Sensoria contains brief assessments, focusing on key concepts, of twenty-odd general intellects, some of whom are well-known.13 I have tried to look beyond my New York–centric view of the world and beyond the confines of the academy. Not surprisingly, I have failed in the task of producing a completely diversified overview; I have just the parts of the elephant I can touch from where I stand.
In my reading, all of these general intellects manage to generate out of their particular ways of working some concepts that can be connected or contrasted with others derived from other kinds of knowledge work. That to me is what a general intellect is: someone who generates concepts out of particular knowledge work in particular departments of the intellectual division of labor. Not all are academics; some are artists or writers. Art and literature seem to me to have analogous problems to scholarship in the common task of knowing the world.
This book is meant to be useful. At the low resolution view, where you take in a fair swath of elephant but with not much detail, what I think is most useful are concepts. I’m looking for ways to compress and condense by focusing on concepts. If a good fact is mostly true about something in particular, a good concept is slightly true about a lot of things. Both fall short of the common task of knowing the world. That can only be begun by lacing concepts together from different labors. It is toward that objective that this book is aimed.
Sianne Ngai: Zany, Cute, Interesting
I commonly encounter two problems when I try to teach aesthetics. One is that today’s students don’t seem to relate to categories of aesthetic experience and judgment such as the sublime and the beautiful. Another is that in today’s cosmopolitan classroom, these seem like rather western categories. An approach that might help here is Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.1 The our in the title is a delicious provocation.
The book presents two problems of its own: first, it is written from within the upper echelons of literary-critical and theoretical work, as conducted in our top universities, a world to which I do not belong. Can it be made interesting for those of us in more ordinary day jobs? Second: is it possible to extract from it some concepts that can help with the making of a counterhegemonic culture in our times?
Rather than the sublime and the beautiful, Ngai offers three categories, which one can already see at work on the surface of social media, distributed more or less as “zany blogs, cute tweets and interesting wikis.”2 Even just as common words, zany, cute, and interesting seem intuitively right as keys to what many people want to look at, laugh with, sigh over, and share with others. If you want to make a meme, in the general sense of a unit of media that will be shared by others, those three all work.3 The question is, why?
To cut to the punchline: “The best explanation for why the zany, the interesting, and the cute are our most pervasive and significant categories is that they are about the increasingly intertwined ways in which late capitalist subjects labor, communicate and consume.”4 They are the material through which we can have perceptions and share judgments that seem most closely related to what we do, say, and use in the twenty-first century.
Ngai frames this as a tension between the relative novelty of these aesthetic categories and something that appears as more of a constant—capitalism. The pressure I want to put on this is to ask whether they are indicative not of “late” capitalism, but “early”’ something else.5 But first, let’s flesh out the three categories.
The zany: it’s a performative aesthetic that is hot and sweaty, anxious and excessive. It is physical and sometimes libidinal. It is about activities where play becomes a job or work gets too playful. It involves imitation and mimicry, as if trying to copy what someone else does but doing it clumsily. It may be done as a joke but taken seriously or done seriously and taken as a joke: think Lucille Ball or Hugo Ball. Injury is possible: think Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line. It borders on camp, or what Jack Halberstam calls the queer art of failure, as in Sandra Bernhard or Kikki and Herb.6 But the zany is more likely to convert triumph into failure than failure into triumph. Think the coyote’s endless labor of trying to catch the roadrunner.7
The zany performance can be too rigid or too elastic. Either way, there’s instability between doing a job and performing a role, or between cultural and occupational performance, or between play and labor. The zany can be desperate or stressed, but it is not Dionysian frenzy; it is more precarious and forced, like bad porn. Obliged to play, the zany can be sexy but not joyous.
The stock character of the zanni was originally an itinerant servant, a peasant forced by drought or war into the city. The zagna was the female counterpart. The zanni and zagna are supposed to repair the amorous relationships of others. Comedy ensued. The zanni came to refer to a second mime imitating another very broadly, an anarchic improviser. He was a “substitute for another guy.” He mutated into the Cable Guy and as such is linked to post-Fordist labor and is caught in-between modes of production, in this case between industrial work and service work.
The zanni shows up again as Kramer on Seinfeld: like Jerry, only more so. All the show’s characters perform versions of what Paolo Virno calls virtuoso labor (what for Angela McRobbie and others is affective labor).8 Ngai also thinks of this as feminized labor, a term Paul Preciado would push back on, in the assumptions it makes about what is feminine.9
Feminized labor is certainly at play in movies like Richard Pryor’s The Toy, in which he dresses as a waitress to get a job. Ngai thinks there are ambiguities for women about skills formerly associated with their special role in social reproduction now being used in the workplace. If there’s a genre that performs this kind of performativity, reality TV shows like Top Chef, Project Runway, or Drag Race are examples of it. They are all about aesthetic judgments on forms of virtuoso or affective labor.
The cute: The word derives from the word acute. The word itself is a cute version of an edgier word. The zany is to be held at a distance; the cute is intimate, domestic. We have powers over cute things, and yet they still seem to make demands of us. The zany is about production; the cute is about consumption. The zany is about the worker; the cute is about the product. The zany is hot and may involve sharp implements; the cute is warm and fuzzy. If the zany is about performing subjects, the cute is about subject–object relations, including transitional objects, like the plushie the child can love or (if the kid is anything like my daughter) just abandon in the strangest places.
Cuteness lacks beauty’s novelty, singularity, and untouchability—and power. The cute can be handled and fondled. It is proximate to kitsch, to easy consumption, to the simulating of affect.10 The cute commodity often seems to be asking: Are you my mother? The cute thing can be a fetish, masking its own making, but it can also be utopian, a model of a world of use value without exchange value.
Marx imagines commodity fetishes a bit like child actors, squealing and appealing for their buyers.11 Cuteness is perhaps a kind of fetish redoubled. It tries to work on the fantasy of the fetish itself. It pines for the utopia of the qualitative, which seeks refuge under capitalism in the fetish. Cuteness is a fantasy of the commodity addressing its protector. One feels like one is carrying out its wishes. Its exaggerated passivity can provoke sadism or care. It can also hint at a pastoral fantasy of use value that could be rescued and kept safe, as in the Toy Story movies. The cute provokes a desire for intimacy to cut out exchange. Its powerlessness can itself be powerfully erotic.
Ngai: “the ultimate index of an object’s cuteness may be its edibility.”12 It is sweet but edged with disgust. Keston Sutherland