Examples of the Stuplime

Where have we seen the stuplime so far in our course? I can think of several examples. The first example that comes to mind is that of Peter Handke's offending the audience. Here I am thinking especially of the beginning lines of the play. To refresh our memories I’ll borrow the video that was posted earlier in the semester. The portion of Handke’s script and of the performance that I am interested in takes place from approximately minutes 1:30-2:00 of this video.

Offending the Audience Video

This "thick" language, as Ngai would call it, fulfills the requirements of the stuplime. First, it partakes in the repetitiveness characteristic of the stuplime. The actors repeat the same lines over and over. This makes these speeches tedious and exhausting, a trait of the stuplime. Second, it has a depth of form (not meaning) necessary to stuplimity. The way this is achieved in the performance medium is through the simultaneity of the lines, that is, all the actors speaking at the same time. This provides the requisite barrier to understanding of the stuplime. Third, the language, provides enough of a threat to the audience (this time in its content) to fulfill the stuplime requirement of excitation in the audience. The lines are meant as insults and provocations to the audience. This speech, and in a larger way, this play is a perfect example of Ngai's stuplime. If, as Whitney claims, the stuplime is postmodern, then Offending the Audience is the postmodern stuplime within the theater.

"Though stumplimity begins with the dysphoria of shock and boredom," Ngai writes,"it might be said to culminate in something like the 'open feeling' of 'resisting being'--an indeterminate affective state that lacks the punctuating 'point' of individuated emotion...the negative affect of stuplimity might be said to produce another affective state in its wake, a secondary feeling that seems strangely neutral, unqualified, 'open'... [that] makes possible a kind of resistance." This, I would argue is the power of this scene in Handke's piece and the power of its use of stuplimity.