—
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, pg. 276.
This excerpt reads Beckett’s How It Is an an attempt to think through the “concatenation of boredom and astonishment—a bringing together of what “dulls” and what “irritates” or agitates,” which Ngai calls stuplimity. As an affective response, Ngai goes on, “stuplimity reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality,” but “not through an encounter with the infinite but finite bits and scraps of material in repetition” (271).
Ngai’s stuplimity approximates how I am trying to think of “indifference,” especially how this strange affect might be produced. First, indifference is not a lack of an affect but the product of two powerful if not overwhelming affects, boredom and astonishment. Second, the object of indifference is double insofar as we are trying to grasp both a systemic totality and the infinite little horrors that make up but are not identical to that totality.
The initial prod and focus for conceptualizing indifference is genocides particularly and humanitarian intervention generally; the affect’s scope, of course, is much larger but I begin here.
So, if we think indifference in line with Ngai’s stuplimity, we are horrified at the sheer scale of violence in the world. However, an attempt to grasp these horrors by narrating the infinite particularity of each victim—cataloguing the types of injury, the weapon deployed, the angle of attack etc.— in short, a legalism based on the individual, fails and may even stifle those who seek to understand the larger structures fueling these explosions. If horror does not help map these particulars in meaningful and preventative ways, we are thrown back on the futility of our reason, exhausted.
Couple this potential affective trajectory with its tangent, boredom in the face of forever multiplying particulars: People shot, drowned in flood, buried in an earthquake, genitally mutilated, burned alive in front of their family; we’ve heard all these before, offered our horror and sympathy as alms on suffering’s alter, and continue on. The continuous stream of stories and statistics both horrify and bore us.
I am indifferent because I am horrified at the expanding scale of violence and bored with the tireless enumeration of each injury. Horror exhausts, especially when each infanticide calls me impossibly to feel horror’s full force again and again. Perpetual horror would be strangely static, the same affect forever, and parallel boredom in unhelpful ways. More importantly, each affect and their combination fail to provide a productive relation to their object.
