Beyond Snarkiness
Whitehead on Tenderness,
Dember on Meta-Cuteness
by Jay McDaniel
Snarky
Originally: irritable, bad-tempered. Later also: critical or mocking in an indirect or sarcastic way; snide
- Oxford English Dictionay
The Tenderness of Life itself
It is the business of philosophical theology to provide a rational understanding of the rise of civilization, and of the tenderness of mere life itself, in a world which superficially is founded upon the clashings of senseless compulsion. I am not disguising my belief that in this task, theology has largely failed. The notion of the absolute despot has stood in the way.
- AN Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
Beyond Snarkiness
For several years I had been observing and contemplating a certain shift in culture — something that was rather hard to pinpoint but yet was unmistakably new. Something seemed to have changed in the new millennium that made it cool again to express unabashed feelings — joy, wonder, sadness, vulnerability, triumph — in our art, and in everyday life, unfettered by the ever-present ironic snark that controlled the nineties and earlier.
- Greg Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism
Meta-Cuteness
“[Meta-cuteness] has to do with things that evoke childlike innocence and simplicity, but are meant for usage by adults. In a sense, it’s a way of puncturing modernist over-seriousness, but in a way that is kind, not (postmodernly) biting.”
God and Tenderness
The image—and it is but an image—the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
Beyond Snarkiness
There is a time and place for snarkiness, A time and place to be sarcastic, ironic, and snide. Sometimes it is just plain fun. But when it becomes a dominant cultural mode, when it becomes "cool" to be snarky, and un-cool to be earnest and sincere, something is awry. We lose one of the most beautiful things in life: the capacity to express what Greg Dember above calls "unabashed feelings" in response to what Whitehead calls "the tenderness of life itself."
Consider, then, the act of expressing "unabashed feelings"--joy, wonder, sadness, vulnerability, triumph—without irony or snarkiness, without putting those feelings in quotation marks as if you didn't really mean them. As if they are not really true to something in the very nature of things.
Consider thinking of these unabashed feelings as part of what Whitehead calls “the tenderness of mere life itself.” Assume that he uses the word "mere" not to dismiss life, but to say that we too often think of it as ordinary, when in fact, amid its ordinariness, it includes an unmistakeable tenderness,
Emotions such as joy, wonder, sadness, vulnerability, and perhaps even triumph, are ways in which life bubbles up within us, within felt experience, as we interact with the world. They may be understood as outcomes of evolutionary biology, and thus selectively advantagous; or acts of self-enjoyment and self-creativity with value in their own right; or both. In either instance they are ways we respond to the world inwardly, through what Dember calls our "interiority," and through what Whitehead calls the “subjective immediacy” of lived experience in the here and now.
Now add to these examples - joy, wonder, sadness, vulnerability - a feeling rarely discussed in philosophy or theology, perhaps because it seems too trivial and childlike: the sense of cuteness we feel in response to things that seem innocent, playful, or, in their own way, irresistibly adorable—kittens, puppies, and infants, for example.
Metamodernism and Meta-Cuteness
Dember introduces cuteness as an aspect of what he calls metamodernism. He calls it meta-cuteness. It is one of eleven sensibilities that moves beyond the almost obsessive irony that characterizes postmodern culture. As I understand it, meta-cuteness can be a state of consciousness in which a person oscillates between a sense of purity and a sense of skepticism or, to put it Whiteheadianly, an inwardly felt "contrast" between the two, or, as Whitehead might prefer, a creative synthesis of the two in a still different mode that feels the two gathered together into a felt whole. Dember's word "ironesty' can be interpreted either way.
For Dember, "metamodernism" is a reclamation, after irony, of the truths of immediately felt experience. Its aim is Whiteheadian in spirit: to protect immediate experience from scientific reductionism and also from the ironic detachment of the postmodern sensibility. In his words:
Consider, then, the act of expressing "unabashed feelings"--joy, wonder, sadness, vulnerability, triumph—without irony or snarkiness, without putting those feelings in quotation marks as if you didn't really mean them. As if they are not really true to something in the very nature of things.
Consider thinking of these unabashed feelings as part of what Whitehead calls “the tenderness of mere life itself.” Assume that he uses the word "mere" not to dismiss life, but to say that we too often think of it as ordinary, when in fact, amid its ordinariness, it includes an unmistakeable tenderness,
Emotions such as joy, wonder, sadness, vulnerability, and perhaps even triumph, are ways in which life bubbles up within us, within felt experience, as we interact with the world. They may be understood as outcomes of evolutionary biology, and thus selectively advantagous; or acts of self-enjoyment and self-creativity with value in their own right; or both. In either instance they are ways we respond to the world inwardly, through what Dember calls our "interiority," and through what Whitehead calls the “subjective immediacy” of lived experience in the here and now.
Now add to these examples - joy, wonder, sadness, vulnerability - a feeling rarely discussed in philosophy or theology, perhaps because it seems too trivial and childlike: the sense of cuteness we feel in response to things that seem innocent, playful, or, in their own way, irresistibly adorable—kittens, puppies, and infants, for example.
Metamodernism and Meta-Cuteness
Dember introduces cuteness as an aspect of what he calls metamodernism. He calls it meta-cuteness. It is one of eleven sensibilities that moves beyond the almost obsessive irony that characterizes postmodern culture. As I understand it, meta-cuteness can be a state of consciousness in which a person oscillates between a sense of purity and a sense of skepticism or, to put it Whiteheadianly, an inwardly felt "contrast" between the two, or, as Whitehead might prefer, a creative synthesis of the two in a still different mode that feels the two gathered together into a felt whole. Dember's word "ironesty' can be interpreted either way.
For Dember, "metamodernism" is a reclamation, after irony, of the truths of immediately felt experience. Its aim is Whiteheadian in spirit: to protect immediate experience from scientific reductionism and also from the ironic detachment of the postmodern sensibility. In his words:
I propose that the essence of metamodernism is a (conscious or unconscious) motivation to protect the solidity of felt experience against the scientific reductionism of the modernist perspective and the ironic detachment of the postmodern sensibility.
And, for him, meta-cuteness includes not only our felt responses to infants, puppies, kittens, and other animals, but a sense of innocence, simplicity, and quirkiness. Dember writes:
...meta-cute includes spare/clean/flat design (such as the obsession with the font Helvetica that prevailed during the 2000s, incorporation of child-like instruments (such as the glockenspiel) in indie rock music, children being featured in lead roles in plot-lines not meant for children, adults who show childlike qualities in films e.g., having motivations not based in sexuality, career, or power-seeking, etc.
Whitehead's Metaphysics of Felt Experience
If we combine Whitehead and Dember, interesting possibilities emerge: namely, that of having an aethetic sensibility which is also an ontology of feeling. This was Whitehead's aim in Process and Reality. Whereas Kant offered a Critique of Pure Reason, Whitehead seeks to offer a Critique of Pure Feeling. He writes: "The philosophy of organism aspires to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in [173] which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason."
A critique of pure feeling is not a criticism of feeling in a negative sense; to the contrary it is an affirmation of immediate feeling as the essence of human and more than human actualities. His name for feeling is "prehension," To experience the world is, for him, to prehend the world, to feel its presence, and to respond inwardly to what is felt, with "subjective forms" or emotions are part of the very being of the responder.
In what follows I offer amplfications of these ideas, with a focus on cuteness. I focus on cuteness not because it is more important than joy, wonder, sadness, vulnerability,or triumph, but because it forms such a sharp contrast to the indirection, irony, and sarcasm.
Tenderness as Sympathetic Feeling
One implication of the passage from Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas is that life itself includes a tenderness that is more than its conflicts and clashings. Whitehead does not say that tenderness transcends the violence of life, as if violence could somehow be explained away or overcome. He suggests, rather, that life cannot be reduced to violence, conflict, competition, and struggle. There is tenderness, too.
One task of philosophical theology, he adds, is to help us understand and appreciate this tenderness. The image of God as an absolute despot has often stood in the way. This is not simply because such a God is imagined as all-controlling. It is also because this God is so often portrayed as preoccupied with the moral side of life and, more specifically, with questions of obedience and disobedience, reward and punishment, righteousness and sin. God becomes, in effect, the supreme moral judge.
Tenderness is more than “being good,” however, and even more than “being compassionate.” It is a kind of sympathetic feeling: an openness to the presence and value of another. It occurs, for example, when we feel kindly toward another person, wanting to help them; or, in a different register, we encounter a baby or a beloved dog and feel, in the depths of our bones, “This is so cute.” The feeling may be playful and lighthearted, but it is not therefore trivial. Something in the other has touched us; its presence matters to us for its own sake.
There are many other expressions of sympathetic feeling: wonder before something beautiful or mysterious; nostalgia for people and places that have shaped us; appreciation for another person simply because they exist; affection, fondness, gratitude, delight, gentleness, protectiveness, amusement, and the quiet pleasure of companionship. Even grief can be an expression of tenderness, because we grieve what we have loved.
Seen in this way, tenderness names a whole dimension of life that cannot be contained within the categories of morality alone. It is not primarily about asking, “What ought I to do?” It begins with something more elemental: “I feel your presence. You matter to me.” A Whiteheadian philosophical theology can invite us to imagine that this tenderness belongs not only to human life but also, in some deep sense, to the life of God.
Meta-Cuteness (and Ten More)
With this in mind, I turn back to the experience of something as “cute.” As npted above it is on of eleven modes or methods that, in his view, is part of a metamodern sensibility. He notes, by the way, that there may be many more than ten; his listing is meant to be inclusive but not exhaustice. The others deserve response in another context, and I hope to provide a discussion of some of them in another context. Here is the totality.
1) Empathic Reflexivity* (“Life as Movie”)
2) The Narrative Double Frame (Eshelman’s Performatism)
3) Oscillation Across Modern/Postmodern oppositions
4) Quirky
5) The Tiny (metamodern minimalism)
6) The Epic (metamodern maximalism)
7) Constructive Pastiche
8) Ironesty
9) Normcore
10) Overprojection (Anthropomorphizing)
11) Meta-Cute
What all of these have in common is a turn toward sincerity and felt experience, The culture of postmodern irony, as Dember describes it, is one in which spontaneous, first-person responses to the world are deflected, qualified, or ridiculed. When postmodern irony reigned, it became, as he puts it, “embarrassing to express any earnest sense of an uncomplicated truth, or to openly identify with sentimentality.”
Feelings of hope, sincerity, enthusiasm, vulnerability, wonder, and unabashed affection could seem naïve or embarrassingly personal. The safer and seemingly more sophisticated response was to step back from such feelings—to place them in quotation marks, as it were, through irony.
Dember’s aim in Say Hello to Metamodernism! is to suggest that a different cultural mood is now emerging: a metamodern sensibility that makes room for felt experience again. It builds upon, but also moves beyond, characteristic tendencies of both modernism and postmodernism.
Modernism, understood as a cultural mood, could assume an attitude of absolute seriousness about knowing what things are and how the world works, with little room for humor, ambiguity, or frivolity. And in its romantic mode, it could elevate the individual self—the heroic ego—as a privileged source of meaning and value.
Postmodernism reacted against such confidence, emphasizing instead the socially constructed character of the self and subjecting claims to individual authenticity to suspicion. At its most extreme, however, this leaves little room for the reality and importance of individual felt experience and its inwardly felt truths.
Subjective Immediacy = Felt Experience
Metamodernism seeks another possibility by reclaiming what Whitehead would call the "subjective immediacy" of individual felt experience. Such immediacy is for Whitehead a fundamental fact of the universe. While it can be understood from a third-person perspective as a result of causal factors, as in evolutionary biology, it also has an indubitality that cannot be reduced to those factors.
In a Whiteheadian context this immediacy includes feelings (prehension), emotions (subjective forms), purposes (subjective aims), memories (physical prehensions of the past actual world), hopes (anticipatory feelings), self-enjoyment, self-creativity and, most importantly, a direct feeling of being inwardly connected with the world through feelings of it. Thus subjective immediacy is indeed private, but it is not the kind of privacy that is cut off from the world. Instead it is a relatonal privacy, a privacy that emerges out of a sense of being connected to the world.
Ironesty
Back, then, to Dember. As he sees things, the metamodern sensibility does not simply abandon postmodern irony and return to an earlier innocence. It allows sincerity and irony, knowingness and naïveté, to coexist. Dember calls it "ironesty." We can recognize that our feelings are valuable and real, know that they vulnerable to criticism, exaggeration, and nevertheless allow ourselves to feel them. And we can recognize that irony itself in many contexts is fun. This is why cuteness is meta-cuteness.+
This is where cuteness becomes relevant. It is part of the recovery of the spontaneities of felt experience as lived from the inside. The most obvious examples in human life arise in our responses to other people and animals. We experience babies, puppies, and kittens as “cute,” and something in us softens in response.And yet, as the emerging field of Cute Studies makes clear (see below) the experience of cuteness extends far beyond babies and animals. We can experience toys, dolls, stuffed animals, cartoon characters, miniature objects, clothing, foods, household objects, robots, buildings, and works of art as cute. Sometimes the objects deliberately reproduce features associated with infants and young animals: smallness, roundness, softness, vulnerability, large eyes, or slightly awkward proportions. At other times, the cuteness is harder to analyze. Something simply strikes us as endearing.
What matters in a metamodern context is the experience itself. To find something cute is to be affected by it. For a moment, a sense of inner distance from the world, and from our own emotions, falls away. We may smile, laugh, want to touch or (especially in the case of biological realities, protect what we find cute. Or we may simply enjoy its presence. Cuteness is thus a small but illuminating example of sympathetic feeling, of tenderness: a moment in which something in the world reaches us and we allow ourselves to be touched - indeed, touched in a way that is neither overly-serious or defensively cynical.
One task of philosophical theology, he adds, is to help us understand and appreciate this tenderness. The image of God as an absolute despot has often stood in the way. This is not simply because such a God is imagined as all-controlling. It is also because this God is so often portrayed as preoccupied with the moral side of life and, more specifically, with questions of obedience and disobedience, reward and punishment, righteousness and sin. God becomes, in effect, the supreme moral judge.
Tenderness is more than “being good,” however, and even more than “being compassionate.” It is a kind of sympathetic feeling: an openness to the presence and value of another. It occurs, for example, when we feel kindly toward another person, wanting to help them; or, in a different register, we encounter a baby or a beloved dog and feel, in the depths of our bones, “This is so cute.” The feeling may be playful and lighthearted, but it is not therefore trivial. Something in the other has touched us; its presence matters to us for its own sake.
There are many other expressions of sympathetic feeling: wonder before something beautiful or mysterious; nostalgia for people and places that have shaped us; appreciation for another person simply because they exist; affection, fondness, gratitude, delight, gentleness, protectiveness, amusement, and the quiet pleasure of companionship. Even grief can be an expression of tenderness, because we grieve what we have loved.
Seen in this way, tenderness names a whole dimension of life that cannot be contained within the categories of morality alone. It is not primarily about asking, “What ought I to do?” It begins with something more elemental: “I feel your presence. You matter to me.” A Whiteheadian philosophical theology can invite us to imagine that this tenderness belongs not only to human life but also, in some deep sense, to the life of God.
Meta-Cuteness (and Ten More)
With this in mind, I turn back to the experience of something as “cute.” As npted above it is on of eleven modes or methods that, in his view, is part of a metamodern sensibility. He notes, by the way, that there may be many more than ten; his listing is meant to be inclusive but not exhaustice. The others deserve response in another context, and I hope to provide a discussion of some of them in another context. Here is the totality.
1) Empathic Reflexivity* (“Life as Movie”)
2) The Narrative Double Frame (Eshelman’s Performatism)
3) Oscillation Across Modern/Postmodern oppositions
4) Quirky
5) The Tiny (metamodern minimalism)
6) The Epic (metamodern maximalism)
7) Constructive Pastiche
8) Ironesty
9) Normcore
10) Overprojection (Anthropomorphizing)
11) Meta-Cute
What all of these have in common is a turn toward sincerity and felt experience, The culture of postmodern irony, as Dember describes it, is one in which spontaneous, first-person responses to the world are deflected, qualified, or ridiculed. When postmodern irony reigned, it became, as he puts it, “embarrassing to express any earnest sense of an uncomplicated truth, or to openly identify with sentimentality.”
Feelings of hope, sincerity, enthusiasm, vulnerability, wonder, and unabashed affection could seem naïve or embarrassingly personal. The safer and seemingly more sophisticated response was to step back from such feelings—to place them in quotation marks, as it were, through irony.
Dember’s aim in Say Hello to Metamodernism! is to suggest that a different cultural mood is now emerging: a metamodern sensibility that makes room for felt experience again. It builds upon, but also moves beyond, characteristic tendencies of both modernism and postmodernism.
Modernism, understood as a cultural mood, could assume an attitude of absolute seriousness about knowing what things are and how the world works, with little room for humor, ambiguity, or frivolity. And in its romantic mode, it could elevate the individual self—the heroic ego—as a privileged source of meaning and value.
Postmodernism reacted against such confidence, emphasizing instead the socially constructed character of the self and subjecting claims to individual authenticity to suspicion. At its most extreme, however, this leaves little room for the reality and importance of individual felt experience and its inwardly felt truths.
Subjective Immediacy = Felt Experience
Metamodernism seeks another possibility by reclaiming what Whitehead would call the "subjective immediacy" of individual felt experience. Such immediacy is for Whitehead a fundamental fact of the universe. While it can be understood from a third-person perspective as a result of causal factors, as in evolutionary biology, it also has an indubitality that cannot be reduced to those factors.
In a Whiteheadian context this immediacy includes feelings (prehension), emotions (subjective forms), purposes (subjective aims), memories (physical prehensions of the past actual world), hopes (anticipatory feelings), self-enjoyment, self-creativity and, most importantly, a direct feeling of being inwardly connected with the world through feelings of it. Thus subjective immediacy is indeed private, but it is not the kind of privacy that is cut off from the world. Instead it is a relatonal privacy, a privacy that emerges out of a sense of being connected to the world.
Ironesty
Back, then, to Dember. As he sees things, the metamodern sensibility does not simply abandon postmodern irony and return to an earlier innocence. It allows sincerity and irony, knowingness and naïveté, to coexist. Dember calls it "ironesty." We can recognize that our feelings are valuable and real, know that they vulnerable to criticism, exaggeration, and nevertheless allow ourselves to feel them. And we can recognize that irony itself in many contexts is fun. This is why cuteness is meta-cuteness.+
This is where cuteness becomes relevant. It is part of the recovery of the spontaneities of felt experience as lived from the inside. The most obvious examples in human life arise in our responses to other people and animals. We experience babies, puppies, and kittens as “cute,” and something in us softens in response.And yet, as the emerging field of Cute Studies makes clear (see below) the experience of cuteness extends far beyond babies and animals. We can experience toys, dolls, stuffed animals, cartoon characters, miniature objects, clothing, foods, household objects, robots, buildings, and works of art as cute. Sometimes the objects deliberately reproduce features associated with infants and young animals: smallness, roundness, softness, vulnerability, large eyes, or slightly awkward proportions. At other times, the cuteness is harder to analyze. Something simply strikes us as endearing.
What matters in a metamodern context is the experience itself. To find something cute is to be affected by it. For a moment, a sense of inner distance from the world, and from our own emotions, falls away. We may smile, laugh, want to touch or (especially in the case of biological realities, protect what we find cute. Or we may simply enjoy its presence. Cuteness is thus a small but illuminating example of sympathetic feeling, of tenderness: a moment in which something in the world reaches us and we allow ourselves to be touched - indeed, touched in a way that is neither overly-serious or defensively cynical.
Cuteness Studies
For Whitehead, moments of tenderness are revelatory not only of human experience but of all experience. They illustrate the fact that what he calls "occasions of experienee," whether in human life or animal life or cellular life or divine life, begin with feeling the feelings of other and inwardly conforming to the feelings that are felt. And he believes that all actual existents, including the inorganic, are, or are aggregates of, occaasions of experience, When we feel the presence of the world around us in whatever form, we are feeling what he calls "superjects" of their own subjective immediacy, The entire universe is, for him, alive with feeling. Understood in this way, a sense of the cute is a feeling of affection for the world, evoked by particular kinds of objects which are windows into tenderness. The sense of the cute may or may not be conjoined with irony. It may or may not be meta-cute. But it is cute.
It is no accident then, that a field of academic study has not emerged called Cuteness Studies. For modern philosophers, the very idea would be laughable. Cuteness is too small, and not quite serious enough. But for a Whiteheadian and for a Metamodernist of the Dember kind, it is an opening into something deep and rich. An opening into the tenderness of mere life itself. The books are illustrative of the many avenues into which such studies can lead us.
Cuteness and the Brain
Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to Disney characters?
Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have - the ones that elicit our care and protection - but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards.
In Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World (Profile Books, 2023) Dr. Joshua Paul Dale, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, explains how the cute aesthetic spread around the globe, from pop brands to Lolita fashion, kids' cartoons and the unstoppable rise of Hello Kitty. Irresistible delves into the surprisingly ancient origins of Japan's kawaii culture, and uncovers the cross-cultural pollination of the globalised world. Understanding the psychology of cuteness can help answer some of the biggest questions in evolutionary history and the mysterious origins of animal domestication.
This is the fascinating cultural history of cuteness, and a revealing look at how our most powerful psychological impulses have remade global style and culture.
Joshua Paul Dale is a Professor in the Department of English Literature and Culture at Chuo University in Tokyo. Since moving to Japan in the 1990s, Dale has pioneered the field of cuteness studies, and is the co-editor of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, and edited 'Cute Studies', a special issue of The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture. Dale has been featured as an expert on cuteness by media outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, National Geographic, the Guardian, The Cut, Refinery29 and Discover Magazine.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher.
Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have - the ones that elicit our care and protection - but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards.
In Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World (Profile Books, 2023) Dr. Joshua Paul Dale, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, explains how the cute aesthetic spread around the globe, from pop brands to Lolita fashion, kids' cartoons and the unstoppable rise of Hello Kitty. Irresistible delves into the surprisingly ancient origins of Japan's kawaii culture, and uncovers the cross-cultural pollination of the globalised world. Understanding the psychology of cuteness can help answer some of the biggest questions in evolutionary history and the mysterious origins of animal domestication.
This is the fascinating cultural history of cuteness, and a revealing look at how our most powerful psychological impulses have remade global style and culture.
Joshua Paul Dale is a Professor in the Department of English Literature and Culture at Chuo University in Tokyo. Since moving to Japan in the 1990s, Dale has pioneered the field of cuteness studies, and is the co-editor of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, and edited 'Cute Studies', a special issue of The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture. Dale has been featured as an expert on cuteness by media outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, National Geographic, the Guardian, The Cut, Refinery29 and Discover Magazine.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher.
Interview with Joshua Paul Dale
The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness
Cuteness is one of the most culturally pervasive aesthetics of the new millennium and its rapid social proliferation suggests that the affective responses it provokes find particular purchase in a contemporary era marked by intensive media saturation and spreading economic precarity. Rejecting superficial assessments that would deem the ever-expandingplethora of cute texts trivial, The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness directs serious scholarly attention from a variety of academic disciplines to this ubiquitous phenomenon. The sheer plasticity of this minor aesthetic is vividly on display in this collection which draws together analyses from around the world examining cuteness’s fundamental role in cultural expressions stemming from such diverse sources as military cultures, high-end contemporary art worlds, and animal shelters. Pushing beyond prevailing understandings that associate cuteness solely with childhood or which posit an interpolated parental bond as its primary affective attachment, the essays in this collection variously draw connections between cuteness and the social, political, economic, and technological conditions of the early twenty-first century and in doing so generate fresh understandings of the central role cuteness plays in the recalibration of contemporary subjectivities.
The Zany, the Interesting, and the Cute
The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.
Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.
Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.
Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.
Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.