On her book Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
Cover Interview of August 18, 2020
The wide angle
Theory of the Gimmick continues the effort undertaken
in my previous books, Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) and Ugly
Feelings (2005) to get people to take “minor,” trivial, or everyday
affective and aesthetic phenomena seriously. The aesthetic forms and judgments I
analyze—from ambiguous evaluations like “interesting” to viscerally powerful
experiences like cuteness—are specific to capitalism and inevitably compromised:
based on mixed or clashing feelings, ideologically ambiguous, and lacking in
moral prestige. But they tell us just as much—if not sometimes more—about the
world, the way it appears to us, and our complex and historically changing relation
to others, as do the philosophically prestigious concepts of the beautiful and
sublime.
So my study of the gimmick carries on with a project undertaken
in my other books. But it goes deeper, by focusing on “value” and the dynamics
of its production and realization underlying the phenomena discussed in these
other books. The valorization of commodities ultimately connects the processes
of production, circulation, and consumption I discuss in Our Aesthetic
Categories.
Some theorists of the contemporary like to proclaim Marx’s
value theory obsolete, preferring to use concepts like “human capital” or “bare
life” when speaking of how capitalism exploits people, including the many who
are not laborers. But simply in being what it is, the gimmick proves that value-labor
theory is alive and kicking in the ordinary ways in which people make aesthetic
judgments, and thus share their aesthetic experiences with other people.
This is good, because value-labor theory—a theory of social
domination based on how value becomes bound to time through the
abstraction of labor—highlights and even enables the measurement of exploitation
that basic economic forms like the wage and profit obscure. It is also a theory
that takes the historical uniqueness of capitalism’s social forms seriously—and
as forms which impact as much if not more on those kept or left outside the
wage relationship as on those who are inside it.
Aesthetic theory and Marxist theory—in what I take to be its
inseparable intersection with feminist social reproduction theory—are thus the main
intellectual traditions I engage with.
[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
The wide angle
Theory of the Gimmick continues the effort undertaken in my previous books, Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) and Ugly Feelings (2005) to get people to take “minor,” trivial, or everyday affective and aesthetic phenomena seriously. The aesthetic forms and judgments I analyze—from ambiguous evaluations like “interesting” to viscerally powerful experiences like cuteness—are specific to capitalism and inevitably compromised: based on mixed or clashing feelings, ideologically ambiguous, and lacking in moral prestige. But they tell us just as much—if not sometimes more—about the world, the way it appears to us, and our complex and historically changing relation to others, as do the philosophically prestigious concepts of the beautiful and sublime.
So my study of the gimmick carries on with a project undertaken in my other books. But it goes deeper, by focusing on “value” and the dynamics of its production and realization underlying the phenomena discussed in these other books. The valorization of commodities ultimately connects the processes of production, circulation, and consumption I discuss in Our Aesthetic Categories.
Some theorists of the contemporary like to proclaim Marx’s value theory obsolete, preferring to use concepts like “human capital” or “bare life” when speaking of how capitalism exploits people, including the many who are not laborers. But simply in being what it is, the gimmick proves that value-labor theory is alive and kicking in the ordinary ways in which people make aesthetic judgments, and thus share their aesthetic experiences with other people.
This is good, because value-labor theory—a theory of social domination based on how value becomes bound to time through the abstraction of labor—highlights and even enables the measurement of exploitation that basic economic forms like the wage and profit obscure. It is also a theory that takes the historical uniqueness of capitalism’s social forms seriously—and as forms which impact as much if not more on those kept or left outside the wage relationship as on those who are inside it.
Aesthetic theory and Marxist theory—in what I take to be its inseparable intersection with feminist social reproduction theory—are thus the main intellectual traditions I engage with.