The Hundreds, observation, encounter, atmosphere, and world-making

Abstract

The conversation with Lauren Berlant begins with reflections on the experimental form of her new, collaborative book The Hundreds (with Kathleen Stewart, 2019) and on worlding imaginaries. Berlant elaborates on the genre of the theoretical poem, how it came into being, and how it works. She reveals her creative politics of theory-making, processes of generating theory from everyday observations as well as from numerous and heterogenous sources she has been ‘thinking with’. Images – including the dialectical image and the elaborative ekphrasis – are discussed as triggers in the process of writing. As such, they open up a potentially revolutionary elsewhere that is so central to queer and Marxist theory and aesthetics, as well as to Berlant’s version of affect theory, and her affective realism. Towards the end of the discussion, Berlant praises the loss of our ‘footing in the world’ which might be for the benefit of a commitment to change, and offers an engagement in making another kind of world.