Speaking Jabberwocky!

“Deconstruction the way as I understand it doesn’t produce no sitcom” answers Derrida in an interview in which a link between Deconstruction and Seinfeld is stated by an interviewer, thinking of an explanation of the use of irony as a mechanism of Deconstruction. The answer given by Derrida to break this bond is that if people are trying to understand Deconstruction with this sitcom they should read, stop watching the sitcom, do the homework and know that deconstruction doesn’t produce this kind of materials. The little piece of the interview in which this topic is tackled is located at the end of an edition of a presentation about Forgiveness that took place in South Africa. The question that intrigues us here is what is the possibility of Seinfeld as a text, or of any ironic, but superficial, could say popular or commercial, cultural productions.
This question is if there is possibility in the productions within the structure of media and what productions would them be. This could be thought because the worlds we inhabit are produced by some kind of radical subconscious elements, not only an active discourse. In certain fashion, there is a negative discourse that belongs to every enunciation. Not that willingly are expressing a radical perspective is produced, we don’t even care about those, but that there is a use of enunciation that is the unsaid, deviated from a speech that serves the market, some kind of mechanism that makes some expressions —not all— slip from the grasp of ideological and definition and are there to be re-taken as a mark within the system that breaks the continuity of speeches that are assimilated by it, from the self-righteous speeches of freedom or the fear induced-inducing speeches of hate, or even the reproduction of “radical” revolutionary speeches that can be assimilated and fixated as part of the same continuum. This last element considered by the example of the use of the image of Che Guevara as part of a speech of freedom that can be turned into a T-shirt or a Gael García movie becoming a part of the way the capitalism uses this kind of radical thinking. The exploration that is proposed is how a negative enunciation can be found as a critical perspective, or a cynical one, ironic in popular culture, breaking the limits of the assimilation of speech.
So, the work at hand is to recognise how can materials can be released as operations of enunciation giving them germinal possibility. We needed to address Derrida, because, it is not the work to understand Deconstruction or Simulation, or exemplify it, but rather, through the singularity of the world use these fragile and ductable elements as possibility of the unfixable, the imposible within the expression of the secularised and technologicalized world.
The world that we are facing is not similar to that after WWII, that Derrida and other thinkers faced, with the terror of an extermination and of organised governments, but the more dull and worrisome structure of the expansion of the banality of evil to the practices of a “free world”. The world is able to transmit images of horror and destruction from Mexico, Middle East, Europe and the United States as part of a mass of continuity. The process is not that of milestones, but of static movement allows everything to be integrated into an homogeneous flow.
The world must continue no matter what.
But, on the other hand, the responsibility that is not bestowed but must be produced is of breaking the limits of the speech of numbness and continuity, not through a mechanism of addition, that will just dump more into the actual flow, but think how through Irony and other mechanisms find the uses of the strategies that unbind themselves from the rest.
Why talk about Seinfeld then? Why break that clear task that Derrida brings, quit watching the sitcom and read. Because the distance, and here we are talking about technologies and maybe tele-technologies, between experience and reading must be recognised. We are in a world that the distance between seeing and reading has been modified by the act of watching. This is something that must be understood in the English language. Watching is an act that has been directed to mimic Watching the T.V. and the Computer, watching a Show, a relation with the screens. And this is something that Baudrillard addresses in his book The Intelligence of Evil. The screens and technology have modified the limits of sight, and for that the scrambled acts of sensibility. No sense is used in an independent way, the experience of seeing is more a sum of some sight, some touch, some smell, some taste and as well a whole background that, in this moment is not of our interest to define (Even when a nagging voice from faraway could say boringly: “That is Kant” or something similar). This is not a definition of human experience, rather a call for the use of enunciation in experience and in culture.
So, going back to Baudrillard, the screen has modified the experience through a notion of continuity, that Derrida could be cited on, somewhere. But, the limit of the Intelligence of Evil, wouldn’t be a desire for naturalisation, bring back watching as a word for bird-watching, to let watching television for the more cultural “reading”. Nowadays reading can simulate watching T.V.
The noble acts that heighten the act of reading try to ignore the density of cultural production in television.
Approaches that search for the good, seem to be subdued in the media. That could go terribly in the way of the Discovery Channel and the transition of Shark Week form Science Shows to Simulacra about Evil. That should be explored in the way that while the first shows that ran around that subject were related with the exploration and analysis of sharks as animals. The later runs focus on the predatory and destructive notion that the shark has represented, related with a need for ratings. People like to see sharks as a symbol more than as an animal.
So, shows with a broad display that don’t focus in the stabilisation of a symbol but in the delivery of a multiplicity of actions unstable in delivery could work as a lab for thinking culture as the problematic and contradictory mesh in which we lay, and think them trough the frailty and malleability of Irony. The loosest way that it can be understood, the most variable, less explainable and defined may work. As a failure to produce definite meaning. The way that the Ironic, and this surpasses the shows that are trying to be ironic, but come in the singularities of irony is not to be fixed, to deliver themselves as variables. So, trying to tell this is more an inverse reading of the interview with Derrida, where he seems to exclude Seinfeld from Deconstruction, and yes, it is excluded, it is not that the limit should be buried then. How to rearticulate T.V. culture.
The proposal would be in the irony of the bond of Deconstruction and Seinfeld. The interviewer, unwillingly brings that to the audience, to Derrida, talking about a series she doesn’t knows, she says “An example that I have thought to myself, Seinfeld, which is America’s most popular ever sitcom, Seinfeld, do you know the Seinfeld sitcom in America, if you think of a Classic American, Jerry Seinfeld, made this sitcom, about a group of people living together, everything is about irony and parody, and what you do with your kitchen covert is imbued with as much feeling or thought as wether someone believes in god if you like”. to which Derrida answers “Deconstruction the way as I understand it doesn’t produce no sitcom”. The question goes then both ways, what kind of marks does Deconstruction produce on popular culture? and what the fuck was the interviewer watching? The irony is the link provided to a unstable surface, Seinfeld, not the Seinfeld of the interviewer may be something that any negative approach may deal with as an element of unfixed thinking.