Sianne Ngai delivers the Society for the Humanities Annual Culler Theory Lecture.

This talk uses a pop song by Wham! and a reading of Marx's Capital to explore the stakes of recreating and affectively lingering in wrong ways of thinking. To linger in error is to subjectively nourish and deepen error, expanding the reach of its domain. This is especially the case in a world where truths are hidden in the social forms in which they are expressed, making error an unavoidable part of everyday perception. Yet when contradiction is a part of the world (as Hegel saw it), and not a tendency in reason (as Kant saw it), error will need to be phenomenologically inhabited in order to be fully understood. 

Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings (Harvard UP, 2005), Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard UP, 2012), and Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Belknap, 2020). A roundtable on comedy featuring Ngai, Lauren Berlant, and Alenka Zupančič was recently published in Texte Zur Kunst (March 2021). She is currently working on a book about the ways in which Marx, Hegel, and a number of writers and artists inhabit error.

This in-person event is limited to the Cornell community only.