Ngai: What is the "stuplime"? (Whitney)

In her chapter on “Stuplimity” from Ugly Things, Sianne Ngai offers this term as a necessary reaction to new, primarily postmodern, objects of analysis. Contemporary criticism, she writes, “in its engagement with radically different forms of cultural production” needs “new terms designating our ways of responding to them” (271). Stuplimity is offered as a counter to the Kantian sublime that has generally been appropriated to describe emotional overwhelming reactions to objects or events. In Ngai’s words, the Kantian sublime has become, primarily through its use in relation to Romanticism, “an experience of being astonished and overwhelmed by a vast or intimidating object” (267). Ngai seems to suggest that this “contemporary version” of Kant’s term is actually an incorrect appropriation of the original concept in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, which Kant never intended to be applied to objects of art, only to “rude nature” (265).

Ngai emphasizes three key problems with using the Kantian sublime as a way to describe our reactions to postmodern texts like Gertrude Stein’s text The Making of Americans and Gerhard Richter’s installation Atlas. (Side note: I’m labeling most of the works in Ngai’s essay as postmodern because they follow with my understanding of that categorization, but if someone closer to that field needs to correct me, I’d be grateful for a clear understanding of the pre- and post- modern distinctions). The first clarification Ngai makes about the Kantian sublime is that it “applies only to a quality or state of the subject’s mind, and not to the object that excites that state of mind” (266).  In other words, for Kant, sublimity emerges only properly on the side of the subject and cannot take into account any overwhelming or intense characteristics inherent within or attributed to the object itself. Secondly, the movement of sublime reaction in Kant is transcendental – “involving an uplifting transcendence” – rather than the postmodern works which “tend to draw us down into the sensual and material” (267). This second discrepancy is tied up in the difference in subject matter between Kant’s examples and the postmodern works Ngai analyzes. Kant’s examples all come from nature and involve encounters with the infinite, while Ngai’s examples encounter “bits and scraps” of finite material – copper pennies, words, paper, etc. (271). The final problem with using the Kantian sublime to express our reaction to postmodern objects is that it can only properly take into account the “astonishment” part of the reaction process. “Boredom” is the other piece of the reaction that Ngai attaches to the objects she analyzes and Kantian sublimity cannot account for the kind of “dissatisfied (and often restless) mood of boredom” (269).

Stuplimity, then, once Ngai situates it as an alternative to the Kantian sublime in these three significant ways, is finally defined as “the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom” (271). Put another way, stuplimity is a “bringing together…of sharp, sudden excitation and prolonged desensitization, exhaustion, or fatigue” (271). Additionally, just as stuplimity is offered as a new term for aesthetic reaction, Ngai suggests that the work of postmodern objects that call on this reaction also push us to formulate new tactics for reading (272). By forcing an emphasis on “the finite and iterable” – those material and potentially overlooked elements of everyday life that structure the organization of our existence (language or money, for instance) – and presenting these objects simultaneously or in repetition, stuplimity induces “a series of fatigues or minor exhaustions, rather than a single, major blow to the imagination” (272). Consequently, these objects invite the viewer forward while consistently pulling him or her back, suggesting that our traditional mode of progressional reading must be questioned.