Book Review: Ordinary Affects
Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.
The overwhelming feeling I have by the end of Ordinary Affects is that the author, Kathleen Stewart, has transcribed and compiled an array of haphazard, quasi-accidental and unpredictable trajectories that haunt cultural theory and, ultimately, show it up in all its fragility. Ordinary Affects challenges the theorization of society and culture to consider its precarious foundations. In Stewart’s own words, this book is an experiment
[c]ommitted not to the demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world, but rather to speculation, curiosity, and the concrete, it tries to provoke attention to the forces that come into view as habit or shock, resonance or impact (p.1).
There is no need to defend the format of this book in its self-aware departure from convention: either you see a place for experimental writing in ethnography, history, and cultural theory or you don’t. To my mind, 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.
In theorizing the “ordinary,” which I read as a deliberate subversion or reinvigoration of the somewhat too-stable, faddish, or familiar term “everyday,” Stewart deploys a compelling autoethnography written in short vignettes. The subject of inquiry is the author herself and her habitat, which is middle-class America (whatever that is). The boundary-crossing sections feature scenes that blur the distinction between sites of research and sites of intellectual production. In this book there is no safe ground for observation and everything is potentially an event or object of study.
Each of the sections or vignettes in Ordinary Affects are skillfully juxtaposed to one another and distributed through the 129 page book (there are, unless I counted wrong, one-hundred and fourteen vignettes). The shortest are only a paragraph or so in length while the longest run several pages. At their best, they 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 .
In many ways I am reading this book as a photoalbum, though it has no photographs in it save the well-chosen cover picture by the American photographer Nic Nicosia. Nicosia’s beautifully troubling image is actually a compelling point of access for Stewart’s own project. Like Nicosia’s photographs (or those of Robert Frank or Wolfgang Tillmans, to name a few others in that tradition) Stewart’s vignettes relish in their play of ambiguity–that ascendant language of late 20th century art–and provide a compelling provocation to the stable meanings produced in conventional social science. The vignettes operate as a form of ethnographic mise en abîme: they refuse to allow the reader to settle and they bar the mirror of representation from passing through a scene without reflecting itself surreptitiously in its own reflection (causing an endless array of signification). Through this interminable play Ordinary Affects trains its analysis on the casual and mundane and its capacity for excesses or “surges” of meaning.
Key idioms in this book include affect and the ordinary (obviously), surging (which reminds me of Bush’s infamous “troop surge” in Iraq, 2007) but also cracks & fissures, circuits, surface-tension, and agency. The descriptive environment seems more like a witch’s brew than the ‘tapestry of culture’ that has been such a resilient metaphor for human life in the 20th century. The implication is a critique of surfaces and depths. A common trope used to describe the work of many contemporary art photographers suggests that their photographs reveal social and psychological ‘disparities lying just below the surface of modern-day life’ (MOCP 2008). Kathleen Stewart’s ordinary affects, however, seem to be less about what supposedly lies below the surface of quotidian life than what constitutes the surface itself. They are, in her own words,
[a]t once abstract and concrete, . . . more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meanings (p. 3).
Reviewed by: Craig Campbell, Intermedia Research Studio, University of Alberta, Canada.
- Ondine