Killing Joy in the Best Place on Earth

On Vancouver and the Politics of (un)Happiness

At the risk of lapsing into metaphysics, I think there are ways of relating to a place that confound our attempts at explanation. There are ways of feeling at home, ways of taking and holding place that, strangely, escape capture in both language and logic. Or perhaps that overflow language and logic at once, revealing how neither one is quite adequate to the work of place-making, not quite up to the task of grasping just what is at stake in the act of putting one’s feet on the ground. There are ways of being in and being with a place that, for all their muddiness—for all the ways in which they invite us to lay hands upon, to sink teeth into, to feel a part of—remain curiously intangible, that touch on the ineffable. As if the poetic effort to situate oneself in a place were overwritten from the beginning by the prosaic experience of being with it, of carrying on in its presence.

I think this is the best (or only) way I can describe how I feel about Canada’s west coast, and about Vancouver in particular. It is a part of the world to which I have always felt curiously bound, to which I have always been drawn, and that I will always love. Growing up in Calgary, I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed of upping sticks and heading west just as soon as age would allow. Every summer for a number of years, my father and I would visit Tofino—a small town on the west coast of Vancouver Island—to go salmon and halibut fishing. I never told him so, and I would even hesitate to do so now, but probably the only reason I agreed to these trips at all (being tossed about by 10-foot swells on a 22-foot fiberglass fishing boat 25 miles past the last discernible scrap of land is not something I ever learned to fully appreciate) was that it always meant a short layover in Vancouver.

It meant an opportunity to watch the sun come up over the Burrard Inlet, to see those first bits of light shatter against the glass and steel spires that populate the downtown peninsula. It meant watching, hypnotized, as the low cloud drifted through the dark cedars on the North Shore mountains, occasionally becoming ensnared in an odd cluster of branches that tugged at its edges, the way a loose nail unravels an old sweater. It meant an opportunity to feel at home somewhere I had no business feeling at home, an opportunity to satisfy some prosthetic memory I had of a place from which I’d never been removed. It was to be in and with a place where it seemed possible to carry on, to finally put these feet on the ground.

And so it was no small matter when, at the age of eighteen, I left Calgary to begin my undergraduate studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. I was ecstatic, and for at least the next two years, I remained as such. At school I was reading texts that pushed me to understand this world otherwise, to invest myself in it ethically, politically, morally. In my social life, I was meeting artists, musicians, and activists. I was producing writing good enough to be published (it was still shit, but it was good enough). I was playing music in front of appreciative crowds. I was dating. I landed exciting internships, participated in wonderful events, and carved out a space that felt like my own for the very first time. I had things that I could call mine, things that I could touch and sense as mine, a self that I could touch and sense as a self. I was happy, in a word.

And as far as I could tell, so was everybody else. Indeed, it seemed that happiness was all anyone wanted to talk about. Somewhere around 2008, the question of how and with what intensity one’s happiness was anchored in the urban scene that ‘Vancouver’ named became the centre around which my social life was organized. The shift was most apparent at work, where those who had once called themselves communications practitioners or public relations officers now called themselves community managers and engagement specialists; social conveners whose work was the production and maintenance of happy affiliations between brands, citizens, and government agencies. These jobs and their attendant lexicons of conviviality and friendship seemed to arrive all at once and en masse. Virtually non-existent only a few years before, it suddenly felt as though everyone I knew was taking gig work convening, facilitating, engaging, collaborating, connecting, reaching-out, ad infinitum. And, at least for a little while, I was a willing participant. As an erstwhile community manager for several non-profit organizations, it was often my job to be present in, to, and for the city; to swap information, to smile, and to shake hands. I became something of a happiness packet switcher, strategically routing good feelings this way and that, establishing redundant connections, wrapped up in an affective combinatorics.

Around the same time, new websites, media ventures, and community groups began to emerge that championed the city in terms that were, to say the least, effusive. One such website, which began as a more or less standard arts and culture blog, even incorporated itself as a non-profit organization with an explicit mandate to report only good news about the city. In incredibly short order, happiness-talk had become the Ur language through which the city made sense of itself. It saturated discussions of work, civic participation, and community building alike. It was as if bottomless enthusiasm had been tacitly drafted into the conditions of municipal citizenship. Happiness became more than something one had and much more than something one simply felt. It was something one did. It was an occupation, a way of being, a livelihood, and a complex social process underwritten by an elaborate social infrastructure.

The chatter reached a fever pitch in 2010 with the arrival of the Winter Olympic Games, which at this point I remember both acutely and almost not at all. I know I was drunk a lot. One time I slept in a car outside of a train station. Another time, while on a Valentines Day date with someone I don’t remember, I pissed in an alleyway behind a dumpster while fireworks erupted behind me. This sounds terrible (and it was), but the air of civic euphoria made it hard to tell. The whole exercise was an awful, overwrought effusive playing-out of the claim that Vancouver is the best place on earth; that those who call it home are nothing, indeed less than nothing, if not lucky. And so in addition to functioning as its own kind of economy, happiness also began to take on a certain moral valence, transmuting into something like an exhortation. The social space of the city was being re-contoured into one of constant, barking euphoria. The boundaries around what (and who) was permissible within that space were being redrawn.

Consider the case of Vancouver artist Jesse Corcoran who in 2009 installed a new work outside a small gallery in the city’s Downtown Eastside. Wrought simply in flat black paint, the work re-imagined the Olympic rings as five faces, four frowning and one smiling. Only two months after the piece was installed, however, the city ordered the gallery’s owner to remove it, citing a municipal anti-graffiti bylaw. Few incidents so neatly condense the curious work done by happiness in contemporary Vancouver. Corcoran’s work indexes the ways in which the cosmo-humanitarian rhetoric of global marquee events like the Olympics covers over the enormous disparities in wealth, safety, and survivability that both under- and over-write the lived experience of globality; disparities that are in fact created and sustained by the very megacorporations that so often sponsor Olympic-scale events. And more locally, it flagged out the deleterious effects that such events have on low-income and historically marginalized neighbourhoods like the Downtown Eastside itself, which in the years since the games, has been placed squarely in the crosshairs of property speculators and real estate developers.

But as the removal of the work suggests, in Vancouver, such unhappy stories had become impermissible. Corcoran’s mural interrupted, caused trouble for, and threatened to spoil the city’s exhaustive happiness talk. It signaled the presence of bad news, of happenings and events that were uneasy, of events that had the potential to un-ease by revealing limits, constraints, and blockages-in-flow. Quite literally, it frowned. It offered an unhappy face. And in turn it became—apparently without a modicum of irony or a shred of sarcasm—that which ought to be frowned upon.

And so the Olympics, though something of a happiness high water mark, also introduced into the chatter a number of sour notes. Something was amiss. No amount of enthusiastic celebration would cover over the stubborn fact that there were people and places that weren’t participating, figures that were making noise inside circuits meant to carry happiness signals.

And there were other confounding factors. Even as the city’s champions waxed lyrical in the press about the vibrancy of the local cultural and artistic scene, for instance, art spaces were shuttering their operations with a grim frequency. The Pantages, the Red Gate, the Junction, the Hollywood, VIVO, the Playhouse Theatre Company, Lick: all of them—which at various times had played host to everything from live music and independent video production to theatrical exhibition and drag shows—disappeared within the space of five years. Some were demolished outright, while others were stripped of permits, some were ‘re-developed’ while still others sunk under the combined weight of skyrocketing operating costs (read: rent) and declining revenues. Whatever the means, the end was always the same. The demand to engage, to participate, and to enjoy was all the time becoming more vociferous, yet the infrastructure that would support such participation was vanishing.

What began to emerge, then, was something like a happiness bubble economy: surplus happiness with nowhere to go, a demand to be happy with no infrastructure to satisfy it, incentives without reward, investment without return. Happiness became liquid. It was everywhere, but seemed to have no substance. It seemed utterly incapable of cohering or coalescing into something of a higher order, unable to support anything other than itself. And as with any bubble (to push the metaphor), when an overvalued liquid asset runs up against a paucity of fixed capital, a crisis can’t be far behind. Though I won’t hazard any positive definition of the term here—it is too unwieldy—if there is any constant within the chaotic space we call ‘crisis,’ it is surely crisis-talk: endless punditry, flailing attempts to rationalize that which exceeds us. As if speaking and speaking once again might conjure up some object or thing that we can recognize as crisis. Talking becomes a strategy for containing and concretizing that field of erratic relations that we have learned to read as crisis-like, relations that become crisis-like precisely because they elude containment.

Such was surely the case as my time in Vancouver drew to a close. In the wake of the Olympics, which had inadvertently exposed and inflamed a whole range of social, political, and economic rifts, talk of happiness began to take on a note of desperation. It became a tangible political problem, an impending urban crisis in urgent need of address. In June of 2012, for instance, the Vancouver Foundation released a major report that found that among the 275 community organizations and 100 individual community leaders surveyed, loneliness and isolation were reported to be the most serious issue facing the city. The report opened the affective floodgates, unleashing a seemingly endless stream of blog posts, newspaper articles, and community dialogues balanced on the question of loneliness, its drivers, and how it ought be thwarted at the level of community practice and municipal policy development.

This is not to say that the report was somehow trumped up or that isolation and loneliness are not problems in Vancouver. On the contrary, they are drearily common and often dangerously draining. Without delving into too much anecdotal evidence, it suffices to say that the last two years I lived in Vancouver were spent primarily wishing I didn’t—not only that I didn’t live in Vancouver, but that I didn’t live at all. After three or four years in the city, my initial enthusiasm had been exhausted. Though there were still good moments, the combined weight of low pay, rising rents, and an increasingly toxic political culture began to take a toll on my physical and mental health: a lifelong singer, my voice disappeared for the better part of a year; I was in constant respiratory distress; work and social engagements alike became at once tiresome and vexing; sleeping became a struggle and being awake became a chore; putting my feet on the ground every morning became an accomplishment in itself. If there hadn’t been mice in my walls, I would have just stayed in bed, permanently. Attempts to reach out for support felt useless and indeed isolating, greeted as they often were by so many well meaning but grievously misguided suggestions: that I take up Pilates, that I adopt an all-local diet, or that I try on for size a more positive outlook (read: be happier). In the thick of depression it can be difficult to make sense or logical order of anything, but I remain reasonably sure that no volume of kale and no amount of stretching would have corrected my overwhelming desire to walk into the ocean and stay there.

The finding that even prominent and well-connected Vancouverites felt isolated, then, was both significant and plausible. But it was also deeply unseemly for a city whose reputation was staked on the image of the happy-go-lucky entrepreneurial wunderkind, the venture capitalist-cum-weekend warrior-cum-social enterprise miraculé. Recall that Corcoran’s installation had been censored on the grounds of a few cartoonish frowning faces. What was to be done with hundreds? Unsurprisingly, the city seized on the report, striking up the so-called “Engaged City Task Force” to manage unhappiness and loneliness out of existence. The task force’s first report was released in May of 2013 and outlined sixteen immediately implementable proposals that, while (once again) well meaning were (once again) sorely misguided. For example, in response to concerns over the manifest inaccessibility of the city’s development process—which continues make life in Vancouver radically unaffordable for so many—the task force proposed the use of “better development signage,” as if brighter colours and clearer descriptions would somehow remediate the deleterious effects of intensifying property speculation.

Such inadequacies notwithstanding, the report was greeted with enthusiasm. The non-profit “good news” website referenced above, for instance, waxed emphatic about the task force’s work: “essentially, they’re working to make your Vancouver a better place to live.” Never mind, of course, the city’s consistent failure to hold developers to account when it comes to satisfying social housing and community investment commitments, never mind its often shambolic and opaque neighbourhood planning sessions, and never mind the ways in which such websites stump for precisely those development companies who want nothing more than for Vancouverites to grin and bear the brunt of accelerating land expropriation. With the advent of the Engaged City Task Force, a widespread and complex happiness regime coalesced. Civil society, municipal government, corporate bodies, and community discourses fell into lockstep and began an indefatigable march toward what Charles Montgomery, in a book launched recently at the Museum of Vancouver, calls “the happy city.”

What is at stake in this march and why should I have reason to object to it? What grounds can there be on which to contest happiness? What can follow from such a position? Is it nothing more than contrarianism? Surely, some will say so. Many already have. But I maintain that happiness and the ways in which it has been instrumentalized and institutionalized in Vancouver—a site already circumscribed by a powerful and troublesome ‘wellness’ discourse—demands critical attention. The emergence of happiness as a guiding narrative framework in cities like Vancouver, after all, can hardly be treated as coincidental or anomalous. Rather, as Angela McRobbie [1] writes, over the past twenty years (and particularly in the years since the 2008 financial crisis), happiness-talk has become a common feature of post-industrial urban and cultural ecologies. However geographically disparate, cities like Berlin, London, San Francisco, and yes, Vancouver are today threaded together by and active participants in what she calls a kind of “upbeat business-minded euphoria.” Yet seductive though they might be, For McRobbie, these discourses ought to be understood primarily as disciplinary apparatuses. They work to incentivize civic and economic participation even as opportunities for these modes of engagement recede, batted back by the dynamics of predatory urbanization, property speculation, and labour precarization, all of which pry open rather than suture social divisions. As cities are evacuated of stable, long-term jobs and refashioned into entrepreneurial hubs and startup incubators that operate primarily through contracting, sub-contracting, and other forms of short-term employment, happiness shoulders an ever-increasing economic and political burden. As McRobbie puts it, “work has been re-invented to satisfy the needs and demands of a generation who, ‘disembedded’ from traditional attachments to family, kinship, community or region, now find that work must become a fulfilling mark of self…There is a utopian thread embedded in this wholehearted attempt to make-over the world of work into something closer to a life of enthusiasm and enjoyment.”

In an article published ten years later, McRobbie [2] goes on to suggest that while it would be wrong to simply dismiss as mere self-exploitation the attachment of such “energetic meanings” to deformalized work practices, these attachments nonetheless take shape within “a biopolitical landscape” characterized by “diminishing opportunities for work.” That is, as the pursuit of work becomes more or less constant, an incentive is required to sustain that pursuit. Happiness furnishes that incentive. If work is remade in the image of self-actualization, joy, and happiness, then surely the endless pursuit of work can be justified. Not only justified, but celebrated. In McRobbie’s words, happiness “functions to solve the problems thrown up by the decline of the employment society for an aspirational sector of the workforce.” It is happiness that steps in to ‘resolve’ the economic and cultural contradictions that, for me, quite literally made life in Vancouver unliveable: the contradiction between increasing rents and diminishing work opportunities (marginal increases in municipal employment figures in recent months do little to remediate British Columbia’s seemingly chronic inability to deliver on job-creation promises), between the command to engage and the steady collapse of the very infrastructure that sustains engagement, between the rhetoric that constructs the city as the ‘best place on earth’ and the reality of pervasive social isolation, loneliness, and economic inequality. Happiness-talk is the conjuring trick that seems to ease these tensions even as it leaves them substantively untouched, smoothes out rough edges even as it inflames divisions, and miraculously remakes meaningful, if unhappy, oppositions into mute continuities, noise into signal.

But this is not just about work. This is also about politics, ethics, sociality, and survival. For in the happy city, not only unhappy jobs but also unhappy people become disciplinary problems; little points of friction to be managed and minimized, failed nodes in otherwise happy networks, small fragments that rupture, displease, and unsettle. To speak ill is to identify oneself as illness, to put oneself at an angle to the affective grids that govern the terrain. As McRobbie writes, “in an atmosphere of businesses-like conviviality…the emphasis on presentation of self is incompatible with a contestatory demeanour. It’s not cool to be ‘difficult.’ Personal angst, nihilism, or mere misgivings must be privately managed and…carefully concealed.”

Anti-gentrification protesters who barricade development sites, outspoken critics who openly challenge city hall, those who attend to and stalwartly report the bad news—in my time in Vancouver, I saw all of them subjected to endless moral injunctions to behave, to be more respectful, and to engage in what many have the nerve to call ‘polite’ dialogue. In short, to smile and to keep on smiling: to smile as civic duty, to smile as political practice, to smile as ethical obligation, to smile as economic imperative; to make joy, sustain joy, and rehearse joy even in the face of manifest injustice and struggle; to make joy precisely because it evacuates the possibility of attending to manifest injustice and struggle. Instrumentalized and instutionalized as a new urban imperative, as the condition of one’s livelihood, and as that which secures one’s participation in civic and political life, happiness demands and installs a certain kind of inattention. Its modes of engagement are promised and satisfied precisely in the gesture of turning-away-from. It is productive to the extent that it quite literally makes-up new kinds of urban subjecthood, yet this productivity comes at the expense of leaving untouched all those conditions that would threaten it. It is secured through the dual motions of disavowal and conjuring, rather than through the more prosaic work of responding-to, taking-account-of, and staying-with. In McRobbie’s [3] words, it helps to instantiate a “‘PR’ meritocracy where the question of who gets ahead on what basis and who is left behind finds no space for expression. Speed and risk negate ethics, community and politics.”

Six months before I left Vancouver, and a little less than two months after I’d written my first and only suicide note, I found myself on a tiny bi-prop commuter plane somewhere between Los Angeles and Phoenix. In the middle of the night and through tears, I was reading Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness. In the opening pages of that book, Ahmed writes “Happiness: a wish, a will, a want…The history of happiness can be thought of as a history of associations. In wishing for happiness we wish to be associated with happiness, which means to be associated with its associations. The very promise that happiness is what you get for having the right associations might be how we are directed toward certain things. Happiness shapes what coheres as a world.” Later, she continues: “to consider happiness as a form of world making is to consider how happiness makes the world cohere around, as it were, the right people.” If happiness can make a world cohere, if it can organize a world around certain bodies and certain lives understood to be happy, then to be unhappy is to find oneself at odds with that world in the most fundamental sense. It is to find oneself up against but ultimately outside of those ways of being and being-with that seem to hold the world together as a place that one might inhabit, where one might survive. Where one might put one’s feet on the ground. It is not exactly to be excluded, nor is it to be fully illegible. But it is to be, as McRobbie put it, “difficult,” the wrong kind of person. It is to realize that “the world ‘houses’ some bodies more than others, such that some bodies do not experience that world as resistant.” It is to be “stressed by the very forms of life that enable some bodies to flow into space.” Unhappiness is lived as a kind of unhousing, or as a way of being unhoused.

In contemporary Vancouver, this odd affinity between unhappiness, unhousing, and resistance is made concrete. It is a place where homes routinely disappear, where lives and bodies are “stressed” by institutionally sanctioned kinds of movement, and where critical political claims are routinely dismissed as mere contrarianism, as so much naysaying. The effects of bad attitudes. It is a place where the work of world-making and its attendant forms of civic, political, cultural, and social engagement are to be organized under the rubric of happiness, lest one become something of an exile. To return to Ahmed: “Happiness scripts could be thought of as straightening devices, ways of aligning bodies with what is already lined up. The points that accumulate as lines can be performatives: a point on a line can be a demand to stay in line. To deviate from the line is to be threatened with unhappiness.”

At some point, this threat becomes unbearable and the lived experience of unhappy exile becomes unliveable. And at that point, there is a choice to be made between attempting to somehow bear that unliveable life and imagining a different sort of world and a different sort of world-making process that does not automatically privilege those institutional forms of happiness that, for being mandatory, unhouse and stress. Ahmed responds to this junction with the notion of “killing joy as a world making project.” It seems counter-intuitive, but when joy becomes unbearable and happiness unliveable, perhaps the best hope for survival, for feeling at home and in the world (and at home in the world) is precisely the undoing of joy. Or at least the undoing of the ways in which it is instrumentalized and made into a form of discipline; to bend the “straightening device” of happiness beyond recognition.

Six years after I first arrived, almost to the day, I left Vancouver. It was August, and save for the humidity that made the midday breeze dense and close, I felt almost nothing at all. Neither joy nor sadness. But there was and there is a degree of freedom in that ‘almost,’ a (political) space between euphoria and misery that I am willing to call a place for surviving. If unhappiness, within a happiness regime, is lived as a way of being unhoused, then perhaps the way to make the unhappy life liveable is to make a home in unhappiness’ domain, to take and hold place there; to stay with it and take it seriously as part of the gravity of the social, rather than simply walling it up and closing it off. Now, that is where I hope to make a world.

Notes:

[1] McRobbie, A. (2002). Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Words. In Cultural Studies 16(4), pp. 516-531.

[2] McRobbie, A. (2012). A Good Job Well Done: Richard Sennett and the Politics of Creative Labour. In (M. Heinlein et al., eds.), Futures of Modernity: Challenges for Cosmopolitical Thought and Practice, pp. 155-177. Transcript-Verlag

[3] McRobbie, A. (2002). Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Words. In Cultural Studies 16(4), pp. 516-531.