"Worldmaking in a Shitstorm: Review of The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart"

The Hundreds is a speculative and seductive book. It not a typical academic tome; rather than containing sequential chapters that analyze and judge a given topic, it is composed of short prose poems and theoretical musings about the impact of the world on everyday experience. Each vignette is only 100 words, or multiples of 100 words—hence the book's title—and dwells in commonplace and often unnoticed points of contact between people, objects, infrastructure, and atmosphere. They magnify situations otherwise written off as unimportant or irrelevant to the serious work of politics and social analysis: small talk at the gym, butt marks on a couch, Red Bull, a broken-down car, cake decoration, stress and weed at the end of a long day, sex-like noises from a juice box, tennis lessons. Combined, the vignettes make up a "congested tableau of the present": ordinary scenes that impact, take over, or underwhelm everyday experiences. (105) Authors Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart ask what sustained attention to the minor might reveal about what's happening in the world and the relations that constitute that happening. They explore how people make a world, and make do with a world, within and against "a shit-storm of a life," and they attend to the smallness of pain, intimacy, discomfort, and astonishing beauty that comprise banal encounters. (22) Yet the authors push against the idea that every encounter has to be judged or have a use value. As they lament, "These days even a shit has to enter the workforce." (13) Berlant and Stewart aim to do something else with that shit. They probe it, caress it, notice the angst and the pleasure and the disappointment of different kinds of shit people confront every day. And they ask us to also perceive the subtlety of these daily encounters, rather than criticize or dismiss them. From there they invite readers to imagine expanded possibilities for living in the present: "Something says wake up and pee, then go make life." (102) This is fundamentally a book about making life.

The Hundreds is an outgrowth of the work we've come to know of Berlant and Stewart, as each work in various registers to show how ordinary affective experiences make worlds and shape attachments to others. But in this collaboration the authors depart into a poetic and speculative register to explore more personal vignettes, including encounters with Disney World, homeless ministers at the gym (the gym being a central space for encounters in this book), café chatter, fake dating games, and Midway Airport, dissecting felt moments of self-dissolution, uncomfortable closeness, eavesdropping, and frustration. The vignettes initially might seem to find kinship with expressive forms like the Facebook post or Twitter feed (including the arbitrary space limits), but are actually quite different. Their prose poems are not self-burnishing personal brand enterprises, approval-seeking humblebrags, righteous political denunciation, or even reflective of a coherent and self-referential subject. Instead, by exploring the subtlety of how people navigate their worlds, their "way is to notice relations and varieties of impact," to strive for the "perfectly quotidian ambition to register what's happening" (5, 21). They are less concerned with shoring up a self than in exploring the intricacies of relationality; a vignette titled "Friendhating" is at once eviscerating, petty, and full of affection, encompassing a range of different modes by which people connect to others amidst the blockages placed in their way and the blockages they create for themselves.

The authors' approach to scenic moments is distinctly non-melodramatic and nonheroic, which doesn't mean they aren't intense or affectively powerful. But if "genre's a blanky" (91) that provides clarity, predictability, and solace against the incoherence of life, The Hundreds uses less clarifying genre forms that allow readers to feel their way into a scene rather than prescribing a coherent felt experience for them. Berlant and Stewart call them "genres of the middle": thought experiments...