嗨:机械化时代的丑感叙事

Animatedness: the Narrative of the Ugly Feelings in the Mechanization Era

嗨(animatedness)是近年来在国际学术界声名鹊起的华裔新美学专家倪迢雁(Sianne Ngai)在其首部美学专著《诸丑感》(Ugly Feelings)中新创的一个范畴。通过在不同文本中的游走,倪迢雁探讨了嗨这一范畴在极具活力的表达中,如何显现出种族化的标签意味,更重要的是,在这种夸张化表达中,主体事实上在机械化的操纵中失去了其自主意识,嗨这一范畴因而显现出了丑陋的无力性。进而,通过进一步将嗨放入叙事框架中,倪迢雁展现了嗨如何在技术的双重性之下产生出一种颠覆性的力量,由此显现出这一范畴的丰富可能性。这一范畴的创设,不仅对于理解当前时代的现状有着重要的启迪,而且在研究内容与研究方法上为新时代的美学建设提供了新的视野与启发。

Animatedness is a new aesthetic category created by Sianne Ngai,a new aesthetics expert who has gained international fame in recent years in her first aesthetic monograph Ugly Feelings.Wandering through different texts,Ngai explores how this category,in its extremely active expressions,reveals itself as a racialized label,and how it shifts to ugly powerlessness.Moreover,by putting this category into the narrative framework,Ngai presents how the subversive power can be generated out of its obedience.The creation of this category is not only an important inspiration for understanding the current situation of the times,but also provides a new vision for the construction of aesthetics in the new era in terms of research content and methodology.