Ugly Feelings

[droqen]

Regarding Sianne Ngai's
"Ugly Feelings"
(accessed online in part)

[droqen]

[..] 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Americans, since here the initial experience of being aesthetically overwhelmed involves not terror or pain (eventually superseded by tranquility), but something much closer to an ordinary fatigue—and one that cannot be neutralized, like the sublime's terror, by a competing affect.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.

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Stuplimity...

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

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

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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.

The 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[..]

[droqen]

One major header from Video Games and the Sublime 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...

[droqen]

---
from the top

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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[..]", 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:

[..] 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...

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

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[..] 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.

[droqen]

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.

a 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."

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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.

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While 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."

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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.

[droqen]

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.

[droqen]

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

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?