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, brief update: in May 2007, fueled by University of Saskatchewan bar that remained open for business and playlist engineered by then-ACCUTE president Steven Bruhm, the first annual ACCUTE dance 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 site where 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 whole--and the dance party expressly so--is collective performance of what Lauren Berlant has identified as 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, fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. She goes on to specify that what is 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 tenure-track job, which is ultimately relation of attachment to 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 gathering of possibility: of making connections, of showing off one's good work--demonstrates 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 (34). …