On her book Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
Cover Interview of August 18, 2020
A close-up
The photographs by Torbjørn Rødland on pages 216-217 showcase
a gimmick he often uses in his images: a hand entering from an invisible space
outside but also entirely specific to and thus belonging to the picture—a space
Eyal Peretz calls the “off”—to manipulate or toy with something inside its
boundaries. I say a lot about this “handy” device, how it enables Rødland to
introduce a surprising abstraction into his imagery, and why it reminds me of
the white-gloved, disembodied hand of Hamburger Helper: a product originally
designed to save American housewives time and effort in the preparation of
family meals.
So here we have a classic gimmick: the labor-saving device.
Represented by that other classic gimmick: the advertising icon. We find this
recursivity in the original Helper jingle, which readers my age and older might
remember: “Hamburger Helper / helped her hamburger / help her / make a great
meal.” And so the gimmick assists in reinforcing the euphemism of the housewife
as the performer of a personal service (“helper”)—as opposed to a reproductive
laborer whose contribution to surplus-value is structurally concealed by the
wage.
As a literature professor who thinks it is important to
recover the work of brilliant but forgotten or little-known writers, I also
hope that the reader turns to page 11. I have a short reading there of a zany
novel published in 1966 by Charles Stevenson Wright, a queer experimental writer
who has fallen outside the canons of both postwar American and African American
literature. The Wig opens with the narrator’s explanation of how racism’s
blockage of his ability to acquire a wage directly forces him to acquire
a gimmick. This gimmick is the novel’s eponymous wig, or new way
of styling the narrator’s hair—via a product called Silky Smooth—so he can
appear non- or “less” Black to racist employers.
Wage, wig, and gimmick all slide
together here in a provocative way that anticipates all of the major themes in
my book—and that reminds us of how one cannot talk about capitalism without
talking about racism. The Wig, which I think Wright wants us to imagine
as almost just as easily titled The Wage, also highlights one of the
most important contradictions involved in the valorization of commodities,
which is the way in which capitalism links the necessary to the superfluous.
That contradiction gets mirrored in the gimmick’s flagrantly unworthy form.
[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
A close-up
The photographs by Torbjørn Rødland on pages 216-217 showcase a gimmick he often uses in his images: a hand entering from an invisible space outside but also entirely specific to and thus belonging to the picture—a space Eyal Peretz calls the “off”—to manipulate or toy with something inside its boundaries. I say a lot about this “handy” device, how it enables Rødland to introduce a surprising abstraction into his imagery, and why it reminds me of the white-gloved, disembodied hand of Hamburger Helper: a product originally designed to save American housewives time and effort in the preparation of family meals.
So here we have a classic gimmick: the labor-saving device. Represented by that other classic gimmick: the advertising icon. We find this recursivity in the original Helper jingle, which readers my age and older might remember: “Hamburger Helper / helped her hamburger / help her / make a great meal.” And so the gimmick assists in reinforcing the euphemism of the housewife as the performer of a personal service (“helper”)—as opposed to a reproductive laborer whose contribution to surplus-value is structurally concealed by the wage.
As a literature professor who thinks it is important to recover the work of brilliant but forgotten or little-known writers, I also hope that the reader turns to page 11. I have a short reading there of a zany novel published in 1966 by Charles Stevenson Wright, a queer experimental writer who has fallen outside the canons of both postwar American and African American literature. The Wig opens with the narrator’s explanation of how racism’s blockage of his ability to acquire a wage directly forces him to acquire a gimmick. This gimmick is the novel’s eponymous wig, or new way of styling the narrator’s hair—via a product called Silky Smooth—so he can appear non- or “less” Black to racist employers.
Wage, wig, and gimmick all slide together here in a provocative way that anticipates all of the major themes in my book—and that reminds us of how one cannot talk about capitalism without talking about racism. The Wig, which I think Wright wants us to imagine as almost just as easily titled The Wage, also highlights one of the most important contradictions involved in the valorization of commodities, which is the way in which capitalism links the necessary to the superfluous. That contradiction gets mirrored in the gimmick’s flagrantly unworthy form.