After Critique, After Criticism
A simple compromise has often tempted cultural critics. There might seem to be a fundamental tension between experiencing a work of art as intrinsically valuable—as art, in other words—and studying it so as to grasp the social reality in which it was produced. One can do either criticism or history, so the old opposition goes, but not both. But what if the tension were merely illusory? What if the notion of such a tension reflects a fundamentally mistaken view of the relationship between art and society? What if there were a way of thinking about aesthetic experience—or perhaps better, an actual way of experiencing art—that grasped both non-reductively? The compromise seems difficult but potentially incredibly powerful, as if there were a way of drinking a cup of coffee that did justice both to its pleasant taste and to the global networks of exploitation that produced it.
The last generation of criticism has been dominated, it is only a slight exaggeration to say, by an incredibly succession iteration of this compromise. Fredric Jameson’s approach, theorized in The Political Unconscious and masterfully practiced in Postmodernism, took as a premise that aesthetic form was the distillate of social, economic, and political history. In his famous phrase, the literary narratives a society developed offered “imaginary resolutions” of real contradictions. Correspondingly, the critic might reverse the relation. The analysis of a work’s formal structure or sensory pattern, seemingly of interest only to those who care about pure aesthetics, in fact yields an understanding of the material conditions forming its environment when properly conducted.
But in keeping with the models of artistic criticism he was pushing against, Jameson assumed a unity in the aesthetic field, one that scholars have increasingly called into question and sought to move beyond. Given that there is no property called “form” shared by all works of art or even by all narratives, if the compromise is to be renewed it has to be on the basis of a recognition of the variety and incommensurability of aesthetic experiences. Two recent books by two leading literary critics, Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form and Rita Felski’s Hooked: On Art and Attachment, take up the challenge. Although they seem at a broad level diametrically opposed—critique and post-critique, in the argot of the discipline—what stands out in a close comparison is how much they have in common. In fact they’re even about the same basic thing. As Ngai points out, the “hook” in a work of art can often seem sort of gimmicky. So it may be because they are quite close that the debate has been so vituperative. Ignorance may breed fear, as they say, but hatred requires kinship.
Felski’s Hooked in the next step in a decade of work that began with The Uses of Literature, the first step into her developing theory that the dominant modes of literary interpretation were inadequate for grasping the complexity of their objects of study. She sought to identify the “limits” of critique, as her eponymous 2015 work put it, and consider what ways of studying literary works such a paradigm marginalizes. As The Limits of Critique argued, when a rhetoric of suspicion and a privileging of detachment becomes definitive of scholarly rigor as such, then any positive connection to a work of art becomes prima facie questionable. When the first question to ask about any such connection is, “what is the underlying social structure that made the connection possible?”, then no matter how sensitive the critic’s treatment the analysis cannot help but reveal the fundamental superficiality of artistic experience. Indeed for many of the scholars Felski identified this was exactly the point. The coffee might taste good, sure. But the goodness of its taste pales in comparison to the oppression necessary to bring it to the local Starbucks.
Yet in responding to the scathing reactions to the Limits of Critique, Felski expressed puzzlement at her readers’ failure to understand her argument in the context of her longtime identification with the project of critique. Her sense of the limits of a reflexive attitude of suspicion did not stem from an urge to uphold traditional notions of aesthetic value or to celebrate the European canon with its saturation in reactionary politics. Rather, her scholarship grew out of the sense that the attitudinal investments of critique could on occasion prevent it from achieving its goal of understanding the social world, and that neither aesthetic experience nor socio-economic structures are well understood when the former are presented as a mask on the latter. In that sense her work is mislabelled if we think of it as a rejection of critique: it is an iteration of it.
Hooked delivers on that goal by carrying out what Immanuel Kant famously named as the project of critique: an inquiry into the conditions of possibility of phenomenal experience. As Felski writes:
I’ve proposed, meanwhile, that art’s presence is not attenuated by its relations but made possible by its relations. That we find a piece of art to be extraordinary, radiant, sublime—that it fills up our consciousness, crowding out awareness of other things, such that the rest of the world dissolves into nothingness—does not mean other actors were not involved. It is not a sign that we have vaulted into the stratosphere, far removed from the things of this world. Rather than subtracting from art’s presence, these things help to bring it into view. Mediation does not block access to phenomena but makes it possible.
In other words studying the way a work of art is mediated by other actors does not mean dismissing its individual effects, and studying those effects does not mean dismissing its mediations. Aesthetic experience is immediate but not unmediated, as Felski puts the book’s slogan, and her variation on the tradition of critique is perhaps best expressed by noting that she simply wants to include the work of art itself, alongside all of the other mediating forces and structures, as one of the conditions of possibility for aesthetic experience.
The idea that the experience of the work of art can be made possible by the relations in which it’s caught up looks unintuitive at first blush—it’s tough to see how social relations are involved in, say, hearing a new song and enjoying it—but a quick comparison can clarify the intuitions at work here. Imagine for a moment a game of chess. What value the game has doesn’t inhere in the pieces or the chessboard, though that is the matrix through which the value is realized. Rather the value depends on the relationships between the players. Rules can seem like constrictions, but in the case of chess they’re productive: it’s because two people agree to follow certain rules that the goodness of the game appears. By mutually acting, the players bring something new into the world—the practice of chess. For this distinct sort of existence Felski uses the peculiar word “instauration”:
Hennion and Latour draw on the language of “instauration,” taken from the French philosopher Etienne Souriau, to talk about how things are realized— that is to say, how they are made real. And here art has its own modes of instauration— its particular ways of having an impact. What is the difference between being carried away by a story and by a subway train? It is not that one experience is false or illusory while the other is real, remarks Latour. Rather, the former requires our attention and participation in a way that the latter does not. The effects of paintings, novels, and plays depend on their being taken up by readers or viewers, as intermediaries through which they must pass. Without their input, a painting is reduced to nothing more than daubs of pigment on a stretched canvas; a novel dissolves into endless black squiggles on glued- together sheets of paper.
Aesthetic experience, then, is not interrupted or disturbed by the social and institutional phenomena that surround it, or by the idiosyncrasies of particular viewers and readers. Rather, those are precisely the elements bring aesthetic experience into existence. It does not undermine the experience of the work of art to observe that one’s viewing depended on the existence of a museum, on a curator’s decision, on a day off from work, so long as we don’t think the experience can be reduced to such things and that the properties of the work itself are irrelevant.
Now, one might accept this basic intuition about the social ontology of value, but think that linking it so definitively to a practice like chess is unnecessarily restrictive. After all games have unique properties. The rules are clear, for one thing, and players grasp them. But surely many of the practices that define human existence don’t work like this. And then too one might think that the valuable experiences our social world makes possible can’t all be well defined by linking to them to some kind of pre-existing practice. Surely there are moments, the objection might run, in which more or less random elements of the world happen to come together momentarily to create an aesthetic experience. Riding in a car on the way to a wedding, for instance, one hears a song by a previously hated musician and which one would never have sought out, and which if one had full control over the car’s sound system would be turned off immediately. And yet this time—as Zadie Smith narrates in one of Felski’s key examples—the song sticks somehow and creates art.
That’s the real thesis of Hooked. Not that aesthetic experience is made possible by social reality: Felski shares that claim with many others. But that the ways the social world makes aesthetic experience possible are not always well understood through analysis in terms of larger determinative structures, and that works of art themselves often have more power than social analysis often suggests, as if chessboards themselves could extend invitations to play. As she writes, “It is not a matter of tongues slotting smoothly into grooves over and over again. Responses cannot be corralled into tidy boxes; actors do not always hook up in expected ways; anomalies, surprises, exceptions are not uncommon” (25). There are moments when the connections that constitute an aesthetic experience are more ephemeral and random, not predictable on the basis of one’s identity or circumstances. Yet these aesthetic experiences are often the most powerful: we get “hammered” by a painting one day because a variety of factors happen to come together at particularly this moment in a way they have not before and may not again. To characterize this ephemerality Felski reaches for the language of environment; there is a mood, an atmosphere, a certain way of being situated in the world, in which one is aesthetically open to other objects.
Thus Felski turns to narratives of artistic encounters, seeking to enrich three core ideas in the conceptual vocabulary of cultural critics, The first is “attunement,” and the musical overtones of the concept are deliberate. Artworks do not reliably impact everyone in the same way and for the same reasons: rather, to “get” certain artworks we must tune in or be tuned to them. The second is the long-fraught idea of “identification,” which in Felski’s hands is an umbrella term for the ways we become attached to literary characters. This includes but is very importantly not limited to empathizing with them as if they were real people. For one thing, Felski notes, very often our connections to such characters depends on grasping their fictional status; for another, there are all manner of ironic identifications, as well as moments where we recognize ourselves not in any concrete figure in the work but in something like its environment. “By temperament I am something of a malcontent,” Felski writes, “prone to brooding and seething. There is something exceptionally gratifying about [Thomas] Bernhard’s channeling of this irritation: the relief of seeing it acknowledged, cranked up a hundredfold, and vomited out into the world.” The third and final concept involves reframing the act of interpretation and particularly its practice in the literary studies classroom: close analysis and critical thinking have often been portrayed as the opposite of enthusiastic attachment to works of art, Felski observes, but they are better thought as another way of “relating” to a literary work. To the extent there has been a transformation it involves not the elimination of attachments but rather their expansion, incorporating alignment with particular methods as well as connections to particular works. Such “differing forms of attachment are intertwined,” Felski explains; “Receptivity is a thought-filled rather than thoughtless engagement.”
In emphasizing the diversity of our artistic attachments, Felski aligns with a good deal of recent work in philosophical aesthetics, which has recently begun exploring the enormous variety of “everyday” aesthetic experiences. And while sociologists have long been interested in ordinary relationships with art, Felski contends that literary critics have not grasped the implications of the scholarship on “lay audiences”:
The very framing of such responses as “other”— as the property of a group that is not one’s own— lets critics off the hook. It allows them to keep such responses at arm’s length; to dismiss them as being of merely sociological interest; to evade, in short, their normative implications for, and provocation to, a certain academic self- image. What Deidre Lynch writes of the study of English holds true for the humanities generally: oppositions between a specialized guild of interpreters concerned with knowledge and meaning and a broader public driven only by feeling and pleasure create a distorted picture of both.
Call this the normative challenge of lay experience. Merely to regard the public as an object of study means implying that a critic’s own investments in literary works are a different kind of thing. But this distinction can’t be sustained; not only are the attachments to works of art among lay audiences quite thoughtful, nuanced, and occasionally critical, but many of the techniques scholars use are themselves forms of attachment to art, invested with as much feeling and emotion as any lay reader. Thus the importance of Hooked’s final chapter: scholarly practices of interpretation as not the distanced acts of knowledge production they sometimes appear to be. But acknowledging this does not undermine them: it’s because they’re ways of being attached that they produce knowledge. Attachments to art and knowledge about it go together.
Although Felski is named only briefly in one note, Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick often presents itself as a scathing rejection of her broader line of thought, critique’s response to post-critique. The postcritical “family of theories […] inspired by Bruno Latour,” Ngai writes, are guilty of a duplicitous radicalism, “gutting Marx’s concepts while often continuing to draw on the cachet of the shells.” Deemphasizing the labor theory of theory and thus the effort that produces the work of art, Ngai contends, defangs the study of culture. To put the objection back in the Kantian terms, we might say that labor is by far the most important condition of possibility for aesthetic experience, and to marginalize it is both to mistake the nature of the object and to eliminate the radical potential of cultural criticism.
And, not incidentally, it is to ignore the real normative challenge of lay experience. A core premise of Ngai’s argument is that the kind of economically-inflected aesthetic judgment she values is already implicit in one of the most commonplace judgments of all: the sense that a work of art is using a gimmick. As she writes:
Yet if so much theory no longer sees labor […] or no longer thinks that labor can be measured […] the extravagantly impoverished, overperforming/underperforming gimmick testifies to the fact that ordinary aesthetic subjects do. […] The gimmick is thus an aesthetic judgment uniquely reflecting on the genre’s capacity for absorbing and transcoding nonaesthetic judgments. In contrast to claims for the contemporary immeasurability of value, it shows how a kind of quantitative measurement can persist, abstracted, inside qualitative judgments.
To call something a gimmick is to do more than just to say it’s bad. It’s a thick concept, combining description and evaluation, and interestingly its negative judgment depends on the sense that a piece of art is working too hard and/or working too little to create its effect. Perhaps a book’s plot is contrived and lazy, or perhaps a show’s laugh track is incredibly explicit, specifying exactly when to react. In such cases, calling the effect a gimmick assesses, somehow, the amount of labor involved in the aesthetic experience. Where Felski might see attachment, the gimmick sees real, measurable effort.
And more than that the gimmick judges others: the gimmick’s gimmickness makes explicit the role other people play in the act of aesthetic judgment. To say that something is a gimmick, after all, is to say that it doesn’t work for me while recognizing precisely that it does work for others. That effectiveness on other people is exactly why the gimmick is in the work, and calling that effectiveness gimmicky is necessarily a criticism of them. “As so many strains of theory move for varying reasons,” Ngai writes, “toward a state of generalized postcritique, the judgment of the over and/or underperforming gimmick remains suspicious, unapologetically negating the judgment of others who think that the object’s exaggerated claims to value are true.” So far from needing to move away from critique and suspicion to capture the varieties of aesthetic experience, then, for Ngai what’s necessary is to recognize the way suspicion is already built into one of our most common aesthetic judgments.
Much more so than Felski’s book, which is more of a manifesto describing a theory of literary method than a sustained attempt at practicing it, Ngai’s book is a traditional work of literary criticism. Opening with an introductory chapter that enacts rather than summarizing the overall argument, each of the eight subsequent chapters deepens various details. The result is more of an accretive analysis than a deductive argument, fleshing out what Ngai calls the “antinomies”—contradictory statements that are equally true—of the gimmick via an array of examples.
Perhaps the most important antinomy concerns the gimmick’s deeply conflicted ideas about saving labor: on the one hand, it’s a device that offers the ability to work less; on the other hand, it’s a waste of labor, a fruitless expenditure. That maps onto a key tension within capitalist development: on the one hand, capitalism continually grows through new technologies that promise greater productivity; on the other hand this occurs only through shifting the labor elsewhere and thereby intensifying it (labor often involved in making precisely the supposed time-saving machines) or by eliminating a category of labor entirely and rendering a group of workers unemployable. “The gimmick is the objective correlative of this ambiguity,” as Ngai puts it, “translating a source of increased productivity and material wealth, the reduction of socially necessary labor through progressively advanced machines and techniques of production, into a sign of impoverishment in the aesthetic realm.”
Thus the similarities between Helen Dewitt’s 2011 novel Lightning Rods and Henry James’s late fiction. Dewitt’s novel narrates the incredible success of a temp agency whose employees are simultaneously clerical workers and sex workers. It’s thus about a labor-saving gimmick—the “lightning rod” device, which enables anonymous sex and thus more productive work from the “highly productive” male employees—that also reveals how the labor is displaced onto the less-privileged female workers contained in the device. As Ngai wryly concludes, “capitalism’s ultimate labor saving device is just simply a woman.” Although much less explicitly, James in Ngai’s hands addresses a similar problem: the “ficelle” of James’s narrative theory, a device that doesn’t fit a novel’s form organically but which serves to advance the plot, also often turns out to be a woman. In novels like The Golden Bowl, James emphasizes the analogies between feminized domestic work and women’s emotional labor; Maggie Verver must work to repair the emotional connections in her family without ever appearing to know they are damaged, and thus—crucially—without anyone knowing she is working. Labor may appear to be saved, but it is only hidden.
A second and related antinomy appears in the feeling the gimmick reveals something about capitalism and that it simultaneously makes something about capitalism obscure. ˜This antinomy tracks the ambiguity of value itself in a capitalist system, which at once must appear as “an autonomous property of individual objects” and as the result of a web of relations of production. Marx’s broad analysis of commodity fetishism—how a thing’s value, which is actually the result of a historical relationship between people, near-mystically appears when it shows up in the store as a fact solely about the thing—reaches a surprising high point in his striking metaphors for abstract value. Returning to a body of scholarship she addressed in her 2012 book Our Aesthetic Categories, Ngai emphasizes Marx’s decision to call abstract labor “bloße Gallerte.” While the phrase can be translated as “mere congelation,” Keston Sutherland’s work reveals how the metaphor draws on the everyday life of Marx’s initial readers, “Gallerte” in nineteenth-century Germany being a kind of meat jelly they would have purchased and eaten regularly. In that sense the point of the phrase is to render disgustingly visceral the abstract labor inhabiting every commodity. A very similar pairing of the abstract and the visceral is at the core of Rob Halpern’s 2012 book of war poetry Music for Porn, where the male soldier’s body is at once a figure for erotic fascination and an abstract symbol. “One reason both Halpern and Marx make use of the same catachrestic image of congealing substance as a metaphor for value,” Ngai explains, “is to underscore the socially binding action of capitalist abstractions. And more specifically, to emphasize the synthetic or plasticizing action of an abstraction like value.” Like the commodity the gimmick of the soldier’s body obscures something about capitalism, hiding the deep complexities social life under the cover of eroticism. But in so doing it reveals something too: the way capitalism’s social power depends on making abstract labor relations vividly real.
So Ngai’s close readings proceed, in ways that don’t admit of easy summary. But one particular argument is worth a final mention. A gimmick can often hook us in with its very gimmickiness; it’s “the catchy device,” Ngai writes, “that, in spite of our contempt for its transparent intentions, manages to suck us in.” So Torbjørn Rødland’s photographs literalize the effrontery of the gimmick; the image Vacuum Cleaner, for instance, shows a woman hotel maid “caught” by a vacuum cleaner sucking at her skirt, its hose literally bent in the shape of a hook. Groan, the viewer reacts—it’s a hook, caught her, she’s caught by her job, we get it. “Irritating, stupid, yet affectively complex,” Ngai summarizes, “the gimmick also helps make sense of why so many critics describe Rødland’s work as full of “lure[s],” “traps,” and of course “insidious hook[s].” So one might imagine the challenge to Felski running something like: fine, we are often attached to works of art, and attached through a power the work has in spite of ourselves. But surely sometimes we recognize this is happening. Yet our own diagnosis of that hooked-ness can’t be captured well by an explication merely in terms of attachment: it involves too many other factors, including the complex awareness of the way its technique succeeds on others and our sense that unmitigated enthusiastic attachment to this artwork is unwarranted. And far from regarding ordinary aesthetic experience suspiciously, or introducing elaborate Marxist terminology to characterize such critical awareness, it just involves taking seriously one of the most banal experiences around: calling something a gimmick. Calling bullshit.
And yet it’s not hard to imagine a response from Felski’s view. Instead of diagnosing gimmicks in her readings, Ngai works with a self-conscious body of artworks—as she explains her principle of selection, “these representations not only reflect on the gimmick but riskily instrumentalize it in the service of doing so.” It certainly seems that Ngai regards these works not merely as symptoms of late capitalism but as thoughtful reflections on our social world. One of the many fascinating elements of the work is the variety of verbs Ngai uses to describe the relationship between the artworks she discusses and their socio-economic environment: often gimmicks “index,” “register,” or “encode” various dimensions of capitalism; Henry James is “trying to grasp […] the historical trajectory of labor”; Stan Douglas’s Suspiria uses gimmicks “to think about how one might visualize the ghostly objectivity of ‘value’”; even Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court gets redescribed as a response to “questions about capitalist timing […] at the forefront of Twain’s mind” in the 1890s. That’s to say that while Ngai emphasizes the potential for critique inherent in the suspicious stance of the gimmick, actual negative judgments of gimmicks play a surprisingly marginal role. Instead Ngai gives us artworks that are often quite sophisticated analyses of the relationship between aesthetic experiences and the modes of production that make them possible. Correspondingly her close readings do not condemn the artworks for their trickiness or laziness, but instead show readers, listeners, and viewers how to experience the works she discusses as sophisticated analyses of social life. And so one is tempted to ask: isn’t this sort of attachment not really a diagnosis of a gimmick at all, but something closer to exactly the kind of attachment via interpretation Felski discusses?
A debate might continue here, but when viewed from a few steps back what stands out is not the differences between the books but rather the similarities. There are a number of striking overlaps in the works cited pages, for instance, and both books are critical of what philosophers of art call the “hedonist” thesis, the idea that the value of the work of art can be reduced to a certain amount of something called “pleasure.” Relatedly both thinkers are skeptical of the Kantian notion of the autonomy of aesthetic experience, or the idea that there is a unified realm involving a distinctive and singular kind of pleasure independent of “interest” and the satisfaction of desire, and that this experience defines the work of art. And most importantly, both books are fundamentally engaged in studying the conditions of possibility for aesthetic experience: their disagreement lies primarily in the details of what those conditions are.
One might sense a slight tension in those last two points. It’s difficult to discuss the conditions of possibility for aesthetic experience if aesthetic experience is not a fact a discrete thing. Both Ngai and Felski thoughtfully and eloquently reject the Kantian view; Ngai’s discussion of the limits of beauty in the introduction to Our Aesthetic Categories is one of the finest discussions of the problem in contemporary literary criticism. And yet both thinkers end up relying on a version of it in their practice. For Felski’s argument, for instance, suppose we grant that attachments are a valuable and important part of self-constitution and social life, and grant further that identification with characters and the interpretation of works are important kinds of attachment. It would seem that we will have only a very limited grasp of the nature of attachment if we analyze it solely in terms of artworks. How do our attachments to artworks compare to our attachments to people, to tools, to foods, to places, to parts of ourselves? How do the attachments we forge via interpreting literary works compare to those developed via interpreting philosophical or historical works? If there’s nothing unique about art, then it must be the case that our attachments to art are more or less like our attachments to anything else, and grasping them means starting from that fundamental similarity. But the structure of Hooked prevents Felski from developing that argument.
Similarly, an important point for Ngai is that the “gimmick” is not applied only to artworks but also to things. The laugh track on a television show is a gimmick, but so is Google Glass. This seems correct and important, but then it correspondingly seems confusing why Ngai emphasizes art works. Surely if we wish to understand the way the gimmick crosses the boundaries between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic so fluidly, the gimmicks outside artworks need just as much analysis. But again, the structure of Ngais’ argument makes developing this claim impossible. Both Felski and Ngai consider an impressive range of artistic media—poems, novels, plays, but also movies, visual art, and music. But what is included seems less important than what’s excluded—anything that isn’t art, and art in basically the traditional sense implied by the Kantian notion of aesthetic experience. And so the thesis of aesthetic autonomy dismissed in the content of these works reappears as implicit in their form.
It’s not fair, really, to call this a limitation on the parts of these books. It’s more a limitation on literary study, which is predicated on the uniqueness and distinctiveness of an object—literature—that many in the field and certainly Felski and Ngai no longer regard as unique and distinct. The vision of a cultural criticism that could explore social reality and aesthetic experience simultaneously, to do the one by and through doing the other, may have made sense when aesthetic experience could be plausibly conceived of as a discrete thing related in reliable ways to the formal structures of artworks, structures that were themselves connected in comprehensible ways to the rest of the world. But having abandoned the latter assumption, it looks like the prior goal has to go too. The projects these books set themselves cannot help but go beyond the resources Felski and Ngai deploy to pursue them. That the projects can’t be fulfilled says less about them, in the last analysis, that it does about the troubled prospects for a specifically “literary” or even “artistic” criticism.