droqen's forum-shaped notebook

Quote from: p270[..] the sublime cannot [..] account for the affective response elicited by enormous, agglutinative works like Atlas or Americans, since here the initial experience of being aesthetically overwhelmed involves not terror or pain (eventually superseded by tranquility), but something much closer to an ordinary fatigue—and one that cannot be neutralized, like the sublime's terror, by a competing affect. [..] 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.

Stuplimity...

Quote from: p271[..] reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality

Quote from: p273[..] drags us downward into the realm of words rather than transporting us upward toward an unrepresentable divine.

currently I perceive stuplimity not on the same plane as the sublime but as a lesser category of thing -- a reaction which a person might have and then seek to be safe from. the sublime requires a "safe place" while the stuplime does not, because the stuplime is the "danger" alone.

Quote from: p268The precondition for experiencing the sublime, and the dynamical sublime in particular, is that the observer feel safely removed from the object that inspires this emotion. [..] while both Kantian and popularized versions of the sublime might be conscripted to account for the astonishment, awe, or "respect" that a massive, even stupefying text like Americans solicits from its reader, no theory of sublimity seems adequately equipped to account for its concomitantly solicited effect of boredom. [..] this boredomi s absolutely central to Stein's quasi-scientific experiment with sentences and paragraphs in Americans [..] Yet the passivity, duration, and ignoble status of boredom would seem to contradict nearly all aspects of the sublime[..]

One major header from Video Games and the Sublime (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=339) reads "Gameplay: stuplimity or flow?" and to apply my previous thought to this, as well as what Frank Lantz said (link to be found) about "hooks," the sublime is found in a transcendent escape -- requiring a place safe -- from stuplimity, from flow, and from gameplay. Ngai's stuplimity is "the danger" that "we must regard ourselves as safe [against] in order to feel this [sublime] inspiring satisfaction."

If the sublime comes from "revealing the self's final superiority to nature" (p266) and evokes an "inspiriting satisfaction" (p266) then I suppose I feel as though my experience of the sublime comes from a recognition of my superiority to gameplay, which has given me a sense of inspiriting satisfaction...

---
from the top

Reading this book (as well as other dense and difficult texts recently) brings about a pleasure of puzzling out meaning. I get a similar feeling from some poetry.

Here are some phrases I really love not simply because of their arcaneness but also because I can tell: they are trying to convey something. As I describe in my reading of Elyot Grant's "30 Puzzle Design Lessons[..]" (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=319.0), it comes not from the Eureka or the Fiero but both together... I'll have to rewrite this when I have a more precise way to actually convey what that is again.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying reading these sentences pockmarked with long parenthesized interruptions which I must go back and reread in order to remember where we were, and this one in particular is puzzling to me at this moment:

Quote from: p6[..] this book's turn to ugly feelings to reanimate aesthetics is simply the flip side of its privileging of the aesthetic domain as the ideal site to examine the politically ambiguous work of negative emotions.

I've had many such moments with this book (six pages in!) and I think I've been having this feeling significantly more because of this 'Close reading' forum of the self-- it's a good excuse to note down things that make sense to me, or things that don't make sense to me but I assume they do, and write down what they mean in different language-- in my own language. I find that it's useful to practice this 'translation' in an explicit way even if the real translation that I care about most is only the first half: the translation from external to internal.

The rest is just practice. It's means and ends reversed. It's a game. Written close analysis is a game which enables deep thought...

I'm very excited to read and explore these ugly feelings! You don't even know!

Quote from: p23,24[..] what Genette calls "aesthetic predicates," affective-aesthetic values like "precious," "stilted," "monotonous," or "imperious," created from, or based upon, this feeling of pleasure or displeasure that accompanies our initial perception of the aesthetic object (The Aesthetic Relation,90). Genette in fact describes these objectifying predicates, which bear a close resemblance to what I. A. Richards called "aesthetic or 'projectile' adjectives," as descriptive terms that "sneak in" evaluations of the object based on feelings about the object. There is thus a sense in which the "aesthetic relation," which for Genette is more or less synonymous with "objectification," can be understood as an oblique effort to justify the presence of feeling in every aesthetic encounter.

I am still in the first chapter - not yet "tone" (the second chapter which I am excited to get to) but still "introduction" but here Ngai is, already, discussing in precise detail what tone is.

Quote from: p28a literary or cultural artifact's feeling tone: its global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world. [...] the formal aspect of a literary work that makes it possible for critics to describe a text as, say, "euphoric" or "melancholic," [...] the category that makes these affective values meaningful with regard to how one understands the text as a totality within an equally holistic matrix of social relations.

Have I written about this on newforum? This "holistic matrix of social relations" reminds me of this feeling I've had that it is defined by the full spectrum of interpretations that have been, can be, or will be made of it. No interpretation is correct or incorrect, but instead form a singular... well, since Ngai presents a term here I shall accept it, "holistic matrix."

Pages 30 and 31 are blowing my mind a bit... I want to quote every single word of it. I will refrain. I couldn't even summarize.

Quote from: p36While Kant's sublime involves a confrontation with the natural and infinite, the unusual synthesis of excitation and fatigue i call "stuplimity" is a response to encounters with vast but bounded artificial systems, resulting in repetitive and often mechanical acts of enumeration, permutation and combination, and taxonomic classification.

Almost at the end of the first chapter, "introduction."

End of chapter 1. I'm so excited for this book still, and I'm hoping I don't hit a mid-book slump as i so often do - not where I can't muster the energy to continue but where so often books seem to enter muddy ground with neither beginning nor end in sight, floundering.

Also who is Bartleby? This name has come up a dozen times in this 37-page chapter.

Oh it's a famous short story only 30 pages long! I'll have to read that before resuming my ugly feelings journey.

UPDATE: I've now read Bartleby, the Scrivener. What a weird little story. I'm glad to have the reference point.

Well, this is just about the strongest opening for a chapter ever. This book continues to astound me. Here we go!

Quote from: p38

1. tone

How does one go about creating a "fake" feeling? And to what uses might an artfully created feeling be put?

I had to stop reading and put the book down upon reading these questions. I've asked a form of the second question myself many times, and I found MDA to be most stunning framework when I first read it because of how it foregrounded itself as an attempt to answer the first. I am very excited to think that this chapter, alone, the first chapter (or second? do i count the introduction?) of this amazing book, might be an at all fruitful exploration of these questions. If it is (and I have a lot of hope because of how amazing I've found the introductory chapter), then what on earth could the rest of the book have in store for me?

Wow, I'm struggling with this chapter. I've read the first ten pages but my mind is not finding anything to quite grab ahold of - what IS tone? I have to back it up and reread it more carefully. What is Ngai's tone? It's possible it's not something I agree with, but I also don't think I fully grasp the description of it in the first place -- maybe a whole description has not even been given yet. Parsing this chapter reminds me of my time reading through the Nemesis [system] patent (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160279522A1/en) (which I did for Tic-Tac-Crow (https://droqen.itch.io/tic-tac-crow)): actual statements are riddled with fragmenting distractions that make it hard to grasp the singular idea which is being put forth.

Quote from: p39[In the case of a body such as the stock market which is sensitive to affective factors,] a panic "contrived by artful alarmists" can generate repercussions identical to those of a genuine panic [..] Such "spurious" emotions and their real effects[.]

Quote from: Webster's 1913Spurious
Not proceeding from the true source, or from the source pretended; not genuine; false[.]

Quote from: p40[Melville's book] The Confidence-Man might be described as an exploration of the new emotional economy produced by the general migration of "trust" from personal relationships to abstract systems, [..which] becomes predominantly preoccupied with how "confidence" and other feelings might be artfully created.
[..F]eeling slips in and out of subjective boundaries, at times becoming transformed into psychic property, but at other times eluding containment.

I think I have a better understanding of why Ngai goes so hard on this book -- but, seriously, I don't think I'm going to read it, even if it is a central facet of her definition of tone. (It's a whole book!) Tone is somewhat about feeling, but understanding tone vs feeling requires some understanding of these "subjective boundaries". A feeling that I have may be psychic property (i.e. the property of one psyche (e.g. mine)), while tone may "elud[e] containment" (i.e. not belong to one psyche but rather some inhuman or superhuman body). The question I hope Ngai answers, and I suspect she will try, is to whom or what does tone belong? If it is not psychic property, then it is what form of property? No-one's? The collective's?

I ought to say that my worry is Ngai will go on to make some claim that tone is an objective property without properly exploring what objectiveness is; but I will carry on supposing that my phenomenal understanding of objectiveness as collective subjectiveness will bear fruit in the end, as it aligns so well with Ngai's phrase repeated in the introduction and on a later page in this chapter, "holistic matrix."

Quote[The] "attitudes" [I. A. Richards, in Practical Criticism,] classifies under "Feeling" apply specifically to "the state of affairs" created by the poem, whereas those classified under "Tone" apply to the relationship between the speaker and the implied listener--as if the latter relation could be neatly separated from the former, which is often not the case.

My interpretation of this passage is that Ngai is presenting the idea that "the state of affairs (mental, emotional)" created by a work are (often) impossible to detangle from "the relationship between the speaker and the implied listener," and that this is relevant to her understanding of Tone. In a later sentence (same page) she criticizes "The tendency to divorce emotion from tone" by "formalists".

There is much more explicit countering and criticism of similar attempts to remove emotion from tone. The point I see Ngai making, interrupted by references which a more well-read tone scholar might be able to appreciate more than I can, is that emotion cannot be removed from tone.

I won't quote any particular examples but it's interesting to have Ngai handing me all these weapons against a common resistance that people seem to have against acknowledging the existence of emotion in tone.

Right, here's where Ngai starts to define tone, to lay it out, in a way that gets objective and starts to lose me... but she avoids using the word "objective" herself (yet?)

Quote from: p43[..] by "tone" I mean [..] the formal aspect of a work that has made it possible for critics of all affiliations [..] to describe a work or class of work as "paranoid", "euphoric", or "melancholic"; and, much more importantly, the formal aspect that enables these affective values to become significant with regard to how each critic understands the work as a totality within an equally holistic matrix of social relations.

This I am down with, but other quotes from other writers are as follows (unattributed, p44-45, i'm lazy)

QuoteThe mood of a landscape appears to us as objectively given [..] the mood belongs to our total impression of the landscape and can only be distinguished as one of its components by a process of abstraction

Hmm. Now that I read this closely I like that the phrasing is not "the mood is objectively given" but that "the mood appears to us as objectively given." It does leave a significant and important amount of room for me to see this quote as not making a statement that an object's mood is objective, but rather noting the common inclination to perceive it as objective. This is more in line with Ngai's earlier discussion of projectile adjectives (see: introduction), where people use adjectives to in some sense hide their own emotions within other objects, as if their emotions belong to those objects rather than themselves.

Really good precise exploration of aesthetic here, I was hooked by these quotes

Quote from: p45-46"[..] in which the factor of significance is not logically discriminated, but is felt as a quality rather than recognized as a function[20]" (FF, 32, Langer)
"Affect is .. a-signifying .. But this does not mean that affect is some ineffable experience or a purely subjective feeling." (OTP, 80, Grossman)

I still need to chew on footnote 20 (page 364) but I understand what is being said and excited to dig in more.
My understanding of the value of a-signifying is that a piece of a work of art is not necessarily signifying something, it is evoking a feeling or part of evoking a feeling, whereas most criticism and analysis seems [obsessed] with noticing SIGNS

This was, is, a useful practice for improving reading comprehension, but I should try reading without writing. See you at the end of tone...

Will not taking notes mean I forget everything?

There are so many thoughts leaping out at me from these pages.

I never quoted that footnote. Let's just do that.

Quote from: p364, footnote 20Langer rejects a privileging of "medium" as the criterion for distinguishing the various arts [..] their specificity resides less in the materials or techniques "used" than in the nature of the "primary illusion" or semblance (Schein) that each art creates: "virtual time" in the case of music, "virtual memory" in the case of narrative fiction, and so on.

My friend who created the soundtrack for HANDMADEDEATHLABYRINTH issue 0 (https://flamberge.bandcamp.com/album/hmdl-issue-0) once quoted to me that music "decorates time"... I wonder if this is related. If paintings and other works of art "decorate space" or create virtual images, and music "decorates time" or creates "virtual time"... that is, if these are in some sense the primary illusion (does music create the illusion or semblance of time, or does it decorate it? curious), it raises the question--which I shall here intentionally not even attempt to answer--what is the "primary illusion" of the mediums in which I work? What is the "semblance" which I...

Hmm. Beyond than the materials or techniques with which I am familiar, let me ask- to what end do I use them, to what end do I wish to use them, to what end can I use them? What illusions and semblances can my art create? What virtual things?

It occurred to me last night that I have not read or given much attention to serious art analysis or criticism, and ugly feelings is my window into it. Contrasting with Sicart's Against Procedurality (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=359.0), a work of literature may be analyzed as a relatively standalone object. Sicart discusses how procedurality is focused on the way meaning is (formally) "expressed, communicated to, and understood by a player" by the game, and proposes a more "player-centric approach" which prizes the player's play, and a sense (I argue in the AP thread) erasing the designer.

Ngai's tone appears to presume that a work of art is an object that might contain tone, some sort of pseudosingular tone. I need to keep reading to get to the end of it and develop my own feelings, but taking Sicart's player-centric lens, where lives tone in the player-centric played game? Where live those formal yet human elements?

THERE IS SO MUCH GOOD SHIT IN HERE.

Quote from: p76tone is a feeling which is perceived rather than felt and whose very nonfeltness is perceived

Quote from: p71Langer: "It takes precision of thought not to confuse an imagined feeling, or a precisely conceived emotion that is formulated in a perceptible symbol, with a feeling or emotion actually experienced in response to real events."

Taken together I am very interested in how this relates to the human ability to empathize, specifically, to model another human's psychic state and comprehend or relate to it. Is the 'confusion' described simply automatic empathy? An 'imagined' feeling which is confused with a feeling or emotion 'actually experienced in response to real events' might in fact both be 'genuine' feelings, and this 'precision of thought' is differentiating the source and cause of a feeling or emotion; they may experientially, chemically, be identical.

Quote from: p75Tomkin: "Scenes are magnified not by repetition, but by repetition with a difference . . . Sheer repetition of experience characteristically evokes adaptation, which attenuates, rather than magnifies, the connected scenes"

This one requires some unspooling and translation which I can't be bothered to do right now, so instead I'll paraphrase my own takeaway: Undifferentiated repetition invokes tolerance whereas repetition with difference eludes tolerance and is therefore more adept at magnifying the effect of what is being repeated. This is an incredibly salient observation.

Quote from: p76what Jean-Christophe Agnew calls the "placeless market," a market which is dependent on a virtual feeling that cannot be felt and whose power to lubricate nonaffective [i.e. material?] exchanges rests precisely on [its unfeltness] [..] that system requires each transaction to "place the [real feeling] farther out of reach."

Ngai cites Agnew's Worlds Apart and makes certain claims on his behalf that I don't entirely understand out of context. What is the justification for the claim of the existence of such a market so dependent on a "virtual feeling"? What is the utility of a feeling which "[resists] being psychically captured as one's own" in the context of the placeless market that "lubricates" nonaffective exchanges, and what constitutes a nonaffective exchange, precisely? Is it an exchange of nonaffective objects, or is it an exchange totally devoid of even collateral affect?

Ngai brings up Kant's "disinterestedness" and calls it the "defining feature of aesthetic experience", then says this later in the page...

Quote from: p86how dangerously close this disinterestedness always comes to sliding into noninterest in a society where art's narrowly delimited agency allows it to be safely ignored.

Art can be "safely ignored," presumes Ngai, but not as part of the definition of art, rather as its role given by society.

I wonder about games and play. I believe many definitions of these things come close to requiring that e.g. a game may be "safely ignored," else it is not a game, but something else - some other kind of activity.

Hmm.

I've been lost in The Nature of Order (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=364.0) for the past couple weeks, but have returned to Ugly Feelings now and then. The entire chapter on 'animatedness' is behind me now, hazy. I'm in 'envy'.

P. 129-130
As Kierkegaard notes, "Envy is concealed admiration. An admirer who senses that devotion cannot make him happy . . . become[s] envious of that which he admires. He will . . . declare that that which he really admires is a thing of no consequence, something foolish, illusory, perverse and high-flown. Admiration is happy self-abandon; envy, unhappy self-assertion."

P. 141-142
[Single White Female] position[s] Allie as the embodiment of a feminine ideal who admiration by Hedy or other women is to be expected, even mandated, while depicting any act of striving toward that ideal as troubling or problematic.

P. 143
. . . emulation can . . . be performed without unconscious or conscious desire to transform one's identity after the fashion of the other. Thus, emulation in more aggressive forms of parody, including political satire and cultural mimicry, often works as a sort of prophylactic against or antidote to identification[.]
. . . from philic "striving-toward" to a phobic "striving-against" . . . uncoupling emulation from identification. Why, then, the critical tendency to equate them? Or to treat the former as evidence of the latter?

//

I'm glad to get back into this habit. Maybe i just didn't run into anything personal to relate to in animatedness but, no, I think the note-taking habit really does help me relate more strongly to a text. For example the first quote made me wonder how my resistance to gamification does run parallel to a form of admiration or appreciation, but devotion to it was not making me happy. Was I, am I, envious of game design in this sense? It has felt to me as though games and game design are "illusory" and "perverse". I'll ponder on this.

The next two are interesting. I haven't seen the film Single White Female but Ngai describes a lot of the critical discourse around it while using it to dissect this conflict which appears to lie at the heart of envy, this striving-toward and striving-against that live in the same body, the same mind, perhaps the same act. Envy is a striving-toward and a striving-against that cannot coexist, thereby producing a deep dissatisfaction. The second quote shows an example of this. The third shows how these things are separable, despite a common instinct to conflate the two.

P. 152
. . . emulation turns the thing emulated . . . into a thing that can be copied, and in doing so transforms that thing into something slightly other than what it was,

P. 152-153
it is possible to interpret Hedy's mimeticism not as the enactment of a wish to be Allie, or an effort to transform herself into Allie and occupy her place, but rather an attempt to transform Allie. As the film's plot reveals, it is the emulated subject's life and not the emulator's that most radically changes as a result of the [emulator]'s actions. . . . Hedy maintains a comparatively consistent identity. . . . it is Allie's sense of selfhood and her relationships with others which are ultimately altered. . . . As Allie says to Hedy, "I'm like you now."

P. 161

. . . aggressive acts of not identifying can play as active a role as identification in facilitating the transition from single to group . . .

. . . we could . . . argue that envy enables a strategic way of not identifying, which . . . preserves a critical agency whose loss is threatened by full-blown idealization . . .

P. 161-162

. . . a subject might envy and emulate not just as a safeguard against fully identifying . . . but precisely in order to convert her admiration into polemicism, qua critical force or agency. Envy's critical potential thus resides in its ability to highlight a refusal to idealize X, even an ability to attack its potential for idealization by transforming X into something nonsingular and replicable, while at the same time enabling acknowledgement of its culturally imposed desirability.

//

Wow, this was a lot. I don't know about the linkage of this to envy, exactly, but I am totally into this complex reading of imitation, identification, not as mere feelings, but as . . . hmm. "Strategies," perhaps.

Using envy and emulation of a thing to "attack its potential for idealization . . . while at the same time enabling acknowledgement of its culturally imposed desirability." Wowowow.

Also, there's no way I can avoid comparing this to emulators which transformed old videogames into things "nonsingular and replicable." When I chose to rerelease Cruel World for sale, I did the same thing for the April Fool's "Games that Shouldn't Be Games Jam 2021" (https://itch.io/jam/games-that-shouldnt-be-games-jam), turning my back on its singular and nonreplicable nature in favour of arguments against '[artificial] digital scarcity' in the wake of all the NFT stuff happening at the time.

Ngai's argument (through inversion? contraposition?) implies that singularness and nonreplicability increases a thing's "potential for idealization," which is clearly borne through by the clamor for NFTs. These both are aspects of the larger family of inaccessibility; if a thing is singular, it is not as broadly accessible; replication is a form of granting broader and more public access to the thing. As far as my arguments to myself go, I'm as uninterested in the designed scarcity of NFTs as I am uninterested in walls, gates, and locked doors in games (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1570645606997327874) which serve the same purpose: to, through contrived* inaccessibility, become a false ideal.

*From The Nature of Order (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=364.msg1578#msg1578), see: "Roughness can never be consciously or deliberately created. Then it is merely contrived. To make a thing live, its roughness must be the product of egolessness, the product of no will." Inaccessibility, like roughness, must "be the product of egolessness, the product of no will." That is, the product of almost unconsciously following the way.

loss aversion in the age of plenty, i repeated
to myself again. how can an artwork be singular
while replicable artifacts become increasingly ubiquitous?
no contrived scarcity. we must note that
which is genuinely scarce now, and appreciate,
play with it.

P. 164
Freud says envy in fact precedes the establishment of identifications that enable group formation, suggesting that ultimately "social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie" . . . Freud's thesis here is that the identifications on which group formations depend are only secondarily established through a reversal of envy. . . . only after the subject, in the face of cultural disapproval, comes to recognize "the impossibility of maintaining his hostile attitude [envy?] without damaging himself" and is subsequently forced (the verb is Freud's) "into identifying himself with [others]." . . . "..esprit de corps.. does not belie its derivation from what was originally envy"

In the final pages of the chapter envy, in particular in the final pages under the (compelling, if I may say so) subheader Bad Examples, Ngai describes the power of bad examples and how Single White Female is powerful and useful in this way: exactly for being the bad example which it has been criticized for being.

P. 166
. . . bad examples of X might be good for group X, since they compel its members to constantly question, reevaluate, and even redefine what it is they supposedly exemplify.

P. 166-167
Once a group has fought for and attained a certain degree of political recognition, the demand that its members be "good examples" can easily turn repressive, [. . . taking] the following form: "You, . . . must now exemplfy X as a fixed concept which you merely refer back to or reflect." A corollary of this logic would be the following: "In your failure to adequately exemplify X, you threaten the validity and legitimacy of X, as well as any group formation or collective identity based on X."

I had never thought about the power of bad examples in this way, but I can say that I feel deeply about being a bad example. I have identified with various groups, and I have often felt driven to be . . . this, a bad example. Perhaps too much, actually!

Anyway. On to the next chapter, when I get to it.

Hold on, I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to get into the previous chapter first.


P. 91
. . . questions of agency will figure . . . as we focus on one of the most basic ways in which affect becomes socially recognizable in the age of mechanical reproducibility: as a kind of "innervation," "agitation," or (the term I prefer) "animatedness." . . . "animated" seems to imply the most basic or minimal of all affective conditions: that of being, in one way or another, "moved."

//

Ngai writes that after this we shall "see how the seemingly neutral state of "being moved" becomes twisted into the image of the overemotional racialized subject, abetting his or her construction as unusually receptive to external control." There is a lot of argumentation and evidence that goes completely over my head, as much as I savoured the attempt to find a deeper relation to it (that is, a personal understanding of the whole more complete than simply comprehending the ideas presented).

Perhaps one day I will come back to this chapter and it will stick with me.

Ngai opens by describing animatedness as similar to being moved, but quickly advances into the main thrust of her argument which is not about animatedness itself, or its sources or purpose, but the highlighting of animatedness as a racialized cliche... In the same way, the chapter 'envy' discusses in depth the highlighting of envy as a genderized cliche, something more capable of being ascribed to femininity than masculinity. In writing this, I realize that of course Ngai must be most interested in the tone of animatedness, the tone of envy.

One of the examples she gives in this chapter (animatedness) is a series of events from The Invisible Man in which the protagonist observes an activist he admires puppeting a doll, realizing only after falling for the illusion of its animation that the activist is the one animating it. Both men (protagonist and activist) are black, and the doll is a racist caricature of a black man. (Based on some quick internet research, the situation is ambiguous as to whether the activist is puppeting the doll to profit off of racial stereotypes or to parody and destroy them in some way. Or, some combination of both.)

While I understand how this plays with the concepts of 'animatedness' and 'the racialized subject being animated', and there are even better examples given (this one was simply the one I felt I could picture best in my mind and thereby describe), I'm not sure I drew any conclusions from this chapter the way I have drawn them from other chapters. I can understand but I cannot build on top of that understanding.

I am avoiding the term 'relate' because I do not expect to 'relate' directly to racism, but I suppose it is the most appropriate word. I will restate that I cannot relate to anything I understood in this chapter, in not the sense that I have no similar experiences, but I have no similar understandings which might be extended or deepened by acquiring this one. It is an understanding on an island all its own in my mind, and I hope that a neighbour comes to live nearby someday.

Okay. I think that's it.

I keep my copy of Ugly Feelings next to my head when I sleep so that I can pick through a page or thirty when the mood strikes. Today the mood struck.

Without opening it, before even touching it, just by thinking of its object, I thought about how I'm part way through irritation, and I don't remember exactly what it was saying about the ugly feeling of irritation. When I pick up the book I notice where the bookmark is: exactly halfway through the book, between the two covers.

I don't get any of this from things I read on computers. I can't keep a pdf on my bedside table, or picture the object, or stick a bookmark in and see the dark cleft where it parts the pages. Books. What a thing.

First, what is irritation? I think this quote clicked for me:

<<Helga's irritation is both an excess and a deficiency of anger . . . an insistently inadequate reaction, one occurring only in conspicuous surplus or deficit in proportion to its occasion>(UF, p182)

Ngai does not make this connection explicitly (yet), but her current discussion of irritation through (or even as the 'organizing logic'--a phrase she uses in a previous chapter which I liked--of) the novel Quicksand (of which Helga is the protagonist) is in some ways a counterpoint to animatedness, its inverse.

<< . . . irritation's radical inadequacy . . . calls attention to a symbolic violence . . . when there is an underlying assumption that an appropriate emotional response to racist violence exists, and that the burden lies on the racialized subject to produce that appropriate response legibly, unambiguously, and immediately.>>(UF, p188)

In a sense Helga's irritation in Quicksand draws attention to the animatedness which is expected of her (the racialized subject in this instance). Animatedness is that legible, unambiguous, immediate response to some stimulus... while irritation exists somewhere in the negative of that space.

I said, to some peers, that I had recently acquired the ability to consume "thousand-page nonfiction texts," and either claimed or implied or at least thought that part, a necessary part, of this was a sub-ability to "skim or skip . . . in order to better understand the whole."

I have been reluctant to do so with Ugly Feelings but I am becoming increasingly aware that it is important for me to stick to my guns, to follow my impulses, to not treat authorial linearity as so sacred.

I'm skipping to stuplimity.

P. 250
As [Gertrude] Stein puts it in "Poetry and Grammar,"
. . . Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are.

Repetition.
Ngai contrasts with the sublime in order to explore a 'non-cathartic' state of feeling (affect?); this is how I feel about many games, about much of gameplay...

Quote from: p272Inducing a series of fatigues or minor exhaustions, rather than a single, major blow to the imagination, stuplimity paradoxically forces the reader to go on in spite of its equal enticement to readers [to] give up

..

That is, I have thought about how many games do this exact thing, dabble in repetition, in stuplime affect, but for no reason I can fathom... it is useful to read, through Ngai's lens, what stuplimity does, in context of what any art does, to better understand and appreciate the purpose and impact of the experience of "forc[ing] the [player] to go on in spite of its equal enticement [to players/games] to give up", beyond those often given by the emotionally too close videogame subculture (e.g. that the frustration and difficulty are necessary for satisfaction ultimately, or the baser drives of sheer completionism or sunk cost etc.)

Very, VERY often games participate in "a series of fatigues or minor exhaustions, rather than a single, major blow to the imagination" when I would distinctly prefer the latter. Is there something nonetheless worthwhile in the former?

Quote from: p272-273In the stuplimity of slapstick comedy, which frequently stages the confrontation of small subjects with the big systems that circumscribe them, one is made to fall down---often. . . with an exaggerated expression of inexpressiveness---only so as to get up again, counteracting the seriousness of one-time failure with an accumulation of comic fatigues.

Such an elaborately put description of another oft cited 'videogame benefit'---that of failure experienced in safety---but it is particularly fascinating to see this particular benefit completely outside of their domain.

Also, "the confrontation of small subjects with the big systems that circumscribe them" is a strong aesthetic. I love it!

Topic: stuplime as unsublime

Ngai seems eager to describe the stuplime affect as distinct from the sublime, as wholly different, as nearly incompatible, but I can only see it myself through the lens of some awful force, some new subcategory of Kant's sublime, some tool of emotion for the considerer to overcome and thereby experience sublime superiority over it.

P. 261-262 "...shock and boredom...both are responses that confront us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in general."
P. 265-266 "...the sublime encounter with the infinitely vast or powerful object...is at the outset negative...threatens the mind's sense of its own capabilities...physical inferiority to nature that induces fear and pain...both encounters [the dynamical and mathematical sublime] end by reversing these initial challenges to the self's autonomy, culminating in "inspiriting satisfaction" rather than in unpleasure"
P. 266 "...for Kant sublimity applies only to a quality or state of the subject's mind...not the object of great magnitude or power that awes...but rather the self's pleasurable and emotionally satisfying estimation of itself"

P. 268 "Yet the passivity, duration, and ignoble status of boredom would seem to contradict nearly all aspects of the sublime..."

I think perhaps I am too unfamiliar with Kant's sublime and too familiar with my own personal appreciation of its hazy aura; Ngai makes many comments such as this one about how the stuplime is not the sublime, cannot be, would not be considered properly as a part of it.

Can one not feel transcendentally superior to boredom? Well...

Quote from: p278...stuplimity...at times deliberately risks seeming obtuse, as opposed to making claims for spiritual transcendence or ironic distance. Instead of emerging [...or...] exaggerating... boredom resides in relentless attention to the finite and small

~ See also PLAY ANYTHING (worldfulness, anti-irony, paying (playing) attention) (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=57)

Quote from: p280...stuplimation, as the synthesis of awe...with what refuses awe...

Topic: the purpose of stuplimity?

Why make stuplime art? As above, the reasons given by Ngai are reminiscent of my own explorations. (Good!)

Quote from: p283"Open feeling," which is a prerequisite for what Stein calls "loving repeating being", could be described as a state of undifferentiated alertness or responsiveness

Quote from: p284...the state of receptiveness fostered by [open feeling] actually depends on slowing down other emotional reactions, much the way states of extreme excitation or enervation do... the negative affect of stuplimity might be said to produce another affective state in its wake, a secondary feeling that seems strangely neutral, unqualified, "open."

Quote from: 284...the final outcome of stuplimity--the echo or afterimage produced by it, as it were--makes possible a kind of resistance.

The explorations I speak of are those that touch Emersion (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=387.msg1645)... I think that Ngai is attempting to describe a specific affect which I cannot yet identify, but I would like to. My own direction has been towards a quiet... a quiet reflection... a moment of calm... comprehension of one's own reality.

I wish to read Difference & Repetition (Deleuze, Gilles).

Quote from: p296. . . the postmodern subject, always already a linguistic being, hence always a small subject enmeshed in large systems.

Quote from: p297"too-perfect attention to detail" is [a] strategy . . . "falsely submissive souls" . . . have followed this stuplime path in . . . confrontations with the systems encompassing them, formulating a resistant stance by going limp or falling down. . .

~ Difference and Repetition (Close Reading) (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=464)

And quite suddenly the  chapter is over.

Paranoia starts with a strong link to a concept from the previous chapter, that of "small subjects caught in larger systems" or, as referred to earlier, small subjects confronted by the "big systems that circumscribe them"(p272-273):

Quote from: p298-299Was "conspiracy theory" quietly claimed as a masculine prerogative in the last decades of the twentieth century? . . . male protagonists who, like the conventional film noir detective, belatedly find that they are small subjects caught in larger systems extending beyond their comprehension and control.

There is a common, related idiom: that of the "small fish in a big pond", a small subject who finds themselves unimportant in an overwhelmingly larger system. This idiom is distinct, however, in that it evokes its inverse, "big fish in a small pond", this pair of metaphors suggesting that the subject's importance is relative to their position in the world. Generally the small fish in a big pond describes a situation where someone has escaped some smaller system into a larger (and more desirable) system only to discover that this act has inadvertently caused the loss of their individual importance.

Ngai's "small subject in a big system", especially given the 'conspiracy theorist' lens, is similar but implies one major difference which speaks to the global culture that pervades today: There is no small pond to return to. That is, there never was a small pond to begin with. It is not an inflicted state but a discovered one, with which one must now deal, forever.

(This is not to say that this is the truth of the matter-- I have myself greatly enjoyed returning to the small ponds which are available-- but over my lifetime thus far I have certainly felt a seductive invitation, as well as an efficiency-minded pressure, towards global connectivity via the internet and other technologies which produces this specific stress of pervasive individual unimportance.)

P. 308, 309
... for the critic today, most attempts to articulate a poetics based on foregrounding connections between the literary text and poststructuralist theory will end up ... predictable or descriptive—a rather undesirable outcome [to the] privileging and politicization of difficulty and defamiliarization. Interestingly, the problem here is not one of a gap, dissonance, or contradiction...but rather one of a fit that seems too close[, to which] you might well respond: "Tell me something I don't already know!"

Again there is a startling familiarity at work here, themes of art and art criticism and art disconnection and art criticism disconnection which I relate to on a level obviously not bound to medium.

I highly privilege difficulty and unfamiliarity, and I believe the experience of them is... political in some sense, certainly.

A fit that seems too close. What does Ngai have to say about the too-close fit's relation to paranoia?

And what do I feel about difficulty and unfamiliarity? Why these aesthetics??

P. 310
[Rosi Braidotti] questions the "deconstructing, dismissing, or displacing the notion of the rational subject at the very historical moment when women are beginning to have access to the use of discourse, power, and pleasure" . . .

. . . "conspiracy theory" . . . "bad timing" . . .

From the previous page (of my notes), I realize that I have a strong desire to make connections, specifically to cohere disparate ideas into one idea for a reason I can only vaguely explain. "Conspiracy theory", "difficulty", "unfamiliarity", "bad timing", and "a too-close fit" all orbit this habit -- and here is also an example of the drive in action, here I am looking for (and finding) a way to cohere all these thoughts into one vessel.

The "too-close fit" in particular is an interesting case. It exists opposite from 'difficulty' and 'unfamiliarity', perhaps seen as worthless because it is a too-easy connection, made of parts that are already too familiar, therefore not worthwhile? The example response given by Ngai on page 309 is "Tell me something I don't already know!"

This expresses not fear or anger, but dismissiveness, something closer to an ugly feeling like disgust or irritation - perhaps paranoia's opposite, the feeling of too-closeness produces a provocation towards paranoia, towards overreach.

I've never seen this laid out in plain text... I won't try to fully recapture it here.

P. 317

Quote. . . emphasis on the politics of form can also lead to an opposing feminist position: . . . attachment of gender codes to language promotes the restriction of women to certain kinds of expression . . . How does one develop a critique of sexual differences without . . . affirm[ing] and reinforc[ing] the system of sexual difference itself? . . . the enterprise of critique threatens to become a paranoid economy with the question of complicity at its very center. [emphasis mine]

A paranoid economy. what a term.

Quote from: p317[Suppose] paranoia forefronts the question of how to adequately distinguish our own constructions from those which construct us

As I read this I thought a lot about games criticism. I am... I have thought about where games criticism comes from or could come from. I am really enjoying reading this book: a rather dense text, a perhaps paranoid text.

P. 330

Quote. . . the kind of articulating logic central to paranoid knowledge, which insists that there must always be a link . . . between situations and events

P. 331

Quote. . . while paranoid logic always offers "escaping" as one option, it offers "thinking" as the other:

Quote from: SpahrAs in theories of capital, realize this situation and see it as the beginning place for all current thinking or escaping.

End of paranoia.
This chapter struck me deeply - though much of it felt like it went over my head or under the tongue, the central thread of paranoia as positive, or necessary, or thinking spoke to me.

Finding connections. That's a pleasurable action which I can understand very well, relate to too closely. Whether it is rooted in paranoia or paranoia's root, finding and forming tenuous, even misguided connections is a deeply meaningful act to me and my life.

Games criticism. There is an irritation there that I cannot resolve yet, but I look forward to finding its connection in the future,

Ngai discusses disgust and contempt, disgust 'fixing its object as "intolerable"' (340) while 'the object of contempt is perceived in a manner that allows it to be dismissed or ignored . . . tolerated (if only barely)' (336).

Disgust is a negative affect, but not one of those 'associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended' (back cover). We might say that true disgust is defined in part by a call to action, an unblockedness, a dissuspension.

Artwork that employs the provocation of non-acting emotion leaves a negative space... perhaps to be filled by escaping or thinking, but generally to demand its appreciator fill it with something of their own, be that paranoia, irritation, anger, or appreciation -- not the animated joy or pleasure or comfort which is delivered, given, or even forced by 'readerly' writing or other pleasant art, but the more rare self-motivated appreciation. Choosing what to appreciate may be rendered elitist in some cases and from certain perspectives but may also be understood through the lens of love (an impossible to understand hydra of feeling, with its slippery many-headed meanings and definition) in which one chooses in some sense to persevere through ugly feelings to emerge unscathed and better equipped to persist through the same in the future.

Not quoting anything yet but this regards the pages 344-345 (plus maybe a little before and after)

Ngai describes a 'political pluralism' which aligns better with 'desire' than disgust but which still wields weapons.

The ideal of multiplicity seems to have a strong parallel with the ideal of freedom, and both these ideals must include a contradictory subideal - there can be no freedom given to restrict freedom. In multiplicity and plurality, defined by inclusivity, anti-inclusive perspectives must be themselves excluded, but this exclusion is itself an anti-exclusive force.

The weapon employed with regards to art (and many other things) is that of tolerableness, a perspective which neuters any effectiveness (political, ideological, emotional) the tolerated object might otherwise have; in the pursuit of plurality, of a multitude of experiences, a defensive mechanism opposing any actual effect of those ideals has formed.

P 349

Quote. . . one could say that the desire of this poetry [Bruce Andrews' "[..]Shut Up[..]"] is to become . . . intolerable to the extent that it cannot be absorbed by the pluralist economy of an aesthetic eclecticism [or] its inclusive pull . . . [to, like "Bartleby",] activate an ugly feeling to disclose the limits of the "social disattendability" that enables friendly as well as disdainful tolerance for an object perceived as so unthreatening in its inferiority as to be barely perceptible at all.

> There is an "inclusive" "aesthetic eclecticism" which uses dismissive contempt to better digest that which is to be included, stripping all undesirable individualities of their importance without fault for destroying the actual things themselves. Ugly feelings may allow a thing to resist this social digestion, or commensuration?

Disgust. Ngai concludes by describing all the ugly feelings explored as 'nonstrategic affects characterized by weak intentionality' (353), and stating that disgust has taken us to the edge of ugly feelings, 'preparing us for more instrumental or politically efficacious emotions' (354). It is 'the furthest [this project, this book] can go'.


I've been reading this book since early-mid November of last year, it seems. It's mid-March now, so I've been reading Ugly feelings for four months. I started reading it before I began The Nature of Order Book One, and I finished Book Two before finishing Ugly Feelings.

I thoroughly enjoyed this read, and the recursively ugly feelings it gave me - it was a 'difficult' and 'unfamiliar' read, a journey through tough territory. I lost and found my way many times, perhaps losing it more often than finding it. I had a lot of individual, independent thoughts along the way; reading and writing has felt much like a conversation - I took time and space to reflect on what I had read and composed my own thoughts, then returned to the book to see where Ngai would go (or where Ngai had already gone, but subjectively speaking it lay in the future, not the past).

Often my thoughts and those presented in the book had interesting mirrors, though in other cases our thoughts were too divergent to be a productive conversation. Still, that's even how ordinary conversations go, sometimes. You talk to anyone about anything, and they may have complementary thoughts to share, or they may not.

I'd like to read more books like this, but it's rare to find a book on such a strange topic as this that I would be interested in, written by someone with thoughts I can suitably explore and chew on. The book doesn't just need to be a great conversational partner for me... I must also be a great conversational partner for the book.

~ tarseed Pilgrim and The Void - Two Strange Worlds of Light and Darkness (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=498)

~ I'm reading it again (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=559.0)