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Theory of the Gimmick

1. Labor-Saving Device What 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.” 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