Ordinary Affects

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/ordinary affects/

A couple of pages in, I decided that even though this is a scholarly work, probably belonging to the discipline of postmodern anthropology, I lack the background to be able to read it in a scholarly manner. Instead, I let it kind of break over me. I read it as if it was poetry. And I enjoyed it. I can't tell you what it's about, mind you. It abounds in anecdotes, ranging from a pleasant but odd encounter in a check-out queue to horrific violence, from bizarre plane travel incidents to odd things seen from the car. It offers fascinating reflections on public responses to big events – the OJ trials, the Columbine shootings, child care sex abuse scandals, nuclear waste show more disposal, 11 September 2001. It positively bristles with gnomic utterances that would make great epigraphs for poems ('The ordinary can turn on you,' or 'Dream meets nightmare in the flick of an eye') or citations in other scholarly works ('Like a live wire, the subject [which I think here means a person] channels what's going on around it in a the process of its own self-composition. Formed by the coagulation of intensities, surfaces, sensations, perceptions and expressions, it's a thing composed of encounters and the spaces and events it traverses or inhabits').

Ordinary Affects deals in something that precedes thought: 'The ordinary can happen before the mind can think.' 'Something' is a word that Stewart uses often and interestingly, usually in the phrase 'or something', as if to insist on the provisional nature of her thinking. At least part of what Stewart means by 'ordinary affect' is what happens when we pay attention, how we integrate, or not, the many influences on our perception, our emotional responses, our unreflective thoughts.

I found myself remembering the only lines I know from the US poet Muriel Rukeyser:

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET

(The capitals are hers.)

If I get a chance I'll re-read this book, though I expect it will be a matter of letting it break over my head again. show less

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 show more 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. show less