a.

I am skeptical that the thing holding back political action nowadays is “hopelessness.” It’s true that people can lack a sense of the possibility of improvement to such a degree that it limits their ability to act because “what’s the point.” people can also, as OP is pointing to, use hope as a means of delaying their willingness to think creatively, to take risks that might pay off, to cultivate the actual skills and capabilities that are far more directly useful to achieving desired outcomes than possessing hope. if I lack the skill, tools, or capacity to achieve a goal, hoping that the goal will still be achieved probably won’t change the outcome (although random chance is still a possibility but I wouldn’t want to rely on it). and if I throw up my hands and say “well there’s no hope” because I lack those things, that is, counterintuitively, still an assertion of hope’s supposed value as an affect and also a way of denying my own ability to act.

"Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures." David Graeber

"I want to explore how optimism and hope participate in this turning. I do not want to argue that optimism and hope are always good things or necessary tools for revolutionaries. To be turned is not always about being turned into action but can be about how one is turned by the actions of others.

To become revolutionary would seem to require a belief in the possibility of revolution. To become revolutionary would also seem to require a belief that a revolution is necessary. In other words, you would agree that what exists is something against which we should revolt. The revolutionary might have pessimism about the present but optimism about the future. This does not mean that revolutionary action depends upon subjects acquiring the right kind of orientations toward the present or the future.

I want to turn to the question of hope as a way of reconsidering the temporality of feeling, how feelings are directed toward objects in the present; how they keep the past alive; and how they involve forms of expectancy or anticipation of what follows (the future is always “the what” that follows, never arriving, always or only tomorrow, even when we have past futures behind us).

(...)