On her book Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
Cover Interview of August 18, 2020
In a nutshell
This book looks closely at an aesthetic form unique to
capitalist society: the irritating and yet strangely compelling gimmick. It
argues that the gimmick lies latent in every made thing in capitalism. The
gimmick is an unconvincing aesthetic object that we tend to describe in
specifically economic terms as cheap or overvalued. It can take the guise of an
aging “special effect,” a questionable financial strategy, a supposedly
time-saving kitchen gadget, or a foam served in a high-end restaurant—any
device we regard as making dubious claims about value. It includes both the
painstakingly devised and the gratuitously disposable. The gimmick is also an
aesthetic judgment, or spontaneous, feeling-based evaluation. It is what we
call things when we are uncertain if they are wonders or just tricks. Most
crucially, the gimmick strikes us as working both too little and too hard.
In our encounter with the gimmick’s dissatisfying and yet still
bizarrely attractive form, we are thus registering an uncertainty about labor,
value, and time: the essential metrics of capitalism. These measurements become
tellingly impossible to separate in a system compelling continuous technological
innovations as capital moves around the world in search of profit, expelling
labor from the lines it abandons and throwing entire populations out of work.
Our ambivalent experience of the intrinsically overrated gimmick thus ultimately
reflects doubt about where “value” is said to reside in capitalism—and about
why wealth needs to be measured in this specific form in the first place.
I look at the gimmick from a variety of angles but mostly
within the domain of culture or art, where ambiguities about value and labor
have always come to the fore—and especially in our late capitalist present. I
focus on works by artists who willingly take the risk of deploying the
gimmick in efforts to represent and reflect on its compromised form. Tracking
this form across a variety of objects—novels by Helen DeWitt, Nicola Barker,
Thomas Mann, Henry James, and Mark Twain; horror films like It Follows,
the photographs of Torbjørn Rødland, and the video art of Stan Douglas—we see
how the gimmick sparks not only suspicion but comedy. Both point to deeper
anxieties about capitalism as a whole.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
This book looks closely at an aesthetic form unique to capitalist society: the irritating and yet strangely compelling gimmick. It argues that the gimmick lies latent in every made thing in capitalism. The gimmick is an unconvincing aesthetic object that we tend to describe in specifically economic terms as cheap or overvalued. It can take the guise of an aging “special effect,” a questionable financial strategy, a supposedly time-saving kitchen gadget, or a foam served in a high-end restaurant—any device we regard as making dubious claims about value. It includes both the painstakingly devised and the gratuitously disposable. The gimmick is also an aesthetic judgment, or spontaneous, feeling-based evaluation. It is what we call things when we are uncertain if they are wonders or just tricks. Most crucially, the gimmick strikes us as working both too little and too hard.
In our encounter with the gimmick’s dissatisfying and yet still bizarrely attractive form, we are thus registering an uncertainty about labor, value, and time: the essential metrics of capitalism. These measurements become tellingly impossible to separate in a system compelling continuous technological innovations as capital moves around the world in search of profit, expelling labor from the lines it abandons and throwing entire populations out of work. Our ambivalent experience of the intrinsically overrated gimmick thus ultimately reflects doubt about where “value” is said to reside in capitalism—and about why wealth needs to be measured in this specific form in the first place.
I look at the gimmick from a variety of angles but mostly within the domain of culture or art, where ambiguities about value and labor have always come to the fore—and especially in our late capitalist present. I focus on works by artists who willingly take the risk of deploying the gimmick in efforts to represent and reflect on its compromised form. Tracking this form across a variety of objects—novels by Helen DeWitt, Nicola Barker, Thomas Mann, Henry James, and Mark Twain; horror films like It Follows, the photographs of Torbjørn Rødland, and the video art of Stan Douglas—we see how the gimmick sparks not only suspicion but comedy. Both point to deeper anxieties about capitalism as a whole.