Ordinary Affects

by Kathleen Stewart

Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances rendered are from Stewart’s own life, she writes in the third person in order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world. Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system—whether it’s called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism—to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history—one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life—Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world.

Genres: Anthropology, Theory, Nonfiction, Academic, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Grad School

129 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Chloe Coventry · Rating 4 out of 5]

social theory for poets

[Jocelyn Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it slowly, a little at a time. Very satisfying vignettes demonstrating the theory of affect. Beautifully written.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

my dream class would have this and delillo's white noise as required texts. or something. a kind of unclassifiable work (my favorite) about learning to see what charges a moment into a sort of event. or something. beautifully written, almost like prose poems. a poetic guidebook to contemporary culture. that it happens to be set in texas adds familiar color for me. it's definitely piqued my interest in "affect theory," which feels tantalizingly like a reflection of buddhism's middle way. like western theorists stumbling their way toward buddhist philosophy.

[Mohammed Yusuf · Rating 3 out of 5]

كما انفتاح اللغة على التأويل يكون انفتاح الفعل لكنه اعقد وأبعد ، في كل لحظة هنالك تفسير هنالك تراكمات لخبرات ، حدوس وتنبؤات، هل هي نظرية الانفعال هي ما يخلق هذه اللانهاية من الأفكار ام نظرة حالمة مني

[Nat Nesvaderani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is it, or isn't it anthropology? It seemed to matter to me a great deal while reading the book, but now that it's done and re-shelved, I'm left with the powerful moments and feels that come through Stewart's strong descriptions. I appreciated that, instead of calling out the big names (capitalism, colonialism, blah-blah-ism), as manly scholars are compelled to do, she leaves us at the interactional everyday, in the lingering odor of dryer sheets. While it's a book that wrestles with scholarly and literary genre, it may not be a book that translates across class, race, or certain kinds of academic privilege.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathleen Stewart writes:


The objects of mass desire enact the dream of sheer circulation itself – travel, instant communication, movies, catalogues, the lure of new lifestyles patched together from commodities gathered into scenes of possible life.

The experience of being “in the mainstream” is a concrete sensory experience of literally being in tune with “something” that’s happening.

But nothing too heavy or sustained.

It’s being in tune without getting involved. A light contact zone that rests on a thin layer of shared public experiences.

A fantasy that life can be somehow seamless and that we’re in the know, in the loop, not duped. That nothing will happen to us, and nothing we do will have real consequences – nothing that can’t be fixed, anyway.

The experience of being “in the mainstream” is like a flotation device.

But its very surge to enter life lite leaves in its wake a vague sense of all the circuits that give things a charge.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book. If you love cultural poetics, I recommend Mick Taussig's work and in the field of Composition/Rhetoric, Geoffrey Sirc's _Composition as a Happening_. Also Ross Chamber's lovely book, Loiterature. These authors saved "Academic Writing" from being an oxymoron for me.

[Margaret Robbins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book and found the vignettes toward the beginning especially compelling. I have an interest in affect theory and ethnography, and reading this book increased my understanding of both concepts. This ethnographic observations of every day life and the passions behind the events showed an intriguing, alternative way to represent data that parallels other feminist qualitative researchers I have read so far, such as Margery Wolf and Bettie St. Pierre. The introduction of the book was helpful in disseminating the book's overall purpose. Overall, I am intrigued to read more about affect theory and how to put it into action with my own research. The affect Stewart describes in these vignettes reminds me of what I've experienced in some fandom events I have attended, so I am excited to explore the concept further.

[Clive Tetris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects offers many intriguing short stories that register the intensities and all-encompassing immediacy of ordinary life, and how it has the ability to disconnect, disperse and distort rational thought from the foreground; “to the point of literal senselessness.” It portrays life as a collective of 'hardwired' surging affects and little dreams; one is so folded in, that “attention is distracted, pulled away from itself”, and what remains from the pull to attention is both “confused and attuned” simultaneously.

[Adam Lauver · Rating 5 out of 5]

she stoops to rejoin the water and ambiguity and dirt of lived/pre-signified experience, reintroducing consciousness to intentionality, suggesting (maybe?) that the greatest challenge is simply being aware and attuned but that so often we shirk that challenge and slide dodgefully around the most vital moments in life, extremely careful not to brush up against them because if we did we might lose something or gain something or, what's worse, have something happen to us that isn't easily categorized into either

[Fiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

A text that touches you to the core of your being. To actually achieve a poetics of the ordinary is a brilliant achievement, but then again Stewart would not wish for this to be characterized as such.

Composed as a series of vignettes that are specific to capturing an ethos of contemporary America, the images are yet so familiar to other spaces and places.

The singularity of each moment as lived in life is perhaps for the first time really given importance. Read to see the peripheral everyday brought to center stage.

[Christina]

Didn’t want to rate this book because I didn’t care enough (assigned for a grad school workshop). I found it unfocused and forced and meandering, with no real innovations or ideas, and not even a very compelling commentary on affect theory (which I always find better defined with different words/language not called “affect theory,” and annoying in its vagueness). Very navel-gaze-y.

[Michelle Clegg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably not a book that I would choose to read of my own accord. However this book was interesting nonetheless. I enjoyed each of the vignettes and how they complimented each other, and emphasized the points made in earlier episodes.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had fun reading this book!

[Laura Merlina]

Found this super frustrating at first, but as I reread the vignettes over and over (and over and over) I really came to appreciate this. Her voice is so distinct which was great for me and the reason we had to read this.
Someone said social theory for poets and yeah. I am not an affect theorist and not a poet (I wish) so did I fully understand this ? No? But it makes me feel better that Stewart self proclaims this as an experiment. Also probably would be a better read if savored, and I just didn’t have the time for that.
Like I was there in it, then I wasn’t.
Wait also wanted to say I loved how western it was. Everytime austin was mentioned I was like omg🥰

[Shane Skelcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this book. It definitely made me think about the little moments which make a life, but some of the writing was just a little too confusing. I’m chalking it up to reader error anyway.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Theory hidden in prose poetry. Some bits here and there were helpful to my project but overall the text functions as entertaining little snippets with an affective theme. A methodology I'm glad to explore.

[Kandace · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do we make sense of the ordinary? Stewart sets out to do it by speculating and articulating the ways that the ordinary takes shape in our world, through short vignettes and with a variety of examples to illuminate her points. The book then is organized kind of like the currents of activity, feeling, and structures she tracks in terms of how they interact and build off of one another. Each vignette is rich in its own right and expands to form a constellation of the experience of the mundane and the extraordinary in attempts to name the sensations of themes like mainstream or ordinary. Thought provoking and definitely a book from the library I'm now working on getting my own copy to mark up.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Stewart's book appears slight and impressionistic, its exquisitely crafted vignettes display an incredibly sophisticated gift for uncovering the significance of the ordinary, everyday lives of people in contemporary America. From this start, this book announces itself as decidedly different from standard ethnographies: Stewart writes in the third person, does not perform the narrow but deep analysis so common to academic studies, and refuses to ground her observations within the common ideological tropes she attempts to depict. In eschewing such things, she opens up the possibilities for what her book can do and rises to the extraordinary task she sets herself: providing carefully crafted, beautifully written accounts of moments as varied as photocopying documents in academic lounge to witnessing the consequences of a terrible biking accident. In brief, she attempts to give voice to a collective "we" whose voices are often obscured and even more frequently absent from theoretical attempts to describe contemporary life. In my reading, her attempt is widely successful, and if taken to its most extreme end offers an entirely new theoretical persuasion for academics interested in understanding the affective dimensions of experience. Unfortunately, the uniqueness of Stewart's methodology means that it couldn't be easily replicable -- in large part because her gift for careful description is uncommon to the average scholar. However, her contribution is well-worth reading in its own right. I only wish it were as easy to mimic as to admire.

[Jeanine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came home to find this in my mailbox one day. My good friend had sent it to my as a surprise holiday gift! That in itself has made it a special book for me, and I'm not sure if I could have not read it through at that point. I appreciated how many of the stories were somehow connected to each other; it was kind of like reading a mix cd of vignettes. I haven't read a whole lot of writing like this so I did find myself reading and rereading parts over and over again, instinctively searching for a plot thinking, "wait, what happened?" But that's not the point if this book, and as soon as I was able to let go of that, I still read parts of it over and over, but it was to absorb all the detail-- not because I was stuck on a plot that wasn't there. Happy to keep this as a book on my shelf.

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

We experience the ordinary in "failed relays" and "jumpy moves" and attunements. We rush to gather up banal events into a totalizing narrative without seeing such events for what they are - floating images. To quote Kathleen Stewart:

"Ideologies happen. Power snaps into place. Structures grow entrenched. Identities take place. Ways of knowing become habitual at the drop of a hat. But it’s ordinary affects that give things the quality of a something to inhabit and animate...Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences."

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that represents the very beginnings of an experiment: to try to step outside the consuming flow of “ordinary” life and try to say something about its makeup. Stewart uses language almost like an incantation, to try to summon to mind the strange pulls and resonances of objects and circumstances normally beneath remark—brief eye contact, standing in lines, the squeeze of a sponge. Often she fails, but when she succeeds it’s pretty mind blowing.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating study of the everyday, but a study which is far removed from that of for instance de Certeau. Instead, Stewart argues that the ordinary affects we all undergo every day are the primary ways we engage with the world. An autobiography written in third person, the style is dreamy and associative, just like the ordinariness of every day.

[Keight · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided. It takes everything we have. But it also spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things.” Read more on the booklog

[Jessie Pants · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found myself feeling bereft after finishing this. The writing drew me in to a kind of meditative engagement with the everyday that Stewart grapples with. Excellent read, blending theory with performative writing and observation.

[scottishgirlreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to read this for a rhetoric class about emotions and it was amazing. It made me look at my own writing and want to change my writing style and play off the words the way she does. So many moments in the book resonated with me, so it really was an affective moment reading this.

[Laçin Tutalar · Rating 5 out of 5]

on intensities of acts, encounters and 'jumps' (wonderful choice of word, thank you, Stewart!) that make sense if the protagonists don't pause for a moment and look into a mirror for long enough to recognize their jump.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took several undergrad classes with Dr. Stewart and her ability to write with cultural metaphors is simply amazing! A unique voice in the academic arena.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an amazing collection of short vignettes about the politics of public feeling and the intense emotional saturation of ordinary moments.

[Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very thought provoking book about looking at the minutiae of American culture and seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary.