Ugly Feelings Quotes

“The pain receptors have evolved to make us care about injury and disease. Pain is an analog of injury in its inherent similarity. Contrast pain with an orgasm, as a possible analog. If, instead of pain, we always had an orgasm to injury, we would be biologically destined to bleed to death.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“a highly organized and articulate set of ideas about anything. As in the case of a love affair the fit need not at the outset be perfect, so long as there is sufficient similarity . . . to set the vibrations between the two entities into sympathetic coordination with each other. . . . It is possible, and indeed common for different individuals to resonate in different manners to the same ideology. (EA,”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Affective amplification does not simply turn up the volume on what is already there, but points to the presence of something “separate.” Tomkins places a particular emphasis on this difference-throughamplification when discussing magnification. As he notes, “Scenes are magnified not by repetition, but by repetition with a difference. . . . Sheer repetition of experience characteristically evokes adaptation, which attenuates, rather than magnifies, the connected scenes”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“[My original] theory of affect as amplification was flawed by [one] serious ambiguity. I had unwittingly assumed that in both electronic amplification and affective amplification there was an increase in gain of the signal. If that were the case, what would be amplified would remain essentially the same except that it would be louder. But affects are separate mechanisms, involving . . . responses quite distinct from the . . . responses they are presumed to amplify.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Note how the basic principles of Tomkins’ systems theory, “coassembly” and “amplification,” are taken to increasing levels of reflexive complexity here. Affect not only co-assembles and amplifies its activator and responses “in a single momentary scene,” but these single scenes are themselves co-assembled in a way which triggers fresh responses and affect that then amplify the already amplified scenes.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“In an equally counterintuitive fashion, affect’s distinctive function of amplifying the awareness and effects of other functions is based on its ability to “simulate” them. Affect produces “urgent analogs” not only of the rate and duration of its “external activator” (the pistol shot, for instance, that activates surprise), but of the abstract profiles of “neural firing” generated by the external activator, profiles which Tomkins calls “innate activators.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Tomkins ultimately bases his theory of affect on a principle he calls “analog amplification.” He describes affect as a mechanism that magnifies awareness and intensifies the effects of operations associated with other biological subsystems (drive, cognitive, motor, perceptual, homeostatic) by “co-assembling” with these other vital mechanisms: “The affect amplifies by increasing the urgency of anything with which it is co-assembled. It is what I have called an analog amplifier” (EA,”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Envy is, in a sense, an intentional feeling that paradoxically undermines its own intentionality.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“More specifically, this book turns to ugly feelings to expand and transform the category of “aesthetic emotions,” or feelings unique to our encounters with artworks—a concept whose oldest and bestknown example is Aristotle’s discussion of catharsis in Poetics.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“played. While this unintended crackle, generated by an overproximity between transmitter and receiver, explicitly recalls the static that appears in Thomas’ photographic enlargements (both result from relatively routine techniques of amplification, though one is achieved via a darkroom enlarger and the other via electronic equipment), like the “great noise” encountered by Tomkins, it ends up disrupting rather than facilitating narrative sequencing and order.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Indeed, as a system of exchange based on a highly codified feeling that is continually reproduced and circulated even as it cannot be subjectively felt, Melville’s novel harnesses the logic of this market for an inquiry into the role of virtual emotion in literature in particular.55 It seems fitting, then, that Melville’s most anti-psychological novel, one explicitly preoccupied with the politically ambiguous uses of semblances of feeling, takes care to ensure that readers remain uncertain about what its own organizing semblance of feeling might be.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Yet the point of the Black Rapids agent’s story is precisely that an illusory panic can easily generate a “double” that is actually experienced in response to real events, reminding us of how tone influences our subjective responses to a literary work even if it cannot be assimilated to them.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“In both cases, the difficulty lies not in the ontological difference between real emotion and virtual emotion, but rather in their proximity.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“much the way the proximity between real and virtual feeling in the concept of tone can produce anxiety for the literary theorist.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“these audible demonstrations that whether the feeling is vested in abstract systems or in personal relationships, the world of the novel’s story runs on a feeling that no one actually feels.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“The Confidence-Man is actually anaphoric in its narrative structure, insofar as its entire plot consists of a series of exchanges involving one term which remains constant while the elements co-assembled to it rotate and change: CM and crowd CM and merchant CM and young scholar CM and clergyman CM and miser CM and sick man CM and soldier of fortune CM and cripple CM and Missourian CM and barber CM and the stranger CM and the stranger’s disciple CM and old man, etc.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“In other words, a positional parallelism in which sound is foregrounded as an independent feature (Nathanson, WP, 140), comes to override an ideational parallelism at the exact moment the subjective proprietorship of a feeling, ostensibly secured by analogical equivalences between affect, money, and language, is rendered questionable and unstable simply by the amplification of these equivalences.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“How much?,” referring to the medicine peddled by the confidence-man in his incarnation as “herb-doctor,” the analog amplifier replies, “As much as you can evoke from your heart and soul.” When the sick man asks in bewilderment, “how?—the price of this medicine?,” the confidence-man’s response (“I thought it was confidence you meant; how much confidence you should have. The medicine,—that is half a dollar a vial”) deliberately calls the identity of the purchase into question, demonstrating the ease with which the affect and money are confused (CM, 107).”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“fact, at times it seems as if The Confidence-Man has been aggressively constructed for the purpose of giving the reader the unpleasant feeling of ironies constantly missed or passing over her head—that is, the meta-ironic feeling of an irony intended for and available to everyone but oneself.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Affect is perhaps the most difficult plane of human life to define and describe, not merely because it is a-signifying (and contemporary theory is so heavily directed toward signifying practices), but also because there is no critical vocabulary to describe its forms and structures.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“In other words, I mean the formal aspect of a work that has made it possible for critics of all affiliations (Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, historicist) to describe a work or class of works as “paranoid” (Mary Ann Doane on the Hollywood “woman’s film” of the 1940s), “euphoric” (Fredric Jameson on postmodern art and architecture), or “melancholic” (Anne Cheng on Asian-American literature); and, much more importantly, the formal aspect that enables these affective values to become significant with regard to how each critic understands the work as a totality within an equally holistic matrix of social relations.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“This awkward quality might be attributed to a conspicuous avoidance of the dimension of feeling already deeply associated with “tone” and even “attitude” in everyday usage, as in the familiar “I don’t like the [insert unstated but implied emotional quality] tone of your voice” or “That kind of [insert unstated but implied emotional quality] attitude will get you nowhere.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Heidegger claims, it seems fitting that Melville’s story about public exchanges facilitated by an anonymous agent becomes primarily preoccupied with how “confidence” and other feelings might be artfully created.7”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Whether in a direct or indirect manner, this Bartlebyan problem is one to which all of the following chapters will repeatedly return, even as animatedness, envy, irritation, anxiety, stuplimity, paranoia, and disgust are mobilized to investigate a multiplicity of other representational and theoretical dilemmas.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“in my afterword, which discusses the ugliest of all ugly feelings: disgust. As”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“As an affective matrix devised as a “psychological explanation” for revolutionary or political impulses, which reduces social antagonisms to deficiencies of individual character or “private dissatisfactions,” Jameson notes, “the theory of ressentiment, wherever it appears, will always itself be the expression and the production of ressentiment.”41 Even if envy is not exactly the same feeling, then, as this moralizing pathos (though ressentiment is a matrix of a number of affects that can include envy), it is an antagonistic response to a perceived inequality easily discredited for similar reasons—especially, I argue, when the envious subject is a woman.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“For envy makes no claim whatsoever about the moral superiority of the envier, or about the “goodness” of his or her state of lacking something that the envied other is perceived to have. Envy is in many ways a naked will to have. In”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“is an account, in other words, of how a problematic valorization of powerlessness as “good” can easily emerge from the same situation of “withheld doing” that produces the ugly feelings foregrounded throughout this book.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“On one hand, the state of being “animated” implies the most general of all affective conditions (that of being “moved” in one way or another), but also a feeling that implies being “moved” by a particular feeling, as when one is said to be animated by happiness or anger. Animatedness thus seems to have both an unintentional and intentional form. In a strange way, it seems at once a zero-degree feeling and a complex meta-feeling, which not only takes other feelings as its object, but takes only other intentional feelings as its object. For we can speak of someone’s being “animated” by a passion like anger, but not by an objectless mood like nostalgia or depression, which tend to have a de-animating effect on those affected by them.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Melville’s last published novel, The Confidence-Man (1857), a notably “talky” text that offers a useful allegory of the very”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings