The Hundreds

by Lauren Berlant

Overview

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making. The experiment of the one hundred word constraint-each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long-amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground. What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478002888
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	02/22/2019
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.39(d)

About the Author

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is author of Cruel Optimism and The Female Complaint, both also published by Duke University Press.

Kathleen Stewart is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of Ordinary Affects, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Preludic x

I The Hundreds

1 First Things 3

2 Swells 4

3 Dilations 5

4 Space Junk 6

5 You have to start somewhere 7

6 This is vanilla 8

7 Handyman 9

8 Writing, Life 10

9 Red Bull Diaries 12

10 As if 14

11 Checked out OK 15

12 Graduation Speech, 2016 16

13 The New Ordinary 17

14 Contact Sheet 18

15 The Things We Think With 20

16 Worlds 21

17 Weight of the World 22

18 Today in Political Emotions 23

19 The Road 25

20 The State of Drift 27

21 On Collaboration 28

22 The Icing on the Cake 30

23 Bad Feelings 31

24 Halloweens 32

25 Take a Breath 33

26 Friction 35

27 The Game as Method 37

28 Once 38

29 This isn't consoling 40

30 In the middle 41

31 Cover Story 43

32 In the cut 44

33 What Does Webster's Say about Soul? 45

34 Against literal-minded explorations of the ordinary 46

35 At the Y 47

36 No world beyond the world 50

37 Slide 51

38 Two Elizas 52

39 Keep It Together 53

40 Welcome to the Joke 54

41 The women 56

42 Outside chances 57

43 Writing Lessons 58

44 Fish in Drag 60

45 Suicidiation Nation 61

46 The Morning Demons 62

47 A Place 63

48 A Skeletal Thought 65

49 Utopian Capitalism 67

50 Chicago 69

51 A return 71

52 Stony Island Story Problems 72

53 Last summer 74

54 Lets Not Ask for the Moon 76

55 Minds at Work 77

56 Everyday Life in Early Spring 79

57 Atmospheric Pressures 80

58 After Meth 81

59 Thought practices 82

60 Approaching the Commercial Corridor 83

61 What the houses are doing 84

62 On Editing 85

63 This Week in Shakes 86

64 Lifelines in the middle of nowhere 89

65 Hefty with Febreze 91

66 A Family Line 92

67 In the Terminal 93

68 Kinships 94

69 Projects 95

70 Friendhating 96

71 What Comes Through 100

71 Everyday a Video Installation 102

73 Collecting 103

74 If we could pay attention to everything 104

75 What is it to be naked among men? 105

76 Camera Worthy 107

77 The Strange Situation: A Wedding Album 108

78 All I know is 109

79 Written in a place that smells like chicken 110

80 Anxiety made a nest in her 111

81 Book Reviews 112

82 The Twins 113

83 All the Desperate Calls Rolled into One 114

84 It's Structural 115

85 Media Trouble 116

86 Hundreds do things 117

87 Survivors in Training 118

88 Two young men with beards kissing on the floor 119

89 Refractions 120

90 Reading Notes, the Week of December 16, '16 121

91 Just being me 123

92 Office Hours 124

93 Underpressure 126

94 Ordinary Love 128

95 Stocking Up 129

96 Bad Weather 130

97 In it 131

98 A Number on Introductions 132

99 A month in arrests and other things 133

100 Not Over Yet 135

II Indexes

Index Fred Moten 139

Not-Index Andrew Causey and C. Thresher 142

The Index Susan Lepselter 152

Untitled Stephen Mucche 153

For Your Indexing Pleasure 155

Some Things We Thought With 157

What People are Saying About This

The Smoking Book - Lesley Stern

“Through seduction, coercion, intimate address, indifferent rambling, The Hundreds invites us to train with the writers, to entertain other ways of reading than through familiar academic protocols. We sense what it might be like to be unlike the writers. We experience what is in the air in these times. How easy it is to take a breath and inhale raw fear, paranoia. Or delight: as some unexpected affinity whacks us as we are about to turn the page. So we pause, think it over, and only then turn the page.”

Violence and Splendor - Alphonso Lingis

“Movements of attention to mostly ephemeral sights and happenings. Movements of wry, bemused, wistful, perplexed attention that awaken desire and affection for things happening about us and quicken an urge to know more. We should read but a page here and there at a time, and let this attentiveness extend into the rustle and whir of things about us. And how the freshness and spring of the language works to make us see what we look at!”

Editorial Reviews

"The seemingly arbitrary parameters Berlant and Stewart put in place act out an illuminating thought experiment for the reader. . . . A haunting and thought-provoking read that asks readers to slow down and take stock of what is in front of them."

Ploughshares - Julia Shiota

"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."

Cleveland Review of Books - Matt Morgenstern

"A roving adventure in critical prose. . . . Berlant and Stewart eschew a literary focal point for a broadly questioning spirit. . . . The point is not to 'track thing into their secret lairs,' or to place them in the 'so-called big picture,' rather, it is to look again, and encourage the reader look again too."

TLS - Michael Caines

"The Hundreds, by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, is at once a bold thought experiment and a radical exploration of reflexive ethnographic writing. . . . The Hundreds is a must read for scholars interested in affect as another register of human experience that exists alongside the psychological and phenomenological."

Feminism & Psychology - Asha L. Abeyasekera

"As compositions, the hundreds illuminate and obscure, defamiliarize and refamiliarize, reflect and refract (tip of the cap to Volosinov 1973) both their authors and the cultural artifacts that appear in them, and offer a way of archiving cultural moments in ways that acknowledge, even foreground, their affective power."

Anthropological Quarterly - Seth Kahn

"A speculative and seductive book. . . . The Hundreds asks us to pay attention to the capacious and crucial smallness of our everyday, to slow down and dial in to the richness and frustrations of ordinary encounters as a grounding and creative political practice."

Theory & Event - Elisabeth R. Anker

"A speculative and seductive book. . . . The Hundreds asks us to pay attention to the capacious and crucial smallness of our everyday, to slow down and dial in to the richness and frustrations of ordinary encounters as a grounding and creative political practice."--Elisabeth R. Anker "Theory & Event" (7/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"As compositions, the hundreds illuminate and obscure, defamiliarize and refamiliarize, reflect and refract (tip of the cap to Volosinov 1973) both their authors and the cultural artifacts that appear in them, and offer a way of archiving cultural moments in ways that acknowledge, even foreground, their affective power."--Seth Kahn "Anthropological Quarterly" (1/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"The Hundreds, by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, is at once a bold thought experiment and a radical exploration of reflexive ethnographic writing. . . . The Hundreds is a must read for scholars interested in affect as another register of human experience that exists alongside the psychological and phenomenological."--Asha L. Abeyasekera "Feminism & Psychology" (1/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"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."--Matt Morgenstern "Cleveland Review of Books" (2/3/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"The Hundreds is playful and loose, it roams and discovers, only to drift elsewhere, but it works: it grounds theory, makes it real."--Casey Dawson and Christopher Schaberg "Los Angeles Review of Books" (12/1/2019 12:00:00 AM)

"A roving adventure in critical prose. . . . Berlant and Stewart eschew a literary focal point for a broadly questioning spirit. . . . The point is not to 'track thing into their secret lairs, ' or to place them in the 'so-called big picture, ' rather, it is to look again, and encourage the reader look again too."--Michael Caines "TLS" (8/9/2019 12:00:00 AM)

"In Berlant and Stewart's hands, affect theory provides a way of understanding the sensations and resignations of the present, the normalized exhaustion that comes with life in the new economy. It is a way of framing uniquely modern questions."--Hua Hsu "The New Yorker" (3/25/2019 12:00:00 AM)

"The seemingly arbitrary parameters Berlant and Stewart put in place act out an illuminating thought experiment for the reader. . . . A haunting and thought-provoking read that asks readers to slow down and take stock of what is in front of them."--Julia Shiota "Ploughshares" (4/25/2019 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher

"In Berlant and Stewart’s hands, affect theory provides a way of understanding the sensations and resignations of the present, the normalized exhaustion that comes with life in the new economy. It is a way of framing uniquely modern questions."

The New Yorker - Hua Hsu

"The Hundreds is playful and loose, it roams and discovers, only to drift elsewhere, but it works: it grounds theory, makes it real."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Casey Dawson and Christopher Schaberg