Issue 43 Forensics Fall 2011 Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai Adam Jasper and Sianne Ngai Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline was an invention of the Enlightenment, and appropriately enough, most of the historical discussion has focused on the beautiful and the sublime. However, as J. L. Austin noted in "A Plea for Excuses," the classic problems are not always the best site for fieldwork in aesthetics: "If only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy." Sianne Ngai, a professor in the English department at Stanford University, has dedicated years of research to such marginal categories within aesthetics. She is the author of a book on minor affects called Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005) and several heavily photocopied papers on aesthetics, including "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde" (2005) and "Merely Interesting" (2008). Her forthcoming book expands her investigation of apparently trivial but culturally ubiquitous aesthetic categories to include the zany. Adam Jasper interviewed Ngai by email. You've written on cuteness, on envy, on boredom, and now on the interesting. If it could be said that there is a unified project behind these topics, what is it? I'm interested in states of weakness: in "minor" or non-cathartic feelings that index situations of suspended agency; in trivial aesthetic categories grounded in ambivalent or even explicitly contradictory feelings. More specifically, I'm interested in the surprising power these weak affects and aesthetic categories seem to have, in why they've