Kafka (Benjamin and Brecht) on Facebook: Understanding Astonishment, Discipline, and Guilt on Facebook

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Let’s be honest. Many of us have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. Although we check it on and off throughout the day, we need to admit that, most of the time, it isn’t a pleasurable experience. We expect to find, each time or at least a few times a day, film clips, articles, images or status updates that are shocking or sensational.   And when we comment or put up a status update, there is always the fear that someone will say something that puts our credibility or image on the line. Sometimes we fear that we will be ignored. In short, half of the excitement of going on Facebook comes from seeing things that are shocking, but the other half comes from the apprehensive feeling that we will most likely be judged.

But why would anyone find this experience so addictive? Why would anyone want to experience shock and judgment on a daily basis and not once but several times a day?

Just yesterday I came across an article from The New Yorker that sketched the problem out for me and gave me a starting point for addressing an experience I have been troubled by since I joined Facebook. Joshua Rothman’s article, entitled “In Facebook’s Courtroom,” draws on Kafka to explain this experience. While I find his reading of Facebook by way of Kafka very interesting, I find his reflections to be preliminary (in a good sense). I would like to build on them by focusing on Kafka’s reading of astonishment and using it to take Rothman’s reading to another level. To this end, I will be drawing on the dispute between Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht over the meaning of astonishment in Kafka’s work. By outlining their differences and applying it to a reading of experience on Facebook, we can better understand our troubling addiction to Facebook shock and the experience of addiction.

Rothman articulates his description of Facebook experience at the outset of the article by describing the omnipresence of the TMZ Video of Ray Rice hitting his wife, Janay Palmer, in a Las Vegas elevator. He notes how, over time, it “grew baroque.”

In my Facebook feed, people hate-liked terrible reactions to the video. Others wrote impassioned posts addressed to supporters of Ray Rice, even if they didn’t know any supporters. Some used the video as a “teachable moment” to share facts about “#domesticviolence,” or helpfully suggested as-yet-unblamed parties who could also be criticized. (“Why is no one talking about the role of alcohol in this?”) A widespread response was meta-outrage: asking, in an outraged tone, why there weren’t an even greater number of outraged Facebook posts about Ray Rice.

Reflecting on this, Rothman notes that, of course, there is a “lot to be angry about” but “at the same time, though, there can be something unsettling about the Web’s communal rage, even when that rage is justified.” He points out how, in Web Culture, “anger is an end in itself.”   This turns into what he calls a “never ending, unpredictable justice system.”

In recent years, the Web’s continuous pageantry of outrage, judgment, and punishment has become an inescapable element of contemporary life. We all carry in our pockets a self-serious, hypercritical, omnipresent, never-ending, and unpredictable justice system.

Drawing on the words “never ending, unpredictable justice system” Rothman makes an analogy between Facebook experience and the experience of Kafka’s characters in novels like The Trial and The Castle.

But Kafka wasn’t writing about the D.M.V.; his novels and stories are actually about justice, which he saw as aloof and possibly unobtainable, and punishment, which he saw as endless and omnipresent. He described an aspect of life that the online world makes more visible and acute.

Echoing Kafka, Rothman astutely points out how, on Facebook, one is likely to come across an “unexpected discipline in progress.” This, I think, hits the nail right on the head. After all, I have not only personally seen this but I have also been the subject of such “unexpected discipline.” Rothman sums up the experience of seeing or being the subject of such experience in these words – which are the same words that can be used to describes K’s experience in The Trial where, like Facebook, “punishment is pervasive.” On Facebook, as in the Trial, we have “a mixture of guilt and innocence, fear and excitement, outrage, pity, incomprehension, revulsion, and prurient interest.”

Rothman dovetails into a brief discussion of how, in Kafka and Facebook, there is a “surreal humor.” What makes it surreal is the fact that the judgment and disciplining are often done by way of exaggeration.   Moreover, he notes that this exaggeration is mixed with “something sexy” and “something childlike.” But the most important Facebook feeling of all, for Rothman, is the feeling of guilt. With all of the judgment on Facebook, regardless of the inflections of something comical, childlike, or sexy, there is this pervasiveness of guilt (for the discipliner and the disciplined and the witness to such disciplining).

Employing an ironic and apologetic tone, which one often sees on Facebook (out of fear of being attacked) Rothman, notes that it’s not always so bad:

It’s not always so grim. Sometimes, when Facebook is in especially fine form, Kafkaesque humor emerges. As you scroll, you wonder, what’s next on the docket? Which outrages and exemplars will confront me today, and how will I react to them? On the one hand, you’re criminally uninterested in a controversy about sexism amongst hedge-fund managers; on the other, at least you’re not one of the “ten celebs who have killed people.” The social-media stream puts moral life on shuffle—and expresses the fact that, while being a good person matters perhaps more than anything, it’s also very unclear how one might go about being good. This gently comic sense of ironic, bitter, and morally exhausted desperation even has its own Kafkaesque emoticon: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Rothman ends his reflections on Facebook with a set of questions that hits on the main issue. Why, if we all clearly experience and understand the omnipresence of judgment, guilt, shock, and discipline on Facebook, do we return over and over again? Wouldn’t it be more optimal to live a life without the daily experience of these troubling emotions?

Rothman’s appeal to Kafka to address Facebook is the best I have seen yet. It raises questions I have had, in my own work, about how to read Kafka in relation to our society and ourselves. In my own work, I am very interested in how Walter Benjamin reads Kafka as it informs his reading of the modern schlemiel. One of the most interesting discussions Benjamin has about Kafka’s work is with Bertolt Brecht, a playwright he deeply respected. To be sure, Benjamin struggled with Brecht’s reading of Kafka and brought it into his famous essay on Kafka. All of themes that Rothman touches on in terms of Kafka, to be sure, are touched on by Benjamin in his essay on Kafka.

Benjamin, to be sure, in the spring of 1931 spent time with Brecht in France. In a journal entry, dated June 6th 1931, Benjamin notes how, for Brecht, astonishment was the central motif of Kafka’s work:

He believes that Kafka has just one there, and that the richness of Kafka as a writer is simply the rich variety of this one theme. According to Brecht, this theme, in its most general sense, is astonishment. The astonishment of a man who feels that huge shifts are in the offing in every aspect of life, without being able to find a niche for himself in the new order of things. For this new order…is governed by the dialectical laws that dictate the life of the masses to themselves and to the individual. But the individual as such must react with astonishment tinged with panic-stricken horror to the almost incomprehensible deformations of life that are revealed by the emergence of these laws. Kafka, it seems to me, is dominated by this to the point that he is incapable of portraying any event without distortion.

Benjamin goes on to note that Brecht doesn’t like the astonishment of Kafka’s characters. Brecht found the lack of astonishment of Schweik, the main character of the Czech writer, Jaroslav Hasek’s satirical novel about war, to be better.

Brecht contrasts Kafka – and the figure of K. – with Schweik: the man who is astonished by everything with the one who is astonished by nothing.   Schweik puts to the test the monstrous nature of existence into which he has been placed by making it seem as if nothing is impossible for him.

Benjamin brings many of Brecht’s thoughts on Kafka into his essay on Kafka. In that essay, he posits a difference between two types of fools who have a different relation to astonishment. Benjamin reads astonishment as a gesture and notes that Kafka “does not grow tired of representing the gestus (of the characters in The Castle and America) in this fashion, but he invariably does so with astonishment”(137). This astonishment is the same astonishment as K. who differs from Good Soldier Schwiek: “the one is astonished at everything, the other nothing”(137).

Benjamin also brings in the notion of astonishment to a radio talk on Kafka in 1931. he notes how astonishment at law is a key feature of Kafka’s characters.   And he sees this astonishment as prophetic:

Kafka’s work is prophetic….His only reaction to the almost incomprehensible distortions of existence that betray the emergence of new laws is a sense of astonishment, mixed with elements of panic-stricken horror. Kafka is so possessed by this that he is incapable of imagining any single event that would not be distorted by the mere act of describing it…In other words, everything he describes makes statements about something other than itself”( Selected Writings 1931-1934, Volume II, 496).

Benjamin goes on to note that this is not a “purely poetic prose” but is a direct result of the rapid shift of our lives and the effort to describe it.   Astonishment, in other words, relates to the failure of man to create a new idiom for rapid shifts in one’s existence. This failure – which, without a doubt, has mystical resonance – gives one access to language as such.

To be sure, while Benjamin thought of astonishment as prophetic, Brecht found this aspect of Kafka to be most deplorable. Brecht was very harsh with Benjamin’s obsession with Kafka and thought of Kafka’s work (and Benjamin’s) as “mystery mongering,” and “nonsense”(786).   Astonishment and mystery mongering, for Brecht, go hand in hand.

As Benjamin learned, Brecht saw Kafka as a “Jewboy…a feeble, unattractive figure, a bubble on the iridescent surface of the swamp of Prague’s cultural life, and nothing more”(786).   Astonishment, for Brecht, it seems, came out of Kafka’s Jewish, poor life. For this reason, Brecht, building on his anti-Semitic view of Kafka, told Benjamin “I reject Kafka” and his “depth.” This rejection of Kafka (and Benjamin’s project) had an effect on Benjamin. He even admits that “I could not refute the criticism that it was a diary-like set of notes…I was well-aware that his writings contained a lot of debris and rubbish – a lot of real mystery mongering. But other things were crucial, and my study touched on them”(786-87). These “other things” are things that Brecht, apparently, could not understand because he could not understand the meaning of a schlemiel.

Astonishment, for Benjamin, is the key to the schlemiel and Kafka’s characters’ wakefulness: it is in a constant state of surprise because the schlemiel is always forgetting what it was and, for that matter, who or what it is. Hence, the astonishment goes hand in hand with a vigilant study. The schlemiel, as an exceptional character, is astonished at what “normal” people would consider average and nothing.   It is acutely aware of change.   Unlike Soldier Schweik, who is a cunning trickster much like Odysseus, Kafka’s schlemiels are more astonished and less cunning.

Instead of being self-present, cunning, and self-reliant, (which is what Brecht loved about Schweik) they are open to and affected by alterity. And in this Benjamin differs radically from Brecht and his privileging of reason, will, and freedom. Brecht associated this interest in questions, “depth,” and astonishment with “Jewish fascism,” while Benjamin saw astonishment as a positive, critical feature of the Kafka’s schlemiels. Astonishment, which has its mystical correlate, is pronounced in these moments in the text.

Benjamin relates this astonishment to that of the reader or viewer when seeing one’s own gestures in another medium: this is an astonishment at one’s alienation: “The invention of the film and the phonograph came in an age of maximum alienation from one another, of unpredictably intervening relationship which became their only ones. Experiments have proved that a man does not recognize his own walk on the screen or his own voice on the phonograph”(137).

And perhaps this is the key to our fascination with Facebook. Contrary to Brecht, we cannot help but be astonished at the surprises we find on Facebook vis-à-vis ourselves and others. Regardless of how cunning and unastonished we try to be (or present ourselves) on Facebook (and I have many academic colleagues who attempt to maintain this image), the fact of the matter is, as Rothman suggests, that – regardless of how sexy or comical it may seem – we are under constant discipline (either as the subject or the agent).  He is correct. Facebook experience is very “Kafkaesque.” And our attraction to it should trouble us. However, the reason for this doesn’t have to do with the medium alone or the age we live in. It may have to do with the fact that we like to experience astonishment. It evinces a deep and mysterious experience (one that Brecht was sickened by) of our own oscillation between power and powerlessness.

But, ultimately, this may be too much for us to handle. Why, after all, would we want to experience this?  For this reason, leaving Facebook for a while may be a good thing; it can make us feel “as if” we are in control of ourselves and outside of judgment, discipline, and guilt.  But the truth of the matter is that, in every modern situation we, like the schlemiel, may always be astonished. On or off Facebook, there will be astonishment. However, on Facebook the experience of judgment is omnipresent and often very troubling.

…..to be continued….

Blindness And Insight: From Paul and Augustine to Woody Allen’s “Anything Else” – Part I

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The movement from blindness to insight is a time honored theme. It has its roots in early Christianity and in the Enlightenment it becomes a guiding principle.   The Christian appropriation of blindness is fascinating. In Corinthians 2 (3:14-16), Paul associates blindness with the Jews and sight with the Christians:

Therefore, since we have such hope, we use great boldness of speech – unlike Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the end of what was passing away. But their minds were blinded. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in their reading of the Old testament, because the veil is taken away in Christ. But even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart. Nevertheless, when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.

Following these lines, Paul associates the vision of God seen by Christians with freedom:

Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image form glory to glory, just as in the Spirit of the Lord.

In other words, insight, which the Jews don’t have, is associated with “freedom.” Hence, if Jews lack insight, they are not just blind, they are servile to materiality (and not the Spirit). This bias finds its way from Paul to Augustine.

In Augustine’s Expositions on the Psalms, Augustine likens the Jews to a blind person who turns to a mirror:

The appearance of the Jews in the holy scripture which they carry is just like the face of a blind man in a mirror; he is seen by others, by himself not seen. “He hath given unto reproach those that trampled on me.”

Reading this, Jill Robbins, in her book Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, Levinas, argues that the “reproach” of the Jews “consists (1) in their servitude, in their carrying a book they are unable to read because they fail to read figuratively…and (2) also in their self-concealment, their blindness, when they fail to recognize themselves as “the reproach” signified in the figural reading of the scriptural verse.” This suggests, jut like Paul, that the Christian has insight and freedom while the Jew is blind and servile.

The Enlightenment takes this metaphor on as well and situates the critic as a person who unmasks the truth and reveals it to the knowing rather than the faithful. This very same tradition is also taken by Karl Marx who was keen on disclosing the truths hidden by Capitalism. In his system, it would be the Proliteriate who would see the truth and lead the revolution as a result of their insight into what Capitalism had hidden from them.

The post-Enlightenment crowd, however, wasn’t too happy about the blindness/sight metaphor. For this reason, a deconstructive thinker like Paul deMan, in his essay “The Rhetoric of Blindness” argues that critics who claim to move from blindness to insight are blind to their own assumptions and in this blindness they, paradoxically, attain their greatest insight:

Critics’ moments of greatest blindness with regard to their own critical assumptions are also moments at which they achieve their greatest insight. Todorov correctly states that naïve and critical reading are in fact actual or potential forms of “ecriture” and, from the moment there is writing, the newly engendered text does not leave the original text untouched. Both texts can even enter conflict with each other. (109)

In other words, the critical text, without knowing it, doesn’t reveal the text it is examining so much as come into potential conflict with it because, as Todorov suggests, it is naïve and blind to its own assumptions.

But there is more to the story. The deconstructive critic, like a good writer, communicates a kind of blindness to his or her readers. Writing on Derrida, deMan argues that: “Lukacs, Blanchot, Poulet, and Derrida can be called “literary,” in the full sense of the term, because of their blindness, not in spite of it.”

DeMan, in distinction to Paul and Augustine, tells us that blindness is also passed on to the reader. The irony of his reading is that deMan, who is thought of by many (and for good reasons in his early work) as anti-Semitic is actually siding with the Jews that Augustine and Paul is rejecting. He, like Derrida, affirms a “literary” kind of blindness that doesn’t presume to have the “spirit” of the text. And it doesn’t presume to be free in the same way someone with insight considers him or herself to be free. The freedom of the text consists in a certain kind of blindness.

The theme of blindness and insight also makes its way into schlemiel film and literature where, oftentimes, a schlemiel is depicted as a Jewish character who fails to see what is front of him or her. And this blindness, like the blindness of Don Quixote in Western Literature, is not tragic, as it was for Augustine, so much as comical.   However, depending on your approach to blindness, it can be good or bad.

One can read oneself (as an audience member), via irony, as better than the character who cannot see. Or one can, alternatively, identify with the blindness and naivite of the schlemiel. The purpose of such an identification is to admit that there is a problem with society which is blind to the schlemiel’s goodness and not simply the blindness of the schlemiel to society. There is, in this scenario, a double blindness. This is more akin to the Eastern European reading of the schlemiel and has resonance with what deMan means by “literature.”

The German-Jewish reading of the schlemiel takes the opposite view and makes the schlemiel’s blindness into a figure that has more in common with Paul and Augustine.   Like a Christian looking at a Jewish reading of the “Old Testament,” it is something that one doesn’t want to do if one is to be “free” rather than servile to something old (or, in the case of German-Jewish schlemiels, servile to the pre-modern ways of the ghetto).

Early on in his career, Woody Allen clearly took to the schlemiel character. And in films like Annie Hall he decided to create a schlemiel character whose failures had a certain kind of charm. The theme of blindness and insight was not, to be sure, at the forefront of this or any of his films before it.   If anything, Alvy Singer’s awkwardness and failure are the main attraction.

Woody Allen’s Everything Else (2001) shows a different trend. In this film, he has a schlemiel character who explicitly moves from blindness to insight. Moreover, this movement is associated with becoming free and independent (which has echoes with Paul and Augustine) and not just the American spirit of self-reliance.

In this film, Allen plays a reformed schlemiel named David Dobel. He is a veteran comedy writer who, echoing his role in the film, happens to now be an acting teacher. Dobel’s primary role, however, is to play the teacher to Jason Biggs, who plays Jerry Falk – a young aspiring Jewish comedy writer whose biggest problem is that he’s vulnerable, too nice, and can’t say no.

While Dobel, his teacher, has insight into what’s in front of him and what not to do, Falk plays the role of the blind schlemiel who can’t see what’s in front of him and is often unable to act. Dobel’s role is to help Falk leave the schlemiel behind and become an independent agent; he does this by way of several conversations in or around Central Park. In these conversations, Dobel advises Falk. Dobel’s advice prompts the blinded, yes-saying schlemiel to say “no” and, as Allen believes, this magic word, when acted on, will transform the schlemiel into a man.

What makes Allen’s treatment of the schlemiel in this film so interesting is the fact that he shows the audience how, for us today, the schlemiel lives on. And, at the same time, he shows us why, in his opinion, this isn’t such a good thing. Biggs, not Allen, is the new schlemiel. However, Falk, the millennial schlemiel, must be taught how to not make the same mistakes as Allen’s generation of comedians; and for the Woody Allen who wrote and directed this film, one of the biggest mistakes was the adoption of the schlemiel as a model for Jewishness in America. The irony, of course, is that Allen created the problem; after all, he popularized the schlemiel in many of his films and especially in Annie Hall.   Now, in the role of teacher and in the wake of a career playing schlemiels, Allen, playing Dobel, realizes that Falk needs to be educated. He needs a comedic father-slash-teacher. And Dobel has the right to play this role since he has already gone through the process of playing the schlemiel and leaving the schlemiel behind.

His first words of advice and the last words of the film are the words of the film’s title. Instead of being blinded by astonishment (at being lied to, betrayed, or surprised) by things that seem to come out of nowhere one must simply admit that this or that shocking thing is just like “everything else”(a position Bertolt Brecht, in contrast to Walter Benjamin, believed was optimal). The meaning of these words and the attitude that go along with it inform the transformation of the schlemiel (a man-child) into an independent man. And we see this transformation slowly unfold throughout the film. Each major scene shows us how the schlemiel’s hesitations and attitude are eventually displaced by that magic word: no.

At the outset of the film, Doblin tells two jokes which situate him as Falk’s teacher and hit on what Allen understands as the key contrast between a man and a schlemiel:

You know there’s great wisdom in jokes. There’s an old joke about a prizefighter and he’s getting killed, he’s getting his brains beat out, and his mother’s in the audience, and she’s watching him getting beaten up in the ring. And there’s a priest next to her and she says, “Father…father…pray for him.” And the priest says, “I will pray for him but if he could punch it would help.” There’s more insight in that joke than in most books on philosophy.

The comparison of the joke’s wisdom to that of “books on philosophy” is by no means accidental. To be sure, Falk loves existential literature and philosophy. As Doblin understands it, most of these books make suffering, absurdity, and freedom into themes or ideas. While they are interesting, the person reading them, like the prizefighter who is loosing, could do a lot better if he knew how to punch. And this, for Doblin, hits on the problem with Falk’s version of the schlemiel: he doesn’t know how to punch and stand up for himself. Falk hides behind ideas and the book he is trying to write on existential themes. Doblin’s joke suggests that Falk takes the book (and existential ideas) so seriously that his will and autonomy suffers in the process.   To be free, one must act not think. And for this to happen, Doblin suggests that one must eliminate one’s blindness. One must recognize it and say no. We see this articulated in the second joke Doblin shares with Falk:

There is a seminal joke that Henny Youngman used to tell that is perfect…It sums it up perfectly as far as you go. Guy comes into a Doctor’s office and says, “Doc..Doc…it hurts when I do this.” (Dobel twists his hand.)   The Doctor says, “Don’t do it.” Think about that.

The irony of it all is that even though Doblin looks like a schlemiel, he portrays himself and acts like someone who knows how to punch. (He, in a sense, is, like his name, “doubling.”) He portrays himself as someone who can say no.   Falk, in his view, can do neither because, when he first meets Doblin, Falk doesn’t realize that he is blind to his condition; and for this reason, he can’t say no. And that is what, in Doblin’s eyes, makes Falk a schlemiel.

…to be continued….

The Medium is the Message: Marshall McLuhan on Media, Humor, and the Media Child

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Marshall McLuhan, one of the main pioneers of media studies, is most famous for his expression “the medium is the message.”   His work, to be sure, is very difficult to comprehend.  One needs to have a wide grasp of the humanities to understand him.  To be sure, his writings on media are a combination of literary criticism, philosophy, and historicism.   Through them, he attempts understand and communicate the meaning of media. The result: a new idiom for media that is literary historical, and philosophical.  Reading him may be difficult, but it is a thrill.  One can feel his excitement over the power of media (TV, newspapers, radio, advertisements, Movies, telephones, etc) to transform life as we know it.

We can see that he is struggling to create a language with new idioms that can describe the transformations we, in our “media age,” are currently going through.  This struggle for find media idioms may still speak to us today; in many ways, he anticipated a world in which people would live most of their lives through electronic media. And he was right: we do.  In many ways, McLuhan anticipated Facebook and Twitter. He would see social media and its bringing of people together as an expression of what he called a “global village” – social media, more than TV, brings out what he was getting at by many of his idioms.  To many people, these new words, descriptions, and predictions seemed, utopian or even totalitarian.    For instance, the great American author Norman Mailer.  In this debate, he keeps a great distance from McLuhan and is apprehensive of the implications for humanity.  Mailer fears that what McLuhan speaks of is something much worse, something tragic: the end of humanity and something totalitarian.

Despite his differences from Mailer; he, like Mailer, appealed to an entire generation of youth in the 1960s.  McLuhan wanted to create a buzz of sorts around his ideas about media.  So, in order to make his concepts of accessible, McLuhan worked together with Quentin Fiore to create a text juxtaposed with collaged images that anyone could pick up, read, scan, feel, and understand how the medium is the message. This book, published in 1967, is entitled The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects.   (An audio version of the book also was circulated at the time; the correlation between the two, however, is complicated.)

What I find most striking about this little book (without page numbers) is the fact that it sees the subject of this new media transformation as a kind of man-child and it finds that the best medium for educating the man-child to be humor.

McLuhan begins by noting that our “anxiety” with the new age has to do with the fact that we are approaching the changes we are going through with the “wrong tools”:

Everything is changing – you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to “the others.” And they’re changing dramatically…Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools – with yesterday’s concepts.

However, “youth instinctively understands the present environment – the electronic drama.” They understands everything in terms of “interfaces.” They also understand that education can longer be based on the previous educational system which was too “serious.” Today, in the media age, humor must be the new basis for education:

Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor – a perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaningful than platitudes lying between two covers.

One needs to live in the “social drama” by way of the witty response which focuses on “means or processes rather than ‘substance’.”   And instead of the “family circle” or the school being the basis of education, “character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world’s a sage.” This last pun, playing on Shakespeare, indicates that our new kind of education is, because of the media “buzz”…everywhere.

Juxtaposing a picture of a young boy, McLuhan writes, in a section entitled “Your Neighborhood”: “you can’t go home again.” This section suggests that the child is, so to speak, abandoned to the endless time and space of the media. What is a child to do? Wouldn’t this provoke anxiety? What role does humor or wit play vis-à-vis this child’s new anxiety and homelessness?

Anticipating these questions, McLuhuan writes about “the child” of the past and compares it to “today’s child.”

The “child” is an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare’s day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense.

Today’s child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up – this is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

What I find so fascinating about McLuhan’s comments about “today’s child” is the fact that he is describing a “man-child” of sorts (a schlemiel). His description rings an interesting note if it is juxtaposed to A.O. Scott’s recent New York Times Magazine article entitled “The End of Adulthood.”   As I noted in a blog on Scott’s article, Scott finds it nearly impossible –with the sheer amount of films, TV shows, and young adult fiction (read my people in their 30s and 40s – for us to “grow up.”   He sees this problem pronounced in Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow’s popular films. They pronounce the “end of adulthood” and a perpetual adolescence.

If anything, the last words of Scott’s article – “get off my lawn”- show us that he has no solution.

Does McLuhan?

At the very least, he says that “growing up” is our “new work, and it is total.” But, as we saw, this “growing up” has something to do with being witty and ready for anything that comes at one in this “social drama” otherwise known as the media age. However, since he can’t appeal to old models, its not certain what he means by “our work.” It’s as if we have to put the pieces together and in improvising this we will, somehow, “grow up.”

What he suggests, as a way of becoming mature, is a kind of understand of the world we are living in. His descriptions of how we have, because of media, become “responsible for each other” suggest this. We see this in a section entitled “the others.”

The shock of recognition! In an electronic information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained – ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

This suggests that we recognize this “fact” and do something about it. However, there are many problems with this.   Many people may see the news about this or that oppressed group in the world by way of this or that facebook feed, or even by means of humorous media such as The Daily Show or the Colbert Report (amongst others), but who takes this seriously enough to “commit” oneself or “participate.” Do we feel “compelled” to do something by virtue of a facebook feed or comedy episode? What happens when there is media indifference? When there is too much media?

Perhaps it is the case that our inability to grow up (or rather our failure to do so), which Scott accuses us all of, has to do with the fact that though we feel responsible we don’t want to do anything. We’d rather not. After all, its easier to float around the media world which, more often than not, is full of humor.

Unlike Scott, who argued that feminism has something to do with the “end of adulthood,” McLuhan suggests that the process of media is responsible for the latest displacement of adulthood.   His answer is that we should respond to the media around us which “compels” us to “commit” ourselves and “participate.” Yet, somehow, this must be done with wit which, to his mind, is more mature than childish humor.

This opens up many questions as to the distinction between the two. At the very least, he sees humor as the primary modality today for learning and action. Scott seems to see humor as incompatible. What’s the difference?

…to be continued….

A Special Article for Berfrois: “On Innocence: Robin Williams and the Comedy of the ‘Little Man’

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Today, a piece I recently wrote on Robin Williams entitled “On Innocence: Robin Williams and the Comedy of the ‘Little Man'” was published in Berforis, a wonderful Arts and Culture magazine.

Here’s the link to the article.  Take a look!

http://www.berfrois.com/2014/09/menachem-feuer-on-innocence-robin-williams-and-the-comedy-of-the-little-man/

Freaks Like Us: In Memory of Eric the (Midget) Actor of the Howard Stern Rat Pack

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I listened to Howard Stern on and off over the last ten years. Many of my close friends were avid listeners and they always made sure to let me know of something unusual about the show on this or that day.

One of the most interesting characters on the show, who I remember hearing on several occasions, was Eric the Midget (aka Eric the Actor). He would call in to the Howard Stern quite often.   He was a part of Stern’s “rat pack.” Howard, it seemed, was obsessed with Eric’s life and asked many questions about how Eric lived his life.

In many ways, one could argue that Stern’s interest in “Freaks” expressed his interest in what it means to be human and in-common. In fact, this kind of argument was made by Leslie Fiedler in his book by that name: Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self.

At the outset of his book, written in 1978, Fiedler points out that the word “freak” has gone from being a negative name to an “honorific title by the kind of physiologically normal but dissident young people who use hallucinogenic drugs and are otherwise known as “hippies,” “longhairs” and “heads.” Such young people – in an attempt to perhaps make clear that they have chosen rather than merely endured their status as Freaks – speak of “freaking out,” and, indeed, urge others to emulate them by means of drugs, music, diet, or excitement of gathering in crowds”(14).

However, Eric was a real midget. He didn’t choose to be a “freak.” And he didn’t think of himself as a “freak,” either. Howard treated him as he would treat many people on the show. And like Leslie Fiedler, Howard may have seen something in Eric that he saw hiding in himself. He identified with him although, in many ways, he tried to retain his distance.

At the end of the introductory chapter, Fiedler recalls his feelings, when he went to the “Circus World Museum” in “Baraboo, Wisconsin.” There he saw wax effigies of Freaks from the past: “Lionel the Lion-faced Man and Jo-Jo the Dogfaced Boy,” and the “Cardiff Giant.”

Confronting them, I could feel the final horror evoked by Freaks stir to life: a kind of vertigo like that experienced by Narcissus when he beheld his image in the reflecting waters and plunged to death. In joined twins the confusion of self and other, substance and shadow, ego and other, is more terrifyingly confounded than it is when the child first perceives face to face in the mirror an image moving as he moves, though clearly in another world. In that case, at least, there are only two participants; the perceiver and the perceived….so the distinction between the audience and exhibit, we and them, normal and Freak, is revealed as an illusion, desperately, perhaps even necessarily, defended, but untenable in the end. (36)

Given his final words, we can see that Fiedler would likely find the difference between himself and Eric effaced.  He would come to terms with the other.  But now…it’s too late.  And we must mourn our loss.

Eric died today at the age of 39.

To give you a sense of who he was and how Howard related to him, I’m going to post a few clips.

And here was a recent show….

As Fiedler might say, Eric was one of us, yet, at the same time, he wasn’t. This difference and its limits were traversed by Howard Stern for well over a decade. And we have yet to go through all of the footage and to figure out what happened and what this all means. Because of Stern, Eric the Midget (Eric the Actor) was heard by millions of listeners who otherwise wouldn’t give him a second glance on the street. He was on Stern right to the very end.  And Howard, ultimately, didn’t want to exploit him.  He wanted to make his life better and gave him the stardom that Andy Warhol believed all Americans deserve.

And now he’s gone.

From the Face-to-Face to the Interface: A Moment in Jean Baudrillard’s “America”

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In our socially networked world, we are over saturated with information and images. We are bombarded and, in the midst of this, we seem to cobble together something of our own virtual bubble with icon-slash-friends who we share images, information, and identifications on a daily basis.   But, before this all become normal; it was called hyperreal. To be sure, Jean Baudrillard is most well known for his notion of the “hyperreal” which was popularized by his book, Simulations. In that book, published in 1983, he writes:

Abstraction today is no longer that of a map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – PRECESSION OF SIMULCURA – it is the map that engenders the territory….The desert of the real itself. (2)

As a part of his explanation of what this means, in “reality,” Baudrillard describes Disneyland, the American hallmark, as the prime example of the hyperreal. It is an “infantilized” world:

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: Pirates, the Frontier, Future World, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious reveling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. (24)

Five years later, Baudrillard returns to his meditation on American as the center of the simulated world. He writes a book called America. In this book, Baudrillard goes deeper into the “desert of the real” than ever so as to provide his readers with a kind of journalistic account of his dissolution into a sea of relations. Everything, it seems, is caught up in virtual relations that are repeated in different series. Relations are altered and recycled.  Our lives are animated by them:

Sex, beach, and mountains. Sex and beach, beach and mountains. Mountains and sex. A few concepts. Sex and concepts. “Just a life.” Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photography, women as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem to exist by virtue of this strange destiny.   You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world. (32)

Baudrillard dives into the experience of relation to argue that all relation, today, is nothing more than what he calls an “interface” or “interaction” which has “replaced face-to-face contact and action”:

This is a culture which sets up specialized institutes so that people’s bodies can come together and touch, and, at the same time, invents pans in which the water does not touch the bottom of the pan, which is made of a substance so homogenous, dry, and artificial that not a single drop sticks to it, just like those bodies intertwined in ‘feeling’ and therapeutic love, which do not touch – not even a moment. This is called interface or interaction. It has replaced face-to-face contact and action. (32)

Touching the other, in his view, is “interfacing with the other.” There is a kind of “communication” in which there isn’t any real “communication.” He calls this a “code of separation.” By way of this code, all everything has become information that “wormed its way into everything, like a phobic maniacal leitmotiv.”

One wonders how this anticipates facebook and twitter: mediums that “interface” different people who exchange information but never really touch.   And it does seem as if there is a code of separation which rules over all of our relations. Baudrillard laments this and mourns the death of the “face-to-face” contact and action.

The problem with this, of course, is that it suggests that all bodily relations are “interfaced.” This suggests that Levinas is wrong and that we cannot be “persecuted” or “traumatized” by the other. In this hyperreal world, we can interface with the other and keep our distance; we need not be obligated by them. The only thing that affects us is the information that passes through us and keeps us and all things separate.

The only reason we are concerned about our bodies is because “everyone is made to concentrate” on the body, “not as a source of pleasure,” but “as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sing and an anticipation of death, that death which not one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented”(35).

Our main concern, therefore, is to preserve our bodies from death and to make them properly interface with other bodies. We are “into” things because we are a part of this or that circuit within which we function.   We are constantly maintaining a circuit. Do we fit in or are we “the odd one’s out?”

The comedy, it seems, for Baudrillard is not to be found save for the fact that we are caught up in too many surfaces and interfaces. We live for the ecstasy of the network. But we fear, too often, that we have missed our cue. As Paul Celan says in one poem, we are adrift in a sea of relations.   And these relations often blur into each other making our relations more confusing.

For Baudrillard this can only go in one direction: toward a kind of Apocolypse of all history and all meaning. This is the fatalist reading. And it all starts in Disneyland where we all become infantile and, for Baudrillard, where we lose all sense of an adulthood that once was. In his world, the Levinasian face-to-face is a thing of the past. In the hyperreal, we all become children who know only interfaces and not faces.

The Flash of Comic Illumination: Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and the Witz

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One of the most interesting confluences between German Romantic conceptions of humor and a certain thread of Jewish-German Philosophy is the obsession with time, immediacy, and illumination. The two seem like odd bedfellows since, after all, religion is a serious affair and humor, as a matter of course, is not.   The witz, like revelation, is a surprise. And, like a comedic audience, the religious community must be ready for the lightning delivery. Illumination is the punch line.

In an essay on the German Romantics obsession with the Witz (the joke), Jean-Luc Nancy points out, for them, the speed of the joke and its immediacy are central to its affect. According to Nancy, they shared this interest with Shakespeare:

Since Shakespeare’s famous “maxim” in Hamlet (constantly repeated by Freud), “brevity is the soul of wit,” the only “genre” or the only “form” always recognized as the property of Witz, as peculiar to all Witz, is succinctness, the swiftness of the utterance that carries the point.   The Romantics were to express it by means of the much reiterated German Witz: Witz ist ein Blitz; wit is a flash of lighting. Flash, lightning, explosion are the forms of the cogito’s double insofar as it is instantaneous. (263, The Birth of Presence)

Franz Rosenzweig, in The Star of Redemption, often talks about Revelation in terms of immediacy and suddenness. God’s command to Love Him is an act of urgency and immediacy and it gives birth to the soul. It is born out of its immediate response to its Creator which calls on man to respond to His call.

In an essay entitled, “Renaissance of Jewish Learning and Living,” Rosenzweig relates this sense of immediacy to readiness and confidence vis-à-vis any possible religious experience. To be Jewish, according to Rozenzweig, is to be ready or, as he says, “confident”:

There is one recipe alone that can make a person Jewish and hence – because he is a Jew and destined to a Jewish life – a full human being: that recipe is to have no recipe…Our fathers had a beautiful word for it that says everything: confidence.

Confidence is the word for the state of readiness that does not ask for recipes, and does not mouth perpetually, “What shall I do then?” and “How can I do that?” Confidence is not afraid of the day after tomorrow. It lives in the present, it crosses recklessly the threshold leading from today to tomorrow. Confidence knows only that which is nearest and therefore it possesses the whole…Thus the Jewish individual needs nothing but readiness. Those who would help him can give him empty forms of preparedness, which he himself and only he may fill. (223)

Martin Buber, in several of his essays on the Torah, echoes this imperative to be ready. He calls it the “demand of the hour.” And one must be ready to hear it and respond to it. In an essay entitled “Prophesy, Apocalyptic, Historical Hour,” he writes:

What is possible in a certain hour and what is impossible cannot be adequately ascertained by any foreknowledge. It goes without saying that, in the one sphere as in the other, one must start at any given time from the nature of the situation insofar as it is recognizable. But one does not learn the measure and limit of what is attainable in a desired direction otherwise than through going in this direction. (186)

Buber adds that “room must be left for such surprises….planning as though they were impossible renders them impossible. One cannot strive for immediacy, but one can hold oneself free and open for it.”

In other words, a Jew must always be ready for surprises. One must be prepared.

In an essay entitled “The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,” he delves deeply into the meaning of “the hour” with an audience that is not familiar with the relationship of Revelation, Creation, and Redemption to the Torah. To give them an idea, he takes them through a guided meditation of sorts:

The lived moment leads directly to the knowledge of revelation, and thinking about birth leads indirectly to the knowledge of creation. But in his personal life probably not one of us will taste the essence of redemption before his last hour. And yet here, too, there is an approach. It is dark and silent and cannot be indicated by any means, save by my asking you to recall your own dark and silent hours. I mean those hours in the lowest depths when our soul hovers over the frail trap door which, at the very next instant, may send us down into destruction, madness, and suicide at our own verdict. Indeed, we are astonished that it has not opened up until now. But suddenly we feel a touch as of a hand, to let us draw up out of the darkness. This is redemption.

Buber and Rosenzweig’s obsession with immediateness and being ready suggests that we be ready for a surprising Blitz-of-illumination. And in a sense the comedian, like a prophet of sorts, must also be ready to not just deliver a joke at lightening speed but for an explosion of humor. As Nancy suggests in his reading of the German Romantic concept of the Witz, there is a kind of immediacy that humor shares with mysticism. In the wake of reading Nancy, when I read these lines from Buber and Rosenzweig, I could not help but think that they want everyone to be ready for the Witz.

But there is a difference.

For them the Witz is a spiritual Blitz, not a secular one, as it is for the comedian. Perhaps comedy, for the German Romatnics, offered what Benjamin would call a profane illumination….in the Blitz of the Witz? To be sure, Benjamin, following Charles Baudeliare, would call that the “experience of shock.” Moreover, Benjamin, at the end of an essay on Surrealism spells out the relation of Revelation to time when he argues that experience today, if it is to be revolutionary, must be a like a clock whose alarm goes off every second.

The only problem with this, however, is that it leaves no time for the delivery of the joke. It may be fast but it takes time to reach the audience. Immediacy needs mediacy. The Blitz needs the Witz. And whether it’s the Jewish-German Philosophical approach to Revelation or the German Romantic approach to comedy it seems that both believe the audience needs to be ready for surprises. And, as Rosenzweig and Buber seem to have believed, that’s the crux of being Jewish.

The “Zero Point” of “Madness” and “Monstrosity” or The American Philosophical Ramblings from the 1990s – APR90s

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There’s nothing like a simple sentence and a simple message.

And then again, some people love to be obtuse. When we let them, some people just don’t know when to stop. People like to yap; especially academics.

Once in a while, I dare myself to open up a book from the 1990s by this or that thinker who wanted to write like Jacques Derrida. I knew a few of them. They wanted to write and speak like him but, since they were American, they wanted to be daring and mimic him with an American accent. What would sometimes happen, however, was a language that went on and on without style – in short, American Philosophical Ramblings from the 1990s – APR90s.

Don’t get me wrong. The content is interesting and worthy of discussion, but the rhetoric destroys it all. And, the blindness of the writer to the train-wreck makes it…comical

Here’s one. To protect the innocent, I won’t say who the professor was:

I am not happy that mythmaking serves the machinations of power and money; but I know that myths challenge each other for domination and that we suffer in the present not because we tell stories about the world but because one story – the story that says capitalism and the market are the answers to all problems that matter – has enervating our storymaking and mythmaking talents.   It has, in fact, done what all myths are designed but seldom do: Convince us that it is not an intellectual totem but a testament to the essential truth and reality of things, and that what opposes this reality and truth is always the work of spin doctors and Hollywood producers hired to make us believe in “make believe.”

Here’s another sample from another author. He writes on madness, not in a mad way, but in a note-taking kind of way. He write-jots. And, after a while, this rambles. (Don’t get me wrong though, I love madness just like anyone else, but what happens when madness is communicated by way of the write-jot?

The relation of madness to reason seems one of oppositions, at least in Descartes; against the plain truth of facts, “they” persist in their follow; madness against reason. We equate madness with unreason even as reason evinces its own madness. This madness, belonging to reason, seems worlds apart from madness “itself,” though Foucault speaks of such a madness, of a madness “before” reason’s regulation: “We must try to return, in history, to that zero point in the course of madness in which madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself”(Madness and Civilization, p. ix). How, Derrida asks, may we confront this “zero point” of madness, madness itself? How can we think this zero as a confrontation with madness, with its monstrosity, represent our greatest achievement, however, impossibly.

Do we, in reading this write-jot, experience the “zero-point” of “madness” and “monstrosity”?

I can’t read this without smirking. It’s as if he’s saying: this is madness, this is, monstrosity, it “represents our greatest achievement.” But, as he asks, how can we think of this as “our greatest achievement?” That’s the irony. It’s ridiculous to believe that this rambling, this monstrosity, which can’t, ultimately be named, but jot-sketched, is our “greatest achievement.”

And perhaps this is the “doubleness” that Paul deMan saw at the heart of irony: the “irony of ironies” which effaces intersubjectivity and subjectivity and leaves you with “nothing” and a “consciousness of madness.”

And, as deMan well-knew, this consiousness is the conscisousness of one’s blindness to what one says. But the true point of doubleness and the irony is to the following distinction: To say and not hear what one is saying is to be comical. But to know and hear that it is a meaningless rambling is….tragic. For deMan, it is “the consciousness of madness.” It is, literally, for him, the “zero point.”

I’m not so sure these APR90s knew this. But, I may be wrong. Maybe they knew that they were rambling off monstrosity which, of course, cannot be thought. But can it be said?

The only way to know is to ramble on, and as you ramble, who knows, maybe you can experience the “Zero point” of “madness” and “monstrocity.” Now: is that funny or what?

Nu…It’s Quiz Time! Which Yiddish Word Describes Your Personality? Schlemiel?

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When it comes to quizzes on facebook, I often pass them by. But I’ll have to admit that I came across a recent facebook quiz that drew my attention. While I’m not interested in what philosopher, artist, or actor I most resemble, I am interested in a kind of quiz that would let me know whether or not I’m a schlemiel. In fact, I’ve always been interested in whether I or any of my friends would be dubbed a schlemiel. I’m not alone, however, in my interest. To be sure, when I tell people that I write on the schlemiel, they often do three things: 1) they ask for a definition of the schlemiel; 2) they ask me if I’m a schlemiel; and then they ask me if 3) they are schlemiels.   In a sense, I am the one who is often asked to give a quiz on the schlemiel the minute I’m asked about what I do.

For this reason, I was happy to see this quiz which has the tagline: “Which Yiddish Word Describes Your Personality?” It’s not exactly a schlemiel quiz, but it prompted me to wonder whether or not the quiz would tell me that my Yiddish word is “schlemiel.”

When I took the quiz, I could see that there may be a pattern of answers that would lead it to dub a person a schlemiel. I saw questions that asked what kind of film I liked most, so I chose “Annie Hall.” When it gave me several options as to what Jewish comic character I identified most with (and most of the characters are from Seinfeld) I chose George, the prototypical schlemiel of the show. Moreover, I chose things that I thought a schlemiel would choose.

But in the end, to my chagrin, I learned that the word that best fit me was…mensch.

However, is it really so bad to be a mentsch? I wondered what I had done wrong, after all, I am a schlemiel theorist. What went wrong?

Before I could formulate an answer, one of my facebook friends wrote something that I found to be very insightful about me and my desire to be identified as a schlemiel:

“What kind of schlemiel wants to be a recognized as a schlemiel? A mentsch.”

The way I read this witty observation is that it says a lot for humility. In fact, that makes sense when we are talking about schlemiels in the Yiddish tradition. Most of them don’t think of themselves as schlemiels and many of them, because they are so sincere and caring, are like mentsches.

Daniel Boyarin, in his book Unheroic Conduct: The Invention of the Jewish Male, suggests that a mentsch is simply an effeminate male who cares for and often takes care of others before he or she takes care of him or herself. This sounds a lot like I.B. Singer’s proto-schlemiel, Gimpel. He trusts people and wants to help them. But he is betrayed. Perhaps the only difference between Boyarin’s ideal mentsch and Singer’s schlemiel is that Singer knew full well – in the wake of the Holocaust – that in a world filled with evil and deception, maybe the mentsch is the real schlemiel.   And the irony is that we need to change, not the schlemiel.

That said, this schlemiel-want-to-be-who-may-really-be-a-mentsch would love to find out if anyone who has read this post and taken this test has been dubbed a “schlemiel.” If so, let schlemiel theory know.

We’d like to find out, by way of trial and error, what magic combination of choices will yield a schlemiel. Please let me know! Have fun!

Here’s the link: http://www.playbuzz.com/benjaminbirely10/which-yiddish-word-describes-your-personality

The End of Adulthood or the Dawn of the American-Schlemiel? A.O. Scott’s Kvetch About America’s “Devolution”

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America is changing. We are or rather we have gradually become more and more fixated on the man-child or what in Yiddish is called the schlemiel. While academics have seen this coming, journalists and cultural critics are catching up.   In Eros and the Jews (1997), David Biale argued that Jewish-American comedians “neutralized” the negative connotations associated with the man-child slash effeminate male and, over time, it became identified with the American everyman. Most scholars agree that Woody Allen set this trend into the main stream with films like Annie Hall (1976). Sidrah Ezahi, in Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Jewish Imagination (2000), followed suit and argued that the schlemiel has become an “American icon.” Jon Stratton’s Coming Out Jewish (2000), drawing on Biale, makes a similar claim.   And Daniel Itzkovitz, in his 2006 essay “They Are All Jews,” argues that while Jewishness and assimilation are on the rise and Judaism is in the decline, American audiences have become “Jewish.” And by this he means that they have become enamored with the man-child or what he calls the “new schlemiel.”

Just yesterday, I was astonished to see two articles – one from The New Yorker and one from The New York Times – that focus in on the man-child as the norm. And both of them ask when this happened.  In response to The New Yorker article, which is entitled “The Awkward Age,” yesterday, I wrote a blog/essay.  And today I’d like to write on the New York Times article which is entitled “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture, which is written by the celebrated film critic A.O. Scott.

What both of these articles share is in interest in when things started to change.  They both ask: when did America start becoming “awkward” or “childlish”? The author of The New Yorker essay argues, against Adam Kotsko – who wrote an intelligent book called Awkwardness – that the beginning of the “age of awkwardness” was not the 60s –when traditional values were radically put into question – but after 9/11.   But, as I pointed out in my blog piece, the author of the essay needs to understand Kotsko’s philosophical and sociological approach to awkwardness before she can understand his periodization. Regardless, it’s interesting how, if we look at the dates of the above-mentioned scholarly works, the merger of the schlemiel with American culture are all dated before 9/11.

In his search for when things started changing in America, A.O. Scott, in his article “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture,” also goes back before 9/11 . Reflecting on Madmen, Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, Scott demurs that, with their deaths at the end of their respective shows, “Tony, Walter and Don are the last of the patriarchs.”

But their death, says Scott, is the result of a longer death that was going on since the 1960s: the “slow unwinding” of patriarchy:

In suggesting that patriarchy is dead, I am not claiming that sexism is finished, that men are obsolete or that the triumph of feminism is at hand. I may be a middle-aged white man, but I’m not an idiot. In the world of politics, work and family, misogyny is a stubborn fact of life. But in the universe of thoughts and words, there is more conviction and intelligence in the critique of male privilege than in its defense, which tends to be panicky and halfhearted when it is not obtuse and obnoxious. The supremacy of men can no longer be taken as a reflection of natural order or settled custom.

Even though the rise of feminism “has been understood as a narrative of progress,” Scott tells us that there “may be other less unequivocally happy consequences. It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grownups.”

Scott’s thesis, to be sure, resonates much with what Adam Kotsko says in his book. Men no longer have the same “norms” to live up to and this is what creates what Kotsko calls “awkwardness” and what Scott calls the “end of adulthood.”  And it is not a mistake that all of the examples Kotsko brings for awkwardness are the same candidates Scott has in mind when he speaks of the “end of adulthood.”

However, Kotsko gives this “end” a different, more positive valence.

To point out what has happened as a result of the end of patriarchy and the end of adulthood, Scott notes that “nearly a third” of the books for “Young Adult readers” are read by men and women between the ages of 30 and 44.

And he’s not happy about this:

Full disclosure: The shoe fits. I will admit to feeling a twinge of disapproval when I see one of my peers clutching a volume of “Harry Potter” or “The Hunger Games.” I’m not necessarily proud of this reaction. As cultural critique, it belongs in the same category as the sneer I can’t quite suppress when I see guys my age (pushing 50) riding skateboards or wearing shorts and flip-flops, or the reflexive arching of my eyebrows when I notice that a woman at the office has plastic butterfly barrettes in her hair.

Scott doesn’t stop ranting. He goes on to call this “absurd” and “impotent.” And he takes Hollywood as the purveyor of this culture and his target:

God, listen to me! Or don’t. My point is not so much to defend such responses as to acknowledge how absurd, how impotent, how out of touch they will inevitably sound. In my main line of work as a film critic, I have watched over the past 15 years as the studios committed their vast financial and imaginative resources to the cultivation of franchises (some of them based on those same Y.A. novels) that advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world. Comic-book movies, family-friendly animated adventures, tales of adolescent heroism and comedies of arrested development do not only make up the commercial center of 21st-century Hollywood. They are its artistic heart.

The last gasps of manhood, according to Scott, can be seen in TV series like The Sopranos and Mad Men, which herald the “end of male authority.” And now “adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable.” And this, for Scott, brings up the central question:

Should we mourn the departed or dance on its grave?

Before Scott answers the question, he points out how America was, historically, born out of a rebellion against authority: “From the start, American culture was notably resistant to the claims of paternal authority and the imperatives of adulthood.” To illustrate, he cites Leslie Fiedler who argues that “the great works of American fiction are notoriously home in the children’s section of the library.” Rip Van Winkle and Huckelberry Fin are our classics.   And as Fiedler argues, the heroes of many novels want to run away from civilization. They aren’t interested, primarily, in “marriage and responsibility.” They are “boyish.”

What sticks out most, according to Scott citing Fiedler, is the American fictional character’s “innocence and instinctual decency” which are “juxtaposed with the corruption and hypocrisy of the adult world.” And, here we should note, the schlemiel has much in common with these kinds of motifs. Like the American fictional character, Sholem Aleichem and Mendel Mocher Sforim’s characters also have an “innocence and instinctual decency” which is “juxtaposed with the corruption and hypocrisy of the world.” For this reason, when I.B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool” was translated by Saul Bellow and first published in The Partisan Review, in the early 1950s, was a hit. And Singer went on to be a celebrated Jewish-American writer and a Nobel Prize winner. The reason: Gimpel is nearly identical with the American fictional character, as described by Fiedler.

Although there is a history of this in American culture, Scott, like Fiedler, considers it “sophomoric.”

Fiedler saw American literature as sophomoric. He lamented the absence of books that tackled marriage and courtship — for him the great grown-up themes of the novel in its mature, canonical form. Instead, notwithstanding a few outliers like Henry James and Edith Wharton, we have a literature of boys’ adventures and female sentimentality. Or, to put it another way, all American fiction is young-adult fiction

Scott argues that this American fictional figure is translated into novels in the 60s and 70s about “wild, uncivilized boys” who rebel against authority and express “youthful rebellion.” Scott takes this thread and argues that it is but a “quick ride” to Hollywood which, eventually, ends up in Apatow’s films that celebrate perpetual adolescence.

However, at this point, Scott makes an interesting move and argues that with Apatow’s films and actors -who play man-children like Adam Sandler – we have a “devolution.”

We devolve from Lenny Bruce to Adam Sandler, from “Catch-22” to “The Hangover,” from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.”

At this point, Scott finally lays down his cards are suggests a choice between good rebellion or giving up on rebellion. Lenny Bruce, for him, is a rebel, an anti-Hero, while Sandler is a caricature and Apatow’s characters…don’t rebel; they just hang out:

But the antics of the comic man-boys were not merely repetitive; in their couch-bound humor we can detect the glimmers of something new, something that helped speed adulthood to its terminal crisis. Unlike the antiheroes of eras past, whose rebellion still accepted the fact of adulthood as its premise, the man-boys simply refused to grow up, and did so proudly. Their importation of adolescent and preadolescent attitudes into the fields of adult endeavor (see “Billy Madison,” “Knocked Up,” “Step Brothers,” “Dodgeball”) delivered a bracing jolt of subversion, at least on first viewing. Why should they listen to uptight bosses, stuck-up rich guys and other readily available symbols of settled male authority?

Scott, understandably, can’t stand the “bro comedy” that we find in Apatow’s films, most of which cast Seth Rogen as the ultimate bro:

The bro comedy has been, at its worst, a cesspool of nervous homophobia and lazy racial stereotyping. Its postures of revolt tend to exemplify the reactionary habit of pretending that those with the most social power are really beleaguered and oppressed. But their refusal of maturity also invites some critical reflection about just what adulthood is supposed to mean. In the old, classic comedies of the studio era — the screwbally roller coasters of marriage and remarriage, with their dizzying verbiage and sly innuendo — adulthood was a fact. It was inconvertible and burdensome but also full of opportunity. You could drink, smoke, flirt and spend money. The trick was to balance the fulfillment of your wants with the carrying out of your duties.

Scott, it seems, is fed up with these “coming of age” stories that fall flat. He wants men who are counter-cultural rebels (like Lenny Bruce) and a new approach to adulthood. And, at the end of the article, he’s not sure what to say. It rings of cynicism. It seems it may be too late; we, Americans, may be stuck in perpetual childhood:

I do feel the loss of something here, but bemoaning the general immaturity of contemporary culture would be as obtuse as declaring it the coolest thing ever. A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. They imagine a world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what’s going on, where identities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers; little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for the territory and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We have more stories, pictures and arguments than we know what to do with, and each one of them presses on our attention with a claim of uniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight.

I’m all for it. Now get off my lawn.

By ending on this note, we can see that Scott is not happy with what Itzkovitz would call the “new schelmiel.” And while he understands that the “boyish” man-child is a central American literary tradition, he doesn’t know what to do with this history. His appeals to Lenny Bruce echo the reading of Lenny Bruce made by David Biale in his book Eros and the Jews.   But, as Biale notes, these two figures – the schlemiel and the rebel – are what we are left with. Nearly 20 years after Biale notes this, it seems that Scott sees the battle as over. After all, as Scott says, “Adulthood is dead” and now “the world is our playground.” His last notes are comic, but bittersweet.  And they give us the answer to the question he posed above: he is going to mourn the death of adulthood while we, it seems, will dance on the grave.

But as I look to show, in my forthcoming posts on Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness and my reflections on the schlemiel, one can read this turn to perpetual adolescence in a different manner.