I've heard that when you are thinking of buying a certain car, you start noticing that car everywhere you go. Maybe that's why the aspect of Ngai's article that I noticed was its conception of transport or absorption, which brought me all the way back to Artaud.
Ngai notes that the lack of temporal or causal links in the message slows down your interpretation and "paradoxically strengthens an affective link between text and reader, transferring the text's 'stupor' to him or her." This establishes that the mixture of boredom and awe can be a gripping emotional experience, maybe one that a reader or viewer could lose themselves in. It is also a new way to experience empathy without needing to establish "sameness as a criterion of worth" (Davis 154). For Ngai, this is done through the creation of 'open feeling': "a condition of utter receptivity in which difference is perceived (and perhaps even 'felt') prior to its qualification or conceptualization."
Artaud was also interested in creating a trance or transport for audience members, and although his description seems to aim more for the sublime, it could easily be perceived by an audience member as stuplime instead. The kind of displays he describes for the stage are thick, difficult images that would require slow interpretation by the audience as they allow their visceral reaction to translate itself into meaning. Artaud says that theater's unique language lies between gesture and thought, expanding beyond words to space, sounds, and light, which is similar to Ngai's erosion of formal difference in favor of modal difference.
I have been thinking about transport mainly in terms of the sublime, but this article gives me an alternate view and a new way to look at Artaud's theater of cruelty.
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