SINGULAR SENSATION

Kathleen Stewart is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin (USA). She writes on affect, the ordinary, and modes of attunement based on speculative curiosity. A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an `Other’ America (Princeton, 1996) portrays a dense and textured layering of sense and form laid down in social use. Ordinary Affects (Duke, 2007) maps the force of present moments lived as immanent events. The Hundreds (with Lauren Berlant, Duke 2019) is a writing experiment in dwelling in a history of the present. Her current work, Worlding, approaches generative ways of collective living through sensing out what happens.

She writes:

Worlding is a book of creative non-fiction approaching the generative compositions in everyday life in the U.S. at the moment.

We’re all differently feeling our way through the transitional immediacy of a charged present–unstable, damaging, made durable in the suggestion of a coherence. Thinking worldly is an elaboration in the swell of a milieu.

Drop the mimetic ambitions of a thinking subject trying to represent a world per se and it matters that something was yellow, that it passed in a blur, that the thawing ice on a lake moans.

A field opens in a note struck or in the thickness of a duration.

A percept echoes in the frankness of a word.

Fabrications grow singular in a radical specificity.

Expressivities experiment.

The ‘there is’ of existence has the over-exactitude of a painting or music, at once overdetermined, built of differing, and opening onto furthermores and otherwises.

This is a lot. It will take a kind of politics trying not to inculcate a particular awareness but to attune to conditions of insipiency, a capacity to be in a medium of elements coming together, the skill to sense out and perform with thresholds tipping into expression out of a reservoir of felt affects lodged in socialities, performances, objects.