Open Access
PRECARITY'S FORMS
Author(s) -
STEWART KATHLEEN
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
cultural anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.669
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 1548-1360
pISSN - 0886-7356
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01157.x
Subject(s) - precarity , aesthetics , assemblage (archaeology) , register (sociolinguistics) , history , sociology , epistemology , visual arts , linguistics , art , philosophy , gender studies , archaeology
ABSTRACT Writing matters if objects of analysis are to be understood as emergent forms with qualities, intensities, and trajectories that can be described or evoked. Writing is not epiphenomenal to thought but its medium. As it sidles up to worlds, disparate and incommensurate things throw themselves together. As it attunes, spatial and temporal dimensions come into play; writing skids over surfaces, pauses on a detail, grows capacious or pinched. Here, I write four very different scenes of precarity as a form that accretes, accrues, and wears out and one that takes place through attachments, tempos, materialities, and states of being. Such objects of analysis register the tactility and significance of something coming into form through an assemblage of affects, routes, conditions, sensibilities, and habits.