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March 2004
I just turned the television on and SEINFELD was on. I was reminded of
the DERRIDA film that just came out. One of the American interviewers
asked him about whether the Seinfeld show was 'deconstructive' in it's
parodic assault. In the first place an unfair question since he had never
seen the show. He denied that it was deconstructive, rightfully so. But
it is nihilistic, a sort of free-floating savagery of the mundane and
the banal that is perhaps miles from any sort of Derridean project. The
common American conception of deconstruction anyway (which is not the
Derridaean corpus necessarily) is a kind of virulent skepticism. The American
apparatus of Television, especially as it has developed AFTER Seingfeld,
is self consuming, both of itself and of the public which watches it,
reaching a contemporary apotheosis in 'reality shows'. Polite nihilism
of a representational form can only go so far until it feels the need
to escape its frame and descend into real life. It is the only way that
the self-consuming artifacts of commodity banalism can find their lowest
energy level, by their continual humiliation and destruction (mortification
if you will).
(Perhaps the interviewer had inadvertently collapsed Derrida into certain
jewish comedians, deconstruction as a perpetual banana peel. In America
any kind of critical theory must needs take on an abject, groveling stance
before the all-seeing Polyphemus TV eye. From Stand Up Comedy, or, Abjection
in America by John Limon: "I mean by abjection two things. First,
I mean by it what everybody means by it: a debasement, groveling, prostration.
Second, I mean by it what Julia Kristeva means: A psychic worrying of
those aspects of one's self that one cannot be rid of, that seem, but
are not quite alienable--for example blood, urine, faeces, naivs, and
the corpse. The 'abject,' in Kristeva's term of art, indicates what cannot
be subject or object to you; but I came to realize that was also the essence
of abjection as it was commonly understood. When you feel abject, you
feel as if there were something miring your life, some skin that cannot
be sloughed, some role (because 'abject' always, in a way, describes how
you act) that has become your only character. Abjection is self-typecasting.
[….] what is stood up in stand-up comedy is abjection. Stand-up makes
vertical or (ventral) what should be horizontal [or dorsal])
and then he moves from ethnicity (jewish, lenny bruce etc) to race and
then gender….
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