Class Notes - 10/25/2012

Amy: Let’s start with today’s text; I’m grateful for the initial work done on the blog posts for today; I’m sure many of your have encountered the sublime before, before moving to the stuplime, can we develop a clear understanding of ‘sublime’

Jenna: This may be rather stupid, but I found it helpful to think about the serif attached to each term, the upward b and the downward p help to remember how sublime and stuplime contrast

Cody: consider Kant’s definitions of sublime and beauty; the sublime is a reaction to the inexplicable, it is both psychological and affective (whereas beauty is merely affective and exists within an object)

Amy: What is central to Kant’s notion?

Cody: it suggests a sort of subjectivity in the viewer

Sara: the sublime isn’t in the landscape (taking the seascape picture on my blog post into consideration) but lies in the recognition of the self in relation to the experience

Jennifer: implies a sensibility in the face of the sublime (be sensible while feeling the sublime)

Courtney: gets to Ngai’s notions of shock and serenity

Amy: Why?

Courtney: she is attributing emotion to the sublime, a la Kant, but it doesn’t go far enough to be put a subject in a panic

Amy: I’m curious about the experience of the perceiver of the sublime and the removal of that spectator from such a position – consider, the ocean is sublime while watching over it, but not while drowning in it; How can we harness this in terms of performance?

Jess: this notion does not remind me of Artaud, who want to create the panic within the viewer (put the viewer amidst the ocean, not just viewing from afar)

Iris: would we say that Brecht would want that?

Sara: it’s akin to the theatricality as described by Davis; it’s not quite Brechtian, but it acknowledges subjectivity

Amy: the collision of vastness and serenity creates an emotional trance, like a state that is counter to Davis, perhaps more in a Brechtian sense; recognition of that kind lies beyond the comprehensible – the idea of comprehension and its absence is central to Ngai; Does this make sense as a baseline?; let’s look at examples of the stuplime – either in Ngai’s text or in the blog posts

Andrea: related to my experience at Black Watch where the sign language scene went on just too long, evoking a sense of the stuplime; it marks a separation in temporal links from what’s being shown – chronological links aren’t shown

Jennifer: the similar movements seem to parallel the simultaneous layers that Ngai mentions; the layers also seem related to the palimpsest, though different

Sara: the movements are also interdependent – in isolation each movement wouldn’t hold the same meaning

Jennifer: which shows the contradiction between Ngai’s layers and the palimpsest

Amy: watching the sign language goes on too long; what does that do and how do we connect it to the stuplime?

Derek: the overlapping of the performances of all of the actors, as they were added to the scene, made it difficult to focus on just one; at a point, it became overwhelming and forced viewer to ask what individual differences between each performance might mean; in that sense (too much information) it brought to mind Ngai

Sara: from Derek’s post, I understood Ngai’s notion of being open – a viewer reaches a point of appreciating beauty that does not have specific meaning

Iris – page 262; instead of becoming frustrated and angry, to the point where you give up on a performance, now you have more options for thinking about the work

Amy: does watching it to that point present opportunity for expressing what it does mean for you?

Jennifer: incorporates defamiliarization – able to what the rest of the performance after being opened up by the ‘overwhelming’ scene

Iris: essentially stopped asking questions, and watched in a different way

Sara: that moment epitomizes the idea that ‘words cannot express’ feeling; reframes how you look at the stage; not causal or continuous, so you have to watch differently

Courtney: if it was just reading, we wouldn’t have a lack of access; such moments remind the audience of such a lack of access

Sara: Black Watch created an interesting juxtaposition of visual text (that was not readable) next to sign language (that was indecipherable); provided access to an idea of communication and how it relates to new global forms of communication

Amy: What are possible applications of the stuplime to performance? What is the methodology and how is it fruitful?

Andrea: understanding is different concerning of what is necessary for transport to take place; having doubleness doesn’t need similarity to identify with characters; this is a way to be receptive/open, without having to identify or feel the same

Amy: what does it suggest if usual identification is frustrated and there is this different option?

Whitney: opens up possibility for new reactions to something; taking something like performance where the audience is keyed to identify, something else might emerge; we need to figure out how something like this might work, but Ngai doesn’t necessarily tell us how

Amy: think about the notion of the sublime in terms of spectator/spectated; How would we restage the ‘man overlooking the ocean’ as stuplime?

Jennifer: How would it change the space? How could we overwhelm in a different space? Does it require a ‘non-tradition’ space?

Jenna: reminding of Black Watch where audience focus was divided between by two poles spaced widely apart, forcing the audience to look back and forth repeatedly

Jess: brings to mind Beckett’s Not I

Sara: interesting if we ask about space; makes me think of Pina Bausch and Café Muller

Jennifer: the idea of repeated motion inducing open mental space must have been psychologically studied

Amy: Yes – military drills and raves; repetition (especially physical) moves people into a state where sense of group takes over the sense of I or self

Jennifer: similar to Buddhist monks and walking meditation, as well as children suffering trauma who use repetitive rocking movements as a self-soothing mechanism  

WATCH YouTube CLIP OF NOT I

Jess: interesting to see it in video; a friend performed the piece and put it on continuous loop in order to memorize it; it has lost something by being on a screen, but highlights how mouth has become disconnected from the person playing the role

Cody: the clip allows the spectator to become mesmerized by the enormity of the lips displayed on the screen, whereas on stage they are so small that spectator is mesmerized by the flood of words coming from the small (hard-to-see) lips emoting through a curtain; the clip makes it appear that the speaker is talking to herself, but on stage she is really talking to a spectral bystander

Iris: in the clip, I found myself almost moving along with the speaker; this is her physicality as she expresses it; it is a painful process, but brings to mind the mechanism that works behind the idea

Cody: I know the narrative of Not I very well, but in watching it always find that the narrative disappears

Jess: a viewer begins picking out his or her own connections that the original text would not allow; it’s as if one is adrift in a sea of water and the words act as life preservers that may carry one to a boat or to solid ground

Iris: I appreciate that notion of drowning and grasping at what stands out as a way of saving oneself

Amy: can you map that idea for us

Iris: the water represents a feeling of frustration and the words (the life preservers) are the only way to pull through the frustration

Jennifer: the speaker could not cut off or hinder her elocution because that would cut her listeners off from the only things they have to hold on to in the performance

Cody: other performances of this text are not as fast, so it is often easier to follow; also, the camera often follows the narrative, helping to indicate past, present, and future; I agree with Iris, words act as life preservers in this performance – we find ourselves encased in language even as it is falling apart for us

Iris: in a way, this is why Jenna’s serifs are valuable (shows the earthly thing versus that which is unearthly)

WATCH CLIP FROM BILL T. JONES DANCE

Amy: this was just a small chunk of the performance, hopefully showing a connection between the stuplime and dance; does it offer us anything?

Ming: brings to mind a certain carnality; movement is responsive/necessitated to the sound; what happens when such carnality dissolves?; refer to pages 254 and 266 in the article

Cody: it is held in the spectator’s mind

Amy: the mind struggles to make connections; does an example where cause and effect can be easily linked to music and movement make this less stuplime?

Ming: Yes – if movement and music connectivity is broken, then stuplime is more accessible

Jess: the connection of narrative would be disrupted

Amy: is stuplime an absence of response?

Jess: stuplime is being overwhelmed paired with the absence of comprehension; one must become bored and then let go of that response

Amy: I am reminded of the quote from page 271 that appears in Sara’s blog post; if stuplime just describes theater we don’t like, then the stuplime really only denotes a difference between an ‘initiated’ and an ‘uninitiated’ audience member – I want it to be more useful than that

Courtney: stuplime traits are valuable to performance repetition; consider thick language – not just emotions in the viewer, but traits that are necessary to the work of art

Andrea: the heaping up of things is another trait of the stuplime; watching a part of a performance complicates our ability to see this; in group dances, we can look at one dancer or the whole group of dancers; does Ngai address problems that may arise by viewing parts or wholes?

Sara: she seems to make that a fundamental difference between the sublime and the stuplime

Cody: returning to Kant, he suggests that we are all reasoning beings and the sublime gives us room to do such reasoning, whereas the stuplime does not

Sara: modern dance confers a certain appreciation of the human body; I am reminded of the work of Richard Foreman where even when a spectator checks out, the performance does something that forces the viewer to come back to it; also brings to mind the million year art project – 10 leather-bound volumes of past million years – after the initial reaction, one can recognize the care of creating such a work and also see what time is (‘a drowning in infinity’); a performance was then created to go with the volumes – one can hear a person reading the list of years (provides no catharsis from time, impossible to escape its oppressiveness)

Jennifer: there is an intention to these works

Amy: I tend to be uncomfortable with the idea of intention, but acknowledging intention is valuable to a point; there is a way to get to the rock (per the drowning in water analogy); it is characteristic of the stuplime that it refuses us this place (sanctuary)

Courtney: can stuplime exist in nature or does it have to be created? Can it be a natural phenomenon? (question arises as it seems to require a desire for meaning)

Amy: leads to a question of mine about Romanticism – seems to be interested not in the actual ocean (nature), but in attempts to capture the ocean (nature) within its works, yes?

Jennifer and Whitney: not exactly – Romanticism was very much interested in actual nature and its wonders; requirement of the works seems to be built on actual experience with the thing depicted, not just a creation of a representation

Andrea: depicts what is always beyond you just a little

Amy: they create a different relationship between the spectator and spectated; what is usable in this? How does it speak to our own work?

Whitney: Jess noted how Shakespeare can be stuplime for her, but since that is my area, it never comes across to me as such; it is odd that the stuplime works very differently for different people

Sara: brings to mind things that are ritualistic – provides a way to recognize affective response in a crowd without asking for people to discuss it; explains efficaciousness in ritual performance – don’t just recognize performance as a semiotic experience, if you can immerse yourself into the experience of others

Amy: it’s a way into the hermeneutics; allows for a much more complicated receptive event; especially in terms of type of subjectivities that are possible (not just adoration of the individual)

Sara: comforting to know that no one feels transcendence from Gertrude Stein; provides a way for understanding that boredom can be okay

Amy: it is helpful for talking to students who don’t like something; allows us to ask why we’ve romanticized certain things into a lifeboat

Class Discussion Notes 10/25

Amy: Suggest we have a discussion of the “sublime” before moving to the “stuplime.” What is the sublime? Where have you encountered it before in your various fields?

Jenna: Interjection that the way I tell the difference between the two terms is the serifs on the “b” and the “p” – sublime, the “b” goes up and stuplime, the “p” goes down.

Cody: Kant makes a distinction between beauty and sublime. Beauty exists in objects and sublime is a reaction to the indescribable object or observed. Ngai’s term suggests more of a psychological reaction.

Amy: What’s central to that observation of sublime?

Cody: The experience of subjectivity.

Sarah: The earlier sense of the Kantian sublime is that the sublime isn’t contained within the object but it has to do with the subjectivity of the experience.

Courtney: On page 269, Ngai talks about the two competing effects of the sublime – shock and serenity.

Amy: Why are those two reactions important for her definition of the sublime?

Courtney: It goes back to Kant and these two distinct reactions.

Amy: Right. Having to do with the distinct experience of the perceiver of the sublime. Central for Kant is that shock and serenity. Also, an important removal from the object that inspires the emotion. Central in his account is the observer’s position as spectator. How can we think about that in terms of ideas of performance that we’ve talked about in class?

Jess: Certainly not Artaud. He’s not at all about safety and distance.

Iris: Would we say it’s more Brechtian then?

Sarah: Less Brechtian, maybe closer to Davis’ concept of theatricality. But the part about acknowledging our own subjectivity does seem related to Brecht.

Amy: But the sublime does seem to be more about vastness and serenity – there’s an emotional, trance-like aspect that might be anti-Davis. Maybe more like Berlant? There’s a spectrum of possibilities here, definitely. It’s the recognition of that which lies beyond the comrehensible, which seems more important for Berlant. Let’s shift to talk about the “stuplime” now using the blogs as a jumping off point. We’ll start with the examples you posted and try to backend into a definition of “stuplime.” So where does this manifest itself?

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.

"Stuplime" Examples (2nd Responder, Derek)

I have had difficulty thinking of examples from this semester. More precisely, I'm unsure whether the examples I've gathered here satisfy the definition of stuplimity well enough.

First, I might suggest the singing and dancing we saw in Black Watch, including the sign language scene. As Ellen has pointed out, these little routines went on just long enough (i.e. a couple of verses too many) to create irritation and boredom in the audience.

Second, let's consider whether opera's formal characteristic of the thrice-repeated utterance qualifies as stuplime, especially when compounded by the supertitles shown above stage (effectively giving the audience every utterance six times).

Third, I would like to bring in an outside resource: Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls, which features overlapping dialogue. Ngai might have been talking about that play's first scene when she writes "the tension created by slightly overlapping phrases results in gap and disjunction" (Ngai, 280).

Fourth, I would like to suggest there is an element of the stuplime in some of Monty Python's sketches. In particular, the Travel Agent sketch. An argument might also be made for some others, such as the Spam sketch (and the fish-slapping dance if it were extended much longer). Here is the Travel Agent sketch:

Fifth, we could say the old knock-knock joke about the banana and the orange contains an element of stuplimity as well, mainly due to the repetition which irritates the questionee. I used to love this one when I was a kid. Oh heck, here it is:

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?