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Chargement... Ordinary Affects (2007)par Kathleen Stewart
   Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. 1   shawjonathan | May 4, 2010 |  aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances rendered are from Stewart's own life, she writes in the third person in order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world. Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system--whether it's called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism--to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history--one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life--Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)302.12Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Social Interaction General topics of social interaction Social understandingClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (4.14)
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A couple of pages in, I decided that even though this is a scholarly work, probably belonging to the discipline of postmodern anthropology, I lack the background to be able to read it in a scholarly manner. Instead, I let it kind of break over me. I read it as if it was poetry. And I enjoyed it. I can't tell you what it's about, mind you. It abounds in anecdotes, ranging from a pleasant but odd encounter in a check-out queue to horrific violence, from bizarre plane travel incidents to odd things seen from the car. It offers fascinating reflections on public responses to big events – the OJ trials, the Columbine shootings, child care sex abuse scandals, nuclear waste disposal, 11 September 2001. It positively bristles with gnomic utterances that would make great epigraphs for poems ('The ordinary can turn on you,' or 'Dream meets nightmare in the flick of an eye') or citations in other scholarly works ('Like a live wire, the subject [which I think here means a person] channels what's going on around it in a the process of its own self-composition. Formed by the coagulation of intensities, surfaces, sensations, perceptions and expressions, it's a thing composed of encounters and the spaces and events it traverses or inhabits').
Ordinary Affects deals in something that precedes thought: 'The ordinary can happen before the mind can think.' 'Something' is a word that Stewart uses often and interestingly, usually in the phrase 'or something', as if to insist on the provisional nature of her thinking. At least part of what Stewart means by 'ordinary affect' is what happens when we pay attention, how we integrate, or not, the many influences on our perception, our emotional responses, our unreflective thoughts.
I found myself remembering the only lines I know from the US poet Muriel Rukeyser:
PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET
PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET
PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET
(The capitals are hers.)
If I get a chance I'll re-read this book, though I expect it will be a matter of letting it break over my head again. (