Review of “The Hundreds,” by Kathleen Stewart & Lauren Berlant

This review was written in July 2021.

I’ll start by saying that I’m a fan of Lauren Berlant, and her death did what so many artist’s deaths do, which is motivate me to get to know her work better, and this book had been on my list since I started my list in 2019. I’m a proponent of thinking about the world via affect. It is, in so many words, how I teach art to students, and how I think about music when I’m writing it.

I might be guilty of being uncreative, and wanting scholarship to stay scholarship, and poetry to stay poetry. I have also been guilty of reacting poorly to work that I see too much of myself in, in the sense that I recognize goals, defense mechanisms, shortcuts. The authors here, it felt like, were experimenting with where their groundbreaking concepts could take them in prose poetry. They were collaborating too, a place where my defense mechanisms tend to come out even more. I suspended my disbelief with the book for a while but I found myself shielding against uncharitable thoughts, which then gets me thinking about Tressie McMillan Cottom’s advice that when you don’t understand an academic work, consider that you might not be its audience. I thought I started to recognize some academic tricks, though. The trick of performing a musical genre with your academic peers who are impressed with hobbying skill but unqualified to judge it. The trick of buttressing your art with descriptions and reading recommendations that your peers can judge instead of the art itself. Placing the profane alongside the sacred or the popular alongside the scholarly to perform a breadth of interest and an unbothered indulgence in your personal tastes.

Although each contribution is unlabeled, I started to get the sense that I enjoyed one writer’s contributions more than the other’s. I have the same feeling about They Might Be Giants, and, in a similar way, there was the lingering feeling that I could also be wrong about who was who. The passage “In It,” which describes each author’s style, confirmed it for me a bit, as I preferred for “all the knowledge of a place to converge” with “precision and rhythm” to the alternative of getting “the world some attention.” I think I prefer Berlant’s microscopy to Stewart’s overt referentiality.

On twitter I made the joke “Affect theory aka competitive noticing.” It was a joke that I hope doesn’t get me cancelled — again, I love affect theory and Berlant especially! The scholarly works of affect theory feel contained, like many diverse ideas as pebbles in an urn, where they have purchase with one another. This felt like an attempt to completely flatten the plane of the ideas, to smash the urns of genre and scatter the pebbles across the beach, and as a result I felt myself sprawled on the ground trying to feel them all. The prose is pleasant, but it is almost Seinfeldian in each passage’s take on “have you ever noticed…” And in the flatness of the attempt to move beyond scholarship OR poetry into “the world,” in the attempt to get down to the minute level and notice every detail, the authors fall back on stereotypes in pursuit of an immediacy of recognition in their readership. How else to explain casual references to “homeless” people or “heroin addicts” from two minds who mean to represent the most enlightened among us? I also have a pet peeve about leveraging students’ personal lives for one’s work, and in this context, “Office Hours” strikes me as practically unforgivable. It’s entirely possible the author had permission to share, of course.

Maybe this prose has a genre that I simply do not see, because when another genre is added — the delightful cartoons in Andrew Causey & C. Thresher’s “Not-Index” to the book — I feel like I have more to grasp, and the rest of the essays shine a little more as I look back on them. The essay I’m most likely to take with me into the future is “Writing, Life,” because it is a description of, well, writing life, with an honesty and detail that I think will be quite useful to my students. And as an academic, part of me is taken in by the bibliography, no matter how performative. As for the observations otherwise scattered throughout, at best they are a fun template for making my own. Which is maybe how they wanted it.