The Hundreds

by Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making. The experiment of the one hundred word constraint—each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long—amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground. What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Writing, Theory, Philosophy, School, Politics

184 pages, Hardcover

First published February 22, 2019

About the author

Lauren Berlant was an English Professor at the University of Chicago, where they taught since 1984. Berlant received their Ph.D. from Cornell University. They wrote and taught on issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.

Reviews

[Ian Power · Rating 2 out of 5]

Review of The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant & Kathleen Stewart

I’ll start by saying that I’m a fan of Lauren Berlant, and her death did what so many artist’s deaths do, which is motivate me to get to know her work better, and this book had been on my list since I started my list in 2019. I’m a proponent of thinking about the world via affect. It is, in so many words, how I teach art to students, and how I think about music when I’m writing it.

I might be guilty of being uncreative, and wanting scholarship to stay scholarship, and poetry to stay poetry. I have also been guilty of reacting poorly to work that I see too much of myself in, in the sense that I recognize goals, defense mechanisms, shortcuts. The authors here, it felt like, were experimenting with where their groundbreaking concepts could take them in prose poetry. They were collaborating too, a place where my defense mechanisms tend to come out even more. I suspended my disbelief with the book for a while but I found myself shielding against uncharitable thoughts, which then gets me thinking about Tressie McMillan Cottom’s advice that when you don’t understand an academic work, consider that you might not be its audience. I thought I started to recognize some academic tricks, though. The trick of performing a musical genre with your academic peers who are impressed with hobbying skill but unqualified to judge it. The trick of buttressing your art with descriptions and reading recommendations that your peers can judge instead of the art itself. Placing the profane alongside the sacred or the popular alongside the scholarly to perform a breadth of interest and an unbothered indulgence in your personal tastes.

Although each contribution is unlabeled, I started to get the sense that I enjoyed one writer’s contributions more than the other’s. I have the same feeling about They Might Be Giants, and, in a similar way, there was the lingering feeling that I could also be wrong about who was who. The passage “In It,” which describes each author’s style, confirmed it for me a bit, as I preferred for “all the knowledge of a place to converge” with “precision and rhythm” to the alternative of getting “the world some attention.” I prefer Berlant’s microscopy to Stewart’s overt referentiality.

I made a joke on twitter that, filtered through this work, affect theory is akin to “competitive noticing.” It was a joke that I hope doesn’t get me cancelled--again, I love affect theory and Berlant especially! The scholarly works of affect theory feel contained, like many diverse ideas as pebbles in an urn, where they have purchase with one another. This felt like an attempt to completely flatten the plane of the ideas, to smash the urns of genre and scatter the pebbles across the beach, and as a result I felt myself sprawled on the ground trying to feel them all. The prose is pleasant, but it is almost Seinfeldian in each passage’s take on “have you ever noticed…” And in the flatness of the attempt to move beyond scholarship OR poetry into “the world,” in the attempt to get down to the minute level and notice every detail, the authors fall back on stereotypes in pursuit of an immediacy of recognition in their readership. How else to explain casual references to “homeless” people or “heroin addicts” from two minds who mean to represent the most enlightened among us? I also have a pet peeve about leveraging students’ personal lives for one’s work, and in this context, “Office Hours” strikes me as practically unforgivable. It’s entirely possible the author had permission to share, of course.

Maybe this prose has a genre that I simply do not see, because when another genre is added--the delightful cartoons in Andrew Causey & C. Thresher’s “Not-Index” to the book--I feel like I have more to grasp, and the rest of the essays shine a little more as I look back on them. The essay I’m most likely to take with me into the future is “Writing, Life,” because it is a description of, well, writing life, with an honesty and detail that I think will be quite useful to my students. And as an academic, part of me is taken in by the bibliography, no matter how performative. As for the observations otherwise scattered throughout, at best they are a fun template for making my own. Which is maybe how they wanted it.

[Nate Rennick · Rating 5 out of 5]

makes me love my soylent

[Alana · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It might be worth saying that the next phase pulses. We’ve done a lot of coasting in our life. We’ve coasted more than lived. The yogurt, the potatoes, the peanuts and bananas. If we’re lucky, and only if we’re lucky, we’ll get to do more of that, more not paying attention and being forgiven for mistakes we could have avoided. But the world isn’t made for most of the people who make value in it: rebegin there. That includes us. All the kissing and commenting and ridiculous eating to keep things going distract us: the exceptional cruelty too."

[Frankie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m inspired by this as a project, particularly the experiments with citation and indexing which reminds me of Reality Hunger which I loved so much last year. But the reading experience was eye-glazing. Also in the preface they mention there are blank pages for your own indexing experiments which I was fully on board with but you get there and there’s only half a page and I think they must have forgotten to actually put those pages in when typesetting 😭

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://chopsueyngarod.wordpress.com/...

One time, I was a student and Mam Grace ripped to shreds my overworked thesis proposal (BLL 199!) which I left dormant under her office’s door (she’s with the Office of Public Affairs then)—and she accepted it as a *late* submission, as she should have, no doubt about it.

[daniel dillon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful, provocative, smart, funny. There is a lot to love in this little book. I recommend putting the analytic away for the reading; feel your way through these and see what happens. You can always interpret it to hell once you've finished.

[Molly Nash · Rating 3 out of 5]

fascinating concept but the execution was difficult

think it would be best read slowly, having to read it as a whole book at once was overwhelming and confusing

lots of potential and fun writing practices embedded

[Kay Slater · Rating 4 out of 5]

jackalope being mentioned made me Cry

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The co-writers are a (recently passed) cultural theorist from the University of Chicago and an Austin Anthropologist, Lauren Berlant (1957-2021) and Kathleen Stewart. They write at the margins of their disciplines, a collaborative project in the representative anecdote, 100 short prose passages of 100 words ordinarily, though many go beyond that word-count. The collaborators use writing in their classrooms, and no doubt a few of these prose poems come out of free-writes done with students.

We might think of the collaboration itself as a context-collapsing inquiry into the social-poetic where social must now include things as well as persons, stylistically in a flat aside from the lyric, though in flirtation with chance (that word-count introducing a random element). That is, its concessions to compression include that it takes some game rules seriously though it's never quite explicit what they are. Nor does it see why we need to know. It does not operate in verse but tropes are understood as meditations in an emergency. O'Hara is invoked explicitly.

I got here because I have read some Berlant. "Cruel Optimism" always seemed an idea you'd want to convince an adjunct college teacher of if you wanted them or hoped they'd resign their meagre posting. (The tenured always do want you to resign so they can move a younger student into your spot. Collegiality has also thinned out.) The self-interested tendentiousness of the collocation ought to be apparent on the face of it, however it made Berlant much sought after on the lecture circuit. She had the reputation as a master teacher so I came for the news (I'm a teacher) which is not entirely a scrutable position from which to criticize the book.

I liked it well enough though it got better as it went on. In the last ten pieces we get a set of maxims from the authors' reading for a week (12/16/16), 39 aphorisms that offer a sense of what the two value in what they read -- a good spoiler alert for their teaching. From, I assume, Berlant, we get this slight revision of Raymond Williams ("The point would then be, not to find some other term to replace [criticism] while continuing the same activity, but to get rid of the habit [of judgment], which depends, fundamentally, on the abstraction of response from its real situation and circumstances . . ."): "Evaluative critique is a mental habit of demagnetizing things for the sake of clarity. Try remagnetizing and then think again." Berlant tweaks Williams by introducing the trope from magnetism, appropriate for a historian of affect. [This trope is not unlike Geoffrey Hill's "rose in the steel dust" trope in his Oxford Lecture on Chesterton's "the democracy of the dead" -- the ontological background is similarly magnetism.]

On this account, what's getting re-magnetized for me is the socially agitant impatience of cultural theory with literary vanity of aspiring to have a style. We have seen this before in things like Harvard's The New Literary History of America (also short essays by academics that bring the literary to cultural history), but here the endeavor is more modest. Here's a typical sentence: "The freedom of loving is like this swerving ongoing transcranial fishing for our unshakable relational singularity, which includes our tropes." There's some ranginess of tone: "ongoing transcranial fishing," natch. It's useful to know that Duke thinks this kind of thing needs to hit faster and catch-out its insights more al fresca.

[Leah W · Rating 5 out of 5]

1:
I enjoyed this book, though I suspected I was reading it wrong. On the back, it said “CULTURAL STUDIES / ANTHROPOLOGY / AFFECT THEORY”, but I chose to read it as a series of tone poems, a bulked-up version of the Felix Feneon approach where all of the pieces had to be some multiple of a hundred words. At the bottom of most pieces, a great thinker of the last 100 years was referenced (though sometimes the references were to the show “Search Party” or “Four boxes of cranberry bread mix”). I could’ve gone deeper, but I didn’t need to.

2:
My partner asked me what this book was about. I replied, “Aboutness is not what this book is about,” which may madden some but I found refreshing.

In the last year, I’ve been frequently annoyed by live interviews conducted by professors, curators, directors and lawyers. I understand that people in these professions have been trained to pursue and prove an argument, stick to a thesis, but this is a terrible approach to an in-person conversation. I’ve watched several great conversationalists have to respond to interview questions that start “Would you agree that”, and questions with a yes or no answers. It feels less like an interview and more like a self-interrogation done with an unwilling accomplice. It makes me appreciate journalists and comedians, those who don’t always pursue something with a point, even more in these settings.

However, at least on first read, this book wasn’t pursuing a particular argument, which feels miraculous given it was primarily written by two professors (plus some other academics adding brief indices). I like exploring wide-open spaces with sharp-minded writers; they can return to arguing theses, but this book is a treasure. It also includes the greatest review of shake powders I’ve ever read.

3:
Here are some favorite quotes:

Writing, Life: Once, I needed the perfect time and place to write. I stood in my way like a poison-pen letter to myself. But slowly, under the velocities of worldly reals that came and went, I learned to write in my own skin, like it or not.

Red Bull Diaries: The university is a harbor for Cartesian OCDers testing out their desires for impact.

Weight of the World: Too many of us get a shit storm of a life and then have to find a way to get to the food bank on top of everything.

Outside chances: The phrase “people are idiots” is the lingua franca of the moment and, OK, enough said, but there’s also a lot of work going on here. Any pressure point is a social tendon tweaking.

This Week in Shakes: I had committed to two tubs of vegan breakfast powder. One recalled inhaled bugs and the other a bully shoving my face down hard into tough wet dirt.

Refractions: Evaluative critiqued is a mental habit of demagnetizing things for the sake of clarity. Try remagnetizing and then think again.

Under Pressure: Ours is a thought experiment of thought experiments.

[Margaryta · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 40%.

I was clearly getting nowhere with "The Hundreds." I was forcing my way through it without enjoying it. The book really does read like a compilation of writing exercises based on a specific rule/restriction, in this case to write a text that is a hundred words, or a multiple of a hundred. Many of the pieces felt eccentric and the speaker rubbed me the wrong way. There were also a few places where it felt like the writing was trying to be edgy or cool with its wording/focus but it wasn't working for me. The only reason why I'm giving this two stars is because it wasn't AWFUL in a way that some books could be and I feel like "The Hundreds" at least deserves an A for effort.

Maybe I'll pick this up again in the future because "The Hundreds" has something of Maggie Nelson's "Bluets" to it, which I reread recently and enjoyed and appreciated much more several years after my initial reading. Right now, though, this isn't for me, nor will I clearly get any more out of this if I force myself through the second half for another month.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just because everyone is ragging on Sebald currently (randomly) it’s worth mentioning that line I think Walter Benjamin said about how the greatest writers of their generation create their own genres. The Hundreds is certainly a genre of one - brief, deeply structured fragments of daily existence structured in increments of 100 - but the dense layering of information, anecdote, and theory makes for particularly difficult reading.

This book is certainly ambitious and brilliant. I do not know enough about Affect Theory to understand precisely how this ties into that. Packed sentences overflowing with detail underlie the fact that this book seems so alienated with human experience, or at least how I see the world as Peter. Maybe I was reading too quickly? I get the sense that these works, collected, spoke to something about the ways people are layered upon each other and how we are networked. I can’t really say I found the experience of reading this was enjoyable or easy to interpret.

Sebald (and autofiction) work as genres because of the interplay between storytelling, fact, and fiction. The Hundreds doesn’t really deal in any of these, if that’s even possible. References to books and other “thinking material” are given but rarely clarified. Sometimes, I was unsure of why a particular hundred was even added, although the authors seem certain it is.

In the second matrix there’s this scene where the key maker opens a door to a bleached infinite hallway of doors that serves as back-end developer access to the rest of the world. In this hallway, Neo describes it as “feeling like death”, but somewhere there’s a door that leads to the world building “architect”. This book feels a bit like this to me - you can access any of the doors and they will take you to many places, but they are devoid of something I can’t quite put my finger on. You get the sense that behind one of these doors lies an answer, but there’s no way of knowing which one unless you’re in on it. Does this book aim for expansiveness at the cost of deep feelings? Was it trying to be more emotional than I recognized? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not smart enough lol

[emma truong · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the way Lauren Berlant described brief but impactful encounters as “animum”, the occurrence of something after which you “can never know what is forgotten or remembered.” (what can this something l be?) To not know what is forgotten or remembered implies an irreversibility, and also a lack of agency, of letting things happen to you - you can’t really choose to forget, can you?

I like the form of the hundreds, and the *freedom* it allows for, not just structurally but also as an affect on the side of the writer.

I often think about whether there is any way you could be convincing when talking about feelings
without it being personal. It seems to me that Berlant is playing a game with this question by making it so fleeting and lacking in context that what you are left with to wonder is whether anything written is about affect at all or is *big* enough to be a *thing* (because repetition creates a *thing*). The further I got in the book though, the greater the urge I had to look for myself in these unnameable instances. Relatability is more convenient in a text like this because it's not righteous/ rationalized/ moralized.

if you are busy, i would recommend 'red bull diaries', 'once', 'if we could pay attention to everything', 'all i know is', 'book reviews', 'ordinary love', and 'in it'.

if you have only a minute or if i really want to convince you to read this, i would recommend 'what is it to be naked among men?'

[Ava · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Punctum" ought to mean whatever grabs you into an elsewhere of form. There ought also to be a word like "animum," meaning what makes an impact so live that its very action shifts around the qualities of things that have and haven't yet been encountered. You can never know what is forgotten or remembered. Even dormancy is a kind of action in rela-tion. Think about watching a dead thing, a thing sleeping, or these words. Think about skimming as a hunger and defense against hunger. Think about the physiological pressure of itching.


Sentimentality doesn't describe this noumenal-material suspension, the sudden cushioning density of the summons to an outside chance. Everyone has their own version of the glimpse of a long-forgotten realm of possibility suddenly intruding into the real like a splice of light captured in a photograph. My version of this is a recurring dream in which I'm walking to the back of an old house I forgot existed through room after room, repeating my surprise to rediscover them, some already clean, most still occupied by the detritus, clothes, and toothbrushes of a living that once looked for traction and company here.

We need the weight of the world we fear. Were selfie-obsessed or hoard-ing. Or were all about mindfulness and hardened against those who fail. Whether were jumpy, or trained in the controlled pause, it's a world under pressure that inspires us.

[Sanna Wani · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books was an exercise in patience and in listening. It is purposefully defiant of linear time, so it took me months to read. It will take me months more to absorb. It asks to be read and reread—no, heard. Moments are sounds, calibrated to their sharpest inch. There is a lot (a lot) of really great descriptions of writing, why we write, ethnography. I loved all three of the indexes but Lepselter’s and Moten’s were my favourite. If this book gives you a headache, remember the times you go out with a friend who talks and talks and talks and also gives you a headache. Remember her stories are still worth hearing. Take your time—regroup—different shards pierce differently. Sense is a constraint—beyond it there are feelings worth feeling. My only complaints is the repeated use of the word crazy—an ableism I did not appreciate. Some of the racial political foundations left me wanting—the stuff about those Irish Americans fighting Asian Americans, the white supremacist kids by the lake. It is worth asking what can and should be poeticized. No—how it can be. Poetry is attends to life after all. Who’s life are you choosing?

[Kevin Hodgson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors leave us a blank page at the end, suggesting the reader create an Index of their own. My index is here in this review space (don't ask why ... I don't rightly know why):

Breath, taken away -- some passages, some sentences, some ideas, some scenes
Calculating -- why 100?
Huh -- more often than not, but not the huh of discouragement but the huh of discovery
Kilter, off -- slightly out of balance from passage to passage
Poems or Prose -- or prose poems
Unveiling, connection -- places where the authors reference what they are doing, embedded as 100s
Wandering, wondering -- leaving the pages for now to walk around with the words for a bit

(page number references for indexed point unavailable until further notice)

Kevin

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only give it three stars because I found it difficult to understand, the language of affect theory is beyond me. Maybe I’m just dumb. But in those passages where I did get it I found it really resonated with me. It wasn’t a happy resonance, it was a longing for something different, even while I remain trapped in my own scene (ha! Maybe I was paying attention? Or maybe I’m just trying to show everyone how clever I am).

I think if it was more accessible then I would have given it more stars, though that does seem unfair because it’s inaccessibility is my problem and stems from my own limits, rather than the authors’.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth reading if only to reach the indexes and relish how singular and mysterious reading actually is:

My favorite is Susan Lepselter’s index:

We ask our readers to perform the jamb when language overruns the mental breathing that reading entails…

….You remind me to point sideways, to the shapeless thing I want to name, the thing that hangs around. It shifts its shape. A shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to….

…We walk on the dunes and forget the news of missiles. We just feel this recursive earth might break any day like a glass container, back to the particles of its birth.

[Jay Jolles · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's difficult to articulate how I'm disappointed by this particular project, but...I am. Some of the language is exquisite and there are lines that are super gorgeous but this project leaves me with a lot of the same questions I often have when it comes to reading/exploring/looking at conceptual writing: how did this thing happen? what's at stake in that creation? If I try and disentangle the project from what I assume/presume some of its theoretical stakes to be, then it's a pretty engaging read with strong Maggie Nelson vibes.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book without presuming to “get” it all; Berlant & Stewart craft 100-word passages of observation & reflection about various life scenes/scenarios & words & composition. Their experiment of one hundred word constraint & their index-catalogue of “some things we thought with” inspire writing.

[Kennedy Butterfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the way this book helps you feel the way that all thinking is conversation and each participant in conversation is pivotal. And makes me think of how it feels being on an airplane with lots of people you didn’t choose but have to cooperate with. Index idea is so genius fun maybe I will make one.

[Amaris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful concoction between two minds that I admire. Pretty inaccessible to anyone not in the realm of affect theory and social theory; however, for nerds of that kind, this will be an exciting read. :)

[Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a text that I really love not just for it's prose, but also for it's form. For anyone interested in the practice of writing, as well as the affective profusions writing comes from and can induce for readers, I would highly recommend this text!

[Erik Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

"She reminds me of a woman I met who has trouble being in a room. I stood next to her. We started off pretty well, talking about books and travel and how we knew people, but after twenty minutes we were trapped. I drifted away, releasing us."

[Aya Nassar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun to write so fun to read!

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Knocks my head off...

[Kassidi Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you liked Tender Buttons, you'll like this!

[Gail Reitano · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will never finish this book because I keep dipping in and out and finding things. Rereading favorites and discovering others. My kind of book.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good book, but I feel like I’m “missing” something about the book.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...#