Affective life of financial loss: Detaching from lost investments in the wake of the gig economy

Dialogues in Human Geography

2022

Attachment is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary cultural geography. Cultural geography is full of relations that look like attachments. But attachment as a concept is mostly absent, used interchangeably with association, connection or simply relation per se. In this article, I respond to dissatisfaction with the flattening effects of the relational turn by arguing for a cultural geography orientated to attachments. Engaging with the work of Lauren Berlant and other feminist and queer theory in dialogue with actor-network theory, I conceptualise attachments as enduring trajectories that ‘bring closer’ something which comes to feel necessary to a way of life. This means that ‘objects’ of attachment – whether a person or a place, a song or a nation or anything else – come to be encountered as promises. To understand the (de/re)composition of attachments, this paper offers two concepts. Forms of attachment are arrangements that make available promises to be attached to. They channel the optimism of attachment. The presence of the promissory object intensifies in scenes of attachment – everyday space-times of limited duration which give an affective push to forms of attachment. The result of orientating inquiry to forms and scenes of attachment is a cultural geography of promises.

Section: Section 2: the Optimism Of Attachmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forms and scenes of attachment: A cultural geography of promises

Dialogues in Human Geography

2022

“…The publication of Cruel optimism sparked engagement with the multiple tendencies and latencies of Berlant's thought, finding in them resources for making sense of the dramas and tensions of relationality and vocabularies for everyday violences and harms in the crisis‐prone present (see, for example, Anderson, 2022; Bissell, 2022; Brickell, 2020; Cockayne, 2016; Linz, 2021; Pain & Cahill, 2022; Wilkinson & Ortega‐Alcazár, 2019). Berlant's is no simple affirmation of being‐in‐common as counterpoint to the ravages of neoliberal individuation, though.…”

Section: Introduction: Concepts Otherwisementioning

confidence: 99%

Encountering Berlant part one: Concepts otherwise

Aitken

Baćević

et al. 2022

Geographical Journal

In Part 1 of 'Encountering Berlant', we encounter the promise and provocation of Lauren Berlant's work. In 1000-word contributions, geographers and others stay with what Berlant's thought offers contemporary human geography. They amplify an encounter with their work, demonstrating how a concept, idea, or style disrupts something, opens up a new possibility, or simply invites thinking otherwise. The encounters range across the incredible body of work Berlant left

“…The tension that Berlant confidently defined in the above quote—the opening line of Cruel Optimism (Berlant, 2011)—offers geographers and others a way into the perplexing question of why detachment from harmful lives can be so difficult, if not impossible. In particular, the concept has become a key resource for understanding the configurations of the affective and political economies that compose the impasse that followed the 2008 financial crisis, offering a way of staying with the double‐binds that subjects inhabit as they try and make a life in worlds that are failing and falling apart (e.g., Addie & Fraser, 2019; Anderson & Secor, 2022; Bissell, 2022; Brickell, 2020; Cockayne, 2016; Pettit, 2019; Raynor, 2021).…”

Section: Introduction: What Kind Of Thing Is Cruel Optimism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms

Awal

Cockayne

et al. 2022

Geographical Journal

Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flour ishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of ambivalence to Berlant's thought, as well as their orientation to overdetermination and incoherence. Geographers and others have found in the concept a way of understanding the intersection between affective and political economies in the crisis-present following the 2008 financial crisis. Together with Berlant's linked concepts such as 'crisis ordinariness' and 'impasse', cruel optimism has offered a way of understanding why detachment can be so difficult and how damaging conditions endure. Contributors begin from these starting points, amplifying the concept's promise: a new way of researching and writing about the reproduction of ordinary damage and harm.