Theory of the Gimmick
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/689672
ISSN1539-7858
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Media and Philosophy
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeTheory of the GimmickSianne NgaiSianne NgaiPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore1. Labor-Saving DeviceWhat are we as subjects of capitalist lifeworlds implicitly saying when we call something a gimmick, regardless of the inevitably varying objects to which the evaluation is applied and varying identities of those applying it? What is being registered about a shared world, perhaps without the speaker entirely knowing she or he is registering it, in this ambivalent, if mostly negative aesthetic judgment? That is, in the fascinatingly complex but also ordinary speech act—a demand for universal agreement based on feelings rather than concepts—spontaneously elicited by a perception of form?We can start by putting the question differently: why are gimmicks almost comically irritating? Even the word seems to grate on Ivor Brown, who nonetheless devotes an entire essay to lovingly exploring his distaste for it in Words in Our Time (1958). "Comedians have their gimmicks, either as catch-phrase, theme-song, or bit of 'business,' which they exploit in … their appearances."1 Gimmicks seem to provoke contempt simply in part because they are job related: bits of business for performing aesthetic operations that we somehow become distracted into regarding as aesthetic objects in their own right. Here the much vaunted concept of aesthetic autonomy turns into an undesirable feature for once, when asserted not by the work as a whole but illicitly by an instrumental part-object. More significantly, we see that in addition to being what Brown calls a "poor kind of artifice," the gimmick irritates because it "abbreviates" work and time. As Brown writes, "I remember an old music-hall comedian called Phil Ray who began his turn by announcing, 'I always abbriev. It's my hab.' Never to finish a word was his (not wildly diverting) gimmick" (W, p. 48).Repulsive if also in an important way attractive, maintaining a degree of charm we often acknowledge grudgingly, if at all, labor and time-saving gimmicks are of course not exclusive to comedy or the arts. We find them in shoes and cars, appliances and food, politics and advertising, journalism and pedagogy, and virtually every object made and sold in the capitalist system. But comedy, and especially what David Flusfeder calls the "comedy of procedure," is especially suited for bringing out the uniqueness of the gimmick as an aesthetic category—that is, as a form linked in a specific way to a judgment based on the feelings our perception of the form elicits.2 As with the "operational aesthetic," described by Neil Harris in Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum, the comedy of procedure turns modern rationality in general into an aesthetic experience, encouraging the reader's "fascination with the ways things come together"3 and the "visualization of cause and effect."4 This incitement of pleasure in "information and technique," which Harris locates in a range of nineteenth-century objects "expos[ing] their processes of action," from newspaper hoaxes to sea novels, was also central to early film comedy (H, p. 57). As we learn from Tom Gunning, the invitation to visualize causality becomes especially noticeable in comic films featuring a "device gag" or "apparatus": the sausage machine, in which animals herded into one end come out as links from the other; or the webs of string with which children join buckets, blankets, and other commodities to unsuspecting adults who thus become parts of an elaborate "connection device"—one which the living beings absorbed into it cannot fully see ("CM," p. 100).5With this image of an apparatus binding together agents who otherwise seem to be acting independently (connecting them "behind [their] backs," as Karl Marx likes to say), we may begin to suspect that the gimmick form, like the comedy of procedure that puts it so ostentatiously on display, emerges explicitly as a phenomenon of industrial capitalism, not just of a rationalized modernity.6 Today this mode of production continues to subtend and coexist with its postindustrial or deindustrialized aftermath, in which financial instruments like CDSs and CDOs, ways of dividing and moving values created in the immediate production process, give older gimmicks like the tontine and Ponzi scheme a new lease on life. The gimmick, this essay argues, is a specifically capitalist aesthetic phenomenon. Tellingly, the word that finally consolidates the concept of this not-so-marvelous marvel does not appear in print until the late 1920s, a moment of both euphoria as well as radical disenchantment with a host of capitalist techniques (industrial and commercial as well as financial).7To be sure, there are marvelous devices centuries before these economic developments that we might be tempted to call gimmicks today. Describing the "mechanical apparatuses, restored and painted by Melchior Broederlam, that sprayed the guests of Philip the Good with water and dust," Giorgio Agamben notes that prior to the seventeenth century European sensibility did not recognize a significant difference between "works of sacred art" and elaborate contraptions such as those in the castle of Hesdin, where "in a hall decorated with a series of paintings representing the story of Jason, a series of machines was installed which, in addition to imitating Medea's spells, produced lightning, thunder, snow, and rain, to obtain a more realistic effect."8 Gimmicky as we might think them now, these precapitalist devices made no particular claim to abbreviating work on which they could henceforth renege. More significantly, such devices were objects of admiration only, unmixed with suspicion or contempt. It is only today that the deus ex machina, the machine or crane used to transport gods to the stage in ancient Greek tragedy, has become the name for a cheap or aesthetically unconvincing contrivance for achieving narrative closure.9Devices like these were wonders only and not in any way equivocal or funny to their ancient and feudal contemporaries. The capitalist gimmick, however, is both a wonder and a trick.10 It is a form we marvel at and distrust, admire and disdain, whose affective intensity for us increases precisely because of this ambivalence.11 Indeed, the gimmick is the very slippage between these positive and negative judgments—wonder and trick—in a way that gives it a special relation to comedy, opening a window onto the genre in a way that the unequivocally appreciated precapitalist device does not.As I suggest above, the "connection device" Gunning singles out as an example of the classic gimmick or gag and also of early film comedy's operational aesthetic might be read as the emblem of an entire mode of production. Could our experience of the gimmick's compromised aesthetic form, illuminated for us in a special way by the comedy of procedure, be related in an even deeper way to the methods and devices of capitalism? And in a way that has something to do with the gimmick's special relation to time (its saving), to labor (its reduction), and to value (its cheapening)?As already glimpsed in Brown's comments about comedians, there is clearly a connection between our negative evaluation of the gimmick's aesthetic integrity and our negative relation to the abbreviation of labor it appears to encode. Take "Notes on Comedy" by L. C. Knights (1933). Knights opens with a complaint about literary criticism, invoking the domestic appliance—vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, coffeemaker—to underscore the contempt that the gimmick's promise of reducing labor elicits therein: "Labor-saving devices are common in criticism. Like the goods advertised in women's journals they do the work, or appear to do it, leaving the mind free for the more narcotic forms of enjoyment. Generalizations and formulae are devices of this kind."12Note how the very idea of a "labor-saving device" seems suspicious to Knights and in a way underscored by its association with machines and women, regardless of whether such devices merely appear to or really do save labor. There is thus a real social insight in what might otherwise seem like fussing on the part of someone not wanting to succumb to the lure of gimmicks in his or her own line of work. In what circumstances might the reduction of labor by way of a device—the simplest promise of all technology—become regarded, even when not illusory, as a contemptible, untrustworthy, or generally negative thing? When, due to the structurally compelled pursuit of maximum profits by capitalists solely capable of reuniting what capitalism fundamentally separates—means of production and labor power—labor-saving machines proliferate in tandem with rising proportions of machines to workers. What Marx calls the increasing "organic composition of capital" in turn produces a tendency toward falling rates of profit, leading to flights of capital into nonproductive sectors and rising levels of unemployment, while also driving the capitalist to devise new, increasingly nuanced ways to squeeze increasingly small increments of surplus labor from workers in the immediate production process on which the entire system continues to depend.13 While we would not be wrong to hear it in Knights's comment as well, indignation on behalf of a violated Protestant work ethic is thus only part of the story. It cannot by itself account for this more fundamental distrust of the labor-saving device, which relates not only to the "spirit" of capitalism but its most basic operations. Here the very concept of labor saving comes to be profoundly ambivalent. Whether in the form of an idea ("generalizations and formulae") or thing ("goods advertised in women's journals"), the device that "saves" human labor contributes to both its intensification and elimination in the long run.14The gimmick is the objective correlative of this ambivalence, translating a source of increased economic productivity and material wealth, the reduction of human labor through progressively advanced machines and techniques of production, into a sign of impoverishment in the aesthetic realm. For gimmicks register as deficient in aesthetic value even when their appeal is obliquely acknowledged. Calling something a gimmick is a distancing judgment, a way to apotropaically ward off, by publicly proclaiming ourselves unconvinced by, or impervious to, the capitalist device's claims and attractions. At the same time the gimmick enables us to indirectly acknowledge this power to enchant, as one to which others, if not ourselves, are susceptible.15 In this elliptical fashion, gimmicks can be found amusing or even cute (indeed, the gimmick often takes the form of a charmingly miniaturized machine). Yet it is our feeling of suspicion, followed closely by contempt, that defines the aesthetic judgment/experience of the gimmick as such. A device cannot be a gimmick—it would just neutrally be a device—without this moment of distrust and aversion, which seems to respond directly to or even correct our initial euphoria in the image of something promising to lessen human toil. This is again what separates the capitalist gimmick proper from ancient or feudal machines that might call attention to their ability to make work more efficient, because the compound crank or water mill's promise of enhanced productivity does not elicit (potentially comic) feelings of misgiving or fraudulence. Always enchanting and repulsive at once, and never simply one or the other, the gimmick is once again fundamentally a capitalist phenomenon—what the poet George Oppen calls a "sad marvel."16This ambivalence comes forth most strongly in the aspect of the gimmick which I think irritates and charms us the most: the way in which it seems both to work too hard and work too little. The self-described inventions of former vaudevillian and mining engineer Rube Goldberg, explorations in his own words of "man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results," highlight this contradiction in a memorable way (fig. 1).17 In these tongue-in-cheek designs for fictional machines, first appearing as newspaper cartoons in the early twentieth century and living on today in examples ranging from engineering contests to Peter Fischli and David Weiss's art film The Way Things Go (1987), a stunning variety of inanimate devices are combined with animal or human agents in painstakingly elaborate ways, if also in ultimately simple chains of linear cause and effect, to perform anticlimactically ordinary tasks: emptying ashtrays, buttoning a collar, sharpening a pencil (fig. 2).18 Reminiscent of the gag film's "connection device," the Rube Goldberg perfectly captures how what the gimmick does to achieve its intended effect seems at once excessively laborious but also strangely too easy. This is why we can refer to it both admiringly as a labor-saving "trick" and also disparagingly as a labor-avoiding "dodge."19Figure 1. Rube Goldberg. Copyright heirs of Rube Goldberg / Courtesy Abrams Books. Source: www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-wacky-inventions-of-rube-goldberg.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 2. Pencil Sharpener. Copyright heirs of Rube Goldberg / Courtesy Abrams Books. Source: www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-wacky-inventions-of-rube-goldberg.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointMirrored in this appearance of both overperforming and underperforming, the equivocal saving of labor that the gimmick's form encodes is the main reason for why it both attracts and repels us. Because the capitalist seeks state-of-the-art machinery at costs lower than those at which new technologies are introduced, his or her mode of production requires a constant negotiation with the social aging of productive devices. If we speak of outdated equipment as working too hard, below a standard of productivity continually being reset at higher levels, expensive new technology adopted too early might be described as working too well, performing above standard, but unprofitably. And so the ambiguous reduction of labor by productive devices whose timeliness greatly matters is reflected in another closely related contradiction on the part of the gimmick qua compromised aesthetic form: that of seeming either too old or too new.20 Being out of synch with "the times" as defined by their productivity, whether by lagging behind or hubristically advancing too far ahead, is another reason why the gimmick irritates us, and all the more so given how aggressively it insists on its contemporaneity with its audience.21 It is moreover in this insistence, one against which the gimmick's anachronisms become apparent in the first place (and one significantly shared by advertising), in which something about the gimmick seems too revealing of its aim: that of giving its addressee what it says it knows we want. It is from this interpellation that we recoil, not because the gimmick's claim to knowing us is wrong but because it so often isn't.Comedy shares the gimmick's insistence on its contemporaneity, according to some critics, because of its special relation to appraisals of worth (and to the meta-appraisal of those appraisals). Due to a commitment to "exhibiting current evaluations in light of their shortcomings," James Feibleman argues, comedy's "specific points bear always upon the contemporary world." The "contemporaneity of comedy" is thus "one of its essential features" and directly linked to its critique of idealization.22 Alenka Zupančič makes a similar argument, albeit from a point of view explicitly countering the humanist one tacitly underpinning Feibleman's argument about comedy's metaevaluative correction of overevaluations. Rejecting the thesis that comedy brings us down to earth from our identification with abstract ideals by exposing the universal's contamination by particularity, returning us with joy to our embodiment and the knowledge that we are only human, comedy is rather understood as a finitude compromised by universals—as a finitude that leaks.23 In making this argument about the inherently comical contamination of particularity by universality (and of its corollary image, the walking abstraction or idea in the flesh), Zupančič expands on Agnes Heller's claims about the genre's "preeminent involvement with the present" (O, p. 177). Heller points out that in contrast to the centrality of mourning in tragedy, no past-oriented emotion seems equally central to comic experience. We see comedy's unusual attachment to the present reflected also in the fact that live improvisation on the stage is the exclusive métier of comic actors: "there is no tragedia dell'arte, only comedia dell'arte," Heller writes.24 To these insights Zupančič adds the following: comedy is "extremely adept at showing how something functions—that is to say, it is adept at showing the mechanisms, in the present, that allow its functioning and perpetuation."25 Here it is not the project of metaevaluation that accounts for comedy's special tie to the present but rather the way in which it shares the gimmick's operational aesthetic, its interest in showcasing how things are done. What is interestingly suggested is that this focus on procedure might not just define one species of comedy among others but comedy in general.Toggling between wonder and trick, overvaluation and correction, the gimmick thus draws into sharper relief something about the workings of comedy, just as comedy reveals the gimmick as aesthetic form. Yet gimmicks also belong to a world of practical and industrial inventions.26 In twentieth-century engineering manuals and popular science magazines, we see the term used as technical slang to refer to the working part, often a unit enclosing or comprised of many smaller parts, of a larger machine.27 Here gimmick seems descriptive instead of evaluative—a generic term, like gadget, thingamabob, or doohickey, for any functional device.28 Yet it is this explicitly industrial as opposed to aesthetic version of the labor-saving gimmick that best reflects the way some notable early-twentieth-century aesthetic theorists regard comedy. For Theodor Lipps, for example, the "feeling of the comical" is what results when the mind's preparation for grasping something it thinks will be challenging is revealed as being in excess of the actual amount of effort required. 29 What was anticipated as being strenuous suddenly turns out to be "easily comprehended and mastered" in a kind of paradoxically uplifting deflation ("CRL," p. 395). At the same time, for Lipps the "feeling of the comical" produced through this reduction of mental exertion is interestingly one that does not "gratify" even as it "arouses joy" ("CRL," p. 394). Rather, it remains a complex, ambivalent pleasure that never forgets the initial moment of strain, retaining an unease akin to that which the gimmick's promise of saving labor elicits. Freud makes this connection between comedy and the reduction of work even more explicit, though in his case mental exertion is not the problem but the cure: "By raising our intellectual expenditure we can achieve the same result with a diminished expenditure on our movements. Evidence of this cultural success is provided by our machines."30There is an emphasis on the "intellectual" in these theories of comedy as a "diminished expenditure" of work that comes to a head in the comedy of capitalist procedure as a fetishization of the idea. "If you're an ideas man you don't just stop having ideas because cash flow is not a problem," thinks the personification of capital who is the protagonist of Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods (much more on this novel soon). "You go right on having new ideas, and when you have an idea you want to see that idea in action."31 In a way that might explain why the conceptual artwork remains such a prominent stereotype of a gimmicky artifact, in capitalist culture idea and gimmick often become synonymous. We see this slippage in the Oxford English Dictionary's definition: "gimmick, n. A gadget; spec. a contrivance for dishonestly regulating a gambling game, or an article used in a conjuring trick; now usu. a tricky or ingenious device, gadget, idea, etc., esp. one adopted for the purpose of attracting attention or publicity."32 If, as Zupančič suggests, the materialism of comedy resides not in the rejection of abstractions but rather in their enticization, something similar seems to happen in the form of the gimmick. The gimmick is both an idea and also its thingly materialization in a "gadget," "article," or "contrivance"; it is more precisely the transformation of idea into thing in a way that charms but also disturbs us. It is worth lingering on the negative element of this affectively mixed response. Is not the realization of supposedly abstract ideas in supposedly concrete things regarded as desirable by pretty much everyone, skeptics and proponents of capitalism alike? And is not the capitalist gimmick a trivial and merely symptomatic form and/or judgment, incapable of critical reflection on the mode of production for which it is merely a synecdoche? Yet in this aesthetic experience the well-nigh universally celebrated transformation of ideas into things becomes an object of rare misgiving—as if to underscore just how little distance separates realization from reification in a system of generalized commodity production.This is of course a system in which the production of commodities increasingly encompasses the production of the specific way in which they will be consumed. Here, to cite the main idea of one post-Fordist "business bible" designed to look like a bro-friendly cookbook, the reception of a commodity is not something organized after the fact of production by a separate division of workers.33 Rather, the marketing is to be "baked" into the commodity during the process of production itself. The male authors of Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves attempt to market this conflation of production and reception as a cutting-edge capitalist technique (if also, interestingly, as a cutesy domestic one). Yet it is a conflation already central to the gimmick as a historical phenomenon coinciding with the birth of mass advertising, when methods for realizing the values of otherwise unsalable commodities by creating unprecedented kinds of demand were codified in response to one of the first waves of visible overaccumulation of industrially produced goods. Mirroring the unity of production and exchange distinctive to capitalism—beginning with the worker's sale of labor power to the capitalist, these activities mediate one other at every point—in the gimmick making and selling always seem to happen at once.We are given a detailed demonstration of how this "classic" version of the gimmick works in "The Glory Machine" (1883) by symbolist writer Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.34 The device at the heart of this late nineteenth-century story, narrated in the blustery tone of a market still difficult to separate from theatre, is a "machine" for insuring French playwrights against ruin by guaranteeing that their aesthetic productions will be met with an unequivocally positive response. "In the future, [such] risks will be completely ruled out" ("GM," p. 62).35 The punch line of Villiers's laying bare of the gimmick form—the story's metagimmick, if you like—is that the "sublime mechanism" for generating Glory proves to be nothing other than the physical building of the theatre. The output of the "The Glory Machine" is thus a paradoxically glorious deflation akin to that at work in Lipps's and Freud's theories of comedy. For we quickly discover that the Machine is not a scientifically advanced marvel difficult for us to understand but just an ordinary amphitheater modified with hundreds of mechanical devices and controlled by a hidden central operator on a giant "Keyboard" for generating a simulation of collective aesthetic pleasure. Even more than the theatrical production for which it is simultaneously produced as both a response and a work to be aesthetically consumed in its own right, the artificial reception is an elaborately orchestrated Gesamtkunstwerk. In addition to "laughing and lachrymatory gases" pumped out at the appropriate moments from pipes, automated cane ends to thump on floors, and the installation under every seat of a folded "pair of very shapely hands, in oak" (the narrator archly notes, "It would be superfluous here to indicate their function"), its devices include "tiny bellows … operated by electricity" placed in "phonographic machines" hidden in the mouths of the proscenium cupids. At appropriate moments these phonographic machines play the prerecorded sounds of aesthetic reactions—"Bellowings, Chokings, 'Encores,' Recalls, Silent Tears, Recalls-with-Bellowings-extra, Sighs of Approbation, Opinions Proffered, Wreaths, Principles, Convictions, Moral Tendencies, Epileptic Seizures, Sudden Childbirths, Blows, Suicides"—said to exceed the variety already offered by any "well-organized Claque," the paid human applauders who represent what the Machine technologically supersedes. The Glory Machine's much vaster repertoire extends even further to "Ideas" and "Noises of Discussion (art for art's sake, Form and Idea)" and even to full-blown "Critical Articles," churned out while the play under review is still in process of being performed ("GM," p. 65).36The seemingly exotic futuristic device for securing the ideal reception for an aesthetic commodity ends up being nothing other than the ordinary present-day apparatus for the commodity's production. The final joke is that the Machine's production of an unambiguously positive aesthetic reception ends up producing an unfeigned pleasure for the audience in the world of the story. "Whence it comes—and here is the solution of the problem of a physical means attaining an intellectual end—that success becomes a reality—that Glory does veritably pass into the auditorium! And the illusory side of the … Apparatus vanishes, fusing itself, positively, in the glow of the True!" ("GM," p. 63). With this moment of metaphysical triumph, the emergence of the "real thing" from its simulation, which Robert Pfaller claims defines the essence of comedy, the tale completes its comedic act of generic self-deflation, as the speculative allegory or philosophical parable we may have thought we were reading—which begins with a series of pseudo-Hegelian reflections on the "common point" between substance and idea, or matter and thought—devolves as it were into a satire on the pettiness of contemporary French dramatists and the mediocrity of their drama.37 In accordance with the disappointment specific to the overworking/underworking, too laborious/too easy gimmick, this deflation cleverly takes place in tandem with the story's demonstration of how its eponymous aesthetic machine works.Yet there is disappointment precisely because euphoria comes before. The gimmick lets us down—self-corrects our overestimation of its abilities—only because it has also managed to pump us up. We express contempt for it as a labor-saving trick because our attention was in fact initially caught by its promises of saving labor; we describe it as cheap or aesthetically impoverished only because something about it seemed so truly shiny with value. Even if the gimmick is fundamentally an aesthetic failure, our irritation by it has everything to do with the fact that it also partially succeeds. One wonders if we find gimmicks repulsive insofar as we find them attractive, as if in a reevaluation of the initial evaluation (here, reversing the order of the sublime's two affective phases, our negative response overrides the positive one). In an almost homeopathic as well as autocorrecting way, the gimmick qua device of capitalist production, as well as distinctively capitalist aesthetic form and judgment, deflates the claims to value or hype it initially excites.This prompts us to ask: is it production per se that irritates us in our aesthetic experience of the gimmick or something about the specific way in which the gimmick comes to index it? Why is the gimmick's operational or procedural aesthetic not a source of simple pleasure, as it is in the practical jokes and how-to-do-it books Harris describes in Humbug, the "task films" and "device films" analyzed by Trahair and Gunning, or today's Discovery Science Channel television show How Is It Made? Given that all involve revealing and inviting audiences to take pleasure in learning about methods of production, why are we charmed in these instances but not entirely so in the experience of the gimmick? Even if the literary archive from which he builds his argument lies at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum from these popular entertainments, a similar question could be asked about Viktor Shklovsky's concepts of "art-as-device" and as "exposing the device," in which the elucidation of the procedures by which an aesthetic effect is achieved contributes to the salutary project of art as ostranenie or making-strange, a formalist idea subsequently politicized in Bertholt Brecht's epic theater and high modernist Verfremdungseffekt.38 For Brecht and Shklovsky, whose privileged example is Lawrence Sterne, the making visible of methods of production adds pleasure, adds aesthetic value, whereas in the gimmick it directly detracts from both our enjoyment and esteem. What accounts for this difference in our relation to the exact same maneuver of calling attention to the process of making by way of the aesthetic device? It can only be the fact that the capitalist gimmick seems to make promises about the reduction of labor in a way that Shklovsky's literary device does not—promises that, interestingly, we distrust from the start.39Ambiguities surrounding labor and value in capitalism are
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