And quite suddenly the  chapter is over.

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)

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... 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.

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

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)

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...

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"

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

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.

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.)

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

..

Everyone's systems playable. I like the "world", the idea of this action as all encompassing. Not one system, not yours, not mine. Making every system as playable as possible. A playable world. Not an artificial new world, but our world, the one (or ones) which presently exist. Not "A PLAYABLE WORLD" but "OUR WORLD'S FUTURE", a playable vision of itself...

I have been thinking about business cards recently, and my website. Who am i? What is it that i do, or aspire to do? Rather than a title, i think it is a verb or an aspiration that I'm more comfortable standing by, and this is the pseudopoetic phrase i have in mind:


Now, I'd like each line to stand on its own- the second line is beautiful, but the first is obviously a hanging fragment in want of a conclusion...

Maybe that's ok? Anyway I'm much happier with the second line, and i hope to find a whole i like as much.

"Making all the world
Systems playable"

Hmm...

"All systems playable"...