Arrested Development and the form of TV

I'll develop this more some time, but one can say that Arrested Development was so amazing precisely because it grasped the form of the television show more precisely than any other program, ever. What I mean by "grasped" is that it did not just combine the sitcom and the drama, Seinfeld and Larry Sanders, but internalized it, made the tension of the two the motor of its humor. Just look at the following exchange:

(Gob, with his puppet, Franklin enters a room where Michael is sitting.)
Gob: Busy?
Michael: Actually, I'm--
Gob: Check this out, my lips don't move. You call me up to the stand, say something like, "Who's this little friend," and he'll say:
Franklin (outfitted with Judge Reinhold magazine-ad-recording-device): My name is Judge.
Gob: Who's name is Judge?
Franklin: My name is--
Gob: That's a silly name!
Franklin: Judge. My name--
Gob: Yes I am judging your name! It am silly!
Franklin: Is--
Gob: Oh! Now you're correcting my grammar!
Michael: Gob, not gonna put Franklin on the stand. And you're lips are moving just a little bit.
Franklin: Judge.
Gob: He's right. His name is Judge now.

What's so amazing about this--besides Will Arnett's acting, which is absolutely unbelievable--is that all we get is the same sentence repeated different ways. But not in the form: in the content. This is what is so striking, and so hilarious, and so typical of Arrested Development: here we have in miniature how the program picks up where it leaves off and yet always repeats itself, how it gets caught in (or catches itself up in) a  logic of repetition that actually manages to go nowhere.

To be a bit clearer, what the sitcom or the drama always plays off of is that the show repeats with a difference the plot and the characters and the general look of the show with each new episode. In this repetition, jokes are made or, if it is a serious drama, character development or emotion gets enacted. But what we get here is the logic of the dialogue, the humor, the jokes, mirrors the logic of the sitcom and drama itself--it internalizes this form to the utmost and then throws it back at us, or rather at the program, and becomes the rule of its development. Everything has been repeated even before it comes on the scene, so that when it appears, it only enacts a pas de thèse, a thesis, a positing of something, that at the same time as it takes this step, has already consigned itself to not take a step. Out of this stepping/not-stepping, this running in place, we get the humor of the show.

If I used a Derridian play on a phrase, pas de thèse, to describe this, it is because this is a Derridian show more than any other. He was famously asked whether Seinfeld exhibited deconstruction, because it was ironic, to which Derrida responded with a no. Indeed, as he said, no television show is deconstruction--what an absurd question to ask!--but there is a logic within the text of a show that can enact certain structures that one finds characteristic of Derrida's work--particularly his work on Hegel. The auto-affection or running in place of the continual repetitiveness in Arrested Development might be a form of Derridian dialectic. I think at least trying to pair the two in an effort to show why exactly (in a Freudian way, similar to his book on jokes) Arrested Development is absolutely hilarious can indeed illustrate the general tenor of certain things he gets at.

This all revolves around the simple question of how we could actually get a new show each week, given the fact that in each show, a lot of it of it is watching previous shows!

Reflections on Camera Lucida

First, the organization of the book: no titles of chapters (or sections), only numbers. But, titles in the table of contents. So each chapter cites the table of contents, like a photo has a caption. The most interesting of these is the beginning of the second Part, whose title merely cites the language of the text (or photo-like-graph) of the chapter's first sentence, "One evening..." One gets a mise-en-abyme effect of infinite citationality: no referent, no time, no narration of the process whereby Barthes discovers the photograph (which is the whole structure of the book) in the event in which he finds the photograph. The whole chapter thus interrupts the book and, like the photo itself, which cannot be pictured in the book, like his mother in the photo he finds who is only a girl and not yet his mother, and yet constitutes the whole structure of the unfolding of the text.

Second, the captions on the photos: I have to check the French edition, but I think they should be duplicated there. The captions quote the text, but never exactly. There is always distortion in captions' citing of the text, so that they function to clarify the photo in relationship to the text. But if there is an inexact citation of the text in the effort to accommodate the photo, can one really say that the captions help relate the text to the photo? For me, they disturb it.

Third, "I could do no more than await my total, undialectical death" (72): this is according to Barthes what happens when you "find" the photo, your photo. You stumble and hover on until your death, like you are already dead. But this is because indeed you have already died: the photo you find will have to be a mourning photo, a photo whereby the punctum for you shatters the image so much it buries itself in you if only because you are so absolutely ready to receive it--it is your punctum after all, your photo. When you find this, you die just as much as what you were mourning for in the photo. A real photo is a relation between two killed people, two dead people, and in that sense it cannot, must not be dialectical.

I'll thematize all this more, but I just wanted to get it out there.

Le gai savoir

I'm still not sure how to translate Nietzsche's fröliche Wissenschaft, so for now I'll pose the question of translation by deferring it. This deferral follows a logic, the logic of translation itself, which always seems (especially if we follow Nietzsche himself: Die fröliche Wissenschaft also has a title in Italian on its title page) to ask another question that Jacques Derrida brings up:

How to translate a text written in several languages at once? How is the effect of plurality to be "rendered?" And if one translates with several languages at a time, will that be called translating?

-"Des tours de Babel," in Psyche