Ordinary Writing: Theorizing the Affective Structures of the Present in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds

Abstract

The present work explores how affect is conceptualized throughout The Hundreds (2019), a collaborative project between Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart composed of one hundred poems of one hundred words each (or multiples of one hundred). Throughout these poems, the authors affectively reflect on and theorize about everyday life through experimental ethnographic and writing practices, self-imposing a word restraint to their writing with the objective of exploring the creative and theoretical possibilities behind alternative ways of writing affect theory. Focusing on the unique fusion of poetry, ethnography and theory present in their work, this text explores the formal qualities of the poems and how the distinctions between criticism and fiction are blurred through a series of creative and experimental tactics that point towards radical ethical pedagogies and resist neoliberal values in academia. Some of these tactics specifically subvert academic conventions regarding citation, authorship and enunciation, and point towards innovative ways of inhabiting the place of the scholar and understanding academy itself. One of the central questions this investigation seeks to answer is how form is used by Berlant and Stewart in The Hundreds to theorize affect, with a special focus on how their efforts amount to what could speculatively be called «ordinary writing», a method to creatively describe and conceptualize the ordinary.