was in the early 1990s for reimagining political agency, it also tended to idealize the destabilization of identity and the affirmation of incoherency in oneself. As Snediker puts it,
 

Dissatisfaction with a given regime of coherence [e.g. heteronormativity] might sponsor a critical commitment to dismantling coherence tout court. Such a dissatisfaction, however, might likewise productively sponsor a reconfiguration of coherence-the cultivation of a vocabulary of coherence that more precisely does justice to the ways in which coherence isn’t expansively, unilaterally destructive, reductive, or ideological.
 

(25-6)

Snediker uses queer optimism in order to mobilize the second possibility against the first. At his most ambitious, Snediker asks how a critical investigation of optimism might lead to a new understanding of some fundamental categories: queer desire, queer ontology, and queer representation.

 
So what exactly is queer optimism? This isn’t an easy question to answer, and not just because queering concepts tends to make them difficult to pin down. In his discussions of what queer optimism might be, Snediker is much clearer about what it’s not rather than about what it is. Snediker is very careful not to equate queer optimism with the kind of hopefulness that Lee Edelman aggressively dismantles in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman argues that a liberal politics based on hope for the future carries with it an investment in the fantasy of the innocent child. Because of this, liberalism sets in motion an ideological circuit that idealizes reproductive heterosexuality while excluding non-reproductive, queer subjectivities. In response, Edelman argues quite forcefully that queer politics must embrace a kind of negativity that refuses this investment in the future and, in so doing, breaks with this ideological circuit. For Snediker, queer optimism isn’t hopeful because it’s not futural. It’s not at all attached to the kind of heteronormative temporality that Edelman describes. (And, I should add in passing, Snediker gives an excellent critical account of the aggressive edge of Edelman’s argument, which he reads as symptomatic of a demand issuing from the super-ego.)
 
To explain what a non-hopeful optimism looks like, Snediker initially turns to Leibniz-or, better, to Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz’s claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds. It’s hard to get more optimistic than that. But, as Deleuze explains it, Leibniz’s claim needs to be understood against the backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War and the effect of war on political philosophy. The baroque world is a world in crisis, a world that has to be rebuilt “amidst the ruins of the Platonic Good.” For Deleuze, and for Snediker following him, Leibniz offers a model of optimism that suspends hope for a better world because it affirms the current world as it is. “If this world exists, it is not because it is the best, but because it is rather the inverse; it is the best because it is, because it is the one that is” (Fold 68). Optimism is something like the optimal affirmation of the goodness of the world in its present state, even if that present state doesn’t actually look all that great.
 
Leibniz’s version of optimism hinges on faith, belief in the goodness of God. Understandably uncomfortable with reproducing a theological version of optimism, Snediker queers it by recasting Leibniz’s version of optimism through object-relations psychoanalysis. Snediker turns to Winnicott’s essay, “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications.” Reworking Freud’s discussion of identity-formation and the death drive, Winnicott acknowledges that once the subject uses an object for purposes of mastery, the subject destroys the integrity of that object. At the same time, Winnicott argues, this destruction is not usually total. In practice the object most often survives its own destruction, not only demonstrating the limitations of omnipotency assumed by the masterful subject but also suggesting a capacity for endurance in the object itself-in spite of the ways in which the subject may have used, harmed, or damaged it. In this way, the object can become a model for optimism. The point is not that the subject affirms the object, that the subject is optimistic about the object’s survival. Rather, it’s the reverse. The endurance of the object affirms a capacity for endurance about the subject that the subject may not see or be able to anticipate. It’s this external aspect of optimism that most interests Snediker. That is, for Snediker, optimism is much less about a subjective state in which one feels happy or hopeful and more about a sense of affirmation that comes from the outside and exists alongside a sense of pain, damage, or loneliness. For Leibniz, optimism is a form of subjective affirmation based on faith. Winnicott allows Snediker to develop a de-subjectivized version of queer optimism that doesn’t idealize or glorify a process of de-subjectification but suggests instead that optimism comes from the shards of the world in crisis, shards that must be affirmed and, in the process, transformed.
 
This provocative combination of Winnicott with Deleuze is at the heart of what I think is most interesting about Snediker’s project, which I would describe as an attempt to rethink optimism and love through two central operations: the isolation of singularity against attempts to generalize it in models of exemplarity, and the serialization of that singularity in lyric poetry. Snediker develops his claims most powerfully through literary analysis of four poets: Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop. Although Queer Optimism begins with an opening chapter that critiques Butler, Bersani, Edelman, and Sedgwick for assuming pessimistic views of queer sexuality that effectively foreclose the positive and affirmative nature of affect, the book’s most compelling claims get developed through analysis of poetry. Each of the chapters in Queer Optimism is organized around a theoretical model from queer theory that Snediker displaces through sophisticated and focused close readings. This mode of argumentation might be a turn-off to some readers who, like myself, are deeply interested in queer theory but are neither Americanists nor modernists. But Snediker handles it quite masterfully. His readings are sharp, and rarely does he lose focus on the central theoretical problems that his chapters announce. Throughout, he develops a new set of terms for thinking about queer sexuality in its intersections with poetics and literary form.
 
One of Snediker’s most salient points (a point that deserves more attention than he gives it) is that queer isn’t best understood as deviation from social norms but rather as a kind of singularity that emerges within the Winnicottian space of object relations. In this account, queer is no longer opposed to norms but becomes a moment of optimistic affirmation through which new sets of norms can be created. Snediker develops his claims for singularity through chapters on Crane and Dickinson. Chapter One of Queer Optimism focuses on the network of smiles in Crane’s poetry, reading the figure of the smile not as a sign of ironic suffering but as a singular affirmation of joy produced through its repetition. Snediker develops this thesis against the backdrop of Bersani’s writings on self-shattering, showing how the smile survives as a poetic artifact that endures beyond Crane’s suicide. Like the object in object relations that survives beyond the subject’s attempt to destroy it, Crane’s smiles are involved in a poetics that sustains “relationality” beyond all forms of anti-relational thinking (77). Chapter Two reads the figure of the smile in Dickinson in order to show how her repeated emphasis on pain highlights the surprising singularity of joy-surprising for Dickinson and, perhaps, for her readers as well. Instead of reading Dickinson’s emphasis on pain as a queer performance of masochism, Snediker reads the repetition of pain as Dickinson’s attempt to isolate and understand the feeling of joy as a positive affect that is, for Dickinson herself, only minimally understandable.
 
The other salient point that Snediker insists on is that this understanding of queer is best thought through a poetic-and not a theatrical-notion of the person. In some ways, this is Queer Optimism‘s most powerful insight, one that should stand as a serious challenge to queer studies. While a theatrical notion of the person has allowed critics to show the constructedness and naturalization of norms, it also tends to assume a vision of politics and culture that is fundamentally anti-aesthetic. The revelation that norms are artificial is revelatory only to the extent that one assumes a worldview in which art and nature are firmly separated. But, as Snediker argues, a poetic notion of the person assumes that the person is first and foremost a literary artifact (a point that could be significantly elaborated through a reading of Barbara Johnson’s account in Persons and Things of personification in lyric and law). In Chapters Three and Four, Snediker focuses on Jack Spicer and Elizabeth Bishop, respectively. Especially for modern poets working against T.S. Eliot’s poetics of impersonality, the literary nature of the person becomes the basis for exploring the persistent singularity at the heart of the person through the serial nature of lyric poetry. Although Spicer explicitly espouses Eliot’s poetics of impersonality, Snediker shows that his serial poem Billy the Kid attaches singularity and repetition to the problem of the poetic person. For Bishop, this repetition is related to love. Snediker reads submerged reference to Crane in her poetry as an attempt to develop a logic of love based on “a particular form of incomplete or imperfect repetition” (191). In a sense, both Spicer and Bishop explore the inner workings of the Winnicottian space of object relations and its implications for queer identity and love through a Deleuzian sense of repetition and seriality.
 
Queer Optimism is a book that rewards careful reading. It will no doubt be of interest to specialists in modern American poetry. But its redefinition of queer and its insistence that we rethink identity through a poetic understanding of the person make the book a major contribution to queer studies as well.