Registers of Affect #0: What Are They?

Each week, I will post one example of what I am calling "Registers of Affect." These will be brief passages (often from DeLillo's texts, sometimes from his interviews, and occasionally from secondary literature) that speak in the language of affect theory. Admittedly, you may ask: What does this language sound like?

In her book Ordinary Affects (2007), Kathleen Stewart asks us to be attentive to the affective dimensions of the everyday. As she writes,

The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life. 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 emergencies. They're things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.  (2-3)

While one could interpret this passage as being too broad ("it can mean anything!"), I would caution against doing so. For Stewart is in fact saying something quite unordinary. By calling attention to those moments of the everyday that are so frequent, mysterious, and routine that we do not usually try to account for them, Stewart reveals just how much we ignore the fabric of everyday existence.

If we are going to develop a sound politics, we need to be attentive to how things happen, how we are affected to act. And we should consider doing this in a way that may not necessarily be scientific, but certainly is committed to "speculation, curiosity, and the concrete" (1).

Using these "Registers of Affect," I will argue that DeLillo is attentive to the affective dimensions of everyday life. Note, too, that I will not offer any commentary about them (though I may occasionally point to connections between two or more).

Please, just enjoy and contemplate these "Registers of Affect."

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Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.