Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
Sianne Ngai
(Author)
Description
A Literary Hub Favorite Book of the Year
A New Statesman Book of the Year
Product Details
Price
$38.00
Publisher
Belknap Press
Publish Date
June 16, 2020
Pages
416
Dimensions
6.1 X 9.2 X 1.5 inches | 1.65 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780674984547
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
About the Author
Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon 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.
Reviews
Theory of the Gimmick is a masterpiece--a culmination of the dazzling project begun in Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings and elaborated in Our Aesthetic Categories, both celebrated books that have anchored affect theory to a strong account of tone and form. It is a major advance in aesthetic theory, and Marxist theory in particular, one that could help us all get over our Frankfurt melancholy and down to the garrulous work of actually naming the dynamics that produce art and artistic judgment under capitalism.--Christopher Nealon, author of The Matter of Capital
It is the simplicity and vernacular quality of Sianne Ngai's central concept that elevates this book to a classic in the making. Ngai's most important contribution to Marxist cultural and economic theory comes from her insight that--like the judgment of the beautiful for Kant--the gimmick is a subjective category, neither cognitive nor ethical, but historical through and through. The gimmick is a way to bring together the theory of the commodity with Kant's category of judgment. Through Ngai, we are able to vernacularize Marx and to understand the most basic but enigmatic proposition: that truth and appearance are identical in the commodity.--Timothy Bewes, author of Reification: Or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism
Books of this ambition and accomplishment are rare! Theory of the Gimmick continues the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and others in seriously putting together aesthetic theory and Marxist theories of capital. In an impossibly erudite, wide-ranging, and theoretically sophisticated argument, Ngai gives us a unique insight into the relationship between labor, time, and value in a capitalist economy. This book is a major event in American intellectual life.--Jonathan Flatley, author of Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism
A culmination of Ngai's work as a critic...Ngai makes the case that the gimmick, whose value we regularly disparage, is of tremendous critical value. The gimmick, she contends, is the capitalist form par excellence...Ngai's study lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag's best work.--Andrew Koenig "Los Angeles Review of Books" (8/10/2020 12:00:00 AM)
One of the most creative humanities scholars working today...Ngai sets off on another mind-blowing exploration, this time drawing a line between our own judgements of productivity, as well as considering what entertainment is worth to us. My god, it's so good.--Olivia Rutigliano "Literary Hub" (12/7/2020 12:00:00 AM)
The gimmick draws out our unease about capitalism's seductions, deflating their lofty appeals with the suddenness of a punch line. It is an aesthetic category that dunks on capitalism's too-good-to-be-true promises by dunking on itself...It is undeniable that part of what makes Ngai's analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing--so appealing as to even appear to raise the esteem of the object under analysis--is simply her capacity to speak about them brilliantly.--Jane Hu "Bookforum" (9/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)
Ngai tracks the gimmick through a number of guises: stage props, wigs, stainless-steel banana slicers, temp agencies, fraudulent photographs, subprime loans, technological doodads, the novel of ideas...[She] has slowly been building a reputation as one of America's most original and penetrating cultural theorists.--Charlie Tyson "Chronicle of Higher Education" (6/25/2020 12:00:00 AM)
Ngai is a keen analyst of overlooked or denigrated categories in art and life...Moves quickly from the fantastical contraptions of Rube Goldberg to the philosophical machinery in Kant or Marx that might explain their appeal...Highly original in theme and suggestive in approach.--Brian Dillon "4Columns" (6/12/2020 12:00:00 AM)
Ngai has done so much to illuminate.--David Trotter "London Review of Books" (3/18/2021 12:00:00 AM)
[A] groundbreaking argument.-- "Choice" (7/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)
Ngai's penetrating and at times humorous work feels uncommonly generous at a deeply polarized moment when emotions run high and much theory and criticism has taken on an increasingly grave, moralizing tone...Explores across a remarkably broad range of works of art, film, and literature the 'gimmick, ' a simultaneously attractive and repulsive form that links the aesthetic to the economic.--Matthew Rana "Kunstkritikk" (8/20/2021 12:00:00 AM)
Ngai exposes capitalism's tricks in her mind-blowing study of the time- and labor-saving devices we call gimmicks.--Katrina Forrester "New Statesman" (11/17/2021 12:00:00 AM)
The whole book suggests that critique is an occasion for delight, as the explication of how the gimmicks Ngai finds everywhere from Henry James to a toy box reveal the inner workings of capital is accomplished with a joyful relentlessness. The book is a page turner.--Theo Davis "American Literary History" (10/8/2021 12:00:00 AM)
It is the simplicity and vernacular quality of Sianne Ngai's central concept that elevates this book to a classic in the making. Ngai's most important contribution to Marxist cultural and economic theory comes from her insight that--like the judgment of the beautiful for Kant--the gimmick is a subjective category, neither cognitive nor ethical, but historical through and through. The gimmick is a way to bring together the theory of the commodity with Kant's category of judgment. Through Ngai, we are able to vernacularize Marx and to understand the most basic but enigmatic proposition: that truth and appearance are identical in the commodity.--Timothy Bewes, author of Reification: Or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism
Books of this ambition and accomplishment are rare! Theory of the Gimmick continues the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and others in seriously putting together aesthetic theory and Marxist theories of capital. In an impossibly erudite, wide-ranging, and theoretically sophisticated argument, Ngai gives us a unique insight into the relationship between labor, time, and value in a capitalist economy. This book is a major event in American intellectual life.--Jonathan Flatley, author of Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism
A culmination of Ngai's work as a critic...Ngai makes the case that the gimmick, whose value we regularly disparage, is of tremendous critical value. The gimmick, she contends, is the capitalist form par excellence...Ngai's study lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag's best work.--Andrew Koenig "Los Angeles Review of Books" (8/10/2020 12:00:00 AM)
One of the most creative humanities scholars working today...Ngai sets off on another mind-blowing exploration, this time drawing a line between our own judgements of productivity, as well as considering what entertainment is worth to us. My god, it's so good.--Olivia Rutigliano "Literary Hub" (12/7/2020 12:00:00 AM)
The gimmick draws out our unease about capitalism's seductions, deflating their lofty appeals with the suddenness of a punch line. It is an aesthetic category that dunks on capitalism's too-good-to-be-true promises by dunking on itself...It is undeniable that part of what makes Ngai's analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing--so appealing as to even appear to raise the esteem of the object under analysis--is simply her capacity to speak about them brilliantly.--Jane Hu "Bookforum" (9/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)
Ngai tracks the gimmick through a number of guises: stage props, wigs, stainless-steel banana slicers, temp agencies, fraudulent photographs, subprime loans, technological doodads, the novel of ideas...[She] has slowly been building a reputation as one of America's most original and penetrating cultural theorists.--Charlie Tyson "Chronicle of Higher Education" (6/25/2020 12:00:00 AM)
Ngai is a keen analyst of overlooked or denigrated categories in art and life...Moves quickly from the fantastical contraptions of Rube Goldberg to the philosophical machinery in Kant or Marx that might explain their appeal...Highly original in theme and suggestive in approach.--Brian Dillon "4Columns" (6/12/2020 12:00:00 AM)
Ngai has done so much to illuminate.--David Trotter "London Review of Books" (3/18/2021 12:00:00 AM)
[A] groundbreaking argument.-- "Choice" (7/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)
Ngai's penetrating and at times humorous work feels uncommonly generous at a deeply polarized moment when emotions run high and much theory and criticism has taken on an increasingly grave, moralizing tone...Explores across a remarkably broad range of works of art, film, and literature the 'gimmick, ' a simultaneously attractive and repulsive form that links the aesthetic to the economic.--Matthew Rana "Kunstkritikk" (8/20/2021 12:00:00 AM)
Ngai exposes capitalism's tricks in her mind-blowing study of the time- and labor-saving devices we call gimmicks.--Katrina Forrester "New Statesman" (11/17/2021 12:00:00 AM)
The whole book suggests that critique is an occasion for delight, as the explication of how the gimmicks Ngai finds everywhere from Henry James to a toy box reveal the inner workings of capital is accomplished with a joyful relentlessness. The book is a page turner.--Theo Davis "American Literary History" (10/8/2021 12:00:00 AM)
