Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form : Sianne Ngai

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/523709 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form Author: Sianne Ngai Narrator: Nancy Wu Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 51 minutes Release date: September 14, 2021 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Lessons in Philosophy Publisher's Summary: A provocative theory of the gimmick as an aesthetic category steeped in the anxieties of capitalism. Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and as working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention). Focusing on this connection to work, Ngai draws a line from gimmicks to political economy. When we call something a gimmick, we are registering uncertainties about value bound to labor and time—misgivings that indicate broader anxieties about the measurement of wealth in capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; photographs by Torbjørn Rødland; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.