While I work my way through your very interesting final projects, I wanted to share a piece in yesterday’s NYT** about “slop.” I was dimly aware of the term from my teens at home, but this piece stretches the boundaries of “slop” to embrace a wide range of cultural fields and practices in ways that resonate with a number of things that we read. The author points to “slop bowls”: the trend towards modular fast-food options that basically throw abstract selectable components into a uniform bowl, often with formulas on the wall–PROTEIN + GREEN + RICE + ADD-INs–like a chemistry lab. And to “fast fashion” as a form of “slop” dress: ultra-cheap mail order from Temu et al. makes it possible to continually wear new things that … all look the same, are ill-fitted, and have a bland color palette. And especially the algorithmically served and limitless procession of cheaply-produced (and often AI-made) video content that’s designed to keep us minimally engaged so we remain on the platform and have our “behavioral surplus” extracted, kind of like unwitting mental plasma donation.

The piece name-checks Lacan, briefly, on the babble or “filler” analysands sometimes produce, as a form of “slop,” but for me, the closer theoretical cousins are the “cruel optimism” of Berlant, where what we supposedly want (new ‘fits, dopamine hits) hurts us, and Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” revision of Marx’s “alienated labor.” In a slop-filled cultural sphere, we experience an alienation from even consumption, where the things we desire and buy have some of the empty/abstract qualities of abstract waged “labor power” that Marx attributes to mid-19thC modern labor.

Enjoy your slop, everyone, and have a great summer.

** You know, right, that you can get free digital access to the NYT via Hunter’s Library, right? Take advantage while you can!!

While scrolling social media over the past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about our affect theory readings, particularly Ngai’s Ugly Feelings. Ngai doesn’t really engage with the digital, which makes sense since the text is from 2005. Yet so much of her argument works for me in helping to articulate how it feels to be online right now. To me, being on Instagram, TikTok or Twitter (sorry, I know it’s X) is characterized by the experience of an array of shallow micro-emotions – or maybe, affective states – that are often just different shades of bad. Obviously, there are silly or funny videos that might make me laugh and there are tiny moments of joy. But more often than not, I feel Ngai’s uglier feelings: “moods like irritation and anxiety, for instance, are defined by a flatness or ongoingness entirely opposed to the ‘suddenness’ on which Aristotle’s aesthetics of fear depends” (2645). And I often feel irritated or anxious or paranoid even if the content itself leans neutral or positive (fashion styling, animal videos, makeup tutorials). Like “anxiety, distraction, and cynicism,” which Ngai describes as “haunt[ing] the workday like a mood that cannot be escaped,” our current political, economic and cultural moment also permeates social media like a collective bad mood. But often, these emotions flit by so quickly (as I cruise through video after video), that it’s difficult to clock them – and that’s why affect theory’s ability to help capture this kind of pre-conscious, pre-cognitive state resonates with me.

Ngai’s point about how these more minor emotions might stifle political power also helps explain why we may not be moved to action even when we consume content that desperately, urgently warrants attention… like first-person accounts out of Gaza or existentially dark climate  news. The affective experience of our political situation feels connected to Foucault’s point about biopower’s displacement of disciplinary power. Maybe Ngai and Foucault’s ideas describe a one-two punch of disaffection. Just as it might’ve been more straightforward to cut off the head of the classical, pre-modern sovereign, maybe it was also easier to rise to resistance when the grand emotions dominated our experience of political life.

There’s one part of Ngai’s argument, though, that didn’t land as much for me in our contemporary moment. On p. 2646, Ngai notes that “something about the cultural canon itself seems to prefer higher passions and emotions–as if minor or ugly feelings were not only incapable of producing ‘major’ works, but somehow disabled the works they do drive from acquiring canonical distinction.” I’d argue that in the years since Ugly Feelings’ publication, these minor affects have become so dominant to our experience of life that they’ve also made their way into the contemporary literary canon. As with our discussion of White Lotus, we see anxiety, irritation, envy and paranoia in a number of “great” recent literary works. I’m thinking of the disaffected female protagonists in the new canon of so-called “cool girl literature,” also referred to sometimes as “hot girl” or “sad girl” lit. As Charlotte Stroud writes in The New Statesman, the cool girl novelist’s “prose is bare” and “her characters are depressed and alienated.” I think novels like Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (which is kind of the poster child of this subgenre) have reached the status of contemporary classic because they’ve traded in the classical emotions for these “sentiments of disenchantment.” Now, our major works might deal in minor feelings. But, like our social media content, they have yet to move us toward major change.

I recently bought the first body weight scale of my adult life. Remembering the robust and everlasting mechanical scale I spent my childhood and adolescence with, I assumed procuring such a mundane device would be anything but unspectacular. What a misconception! Once the sleek, disc-looking thing came out of the box, I realized with consternation that I inadvertently purchased a “smart” scale. Holding the ugly glass plate in one hand and the user manual with its gibberish about “tracking body composition metrics” in addition to instructing me to scan a QR code, install an app, and open an account in the other hand, I was ready to return the odious gadget and just forget about getting a scale altogether. I just wanted a damn scale! Only after spending at least half an hour on the internet before coming across a well-hidden user forum post claiming that the scale can be utilized despite my unwillingness to create an account and install an app (and providing all my information) did I grudgingly decide to keep it. Something as ostensibly trivial as a weight scale tucked away under a bathroom vanity has now been engineered into a surveillance device with an insatiable appetite for our data. Shoshana Zuboff cautions that gadgets such as the so-called Nest thermostat and its “brethren [smart] devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power,” and that what once might have originated as a common good-oriented approach to smart/ubiquitous computing with at least some guardrails in place (e.g. “Aware Home” project), has by now been taken over by unbridled market forces claiming total ownership of the extracted knowledge. While previously the raw material fueling capitalism was at least to a certain extent distant from humans, in surveillance capitalism human life experience itself has become (free!) raw material. The business model: Prediction of future human behavior, which is achieved by reaching into our most intimate spaces and mining them for free “raw material” that will be reinterpreted into behavioral data. Ultimately, “these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that [Zuboff calls] behavioral futures markets” (15). The goal is to know and influence human behavior so that it leads to profitable (and predictable) outcomes. Zuboff recognizes in this a “new species of power” that “knows and shapes human behavior toward other’s ends. Instead of an armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of ‘smart’ networked devices, things, and spaces” (16). In this set-up we are not surveillance capitalism’s customers; we are the raw material. The enterprises trading in surveillance capitalism’s markets for future behavior are the actual customers. Zuboff rightly deems surveillance capitalism as a “rogue force” that wrecks foundations crucial for the survival of a democratic society. Overall, Zuboff draws a rather bleak picture of the future. Yet, she does mention that the “overthrow of the people’s sovereignty” and the concomitant demise of the Western liberal democratic model can be reverted (28). However, since the publication of Zuboff’s book in 2019, things have only gotten worse. Just think about the signification of the smirking tech oligarchs surrounding Trump at his inauguration. How swiftly some of them adjusted their stances and consolidated behind a right-wing politician. Or Zuckerberg’s recent ramblings about the need for “masculine energy.” Think about the findings of scholars and UN investigators that Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar. Or DOGE’s post-puberty tech-bros who fantasize about being “disruptors” and get off from wreaking havoc in unionized workplaces and destroying people’s livelihoods. Zuboff didn’t quite foresee how much worse a situation we find ourselves in just a few years after the publication of her book.

In “Ugly Feelings” Sianne Ngai discusses feelings that have emerged in modern times such as irritation, envy, anxiety, paranoia, and boredom as a result of late capitalism in which individuals may feel powerless or agency is limited. She compares these to more ‘classical’ feelings such as rage, passion, and pity, which she sees as more productive affects. As I read, I found it difficult to discern whether or not Ngai approves of ‘ugly feelings’ because she describes them as necessary for the society we live in, but mostly speaks negatively of them. She notes, “central and perversely functional such affective atti­tudes and dispositions have become, as the very lubricants of the economic system which they originally came into being to oppose” (2643). She’s saying that these affects are necessary in order to function in a capitalist society, which honestly perplexed me since she’s also speaking about these affects in a negative light. This also made me think about the fact that today, there is less stigmatization surrounding mental health and it is discussed a lot more than it used to be. Perhaps ugly feelings such as anxiety have always existed, but 1. are acknowledged more in modern times and 2. are exacerbated by not only capitalism, but other pressures such as relationships, societal expectations, health concerns, etc. 

Another point of Ngai’s that struck me was her contrast between these ugly feelings and more classical ones: “…the nature of the sociopolitical itself has changed in a manner that both calls forth and calls upon a new set of feelings— ones less powerful than the classical political passions, though perhaps more suited, in their ambient…” (2643). Using the word ‘powerful’ struck me here, because who’s to say if one emotion is more or less powerful than another? I have definitely felt anxiety in stronger ways than I have rage, so I guess I’m grappling with the question of why are ugly feelings not as productive or admirable as classical ones? Ngai addresses this later on by discussing the fact that ugly feelings exist in a sort of cycle and are characterized by ‘flatness’ or ‘ongoingness’ versus the ‘suddenness’ of classical feelings (or rats and possums versus lions). This was also an idea I was grappling with, because wouldn’t it be considered a good thing to control your emotions and not have such strong, overdramatic reactions? Should we all really be living our lives like a Shakespearean tragedy? I also found her mention of Ahab interesting since he is a character I have analyzed a lot, and he ultimately caused his own downfall and misery due to his immense rage. Perhaps Ngai here is suggesting that classical feelings are good for the drama of literature, but not necessarily good for real life.

I was also a bit confused about Ngai’s notion of subjectivity versus objectivity. Similar to art or aesthetics which she mentions frequently, aren’t all emotions or affects subjective? She says that, “Unlike emotions, affective states are neither structured narratively nor organized in response to our interpretations of situations.” (2649) I was a bit confused about how affects are not in response to situations, but she says that affects are more ambiguous or not connected to action. Ngai asserts, “While one can be irritated without realizing it, or knowing exactly what one is irritated about, there can be nothing ambiguous about ones rage or terror, or about what one is terrified of or enraged about” (2650). The way she phrased this made a bit more sense to me, because anxiety and irritation can sort of sneak up on you, but with rage and terror it’s very clear where those emotions stem from. Towards the end of the essay, she also makes it clear that ugly feelings are different from classical ones in terms of intensity rather than quality which also clarified the differences between the two a bit more for me.

In Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai reorients affect theory by examining emotional states often dismissed as trivial, unproductive, or aesthetically unpleasing, such as irritation, envy, anxiety, paranoia, and her coined term stuplimity. These “ugly feelings,” she argues, reflect the suspended agency and ambivalence endemic to late capitalist life. According to Sianne, she says how “At the core of Ugly Feelings, then, is a very old predicament-the question of relevance-that has often haunted the discipline of literary and cultural criticism” (page 2642). She continues by stating how “the evidence here would suggest that the very effort of thinking the aesthetic and political together-a task whose urgency seems to increase in proportion to its difficulty in a increasingly anti-utopian and functionally differentiated society-is a prime occasion for ugly feelings” (page 2642) Rather than producing catharsis or driving political action, they mark an impasse, which is a condition of being stuck in structures too vast to navigate or dismantle directly. By focusing on these affective states, Ngai broadens the scope of literary and cultural criticism, inviting us to consider what seemingly minor feelings reveal about subjectivity, power, and the conditions of everyday life.

Drawing from theorists like Adorno, Tomkins, and Williams, Ngai challenges the binary of affect versus critique. Instead, she proposes that feelings like irritation and envy are not only worthy of analysis but are themselves forms of critique and embodied responses to social and structural tensions. Her approach intersects with feminist and queer theory, especially in its focus on experiences often coded as feminine, emotional, or irrational. According to Sianne, “If ugly feelings is a bestiary of affects, in other words, it is one filled with rats and possums rather than lions, its categories of feeling generally being, well, weaker and nastier.” (page 2645) These “ugly” effects, while politically ambiguous, are deeply expressive of marginalization, economic frustration, and constrained agency.

Ngai’s work is also prescient in the context of contemporary internet culture, where ambient envy, paranoia, and ironic detachment are widespread. In resisting heroic narratives and embracing minor affect, Ugly Feelings offers a compelling aesthetic and political framework—one that acknowledges how emotions, even the unpleasant ones, carry critical weight in both literature and life.

For instance, the affective economy of social media: doomscrolling, subtweeting, influencer envy, and the constant pressure to be “relatable” or “authentic” for public consumption. These platforms feed on exactly the kind of low-level, ambient feelings Ngai theorizes. Feelings like envy aren’t just private but also structurally cultivated. Anxiety is no longer an individual pathology, but a collective baseline. The irritations and micro-frustrations of everyday digital life, such as the buffering screen, the ghosted text, and the algorithm’s opaque logic mirror, reflect Ngai’s view of the subject trapped within vast, impersonal systems.

Ngai’s emphasis on the stuckness of these emotions (what she calls their “obstructed agency”) offers a lens for understanding the current malaise of political fatigue and affective overload. In many ways, her ugly feelings reflect the contemporary condition: saturated with information, yet powerless; expressive, yet unheard. Rather than dismiss these feelings as useless, Ngai urges us to see them as historically and politically symptomatic. They don’t point the way forward, but they reveal where we are. In that recognition lies their radical potential.

We won’t have much time to review biographical details today, so I wanted to share these moving tributes from THE NATION,from academics, writers, and activists, to the late, great Lauren Berlant (who died in 2021).

Someone I was talking with brought up Mirror Neurons, which, according to the NIH “respond to actions that we observe in others. The interesting part is that mirror neurons fire in the same way when we actually recreate that action ourselves.”  This is quite similar to what Lacan writes of in the mirror stage, particularly the notion that human knowledge is based upon human interactions or paranoiac (1114). Continuing in that section Lacan writes “I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality— or as they say, between the Innenwelt and Umwelt (Inner and Outer World) (1114).”  Imago being, as I understand it, the effect during the moment when a subject assumes an image, so a moment of “identification” as Lacan identifies it (1112).  Thus inferred the idea that there is the asymptotic relationship with the ideal self in the imago, at that moment in the mirror stage when the child looks at the mirror and sees himself in a stable, ideal way. What seems so interesting with Mirror Neurons is that it shows how that form of identification and knowledge through others even oneself is in fact activated by neurons, or at least thought to be. So if there is a natural response to seeing ourselves and/or another, then it follows that cultural productions are how we gain an identity, through painting, film, advertising and just images. There is obviously not a singular way of seeing others and having a singular emotional response through art, or a mirror, or just walking around. In this idea I found myself thinking about Ways of Seeing by John Berger in relation to this identity formation. In the first chapter, or section, he writes that through the camera and mass production of images “today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way (16).”  All of a sudden art is cut and copied and reproduced (Berger cites Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as a major source) and words added on and around art to signify a plethora of ideas.  So how we learn and identify becomes all the more influenced by the amount of images we see now than we would have observed in the past.  We touched on this in class, both with Mulvey in the profusion of more film that does not challenge what she has found in narrative and in social media as an example of the mirror stage and that asymptotic relationship to the ideal self. Thinking more about the consumption of art now, particularly film, is that it becomes reduced to clips, partials of the original. We are able to watch a film for a few minutes, pause it, fast forward, return to it or disregard it, in ways that were once not even available modes of consumption. I think Berger was making the similar case for painting, that what once required going to the museum, or another place, to see a Da Vinci or a Petroglyph can now (and then) be substituted or cropped or edited to show a part of whole piece and experience. This creates a jarring or disharmonious way of identifying, as a part is missing.  I wonder what Lacan might write about how we identify now with this profusion of images and videos?  This is not to say this is negative or positive, but just that our formation of an identity and how we see ourselves must be changed in the contemporary moment. Or perhaps Lacan would make the claim that our selves are always fragmented and never resolved and that has historically been the case and will continue to be so? Or perhaps in some coming moment our mirror neurons will be overloaded as we watch people laugh, cry, scream and feel other emotions within such close proximity and time on our screens?

In Sianne Ngai’s “From Ugly Feelings”, it examines the conflicts that exist between societal issues within aesthetically pleasing literature and exemplar literature that describes ongoing issues without a layer of ambiguity. Ngai challenges the manners in which traditional literature for the “privileged” is not meant to hold moments of uncomfortability so as to not generate any emotions but instead formulate opinions. And while this may be useful when distinguishing between life saving advancements in medicine or law, the same does not apply when referencing social manners in society. Ngai is emphasizing that literature has the potential, like art, to invoke emotions, even the emotions that make us uncomfortable. It is important to sit in those emotions in order to allow ourselves the ability to self reflect and perhaps sit with any “guilt” that surfaces. 

“Aesthetic autonomy in Aesthetic Theory suggests that literature may in fact be the ideal space to investigate ugly feelings that obviously ramify beyond the domain of the aesthetic proper, since the situation of restricted agency from which all of them ensue is one that describes art’s own position in a highly differentiated and totally commodified society.” (2642) Ngai is describing the ways in which  literature should be used as an outlet to discuss “feelings” or difficult conversations in order to generate thinking.  What can be fundamentally difficult could be the ways in which society responds to uncomfortable situations that involve intertwining feelings with reality. Having to describe or view an event or conversation as difficult pushes away from the “aesthetically” pleasing aspect of being in complete agreement with a topic. Sitting with the uncomfortable truth of other issues happening in society and not the commodified versions given in order to keep the image of a well structured living is uncomfortable. While topica may not be structured or fit to the social norms currently instilled in societal expectations of aesthetically pleasing, these “ugly feelings” are a representation of real issues that occur that can not and should not be masked as art in order to be important or relevant. Ngai is describing how the ability to view past this “commodified society” is needed urgently for societal issues to be viewed and taken seriously. Looking beyond what is considered “aesthetic” and more into how it is a part of society and how it impacts lives that do not conform to the typical norm.

In “Ugly Feelings,” Sianne Ngai is working with something called “affect theory,” which to some extent involves parsing apart what is subjective and what is objective about feelings. Divided into categories, emotions and feelings are attached to the first-person subject, belong to a personal or social context, and are therefore (historically) deemed too idiosyncratic to categorize or interpret theoretically; contrarily an “affect” is removed from individualistic or social context enough for us to get away with analyzing it. In a way, it seems the sort of permission granted by distinguishing “affect” from “feelings/emotion” enabled discourse about feelings more broadly to return to fields like literary criticism. Although Ngai is clearly well-versed in the finer distinctions established by other affect theorists, she establishes her own for the sake of discussing the “ugly feelings” that form the subject of her book. She writes in her introduction:

The difference between affect and emotion is taken as a modal difference of intensity or degree, rather than a formal difference of quality or kind. My assumption is that affects are less formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure altogether; less “sociolinguistically fixed,” but by no means code-free or meaningless; less “organized in response to our interpretations of situations,” but by no means entirely devoid of organization or diagnostic powers.  (2650)

Arguing that they don’t fully exist outside of language, Ngai posits that even the dilute, ambient, negative feelings (such as paranoia, envy, or irritation) merit serious discussion. She’s particularly interested in how they differ from stronger, more “cathartic” emotions (such as anger or fear) one might find driving the plot in classic literature. Within the vein of the subject-object issue presented by “affect theory,” Ngai is considering the same theoretical tension within a literary text: when considering a novel’s feel, do we owe that to the story itself or to the reader? Are there “feelings” within the text (perhaps described as experienced by the characters or inflected by narrator’s voice) that cause the reader to feel their own “feelings”? 

With that strange layering of feelings on feelings in mind, I was struck by Ngai’s relating of irony—a literary term indeed—to “ugly feelings.” She argues it’s easy to feel ashamed about feeling envious, or anxious about feeling malaise (something pretty much anyone I think could relate to), and that the distance that comes with doubling feels familiar with the “ironic attitude.” She writes:

In their tendency to promote what Susan Feagin calls “meta-responses” (since it is hard to feel envy without feeling that one should not be feeling envy, reinforcing the negativity of the original emotion), there is a sense in which ugly feelings can be described as conducive to producing ironic distance in a way that the grander and more prestigious passions, or even the moral emotions associated with sentimental literature, do not. (2645)

Ngai’s writing obviously feels very relevant to the postmodern condition—at least in sense that unplaceable, inarticuable malaise and irony seem tactically entwined. It’s interesting to think about when trying to map the feel of our current era’s political satire on both the right and left, or the relationship between earnesty and the “cringe” it often produces. If you can’t cry, laugh—if your feelings have you frozen and inert, try ironic distance?

Ahead of Monday’s class, I wanted to share a few links that might help you better grasp what Mulvey and Silverman are getting at in their revisions of Lacan’s work:

Here’s a splendid 20 min lecture on Mulvey’s argument. The lecturer has an extensive array of podcasts on hundreds of theoretical pieces, including some stuff that we’ve read together, here.

Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

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And here are some examples (with very little contextualization) from the kinds of classic Hollywood cinema that Mulvey analyzes:

Laura Mulvey-Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema examples

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And here’s a moving short piece on the model and actress Brooke Shields’ reflections on her being rendered as an object for others’ scopophilia in today’s New York Times. It’s not super theoretical but does convey a vivid sense of the human cost of the patriarchal cinematic apparatus that Mulvey analyzes [remember that you can get free digital access via the Library’s site]:

Opinion | Brooke Shields, Social Media and the Public’s Withering Gaze (Published 2023)

Some kids raised in the spotlight feel that their formative years were stolen.

Finally, here’s Hunter Library’s copy of the Harun Farocki film that Silverman close-reads in her excerpt:

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