motif: AFFECT

I am a devout reader of all that anthropologist and theorist Kathleen Stewart has written. Her book, Ordinary Affects, has taught me not to think by way of subject, concept, world, but rather to always speculate about the possibilities of relating to things; to know there are more ways of being in this world than I’ve yet discovered. For Stewart, affect is the potential that animates the ordinary. It is the charge that makes moment shimmer. Or deflate. When we notice a resonance, a zing. When, as she puts it, “something feels like something.” More of her words that I just love: “The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life. Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences.”