A culmination of Ngai’s work as a critic…Ngai makes the case that the
gimmick, whose value we regularly disparage, is of tremendous critical value. The
gimmick, she contends, is the capitalist form par
excellence…Ngai’s study lies somewhere between critical theory and
Sontag’s best work.
-- Andrew Koenig Los Angeles Review of
Books
One of the most creative humanities scholars
working today…Ngai sets off on another mind-blowing exploration, this time drawing a
line between our own judgements of productivity, as well as considering what
entertainment is worth to us. My god, it’s so good.
-- Olivia Rutigliano
Literary Hub
Theory of the
Gimmick is a masterpiece—a culmination of the dazzling project begun in
Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings and elaborated in Our
Aesthetic Categories, both celebrated books that have anchored affect
theory to a strong account of tone and form. It is a major advance in aesthetic
theory, and Marxist theory in particular, one that could help us all get over our
Frankfurt melancholy and down to the garrulous work of actually naming the dynamics
that produce art and artistic judgment under capitalism.
-- Christopher
Nealon, author of The Matter of
Capital
The gimmick draws out our unease
about capitalism’s seductions, deflating their lofty appeals with the suddenness of
a punch line. It is an aesthetic category that dunks on capitalism’s
too-good-to-be-true promises by dunking on itself…It is undeniable that part of what
makes Ngai’s analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing—so appealing as to even
appear to raise the esteem of the object under analysis—is simply her capacity to
speak about them brilliantly.
-- Jane Hu
Bookforum
Ngai exposes capitalism’s tricks in her
mind-blowing study of the time- and labor-saving devices we call
gimmicks.
-- Katrina Forrester New
Statesman
Ngai tracks the gimmick through a number
of guises: stage props, wigs, stainless-steel banana slicers, temp agencies,
fraudulent photographs, subprime loans, technological doodads, the novel of
ideas…[She] has slowly been building a reputation as one of America’s most original
and penetrating cultural theorists.
-- Charlie Tyson Chronicle of Higher
Education
Ngai is a keen analyst of overlooked or
denigrated categories in art and life…Moves quickly from the fantastical
contraptions of Rube Goldberg to the philosophical machinery in Kant or Marx that
might explain their appeal…Highly original in theme and suggestive in
approach.
-- Brian Dillon 4Columns
Ngai has
done so much to illuminate.
-- David Trotter London Review of
Books
Ngai’s penetrating and at times humorous work
feels uncommonly generous at a deeply polarized moment when emotions run high and
much theory and criticism has taken on an increasingly grave, moralizing
tone…Explores across a remarkably broad range of works of art, film, and literature
the ‘gimmick,’ a simultaneously attractive and repulsive form that links the
aesthetic to the economic.
-- Matthew Rana
Kunstkritikk
It is the simplicity and vernacular
quality of Sianne Ngai’s central concept that elevates this book to a classic in the
making. Ngai’s most important contribution to Marxist cultural and economic theory
comes from her insight that—like the judgment of the beautiful for Kant—the gimmick
is a subjective category, neither cognitive nor ethical, but historical through and
through. The gimmick is a way to bring together the theory of the commodity with
Kant’s category of judgment. Through Ngai, we are able to vernacularize Marx and to
understand the most basic but enigmatic proposition: that truth and appearance are
identical in the commodity.
-- Timothy Bewes, author of
Reification: Or, The Anxiety of Late
Capitalism
Books of this ambition and
accomplishment are rare! Theory of the Gimmick continues the work
of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and others in seriously putting together
aesthetic theory and Marxist theories of capital. In an impossibly erudite,
wide-ranging, and theoretically sophisticated argument, Ngai gives us a unique
insight into the relationship between labor, time, and value in a capitalist
economy. This book is a major event in American intellectual life.
--
Jonathan Flatley, author of Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics
of Modernism
The whole book suggests that
critique is an occasion for delight, as the explication of how the gimmicks Ngai
finds everywhere from Henry James to a toy box reveal the inner workings of capital
is accomplished with a joyful relentlessness. The book is a page turner.
--
Theo Davis American Literary History
[A]
groundbreaking argument.
--
Choice
[Theory of the Gimmick]
firstly offers an eminently usable theory of the gimmick, and secondly offers a
series of masterful extensions of that theory in practically unrepeatable analyses
of texts…where we witness, in addition to Ngai the theorist, Ngai the virtually
peerless reader.
-- Astrid Lorange Sydney Review of
Books
