Kathleen Stewart - Ordinary Things

In Ordinary Affects, Stewart, writes "The notion of a totalized, of which everything is always already somehow a part, is not helpful (to say the least) in the effort to approach a weighted and reeling present" (1). She continues by setting writing her goal at bringing these 'forces' into view, and defining 'the ordinary' which for her is "a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life" (1). Stewart sets to write about this ordinary affects in the 'United States caught in a present that began some time ago' (1).

Building on the work of Raymond Williams, Deleuze, Guattari, Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Leslie Stern, Sedwick, Stewart writes about encounters and of "public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation" (2), and of affects that are a "kind of contact zone where the overdetermination of ciculations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place" (3). Her approach is one that points towards that which cannot be easily measured, that is vague, that can't be quantified. It is, instead "a problem or question." She writes: "Models of thinking that slide over the live surface of difference at work...mis how someone's ordinary can endure or can sag defeated; how it can shift in the face of events like a shift in the kid's school schedule or the police at the door" (4).

She got me right there. I understood what she was talking about. For I have had those changes in schedule, and a knock at the door –not of the police –but of adversity, tragedy, intolerance, suffering. Those things that can't be placed in a scale, but that make experience. Events that as she writes: "They can gather themselves into what we think as stories and selves. But they can also remain, or become again, dispersed, floating, recombining –regardless of what whole or what relay of rushing signs they might find themselves in for a while" (6).

We all have those knocks at the door, but what Stewart does with them is what matters. She presents them as to leave the reader with "an embodied sense of the world as a dense network of mostly unknown links" (6).

How wonderful!

It reminds me of what Juan Rulo, a Mexican writer wrote: "In order to see reality one needs a lot of imagination."

"Para ver la realidad se necesita mucha imaginacion."

For what I wrote about Cultural Poesis, another writing by Stwewart, see
Snapshot of US culture