CRUEL OPTIMISM

While Berlant puts a new twist on the Marxist theory of false consciousness (which, curiously, she never mentions), her choice to examine this phenomenon through bourgeois forms such as art-house cinema, obscure fiction, poetry, and aca- demic theory distances the author from her supposed subjects. In the post-Fordist world of scarcity and austerity, workers have little time for imagining a revolution, Berlant argues, and given the pressure to stave off total defeat, they are left with "the desire for a less-bad life" (179-80). Since Berlant appears to have learned about workers only through middle-class depictions of them, she presents an unrelenting portrayal of misery exacerbated by their inability to break free of the "ruthless fantasy" of capitalist abundance (167).