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?

In the “Incitement to Discourse” chapter from The History of Sexuality, Foucault examines the relationship between language and sex in a historical context: how it became a topic in discourse first through the act of describing sins of the flesh in the confessional practices of the Middle Ages, and then dispersed into discussions within solemn “scientific” fields from economics to psychiatry to justice. He argues that this shift, particularly the “subjugation” of sex “at the level of language” (1421) onto the “objectification of sex in rational discourses” (1431) is the true culprit for our default understanding of Victorian-era sexual repression. Primed by our earlier readings, we can assume that any qualitative records of sexual activity from centuries ago—however dissected, neutered, or abstracted—were no reflection of how people were actually having sex in reality. But Foucault makes a rather compelling case that these records reveal no indication that people were mum on the topic, either. He seems to believe that in fact, it’s sex examined under fluorescent lights, talking about sex ad nauseam under the guise of another topic, and even contriving “devices” to generate more discourse about sex, that give the subject the sensationalist feeling of danger: that it is the secret to be exploited (1432). “Censorship” is the very apparatus driving a societal rambling-on about sex. Foucault writes:

“Sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence. From the singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse, to the manifold mechanisms which, in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice, incite, extract, distribute, and institutionalize the sexual discourse, an immense verbosity is what our civilization has required and organized…it is possible that where sex is concerned, the most long-winded, the most impatient of our societies is our own.” (1430-1431).

Although I think Foucault only mentions two plausible works of literature in this selection as examples of sexuality relegated to discourse (The 120 Days of Sodom by Sade and the anonymously-written My Secret Life), I’m interested in how the so-called Victorian Puritanism appears in sexier, not-so-scientific contexts. Foucault argues, in the case of his two examples, that the libertines’ memoiristic “telling all” about their sexual activities are no exception to Victorian reticence, but rather are an extension of the Christian pastoral urge to confess (which is actually the urge to return to the desire and prolong, purge, or modify it). With Victorian-era scandalous texts in mind, I thought of Madame Bovary—that Flaubert’s prosecution for its obscenity is what drove its initial popularity in the nineteenth century—and that this event was indeed the opposite of “silencing” conversations around sexuality. Yet it’s important to note that in the hands of today’s reader, Madame Bovary is hardly titillating in a truly sexual way; which is to say that there are no overtly-depicted sex scenes comparable to what Foucault summarizes in Sade and My Secret Life. Regarding the way sex scenes were handled by Flaubert, there’s a passage from William Gass’s book On Being Blue I’ve always liked, from a section in which he rather funnily discusses how different authors handle sex: 

“Flaubert directs our eyes to the room Emma Bovary commits her adulteries, and has the sense, so often absent in his admirers, to be content with that […] How is it that these simple objects can receive our love so well that they increase it? I answer: because they become concepts, lighter than angels, and all the more meaningful because they began as solids, while the body of the beloved […] escapes our authority and powers, lacks every dimension, in that final moment, but the sexual, yet will not remain in the world it’s been sent to, and is shortly complaining of an ache […] It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.” (31-32). 

Does euphemism, metonymy, or other figurative approaches to sex that might occur in literature fit into the repressive objectification or exploitation of sexuality on Foucault’s terms? Flaubert has a cheeky description of Emma and Leon’s carriage ride that focuses on the quality of the road, the various inclines, and how hard the horses are working, instead of the sex the two characters are likely having inside of the carriage. Does that gesture de-sex or “Victorianize” the matter simply by fictionalizing it in the first place, and then abstracting it from ‘what it really is’? Or is Flaubert’s move still somehow less rationalizing than Sade or My Secret Life’s extensions of the Christian pastoral rambling? It may be beside Foucault’s point in this section to compare blunt memoiristic accounts with shier fictional forays into sex, as they’re both excuses to force the subject into language, regardless of their expressive qualities.  

In “The Reality Effect,” Barthes investigates the purpose of what we might today call “filler description” in literary fiction. By calling on passing details in a short story by Flaubert, he remarks that while these details may have some functional relevance with regard to a fiction’s characters or atmosphere, they’ve been overlooked in literary criticism because they don’t directly pertain to narrative structure. He goes on to explain that “insignificant notation” is detached from what we think of as narrative because it lacks a “predictive” quality. That means it isn’t temporal, or related to a chain of cause-and-effect that gives substance to a plot; it isn’t “significant” to this sort of contextual ordering that produces the legible “meaning” that de Saussure talked about with regard to language. Barthes then makes a brief foray into the aesthetic role of description and gives Flaubert some credit where it’s due: in his novel Madame Bovary, Flaubert “paints” his setting of the real-life town of Rouen not to capture it in its most empirically accurate state but to use it as a vessel for “the jewels of a rare number of metaphors,” and painstakingly revised his descriptions of the place simply to avoid the phonic repetitions he detested (144). He goes on to argue that–even while carefully crafted by the hand of an artist–Flaubert’s descriptions still lack meaning within the mechanism of narrative, and therefore fill a separate purpose even while being arbitrary. That’s all to say that these details are signs shed of what they would otherwise signify: they create the illusion of referencing something, but they surely don’t reference anything to do with plot. Standing “alone,” they have the effect of seeming “real,” just like rain hammering against your window on a Tuesday evening has no structural or symbolic meaning in your real life, it just “is.” Barthes makes the great point that harnessing mundane, random, but ultimately recognizable details is an important gesture in literary realism and part of a necessary breakthrough into that genre.

While Johnson doesn’t discuss Melville in terms of realism, I think “Melville’s Fist” makes for an interesting extension of what happens in fiction when the relationship between sign and the signified is complicated. As we discussed in class, the narrative structure of Billy Budd in fact hinges on the binary qualities of its characters being crisscrossed, the “tension between two incompatible possibilities,” the “polarizing gap between what was said and what was meant,” and that in the end maybe the late Melville was trying to draw our attention to the scrambled delineations of “difference between.” What Johnson seems to be getting at are the moral implications of reading, or judging, based on a simplified relationship between the sign and the signified (even if reversed in the Claggartian “ironic” way). Is that “insignificant notation” Barthes referred to–in which the sign is detached, points to nowhere, ultimately escaping judgment–another way of wielding ambiguity in fiction? Does Melville’s purgatorial use of ambiguity through Captain Vere, before the execution is finalized, create the “reality effect” in a story that would otherwise be allegorical and therefore plainly predictive? I don’t think they can be associated so simply, but reading Johnson has helped me rethink what the greater purpose of the “reality effect” might be. I’ve recently become very interested in what exactly makes a work of art (man-made, constructed, artificial by nature) feel “real,” I think especially in the context of virtual realities, the “deepfake,” the drive for immersion and roundabout ways of simulating whatever we want to think of now as “real life.” What is accomplished by getting at the “real” via the fictional or “fake”?

P.S. Sorry for the late-night post! Have been suffering at the hand of nyc housing applications, which I’ll say involves some concrete examples of the tension between two incompatible possibilities. (:

In Course in General Linguistics, Saussure introduces what he calls the “linear nature of the signifier” in Principle II: the explanation is comparatively brief, and he qualifies it as obvious enough to have been overlooked in the study of linguistics, i.e. too plain and simple to merit mention. He throws us a bone and explains that because the signifier is auditory, it takes place in a span of time, and that “the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line” (829). Evidence of a signifier’s linear relationship to time can be found in writing, where graphic marks on a page are created and perceived in spatial lines. The time we take to read signifiers “in our heads” on a page simulates the time we would take to hear those signifiers spoken aloud, in corresponding order. In the particular language you’re reading this in, you’re processing what I’ve written from left to right, top to bottom, based on our collective understanding of linear time. This principle, which Saussure underlines with enough importance to declare that “the whole mechanism of language depends upon it” (829) provides scaffolding for his notion that words acquire valuable relations because they are chained together in a sequence of speech. Two words can’t be spoken simultaneously, so they fall into a certain order, and the context created by that order is essential to how we process the meaning of those signifiers within what Saussure refers to as “discourse” (838).

Of course, this makes me think about the “line” as we understand it in poetry. “Breaking” a line is perhaps a unique intervention in how a reader experiences the procession of time within a poem, and a way of generating a different type of distinct unit. One reads a sentence in prose that will go as far as the material boundaries (margins) of a page or screen allow, and then on until the writer has halted the sentence and closed it with a period to make it a distinct sequence, which is then a unit within a larger sequence (paragraph), and then a larger one (text): there’s our usual system for wrangling concepts or thought through language. Yet enjambment in verse can alter the natural flow of speech by creating a minute suspension within a sentence, chopping up what would usually be understood as one unit mimicking the linear time span of a sequence conveyed. A line break affects the process of reading words on a page in one’s head (visual/spatial) and ideally the process of reading a poem out loud (auditory). Is it unnatural, as in a willful intervention on the natural logic and flow of speech? Well, one could argue that poets do this (and a lot of other things) because they’re taking into account the potential for spoken language to mimic music: its laws, its measurements, its sensations, which are also commanded by sound taking place in time. Saussure isn’t concerned with that in this snippet, but I wonder if Nietzsche might care in the context of our sober, scientific, mendacious classifications being capable of being broken by willful illusion, intuition, and the drive for artistic pleasure.

Saussure makes clear immediately in Course that the individual “can never create nor modify language by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community”: the signs that make up language are social and collective (824). Yet in On Truth and Lying, Nietzsche suggests that somewhere outside of “hardened” classification exists unique and individual sensuous perception. Can this ever be translated using our preexisting system of language? Towards the conclusion of On Truth and Lying, Nietzsche’s idea of Heroic individualism within artistic creation peeks through. He presents two archetypes in opposition: the Enlightened “needy” man of reason, and the more liberated, free-willed man of intuition.

That vast assembly of beams and boards to which needy man clings, thereby saving himself on his journey through life, is used by the liberated intellect as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which to perform its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, jumbles it up and ironically re-assembles it, pairing the most unlike things and dividing those things which are closest to one another, it reveals the fact that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it is now guided, not by concepts but by intuitions. (761)

Taking hold of the linear nature of language, and using it as a site for play (reckless tricks) through the bizarre breaking and spatial rearranging of sequences, may just be one way humans are capable of altering the agreed-upon logic of language proceeding in “real” time. Of course, it may be worthwhile to investigate music’s role in this–perhaps yet another deceptive man-made and man-measured edifice.