Ordinary Affects

Kathleen Stewart is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the AmÉrico Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America.

• Acknowledgments ixOrdinary Affects 1References 131

“Ordinary Affects works superbly as a challenge to prevailing norms of social and cultural research and as an effective call to surface, to the mundane, and the ordinary. . . . At their best, [these vignettes] are as fascinating as a short story by Raymond Carver, though they show an intellectual lineage with figures like Walter Benjamin, Michel Leiris, and Michael Taussig .” - Craig Campbell, Space and Culture “In this short, insightful book, Kathleen Stewart probes a dizzying range of scenes and structures of ordinary life in America. With keen ethnographic attention to American cultural detail, Stewart exposes the multilayered forces, surges, blockages, and intensities that shape and invent the affective texture of, and complex public feelings pervading, disparate but familiar places and vehicles of the American dreamscape: supermarkets, cars, malls, highways, subdivisions, small towns, motels, railroads, and so on. . . . Stewart contributes great insight for revising theoretical and methodological approaches to ordinary life and culture and, in so doing, provides an overdue and important entry on the meaning and uses of affect for anthropology. The appearance of Ordinary Affects augurs well for new and productive forms of ethnographic inquiry and cultural study.” - David Staples, American Ethnologist “Stewart’s ethnographer’s eye and attention to concrete, lived experience give us an extraordinarily vivid portrayal of America at the end of the twentieth century/dawn of the twenty-first. . . . The power of Ordinary Affects is simply this: it asks us to attend to our own networks, to linger on these moments of tension and communion rather than assimilating them quickly into our own personal, private narratives.” - Megan Savage, The Indiana Review “Rather than simply theorizing about cultural poesis, Stewart performs it. . . . Stewart is a gifted storyteller. Her tales are written in the third person, which alienates the author from herself, creating the requisite critical distance rigorous academic scholarship requires. Equally important, however, this narrative format casts readers in the role of affective ethnographer to Stewart’s extraordinarily ordinary stories, awakening us from the stupor induced by far too much torpid academic prose and engendering a new form of critical intimacy.” - Sara L. Warner, Feminist Theory “This is hardly conventional ethnography. It pushes ethnography to the brink and beyond, scoring high in poetics and resonant voice. Ordinary Affects is to ethnography what slow food is to American cuisine. Savor it.” - Elizabeth L. Krause, Anthropology and Humanism “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 “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 “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 “Ordinary Affects works superbly as a challenge to prevailing norms of social and cultural research and as an effective call to surface, to the mundane, and the ordinary. . . . At their best, [these vignettes] are as fascinating as a short story by Raymond Carver, though they show an intellectual lineage with figures like Walter Benjamin, Michel Leiris, and Michael Taussig .” - Craig Campbell (Space and Culture) “In this short, insightful book, Kathleen Stewart probes a dizzying range of scenes and structures of ordinary life in America. With keen ethnographic attention to American cultural detail, Stewart exposes the multilayered forces, surges, blockages, and intensities that shape and invent the affective texture of, and complex public feelings pervading, disparate but familiar places and vehicles of the American dreamscape: supermarkets, cars, malls, highways, subdivisions, small towns, motels, railroads, and so on. . . . Stewart contributes great insight for revising theoretical and methodological approaches to ordinary life and culture and, in so doing, provides an overdue and important entry on the meaning and uses of affect for anthropology. The appearance of Ordinary Affects augurs well for new and productive forms of ethnographic inquiry and cultural study.” - David Staples (American Ethnologist) “Rather than simply theorizing about cultural poesis, Stewart performs it. . . . Stewart is a gifted storyteller. Her tales are written in the third person, which alienates the author from herself, creating the requisite critical distance rigorous academic scholarship requires. Equally important, however, this narrative format casts readers in the role of affective ethnographer to Stewart’s extraordinarily ordinary stories, awakening us from the stupor induced by far too much torpid academic prose and engendering a new form of critical intimacy.” - Sara L. Warner (Feminist Theory) “Stewart’s ethnographer’s eye and attention to concrete, lived experience give us an extraordinarily vivid portrayal of America at the end of the twentieth century/dawn of the twenty-first. . . . The power of Ordinary Affects is simply this: it asks us to attend to our own networks, to linger on these moments of tension and communion rather than assimilating them quickly into our own personal, private narratives.” - Megan Savage (Indiana Review)