Tag Archives: History

A Schlemiel or Two in the Cartoon Lagoon – Part II

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Like the German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin and like Sigmund Freud, I’m one of those people who loves searching through the trash for treasures.  For both Benjamin and Freud, the trash that they searched through is the trash of history and the past.  Their work in philosophy, literary criticism, and psychology was to look through the past so as to find things that would transform how we look at ourselves and the world we live in. While Freud was interested in the trash people bury in the their personal histories (and, at times, with a nation: as in his book Moses and Monotheism),  Benjamin was also interested in the material that is buried in cultural history.  To be sure, these things, upon discovery and re-interpretation, can teach us about who we are; after all, who “we” are as North Americans, or as people who have grown up on media, cartoons, films, TV, etc is who we were.  Therefore, the more we know about or reflect on who we were, the more we can understand who we are or rather who we might be.   Strangely enough, however, this requires us to look, as Benjamin understood it, through things that we may consider retro-trash.  This trash, for him, wasn’t trash so much as a treasure: it helped him to tap into a collective sort of historical self-awareness.

That said, I think we can learn something from cartoons.  Like many people, I have grown up with cartoons.   I lived in Upstate New York, but I would often see cartoons – after school – by way of my favorite channel (which hailed from New York City): 11 Alive.  I also saw cartoons on the weekend.  But, in addition to cartoons, I also watched the Three Stooges after school.  To be sure, I really loved watching these episodes more than any comedy show on the boob-tube.  Unlike many, I actually liked reruns of their performances.

So, when I saw the latter half of the Cartoon Lagoon Episode entitled “Game Over!” (which I blogged on last week), I was surprised on a few different levels.

First of all, as I noted in my blog entry, the crew (which consists of Captain Cornelius, Wet Willy Jones, and Axel Rod Magee) runs into a cartoon that is floating around the cartoon lagoon.  (To be sure, this is a major part of the plot of every show.)  When they run into the cartoon, they go down into a screening room to watch the cartoon and comment on it.  The cartoon they view, to my surprise, was a cartoon of the Three Stooges entitled “Dentist the Menace.”  What I found so interesting about this selection is that it has a “meta” quality: not only are we watching the characters from the cartoon watch another cartoon and comment on it; we are also, watching a cartoon that is based on the Three Stooges show.

There is an additional surprise to this since, while watching it, I am prompted to wonder whether there a) was another episode that this was based on (or if it is something new) or b) the gestures that are depicted in this cartoon “properly” depict the characters gestures from the show.  In other words, the constant question in my mind, which the comments of the three comic characters watching the cartoon remind me of, is what to make of this interpretation which was made, most likely, in the 1970s or early 80s?  How do we interpret this piece of cartoon trash (which may really be a treasure) that is floating around the Cartoon Lagoon.  Like many things from the past, the submarine, so to speak, stumbles upon it.  But, as with any dream or figment from the (cultural) past, we need to ask whether it is meaningful or just a piece of trash.

The first thing that strikes me, even before I hear the cartoon characters’ comments, is the fact that the speed of this cartoon, in contrast to the Cartoon Lagoon segment in the beginning, is much slower.  There is already a lapse.  And this may indicate that our sense of timing, today, is different.

In fact, the first comments focus on the represented space and on the time gap between the two: “I miss furniture tassels.”  And when Curly says his “teeth are killing him,” one of the cartoon characters says that this “cartoon is killing me.”  Already, he is agitated (perhaps by its slow delivery).

We are then reminded of the 90s (and a scandal which changed history) when, upon hearing Moe say “shut your trap and close your mouth,” one of the characters says: “That’s Bill Clinton’s motto.”  This hits on the historical-political dimension.

Following this, the Cartoon Lagoon characters poke fun at the timing, design, and gestures of the cartoon Stooges.  After Moe opens the door to attach Curly’s tooth, he makes an odd gesture with his leg.  Upon seeing this, one of them asks: “Is he peeing on an invisible fire hydrant?”  Following this gesture, Curly flies into the door. We see half of his body, the back half, twitching in the door.  Seeing this, one of Cartoon Lagoon characters makes a reference to the present moment (namely, Miley Cyrus’s “twerking” on MTV moment): “Oh no…he’s twerking?”  In contrast, the next comment focuses on the past (namely, on Vaudeville): “We didn’t save our money from Vaudeville.”  Following this we hear a vulgar slapstick idiom which marks the time: “Hey, he’s talking out of his ass!”  At this point, the commentary is interrupted.  And we notice there is a technical difficulty – most likely in response to the vulgar commentary.  But the Cartoon Lagoon doesn’t end with a reflection on the past.  It ends with an ad for Squish Cereal.  And this break, juxtaposed with the previous dated comments and scenes, suggests a way of thinking the past against the present cartoon moment.

To be sure, the attention to gesture (dated and not dated) that we see in this clip is an attention to the fine points of the past and its cultural translation into the present.  What we need to ask is: What is translated and what is not?  This question, necessarily, is a meta-commentary on cartoons.  And I think this question is prompted by the fact that, by virtue of the plot, the characters and their submarine are bound to run into old cartoons and the fact that when they comment on them they often reference historical moments.

This implies that the cartoons as well as the commentary they use are historically embedded.  And this calls for us to carefully read the translation into the present.  We are, in effect, asked to consider whether the Cartoon Lagoon has discovered Cartoon Treasures or….trash that comes from the depths of cartoon history to the surface of our comic historical consciousness.

This exercise, I believe, is important since, in a postmodern age where, as Fredric Jameson argues, history itself is in the dustbin.   And any form of historical consciousness, especially when articulated through the cultural imagination, is timely.  What interests me most about this gesture is that at least two people of the Cartoon Lagoon commenting on these cartoons are schlemiels.  This suggests that at least one variety of the schlemiel is caught up in reflections on the culture past.  And this suggestion, to my mind, is right on the money.  To be sure, Walter Benjamin would subscribe to this whole-heartedly.  Indeed, one of the things that worried him most about his thinking is that the more he remembered the past, the more addicted he would become to its translation.  For Benjamin, this was a good thing and a bad thing.  The good thing is that it provided a relation to the cultural past (as in his reflection on the telephone, which I have blogged on).  Yet, on the other hand, it is bad because too much reflection on the past may keep one from politically acting in the present.  But, as Benjamin later realized, reflection on cultural artifacts (even if they are cartoons – which have never been of interest to philosophers but were of great interest to Benjamin) in itself had a redemptive and revolutionary act built into it.  For as Jews have known for centuries, interpretation of the past has its benefits and can be the basis for a shared world.

Cartoon Lagoon steps along a similar path to Walter Benjamin and should provide us – just like the characters of Cartoon Lagoon – with lots of things from our animated-cartoon past to translate into the present.  In a way, being addicted to the past makes schlemiels out of all of us; but in translating it into the present, we realize that, after all is said and done (and to play on the title of the Cartoon Lagoon episode), the game is far from over.  Analysis is, as Freud once said, interminable…and so are the cartoons hidden and waiting for discovery in the cartoon lagoon!

Why Have I Been Blogging on Agamben or How Can the “Decisive Historical Gesture” be Comic?

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As anyone who has been following my blog will notice, I have been blogging a lot on Giorgio Agamben’s “Notes on Gesture” and his “Fable and History: Considerations of the Nativity Crib.”  The reason I have been pursuing these readings is because I am very interested in thinking through the meaning of comic gesture.  Agamben, following Walter Benjamin (and Aby Warburg – another Jewish-German thinker-slash-art-historian who I will address in the near future), has taken to the task of addressing the gesture-as-such.  What I want to remind everyone is that what spurred my search for the meaning of gesture was (and is) Walter Benjamin’s treatment of gesture in his essay on Franz Kafka.

To be sure, Benjamin scrutinized the gestures of Kafka’s characters and argued that by paying close attention to them we could learn something of great – even messianic – urgency.   Benjamin reads these gestures as “pre-historic,” and this is what Agamben latches onto; however, what Agamben misses is the fact that Benjamin also saw them as comical.  As I have noted elsewhere, the keynote of Benjamin’s essay on Kafka can be found in its final gestures, which belong to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Like Sancho Panza, we watch the comic gesturing of Don Quixote.  But we are not alone.  Benjamin’s most favored Kafka aphorism was the aphorism on Don Quixote.  It teaches us about a comic tradition that is passed on.  And, this, for Walter Benjamin, is relayed to us through a close attention to comic gesture.    Benjamin knew, as well, that the messianic had to be thought through a close attention to this comic gesture.

We see this in his essay on Kafka and in some of his last letters to his friend and confidant Gershom Scholem.  Benjamin was after the comic aspects of Jewish theology.  And this is a point that Giorgio Agamben misses since he uses Benjamin’s work within a different context, one which, as I have argued, is much more solemn and Christian then Benjamin’s.

The point of my blog entries on Agamben is to show how Agamben is and is not on the right track.  Following Benjamin, he is right to think about the relationship of gesture to secularization, history, infancy, and the messianic; however, Agamben’s way of thinking of gesture misses something comical that both Benjamin and Kafka were following through.

I’d suggest that “infancy” and the “decisive historical gesture” that Agamben speaks of need not be isolated to the “nativity scene.”  For Agamben, the most profound movement which should be of concern to us, today, is the movement from silence to speech.  To be sure, as I pointed out in the last blog entry, Walter Benjamin addressed this in terms of the movement from tragedy to comedy.  Indeed, for Benjamin, comedy speaks from out of infancy.  And I would suggest that it constantly returns to it; hence, the preponderance of men-children and schlemiels in Jewish comedy.   I’d like to look more into this gesture of return and departure from infancy since, as far as I can see, Benjamin initiated this thread without following it through.  I would like to suggest that this gesture, and not the gesture of the crib, is “the decisive historical gesture” which brings man out of tragic silence.

To think infancy in a “serious” manner, as thinkers such Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, and even Jean-Francois Lyotard have done, may miss the point that Benjamin was sketching out in his early work.   As these thinkers all knew (and know), their work could be aided by the Jewish tradition. But the tradition that they often turn to does not include any reflection on the comic gesture.

I would like to suggest that there is another Jewish tradition that they missed; namely, what Hannah Arendt called (in her “Jew as Pariah” essay) the “hidden tradition.” Arendt tells us that at the beginning of this tradition is the schlemiel.  Although Arendt is right in calling this a “hidden tradition,” I think her reading of it is problematic.  I will discuss this in future blog-entries (and it will appear as a fundamental point in my book).

For now I just want to suggest that, for Jews, the “decisive historical gesture” is not to be found in the “nativity crib.” For a people who was “pre-historical” for centuries, the comic gesture played a key role in linking Jews to history.  And it is the comic gesture which, for many Jews, has had messianic, historical, and secular resonance.

So, in closing, I just want to point out that my attention to Agamben’s work on gesture, infancy, and the messianic was based on laying out the question of gesture.  I may not agree with his reading of it, but, at the very least, I tip my hat to him for making it an issue and thinking through its relations.  This is a discourse which, I believe, can be fruitful for schlemiel-in-theory.  After all, comedy is not simply about ideas as about gestures.  And these gestures are, as I will argue, deeply historical.  As all comedians know, it’s “all in the timing.”

The “Anxiety of Influence” or Giorgio Agamben’s Gloss on Benjamin’s Reading of Kafka’s Pre-Historic Characters

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One of the euphemisms that the literary theorist Harold Bloom is famous for is the “anxiety of influence.”  For Bloom, this term describes the contentious relationship of the contemporary writer to his antecedents.   The anxiety deals with how one relates to these antecedents and the greatness of the modern writer is to “revise” the tradition and overcome past influences.  So, what might seem as a generous interpretation is, in fact, an act of overcoming.  It relates to a temporal issue or what Bloom, citing the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, would be the triumph of the “I willed it” over the “it was.”   This Nietzschean gesture is based on the desire to be free from the influence of history and tradition.  In saying “I willed it,” the “strong artist” (Bloom’s term) has a kind of victory over time and history.  He is free, a “great” individual.

We see a kind of “anxiety of influence” between Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin with regards to Benjamin’s reading of Kafka and the pre-historic.  In my last two entries on Agamben, I have been making close readings of Agamben’s essay “Fable and History: Considerations of the Nativity Crib.”     In these readings, I have made brief mention of Walter Benjamin’s work but I have not considered the relationship of Giorgio Agamben to Walter Benjamin, that is, with reference to this essay in particular.  The key moment in this essay, to be sure, takes Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s character’s up and, in effect, “completes” it as the New Testament completes the Old (yet another gesture of the “anxiety of influence”).

As I have been pointing out, for Agamben, the New Testament’s description of the nativity crib was taken up in representational form and these representations mark the “crib” as a “decisive…historical gesture.”  The nativity crib, for Agamben, secularizes the fable and, as I will show, opens us up to the messianic.  But, before he comes to the messianic, he must address his “anxiety of influence” with Walter Benjamin.

Agamben prefaces his reading of Benjamin by noting that in the “fairy tale” all is “ambiguous gesticulation of law and magic, condemning and absolving, prohibiting and permitting, spellbinding and spell breaking.”  For anyone who has read Benjamin’s reading on Kafka, these words will have resonance.  Agamben is, in effect, saying the the “prehistoric” world we find in Kafka is traversed by nomos (law) and magic: it is enchanted and pre-historical.  History is secular; fable is not.

Moreover, his reading of the crib is secular while Benjamin’s reading of Kafka is not.  And this is the point.  Agamben sets this reading up when he notes that, in contrast to the fable, “in the crib man is returned to the univocality and transperancy of his historical gesture”(142).

Following this, Agamben makes a long list of all the simple people who are in the “nativity crib” and to this list he appends a colon.  Following the colon is the meaning that parts with and revises Walter Benjamin.

Tailors and woodcutters, shepherds and peasants, greengrocers and butchers, hunters and innkeepers, roast chestnut and water vendors: this whole profane universe of the market and the street emerges into history in a gesture from the prehistoric depths of that world which Bachofen defined as ‘etheric’, and which had a short-lived revival in Kafka’s stories.  (142-43)

Although Benjamin does not appear in this reference, it is clearly an articulation of the “anxiety of influence.”  Benjamin, to be sure, is the only person to have written in this way about Kafka’s stories and, in fact, he also cites Bachofen.

But now Agamben is the master.  Like the New Testament, he “completes” Benjamin’s project when he reads the “fairy tale” as “the medium between the mysteries of the hierophants and the historical gesture of the crib.”   In effect, had Benjamin known about the “meaning” of the nativity crib, he would have written an entirely different essay on Kafka.  He would have realized that it was the secularizing gesture that Kafka had missed.

Now, to be sure, this rings very odd – especially if anyone is familiar with the metaphors and allegorical figures used by Augustine with regards to the “blindness” of the Jews.   Jill Robbins’ book Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, Levinas does an exceptional job of showing how that metaphor played itself out in the history of the church and in literature.  The blindness of Benjamin, as Agamben suggests (by way of indirection) is that Benjamin (and Kafka) didn’t recognize the moment of secularization was, in fact, a Christian moment and a Christian gesture: it is the “decisive…historical gesture of the crib.”

After noting this, Agamben takes up the rethinking of the Messianic which is one of Walter Benjamin’s greatest legacies to us today:

For in the Messianic night, the creature’s gesture is loosed of any magical-juridicial-divinatory density, and becomes simply human and profane.

Here, the “naked life” of the creature, which is a major trope in Agamben’s work (a trope which he takes from Hannah Arendt),  is given yet another meaning.  Naked life now relates to the “nativity crib” and is “messianic.”  Secularization is equivalent to seeing man in the nativity crib, as a creature in its “everydayness.”  Kafka and Benjamin’s reading of Kafka are too caught up in fable and mysticism to be taken seriously.  The figures we find there are, for Agamben, too contaminated by myth, mysticism, magic, and law.  They are too pre-historical.

To add to this, there is someone in the crib who may in fact be a figure of the Jew: namely, the sleeper:

The sleeper who, strangely, never fails to appear near the manger can perhaps be seen as a figure from the world of fairy tale, unable to wake on redemption and destined to continue his crepuscular life among children.

Following this, Agamben actually cites the Book of James which does, in fact, align Jews with sleepers, but Agamben doesn’t mention this.

Instead, Agamben notes that the sleeper doesn’t sleep the sleep of the “incubatio, laden with divinatory presages, nor, like Sleeping Beauty, the timeless sleep of bewitchment, but the profane sleep of the living creature”(143).

Would this suggest that the one who awakes from sleep is the person who recognizes the “nativity crib” as a figure of secularization?   Is the sleeper a remnant of the pre-historic which, nonetheless, is disclosed by the “nativity crib” to just be a poor creature who doesn’t get the messianic?

What I’d like to suggest is that the “anxiety of influence” here is not simply between Agamben and Benjamin or Agamben and Kafka; it may also be between Christianity and Judaism.  The suggestion that Jews are pre-historic is not, to be sure, new.  Its been around for a long time and even Hannah Arendt suggests this in her own work on Jewishness.  The historical gesture, for her, however was political.  Jews didn’t know how to live in the political world and a part of Arendt’s project, which was very influenced by her work with Zionism, was to make sure Jews could be “normal.”  For her, Kafka just wanted to be normal; in fact, her reading of Kafka in the “Jew as Pariah” is based on this claim.

Perhaps Agamben would say that Kafka and Benjamin wanted to be secular but, unfortunately, they got caught up in the pre-historic and the magical.  Unlike them, however, he discovered the “nativity crib.”    They were like the sleeper in the nativity crib (or rather, on its margins).

He “woke” up.

(I put this waking in quotation marks for the sole reason that it is based on the “anxiety of influence.”  To be sure, the “gesture” of secularization and the departure from myth are found throughout the Torah and many scholars have pointed this out.  I would add that there are many historical gestures of secularization.  To limit it in this way, to a Christian moment, is odd.  My job is to simply “make it strange.”)

Giorgio Agamben’s Fable, or the Crib as a Historical Gesture – Take 1

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One of Giorgio Agamben’s most thought-provoking and clear explanations of “gesture” can be found in an essay entitled, “Fable and History: Considerations of the Nativity Crib.”   But, what we find there is not so much a gag.  It is more like a profane illumination that comes to us by meditating on the “crib as a historical gesture.”  For Agamben, the crib mediates between the sacred and the profane.  And, as a historical gesture, the crib takes us from the mystical and mythical to the secular and everyday.  In fact, Agamben says that the crib “liberates time.”

But the catch is that Agamben focuses on a very specific example as mediating between ritual and secularization: the nativity scene. He reads this scene first as the “nativity crib” and, at the end of his essay, as a “historical gesture.”

What does this mean?  What is at stake?  And, in terms of what I am most interested in, what does this mean for the schlemiel?  More importantly “who” is in the crib?  Is the schlemiel in the crib or is it, rather, the Christian fool?  And how does “he” (whoever he is) relate to the “crib as historical gesture”?

To answer these questions, I need to unpack the essay so as to follow Agamben’s logic and rhetorical tactics.   I will begin this task here and carry it out over a few entries.

(Note: A cursory look at first words and final words of his essay show us that Agamben has a messianic end in mind when he claims that the crib is a “historical gesture” which, ultimately, takes us into history and into a messianic kind of event.   Is this event-slash-gesture a secular one? Is it another crib? And will the fool or schlemiel be there in that messianic gesture?)

Agamben starts his essay by defining the crib as such: it is an “image of the world presented in miniature.”  And the image-of-the-world-it-presents-in-miniature is, and this is key, a “historical image.”   For Agamben, this means it is not a religious image or a mythical image; the crib is a “historical image.”   And it discloses itself as a “moment” of transition.  Using Benjaminian language, Agamben writes of this “moment”:

For what it shows us is the world of fable at the moment when it wakes from enchantment to enter history.

And this is possible only because the “fable has been able to separate itself from initiation rites.” And by “abolishing the mystery which was at its center and transforming it into enchantment.” This separation, abolition, and transformation of cult and ritual into enchantment is the key.  But there is a difference. As Agamben explains, the “creature of the fable” may be enchanted but is not under a religious spell or trance:

The creature of the fable is subjected to the trials of initiation and the silence of the mystery, but without experiencing them – in other words, by undergoing them as a spell.

Agamben further explains that the creature of fable is “bewitched” but s/he is not “participating in a secret knowledge that deprives it of speech.”

But wouldn’t “enchantment” also be a deprivation of speech?

Anticipating this question, but not openly stating it, Agamben argues that this is enchantment “must be shattered and overcome.”  I find this moment fascinating since, as I pointed out in my last blog entry, Agamben’s “gag” risks enchantment itself.   After all, a gag is something you put in a mouth to keep one from speaking.

This, I would argue, is the danger of the gesture which, though it may be “historical” can easily become and remain “enchanting.”  And although it may leave the creature on the other side of mystery, it may leave the creature in the midst of “enchantment.”

In the next entry, we will take a closer look at the creature and its relationship to the crib and the nativity scene.  And within this scence-slash-historical-crib-gesture, we will find Waldo (I mean the fool who may not be a Christian fool).