This talk explores the gimmick as a form that simultaneously repels and attracts us and the judgment by which we express this ambivalent mixture of feelings. As a compromised aesthetic form and equivocal judgment stemming from the recognition of interlinked contradictions surrounding labor, time, and value, the gimmick offers us a surprisingly rich place to think about capitalist aesthetics and the intertwining of technique and enchantment therein.
Sianne Ngai (Professor of English at University of Chicago): Ngai’s first book, Ugly Feelings (2005, Harvard University Press), is considered a key work of affect theory for its focus on politically ambiguous, non-cathartic negative emotions—envy and irritation as opposed to anger and fear. Her second book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012, Harvard University Press), which won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, argues for the contemporary centrality of three everyday aesthetic categories, which are approached with the same philosophical seriousness given to the beautiful and sublime. Ngai’s most recent book, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), explores the “gimmick” as a verdictive speech act and form encoding a series of interconnected contradictions concerning labor, time, and value. Ngai’s work is most broadly concerned with the analysis of aesthetic forms and judgments specific to capitalism. Register in advance for this webinar: https://illinois.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ntwafFjeS1SVVH0R1s96SA
