Sianne Ngai, _Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting_

 AT SOME POINT last summer, I had seen Ngai's work cited so often that I decided I had better read some of it, and the cover image of Lucille Ball (as Lucy Ricardo) awkwardly straddling a barre in a dance studio was enough to persuade me this was the one to read.

Aesthetics has been a bit neglected as a philosophical domain in recent decades, I would say. Aesthetics as a discipline developed by focusing on the beautiful, the sublime, the great, the important, on good vs. bad taste, etc., and so was terribly exposed to arguments (by Pierre Bourdieu, for example) that it was just a cover for class privilege, a camouflage for power, a ducking of responsibilities. Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just might serve as an example of aesthetics, as a discipline, being a bit on the defensive.

But Ngai gives aesthetics a whole new energy by taking up more familiar, lower stakes categories--the cute, the interesting, the zany--and using them to build a convincing argument about where art is and where we are in our late capitalist moment.

For example, Ngai connects the "cute" to avant-garde poetry and the paradoxical power that may emerge from powerlessness, the "interesting" to that which opens up to the not-yet-noticed and not-yet-articulated, and the "zany" to the increasing tendency of work to involve more and more kinds of performance (even to the need of performing "humanness" if one os a flight attendant or answers phones). She not only illuminates the language game one plays with these tokens, so to speak, but also can make rethink Hello Kitty. 

Like Fredric Jameson she has a gift for turning from high culture to popular culture to high theory and back again without missing a beat or batting an eye, and however far she goes, the means of production and its relationships are never far away. The chapter on "zany" gathers in Lucille Ball, Richard Pryor,  and Jim Carrey, reasonably enough, but also the zanni of the commedia dell'arte, Diderot's dialogue with Rameau's nephew, Nietzsche and Arlie Hochschild, Hardt and Negri and Kathy Weeks...and it all adds up to an insightful discussion of the unexpected kinds of labor late capitalism ropes us into doing.