Abstract
The Hundreds, by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, is at once a bold thought experiment and a radical exploration of reflexive ethnographic writing. The subject of the book is ordinary life as it appears in moments and encounters with the world, and the way the quotidian stir ups or sediments in thoughts and ideas, feelings and sensations, facial expressions and bodily demeanours. The purpose is to capture “the new ordinary”; specifically, those affective dimensions of living and belonging in the United States in the present historical moment. The title refers to Berlant’s and Stewart’s experiment in writing: compositions of hundred-word units or units of hundred multiples that “[follow] out the impact of things”. The result is a captivating collection of one hundred vignettes that are at once familiar and strange. Familiar because the vignettes resonate with our own encounters with the ordinary — rude people, awkward social interactions, obsessions with selfies-taking and mindfulness — even if we do not reside in the United States. The compositions are also strange because they illuminate the idiosyncratic: the specific contexts of the United States—its cultural practices and patterns of behaviour as they manifest in various regions and neighbourhoods—and on the other hand, the particular ways in which the authors inhabit, observe, and respond to their life-worlds.
The Hundreds boldly experiments with structure, form, and content. It demonstrates how the affective, ethnographic, and reflexive turns coalesce, and is generative of a methodology that is about attunement to the ordinary. What then is “the ordinary”? What can be known about it? And how do we intuit its presence and sense its contours? The question of ontology is addressed very early in the book: “Ordinaries appear through encounters with the world, but encounters are not events of knowing, units of anything, revelations of realness, or facts” (p. 5). Berlant and Stewart evoke the ordinary by returning to familiar everyday scenes: encounters in coffee-shops and in airport lounges; interactions at the gym and while walking the dog; eavesdropping on conversations on street corners and at the grocery store; and observing expressions and gestures at the kitchen table and while on road-trips. “We’re interested,” they say, “in what’s active in receptivity” (p. 28). They bring form to affect by “writ[ing] down all the resonances the ordinary holds for [them], its senses, practices, accidents, things” (p. 65). They make the ordinary visible by cataloguing morning routines and office hours, by listing what they observe in a day or do in a week, and by categorising the habits and temperaments of their friends.
While reading The Hundreds, there is a distinct sense that a “new ordinary” is burgeoning in the accumulation of moods and moments and melding into a new atmosphere. Berlant and Stewart describe their efforts as “writ[ing] to what’s becoming palpable in sidelong looks or a consistency of rhythm and tone” (p. 4). In referencing emotions, moods, and atmospheres as historical and social phenomena, Berlant and Stewart recall Raymond William’s “structure of feeling”. In the pages of The Hundreds the historical present is saturated with disappointment and disillusionment, and by people “who rage up from unsteady to overwhelmed” (p. 22). There is a sense of both futility and the absurd in Berlant’s and Stewart’s descriptions of people desperately escaping the “weight of the world” to seek weightless lives through yoga and mindfulness that has only resulted in a “[hardening] against those who fail” (p. 22). At the same time they remind us that “it’s the world under pressure that inspires” them (and us—social scientists and cultural theorists) to write about the world we inhabit (p. 22).
To say that affect is fundamental to the book’s epistemology is to state the obvious. “I hear Affect Theory announces that life persists throughout moments. But why is that a thing to say?” ask Berlant and Stewart (p. 118). To merely acknowledge our worlds are shaped and experienced not only through narrative but also through the non-linguistic effects of emotions and feelings, moods and atmosphere is, for Berlant and Stewart, obvious and inadequate. The Hundreds “is about what happens when we stop saying ‘affect is in the world’ as though the phrase resolves the writing of impact, […] and relations” (p. 124). What affect does and how it manifests needs to be written down. Catherine Lutz (2017), reflecting on writing about affect, observes that to capture the personal, relational, ambiguous, and contradictory dimensions of emotional events and how they move us “requires intricate, microcontextual narrative writing, longer periods of fieldwork, and more linguistic dexterity” (p. 185). The Hundreds epitomises such writing. Berlant’s and Stewart’s receptivity and sensitivity to “the elaborate strange logic of the world” is illuminated through an experimental form of reflexive ethnographic writing that renders the ordinary and “ordinary affects” in minute yet poignant detail (p. 28).
The writing of affect, Berlant and Stewart tell us, has been no easy task. “From the beginning we committed to the composition and decomp in everything […] We tried on other keys […] working the angle on what describes and hovers […] We made a method of sounding things out” (p. 131). Whether The Hundreds portends a new “turn” in the social sciences can only be conjecture at this point. Berlant and Stewart, however, by reflecting on their methodology at various points in the book, give us tools and techniques to experiment with writing on affect. Fundamental to the experiment is a disavowal of explicit theorisation of what affect is and instead focusing on how it permeates consciousness and experience. “Dropping the diagnostic tone even for a minute brought surprise, attitude voiceovers; perspectives became precise” (p. 131). “The point,” they tell us, “is not to track things into their secret lairs but to see what could happen in singular thought-events” (p. 126). They discover that “you can’t get to the bottom of things, just at the thick of them and the gravity that pulls them, and you, along” (p. 43). All this means “being in the scene that is pulsating, not separating what’s out there or in us” (p. 28). In making such a declaration The Hundreds bridges conceptual dualisms between mind and body, and self and other. And in writing a hundred compositions that illuminate how affect dwells and shapes the ordinary and the everyday, the book rejects the division between emotions as embedded in the linguistic, and affect as essentially non-discursive. What The Hundreds achieves in illuminating what has often been described as imperceptible is artfully captured in one of its many reflections on methodology: “What’s the thought practice for what seems incomprehensible but then makes perfect sense?” (p. 82).
The Hundreds is a must read for scholars interested in affect as another register of human experience that exists alongside the psychological and phenomenological. The value of the book is that it illustrates not only how to sense, but actually capture the resonances that operate at the ordinary level of everyday experience. In doing so, Berlant and Stewart have devised a creative and ingenious approach to teaching a methodology that is simultaneously about reflexivity — an attunement to the ordinary — and also about writing the non-verbal dimensions of everyday experience.
