The new "text"

I have spoken too often of Sianne Ngai's book Ugly Feelings without outlining its argument. It's time to make clear what I find problematic about it, rather than let the little allusions perform a work of dismissal.

For I don't think you can dismiss Ngai: her work is important for drawing our attention to the everyday feelings which make up the book (animatedness, envy, irritation, anxiety, stuplimity, disgust, interestedness, and a few others). We see, in her work, that the grand emotions (anger, melancholy, even the belatedly recognized shame) are perhaps overpriveliged in aesthetic theory precisely to the extent that feeling generally has been seen as an ornament or effect of the artwork--not as something in which the artwork is always moving, as it were. In this respect, her emphasis on how feeling can, at times, be more useful for us in than form in diagnosing ideological effects seems genuinely correct (48). It opens the possibility (which, unfortunately, to make her own work seem novel, Ngai doesn't pursue) that historically, feeling has been more useful in this respect, because usually what we first catch about a suspect situation is within the affective register--and this would profitably provides a more accurate and nuanced view of the history of criticism. Those who take issue with the "cultural" or "discursive" turn of literary studies often are shown to have too narrow of a view of what the work of interpretation and criticism does, as if it were only a combination of philology and hermeneutic and not, often, driven precisely by feeling (the extremely dry "Against Theory" of Knapp and Michaels seems to be the most concrete expression of such a view, though also deconstructive critics and, to a lesser extent, structuralist poeticians often share it). In short, in Ngai's work we find the focus powerfully, fully returned to experience in Ngai's work--which is welcome after experience was generally banned as a reference point in poststructuralist times (though it always seemed to resurface in horribly contradictory ways, often through intense emotion), and is still banned in areas like Post-Marxism.

All this culminates in what I think is the strongest and most promising aspect of Ugly Feelings: the focus on the ugly feelings, the feelings associated with negativity. This focus is indispensable when criticism is everywhere under attack for overusing its negativity. What Ngai suggests is that such blame is misplaced (and in fact an instance of the traditional denigration of affect), and that, really, we can strengthen the situation of the critic by cultivating a more robust language for the forms of its negativity--that is, by acknowledging many negative affects. That is, we can produce better (or at least other) forms of negativity if we begin to acknowledge the complexity of the critical situation, and reform things, rather than reduce criticism simply to some monolithic negativity (opposed to positivity). I might add that such a reductive gesture only really has the effect of making criticism seem outmoded, to what, rather than reform, we can (without any trouble) replace. This sort of shop-counter view of method seems suspect--especially after the days of literary/critical theory which this anti-critical critique supposedly acknowledges.

I do, however, want to turn to what I find problematic in Ngai's work, because I see it in many ways hindering the effort to carry out the reform effort which it makes possible. How? Through its general vagueness regarding its theory of feeling. Ngai is out always to find what she calls "objectified emotion"--neither emotion as subjective or affect as observable emotion. And while she's not wrong to consider this objective category in general, she deliberately leaves open the vital question: whose emotion is being objectified? In other words, she makes leaving this question open the necessary gesture for any grasp of feeling. Feeling then becomes a moment where we do not know where the feeling comes from, or what intention to which it corresponds. When we have this general "feeling about feeling," as Ngai calls it, or a sort of confused feeling about whether we should be feeling the way we do, she says we have happened upon a feeling in art.

Against this gesture, I'd ultimately say that we need to answer the question of whose feeling this is, or where it originates, otherwise the feeling indeed originates in the artwork, merely as the quality or even property of it that seems to lack an origin or intention.

To show how such a reinsertion of Ngai's feeling back into the artwork occurs, we can look at her analysis of tone. One can see the problem even in her description of tone as "organizing affect" (that is, qua organization, as a work, something to be decoded and read in itself). For we really have to ask ourselves--what is involved in reading something like tone? Certainly the tone of a work can't be read.

Or, at least, this is what the New Critics actually understood about tone, even though Ngai claims (and needs to claim) that such a gesture divorced tone precisely from feeling: fundamentally, these Critics said, you can't read a tone because the tone is carried with the message, with the utterance, with what you read, and indeed becomes a part of it. Tone is a means through which you grasp what you read, not an end that can be read alongside what you read.

And, we might add, this is also what Marxists understood about aura--that it was not a property of the work but the means by which a certain change in the structure of perception could be registered as the effect of technological reproducibility--that is, a change in the productive forces as they affected the production and consumption of art.

Why do I bring up this second, seemingly unrelated point on aura? Because Ngai absurdly ends up seeing tone as aura--except that it is then cut off from every crucial origin in the means of production that I just mentioned, or rather everything that makes aura, aura.

I'll briefly summarize the argument. As we said, tone for her is not something appended to a message. What is it then? The general atmosphere created by the artwork. It has nothing to do with the communicative function of language, or with meaning in general, but is something that we grasp about the work on a general holistic level. But while this holism is somewhat welcome (I'll get to this near the end), though only as something prior to the work of criticism, I'd say it isn't an accident that her first example of this is from film, not literature (Double Indemnity). There we can more readily see the atmospheric element of a work, which Ngai begins to characterize in terms of distance to it. She then begins to qualify this distance (which supposedly is tone) in terms of feeling: it becomes something like the general interest of the work, motivating you to look at it but always resisting representation within it--especially in any form, with which tone should not be confused. Thus, tone becomes the general connection you to a work but which itself is not meaningful--and therefore is not there to enhance meaning, or be carried by meaning at all. Ngai thus calls tone "noise." But then, recalling its function as highlighting the work, setting it off, she stresses how this noise becomes the perception of a distance, or rather the distancing that allows you to pay attention to the work in a particular way. And thus, this noise which is tone becomes like "a more specific, value-inflected version of aura" (87). Indeed, she even has the gall to then turn everything on its head and claim that everything critics have been calling aura is tone (88).

I've presented this general summary of the (somewhat overly complex) argument to show how far we are going in order to 1) get rid of the notion of tone as something which has to do with meaning or its origin, and thus align tone with something not present in the work, and 2) at the same time make tone immanent to the artwork, as what allows you to pay attention to that work.

Instead of affirming that this is tone, I'd rather stress that this is really just what allows the notion of the artwork to expand--an operation Ngai performs in order to remove feeling's origin, or say that it's lack of origin is constitutive of it. Thus, what happens is that we end up making tone something like the only other concept that claimed to drop its situation in subject or object, and use its lack of origin as its foundation: textuality. Tone becomes textuality, and feelings texts that can be read. In short, we achieve the same dubious sort of thing that the expansion of the notion of the "text" did after Barthes and Derrida, only with a different name. "Feeling" is the new "text."

How? As I said, for the New Critics tone is a means, which clarifies the message (for a summary of this see the "Context Theory of Meaning" very clearly outlined by I.A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric). Texts, on the other hand, appear anywhere we find something interpretable, precisely because we lose the ability to mobilize the qualities intrinsic to them (for there are none--there is no origin/meaning) and which require something more than mere reading to make sense. In this way, tone becomes something like an end--and thus something which can be read in itself (as we said before was absurd for a New Critic).

To be sure, Ngai doesn't claim to let tone be merely an end: for her, tone as the organizing affect of a work is supposedly not reducible to the work either. Rather, "Tone is the dialectic of objective and subjective feeling that our aesthetic encounters inevitably produce" (30).

But the effect of such a statement is to only make tone more readable--and that, I claim, should make us extremely suspicious. For if it really were a dialectic of the subjective and objective, it wouldn't be able to be talked about in the way Ngai talks about it: as what doesn't add to the meaning but (by virtue of this very fact--such are the paradoxes of Barthesian textuality) becomes able to be interpreted. For suddenly we're in the practice of talking about the emotions of a work, the affects of a work, all with their origin where such phrases indeed say they are... the work (only as expanded). We suddenly begin to speak as if people only had feelings derivatively.

On this note, and as I said earlier, it is telling that the first example we get is of a film (an object which was an intense object of textualization in the days of theory, such that now we talk with ease about films as "texts"). In tone and feeling we ultimately have, I think, something that can't really be grasped adequately on the literary level except in the form of a general perception about what the text is doing--that is, in terms of textuality that are ultimately able to be extended to other forms (indeed, we're left wondering whether what Ngai says even may be applied to a non-aesthetic domain). And thus, when it comes time to really understand, through tone, the feeling of "stuplimity" (the biggest hit of the book), it is no accident that we go to Stein, for whom the function of meaning is (in Ngai's reading--I don't think this can be endorsed wholly) suspended. There we begin to talk about the way Stein's work feels--and while this may grasp elements of what Stein is accomplishing, it in no way treats her work as different from any other system of textuality which presents itself in similar organizations.

For where other theories ground this sort of feeling in an origin, we have here no way to explain feeling except as the structure of the object (Stein's work, the texts, are stuplime)--a structure which also allegedly (but only allegedly) makes it something non-objective. In short, tone is precisely what Ngai muddles in order to allow her to make it readable on top of or beside the meanings of the work.

And so Ngai gets confused when Fredric Jameson starts talking about Duane Hanson, since he seems to be raising issues similar to hers:

The problem [tone] poses for analysis is strikingly similar to the problem posed by uncertainties concerning a feeling's subjective or objective status [she will go on, as we saw, to say these problems are the same]. For we can speak of a literary text whose global or organizing affect is is disgust, without this necessarily implying that the work represents or signifies disgust, or that it will disgust the reader (though in certain cases it may do so). Exactly "where," then, is the disgust? Similarly, the "joyous intensity" Jameson ascribes to the work of Duane Hanson in his aforementioned essay on postmodernism does not imply that Hanson's hyperrealistic culptures of tired, elderly museum guards and sagging, overweight tourists represent or express joy, or that they make the viewer feel joyous--as opposed to, say, mildly amused or unsettled. Who is the subject, then, of the euphoria to which Jameson refers? Should this feeling belong to a subject? How is it even produced by the object from which it ostensibly emanates?
-Ugly Feelings, 30.

What she sees in Jameson's analysis is something similar to her notion that emotions are somewhere in the text and outside it, but then confuses what Jameson does with the reading of a text, rather than what he is up to--cognitive mapping (it is telling that Ngai uses Jameson's term precisely as he says not to use it: i.e. as the notion of a map of the mind, somehow both literalized and metaphorized: "affective disorientation" she says, is "being lost on one's one 'cognitive map' of available affects," 14). Such a Jamesonian project situates texts within an area of cultural production/logic, which, in a Lukásian manner, reflects (or represents) the totality of the means of production in the form of a consciousness. For Jameson, unlike Ngai, has a definitive answer to the subjective/objective question--for Jameson, feeling is both at once. What feeling precisely isn't is neither, which is what the ideology of the text (which Jameson himself analyzed) ends up turning Ngai's feeling into. In short, Jameson is confusing to Ngai because she doesn't understand that Marxists (as well as New Critics) don't read texts.

My final points here follow from this last point--namely, Ngai's inability to see an appropriately social dimension to the work (although she seems to make headway in understanding feeling as somewhat social--or rather non-individual--and looking at social issues [not works] mediated by feeling, like in the chapter on envy). First, Ngai's work represents to me a (somewhat welcome, somewhat suspect) attempt to read prose as poetry, where such holistic reading is more common. Where there is this sort of reading in poetry, however--indeed people will talk about the effects of a poem, or a stanza, as shifting the general movement of a poem or introducing a tension, or indeed changing in tone--this is ultimately subordinated to a task of determining meaning or talking about form. It ultimately remains pre-critical (when it is reading: otherwise it becomes theorization, where the texts are used merely as allegories). Which brings me directly to my last point: I take Ngai's effort largely as a sort of formalism that doesn't want to be formalism. The formalism that goes to talk about tone and how a poem feels, ends up always grounding its statements in the form of the poem. This has the downside of making the poem into a bit of an object, but the upside of insisting clearly on where the feeling is, and either treating the poem as a subject or as an object. And while treating a poem as a subject is indeed odd, what Ngai risks, in waffling between these two, is basically the same thing--and this follows from the logic of textuality, where effects are produced in the text by the text (as if it had its own agency). The way out of this dilemma would be adopting something like the Marxist viewpoint--perhaps the ones we find in Raymond Williams (who she cites, oddly as we can now see, as a forerunner of her work), in Jameson, and to a lesser extent in Lukács (as well as Benjamin and Adorno), who ground feeling in not just the experience of a work of art, but in social experience. Another would be to ground feeling in form.