Cuteness in Theory: Siane Ngai (2)

Ngai's article, "On the Cuteness of the Avant-Garde," appeared in Critical Inquiry 31:4 (Summer 2005) and was later incorporated into her book.  A few thoughts on the article version ...

• Ngai implicitly addresses my earlier question, to wit, whether she herself believes cuteness to be trivial. The answer is a resounding no.  Cuteness is marginalized, she argues, but its very marginalization indexes its power as an aesthetic category. This sounds like academic doublespeak, but her whole essay is devoted to showing how cuteness works through and from its low status-position.
• Ngai "black-boxes" the science of cuteness and chooses to focus exclusively on its modern mediation via commodities and artworks.  This makes sense--she's interested in aesthetics, and can't go down other rabbit holes--but it also limits the scope of her claims.  She rightly situates cuteness as as a newer, post-1850 aesthetic category (like luscious or wacky) but fails to stress that (unlike luscious or wacky) cuteness is also an ancient instinct.  However it may be mediated or marginalized, cuteness is imperative to survival.  Cuteness, like sexiness, is (I think) therefore in a special category that makes its aesthetic properties function differently than they would if it were simply a novel sales technique or art gimmick or poetry trope.
• That said, this article is a tour de force and certainly one of the founding documents of cuteness studies.  Ngai begins by using a frog bath sponge to illustrate how commercial cuteness "depends on a softness that invites physical touching, or, to use a more provocative verb, fondling" (815). She suggests that the formal properties of cute objects--smallness, compactness, softness, simplicity, and pliancy-- generate affective responses that are simultaneously protective and aggressive. 
• This mixed response (in which squeezing can quickly turn to strangling) is related to the exaggerated power differentials that cuteness inhabits.  The gazing subject always experiences a flush of power when faced with the cute object, but the object itself also retains some power, since cuteness makes demands: notice me, play with me, care for me, touch me.  Ngai notes that, in Gertrude Stein (and elsewhere) the power of cuteness overwhelms language; responses to cuteness are often nonsensical or preverbal: aww.  She concludes that cuteness "might be described as an aesthetic experience that makes language more vulnerable to deformation--but also, transformation" (831).
• Interestingly, Ngai notes the central role of anthropomorphism to cuteness, and proposes that prosopopoeia might be seen as the "master trope" of cuteness. On p. 832 she quotes Paul de Man: "Prospopoeia [is] the fiction of an apostrophe to a ... voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter's reply and confers upon it the power of speech.  Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face[.]"  To impose a face on an inanimate object is often to make that object into a maimed or inadequate version of a human, like the sponge frog.  This is a dominating gesture; we can't symbolically render the cute object as our equal because its cuteness is predicated in part on our power over it.
• Here's a big leap: towards the end of her essay, Ngai speculates that modern poetry, in particular, bears a relationship to "the cute" because it is small in so many ways: in terms of audience, in terms of cultural impact, and often on the page as well.  Turning to Adorno, she argues that this cuteness is a sign of self-reflexive awareness; that "cuteness" in modern poetry (the ultimate autonomous art, because it is so disconnected from the economy) essentially marks and theorizes its powerlessness.
• Schnell, schnell! I can't wait to get back to thinking about how this plays out in Emily Dickinson.    One thing Ngai doesn't address, but that I think is important, is the short and fragile shelf-life of cuteness:  something can be cute at first, then quickly become irritating or disgusting.  This makes it non-narrative; in poetry, it generates an affectively loaded brief pause and then disintegrates.  "Nothing cute can stay," as Robert Frost did not put it.