On Refusing to Be Worn Out
I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve been on holiday for this past week which is extremely useful in refusing to be worn out. And when I say holiday, I mean that I’ve not been at my day job but have instead been working on the proofs for my book, Everything Affects Everyone, and sorting out various parts of my life and planning just a little into the future. We also went to Banff, and I visited this little tree growing in a stone fence, and which I’ve taken photos of for years. Still, this little tree refuses to give up its hold and boy do I admire and love this tree for just rooting in and keeping the faith. I have communed with this sapling for years via my camera lens, which I guess means that it’s not really a sapling, is it? Returning, I never really expect it to be there. Afterwards, I don’t think much about it. We go home, life resumes. But every year when we return to Banff, I mosey by and when it’s there it’s such a pleasant surprise.
I have lifted today’s post title from a 2019 article about the literary critic Lauren Berlant, who recently died. The article ends:
“No one wants to be a bad or compromised kind of force in the world, but the latter is just inevitable,” Berlant once wrote in a short essay on her personal credos. “The question is how to develop ways to accentuate those contradictions, to interrupt their banality and to move them somewhere.” We can build worlds out of these small ambitions. We continue to write, even if it occasionally feels as though we were spinning our wheels, and we continue to live, even if it means giving up the certainty that our story is going to end the way we want it to. Writing on her blog a few years ago, Berlant issued what she described as her collective’s secret motto: “We refuse to be worn out.”
The author of the article, Hua Hsu, also says: “But attentiveness to affect encourages us to imagine ourselves beyond the present: even if feelings of exhaustion, indifference, or disillusionment may have been naturalized, that doesn’t mean they’re natural.”
I have written before about the book Ordinary Affects by Kathleen Stewart and I continue to crush on it. Obviously it’s meant a lot to me, given the title of my forthcoming novel!
If you are like me and have had trouble finding ways to think about this new/old shabby world that we happen to live in, then I think it’s worthwhile exploring affect theory. There’s something a bit useful in describing what you see and feel and experience in this manner.
What are ordinary affects? Stewart says this:
“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 to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies. They’re things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, connotation and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.”
So after reading the article I mentioned above, I immediately got my hands on a copy of The Hundreds, a collaborative project between Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart.
“Each entry is an experiment in “following out the impact of things” in a hundred words, or a multiple of a hundred words. The result is a strange and captivating book. It is an inventory of what Berlant and Stewart call “ordinaries,” which arise from encounters with the world that are “not events of knowing, units of anything, or revelations of realness, or facts.” They are records of affect, meditations, manifestos, and prose poems. There are entries on smoothies and weird encounters at the liquor store, digressions on selfies, yoga, and capitalism, a reference to the TV show “Search Party” and the real-estate app Zillow. The authors sift through the detritus of the American Dream—the symptoms of cruel optimism.”
Reading both Ordinary Affects and The Hundreds changes how I think about the vignettes of my everyday ordinary life. I assemble my thoughts differently around them. When I think about potentially the feelings and relations and emergencies that come out of a moment and where they go and how they play into dreams and next encounters it also changes how I see myself and in particular how I see myself in this present time, this moment. It allows me to get closer to what’s happening, but also to distance myself from it.
For the writers out there, these books could act as writing prompts. I know I always feel like writing after I dip into one or the other of them. But regardless, I think this mode of writing can alter how we see the world, in ways that would be particularly useful right now. I think this mode of looking, seeing, storytelling, relating, is a helpful tool in a quest to refuse to be worn out.
