Papers by Carolyn Veldstra
Cultural Studies, 2018
Returning to Arlie Hochschild’s foundational work, this article argues for the ongoing relevance ... more Returning to Arlie Hochschild’s foundational work, this article argues for the ongoing relevance of emotional labour in understanding the subjective demands placed on those working at the intersection of affective labour and precarity. Drawing on a range of feminist analyses, I understand emotional labour as the work entailed in producing profitable (often positive) affect at the level of the individual worker, thereby challenging views of affective labour that focus on the affects that circulate productively under neoliberalism. The stakes of such emotional labour in the affective economy, I argue, are heightened by conditions of labour precarity in which many workers are asked not only to produce positive affects, but also to subordinate the bad feelings that can arise alongside socio-economic insecurity. I understand the demand for positive affect from workers as emerging not only due to the productivity of such affects under neoliberalism, but also because the prevalence of positive feeling operates ideologically to normalize precarious working conditions. Bad feeling in this context threatens to challenge the neoliberal status quo. Drawing extensively on Tatjana Turanskyj’s 2011 film Eine Flexibe Frau, I identify the cultural and workplace logics by which bad feelings are excised and suppressed, primarily through the presumption of bad feeling as wilful. These logics complicate any effort to read a straightforward politics of resistance or refusal into bad feeling; however, I conclude that to view bad feeling as structurally embedded and functionalized within capitalist logics offers a means by which to respond differently to those who feel bad as we encounter them in the precarious, affective economy.
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ESC, 2017
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ESC, 2015
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A collective project of the Petrocultures Research Group. My contribution is under "The Arts, Hum... more A collective project of the Petrocultures Research Group. My contribution is under "The Arts, Humanities, and Energy
(or, What Can Art tell us about Oil?)."
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JAC
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Nordic Journal of English Studies, Jan 1, 2010
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The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and …, Jan 1, 2005
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Conference Presentations by Carolyn Veldstra
I gave this paper at the 2015 meeting of ACCUTE (Association for Canadian College and University ... more I gave this paper at the 2015 meeting of ACCUTE (Association for Canadian College and University Teachers of English) in Ottawa, ON on one of two panels organized around the theme "Canadian Precarities." It looks at two voices in the Canadian media landscape--those of Margaret Wente and Jesse Brown--to unpack the way in which dialogues (and diatribes) around entitlement and privilege work to reinforce an affective economy in which particular groups are pegged as having the "right" or the "wrong" orientation to the world, and, in turn, these affects are positioned as at the root of generational inequality.
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I gave this paper at the 2015 meeting of NeMLA (Northeast Modern Languages Association) in Toront... more I gave this paper at the 2015 meeting of NeMLA (Northeast Modern Languages Association) in Toronto, ON on a panel looking at contemporary American redemption narratives. My contribution sought to trouble the notion of redemption through individual heroism or strength--the framework in which it is often posed.
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In his victory speech after the most recent American election, Barack Obama twice used cynicism t... more In his victory speech after the most recent American election, Barack Obama twice used cynicism to describe the inversion (perhaps even perversion) of his brand of hope-filled politics: once at the start to describe a cynical view of politics—a cynic views politics as nothing more than a contest of egos, he suggests—and once to empower his audience, declaring them to be capable of futurity and action because “we’. The usage of cynicism as shorthand for an undesirable, ineffectual or otherwise wrong political stance is common in popular media discourse, particularly around electoral politics and civic engagement. The assumption in references such as Obama’s is that cynicism is chosen, that some individuals decide to be cynical and thus threaten an otherwise functional politics. Yet cynicism also marks a fundamental impasse in the relation between subject and structure, a point at which remedial action seems if not impossible, then at least difficult and riddled with obstacles that threaten one’s ability to live a secure existence. Thus, to dismiss cynicism marks a refusal to address the overwhelming sense of failed or failing agency felt by the subject of neoliberal capitalism, a sense of failure that cannot necessarily be bridged through hope, hard work or faith.
This paper will deconstruct the rhetoric of cynicism used around Obama’s reelection. I will consider how cynicism functions as a limit-case, a signifier used to mark the edge of functional politics, but that also, so positioned, fails to ask difficult questions around the possibility (or lack thereof) for individual agency. By invoking cynicism in opposition to qualities like hope, belief, or optimism, Obama assumes the desirability of positive forms of engagement without acknowledging that for many hope is incongruent with experience, or worse, has in some cases precipitated ongoing calamity. The refusal to acknowledge cynicism as a valid response to the current political situation in tandem with an emphasis on the language of hope, faith or action constructs a political sphere in which agency is often doomed to fail but is also made to bear the burden of that failure; it perpetuates a social sphere in which negative affects like cynicism mark individual failing rather than structural inadequacy.
The work that forms the basis for this paper comes out of the third chapter of my dissertation, which considers the function of cynicism in contemporary culture in terms of its implications for our understanding of subjective agency and political action. My larger project draws together ideology critique, historical materialist readings of mass culture, current mass media theory and affect theory to describe cynicism as a structural feeling that complicates our understanding of agency and perhaps also offers a new way into considering engagement.
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"Deleuzian theories describe affect in terms of force or intensity—“the capacity to move and be m... more "Deleuzian theories describe affect in terms of force or intensity—“the capacity to move and be moved” (Cvetkovich 4). This paper intervenes in that energetic space to consider the notion of inertial affect.
I take as my starting point Lauren Berlant’s characterization of the current moment of neoliberal capitalism in North America as one of impasse—a moment in which many are unable to achieve the “good life” held out as promise and yet to which we remain attached in a relation of “cruel optimism.” We circle in the impasse, she writes, while we yearn for a constantly receding future (Berlant 199).
I consider the affect of impasse from another angle, that of cynicism. I argue that unlike the circularity of Berlant’s optimism, cynicism manifests as inertia, a feeling of having “hit a wall in what [we] can and can’t do” (Stewart 15). To exemplify cynicism, I turn to Tatjana Turanskyj’s 2010 film Eine Flexible Frau (translated in English as The Drifter), which follows Greta, an unemployed architect who drifts unattached through Berlin. Greta’s alienation in the film largely stems from her failure to express the affects required of a neoliberal world: pleasantness, humble gratitude for paltry opportunity, and a willingness to morph to suit the demands of any job offered. She fails in optimism, instead openly expressing her cynicism, an affect that renders her as unlikable to viewers as she is disdained by her peer-group, therapist, and family.
Rather than seeking to redeem a negative feeling as a site of hope, this paper argues instead that our understanding of the impasse experienced by some living under the influence of neoliberal capital must also include paying attention to the ways in which structures of impasse foster negative feelings that are not only cruel in their relation to curtailed agency, but also in terms of the disdain with which they are received as affects.
Keywords: affect, politics, subjectivity, neoliberalism, cynicism, ugly feelings, inertia"
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Special Issue by Carolyn Veldstra
To take up humour in terms seriousness is not simply to consider whether humour is or can be seri... more To take up humour in terms seriousness is not simply to consider whether humour is or can be serious: to focus on seriousness is to inescapably tie humour into wider conversations regarding politics, privilege and power. As the contributions to this special issue illustrate, to think about humour in conjunction with seriousness is to consider how humour intervenes in a variety of textual, cultural, social and above all, political conversations.
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Conference Organisation by Carolyn Veldstra
An Exploration of the Idea, Importance and Influence of Seriousness and Nonseriousness in the Con... more An Exploration of the Idea, Importance and Influence of Seriousness and Nonseriousness in the Contemporary Humanities
The 2013 John Douglas Taylor Conference
May 15-17, 2013
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Confirmed Keynotes: Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London), Julie Rak (University of Alberta).
Scholarship and intellectual work are serious business: serious people thinking seriously about serious things. To be serious is to stake a claim to legitimacy, importance and moral and social relevance. In today’s academic environment, it can seem vital to reiterate the seriousness of one’s work in order to secure promotions, positions, resources and even the notice of one’s peers. And yet to declare seriousness is to deem certain topics, attachments, questions and trends unserious, unworthy of attention, rigorous thought and sustained debate. In staking our work around the unexamined metric of seriousness, what is lost? What questions remain unasked?
Despite its centrality to so much of our practice, the notion of seriousness often goes overlooked and under-thought. Indeed, while much effort is expended on the broad task of delimiting the borders of what could, should or ought to be taken seriously, the question of what constitutes seriousness in our current cultural moment does not receive nearly as much attention.
The purpose of the 2013 John Douglas Taylor Conference is to place seriousness front and centre: to think through seriousness, to consider what it is, what it means, what it might hide or efface. What is invested in a marker like seriousness? Is it important that we retain such a measure and if we were to jettison seriousness, what could replace it? This conference will also call attention to the unserious, considering the value and role of unserious topics, debates and modes of understanding our current cultural moment.
In this approach, we are not interested in establishing a hierarchy of serious and non-serious topics, or advocating a new list of topics to be taken seriously (though we are open to self-reflexive forms of this process) but, instead, in investigating how and why the impulse to construct such a typology works. What is the cultural hold seriousness has over us, how do we fight it, or do we even want to? If we seek to ask serious questions, how do we go about determining what these might be, and how do we know they’re serious? How might an engagement with unserious methodologies and topics enrich or threaten existing knowledge?
Given that seriousness isn’t the subject of any large body of existing scholarship, but rather a common and constant concern across all manner of scholarship, we welcome submissions that engage with seriousness in any number of theoretical, sociological, anthropological, textual, historical, political, activist, ethical, artistic or other methods.
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Articles by Carolyn Veldstra
Comedy Studies, Apr 2015
An introductory editorial to a special issue of 'Comedy Studies' on the role of 'seriousness' in ... more An introductory editorial to a special issue of 'Comedy Studies' on the role of 'seriousness' in the study of humour.
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Books by Carolyn Veldstra
by Brent Ryan Bellamy, Darin Barney, Dr., Ruth Beer, Dominic Boyer, Olivia Heaney, Cymene Howe, David Kahane, Jerilyn Sambrooke, Aaron Veldstra, Carolyn Veldstra, Caleb Wellum, and Saulesh Yessenova One of the many things that make this short document distinctive is that it is a collective docum... more One of the many things that make this short document distinctive is that it is a collective document, the product of intensive work by thinkers committed to addressing the difficult questions we will need to pose—and answer—if we are to ever get to a world after oil. It is this kind of collective work that will be needed over the coming years and decades to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and from a petroculture to the new global culture that we can see just over the horizon.
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by Imre Szeman, Ruth Beer, Brent Ryan Bellamy, Dominic Boyer, Jeff Diamanti, Rachel Havrelock, Cymene Howe, Bob Johnson, Jordan Kinder, Tihamer Richard Kover, Graeme Macdonald, Carolyn Veldstra, Caleb Wellum, and Sheena Wilson West Virginia University Press, 2016
After Oil explores the social, cultural, and political changes needed to make possible a full-sca... more After Oil explores the social, cultural, and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. Written collectively by participants in the first After Oil School, After Oil explains why the adoption of renewable, ecologically sustainable energy sources is only the first step of energy transition.
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After Oil is the product of a collaborative, interdisciplinary research partnership designed to e... more After Oil is the product of a collaborative, interdisciplinary research partnership designed to explore, critically and creatively, the social, cultural and political changes necessary to facilitate a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. The energy forms in any one era fundamentally shape the attributes and capabilities of societies in that era.
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Infrastructure + Materials by Carolyn Veldstra
by Cymene Howe, Janet Stewart, Brent Ryan Bellamy, ian Clarke, Jeff Diamanti, Rachel Havrelock, Olivia Heaney, Bob Johnson, Negar Mottahedeh, Carolyn Veldstra, and Caleb Wellum A multi-authored project embedded in "After Oil: Explorations and Experiments in the Future of En... more A multi-authored project embedded in "After Oil: Explorations and Experiments in the Future of Energy, Culture and Society"
[my small contribution is under Energy Futures, Infrastructures, "Gridlife Dependencies"]
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Uploads
Papers by Carolyn Veldstra
(or, What Can Art tell us about Oil?)."
Conference Presentations by Carolyn Veldstra
This paper will deconstruct the rhetoric of cynicism used around Obama’s reelection. I will consider how cynicism functions as a limit-case, a signifier used to mark the edge of functional politics, but that also, so positioned, fails to ask difficult questions around the possibility (or lack thereof) for individual agency. By invoking cynicism in opposition to qualities like hope, belief, or optimism, Obama assumes the desirability of positive forms of engagement without acknowledging that for many hope is incongruent with experience, or worse, has in some cases precipitated ongoing calamity. The refusal to acknowledge cynicism as a valid response to the current political situation in tandem with an emphasis on the language of hope, faith or action constructs a political sphere in which agency is often doomed to fail but is also made to bear the burden of that failure; it perpetuates a social sphere in which negative affects like cynicism mark individual failing rather than structural inadequacy.
The work that forms the basis for this paper comes out of the third chapter of my dissertation, which considers the function of cynicism in contemporary culture in terms of its implications for our understanding of subjective agency and political action. My larger project draws together ideology critique, historical materialist readings of mass culture, current mass media theory and affect theory to describe cynicism as a structural feeling that complicates our understanding of agency and perhaps also offers a new way into considering engagement.
I take as my starting point Lauren Berlant’s characterization of the current moment of neoliberal capitalism in North America as one of impasse—a moment in which many are unable to achieve the “good life” held out as promise and yet to which we remain attached in a relation of “cruel optimism.” We circle in the impasse, she writes, while we yearn for a constantly receding future (Berlant 199).
I consider the affect of impasse from another angle, that of cynicism. I argue that unlike the circularity of Berlant’s optimism, cynicism manifests as inertia, a feeling of having “hit a wall in what [we] can and can’t do” (Stewart 15). To exemplify cynicism, I turn to Tatjana Turanskyj’s 2010 film Eine Flexible Frau (translated in English as The Drifter), which follows Greta, an unemployed architect who drifts unattached through Berlin. Greta’s alienation in the film largely stems from her failure to express the affects required of a neoliberal world: pleasantness, humble gratitude for paltry opportunity, and a willingness to morph to suit the demands of any job offered. She fails in optimism, instead openly expressing her cynicism, an affect that renders her as unlikable to viewers as she is disdained by her peer-group, therapist, and family.
Rather than seeking to redeem a negative feeling as a site of hope, this paper argues instead that our understanding of the impasse experienced by some living under the influence of neoliberal capital must also include paying attention to the ways in which structures of impasse foster negative feelings that are not only cruel in their relation to curtailed agency, but also in terms of the disdain with which they are received as affects.
Keywords: affect, politics, subjectivity, neoliberalism, cynicism, ugly feelings, inertia"
Special Issue by Carolyn Veldstra
Conference Organisation by Carolyn Veldstra
The 2013 John Douglas Taylor Conference
May 15-17, 2013
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Confirmed Keynotes: Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London), Julie Rak (University of Alberta).
Scholarship and intellectual work are serious business: serious people thinking seriously about serious things. To be serious is to stake a claim to legitimacy, importance and moral and social relevance. In today’s academic environment, it can seem vital to reiterate the seriousness of one’s work in order to secure promotions, positions, resources and even the notice of one’s peers. And yet to declare seriousness is to deem certain topics, attachments, questions and trends unserious, unworthy of attention, rigorous thought and sustained debate. In staking our work around the unexamined metric of seriousness, what is lost? What questions remain unasked?
Despite its centrality to so much of our practice, the notion of seriousness often goes overlooked and under-thought. Indeed, while much effort is expended on the broad task of delimiting the borders of what could, should or ought to be taken seriously, the question of what constitutes seriousness in our current cultural moment does not receive nearly as much attention.
The purpose of the 2013 John Douglas Taylor Conference is to place seriousness front and centre: to think through seriousness, to consider what it is, what it means, what it might hide or efface. What is invested in a marker like seriousness? Is it important that we retain such a measure and if we were to jettison seriousness, what could replace it? This conference will also call attention to the unserious, considering the value and role of unserious topics, debates and modes of understanding our current cultural moment.
In this approach, we are not interested in establishing a hierarchy of serious and non-serious topics, or advocating a new list of topics to be taken seriously (though we are open to self-reflexive forms of this process) but, instead, in investigating how and why the impulse to construct such a typology works. What is the cultural hold seriousness has over us, how do we fight it, or do we even want to? If we seek to ask serious questions, how do we go about determining what these might be, and how do we know they’re serious? How might an engagement with unserious methodologies and topics enrich or threaten existing knowledge?
Given that seriousness isn’t the subject of any large body of existing scholarship, but rather a common and constant concern across all manner of scholarship, we welcome submissions that engage with seriousness in any number of theoretical, sociological, anthropological, textual, historical, political, activist, ethical, artistic or other methods.
Articles by Carolyn Veldstra
Books by Carolyn Veldstra
Infrastructure + Materials by Carolyn Veldstra
[my small contribution is under Energy Futures, Infrastructures, "Gridlife Dependencies"]
(or, What Can Art tell us about Oil?)."
This paper will deconstruct the rhetoric of cynicism used around Obama’s reelection. I will consider how cynicism functions as a limit-case, a signifier used to mark the edge of functional politics, but that also, so positioned, fails to ask difficult questions around the possibility (or lack thereof) for individual agency. By invoking cynicism in opposition to qualities like hope, belief, or optimism, Obama assumes the desirability of positive forms of engagement without acknowledging that for many hope is incongruent with experience, or worse, has in some cases precipitated ongoing calamity. The refusal to acknowledge cynicism as a valid response to the current political situation in tandem with an emphasis on the language of hope, faith or action constructs a political sphere in which agency is often doomed to fail but is also made to bear the burden of that failure; it perpetuates a social sphere in which negative affects like cynicism mark individual failing rather than structural inadequacy.
The work that forms the basis for this paper comes out of the third chapter of my dissertation, which considers the function of cynicism in contemporary culture in terms of its implications for our understanding of subjective agency and political action. My larger project draws together ideology critique, historical materialist readings of mass culture, current mass media theory and affect theory to describe cynicism as a structural feeling that complicates our understanding of agency and perhaps also offers a new way into considering engagement.
I take as my starting point Lauren Berlant’s characterization of the current moment of neoliberal capitalism in North America as one of impasse—a moment in which many are unable to achieve the “good life” held out as promise and yet to which we remain attached in a relation of “cruel optimism.” We circle in the impasse, she writes, while we yearn for a constantly receding future (Berlant 199).
I consider the affect of impasse from another angle, that of cynicism. I argue that unlike the circularity of Berlant’s optimism, cynicism manifests as inertia, a feeling of having “hit a wall in what [we] can and can’t do” (Stewart 15). To exemplify cynicism, I turn to Tatjana Turanskyj’s 2010 film Eine Flexible Frau (translated in English as The Drifter), which follows Greta, an unemployed architect who drifts unattached through Berlin. Greta’s alienation in the film largely stems from her failure to express the affects required of a neoliberal world: pleasantness, humble gratitude for paltry opportunity, and a willingness to morph to suit the demands of any job offered. She fails in optimism, instead openly expressing her cynicism, an affect that renders her as unlikable to viewers as she is disdained by her peer-group, therapist, and family.
Rather than seeking to redeem a negative feeling as a site of hope, this paper argues instead that our understanding of the impasse experienced by some living under the influence of neoliberal capital must also include paying attention to the ways in which structures of impasse foster negative feelings that are not only cruel in their relation to curtailed agency, but also in terms of the disdain with which they are received as affects.
Keywords: affect, politics, subjectivity, neoliberalism, cynicism, ugly feelings, inertia"
The 2013 John Douglas Taylor Conference
May 15-17, 2013
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Confirmed Keynotes: Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London), Julie Rak (University of Alberta).
Scholarship and intellectual work are serious business: serious people thinking seriously about serious things. To be serious is to stake a claim to legitimacy, importance and moral and social relevance. In today’s academic environment, it can seem vital to reiterate the seriousness of one’s work in order to secure promotions, positions, resources and even the notice of one’s peers. And yet to declare seriousness is to deem certain topics, attachments, questions and trends unserious, unworthy of attention, rigorous thought and sustained debate. In staking our work around the unexamined metric of seriousness, what is lost? What questions remain unasked?
Despite its centrality to so much of our practice, the notion of seriousness often goes overlooked and under-thought. Indeed, while much effort is expended on the broad task of delimiting the borders of what could, should or ought to be taken seriously, the question of what constitutes seriousness in our current cultural moment does not receive nearly as much attention.
The purpose of the 2013 John Douglas Taylor Conference is to place seriousness front and centre: to think through seriousness, to consider what it is, what it means, what it might hide or efface. What is invested in a marker like seriousness? Is it important that we retain such a measure and if we were to jettison seriousness, what could replace it? This conference will also call attention to the unserious, considering the value and role of unserious topics, debates and modes of understanding our current cultural moment.
In this approach, we are not interested in establishing a hierarchy of serious and non-serious topics, or advocating a new list of topics to be taken seriously (though we are open to self-reflexive forms of this process) but, instead, in investigating how and why the impulse to construct such a typology works. What is the cultural hold seriousness has over us, how do we fight it, or do we even want to? If we seek to ask serious questions, how do we go about determining what these might be, and how do we know they’re serious? How might an engagement with unserious methodologies and topics enrich or threaten existing knowledge?
Given that seriousness isn’t the subject of any large body of existing scholarship, but rather a common and constant concern across all manner of scholarship, we welcome submissions that engage with seriousness in any number of theoretical, sociological, anthropological, textual, historical, political, activist, ethical, artistic or other methods.
[my small contribution is under Energy Futures, Infrastructures, "Gridlife Dependencies"]