At every forum outside the Occupy movement that I attend, the question of optimism is raised, usually negatively. In academia in particular, you never lose by raising the bet on pessimism, on predicting negative outcomes and highlighting the gaps between stated goals and presumed realities. I get it. There’s a lure to tarrying with the negative and it somehow always seems more intellectual to do so.

At the same time, on a day when I have every personal reason to be a tad pessimistic, I wonder about this. I think back to Stuart Hall, who would deliver amazingly “pessimistic” analyses of the Thatcherite revolution and yet you would feel uplifted by his personal energy and the force of his insight. I’m no Stuart Hall and I’m not making a parallel between us. But his evocation of Gramsci’s old tag about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will is worth revisiting.

What is optimism of the will? It can’t be simple optimism, firstly because it would not have needed qualifying if it were so simple. And in the current conjuncture, to use a Hall-flavored expression, we are all obviously aware of the branding of optimism by neo-liberal politics from Reagan to Obama. Political journalists offer us two incontrovertible “truths” all the time: that positive campaigns succeed and that negative ads work. This polarity expresses the relations of commodity fetishism at work in political marketing: the advertiser sells us what we can’t have (positive), or lets us know we can’t have it (negative).

Optimism of the will would have to be resistant to that fetishism, because it is constantly monitored by the pessimism of the intellect. Despite the term, it cannot be a simple emotion in the William James sense–I think optimistically, therefore I am optimistic. Rather it is the paradox: I think pessimistically, therefore I have optimism. Pessimism has to be distinguished from cynicism, which is a very attractive way to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same, just as the logics of capital would want.

It is not, then, just pessimistic to realize that we are everywhere opposed and that the defeat of the immense materiality of capital can seem unimaginable. What’s truly surprising and the grounds for an optimism that is not one is that nonetheless, there is for the first time in a long time, a way of thinking ahead that does not lead to inevitable defeat. This optimism of the will is harder than pessimism because it means you have to insist on that “nonetheless” without the pay-off derived by the fetishist (the je sais mais quand même, I know but still).

Let’s double-back and note that by “fetishism,” I don’t mean here what people choose to do sexually or affectively. I mean the belief that if you buy a new hybrid car, with the immense energy and material consumption that is involved to manufacture such a vehicle, you are nonetheless (quand même) acting for the good of the environment, part of the solution.

Finding alternatives is difficult, slow, full of defeats and without much by way of gratification. That’s optimism of the will. It means going off, as I am about to do, to spend several hours wandering around in the cold and the rain and calling that “Occupy Education,” even though it’s been poorly organized and not well publicized. That’s OK. It’s not without a tendency to a certain Puritanism, I get that. Anyone who has “ambitions” in the emiserated higher education sector has such tendencies, after all. I get that it’s also, in my own case, the very literal expression of a mid-life crisis and for many younger people in the movement, that this is tedious. It is, as they say in New York, what it is, a statement of non-commodified equivalence that is strangely a comfort.