gimmick, n.
A gadget; spec. a contrivance for dishonestly
regulating a gambling game, or an article used in
a conjuring trick; now usu. a tricky or ingenious
device, gadget, idea, etc., esp. one adopted for
the purpose of attracting attention or publicity.
Oxford English Dictionary

gimmick, n.
A gadget; spec. a contrivance for dishonestly
regulating a gambling game, or an article used in
a conjuring trick; now usu. a tricky or ingenious
device, gadget, idea, etc., esp. one adopted for
the purpose of attracting attention or publicity.
Oxford English Dictionary

Ambivalence. ‘This book is about the irritating yet strangely attractive gimmick’: from its very first words, Sianne Ngai’s latest work Theory of the Gimmick goes straight to the point, evoking the leitmotiv of ambivalence—‘irritating yet strangely attractive’—that was already there in the opening sentences of Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (‘these three aesthetic categories, for all their marginality’), and, earlier, of Ugly Feelings (‘studies in the aesthetics of negative emotions, examining their politically ambiguous work’).footnote¹

In case after case, and medium after medium—a short story like Stevenson’s ‘Bottle Imp’, the two Suspiria films, or Torbjørn Rødland’s photographic series—ambivalence arises from a contradiction in the gimmick itself, which is then registered in the judgement (‘a form we marvel at and distrust, admire and disdain’) of the observer.footnote² This objective-subjective convergence is duplicated by the back-and-forth between concept and affect that is typical of Ngai’s writing: the austere ‘categories’ of her previous title tempered by the personal touch of ‘our’, just as the conceptual aplomb of ‘Theory’ is now quickened by the diffidence of ‘gimmick’. You turn the page, and never know whether what follows will be ‘visceral’ or ‘abstract’, to quote the title of one of her chapters—in which Marx’s labour theory of value is inextricably entwined with Rob Halpern’s Music for Porn. This is Marxist criticism, as early Godard might have imagined it.

Aesthetics. A book on the aesthetics of negative emotions, followed by one on aesthetic categories, followed by one on aesthetic judgement. If ‘ambivalence’ is Ngai’s opening chord, ‘aesthetics’ immediately follows: not for nothing has the Critique of Judgement—the foundational text of modern aesthetics—remained a constant presence in her work, much as other intellectual mileposts have shifted.footnote³ More than the aesthetic sphere as such, though, what truly interests her is ‘the border between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic’: the space where, in lieu of theoretically accredited categories like the beautiful or the sublime, one encounters ‘vernacular’ and ‘undeniably trivial’ notions—the ‘cute’, the ‘zany’ and now the ‘gimmick’—such as ‘one might overhear on a train or at a bar’.footnote⁴

Ngai is of course not the first to reflect on the margins of the aesthetic field: she herself mentions Jan Mukarˇovský’s interest in the ‘dynamic interaction between aesthetic and extra-aesthetic values’, and Nelson Goodman’s claim that ‘most of our aesthetic experiences are based on some combination of ordinary ones’.footnote⁵ But she goes beyond their initial insights, electing the odd eco-system of the aesthetic periphery as her fundamental object of inquiry. In this space, full of ‘compromised forms’—‘impoverished’, ‘unstable’, ‘flagrantly unworthy’: Theory of the Gimmick has no delusions on this point—we often end up being aesthetically dissatisfied and, indeed, ambivalent; but for this very reason we have also a chance of ‘grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism’.footnote⁶ ‘Triviality’, it turns out, has its own unique ‘historical meaningfulness’: it tells the truth about the fate of art in the contemporary world.footnote⁷ The disjointed and ‘jerry-rigged’ morphology of the gimmick is like a ‘natural experiment’ of cultural history, in which aesthetic consistency is attacked, and ultimately overpowered, by economic imperatives.

Labour. As some of the previous quotes have already suggested (‘The gimmick saves/does not save us labour’), gimmicks are for Ngai consistently associated with work of one kind or another. The theme—which had emerged near the end of Our Aesthetic Categories, with the discovery of the effort and strain hidden by the apparent free play of the zany—is central to the new book: by the time the first chapter opens with a section entitled ‘Labour-Saving Device’, ‘labour’ has already occurred over a hundred times in Ngai’s introduction, while a later chapter describes James’s late narrative as ‘teeming with workers’, and specifically with ‘providers of services’, engaged in various kinds of ‘affective labour’.footnote⁸