Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Why do I have to dance like that? <small class="caps" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">accute</small> and the Performance of Optimism

2008; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.0.0145

1913-4835

T. L. Cowan,

Diversity and Impact of Dance

Why do I have to dance like that? accute and the Performance of Optimism T.L. Cowan (bio) I saw the best minds of my generation dancing at a conference, self-consciously drunk happy fools even though they are unlikely to find permanent work in the profession in which they have trained, who gave papers, who went to book launches, offering to fix up a plate of hot hors d’oeuvres for someone who might be on a hiring committee somewhere, sometime in the next decade, writing two papers: one on Atwood, Ondaatje, Munro, or Wah in order to prove that they can teach the canon, the other featuring their power-pointed-multi-media-collaborative-hyper-meta-counter-canonical interdisciplinary research that the profession professes to prefer these days, saying “fuck it “ and then changing their minds and submitting another conference abstract, meeting the November 15th deadline, planning what they will wear to the dance this year. Anonymous Dancing with Myself It is clear to me that the most relevant thing to say in an article about the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English at this particular historical moment is that we dance. For those of you not in the know, a brief update: in May 2007, fueled by a University of Saskatchewan bar that remained open for business and a playlist engineered by then-accute president Steven Bruhm, the first annual accute dance [End Page 18] party was successfully inaugurated with much shaking and shimmying. Since 2007, the dance party has become the social anchor of the annual accute conference and, while it serves the important function of making us English-teaching folk more interesting than those wine-and-cheese-hosting learned societies, I’ve come to think that it also functions as a site where a prominent contemporary “structure of feeling” is performed en masse and writ large. Paradise by the Dashboard Lights In the context of the current academic job market (or lack thereof), it strikes me that the accute conference as a whole—and the dance party expressly so—is a collective performance of what Lauren Berlant has identified as “cruel optimism.” In Berlant’s terms, cruel optimism is “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.” She goes on to specify that what is “cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world” (33). Thus, for example, the relation of attachment to a tenure-track job, which is ultimately a relation of attachment to a middle-class income, stable employment, health and retirement benefits, and time to do one’s “own work,” at this point might be understood to be “sheer fantasy” and even “toxic,” since the pursuit of this attachment can happen at the expense of other careers or, even more cruel, at the risk of driving one’s self mad with the perpetual fantasy-disappointment cycle of the job application process. However, continued participation in the accute conference—which might be understood as the “object/scene of desire” (34) because it functions as a gathering of possibility: of making connections, of showing off one’s good work—demonstrates a refusal to give up hope, even in the face of diminishing employment odds in the humanities, specifically, and the troubling corporatization of universities, more generally. I Will Survive Participation in the accute conference, and in particular the dance party, performs an optimistic practice (even if one does not feel optimistic) of what Berlant calls “keep[ing] one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition” [End Page 19] (34). This desire/attrition configuration is the cruel aspect of these attachments, since, in cruel optimism, the “animating potency of an...