The aff’s hopeful narratives that posit solutions to create some marginally “better” world are cruelly optimistic – we must “avoid the temptation of a solution.”

Such narrative tropes of endurance – putting up with, working through – construct characters that are ground down but also, and crucially, sympathetic and heroic. They are figured as contemporary parables of morality, where the bleaker the context, the starker the highlighting of the good, the kind, the purity of the human condition. They are, in short, ‘getting by’69 and their suffering is occluded by narratives that augment the kernel of interior humanity that is hiding behind the layers of biopolitical and economic exhaustion. Yet this is too easy: these figures are painted too simply; their innocence and quiet ‘ploughing on’ assuages the guilt of metropolitan privilege through their moral redemption. These narratives work for the scholar and critic through a double confessional: by making visible the violence through which their lives are shaped, and at the same time reassuring us (the reader, the liberal elite), that this violence, of which we are part (and upon which our good life rests), is not for nothing. As a basis for politics, we find the implicit morality of the concept of endurance in the academy problematic. This moral framework elevates dignity, and keeping it together in the face of the unliveable. Figures of endurance are wretched, dogged and unflinching in their living on. They do not cry out, nor do they complain; they find hope and solace in each other, in the small things, in the ashes of their ruined worlds. The politics inscribed here are ultimately conservative rather than revolutionary. As Berlant asks, in the context of the neoliberal United States, in such a situation, ‘is the best one can hope for realistically a stubborn collective refusal to give out, wear out or admit defeat’?.70 While we do not want to dismiss a politics of salvage and making do, we refuse to elevate this through the invocation of the otherwise; the ontological indeterminacy of becoming in ruined worlds should not be framed as redemption, or even consolation.

Spectres of progress

Underneath these redemption narratives lie a set of deeply rooted assumptions about the nature of Western critique and social science enquiry, rooted in the Marxist/Hegelian dialectic, the (related) narration of history as progress, and the narrative structure of Christian redemption. In both Marxist historical materialism, and Christian doctrine, suffering provides the conditions for salvation, either through revolution, or through the resurrection of the Christ. Endurance is thus figured as suffering in Christ, as bearing the pain of existence, and holding strong when faith is tested, bearing the pain with quiet dignity.71 In Marx, we see the necessity of working-class suffering under capitalism to bring about the new epoch. By invoking the Deleuzian otherwise, Braidotti reinserts hope at the very moment when exhaustion becomes unbearable: the dialectic of transformation at rock bottom, when capitalism exhausts itself.

The spectre of Marx haunts these attempts to salvage a residual purity of humanity which is figured as the lever for transformation and hope. The embryonic, perhaps dormant, proletarian drive that can be awoken if we, the scholars, join up all the dots. And, among all the talk of multispecies entanglements, of cohabitation, of care, of community and kinship which characterise the redemptive ember, it is this humanity which the scholastic seekers of salvation seek out. Yet, just as power corrupts, so poverty debases.

There are a number of problems with these moves. The first is an unreasonable positioning of responsibility for the redemptive future of humanity on those with the least power to do anything about anything. Redemptive accounts of endurance look to populations who are most vulnerable to those environmental and social degradations that characterise the violences of the Capitalocene, to show us a way forward. Within these narratives, we detect a millenarianism that, in its concern for an analytics of the present and faith in the indeterminacy of the world to come, actually places the wisdom needed for the world to come in the hands of those whose capacities to do anything other than just survive are frustrated at every turn. In other words, focusing on the deprivations of the present enables particular redemption stories to be told and particular figures to emerge, figures that are harbingers of something that exceeds the now, something uncertain but surely better, either through their anachronistic retention of a better past, or their creative bricolage that will provide a way out of this mess.

The second problem is the caricature of goodness and innocence implicit in these accounts which places the dispossessed on a pedestal. This creates a fable from the struggling world, rather than truly staying with it. As Haraway points out, ‘staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures’.72 These populations, exhausted, unhealthy, impoverished, are scrutinised as having the means and wherewithal to not only inherit the earth but to save it. Take, for instance, Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcazar’s hope that they might find ‘angry, politicised citizens ready to fight back’,73 only to be confronted by weariness.

The final problem with these sanguine accounts of endurance that celebrate collectivity and commonality, dignity and perseverance, is that they arguably buy into those forms of violence, and make them sustainable as lives that are just-about-liveable. In celebrating the spaces of endurance, consolation, care and community in exhausted worlds, an as-yet unspecified otherwise is invoked, there is a tendency to overlook the suffering which provides the conditions of its possibility, and an assumption that the otherwise will be better. Thus, framing unliveable worlds as spaces of endurance, or as providing the embryonic glimmers of an otherwise, places a conceptual sticking plaster over the wound, a sticking plaster that, although we might find it discomforting to admit, props up those very structures of abandonment and exhaustion. Martin Savransky,74 in a discussion of social thought ‘after progress’ asks us to embrace the ‘perhaps’ and draws our attention to the felicitous; the chance encounter that may lead to the event. In embracing these felicitous moments, we might find the solution to the better world within the spaces of decline, ruination, predation and degradation. Perhaps Savransky does not go far enough in abandoning the notion of progress, though. Indeed, his faith in, and affirmation of, the unspecified otherwise may inadvertently rebrand progress for a post-progress world. Our concern is that the unspecified otherwise offers a salve to the social sciences, a way of assuaging Western guilt while maintaining historical entrenchment in progress narratives and the promise of a better world.

Refusing to redeem

To present suffering as suffering, without recourse to an otherwise, is unsettling. It is difficult to write without redemption in the context of narrative structures that call out for some kind of way out, for redemptive promise at their conclusion. Whether in the implicit moralities of suffering that underpin Christian redemption, or a faith in the potential of the dispossessed to offer the glimmers of another way of being, there appears to be an imperative, in Western academic accounts of the exhaustive aspects of late capitalist life, to find redemption in a world where the politics of history and ideology are increasingly unavailable, and where the totalising narratives of capitalist realism and the recognition of forms of cruel optimism leave us adrift. And there is, as we have seen, a lack of acknowledgement of the histories of Western thought – via Christian doctrine, Hegel and Marx, as well as the Otherwise of Deleuzian affirmationism, and of the academic’s discomfort with facing bleak and dispiriting situations head on, that lead to the specifically redemptive forms of storytelling, that have political and ethical implications.

While these articulations of endurance and exhaustion rarely make this explicit, we want to entertain the possibility of reading such accounts of structural violence and suffering without redemption. With these examples in mind, we turn away from redemption stories that celebrate the possibility of the otherwise within these ground-down worlds, from the pressure on those who slowly suffer and endure to somehow, despite everything, offer critical theorists inspiration to carve new worlds. A different politics of exhaustion needs to look beyond the moralising of endurance, and point towards figures of refusal and negation. Refusal offers an opportunity for scholars to reflect on the urge to seek redemption narratives, a propensity firmly situated within the progress-laden history of the social sciences that acts as an imperative to seek ways to make things better, to get past the current condition. What would it mean to refuse an open-ended and unspecified ‘otherwise’ as the optimistic excess that these attritional violences of late capitalism call forth? Or to refuse to open up and amplify spaces within the unliveable that offer heart-warming tales of collective becoming, as disquieting as this may be? This is not to deny the very real ways in which those trapped in circuits of suffering are making liveable lives, but instead to question the academic imperative to celebrate this, and elevate it to form the basis of a new politics and a new world.

Elisabeth Povinelli begins Economies of Abandonment with an allegory from Ursula Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. In this story, the abused, deprived and neglected child in the broom closet is the sacrificial lamb upon which the good life of those from Omelas relies. Yet despite this beginning, Povinelli’s charting of modes of endurance through biopolitical violence, abandonment and abjection offer the possibility of reading her work as a powerful redemption narrative. Exhausted, wretched, unhealthy, her interlocutors nevertheless display dogged determination and above all, hope. Povinelli, too, finds hope in perseverance itself, drawing on Spinoza’s concept of the conatus: in the striving to endure conditions and open up the body to greater capacities. Yet it is in her discussion of Le Guin that she offers a way out: while her interlocutors are caught in circuits of cruel optimism, where hope keeps them captive, the reader is offered a chance to refuse – to walk away.

To be stubborn is to refuse to register affectively the knowledge that the world is built to run you over so that others can build their houses on and out of what remains. Refuse to let them . . . refuse to be moved by those that see you as their currency of hope.75

While we find ourselves agreeing with Povinelli about refusing to convert all kinds of circumstances into the currency of hope, our call for refusal differs. This call for a refusal is as much an ethical gesture as it is a political one. In keeping with recent work appraising the rise of affirmationism (and its limits) gestured to at the beginning of this paper, we ask what it might entail to refuse rather than to redeem. This refusal seeks to stay with the trouble, to follow in the wake, to dwell with – and not look away from – that which is unsettling, violent and hard to witness. It is offered as an antidote to the short-cut: seeking a route out, a way past or a future not-yet. As we have suggested, redemption might be understood to operate in a conservative rather than revolutionary manner, binding us to a hope or belief in something better; instead, we ask: ‘what kind of salvation or freedom is actually on offer from neoliberal redemption narratives’?76 This is not a call for pessimism – indeed our call also differs from the passivity often foregrounded in negative geographies – but rather to avoid the temptation of a solution, or to temper the hope that even if things can be otherwise, this does not straightforwardly mean they will better. We are not suggesting that the future itself is refused – that would be foolhardy! – but rather we call for a refusal to invoke the future as an unspecified but implicitly better otherwise, and to remain resolutely in the present tense. Put simply, what would our accounts of contemporary life look like if we documented violence qua violence? Moreover, what would it mean to resist the imperative to affirm, and refuse to narrate celebratory accounts of exhaustion and endurance?