Jane Hu Reviews Sianne Ngai's Theory of the Gimmick for Bookforum

Jane Hu looks at poet and literary theorist Sianne Ngai's newest (and long-in-the-making) book, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form (Belknap Press), for Bookforum. Hu first gives some context for Ngai's work, noting Adorno's thought that "true artwork should seek to remain autonomous by rejecting capitalist commodification. If art made us feel anything at all, it should hardly be the trivialized emotions of envy or boredom, anxiety or irritation."

Yet: "Ngai’s scholarship opens a new way of thinking. Rather than separate art from commodity, she views the two as nearly interchangeable." More:

…Theory of the Gimmick is closer to a collection of essays than a cumulative argument. Its chapters provide a looser, more uneven—even syncopated—pattern; its broader takeaway is less intuitive. As it draws a miscellany of objects into its orbit, Ngai’s book feels at times almost gimmicky. This is a reaction she anticipates: The gimmick’s “sheer stupidity,” she warns in her introduction, places anyone daring to “analyze it at a comical disadvantage.” Yet it is undeniable that part of what makes Ngai’s analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing—so appealing as to even appear to raise the esteem of the object under analysis—is simply her capacity to speak about them brilliantly.

Ngai’s readings regularly counterpose high culture with low, avant-garde poetry with reality television, philosophy with social media. And fair enough: when capitalism has subsumed everyday life, all art is a commodity and all commodities elicit aesthetic judgments. In a book that explicitly theorizes a degraded form, it might surprise readers that more chapters are devoted to high art than not.…

Continue reading at Bookforum.