I harbor such unwarranted suspicions
about them, I will feel compelled to con-
vince him that my suspicions ought to
be felt universally. But I will also delight
in a newfound sense of superiority, my
belief that only I am discerning enough
to see that these devices are overvalued,
too good to be true. Every gimmick,
Ngai tells us, needs a dupe. For every
skeptic, there must be a person, or an
entire market society, who will affirm
the value of what the skeptic judges to
be—in the words of Ron Padgett’s poem
“Gimmicks”—“cheap, tricky, fast, with-
out substance, even immoral.”
F
or Ngai, the problem of the gim-
mick—the mismatch between how
it appears and the value it creates—is
also the fundamental problem of capi-
talism as explained by Karl Marx. In
“Capital,” Marx tells the story of capi-
tal’s relation to value with the help of a
gimmicky character he introduces as
“our friend, Moneybags.” Moneybags
is an “embryo capitalist”—no mustache,
no top hat yet—looking for a special
commodity to buy, one whose consump-
tion will create value, allowing him to
make money from money. Luckily, Mon-
eybags meets a worker. He buys the
worker’s “labor-power” by paying him
a wage, sells whatever product the worker
makes, and appropriates the difference
between the two—what Marx calls “sur-
plus-value”—as profit. That, at least, is
how capitalist relations appear in the
market, “the noisy sphere, where every-
thing takes place on the surface and in
view of men.”
But when Marx accompanies Mon-
eybags into “the hidden abode of pro-
duction,” he draws back the glittering
green curtain on wage and profit, expos-
ing how value is created: the exploita-
tion of labor. Though Moneybags re-
quires his worker to labor for twelve
hours a day to earn his wage, the worker
needs only six of those hours to produce
his means of subsistence: the daily cost
of the food, clothing, and housing he
needs to replenish his “muscle, nerve,
brain” and reproduce his labor-power. In
the six hours he works beyond that, “he
creates no value for himself,” Marx writes.
“He creates surplus-value which, for the
capitalist, has all the charms of a cre-
ation out of nothing.” The wage makes
all labor performed during the workday
appear as if it were compensated labor,
when, in fact, half of it is not. Cloaked
by the “magic and necromancy” of money,
capital’s “trick” is its command of un-
paid labor and time to create value. Be-
hind the appealing illusion of free, happy
exchange sits a hollow and untrustworthy
reality, a gimmick.
Leaning long and hard on Marx,
Ngai argues that the capitalist’s bound-
less quest to increase surplus labor
prompts him to find new ways of en-
hancing his trick. He turns to “the magic
of machinery,” Marx writes—not just
one machine but a system of machines,
“a mechanical monster whose body
fills whole factories, and whose demon
power... at length breaks out into the
fast and furious whirl of his countless
working organs.” These contrivances
intensify capital’s gimmick by increas-
ing the efficiency of labor-power, eking
out more work from the same twelve-
hour day. Yet intensifying labor also
makes it redundant—the same num-
ber of laborers can, with less work, con-
vert an ever-expanding quantity of raw
materials into products. The devices de-
signed to make capitalism’s trick slicker
contain the seeds of the contradiction
that drives it to crisis: they also elimi-
nate labor, and along with it the surplus-
value on which capital depends.
According to Ngai, calling some-
thing a gimmick indicates our discom-
fort with capitalism’s sneaky distortion
of the relationship between value, labor,
and time. The gimmick is both an aes-
thetic and an economic judgment. Think
back to Egan’s PowerPoint. Compared
with the intricacy of the rest of her
novel, the PowerPoint seems like a me-
chanical shortcut—what Ngai would
call a “labor-saving trick,” and what a
critic or a creative-writing professor
might describe as “unearned.” At the
same time, the PowerPoint appears to
be working too hard to get our atten-
tion. The ambivalence about whether
the PowerPoint is, as the cliché goes,
working hard or hardly working be-
comes even more telling when we learn
that its design was outsourced to an
unpaid worker: Egan’s sister, a consul-
tant, who, as Egan reveals, “made the
graphs in the chapter for me because I
couldn’t seem to crunch the numbers
competently.”
The female family member who vol-
unteers her labor recalls Rosey, the robot
maid in “The Jetsons,” perennially un-
paid and verging on obsolescence, as
“I don’t lift weights. I got this way because I wipe down
the equipment really, really hard.”
