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Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in
Twentieth-Century Aesthetics
Sianne Ngai
Harvard University
sngai@fas.harvard.edu
© 2000 Sianne Ngai.
All rights reserved.
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There is stupid being in every one. There is stupid being
in every one in their living. Stupid being in one is often
not stupid thinking or stupid acting. It very often is hard
to know it in knowing any one. Sometimes one has to know of
some one the whole history in them, the whole history of
their living to know the stupid being of them.
--Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1906-08)
Sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry. I regret it. Please accept my
apology. I'm extremely sorry. I regret my mistake. Pardon
me. Pardon me. I hope you'll forgive me. I'm deeply
apologetic. Do forgive me. Pardon me. Accept my apology. Do
forgive me. I'm deeply apologetic. Excuse me. Excuse me. It
was my own fault. Do forgive me. I'm so sorry...
--Janet Zweig, Her Recursive Apology (sculpture), 1993
"Thick" Language
1. "Gertrude and I are just the contrary," writes Leo Stein in
Journey Into The Self. "She's basically stupid and I'm basically
intelligent" (Schmitz 100). What Leo perceived "stupid" about
Gertrude and the non-linear writing of hers he abhorred is
perhaps analogous to what the character Tod finds "thick" about
Homer Simpson's use of words in Nathanael West's The Day of the
Locust (1939). When Tod coaxes a sluggish, almost comatose Homer
to relate his experience of abandonment following the departure
of Faye, Homer's speech at first seems incomprehensible to him.
"Language leaped out of Homer in a muddy, twisting torrent.
[...] The lake behind the dam replenished itself too fast. The
more he talked the greater the pressure grew because the flood
was circular and ran back behind the dam again" (West 143-4).
Yet as Tod discovers, Homer's "muddy, twisting torrent" in its
negative insistence conveys a logic of its own--which, when
acknowledged, enables his interpretation:
[A] lot of it wasn't jumbled so much as timeless. The words
went behind each other instead of after. What he had taken
for long strings were really one thick word and not a
sentence. In the same way sentences were simultaneous and
not a paragraph. Using this key he was able to arrange a
part of what he had heard so that it made the usual kind of
sense. (144)
In the case of Homer, the shock of sudden loss produces its own
dense or "thickening" rhetoric--one that deceptively simulates
an inability to respond or speak at all, by eroding formal
distinctions between word, sentence, and paragraph: the
structural units of conventional syntax. To borrow terms Deleuze
adduces from philosopher Duns Scotus (whose name gives rise to
current usage of the word "dunce"), these formal differences are
exchanged for modal differences that are based on intense
variations or individuating degrees rather than distinct
attributes or qualitative forms (Deleuze 39). Modal differences,
in this sense, could be described as moody ones: temperamental,
unqualified, or constantly shifting. In West's example, the
encounter with language based on such differences involves a
transfer of affectivity: Tod finds himself temporarily stupefied
by the language generated by Homer's stupor. Which is to say
that he discovers that it challenges his own capacity to read,
interpret, or critically respond to it in conventional ways.
2. Radically altering the temporal order dictated by normative
syntax ("the words went behind each other instead of after"),
and blurring the distinction between its building blocks
(sentence and paragraph), West's description of "thick" or
grammatically moody language strikingly coincides with the
signifying logic at work in Stein's dense Making of Americans
(1906-8), where words are deliberately presented in "long
strings" rather than conventional sentences, and the repetition
of particular words or clauses produces a layered or
simultaneous effect--Stein's characteristic "continuous
present." As Stein puts it in "Poetry and Grammar,"
Sentences and paragraphs. Sentences are not emotional but
paragraphs are.... When I wrote the Making of Americans I
tried to break down this essential combination by making
enormously long sentences that would be as long as the
longest paragraph and so to see if there was really and
truly this essential difference between paragraphs and
sentences, if one went far enough with this thing with
making the sentences long enough to be as long as any
paragraph and so producing in them the balance of a
paragraph not a balance of a sentence, because of course
the balance of a paragraph is not the same balance as the
balance of a sentence. (Writings and Lectures 142)
The deliberate making of sentences "simultaneous and not a
paragraph" in The Making of Americans poses a grammatical
challenge to the ideology of "essential difference" and the
symbolic laws it sustains, a tactics of resistance to dominant
systems of sense-making continued throughout Stein's career. The
sense of urgency connected to this local struggle becomes
amplified in How To Write (1928), whose opening piece, "Saving
the Sentence," bears a title suggesting that language, like an
occupied territory in time of war, is in need of rescue (7-32).
For The Making of Americans, the strategy Stein chooses is
primarily an agglutinative one, where the material build-up of
language itself is invested with the potential for
dissimulation, to achieve the "balance" of larger forms through
the accumulation of smaller ones.
3. In "Sentences," Stein makes a similar attempt to recalibrate the
reader's sense of syntactic equilibrium when she writes, "What
is the difference between words and a sentence and a sentence
and sentences" (HTW 181, my emphasis). We can read this as Stein
posing a question about the attribute distinguishing two formal
structures (words versus a sentence), or singular and plural
instances of a particular structure (sentence versus sentences);
we can also read it as a statement defining the term "what" as
precisely this distinction. Here Stein seems to highlight the
fact that "what" can function as an interrogative pronoun or
adjective, as well as a relative pronoun equally substitutable
for plural and singular objects. When constituting a full
sentence on its own, "what" also has the potential to function
as a demand for repetition in itself ("What?" [did you just
say?]), or as an expletive conveying a negative emotion such as
disbelief, anger, or incomprehension ("What!"). In the latter
instance, "what" paradoxically expresses a state of
inexpressiveness. Here the term's sense-making agency resides in
its impotentiality, or inability to refer and represent, since
what it expresses is precisely a situation in which whatever
"what!" is being uttered in response to appears to defy
expression. Thus in locating the difference between words and a
sentence in "what," Stein suggests that the status of such
difference might resemble that of the various roles the term
"what" assumes--in other words, that the difference is at once
relative, interrogative, and potentially stupefying in its
affective force. Like the relationship between sentences and
paragraphs in The Making of Americans, or "one thick word" and a
sentence in Homer's speech, difference as "what" could be
described as a difference without fixed or determinate value, or
as "difference without a concept"-- one of the ways Deleuze
defines repetition in Difference and Repetition.
4. The fact that in its expletive and interrogative roles,
"what(!?)" also functions as a demand for repetition, also
recalls Deleuze's counterintuitive thesis that repetition is
what lies between two differences. Configured as a what, "the
difference between words and sentences or a sentence and
sentences" could thus be described as a demand for repetition
which places us in a relation of indeterminacy, raising a
question rather than providing an answer: "What is a sentence. A
sentence is something that is or is not followed" (HTW 213). As
Stein notes here, "what" becomes a sentence not only when it
raises a question but also when it becomes one--when it actively
solicits but may or may not be followed by a reply. "Now the
whole question of questions and not answer is very interesting"
(HTW 32, my italics). The response difference-as-what solicits,
as in the case of Tod's response to Homer's speech, seems likely
to take the form of an obstruction of response: when the ability
to "answer" is frustrated or delayed. In both cases, the
negative experience of "stupefaction" (in which this
relationship to language is given a specific emotional value)
raises the significant question of how we might respond to what
we recognize as "the different" prior to its qualification or
categorization (as "sexual" or "racial" for instance), precisely
by pointing to the limits of our ability to do so. We are used
to encountering and recognizing differences assigned formal
values; Stein's writing asks us to ask how we negotiate our
encounters when these qualifications have not yet been made.
5. Thus in attempting to "break down the essential combination" of
sentences and paragraphs, or claiming that "what is the
difference between words and a sentence," Stein's agenda is not
to be confused with an attempt to level or neutralize difference
by repetition, but rather to radically reconfigure one's
relationship to difference through repetition and grammatical
play. If a particular kind of negative emotion inevitably
accompanies or is produced by this new relation, it becomes
important to understand how this affective dynamic might
organize and inform strategies of reading made possible by it.
Throughout Stein's career, but beginning particularly around
1908 when, as Marianne deKoven argues, she started to develop
her "insistent" style based on repetition, fixed or "essential"
distinctions are replaced with unqualified ones to generate new
frameworks of sense-making: forms of continuity, order, and
linguistic equilibrium ("balance") alternative to the symbolic
status quo (50). What this requires from the writer, Stein
suggests, as well as from her readers, is an experiment in
duration--or, more precisely, an experiment in the temporality
of endurance, testing whether one can go "far enough with this
thing." As any reader of The Making of Americans in its entirety
can attest, the stakes of this astonishing 922-page narrative
are the exhaustion it inevitably induces, as well as its
narrative themes of familial and historical survival. Stein's
interest in how astonishment and fatigue, oddly in tandem, come
to organize and inform a particular kind of relationship between
subjects and language (or between subjects and difference, via
language), can be further explored by examining how this
peculiar syncretism of affects comes to bear on our contemporary
engagements with radically "different" forms in American poetry.
Poetic Fatigue and Hermeneutic Stupor
6. It comes as no surprise that what Leo Stein, journeying into the
self, considered "stupid" language is language that, in
undermining conventional patterns of grammar, syntax, and sense,
threatens the limits of self by challenging its capacity for
response, temporarily immobilizing the addressee as in
situations of extreme shock or boredom. In the case of Homer's
muddy and twisting rhetoric, the subject no longer seems to be
the agent producing or controlling his speech; rather, language
"leaps out" with its own peculiar force. Yet as West's scene of
interpretation demonstrates, Homer's emotional speech is
readable, once the interpreter recognizes that it simultaneously
constitutes its own frame of sense-making. Like the affectively
charged, insistent language Gertrude Stein uses to create her
vast combinatory of "bottom natures" in Making of Americans,
Homer's "thick" speech demands to be encountered on its own
terms. The critical trajectory or journey it invites is not one
into the self, but into the more complex problem of a particular
kind of self's relationship to language, where the latter is
what radically externalizes the former, pointing to its own
incommensurabilities.
7. "The words went behind each other instead of after. What he had
taken for long strings were really one thick word and not a
sentence. In the same way sentences were simultaneous and not a
paragraph" (West 14). Deviating from conventional syntax and its
standard organizations of temporality, Homer's gush, like
Stein's prose, produces a kind of linguistic overlapping or
simultaneity--one that recalls the source of the cryptanalyst
Legrand's own experience of stupefaction in Poe's "The Gold-Bug"
(1843). In both stagings of hermeneutic perplexity, the obstacle
posed to the reader is attributed to a "thickness" or
superimposition of forms:
Presently I took a candle, and... proceeded to scrutinize
the parchment more closely. Upon turning it over, I saw my
own sketch upon the reverse, just as I had made it. My
first idea, now, was mere surprise at the really remarkable
similarity of outline--at the singular coincidence involved
in the fact, that unknown to me, there should have been a
skull upon the other side of the parchment, immediately
beneath my figure of the scarabaeus, and that this skull,
not only in outline, but in size, should so closely
resemble my drawing. I say the singularity of this
coincidence absolutely stupified [sic] me for a time. This
is the usual effect of such coincidences. The mind
struggles to establish a connection--a sequence of cause
and effect--and, being unable to do so, suffers a species
of temporary paralysis. But, when I recovered from the
stupor, there dawned upon me gradually a conviction which
startled me even far more than the coincidence. (Poe 305,
my emphasis)
In the scenes of analytical stupor staged by both West and Poe,
the discourse initially stumping the interpreter is based on a
logic of vertical stacking or piling rather than a horizontally
progressive trajectory in time. Legrand's glyphs, like Homer's
words, are placed behind each other instead of after, creating a
layered simultaneity of signs. In West's narrative, the
"thickening" of Homer's language is explicitly figured as an
effect of behindness--that of discursive flow "[running] back
behind the dam again" (144), recalling Heidegger's description
of poetry as "the water that at times flows backward toward the
source" (11). The anteriorizing slippage dramatized in Tod's
description of Homer's language is both a convention of Stein's
prose, where narration is consequently forced to "begin again,"
and a stylistic dynamic utilized in Beckett's later writing. In
"Stirrings Still" (1988), for instance, a prose poem that deals
specifically with a subject's experience of stupefying loss, the
overlapping accretion of phrases and word clusters within the
boundaries of a severely limited diction results in a language
that is paradoxically both ascetic and congested, "thickening"
even as it progresses into a narrative of not-progressing:
One night or day then as he sat at his table head on hands
he saw himself rise and go. First rise and stand clinging
to the table. Then sit again. Then rise again and stand
clinging to the table. Then go. Start to go. On unseen feet
start to go. So slow that only change of place to show he
went. As when he disappeared only to reappear later at
another place. Then disappeared again only to reappear
again later at another place again. So again and again
disappeared again only to reappear again later at another
place again. Another place in the place where he sat at his
table head on hands. (259-60)
The familiar theme of "endurance" is conveyed here through a
drastic slowing down of language, or a rhetorical enactment of
its fatigue in which the duration of relatively simple actions
is uncomfortably prolonged through a proliferation of precise
inexactitudes. This process occurs not only through repetition,
but a series of constative exhaustions staged through the
corrective dynamics of retraction and restatement, of statements
partially undoing the completion of preceding statements by
breaking the movements they describe into smaller intervals. The
undoing paradoxically relies on a process of material build-up,
where words are slowly added rather than subtracted. Thus the
finitude of a simple action such as "he saw himself rise and go"
becomes disrupted by being rendered increasingly specific in
degree. "He saw himself rise and go." Well actually, no: first
he rose and stood--then sat--then rose. Then, he went. Actually,
no: then he started to go. No again: then on unseen feet he
started to go. The logic of progression from statement to
statement is paradoxically propelled by a series of invisible
objections continually jerking us backwards, resulting in
writing that continually calls attention to itself as lacking
even as it steadily accumulates. Because units of meaning are
constantly shifting behind one another, Beckett's use of
language performs a stacking of multiple temporalities, an
overlapping of instaneities and durations, rather than a linear
progression in time.
8. Like Stein's style in the period of Making of the Americans,
"Stirrings Still" becomes syntactically dense or complex while
remaining minimalist in diction. As in the case of Homer's
"timeless" language, its language is marked by the absence of a
"sequence of cause and effect," producing the effect of delay,
fatigue, or "temporary paralysis." This discontinuity is
generated within the speech or text itself, as well as
experienced by its interpreter as an interruption of
understanding. What Poe, West, and Beckett suggest in different
ways is that when language "thickens" it suffers a "retardation
by weak links"[1]: it slows down or performs a temporal delay
through the absence of causal connectives. It is this change in
temporal organization that in turn slows down the
interpreter--as if the loss of "strong links" within the
original text or narrative paradoxically strengthens the link
between it and the reader, enabling the transfer of the former's
emotional value.
9. To acknowledge and attempt to understand one's own experience of
"stupefaction" by a text or language, as Legrand and Tod do
(which gives them endurance and enables them to go on as
interpreters in spite of "temporary paralysis"), is not the same
as projecting stupidity onto the text instigating this
relation--as Leo Stein does, turning his emotional response to
Stein's writing into an attribute of the writing in itself.
Attempting to analyze the linguistic factors informing this
dynamic, rather than dismiss the objects involved as senseless,
both interpreters identify: (1) a breakdown of formal
differences and a proliferation of modal ones; (2) a "thickness"
or simultaneous layering of elements in place of linear
sequencing; resulting in (3) the disruption of normative syntax
and its patterns of temporal organization. A similar logic
presides in contemporary writer Dan Farrell's prose poem 366,
1996 (1997), which bears some stylistic allegiance to the
"thick" uses of language in Beckett and Stein:
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday, going into the woods, Sunday, Monday, typical
trees, Tuesday, typical grass traces, Wednesday, Thursday,
typical excitations, Friday, typical regional sounds,
Saturday, Sunday, why slow rather than slowest, Monday,
clouded height, Tuesday, some same ground, Wednesday,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, left and possible, Sunday,
right and possible, Monday, Tuesday, could what there is
not to be believed be asked, Wednesday, Thursday... (57)
Consider also this passage from Kenneth's Goldsmith FIDGET, a
poem/conceptual art piece performed at the New York Whitney
Museum in 1997:
Tongue and saliva roll in mouth. Swallow. Tongue
emerges through teeth and lips. Tongue lies on lower
lip. Teeth click tongue. Lower jaw drops away from upper.
Flesh folds beneath chin. Repeats. Upper lip sucks. Rubs
against lower. Swallow. Saliva gathers under tongue.
Teeth tuck inside jaw. Gather saliva. Swallow. Left hand,
grasping with three fingers, moves toward mouth. Swallow.
Arm drops. Arm lifts. Swallow. Arm drops. Swallow.
Arm lifts. Arm drops. Eyes move to left. Left hand hits.
Arm lifts. Swallow. Arm drops. Right leg crosses left...
Just as Beckett's poem stylistically enacts a form of discursive
exhaustion or fatigue, Farrell and Goldsmith's deliberately
stupefying poems relentlessly focus on the tedium of the
ordinary: the monotony of daily routines organized by calendar
headings, the movements of a body not doing anything in
particular. Simultaneously astonishing and boring, the
experiment in "duration" is taken in each to a structural
extreme: Farrell's poem incorporates every single calendar date
of the year named in its title (366); Goldsmith's documents the
writer's impossible project of recording every single bodily
movement made in a twenty-four hour period (Bloomsday).[2] Using
a similar conceptual framework, Judith Goldman's poem "dicktee"
(1997) described by the author as "a study in the logic of
paranoia" and its strategies of negation, is composed of every
single word in Melville's Moby Dick that begins with the prefix
un-, in the exact order in which they appear:
under, unite, unless, unpleasant, universal,
uncomfortable, unaccountable, under, unbiased,
undeliverable, under, underneath, universe, unequal,
understanding, unaccountable, unwarranted,
unimaginable, unnatural, unoccupied, undress,
unobserved, unknown, unwarrantable, unknown,
unaccountable, understand, uncomfortable, unsay,
unaccountable, uncommonly, undressed, unearthly,
undressing, unnatural, unceremoniously,
uncomfortableness, unmethodically, undressed,
unendurable, unimaginable, unlock,
unbecomingness, understand, under, unusual,
unrecorded, unceasing, unhealing, unbidden,
universal, unstirring, unspeakable, unnecessary,
unseen, unassuming, unheeded, unknown, until,
uncheered, unreluctantly, unto, unwelcome, unto,
unearthly, uncouthness, unbiddenly, unite, unite,...
In a dramatization of modal differences usurping formal ones,
the poet converts Moby Dick into moby dictation, producing a
hyperbolic version of the collage of quotations compiled by the
Sub-Sub-Librarian in Melville's novel. If for Melville the
Sub-Sub is always already a small subject encompassed by a big
and relentless system (hence in many ways a "postmodern"
subject), Goldman comically positions herself as an even smaller
one. The exaggeration of language's citability and iterability
(for Goldman, against conventional poetic lyricism) is similarly
enacted in Goldsmith's encyclopedic No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96
(1997),[3] a collection of linguistic materials compiled over
the period of three years (including lists, phrases,
conversations, found passages, and entire pieces of fiction)
that all end on the sonority of the schwa (rhyme) and then are
laboriously ordered by syllable count, from a series of
one-syllable entries to a piece containing precisely 7228
(meter). Taking a more traditional versifier's attention to
prosodic constraints to an extreme, Goldsmith's Sub-Subish work
also results in what Raphael Rubinstein blurbs as "a weirdly
constructed Baedeker to late 20th Century American society." In
MDCLXXXVI, whose title reflects the number of syllables
determining its order in the volume, constative fatigue is
hilariously performed through an overdetermined
self-referentiality and use of "literary devices" as clichés.
Or, in persistently subsuming content to the ruthless demands of
its self-imposed, unusual rhyming pattern and metrical
structure, does a text which self-referentially appropriates a
prototypically postmodernist text in its own parody of
postmodern appropriation and self-referentiality exhaust the
parodying of these devices as well as the devices themselves?[4]
This is the first sentence of the story. This is the second
sentence. This is the title of the story which is also
found several times in the story itself. This sentence is
questioning the intrinsic value of the first two sentences.
This sentence is to inform you in case you haven't already
realized it that this is a self-referential story
containing sentences that refer to their own structure and
function. This is a sentence that provides an ending to the
first paragraph. This is the first sentence of a new
paragraph in a self-referential story. This sentence
comments on the awkward nature of the self-narrative form
while recognizing the strange and playful detachment it
affords the writer. Introduces in this paragraph the device
of sentence fragments. A sentence fragment. Another. Good
device. Will be used more later. This is actually the last
sentence of the story but has been placed here by mistake.
This sentence overrides the preceding sentence by informing
the reader... that this piece of literature is actually the
Declaration of Independence but that the author in a show
of extreme negligence (if not malicious sabotage) has so
far failed to include even ONE SINGLE SENTENCE from that
stirring document although he has condescended to use a
small sentence FRAGMENT namely "When in the course of human
events" embedded in quotation marks near the end of the
sentence... (Goldsmith 565-66)
In extremely different ways, the conceptual work of Farrell,
Goldsmith, and Goldman continues a tradition of poetic
experimentalism grounded in the work of Stein--including her
interest in affectively reorganizing the subject's relationship
to language through stylistic innovation. Though such diverse
texts should not be reduced to a common equation, each could be
described as simultaneously astonishing and (deliberately)
fatiguing; much like the signifying logics at work in Beckett's
late fiction, or the experience of reading The Making of
Americans. Through hyperbolic uses of repetition, reflexivity,
citation, and clichés, the poems perform a doubling-over of
language which, as in the case of Legrand's confrontation with a
layered configuration, actively interferes with the temporal
organization dictated by conventional syntax. When words or
glyphs are placed "behind" each other, instead of after, "The
mind struggles to establish a connection--a sequence of cause
and effect--and, being unable to do so, suffers a species of
temporary paralysis" (Poe 305). Yet "temporary paralysis" is not
merely a state of passivity; rather, it bears some resemblance
to what Stein calls "open feeling," a condition of utter
receptivity in which difference is felt rather than qualified or
assigned a particular value. The next section examines ways in
which contemporary artists engender this affective dynamic
through their work.
From Stupefaction to Stuplime Poetics
Words are too crude. And words are also too busy--inviting
a hyperactivity of consciousness that is not only
dysfunctional, in terms of human capacities of feeling and
acting, but actively deadens the mind and senses.
--Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will
quaqua on all sides then in me bits and scraps try and hear
a few scraps two or three each time per day and night
string them together make phrases more phrases
--Samuel Beckett, How It Is
10. The sudden excitation of "shock," and the desensitization we
associate with "boredom," though diametrically opposed and
seemingly mutually exclusive, are both responses that confront
us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in
general.[5] Both affects are thus frequently invoked in
responses to radical art usually dismissed as unsophisticated;
few savvy, postmodern readers are likely to admit to being
"bored" by The Making of Americans and perhaps even less likely
to being "shocked" by Jeff Koons or Cindy Sherman. By pointing
to what obstructs critical response, however, astonishment and
boredom ask us to ask what ways of responding our culture makes
available to us, and under what conditions. As "dispositions"
which result in a fundamental displacement from secure critical
positions, the shocking and the boring usefully prompt us to
look for new strategies of engagement and to extend the
circumstances under which engagement becomes possible. The
phenomenon of the intersection of these affective dynamics, in
innovative artistic and literary production, will thus be
explored here as a way of expanding our notion of the aesthetic
in general.
11. As Stein acknowledges, "Listening to repeating is often
irritating, listening to repeating can be dulling" (Making 302).
Yet in the taxonomy or system for the making of human "kinds"
that is The Making of Americans, repeating is also the dynamic
force by which new beginnings, histories, genres, and genera are
produced and organized. As Lacan similarly suggests, "repetition
demands the new,"(Four 61) including new ways of understanding
its dulling and irritating effects. It thus comes as no surprise
that many of the most "shocking," innovative, and/or
transformative cultural productions in history have also been
deliberately tedious ones. In the twentieth century,
systematically recursive works by Warhol, Ryman, Johns, Cage and
Glass bear witness to the prominence of tedium as aesthetic
strategy in avant-garde practices; one also thinks of the
"fatiguing repetitiveness" of Sade[6] and the permutative logics
at work in the writings of Beckett, Roussel, Perec, Cage, Mac
Low, and of course, Stein. This partnership between tedium and
shock in the invention of new genres is not limited, however, to
avantgardisms. The same intersection of affects can be found in
the modern horror film, which in its repetitive use of a limited
number of trademark motifs replicates the serial logics of its
serial killers, and the pulsating, highly enervated, yet
exhaustively durational electronic music known as techno or
house which completely transformed musical subcultures in the
1980s.
12. Though repetition, permutation, and seriality figure prominently
as devices in aesthetic uses of tedium, practitioners have
achieved the same effect through a strategy of what I call
agglutination; quite simply, the mass adhesion or coagulation of
data particles or signifying units. Here tedium resides not so
much in the syntactic overdetermination of minimalist dictions
(as in Ryman's white paintings), but in the stupendous
proliferation of discrete quanta held together by a fairly
simple syntax or organizing principle. This logic, less mosaic
than congealaic, is frequently emphasized by sculptor Ann
Hamilton in her installations, which have included 16,000 teeth
arranged on an examination table, 750,000 pennies immobilized in
honey, 800 men's shirts pressed into a wedge, and floors covered
by vast spreads of linotype pieces and animal hair (Wakefield
10). A similar effect is achieved by Gerhard Richter's Atlas
(1997), which confronts the spectator with 643 sheets of over
7,000 snapshots, newspaper cuttings, sketches and color fields,
each arranged on white rectangular panels. While here the
organization of material is primarily taxonomic rather than
compressive in its grammar, the accumulation of visual "data"
induces a similar strain on the observer's capacities for
conceptually synthesizing or metabolizing information. In this
manner, the fatigue of the responsivity Atlas solicits
approaches the kind of exhaustion involved in the attempt to
read a dictionary.
13. This mode of tedium is specifically foregrounded in Janet
Zweig's computer/printer installations, where rhetorical bits
and scraps are automatically produced in enormous quantities,
then stacked, piled, enumerated, weighed in balances, or
otherwise "quantified." To make Her Recursive Apology (1993),
for example, four computers, each hooked to a dot-matrix
printer, were programmed to randomly generate apologies "in the
smallest possible type" on continuously-fed paper. As Zweig
notes, "The printer apologized for two weeks, day and night.
Whenever a box of paper ran out, the computer displayed the
number of times it had apologized. Because the apologies were
randomly chosen by the computer, no two sheets of paper are
alike. I arranged the pages in a recursive spiral structure,
each stack one sheet larger than the next" (Zweig 248-9).
Pushing the boundary between the emotive and the mechanical, and
ironically commenting on the feminization of apologetic speech
acts, Her Recursive Apology stages the convergence of gendered
subject and machine not via fashionable cyborg, but through a
surprisingly "flat" or boring display of text, its materiality
and iterability foregrounded by the piles of its consolidation.
Zweig's work points to the Lacanian notion that language is
precisely the site where subject and system intersect, as Stein
similarly demonstrates through her own vast combinatory of human
types--a text in which new "kinds" or models of humans are made
through the rhetorically staged acts of enumerating, "grouping,"
"mixing," and above all repeating. For both Stein and Zweig,
where system and subject converge is more specifically where
language piles up and becomes dense.
14. Like the massive Making of Americans, the large-scale
installations of Zweig, Hamilton, and Richter register as at
once exciting and deenervating, astonishing yet tedious.
Inviting further comparison with Stein's taxonomy is the fact
that each of these installations functions as an information
processing system--a way of classifying, ordering, and
metabolizing seemingly banal "bits" of data: newspaper
clippings, snapshots, teeth, words and phrases, repetitions. To
encounter the vastness of Stein's system is to encounter the
vast combinatory of language, where particulars "thicken" to
produce new individualities. As an ordering of visual data on a
similar scale, what Richter's Atlas calls attention to through
its staggering agglomeration of material it is not so much
information's sublimity, but the sublimity of its ability to
condense.
15. Yet "sublime" seems an inappropriate term to use here, even in
spite of its critical voguishness today, which marks the
persistence of an older aesthetic tradition where it was
typically invoked in response to things overwhelmingly vast or
massive and large (mountains, seas, the infinite, and so
forth)--things that threaten to crush the subjectivity out of
us, as the works of Stein or de Sade similarly do, and point to
the limits of our psychological and cognitive faculties. In this
sense, the term seems fully applicable. But while the sublime
encompasses the feeling of awe or astonishment The Making of
Americans solicits from its reader, it fails to circumscribe the
concomitantly solicited effect of boredom. This response,
invoked in tandem with the feeling of awe, is absolutely central
to Stein's quasi-scientific experiment in narrative, which
deliberately forces the reader to participate in its
accumulation, enumeration, organization, and interpretation of
human "data." Though useful as an index of the general value of
affectivity in the negotiation of aesthetic experiences,
sublimity becomes a profoundly unsatisfactory way of
characterizing the particular kind of affective relationship
configured by twentieth-century agglutinations such as Atlas or
Americans, since here the experience of being aesthetically
overwhelmed involves not so much fear, terror, or even euphoria,
but something much closer to an ordinary fatigue. In this
relationship, a similarly negative emotivity is summoned, one in
which the self is made aware of his or her own powerlessness or
impotence, but one conspicuously less romantic, or auratic. How
the observer encounters a work like Atlas thus approaches the
experience of reading Stein and Joyce, whose postmodernisms
avant le lettre similarly seems to call for a rethinking of what
it means to be aesthetically overpowered: a new way of
theorizing the negatively affective relationship to stupefying
objects previously designated by the older aesthetic notion of
the sublime. One way of calling attention to the affinity
between exhaustion and the astonishment particular to the
sublime, invoking the latter while detaching it from its
previous romantic affiliations, is to refer to the aesthetic
experience I am talking about--one in which astonishment is
paradoxically united with boredom as the stuplime.
16. Though criticism continually relies on and returns to older
aesthetic categories, even in its engagement with radically
different forms of cultural production, these often call for new
terms for describing our responses to innovative works, new
dictions to be used in the work of critically commenting on
them. An encounter with The Making of Americans does seem to
approach the experience of the sublime, yet also very much not.
Upon first encounter it astonishes and awes, yet like the
"bottom natures" it inventories, draws us down into the
agglutinative domain of language and its dulling and irritating
iterability. The same could be said for the scatological sludge
in How It Is, in which the subject is literally pulled face
down. Hamilton's vast spreads of hair or typographical rubble
seem to deliberately invite yet ultimately veer away from their
characterization as such. What constitutes the stuplime will
become increasingly clear below, but for now I will briefly
describe it as a syncretism of boredom and astonishment, of what
"dulls" with what "irritates" or agitates, of excessive
excitation with extreme desensitization or fatigue. Whereas the
former traditionally finds a home in the lyrical or tragic, the
latter could be said to more properly belong to the artificial,
the dirtier environments of what Stein calls "bottom humor."
17. Like the Kantian sublime, the stuplime points to the limits of
our representational capabilities, not through the limitlessness
or infinity of concepts, but through a no less exhaustive
confrontation with the discrete and finite in repetition. The
"bits and scraps" of what surrounds the self on all sides is
what Beckett calls "quaqua," the discursive logic of a larger
symbolic system. As such, "it expresses a power peculiar to the
existent, a stubbornness of the existent in intuition, which
resists every specification by concepts no matter how far this
is taken," (Deleuze 13) a characterization mirroring a claim
made in Kierkegaard's comic discourse on repetition: "Every
general esthetic category runs aground on farce" (159). Unlike
the sublime, the stuplime paradoxically forces the reader to go
on in spite of its equal enticement to surrender, inducing a
series of comic fatigues or tirednesses rather than a single,
earthshattering blow to one's conceptual apparatus, thus pushing
the reader to constantly formulate and reformulate new tactics
for reading. Confrontations with the stuplime bear more
resemblance to the repetitive exhaustions performed by
Kierkegaard's Beckmann, Buster Keaton, or Pee-Wee Herman than
the instantaneous breakdown dramatized in encounters with
elemental forces. In the stuplimity of slapstick comedy, which
frequently stages the confrontation of small subjects with the
large Systems encompassing them, one is made to fall down
(typically in an exaggerated expression of inexpressiveness)
only so as to get up again, counteracting tragic failure with an
accumulation of comic fatigues. Significantly, Deleuze's prime
example of this blockage of the sublime and the surrender it
induces is words, as these "possess a comprehension which is
necessarily finite, since they are by nature the objects of a
merely nominal definition. We have here a reason why the
comprehension of the concept cannot extend to infinity: we
define a word by only a finite number of words. Nevertheless,
speech and writing, from which words are inseparable, give them
an existence hic et nunc; a genus thereby passes into existence
as such; and here again extension is made up for in dispersion,
in discreteness, under the sign of a repetition which forms the
real power of language in speech and writing" (Deleuze 13).
18. In this manner, stuplimity pulls us downward into the denseness
of language rather than lifting us upwards toward
unrepresentable divines--a realm much like the mud in How It Is,
where bits and scraps accumulate in being transmitted through a
narrator who only quotes what he receives from an external yet
infiltrating source: "I say it as I hear it." This mud is both
the site enabling the series of arrivals and separations that
comprise the basic movements in the narrative, and yet an
inertial drag or resistance that renders them exhaustingly
difficult or slow: each act of "journeying" and "abandoning"
thus involves a laborious and (as William Hutchings notes)
peristaltic crawl (65), leading us through "vast tracts of time"
(Beckett, How 39). Stein's writing operates through a similarly
anal dynamic, as Lisa Ruddick argues, of "pressing" and
"straining" (81). While Beckett's mud obstructs or slows the
physical movements of individual characters toward and away from
one another, it also seems to enable a process of cohesion, by
which the discrete extensions of Pims, Boms and Bems, "one and
all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last"
come to be "glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh
without breach or fissure" (Beckett, How 140). The social
community it creates is thus one of discursive condensation, as
visually suggested through the absence of punctuation.
19. Here, finitely large numbers substitute for the infinities we
associate with the sublime, yet the effect of these enumerations
is to similarly call attention to representational or conceptual
fatigues, if not destructions. Such tiredness results even when
the narrator subdivides the enormity of what we are asked to
imagine into more manageable increments: "a million then if a
million strong a million Pims now motionless agglutinated two by
two in the interests of torment too strong five hundred thousand
little heaps color of mud and a thousand thousand nameless
solitaries half abandoned half abandoning" (Beckett, How
115-116). Though the narrator often resorts to such calculations
to negotiate his relationship to this mud, and to facilitate
understanding of the "natural order" or organizing principle of
the system he lives in (one legislated by its "justice" or the
disembodied, external "voice of us all" from which he receives
the words of his narration), these acts of enumerating, grouping
and subdividing only produce further fatigues; thus the double
meaning of the narrator's comment "I always loved arithmetic it
has paid me back in full" (Beckett 37). Attempting to make sense
of his situation by finding smaller, more easily manipulable
systems of ordering within the larger one, the narrator finds
these micrologics ultimately subsumed and thwarted by what
encompasses them. We see this in his attempt to describe how
information is exchanged in the world he inhabits: to understand
the ordering principle behind this we are asked to take twenty
consecutive numbers, "no matter which no matter which it is
irrelevant"
814326 to 814345
number 814327 may speak misnomer the tormentors
being mute as we have seen part two may speak of
number 814326 to number 814328 who may speak to
him to number 814329 who may speak of him to
number 814330 and so on to number 814345 who
in this way may know number 814326 by repute
(Beckett, How 119)
similarly number 814326 may know by repute number
814345 number 814344 having spoken of him to
number 814343 and this last to number 814342 and this
last to number 814341 and so back to number 814326
who in this way may know number 814345 by repute
[...]
but question to what purpose
for when number 814336 describes number 814337 to
number 814335 and number 814335 to number 814337
for example he is merely in fact describing himself to
two lifelong acquaintances
so to what purpose
(Beckett, How 120)
As in the case of the repeated pratfalls of the slapstick
comedian, stuplimity emerges in the performance of such
fatigue-inducing strategies, in which the gradual accumulation
of error often leads to the repetition of a refrain: "too
strong"; or "something wrong there." In this manner, every
attempt to account for or explain the "natural order" or "logic"
of the encompassing system (and the acts of movement,
information exchange, narration, and violence it determines) by
means of a smaller logic paradoxically culminates in the
understanding of the wider principle being blocked. There is a
multiplicity of such attempts, ranging from Euclidean geometry
describing the trajectory of subjects (based on a circle and its
division into chords "AB" and "BA"), to simple arithmetic
describing the durations, distances, and velocities involved:
allowing then I quote twenty years for the journey and
knowing furthermore from having heard so that the four
phases and knowing furthermore from having heard so
that the four phases through which we pass the two
kinds of solitude the two kinds of company through
which tormentors abandoned victims travelers we all
pass and pass again being regulated thus are of equal
duration
knowing furthermore by the same courtesy that the
journey is accomplished in stages ten yards fifteen yards
at the rate of say its reasonable to say one stage per
month this word these words months years I murmur
them
(Beckett, How 125)
We are thus brought to a series of calculations which in this
case lead to a finite solution--if our fatigue permits us to
follow them. In spite of its empirical faultlessness, however,
on the page the accumulation of figures visually suggests
babble:
four by twenty eighty twelve and half by twelve one
hundred and fifty by twenty three thousand divided by
eighty thirty-seven and a half thirty-seven to thirty-
eight say forty yards a year we advance
(Beckett, How 125)
The linguistic environment of How It Is thus provides a model
for better understanding stuplimity as an aesthetic strategy in
contemporary practice, insofar as it entails an affective
reorganization of one's relationship to language, as well as a
veering away from the older category of the sublime. Unlike the
instantaneous or sudden defeat of comprehension instigated by
the latter, the stuplime belongs to a different temporal and
emotional register, involving not an abrupt climax of excitation
in terror, but rather an extended duration of consecutive
fatigues. What facilitates this relationship is an encounter
with the finite (though vast) operations of a symbolic order,
the artificial system or "justice" encompassing the subject who
confronts it, rather than an encounter with radically external
and uncontrollable forces of Nature. In experiencing the sublime
one confronts the infinite and elemental; in stuplimity one
confronts the machine or system, the taxonomy or vast
combinatory, of which one is a part. Recalling Stein's
fascination with "mushy masses" in The Making of Americans, How
It Is also suggests features specific to the anti-romantic
environment of the stuplime text: linguistic bits and scraps,
discarded "cultural" waste (torn sacks, empty food tins, dropped
can openers), and the dross or mud in which all acts of
socialization and communication occur and subjects find
themselves partially submerged. The discursive economy supported
by this mud, the basis for all relationships and social
organization, is one of rhetorical "incoherencies" (gasps and
pants, babble or quaqua), enumerations, repetitions,
permutations, retractions and emendations, agglutinations,
measurements and taxonomic classifications, and rudimentary
arithmetical and algebraic operations (grouping, subdividing,
multiplying).
20. Since the forms of exhaustion described above are related to
tedium in a highly particular way, Beckett's example indicates
that there are different kinds or uses of tedium in general,
necessitating some differentiation between them. What stuplimity
does not seem to involve is the kind of spiritualistic,
mesmerizing tedium aimed at the achievement of "higher" states
of consciousness or selfhood, as engendered by metaphysical
plays of absence against presence in the work of Meredith Monk,
Brice Marsden, or Donald Judd. In this case, tedium assumes a
seriousness and a transcendence more proper to the sublime than
the stuplime, to an absorptive rather than anti-absorptive
agenda. Stuplimity also evades the kind of wholly
anti-absorptive, cynical tedium used to reflect the flattening
effects of cultural simulacra, as in the work of Warhol and
Koons. Here tediousness is frequently adopted as aesthetic
self-stylization or mannerism, which often registers as smugness
or self-satisfied irony. Whereas the first type of tedium is
auratic or hypnotic, the effect produced by works utilizing
tedium in this manner could be described as euphoric.
21. What stuplime productions do rely on is an anti-auratic,
anti-euphoric tedium which at times deliberately risks seeming
obtuse, rather than insist upon its capacity for intellectual or
spiritual transcendence and/or clever irony. Rather than being
centered around grandiose questions of being or the
proliferation of larger-than-life iconography, this boredom
resides in relentless attention to the abject and the small, the
bits and scraps floating in what Ben Watson has called the
"common muck" of language (223). The stuplime resides in the
synecdochal relationship between these minute materials and a
vast ecology of repetition and agglutination, the system
ensuring that parapraxes, portmanteaus, and clichés (rotting
metaphors) continue to be made. As Beckett writes, "What more
vigorous fillip could be given to the wallows of one bogged in
the big world than the example of life to all appearances
inalienably realised in the little?" (Beckett, Murphy 181).
Absurdity and black humor play significant roles in this
aesthetic use of tedium to facilitate linguistic questioning,
even when such inquiry leads to direct confrontations with
questions of violence and suffering, as evinced in much post-WW
II writing. The particular use of "obtuse" boredom as means of
engaging in linguistic inquiry is also demonstrated in the
following anecdote, told by Lacan in his 1959 seminar to
introduce a definition of das Ding as "that which in the real
suffers from the signifier":
During that great period of penitence that our country went
through under Pétain, in the time of "Work, Family,
Homeland" and of belt-tightening, I once went to visit my
friend Jacques Prévert in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. And I saw
there a collection of match boxes. Why the image has
suddenly resurfaced in my memory, I cannot tell.
It was the kind of collection that it was easy to afford at
that time; it was perhaps the only kind of collection
possible. Only the match boxes appeared as follows: they
were all the same and were laid out in an extremely
agreeable way that involved each being so close to the one
next to it that the little drawer was slightly displaced.
As a result, they were all threaded together so as to form
a continuous ribbon that ran along the mantelpiece, climbed
the wall, extended to the molding, and climbed down again
next to a door. I don't say that it went on to infinity,
but it was extremely satisfying from an ornamental point of
view.
Yet I don't think that that was the be all and end all of
what was surprising in the collectionism, nor the source of
the satisfaction that the collector himself found there. I
believe that the shock of novelty of the effect realized by
this collection of empty match boxes--and this is the
essential point--was to reveal something that we do not
perhaps pay enough attention to, namely, that a box of
matches is not simply an object, but that, in the form of
an Erscheinung, as it appeared in its truly imposing
multiplicity, it may be a Thing.
In other words, this arrangement demonstrated that a match
box isn't simply something that has a certain utility, that
it isn't even a type in the Platonic sense, an abstract
match box, that the match box all by itself is a thing with
all its coherence of being. The wholly gratuitous,
proliferating, superfluous, and quasi absurd character of
this collection pointed to its thingness as match box. Thus
the collector found his motive in this form of apprehension
that concerns less the match box than the Thing that
subsists in a match box. (Seminar 113-14)
Lacan uses this "fable" as illustration of his formula for
sublimation ("[the raising] of an object to the dignity of the
Thing" [112]), but it works equally well as an example of
stuplimation, as the concatenation of awe (inspired by "the
truly imposing") with what refuses awe (the "wholly gratuitous,
proliferating, superfluous and quasi absurd"). The description
of the array of matchboxes and their internal voids seems meant
playfully to recall an earlier moment in the seminar, where
Lacan claims that the Thing, das Ding, "has to be identified
with the Wieder zu finden, the impulse to find again that for
Freud establishes the orientation of the human subject to [a
lost/absent] object" (Seminar 58). The impulse to find again is
an impulse towards repetition, one centered around and organized
by negativity. In the fable above, the repetition which Lacan
finds simultaneously imposing and ridiculous, threatening and
non-threatening, leads him straight to this Thing, enabling "the
sudden elevation of the match box to a dignity that it did not
possess before" (Seminar 118). Yet this elevation is
paradoxically achieved through a lowering or abjection, an
emphasis on the undignified or "wholly gratuitous... superfluous
and quasi absurd" status of the collection through the
proliferation of bits and scraps. As the producer of
"multiplicities," repetition seems to do opposite things
simultaneously in this anecdote: elevate and absurdify. In
conjoining these divergent dynamics (raising and lowering,
trajectory upwards and trajectory downwards), the repetition in
the fable recalls a similar conjunction of rising and falling in
the stuplime, through its syncretism of excitation and
enervation, extreme "selected attentiveness" and deficit of the
same. Lacan's stuplime array also recalls the structure of a
typical sentence from The Making of Americans, in which the
tension created by slightly overlapping phrases performs the
functions of both disjunction (that which calls attention to the
spaces between signifying units, figured in the image of "the
little drawer" exposed) and what Peter Brooks calls the
"binding" action of repetition (the agglutination expressed in
"threaded together") (101). And as in the case of Stein, its
particular kind of tedium also seems willing to risk a certain
degree of shock value, unlike metaphysical boredom, which risks
none, and cynical boredom, which demands more than we are often
willing to give.
22. The aesthetic differences between sublimity and stuplimity call
attention to the fact that not all repetitions are alike, a
point also foregrounded in Kierkegaard's Repetition. When the
young man on a quest for "real repetition" in Kierkegaard's
narrative euphorically (and erroneously) believes he has found
it in the final outcome of his unconsummated love, "[His]
perhaps disturbing enthusiasm is expressed in terms that only a
little earlier in aesthetic history were standard when
describing the sublime: 'spume with elemental fury,' 'waves that
hide me in the abyss... that fling me up above the stars'"
(Melberg 76). Significantly, these prototypical invocations of
sublimity involve the image of elevation, situating the young
man's relationship to the "ocean providing his 'vortex of the
infinite'" as an experience of verticality and depth (222). In
contrast, having chosen to pursue repetition in a
comic/materialist rather than tragic/romantic arena, Constantin
Constantius's description of farce as a "frothing foam of words
that sound without resonance" (Kierkegaard 156) ironically
references this sublime imagery only to flatten or deflate it,
reconfiguring the experience of genuine repetition as one of a
superficial and almost abject horizontality.
Thus did I lie in my theater box, discarded like a
swimmer's clothing, stretched out by the stream of laughter
and unrestraint and applause that ceaselessly foamed by me.
I could see nothing but the expanse of theater, hear
nothing but the noise in which I resided. Only at intervals
did I rise up, look at Beckmann, and laugh so hard that I
sank back again in exhaustion alongside the foaming stream.
(Kierkegaard 166)
In a satirical twist of the young man's invocation of the
sublime, Constantin's description of his stuplime encounter with
farce places him not in the elemental fury of a vast and abyssal
sea, but rather horizontally alongside a mild and insipidly
picturesque stream; it depicts him not as a mortal body
engulfed, but as a pile of garments discarded by an absent body.
Instead of the roaring or crashing of oceanic waves in which one
becomes lost, we have "plaintive purling" of a small brook on
the site of the family farm (166). As a "frothing foam of words
that sound without resonance," farce finds its structural
counterpart in the mode of its reception: laughter. This
laughter foams and flows by a self with no substantive content
or body. Much like the "mushy mass," "flabby mass," or "lax
condition" Stein attributes to "the being all independent
dependent being in possibility of formation" in The Making of
Americans (386), the self who experiences farce is described as
a body's outline gone flaccid, one having lost its original
form. In laughter, the self becomes "stretched out" like the
Steinian sentence itself, which would seem to generate a
linguistic foam of its own through the cumulative build-up of
repeated phrases and the repeated abutment and overlapping of
clauses against others.
23. Unlike the upheaval of waves that fling the young man towards
the sky, linguistic "foam" would seem to cling by cohesion to
the ground, often in accumulated lumps. It is the "vast sea"
slaver or waste product: the dross of the sublime. Since to
froth is to produce foam and foam is what froths, Constantin
Constantius's phrase "frothing foam" is itself a repetition
(like his own name); one accordingly used by him to characterize
the form of comedy he finds most repetition-friendly. One seeks
repetition in what foams or bubbles; thus the comic genius
Beckmann is described as a "yeasty ingredient" (Kierkegaard
165). The littoral environment of farce in which Constantin
pursues repetition might here recall the importance of "foaming"
language to Stein's comic taxonomy of human "types" in The
Making of Americans, as exemplified in this description of
"bottom nature"--where bottom is literally "ground" in the sense
of dirt:
The way I feel natures in men and women is this way then.
To begin then with one general kind of them, this a
resisting earthy slow kind of them, anything entering into
them as a sensation must emerge again from through the slow
resisting bottom of them to be an emotion in them. This is
a kind of them. This bottom in them then in some can be
solid, in some frozen, in some dried and cracked, in some
muddy and engulfing, in some thicker, in some thinner,
slimier, drier, very dry and not so dry and in some a
stimulation entering into the surface that is them to make
an emotion does not get into it, the mass then that is
them, to be swallowed up in it to be emerging, in some it
is swallowed up and never then is emerging. (343)
If Constantin seeks repetition not in the vast sea, but on a
ground covered by its dross, Stein pursues it in the "slow
resisting bottom" of language: a relentlessly materialist
environment of words which similarly summons, yet ultimately
deflates, the traditional romanticism of the sublime.
24. Since for Stein, as for Deleuze, all repetition is repetition
with an internal difference ("a feeling for all changing"
[Making 301]), for "getting completed understanding [one] must
have in them an open feeling, a sense for all the slightest
variations in repeating, must never lose themselves so in the
solid steadiness of all repeating that they do not hear the
slightest variation" (294, my emphasis). In contrast to the
sublime's dramatic awes and terrors, "open feeling" is also
described as an emotion of indeterminate emotivity, a state of
utter receptivity that actually slows or impedes reactivity, as
both astonishment and fatigue are wont to do:
Resisting being then as I was saying is to me a kind of
being, one kind of men and women have it as being that
emotion is not poignant in them as sensation. This is my
meaning, this is resisting being. Generally speaking them
resisting being is a kind of being where, taking bottom
nature to be a substance like earth to someone's feeling,
this needs time for penetrating to get reaction. Generally
speaking those having resisting being in them have a slow
way of responding, they may be nervous and quick and all
that but it is in them, nervousness is in them as the
effect of slow-moving going too fast... (Making 347-48, my
emphasis)
The "open feeling" of resisting being is thus an
undifferentiated emotional state, one which lacks the
punctuating "point" of "poignancy." Skepticism is to be expected
here: how can an affective state exist prior to the making of
affective distinctions or values? Since, as Greimas and
Fontanille point out, we tend to automatically assume and
"reiterate uncritically the notion that living beings are
structures of attractions and repulsions," it becomes quite
difficult to imagine how "phoria [might be] thought of prior to
the euphoria/dysphoria split" (3). Yet stuplimity as "open
feeling" could serve as an example of the phoria or
"not-yet-polarized tensive horizon" Greimas and Fontanille ask
us to imagine; a realm of "gluey" emotivity [Stein] which could
perhaps be described as "the individual's possibility
[wandering] about in its own possibility" (Kierkegaard 155).[7]
It is important to note here that Stein describes the kind of
subject with "open feeling" as "that kind of being that has
resisting as its natural way of fighting rather than... that
kind of being that has attacking as its natural way of fighting"
(Making 296, my emphasis). As a mode of "open feeling"
engendered by the syncretism of shock and boredom (that is,
engendered by an encounter with difference prior to its
conceptualization), stuplimity also functions as state of
receptivity that paradoxically enables this tactics of
"resistance" as a form of critical agency; one which the next
section attempts to elaborate.
Linguistic "Heaps"
25. In one of his most influential and much-discussed essays,
Frederic Jameson describes postmodernism as an "aesthetic
situation engendered by the absence of the historical referent,"
or as an ongoing process of simulacratic spatialization
disabling our capacity for temporal organization and hence
relationship to "real historical time" (25). The here and now
becomes the erewhon of the simulacrum, which "endows present
reality and the openness of present history with the spell and
distance of a glossy image" (21). As Jameson continues,
Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as
an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of
our living possibility to experience history in some active
way. It cannot therefore be said to produce this strange
occultation of the present by its own formal power, but
rather merely to demonstrate, through these inner
contradictions, the enormity of a situation in which we
seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations
of our own current experience. (21)
The subject is described as impotent in this regard, having lost
the ability to "organize [his or her] past and future into
coherent experience" (Jameson 25, my emphasis).
26. Since coherent representations of current experience are what
Jameson (in 1984) finds most lacking in postmodernism as an
"aesthetic situation engendered by the absence of the historical
referent," we might take a closer look at how these breakdowns
in reference and coherence are described, and what types of
production they are said to result in (25). A good place to do
so is where Jameson begins to delineate a common feature of
postmodern textuality, or the "schizophrenic" writing he later
associates with Cage, Beckett, and Language poetry:
If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to
extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal
manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent
experience, it becomes difficult to see how the cultural
productions of such a subject could result in anything but
"heaps of fragments" and in practice of the randomly
heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory. These are,
however, very precisely some of the privileged terms in
which postmodernist cultural production has been analyzed
(and even defended, by its own apologists). They are,
however, still privative features... (25, my emphasis)
The language of this passage clarifies what Jameson understands
and expects coherence to be, and what forms he assumes it can
take. In the movement from "heaps of fragments" to "the
fragmentary," used to relate a specific kind of production back
to the practice engendering it, what gets eclipsed from the
sentence (and the theory) is the heap.
27. Effaced perhaps in the desire to emphasize fragmentation in
general (as privation) over its potential effects, this heap
disappears from the critique of postmodernity just as the
historical referent is said to do within the aesthetic situation
it engenders. According to the logic of the paragraph, then,
"heaping" does not appear to be a valid means of cohering, nor a
proper form of organization. Yet insofar as for something to
cohere is for it "to hold together firmly as parts of the same
mass; broadly: STICK, ADHERE," a heap does seem to be a
coherence of some sort. The difference seems to be the degree of
"firmness" involved in the act of sticking, though this is only
a difference of degree; a less than firm consolidation of parts
would still be a proper coherence. We might think here of the
"slowly wobbling," "flabby mass of independent dependent being"
that is Stein's Martha Hersland, or the "slimy, gelatinous,
gluey" substance that is "attacking being" disguised as
"resisting being" (Making 349). As Stein insists, "[s]ome are
always whole ones though the being in them is all a mushy mass."
Thus Jameson seems to have a more specific, dictionary
definition of "coherence" in mind when he excludes from it acts
of holding-together in general. Insofar as it does not seem to
cover particular forms of adhesion perceived as loose, limp, or
unstable (such as heaps or mushy masses), what constitutes a
legitimate form of coherence here would seem to be the process
of making "(parts or components) fit or stick together in a
suitable or orderly way," implying "systematic connection,"
especially in "logical discourse" (Webster's 216, my italics).
In its orientation toward (phallo)logical firmness, this
definition would seem to disavow limpnesses or flaccidities as
equally viable organizations of matter.
28. An obvious point that must be stressed here is that what
constitutes "logical consistency" or "logical discourse" is
always a standard imposed by the cultural status quo. Might not
unpredicted and seemingly "accidental" ways of cohering,
then--even those resulting in unsightly heaps, lumps, and flabby
masses--point to the possibility of new systems, enabling us to
critique traditional assumptions about what "systematic
connection" should look like?
29. Thus if we follow the logic of Jameson's passage, "coherence"
appears to be something that can only be imposed from without,
an abstract concept rather than active manifestation, a
stabilizing, fixed idea of order dictating in advance how
particles might be molded or organized, rather than a particular
activity or becoming by which things are brought together, made,
into some order. Yet if coherence must imply suitability and
orderliness as well as adhesion, then how does one describe the
way hair, teeth, and linotype pieces come to accumulate in
Hamilton's installations, or words and phrases in the poetry of
Kenneth Goldsmith? As a noun rather than a verb, the radical
potentiality of "coherence" to generate new forms and new
theories of formation becomes limited, restricted to the safe
domain of the suitable, the orderly, and the aesthetically
consistent.
30. Both Jameson's and Stein's notions of coherence are informed by
and diverge precisely around this question of "consistency."
Whereas for Jameson the term would seem to imply regularity or
conformity to a particular ideal, an absence of variations or
contradictions, consistency for Stein is a matter of
irregularity and constant flux, as well as a matter of matter:
There must now then be more description of the way each one
is made of a substance common to their kind of them,
thicker, thinner, harder, softer, all of one consistency,
all of one lump, or little lumps stuck together to make a
whole one cemented together sometimes by the same kind of
being sometimes by the other kind of being in them, some
with a lump hard at the centre liquid at the surface, some
with the lump vegetablish or wooden or metallic in them.
Always then the kind of substance, the kind of way when it
is a mediumly fluid solid fructifying reacting substance,
the way it acts makes one kind of them of the resisting
kind of them, the way another substance acts makes another
kind of them the attacking way of them. It and the state it
is in each kind of them, the mixing of it with the other
way of being that makes many kinds of these two kinds of
them, sometime all this will have meaning. (Making 345, my
emphasis)
Hilarious and stuplime, this description usefully eludicates the
main differences between the two notions of coherence. For
Stein, coherence is a mode of substantiation--a material process
of making rather than a value or ideal imposed on things made.
As such, it involves an active potentiality or
becoming--pointing not just to the creation of new "kinds," but
of futural meanings. Secondly, coherence structurally
complexifies, as a process diverse and varied in the ways in
which it can occur, and the forms in which it may appear.
Thirdly, coherence functions as a vast combinatory, in which new
consistencies are produced through the "mixing" or hybridization
of others.
31. We can also see that different kinds of material consistency are
emphasized in the two notions of coherence: firmly constituted
versus mushy or gelatinous; graspable versus slimy. Generally
speaking, Jameson's notion of coherence seems a lot less messy
than Stein's--free of heaps, masses, and lumps. In the passage
above, the disappearance of the "heap" seems related to the fact
that Jameson very much wants to see the heaping of fragments as
indicative of privation rather than accrual--perhaps because the
accrual implied is so, well, unsightly. Yet as those with
agricultural, laundry, postal, or waste disposal experience
might attest, a heap is an organization, though perhaps a not
particularly organized-looking one.
This coming together in them to be a whole one is a strange
thing in men and women. Sometimes some one is very
interesting to some one, very, very interesting to some one
and then that one comes together to be a whole one and then
that one is not any more, at all, interesting to the one
knowing the one. (Stein, Making 382)
This passage suggests that how things cohere or come together is
of intellectual interest to Stein, perhaps more so than the
actual entities produced through this process. Following her
lead we might similarly ask, how do the fragments in Jameson's
"heap of fragments" get heaped? "Practices of the randomly
heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory" would seem to
account for the fragments themselves, but leaves the question of
their particular accumulation unexplained. To further elucidate
this characterization of late twentieth-century experimental
writing, Jameson refers to what he calls Lacan's "schizophrenic"
theory of language, as a "linguistic malfunction" or breakdown
of the relationships between signifiers in the signifying chain
that ultimately results in "the form of a rubble" (27). While
this reference to Lacan seems to elaborate causes for the
fragmentation discussed above, it nevertheless continues to
evade, or withhold acknowledgment of, the particular structure
or organization these fragments assume. Just as the heap in
"heap of fragments" disappears from critical scrutiny, so does
the form in "form of rubble." One wants a less reductive or
dismissive analysis of "breakdown" here, as well as less narrow
definition of "coherence." Are there not, as Stein suggests,
multiple and various ways of heaping and cohering?--as well as
different kinds of linguistic or semiotic rubble? An isolated
fragment may be an "inert passivity" (Jameson 31), but a heap of
fragments is more accurately described as a constituent
passivity, or "passive synthesis"--a term Deleuze applies to the
work of repetition for itself (72).
32. Significantly, Jameson finds the waning of historicity endemic
to postmodernism (as reflected in its textualities) concomitant
with "a waning of affect" and negative affect in particular.
Thus "concepts such as anxiety and alienation... are no longer
appropriate in the world of the postmodern" (14); rather,
Jameson sees them displaced by euphoria, which he describes as a
"joyous" or "hallucinatory exhilaration" (33), an ecstasy or
high. Yet anxiety and alienation in their most hyperbolic
manifestations--shock and boredom--converge in attempts to
negotiate historicity by Beckett and Stein, writers Jameson
himself considers "outright postmodernists" (4). For Stein, the
work of "telling" or "making" history is inseparable from the
labor of making of subjects ("kinds of men and women"), which
itself entails the tedious labor of enumerating,
differentiating, describing, dividing and sorting, and mixing
within the chosen limits of a particular system. Such making
does have its moments of exhilaration, but more generally takes
place as a painstakingly slow, tiring, and seemingly endless
"puzzling" over differences and resemblances. Temporal and
taxonomic "organization" becomes marked by a series of fatigues
rather than of euphoric highs. Stein accordingly acknowledges
the number of failures occurring in this struggle for coherence
(also described as "learning" or "studying" of a new discursive
system), as well the alienation and anxiety it induces: "Mostly
every one dislikes to hear it" (Making 289). With this
projection of a less than receptive audience, writing becomes a
seemingly isolating enterprise for the taxonomist-poet, who
finds herself forced to announce "I am writing for myself and
strangers. This is the only way I can do it" (289). This address
can be read as a more inclusive formulation of audience,
however, rather than a restriction of one, if we perceive
Stein's writing itself as a process of "strangering," of forming
community based on something other than the satisfactory
fulfillment of membership conditions.
33. Reflecting an essentially constructivist world view, everyone
for Stein is a "kind of," and thus strangered. Yet the
alienating effects of this subjection are themselves perceived
as valuable subjects for study: "Mostly always then when any one
tells it to any one there is much discussing often very much
irritation. This is then very interesting" (Making 338). Thus
the narrator finds herself able to continue even at moments
where she finds herself "all unhappy in this writing... nervous
and driving and unhappy" (348). For above all, the making of
"completed history" that is the self-consciously impossible (and
thus unhappy) fantasy of The Making of Americans, which even
more impossibly depends on the consolidation of the completed
history of every single subject, is absolutely synonymous with
repeating:
Often as I was saying repeating is very irritating to
listen to from them and then slowly it settles into a
completed history of them... Sometimes it takes many years
of knowing some one before the repeating in that one comes
to be a clear history of such a one. Sometimes many years
of knowing some one pass before repeating of all being in
such a one comes out clearly from them... This is now more
description of the way repeating slowly comes to make in
each one a completed history of them. (292)
Stein's comment that "sometimes many years pass" before
repeating slowly comes to make a "completed history" finds
contemporary realization in On Kawara's One Million Years (Past)
(1970-1972), a series of ten black, official-looking ledgers,
each containing 2000 pages listing 500 years per page, from
998031 B.C. to 1969 A.D.[8] The sublimity of such a vast amount
of time is trumped by its organization into bureaucratic
blandness; comprehension of one million years is rendered
manageable, if also tedious, when consolidated in a set of ring
binders bearing some resemblance to the complete Starr Report.
Yet this tedium turns back into astonishment when we come to
realize the amount of time and labor it took (two years worth)
to make such a severely minimal product. Dedicated to "All those
who have lived and died," what this piece records is not so much
a completed "history," though it certainly speaks to the fantasy
of or desire for this, but the time spent in the attempt to
organize one even in the most stark and reductive way. The hic
et nunc postmodernism of Kawara may be very different from
Stein's avant le lettre variety, yet the comparison points to
how The Making of Americans deliberately stages its own failure
by setting itself against an impossible fantasy of absolute
historical coherence or explicitness, usually imagined as an
incipient future: "Sometime there will be here every way there
can be of seeing kinds of men and women. Sometime there will be
then a complete history of each one" (290); "Sometime then there
will be a complete history of every one who ever was or is or
will be living" (283). Or even more hyperbolically: "Sometime
there will be a description of every kind of way any one can
know anything, any one can know any one" (311); "sometime there
will be a completed system of kinds of men and women, of kinds
of men and kinds of women" (334).
34. While stuplimity offers no fantasy of transcendence, it does
provide small subjects with what Stein calls "a little
resistance" in their confrontations with larger systems. The
fatigues generated by the system which is The Making of
Americans may be "nervous and driving and unhappy," but such
fatigues can also be darkly funny, as Beckett's Molloy, Keaton,
Harpo Marx, and Pee Wee Herman remind us by their exhausting
routines: running endless laps around a battleship, trying to
enter a door, falling down and getting up again, collapsing in
heaps. Significantly, the humor of these local situations
usually occurs in the context of a confrontation staged between
the small subject and powerful institutions or machines: thus we
have Chaplin versus the assembly line; Keaton versus military
engines such as The Navigator (a supply ship) and The General (a
locomotive); Lucille Ball versus domesticity. Here we might add:
Stein versus her own taxonomy. Critics have persuasively
suggested that Stein's refusal of linear for cyclical or
repetitive time signals a rejection of official (male) history
for a temporality specific to feminine subjectivity, formulated
by Kristeva as "the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm"
(113). Yet this preference for the cycle, one of "driving"
excitations and fatigues, could equally suggest Stein in Chaplin
drag. By adopting this particular cultural role, Stein chooses
the artifice of comedic "types" over the seriousness of
"biological rhythm" as a preferred strategy for feminist and
linguistic change.
35. Just as in Kierkegaard's Repetition, where Constantin describes
himself, consumed by laughter at a farce, as a pile of discarded
clothes, the "kinds" of subjects produced in The Making of
Americans function like garments without bodies, heap-like
outlines, as it were, waiting to be "filled up" with the
repeating (the discourse) that makes them "whole ones."
Whole--but loose as opposed to firm. In The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas, Stein calls attention to the male comedian's
use of misshapen or "misfit" clothes "later so well known on
Charlie Chaplin," clothes that "were all the delight of Picasso
and all his friends" (qtd. in Wagner-Martin 75)--i.e., Stein
herself, well known for her own loose and flapping garb. We see
here again the role of limpnesses or "flabby masses" in
counteracting an oppressive System's fantasies of phallic
virility: the clothes worn by Chaplin so admired by Stein are,
of course, always falling down. Hence slackness becomes
underscored by slacklessness. Stein's love of the wobbling heap
or mushy mass similarly recalls the strange fascination with
dough in Chaplin films. As if in anticipation of Oldenberg's
soft and puffy typewriters and other machines, or Yayoi Kusama's
squishy penis-shaped pillows covered with polka-dots, Chaplin
shapes flabby substance into handcuffs and missiles (Dough and
Dynamite, 1914). Perhaps to ask us to imagine: what might happen
to the machine when the exaggeratedly obedient cog within it,
while continuing to maintain its function, goes limp? As when
the characters played by Chaplin or Keaton, continually in
confrontation with the larger systems enclosing them, repeatedly
fall into heaps? Here we might also imagine the incontinent
Molloy, collapsed under his bicycle, or Murphy, overcome by the
"total permutability" of his biscuit assortment ("edible in a
hundred and twenty ways!") (Beckett, Murphy 97).
36. In the tradition of Beckett and Stein, formulating a materialist
poetic response to the "total permutability" of language is
perhaps what is most at stake for poets like Farrell and
Goldsmith, as well as visual artists like Zweig. For these
postmodern practictioners, the staging of "accidental
concretions," as Constantin describes the comic character in
farce [Kierkegaard 163], strategically enables us to find new
forms of "coherence" in an incoherent world--such as seen in
Alice Notley's feminist epic poem, The Descent of Alette (1996):
"When the train" "goes under water" "the close tunnel" "is
transparent" "Murky water" "full of papery" "full of
shapelessness" "Some fish" "but also things" "Are they made
by humans?" "Have no shape," "like rags" "like soggy
papers" "like frayed thrown-away wash cloths"... [16]
"There is a car" "that is nothing but" "garbage" "Shit &
spittle" "dropped food" "frayed brownness" "dirty matter"
"pressed down & flattened" "Paper piled" "piled on the
floor" "heaped on the benches" "Napkins yellowed" "tampons
bloody"... (17)
Each quoted phrase, in being presented as a citation, becomes
"thick" and carries with it a behindness or prior
context--creating a series of halts or delays in the narrative
produced through their accumulation.[9] There's clearly nothing
"accidental" about this concretion of language, yet the poem
nevertheless seeks to look like one. For like the massive
accumulations of "dirty matter" in Hamilton's installations,
Stein's mushy masses, and the lumps formed by comic actors in
their continual collapses and falls, such concretions challenge
existing notions of form and aesthetic order. We can see how
unsightly "heaping" offers what Stein might call a "little
resistance" strategy for the postmodern subject, always already
a linguistic being, hence always a small subject caught in large
systems. For as Deleuze suggests,
There are two known ways to overturn moral law. One is by
ascending towards the principles: challenging the law as
secondary, derived, borrowed, or 'general'; denouncing it
as involving a second-hand principle which diverts an
original force or usurps an original power. The other way,
by contrast, is to overturn the law by descending towards
the consequences, to which one submits with a too-perfect
attention to detail. By adopting the law, a falsely
submissive soul manages to evade it and to taste pleasures
it was supposed to forbid. We can see this in demonstration
by absurdity and working to rule, but also in some forms of
masochistic behaviour which mock by submission. (5)
This "too-perfect attention to detail" is the main strategy
utilized by Notley, Goldsmith, and Farrell, all of whom
exaggeratedly follow structural laws in their work; Farrell the
days of the calendar ("Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday... "),
Goldsmith the mechanisms of the body ("Swallow. Arm lifts. Arm
drops... "). It appears also the main strategy used by Stein's
endlessly classifying and subdividing narrator in Making of
Americans, as well as by the comic in farce. For as Deleuze also
notes, while one can oppose the law by trying to ascend above
it, one can also do so by means of humor, "which is an art of
consequences and descents, of suspensions and falls" (5, my
emphasis). Like other "falsely submissive souls" before them,
some postmodern American poets follow this path in their
confrontations with the systems encompassing them, formulating a
stand-against by going limp or falling down, among the bits and
scraps of linguistic matter.
Department of English and American Literature and Language
Harvard University
sngai@fas.harvard.edu
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Notes
1. I've imported this expression from Duchamp's TRANS/formers,
Lyotard's study of Duchamp's Large Glass. Lyotard's analysis of
Duchamp's aesthetics as underwritten by a logic of "inexact
precision" and "intelligent stupidity" seems very much in
attunement with the poetics of Stein and contemporary Steinians.
2. Quotations are taken from the FIDGET website, which is
sponsored by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter,
and Stadium, and is available at
. FIDGET was originally
commissioned by the Whitney Museum and was performed in
collaboration with vocalist Theo Bleckmann on June 16, 1998 at
the Whitney. A book and compact disc were issued by the Maryland
Institute of Art in 1998.
3. As Raphael Rubinstein notes in his blurb for this volume,
"Goldsmith's epic litanies and lists bring to the textual
tradition of conceptual art not only an exploded frame of
reference, but a hitherto absent sense of hypnotic beat. Under
its deceptively bland title, No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 attempts no
less than a complete reordering of the things of the world."
4. For those curious about the (original?) text claiming to
"appropriate" the Declaration of Independence which Goldsmith
edits for incorporation into his own conceptual framework, the
self-referential story is written by mathematician David Moser
and cited by Douglas Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas, 37-41.
Ultimately, however, what determines this text's positioning
between MDCLXXXV and MDCLXXXVII in Goldsmith's poem?
encyclopedia? Baedeker? is the fact that it contains the
appropriate number of syllables, and, like the other rhymed
"verses," ends with a sound related to the sound "R": "Harder
harder" [568]. Yet the point is not simply to dramatize a
privileging of form over content, since the hetergenous
assortment of works chosen to build this aggressively prosodic
text pointedly direct us to the untotalizable linguistic world
of the late twentieth century.
5. Frederic Jameson makes this point about boredom alone in
"Surrealism and the Unconscious," his chapter on video in
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:
"Boredom becomes interesting as a reaction to situations of
paralysis and also, no doubt, as defense mechanism or avoidance
behavior" (71-72). Deleuze suggests similar possibilities in
noting that "fatigue is a real component of contemplation" (77).
6. I am convinced this characterization is Sontag's but have
been unable to find source.
7. This description by Constantin of farce and its effect on
spectators suggests that its "frothing foam of words" is yet
another modulation of nonpolarized "phoric tension": "Seeing a
farce can produce the most unpredictable mood, and therefore a
person can never be sure whether he has conducted himself in the
theater as a worthy member of society who has laughed and cried
at the appropriate places" (Kierkegaard 160); thus farce enables
the viewer to "maintain himself in the state in which not a
single mood is present but the possibility of all" (161). Farce
obstructs the "unanimity" of emotional impressions "and,
strangely enough, it may so happen that the one time it made the
least impression it was performed best" (160, my emphasis).
8. Exhibited at PS 1, Deep Storage. New York, 1998.
9. In the Author's Note to The Descent of Alette, Notley offers
"A word about the quotation marks. People ask about them, in the
beginning; in the process of reading the poem, they become
comfortable with them, without necessarily thinking precisely
about why they're there. But they're there, mostly, to measure
the poem. The phrases they enclose are poetic feet. If I had
simply left white spaces between the phrases, the phrases would
be rushed by the reader—read too fast for my musical intention.
The quotation marks make the reader slow down and silently
articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and
with the stresses, I intend. They also distance the narrative
from myself, the author: I am not Alette. Finally they may
remind the reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice:
this is not a thought, or a record of thought-process, this a
story, told."
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