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?