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Reviewed by:
  • Ordinary Affects
  • Christopher Schaberg
Ordinary Affects. By Kathleen Stewart. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 144 pages, $18.95.

Kathleen Stewart has written a book that strikes the reader as something that Edward Abbey could have written if he had let himself be as enchanted with western sociality as he was with western wilderness. Ordinary Affects is teeming with attention to detail and philosophical wonder—even when (or precisely when) the object of analysis is a West Texas Walmart or the subtle mysticism of a gambling binge in Las Vegas. The book articulates a constellation of ideas, trends, queries, and myths that circulate around and define what Stewart calls the "affective subject." Not exactly a sequence of chapters, Stewart's book takes shape around aphoristic snapshots of familiar moments and micro-narratives; each section begins with its own heading, such as "RV Freedom," "Blue TV Nights," or "Tracking Nuclear Waste."

Stewart writes from a critical anthropological perspective about a subject that is slippery, tarnished, and everyday: how banal patterns and unromantic landscapes bring subjectivity itself into being and what happens when common acts accrete—or burst. Stewart defines the ordinary as "a drifting immersion that watches and waits for something to pop up" (95). Likewise, the "affective subject" is the person or para-conscious self who drifts through scenes and scenery and lets life wash over, feeling strangely empowered, embodying "a collection of trajectories and circuits" (59). The author refers to herself in the third person throughout the book to suggest a self-conscious threshold that exists between notions of the "embedded" subject position and any fantasy notion of scholarly (or voyeuristic) distance that one might achieve in writing about "culture." The "she" who appears in the scenes of this book is the existential center of certain stories and that person who always feels a little cut off from "simple presence" (5).

Stewart locates her subject(s) in hotels that spring up at the edges of highways like "mirages" in the Texas Panhandle; in an acquaintance's stories of hunting and fishing in "the big, beautiful, wild Nevada"; on a bridge in Austin, "a stage for human dramas of intimacy, rage, quiet desperation, or simple pleasure"; in looped video clips of "O. J. Simpson's white Ford Bronco traveling down an L.A. freeway"; and in the social dynamics of a trailer park outside Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas (24, 34, 38, 68, 71). On the one hand, then, Ordinary Affects is consistently interested in western spaces, even in the most narrowly conceived geographical sense of this [End Page 179] term. On the other hand, Stewart is shrewd at pointing out moments in which technologies such as eBay turn a specific western place (here, Irvine, California) into a broader "community" at once boundless yet finite and oddly constricting.

This book is key for scholars of western American literature for at least two reasons. First, Ordinary Affects represents a bold and confident (re)entry of cultural studies into the environmental nonfiction that defined this field (e.g., Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Snyder, Barry Lopez, and Gretel Ehrlich). Second, this book poses an important challenge to readers (and writers) who may not think to look at strip malls and mass technoculture as subjects of contemplation. Stewart lays out a methodology and a poetic through which to grapple with postwestern realities—and this "West" is meant to register in a United States as well as in a globalized context. Through tactical observations and streamlined critical allusions, Stewart takes on popular culture instantiations of selfhood—dieting trends, airport fiascos, grocery store aisles, uncannily open spaces of solace—and puts a phenomenological spin on them: How do these things feel, and how might we bracket these feelings in a world that we know keeps spinning? In short, Stewart tries to account for the fleeting, ephemeral currents and themes that make contemporary life livable, coherent, and nearly unbearable. If this sounds like no easy feat, the book surprises the reader with its effortless yet sustained way of lingering on subjects that always seem to slide out of focus and back into the mainstream and minutiae of western existence.

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