During the two-thousands, affect theory became one of the dominant paradigms of literary studies, and a bridge to other fields, notably social psychology, anthropology, and political theory. Scholars like Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, and Ann Cvetkovich began exploring the emotional contours of life during increasingly precarious times. They were circling around a kind of overstimulated numbness, considering everything from what it meant to call something “interesting”—a hedge against actual judgment—to the relationship between economic anxiety and mental health. In “Ugly Feelings” (2005), Ngai published a “bestiary of affects,” including animatedness, envy, irritation, paranoia, and the combination of shock and boredom that she called “stuplimity.” Other affect theorists noted that, amid a sense of dawning futility, many people seem to derive their greatest pleasure from making others feel bad; disaffection and disillusionment are contagions we can spread ourselves.

Berlant roots her version of affect theory less in works of psychology than in works of Marxist thought, especially those of Raymond Williams, who, back in the nineteen-fifties, wrote of the “structure of feeling.” He was trying to describe how we come to agree on social or cultural conventions—the intuitive, pre-ideological sense a cohort has that one version of the future is feasible while another is not. Berlant, in turn, sought to chronicle “dramas of adjustment” that have overtaken the postwar, boom-time conceptions of the good life, and that might “force into being new recognitions of what a life is and ought to be.”

The draw of the American Dream, in her view, has always been its seductive invitation to fuse one’s “private fortune with that of the nation.” When she began teaching at the University of Chicago, in the mid-eighties, Ronald Reagan spoke confidently of a “morning in America,” and the American story of postwar prosperity still seemed possible. General skepticism about meritocracy and opportunity, felt most acutely by marginalized groups who couldn’t see themselves in picket-fence campaign ads, had yet to go mainstream. Berlant saw the contradictions within the public realm played out in sentimental fiction. These works were often seen as unserious because of their appeal to emotion and their focus on the domestic sphere, and yet they could move people to act.

In sentimental fiction, we encounter righteous solutions to problems that feel unresolvable in real life. Berlant held that American popular culture had been built, layer by layer, from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “The Simpsons,” upon the assumption that identifying with “someone else’s stress, pain, or humiliated identity” could change you. “Popular culture relies on keeping sacrosanct this aspect of sentimentality—that ‘underneath’ we are all alike,” she observed.

Everyone has heartstrings. Over time, she wrote, we had grown addicted to having them pulled, rather than focussing on what the pulling could accomplish by way of political change. We’d replaced tangible action with affective experience. “What does it mean for the theory and practice of social transformation,” she asked in a 1999 essay, “when feeling good becomes evidence of justice’s triumph?” Somewhere along the way, doing good had come to seem irrelevant—or maybe just felt impossible.

In 2002, Berlant helped found the Feel Tank Chicago—her version of that ubiquitous vehicle of policymaking the think tank. The collective consisted of academic colleagues, artists, and activists who sought to take “the emotional temperature of the body politic.” It functioned both as a support network and as a strategy workshop for “political depressives.” Underneath the playful conceit was the very serious possibility that politics was essentially theatre, and that it was basically impossible to opt out of one’s part in it. As Berlant later wrote, in “Cruel Optimism,” “The political depressive might be cool, cynical, shut off, searingly rational or averse, and yet, having adopted a mode that might be called detachment, may not really be detached at all, but navigating an ongoing and sustaining relationship to the scene and circuit of optimism and disappointment.”

We dream of swimming toward a beautiful horizon, but in truth, Berlant evocatively observed, we are constantly “dogpaddling around a space whose contours remain obscure.” What stories do we tell ourselves in order to stay afloat? In December, 2007, she started a blog called Supervalent Thought, dedicated to slowing the world down, zooming in on its mundanities. Some of its most bewitching posts had a voyeuristic intimacy, cataloguing interactions on city streets or in coffee shops, scrutinizing nonverbal cues, gestures, and fleeting expressions—the traces of affect that litter our daily lives.

In one post, Berlant recounts an argument between a cashier and an angry customer at a convenience store. The customer leaves in a huff but forgets his credit card, and the “aggrieved” yet duty-bound cashier rushes out after him, hoping to get his attention with an unusually loud whistle—the kind “that you know requires your fingers.” When the cashier returned, Berlant complimented him on his technique. “He told us a story about elementary school,” she wrote. “He said he had had a math teacher who insulted and shamed him. One day she was using him as an example, and he just put his fingers in his mouth and blew.” It was an experience that couldn’t be easily distilled into lesson; it endured as a lingering affect. Berlant was interested in the “atmosphere” of scenes like these, acted out by dispirited characters in search of a plot.

“The Hundreds” (Duke), Berlant’s latest book, co-written with Kathleen Stewart, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, grows out of these short writing exercises. Each entry is an experiment in “following out the impact of things” in a hundred words, or a multiple of a hundred words.

The result is a strange and captivating book. It is an inventory of what Berlant and Stewart call “ordinaries,” which arise from encounters with the world that are “not events of knowing, units of anything, or revelations of realness, or facts.” They are records of affect, meditations, manifestos, and prose poems. There are entries on smoothies and weird encounters at the liquor store, digressions on selfies, yoga, and capitalism, a reference to the TV show “Search Party” and the real-estate app Zillow. The authors sift through the detritus of the American Dream—the symptoms of cruel optimism. Men at the local deli seem to suspect that life is “a set of roadblocks cooked down to a rage.” One particularly haunting page recounts an argument that the narrator had with a neighbor over a urinating dog. Another woman walks by, trying to calm the author down and bring her “back to the good.” “His words were spitballs; hers were gently bouncing tennis balls. He was a rage machine; she was a sympathy machine, but she seemed so tired, too, and I could only imagine why.”

In Berlant and Stewart’s hands, affect theory provides a way of understanding the sensations and resignations of the present, the normalized exhaustion that comes with life in the new economy. It is a way of framing uniquely modern questions: Where did the seeming surplus of emotionality that we see on the Internet come from, and what might it become? What new political feelings were being produced by the rudderless drift of life in the gig economy? What if millennials were unintelligible to their parents simply because they have resigned themselves to precariousness as life’s defining feature?