"Cruel Optimism," Burnt-out-souls, and the Ruptured Fantasy of Education

This dissertation conducts a philosophical political inquiry into ways in which the “pervasive atmosphere of capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009) infiltrates and impedes public education and thus generates a “ruptured fantasy” of education. My project seeks to critically expose an exhausted depressive sensibility, promoted and perpetuated through the logic of neoliberalism, which gives way to what Byung-Chul Han (2015) terms the “burnt-out-soul.” Late critical theorist Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” offers a conceptual framework through which I critically consider the “double bind” induced through attachments to education. I particularly focus on the pernicious effects that result when education forges optimistic attachments, via the pervasiveness of “critical pedagogy,” to enact social transformation in our increasingly menacing times. “Cruel optimism” in education, I argue, is not only instituted through neoliberal rationality but also through mechanisms of neoliberalism, which exacerbate the pre-existing structural and systemic violence historically normalized in education (violence perpetuated on the basis of racism, classism, ability, gender, and through the colonial project). Tracking the trappings of an optimistic relation to education from an interdisciplinary perspective I wonder what it takes for educators to counter this wearing down of our souls that engenders a sense of hopelessness, and which impedes the “educational” (Di Paolantonio 2016, 2018; Biesta, 2013, 2018, 2020). Drawing on theorists both within and outside of education, and on my more than twenty-five years of experience as a high school educator, I consider the following questions: What happens when it is our “optimism” that provokes the cruelty of despair? What are the depressive repercussions of the “soul at work” (Berardi, 2009)? How do critical educators survive as they attempt to disrupt, fight, and hope for possibilities within public education while existing in a constant state of exhaustion and despair as they “manage” and negotiate education’s compromised conditions? Ultimately, I seek to think through how the “educational” can appear only in brief, fleeting moments given education’s present conditions. Finally, in the last part of the dissertation, I offer my concept of thinking with images. Thinking with images, I argue, provokes pedagogical moments of interruption that give students time and space to attend to what they see, thus affording them the chance to think differently about the violence they live in these wretched times when the “past not yet past” (Sharpe, 2016) impacts them daily.