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2024 Lauren Berlant Memorial LectureKathleen Stewart
Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin
The Sensation of Singular Life
This piece is a affective theory of singular life. Taking the subject to be an exposure that doesn’t return to itself (Nancy 2007, 1), it composes with worldly compositions, not about them. Side-stepping explanatory rhetorics and representational practices to lean instead into accumulations of things that seem to be happening or could happen otherwise, it lingers, as in Stengers’s “idiot stories” (2005, 185), on the singularities of a hawk staring down at a Chihuahua in a back yard or the tendency to excess in a voice getting loud.
In a present so weighted with composition and decomp, punchlines multiply on a dizzy verge; a muscle flexes at the differings and matterings of splintering fields of interest and madness.
In a realism unmoored of common sense and other modernist habits, I try to attune to the thisness of something becoming textured, a thread infilling at the hint of a detail.
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Kathleen Stewart will also lead a Writing/Worlding Workshop on Friday, October 25 from 12:00-2:00pm. Please click here for more information and to RSVP: https://forms.gle/NuxH8xJX7UkN97rd9
About the speaker:
Kathleen Stewart is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. She writes experimental ethnographies on everyday affects, the immanent plane of potentia, and modes of speculative attunement. A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an `Other’ America (Princeton, 1996) traces densely textured layerings of sense and form composed in the sociality of a national sacrifice zone. Ordinary Affects (Duke, 2007) suggests the emergent force of a riven present in social, material and aesthetic events and detritis. The Hundreds (with Lauren Berlant, Duke 2019) thinks through writing as sound and dilating bubbles floating over scenes. Worlding (Duke MS) hones the prolific generativity now taking place as collective singular sensations of something that feels like something to be in, or next to, or against.
About the series:
To honor Prof. Lauren Berlant’s intellectual legacy, the Department of English and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality propose a joint annual lecture series to start in Spring 2023. This annual lecture takes its form and inspiration from the Worlding, Writing project that Lauren ran for several years through 3CT and CSGS. The purpose of this project was, in Lauren’s words, “to explore new modes of writing and reading - not in an effort to affirm expertise but to imagine productive idioms for critical engagement and to assemble novel ways of attending to socio-political phenomena.” The invited speaker will be someone whose work draws on Lauren’s intellectual legacy, and/or who is pushing the boundaries of writing and reading in ways that resonate with the Worlding, Writing project. The speaker can be an academic, an artist, or an activist.
Presented by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Department of English Language and Literature’s Carpenter Lecture series.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
5733 S University Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637
