LRB, Vol. 43 No. 6 · 18 March 2021
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Stainless Steel Banana Slicer
David Trotter
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Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
bySianne Ngai
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/search-results?search=Sianne%20Ngai>.
/Harvard, 401 pp., £28.95, June 2020,978 0 674 98454 7/
Agimmick is a gadget that flatters to deceive. It reminds us of the
difference between what we need and what we can be persuaded to want.
Raspberry mojitos hint at arcadia, but they’re never going to taste as
good as the ones nobody thought to add raspberries to. An ironing board
is a plank with a collapsible undercarriage right up until the moment
you try to replace the one you have with something better. Some models
boast a stanchion designed to support the flex of the iron so it doesn’t
get in the way; others have a metal extension that serves as a clothes
rack. In more adventurous versions, the cradle holding the iron is
reconfigured as an area of heat-resistant material in the shape of a
helipad. All this to save labour. And yet the stanchion is so wispy that
festoons of flex soon snarl up on either side of it. Folded, the clothes
rack doubles the board’s weight; extend it, and the apparatus has the
turning circle of an oil tanker. Fanciful though these additions are,
they resist every effort to chisel or blowtorch them off the frame. The
gimmick’s stupidity is nothing if not robust.
Ironing boards have a distant ancestor in the table discussed in the
first chapter of/Das Kapital/. In becoming a commodity, the table has
ceased to be, as Marx puts it, an ‘ordinary, sensuous thing’ made of
wood. ‘It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation
to all other commodities, it stands on its head and evolves out of its
wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to
begin dancing of its own free will.’ According to Marx, the value of a
commodity – and of the labour that went into its making – is realised
only after it has been sold or put into circulation. The gimmick, both a
product of technology and its expression, renders labour more abstract
still, its value that much harder to determine. Gimmickry is the séance
during which some commodities, at least, have begun to dance as if of
their own free will. Marx’s term for ‘of its own free will’ is ‘aus
freien Stücken’ – literally, ‘out of free (or unbound) pieces’.
Gimmickry does not altogether dissolve a commodity’s existence as an
ordinary, sensuous thing.
The gimmick is an ideal topic for Sianne Ngai, a critic and theorist
with a habit, as she puts it, of hanging large coats on small pegs. Her
field of research is the relation between aesthetics and ideology,
viewed from a post-Marxist perspective, and she has already made two
strikingly original contributions to that field./Ugly Feelings/(2005)
provides a sweeping yet fine-grained analysis of the aesthetics of
negative emotions such as envy, anxiety, irritation and paranoia which,
lacking a definite object, offer little or no prospect of cathartic
release./Our Aesthetic Categories/(2012) examines the equivocations
bound up in the judgments we make when we declare that someone or
something is ‘cute’, ‘zany’ or (merely) ‘interesting’. These books have
earned Ngai a formidable reputation as a considerer of unconsidered
trifles that turn out not to be so trifling after all.
The concept of the gimmick has a history in modern American vernacular
usage, a history that requires unpacking since, according to Ngai, the
gimmick adheres even more closely to capitalist crisis than the negative
emotions and unorthodox aesthetic categories examined in her previous
books. The term was coined in the 1920s and began to circulate more
widely at the start of the global recession of the early 1930s; its
usage spiked during the ‘turbulent’ 1970s, ‘in tandem with stagnating
wages, rising household debt and increasing market volatility’. From the
1930s to the 1970s, then, a variety of people used ‘gimmick’ in a
variety of contexts to have their say about capitalist crisis.
The ‘irritating yet strangely attractive’ gimmick is a ‘compromised
form’ which provokes an incurably ambivalent response: it tries too hard
(to get our attention) and not hard enough (its claim is that it will
save us labour). In our everyday encounters with the gimmick, we
register ‘an uncertainty about labour – its deficiency or excess – that
is also an uncertainty about value and time’. Such encounters amplify
the ambivalence we feel in the face of the mere commodity: ‘from the
stainless steel banana slicer to the cryptocurrency derivative, our very
concept of the gimmick implies awareness that, in capitalism, misprised
things are bought and sold continuously.’ We recognise gimmicks when we
see them because they at once over and underperform to an extent that
other commodities do not. For Ngai, the gimmick may take the shape of an
idea, technique or thing-like device, but is best understood as a
performance: it is ‘both a wonder/and/a trick’, she argues, in a
formulation which launches the book’s series of case studies. These are
performances that elicit performances from us. In calling an idea,
technique or thing-like device a gimmick, we distance ourselves from
those who have already drunk the Kool-Aid. What makes it hard to be sure
that we’re right and they’re wrong has to do with how ‘aggressively’ the
gimmick ‘insists on contemporaneity with its audience’. For Ngai,
there’s often a ‘contradiction on the part of the gimmick: that of
seeming either too old or too new’. She notes that the cellphone
brandished by Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s/Wall Street/(1987) – a
Motorola DynaTAC 8000X – was simultaneously cutting-edge and obsolete.
The gimmick matters most to Ngai as ‘a contrivance that writers,
composers and visual artists not only represent but use, deploying it to
think through other aesthetic, conceptual or historical problems’. The
gimmick ‘haunts’ art in a more intense way than ‘other areas of
culture’, she argues, because of art’s ‘equivocal status’ as a
capitalist commodity. Modernism in particular, preoccupied as it was
with ‘both technique and theory’ – and working, one might add, at once
too hard and not hard enough to advertise itself by means of manifesto
and provocation – could not hope to avoid accusations of gimmickry. The
doctrine of/ostranenie/or defamiliarisation put forward in the 1920s by
the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky sought to pre-empt such
accusations by insisting that the work of art should, by contrast with
the gimmick, spare no effort in rigorously laying bare its own devices.
There were no shortcuts to innovation. Doubts persist, however. Under
capitalism, Adorno said, art is always going to resemble a circus stunt
or genteel prank.
Throughout the book, Ngai’s focus is on the ‘seemingly esoteric
problems’ generated by an eclectic mix of works which have little in
common apart from their determination to take liberties with generic
convention or to test a medium’s affordances to the limit. Two chapters
demonstrate to the full her talents as a close reader of word and image:
one on the novel of ideas from Thomas Mann toJ.M.Coetzee and Nicola
Barker; the other on the creepily insouciant photographs of Torbjørn
Rødland. In both cases, the gimmick’s compromised form seems like the
only way to accommodate ‘“ideas” imported from criticism or philosophy’
within a genre, or a medium, long (if contentiously) associated with
‘mimetic representation’. Novels of ideas, Ngai observes, in a formula
that also applies to Rødland’s photographs, ‘re-enact, in their efforts
to comment on, the becoming-gimmick of capitalist thought’.
Nowhere has capitalist thought become gimmick more comprehensively than
in the realm of finance, whose devices, engineered to manage
deficiencies and excesses of capital by ‘structuring time’, flaunt their
status as contrivance while lazily making money out of money. Ngai walks
a tightrope between remote media, genres and historical periods in a
chapter that compares Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘The Bottle
Imp’ (1891) with David Robert Mitchell’s zombie film/It Follows/(2014).
The former was published a year after the sovereign debt crisis brought
about by the insolvency of Barings Bank, the latter conceived in the
aftermath of the 2008 subprime debacle. Both concern ‘gimmicks of
circulation’: a once-in-a-lifetime offer of instant gratification which,
when accepted – by the purchase of the imp in a bottle, in one case, or
by consensual sex, in the other – reveals itself as both a debt and a
curse. A sticky end awaits the current bearer of the debt/curse, unless
they can transfer it to somebody else. The comparison is a bit of a
stretch, since we don’t actually witness any financial transactions
taking place in/It Follows/, but that’s what tightropes are for.
Something happens in this chapter, I think, to the idea of the gimmick.
Its crudeness (an imp in a bottle, sex in the back seat of a car) has
been reconfigured as a way to take the ‘sublimity’, as Ngai puts it, out
of the steepling abstraction of capitalism’s devices. This is also the
gist of the book’s two knottiest chapters, which explore passages
from/Das Kapital/and the/Grundrisse/as an oblique commentary on Stan
Douglas’s film and video installation/Suspiria/(2003) and Rob Halpern’s
book of war poems,/Music for Porn/(2012)./Suspiria/, we are told, ‘pits’
the gimmick of a conspicuously old-fashioned Technicolor palette against
the ‘sublime’ effects created by the installation’s endlessly looping
and randomising ‘recombinant machine’. Meanwhile, Halpern’s allegory of
the soldier’s body attains ‘an affective power mirroring the social
power of all capitalist abstractions’. To characterise the gimmick as an
antidote to something else is at once to elevate it above the triviality
which gives it its special interest as an idea and to risk losing sight
of its inherent toxicity. Hanging large coats on large pegs, these
chapters seem to belong to a different book altogether.
Under capitalism, some kinds of labour have been so far abstracted or
otherwise hidden from view that they cease to be considered labour at
all: the unwaged ‘reproductive’ and ‘kin’ work necessary to create and
maintain a labouring population, for example. Ngai’s long engagement
with feminist theory has led her to explore the ways in which the waged
provision of services on a temporary basis or in a zero-hours contract
has come to be gendered female, just as ‘reproductive’ or ‘kin’ work
always has been.
The titular employment agency in Helen DeWitt’s delightfully
deadpan/Lightning Rods/(2011) combines female temping with female sex
work; the aim is to enhance the productivity of high-performing
heterosexual male employees while at the same time indemnifying the
companies that employ them against the risk of sexual harassment
lawsuits. The service incorporates a mechanical gimmick: a trolley
facilitating fully anonymised consensual sex. But all the fun lies in
the brazenness of those who have an interest in making the use of such a
device appear even remotely plausible. Ngai’s theory of the gimmick is
also a theory of comedy: another compromised form that both distrusts
and revels in technique. Crudely baring an ephemeral device in order to
future-proof it, comedy re-enacts and comments on the gimmick’s
normalisation: the process through which the bizarre device or spectacle
imagined into being by a madcap inventor becomes part of the furniture.
It is ‘not so much defamiliarisation as a kind of funnily irritating
refamiliarisation, constantly surprising us with things we already
roughly expect’.
/The Theory of the Gimmick/concludes, boldly and brilliantly, with a
meticulous analysis of Henry James’s late fiction. Ngai has noticed that
the investigations of opaque social and moral circumstance conducted in
these novels and stories have the effect of exposing an over-reliance,
in times of emergency, on waged and unwaged care-providers whose work is
broadly thought of as female, even when undertaken by a man. On the one
hand, there is the large cast of governesses, nannies, tutors and tour
guides; on the other, the companions, assistants and deputies thrust,
like Mrs Assingham in/The Golden Bowl/or Lambert Strether in/The
Ambassadors/, into ‘intimate, oddly compensated’, and often
quasi-familial relationships with those they find themselves looking
after or offering advice and comfort to.
In these novels and stories, the figure of the forsaken employee
converges with that of the depleted assistant or deputy; this reveals a
preoccupation with the relation between labour and value at a moment of
‘ripe capitalism’ when long-established certainties concerning what a
parent might be said to owe to a child or an employer to a loyal servant
had begun to relax their grip. James did not so much reflect on that
relation as develop his own version of the compromised vernacular form
that exemplifies it. His late style is well supplied with gimmicks:
narrative coincidence, florid metaphor, the use of minor characters to
expound or advance the plot. The ‘Master’ who emerges from Ngai’s
penetrating and sympathetic scrutiny is an essentially comic writer who
is determined to surprise us, in a way that both amuses and irritates,
with things we already expect.
The torque Ngai applies to her argument turns it away from the gimmick
as gadget in the direction of the gimmick as the performance of a trick;
a tendency reinforced, in some chapters, by the construal of such
devices as an antidote to something else. She does not need telling that
the argument could also be turned in the opposite direction. It is
‘internal’ to the device’s ‘aesthetic form’, as she points out, that it
can on occasion ‘slide out of the realm of aesthetic phenomena
altogether. Sometimes gimmick just means thing.’ I happened to be
reading her book when Donald Trump made a notable addition to the annals
of political gimmickry. To me, the decisive moment in his appearance
outside a church across the road from the White House, not quite knowing
which way up to hold a Bible, was the exposure of the gimmick as an
object no longer able to perform its designated narrative or symbolic
function. ‘Is that your Bible?’ a reporter asked Trump. ‘It’s/a/Bible.’
Ngai could point out that in drawing attention to this moment I am in
turn performing my disapproval of those who approved of Trump’s
performance. But something appears to have come significantly unstuck in
his offhand admission that even the most well-seasoned gimmick sometimes
‘just means thing’. The same thought seems to have occurred to some of
those who found a use for the term during the key decades of its
incubation before and after the Second World War.
In June 1939, Joe Jacobs, the manager of Tony Galento, an Italian
American brawler who was about to enter the ring against the great Joe
Louis, announced that he didn’t like what Louis had supposedly done the
previous year to the rather more agile and skilful Max Schmeling. Louis,
he claimed, had made use of a gimmick. ‘For the record,’ the
Washington/Evening Star/noted, ‘the gimmick is a blunt metal instrument,
known variously in the fight business as a “persuader” and a “slug”. If
and when used, it is camouflaged to resemble a portion of a boxing glove
and is carried in the palm of the glove, with just enough protruding to
do fearful things when brought into contact with an opponent’s anatomy.’
Such accusations were part and parcel of the hype surrounding
interracial fights. Galento was one of the white ‘bums of the month’
taken out by Louis in a sequence of title defences between January 1939
and May 1941. It is striking that the reports of these controversies
should so starkly emphasise the thingness of the device. The rivet held
in the glove doesn’t merely contravene the rules of the game, like a sly
punch below the belt. Its purpose is to bring the whole performance to
an abrupt end. This is one gimmick that has taken the opportunity to
‘slide out of the realm of aesthetic phenomena altogether’. The term we
need for such devices is ‘crass’: not just stupid, but gross, dense,
thick in physical constitution or texture./A/metal rivet,/a/Bible:
utterly nondescript, nothing but a thing.
Ngai doesn’t waste time on the more blatant postwar manifestations of
gimmickry. No mention is made, for example, of William Burroughs’s/Naked
Lunch/(1959), which riffs repeatedly on the idea of the gimmick, and is
not shy when it comes to crassness. She refers in passing to the film
producer and director William Castle, a self-styled ‘master of gimmicks’
who specialised in cheerfully excessive horror movies, only to state in
the next sentence that her book will concern itself with more ‘esoteric’
matters. During the 1950s, Hollywood sought to fend off the threat of
television by reasserting the superiority of cinema as a medium through
a series of technical enhancements: Cinerama, CinemaScope, stereophonic
sound. Castle sought instead to return cinema to its origins as a
fairground or music-hall attraction. In his 1977 autobiography,
unceremoniously entitled/Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants off
America/, he chronicles the success he achieved with devices like the
Tingler, a scream-eliciting vibrator placed under cinema seats which the
projectionist could activate at critical moments. The Tingler, like the
‘slug’, was an intervention from outside the realm of the aesthetic. But
esoterica can be blatant too: the Tingler had a distant precursor in the
fireworks Sergei Eisenstein set off beneath the seats in the auditorium
during one of the productions he staged for the Proletkult Theatre in
Moscow in the early 1920s.
Vladimir Nabokov’s transition from Russian to English-language writer
involved a reappraisal of his own indebtedness to Shklovskian theories
of defamiliarisation; and not least the leeway those theories give to
gimmickry. There’s a walk-on part in his first ‘American’ novel,/The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight/(1941), for a Futurist poet called Alexis
Pan whose bold experiments become old-fashioned almost overnight; after
all, ‘super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than
others.’ But it’s his penultimate ‘Russian’ novel,/Invitation to a
Beheading/, translated into English in 1959, that most explicitly
advances a theory of the gimmick. The protagonist’s mother, visiting him
in his prison cell while he awaits execution, is enjoined to note the
clock in the corridor outside, whose hands have to be painted on once
every hour, by hand. That’s nothing, she replies, in comparison with
some of the ‘marvellous gimmicks’ she’s come across in her time. For
example, there are the ‘incomprehensible, monstrous objects’ known
as/nonnons/: ‘knobby things’, like some kind of fossil, each paired with
a ‘crazy’ distorting mirror. The crazy mirror converts the object’s
‘shapeless speckledness’ into a pellucid ‘sensible image’: a marvel
comparable to that performed, in Ngai’s account, by our perception of
the gimmick as at once wonder and trick.
The advantage of the/nonnon/is that it invites attention to what happens
before and after the performance: to the thing whose knobbiness is
already a kind of warning against itself; and to the hand which,
advancing that thing towards the mirror, recedes into a blur. The rack
clamped to the top of my ironing board is a bit weird rather than
knobby. There’s a warning there, all the same, which I ignore. Extending
the rack in the fond hope that I’ll at last have somewhere to hang the
shirts I plan to iron, I discover that the apparatus will no longer fit
into the average-sized living room.
The idea of the/nonnon/fits best with occasions on which the gimmick
announces itself as a thing. Ngai devotes a couple of incisive
paragraphs to Charles Wright’s Harlem novel/The Wig: A Mirror
Image/(1966), a delirious tall tale – ‘folkloric’, Wright called it –
spun out of the protagonist’s fashioning of a new hairstyle which, he
hopes, will render him racially ambiguous, and thus more employable. The
gimmick, she notes, is once again revealed as both necessary and
trivial. But we need to acknowledge the care Wright takes to establish
the material density of Lester Jefferson’s idea, which requires lavish
applications of ‘long-lasting Silky Smooth Hair Relaxer, with the
built-in Sweat-proof Base’ from ‘a Giant economy jar’. ‘I stood tall
like the great-great-grandson of slaves, sharecroppers, Old World
royalty. Tall, like a storm trooper, like an Honour Scout.’ Held up to
the distorting mirror of sexual fetishism, the wig-/nonnon/eventually
gets Lester laid, but that’s the limit of its powers. Everything else
has been reduced to a blur. The only job he is offered requires him to
dress up in a head-to-toe chicken suit in order to promote a fast-food
franchise: the suit eclipses the Relaxer, while putting its built-in
sweat-proof base to the test./Nonnon/-theory might also help to explain
the relation between/The Wig/– a landmark text for writers such as
Ishmael Reed, Fran Ross, Colson Whitehead and Paul Beatty – and the two
other novels Wright published, both semi-autobiographical, which take a
studiously matter-of-fact view of sex, drugs, racism and literary
aspiration. Fluctuating between fiction and journalism, full of ‘tricks’
that can’t be mistaken for wonders,/The Messenger/(1963) and/Absolutely
Nothing to Get Alarmed About/(1973) represent the before and after, in
Wright’s career, of the gloriously gimmicky performance which is/The Wig/.
Even when the gimmick lacks material density, it can still behave like
a/nonnon/. Ngai observes that the ‘only moment’ in Mitchell’s/It
Follows/when African Americans are ‘visible onscreen’ – and then at a
distance – occurs during a drive through Detroit. The sight prompts a
‘conversation about racialised economic inequality, in which that
racialisation is at once alluded to and immediately displaced’. If we
think of the debt/curse as a/nonnon/whose truth is revealed when it’s
held up to the crazy mirror of the deceitful sexual encounter, then we
can understand that an incidental cost of such clarifications is
precisely to displace the visibility of a social order rife with
inequalities.
There are in fact at least two other moments in the film in which
African Americans are visible on screen, and not at a distance. Both
involve the film’s signature slow pan, which in each case comes to rest
on the heroine, Jay. In the first of these, the pan begins on an African
American instructor reciting a passage from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’ in class; it ends on Jay, who has just caught sight, through
the window, of a zombie headed in her direction. The second occurs in
the hospital to which Jay has been taken after a car accident. The pan
slowly passes across a variety of familiar hospital scenes, including an
African American family at a bedside, before once again finding Jay, who
has evidently decided that impromptu post-operative sex with an
ex-boyfriend who doesn’t believe in the debt/curse is as good a way as
any to pass it along. These shots re-enact and comment on the gimmick’s
overshadowing of a complicated and often conflicted world.
The/nonnon/effect amounts to a sudden sharpening of affective focus that
at the same time blurs a great deal else. At its heart, however, remains
the trivial, necessary performance Ngai has done so much to illuminate.
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