Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects

Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke UP: Durham, NC. (2007).

“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 emergences” (2).

“The give circuits and flows the forms of a life. They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation” (2).

“Their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible” (3).

“Ordinary affects, then, are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures” (3).

“Models of thinking. . .They miss how someone’s ordinary can endure or can sag defeated; how it can shift in the face of events like a shift in the kid’s school schedule or the police at the door” (4).

“each scene is a tangent that performs the sensation that something is happening—something that needs attending to” (5).

“The ordinary registers intensities—regularly, intermittently, urgently, or as a slight shudder” (10).

“The first step in thinking about the force of things is the open question of what counts as an event, a movement, an impact, a reason to react” (16).

“Potentiality is a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence” (21).

Potentiality and anticipatory guilt.

“Affects are not so much forms of signification, or units of knowledge, as they are expressions of ideas or problems performed as a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation” (40).

“Ordinary affects highlight the question of the intimate impacts of forces in circulation. They’re not exactly ‘personal’ but they sure can pull the subject into places it didn’t exactly ‘intend’ to go” (40).

“The affective subject is a collection of trajectories and circuits. You can recognize it through fragments of past moments glimpsed unsteadily in the light of the present like the flickering light of a candle” (59).