I’ve been thinking about how theorists play around with the structure of their work. Like, from the 1200s to the 1900s, philosophical texts pretty much stuck to a standard format. But then you have books like A Thousand Plateaus that really mix things up. Makes me wonder, how does the form of Stewart's book affect the way we read and understand it?

I forgot where I read this or even what it was completely (might have even been Deleuze or Berlant) but it was something about the breadth of writing and how the coming into being of "concepts" or I guess what someone like Harman would call "objects" is like on the extremes of linguistic units. So for example something like a word or a sentence is very singular(?) there may be many meanings or connections you can draw from a word or a sentence but at the end of the day there is a kind of exhaustive amount of material. When you get to something like a book or novella or even a short story, where there is a clear first page and a clear last page, there is a physically boundary that kind of determines the boundaries of thought in a way, a clear inside or outside. Something about the paragraph is like taking a drop of water out of a lake or a river and no matter how it is written it can hold plenty of potential. It will never carry as much as a complete story and never leave so much open as a sentence.

I may not be recalling that very accurately but it doesn't really matter. I think something like this is what Stewart may be resonating with (intentionally or not). She really wants to operate in this Deleuzian world of flows and potential and possible. I think switching topics so often and writing in a largely non-referential voice (excepting the intro) really gets us out of this representational and identity-based mode and into a world of immanence and emergence where, like she says, we feel like we are in something because you are kinda left to fill in the gaps between the different sections. At least that is what it accomplishes for me. She's kinda the bizarro Graham Harman I think.

I thought writing like Stewart might help me to get a grip on affect. I wrote the following after watching the opening scene of American Beauty.

Link to the scene: https://youtu.be/XMqwSTe5rvo

Years later you find some record of how you felt about someone that was the center of your world. In it you said you wished they would die. I’m reminded of The Symposium where Alcibiades, Socrates’ admirer, said he wished Socrates would die but couldn’t imagine his life without him. Everything he did was for Socrates who seemed to not even notice him. Like Alcibiades you remember the daily longing for validation.

In the morning the neighborhood is quiet, people are still waking up. Life can feel stagnant. Our dreams are interrupted by the situations we got ourselves in. A type of buyers remorse but for the big decisions that define us, like our careers. The daily need to kill our dreams has become so ordinary. The situations can become so complicated that we feel trapped. Instead of a radical change which would be too much to bear we find joy in the little things like jerking off. These little pleasures become the bargaining chips for our continual acquiescence — compromising on a better life becomes a daily habit, as long as we can get through it until our next release we’ll stick it out. Our pleasures become habits. Interacting with the people closest to us we realize we’ve grown apart and wonder how it happened. The feeling reveals an underlying assumption that things will stay the same. Going about our day we never expect to be surprised I guess that’s a prerequisite for being surprised.