Course blog 16 (Andrea)

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.

Course Blog #16 - 2nd Round (Group D) - Jess

My own personal moments of stuplimity have come from some of the readings so far, which are are awash in a thick river of words that astonishes and overwhelms me. Now that I'm much more cognizant of how much work goes into crafting a lengthy paper or article on this scholarly level, each reading we have tackled this semester seems a room of pennies mired in honey. They are very obviously each a material result of a period of hard work, but the ideas contained within them have sometimes proven hard to excavate. A sticky situation, if you will.

Ngai's article itself is a vision of stuplimity, to me. I feel like it's a very subjective term, perhaps similar to the sublime. Perhaps seeing a Shakespeare play could be a stuplimitous (?) experience for some. The text is dense, heavy, and bewildering sometimes, but wading through the text can be extraordinarily fruitful. Reading Peggy Phelan's book "Mourning Sex" was a truly stuplimitous experience for me. It was the first time I had tried to understand something so complex that it bordered on stuplimitous. Perhaps I reveal too much of my own intellectual limitations, but to me, readings like Ngai and Phelan seem insurmountable at times, especially if there is no opportunity to have a conversation about the works after reading them.

A work we've dissected in class that seems akin to a stuplimitous work is Handke's "Offending the Audience." At times, the words seemed totally divorced from meaning, coming in waves, inspiring both irritation and boredom in me. From what I can understand about Ngai's theory, stuplimity is that mysterious combination of overwhelming awe and mind-numbing boredom. She exhorts us to interrogate that feeling and welcome it as we would welcome a moment of the sublime. Not an easy task.

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.

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.

Prompt: Course Blog 16; Ngai

Group B:  What, according to Ngai, is the "stuplime"?

Group C: Can you think of any moments of the "stuplime" that we have come across over the course of the semester?

Group A: How can we transport Ngai's argument and/or methodology into our discussion from Tuesday about performance? She's steered away from performance as a medium (despite referencing theatrical texts) but how can we mobilize her idea of the "stuplime" for this purpose?