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Introduction: Hope
Hope central to marginal politics
Unfulfilled hope as the object of nostalgia
Metahoping
o Goal directed vs open ended
Hope may not be good, but it does accomplish something
Hope and hopelessness
Duggan, arguing that hope is based in the hope of what I should
what, encouraging submissiveness

Starved

Optimism tied to embracing domination and calling it freedom

Cynicism as a response to the emotional component of work
Nonabstract hope
Berlant
Attachment to normativity and goodness
Delamination of perceptions of the self, peeling away
Now when I write about the conditions of attachment to the normal,
its about the attrition of the subject, economies of exhaustion,
desires for homeostasis, and the variety of ways that the normal
seems like a resting place from the contradictions and
impossibilities that threaten the continuity of the scene of the labor
of reproducing life. (p. 436)

Slow death Berlant

Liberal subjects are meant to act in life-building ways
Cruel optimism Berlant

Desire = cluster of promises

White noise, drowns out the bad
The role of interruptions
The people who are going places are the ones who want thigns that
white people had in Hyde park

Nearly utopian Berlant

Optimism is based on attachments for living that we enver

consented to
Cruel optimism, a projection of an unworkable fantasy
Optimism must be sustained by control over resources that they do
not have?

Refitting Fantasy - Gunn (2004)

Role of the unconscious in fantasy
Fantasy=optimism?
Like the discovery of causes, fantasies are a kind of diagnosis, but

one that necessarily is a misdiagnosis. As a retroactive naming of

the cause, fantasy is always a misnaming of the Real, a nominalism
of sorts.
o Causes and misdiagnosis, seems to imply a link between
Gunn and what Berlant was suggesting
The fundamental fantasy is the narrative that a subject has
internalized to explain to herself the cause of her desiring, what
drives her: the longing for Prince Charming to arrive, the erotic
pursuit of a personal savior, talking to a dead parent.54
There is more pleasure in striving for the impossible.
The desire to please the other
The miracle of communication as (mid)identification
Fantasy is simultaneously the scene of agency and a shield against
contingency

Agentic orientation gunn and cloud

Magical thinking
magical voluntarism fosters a deliberate misrecognition of material

recalcitrance, an inability to recognize the structural, political,

economic, cultural, and psychical limits of an individuals ability to
act in her own interests. Furthermore, magical voluntarism refuses
to acknowledge that there is a limit to the efficacy of symbolic
action, beyond which persuasion and thought alone fail to shift
existing social relations.
Response to agentic orientation in run lola run

Oprah Winfrey endorsement of the Secret as the reason for her

success as opposed to civil rights movement of feminism

Maranatha- Gunn
Lacan-we sacrifice enjoyment in order to function meaningfully in
the world
Freud Civilization and its discontents
Each one of us behaves in some one respect like a paranoic,
corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to hum by

the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality.

A special importance attaches to the case in which the attempt to
procure a certainty of happiness and protection against suffering
through a delusional remoulding of reality is made by a
considerable number of people in common (p. 51)
o Freud on religion
We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love,
never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object
or its love (p. 52).
Civilization is responsible for our misery, I think the point is true
ehre, but not in the way that Freud meant it in regards to rules and
the suppression of the ID
Neuroses is the result of deferred desire
The neurotic creates substitutive satisfactions for himself in his
symptoms, and these either cause him suffering in themselves or
become the source of suffering for him by raising difficulties in his
relations with his environment and the society he belongs to (p.
89)
o Im thinking here that there is an argument about the
substitutive pleasures being the result of his
environment, suffering is the price we pay for
maintaining, Conrad would agree
One thing only do I know for certain and this is that mans
judgements of value follow directly his wishes for happinessthat,
accordingly, they are an attempt to suppor this illusions with
arguments (p. 145).

Mcdaniel 2000 fantasm

The value of forgetting, pleasure and the ability toe xperience it
without worry or pain
Conrad work songs (1988)
Symbolic universe, creates an illusion of life and invites
them to participate
Jensen (1987) patterned interpretations of meanings

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Calling it interpretive
What kind of post-structuralism
Which particular brand
Feminist post-structuralism
Smircich
Calas
Trethewey
Post-structural affiliations within CCO
Subject as diffiuse lends itself to a PS view
Resonance even if its not being specifically drawn upon
Actors across networks, diffuse networks
Agency in discourse
Is CCO the
Sedimentation around types of agency
Ventriloquism needs to be looked at more carefully
Organizational discourse as an alternative?

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