Thought, Still Looking Around: On Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's "The Hundreds"
Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart | The Hundreds | Duke University Press | 2019 | 184 Pages
Recently, when leaving my university’s main library, I encountered my prom date from high school, who, in the year or so we’ve both been students in Cincinnati, I’ve seen only once before. I had developed a crush on her while she and I were on a spring break trip to Peru (a trip I was using to formulate some artificial self-reinvention) during my senior year of high school, and it was a crush so great that I broke up with my then-girlfriend over Facebook Messenger (the immaturity of this whole situation is not lost on me). After the trip in question, I asked this crush to prom, and we hung out a few times as well to be “friends.” But following a disastrous after-prom and high school graduation, she and I lost that spark fairly quickly.
Because of this past, tenuous connection, when we met on the steps outside the library, a meaningful chat was unlikely. She said hello; I said hello; she inquired after what I was doing in Cincinnati (having forgotten I was here at all); I asked if she was still an engineering major (which she was); and that was that. I said have fun down the stairs as she walked down the stairs. Heading away, I couldn’t help but think of the strangeness of interactions like these. A few seconds previous, I only just recognized her coming down the stairs, hoping she wouldn’t look at me. Yet there we were, engaged in an affected propriety that further estranged us from each other. What, after all, was there to say after what did and didn’t happen? Why, after all, should there be?
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The valences of ordinary yet profoundly affective moments that make us who we are and the world around us what it is, for better or worse, constitute one of the many subjects taken up by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart in their book, The Hundreds. Though Berlant and Stewart are humanities scholars writing concretized scholarship, The Hundreds envisages a more creative critical study that is part of a wave of academic texts interested in upending conventional scholarship in favor of a more Barthesian confluence of the self and philosophical work. As Berlant and Stewart detail in the “Preludic” section of the book, they are using hundred-word constraints both to represent those constraints of language on our thinking, but also, more fundamentally, to provide “dilations” that bridge affective ways of seeing between the world and our relationship(s) with it. For Berlant and Stewart, this attention to “world-building” dissolves the barriers to interrogating everyday existence by looking at the spaces between unreality and reality, theory and lived experience.
Though they write in what most would consider prose poems, Berlant and Stewart are immersed in enough scholarship to discursively outline the affective, mobilizing properties of their entries. Besides being influential scholars of affect theory themselves (their recent texts include Cruel Optimism and Ordinary Affects, respectively), Berlant and Stewart engage with noted cultural studies and affect theory names like Sara Ahmed, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sianne Ngai, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze. But, as with the mission of the book overall, their citing and indexing practices dislodge the ordinary academic citation in that, when these and other names come up, they are not cited per an MLA or Chicago standard. Instead, they appear in parentheses after each entry (not dissimilar to Maggie Nelson’s way of “citing” in The Argonauts, an example of what Berlant and Stewart may call “fictocriticism,” or autotheory). It’s ultimately up to the reader, if interested, to go back to the “Some Things We Thought With” index to find the actual sources, and, as well, to find the sources within the entries themselves.
As reality is “not” academic theory, “Some Things We Thought With” encompasses the ever-growing world and its intersections between theory, daily life, and seeing and thinking. Berlant and Stewart’s index utilizes the aforementioned names as grounding, perhaps permissive founders of the discourse, but it also consists of the Beatles, “Sister talk over the decades,” Red Bull, Instagram, and “A fuck you shrug.” The one hundred entries invoke these everyday things alongside more established critical theory and philosophy in entries that range from “Everyday Life in Early Spring” to “The State of Drift” to “Two young men with beards kissing on the floor.” Some are written from Berlant’s perspective (usually taking place in Chicago), others from Stewart’s (Austin).
But I find myself most compelled by Berlant and Stewart because they focalize the power of language to encapsulate the ephemeral. In “Friendhating,” for example, Berlant and Stewart ask, “What’s the difference between talk that pushes talk away and conversation?” As with many of what I would call Berlant and Stewart’s rhetorical “questions as claims,” I don’t have a clear answer, though it must live within the interactions we have with anyone at any given moment. It must also lie in the everyday things that make us do things with, to, and for each other. Yet this creates a paradox I struggle with, and one that The Hundreds wishes to confront us within our intrapersonal and interpersonal relations: How can we negotiate a retreat into an unreal world with our immersion in the real one? What casts us in to each domain, and when should we strive to retreat out of them? The Hundreds is “against literal-minded explorations of the ordinary.” It is looking around in unorthodox ways and being surprised at what you may find dwelling there. It is the there there that something new can walk into sight and into mind. It is “critical thinking,” and the difficulty to be had therein.
Even though I earn a living reading, writing, and talking about fictional, “manufactured” lives, I’ve increasingly come to think that they are, to some extent, much less interesting than reality. As I see it, the explosion of fictionalized entertainment in our society reveals the limits of fiction to transform everyday, unattuned life. If anything, the state of academic English in this country may reveal that many people no longer find freshness and verve in fiction (which I would attribute to an oversaturation of entertainment, besides the university system’s obvious prioritization of STEM education). But I do not want to make generalizations about “deadened” reading sensibilities (especially when, even for people addicted to their phones, “reading” happens constantly). I will say, however, that texts urging us to renew how we look at life are of the utmost importance in this time of mass and social media infection, climate and sociopolitical anxiety, and late-capitalist malaise and duress. Such a propulsive, affective interest in articulating reality’s novel complexities, in its tiny, expansive moments, drives The Hundreds. This is what I read in Berlant and Stewart’s last entry, “Not Over Yet.” They write, “Everywhere you went there was love and other kinds of dispossession. Everywhere you went you had urges without plans and sometimes you made plans. You can look around where you’re sitting now and know that what’s there isn’t all of it.”
The Hundreds focalizes an intrinsic desire to explore the world’s simplicities as the foundation for the potentiality of the extraordinary. Berlant and Stewart show that, indeed, ordinary life is ordinary and transformative, containing so many possibilities for thinking about who we are in the world, really. But our alienation from this ordinariness has catapulted us into the need to lose ourselves in all kinds of ways, when, already, our daily lives are the most fascinating things around. This is what I didn’t realize in that Peru hostel, as I typed madly away on my phone to break up with my high school girlfriend. I also don’t want this review to read as some latter-day atonement for the ills I wrecked in high school (and have, unfortunately, wrecked since). But I’m hopefully getting better, and I know now that although imaginative fantasy is essential to new ideas and experiences, it can obscure the beauty (and fault) of what’s really there. But that’s also the argument of The Hundreds. What makes a life, ultimately, is other people, and to forget about those other people is to harm those people and lose something incalculably valuable.
This review is part of our Theory and Society Series. The Theory and Society Series is meant to bridge the gap between academic critical theory’s mode of social analysis and everyday social criticism, creating a totally new discourse in the process.