Class Discussion Notes 10/25

Amy: Suggest we have a discussion of the “sublime” before moving to the “stuplime.” What is the sublime? Where have you encountered it before in your various fields?

Jenna: Interjection that the way I tell the difference between the two terms is the serifs on the “b” and the “p” – sublime, the “b” goes up and stuplime, the “p” goes down.

Cody: Kant makes a distinction between beauty and sublime. Beauty exists in objects and sublime is a reaction to the indescribable object or observed. Ngai’s term suggests more of a psychological reaction.

Amy: What’s central to that observation of sublime?

Cody: The experience of subjectivity.

Sarah: The earlier sense of the Kantian sublime is that the sublime isn’t contained within the object but it has to do with the subjectivity of the experience.

Courtney: On page 269, Ngai talks about the two competing effects of the sublime – shock and serenity.

Amy: Why are those two reactions important for her definition of the sublime?

Courtney: It goes back to Kant and these two distinct reactions.

Amy: Right. Having to do with the distinct experience of the perceiver of the sublime. Central for Kant is that shock and serenity. Also, an important removal from the object that inspires the emotion. Central in his account is the observer’s position as spectator. How can we think about that in terms of ideas of performance that we’ve talked about in class?

Jess: Certainly not Artaud. He’s not at all about safety and distance.

Iris: Would we say it’s more Brechtian then?

Sarah: Less Brechtian, maybe closer to Davis’ concept of theatricality. But the part about acknowledging our own subjectivity does seem related to Brecht.

Amy: But the sublime does seem to be more about vastness and serenity – there’s an emotional, trance-like aspect that might be anti-Davis. Maybe more like Berlant? There’s a spectrum of possibilities here, definitely. It’s the recognition of that which lies beyond the comrehensible, which seems more important for Berlant. Let’s shift to talk about the “stuplime” now using the blogs as a jumping off point. We’ll start with the examples you posted and try to backend into a definition of “stuplime.” So where does this manifest itself?

Andrea: Agreed with Derek’s post – moment in Black Watch where the sign language seems to go on a bit too long and very few in the audience would have understood it. It was a moment that separated temporal links from the message being communicated. On 256-257 Ngai talks about a change in temporal organization that’s important to the stuplime.

Jenn: Plus the elements of that scene, because the sign language was so repetitive and similar, reminded me of Ngai’s layering – sort of palimpsestic, but also not because it was all concurrant.

Sarah: And because it was interdependent, which is different from a palimpsest. The collage of shadows on the wall during the sign language was really the payoff – seeing the interconnectedness.

Jenn: But there is somewhat of a connection in the palimpsest? Or at least a contradiction or argument between the pieces that Harris talked about.

Amy: Let’s try to connect this sign language moment, which was a bit too long and beyond our understanding, to the stuplime directly.

Derek: With all the performers on stage simultaneously overlapping their performances, it was difficult to see what each one was doing. As a viewer, you’re trying to captures and process the information. It was repetitive, but there were subtle differences between what each character was doing, so at a certain point it felt like the overwhelming-ness of Ngai’s point about simultaneity. Maybe at a certain point you would just dismiss what’s happening in a scene like this?

Sarah: Wasn’t until I read Derek’s post that I really understood the theatrical implications of “open feeling.” The beauty of not understanding from moment to moment. The beauty of overdetermined-ness.

Iris: On page 262 Ngai talks about how shock and boredom can produce new options that are available with which to experience a work. But I’m just not sure what the next step to getting to those is.

Amy: Can we tie that to our feelings about Black Watch? As a vehicle through which we can articulate what Ngai offers us there?

Jenn: Maybe the benefits of defamiliarization? You see what’s happening in a new way and it changes the frame of mind through which we’re watching the play.

Iris: My moment for that was when the knife came out of the pool table. I had been asking constantly unanswered questions and that’s the moment I just stopped asking.

Jenn: So would the knife moment be a moment of shock, then?

Sarah: It becomes a moment where you understand, viscerally, not understanding.

Courtney: Like in the sign language scene, if someone was just holding a letter reading it, it would have bee more accessible. It seems like there was something particularly important about closing off the audience to understanding.

Sarah: From where I was sitting I could see that the letters had handwriting on them. So the juxtaposition between the sign language, the letters and the emotions was really complicated. Also the letters as material objects did provide access into a kind of global communication network.

Amy: So what are the possible applications of Ngai’s arguments to our talks of performance? What is her intervention and methodology and where is it fruitful for us?

Andrea: It opens up room for a different kind of transport to take place, through a kind of doubleness. We don’t have to have sameness to the characters to feel empathy (like Davis suggests). There’s possibly a way to connect through her idea of “open feeling”? Experiencing difference without the same?

Amy: Implications of that for performance? If identification has always been key, how can that be frustrated? Now we have an alternative possibility?

Whitney: She opens up room for it to be frustrated in her idea about new ways of articulating and reading these spaces. Although, she less tells us how to do that than just opens up the space for that possibility.

Amy: If we return to the man contemplating the ocean, what needs to be restaged to make this stuplime? And what’s the benefit of that restaging?

Jenn: Seems hard to do that in theater. Maybe a theater with very minimally scenery and only a few actors. The “non-traditional” spaces that Justin talks about. So the audience is paying less attention to the scaffolding of the theater itself.

Jenna: Some of this seemed to happen in Black Watch, though, with the way the audience was situated. The repetition of moving our heads back and forth seemed somewhat stuplime.

Jess: Would Beckett’s Not I be an example of this?

Sarah: That’s interesting that Jenn suggests the theater would have to change. I’m thinking about Pina Bausch’s “Café muller,” where the room literally becomes a character. There are gestures that remind us of narrative but are not narrative in some way.

Amy: I’ve been reading an article recently on the similarities between the way people talk who have gone through a large amount of military training, or raves. Drugs can do it too. But the physical repetition of certain things can move people into a state where their sense of the group lives through the sense of the “I” and something more than the individual comes to exist.

Jenn: It makes me think of Buddhists and their walking meditations, or children who have undergone a physical trauma and they have physical repetition in their movements.

---Clip of Beckett’s Not I, Whitelaw Production, 1973---

Jess: The first time I saw this was live (and it’s insanely hard to memorize). Something gets lost on the screen, though, because of the more pinpoint focus on the mouth. The mouth gets disconnected in a way that doesn’t happen in stage production.

Cody: Right, on stage it’s just a small hole. In the video clip we’re more mesmerized by the mouth on the screen but on the stage it’s the words that mesmerize us. Plus, it omits the ghostly figure that she’s “talking to.” Here, she’s just talking to us.

Iris: I was trying to mimic her movements because I realized that we rarely don’t see her teeth. Then I realized the amount of work she’s putting into her diction. The physicality that you see here that you maybe wouldn’t in a crowded theater. Although my reaction wasn’t boredom…I wasn’t enjoying it either, but it was more just frustrating.

Cody: I’ve read it and seen it a ton of times but every time I watch it I can’t hold onto the narrative. I get completely immersed in the language or the performance of it.

Jess: Language really breaks down into sounds and syllables. These are connections you maybe couldn’t make just reading it.

Iris: But yet I still don’t give up and drown because of it. It’s like it keeps throwing out a life preserver.

Amy: Explain that metaphor for us. What’s the water, the boat? Who’s drowning?

Iris: The life preserver would be the narrative. When words come in and don’t line up with the narrative, that’s where the water is and that feeling of drowning comes from the loss of narrative and the resulting confusion. I don’t know what the boat is.

Jenn: The words do become muddled, more like nonsense than clear-cut words.

Cody: The Julainne Moore version is much slower and longer. You are more able to follow the narrative. But the camera angles also change, which helps.

Amy: Can you speak to Iris’ idea of the narrative in Not I as a life preserver in relation to the stuplime?

Cody: It seems to work. Narrative does work as the life preserver. The discursive text is what we can drown in if we don’t grasp the narrative. The stuplime comes in when we don’t reach transcendence. We find ourselves wholly cased within language, trying to get outside it but it brings us down.

Iris: And down is that earthy, primal thing in Ngai.

---Clip of modern dance, Bill T. Jones, April 20, 2012---

Amy: Can we think about the stuplime in terms of dance?

Ming: It made me think of Ngai’s sense of causality. When people put movements to sound as if the sound was causing them to move. The importance in the stuplime is what happens when causality dissolves.

Amy: We can look at the bottom of page 254 to help us understand Ngai’s point about that.

Ming: But dancing isn’t paralysis as she seems to suggest here.

Cody: But the point about paralysis has more to do with the motion of our minds as we experience it.

Amy: That does work to think through, though, because dance is an example that seems to develop cause/effect relationship with the music. Does that, then, render it less stuplime?

Ming: Yes. There’s a sequence there between cause and effect. But, you have to be working under assumption that sound is causing movement. There could be some other arrangement between sound and effect.

Jess: But it can be very subjective, like the stuplime. There’s not a narrative to hold onto, which seems stuplim-ish.

Amy: Let’s be careful not to conflate stuplime with absence of narrative.

Jess: Well, you’re overwhelmed with what you’re seeing and you’re not comprehending it. Then you’re allowing yourself to be transported.

Amy: Let’s reference the quote in Sarah’s post about what the stuplime is. If the stuplime is simply that reaction all undergrads have to theater they don’t like, that doesn’t seem as productive. I want it to be something more than just “initiated” or “uninitiated” into a type of comrehension.

Courtney: Ngai distinguishes objects in the article that have specific traits that are stuplime. Like repetition, lack of connection through succession. So it isn’t just emotion in the audience. There seem to be certain traits the object itself has to posses to be considered stuplime.

Andrea: Also the heaping of things. There’s a difficult in watching the part or the whole. Like I wanted to grab onto individual words in Not I, but I couldn’t. In dance, you sort of have to watch one specific dancer because it’s hard to take in the more overwhelming whole.

Sarah: The fundamental different between the sublime and the stuplime is catharsis. There’s catharsis in the sublime but not with the stuplime.

Cody: This goes back to Kant. We reason into transcendence over an object. But stuplime allows no space for us to reason because we become completely immersed.

Sarah: What Jess said about modern dance being incomprehensible is right to an extent here. But the recognition about the beauty of the human body that we eventually get to watching it seems more like a sublime reaction. It’s like in Richard Foreman’s plays, where you’re so overwhelmed by stimuli that you can’t get out of it even if you want to. The example from Ngai about the million years volumes – the second part of that project that she doesn’t describe is that two years after the books were made, they put a man in a glass box who just sat there reading them. You could watch him or listen to him on the radio. The recognition that he’s going to say a year one million times – you can’t escape the affective experience of that.

Jenn: But there is logic in these objects. It’s not nonsense.

Amy: It points to the point Courtney raised that there are certain characteristics of these objects. The rock overlooking the vastness of a modern dance is possible – you actually can get to a place where you experience it from that point. But that place doesn’t exist in Not I. So is the character of the stuplime a refusal of that subjective position?

Courtney: Except that the idea of intention proves problematic. Can the stuplime be found in nature or does it require a fabrication of some kind?

Amy: People with more expertise in the Romantic period might help out here. It’s not so much the ocean itself but the art of the ocean, the representation of that emotion.

Whitney: That brings up the distinction Ngai makes between Kant’s original meaning of the sublime and the reappropriation of it in the Romantic period. Because he really did mean nature.

Andrea: Right, and the idea is that poetry evades the capture of it. It’s always attempting the sublime but can’t quite reach.

Amy: Both point to that which escapes us but there’s a difference in how we experience it. So what is usable in all of this? How, if at all, does this speak to your own work?

Justin: I see the value of it for actor training. There’s repetition in something like kabuki, and it becomes really important to overcome the stuplime to find meaning in every performance. The text could potentially become overperformed and no longer cathartic for the performer. You need to find a way to get past that.

Sarah: I see this in rituals. It allows us to anticipate the potential reaction of the audience. The open feeling and the effectiveness of group performance. Not everything needs to be meaningful, there are still ways of just knowing what it’s like to participate in something not readable with a script.

Amy: Similar to Berlant. Ngai wants to point to the meaning of performance that’s not traditionally understandable. This allows for a much more complicated reception of an event. It’s exciting in terms of the subjectivities possible, something other than the modern admiration of the individual to the unexplainable. Really good performances get us past that boring place to something more complex and exciting. Useful for our undergrads’ reaction of “I don’t like” something because it allows for that frustration and helps us get them to see past it.