Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form

by Sianne Ngai

A provocative theory of the gimmick as an aesthetic category steeped in the anxieties of capitalism.

Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and as working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention).

Focusing on this connection to work, Ngai draws a line from gimmicks to political economy. When we call something a gimmick, we are registering uncertainties about value bound to labor and time—misgivings that indicate broader anxieties about the measurement of wealth in capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; photographs by Torbjørn Rødland; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Art, Sociology, Economics, Criticism

416 pages, Hardcover

First published June 16, 2020

About the author

Sianne Ngai is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, and she has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Reviews

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 4 out of 5]

My careless language is most marked by adjectives. I call things “interesting”, “boring”, “annoying” etc., largely because my affective judgements, in their clear expression of subjectivity, rarely ever invite close scrutiny. People accept those judgements as mine; acknowledge that however much they disagree with the judgements, I am entitled to them. And so they move on. It’s the enjoyable part of inane conversation.

The fact that Ngai takes these affective judgements seriously was the thing that most jarred me when I first encountered her work. It’s also what simultaneously was most attractive to me. Suddenly I was self-conscious while using language. When I described something as “cheesy”, was my knowingness conveying a certain jadedness that said more about me than whatever it was I was talking about? What was it that I primarily referred to as “cute”? - Old people holding hands while crossing the road, children smiling, the characters in “Despicable me”, smiley faces on pillows, girls I found pretty but wasn’t interested in sleeping with, baby bok choy arranged around a plate. Why? Ngai contends that the entangling of cute - kawaii - with consumption renders the cute (both person and object) as the subject of simultaneous tenderness and aggression/ alienation. Makes sense: I feel tenderness for the old, but also often impatience and superciliousness. Same with children. I think minions and smiley faces are silly (in the bad sense), but I often find them useful in communicating affection. etc. etc.

In this, the culmination of her intellectual work on underappreciated aesthetic judgements, Ngai looks at the “gimmick”. Here, the focus is on the gimmick as illustrating both the economics that lie beneath our aesthetic judgements, and the ways in which those judgements are expressed through our words. “Interesting”, “boring” or “annoying” are no longer just careless speech but markers of aesthetic judgements that tell us a lot about our cultural moment.

The gimmick, according to Ngai, is the aesthetic form that most marks (late) capitalism. It is marked by antinomies that expose its contradictory capitalist nature. An instance from Ngai’s adolescence illustrates this: At the crepe shop in Rhode Island where Ngai worked as a teenager, two main things occured. At the front there was a “show”, an intricate crepe-flipping demonstration that drew in onlookers. At the back, there was a refrigerator full of pre-made crepes. When the onlookers, impressed by the show at the front, ordered a crepe, Ngai went to the refrigerator in the back, took out a crepe, warmed it in the microwave, and gave it to them.

Thus the gimmick simultaneously overperforms (flip-show) and underperforms (microwave); saves labour and wastes it - i.e. works too hard and too little. It is a simultaneous display of both worth and cheapness. Ngai’s reading of Herman Melville’s “The Confidence Man” in her previous work, “Ugly Feelings” perfectly illustrates the gimmick. There, in a Mississippi steamboat, the confidence man gets someone’s attention by promising him something for free. The person is thus intrigued: What’s the catch? Surely, there must be one! No? It really is for free? Awesome! Immediately after, however, the confidence man asks for money, not as payment, but as a bill of sale; a marker of the “friendship” they have just created.

Thus, in the very moment when the gimmick is recognized as one, in the very moment when it arouses criticality, a different form of criticality is diminished. At the same time the dupe in The Confidence Man realizes what’s going on, and thus no longer wishes to participate (aroused criticality), he also recognizes the ploy that captured his attention in the first place as merely that, and his interest is commensurately diminished.

The gimmick, then, is the unentanglable relationship between necessity and triviality. By jumbling the normal ways we view the relationship between labour, time and value, the gimmick becomes the perfect illustration of capitalism (which in itself displays contradictions like planned obsolescence - say, the creation of more work even as many workers are rendered obsolete).

But because the gimmick is so ubiquitous under capitalism, it is difficult to pin down. Long before I encountered Ngai’s analysis, I, for one, was never shy of pronouncing something a “gimmick”, even though I wouldn’t have been able to define it had you asked me. I thought of it in the same way Justice Potter Stewart thought of pornography: I know it when I see it. But this mode of thought risks obfuscation. Is the gimmicky the same as the campy, or the kitschy, or the splashy, or even the avant-garde, for example? Ngai doesn’t think so.

A careful analysis - the critic’s work - is therefore necessary in illuminating our understanding of the gimmick. Here is where Ngai thrives. As always, Ngai’s focus is on the ignored: So “lesser” writers like Aldous Huxley; Mark Twain’s more overlooked works, like “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”; Housemaids in Henry James’ literature, Naphta and Settembrini in Thomas Mann’s Die Zauberberg, etc. etc.

I was quite often overwhelmed while reading this book. Ngai's oeuvre is simply too wide. From Randomized Video Installations, the Film “It Follows”, Stan Douglass, Robert Louis Stevenson, Helen DeWitt and the nuances of reproductive labour, etc. etc.. I know Ngai is a cultural critic, and her vocation is to be intimately familiar with “the culture”, but I myself couldn’t keep up.

Nevertheless, I am glad for it. Like before, I do not hesitate to pronounce something a gimmick. But now, Ngai’s considerations of labour, time and value are often nearby. What an illuminating study!

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

wracking my brains for anybody who's killing it in contemporary aesthetic theory quite like sianne ngai is .. she is Essential

-a form we marvel at and distrust, marvel and disdain-

this one I think is best taken as a sequel to Our Aesthetic Categories & I just know I'll be back reading her is such an experience,,, one is in the presence of A Mind

-the capitalist device that 'saves' labour contributes to both its intensification and elimination (over time)-

actually she's kind of reckicked me to thinking about marx & who else has that power

[Bix · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked following the gimmick across different forms in each chapter — felt like a different reading experience than that of ugly feelings or our aesthetic categories (this being more repetitive but also more room to breathe). but in my Ngai power ranking zany/cute/interesting still has my heart

[Cru · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me a long time to read, but... this book is... PHENOMENAL.
I can't thank Sianne Ngai enough for having written this book. My work is receiving so much conceptual validation and I am sure it will guide me for a very long time. This book is condensing so much of my research and putting it into words. So thankful for that <3
This book deserves solid 5 stars for its creative way of generating knowledge, thorough research, vast references and consistent hypothesis.
I will say though, that I believe there is so much of the book I haven't fully understood, because of the amount of references she gives sometimes (80-pages-long-appendix). She also overcomplicates a lot. I believe sometimes the style is hard to get through. She repeats herself. The last chapter was a pain in the ass to read, because I start to space out easily when each quote is ca. 1 page long. HOWEVER I still stand by the 5 stars!

My favorite chapter was Chapter 6 "Rødland's Gimmick" -- I think this is the most accessible chapter and so much becomes suddenly clear at this point. If you don't want to read the whole thing, I recommend this chapter.
An overall engagement with Marx (which I don't think I had, or at least not enough...) would be beneficial. But you can still get to the point without it; in that case, in a way, you're reading/understanding Marx through her.

Value, time and labor become each other's fictionalizing machines under a capitalism regime of aesthtetics. Do you think there was no magic under capitalism?, well folks, there it is... the magic of modernity! Magic is not only "subversive".

I love how she brings the aspect of comedy to gimmick-concept.
The gimmick works simultaneously too little and too hard. it has a rather ridiculous quality, like a useless machine of e.g. for peeling apples: it creates value through an artificial necessity, by performing that artifical and necessity really well and efficiently.

The use of "It Follows" was a bit confusing for me in the begginning, but I slowly understood where she wanted to get at: finance, value and capital as an automated gimmick we are thrown into, a game of "passing on", whereas passing on means both getting rid of the curse, but also strengthing the curse's ability to haunt its preys.

Eventhough she does not talk about it in the book, all of this "contraption-aesthetics" make me think of steampunk in a new way as well.

So much more to say, but I will leave it here... Hard book, but totally worth it <3

[Nat]

In philosopher Elisabeth Camp's work on metaphor, she introduces the concept of the "telling detail", which is one type of "frame", itself a way of "crystalliz[ing] perspectives into stable interpretive principles which can be deployed by an individual agent across multiple cognitive contexts, and shared by multiple individuals in and across contexts" (Camp, "Perspectives and Frames in Pursuit of Ultimate Understanding", p. 33) The telling detail is a *true* frame (as opposed to a just-so story, for example).

I think Ngai's concept of the "gimmick" is a telling detail in Camp's sense, and she deploys it widely, as a frame for understanding "erroneous appraisal of value in general" (Ngai, p. 51), not just in aesthetic judgment (especially Cavell-like judgments of fraudulence in the context of artistic modernism), but in the theory of labor and capital as well.

This book exemplifies a huge disciplinary divide between literary theory and philosophy of art as practiced by analytic philosophers—this is thick with examples, inventive and contentious readings of complex artworks, and copious use of Marx and Marx-flavored cultural analysis. The only analytic philosophers that I remember Ngai citing are C.L. Hardin, in a paragraph where she endorses his claim that the colors of objects are illusions ("but not an unfounded illusion") (p. 226). In a hugely wide-ranging book like this, that paragraph about the (non-) objectivity of color made me a little suspicious of what was going on; it hardly goes without saying that, as Ngai claims, "We know, from seeing lemons at night in a dark room, that yellow is not an objective property of objects". There's shelves of books and journal articles about that very issue, and Hardin occupies one of the more radical positions in the debate about the objectivity of color.

Ngai is very good on Cavell's notion of "passionate utterance", and that was why I picked this book up in the first place—it's one of the few places to discuss that notion in detail. There is one novel observation Ngai makes about aesthetic judgment and passionate utterance that analytic philosophers haven't talked about, namely that it's a felicity condition on aesthetic judgments/passionate utterances that they be uttered with the right *style*:

"Here we begin to see how aesthetic judgments are verbal performances correlated with affects not identical to, yet echoing or amplifying, the affects that give rise to them. To be felicitous as a speech act, the judgment of the sublime must not be shared in the condescendingly affectionate tone in which people judge things cute. If I proclaim X sublime in a tender, condescendingly affectionate way, I apparently do not understand what the concept means; the same holds true if I perform my judgment of X as cute in a tone of fearful awe. The affective style of an aesthetic judgment's verbal performance matters for our determination of the judgment's felicity" (p. 135).

[Allison T · Rating 3 out of 5]

This New Yorker review touches on why my feelings are so MIXED about this book:
“But if we are told to expect gimmicks everywhere, spotting them feels easy: if the propensity for gimmickry is all around us, then it is also nowhere in particular. The wider Ngai casts her net for examples, the less significant being netted starts to seem. As “Theory of the Gimmick” proceeds, one senses Ngai working harder and harder to equate the techniques of artistic production with the productive processes of capitalism. Gradually, the concept of the gimmick begins to recede from intelligibility, until one is left suspicious of the category—of all aesthetic categories. And the more we become aware of Ngai working hard, the more we wonder if her high-concept procedure, developed in the course of three ingenious books, isn’t something of a gimmick itself. “Somehow, you need a trick,” Toni Morrison once said of what gave the most thrilling writing its edge. Certainly, one could hardly imagine Ngai, or anyone else, pulling this trick off again. But while it lasted it was very good: exhaustive, demanding, and enlightening—an ungimmicky gimmick, the best kind of critical pleasure.”

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 2 out of 5]

The basic idea of this book - that the term "gimmick" carries a lot of weight, and deserves closer analysis - isn't a bad one. While I was reading it I suddenly noticed the term everywhere, describing VR or a new form of therapy (classic Baader–Meinhof phenomenon…) What do we mean when we describe something as gimmicky? That it serves its function, but doesn't deserve praise. It cheats by avoiding the hard work of creating value; it is "cheap". (The archetypal dismissal of gimmickry is Samuel Johnson on Gulliver's Travels: "Once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.") The confluence of value, price, labour in this concept give Ngai an on-ramp to Marxism and discussing how the gimmick is specifically capitalist. In fact she seems well nigh incapable of writing a sentence without the word capitalism.

So most of this book is a mash-up of quite interesting criticism of some eclectic media - J.M. Coetzee's metafictional Elizabeth Costello; more generally, the "novel of ideas"; the cult indie horror film It Follows; R.L. Stevenson's experiments with short stories about finance; some book called Clear, about David Blaine's 44 days in a clear plastic box; Helen DeWitt's bizarro comedy Lightning Rods about a sex-work temp agency; Melville's The Confidence Man; Stan Douglas' video art re-imagining the '70s horror classic Suspiria; late Henry James (The Golden Bowl and The Sacred Fount); and much besides - and some turgid standard issue critical theory.

I guess basically I would like to learn more about the former - tell me more about metalepsis, and how the development of the Victorian economy affected its fiction! The endless forays into Marxism - here and in myriad other works - seem like insecurity on the part of the literary critics, who don't believe their work can stand on its own without being grounded in something weightier - no less than capitalism itself.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

In sum, a critique of late capitalism by way of the 'gimmick.' Much like deconstructionism (Derrida), Marxist critical analysis of capitalism, even those like Ngai who offer said critique along aesthetic lines, is better at finding the faults than offer the solutions. If we are to move beyond the critical mode, we have to ask the harder question, 'what's next after capitalism?' While many may not appreciate this as a solid review of the book, I am using this space to say something like, "okay, Ngai, but so what?" If you are interested in an aesthetic critique of capitalist form, I can't imagine a better place to start; if you are wanted more than such critique, keep reading.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the thread of this book about the capitalist gimmick and its place in literature, photography, installation etc. However I definitely could have grasped the concepts with half the text… it repeats itself and over-describes its objects of engagement. (I now know more than I want to about technicolor). This is one of the few times I’d take an abridged version in retrospect. That said, I’m there for these readings and read R Halpern with renewed interest and enjoyment as a result… perhaps I might even tackle The Golden Bowl too.

[Mattschratz · Rating 5 out of 5]

After 265 brilliant pages, you get another 35 brilliant pages that argue that the key to understanding capitalism has, all along, been paying more attention to the late works of Henry James. I have been telling anybody who will listen, on much thinner evidence than what Ngai provides, that the key to understanding *everything* is paying more attention to the late works of Henry James, so I was, needless to say, delighted.

[Adam Burnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

There isn’t enough space to even start with this one, so: Oh boy, am I a sucker for super intense literary theory that I barely understand and this was an absolute gas; an amusement park for the brain full of trick mirrors, tilt-a-whirls, and roller coasters.

[Mehar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only read the parts that are relevant to my degree. Interesting but quite repetitive

[EricheBooks]

DNF. Going over my head and I have lost interest.

[Emma Ratshin · Rating 3 out of 5]

when i get my phd i’ll finally be smart enough to understand this book. then you’ll see. you’ll all see.

[Mantis]

Dnf. The writing is too dense for me right now!!!!

[Almog Cohen-Kashi · Rating 5 out of 5]

sianne ngai is able to convince you that her knowledge has no bounds. she can pull references from every corner of culture to elaborate on the terms she is defining. that said, the chapter titled visceral abstractions was so difficult ever other paragraph made me stop so i could ask myself "what did i just read"