Our Aesthetic Categories

by Sianne Ngai

The recent turn to aesthetics in literary studies has been embraced by some of its advocates as a polemical riposte to critique: a practice increasingly attacked from multiple directions but here specifically for doing artworks the disservice of reducing them to encryptions of history or ideology.

… this quotidian triad of aesthetic categories … is the one best suited for grasping how the concept of “aesthetic” has been transformed by the performance-driven, information-saturated and networked, hyper-commodified world of late capitalism.

This is because the interesting, cute, and zany index … capitalism’s most socially binding processes:

• production, in the case of the zany
  • an aesthetic about performance as not just artful play but also affective labor
• circulation, in the case of the interesting
  • a serial, recursive aesthetic of informational relays and communicative exchange
• and consumption, in the case of the cute
  • an aesthetic disclosing the surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities.

… are important for the study of contemporary culture not simply because they index economic processes but also because they provide traction to a series of long-standing problems in aesthetic theory … that include … the relation between artistic production and labor in a world where immaterial labor is increasingly aestheticized …

… and the “parergonal” relation between art and theoretical discourse, all the more pressured with the rise of an institutional culture of museums and curricula that has led art and criticism to internalize each other in historically unprecedented ways.

… are also linked to major representational modes -

• comedy, in the case of zaniness
• romance, in the case of cuteness
• realism, in the case of the interesting

“What the public realm considers irrelevant can have such an extraordinary and infectious charm that a whole people may adopt it as their way of life, without for that reason changing its essentially private character.”¹

Can we posit the status of “private”, here, as being protective of the disintegrating effects of the hysterics discourse?

“If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle.”²

… cute is warm and fuzzy … merely interesting is cool … and zany, for its part, is hot: hot under the collar, hot and bothered, hot to trot.

… das Interessante, a style of eclectic novelty first explicitly theorized by Friedrich Schlegel and the German Romantic ironists as part of a larger agenda calling for art to become more reflective of philosophical (see Wheeler)³

Pointing to the intensely embodied affects and desires of an agent compelled to move, hustle, and perform in the presence of others, these idioms underscore that the zany is the only aesthetic category in our repertoire with a special relation to affective of physical effort.

… and more specifically about the ambiguous status of performance between labor and play (zany), the ceaseless relaying of artworks through the medium of discourse (interesting), and the paradoxical complexity of our desire for a simpler relation to our house-hold commodities (cute)

… each of the aesthetic categories in this triad revolves around a specific type of inconsequentiality:

• the affect that accompanies the perception of minor differences agains a backdrop of the generic, in the case of the interesting;
• physical smallness and vulnerability, in the case of the cute;
• and the flailing helplessness of impotent rage, in the case of the zany.

… underscoring their politically ambivalent nature:

• for the zany, fun and unfun;
• for the interesting, interest and boredom;
• for the cute, tenderness and aggression

Footnotes §

1. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1958. ↩

2. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1997. ↩

3. Wheeler, Kathleen M., ed. German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe. First Edition. Cambridge Cambridgeshire ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. ↩