Course Blog 22 [Sara]: Abstract for the Work to Come

“Socialist Surrealism” and National Identity: Acts of Radical Imagination in Post-Soviet Poland

In the past four decades, the study of history, national memory in particular, witnessed a radical paradigmatic shift. Abandoning the approach of individual narrative analysis to explore the implications of collective memory as a collaborative social construct, sociologists and historians like Paul Connerton and Pierre Nora found that memory and identity transmission may operate simultaneously and competitively with narrative history, allowing the perseverance of a created collective memory to dominate and even usurp the individual’s memory of actual experienced events. Recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience support this view of both individual and collective memories as plastic, embodied experiences rather than static, stored information; this perspective lends itself to new horizons in the study of meaning-making in revolutionary street theatre and participatory mass spectacle. 

In this paper, I argue that radical student groups such as the Alternative Orange Movement in 1980s and 1990s post-Soviet Poland flourished because they recognized the Soviets’ successful combination of visual iconicity and embodied experience in their revolution-era propaganda and subsequently pursued similar tactics to disrupt the intentionally fabricated Soviet sign systems. Rejecting rhetoric in favor of “socialist surrealism,” their leaders sought to alter Polish national identity by intervening at a physical rather than intellectual level. Alternative Orange’s site-specific “happenings” were purported to be gleefully devoid of meaning; they were acts of radical imagination that sought to reclaim the streets of Wroclaw by creatively engaging sites of Soviet significance and altering their cultural associations. In these acts of anti-meaning, the movement successfully disempowered Soviet-era sign systems and opened a space for the collective creation of a new national identity.

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SELECTED WORKS CITED

Cioffi, Kathleen M. Alternative Theatre in Poland, 1954-1989, Polish Theatre Archive. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996.

Cohen-Cruz, Jan. Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, edited by Jan Cohen-Cruz, 302. London: Routledge, 1998.

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember, Themes in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” TDR 46, no. 2 (2002): 145-56.

Course Blog 21 [Sara]: The Transcendent, Transformative Power of Theatre

By and large, I felt that most of the reviews of the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre's 2012 production of Black Watch fell short in their inattention to the concept of genre, both in an interrogation of the object under review's manipulation of genre and in the medium of the theatrical review itself. This was in evidence in most of our posted examples, but perhaps best exemplified by Oliver Sava's Chicago Theater Beat article that seems, at best, unsure of its own hermeneutics.

I was drawn to this piece, in part, because of Sava's earnest appreciation for Black Watch's innovative theatrics: 

"Incorporating music, movement, and video, director John Tiffany creates a visceral, multi-sensory experience that will shake audience members to their core, and not just because of the booming sound system. Black Watch is the type of play that shows the transcendent, transformative power of theater, and kudos to Chicago Shakespeare for bringing this play to our city."

He seems here to recognize that the true power in Black Watch as a work theatre is its innovative approach to story-telling, but then fails to develop this idea, reverting instead to a textual summary and emotional analysis of the story-level of the play rather than the physical reality of the production, with such remarks as:

"Burke’s script is a deeply powerful look at the history of the Scottish regiment, and captures all the tension, danger, and ennui of their recent campaign in Iraq. Enemy combat is rarely seen, with the play focusing on the conflicts amongst the troops and within the soldiers’ minds, creating a brutally honest portrayal of the horrors of war."

and

"Despite the Scottish dialects and setting, it is easy to relate to Burke’s script, and that connection is what makes Black Watch such a powerful production."

Black Watch is neither a history play nor simply a human interest story "probing the emotional and mental effects of war on the soldiers." In fact, it's history is largely biased and full of holes and its revelations about the male experience of war typical, even maudlin, in spite of its recognition of the effects of the changing nature of terror-based warfare in the twenty-first century. What is interesting about Black Watch is its very physicality, its integration of dance and multimedia with interview-derived text, its subversion of the genre of documentary theatre and its comment on the inadequacy of linear, causal structure and even the medium of text-based narrative to communicate the truth of history, war, or the human condition. The most that Sava says about this is that:

"Black Watch doesn’t follow a traditional plot structure, but rather gives short, concentrated looks at the soldiers’ Iraq experiences that are broken up by abstract movement sequences that build on the thematic themes of the piece."

But Black Watch isn't a straight play juxtaposed by movement scenes highlighting its "thematic themes" (really?), it is something more akin to dance-theatre, a postmodern deconstruction of documentary, an exploration of the aspects of affect present in military space. Savas gets in his own way by adhering to the genre-conventions of typical theatrical reviews with their insistence on plot and character as the dominant items of interest. He plays to the newpaper reader/playgoer's somewhat impoverished expectations of what theatre is/should be, i.e. emotionally engaging stories and "relateable" characters. As such, he fails to push himself past identifying with the plot and historicizing the moment depicted in the play to actually discuss what makes the production exemplify "the transcendent, transformative power of theater." In setting out to make his audience understand where Black Watch is special, he gives only the details which make it "culinary" as Brecht might say, and none of those which make it a experience that goes past theatre's "shoulds" and challenge its "coulds."

Where Sava goes wrong in his account is in failing to identify the positive effects of the manipulation of genre at work in Black Watch and thus he becomes trapped by the trappings of the theatrical review. In this he not only gives a impoverished description of the work of the production, but can never even approach a critical evaluation of the work's project, the successes and failures of its manipulations of genre/story-telling and the possibilities of performance.

Courseblog #20 [Sara] Electioneering and the Electorate

Having grown up in a small rural precinct in Indiana, I have learned over the years that I must develop a strategy for approaching my polling place in order to preserve the integrity of my physical person. This may sound like a bit of an overstatement but, in elections past, I have been quite literally swarmed upon opening my car door by candidates and their children and grandchildren all forcing handshakes and buttons and donuts and t-shirts. There was actually a moment in 2008 where I had stern words with a female candidate running for county treasurer who was particularly aggressive, going to such lengths as to insist that if she touched me one more time that I would not only refuse to vote for her, but that I would take the afternoon off and campaign for her opponent.

Don't get me wrong, this polling place campaigning is not strictly something that I oppose--in small local races there might not be another opportunity for the voting public to even meet candidates running for the smaller offices, and I enjoy the sort of festive atmosphere that the local sherriff's shenanigans can add to the experience, I just fear the ambush, the need to be polite, feeling obligated to say kind words or make promises in the heat of a face to face interaction...  and this is exactly why these tactics work. How can you argue with a 6 year old who asks if you're going to vote for her grandma? Forget about it.

For this reason alone, I put off voting this year until mid afternoon, hoping that I might avoid the worst of the candidate  traffic by skirting the before and after work hours. Much to my surprise, I arrived at my destination just after 2:00 pm to find the following scene:

Republicans cook out within the estricted areas for "electioneering" at Brown County Indiana's Hamblen Township Precinct Three Polling Place.

These signs came as a great shock to me, they effectively fenced off the Republicans to the far side of the parking lot where they were grilling burgers and cooking chili but, nevertheless, at a "safe" distance.

Note: I make mention of the Republicans not because it is them that I am particularly wary of, (though one of Richard Mourdock's female relatives was trying to catch my eye while I took this photo and I had to pretend to be looking for something in my purse for several long minutes until she gave up). No, I mention the Republicans only because they were the only ones toughing it out behind this invisible ethics fence, the Democrats having abandoned their post, their shoes, and a half-full Diet Mountain Dew:

Brown County Democrats in Hamblen Towship, District 3 give up their campaign post in light of the new restrictions on "electioneering" OR maybe they were across the way taking advantage of the free GOP chili? Hard to say.

 I found these new rule of particular interest because they seemed, in many ways, to be a bucking of tradition, a fundamental change to the "performance of Election Day" in small rural districts across America. While I was at somewhat greater ease with the knowledge that I would not be physically approached in the parking lot of my polling place, I couldn't help but remark on the irony of this charade of impartiality or fairness or restraint that seemed to be enacted by the signs. According to the signs, electioneering consists of "expressing support or opposition to any candidate, party, or referendum on the ballot" I respect and admire the election board for going to great lengths to try and protect voters from personal persuasion, but I couldn't help but note the irony of the invisible electioneering that prevailed throughout the location. When I was a little girl, I used to accompany my mother to vote at the local community clubhouse, a sort of rec center where our small lake community held Volunteer Firemen's dinners and Bingo on Friday nights, but when I was able to vote in my first election in 2001, it was after the local Non-denominational Christian Church had petitioned to have our polling place moved to their sanctuary, citing the clubhouse with its gravel parking lot for having insufficient accessibility. Now we in Hamblen 3 vote at the Church of the Lakes, and if you have trouble making the trip out, they'll even come pick you up:

Church of the Lakes - 8844 Nineveh Road, Nineveh, Indiana 46164

Don't get me wrong, the church people are great and the facilities are wonderful and accessible and the whole congregation really goes out of its way to welcome the community, but I'm still amused by the blindness to electioneering by another name:

An interesting juxtaposition of signage inside the front door of the Hamblen 3 polling place, Nineveh's Church of the Lakes.

Volunteers check ID and registrations inside Church of the Lakes' "Harvestland Meeting Place," adjacent to the sanctuary.

We are certainly not the only district to vote in a community church, and most don't give it a second thought, regardless of faith. In fact, I had never much remarked on the potential performance of the space in relations to the election until I was encountered with the electioneering sign this year.

Casting my ballot across from the "Jesus and his Felt Friends" bulletin board in Harvestland. Look, ma, I got to Beta-test our precincts only electronic voting machine this year. Voting with paper and pen is for peasants.

I might have written it off altogether as a particular quirk of white Middle America until I returned to Bloomington around 3:00 pm to discover a new public protest at the St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Parish on East Third Street. As I approached the field of 3,315 crosses planted across the church lawn, I thought that the parish might be erecting a Veteran's Day memorial, but I soon discovered it was an anti-abortion display that, according to an article in the Bloomington Herald Times, was erected Saturday, November 3. According to Father Tom Kovatch, the parish priest who was quoted in the article, the church is “not trying to promote a political agenda or tell people who they can or can’t vote for.” Rather, their role, he said, is to “let people see visually how many lives are lost to abortion each day,  and to encourage them to use their conscience and examine what our church teaches so they can vote with an informed conscience” (Herald Times 6 Nov 2012).

According to Bloomington's Herald Times: "An anti-abortion sign and more than 3,000 white crosses outside the St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church are meant to encourage people to consider the number of lives lost to abortion, and urge them to consider church teachings and their conscience when voting for political candidates."

St. Charles's Church is well within their rights as, as far as my research can reveal, they did not serve as a Monroe County polling place on election day, but in other districts across America, similar displays were erected on the grounds of churches that did serve as voting site. One very similar display marked the grounds of a Colorado polling place and, although many reported finding the display offensive and intimidating, because the crosses were more than 100 feet from the door of the building, they were within the bounds of the law as written.

As a theatre and performance scholar I find this attention to the sort of semiotics of voting spaces particularly relevant to the discussion of fair and equitable voting practice. Even in the absence of the personal, aggressive campaigning of candidates at voting sites it is necessary to recognize that there is still a great deal of very rich performance happening in the interaction of citizens with the very structures in which voting takes place. Outside of the religious rhetoric that overwhelmed the campaign at points still rests very powerful and potentially influential--read intimidating--narratives of bias that masquerade as access, compassson, and conscience. One must draw certain inevitable parallels between the intimidation tactics used against women attempting to enter abortion clinics to these alternately aggressive physical and visual appeals to voters outside polling places. At every instance, the goal is to use a sort of mob mise-en-scene steeped in some semblance of universal emotional appeals whether from a candidate's grandaughter or a picture of an aborted fetus.

As an exhibit, I would be interested in tracing the historical use of religious rhetoric by those not directly affiliated with political campaigns and tracking the evolving opinion of these tactics a both ethical and lawful. It is important, I think, not to focus strictly on the blatant intimidation tactics of some horrendous sites of voter suppression, but rather finding a way to render visible the invisible electioneering that is taking place in the spaces of the performance of voting.

But how do you make people see the apparatus? I was talking it over with friends who suggested that these messages might be painted on bodies, literally, to show their effect on the human emotional response. Others who suggested rebuilding the polling places up-side down. We might solicit photographs from private citizens who vote and build a wall collage of the images. My boyfriend suggested offering kits to regional offices and allowing them to build their own ideal place and seeing what they choose. So much of this, though, feels like baiting to me and I fear it would only speak to those who are already listening. Maybe it's the latent historian in me, but I'm more interested in the archive. I'm most curious about the laws, local and national, that dictate what voting places look like and the inevitable lawsuits that accompany them. I'm disappointed in myself, because it sounds dreadfully boring, but I think it is only through reading about the fights already fought that people might look around them and notice the details, for that is really the matter at the heart of it, not that we need to regulate those details but appreciate what is keeping voters away and what is unfairly pushing them while they're there.

[[Edited to add: So, apparently, my photo-taking at Chruch of the Lakes was a cause for concern and the Republican candidates that I was trying to surreptitiously avoid ended up calling my mother to say that they were very alarmed that I was taking so many pictures and wondered if anyone had done anything to offend me, that they were restricted that year because of complaints of harrassment in the past and that they wanted to be sure that no one harrassed me that day. Short answer, no, no one harrassed me while I was at the polling place that day. But someone did call my mom later and she's been harrassing me about it ever since.]]

Course blog #19, 2:0 [Sara] Escaping Narrativity

Meaningful

“If in some other dimension what people thought about, remembered, or compared the performance to (if they're even paying attention to the performance) were somehow visible or the way in which it was present took up some kind of visible space, what all would we see?” (Ming)

“Perhaps one of the few viewers excluded from this reconfiguration of “I could do that myself” is the entirely immobile one…” (Courtney)

“There was again the sense of playfulness exhibited in what might have been a game of tag. I was struck by the image of one of the male dancers running across the stage, taking long strides with his chest thrust out, smiling broadly; watching him, I felt the joy of unencumbered movement, of running freely through the warm grass in an open park.” (Derek)

“Every time I see feats of physical prowess and athletic ability, I feel a kinesthetic response that I place somewhere in the area of longing. … When performers land on their feet or bodies in a forceful way, my bones feel like I've stuck a fork in a toaster. When they stretch their limbs to the limit, I feel the ache in my own muscles. When they leap, my heart leaps with them.” (Jess)

“I’ve tried to get it, but I just can’t. … How can I review something that I feel I don’t understand? Or do I understand it, just not respond to it? What don’t I understand? These are the questions that I was having throughout the concert: Is there a narrative? Why are the girls in dresses and the boys in pants? Why is that one girl in pants? Why are the pairings only boy/gir?” (Kelly)

“Rite of Summer” was the only piece that really prompted a deep and disturbing physical response. My ultimate conclusion is that I preferred this piece because of the (in)tense relationship between the narrative and the dance itself.” (Whitney)
 

True

“The IU Dance Theatre 85^th anniversary celebration gala was held November 4 and featured four pieces: Esplanade, Rite of Summer, Straight Duet, and Nascimento Novo.” (Derek)

“I was particularly affected by the juxtaposition of joy and misery throughout the evening’s performances. For example, the opening was joyous: happy bodies frolicking across and around the stage in what appeared to be an updated quadrille. The second movement was a sudden change – an exploration of destructive isolation. The dancers reached, but their inability to actually touch each other was painful to watch. The dancers emphasized their shoulder blades and collapsed their cores, dragging themselves to center stage where they revolved in a starving, circling herd. The final two movements, featuring ecstatic leaps and flirtation, were each shaded by this indelible image of suffering.” (Jennifer)

“Never having seen live modern dance before, I was unsure of what to expect from Sunday’s Gala. Actually, sitting in the cavernous, ribbed auditorium, I rather expected plankton to emerge when the curtain lifted (this perhaps reflects on my self-awareness as a consuming observer). The pink, orange, and tan costumes and initial sprightliness of Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade” didn’t undermine this expectation.” (Jennifer)

“The Rousseau figure’s eventual triumph – her rejection of the brides – was evident in the contrast between her previously jerky, seizing movement and her graceful, dismissive exit stage left, leaving the brides to twitch on the floor.” (Jennifer)

“Women convulsing on the floor, epileptic mayhem and then the constant tacit play of the symbolic red petals.” (Dorothy)

“The patterns of movement imitation between the shadow brides and the young virgin felt eerie and dystopic. The dancers displayed extraordinary control over their bodies through muscle isolations and staccato movements that countered a narrative of complete absence of control. There were several other, collective moments of grotesque movement that worked against the general gracefulness of these women’s bodies. At one point, the dancers crawled along the ground on their elbows en masse – dragging both their temporarily paralyzed bodies and their white dresses over the black floor, a moment that actually prompted a grimace.” (Whitney)

“Set to Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major, the dance sets up its contrasts from the very beginning. Against this most classical of classical music, the dancers walk in patterned movements around the stage, pairing and unpairing in turn. These informal movements urge the question “Is walking dance?” and hint at what Reason and Reynolds call the “clichéd response to modern art, ‘I could do that myself’” (“Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures,” 59). Decentering the significance of the dancers’ skills and physical virtuosity, Taylor choreographs a dance that is about movement itself and the beauty of “everyday” movements.” (Courtney)
 

Both
“In the non-narrative dances, I noticed myself responding more physically to the performance. Through most of Esplanade and Nascimento, my enjoyment came from the physicality of the dancers as they moved and the joy that they seemed to have in their own movement. They were often smiling as they ran or jumped or spun onstage, and I felt my face become more lifted as well, raising my eyebrows and lips slightly. I kept finding that my leg muscles, especially my calves, were slightly flexed as I watched, and when the music had a strong beat, I tapped my toes in my shoes. At their best moments, these dances conveyed a kind of exuberance in movement that I somehow experienced with them.” (Andrea)

“The first dance titularly situates its dancers within a phantasmatic space (the esplanade). The second dance is intertextually based off of two different ballets (The Rite of Spring and Giselle), both of which have well-known narrative trajectories. The third dance also situtates the staged movements within a specific space (the bedroom), using a maitress as indicative of such locality. While none of the latter definitively demarcates these performaces as finite, comprehensible narratives, each dance possessed markers of narrativity, of diegetic progression, of conflict(s), etc. that pulled me into this game of narrative interpretation. …As such, while watching dance as a non-expert, I would need either to reach this moment of narrative surrender much more quickly by virtue of the performance’s transience or to abandon the quest for narrative interpretation at the onset. And yet, I’m not sure if giving up the quest for narrative is really worth it.” (Cody)

“The individual is erased, as each member works to embody the same steps and to mirror the rest of the group. This was most evident in “Esplanade” as pairs, trios, and the entire group were challenged to crawl, skip, run or leap in unison. Likewise, moments of differentiated movements called body ownership into question, as they were typified by the sharing of weight and absolute trust in another’s physical strength. ‘It is my head-first leap, but your ‘catch’ that keeps me whole. … The answer may lie in the dancers’ ability to simultaneously perform their own physical movements yet have an external focus that allows for a faultless connection to another or group. Such simultaneous attention to external stimuli and internal response may be attributed to use of what critics have termed the ‘bodymind,’’” (Justin)

“The presence of the functionaries divided the audience into insiders and outsiders, those who attended the gala for celebratory purposes and those who simply came to view a performance. After the exercise of recognizing the dance alums and current students of dance in the audience, I clearly felt my position in the audience as one of interloper. Even though the audience was of such a significant size that I doubt all of the people gathered there were associated with the dance program, so many of the viewers immediately surrounding my seat stood for recognition when prompted that I felt lost in the sea of expert dance spectators. After that point, their incredibly enthusiastic hoots and applause made me wonder if I had missed something. Was their appreciation, like mine, given for the beauty of choreography and the astounding skill of the performers, or were these dances somehow transcendent in a way I was unequipped to realize?” (Jenna)

Course blog #19 [Sara] Esplanade sets the stage for modern dance

Paul Taylor claims that his inspiration for writing Esplanade came from watching a young girl run to catch a bus on a beautiful day. According to the dramaturgical notes archived by the Paul Taylor Dance Company, much like his contemporaries in the visual art world such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were using found objects to create art, Taylor was using “found movements” and quotidian gesture to re-create American dance.

An esplanade is a large outdoor place for walking and indeed Taylor’s choreography is pedestrian in the sense that it refuses the formal, prescribed gestures of classical dance while still capturing the exuberant poetry-in-motion of the everyday joys of being out and about in the air. I was particularly struck by the irreverence of the movement in contrast to the motivic structure of Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto in D minor for Two Violins. At first, I was unable to see the expansion or repetition of a dance idea that might coalesce with the music, but in continuing to watch, I began to pick out the lovely return time and again of the solo women—I’m thinking the first, dynamic entrance by the lone female figure, and the delightful image of the small girl bouncing—leaping—bounding? over the line of prostrate dancers. 

From Research IUBloomington: "IU Dance Theatre celebrates 85th Anniversary" 22 Oct 2012.

This playful image finally forced me out of a losing game in trying to match the relationships between the dancers to the contrapuntal relationship between the two violins and instead see the choreography coalescing so beautifully with the music, rhythmically or “aesthetically” independent and yet intertwining, each made richer and more beautiful in their juxtaposition.

A little research at home turned up a lovely intertextuality between this piece and George Balanchine’s ConcertoBarocco, a ballet made on students at the School of American Ballet in 1941 that also used Bach’s Double Concerto. Here, though, Balanchine is using pairs of dancers to evoke the violins and there is much more consonance between the dance form and the music. I don’t feel as enlivened watching this piece as I did Taylor’s, but my experience of it enriched the IU Dance performance project for me—I’m struck that at an anniversary performance in which only four selections were made that Taylor’s playful exploration of the everyday perhaps finds more resonance with contemporary audiences. I do not suggest that there is a one to one comparison between the pieces nor than Balanchine’s work even entered the conversation in a showcase highlighting modern dance forms; however, in light of our recent conversations about certain universal reactions to the particular shapes of human bodies, I’m struck anew by Taylor’s intervention in the world of dance c. 1975. By eschewing narrative and formal abstraction for embodied exuberance and the aesthetic of the everyday, it was Taylor’s work that created a space for the subsequent pieces we witnessed. There is no beauty much less propriety in the tumble on the mattress without first witnessing the beauty in the walk for the bus. As a retrospective, I was happy to begin with Taylor and ponder the journey from formalism to expression, youth to age, public to private. It let in some necessary air, and the light of a beautiful day.

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.

Richard III Casebook [Sara]: I saw good strawberries in your garden there I do beseech you send for some of them...

I began my inquiry into Richard III with Hasting's Strawberries in Act III, Scene IV.

GLOUCESTER

My noble lords and cousins all, good morrow.

I have been long a sleeper; but, I hope,

My absence doth neglect no great designs,

Which by my presence might have been concluded.

BUCKINGHAM

Had not you come upon your cue, my lord

William Lord Hastings had pronounced your part,--

I mean, your voice,--for crowning of the king.

GLOUCESTER

Than my Lord Hastings no man might be bolder;

His lordship knows me well, and loves me well.

HASTINGS

I thank your grace.

GLOUCESTER

My lord of Ely!

BISHOP OF ELY

My lord?

GLOUCESTER

When I was last in Holborn,

I saw good strawberries in your garden there

I do beseech you send for some of them.

BISHOP OF ELY

Marry, and will, my lord, with all my heart.

 Exit

GLOUCESTER

Cousin of Buckingham, a word with you.

Drawing him aside

Catesby hath sounded Hastings in our business,

And finds the testy gentleman so hot,

As he will lose his head ere give consent

His master's son, as worshipful as he terms it,

Shall lose the royalty of England's throne.

BUCKINGHAM

Withdraw you hence, my lord, I'll follow you.

Exit GLOUCESTER, BUCKINGHAM following

DERBY

We have not yet set down this day of triumph.

To-morrow, in mine opinion, is too sudden;

For I myself am not so well provided

As else I would be, were the day prolong'd.

Re-enter BISHOP OF ELY

BISHOP OF ELY

Where is my lord protector? I have sent for these

strawberries.

HASTINGS

His grace looks cheerfully and smooth to-day;

There's some conceit or other likes him well,

When he doth bid good morrow with such a spirit.

I think there's never a man in Christendom

That can less hide his love or hate than he;

For by his face straight shall you know his heart.

DERBY

What of his heart perceive you in his face

By any likelihood he show'd to-day?

HASTINGS

Marry, that with no man here he is offended;

For, were he, he had shown it in his looks.

DERBY

I pray God he be not, I say.

Re-enter GLOUCESTER and BUCKINGHAM

GLOUCESTER

I pray you all, tell me what they deserve

That do conspire my death with devilish plots

Of damned witchcraft, and that have prevail'd

Upon my body with their hellish charms?

HASTINGS

The tender love I bear your grace, my lord,

Makes me most forward in this noble presence

To doom the offenders, whatsoever they be

I say, my lord, they have deserved death.

GLOUCESTER

Then be your eyes the witness of this ill:

See how I am bewitch'd; behold mine arm

Is, like a blasted sapling, wither'd up:

And this is Edward's wife, that monstrous witch,

Consorted with that harlot strumpet Shore,

That by their witchcraft thus have marked me. (3.4)

I have puzzled over this seeming non-sequitor since first re-reading Richard this year, and my interest was again piqued when I noted that the moment was cut from IU Theatre's production. It seems such a funny thing to request--a bowl of strawberries--a medieval symbol of peace and prosperity--after just announcing in a previous scene that Hastings is essentially a dead man walking if he should refuse to disenfranchise the young princes:

BUCKINGHAM

Now, my lord, what shall we do, if we perceive

Lord Hastings will not yield to our complots?

GLOUCESTER

Chop off his head, man; somewhat we will do:

And, look, when I am king, claim thou of me

The earldom of Hereford, and the moveables

Whereof the king my brother stood possess’d. (3.1)  

And then moments later, his fate is sealed when Buckingham's fears are confirmed:

CATESBY

It is a reeling world, indeed, my lord;

And I believe twill never stand upright

Til Richard wear the garland of the realm.

HASTINGS

How! wear the garland! dost thou mean the crown?

CATESBY

Ay, my good lord.

HASTINGS

I'll have this crown of mine cut from my shoulders

Ere I will see the crown so foul misplaced.

But canst thou guess that he doth aim at it? (3.2)

Scraps from a Shakespeare character card from Richard III., c. 1890; "Scraps became extremely popular in Victorian England to be cut out by adults or children and stuck into albums, on to screens, or used for decorating greetings cards. This scrap is one of a series depicting Shakespearean characters played by popular actors. Edmund Kean first starred in Richard III at London's Drury Lane Theatre, 12 February 1814."

Looking for clues to riddle out this moment, I stumbled upon a letter to the editor written by Dr. J. Swift Joly in the in the British Medical Journal from 2 Jun1956 that puzzled over the same moment:

Course Blog #13: The Lilly Archive [Andrea, Iris, Jenna, Sara]

e chose for our object a lavishly illuminated Book of Hours from the fifteenth century. Our first interesting experience with this object was the librarian’s reaction when she brought us lists of theatre-related books and we asked her for collections of medieval manuscripts. Sara had to defensively come to our aid and insist to the librarian that we did, in fact, want to look at the Book of Hours for a performance class. Integral in forming our impressions of the object was the foam on the table that supported the manuscript as we read it. The fact that elaborate preparations were necessary in order to view this book—registering at the library, ordering the manuscripts, setting up the foam, gently turning the pages—encouraged us to regard the book as sacred. 

Ricketts 118. A book of hours (detail, right) from the collection of Coella Lindsay Ricketts (1859-1941) archived in the Lilly Library Manuscript Collections. The more than 12,000-piece collection contains medieval and historical documents assembled by Ricketts, ranging from the 13th C. through 1848. — Photo by Sara Taylor.

We all felt timid about turning the pages, and not all of us even wanted to do so, although everyone wanted to at least touch a corner. Additionally, we delegated the job of turning pages to Andrea, as she was perceived as a medieval “expert” and therefore was granted  legitimacy to handle the object in a fashion that we “novices” felt was improper. The hand-printed text awed us a little at the thought that producing this book was probably someone’s life’s work, and we especially admired the pictures. 

Iris daintily handles the book of hours after much encouragement. — Photo by Sara Taylor.

One picture in particular caught our attention. It was the last large illustration in the book, and it used darker colors than the rest of the images. It was the image of a funeral, which was the only large picture in the book which was not specifically identified with a biblical scene, which is interesting in a book that is primarily for liturgical use. This is also the only day in the calendar that does not repeat, unlike the Saint’s Days that take up the rest of the book.

Edited to add: Upon doing some further research into books of hours last night, I discovered that this image most likely accompanies the Office of the Dead, a prayer that might have been said for a particular deceased person as a votive, but also commemorated All Souls Day which, despite not being a Saint's Day (but rather All Saints Day) it is still an annual Feast Day, and would have been celebrated by most of the faithful. In many European countries, this would have been a day to visit the dead, clean and decorate graves, and relieve the tension generated by the pagan festival Samhainn/Halloween.

Illumination illustrating prayers for the Feast of All Souls, also known as "All Saints Day" or "All Hallows Day." — Photo by Sara Taylor.

The background was striking in color and design, giving it an almost three-dimensional perspective. The movement implied in this perspective contrasted with the stillness of the death shown in the scene. The text on that page had faded much more than the text on any other pages in the book, which we interpreted as evidence of its greater use. The faces of the people in this picture were unsettling because they are highly detailed and the faces are vividly expressing pain and almost torment.

We considered the performance of this object from two perspectives, focusing on the methodological approaches of Bernstein, Harris, and Cavell. First, the book and the circumstances in which we encountered it invited us to treat it with reverence. Our perception of the book as a sacred object was based on Harris’ notions of untimely matter—the book was sacred because it was a survival of a long-lost time in our own time. Although it is not a palimpsest in the way Harris describes, but its interaction with time is not past or present, but both/and.

The foam and the rules of the reading room acted in a scriptive way, similar to the effect Cavell describes in the theatre; the setting encouraged us to interact carefully and reverently with the book. Not only did we feel that we were too inexperienced to handle the book properly, but we had some difficulty finding the kind of manuscript we were looking for. [Bernstein’s discussion of performance competency] We looked through two different catalogues and eventually chose our Book of Hours from a book the librarian provided that commemorated the Lilly Library's 50th Anniversary.  Without the historical information in this text, Gilding the Lilly, A Hundred Medieval and Illuminated Manuscripts in the Lilly Library, we would have had little to no performance competence with the manuscript.

— Photo by Sara Taylor.

The second perspective we considered was that of the medieval reader of the Book of Hours. Hodgdon and Wexler were important to our methodology in interpreting this reader’s performance with the book. The image is teaching the reader the proper way to mourn, so the performance of mourning is scripted in a literal way by the prayer (which may be in the book) but the illustration showed the reader how to dress, stand, and feel. We connected this to Wexler’s discussion of sentimentality in photographs, which also teach us to normalize and script our reactions to everyday life. Hodgdon is also helpful in allowing us read photographs, which we extended to our reading of this image. These images are visually coded in a way that is no longer easy for us to read—for instance, the image of the Holy Spirit as a bird, or Mary kneeling to be crowned are not as accessible to us without study. The funeral image may signify a much more specific scene that we can casually read. We assumed that the book mainly performed an instructive function for the medieval reader.