Ordinary Affects

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CULTURAL POESISThe Generativity of Emergent Things

Kathleen Stewart

What follows is a piece of imaginativewriting grounded in an intenseattention to the poesis, or creativity,

of ordinary things. This is an ethnographic atten-tion, but it is one that is loosened from any certainprefabricated knowledge of its object. Instead, ittracks a moving object in an effort (a) to some-how record the state of emergence that animatesthings cultural and (b) to track some of the effectsof this state of things—the proliferation of every-day practices that arise in the effort to know what ishappening or to be part of it, for instance, or thehaunting or exciting presence of traces,remainders,and excesses uncaptured by claimed meanings.

The writing here is committed to speculations,experiments, recognitions, engagements, andcuriosity, not to demystification and uncoveredtruths that snap into place to support a well-known picture of the world. I ask the reader toread actively—to follow along, read into, imagine,digress, establish independent trajectories andconnections, disagree. My own voice is particularand partial, tending in this case to be a surreal,dream-like description of ordinary spaces andevents. The subject I “am” in the stories I tell is apoint of impact meandering through scenes in

search of linkages, surges, and signs of intensity.I suppose that the writing gropes toward embod-ied affective experience. Finally, the writing isalso a set of provocations in that it tries to cullattention to moments of legibility and emergence,to moments of impact (instead of to stablesubjects), to models of agency that are far fromsimple or straightforward, to the vitality or ani-mus of cultural poesis in the jump or surge ofaffect (rather than on the plane of finished repre-sentations), and to the still life—the momentwhen things resonate with potential and threat.

In calling this particular arena of thingscultural poesis—the creativity or generativityin things cultural—I am thinking of the ways inwhich this field of emergent things has been writ-ten into cultural theory in various ways by WalterBenjamin, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin,Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, RaymondWilliams, Donna Haraway, Marilyn Strathern, EveSedgwick, Michael Taussig, and others. There areFoucault’s (1990) theses on the productivity andmicropoetics of power,Williams’s (1977) attentionto emergent structures of feeling, Benjamin’s(1999, 2003) theories of allegory (vs. symbol) andhis own nomadic tracking of dream worlds still

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resonant in material things, Bakhtin’s (1982, 1984)fundamental theorization and elaboration of thesocial poetics lodged in language, texts, and socialworlds, and Barthes’s (1975, 1977, 1981, 1985)intense and sustained insistence on the workingsof spaces and pleasures in between, or outside,or somehow in excess of the recognized objectswe call texts, experience, meaning, concept, andanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) polemicizedthe conflict between meaning-based models ofculture and models that track actual events,conjunctures, and articulations of forces to seewhat they do. In the wake of their critique, theyoutlined a theory of the affective as a state ofpotential, intensity, and vitality (see also Guattari,1995). Contemporary feminist theorists, notablyHaraway (1997, 2003), Strathern (1991, 1992a,1992b, 1999), and Sedgwick (1992, 1993, 1997,2003), have carefully—and with enormous cre-ative energy of their own—worked to theorize thegenerativity in things cultural and to make roomfor ways of thinking and writing it, as has Taussig(1986, 1992, 1993, 1997, 1999).

Here, I try to incite curiosity about the vitalityand volatility of cultural poesis in contemporaryU.S. public culture through a story of ethno-graphic encounters (see also Stewart, 1996, 2000a,2000b, 2002a, 2002b, 2003a, 2003b).

2 ORDINARY INTENSITIES:AFFECT, VITALITY, GENERATIVITY

This is a story about public circulations inmoments of vital impact. It takes place in theUnited States during an ongoing present thatbegan some time ago. This is a time and place inwhich an emergent assemblage made up of a wildmix of things—technologies, sensibilities, flowsof power and money, daydreams, institutions,ways of experiencing time and space, battles,dramas, bodily states, and innumerable practicesof everyday life—has become actively generative,producing wide-ranging impacts, effects, andforms of knowledge with a life of their own. Thisis what I mean by cultural poesis.

Here, I offer some random examples of thegenerativity of all things in a state of culturalemergence. The objects of my story are emergentvitalities and the ordinary practices that instanti-ate or articulate them, if only partially and fleet-ingly. Caught, or glimpsed, in their very surge tobe realized, these are things that are necessarilyfugitive, shifting, opportunistic, polymorphous,indiscriminate, aggressive, dreamy, unsteady,practical, unfinished, and radically particular.

The writing here is one that tries to mimic feltimpacts and half-known effects as if the writingwere itself a form of life. It follows leads, sidesteps,and delays, and it piles things up, creating layerson layers, in an effort to drag things into view, tofollow trajectories in motion, and to scope outthe shape and shadows and traces of assemblagesthat solidify and grow entrenched, perhaps doingreal damage or holding real hope, and then dissi-pate, morph, rot, or give way to something new.It talks to the reader not as a trusted guide care-fully laying out the perfect links between theoret-ical categories and the real world but rather as asubject caught in the powerful tension betweenwhat can be known and told and what remainsobscure or unspeakable but is nonetheless real.Its thoughts are speculative, and its questions arethe most basic. What is going on? What floatinginfluences now travel through public routes ofcirculation and come to roost in the seeminglyprivate domains of hearts, homes, and dreams?What forces are becoming sensate as forms,styles, desires, and practices? What does it meanto say that particular events and strands of affectgenerate impacts? How are impacts registered inlines of intensity? How are people quite literallycharged up by the sheer surge of things in themaking? What does cultural poesis look like?

2 DREAMLAND

The roller-coaster ride of the American dreamhad come into a sharp-edged focus. Good andbad. Winning and losing. Those were your choi-ces. Anxious and haunted sensibilities trackedunwanted influences and veiled threats in idioms

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of addiction, trauma, and conspiracy whiledreams of transcendence and recluse set afloatreckless hopes of winning or escape. Life wasanimated in equal parts by possibility and impos-sibility. We lurched between poles of hope anddespair as overwrought dreams flopped to theearth, only to rise up again, inexplicably revital-ized, like the monster in a horror movie or the foolwho keeps going back for more. Lines of escapewere fascinating too—the rocketing fortunes ofthe rich and famous, the dream of a perfect get-away cottage, the modest success stories of peoplegetting their lives together again. New lifestylesproliferated at the same dizzying pace as did theepidemic of addictions and the self-help shelvesat the bookstore.

The political dynamism of this tense mix ofdreams and nightmares registered in an everydaylife infused with the effort to track and assimilatethe possibilities and threats lodged in things.Newly charged forms of the desire to know, tosee, and to make a record of what was behind orunderneath surfaces and systems formed a net-work of ordinary practices. Proliferating practicesof turning desires and ideals into matter bothencoded the everyday effort to master, test, andencounter emergent forces and demarcated astate of being tuned in to the mainstream. Thenew objects of mass desire promised both inclu-sion in the very winds of circulation and thenested still life of a home or identity restingsecurely in the eye of the storm.

As previously public spaces and forms ofexpression were privatized, previously privatizedarenas of dreams, anxieties, agencies, and moralswere writ large on public stages as scenes ofimpact. Yet the world had become weirdly myste-rious just when it started to seem like a private lifewrit large or some kind of collective psyche insti-tutionalized and exported in a global mutation.It was like a net had grown around a gelatinousmutating substance, creating a strange and looseintegration of planes of existence and sensibili-ties. Things had become both highly abstract andintensely concrete, and people had begun to try totrack emergent forces and flows on these variegatedregisters without really knowing what they were

doing. Somehow it was all personal, but it was alsosomething huge flowing through things.

The feminist slogan,“the personal is political,”took on a new charge of intensity and swirled inspinning and floating contexts far beyond anysimple ideological clarity or political program.

2 ORDINARY LIFE

We were busy. Homes were filled with the ground-ing details of getting the rent money together,getting or keeping jobs, getting sick, getting well,looking for love, trying to get out of things we hadgotten ourselves into, eating in, working out, rais-ing kids, walking dogs, remodeling homes, andshopping. There were distractions, denials, shape-shifting forms of violence, practical solutions, andreal despair. For some, one wrong move was allit took. Worries swirled around the bodies in thedark. People bottomed out watching daytime tele-vision. Credit cards were maxed out. There wasdownsizing and unemployment. There was com-petition to get kids into decent schools and forthem to keep their grades up. Schedules had to beconstantly juggled to keep up with dance classesor layoffs. Dizzying layers of tasks filled in thespace of a day.

People took walks in their neighborhoods,peering into windows by night and murmuringover beautiful flowerbeds by day. Or, we scram-bled to find ways to get to work and back on unre-liable buses that quit running at night. We bakedbirthday cakes or ordered them from the super-market decorated with Tigger or a golf course.We “flipped off ” other drivers, read the lusciousnovels and sobering memoirs, disappeared intothe Internet, and shopped at Wal-Mart and theother megastores because they were cheap, con-venient, or new and had slogans such as “GettingIt Together” and “Go Home a Hero.”

Positions were taken, habits were loved andhated, dreams were launched and wounded. Therewas pleasure in a clever or funny image. Or inbeing able to see right through things. Somepeople claimed that they could rise above the flowand walk on water. Others wore their irony like an

Stewart: Cultural Poesis–2–1017


accessory that gave them room to maneuver.There were all the dreams of purity, martyrdom, areturn to nature, getting real, having an edge, andbeating the system.

Just about everyone was part of the secret con-spiracy of ordinary life to get what he or she couldout of it. There were the dirty pleasures of holing upto watch one’s secret bad TV show, taking a trip tothe mall,working out in spinning classes at the gym,spending nights on the Internet, or playing musicloud in the car on the way to the supermarket.

2 GAMES

There were games you could play. One was thedriving game of trying to predict when the carup ahead was going to try to change lanes. Somepeople developed a sixth sense about it. They dis-covered that if they concentrated on the car theycould sense when it was considering a move, evenwhen the driver was not signaling a lane changeand when the car itself was not surreptitiouslyleaning to the edge of the lane or acting “nervous.”The game of the sixth sense became a pleasureand a compulsion in itself. It spread fast, evenwithout the usual help of expert commentary.

You could try out this game in supermarketcheckout lines too. There the game was to try tosize up the flow of a checkout line in a glance. Howfast is that cashier? Does that woman havecoupons? That one looks like a check writer. Thatone looks like a talker. But the checkout line gamewas harder than the driving game. Even a brilliantchoice could be instantly defeated by a dreadedprice check or the cash register running out oftape. And once you made your choice, you werestuck with it. Already impatient, you might thenstart to feel a little desperate. You could switch tomultitasking—make a phone call, make lists inyour head, or get to work on your palm pilot. Or,you could scan the surrounding bodies andtabloid headlines for a quick thrill or an ironicinner smirk at signs of other people’s eccentricityor gullibility. Or, you could just check yourself outby opening and paging through Home and Gardenor Glamour or Esquire. You could relax into the

aura of tactile bodies, living rooms, and gardensthat staged the jump from fantasy to flesh andback again right before your eyes. The glossyimages offered not so much a blueprint of how tolook and live as the much more profound experi-ence of watching images touch matter.

2 ODD MOMENTS

At odd moments in the course of the day, youmight raise your head in surprise or alarm at theuncanny sensation of a half-known influence.Private lives and the public world had gotten theirwires crossed. Any hint of private movementwould be sniffed out and thrown up on publicstages, and people now took their cues so directlyfrom circulating sensibilities that the term “hard-wired” became shorthand for the state of things.

Public specters had grown intimate. The imag-inary had grown concrete on public stages. All ofthose bodies lined up on the talk shows, outingtheir loved ones for this or that monstrous act. Orthe reality TV shows, with the camera busting inon intimate dramas of whole families addicted tosniffing paint right out of the can.We would zoomin to linger, almost lovingly, on the gallon-sizedlids scattered around on the living room carpetand then pan out to focus on the faces of theparents, and even the little kids, with big rings ofwhite paint encircling their cheeks and chins likesome kind of self-inflicted stigmata.

The labor of looking had been retooled andupgraded so that we could cut back and forthbetween the images popping up in the livingroom and some kind of real world out there.

America’s Most Wanted aired photos of bankrobbers with and without beards so that youcould scan the faces at the local convenience storelooking for a match.

The streets were littered with cryptic, half-written signs of personal/public disasters. Thedaily sightings of homeless men and womenholding up signs while puppies played at their feetcould haunt the solidity of things with the shockof something unspeakable. Hungry. Will work forfood. God bless you.



The sign hits the senses with a mesmerizingand repellent force. Too sad. The graphic letteringthat pleads for the attention of the passing carsglances off the eye as something to avoid like theplague. Moving on. But it also holds the fascinationof catastrophe,the sense that something is happen-ing, the surge of affect toward a profound scene.

The handmade, handheld sign of the homelesson the side of the road pleads to be recognized, ifonly in passing. In its desperation, the sign makesa gesture toward an ideological center that claimsthe value of willpower (“will work for food”) andvoices the dream of redemption (“God blessyou”). But it is abject; it offers no affect to mime,no scene of a common desire, no line of vitalityto follow, no intimate secret to plumb, no tips toimbibe for safety or good health. Instead, it sticksout of the side of vision. The shock of somethingunreal because it is too real, too far outside therecognized world, unspeakable. There is no socialrecipe for what you can do about homelessnessor even what you can do with your eyes whenconfronted with homelessness face to face.We livein a profound social fear of encounters like this.

Even to glance out of the corner of the eye atthe sign on the side of the road is a dizzying side-step. What the glance finds in the scene it glancesat, half panicked, is the excluded other’s abjectsurge to be included in the wind of circulation—the mainstream. Its message is too stark; it begs.It mimes the discourse of the mainstream tothe letter, pushing it to the point of imitation orparody or fraud. It makes the mainstream seemunreal and heartless—dead.

A dollar bill stuck out of a car window gets aquick surge forward from the one with the signand the heightened, yet unassimilated, affect of araw contact.“God bless you.”

Now we are trudging the rough terrain of bod-ies and the sensuous accumulation of impacts.

2 WHATEVER

Jokes had started to circulate about how we mightas well wire ourselves directly to sensation but-tons and just skip the step of content altogether.

One day an e-mail came her way from Penny, afriend in the neighborhood who liked to keep upa running commentary on quirky characters andscenes spied from her studio windows or fabri-cated on drowsy afternoon walks. Penny wouldstop by to report tidbits and then move on.A lighttouch. When she used the e-mail, it was to for-ward funny tales filled with delicious descriptivedetails sent to her from like-minded others build-ing a corpus of matters to chew on. This one toldthe tale of something that happened shortly afterthe attacks of September 11, 2001, in a medicalclinic where a friend of a friend of Penny’s appar-ently worked:

Of course, it’s not the big money area and the build-ing is very rinky-dink. Not a big target for anthrax,let’s just put it that way. She works with motherswho have drug abuse problems and the office down-stairs treats juvies [juveniles]. Apparently one ofthe women who works downstairs turned on thea/c [air conditioner] (window unit) and a whitedust sprayed out all over her. Yikes. They called theCDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]and men in white suits and gas masks invaded. Myfriend who works upstairs was dubious—and sothe people in her office just stayed and workedwhile the downstairs was cordoned off and investi-gated. They rushed the substance off to the lab andput everyone who was in the office on Cipro. Thenthe test results came back. Low and behold, thesubstance tested positive for cocaine! So good, isn’tit? They think one of the juvies hid his stash in thea/c when he was afraid of being searched. I thinkit’s a brilliant idea to start pumping cocaine into theworkplace. No need for caffeine anymore. Let’s justmove right on up to the next level of productivityinspiration. Whadya say?

2 A LITTLE ACCIDENT, LIKE ANY OTHER

She was in a café in a small town in west Texas.A place where ranchers hang out talking seedprices, fertilizer, and machines and wherestrangers passing through town are welcomeentertainment. The sun had gone down, and shewas half-way through her fresh-killed steak andbaked potato when the biker couple came in limping.



All eyes rotated to watch them move to a tableand sit down. The couple talked intently, as ifsomething was up, and from time to time theyexchanged startled looks. When she walked pastthe couple’s table on her way out, they raised theirheads and asked whether she was heading out onthe west road and whether she could look for bikeparts. They had hit a deer coming into town anddumped their bike. The deer, they said, had faredmuch worse.

The room came to a dead stop as all ears tunedin to the sentience of the crash, still resonating inthe bikers’ bodies. Slowly, taking their sweet time,people began to offer questions from their tables,drawing out the details. Then other stories beganto surface of other deer collisions and strangeevents at that place on the west road.

As she left, she pictured how, during the daysto come, people would keep their eyes open fordeer parts and bike parts when they traveled thewest road out of town. She imagined that therewould be more talk. Conversations would gatheraround the event and spin off into other questionssuch as the overpopulation of deer, hunting regu-lations, and the new law that legalized ridingwithout a helmet. There might be discussions ofhow to fix bikes (and especially this particularmake of bike), what parts might break or twistwhen the bike is dumped, and who was a goodbike mechanic. Or, people might talk about thecondition of the roads. The image of hitting thewide open road or surviving the desert injuredmight come up. The talk might call up anythingfrom the image of sheer speed encountering adeer caught in one’s headlights to the abstractedprinciples of freedom, fate, and recklessness.

But one way or another, the little accidentwould compel a response. It would shift people’slife trajectories in some small way, change themby literally changing their course for a minute or aday. The chance event might add a layer of story,daydream, and memory to things. It mightunearth old resentments or suddenly bring a newconflict to a head. It might even compel a searchfor lessons learned. Resonating levels of body andmind might begin to rearrange themselves intosimpler choices—good luck and bad luck, animal

lives lost and threats to machine-propelledhumans, risk-taking wild rides and good oldcommon sense.

But for now at least, and in some small wayin the future too, the talk would secretly draw itsforce from the resonance of the event itself. Itssimple and irreducible singularity. And the habitof watching for something to happen would grow.

SCANNING

Everyday life was now infused with the effort totrack and assimilate the possibilities and threatslodged in things. Newly charged forms of the des-ire to know, to see, and to record what was behindsurfaces and inside systems formed a network ofordinary practices.

She was no different from anyone else.All of herlife, she had been yelling “pay attention!” but nowshe was not sure whether that was such a good idea.Hypervigilance had taken root as people watchedand waited for the next thing to happen. Like theguy she heard about on the radio who spends hiswhole life recording everything he does: “Got up at6:30 am, still dark, splashed cold water on my face,brushed my teeth, 6:40 went to the bathroom, 6:45made tea, birds started in at 6:53. . . . ”

Or, there was the neighbor on a little lake inMichigan whose hobby was recording his everymove on video—his walks in the neighborhoodand in the woods, his rides in his Ford Model T,his forays into Polish folk dances where oldwomen went round and round the dance floortogether, the monthly spaghetti suppers at theCatholic church in town. He gave one of his videosto her and her friends to watch. They played it onenight—three anthropologists peering at whatevercame their way from the weird world out there. Itwas a video of him walking around the lake in thewinter snow and ice. They heard his every breathand footstep. There were some deer droppings onthe path and some snow piles with suspiciousshapes. Then he was walking up to Bob and Alice’scabin (the couple were in Florida for the winter),and he was zooming in on a huge lump of some-thing that was pushing out the black plastic



wrapped around the base of the house. Uh oh.Could be ice from a broken water main. Maybethe whole house was full of ice. The neighbor guywondered out loud, if in fact it was ice, whatwould happen when the ice thawed. Could be areal problem. He said that maybe he would senda copy of his video on to Bob and Alice down inFlorida. Then he moved on. Back to his breathingand the icicles on trees and his footsteps in thesnow. Tracking the banal, scanning for trauma.

The three anthropologists looked at each other.What was that? She was mesmerized by it, like itheld a key to how the ordinary could crack opento reveal something big and hidden that it hadswallowed long ago. The other two were not soeasily swayed. It was some kind of weirdness thatpushed banality to the point of idiocy and madeno sense at all. A puzzle as to why anyone wouldwant to record the droning sameness of things,looking for something worth noting to come hisway. Some strange threat or promise that poppedup just for a minute and then sank below thesurface again as if nothing had ever happened.A shimmering—there one minute and gone thenext. Or maybe some lyrical scene you wouldwant to remember. Something with meaning.

All of this watching things was mostly a good-natured thing. Like happy campers, people wouldput up with a lot of nothing in hopes of a glimpseof something. The ordinary was the mother lodethat they mined, hoping for a sighting of a half-known something coming up for air.

It could be that ordinary things were begin-ning to seem a little “off,” and that was what drewpeople’s attention to them. Or, maybe the ordinarythings had always seemed a little off if youstopped to think about them.

There were the obsessive compulsives whokept track of things because they had to (“Got upat 6:30 am, still dark, splashed cold water on myface. . . . ”). These people became sightings inthemselves.

Or, there were those who gave shape to theireveryday by inventing practices of mining it forsomething different or special. People like herfriends, Joyce and Bob, who lived in the woodsin New Hampshire. He was a lumberjack. She

cleaned those little 1950s tourist cabins thatwere called things such as “Swiss Village” and“Shangrila.” She had left her husband and fourkids after years of living straight in a regime ofbeatings under the sign of Jesus. She went out theback window one day and never looked back.Then she met Bob when she was tending bar, andthe two took a walk on the wild side together thatlasted for a dozen happy years (although not with-out trouble and plenty of it). He had a drinkingproblem, and she let him have it because heworked hard. He would hit the bottle when he gothome at night and all weekend long. She calledhim “Daddy” even though she was a good 10 yearsolder and pushing 50.

Joyce and Bob moved from rental cabin to rentalcabin in the north woods. They invited raccoonsinto their cabin as if the animals were pets. Theygot up at 5 am to write in their diaries, and thenwhen they got home at night they would read theirdaily entries out loud and look at the artsy photosof treetops and bees’ nests that Bob took. Finally,they were able to get a “poor people’s” loan to buy alittle cabin they had found in some God-forsakenplace on the north side of the lake and to fix it up.But then a card came from Joyce saying that Bobhad left her for “that floozy” he met in a bar.

She wonders whether Joyce still keeps a diary,whether she still fancies the serendipitous discov-ery of happiness and looks for ways to deposit itin the ordinary, or whether something else hashappened to her ordinary.

2 THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS

The anthropologists kept doing the fun thingsthey did together. Like knocking on the doors ofthe little fishermen’s huts on the frozen lake. Theywould invite themselves in for a visit, but thenthey would sit down on the bench and the fisher-men would not say anything. Not even “who areyou?” or “what are you doing here?” So, they sattogether in a wild and awkward silence, staringdown into the hole in the ice and the deep darkwaters below. The anthropologists could not thinkof a single question that made any sense at all.



When the anthropologists took walks in thewoods, they would come across hunters. Thehunters were more talkative than the ice fisher-men. That is because they all wanted the friendly,nosy, overeducated strangers to know that theywere not “Bambi killers.”Maybe some other hunterswere, but not them—the new breed. They werenice, and a lot of them had been to college and hadthings to say about politics and the environmentand the state. Most of the time there was a womanin the group. The others were teaching her to hunt.Everyone—the anthropologists too—would cowerwhen the mean-looking game wardens camearound a bend looking for poachers. The wardenswere the bad guys. They would drive slowly past inpostapocalyptic cars with burned paint and giantguns and spotlights mounted on the hood. Theywould fix us with hard stares, and you could seethe muscles jump under their camouflage huntingsuits. These guys were jumpy.

2 BEING JUMPY

Sometimes, the jumpy move would take over.Lingis (1994) saw that this had happened amongminers at the Arctic Circle:

The young miner who showed me the mine put outevery cigarette he smoked on his hand, which wascovered with scar tissue. Then I saw the otheryoung miners all had the backs of their hands cov-ered with scar tissue. . . . When my eye fell on themit flinched, seeing the burning cigarette beingcrushed and sensing the pain. . . . The eye does notread the meaning in a sign; it jumps from the markto the pain and the burning cigarette, and thenjumps to the fraternity signaled by the burningcigarettes. (p. 96)

2 A SLASHING

On the river in Austin, Texas, in the early morning,joggers pass over the long high bridge and stopto stretch their hamstrings on its metal rails. Pairsof friends, about to part for the day, will stop tostare out at the expanse of watery sights laid out

below—fishermen in flat-bottomed boats situpright in straight-backed chairs,giant blue heronspoise on drowned cottonwoods, new limestonemansions perched on the cliffs above throw reflec-tions halfway across the river. Crew boats passsilently under the bridge like human-poweredwater bugs skimming the surface. Occasionally,a riverboat will thrust itself slowly up the river,dredging the hard mass of the water up and over itswheel. Here, the world-in-a-picture still vibrates, asif it was just at that very moment that the real worldcrossed paths with an imagined elsewhere and thetwo realms hung suspended together in a still life.

Sometimes there are scenes of quiet desperation.Sometimes people leave memorials on the

bridge.One morning, a crude sign appeared, taped to

the metal railing. Below it was a shrine—yellowribbons and a Sacred Heart of Jesus votive candlewith half-burned sticks of incense stuck in thewax. The names Angela and Jerry were written inbold letters at the top of the sign, like the namesof young lovers repeated over and over in schoolnotebooks or graffitied on train trestles. Thestar-crossed lovers’ names were harshly crossedout and followed by the words “Relationship dest-royed, with malice by Federal Agents & A.P.D.[Austin Police Department] for beliefs guaran-teed under U.S. Constitutional Bill of Rights. Imiss you Angela, Jessica, & Furry Dog Reef.”

It was signed “Always, Jerry.”Below the signature were two graphics: the nick-

name “Yankee Girl”encircled by a pierced heart anda thick black box encasing the prayer “Please ComeBack.” Then a final howl and a promise:

Angela, Jessica and Furry Dog Reef. . . . I miss you.May God have mercy on the souls of the hateful,

evil, vindictive people who conspired to take youfrom me, and did so with success.Angela, I will loveyou always and forever.

I miss you babe,

Jerry

At the bottom, another pierced heart heldYankee Girl in its wounded arms.



The sign was both cryptic and as crystal clearas a scream. Bitter fury was its vitality and its end.Its drive to a sheer satisfaction quivered like fleshin its wavering letters. It heaved grief and longingat the world not as an outer expression of an innerstate but more directly as an act of the senses mak-ing contact with pen and paper and matches. Itsslashing was like the self-slashing of youngwomen who cut themselves so that they can feelalive or literally come to their senses. It had thesame self-sufficient fullness and did not ask forinterpretation or dream of a meaning.

This is a sensibility as common as it is strik-ing. It is the kind of thing you see everyday. In theelaborate poetics of graffiti—the signatures leftso artfully, the politics of slashing through them,crossing them out, erasing them, replicating themall over town. Or in the signs of the homeless onthe side of the road. Or in the countless verbal andvisual signs that come to life on the charged bor-der between things private and things public. Itis the kind of sensibility that surges through thewild conversation of AM radio talk shows andInternet sites. It adds force to the railing of theenraged in everything from road rage, to letters tothe editor, to the face-to-face raging resentmentsof workplaces and intimate spaces. It permeatespolitics from right wing to left wing.

Something in its roughened surface points to aresidue in things, a something that refuses to dis-appear. It draws attention, holds the visual fasci-nation of unspeakable things—transgressions,injustices, the depths of widespread hopelessness.What animates it is not a particular message butrather the more basic need to forcefully performthe unrecognized impact of things.

It flees the easy translation of pain and desireinto abstract values or commonsense coping.Yet every day its dramas of surge and arrest arebathed in the glow of some kind of meaning orform of dismissal. Then there are these questions:Will the gesture of the slashing shimmer as acuriosity passed on an everyday walking path,and will you feel a little jolt as you pass? Or, will itjust go in one eye and out the other?

Sometimes, it might have the vitality of a puresurge pushing back, gathering a counterforce to a

point of intensity that both slashes at itself andspits at the world.

Other times, its very violence means that it willbe erased, ignored, or drawn up, like blood in asyringe, to infuse new life into the enveloping cat-egories of good sense, healthy protest, productiveacts and lives, and mainstream moods by virtueof its bad example. It will be unwilling and unwit-ting nourishment for the more settled world ofcalculation, representation, value, and necessitythat gave rise to its spitting fury to begin with.Yeteven then, the sign, in its perverse singularity, willpeep out of little cracks on barely public stagessimultaneously defying and demanding witness.It will remain a partially visible affecting presencebecause what it registers is not only points ofbreakdown in “the system” but also lines of possi-ble breakthrough beating unbidden in the bloodof the mainstream.

A person walking by such signs might betouched by them or hardened to their obnoxiousdemands. But either way, a charge passes throughthe body and lodges in the person as an irritation,a confusion, an amusement, an ironic smirk, athrill, a threat, or a source of musing. For better orworse, signs that erupt as events teach us some-thing of their own jumpy attention to impacts byleaving visceral traces in their wake.

2 STRESS

The lone body and the social body had becomethe lived symptoms of the contradictions, con-flicts, possibilities, and haunted sensibilities ofpervasive forces. Stress was the lingua franca ofthe day. If you had it, you were onto something,part of the speeding force of things-in-the-making. But it could puncture you too, leavingyou alone during times of exhaustion, claustro-phobia, resentment, and ambient fear.

The self became a thing filled with the intri-cate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, andfinally satisfied or left behind. You could comfortit like a child. Or, you could look at the outlinesof it against the relief of other people’s missedopportunities. Or, you could inhabit it as a flood of



events and relationships caught in a repetitivepattern that you recognized only when you got tothe end of a cycle, and by then you were alreadyonto the next one.

There were little shocks in the rhythms ofsplurging and purging and in the constant edgycorrections of the self-help regimes—take anaspirin a day (or not), drink a glass of red wine aday (or not), eat butter or low-fat margarine orcanola oil, eat oatmeal to strip the bad cholesterolfrom your arteries, eat salmon to add the goodcholesterol, try antioxidants or kava kava ormelatonin.

The figure of a beefed-up agency became abreeding ground for all kinds of strategies ofcomplaint, self-destruction, flight, reinvention, andexperimentation as if the world rested on itsshoulders. Straight talk about willpower and pos-itive thinking claimed that agency was just a mat-ter of getting on track, as if all the messy businessof real selves affected by events and haunted bythreats could be left behind in an out-of-this-world levitation act.

Against this tendency, a new kind of memoirbegan to work the lone self into a fictional sacri-fice powerful enough to drag the world’s impactsout onto secret stages. Self-help groups addeddensity to the mix, offering both practical recipesfor self-redeeming action and a hard-hitting, livedrecognition of the twisted, all-pervasive waysin which compulsions permeated freedoms andwere reborn in the very surge to get free of themonce and for all.

2 THE BODY SURGES

The body builds its substance out of layers of sen-sory impact laid down in the course of strainingupstream against recalcitrant and alien forces ordrifting downstream, with its eyes trained on thewatery clouds and passing treetops overhead andits ears submerged in the flow that surrounds it,buoys it, and carries it along. The body surges for-ward, gets on track, gets sidetracked, falls down,pulls itself up to crawl on hands and knees, fliesthrough the air, hits a wall, regroups, or beats a

retreat. It knows itself as states of vitality, exhaus-tion, and renewal. It exerts itself out of necessityand for the love of movement and then it pulls aveil around itself to rest, building a nest of wornclothing redolent with smells of sweat or cheapperfume or smoky wood fires burrowed into wool.

The body cannot help itself. It is an extremistseeking thrills, a moderate sticking its toe in totest the waters, a paranoid delusion looking for aplace to hide. It is a bouncing fool throwing itselfat an object of round perfection in the doggedconviction that it is on the right track this time.What the body knows, it knows from the smell ofsomething promising or rancid in the air or thelook of a quickening or slackening of flesh. Itgrows ponderous, gazing on its own form witha Zen-like emptiness. As a new lover, it dotes onrevealed scars and zones in on freckles and molesand earlobes. As one of the anxious aging, it isdrawn to the sight of new jowls and mutant hairsand mottled skin in the bathroom mirror.

The body is both the persistent site of self-recognition and the thing that will always betrayyou. It dreams of its own redemption and knowsbetter. It catches sight of a movement out of thecorner of its eye and latches on to a borrowed inti-macy or a plan that comes as a gift to sweep it intothe flow of the world and free it of its lonely flesh.

The body consumes and is consumed. Like onebig pressure point, it is the place where outsideforces come to roost, condensing like thickenedmilk in the bottom of the stomach. It grows slug-gish and calls for sweet and heavy things to matchits inner weight. Or salty or caffeinated things tojolt it to attention.

Layers of invented life form around the body’sdreamy surges like tendons or fat.

Lifestyles and industries pulse in a silent,unknown reckoning of what to make of all this.

The body builds itself out of layer on layer ofsensory impact. It loves and dreads what makesit. At times, it is shocked and thrilled to find itselfin the driver’s seat. At other times, it holes up,bulks up, wraps itself in its layers. The world itlives in spins with the dancing poles of ups anddowns and rests its laurels in a banality that humsa tune of its own.



2 BODY FOR LIFE

She once took up Body for Life on the advice of afriend. Between them, it was a joke. They calledit their cult. But they also knew that there wassomething to a little extreme self-transformation.Or at least the effort. Body for Life was a best-selling book with glossy “before-and-after”picturesof bodybuilders on the inside covers. It started as abodybuilder’s, movement-building, moneymakingchallenge to the unwashed to put down the beerand chips and start loving life instead of just liv-ing it, to start thriving and not just surviving. Itwas “12 weeks to mental and physical strength.”

She was not at all taken with the tanned, oiled,muscle man and muscle woman look on theinside covers, but the little game of moving hereyes back and forth between each pair of before-and-after shots caught her in a spell of momen-tary satisfaction. The eye jumped happily betweenthe paired scenes. Now fat and pale, now muscledand oily and tan. Peek-a-boo. All of the bodieswere white. They made her think of the body dis-plays that she was always running into when shelived in Las Vegas. At the post office, or at thedrive-in movie theater, or while waiting in line toget a new driver’s license, there were always half-naked bodybuilders with wet-skinned snakesdraped around their necks, or monkeys on leashes,or stars-and-stripes halter tops and permed blondhair.

Her friend called the people in the pictures“beefcakes.”Class seemed to be somehow involvedin all of this, but people would swear up and downthat those who were into Body for Life came fromall walks of life. That comfortable claim to plain-ness emerging out of some kind of mainstream.Some kind of mall culture. Ordinary Americansunmarked by anything but the will to changetheir bodies and by the real or imagined fruits oftheir success after those glorious 12 weeks. Theywere people who had been catapulted out of theback seat of life onto the magic carpet ride thatturns flighty self-defeating dreams into vital gen-erative flesh.

They had experienced their breakthroughswhen they saw the inspiring photos on the inside

covers, or when they took a good hard lookat their own eye-opening “before” pictures, orwhen—while watching the inspirational videothat they could get for a $15 donation to theMake-A-Wish Foundation—they were suddenlyreleased from the feeling of being alone and felthope instead. They began to crave the 12-weekprogram even more than they craved a piece ofkey lime pie or a beer.

There is nothing weird about how this happens.It is laid out step by step like a 12-step programwhere the spiritual transformation flows directlythrough the flesh.You follow the steps in the bookas if it were a recipe book, consuming each newexercise with relish. You create 12-week goals outof gossamer wishes. Done. You pull your dreamsout of their shadow existence into the light of day.Okay then! You harness the force in your ownfaintly beating desire to change. Wow! Okay.You ask yourself hard questions. You write downthe answers. You speak your goals out loud withmimicked confidence every morning and nightuntil the confidence is real. You commit. Youfocus; forget the zoning out and drifting down-stream. You create five daily habits. You imagineother people looking at your new body withgleaming eyes, and you hear their approvingcomments until the imagining is effortless andpart of you. You surrender the negative emotionsthat hold everyone back, and you start lookingforward. You realize that you will never again getsidetracked. Everyone who takes the 12-weekchallenge feels like a winner. You do not need acarrot on a stick anymore; you take your eyes offthe prize (a blood red Lamborghini Diablo) andeven consumer fetishism seems to fade into thebackground of a half-lived past. Now you are con-suming your body, and your body is consumingyou. It is more direct.

She was not really interested in the inspirationalbusiness, however, and she never actually read thebook. She passed directly from the game of before-and-after photos to the charts near the end of thebook that tell you exactly what you have to do andeat. She got organized. She made copies of the exer-cise charts so that she could fill one out each daylike a daily diary. She memorized the acceptable



foods in the three food groups and stocked up. Sheritualized each meal and gleefully took off the 7thday each week, carefully following the instructionto eat exactly whatever she wanted that day and noless. She ordered boxes of the shakes and powerbars and began to experiment with the recipes thatmade the chocolate shake taste like a banana splitand turned the vanilla shake into that famousliquid key lime pie. She got the picture. She feltthe surge. She let it become a new piece of herskeleton. Then there were the inevitable ups anddowns, the sliding in and out of its partial cocoon.

A couple of years later, long after she had con-sumed the program enough to reduce it to a fewnew prejudices about how to exercise and how toeat, she drifted into Body for Life Community.comand the dozens of listservs and chat rooms in itsnest. Some were modeled as Christian fellowships:

The only requirement for membership is the desireto be healthy. This is not just a set of principles buta society for people in action. Carry the message orwither. . . . Those who haven’t been given the truthmay not know the abundant life we have found—away out, into life, a real life with freedom.

Other listservs were just organized by state. Inany of them, you could click on someone’s nameand up would pop a Body for Life photo, slippingyou right into the culture of personal ads. In thechat rooms, things got really concrete. Onewoman confessed that she could smell thechocolate right through the wrappers in the bowlof Halloween candy by the door, and someoneshouted support in capital letters: “HANG INTHERE! YOU CAN DO IT!!!” A man happilyobsessed about how to prepare his shakes:

My favorite is chocolate, and to prepare the shakeI always use 3 cubes of ice from the Rubbermaidmold, put them (without water) in the jar, and thenpour the water in. Use 12 and a half ounces and 1centimeter, then blend for about 55 seconds. You[have] got to use a stopwatch! I think this is why Ilove Myoplex, because I blend it for more secondsand I drink it cool without milk or bananas.

People exchanged stories of ongoing tra-gedies, seeking workout partners to help them

get through the ordeals. Others just focused onkeeping up the network connections:

Good morning to everyone. Been off for a few days.Lizzy—sorry to hear about your migraine—scary!Jim—it’s true—your pictures don’t do you justice!Abs—I love your philosophy! It’s true—we becomewhat we think about. Deb—congratulations! Goodluck with your photos—can’t wait to see your pro-gress! If you find something that covers bruises,let me know—I bruise just thinking about bump-ing into something. Can’t wait to see you all at theupcoming events!

All of these self-expressions are excessive intheir own way. They proclaim, confess, obsess,and gush. But that is not because the body reallydoes just get on track and march forward armedwith the drama of success and the minutia of dis-ciplinary practices. It is because it slumps andgets sidetracked and rejoins its Body for Life self.It is because it wants and it does not want andbecause it might do one thing or another. It isbecause it smells its way along tracks, and newtracks intersect the old and carry it away. It isbecause it catches things out of the corner of itseye, and half-hidden things on the sidelines arealways the most compelling.

Body for Life draws its own life from the forceof a bodily surge enacting not the simple, deliber-ate, one-way embodiment of dreams but ratherthe pulsing impact of dream and matter on eachother in a moment when the body is beside itself.Caught in a movement, floating suspendedbetween past and future, hesitation and forwardthrust, pain and pleasure, knowledge and igno-rance, the body vibrates or pulses. It is only whenthe body remains partly unactualized and unan-chored that it seems intimate, familiar, and alive.This can be lived as an event—a moment ofshock, climax, or awakening. But there is alsosomething of it in the banal and quotidian—acontinuous background radiation, a humming leftunremarked like a secret battery kept charged.

Body for Life says that turning fleeting fan-tasies into the force of vitality is about making adecision, but making a decision is itself about



playing games, looking at pictures, followingrecipes, mimicking desired states, inventingsocial imaginaries, and talking to yourself in themirror. Getting on track and staying there is notthe simple and sober choice of a lifetime butrather a thin line from which you can, and proba-bly will, topple back to ordinary sloppiness oronto an “epidemic of the will” (Sedgwick, 1992)such as excessive dieting. Then the body mightswing itself back to a state of moderation orexhaustion, stick its toe in to test the waters, andpull the blankets over itself to hide.

The proliferating cultures of the body spinmadly around the palpable promise that fears andpleasures and forays into the world can be liter-ally made vital all-consuming passions. But thispromise (and threat) is already there in the bodydirectly engaged by shifting public sensibilities,in the senses retooled and set in motion. Like anantenna, the body picks up pulses that are hard tohear, or hard to bear, in the normalizing universe ofcultural codes. It stores the pulses in a neck muscleor a limb, or it follows them just to see where theyare going.It dares them and registers their impacts.It wants to be part of their flow. It wants to be intouch. It wants to be touched. It hums along withthem, flexing its muscles in a state of readiness.

2 SOMETIMES WHEN YOU

HEAR SOMEONE SCREAM . . .

Laurie Anderson had a show at the GuggenheimSoho called “Your Fortune, $1.” A spooky whiteplastic owl perched on a stool in a darkened cornerspewed out a stream of two-bit advice, trenchantcommentary, and stray advertising lingo pluckedout of a realm of sheer circulation. The owl’smechanical yet sensuously grainy voice droned onand on, transfixing her in a flood of Hallmarkgreeting card schlock. She was fascinated to seehow the flood’s ordinary reality seemed toinstantly deflate and become both laughable andalarming from the owl’s simple mimicking.

Then it said something that she swore she hadalready been anxiously chanting to herself.

Sometimes when you hear someone scream, it goesin one ear and out the other. Sometimes it passesright into the middle of your brain and gets stuckthere.

It was one of those moments when the indis-criminate flow stops dead in its tracks. The super-saturated soup of sensory images and soundsgently prodding and massaging us like waves lap-ping a shore takes this opportunity to solidify intosomething momentarily clear or even shocking.Like a trauma we had forgotten or never quite reg-istered that comes back in a flash. Or like a whiffof something hopeful or potentially exciting pass-ing with the breeze. We perk up in a mix of recog-nition, pleasure, and alarm.

One minute you are afloat in the realm of sheercirculation. Then some random sound bite hitsyou with a force that seems to bring you to yoursenses. We sober up in the face of a cruel lucidity.But it is the hungry sense that has been awakenedthat drives the world back into the land ofenchantment. The waves of desire lap at our feet,and we drift off again, held aloft by the sheer den-sity of images, sensory signals, and objects drawninto play in the dreamworld.

When she heard the owl’s line about screamsthat pass right into the middle of your brain andget stuck there, she went home and wrote downa story that had been lodged in her psyche eversince she heard it.

The story starts with a question lodged in atactile sensate anxiety and then opens onto anaesthetic scene of the senses. The question: Doyou ever wake up in the morning, or in the middleof the night, with a sense of sudden dread andstart scanning your dreamy brain for the memoryof what you have done or a premonition of what iscoming? Some do this all of the time; for them,this is what morning has become.

The aesthetic scene: She has a big iron bedlodged against long wide windows looking ontothe back deck. Tropical breezes waft over her inthe night, carrying the sweet and fetid smells ofkumquat trees and mimosa blossoms. At dawn,there are wild bird cries—mourning doves andgrackles and parrots that once escaped their petcages and now breed in the trees. At certain hours



in the still of the night, the train cries in the neardistance. The night pulses with the high lonesomesound of haunted machine dreams roaming thelandscape.

When she has guests, she lets them use theiron bed, and they wake up talking about the bedand the wailing train as if they feel pleased to beset down in some kind of American Heartland.But she is only too happy to lay down a pallet onthe living room floor and fall into a deep sleepwith only the smell of old ashes from the fireplacebecause she knows why the train sings.

The train sings for Bobby, a homeless drunkwho laid himself down on the tracks one nightand passed out as if he too could lay down a pal-let and escape from his ghosts. He and his old ladyhad been down at the free concert on the riverwhere some of the street people party hard. Theweekly concert was their moment to be at home inpublic, doing what everyone else was doing, onlymore. Some would laugh loud or make announce-ments or give people directions and advice.As theday went to full dark, the power of music wouldflow out from the stage, touch spellbound bodies,and spread out to the neon skyline reflecting inthe dark glassy expanse of the river. There werealways graceful moments—a dance gesture,a wideopen smile, a sudden upsurge of generosity, thestartled gratitude of pariahs who suddenly foundthemselves seamlessly rubbing shoulders withthe housed. There were always crashes too—people falling down drunk in front of the stage;the vomiting; a man huddled and pale, too sickto party; flashes of hope and ease dashed on therocks of familiar fury, frustration, humiliation,and grief; people making spectacles of them-selves. Sometimes there were fights.

That night, Bobby had a fight with his old ladyand stomped off alone. He followed the traintracks through the woods to the homeless camp,where he sat on the tracks alone, taking stock ina booze-soaked moment of reprieve. He loved theromance of the high lonesome sound in thedistance and the train’s promise of tactility andpower—the rumbling weight of power incarnaterumbling past, the childhood memory of thepenny laid on the tracks, the way the tracks

carved out a “no man’s land”where shadows couldtravel and live.

He laid himself down on the icy cold tracksand closed his eyes, as if tempting fate. As if thatsimple move held both the possibility of checkingout and a dream of contact with a public worldthat might include him.

Somewhere in the middle of the long trainpassing over, he raised his head, awakening. Theysay that if he had not woken up, the train wouldhave passed right over him.

Now the train screams out a warning whenit draws close to that place on the tracks not farfrom her iron bed. It often wakes her. Or it lodgesin her sleep and comes as an unknown shock ofanxiety in the morning.

2 2 2

2 CODA

The stories that make up my story—disparateand arbitrary scenes of impact tracked throughbodies, desires, or labors and traced out of theaftermath of a passing surge registered, some-how, in objects, acts, situations, and events—aremeant to be taken not as representative examplesof forces or conditions but rather as constitutiveevents and acts in themselves that animate andliterally make sense of forces at the point of theiraffective and material emergence. More directlycompelling than ideologies, and more fractious,multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolicrepresentations of an abstract structure broughtto bear on otherwise lifeless things, they areactual sites where forces have gathered to a pointof impact, or flirtations along the outer edgesof a phenomenon, or extreme cases that suggestwhere a trajectory might lead if it were to gounchecked. They are not the kinds of things youcan get your hands on or wrap your mind around,but they are things that have to be literallytracked.

Rather than seek an explanation for thingswe presume to capture with carefully formulatedconcepts, my story proposes a form of cultural



and political critique that tracks lived impactsand rogue vitalities through bodily agitations,modes of free-floating fascination, and momentsof collective excitation or enervation. It attemptsto describe how people are quite literally chargedup by the sheer surge of things in the making.

My story, then, is not an exercise in representa-tion or a critique of representation; rather it is acabinet of curiosities designed to incite curiosity.Far from trying to present a final, or good enough,story of something we might call “U.S. culture,” ittries to deflect attention away from the obsessivedesire to characterize things once and for all longenough to register the myriad strands of shiftinginfluence that remain uncaptured by representa-tional thinking. It presumes a “we”—the impactedsubjects of a wild assemblage of influences—butit also takes difference to be both far more funda-mental and far more fluid than models of posi-tioned subjects have been able to suggest. It is notnormative. Its purpose is not to evaluate things asfinally good or bad, and far from presuming thatmeanings or values run the world, it is drawn to theplace where meaning per se collapses and we areleft with acts and gestures and immanent possibil-ities. Rather than try to pinpoint the beating heartof its beast, it tracks the pulses of things as theycross each other, come together, fragment, andrecombine in some new surge. It tries to cull atten-tion to the affects that arise in the course of the per-fectly ordinary life as the promise, or threat, thatsomething is happening—something capable ofimpact. Whether such affects are feared or shame-lessly romanticized, subdued or unleashed, theypoint to the generative immanence lodged inthings. Far from the named “feelings” or “emo-tions” invented in discourses of morals, ideals, andknown subjectivities (leave that to Hallmark andthe Family Channel), they take us to the surge ofintensity itself.

My story tries to follow lines of force as theyemerge in moments of shock, or become resonantin everyday sensibilities, or come to roost in astilled scene of recluse or hiding. It tries to beginthe labor of knowing the effects of currentrestructurings not as a fixed body of elements andrepresentations imposed on an innocent world

but rather as a literally moving mix of things thatengages desires, ways of being, and concreteplaces and objects.

2 REFERENCES

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Ordinary Affects

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