Stupid in the Moment: Excavating the Patriarchal Nonconscious of Humiliation

Approaching humiliation as an everyday structure of feeling, this talk links humiliation’s affective and discursive process of articulation to the nonconscious dynamics of a fully mediated—‘teletechnological’ (Clough 2000)—milieu. Stupidity, that culminates in the form of foolishness (having been duped, tricked, played, fooled) and the realisation of one’s being stupid (being made to look the fool), is the mechanism by which humiliation brings one’s status down. This paper explores the idea that being “stupid in the moment,” particularly as a failure to understand and respond to “what is going on,” is less a personal failing that is haphazardly realised or felt, and more a patterned response of non-response that iterates the epistemological shortcomings of patriarchal relations. By linking the “silence” of non-response to the aesthetics of humiliation, this talk hopes to politicise the social significance of humiliation, particularly, the affective anchoring of humiliation in the patriarchal social relations—in their automated, nonconscious capacities—that humiliation brings into play.