our aesthetic categories: Zany, cute and interesting

Sianne Ngai

"Interesting" not only descriptive, but also to relay, to connect, to relate.
"Interesting" based on feeling, but undistinguished judgment. A way to delay judgment, but also keep the temporality of incompleteness and the "ongoing"ness.
"interesting" with the technology of production shifts towards typicality, bordering upon fascinating and boring, generic and different.


"Zany"
Zany always represented as a zany character who is continuously looking for a job.
The zany character who is capable of doing everything contradictorily reveals the anxiety of not being able to accomplish everything.
Zany as performance and the performance of affective labor.
The inadequacy of "empire" in defining "immaterial labor" is that they failed to take in feminist critique of the exclusion of domestic field from social production. The labor of reproduction is not regarded as productive labor.
Ngai's approach is to address the gender aspect of affective labor as represented by the Zany characters.
She argues that the informationalization/softening of work in post-fordist era feminizes the nature of work. certain degree of gender in distinctiveness of service and affective labor