coe168_berlant-stewart.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Welcome back, everyone, to this spring break edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast. Live from Coconut Bay, Washington State Forever.

Speaker2: [00:00:31] That is coconut. Check it up for a second. I was trying to remember the name of it, and I thought it was chuck a ball. All right. But I can't help.

Speaker1: [00:00:40] But 10 seconds in, we got our first double entendre the night, folks. That's high quality.

Speaker2: [00:00:45] Ok, but where do you pay for? Some people probably know are chucking it is, but I didn't know we're chugging. It was until I arrived here and checking out.

Speaker1: [00:00:54] We happened upon it following a merry band of chipmunks

Speaker2: [00:00:57] Till I chuck tonight. That's right. What if it was called Huck Nut? You know, like you could chuck something you throw it or you huck something that's also throwing it?

Speaker1: [00:01:05] One of the reasons we came to talk about Bey is it's within striking distance of Bellingham, Washington.

Speaker2: [00:01:11] It's near Bellingham, where resides.

Speaker1: [00:01:13] One of Symphony's freshman year college roommates leave her name off until we get her permission to identify her. Ok, but let us just say that this roommate and what pseudonym shall we give her?

Speaker2: [00:01:30] Let's call her Sheri Olson.

Speaker1: [00:01:32] Sheri Olson.

Speaker2: [00:01:35] Well, I was unprepared, but there's a reason for that. All right. I think Sheri will understand why I named her that.

Speaker1: [00:01:42] So we met one Sheri Olson here in Bellingham. And part of what we were trying to do, at least myself speaking for myself and our daughter was to find some stories about Simone. How from back in the day. Oh God. Oh, it didn't go as well as we had hoped.

Speaker2: [00:02:01] So that's why you've been in a bad mood for the last 24 hours is because you didn't get a bunch of dirt. I wanted

Speaker1: [00:02:05] A lot of dirt

Speaker2: [00:02:06] Stories. I could see, like as the as the dinner wore on, like after actually got forty five minutes into it and you weren't hearing good stories like I. I saw like a kind of a veil of of grim sadness all over your face. Like, This is not what I drove all the way to chuck it out for.

Speaker1: [00:02:24] My face dropped. Little by little it did. I fell into a deep despondency.

Speaker2: [00:02:29] He's like, Oh my God, we're talking about like the same normative things that we would talk about with any old person. Well, there was one, not the Sheri Olson.

Speaker1: [00:02:37] Let me tell you this, and I'm going to call her Shelly Orson from now on. One of the things I

Speaker2: [00:02:42] Know her name is Sherry Olson.

Speaker1: [00:02:44] Ok, if you say so. One of the things that old Sherry or Shelly said to us was that you used to drive her down to go shopping. She got to hop on the back of your little motor scooter and you would go down. And she said she always knew where to find you after she was done shopping because you would be near the rotisserie chicken warming your hands on the rotisserie chicken unit, which was a really random thing to remember about somebody. But but it's sweet, and I've never seen you do that. So at what point did you give up warming your hands on rotisserie chicken?

Speaker2: [00:03:18] Well, you know, what's so funny is that the second that Bruja heard that she was like, Oh my God, I do that too.

Speaker1: [00:03:24] Oh wow, it's genetic.

Speaker2: [00:03:26] Yeah, it's genetic. Yeah, but I don't.

Speaker1: [00:03:28] Is that really a big thing? Did you have a lot of problems with circulation back in those days?

Speaker2: [00:03:32] I think I mean, I don't remember doing that at all, but I can imagine that I didn't have gloves, right? Because that would be too, I don't know, pedestrian or well prepared, right? So since I was kind of rough and ready, I think the ride all the way down from campus to the Safeway is, I don't know, a couple of miles. And if it were cold out and if you're the driver, you have to have your hands out on the handlebars to control the the gears, the clutch and the brake.

Speaker1: [00:04:03] Meanwhile, oh, I can cut it out. I'll put a bleep in. That'll be fun.

Speaker2: [00:04:08] I usually put a bleep in. She was always riding on the back and so she would be able to like she would then wrap her arms around my belly and probably had her hands in the pockets of my warm coat while my poor little hands, my poor little paws were out facing the the weather I see. Did you see what I'm saying? So I think my hands probably got cold because I was driving the motorcycle and I'm sure I didn't have gloves. That would be way too much for me to handle.

Speaker1: [00:04:37] Ok, so this was kind of a situationally specific thing. It wasn't so much like a fetish you had for warming your hands over.

Speaker2: [00:04:44] No, and I was a hardcore vegan. I was a hardcore vegan at the time. That's one of those. So even getting near that rotisserie chicken must have been like anathema. Ok, OK, I guess so. I must have been pretty cold. My hands must have been pretty cold.

Speaker1: [00:04:57] So even though Sherri kind of let us down in terms of not having a huge trove of stories to share, although let's be honest, it was a while ago, so I'm not going to blame her. She said it was a really long time. It was a really long time ago, and she told us about some of your colorful classmates that I'll leave it to you. Simone, if you want to mention them or not. But the thing we discovered then this week that had nothing to do with Shelly Cherry. It had to do with a random conversation that you and I had when it turned out that you did not know who Bob Ross

Speaker2: [00:05:29] Was from the joy of painting. Yeah, that was the more interesting you were.

Speaker1: [00:05:32] Like, What? Who? And I said, You haven't seen Bob Ross and you were like, No, because there was this period of time when you were too cool to watch TV, which probably was exactly the period of time when the joy of painting was on. But he's like, he's a meme now, like, everybody knows who Bob Ross is.

Speaker2: [00:05:46] And then, lo and behold,

Speaker1: [00:05:47] You know who Bob Ross is, and they've never watched him. And so then we went on YouTube, and of course, we found a bob many Bob Ross videos. I think we watched a whole episode. And you were mesmerized by it. So for somebody

Speaker2: [00:06:00] Who we really watched the whole episode, we I guess we watch most of it. Yeah, now it's pretty enchanting.

Speaker1: [00:06:05] He kept adding new parts to the scene. Like that, was it? First, it was just a cloud, and then it was a cloud in a hill, and then it was a cloud and hill and some happy trees. And then the happy trees found a shed, and then the shed found a path, and then the path found. What was it, gravestones? No, there's there is a

Speaker2: [00:06:22] Dark brook, a little

Speaker1: [00:06:24] Stream. There's a stream, right? I thought he added one more thing to, oh, a couple more trees.

Speaker2: [00:06:28] Maybe stick a squirrel in there. Maybe I heard those bunny.

Speaker1: [00:06:32] I have not seen one of his famous Squirrel episodes, but I've heard there are several of them anyway. So that was amazing. You had the Bob Ross experience for the first time in your life.

Speaker2: [00:06:41] I had never, ever, ever, ever heard of Bob Ross. Never heard that name before that I can recall. Wow. And then lo and behold, there we are, like walking the mean streets of Seattle pop into like a cute little like queer bookstore, right? That's got all these saucy, slightly scandalous greeting cards as their main fare. And there's a whole shit ton of Bob Ross cards in there, and I was like, OK, here he is.

Speaker1: [00:07:06] Now I get all these memes. I totally get the happy trees.

Speaker2: [00:07:10] He kind of reminded me, like, physically a little bit. He looks like the guy he used to do the aerobics who was kind of the weight loss. Richard Simmons with a really like curly hair. Yes, but he had but his his persona, Bob Ross persona is a complete reverse yes of Richard Simmons and the sense that he is like the most peaceful kind of like Buddha fellow that you can imagine. And the thing that I like about his show, Bob Ross, is I like the way that there's no soundtrack and there's no music, no music at all in the background, not even not a laugh track, not even a little bit of piping of music through the background. No, it's just the sound of his brushes on the canvas, and that is one of the most mesmerizing things is him sort of going against the canvas and she just like because he does a lot of sort of strikes on the canvas to make his texture. So it's got this really great audio file that goes with it. Yeah, and he's his ability to create these. I mean, pretty cheesy, but sort of fairy tale landscapes, but they're very well done. I mean, they're incredibly, you know, well constructed, and he does them really, really quickly. So it was kind of impressive.

Speaker1: [00:08:26] You connected with them immediately. So anyways, so that was that was our discovery for the week was mostly the Bob Ross, to a lesser extent, the heating your hands on the rotisserie chicken

Speaker2: [00:08:36] And you weren't even there today. When I met with Cherie again, we had our secret conversation on our girl time today.

Speaker1: [00:08:44] Real stuff that's really has the real story as well.

Speaker2: [00:08:47] This was a little bit better, and I can't wait to tell British because she'll really like it. But it's like, I can't remember this other thing. And I couldn't remember. I couldn't believe. I didn't remember last night. She's like, because she and I shared a room the first year of college, like not just a house, a room together, and we didn't know each other before. Then you're just assigned right. And she said that this was like within the first week that we were in the room together and I had fallen asleep and she was still awake. And she said that like, I started talking to my sleep and I was like, It's in the kitchen.

Speaker1: [00:09:19] Wow.

Speaker2: [00:09:20] She totally freaked out because I guess I said it and stuff like that kind of witchy way, like it's in the kitchen. She got totally spooked and she told me the next morning and I was like, Oh my God, I didn't know I did that, please. You know, if I ever do that again, just wake me up. And I'm sure she thought I was like demon seed or something.

Speaker1: [00:09:40] I'm scared to go to bed to

Speaker2: [00:09:45] Check in the kitchen, but it's

Speaker1: [00:09:48] In the kitchen. And the other thing I think we have to we have to make brief reference to, is this whole cheating to get into college scandal thing that broke this week, which is totally taken over academic social media for a minute. And you know, half of it is people saying, like, my university wasn't in court, yay. You know, we're honorable sort of. And the other half is, yeah, of course, rich white people always do this to get their kids into college. I will say that my one experience when I used to. Teach at Cornell University, where they had a very interesting admissions policy, where an admissions officer and a faculty member would work together and on the spot would make a lot of admissions decisions. It wasn't the usual committee, it was kind of an odd model, but kind of nice in a way. But I will say that there were certain cases I remember this that were flagged as either being athletes or as being what do they call legacies?

Speaker2: [00:10:45] Well, they are

Speaker1: [00:10:46] The children of people who had gone there before and who obviously had given a certain amount of money, right? And they were like taken to. There was a committee for them, let me put it that way. They were like they were flying there saying, No, we won't decide on these. Those will go to the special committee.

Speaker2: [00:11:00] So yeah, I thought that that was standard practice at the Ivies and maybe especially Harvard is that if you're a legacy applicant, you're pretty much guaranteed.

Speaker1: [00:11:10] Jared Kushner type, for example.

Speaker2: [00:11:12] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I don't know if they go into their rosters and say, like, how much has your parent or grandparent given? But I think you're given basically carte blanche. I think, yeah, I'm not sure, but I think you're I've heard that you're kind of just basically admitted, yeah, if you have adequate scores, I mean, they can't be total shit, but.

Speaker1: [00:11:32] Well, what they were doing in this case is they were taking kids who I guess had dreadful scores and they were manufacturing fake sports identities for them. And then they were they were bribing coaches. And guess what was one of the universities that was called out? I hate to single out and malign a university out there, but I will say University of Southern California getting caught a lot of scandal

Speaker2: [00:11:54] Again caught in a lot

Speaker1: [00:11:56] Of stuff, pretty much every type of scandal there in there. So anyway. Usc was one, but I think there was you if Texas was another and there were a few others.

Speaker2: [00:12:03] Austin Oh,

Speaker1: [00:12:05] I think so. I think so. I think there was one coach at Austin, so.

Speaker2: [00:12:09] So this was all sporting aligns

Speaker1: [00:12:11] Well and kind of random sports to like, I'm sorry again, not to malign a sport, but I think rowing was one of them. It wasn't like baseball or, you know, women's soccer or something. It was more kind of boutique sports. And what they did is they bribed the coaches, apparently, and they manufactured like images of these kids allegedly sporting things. And then they would say the coaches would say, Oh, yeah, these are recruits, and then they could lower the standards further so they could be admitted. And the crux of it, though, and the thing that was kind of the most, I guess there's not really a part of this that isn't pretty fucked up. But but one aspect of it that surprised me is somehow this dude had figured out a way to to create a fake charity that then they could write off their bribes from,

Speaker2: [00:12:55] Oh my God,

Speaker1: [00:12:56] As if as if it wasn't enough to get your kids and you also had to have a tax write off

Speaker2: [00:13:00] The same time, you know, for the bribe that you use to get your already super privileged child into an elite university,

Speaker1: [00:13:06] It's like ultimate entitlement hero, like

Speaker2: [00:13:09] Ultimate. It's like it's it's kind of embarrassing.

Speaker1: [00:13:12] Oh, you think so? Yeah, I'd say so.

Speaker2: [00:13:14] It's like, especially like, so sad, like Felicity Huffman, who I think is a pretty cool actress

Speaker1: [00:13:20] And married to William H. Macy and pretty cool too.

Speaker2: [00:13:23] And it's like, why

Speaker1: [00:13:24] Wasn't he arrested,

Speaker2: [00:13:25] Though they arrested her or not him? But I'm finding, I know he knew.

Speaker1: [00:13:28] Oh, of course he knew.

Speaker2: [00:13:29] If they're still married, he had to.

Speaker1: [00:13:31] Oh no, he he met with the dude, but they guess they didn't have enough hard evidence on him. He did. He didn't. He wasn't the bag man who dropped the money. She was so

Speaker2: [00:13:40] Like, Come on, if you, if you're a kid, is that well connected in the industry and you have that much money and that many connections, they don't need to go to an elite school to, like, make it in line like they should go to the school that they tested into. They've had all the advantages already. I'm sure they went to prep schools and had the best education that money could buy up till that point. If they're not academically oriented, they should just go to a school that's more their speed. Come out and then come out and be a fucking movie producer and make millions anyway. Like, it's not going to make a big difference.

Speaker1: [00:14:12] I wonder if somehow they're

Speaker2: [00:14:13] Selling that situation like you don't need to go to Harvard to make it in the world.

Speaker1: [00:14:17] I wonder if they're somehow selling the kids on like, you know, OK, well, we're going to make this whole fake crew career for you. You'll be like doing the background research for a part. It'll be like your first acting award money, like you just have to pretend like

Speaker2: [00:14:30] They did it to try and keep their kids in in town because it's interesting that it's USC.

Speaker1: [00:14:35] Yeah, yeah, it was several,

Speaker2: [00:14:37] You know, I don't, you know, we don't want our kids to go off to the East Coast or the Texas or whatever. So let's just make sure that they can get into the best school here so we can keep an eye on them.

Speaker1: [00:14:49] Well, again, I think there was I think I feel like Yale was in the mix here two or one of the Ivies. So anyway, I don't think we can just limit it. But yeah, it's all of it's very questionable. So we should probably move on to talking about the two stupendous special guests we have on the podcast today. I can't believe we have these two on the podcast single, let alone together. Lauren Berlant and Katie Stewart, who have published a remarkable new book called The Hundreds, which is both. Experiment in Ethnographic Afecta graphic writing with a cool, formal organization that we get into it in the podcast and it has to do with the title the hundreds, but who also are finding exploring ways to kind of capture ordinary life and to find, you know, the way worlds are thrown together or things happen in those moments and to to let concepts be driven by those moments of of engaging the ordinary world instead of, you know, drizzling the concepts down on the world like so much. Oh, fancy rain?

Speaker2: [00:15:59] Oh my gosh, so much fancy rain. Yeah. And the book Surprise Surprise is beautiful, beautifully written. It is absolutely exquisite like little gemstones. And I think the kind of aesthetic of the hundreds is helpful in that regard, too. Yeah, it's a joy to read, and it's a little bit of a kind of mystery adventure too, because it's it's fun to sort of figure out who's doing what and how. And we get to talk on the podcast about the process of creating a developing the book collaboratively so liberally between the two of them and, you know, the sort of pieces that each person would take on and then go back and forth and kind of remediate in different ways.

Speaker3: [00:16:38] So it's a cool peek into the,

Speaker2: [00:16:41] You know, behind the curtain of the process of creating a collaborative book together and a series of essays and also just a fun experiment in terms of writing and thinking through non-fictional worlds in a very poetic manifestation,

Speaker1: [00:16:58] Right? It's like, yeah, it is both ethnographic, but also speculative in cool ways, and I think it really does speak to our kind of experimental zeitgeist in the human sciences right now. So we thought it would be cool and we were very fortunate to get them both on the pod to talk about the project. So probably without saying anything more about it, we should just just jump into it, right? Because they're bringing the magic.

Speaker2: [00:17:21] Absolutely. So you get to hear me pose the very weird question to both of them. What is your favorite word?

Speaker1: [00:17:27] Yeah, yeah. And spoiler alert,

Speaker2: [00:17:30] But no, no, no spoilers. No spoilers.

Speaker1: [00:17:33] All right. You have to listen to the whole thing, people to get the answer to that special

Speaker2: [00:17:37] Question on babies.

Speaker1: [00:17:39] All right. And take it away.

Speaker2: [00:17:40] Go Lauren and go Katie.

Speaker1: [00:17:43] Warm your hands on some more.

Speaker2: [00:17:44] Katie and go Lauren. Warm your hands on some rotisserie chicken.

Speaker1: [00:17:48] There you go. So I'll just welcome everyone back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, we have a real treat, not one, but two amazing interlocutors on today's podcast. Lauren Berlant and Katie Stewart, welcome to the podcast!

Speaker4: [00:18:23] Thank you.

Speaker5: [00:18:24] Hi, this is Lauren and the other person's Katie.

Speaker1: [00:18:27] There you go. Thank you for identifying. That's actually very helpful. That's good.

Speaker5: [00:18:30] It's true.

Speaker2: [00:18:31] Yeah, we got a lot of voices in the mix here.

Speaker1: [00:18:33] You have a remarkable, truly remarkable. And I say this with all sincerity in my heart. Remarkable new work called the hundreds that we're going to be talking about today that just came out just a few days

Speaker3: [00:18:42] Ago with Katie and I were just talking. It was it came out like what? Like seven days ago or something. So this is truly hot off the press. So one of the things we wanted to begin with and you address us a little bit in the book in various places is the origin story of the hundreds. That is how you came to write this work together, how it came to fruition and what the sort of motivations were for making it happen. So how how did this baby all begin?

Speaker4: [00:19:10] Well, it actually. I was talking with Anne Petkovic about this when she left town, and we had our last last public feelings meeting here in Austin. It started Lauren. Correct me if I'm wrong. When you started it, you had a conference in Chicago sex and gender that I believe was supposed to be planning for 20 years after Barnard. And so that was in two thousand or two thousand one, maybe. Mm hmm. And yeah, and it was kind of a lot of people and it was activists and artists as well as academics. And it was an amazing event. And also we decided at the end of that in a big room where we're all sitting together to create little nodes in locations. So there was one happened in Chicago, which was called field tank. One happened in Austin, which was called public feelings. And then there was one in New York and one in L.A. I don't remember what they were called

Speaker5: [00:20:07] And there was one in Arizona the sexual freedom.

Speaker4: [00:20:09] Oh, right. And for a few years, we were meeting separately and doing different kinds of things. Feel Tank was doing all these amazing things about depression as politicals what I recall. And we would have a

Speaker5: [00:20:22] Oh, we also like the three. You know, the Chicago fuel tank came to Austin and we had group meetings there. That's when all of us, all of us went to New York and had group meetings there, you

Speaker4: [00:20:32] Know, for about five years. We switched off locations and we all met. But meanwhile, we also went on with our little local nudie things. And one in in Austin that ended up eventually taking the form of writing workshops that were either at my house or at Petkovic house. And we would do it any time anybody came to town, and there were about a dozen faculty from UTI who were core people and then other people, too. And we would have 500 words. That was my call was cost of admission is five hundred words and we read them aloud and we would meet for like four hours at a time and bring a potluck lunch, usually Sunday morning to 11:00 three afternoon. And we'd read three at a time. And others would take notes and practices developed over time about that listening practice and the note taking in the discussion. But it was really wonderful and generative for the people who were poor and things were happening in the other notes too. And every time Loren came to town, we would have one of those. And one time Lauren was in town and Searcy Sturm was a colleague in Anthro was there and she mentioned something a project called the hundreds right. And it was something Italian-American women. And they had done something a small journal article together or something where each one of them Emily

Speaker5: [00:22:00] Emily Bernard, who's African-American woman. But they anyway, they had a kind of little hundred's project in their group where they were writing multiples of hundreds, you know, some kind of live performative writing of a hundred words.

Speaker4: [00:22:11] So that's where the idea came from, where all

Speaker5: [00:22:14] Existed in generating a kind of brainstorming together about how we could generate concepts from description rather than generate description from concepts from, you know, from what we would normally recognize as theoretical concepts. So we were at that Austin thing and it was exciting. And Katie and I had been working both separately and together on thinking about how to document ordinariness in a way that wasn't reporting on it, but generating some space from within it. So we started writing together and doing was a lot of this kind of talking on the phone about what we were seeing and then trying to trying to compose from that. I don't know.

Speaker4: [00:22:54] We had a lot of extremely funny phone conversations, long ones, many I remember where I was in New Hampshire, where there's very bad reception and I'd have to say in one place in. A parking lot. No, you know, how cell phones are, we'd get, you know, 30 minutes and then it would start messing up on us and we'd be calling each other back. But they were hilarious, amazing conversations. And so this was Lauren's idea to have this kind of formal constraint of 100 words. And she stuck with stuck with it and made me stick with it. Exactly one hundred words. And then, wow.

Speaker5: [00:23:30] I mean, did it make you? Yeah. We had this. We thought, you know, we thought the ActionScript would be interesting, but we had very different processes. I tended to stay pretty tight while I was writing. And Katie tended to write long, flowy things. And you can really tell the difference, I think. I mean, you, I don't think you can tell every who wrote every piece, but there's a general tautness to my pieces and a slight, I would say, more looseness to your pieces. But we both have longer and shorter pieces.

Speaker4: [00:24:00] Well, eventually we decided we could do multiples of 100. Yeah, that helped people both started fooling around with the constraint, but we loved the constraint. Yeah, because it meant that we had to edit things a million times and especially when in the 100 word ones which turned out to be my favorites, to do to write, you'd have to get rid of three words or something. And so that would change a sentence and it would change the entire thing because you only had 100 words. So it was this amazing experience of this Rubik's cube of cascading words and changing meanings and what I came to think about. Lauren was talking about this kind of conceptualization, and I think many things happened in the the simple experiment of having this constraint and editing and editing and editing and editing so many times and having these hilarious conversations. For me, it was a kind of conceptualization in contact, and we have a lot of language about contact learning as a piece called contact sheet. We were we're working with slightly different theoretical approaches, as she's saying or different problems and so different practices too. But we came together, we came to through this weird process of writing and talking about all kinds of things can do something that I think of as a kind of conceptualization. Contact with things, with events, scenes, encounters world or in other word that comes up a lot is reverb kind of reverberation between word and world. So that started happening.

Speaker3: [00:25:35] So one of the things that and I have to admit that, you know, a few essays into the book, I did start to guess whose was whose was sort of trying to resist that in a way, but that it was also became sort of a fun game in itself. So I wanted to ask you to first. Is there something magic about 100 or is that just a kind of satisfying three digit number that you can really hold on to? And then second, the other thing I kept coming back to was what to call these things. I mean, at some point in the book, you call them prose poems, and I think that works as an identity for these objects of text and feeling. I don't want to call them an essay, but they also felt like haikus in a way, especially the very short pieces really felt like some kind of conceptual haiku more than than anything else.

Speaker1: [00:26:25] You know, I actually had a thought along those lines of just jump in. I was thinking when you were just describing the project as a kind of ethnography, I was thinking, it's actually also kind of an effect of graffiti. And then looking that up on Google, I found some weird, you know, deviant art website where they said they had coined the term affective gram. And I thought Afecta gram or gram would be another way of thinking, That's cool.

Speaker4: [00:26:49] That's funny. We, Lauren uses the term field plot and we do. We're thought, feelings or something, too. Yeah, I do to think about what the concept is. Yeah.

Speaker5: [00:26:59] I don't remember that. But you know, I don't. I would like to not get very stuck on the question of form. I mean, you know, we're trying to it seems to me the question of process of the more interesting one. If you want to coexist, I don't care, you know, it doesn't matter to me. But what each of the pieces is kind of a register of an encounter with, you know, what we would call an object, which is to say something that's sustaining a thought thought in relation to a world or in relation to an event or incident or something that some prompt, you know. And so whatever you call the form doesn't mean it doesn't matter to me. But whatever you form, the idea here is that what generates what generates what we would normally call a theoretical concept, it doesn't come from the inheritance of an Enlightenment genealogy or it doesn't. It's not only referring to a theoretical register, but a, you know, essential and kinetic register, too.

Speaker4: [00:27:52] But there is something about not choosing a genre and the problem word does that for me. It just says we're not dropping into a form in that way, but we're. Experimenting with form in order to think differently about how to have thoughts. And so there's a kind of license in it, but also for me, all poetry makes sense as an anthropologist because it's kind of outside of the field, but also it's in line with sensory sensory ethnography or what happened to me in the writing was that I became interested in the sound of the words, and I think that happened to you to learn, right? Oh yeah, the rhythm and the sound of the words was what would often determine what went into a sentence or how a sentence ended or something like that. And for me, it's not. The hundreds is certainly not magical number, but shortness is magical.

Speaker5: [00:28:51] Yeah, we suppose it becomes, you know, feeling the looseness of our work as a kind of challenge. You know, it takes a long time for a sentence to feel something out. And then you have to ask yourself the question What do I need? What do I need? And this has been a discipline in thinking that we could do with less, but also sometimes less is less involved. A lot, you know, 700. It's complicated anyway. Another phrase that I use for what it is is while the Crassus, you know, the idea that you're you're describing something, but you're describing something that isn't fully formed in front of you. So it's a description that's also a feeling out. There's a lot of different kinds of things we're trying.

Speaker1: [00:29:26] It's it's incredibly effective and also incredibly diverse. And even just the difference between the hundred word and the multiple hundred word pieces is really striking. And I guess, you know, when you're counting words, words come to count more in certain ways. I mean, you certainly feel like that when you're having to having to tighten up and explore your own looseness. And I wanted to just pick up. There's so many great phrases, and I just kind of in the spirit of the book, I just wanted to throw out a couple of things and ask you maybe to riff off them just on process. You say that in any collaborative relation, there's a fear of deep checking in, which is somebody who's collaborated a lot. I know exactly what you're talking about, but I wanted to ask you to expand on that a little bit.

Speaker5: [00:30:06] What's one say, really?

Speaker1: [00:30:07] No, but only in one hundred word responses, please. That's right.

Speaker5: [00:30:12] Well, you know, of course, this is this is a historical aren't there for a long time. We would we were posting our writing on Google. Google Doc. And we didn't really, you know, we like I loved it or I didn't love it or I love this phrase or I didn't love this phrase. No, no, no, no. Let me take it back. We would say what we loved, but we weren't really dealing with them as formal pieces. We were just it was like a continuation of our conversations. Then when we started to actually turn it into the book, we got more. We got into the weeds of each other's writing a little bit more. And the thing we're working on now is even more, you know, we're responding to each other, even more so. So I guess that's one that's one thing to say, one thing to say about it. You know, I think we say in that very piece that you're citing, you know, collaboration is the meeting of minds that don't match. So you have to try to stay in the room together and that we had different phases of that.

Speaker4: [00:31:04] Yeah, it was. It was scary and amazing and took a long time or a long process to be able to have arguments that were implicit that had to become more explicit at points and that we could only bear for so long. And and then, oh, I know each other.

Speaker5: [00:31:23] Katie, 40, of mine and I chose 40 of Katie's. That's how we started doing the collecting, too. Oh, right.

Speaker3: [00:31:28] Interesting.

Speaker5: [00:31:29] Ok. And then we like, got sad as something that we like didn't make it in. So we, you know, then we had, you know, a little bit of leeway, but 10 of them we really worked on together. I mean, somebody drafted it first, probably. But we, you know, and I drafted a lot of things from our phone notes, too. So even though I wrote them, we wrote them

Speaker4: [00:31:46] And we ended up writing some together, right, rewriting parts of each other's. And there's also something scary when the words have been edited that many times and there are so few of them to have the other say, I don't know what you mean by that. What's that? What is that word? So because there's a kind of, at least for me, an investment in those words. And even though you don't really know exactly what you mean because it's trying to be suggestive, it's not the kind of exhaustive description of of anything but, but just constantly cutting into new possibilities of what you might be meaning or what readers might be meaning. So it's kind of open ended. But then we also had to edit for each other to say, What do you what do you mean by that?

Speaker5: [00:32:34] Well, one of the things that's great about that is, you know, a lot of what we're describing in the book is the the intimacy of this recognition that happens in any encounter, the ways in which you're talking past each other, but you're also talking to each other. And of course, collaboration is like that, too.

Speaker4: [00:32:49] And it's very associative. It's very generative. The misinterpretation to that was a lot of the hilarity to just learn to associate, free associate and jump off onto new things. And what someone had written,

Speaker3: [00:33:03] I wanted to think to a little bit about how. Kind of in some ways that's reflexive, but that's not even really capturing it, but it's kind of the role of the narrator or the author, the person who's writing or the voice that we're hearing, the kind of affective subject that we encounter in each of these pieces. And I think one of the places where I was really attracted to that question was in the piece called writing Comma Life. And I just want to read a teeny bit from that. You say that once I needed the perfect time and place to write, I stood in my way like a poison pen letter to myself. But slowly, under the velocities of worldI reels that came and went, I learned to write in my own skin. Like it or not, making money, making dinner, taking care of people and stupid shit, getting sick or getting well, getting into and out of what presented, I ended up with a writer's life. Some people have long, lean writing muscles. Mine are shortened and taut, like a repetitive stress injury turned into a personal tendencies. Its tendency. I mean, I love that kind of evocation of the writing comma life, and I wanted to ask how how you do your writing where you kind of come to. I mean, some of it happens in the telephone calls and some of it happens sitting up in bed, we learn. So if you have practices of writing, but also to kind of think through how the voice of the eye or the third person, the first person versus the third person voice are used in the pieces and whether there was a kind of specific concentration on that or whether they were just kind of allowed to emerge as subjects and figures as the writing unfolded,

Speaker4: [00:34:42] We did do a lot of reading writing in bed. Lauren Lawrence said You can always write one hundred. I mean, that's the beauty of the short, right? It's the scary project. I always write or write one hundred and then and then editing it and re-editing it. I'm super, super, super fun. We never got sick of it and we couldn't believe it. After 20 edits on a 100 word piece, we'd say, Why do I still have that word in there? I couldn't believe it. I read it. That's a shitty word. It was like never ending. And so it becomes kind of larger than

Speaker5: [00:35:15] Life

Speaker4: [00:35:16] In a weird way. It becomes a life in itself, the wording and the living with the words, and it was pleasurable for both of us. I think there was no pain really in the writing itself. And then I think that we certainly didn't think of ourselves as inventing any types of narrator. But there was some discussion and there's some writing in there about method actors that Lauren has done work on about what is a subject anyway. So there was a lot of thinking, I think, as we were writing this about the question of what a subject is and the and the question of the character and the character that fits the particular project that it's attuned to or engaged with. And so the character kind of shifts in the different hundreds as we wrote them to fit. What do you think, Lauren? Yeah, that's what I mean.

Speaker5: [00:36:09] I think that there's a difference. You have an ethnographic voice already. And I think I have a lyric voice. So when we're pursuing the description of a scene or a situation or an encounter you will often describe for a long time before you enter. And I tend to try to. I mean, I don't try to do anything. I just I basically just start where I start. But as I as I look back over it, I, you know, sometimes I describe things that I don't enter in, but often there's an impact that produces a kind of a kind of hook that I then try to follow out and a lot. I'm interested in atmosphere. I'm interested in how people stay in a place and what Katie and I have said often during the period of the final revisions is, you know, she's very interested in how worlds throw themselves together like something happens. And then there's a whole world there and there might be a temporary one, but it might be a mood or an atmosphere. But it might also just be might be ongoing. And I'm interested in how we proceed in brokenness. So often I'm just kind of watching people try to hold things together, you know, and and not be defeated by what they can master. But just how they moved with it anyway. And so, so sometimes my eye is kind of adhesive there, and sometimes it doesn't. It really

Speaker4: [00:37:26] Depends. So what I would say about the subject in that story is that in both of for both of us, the narrator or the subject of the writing and the the subject in the world is part of composition. We're doing our own compositions, but we're also reacting to the things that we are pulling up through this kind of descriptive lyric writing things that we notice. And then having thoughts about. And there's no line between who the subject is and what that that thing is that it's trying to just describe. I became very interested in things. Phenomenally, the ease with which a thing can become a thing after only very short repetitions and things like that.

Speaker5: [00:38:15] And I also, you know, when I was writing sexually unbearable with the Eidelman, I got really interested in an argument he and I had throughout the entire book about whether you can change a structure. And one of the things I got very interested in, just methodologically and theoretically, was that you change. You partly change an object by by changing the associations with that object. And a lot of what we do, I think, is the question what are we associating with or what are we bringing into the room with it? What is it and what is it pulling? What is the object or in your object means the encounter or the person or the or the thing to see or to see? What is it pulling in? And we follow. Know we feel a lot like we're being pulled into things, but also that we're trying to associate. We're trying to change the associations with things. That's a big deal for me. Mm-hmm.

Speaker1: [00:39:00] I think it's yeah, that's something that is really effective in the book. And here's just another another moment that I think since you brought up the potential of a critical orientation, here you write Humanist critique just keeps snapping at the world as if the whole point of being and thinking is just to catch it in a lie. And all of us, I think on this podcast grew up in the kind of heyday of the humanity's obsession with continental critical theory, and I think we all can do that and we all appreciate what that's done. But it does seem to me like we're we almost or maybe I'll put this as a question. Do you think there is a new ethos now that is more collaborative, experimental, more about throwing yourself into the world rather than trying to stand back? And in that Archimedes point kind of finding a critical vantage point? Does this suggest a different critical ethics?

Speaker5: [00:39:46] Well, I think what we would normally say to that is not enough. You know, I think what we normally say, like if we're on the phone and talking to each other is, you know, for a lot of people associated with European meta theory makes it gives them permission to exist, gives them permission to say things, and we don't see subordination to any register of thought as the permission we would have to say things. We want to be able to use all of the different kinds of knowledge we have. This is especially, I think, for me, it's a big motive. I want to use all the different kinds of knowledge. I have to move a problem. And so I don't hate theory at all. I love Thieriot items. You know, I'll I'll I'll use anything I can to be able to move something somewhere.

Speaker4: [00:40:27] Yeah, but the theory in the hundreds is not theory. That dogmatic theory.

Speaker5: [00:40:32] No, no, no, no. I know. I'm just saying I don't want to sign up for the, you know, we've been there and done that, and now we're doing another thing.

Speaker4: [00:40:39] Well, what what you hate is when people say to us, Yes, you get it. This is reality. Now you've struck reality or something as as if it's transparent now. Right? And that's I think those are

Speaker5: [00:40:52] Two different things.

Speaker1: [00:40:53] Yeah, no, definitely. And I mean, obviously, this is a work that through and through is is informed by, I would say, perhaps especially a kind of broadly conceived phenomenological tradition of engagement with the world. But the kind of the good phenomenology, not the kind of you know what I mean, the kind of the embodied corporeal messy phenomenology, not the kind of super rationalist type. And and that's one of the things that I really I really love about the tone and the approach to this project is the way you're able to to work through that, to communicate how deeply informed it is by philosophy. Let's say at the same time that it is very worldly, very intimate, very, very present for the world. And I'll just give you one example, and I don't know if this is one of your pieces learn or not, but it was about the south side of Chicago where I grew up. So it was about the disappearance disappearance of Mavenlink and which is something I used to see every time I drove to my grandparents house

Speaker3: [00:41:49] And the still gets very,

Speaker1: [00:41:50] Very nostalgic. Somebody will confirm that, and instead it's been replaced apparently by this dollar tree. And you write everything at the Dollar Tree is manufactured with poison then dispersed through middlemen to the people who scrape. What a lovely I mean, it just yes, taught and precise, but really captured something. So do you think then, that this is an experiment that is repeatable? I mean, do you? Is this something you would encourage other people to try to do? Or is it more personal or collaborative venture at a smaller scale?

Speaker5: [00:42:21] Well, I I think so. We're starting a pretty sure series of Duke called Wedding Matters, where with this idea, Hartman and Erica Rent and partly we're trying to. We don't want people to be imitating life. We don't want somebody to do the 200's, you know, we would like to have that up. But but you know, we want it to be possible for people to generate a concept, you know, concept of the world, generate the matters of the world, including, you know, however they're organizing their knowledge and however they're rooting it in the history of knowledge, you know, and so on. The people who are not starting with the meta but who are who are imminent. We hope that we can make a space to cultivate that kind of writing without it sounding like us. I mean, we're just doing and we don't. Always sounds like each other, so there is something that we want to make room for, which is a different kind of tradition in the in thinking about the relation between concepts and craft. It matters to us and I think to go back to your earlier question, I do think we're in a moment when people are hungry for that. And the way I would put it as a professor, as a teacher is, I think the students of mine who have the best lives are the ones who you forget that you're reading work when you're reading their work because they're actually thinking about writing as a craft. And most of us aren't really trained to do that in graduate school because people don't think of writing is what we're doing. They don't think lots of writers thinkers. So we're partly trying to make a world for changing that. So it's kind of like what we're doing, but it doesn't mean it would have to look like what we're doing.

Speaker3: [00:43:53] I wanted to, Katie, did you want to say something more about that?

Speaker4: [00:43:57] Oh, that's great. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:43:59] I wanted to go to the the piece called contact sheet here. Lauren, I think this one's yours also. And to ask about because Katie, you mentioned earlier that you got very interested in the sounds of the words. And I imagine that came through some of the workshopping where you're reading these pieces aloud and really hearing them in this piece. I was struck by the use of the all caps. So what we have here is kind of at the end of it, but doesn't revolt require lubrication and interruption? Isn't that why it's sexy? Yes. Thumbs up to that. And then we get in all caps. We get in all caps. Return the world to the raw. Choose your larva. When you rub something rough on what's rough, it gets smoother, period. And then we move into the more standard font. Not all caps politics moves across the surface like sex with it's rush hour friction and minor pulsation. So, I mean, there's a lot to kind of think through and unpack in those, just those three, those several lines. But I wanted to ask about the all caps and about the kind of messaging or the shape or the sound that's evoked when you move into that that way of lettering rather than the more conventional form.

Speaker5: [00:45:08] What would you say? I haven't thought about it, so I'll think about it now. I'm thinking about that. There might be, yeah, I think in the piece Suicide Asian Nation also Lincoln logs of Lego or in caps to, you know, one of the things that's hard to do, which is so important to both of us and as a part of the whole atmospherics of the work and of the deep desire for the work concepts to emerge is the change in tone. And so one of the things and I guess I would just say that the shift in the shifting type is just about to shift into it, to make you realize that it has a tone, you know, you really it's something that I come across a lot in the in my pieces as we go through. Are you imagining something when we write? Are you hearing something when we write? How many of your senses are involved in the production of a concept which is sorry?

Speaker4: [00:46:03] No. Go ahead.

Speaker5: [00:46:04] Go ahead, go ahead.

Speaker4: [00:46:05] Which is which is really interesting to think about in terms of the composition of writing and the composition of worlds or whatever you're thinking about. Because when you're saying to the reader, do you hear it or let's show you that there is a tone, it's because we have been writing and rewriting these same words and shifting them around so many times that we've been. For me, this is a kind of really being in the middle of something and being able to stand in the middle of this scene that I'm reconstructing and look around at what's possible and what's going on, which is very similar to ethnographic engagement and other kinds of very immersive engagement, too. So it's a kind of awareness of how of the complexity of how things happen in the world as well. That becomes a kind of practice in the in writing and the sounding out for me has something to do with that. It is the the this also happens with the practice of reading, writing aloud. But of course, writers also read their own writing aloud. It has to do with repetition and refrain and a different kind of engagement that comes with that very precise attention to all of those words and the sort of prismatic way that things can be generated in a composition.

Speaker3: [00:47:35] Yeah, I think, you know, just in reading the pieces and thinking about the constraints or the form of the 100, it really motivates me as a reader to kind of think through those sorts of things that you've just described the kind of what is the tone, what is the sound of the word and even what is the shape of a certain word? I have a favorite word and it's spoon. And the reason I like spoon is because I love the way it's shaped and I love the way it sounds. I hardly ever get to use it in my writing, ever. But I love the shape and the sound of it, and so one of the things I was telling Katie that we have the Kindle version, the electronic version of the book. And so I just had a moment where I was like, I wanted to look for certain words in the book and find out how they showed up, where they showed up. And so I just picked random stuff totally off the top of my head. So I found out that the word dog shows up thirty six times

Speaker2: [00:48:31] The word

Speaker4: [00:48:32] Ghetto to

Speaker3: [00:48:33] The word fuck shows up fifteen times the word. The word breadth shows up. Twenty times there were dig. I don't know why. I don't know where I got dig. But anyway, that comes two times. The numeral one hundred one zero zero comes up four times, and they're the word world. Wral shows up. How many times I give you one guess?

Speaker2: [00:48:56] Thirty one hundred. Well done. Yes, exactly, Larry.

Speaker4: [00:49:05] So doing some of that to Lauren discovered how many she said. Do you realize how many times we talk about dogs? Thought about that, didn't we? Did we OK,

Speaker2: [00:49:18] Chicken, right? Ok.

Speaker3: [00:49:21] So do

Speaker2: [00:49:22] You do either of

Speaker3: [00:49:23] You have or both of you have a favorite word?

Speaker4: [00:49:27] Well, obviously mine is world.

Speaker5: [00:49:30] Totally world, totally world. Nice. I don't know.

Speaker2: [00:49:35] That's a good answer. Well, that's three. That's three words.

Speaker1: [00:49:38] This this one. This line of discussion kind of leads me to want to ask about the index project.

Speaker3: [00:49:44] You mentioned different words.

Speaker1: [00:49:45] And also, of course, the reference is where I laughed out loud more than once because in addition, this is a spoiler alert for people. I've looked at it, but definitely read through to the list of things that you thought with because in addition to the conventional academic citations, there are things like Oh fuck you, shrug cats and dogs, the TV so search party, which I felt is really underrated. I'm so glad you were watching it.

Speaker2: [00:50:07] Oh yeah, that's a great show

Speaker1: [00:50:10] And very much about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, right? So this is, you know, really on the wavelength you're working on. But so how did you decide to invite people to further collaborate with you on the index?

Speaker5: [00:50:21] Well, this is my idea, I think is that right, Katie? Yes. But the pretextual experiment quality was really my idea. I mean, I had this both my interest in, you know, indexes I find incredibly interesting as this kind of aesthetic forms and also spaces of frustration. And you know, this is a book so much about kind of slowing down and paying attention and the impulse to be defended against letting in what one is reading and the impulse to skim and the need for skimming and the need for posting. And yet also a kind of training in being able to pay attention in the space of one's own resistances. And so, you know, I described before my desire to be able to use everything I know to move something. Some things we thought with is the title of a bibliography that says we bought a lot of different kinds of things to the situation of the hundred. And that's so that, I think, you know, just goes back to what we had referred to previously. And then the index who are we're probably the worst readers of our world work because, you know, we're being too familiar with it at some level. So we thought it would be fun. Instead of hiring an index in the old academic way to ask other people what how they will remember it, how they would help people point to things. And I just I really, really love the Kindle version of the book because I feel like the indexes, especially Andrew Cawsey and C Thresher, but all of them are really surprising reorganizations of the book.

Speaker3: [00:51:51] Yeah, and in the electronic version, you can click through on the hyperlinks and it takes you back to the site, right?

Speaker5: [00:51:57] And on the paper version, there are pages for our we hope students. But anyway, everybody to do their own index. You know, what is this that you noticed? What did you pay attention to? Do you want a storyboard, the book doing a storyboard? One of the poems? I think a lot about storyboarding in relation to writing because of the different kinds of silences that get and pacing that get produced there. And so we were hoping to generate to give people a shot in reading form and really kind of in real time relation to the book too.

Speaker3: [00:52:23] And you leave open real like blank pages at the end of the printed book, right?

Speaker4: [00:52:28] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker3: [00:52:29] Yeah, that's great.

Speaker4: [00:52:30] And then some things we thought with. For me, that was thinking with Isabel Stingers about reproducing existing knowledge and the non-human. And then we thought about. So there's different politics. There's politics of citations and what kinds of citations. And then there's this other thing of leaving the Macintosh apples in there. Two things that say things in particular worlds. And we thought about doing formal things before we came up with this thing of doing these things we thought within. In parentheses at the end. Hundreds. Remember, we were thinking about following a BART book where there were sort of citations, but mixed things also on the side on the edges. Of course. And they wouldn't let us do that.

Speaker5: [00:53:21] It was too hard. But then also when Bart started, I think one of the problems was Bart does it in public discourse? He just gets to put in the margin gutter, you know? That's right. You know, so and I don't want to make fun of it. But you know, he like he has this whole canonical context that he thinks all of his readers are also limited. And our point is that we, you know, we're not all in this. We're not holding the same objects anymore. And so we want we want it to be possible to make objects available to each other in in a kind of context where continuity and history and tradition and value aren't already decided. So what I love about, but you know, but he had it easier.

Speaker4: [00:54:01] That goes to your point, Dominic, about new forms of critique to be midst of things that are emerging, unfolding in multiple. And we were just being suggestive to throw in some of these objects in there to say that there are so many things. I think Lauren had one. One of the parentheses at the end of one hundred was a long list of all the possible things that she was thinking with as she was writing. So, yeah, so it could have gone on. That's cool.

Speaker2: [00:54:27] Yeah, I'm just looking

Speaker3: [00:54:28] At one now. It's got Howard Johnson's Kerouac 57 Sunset magazine, a classic and then saying two thousand five. So that's just a sample for the listeners, and the rest is an adventure that you must read your your way into.

Speaker1: [00:54:45] Indeed. And what an adventure it is, and we couldn't recommend it more. This new book, The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Katie Stewart maybe as a way of taking us back to the beginning, closing the circuit also in recognition of your time and attention and and thanking you for that, bringing us back to the topic of collaboration. Many of the listeners of our podcast are younger scholars kind of more towards the beginning of their careers, and I wonder if you have any advice for them since you seem to have attained this sweet spot of Hegelian mutual recognition in your work? Or do you have any advice for people who might be just starting out thinking about collaborative ventures, some thoughts about how to establish those relations or those ethics?

Speaker5: [00:55:27] Well, we both collaborated a lot. I'd be really curious to hear what he have to say about that.

Speaker4: [00:55:31] I think it's it was in this case, very inspiring and challenging in a good way to be collaborating with you and that we're still learning what we want to do with that form. So this thing that we're working on now is called couplets, and we're writing it in in two word pieces multiples of two sentences, sorry, two sentences and much more tightly moving back and forth, carrying on a conversation between these short pieces that are couplets. You know, I think that it's such a minefield for young scholars in academia right now that, you know, for us, this is pleasure and also a context for bravery, for being able to stand up together and do things. There's been a lot of vulnerability in the process in doing readings and just with each other. So I mean, I think you have to have you have to create a safe space through collaboration, maybe even with larger numbers of people like some of the art collectives that people are working with now and multimedia projects. That seems like a good idea, and you have to be careful about what the form is that you're using. Mature critique mode is,

Speaker5: [00:56:47] I think also there's just nothing better than good brainstorming like write one. One way of thinking about our process is we brainstormed for years together. You know, Kenny would tell me a story or I would tell her story, and then we would just go off and we would would leave. It's not that we're releasing each other from our story, but we were releasing our story into something generative and whatever, whatever, like just aesthetic form that a collaboration would take for younger scholars or whatever giving, giving, brainstorming room to breathe so that people's minds so that you can build trust by really riffing off each other and riffing on each other. The difference to not just through, you know, similarities. Mm hmm. Building trust is the hardest thing. That's why the deep checking in part, you know, matters because it took me in different collaborations I've done. It took me a really long time sometimes to be able to say no. Mm hmm. But so when you learn improvisation in comedy training, which I've done, you're supposed to always say yes. And so sometimes you have to say no or or if you're me, there's a lot of I don't know. I don't know, you know, but I don't know, doesn't mean don't exist. It means let's keep going.

Speaker4: [00:58:00] But just for just for example, these workshops, these writing workshops are safe places. For young scholars to come and just do 500 words, and those have become generative of projects that are much bigger for people and don't necessarily take in any form that calls attention to them as weird. So it really is about inspiring each other and riffing on each other. These refrains came up over the years in the one that we've done here that become kind of jokes, but also become concepts in in people's work taken up differently. And so that's a very easy thing to do, and it's amazing how much that that helps people.

Speaker3: [00:58:46] Well, I'll just close to my saying again, thank you both for writing the book and doing the work. It's such a pleasure to walk through all these storms of your brains come together and to kind of meander in those spaces and the yes, hands will keep coming. I know. And I'm really excited for people to get a hold of the book and begin to enjoy it and play with it and and love it and think of, you know, new, different imaginaries for taking it forward.

Speaker1: [00:59:12] Right. And thank you for taking the time to talk to us to

Speaker2: [00:59:14] Convey that to

Speaker4: [00:59:16] You. Thank you. That was super interesting.