Stuck in the Impasse: Cynicism as Neoliberal Affect

Abstract

<p>Recent work in affect theory has addressed the category of what Sianne Ngai terms “ugly” feelings (Ngai 2007, Edelman 2004, Halberstam 2011) and the costs associated with the premium placed on so-called positive modes of thinking and feeling (Berlant 2011, Ahmed 2010, Love 2007), yet cynicism persists in many accounts as the feature of an undesirable political subjectivity. Likewise in popular and political discourse, cynicism is denounced as the mark of an ineffectual subject who chooses to opt out, rather than reach for supposedly obvious markers of (capitalist) achievement. This dissertation refuses these characterizations, instead considering cynicism as an affect bound up in neoliberal sociopolitical shifts. I argue that cynicism describes a feeling of living under structural conditions that curtail—in ways that are often effaced—the kinds of self-determining subjectivities that have been taken for granted as a feature of Western, liberal democracies and remain foundational to imagined modes of dissent. Exploring this situation in the context of three cultural frames—politics and governance, modes of labour in capitalist economies, and a structure of feeling premised on the pursuit of happiness—I examine cynical subjectivities in fiction, film, and American political discourse so as to 1) develop an inquiry into affect as situated between subject and structure; 2) acknowledge the commonality of a feeling of impasse and dominant cultural narratives that mask this frustration of agency; and 3) consider inertia and passivity as sensible orientations in a cultural moment in which the costs of momentum are becoming increasingly visible.</p>