Toward a culture-industrial politics of spirit; or, the worst crap I’ve written for a long time…
In recent days I have been working, once again, on some fiction, primarily the stalled novel I began some time ago, provisionally labeled ‘authorities’. And I’ve been having discussions with Sarah about the results, most recently about a section of chapter 2.3, originally entitled “now for something completely the same…” but more recently headed “the secret of comedy” for reasons which only become totally clear, even if not particularly interesting, somewhat later in the text. In this sub-section we are introduced to the relationship between Juliet, an editor, and Nick, a bad stand-up comedian (and drug dealer) who lives in the flat above her. Under the most (negative) discussion is the following section:

Hanging in Nick’s living room was a framed poster, helvetica text superimposed over a photograph of Monica Lewinsky:

Remember JFK and Marilyn? Presidents get to sleep with whoever they want. We call it the Monroe Doctrine.
Bill Clinton

Juliet knew what the Monroe Doctrine was and she still thought the poster wasn’t funny. She liked Nick more than any dealer she had ever had and almost as much as any neighbor, but these were low bars to get over. On the other hand, having him upstairs was certainly convenient, in that he was almost always close by, he gave her credit, and he let her use in his living room, but he would then try out bits of his act: the poster’s text was from Nick’s first ever performance - “Australia - the sucky country” - which happened in the middle of the Kondratiev wave during which US political discourse was centered on interns and semen stains and so on.

The fake Clinton quote is supposed to be indented within the overall quote but I don’t know how to do this in this program,

Sarah feels, I believe, that the above is unambitious, low-brow maybe. That I illustrate a kind of conventionally ‘topical’ comedy which was saturating the period referred to but have nothing interesting to say or do with it. That, whether I am read as thinking the material is funny or thinking it is awful (or worse, funny because it is awful), I am not really working at anything other than the accuracy of my invocation of such phenomena and offering an implied authorial response which is just, I think she thinks, dull. The Clinton stuff in particular is obviously what she is critical of, like I have lowered myself to the level of David Letterman or worse. (These are not the only examples of less-than-great jokes which I attribute to Nick - in fact, as part of ‘my writing process’ I started keeping a file of bad jokes I thought of to have him be responsible for.)

So I agree, the text as it stands is not exactly Ponge or Blanchot, or Bataille, or even Pynchon, though it may not be that far from the less impressive bits of Mark Leyner I suppose.

In my responses to Sarah I didn’t argue the quality of this text but rather the legitimacy of trying to somehow reflect on intersections of (1) political tabloidism in journalism and (2) pop-culture topicality in that section of the culture industry called ‘comedy’, intersections which can even pass for commentary or satire in what I am tempted to call degraded political cultures, but which are certainly witless. In what I am producing I am in principle against making comedy out of people trying to be funny and failing, in the same way as I am against making comedy out of people being really really stupid, and I don’t think I am trying to do either of these things, even if I do want to illustrate that Nick is a (a) bad and (b) conformist would-be comedian, that he is aspiring to something specific and that that specific thing mostly succeeds in the improbable ie making us stupider.

I got the impression that Sarah didn’t think the project of reflecting the cretinizing relationship between (1) and (2) was worth doing (or, I guess, that I wasn’t going to be able to do it well enough to justify doing it - a judgment based in part on the above effort I suppose - that I will not be able to offer even the beginnings of what might count as a real critique). So now I feel I have to rethink not just the above but everything I wanted to do with that character’s minor career in stand-up. But I guess that fake Clinton quote is going to have to go. That ’sucky country’ thing too. What was I thinking?

If the above seems like a pretty uninteresting series of reflections - an excuse to put some kind of post on this neglected blog - you’re wrong: it is really an excuse, as if any was needed, to put a link to that text by Bernard Stiegler in the previous paragraph. Have a read.