Cuteness in Theory: Sianne Ngai (1)

Siane Ngai's Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard UP, 2012) is a key text in the field of Cuteness Theory, or CuteT.  Any attempt to summarize Ngai will inevitably oversimplify things but here are some useful (to me) ideas culled from her intro:

• CUTENESS is an aesthetic category that (along with the zany and the interesting) is uniquely "suited for grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism" (Ngai, i).
• As aesthetic categories go, CUTENESS is young; Ngai locates its origins in the middle of the nineteenth century, likely taking her cue from Lori Merish, whose work on Tom Thumb's wedding will be the subject of another entry.  
• CUTENESS is a site of affective negotiation; it is seen as both a quality (a cute sloth) and a judgement (I find sloths cute).  
• Among literary genres, twentieth-century poetry has been particularly susceptible to charges of CUTENESS.  This is partly a result of sheer size (many poems are small) but also partly because poems often traffic in enchanting domestic objects.  Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons epitomizes this tendency.
• CUTENESS often indexes power asymmetries, but CUTENESS itself is also a bid for power by the small and vulnerable; it is therefore attractive but also needy, appealing especially to women who have been socialized as caregivers. CUTENESS always functions as an intersubjective demand: for contact, for play, for attention.
• CUTENESS is "undeniably trivial."  Although Ngai takes her aesthetic categories (CUTENESS included) seriously in some ways, she is careful to distinguish them from the beautiful, with its moral and theological heft, and from the sublime, with its connotations of uplift.  At this point in the intro, I can't tell whether Ngai is buying into this trivialization or simply describing an extant cultural hierarchy.
•  CUTENESS is an aesthetic judgment that is predicated, not just on our feelings of pleasure but also on our imagined feelings of the pleasure of others; that is, it is an internet meme on a deep structural level.

Ngai's work is rich and amazing, even if she does refer to the world (or what I'd call the world) as "late capitalism." I guess if we're going to talk about society at all we have to call it something. But the term "late capitalism" obscures as much as it reveals, and using capitalism as the central organizing principle for thinking cuteness makes all cute objects act like commodities.  It seems clear that the structure of mediated cuteness is related (as Ngai convincingly argues) to commodity form, but does it therefore follow that commodity form is a necessary feature of cuteness?  Before cuteness was commodified, did it (could it?) take other forms and perform other social or aesthetic functions?  I ask these questions not to counter Ngai (who has other fish to fry besides historicization) but to ground my own inquiry in specifics:  what was cute in, say, America in 1850? Was anything manufactured to be cute at midcentury? Did mediated cuteness (that is, representations meant to elicit the cuteness response, as opposed to, say, cute babies) exist before it was captured by people with something to sell?