Queer optimism is good---imagining radical queer futures is necessary for providing alternatives from neoliberal capitalism.

In constructing their arguments, Dolan and Muñoz both turn to philosopher Ernst Bloch's account of the 'anticipatory illumination' of art to theorise 'never finished gestures towards a potentially better future' (Dolan 2005: 8) that might help us to 'combat the force of political pessimism' (Muñoz 2009: 4). Variously translated as 'ontological anticipation' and 'pre-appearance', this concept expresses Bloch's belief 'that it is somehow possible to experience a kind of foreglow of future possibilities' (Geoghegan 2008: 37) in a manner which is both objective and open. Bloch's account of hope, in other words, evades the traps of both wishful thinking and leaden pragmatism to figure a realism which is not constrained by what has come before. In elaborating this idea, Muñoz draws on Agamben's extended exploration of potentiality as something which is 'present but not actually existing in the present tense' having instead the quality of ‘a trace or potential that exists or lingers after a performance' (Muñoz 2009: 99). For Agamben, potentiality 'conserves' itself even after an event is actualised: it is not 'used up' by any given iteration but extends beyond itself, much as thinking does not exhaust thought (see Cooke 2005: 184). Accordingly, reading for potentiality involves 'scouting for a "not here" or "not now" in the performance that suggests a futurity' (Muñoz 2009: 99) – that is, a willingness to look beyond what is most immediately present in favour of that which signals what might be in the future. A difficulty with this account is how Muñoz's emphasis on 'not here' and 'not now' and Dolan's insistence on transience as a condition of performative efficacy may serve to constrain recognition of what might be accomplished – and sustained – in the present, while effacing how potentiality's persistent trace may itself constitute the ongoing existence of different worlds beyond hegemonic order. Such an account lends itself to a worldview in which ruling conditions are given to be so overwhelmingly dominant as to make alternatives in the here and now an impossibility. Whatever we might glimpse as 'extra to the everyday transaction of heteronormative capitalism' (Muñoz 2009: 22) cannot be grasped in the everyday without falling into the trap of complacency, reinforcing hegemonic terms for being or investing in neoliberalism's promise of a 'better future' as grounds for privation and sacrifice in the present. This tendency is more sharply articulated in Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) where the susceptibility of queerness to normalisation through the logic of reproductive futurity becomes an inevitability and in which, as Michael Snediker observes, the ubiquity of 'always' and ‘every' in Edelman's argument would seem to make the world 'so irrevocably one thing that response to the world would amount to one thing' (Snediker 2009: 24). Are futurity and the possibilities of the here and now unthinkable except on these narrow terms? Might the potentiality of performance - and the 'certain surplus' that is for Muñoz peculiar to queer performance - indicate something other than or, crucially, as well as a vanishing over the horizon? In response, my readings of performance in this final chapter are informed by what Lloyd Pratt identifies in his analysis of novelist Eudora Welty as a 'condition of radical present-tenseness that subordinates to the future and the past, and which favors a committed attention to what is most clearly now' (2011: 200). Grounded in a close reading of the instant as it unfolds, such a stance is ‘neither unduly grim and retrospective nor jolly and hopeful without cause' but instead involves ‘a form of immanent particularity, which opens onto nothing other than the truth of the present' (Pratt 2011: 200). Beginning with Deborah Pearson's The Future Show, Ivana Müller's 60 Minutes of Opportunism and Duncan Macmillan's Every Brilliant Thing – each of which address the uncertain relationship between past, present and future - I consider how performance might elaborate an understanding of optimism's potentiality as a state of being and not-being, and doing and not-doing. While each work narrates an attachment to the possibility of a future, they also describe how the labour of making oneself present to and for others through performance involves a paradoxical vanishing act wherein optimism registers as an equivocal if not deeply ambivalent attachment to futurity. Structured by attempts to imagine the future in its relation to a persistent present, each of these works elaborates how the figure of the optimist might embody a critique of the conditions in which we find ourselves without reserving the possibility of alternatives to another where and another when. Such a critique does not privilege hope over hopelessness but draws attention to how the potential of what Robyn Wiegman describes as 'small worlds of sustenance that cultivate a different present and future' (2014: 11) involves the attempt to be present in the present, for the present. In the second part of the chapter I explore three further performances - FK Alexander's (I Could Go On Singing) Over The Rainbow, Rosana Cade's Walking:Holding and Nando Messias' The Sissy's Progress - as works which elaborate how the optimist's insistence on the here and now does not model heroic resilience but instead invokes vulnerability as the means by which an ethics of interpersonal relations might be forged apart from neoliberalism's preference for responsible future-oriented and ultimately paranoid prediction. Such an ethics centred on our constitutive exposure to one another – is not straightforwardly affirmative, and invites recognition of the contingent qualities of any claim on the future as a remedy to deleterious uncertainty, or social injustice. Characterised by an attentiveness to the possibilities and consequences of life lived beyond its most normative parameters, it articulates a politics which understands that the world as we know it can be different because other worlds already exist.