SIANNE NGAI IS KNOWN for her close attention to the overlooked, the fringe, the marginal. Her first book, Ugly Feelings(2005), was a taxonomy of “minor” emotional-aesthetic responses like irritation and paranoia. Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) centered on the “zany,” the “cute,” and the “interesting.” With these two works Ngai was credited with making the study of aesthetics — albeit under the banner of “affect theory” — sexy again.
In her third book, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, Ngai delves further into her longstanding preoccupations: first, the economic underpinnings of aesthetic judgment; second, the way affective judgments are built into nomenclature. (When we say someone’s “cool,” we convey nonchalant admiration; when we call a movie “cheesy,” we come off as knowing, jaded.) For Ngai, the critic’s task is to tease out the two, thus making apparent what gets obscured in the judgments we toss off. Although the subject of Theory of the Gimmick is unsexy at times — there is more than a little on transvaluation and reification — it marks a culmination of Ngai’s work as a critic. Not only does Ngai open up suggestive new lines of inquiry here, but she also completes a critical trilogy begun 15 years ago.
Ngai makes the case that the gimmick, whose value we regularly disparage, is of tremendous critical value. The gimmick, she contends, is the capitalist form par excellence. The book’s argument starts from the simple premise that the gimmick is “simultaneously overperforming and underperforming,” confounding our normal estimations of labor, value, and time. Ngai distinguishes the gimmick from its kin — kitsch, camp, conceptual art — making the case that, although superficial resemblances may bind the gimmick to these categories, the calculations of worth and cheapness it involves us in set the gimmick apart as a specifically capitalist form.
In a series of Kantian-Marxian “antinomies,” Ngai sketches out the gimmick’s contradictory, capitalistic nature: the gimmick simultaneously saves labor/does not save labor; works too hard/too little; is outdated/newfangled, dynamic/static, unrepeatable/reusable, and transparent/obscure about capitalist production. These antinomies are the book’s guiding thread, reiterated and elaborated throughout. They make some of Ngai’s more cryptic-seeming pronouncements intuitive: “The moment in which the gimmick arouses critical response is therefore simultaneously a dissipation of criticality.” “A gimmick that is necessary […] must by definition be trivial.” The gimmick’s capitalist DNA allows for
such reversals [which] are endemic to the world that gives rise to the gimmick’s compromised aesthetic. Like capitalism itself, in which paradoxes like planned obsolescence and routinized innovation abound, the gimmick is a […] fundamentally unstable form.
Capitalism, which ceaselessly generates more work while making workers obsolete, is the gimmick’s progenitor and twin.
The gimmick’s ubiquity, like that of capitalism, makes it similarly hard to pin down. Ngai follows Susan Sontag’s lead in “Notes on ‘Camp’” by personifying her object of study: the gimmick is loud and embarrassing, pestering and diverting like a precocious child. Theory of the Gimmick is never dry because it has the quality of the hunt, even when Ngai arrives at abstract formulations or locates the social value of the gimmick by wading through devalued aesthetic responses (annoyance, embarrassment, amusement). Ngai’s study lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag’s best work; her rigorous economic analysis, combined with her flair for the memorable epigram, makes the prose rangy and zippy. (She would have plenty to say about adjectival characterizations like these intrinsic to book reviews.)
More : https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gimme-more-on-sianne-ngais-theory-of-the-gimmick
Text by Andrew Koenig
