Courseblog #16 [Sara]: Defining the Stuplime

I found this chapter initially difficult to track, mainly because its project is so far outside my realm of everyday thought--in the good way, but also the bewildering way. A small bit of biography on Sianne Ngai helped a lot to situate my thoughts vis-à-vis the reading, so I thought I'd share them in my post. 

According to this very illuminating interview in Cabinet Magazine and some other shallow Googling, Ngai is currently a professor in the English department at Stanford University. Her research focuses on “marginal categories within aesthetics.” I found her description of her research very helpful. She writes:

“I’m interested in states of weakness: in ‘minor’ or non-cathartic feelings that index situations of suspended agency; in trivial aesthetic categories grounded in ambivalent or even explicitly contradictory feelings. More specifically, I’m interested in the surprising power these weak affects and aesthetic categories seem to have, in why they’ve become so paradoxically central to late capitalist culture. …By non-cathartic I just mean feelings that do not facilitate action, that do not lead to or culminate in some kind of purgation or release—irritation, for example, as opposed to anger. These feelings are therefore politically ambiguous, but good for diagnosing states of suspended agency, due in part to their diffusiveness and/or lack of definite objects.”

So, Ngai's work is essentially similar to Berlant, but taken to its logical conclusion. In the chapter we read from her book Ugly Thoughts, Ngai is tackling a similarly non-cathartic affect that she excavates in comparison to the Kantian sense of the sublime which she calls stuplimity, and defines as:

“The aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom… This term allows us to invoke the sublime--albeit negatively, since we infuse it with thickness or even stupidity--while detaching it from its spiritual and transcendent connotations and its close affiliation with Romanticism” (271).

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1817. Romantic artists during the 19th century used the epic of nature as an expression of the sublime. “Kant distinguishes two notions of the sublime: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. In the case of both notions, the experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature” (§28, 261).

Ngai identifies the need for such a term in attempting to describe her experience with Gertrude Stein's modernist novel, The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress, saying:

“Our encounters with astonishing but also fatiguing works like Americans thus call for a different way of thinking what it means to be aesthetically overpowered--a new way of characterizing an affective relationship to enormous, stupefying objects that may seem similar to, but ultimately does not fall within the scope of, either the Kantian or the popular sublime” (270-71).

Qualifying this statement, she describes the initial experience of “being aesthetically overwhelmed” as lacking the sublime’s sense of terror or pain that is “eventually superseded by tranquility,” but rather stuplimity is:

“Something much closer to an ordinary fatigue--and one that cannot be neutralized, like the sublime’s terror, by a competing affect. In the case of Stein’s colossal novel, a dysphoric affect is similarly summoned in which the reader's or observer's faculties become strained to their limits in the effort to comprehend the work as a whole, but the revelation of this failure is conspicuously less dramatic-and does not, in the end, confirm the self's sense of superiority over the overwhelming or intimidating object”  (270).

Ann Hamilton’s, privation and excesses. 1989. In this installation, “Hamilton and assistants laid 750,000 copper pennies on a honey-coated floor. Behind these sat an isolated figure in plain clothes, wringing its hands over a honey-filled felt hat. And behind the figure was an enclosure of grazing sheep.”

Detail: Side room. 3 sheep, morgue sink. “The materials Hamilton has used in this installation give us clues to the meaning of the work. Laying out the pennies took systematic organization and intense labor. Honey is produced by bees, noted for their organized labor and for their factory-like production of a life source that is, for humans, a commodity. The honey and the pennies might be seen in contrast to each other. A penny has little inherent worth. An exchange commodity, a penny itself cannot feed, clothe, or house us. As the smallest unit of U.S. currency, most people who see a penny on the street will not even bend over to pick it up. Honey is inherently valuable both to bees and to humans as a source of nutrition.

Despite the human labor of laying the pennies and their accumulated monetary worth (the budget Hamilton was given for the installation, $7,500), the performer, without companionship and apparent meaning, looks isolated and anxious. Wringing its hands over a hat of honey, but not eating the honey, there is no evidence of any communal bonds. Ironically, the sheep, who appear content in their enclosure, would die of melancholy if isolated from one another.”

The apparent distinction between the manifestation of stuplimity Ngai describes as opposed to the Kantian sense of sublime is a lack of catharsis. Quoting Paul de Man, she notes that the Kantian sense of the sublime “stages a competition between opposing affects in which one eventually supersedes and replaces the other,” whereas in the “concatenation of boredom and astonishment” that is the linking up of these minor affect that Ngai describes as stuplimity (271), the experience is less of a purgation of emotion than a “bringing together of what ‘dulls’ and what ‘irritates’ or agitates; of sharp, sudden excitation and prolonged desensitization, exhaustion, or fatigue. … stuplimity is a tension that holds opposing affects together”  and it does this not through a recognition of the infinite in nature and thus the self, but rather in the recognition of repetition and scale (271-72).

An artistic example of the stuplime: On Kawara’s “One Million Years (Past and Future), since 1970.” Machine-written directory, two sets of 10 leatherbound books, each in a black box and measuring 29.5 x 23.5 x 8 cm. 
 According to Ngai: "The sublimity of such a vast amount of time is trumped by its organization into bureaucratic blandness; our comprehension of a million years is rendered manageable, if also tedious, when consolidated in a set of ring binders bearing some resemblance to a completed report by the Senate Finance Committee. Yet this tedium turns back into astonishment when we come to realize the amount of time and labor it has taken (two years’ worth) to make such a severely minimal product” (293-94).

Unlike the uplift of the sublime, stuplimity drags down, miring us in the “thickness” of words and meaning. One of the most evocative words Ngai uses to describe the sensation of this, I think, is agglutination, literally a gluing together of both formal and modal structures of language that can initially seem to obscure meaning, but eventually, with patience and shifting perspective, allow new interrogations of the frameworks in which meaning is made. This experience Ngai describes as the “affective state in [the] wake, a secondary feeling that seems strangely neutral, unqualified, ‘open,’ (284). It is only in this state of heightened receptivity that follows the initial mire that one might appreciate the subtly emerging variations in the repetition and learn to love them for their variety as much as their sameness.