ABSTRACT
In Ordinary affects Kathleen Stewart (2007) assembles her close ethnographic attentiveness and attachments to life as a series of disparate scenes, each scene “a tangent that performs the sensation that something is happening—something that needs attending to. From the perspective of ordinary effects”, she writes, “thought is patchy and material. It does not find magical closure or even seek it, perhaps because it’s too busy just trying to imagine what’s going on” (2007, p. 5). Like Woolf, there is a flow, continuity, density and intensity to her writing as Stewart attends—slowly, without need or care to rush to conclusion—to the thinking, feelings and “stuff” in public, social and intimate worlds that have capacity to affect and be affected. They are, she contends, the things that happen that “catch people up in something that feels like something” (2007, p. 2). In this chapter, I play around with Stewart’s thinking and writing texts as “tangle[s] of trajectories, connections, and disjunctures” (2007, p. 5) and consider the kinds of “permissions” she might give to write our own words of intimacy and sociality in a kindred way.
