The particular affective responses involved are hardly grand ones. The cute evokes feelings through its vulnerable and diminutive form. The zany is itself a feeling of flailing helplessness. (Ngai does not include erotic frenzy but one might as well, particularly if hyperbolic and joyless.) The interesting is a moving target, tracking along with the difference between norms and anomalies. These might all be trivial or bathetic feelings—but they are not detached, disinterested, or leisurely contemplation of the beautiful. Nor are they the overwhelming force of the unmasterable sublime, which one nevertheless puts back in its box with the gesture of respect or recognition of delight. They nest between those two extremes. We are dealing with weak forms and subtle powers that make the histrionics of the sublime in Lyotard or Land look a bit dated.34
In a novel formulation, Ngai suggests that art really has become autonomous. Moreover, the other great ambition for art, its merger with everyday life, has also come true at the same time. Both utopias came to pass, but not quite in the form anyone envisaged. They happen through rather than against the commodity form. Art survived through weakness, through a faint facility for standing-in for nonalienated labor, as a vague and friendly ghost rather than the specter haunting Europe. The aesthetic is still with us, but in banal form, lacking religious solemnity. You can cuddle up to it at night or glance it in a museum. “Hey…”, it says. It can be awesome but never inspire awe. It has no higher power to appeal to and not much up its sleeve.
That aspect of art that really did fuse with the everyday becomes almost indistinguishable from neurotic symptoms: Interest cycles through irritating obsessions and boredom; cuteness reeks of manipulation that provokes phobias and disgust; zaniness performs hysteria or mania. Everyday art is the kipple of once-great genre tropes: cuteness is the pastoral in a .jpeg; the zany is a comedic return and reconciliation in a .gif; the interesting is realism in a Facebook quiz.
The ubiquity of these more secular aesthetic categories may be related to “the increasing routing of art and aesthetic experience through the exchange of information.”35 The aesthetic now attaches to performance, commodity, and information. This connects a series of historical phenomena:
the convergence of art and information; the loss of tension between art and the commodity form; the rise of an increasingly intimate public sphere and of an increasingly exchange-based private one; the proliferation and intensification of activity in both public/private domains that cannot easily be dichotomized into play or work.36
While more secular than the sublime, all three also put pressure on the category of beauty: cuteness violates the distance to the object, zaniness troubles the concept of spontaneous play, while the gaze of the interesting is clinical but remains unmoved.37 The aesthetic experience is just not to be found where classical western aesthetics thought it was. Ngai: “Can distance, play and disinterested pleasure—essential images of freedom rather than compulsion or determination—still be considered reliable ‘symptoms’ of the aesthetic, if late capitalist culture’s most pervasive aesthetic categories pose such a challenge to each as such?”38
Schlegel and Fredric Jameson now appear as the synthetic observers of transitional moments. Ngai:
If, in response to the loss of the sacred under conditions of secular, industrial modernity, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries plunged headlong into the resacralization of the aesthetic, the contemporary moment seems defined by a desacralization of the aesthetic turn, but a desacralization caused precisely by the aesthetic’s hyperbolic expansion.39
Contrary to Jameson, Hiroki Azuma got the postmodern moment right when he noticed a shift from a grand narrative to a vast database—of cute elements or moe-points—as what was already emerging in Japan in the nineties.40
Aesthetic theories may themselves have their aesthetic modes, the beautiful being no doubt the most common. Jameson’s aesthetics may have tried to pull off the sublime: You were meant to feel as if you stared into the abyss of the totality itself. If we think of Adorno’s Minima Moralia as cute, then what do interesting or zany aesthetic theories look like? In these terms, Ngai’s own book seems to work in the interesting mode. Perhaps the new only appears against the background of a constant—in this case, eternal capitalism. It can have novel features, but somehow its essence remains the same. It can be late but all tomorrow’s parties still go on and on and are all the same.
What would not just a zany aesthetic, but a zany aesthetic theory, look like? In retrospect, I think I tried it in A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory.41 The titles themselves name kinds of performing-subjects, who, like the zanni in his time, do emerging kinds of labor. Gamer Theory itself was performative, appearing online as a networked book. It worked within Oulipian constraints and was certainly not cool but a lot of hot, hard work.42 It wasn’t as compellingly zany as Eddo Stern’s Tekken Torture, a modified fighting game that gave real electric shocks when players were hit by their opponents, but it felt that way.
Unlike the interesting, the zany really works against its constraints. There’s an acceptance of a given form and temporal constant in the interesting that the zany pushes exhaustively and exhaustingly past. Maybe with a touch more of that mania we can then unmoor the aesthetic experience of the interesting, the zany, and the cute from the assumption of an eternal capitalism. Maybe this isn’t late capitalism, but early something else.
What might be novel is the ownership and control over the entire value chain through command of the information vector itself. Here I’d like to connect Ngai to the pioneering work of Randy Martin, whose interest was in forms of performative aesthetics that might include her category of the zany but are perhaps a bit broader. The zany is anxious about doing it right. The escape hatch the performative art (and sport) that interested Martin found is close to the queer art of failure, in that it recognizes a new volatility in its conditions of operation. It lets go of the guiderail.
The secularization of the aesthetic seems homologous with the subsumption of the value chain under control of information. The power of what I call the vectoralist class is an aesthetic power, a power over appearances, over the stocks, flows, and (more importantly) the vector via which information is managed and material production is ordered. The aesthetic—in the sense of the apprehension of information—integrated the everyday into commodification but also changed what the commodity form is. It is not just that information became a commodity but that the commodity could now take the form of information itself.
Tiziana Terranova suggests that counterhegemonic struggles are now about tactics in a turbulent flow of information. In this connection, Ngai’s identification of three operative aesthetics is useful and can be instrumentalized as styles of engagement. These are aesthetics about the subsumption of creative effort of what I called the hacker class, into the commodification of information and the informationalization of the commodity. Clearly this era of the zany, the cute, and the interesting may also pass. The Anthropocene may require a revolution in modes of perception, affect, and cognition.
But all this too may be automated. I sometimes joke with my “millennial” students and “post-millennial” kids that our last job will be to figure out how to be cute so our new artificial intelligence (AI) overlords will keep us mere humans as pets. Or perhaps they will find the weird data we throw off interesting—although we will still have to be careful not to become persons of interest. Maybe our AI overlords will evolve a posthuman language in which to LOL at our zany mammalian antics. But Ngai’s book is no joke and may well be the basis for a manual for appearing to each other, that we might feel and know and think each other, and endure.
Kodwo Eshun: Black Accelerationism
Sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying,
We are hostile aliens, immune from dying. —The Spaceape
There are two bright stars of London culture whose premature