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Our Aesthetic Categories

sianne ngai

SIANNE NGAI is associate professor of

English at the University of California,
Los Angeles, and the author of Ugly Feelings (Harvard UP, 2005).

948

HE 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. But while the new or revived focus on pleasure (and, to a much lesser extent, displeasure)1 has been
vaunted for the way in which it seems to circumvent the reduction of
artworks to historical or ideological concepts, our aesthetic experience is always mediated by a finite if constantly rotating repertoire of
aesthetic categories. Any literary or cultural criticism purportedly engaged with aesthetics needs to pay attention to these categories, which
are by definition conceptual as well as affective and tied to historically
specific forms of communication and collective life. But how does one
read an aesthetic category? What kind of object is it, and what methodological difficulties and satisfactions does its analysis pose?
The book I am working on makes a simple if no doubt contentious argument about the zany, interesting, and cute: that this quotidian triad of aesthetic categories, for all their marginality to historical
accounts of postmodernism as well as to canonical aesthetic theory,
is the one in our cultural repertoire best suited for grasping how the
concept of aesthetic has been transformed by the performancedriven, information-saturated and networked, hypercommodified
world of late capitalism. This is because the interesting, cute, and
zany indexand are thus each in a historically concrete way about
capitalisms 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 communica-

[ 2010 by the moder n language association of america ]

125.4

tive 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 ostensively subordinate and unthreatening commodities). As sensuous, affective
ref lections of the ways in which subjects
work, communicate, and consume (and as
the cute and zany in particular show, in ways
directly mediated by gender and class), the
domestic and commodity-oriented aesthetic
of cuteness, the informational and discursive
aesthetic of the merely interesting, and the
occupational and cultural performance aesthetic of zaniness help get at some of the most
basic dynamics underlying life in Western industrial societies. No other aesthetic categories in our current repertoire speak to these
everyday practices of production, circulation,
and consumption in the same direct way.
It is thus no surprise that the zany, cute,
and interesting are omnipresent not just on
television and across the Web but also in the
postwar literature anthology, where one is
likely to encounter an example of each style in
rapid succession, from the vertiginous zaniness of Thomas Pynchon to the poet Matthea
Harveys aggressively cute tributes to objects
like the bathtub and sugarbowl to the merely
interesting serial texts of the conceptual writer
Robert Fitterman. But while the uniquely intimate relation of these aesthetic categories
to production, circulation, and consumption
provides the best explanation for their pervasiveness, the zany, cute, and interesting 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 continue to inform the
production, dissemination, and reception
of literature and art in the present. These
problems include the close relation between
the form of the artwork and the form of the
commodity; the ambiguous state of the avantgarde, which in zombie fashion persists even

Sianne Ngai

as its disappearance or impossibility is regarded as one of postmodernisms constitutive

features; the relevance of aesthetic to critical
or other nonaesthetic judgments aimed at producing knowledge (or how one is permitted to
link judgments based on subjective feelings of
pleasure or displeasure to ones with claims to
objective truth); 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.2 While central to
some of the most important texts of modern
aesthetic theory, these problems have also remained fundamental to contemporary literary practice in ways directly reflected by the
three aesthetic categories in my study.
Prompting us to think across our entire system of fine arts, the zany, cute, and
interesting are also linked to major representational modescomedy, in the case of
zaniness; romance, in the case of cuteness; realism, in the case of the interestingas well as
to specific forms, genres, and media. As I have
argued elsewhere (Cuteness), it is easy to see
how the cute becomes a particular problem
for twentieth-century poetry, a genre associated commonly (if not always correctly) with
small texts focused on domestic objects. Reflecting what Hannah Arendt describes as the
modern enchantment with small things . . .
preached by early twentieth-century poetry in
almost all European tongues, the petite bonheur of cuteness, or the art of being happy
. . . between dog and cat and flowerpot, is
thus part of the expansion of the charmingly
irrelevant, which she links to the decay of
a genuinely public culture: 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

Our Aesthetic Categories

private character (52). Since cute things evoke

in us a desire to protect them, poetry might
be considered cute in another problematic
sense. Twentieth-century poetrys smallness
in comparison with novels and films, where
the proportion of quotable unitsentence or
paragraph, frame or shot sequenceto the
work as a whole is substantially lower, has
made it excessively protected by copyright and
thus, in a certain economic sense, protected
from criticism: one literally has to pay in order to comment. Susan Stewarts wry caveat
in the preface and acknowledgments to Poetry
and the Fate of the Senses (Like anyone who
writes on poetic forms, I have been restricted
. . . by the availability of permissions for reproduction [ix]) will be familiar to any critic
who has tried to write on the genre, which
copyright laws have indirectly defined as unusually tender or vulnerable speech. Poetrys
complicated and ambivalent relation to an
aesthetic that celebrates the diminutive and
nonconsequential becomes all the more problematic in the case of the avant-garde, which
has historically defined itself in opposition to
everything for which cuteness stands. Yet in
examples ranging from Gertrude Steins homage to lesbian domesticity in Tender Buttons
to William Carlos Williamss spare objectivist
poems about ordinary household objects to
Harryette Mullens exploration of fashion and
groceries in Trimmings and S*perm*rk*t, cuteness remarkably gives us leverage not just on
the genre of poetry but also on two problems
central to modern aesthetic theory: the ambiguous status of the contemporary avant-garde
and the closeness between the artwork and
the commodity. As Walter Benjamin writes,
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 (55; emphasis added).
If the cute is thus warm and fuzzy, the poetics of the merely interesting is cool, both in

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the sense of the ironic detachment attributed
to 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 or philosophical (see Wheeler), and
in the technocratic, informatic sense Alan Liu
conveys in his book on postmodern knowledge work. And the zany, for its part, is hot:
hot under the collar, hot and bothered, hot
to trot. 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 or physical
effort and is thus an aesthetic whose dynamics
are most sharply brought out in performance:
dance, theater, happenings, television, film. It
is because the zany, interesting, and cute are
respectively about performance, information
or media, and domestic lifeand more specifically about the ambiguous status of performance between labor and play, the ceaseless
relaying of artworks through the medium of
discourse, and the paradoxical complexity of
our desire for a simpler relation to our household commoditiesthat the deepest content of
these aesthetic categories concerns the socially
binding processes of production, circulation,
and consumption. And it is because the zany,
interesting, and cute are about production,
circulation, and consumption that they are so
important, as a triad, to the genealogy of the
postmodern and to our aesthetic theory.
Yet the interesting, cute, and zany are also
undeniably trivial. Indeed, in contrast to the
powerful moral and political resonances of the
beautiful and sublime, each of the aesthetic
categories in this triad revolves around a specific type of inconsequentiality: the low affect
that accompanies the perception of minor
differences against 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,

125.4

in the case of the zany. Because of a contradictory mixture of affects underscoring their
politically ambivalent naturefor the zany,
fun and unfun; for the interesting, interest
and boredom; and for the cute, tenderness and
aggressionwe might say that the cute, interesting, and zany have a certain mereness at
their cores. Yet this triviality is not itself trivial; it explains why these aesthetic categories
are suited for helping us think more deeply
about the shifting meanings of the aesthetic,
art, and even culture in our time, a period in
which, with the integration of aesthetic production . . . into commodity production generally, as Fredric Jameson notes, the frantic
economic urgency of producing fresh waves of
ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing
to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover,
now assigns an increasingly structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and
experimentation (4). In addition to posing
unprecedented challenges for our understanding of the new and avant-garde, this increasing
interpenetration of economy and culture has
wrought two significant changes for the concept of art as such, Jameson notes: the weakening of arts capacity to serve as an image of
nonalienated labor (which it has arguably done
since the eighteenth century) and the loss of
arts more specifically modernist, twentiethcentury mission of producing perceptual
shock (14647, 12122). With the waning of
these older vocations for art and aesthetic experience, minor aesthetic categories crop up
everywhere, testifying in their ubiquity to how
aesthetic experience, radically generalized in
an age of design and advertising, becomes less
rarefied but also less intense. The romance of
cuteness, the comedy of zaniness, and the realist and information-oriented aesthetic of the
interesting are thus important to autonomous
arts attempts to reflect on the smoothness of
its integration in mass culture. What better
way to get traction on arts diminishing role
as the privileged locus for modern aesthetic
experience than an aesthetic category of and

Sianne Ngai

about inconsequentiality? As styles about our

complex and often conflicted affective relations to commodities, labor, and media or
communicative systems, the cute, zany, and
interesting are also suited for helping us figure out what the discourse of aesthetics might
mean or become in the wake of aesthetic idealizationwhen reverence for the aesthetic
as such, though still advocated by many, no
longer seems self-evidently desirable or even
defining of what an aesthetic attitude is.
To be sure, the zany, cute, and interesting are not exclusive to the late twentieth or
the twenty-first century. Deriving from the
character of the zanni, an itinerant servant
in commedia dellarte who is modeled after
peasants seeking temporary work in Venetian households, zaniness has a history that
stretches back to the sixteenth-century division of labor and the theater and marketplace
culture of what is now Italy (Henke 23). Two
hundred years or so later, Schlegel and the
German Romantic ironists codified the interesting as das Interessante, a modern style
of literature opposed to the beautiful art of
the Greeks (die schne Poesie). Coinciding
thus with the professionalization of literary
criticism in the eighteenth century, in a newly
emergent bourgeois public sphere made possible by the rise of a literary marketplace and
the expanded circulation of printed matter
(which is to say, the very conditions that gave
rise to aesthetics), the interesting appears
to be the one aesthetic category in our contemporary repertoire invented expressly by
and for literary critics3hence its continued
popularity in this circle today. Cute, finally,
is the youngest of the triad, emerging as a
term of evaluation and a formally recognizable style in the nascent mass culture of the
industrial nineteenth-century United States
and so with the ideological consolidation of
the middle-class home as a female space organized around consumption.
While the zany, cute, and interesting have
separate if overlapping histories, all three are

Our Aesthetic Categories

modern, emerging in tandem with or against

the development of markets, the rise of civil
society, economic competition, and an increasingly specialized division of labor. These
aesthetic categories also cut across modernism and postmodernism, considered here less
as distinct episodes in the history of culture
than as diverging responses to a single process of modernization involving new conditions of production (the machine, the factory,
urbanization), circulation (the new systems
of transport and communications) and consumption (the rise of mass markets and advertising) (Harvey 23). From the zanni-ness
of commedia to the zany sitcom of Lucille
Ball, or from Henry Jamess championing
of interesting as the only aesthetic standard appropriate for evaluating the modern
novel (191) to the attempt to marry art and
information in the merely interesting conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, the zany,
interesting, and cute have been present in
modern cultureacross mass culture and
high artfor several centuries. But only in
the late twentieth century, I would argue, did
these categories become useful for thinking
about the meaning and function of aesthetic
experience in general, and perhaps in a way
that accounts for their pervasiveness across
media, movements, and genres.
But what does it mean to work on aesthetic categories in the first placerather
than on more ontologically stable objects
like authors, genres, or movementsto reconstruct a feeling for what is peculiar and
specific, original and historic, in the present
(Jameson 301)? Why choose entities of such
ambience and scaleand thus inherent vulnerability to historical and conceptual imprecisionas a site of analytic engagement with
contemporary culture?
For me it is crucial to approach aesthetic
categories as rhetorical judgments and as
objective styles: cute as a verbal evaluation
compelled by subjective feelings called up by
objects in a certain context and cuteness as a

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sensuous quality attributed to objects themselves. As sites where ways of speaking or

aspects of human intersubjectivity routinely
intersect with qualities or aspects of the thing
world, aesthetic categories are thus challengingly double-sided in more ways than one:
objective and subjective, descriptive and evaluative, conceptual and sensuous. Aesthetic
categories like the ones in my study are not
for all this in the least bit abstruse but part of
the daily texture of social life: central at once
to our vocabulary for sharing and confirming
our aesthetic experiences with others (where
interesting is notoriously pervasive) and to
postmodern culture in general (where cuteness and zaniness surround us from all directions). Yet with notable exceptions, such as
Daniel Harriss landmark work on the styles
of consumerism in Cute, Quaint, Hungry,
and Romantic and Judith Browns brilliant
Glamour in Six Dimensions, which tracks the
origins of glamour, a bewitchingly negative
and even deathly style, to modernist literary
form, aesthetic categories have rarely been
singled out as primary objects of analysis in
literary and cultural studies. This is no doubt
related to the fact that even when considered
solely as styles or appearances, as opposed
to ways of discursively compressing fact and
value or of publicly sharing, disputing, and
confirming pleasure, aesthetic categories occupy a peculiar place in a vast and already
quite complicated continuum of styles. For, as
George Kubler notes, style is a tricky concept whose ambiguities and inconsistencies
mirror aesthetic activity as a whole (4) and
that is at times difficult to distinguish from
mode (as in comedy and melodrama), artistic
movement or school (brutalism and surrealism), and even genre (romance and epic). The
zany, for instance, is a subspecies of comedy,
while cuteness, as a style that speaks to our
desire for a simpler relation to commodities,
is arguably a kind of pastoral. Though less
institutionally codified than the primitive,
baroque, and gothic, which are in turn less

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chronologically restricted than styles such as

minimalism or art deco, aesthetic categories
like cute, zany, and interesting can be easily
related to these more particular styles (all of
which are already prone to overlap), as well as
to broader categories for organizing cultural
objects (such as realism and romance). Complicating things further, vernacular styles like
the cute and zany can slide dangerously close
to simpler aesthetic qualities like the stark
and robust, qualities that, while carrying the
same axiological charge or implicit claim to
positive or negative value that distinguishes
aesthetic from nonaesthetic qualities, have
not given rise to styles (not even to ones as
informal as the cute and zany).
Like literary affects or tones, aesthetic categories such as cute and zany are thus unusually vulnerable to accusations of subjectivism
and impressionism. Though no less rooted in
history than other categories used by critics to
classify cultural products (baroque, postmodern, etc.), the cute, zany, and interesting are
more tricky from the standpoint of the kind
of historicism that has dominated literary and
cultural studies over the last three decades, in
that they slide across wider spans of time. The
interestings rise to prominence as an informational, anti retinal aesthetic in the serial
photographs, distributed media, and theorydriven work of conceptual artists in the 1960s
and 1970s only appears in its full significance,
I argue, if traced back to the eighteenthcentury writings of the German Romantic
ironists, for whom das Interessante played
a key role as sign of a vaunted becomingcriticism of art. Similarly, the historical significance of postmodern zaniness, as evinced
by virtuosic performers ranging from Lucille
Ball in I Love Lucy to Richard Pryor in The
Toy and Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy, is only
made fully clear if we take account of how
this performative aesthetics conflation of role
playing and affective labor, already prefigured
in the zannis way of bridging the worlds of
cultural performance and service work, gets

Sianne Ngai

mulled over specifically by Nietzsche as a

problem for the philosophy of art in The Gay
Science: a late-nineteenth-century work of aesthetic theory written in a famously aggressive,
fast-paced, overheated style as arguably zany,
in its own way, as an episode of I Love Lucy.
Thinking in the way the analysis of an
aesthetic category demandsbroadly, across
heterogeneous domains of culture and historical periodspresents methodological
challenges. A difficulty posed by the historical
analysis of aesthetic categoriesin striking
contrast to styles, such as primitivism; genres,
like the novel; and modes, such as comedyis
their relative resistance to institutionalization.
While there are museum exhibits, anthologies,
and university syllabi devoted to primitivism, the novel, and comedy, the cute and zany
do not seem capable of drawing structures
around them in quite the same way. Though
aesthetic categories like the cute and zany are
associated with practices, they do not give rise
to practices stable or consistent enough to be
captured by institutions. Aesthetic categories thus become harder to track in time and
space: a point that by no means suggests we
abandon their historicization but rather calls
on us to historicize differently. Indeed, if in
the effort to grasp the present by way of these
spatially and temporally distributed objects
one sacrifices a historical precision more easily available to the study of specific authors,
genres, and movements, one gains perhaps a
stronger way of critically approaching culture
as a whole way of life (Williams viii). Here
one of Pierre Bourdieus arguments is surprisingly apposite. The autonomy of the restricted
field of production ensures that in the works,
genres, and movements produced in it, states
of the social world are mediated by the state
of the field. One cannot read a Sylvia Plath
poem, for instance, as a reflection of cold war
gender politics; one first has to understand,
through a principle of structural homology,
how these struggles in the field of power
inform the internal dynamics of the postwar

Our Aesthetic Categories

American poetry scene: What happens in the

field is more and more linked to a specific history of the field, and hence it becomes more
and more difficult to deduce it directly from
the state of the social world at the moment
under consideration (243). Since vernacular
aesthetic styles like the cute and interesting,
as opposed to individual artworks, genres,
and movements, are not products of restricted
fields (though of course by no means unmediated by them), by this account they could,
at least theoretically, index states of the social
world and struggles in the field of power more
directly, thus providing certain advantages for
the analysis of culture as a whole.
However intriguing, this thesis needs to
be measured against Jamesons argument to
the opposite effect in Postmodernism: that due
to the well-nigh universal practice today of
what may be called pastiche, a metastyle made
possible by late capitalist cultures stupendous
proliferation of social codes, the contemporary analysis of styles can no longer count
as a legitimate way of doing history (17). Yet
this argument about the decline of styles ability to function as an index of sociohistorical
conditions needs to be stacked up against the
way Jameson uses stylistic categories to make
the historical claims about postmodernism
that underlie this very point. The messy and
glossy, in particular, stand out in this magisterial work as styles unusually pregnant with
sociohistorical meaning; the general appearance of the photographed interior of a Frank
Gehry house in Santa Monica, for example, reflects the messiness of a dispersed existence,
existential messiness, the perpetual temporal
distraction of post-sixties life, and thus, in
snowballing fashion, the general informing
context of some larger virtual nightmare . . .
in which psychic fragmentation is raised to
a qualitatively new power, the structural distraction of the decentered subject now promoted to the very motor and existential logic
of late capitalism itself (117). Messiness and
glossiness are closer to cuteness and zaniness

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than to styles such as art deco or cubism, as if,
when it comes to postmodernism, only the less
institutionally codified, less chronologically
restricted set of styles can still be historical.
To consider aesthetic categories not as
styles but as discursive judgmentsculturally formalized ways of publicly sharing our
pleasures and displeasuresis to go to the
heart of Kantian aesthetic theory in a way
that might make us wonder why so little attention has been given to this aspect of them.
Yet in a sense the asymmetry is not hard to
understand, since the discursive life of aesthetic categories, subtly woven into the fabric
of ordinary conversation, is both less visible
and also arguably more complex. For one
thing, as Stanley Cavell has shown, aesthetic
judgments belong to the troublesome class
of performative utterances that J. L. Austin
classified as perlocutionary: verbal actions
such as praising, criticizing, complimenting,
soothing, or insulting, which, in contrast to
illocutionary acts like betting and marrying,
are more successfully performed in an inexplicit rather than explicit form. Saying Nice
haircut! is a more effective way of complimenting than announcing I compliment
you. The most important feature of perlocutionary utterances for Cavell, however, and
particularly of the affective subset of perlocutions he calls passionate utterances, is the
way in which the power to assess their accomplishment shifts from the speaker to the
interlocutor. It is the person in the position
of receiving a compliment or apology rather
than the one who offers it, in other words,
who ultimately determines whether the act
of complimenting or apologizing has successfully taken place (if my friend takes Nice
haircut! as a sardonic insult, for example, my
act of complimenting failed).
Cavell thus brings out the surprising relevance of Austins theory of performative language for aesthetic theoryand particularly
for our understanding of the feature of the
aesthetic claim, as suggested by Kants descrip-

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tion, as a kind of compulsion to share a pleasure, hence as tinged with an anxiety that the
claim stands to be rebuked (9). Though forming judgments of beauty silently in our heads
seems possible, making aesthetic pleasure
a feeling that does not need to be publicized
and confirmed by others, this is not the way
in which Kant describes it.4 In his account,
it does not seem possible to judge something
beautiful without speaking or at least imagining oneself speaking and without making the
error of putting ones judgment in the form
of a descriptive, third-person statement (X is
cute) rather than a first-person statement that
looks more openly like the subjective evaluation it is (I judge X cute). There is thus something rhetorically stealthy in a curiously open
way, about the work of aesthetic categories, as
Grard Genette underscores in his account of
aesthetic predicates as persuasive or valorizing descriptions that bridge the abyss between
fact and value without becoming too conspicuous. Because interesting and cute (and
perhaps we could add glossy and messy) are
semidescriptive or semijudgmental, they are
essentially means [by] which one judges under cover of describing (92; emphases added).
The rhetorically clandestine work of aesthetic categories thus throws further light on
a problem for criticism that, I have elsewhere
suggested, the interesting embodies (Merely
Interesting): why it is so strangely easy to
mistake criticism that identifies with and
strives to participate in the making of aesthetic judgments with criticism in which the
main goal is analyzing aesthetic judgments.
The fact that they are so frequently conflated
is itself of theoretical interest. For mistaking
aesthetic evaluation with analysis mirrors
not only the constitutive error of Kantian
taste, which necessarily confuses subjective
judgments with statements of objective fact,
but also the way in which it is paradoxically
internal to the interesting to toggle between
aesthetic and nonaesthetic judgments. I want
to turn our attention to this issue, since it

Sianne Ngai

surfaces explicitly around the interesting, in

what I think is still one of the most forceful
accounts of contemporary culture.
Though Jamesons Postmodernism is
not often read as a work of aesthetic theory,
its tour de force, 118-page conclusion opens
with a discussion of this problem. Jameson
notes how despite the trouble I took in my
principal essay on the subject to explain how
it was not possible intellectually or politically simply to celebrate postmodernism or
to disavow it, the mere act of writing about
postmodernism was widely viewed as an act
of aesthetic advocacy or oppositionthat is
to say, as an aesthetic judgment on the postmodern (297). The confusion leads Jameson
to try to more sharply differentiate three
kinds of intellectual activity: taste, a practice performed by old-fashioned critics and
cultural journalists that includes judgments
ranging from personal opinions to aesthetic
judgments proper; analysis, the investigation of the historical conditions of possibility
of specific forms; and the explicitly sociopolitical work of evaluation, a judgment of the
value or quality of social life itself by way of
the text or individual work of art. For Jameson the more subtle and important difference
is not between analysis and evaluation but
rather between the more sociologically and
economically removed practices of evaluation
and taste. Though a wider gulf would seem to
separate cultural journalists from the main
practitioners of evaluation (Marxist critics)
than the latter from literature professors who
do analysis or literary and cultural study
(Jameson himself is a prime example of the
overlap between the last two groups), because
taste and evaluation are fundamentally judgmental, the difference between them becomes
more important to secure (298).
The paragraph in which taste, analysis,
and evaluation are differentiated is immediately followed by one in which Jameson
finally acknowledges the presence of judgments of taste in Postmodernism, though in

Our Aesthetic Categories

an amused and desultory way that seems intended to highlight their irrelevance:
As far as taste is concerned (and as readers of
the preceding chapters will have become aware),
culturally I write as a relatively enthusiastic
consumer of postmodernism, at least some
parts of it: I like the architecture and a lot of
the newer visual work. . . . The music is not bad
to listen to, or the poetry to read; the novel is
the weakest of the newer cultural areas and is
considerably excelled by its narrative counterparts in film and video (at least the high literary novel is; subgeneric narratives, however, are
very good, indeed . . . ). My sense is that this is
essentially a visual culture, wired for sound
but one where the linguistic element . . . is slack
and flabby, and not to be made interesting without ingenuity, daring, and keen motivation.
(29899; emphasis added)

Interesting is clearly being used here as

a judgment of aesthetic quality, along with
other aesthetic predicates (slack, flabby)
and purely evaluative or nondescriptive verdicts (not bad, very good). In case of any
doubt, Jameson underscores his judging in
his next sentence: These are tastes, giving
rise to opinions; they have little to do with
the analysis of the function of such a culture
and how it got to be that way. Indeed, even
the opinions are probably not satisfactory in
this form, since the second thing people want
to know, for the obvious contextual reason,
is how this compares to an older modernism
canon. Jameson accordingly reformulates his
initial opinions to accommodate this comparison, though with little difference in language: The architecture is generally a great
improvement; the novels are much worse.
Photography and video are incomparable (the
latter for a very obvious reason indeed); also
were fortunate today in having interesting
new painting to look at and poetry to read.
The next sentence, which also introduces a
new paragraph, is as follows: Music, however
(after Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Thomas

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Mann), ought to lead us into something more

interesting and complicated than mere opinion. Suddenly, interesting no longer seems
part of the vocabulary of taste but rather a sign
of a movement beyond taste into the more . . .
complicated realm of evaluation that it seems
to facilitate. Why is it music whose study might
lead us into something more interesting and
complicated than mere opinion? Because music includes history in a more thoroughgoing
and irrevocable fashion, since as background
and mood stimulus, it mediates our historical
past along with our private or existential one
and can scarcely be woven out of the memory
any longer (299; emphasis added). Regardless
of our take on this explanation, the very idea
of a shift from mere judgments of taste (such
as the finding of painting and poetry interesting) to something more interesting and complicated than mere opinion (evaluation) allows
Jameson to arrive at his final suggestion, that
perhaps aesthetic evaluations of postmodernism are relevant to its theorization after all:
We therefore begin to make some progress
on turning our tastes into postmodernism
theory when we step back and attend to the
system of fine arts itself: the ratio between
the forms and the media (indeed, the very
shape that media itself has taken on, supplanting form and genre alike), the way in
which the generic system itself, as a restructuration and a new configuration (however
minimally modified), expresses the postmodern, and through it, all the other things that
are happening to us. (300; emphasis added)

In toggling between and thus helping the

critic cross the divide between tastes and
evaluations (much in the same way aesthetic
categories cut across the individual arts), the
judgment of interesting also helps the critic
arrive at the following conclusion: judgments
of taste are not only more intimately related to
the work of criticism and theory than may initially appear; if performed at the proper scale,
they can be turned into criticism and theory.

125.4

Note how Jamesons effort to negotiate

the relation among aesthetic taste, historical
analysis, and sociopolitical evaluation overturns, along the way, presumptions we might
have about the proper unit of aesthetic judgment and experience (and, indeed, about the
proper objects of literary criticism). His text
makes it clear that judgments of taste do not
apply exclusively to individual artworks, as
the canonical texts of philosophical aesthetics
would seem to have it, nor even just to bodies of work by an individual author or artist.
As evinced in his claims about the weakness
of the serious novel in postmodernism (and
claims about the interestingness of poetry and
painting), the unit of aesthetic judgment can
be as large as a genre, a medium, or even an
entire art. If, moreover, judgments of taste at
the level of cultural journalism are immanently evaluative in that they unconsciously
point to the social worlds that make them possible (even becoming readable as allegories for
modes of production or for ways of life that
extend far beyond the aesthetic or cultural
as such), aesthetic categories generated by
and for the world of taste can become a useful tool for the political evaluation of largescale cultural phenomena (301). I wager that
this argument can be extended to our current
repertoire of aesthetic categories. Finding a
way to grasp this set (if not exactly system)
of aesthetic conceptsa structure in which
certain ones will prevail over others as judgments and styles and inhere to specific forms
and genres at a higher ratio than otherswill
be similarly salutary for getting a handle on
postmodernism and through it, all the other
things that are happening to us.

NOTES
I am grateful to Mark McGurl for his comments on this
essay. I would also like to thank Jonathan Culler and
Cathy Caruth.

Sianne Ngai
1. It is worth noting how quickly displeasure seems
to drop out of the picture not just in contemporary aesthetic theory but also in The Critique of Judgment, where
Kant first mentions dissatisfaction without any interest
side by side with satisfaction without any interest but
never gives us an account of what the former is (leading
to much debate about whether or not Kantian aesthetics can genuinely account for the ugly; 96). Would the
widely held idea that aesthetic judgments have no place
in critique be less prevalent if it were recognized that the
aesthetic includes displeasure as well as complicated mixtures of displeasure and pleasure? This is in fact the case
for all the aesthetic categories featured in my study.
2. On the disappearance or impossibility of the
avant-garde, see Jameson 167. On the parergon as index
of the relation between art and theory, see Derrida.
3. Thanks to Mark Goble for helping me see this.
4. See par. 6 and esp. par. 7, in which the difference between the pleasant and the beautiful is described first and
foremost as a difference in how we converse about them.

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