Pockets

Abstract This comment notes how Lauren Berlant's work attends to the compelling but not necessarily explicit emergence of forms in the course of everyday scenes of living through things. Keywords: AttunementsAffectLaborsWritingForms Notes 1. Andre Dubus III, The Garden of Last Days (New York: Norton, 2008), 38. 2. Lauren Berlant, “The New Ordinary,” (unpublished manuscript, September 2, 2009), Word files, notes, and personal communication. Concepts and working ideas cited as “The New Ordinary” at the time of first writing this commentary have since appeared in Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 3. Roland Barthes, Incidents, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 7. 4. Kenneth MacLeish, Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). 5. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 110. 6. Berlant, “The New Ordinary,” 4. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKathleen Stewart Kathleen Stewart is Chair and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her previous books, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton University Press, 1996) and Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press, 2007), are experiments in ethnographic creative nonfiction. Her current book project, Worlding, approaches the composition of forms and sensibilities through refrains, rhythms, impacts, and attachments