I always wondered about Clement Greenberg’s assertion (in Homemade Esthetics) that “there's one kind of experience that can't double back on itself, and that's esthetic experience itself. If it could that would mean receiving esthetic judgments of esthetic judgments, which can't be done.” It was never clear to me why he needed this caveat, or why he thought it plausible. Greenberg is not mentioned in Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick, but the book helps answer my question: First of all, Greenberg is wrong, because aesthetic judgment is not private experience, but inevitably discursive; look at Kant’s Third Critique, which, as Ngai says, “makes it clear that beauty is about how we speak, how we demand, and how we rebuke.” And those verbal activities in judgment are inevitably subject to judgment themselves. Ngai puts it in italics: “The affective style of an aesthetic judgment’s verbal performance matters for our determination of a judgment’s felicity.” There’s the defense of criticism in a nutshell. I think Greenberg wanted to fence judgment off from ulterior judgment because such specularity detaches judgment from a secure connection to its object. That’s where the judgment that something is a gimmick (like judging that something is kitsch) comes in: It’s a manner of questioning a thing’s value that posits a third party who would be taken in, whereas I remain impervious to the proffered fakery. It’s a judgment both on the object and on the judgment of a real or imagined another—which also means that from a certain point of view I can also admire the gimmick’s success, even if it’s not immediately successful with me. The problem is, what kind of affective style emerges from the judgment on the gimmick? Do felicitous judgments remain possible? I have my doubts. First of all, in judging the judgments of another, I judge their choice of objects on which to excise judgment. And it turns out that a thought that “ascribes enormous efficacy to an intrinsically stupid form” entails detailed readings of texts I would have rather not know so much about—for instance, a novel about Londoners’ reactions to the illusionist David Blaine playing the Kafkaesque hunger artist in transparent box suspended over the Thames (yes, that really happened, in 2003) or a trashy-sounding horror film about a supernatural curse that’s transmitted via sex—or that I’d have thought I wanted to read but now realize are bound to be disappointing (Henry James’s The Sacred Fount). Concomitantly, a self-consciousness about the instability of judgment seems to lead to reluctance to exercise it, which reads as aloofness, as if, judgment is an indulgence best left to the rubes and not for sophisticated critics. A similar “kind of fence sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal” (Ashbery) emerges with regard to what might be called intellectual resources. The first two pages alone of Ngai’s fourth chapter, “It Follows, or Financial Imps,” for instance cite no fewer than sixteen authorities—David Ricardo, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Thorsten Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, David Harvey, Robert Brenner, Anwar Shaikh, Annie McClanahan, Randy Martin, Dimitris Sotiropoulos, John Milios, Spyros Lapatsioras, Leigh Claire La Berge, Marx, Riccardo Bellofiore, and Patrick Murray—in ruminating on possible interpretations of the role of finance in capitalist economies (to which the problem of the gimmick is, she thinks, specific). She’s setting up her readings of the horror film It Follows (2014) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Bottle Imp” (1891), neither of which explicitly deals with finance, though Ngai takes their fantasies of circulation and deferral as allegories of that. But her pantheon of references establishes no operative theory of finance beyond the notion that “finance emerges here as part of a continuum of appearances generated in the realm of productive labor”—which is perhaps all a literary theorist needs to know about it. As she says of the movie’s conclusion, the “economic problem…is left with a giant question mark hanging over it.” As a result, her historicization of these texts seems aimed not at claiming conviction but simply at being entertained by the reader as aesthetically attractive. She quotes Stanley Cavell’s idea of aesthetic judgment as “passionate utterance” but too much knowingness drains all passion.
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Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, is published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2020
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.