Affective Encounters, Rhythmic Writings: A Review of Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's The Hundreds

Abstract

The Hundreds , by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 184 pages. $84.95 cloth. $23.95 paperback. “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?”1 In short, how can we conceptualize in contact? Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart seek to answer these affective musings in The Hundreds —a provocative collection of 100-word pieces to “keep up with what's going on” (x) through compositional poiesis , a reimagination of how we might participate and experiment in writing form, affective coupling, and generative worlding. Originating as a series of ethnographic experiments in which each story is constrained to 100 words (or multiples thereof), Berlant and Stewart document ordinary life—the banal, commonplace, and repetitive—as a way of amplifying its resonance in a written environment. Together, the pieces comprise a poignant frenzy of sentences that fold into one another, reminiscent of the “analytic, observational, and transferential ways …