What is the underlying connection between affects and aesthetic experience?

I think Gerard Genette is right to say that all of our aesthetic predicates are “objectifications” of feeling. To make an aesthetic judgment, with all its necessary claims for universality, is to project one’s feelings onto the object in such a totalizing fashion that the “actually subjective” basis of the judgment of aesthetic quality ends up being somewhat incidental to how we experience or understand that quality.

Does this mean there is a one-to-one correspondence between the minor affects and marginal aesthetic categories?

No. The former are sort of like raw materials for the latter, which are both descriptive and evaluative. In fact, and this is part of what intrigues me about them, aesthetic judgments like the ones in my study revolve around multiple and even conflicting feelings: tenderness and aggression, in the case of the cute; fun and unfun, in the case of the zany; interest and boredom, in the case of the interesting. I should stress that these aesthetic categories are trivial, but not for all that marginal. In fact, my argument is that they are absolutely central not just to postmodern culture, but for a proper understanding of how the very concept of the “aesthetic” has been perhaps irreversibly changed under the hypercommodified, intensively informated and networked, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.

The centrality of judgment to aesthetic experience remains controversial. For Kant, Clement Greenberg, and others, it seems like there can be no such thing as an aesthetic experience without judgment, while Nietzsche and others suggest the contrary. I think the former camp is ultimately right on this, which is why I treat aesthetic categories as both discursive evaluations (“cute” as something we say, a very particular way of communicating a very particular kind of pleasure) and as objective styles (cuteness as a commodity aesthetic, as a sensuous/formal quality of objects), and try to pay close attention to the relation between them. At the same time, I don’t agree that aesthetic experience/judgment is necessarily synonymous with conviction. Or reverence, or idealization.

Contemporary theorists continue to attribute the specificity of aesthetic experience to the presence of a special, singular emotion like “disinterestedness.” Yet most of our aesthetic experiences are based on combinations of ordinary feelings. Aesthetic judgments based on clashing feelings, in particular, mirror the disputes between subjects or groups that underlie them: a state of social conflict that not all aesthetic categories make equally transparent.

I’m drawn to these weak or equivocal aesthetic categories because, precisely in not being experiences of conviction, they foreground the question of their justification outright. Indeed, judgments like “interesting” seem to demand justification, much in the same way that all aesthetic judgments (including even “interesting”) demand concurrence. The justification of aesthetic judgments, which will always involve an appeal to extra-aesthetic judgments—political, moral, historical, cognitive, and so on—is, I think, the really interesting heart of all aesthetic discourse and experience. Aesthetics is a discourse not just of pleasure and evaluation, but of justification. How we talk about pleasure and displeasure turns out to be a very rhetorically tricky and socially complicated thing.

How can you subscribe to Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgments as making a claim for universality, but at the same time argue that these judgments are not necessarily ones of conviction? Isn’t that a contradiction?

Not necessarily. Cute, interesting, and zany are based on the complex feelings that arise from our encounters with notably “formless” forms: the squishy blob, the indefinite series, the chaotic flow of activity. Yet all make the claim to universal validity that every aesthetic judgment makes and in the same distinctively performative mode—if perhaps not with the same degree of affective force as our judgments of, say, the beautiful or disgusting.

When I judge something to be cute, or even interesting, I’m judging it to be objectively so. I’m compelled to say that “interesting” is a quality of the object, precisely because putting it this way is the most forceful way, the best way to get others to agree with me. That’s the claim for universality, without which a judgment would not be a judgment of taste. Having had to put the judgment in this objective format, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that its axiological charge is going to be unequivocally positive or negative. Or that the affective force of the judgment is going to be strong.

Cute is a good example. I’m compelled to speak of it as an objective property of an object, which reflects my demand that everyone judge that object the same way. But our experience of something or somebody as cute is itself easily overpowered by a second feeling of manipulation or exploitation. Like the sentimental, which as literary critic Jennifer Fleissner points out, we wouldn’t call “sentimental” if it really moved us deeply in the way that it aims to, the cute seems coupled with a certain inability to complete its own project. The same could also be said of the zany, tellingly defined by one online dictionary as a “ludicrous” character (that is, one who is not really convincing) who “attempts feebly” (that is, badly) to “mimic the tricks of the clown.” And the same could also be said of the interesting, always just a step away from being merely interesting and thus just a step away from being boring. In comparison to powerful experiences like that of the sublime or disgusting, these aesthetic experiences are profoundly equivocal; indeed, they almost seem to call attention to their relative lack of aesthetic impact or power, to their own aesthetic ineffectuality. But that doesn’t finally negate their status as aesthetic categories. And to me it makes them all the more worthy of our intellectual attention.

During a conversation about this project, Ken Reinhard jokingly pointed out how these three aesthetic experiences can easily turn pathological, in a way that almost perfectly corresponds to Freud’s categories of neurosis: phobia, in the case of cute (because cute objects can quickly become gross or disgusting); hysteria, in the case of zaniness; obsession, in the case of the interesting. I think I’m attracted to them for this reason as well, though I didn’t realize this until he pointed it out!

Could you explain a little more how the aesthetic categories that interest you acquire the capacity to reveal social conflicts? I’m not being willfully ignorant. My bias can be read back to Frank Sibley, who wrote about the way in which aesthetic justifications ultimately resolve, at least in written description, in non-aesthetic terms. However he also insisted upon the irreplaceable role of direct personal experience of the aesthetic object. No one can convince you of the beauty, elegance, or garishness of an object by describing it.

The act of professing aesthetic pleasure or displeasure, in and of itself, is not interesting to me. What is interesting is the complexity of the ways in which people then defend these judgments (which they feel just as strongly compelled to do). As Simon Frith aptly puts it, “Value judgments only make sense as part of an argument and arguments are always social events.” So in my comment above, I just was thinking in a general way about what John Guillory calls the “constitutive role of conflict for any discourse of value.” That said, the argument of my second book is that the commodity aesthetic of the cute, the performance-oriented aesthetic of the zany, and the informational and discursive aesthetic of the interesting have a unique and even indexical relation to the ways in which the subjects of late capitalism consume, labor, and exchange. Insofar as these socially binding processes are also, inevitably, sites and stakes of social struggle, the aesthetic categories featured in the book reflect these struggles, albeit in a highly indirect and mediated fashion.

The zany, for example, is an aesthetic not just about cultural performance but about performance as affective labor, whose gendered status in the post-Fordist culture of what Heather Hicks calls “soft work” becomes increasingly ambiguous. And in a way that repositions gender, in a historically unprecedented way, as a central question for late-capitalist zaniness, as we see in I Love Lucy. The longstanding question of the relation between gender and class gets raised by the question of how post-Fordist zaniness differs from its precedents. It’s worth noting here that zaniness is an old but distinctively modern style of performing in which the employer/employee or master/servant agon has always played a central role, since its inception with the character of the Zanni (an itinerant servant) in sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte. It’s only in the late twentieth century that the question of gender starts to become increasingly central to this aesthetic about work.