Can’t we just talk?, they seem to plead, as the world hammers them into submission. The new tiny political tracts promise to offer strong defenses against a violent status quo, but end up begging for a shred of liberal decency. Avant-gardes eschew liberal concession but know they will ultimately be squished like the cutest of plush toys.
In content, their stated goals are shockingly weak from the start. But the new little political books have retained militancy in style only. Or is it worse than that? The avant-garde used cuteness as a comment upon the tension that existed between the radicalism of its intentions and the limitations of its effects. Cuteness, Ngai finds, is “explicitly mobilized by the poetic avant-garde as a meditation on its own restricted agency, as well as on the fetishization of its texts.” The avant-garde is cute because it knows that its most radical gestures will ultimately fade as they become subject to commercial appropriation.Ĭould something similar be said of the new tiny political tracts? Is their smallness a sign of their awareness, no matter how slight, of the restricted agency of leftist speech? Could their cuteness be a comment upon their inevitable fetishization, their transformation into bookstore impulse buys? Cuteness therefore turns out to be a way of “grappling with powerlessness,” that the avant-garde faces as a result of its inevitable failure to achieve its most radical goals. In a brilliant analysis featuring photographs of an adorable squishable bath sponge shaped like a frog, Ngai argues that cuteness pairs a solicitation of maternal feelings (I want to love that darling frog) with a strange impulse toward violence (I want to squish that frog’s adorable face into oblivion). This frequency is surprising, she argues, because “the antisentimental avant-garde is conventionally imagined as hard and cutting edge” while “cute objects have no edge to speak of.”īut there is an explanation. In Our Aesthetic Categories, she observes that cuteness is a major aesthetic mode of avant-garde writing. My understanding of cuteness comes from Sianne Ngai’s analysis of cuteness in avant-garde poetry. It is the section I like to call Progressive Identity Items, which also features reusable shopping bags with clever slogans and pretty designs, handwoven baby slings, a variety of leftist lawn signs, political coffee mugs, and bumper stickers. The books are on display at my local bookstore in the front section by the registers. They are reasonably priced: either to be accessible to the people or to be impulse buys - it’s not clear which. Their titles suggest what might have once been unfashionable didacticism or naïve breadth: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Demagoguery and Democracy, A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time. Their designs recall radical pamphlets of yore. Their slim profiles ask to be slipped into jackets, jeans pockets, and purses so that their lessons might be brought to bear upon life directly. And now, in the wake of the 2016 election, a flurry of new little books have emerged, their smallness signifying their radical aspirations, their seriousness, their urgency.
Mao’s Little Red Book was said to be pocket-sized so that it could be carried close to the heart. Right-wing think tanks such as the Cato Institute and The Heritage Foundation distribute mini-constitutions. SPEAK SOFTLY and carry a tiny book, the radical adage might as well go.
0 kommentar(er)
