Cruel optimism, affective governmentality and frontline poverty governance: ‘You can promise the world’

Cruel Optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) sustains neoliberalism by promising freedom and autonomy through adherence to and performance of competitive behaviours. As Brown (2003) observes, neoliberalism is a discourse which operates, not through repression or restriction, but through promising self‐fulfilment and happiness. The role of emotion‐management in poverty governance has been widely acknowledged. However, this has focused on cultivation of population‐level punitive, negative emotions (such as shame, stigma, or resentment). It is widely acknowledged that welfare provision has been specifically targeted by neoliberal discourse, justifying intensifying interventions aimed at reshaping the subjectivities and aspirations of poor and marginalised individuals and households to serve the needs of deregulated markets. However, little attention has been paid to the importance of positive, hopeful emotion management in legitimising and effecting co‐operation. Drawing on interviews with 54 workers in the Welsh homelessness system, I argue that workers systematically create and sustain optimism in their clients as a mechanism to enable them to survive within an increasingly hostile housing system, as part of a deliberate, if reluctant, strategy to cultivate empowered, ‘ethical’ welfare selfhood against a backdrop of citizen abandonment. A three‐stage approach deployed by workers includes (1) destabilisation of expectations of state help (2) re‐orientation, through cultivation of belief in neoliberal promise (3) development of maintenance strategies. Improving applicant capacity to perform neoliberal welfare citizenship was perceived as an urgent, moral and pragmatic necessity, and justified by care logics. I demonstrate how this extends not only our understanding of welfare implementation, but also shows how positive emotion‐management generally, and Berlant's Cruel Optimism specifically, can be used to understand the practicalities of welfare governance.