64 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
miles) reveals that they were gimmicks
all along. Donald Trump’s threat to veto
the National Defense Authorization
Act, in order to stop Confederate names
being removed from military bases;
Kanye West’s announcement of his Pres-
idential run; and Amazon’s new surveil-
lance drone, the Ring Always Home
Cam, have attracted scorn as “gim-
micks”—promotional shticks, danger-
ous stunts. Why is a word used to de-
scribe a literary technique also the word
used to describe the buffoonery, the cru-
elty and carelessness, of contemporary
political and economic life? What is in
a word as minor as “gimmick”?
For Sianne Ngai, a professor of En-
glish at the University of Chicago and
the author of “Theory of the Gimmick”
(Harvard), the answer is: everything, or
at least everything to do with the art
consumed and produced under capital-
ism. One of the most original literary
scholars at work today, Ngai has made
a career of unravelling the social and po-
litical histories that shape our aesthetic
judgments (“How beautiful! How hid-
eous!”) of novels, films, and photographs,
as well as of show tunes and YouTube
videos, bath toys and smiley faces. Her
work draws attention to the public di-
mensions of apparently private reactions
to art, and to the world in which these
aesthetic experiences arise—a “capital-
ist lifeworld,” she writes, where art is in-
creasingly trivial and artifice reigns su-
preme, where fun and fright merge to
create the same arresting, alienating
magic as Nabokov’s mirror.N
gai’s first scholarly book, “Ugly
Feelings,” published in 2005, ex-
amined a set of negative emotions—ir-
ritation, envy, paranoia, anxiety—that
she described as “minor and generally
unprestigious” compared with the
“grander passions” of love, anger, and
sympathetic uplift, which have histor-
ically animated so much of art and lit-
erature. The passivity and inscrutabil-
ity of these ugly feelings, which Ngai
tracked in works from “Bartleby, the
Scrivener” to “Single White Female,”
offered a frustrated response to the sense
of limited agency—to living and work-
ing, especially as a woman or a non-
white person, in a “highly differentiated
and totally commodified world.” Her
next book, “Our Aesthetic Categories:
Zany, Cute, Interesting” (2012), placed
the three ambivalent assessments in its
subtitle at the heart of aesthetic theory,
arguing that they best captured the na-
ture of aesthetic experience in “the hy-
percommodified, information-saturated,
performance-driven conditions of late
capitalism.” The cuteness of a sculpture
by Takashi Murakami, for instance, fe-tishized the helpless; the zaniness en-
acted by Lucille Ball or Richard Pryor
showcased the incessant activity of a
person who was always working.
Although Ngai’s books are concep-
tually and philosophically dense, their
appeal comes from how they tap into
our ordinary use of language. Unless I
collect art, or live in a many-windowed
house at the edge of a westerly penin-
sula, where the sea is gilded by the sun
and silvered by the moon, I am unlikely
to have regular encounters with things
I would call “beautiful” or “sublime,”
and I may well find the rush and roar
of such Romantic descriptions embar-
rassing. But not a day goes by when I
do not call something—my son’s stuffed
animals, a dress, a poem by Gertrude
Stein—“cute,” or a novel or an essay
“interesting.” And I can’t count the num-
ber of times I’ve called a kitchen gizmo
my husband swears we really, really need
(but we really, really don’t) or a col-
league’s online persona “gimmicky.”
“Theory of the Gimmick” finds in the
pervasiveness of the gimmick the same
duelling forces of aesthetic attraction
and repulsion that shape all Ngai’s work.
“‘You want me,’ the gimmick outra-
geously says,” she writes. “It is never en-
tirely wrong.”
As with all aesthetic judgments, call-
ing something a gimmick begins sim-
ply, with a feeling of pleasure or dis-
pleasure, or some uncertain mingling
of the two. Consider the pandemic-era
robot chef: behind its flashiness and the
obvious expense of producing it, behind
the hypnotic slicing and dicing of its
hands, I sense its fraudulence. No doubt
it will underperform, cooking meals
only as well as a Roomba cleans a house.
No doubt it will occasion gruesome
comic mishaps—say, if the cat tries rid-
ing it. None of this needs to be explained;
I know a gimmick when I see one. My
judgment is elicited by my perception
of what Ngai identifies as the gimmick’s
defining feature: “dubious yet attractive
promises about the saving of time, the
reduction of labor, and the expansion
of value.”
Although my calling something a
gimmick registers a subjective response,
it also demands agreement or invites
confrontation, and more brazenly so
than other judgments. Should a fan of
robot chefs and Roombas question why“No way! It’s your turn. I got whacked all day yesterday.”