#stuplimity

Like animatedness, irritation, envy, anxiety, stuplimity, and paranoia – nonstrategic affects characterized by weak intentionality and characteristic of the situation of scriveners – disgust does not so much solve the dilemma of social powerlessness as diagnose it powerfully. But while all of the negative affects we have discussed call attention to this problem, the poetics of disgust seems to have drawn us closer to the domain of political theory, perhaps even of political commitment, than these others. In its intense and unambivalent negativity, disgust thus seems to represent the outer limit or threshold of what I have called ugly feelings, preparing us for more instrumental or political efficacious emotions. It therefore brings us to the edge of this project on the aesthetics of minor affects, marking the furthest it can go.

At a panel I participated in at this year’s Modern Language Association convention, on humanistic approaches to climate change, fellow panelist Stephen Sipirstein (Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Oregon) suggested some possible reasons for the inattention to climate change that went beyond the political and economic factors usually cited. He proposed a new theoretical frame for addressing the issue. Climate change as a cultural subject, he argued, is a textbook example of the phenomenon denoted by Sianne Ngai, as “stuplimity.” Like the sublime, the stuplime is overpoweringly vast to the point that our intellectual and sensory faculties are disoriented. Climate change occurs on a scale and timeframe that is so outside of our embodied experience as to be almost incomprehensible. Yet unlike classical formulations of the sublime by Burke and Freud as a source of energy and action, the distinctly modern phenomenon of the “stuplime” is enervating and stupefying, beating us into inaction through an accumulation of incomprehensible information. The stuplime is simultaneously shocking and boring. Each frightening new piece of data or dire prediction, each report of disappearing species or of freakish weather,vanished glaciers or rising sea levels, force us deeper and deeper into a kind of waking stupor in which we seem to lack all agency, rather than mobilizing us into action.