ORCID iDI asked, yesterday on Twitter, whether anybody had written about one of the most prominent verbal tics in humanistic academic discourse: “I am interested in”. This phrase is used to justify critical attention to almost any object while also placing the idea of such scrutiny beyond any challenge. Why should we care that you are interested in something? From what position of authority does such a statement derive meaningful value?
In any case, the following pieces all circle around this theme, presented here with some choice quotations:
Ngai, Sianne, ‘Merely Interesting’, Critical Inquiry, 34.4 (2008), 777–817 https://doi.org/10.1086/592544
Here interesting comes to the fore as the aesthetic judgment in which this question of justification looms largest of all. Someone who succeeds in convincing me of the rightness of her judgment of an object as cute or gaudy will have done so by getting me to perceive it as she does, and she’ll have done this by directing my attention to its roundness, softness, and smallness or to its bright and intense colors. But, in contrast to what Sibley calls the “notable specific dependence” of aesthetic character on nonaesthetic features in these cases, the interesting doesn’t seem tethered to any features at all. Though bound up with the perception of novelty (against a backdrop of the expected and familiar), what counts as new is much more radically dependent on context than features such as round or bright. There are thus no nonaesthetic features ever specifically responsible for anything being interesting. In fact, it seems as if virtually any nonaesthetic feature, including ones that may not be immediately perceivable (such as aspects related to an object’s history), can be singled out as evidence in support of this judgment. Because the problem posed by the interesting is thus not a dearth of admissible evidence but rather the proliferation of too many kinds, the task of legitimizing this aesthetic judgment becomes unusually difficult to the extent that it also becomes too easy. Anything can presumably count as evidence at one moment or another for the interesting, and so no particular kind of evidence will ever seem especially or finally convincing.
During, Simon, ‘Interesting: The Politics of the Sympathetic Imagination’, in Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 39–54
These days, however, we say “That’s interesting” phatically, mundanely, almost without noticing it and without meaning anything at all. At most, the phrase signals a qualified, limited investment of feeling in an object – a detached engagement, so to say. As such, it might be understood as an indication of how little ethical, esthetic, or political commitment is demanded of contemporary cultural participants. But this kind of understanding, while not altogether mistaken, risks underestimating the term’s complex past and the discursive structures in which it first appeared.
In the eighteenth century, “interesting” meant something more than it does today. Indeed, it could possess a specifically political force within the debates over sentimentalism and compassion. At one level there is a transition from the old meaning of “interest” as a stake, and more particularly a competitive and/or precarious stake in some finite good or advantage, as in the current phrase “interest group” to a more personal “interest” – a soldier’s in R&R, for instance, to something vaguer still, the interest or interestingness of a fiction, say.
Davis, Murray S., ‘That’s Interesting!: Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1.2 (1971), 309–44 https://doi.org/10.1177/004839317100100211
QUESTION: How do theories which are generally considered interesting differ from theories which are generally considered non-interesting ? ANSWER: Interesting theories are those which deny certain assumptions of their audience, while non-interesting theories are those which affirm certain assumptions of their audience. This answer was arrived at through the examination of a number of famous social, and especially sociological, theories. That examination also generated a systematic index of the variety of propositional forms which interesting and non-interesting theories may take. The fertility of this approach suggested a new field be established called the Sociology of the Interesting, which is intended to supplement the Sociology of Knowledge. This new field will be phenomenologically oriented in so far as it will focus on the movement of the audience’s mind from one accepted theory to another. It will be sociologically oriented in so far as it will focus on the dissimilar base-line theories of the various sociological categories which compose the audience. In addition to its value in interpreting the social impact of theories, the Sociology of the Interesting can contribute to our understanding of both the common sense and scientific perspectives on reality.
Lambert, Steve, ‘No Longer Interested’, Steve Lambert, 2014 https://visitsteve.com/made/no-longer-interested/ [accessed 20 August 2021]
Let’s imagine I meet a woman at a party and ask “so, what do you do” She answers, “I am interested in the body, healing, and science, and how those intersect within institutions and the public.” Fascinating right? But why not cut to the chase and say you’re a medical doctor? In the non-art world, people talk about what they do. Describing what you’re doing instead of your interests moves the conversation forward. It’s more clear.
Why be so forthright? Because artists are already too cloistered off from the rest of our culture; isolated in elite institutions, appreciated by small numbers, and/or segregating ourselves in confusing social difference alone as some kind of admirable attribute. Around 45 years ago John Berger disparagingly called this phenomena the needless “mystification” of art. If we want to change this, and we should, we need to speak clearly in a language people can understand – not by adopting academic language for institutional appeal or trying to cover over our insecurity with pompous nonsense.