Ordinary Affects (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ordinary Affects is an extraordinary work of finely observed aspects of everyday life in contemporary America. It is a beautiful book about waking life, being awakened to life, and the fear and desire rippling on the surface of people's ordinary movements through space. Radical yet familiar, it is a profoundly pedagogical book."--Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship "Full of resonating stories, encounters quirky in their unapologetic ordinariness, and murmuring objects, this book takes me into the thick world of the everyday in the U.S.A. Intent on critique or explanation, too many scholars hardly know how to experience, much less think, such worlds, and so regularly give them Big Names like Capitalism and Modernity and Neoliberalism. Ordinary Affects sounds the depths and shallows of intimate, particular worlds crucial to finding our way in the tidal basin of contemporary culture. Here are accounts of lives in plain sight, but only if we cultivate the deceptively hard practices of slow looking and off-stage hearing. Kathleen Stewart touches the marrow of things by nurturing an oblique and unrushed sort of attention, one alert to the bio-luminescence generated in ordinary living taken seriously, without which we are in the dark in politics, philosophy, and cultural theory."--Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz "Anything but ordinary, this book rewrites the social sciences from top to bottom through its bleak and beautiful honesty as to the human condition and the conditional nature of our language and concepts. How the author has been able to step outside of the bubble we call reality so as to render reality is a miracle, yet one we might all aspire to on reading this."--Michael Taussig, Columbia University

Product Description

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press (October 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822341077
• ISBN-13: 978-0822341079
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #50,031 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thinking about the little things, May 10, 2009

By	Meredith R. Jones (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just loved this book. It's part autobiography, part description of the contemporary American world, part celebration of everything "ordinary". It makes everyday things seem bizarre and incredible, and has some beautiful writing that made me think about how we travel through time and space in our "now". In some ways, this book is very much about that cliche, "living in the moment", except that it encourages us to really look at that moment in order to fully experience its every minute inflection.